Olbermann: Family Values Voters + Rush + Huffington + Mukasey + Worst (videos no longer available)

videos no longer available

Dandelion Salad

clyde1952

It’s Friday, last show of the week. First up, Keith explores how the Republican Hypocritical Candidates try to suck up to their “Family Values” and “morals” and “Christianity only, all others need not apply” constituency. You know who they are. The ones dead set on turning the country into a theocracy.

An important note here: There is a lot of misconception that these voters are the “value voters” who gave Shrub his victory in 2004. This was a myth perpetuated for a long time by the MSM. But it just wasn’t so and watch for Keith’s guest Richard Wolfe to clear that up for you. My hope is that these candidates will continue to suck up to the James Dobsons and Tony Perkins of the world, so that in the end they all become a millstone around the neck of the Republican party if they aren’t already.

Oh, dear. Fatboy is at it again. I’m talking about none other than Rush Limpbutt who just can’t seem to quit finding the fun in ridiculing and smearing a twelve year old boy with a speech impediment caused by a serious action. Limpbutt goes on Hannity and Colmes and says, “I didn’t make fun of that kid, I didn’t smear that kid. I’m innocent I tell you! Innocent, do you hear?” And as his dummohead audience nods in goosestepping agreement, Rush wastes only about a second and a half before he begins mocking and making fun of Graeme Frost once again. Arianna Huffington joins Keith for a discussion about those who find some strange ways to get perverse pleasure, and those of course who continue to cheerlead them on.

Another segment in the continuing sag of “Broken Government” with John Dean. It’s hard to believe that after his first day testifying before Congress, Attorney General-to-be, Michael Mukasey had a lot of people star struck with his talk of nobody being above the law and that torture was illegal blah blah blah. (Honestly, I never believe what any of these appointees say at these hearings. They’ll say practically anything to get approved, with the worst being appointees to the Supreme Court)

Well the best that I can figure out is that the CIA kidnapped Mukasey, did some water boarding because he came back sounding like another version of Alberto Gonzales Part II. I mean, when suddenly you can’t just outright say that water boarding is torture, you’re protecting somebody’s ass. I wonder who that might be.

Was Joe Torre offered a contract by the New York Yankees that he had no choice but to turn down in order to save face? If you look at a lot of the details of the contract, it would seem so. Bob Costas joins Keith in a discussion about Torre, George Steinbrenner, and the Yankees.

David Copperfield, what did you do? David’s magic warehouse in Vegas gets raided and items are confiscated by the police. I’m not sure what he is supposed to have done but I’ve always been a fan so I hope it’s nothing too awfully bad.

Keeping Tabs: Lindsay Lohan says she is not getting married, except her body guard says she is. Her new boyfriend is a real winner, between DUI’s and prescription forgery.

Also, will there be a Brokeback Sequel?
Heath Ledger in talks according to OK Magazine so take it with a grain of salt.

Worst Persons: Billo, who is taken to task for his softball love fest with Ann Cooter, the Department of Defense, where they don’t know the difference between 24 billion and 24 million and finally Hugh Hewitt.

After a few days of Ellen’s dog, Britney Spears comes back in the cartoon segment for running over a paparazzi’s foot. Listen for Keith to slip into his Walter Cronkite impersonation at the very beginning. Comedienne Paul F. Tompkins joins Keith.

see

Mukasey Attorney General Senate Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 (videos; links)

Mukasey Defends Bush Admin on Post-9/11 Measures, But Vows Independence (link)

Dodging Impeachment by Ralph Nader

Dandelion Salad

by Ralph Nader
Friday, October 12. 2007

The meeting at the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts on July 5, 2007 was anything but routine. Seated before Cong. John Olver (D-MA) were twenty seasoned citizens from over a dozen municipalities in this First Congressional District which embraces the lovely Berkshire Hills.

The subject—impeachment of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.

The request—that Cong. Olver join the impeachment drive in Congress.

More than just opinion was being conveyed to Cong. Olver, a then 70 year old Massachusetts liberal with a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These Americans voted overwhelmingly during formal annual town meetings in 14 towns and two cities in the First District endorsing resolutions to impeach the President and Vice President.

Presented in the form of petitions to be sent to the Congress, the approving citizenry cited at least four “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

They included the initiation of the Iraq war based on defrauding the public and intentionally misleading the Congress, spying on Americans without judicial authorization, committing the torture of prisoners in violation of both federal law and the U.N. Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention, and stripping American citizens of their Constitutional rights by jailing them indefinitely without charges and without access to legal counsel or even an opportunity to challenge their imprisonment in a court of law.

Forty towns in Vermont and the State Senate had already presented their Congressional delegation with similar petitions.

Impeachment advocates reported the results to Cong. Olver from each town meeting. Leverett’s vote was 339-1; Great Barrington was 100-3. No vote in any of the towns or cities was less than a two-third majority “yes” in favor of impeachment, according to long-time activist, Atty. Robert Feuer of Stockbridge, Mass.

With three fourths of reports completed Cong. Olver, who voted against the war, raised his hand and said, “Spare me, I know full well the overwhelming majority of my constituency is in favor of impeachment.” He then told them he would not sign on to any impeachment resolution whether against Bush or against Cheney (H.Res. 333 introduced by Cong. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)). He was quite adamant.

In taking this unrepresentative position, Rep. Olver’s position was identical to that of the House Democratic leadership and many of his Democratic colleagues.

The Democratic Party line on impeachment is that Bush and Cheney are the most impeachable White House duo in American history (they believe this privately). The Democrats do not want to distract attention from their legislative agenda, and need Republican votes for passage. Moreover, they do not have the votes to obtain the requisite two-thirds of the members present for conviction in the Senate.

Strangely, none of these excuses bothered Republicans when they impeached Bill Clinton in the House for lying under oath about sex and proceeded to a full trial in the Senate where they failed to get the required votes. Can Clinton’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” begin to compare with this White House crime wave?

The last question to Cong. Olver was from a young veteran back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “What could we possibly do to bring you around to our way of thinking,” he asked?

Cong. Olver’s response, after several seconds of silence, was “You have to prove to me that impeachment will not be counterproductive.”

Members of Congress should apply the same standard to themselves that they like to apply to members of the Executive and Judicial branches—namely to honor their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. That Oath is supposed to transcend political calculations.

Maybe the Democrats think that Bush and Cheney are such wild and crazy guys that a serious impeachment drive in Congress would provoke the two draft-dodgers to launch a military emergency, strike Iran or otherwise generate a crisis, based on their continual fulminations about the “war on terror,” that would engulf the Democrats and throw them on the defensive for 2008.

In short, the Democrats may be viewing Bush and Cheney as being so defiantly, aggressively impeachable on so many counts as to be unimpeachable. That is, with the White House harboring so much political nitroglycerine, don’t even try to remove it.

