Elsewhere Today 443
Aljazeera:
Earthquake strikes Indonesia
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2007
15:14 MECCA TIME, 12:14 GMT
An earthquake off western Indonesia has prompted warnings of a tsunami across the Indian Ocean region, meteorological agencies have said.
An underwater earthquake with a magnitude of 8.2 hit at about 6:10 pm (1110 GMT) on Wednesday, the US Geological Survey said. Local media reports say up to seven people have been killed.
The quake struck 105km southwest of Bengkulu on Sumatra, Indonesia, it said. Three aftershocks were came after the main earthquake, registering 6.1, 5.7 and 6.6 on the Richter scale.
The third shock prompted Indonesia to issue a second tsunami alert, shortly after it withdrew its first warning.
Reports that a small tsunami hit Padang in Sumatra shortly after the earthquake have been denied by Indonesia's meterological agency.
Alerts issued
Several buildings in Padang province in western Sumatra have been heavily damaged or destroyed by the quake.
"Earthquakes of this size have the potential to generate a widespread destructive tsunami that can affect coastlines across the entire Indian Ocean Basin," the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said.
The centre said that waves could strike Indonesia and Australia within an hour, with India and Sri Lanka possibly hit within three hours.
India's government issued a tsunami alert for the Andaman Islands, while Malaysia warning people to stay away from beaches.
Sri Lanka also issued an alert for its north, south and eastern districts following the quake, the National Disaster Management Centre said.
"We have issued a warning for the south, north and east after the quake," Keerthi Ekanayake, an official at the centre, said.
Panic
People at Bengkulu ran inland as the quake occurred. The shock could also be felt in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Buildings collapsed in a town on the west coast of Sumatra after the earthquake, a police officer said.
Buildings of three storeys and higher either collapsed or cracked in Mukomuko, Budi Darmawan said. The town is located approximately 300 km from the quake's epicentre.
"Those with cracks are many, buildings of three floors or more are either fissured or collapsed," he said.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is located on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin, and is prone to earthquakes.
In December 2004, a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami off the coast of Sumatra that killed more than 131,000 in Indonesia's Aceh province.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/CBEC9ED1-B5D6-4DE7-AA0B-E2305B1C6F5F.htm
AllAfrica:
11 Killed in Foiled Ibadan Jailbreak
By Tunde Sanni, Ibadan
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
12 September 2007
Eleven prisoners were feared killed in an early morning bloody confrontation yesterday between prisoners at Agodi Federal Prisons, Ibadan and warders who wanted to take a head count of inmates in the awaiting trial cell.
The State Comptroller of Prisons, Mrs. Muareen Omeili, and Oyo State Commissioner of Police, Prince Udom Ekpoudom, claimed that eight inmates fell to the firepower of the security agencies while 18 others sustained gunshots injury while trying to escape from prison.
Already, the Comptroller-General of Prisons, Mr. Sola Ogundipe, is in the state capital to assess the situation and get first hand report on the incident.
Sources at the University College Hospital (UCH), however, confirmed that eleven dead bodies were deposited at the mortuary while twenty-two injured inmates with bullet wounds were receiving treatment.
Among those injured are eight staff of the prison who are now lying critically ill at the hospital.
Sources at the prisons told THISDAY that trouble started around 6 am shortly after the warders opened the gate. No sooner had they opened the gate than the inmates swooped on them.
The confrontation was on the heels of complaints of alleged poor medical treatment over which the prisoners had earlier attempted a jail break. The revolt was believed to have been led by one suspect nicknamed Sanponna.
The prisoners' anger, sources hinted, stemmed from their alarm that one of them whose name was not disclosed had died as a result of poor health care facilities at the prison.
All the inmates were said to have come out to participate in the revolt, armed with sharp objects after which they went to another cell where they broke the iron-gate to free some other inmates to support them.
The inmates later went to the female yard to demand for mobile phones and handsets. Eight of the prisons staff were reportedly stabbed by the inmates in the ensuing scuffle.
The prison, one of the oldest in the country, has capacity for 500 prisoners but has 680 inmates at present, consisting 612 awaiting trial men and seven awaiting trial women. There were also 60 condemned male prisoners and one female.
The prison premises were completely overturned by the prisoners while traces of blood dotted some parts of the prison.
Window louvers were smashed; offices upturned and everywhere littered with oil and food items.
Part of the equipment destroyed in the fracas included the close circuit television installed by the prison authorities.
All the equipment in the clinic, kitchen, store and tailor's workshop were destroyed with bags of beans torn and gallons of palm oil broken.