Such a cowardly position would make quite a precedent for future Presidents who want to illegally elbow out the other two branches of government and our Constitution.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

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Ralph Nader: Things Are a Lot Worse than We Thought! (video)

The reality of NSPD-51 is almost as bad as the paranoia. By Ron Rosenbaum

Dandelion Salad

By Ron Rosenbaum
ICH
10/19/07 “Slate

Oh, god. I’m reluctant to write this particular column. I’ve been scarred by this kind of story before. I’ve learned that it’s difficult to write about the sources of paranoia without spreading paranoia. But the subject, NSPD-51—that’s National Security Presidential Directive 51—and the attendant explosion of blogospheric paranoia about it deserve attention. Even if you don’t believe, as I don’t, that NSPD-51 is a blueprint for a coup in the guise of plans for “continuity of government” in the event of a national emergency (such as a terrorist attack during an election campaign). Even if you don’t believe, as I don’t, that it will be used as a pretext for canceling the upcoming presidential election and preserving “continuity” of this administration in office.

Nonetheless, the specifics of the directive are a matter of legitimate concern that has not been given the urgent and sustained attention it deserves by Congress or the mainstream media.

I first became aware of the extent of the paranoia when I read the following comment, which was appended to an essay Naomi Wolf wrote for the Huffington Post:

Scenario for 2008: Sometime in middle to late summer, perhaps early fall, a “terrorist attack,” or a natural disaster occurs, allowing Bush to suspend the elections in the name of “national security,” and take the control of the government via the “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51” and “Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20,” released by the WH May 9th of this year. He could remain in control as long as he wanted. Now, wouldn’t THAT be an interesting nightmare?

Crazy, right? Well after I read it I Googled “NSPD-51” and got something like 36,000 hits. (HSPD-20 is essentially the same directive under a different title.) Most of the ones I sampled elaborated on the “nightmare” coup scenario above. Of course, Google hits are not evidence of the facts, only of the temper of the times, and the times are seething with paranoia.

But that doesn’t mean NSPD-51 doesn’t deserve careful scrutiny. Consider that an election-eve al-Qaida attack, for instance, is not inconceivable. What if a nuclear device goes off in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles the weekend before the election and a warning is issued that the other two cities will be hit on Election Day?

Who will decide whether the elections in those heavily Democratic states should be put off or whether the entire election should be postponed until … when? Until the bodies are cleared, the gamma radiation has subsided? Just how wise and fair—and constitutional—are the brand-new mechanisms for “continuity of government” that NSPD-51 has put into effect with almost no prior and little subsequent discussion last May?

And there’s another paranoia-inducing element of the story: The existence of “classified continuity annexes” whose content has been kept secret even from the House Committee on Homeland Security. A troubling aspect of the story that, so far as I know, only one mainstream media reporter, Jeff Kosseff of the Portland Oregonian, has pursued.

As it happens, I had a troubling experience in the past writing about paranoid fears that an unpopular president will cancel a presidential election. The experience helped turn me into a conspiracy theory skeptic, so let me briefly recount that incident—which, curiously enough, also involved the Portland Oregonian—so you’ll understand the perspective I bring to the question.

Return with me to 1970, another moment of seething paranoia two years before Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, before Watergate was even a gleam in Gordon Liddy’s eyes. A time of war and of an increasingly frustrated and suspicious anti-war movement. It was my first year as a reporter, and the whole episode started with a cab driver from Staten Island.

As historian and frequent Slate contributor David Greenberg recounts it in his thoughtful book Nixon’s Shadow, “the rumor [that Nixon had a secret plan to cancel the ’72 presidential election] first appeared in print on April 5 in the Portland Oregonian, the Staten Island Advance and other Newhouse-owned newspapers. According to the item, the administration had asked the RAND Corporation … to study whether ‘rebellious factions using force or bomb threats would make it unsafe to conduct an election’ and how the president might respond. Ron Rosenbaum, a reporter from the Village Voice, heard about the article from a Staten Island cab driver and investigated. He reported in The Voice on April 16 that RAND and the administration denied that any such study existed, but then playfully pointed out that they would surely deny it if it were true. Rosenbaum added that the country would just have to wait until 1972 to see.”

Lesson here: Don’t get too “playful” when writing about conspiracy theories. The problem with being “playful” back then was that much of the anti-war movement read the Voice at the time, and my story ignited a firestorm of paranoia. Soon there were “documents” of dubious authenticity circulating that purported to be RAND memos outlining plans to round up and lock up leaders of the anti-war movement. Eventually Pat Moynihan, then a Nixon consigliere, thundered against the rumor as an example of the intrusion of irrationality into politics.

The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with planning for “continuity of government,” especially in the nuclear age. Planning for continuity doesn’t necessarily mean plotting a coup, although that’s the way my story was read and spread. (Of course, meanwhile—proving that reality can outrun paranoia—the Nixon administration was planning to subvert the election, anyway, with the assortment of illegal actions and dirty tricks that became known as Watergate.)

Still, there’s nothing I feel the need to apologize about for pursuing that story then (or this one now). Indeed, it was marginally possible back then, when the anti-war movement had become massive and some were turning to violence, that the RAND Corp. might have been involved in planning how to maintain “continuity” in the face of violent disruptions.

But the fact that the extreme worst-case scenario didn’t happen in 1972 (no coup attempt) left one big question unanswered—and NSPD-51 illustrates it still hasn’t been settled in any satisfactory way: What are the contingency plans for holding or postponing a national election in the midst of a traumatic national emergency?

I’ve studied the actual presidential directive, which you can find here.

In many respects, it’s innocuous. It doesn’t, for instance, tamper with the procedures for presidential succession in case, say, the chief executive and vice president are killed. And there’s a value to requiring that every government agency prepare a plan to deal with a catastrophe.

But consider provision 2E of the directive:

“Enduring Constitutional Government,” or “ECG,” means a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency. (Italics mine.)

Do you see those five weasel words “as a matter of comity”? Just what elements of the legislative and judicial branches will be allowed to participate in “executing constitutional responsibilities” and “providing for orderly succession [and] appropriate transfer of leadership”?

In other words, who gets to call the shots? What does comity mean in this context? Informally, it means good-natured, good-faith camaraderie. In its jurisprudential sense, the American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “the principle by which the courts of one jurisdiction may accede or give effect to the laws or decisions of another.”

In other words, in the weasel-speak of NSPD-51, it implies that one or more branches of the government will have to cede power to another. And since everything is to be “coordinated by the president,” I’m guessing that the members of the Supreme Court left alive and some congressional leaders left alive (How chosen? What party balance?) will in effect have to sit around a big conference table and do a lot of “ceding” to the executive.

And given the current state of relations between Congress and the executive, such comity will not necessarily translate into camaraderie.

If it comes down to whether to pull the nuclear trigger, who will get to vote, and how large a majority will be required to launch?

Comity—that innocent-sounding word—could well turn out to be the excuse for junking those pesky checks and balances the Founding Fathers seemed so obsessed with. For an indeterminate period of time.