Omeili was visibly shaken while her officials were rattled.
Blood stains, spent tear-gas canisters, knives, spades, bags of beans, plates, padlocks, drugs were seen all over the place when THISDAY visited the prison around 3.30pm
At the far end of the prison, there was a drilled hole in the fence with blood-stained blanket.
Armed mobile policemen were standing at the other side of the fence to ensure that no inmates escaped through the drilled hole.
The State Comptroller of Prisons instructed her men not to allow journalists entry into the prison yard, leading to the officials attack on an Assistant News Editor with the Tribune titles, Mr. Tope Abiola, whose plea was violently rebuffed by the warders.
Omeili who later caved in to newsmen's inquisitiveness confirmed that the confrontation started around 7 am when the inmates complained that one of them who was sick had died due to poor medical attention.
"But it is not true that the inmate had died. He is still alive. They went wild and went into our workshop and kitchen, took tools used to cook their food and other sharp objects and stabbed some of my men. They also went into the clinic and scattered the drugs we use for their treatment.
"It is not true that they are not well fed. They are all well fed Look at the bags of foodstuffs they scattered in the kitchen. And we take adequate care of their health. The drugs they scattered there are the ones we use for them. We thank God that none of them escaped. My men are up to the task", she said.
The comptroller disclosed that the inmates who were armed with dangerous weapons held the officials hostage for an hour before the intervention of policemen from the state Police Command Eleyele.
"From the preliminary reports, the inmates believed there was no adequate medical care for them and importantly they thought one of them who was hospitalized at the weekend was dead that was why they revolted this morning and damaged properties and attempted to escape after over powering the officials," she said.
Speaking during the assessment of the prison, the Commissioner of Police, Prince Udom Ekpoudon said, "there was an attempted jail break and police authorities were invited and we halted it. If they had escaped, the prison authorities and the police would have been in serious trouble.
"I don't want people to speculate this type of thing. Thank God the prison authorities called us on time and we responded swiftly.
"They destroyed properties, injured prisons staff and drilled holes into the walls with the aim of escaping but none of them escaped."
Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709120024.html
AlterNet: Voter Purging:
A Legal Way for Republicans to Swing Elections?
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on September 11, 2007
The Department of Justice's Voting Section is pressuring 10 states to purge voter rolls before the 2008 election based on statistics that former Voting Section attorneys and other experts say are flawed and do not confirm that those states have more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleges.
Voting Section Chief John Tanner called for the purges in letters sent this spring under an arcane provision in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter law, whose purpose is to expand voter registration. The identical letters notify states that 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions have problematic voter rolls. It tells states to report "the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote."
"That data does not say what they purport it says," said David Becker, People for the American Way Foundation's senior voting rights counsel and a former Voting Section senior trial attorney, after reviewing the letters and statistics used to call for the purges. "They are saying the data shows the 10 worst voter rolls. They have a lot of explaining to do."
"You are basically seeing them grasping at whatever straws are possible to make their point," said Kim Brace, a consultant who helped the U.S. Election Assistance Commission prepare its 2004 National Voter Registration Act report, which contains the data tables cited by the Voting Section letter to identify the errant states.
The Justice Department would not comment for this report, despite repeated requests.
The 10 states receiving Voting Section purge letters are Iowa, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont. Since 2005, the Section has also sued six other states or cities - Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Pulaski County, Arkansas - where purging voter rolls was part of the resulting settlement. Only Missouri fought a Voting Section suit, winning in federal court, although that decision has been appealed.
Democratic Party officials in Washington and state capitals were not fully aware of the latest Voting Section effort to winnow voter rolls, but Democratic National Committee officials said it would be studied in a 50-state review of election practices before 2008.
The voter roll purges are part of an unprecedented effort at the Justice Department to eliminate "voter fraud," which, as defined by Republican activists, is an assumption that Democratic political operatives or sympathetic political organizations have filed fake voter registrations or encouraged supporters to vote more than once to win elections. These claims have been investigated by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and academics and found to be without merit. However, the Bush administration's Justice Department, starting under former Attorney General John Ashcroft, has devoted considerable resources to prosecuting "voter fraud." The effort to pressure states to additionally purge voter rolls is a trickle-down effect of these policies.
Voter roll purges, if incorrectly done, can be a factor in determining election outcomes - particularly in tight races. Unlike most of the "voter fraud" cases cited by GOP activists, where a handful of registrations - usually in the single digits - from big voter registration drives are found to be erroneous, purges can affect thousands of voters. In Florida and Missouri in 2000, a total of 100,000 legal voters were incorrectly removed, according to academics and local election officials. In Cleveland in 2004, voter purges were a factor behind long lines and people leaving without voting as poll workers dealt with people who did not know they had been removed from voter lists, various media reported.