The document is also hazy on when our new continuity policies will be set in motion. The directive tells us that they’ll kick in whenever the nation faces a “catastrophic emergency.” But look how vaguely “catastrophic emergency” is first defined:

“Catastrophic Emergency” means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

These are profoundly, potentially calamitously, broad terms. Who defines what is extraordinary? Who defines how severe severely is? Is there any procedure to challenge the junking of constitutional government?

Worse, “catastrophic emergency”—woefully vague to start out with—is later expanded to include even “localized acts of nature and accidents” as well as “technological or attack-related” emergencies.

In other words, even if you don’t believe the most sinister paranoid coup theories, the document does nothing to allay one’s fears that it could be used in a sinister way.

I wish I did, but I see nothing in the document to prevent even a “localized” forest fire or hurricane from giving the president the right to throw long-established constitutional government out the window, institute a number of unspecified continuity policies, and run the country with the guidance of the “National Continuity Coordinator” and with the “Continuity Policy Coordination Committee” for as long as the president sees fit.

This order has been issued by executive fiat and has not been subjected to any public examination by the other two branches, which have behaved in a supine way that suggests how they’ll behave when comity time arrives and urgent decisions on the fate of the nation and perhaps the world (nuclear retaliation being what it is) need to be made immediately.

The fact that Congress has not scrutinized and challenged the potential here for an emergency-situation power grab is scandalous, unacceptable.

Let Congress pass a law posthaste nullifying the directive, and then when the executive nullifies the nullification, challenge it in the courts. I can’t believe even this Supreme Court, with its deference to executive power, could take this clownishly drafted document seriously.

It’s not that others haven’t noticed the problem. The Wikipedia entry on NSPD-51, for instance, cites rational warnings against it from both right and left:

Conservative activist Jerome Corsi and Marjorie Cohn of the [left wing] National Lawyers Guild have interpreted this as a break from Constitutional law in that the three branches of government are equal, with no single branch coordinating the others. … The directive does not specify whose responsibility it would be to either declare a catastrophic emergency or declare it over.

Good point. And then there are the final two provisions of the NSPD, which mysteriously refer to unseen secret “annexes” to the directive. Needless to say, if what they’ve made public is so shameless in its disregard for the Constitution, the following two sections on secret provisions don’t allay suspicion:

(23) Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto, are hereby incorporated into and made a part of this directive.

(24) Security. This directive and the information contained herein shall be protected from unauthorized disclosure, provided that, except for Annex A, the Annexes attached to this directive are classified and shall be accorded appropriate handling, consistent with applicable Executive Orders.

So, how many secret annexes are there in addition to “annex A,” and what kinds of things do they say that even the paranoia-inducing public document can’t include?

Here’s where Jeff Kosseff of the Portland Oregonian comes in. In an e-mail to me, he said he believed he was the first mainstream media reporter to pursue the classified annex issue (although Charles Savage reported on the disturbing public aspects of the directive itself in the Boston Globe in May).

Kosseff told me he got onto the story when Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio expressed puzzlement that he was having trouble seeing what was in the classified “annexes.” DeFazio was a member of the homeland security committee and cleared to read classified material in a supersecure “bubble room” designed to prevent any kind of surveillance. But DeFazio’s initial request was, as Kosseff reported, “denied” by the White House, which cited “national security concerns.”

DeFazio said this was the first time he had been denied access to classified documents. He brought in the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Bennie Thompson, and the chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Investigation and Oversight, Chris Carney, to back his request for access to the classified annexes.

In a phone conversation, Jeff Kosseff told me the latest development. In August, these requests were denied as well. On grounds of “national security.”

I don’t want to be alarmist, I have no evidence there’s a coup brewing. But I think the American people and their congressional reps deserve some say in how they will be ruled when the ordinary rules go out the window in a national emergency. For one thing, what will happen to the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of individual liberty and the courts that are supposed to enforce them?

If you ask me, setting aside any paranoid fantasies, it is clear on the most basic level—read it yourself—that NSPD-51 is the creation of irresponsible incompetents, bulls in the china shop of our constitutional framework. It is a recipe for disaster. For a catastrophe of governance that would match whatever physical catastrophe it followed and threaten the re-establishment of constitutional democracy. It would make the partisan warfare over the 2000 election in Florida seem like child’s play. We might recover from a disaster but we might never recover from the “continuity coordination” that followed, “coordination” that could forever undermine any faith in the actual continuity of constitutional liberty in America since it would put it at the mercy of any president who wants to “coordinate continuity” rather than govern legally.

I think it’s urgent that we bring these questions out of the shadows of phony comity. I’d urge readers to call or e-mail their members of Congress and senators now. Call for an emergency joint congressional hearing to end this farce, give us some transparency about what our government will do if we suffer another 9/11. Let all branches of government participate in the attempt to reach some consensus on rational and effective continuity planning. Something more specific and sophisticated than the clumsy but dangerously Orwellian “Continuity Coordination Committee.”

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

see

Bush Declares Himself Dictator – Presidential Directive 51 (May 2007; video link)

Bush Directive for a “Catastrophic Emergency” in America by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky (Iran)

Bush Pens Dictatorship Directive, Few Notice by Kurt Nimmo

National Security & Homeland Security Presidential Directive 51 (2007)

Bush To Be Dictator In A Catastrophic Emergency by Lee Rogers (Martial Law; Police State)

Tomgram: Do We Already Have Our Pentagon Papers? By Tom Engelhardt

Dandelion Salad

Bush’s Pentagon Papers

The Urge to Confess

By Tom Engelhardt

They can’t help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.”

All of these memorandums, in turn, were written years after John Yoo’s infamous “torture memo” of August 2002 and a host of other grim documents on detention, torture, and interrogation had already been leaked to the public, along with graphic FBI emailed observations of torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those “screen savers” from Abu Ghraib, and so much other incriminating evidence. In other words, in early 2005 when that endorsement of “the harshest interrogation techniques” was being written, its authors could hardly have avoided knowing that it, too, would someday become part of the public record.

But, it seems, they couldn’t help themselves. Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled “legal” justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials — from the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense on down — just couldn’t resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we’re dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that’s gripped this administration. None of the predictable we’re shocked! we’re shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.

Continued…

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

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American Freedom Campaign – Take Action (Close Gitmo; wiretapping)

Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated by Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor

Mukasey Attorney General Senate Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 (videos; links)

Mukasey Defends Bush Admin on Post-9/11 Measures, But Vows Independence (link)

American Freedom Campaign – Take Action (Close Gitmo; wiretapping)

Dandelion Salad

American Freedom Campaign

Take Action

Below is a list of timely and ongoing actions you can take to support the American Freedom Campaign’s agenda and protect the Constitution. Please note that some of the actions are sponsored by allies or supporters of AFC.