AlterNet obtained and analyzed the EAC data used by the Voting Section to identify states with allegedly swollen voter rolls that need purging. Using the methodology cited in Tanner's letters, it found 18 states where more than 10 percent of the jurisdictions - a total of 2,000 counties, cities and townships - allegedly had more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. It shared those findings with several dozen experts - from consultants like Brace, who compiled the numbers, to former Voting Section lawyers, to state election officials, to political operatives - to assess if those states' voter rolls needed purging and whether the Voting Sections actions were partisan.
AlterNet found many of the states targeted by the Voting Section have outdated voter rolls, especially in rural counties, where the registrations of people who have moved, died or been convicted of felonies need to be removed. That is the standard practice of local election officials and required under federal election laws. However, AlterNet found that some states facing Justice Department pressure to purge voters have long been targeted by GOP "vote fraud" activists, especially where concentrations of minority voters have historically elected Democrats - such as St. Louis, Philadelphia and South Dakota's Indian reservations. One of those Republican activists who is now a Federal Election Commission member, Hans Von Spakovsky, started the department's purge effort in January 2005 when he was a political appointee overseeing the Voting Section's legal agenda, according to former Voting Section attorneys who worked with him then.
Looking toward the 2008 election, it appears the purges could be a new and legal way to accomplish a controversial longstanding Republican Party electoral tactic - thinning the ranks of likely Democratic voters in states where there may be close races. In numerous elections dating back to the 1960s, the Republican Party has tried to challenge new voter registrations to accomplish this goal, although since 1981 federal courts have blocked many of those challenges as illegal electioneering. In 2004, state Republican Parties tried to challenge 100,000 voters in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public-interest Washington law firm. Courts and local officials blocked most of those efforts.
Voting rights attorneys say the purges sought by the Justice Department - in a total of 16 states since 2005 - could accomplish the same goal as the illegal voter challenge efforts. That is because it is harder to contact lower-income voters to validate their registrations as these voters move more frequently and the means of contact - mail that is not forwarded - is not always successful. Historically, this population tends to vote Democratic. All these trends - 2000's flawed voter purges, the GOP's stymied 2004 voter challenges, the origins of the department's latest voter purge effort, and the apparently specious statistics cited in its letters to 10 states - have prompted ex-Justice Department attorneys to view the Voting Section's purge project through a partisan lens.
"To me, it's a very clear view of the Republican agenda," said Joe Rich, who resigned as Voting Section Chief in 2005 after 35 years in the Justice Department, speaking of the voter purge initiative. "The GOP agenda is to make it harder to vote. You purge voters. You don't register voters. This is ripe for partisan decision making. You pick the states where you go after Democrats."
"This stuff disenfranchises voters," said Becker. "There are eligible voters who will be removed. There is no evidence that rolls need to be cleaned up to this degree. This will make things more chaotic on Election Day. People will be given provisional ballots that won't get counted."
Political equations
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) allows the Justice Department to sue states to enforce voter list maintenance laws, or the purging of voter files.
Voter lists, until recently, were maintained mostly at the county level, where election officials periodically remove people who have moved, died or been sent to prison. While the purge process varies from state to state, election offices usually mail letters to voters who haven't cast ballots in the most recent federal election to confirm that their address and voter registration is accurate. The letters are not forwarded. Voters who don't reply are listed as "inactive," but usually can still show up at the next election and vote after showing identification. If that same voter misses two federal elections and does not reply to the mailings, then they can be removed or purged from the voter lists.
Voting rights experts and academics estimate that anywhere from a quarter to one-half of "inactive" voters still have valid voter registrations, but have neither received nor replied to the mailings sent by local election officials. The reasons range from typos and clerical errors in names and addresses, to voters living in nontraditional residences or being away, or mail that may have been improperly delivered. Moreover, low-income people often are transient and hard to reach. A 1991 Yale Law Review article found postal delivery rates for federal tax and census mailings was 15 percent lower in African-American than in white communities.
"It is a misnomer to call them inactive," said Daniel Ivey-Soto, New Mexico's director of elections. "About 18.5 percent of the database is inactive at any time. About half of those people are active voters."
The letters sent this spring to 10 states by Voting Section Chief John Tanner said the Justice Department had examined the most recent federal election statistics - from the 2004 General Election - and identified the states with swollen voter rolls.
"We conducted an analysis of each state's total voter registration numbers as a percentage of citizen voting-age population based on reports following the 2004 general election submitted to the Election Assistance Commission," Tanner wrote on April 18, 2007. "According to that report, voter registration actually exceeded the total citizen voting-age population in 10 percent or more of the jurisdictions within your state."
Tanner's letter said the Voting Section was writing to "assess the changes in your voter registration list," progress in creating the statewide voter lists required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and "the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote." Internal Department procedures strongly suggest sending notice letters to states and local governments before filing suits.
Ex-Voting Section lawyers questioned the timing of the letters because for several years states have been striving to create statewide voter databases to satisfy HAVA. Cleaning up registration lists is an ongoing part of that task, and the department has sued a half-dozen states for failure to comply with that provision. The Voting Section's 10 purge letters came after that initial litigation, prompting the attorneys to say the letters were veiled threats backed by shoddy analysis.
"This is a real problem," said PFAW's David Becker. "The Department of Justice is the nuclear bomb of voting enforcement. If the DOJ sends a letter, the counties listen, even if they do not have a strong basis to force them to act."
Becker reviewed AlterNet's analysis, which listed all the local jurisdictions that allegedly had more voter registrations than eligible voting-age citizens. The state of Massachusetts was a good example of the Voting Section's "sloppy" analysis, Becker said, because all but two of the localities with voter roll problems were rural, sparsely populated and of little consequence in statewide elections. The other two "problem" jurisdictions - the neighboring cities of Boston and Brookline - had more voter registrations than eligible voters only because the inactive voters were included. If half of those inactive registrations are discounted, the cities' rolls look normal and up to date, he said.
"I think it is impossible to claim that this should be a trigger to require a NVRA list maintenance purge," Becker said. "This is a short but sloppy way to figure out and justify something that goes beyond the data. They want more people showing up on Election Day and not finding their names. They want people not voting."
Other experts agreed that the Voting Section was using unreliable statistics.
Kim Brace, a consultant who helped the EAC compile its 2004 NVRA report, said the Section chose a mix of EAC and U.S. Census statistics that was mostly likely to show there were more voter registrations than eligible voting-age adults. The "total voter registration numbers" in Tanner's letter combined active and inactive registrations, Brace said, creating an inflated number for total registrations. In contrast, he said the "citizen voting-age population" was a mid-decade census estimate and a smaller measure.
Brace cautioned against drawing legal conclusions from both these statistical sources, because the voter registration data varied in quality from state to state and because the census figures were estimates, not hard numbers.
"It is the only data available," said Wendy Weiser, deputy director of the Brennan Center at New York University Law School, a public-interest law firm specializing in election litigation, adding it is used by people across the political spectrum. "But if the data is old and bad, then it shouldn't be relied on to challenge people's eligibility."
Preparing for 2008?
An AlterNet analysis of the EAC data used by the department to identify the 10 states that received letters found a total of 18 states with more registered voters than voting-age adults in 10 percent or more of that state's election jurisdictions. That finding raised the question of whether the Voting Section was singling out certain states for voter purges.
A closer examination of the states that didn't get Voting Section letters found some of these states, such as New Hampshire, Idaho and Wisconsin, are exempt from Justice Department oversight because they have Election Day registration. North Dakota also didn't receive a letter, but is exempt from Department oversight because of it has no voter registration system. Alaska, Colorado, Illinois and Michigan also did not receive a letter but had more registered voters than eligible voters in 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions. That omission did not suggest a pattern benefiting the GOP, as most of these states - but not Alaska - lean Democratic.
However, a review of reports and testimony by Republican "vote fraud" activists before and after the 2004 election - when the department brought most of its suits concerning statewide voter databases and Von Spakovsky started the voter purge initiative - found many "hot spots" named by Republican activists such as the now-defunct American Center for Voting Rights were targets of Voting Section actions. That would include historic GOP nemeses such as St. Louis and Philadelphia and states with growing Democratic majorities, such as New Jersey.
Other "hot spots" cited by Republican activists, such as Milwaukee, did not fall under Justice Department oversight because Wisconsin has Election Day registration. Another GOP priority was Cleveland, where there have been extensive voter purges since 2000 under the direction of a county elections board that until earlier this year was headed by Ohio's Republican Party chairman. The Justice Department did not act there.
Looking toward 2008, there are a few states that received Voting Section letters where purges could make a difference in a close race, several political consultants said.