TIMELY

Action: Tell your U.S. representative to co-sponsor the American Freedom Agenda Act. (Sponsored by the American Freedom Campaign)

ONGOING

Action: Show your support for closing Guantanamo: Visit TearItDown.org and take a stand against torture. (Sponsored by Amnesty International USA)

Action: Tell Congress: No more warrantless wiretapping! (Sponsored by the American Freedom Campaign)

Action: Encourage the presidential candidates to sign the American Freedom Pledge! (Sponsored by the American Freedom Campaign)

h/t: Brad

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated

Dandelion Salad

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday October 19, 2007
The Guardian

· Legal charity urges action on Diego Garcia claims
· Prisoners may have been held in ships off coast

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation’s submission to the committee, the UK government is “potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention”.

One possibility which the foreign affairs committee may explore is that suspects have been held on a prison ship off the coast of Diego Garcia. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, has said that he has heard from reliable sources that the US has held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean. There have also been second-hand accounts from detainees at Guantánamo of prisoners being held on US naval vessels.

One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve: “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Continued…

h/t: CLG

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.

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Extraordinary Rendition: Maher Arar on US Detention, Torture + Hearing (videos)

How Clinton Set the Stage for Bush By Mark H. Gaffney

Dandelion Salad

By Mark H. Gaffney
10/18/07 “
ICH

At the end of the Cold War the peoples of the earth shared a rare moment in human history. In fact, nothing like it had ever happened before. The United Sates stood alone as the lone planetary Superpower. The American star which had been rising since the second World War had now reached its zenith. For whatever reason, it seemed that destiny had selected the United States for a special role: to guide the community of nations into a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity. With the fading of East-West tensions this and much more seemed within reach. For a brief time it did appear that anything was possible. And why not? After all, the United States faced no serious military challenges. The US dollar was the favored currency in international exchange. In fact, it had been for decades. English was the lingua franca of science, diplomacy and commerce. Almost the entire world acknowledged US leadership. American culture was widely imitated. Together, this was unprecedented. Never had one nation, let alone a democracy, achieved such global influence. America had both the prestige and the power literally to shape the future of humanity.

Legacy of the Cold War

The world was desperate for a new vision. This was true for many reasons, but primarily because the titanic struggle between capitalism and socialism had been enormously destructive. The forty-five year Cold War had been waged on many fronts and in the most improbable places. It was an ideological war, not a clash of civilizations. As the vying spheres of influence ebbed and flowed across the continents, numerous nations were drawn in. Proxy wars raged along the tectonic margins and at the friction points where East and West collided. Neither side could defeat the other militarily without destroying itself, because the epic struggle was governed by a mad doctrine, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It was a fitting acronym for an insane time, and also a cruel paradox. For decades the world, rigged to a trip wire, could neither stand still nor move forward. The added rub, which I believe the world sensed intuitively, was that the precarious balance could not be sustained indefinitely. Of course, looking back it is now clear that that the Cold War itself, I mean the idea of the Cold War, was a carefully cultivated illusion: a false reality; but that is another story. Certainly the consequences were real enough. Citizens of the planet who lived through the period know what it means to live wedged between impossible alternatives–––the unthinkable on one hand and the unendurable on the other. Many were crushed beneath these wheels. Some nations were utterly destroyed, even beyond hope of recovery. The list of victims is long, and includes Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, East Timor, Ethiopia, Granada, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Sudan, and Viet Nam. No doubt, there are others…

Even as the Cold War trampled on the rights of indigenous people everywhere it despoiled the global environment. Toxic mayhem on a vast scale accompanied the nuclear arms race. Entire regions were affected and many were ruined or left permanently scarred. The open wounds from the heyday of uranium mining still deface the landscapes of the American southwest. As I write, Navaho children play on the tailing piles, amidst the radioactive dust, left behind by soul-less corporations that appeared on the scene, eager to make a fast buck, boomed briefly, then disappeared or were swallowed, in turn, by still larger corporations with even less of a conscience. Even worse scars can be found in the former Soviet republics where whole provinces were poisoned by catastrophic accidents at Sverdlovsk and Chernobyl, and entire districts, such as the Aral Sea region, were despoiled by central planning gone amok.

Dashed Hopes

By any measure, the toll of the Cold War was incalculable, and it’s no wonder that when the corrupt old Soviet state finally collapsed under its own weight the world’s response was: good riddance! The dismantling of the Iron Curtain was attended by joyous celebration across Europe. For a brief moment hope soared. In the US there was even talk of a peace dividend. Everywhere people dared to believe that the victory of the West presaged a new era of international cooperation, now desperately needed to address a long list of pressing problems, among them Third World poverty, overpopulation, the challenge of sustainable development, the energy crisis, AIDs, and the environment. Most importantly, at long last real progress toward nuclear disarmament seemed within reach. All eyes now turned to the West and especially to Washington for answers and for leadership. Yet, as I write in October 2007 it is painfully obvious, and has been for most of the presidency of George W. Bush, that the high hopes have been dashed. All that remains is the question: How and why did this happen? It is a difficult question, admittedly, but if we are to find our way back and regain a measure of hope, we must face it with brutal honesty.

Today, many Americans hold G. W. Bush personally responsible for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that have brought about America’s increasing isolation in the world. Many also blame Bush for the general decline in our fortunes and for the dimming of hope. While I am no friend of the Bush administration, I do not entirely agree with this view, because I take issue with those who still naively believe in a partisan solution. The truth is more complex. In fact, the previous Democratic administration of William Jefferson Clinton bears a large measure of responsibility for the disasters that have befallen us. In many ways the Clinton White House set the stage for George W. Bush. Dr. Helen Caldicott, the tireless campaigner against nuclear oblivion, writes that she got the wake-up call about Clinton in 1999 when she was invited to attend a meeting in Florida about the weaponization of space. Caldicott was aghast as she listened to knowledgeable individuals describe US military planning, then current. Like many of us, she had trusted Bill Clinton, and had believed he was taking care of the nation’s business. Suddenly, Caldicott realized she had been living in a fool’s paradise. She writes:

“To my horror I found that seventy-five military industrial corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, TRW Aerojet, Hughes Space, Sparta Corp, and Vista Technologies had produced a Long Range Plan, written with the cooperation of the US Space Command, announcing a declaration of US space leadership and calling for the funding of defensive system and ‘a seamlessly integrated force of theatre land, sea, air and space capabilities through a world-wide global defense information network.’ The US Space Command would also ‘hold at risk’ a finite number of ‘high-value’ earth targets with near instantaneous force application–––the ability to kill from space…I also discovered that the much-vaunted missile defense system was to be closely integrated with the weaponization of space, and that all of the hardware and software would be made by the same firms, at the combined cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the US taxpayers.”[1]

The plan envisaged “full spectrum dominance,” that is, US military domination of land, sea, air and space. Although US planners sought to portray this next generation of technological wizardry as defensive, in actuality, the planned systems, if implemented, amounted to a major break with the 1972 ABM Treaty, and with long-standing US commitments to maintain the peaceful status of outer space. The cold logic of dominance meant that the project was offensive in nature. But why? Exactly who was to be targeted? Which enemies? Remember, this was 1999. The Cold War had been over for some years. Both Russia and the US were then cooperating to reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals. The START reductions were limited, to be sure, but the process was moving in the right direction and further reductions were possible. Obviously, the US military’s sweeping new plans for the domination of space threatened to undo all of this progress toward a more sane planet. It was obvious to Caldicott that a precious opportunity was in danger of being squandered, perhaps forever. The new space weapons threatened to trigger a new arms race and, very likely, another cycle of world conflict. Caldicott writes that she staggered home from the meeting determined “to become re-involved in educating the public about the impending catastrophe associated with the mad plans of the US Space Command and its associated corporations…”

The Critical Path: Swords into Plowshares

The point is that not even one of the new weapons systems being planned were needed. In fact, the grand plan for space, if implemented, would have benefited no one but a few arms manufacturers and, of course, the bankers who finance such deranged schemes–––all at immense cost to the US taxpayer. The plans were in direct conflict with then-current US foreign policies. The weaponization of space was diametrically opposed to the limited nuclear arms reductions then in progress, yet, was being presented as in the best interests of America: a case of mendacity so brazen one has to wonder how the selfish individuals who cooked it up could sleep at night.

As I’ve noted, the end of the Cold War presented America and the world with a golden opportunity to move in a new direction, a direction that was, in fact, essential for the survival of our planetary civilization. As a younger man I was an admirer of the late R. Buckminster Fuller. The inventor is probably best known for the geodesic dome, but Fuller also popularized the concept of the “critical path.”[2] It is an expression used by engineers and it means exactly what it suggests. The idea is that if we are to become sustainable on “spaceship earth” and avoid destroying our planetary home we must learn to live within the physical limitations or budget imposed by Nature. This, in turn, requires that we drastically reduce our human “footprint” by becoming much more efficient in the way we use energy and natural resources. Fuller was a firm believer in human ingenuity, and he often argued that our predicament called for a designer revolution on various levels, both economic and social. None of the steps in the critical path are optional, from the standpoint of survival. Taken together, they should be understood as the minimum requirements necessary for the long-term success of the human enterprise. While experts often disagree, at the end of the Cold War the single most urgent step was obvious, or should have been, to every thinking person; and this includes the newly elected President Bill Clinton, who entered the White House in 1992 on a wave of high hopes.

As the first US president to be inaugurated in the post-Cold War era, Bill Clinton’s number one priority should have been to meet with our Russian neighbors at an early date, and to negotiate with them a mutual halt in nuclear weapons production and research, as well as a rapid build-down of existing nuclear stockpiles and delivery systems. It was also imperative that Clinton give firm direction to the US military. The Pentagon had to be made to understand that because the Cold War was now thankfully over the nation must chart a new path, one that required the urgent redeployment of resources away from the nuclear arms race. A key part of this redirection would be the announcement of a vital new mission for the national weapons labs (Lawrence, Los Alamos, and Sandia). Henceforth, the labs would cease most weapons-related research/development and would redirect their considerable energies and talents in a positive direction, the new mission being a Manhattan-scale project to solve the nation’s energy problem. The goal would be to wean America from its unhealthy dependence on coal and foreign oil. Clinton would instruct the labs to engineer a phased transition toward abundant and clean energy alternatives at the earliest possible date; and to make it happen he would also press Congress to appropriate the needed funding. Efforts would focus on a range of promising technologies, but especially wind, solar, tidal, and hydrogen. Meanwhile, the nuclear establishment would be stripped of its vast subsidies. Although in a bye-gone era these were a sound idea, the nuclear establishment had produced no energy solutions, despite years of preferential treatment. Indeed, the vast monies lavished upon it had succeeded only in creating another bureaucratic dinosaur. In fact,the nuclear industry itself had become an impediment to change, because its enormous subsidies undermined healthy market forces. Henceforth, nuclear power would have to compete on a more equal playing field with other alternatives. Assisting market forces to operate would be essential to the transition to clean energy; and for this reason another goal would be to achieve the economies of scale necessary to bring down the costs of clean and renewable alternatives. The end result would be greatly enhanced national productivity, the creation of whole new sectors of the economy, boosted foreign earnings, and millions of high-paying new jobs here in the US. Resources would also be redirected to a long list of outstanding social and environmental problems. At the top of the latter list: the urgent clean-up of the toxic mess created by the nuclear establishment during a profligate half-century of out-of-control weapons development. This alone would cost an estimated $350 billion (in 1995 dollars, according to the Department of Energy [DoE]), a whopping figure that does not even include the costs associated with cleaning up the mess at the Hanford reservation, the Nevada Test Site, and the Savannah and Clinch nuclear facilities, all so contaminated that a solution may not even be feasible.

Some will argue that the above visionary plan was (and is) unrealistically utopian–––too much to expect of any US president, let alone the Clinton White House. But I take strong exception with this viewpoint, because in the 1990s the transition I have described was already within reach. Few major technological breakthroughs were needed. Many of the important alternatives were already “on the shelf” and could have been brought to maturity without undue economic strain. Some, no doubt, would have become mainstream long since but for bureaucratic inertia and because powerful vested interests have actively suppressed them–––interests, I should add, that have long sought to keep America addicted to oil. No, what was needed more than anything was genuine leadership in the Clinton White House, in order to beak through the inertial barriers and confront the vested interests. What is the role of a president, after all, if not to use the power of his office (the bully pulpit) to catalyze changes that are needed for the good of the nation? This is precisely why a president must stand above special interests. In the early years of his presidency Clinton did not lack for popular support. A solid majority of the American people elected Clinton because they wanted change; and they looked to him to make the tough decisions. This is not just my opinion. Other commentators have also pointed this out. Bill Clinton entered office with tremendous political capital, yet, incredibly, he never used it. The crucial factor was leadership, and he simply failed to deliver. There are various theories as to why. Dr. Caldicott’s frank assessment will make Democrats uncomfortable, but in my opinion it carries the ring of truth. Caldicott thinks Clinton lacked the necessary strength of character, and she has it right.

Clinton’s Nuclear Policy Review: A Diminished Presidency?

Like other newly elected presidents, Bill Clinton soon ordered a policy review of US nuclear weapons doctrine. The review was of vital importance and required that Clinton become personally involved to insure its success. This also meant taking charge of the Pentagon as the commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, instead of asserting his authority, Clinton vacillated, as if he were unclear himself about priorities and objectives. The policy review was eventually delegated to mid-level officials who were easily outmaneuvered by hard-liners in the military. The generals opposed any changes in US nuclear policy and they ultimately won a decisive victory. This was a major defeat for Clinton, and one from which it seems he never recovered. Caldicott speculates that Clinton, thereafter, sought to compensate for his loss of standing by using military force abroad on more occasions than any president in two decades. She may be right. The point is that Clinton’s attempts to placate the Pentagon were no substitute for leadership. This probably explains why, even today, Clinton is widely viewed with contempt within the US armed services. Soldiers naturally respect strength and revile weakness.

Clinton’s diminished presidency did not become evident, however, for some years. Certainly none of this was immediately obvious. At the 1995 Nonproliferation Review (NPT) Conference the Clinton administration, to all appearances, achieved a major success by persuading a majority of nations to agree to an indefinite extension of the NPT. This success was probably due to Clinton’s vocal support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and because the US delegation agreed to a list of noble principles reaffirming the US obligation under Article VI of the NPT to take steps in the near future toward complete disarmament. The world did not then know that Clinton was about to violate those same principles, by succumbing to a deal with hard-line elements within his own administration. This in itself is an indication of Clinton’s failed leadership, for only a weak president would ever agree to such a back-room deal. What was this deal? The US Department of Energy (DoE), representing the national weapons labs, agreed to back Clinton’s support of the Comprehensible Test Ban only if Clinton agreed to preserve the labs’ traditional role as nuclear overseers; which, of course, meant preserving the nuclear arsenal itself. And so was born the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, otherwise known as Manhattan II. Although its stated purpose seemed innocuous: to insure the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile, in reality, the program would maintain various nuclear research and development programs at roughly Cold War levels for many years. Additionally, the package created new computational and simulation programs to compensate for the anticipated ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It is known that nuclear research secretly continued at Los Alamos–––in violation of the NPT. This came to light in 1995 when Dr. Don Wolkerstorfer, a Los Alamos manager, mentioned a new bunker buster, the B-61-11, during a radio debate.[3] The B-61-11 is a variable-yield nuclear penetrator (maximum yield: 340 kilotons). The following year Department of Defense (DoD) spokesperson Kenneth Bacon revealed that other earth penetrators were also in the works. Bacon told reporters that “We are now working on a series of weapons, both nuclear and conventional, to deal with deeply buried targets.”[4] There were even indications that the labs were moving ahead on an even more ambitious effort to develop the next generation of nuclear weapons. On April 25, 1997, the physicist Hans Bethe, the most senior surviving scientist from the Manhattan Project, sent a letter to Clinton, a letter that one day may have historic significance. In it Bethe urged the president to halt research on new weapons designs, including a pure fusion bomb, long regarded as the nuclear Holy Grail. Bethe, who led the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the development of the Atomic Bomb, was long retired. Yet, he maintained contacts in the labs and was informed about the kind of research that was underway. Bethe informed Clinton that the US already possessed more than sufficient weapons for it security, and he urged that

“…the time has come for our Nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction of any kind. In particular, this means not financing work looking toward the possibility of new designs for nuclear weapons. And it certainly means not working on new types of nuclear weapons, such as pure-fusion weapons.”[5]

Bethe deserved to be taken seriously. After all, he won the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for describing the fusion process that drives the stars. In his letter Bethe further wrote that because “new types of weapons [i.e., a pure fusion bomb] would, in time, spread to others and present a threat to us, it is logical for us not to pioneer further in this field.” Although the great physicist affirmed his support for the stewardship program, he also cautioned that computational experiments could be used to design new categories of weapons, even in the absence of underground testing. For this reason Bethe urged Clinton not to fund such programs. Again, this was sage counsel. It is believed that Israel evaded international detection while clandestinely developing nuclear weapons by this very means, i.e., through the use of computational models and computer simulations. Israel, which has never signed the NPT, is known to have staged only a very few small nuclear tests, perhaps even as few as one.[6] Yet, Israel succeeded in developing a large and advanced nuclear arsenal. Six weeks later Bethe received a polite reply from Clinton, in which the president deftly side-stepped all of the main points Bethe had raised.

Just five months later, in November 1997, Clinton issued a presidential directive, PDD-60, formalizing the outcome of his nuclear policy review. Most of the document remained classified, but more than enough was released to serve notice to the world that the United States had now become a far greater threat to the nonproliferation treaty than any terrorist or rogue state.[7] Clinton’s directive flew squarely in the face of the noble principles he had agreed to at the 1995 NPT conference. The directive reaffirmed the logic of the Cold War and announced a cornucopia of new spending to be showered upon the nuclear establishment over the next two decades. The directive announced that the US would maintain the status quo, that is, the Cold War triad of nuclear forces (i.e., bombers, ICBMs and submarines) as well as the hair-trigger launch-on-warning posture. The US insisted upon the right to nuclear first-use and even the right to use nukes against non-nuclear states that might somehow threaten US “interests.” These shocking revelations were unprecedented. The US also rejected a Russian proposal for deeper cuts in the number of strategic warheads. Instead, the US would move ahead with plans to upgrade the US Trident missile force and the B-2 bomber. The US would also resume production of plutonium pits, which are the fissile cores used in nuclear weapons. The directive reaffirmed the new emphasis on sub-critical testing and advanced computer modeling procedures: the very thing that Hans Bethe had cautioned against. Additionally, the US announced that it would resume production of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen used in thermonuclear weapons. The stated purpose was to provide additional supplies for the stewardship program. Because tritium has a half-life of twelve years, the tritium gas used in nuclear weapons decays and periodically must be replenished. Even so, the explanation was dubious, since tritium can be scavenged from deactivated weapons and recycled. Given even modest reductions in the size of the US nuclear force, in 1997 there was at least a thirty-year supply for the stewardship program.[8] This hinted that Hans Bethe was correct and the US was already secretly developing the next generation of nukes. As if all of this were not enough, the directive also announced that the US would complete construction of a brand new National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, where the world’s most powerful lasers would be used to study nuclear fusion–––another clue.

These policies had been decided with no public debate or consultations with Congress. Ten years later, it appears that Clinton had made a bargain with the devil. He may have acted in the mistaken belief that the much-anticipated ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban by the US Senate would provide him some flexibility, allowing him to later rescind at least some of the newly announced policies. As we know, of course, in 1998 the Republican-controlled Senate rejected the Test Ban, dealing Clinton a stinging defeat. Obviously, Clinton’s attempts to placate the militarists in his administration backfired, with the tragic result of locking the US into a Cold War posture for many years to come, even though the Cold War was long over. All of which raises serious questions about Bill Clinton’s style of leadership, or lack thereof. But his character issues were not limited to placating generals. The more fundamental problem is that he chose to serve a small group of rich and powerful men, instead of serving the nation.

Clinton’s Expansion of NATO

For many years, during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the first line of defense against a possible Soviet attack on Western Europe. But when the old Soviet state collapsed in the late 1980s during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO’s original purpose also ceased to exist. Later, when the Berlin wall came down, President George Bush Sr. assured Gorbachev that the US would not expand NATO into eastern Europe, if Russia did not oppose the reunification of Germany. The agreement was mutually beneficial, and Russia was true to its word. However, during his second term in the White House Clinton reneged on Bush’s promise by proposing to admit eastern European nations to the NATO alliance, starting with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, went on tour promoting the new plan. She argued that NATO expansion was a good idea because it would stabilize central Europe politically and economically. Thoughtful critics, however, such as former Senator Sam Nunn (R-GA), a long-time expert on US nuclear policy, pointed out that because Moscow would naturally view the eastward expansion of NATO as a threat to its national security, the probable consequence would be exactly the opposite. Clinton’s plan would destabilize Europe, stall progress toward arms reductions, and over the long term might even lead to a new Cold War. The critics also warned that the US taxpayer would pick up much of the tab for NATO expansion to the tune of many billions of dollars, most of which would end up in the bank accounts of various arms merchants. Yet, in 1998, with almost no debate the US Congress closed ranks behind Clinton and voted to support NATO expansion.

With hindsight, the critics were correct. Despite claims by the Clinton administration to the contrary, the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe was not in the best interests of the United States, nor in the best interests of Europe. At the time, the relatively poor nations of eastern Europe did not have money to waste on arms. Their top priority was to rebuild their infrastructure after the disaster of communism, and to improve the lives of their people. Of course, Washington promised that in return for purchasing our weapons the US would support their entry in the European Union (EU), which most of western Europe opposed at the time. Yet, this was an illusion, since their purchase of large quantities of US weapons actually slowed their economic recovery, and this more than anything delayed their entry into the European Union. No, the primary beneficiaries of NATO expansion were the US arms makers and their financial backers on Wall Street. All of whom saw in the break-up of the former Soviet bloc an opportunity to enrich themselves. A scurrilous lot, they can only be compared with the wave of carpetbaggers who infested the southern states after the American Civil War, for the purpose of exploiting the defeated Confederacy. The US arms industry, the world’s largest, spent millions successfully lobbying the US Congress and the Clinton administration to expand NATO, and subsequently they cashed-in on this vast new arms bazaar. As early as 1995 Clinton had telegraphed his obeisance to these same powerful interests when he issued presidential directive 41, which announced that arms sales were essential for preserving US jobs. The directive instructed US diplomats to get busy and boost foreign sales of US-made weapons for the good of the economy. Obviously, Clinton found it easier to maintain the status quo, however perilous, rather than use the considerable power of his office to change that reality and move the nation away from the weapons economy built up during the Cold War. When Moscow protested the expansion of NATO Clinton brushed aside Russia’s security concerns with practiced aplomb. The president insisted that NATO was a force for stability, and his casual demeanor seemed to make light of this quaint idea that NATO might somehow threaten the Russians. How absurd!

Today, of course, as George W. Bush prepares to install an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system in Poland and a new ABM radar site in the Czech Republic, on Russia’s doorstep, and as we hover on the brink of world war, it is perfectly clear that Moscow’s concerns were well-founded. The issue is why our former president, a Rhodes scholar, was purblind to the fact, ten years ago. The truth is that Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO was never about the stability of Europe. It was never about US or global security. It was always about one thing: the sale of weapons for profit. All of this becomes more obvious as the world situation deteriorates, yet, the Democratic candidates in the presidential marathon apparently still don’t get it. As far as I can tell, they have been conspicuously silent about Clinton’s failed NATO policy. Which I take as a sober commentary on our deaf and dumb political culture. Someone needs to corner Hillary and ask her this pointed question, on camera: Why did your husband put the interests of the weapons manufacturers and bankers above the interests of our nation and our planet? Why, Hillary? Because there is no doubt that Bill’s NATO policy set the stage for the disasters that have overtaken us. Perhaps the real issue is whether Hillary, or any of the Democratic front-runners, have the integrity and courage to answer a simple question.

Mark H. Gaffney’s latest book, Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes, was a finalist for the 2004 Narcissus Book Award. Mark can be reached for comment at markhgaffney@earthlink.net Check out Mark’s web site www.GnosticSecrets.com


[1] Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven: The Arms Race and Outer Space, The New Press, New York, 2007, p. ix; also see Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, The New Press, New York, 2004.

[2] Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1982.

[3] Broadcast by radio station KSFR in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 18, 1995. For more details about the B-61-11 go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb

[4] Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), DoD News Briefing, Tuesday April 23, 1996.

[5] The text of Bethe’s letter, and Clinton’s reply, have been posted by the Federation of American Scientists. http://www.fas.org/bethecr#letter

[6] Mark Gaffney, Dimona: The Third Temple?, Amana Books, Brattleboro, 1989, chapters 4 and 5.

[7] For an excellent discussion of PDD-60 see Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, USN (ret), “The NPT Review — Last Chance?”, The Defense Monitor, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, 2000. Posted at http://www.cdi.org/dm/2000/issue3/NPT.html

[8] Kenneth D. Bergeron, Tritium On Ice, MIT Press, 2002. Also see Charles D. Ferguson’s review in the March/April 2003 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (vol. 59, no. 02) pp. 70-72.

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Redefining Universal Healthcare: What Consequences will this have on vulnerable workers with poor leadership? by Paul Donovan

Introducing a new featured writer whom I’ve posted a couple of his pieces in the past, Paul A. Donovan. Please see: Donovan-Paul A. to read his past articles. ~ Lo

by Paul Donovan
featured writer
Dandelion Salad

October 19, 2007

SEIU Mission Statement:

“We are the Service Employees International Union, an organization of more than 1.9 million members united by the belief in the dignity and worth of workers and the services they provide and dedicated to improving the lives of workers and their families and creating a more just and humane society.”

My Disclaimer: Continue reading

Eurasia Strikes Back: No War With Iran Likely by Srdja Trifkovic

Dandelion Salad

by Srdja Trifkovic
Global Research, October 18, 2007
chroniclesmagazine.org/

The result of Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Caspian Summit in Iran earlier this week is that there will be no “Operation Iranian Freedom” (or some equivalent thereof) in the remaining 15 months of this administration. A powerful Euro-Asian bloc, based on the Moscow-Peking axis that opposes American challenges along the Continental Heartland’s outer perimeter, is now preempting threats to the existing balance in real time. Mr. Putin is effectively helping President George W. Bush avoid an adventure that would bring ruin to all involved, save the promoters of an Islamic end-times scenario.

The Declaration signed at the end of the summit commits the littoral states to a de facto non-aggression pact. It warns the outside powers to refrain from using the Caspian region for military operations or interfering in any other way, and supports the right of Iran to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Articles 14 and 15 of the Declaration specifically state that the littoral states would not use their armed forces against each other, and—more importantly—that they would not allow any other state to use their territory for military operations against any of the littoral states. Regional commentators are in no doubt that this agreement has thrown a decisive wrench into any plans the Bush Administration may have against Iran:

The entire Caspian region, including the convenient territory of Azerbaijan, is suddenly out of bounds for American military. It would leave Afghanistan and Iraq as the possible staging areas for American military operations against Iran. The fact that the US military options are suddenly limited is just one of the effects of Tehran summit. By a symmetrical sequence of commission and omission, the littoral states have locked Azerbaijan into a push-pull bracket. On the one hand Azerbaijan has been warned against any flirtation with the American military and on the other hand there is a big carrot of North-South corridor. If the Azeri leadership is half as smart as it appears to be, it would lose no time in barricading itself against any foreign military overtures.

This is payback time for Mr. Putin. His displeasure over U.S. missile defense installations along Russia’s western borders and over the stated intention of Washington to recognize Kosovo come what may, was on symbolic display when he kept the US secretaries of state and defense waiting for over 40 minutes when they visited him in Moscow earlier this month. Now he has helped produced something tangible: before leaving Tehran he commented that the use of force in the Caspian region had been rendered unthinkable: “We must not submit to other states in case of aggression or some other kind of military action directed against one of the Caspian countries. We regard that authority in Caspian only belongs to littoral states. It is also connected with subsoil resources.”

For months prior to the summit, Iran had conducted a broad diplomatic counter-offensive. Its leaders had met with Central Asian, Caucasian, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and North African leaders in a series of talks on security and energy. It is developing a “counter-pipeline” to the increasingly vulnerable Ceyhan-Baku pipeline. The new link should connect the Caspian Basin to the Gulf of Oman. In addition, one of the fruits of the Caspian summit is the agreement to build the Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan-Iran railway line that would link Central Asia with Russia in the north the Persian Gulf in the south. According to analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, a wide-ranging Eurasian-based strategy is taking shape: “In Central Asia, Russia, Iran and China have essentially secured their own energy routes for both gas and oil. This is one of the reasons all three powers in a united stance warned the U.S. at the SCO’s [Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s] Bishkek Summit, in Kyrgyzstan, to stay out of Central Asia.”

Indeed, the 25-point Tehran Declaration dovetails neatly with the SCO Declaration issued in Bishkek, and connects China with the new Great Game. The new Eurasian architecture is largely the product of Mr. Bush’s own mix of mendacity and incoherence vis-à-vis Russia and China over the past seven years.

In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Putin was the first foreign leader to contact Bush, promising that Russia would do “whatever is necessary” to help the U.S. His influence with the former Soviet republics in Central Asia was decisive in their decision to allow U.S. forces to use their bases. Mr. Bush subsequently attempted to make that presence permanent, however, in pursuit of the neoconservative policy of encircling, reducing, and ultimately eliminating Russia as a great power. In 2002 the United States unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty and announced a new major expansion of NATO. In 2003 and 2004 came the U.S.-supported and financed “color-coded revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, the geopolitical equivalent of Putin engineering anti-American regime changes in Mexico and Canada. Elements of forward missile defense are now in Poland and the Czech Republic. All U.S. plans for the Caspian gas and oil still entail transit routes that studiously avoid Russia.

In relation to China Mr. Bush has been less brazen but more confused. He has tried a mix of containment, confrontation, and accommodation, in the manner likely to increase both China’s economic and military power vis-à-vis the United States and her distrust of American motives and goals. The award of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama is only the latest example of contradictory, even incoherent, U.S. policy.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to preempt the rise of China as a rival and potential enemy, he should have acted boldly to halt further American investment in the Chinese economy, to reverse massive outsourcing, and to erect effective trade barriers against the continuing deluge of Chinese-made consumer products in American stores. He had done none of those things. In facilitating the growth of China’s economic base he has acted as an appeaser of U.S. corporate interests to the detriment of a viable security policy and world affairs strategy.

If Mr. Bush was not willing to act vigorously to halt the transfer of American wealth and American industrial potential to Shanghai and Guandong, he should have accepted the rise of China as a first-class power with the best possible grace and on the grounds that no fundamental sources of conflict between America and China exist. Such a relationship could have been skillfully managed—with more reciprocity in the field of trade and exchange rates—but it was not thus managed. Its foundation was lacking: the acceptance that Taiwan is part of China, that it will be eventually reintegrated, and that it is in the American interest to facilitate peaceful reunification of the island with the Mainland, perhaps using the Hong Kong formula.

After seven years of Mr. Bush’s contraditory course, China’s growing wealth and power coupled with mistrust of America have produced interesting results in the form of Peking’s strategic partnership with Russia. Directly resulting from Bush’s policies, the Shaghai process may soon reshape the Asian architecture by turning China into a distribution hub for oil and gas exports to South Korea and Japan, two of the largest energy importers in the world—which in turn may lead to their strategic realignment.

The Bush Administration has attempted to counter the growing SCO influence in Central Asia and the Far East by courting another Asian giant, India, as a future counterbalance to China’s power. The final objective—the emergence of a “Quadrilateral of Democracies,” a political grouping consisting of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India—is yet another Bush pipedream, however. India is weary of an alignment with America that remains Pakistan’s key backer, and aware that Washington’s objective is to use New Delhi as a dispensable auxilliary. The Indians are developing close cooperation with the SCO instead. The policy of “superalignment”—an even-handed cultivation of everyone who counts—is paying dividends without tying India to a distant and unpredictable America.

The main reason Mr. Bush has found it so hard to attract overseas partners for his schemes—outside places like Tirana and Riga—is the loss of credibility resulting from the ongoing quagmire in Iraq. He is still staying the course there, predicated on the creation of military preconditions for an elusive political solution, and has no exit strategy.

If there is one thing to be thankful to Mr. Bush, it is for his unwitting contribution to the emergence of a multipolar world. External restraint, unimaginable a decade ago, is being imposed on America. It is dictated by the perfectly normal desire of Russians, Chinese, Indians and many smaller nations, to prove—contrary to Mr. Bush’s repeated assurances— that “History” has not called America to anything.It is to be hoped that the emerging new global balance of power will reflect internationally what the system of checks and balances does at home. Its re-establishment will render ludicrous the hubristic ravings of Benevolent Global Hegemonists. It will also help re-legitimize the notion of America as a nation among other nations and a state among other states, with definable and limited national interests as the foundation of its diplomacy. Contrary to what Mr. Bush and his dwindling band of apologists may claim, this is neither defeatism nor isolationism; it is sanity.

Global Research Articles by Srdja Trifkovic

 


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The March to War: NATO Preparing for War with Serbia? by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Dandelion Salad

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, October 19, 2007

Today in the globalized realm of international relations everything is interlinked. Eurasia is all but a giant jigsaw in name. Two opposite forces are creating a synthesis. This state is a result of the dynamic and static pushes to infiltrate the Eurasian Heartland and those opposed to the American-led drive of infiltration, the Eurasian reactionary outward counter-drive.

A Second Kosovo War Scenario against Serbia: NATO’s Noble Midas 2007

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On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology by Carole Smith

Dandelion Salad

by Carole Smith
Global Research, October 18, 2007
Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 2003

“We have failed to comprehend that the result of the technology that originated in the years of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the West, has resulted in using satellite technology not only for surveillance and communication systems but also to lock on to human beings, manipulating brain frequencies by directing laser beams, neural-particle beams, electro-magnetic radiation, sonar waves, radiofrequency radiation (RFR), soliton waves, torsion fields and by use of these or other energy fields which form the areas of study for astro-physics. Since the operations are characterised by secrecy, it seems inevitable that the methods that we do know about, that is, the exploitation of the ionosphere, our natural shield, are already outdated as we begin to grasp the implications of their use.” [Excerpt]

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