South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson, a Democrat, won in 2002 by 524 votes, and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, long a target of Republican voter fraud activists, is among that state's counties with allegedly more registered voters than voting adults, according to the EAC statistics cited in the Voting Section's letter. North Carolina, which also received a letter, is also moving to Election Day registration by 2008, which will increase turnout among lower-income people. A purge could minimize the growth of likely Democratic voters, one consultant speculated. In Maine, another state ordered to purge in a consent decree, Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe faces a tough re-election fight, another consultant noted.
When contacted, Democratic Party officials in Washington and in state capitals generally were surprised to hear about the Department of Justice's letter pressuring states to more aggressively purge their voter files.
Many Democrats were familiar with the GOP's attempts to challenge thousands of voter registrations in battleground states on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Some also recalled a 2006 effort by the Maryland Republican Party where its members were given a manual with false information about voters' rights and were told to challenge voters and threaten poll workers with jail time.
Last month, the Democratic National Committee announced it would conduct a survey of election administration practices in all 50 states as a way to prepare for the 2008 election. DNC officials contacted for this report said they would examine the impact of the voter purges as part of that inventory of election administration. They declined to discuss the potential political impact of the Justice Department's latest purge effort.
The big question left unanswered by most lawyers, scholars and political professionals contacted for this report was how the Voting Section's purge effort might affect 2008's political terrain. In some states like Florida, the number of registered voters is going down - not up - despite population growth and an increasingly politicized national landscape brought on by debate over the war in Iraq and presidential campaigns, according to reports by statehouse bureaus in Florida's major daily newspapers.
"What is weird here is the timing," said a well-connected Washington attorney. "Most states are doing their required purges on time. They are consolidating their statewide lists post-2006 under HAVA. That is in different phases in different states. It looks like they are trying to hit the ones they care about before 2008, and use the other states for cover. There is definitely something going on."
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62133/
AlterNet:
Petraeus: The Paris Hilton of Generals
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on September 12, 2007
The former Cockney flower-girl turned elegant-English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught something of our moment in these lyrics from My Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words .... Is that all you blighters can do?"
Of course, all she had to do was be Pygmalion to a self-involved language teacher. We've had to bear with the bloviating of almost every member of Congress, the full-blast PR apparatus of the White House, and two endless days of congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled out to do the horse-race assessments of how the general and ambassador performed, whether they "bought" time for the President, and the like.
And - count on it - that's just the beginning. The same cast of characters will be talking, squabbling, spinning, and analyzing stats of every sort for weeks to come - with a sequel promised next spring.
Everyone knows that's the case, just as everyone has known since mid-summer that we would get to this point and, when we did, that things similar to those said (and written) in the last two days would indeed be said (and written), and that nothing the blighters would say or write would matter a whit, or change the course of events, or the tide of history, even though whole forests might be pulped in the process and it would be springtime for hyperbole and breathless overstatement in the world of news.
There has been a drumbeat of growing excitement in the press, preparing us for "pivotal reports," a "pivotal hearing," "highly anticipated appearances," and "long-awaited testimony," or, as both the Washington Post on its front page and ABC World News in a lead report put it, "the most anticipated congressional testimony by a general since the Vietnam War."
Petraeus himself has been treated in the media as a celebrity, somewhere between a conquering Caesar and the Paris Hilton of generals.
Nothing he does has been too unimportant to record, not just the size of his entourage as he arrived from Baghdad, or the suite he was assigned at the Pentagon, or even his "recon" walk through the room in the House of Representatives where he would testify Monday, but every detail. Somehow, when he refused to give interviews before his "long-awaited" appearance, lots of Petraeus-iana slipped out anyway:
[H]e also has taken short breaks for walks with his wife.... for dinner with their daughter, who lives in the area, and for lunch with his wife's parents. On his daily jogging route he maintains a brisk, steady pace over a seven-mile route, snaking from Fort Myer, across the Potomac and through Georgetown ...
Sigh...
So who, exactly, was so eagerly awaiting the jogging general's testimony? If a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll is any indication, a majority of Americans weren't among that crowd. They had already discounted whatever he would say - I doubt the ambassador even registered - as "exaggerated" and "a rosier view" than reality dictated before his face and that chest full of ribbons hit the TV screens. ("Just 23 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents expected an honest depiction of conditions in Iraq.")
This was simple good sense. What exactly could anyone outside of Washington have expected the general - who had a hand in creating the President's "surge" strategy, is now in charge of the "surge" campaign, and for months has been delegated the official administration front man for what was, from day one, labeled a "progress report" - to say? An instant online headline caught the mood of the Petraeus moment while his first round of testimony was still underway: "Gen. Petraeus Sees Iraq Progress." Ah, yes ...
And what in the world could anyone have eagerly anticipated from our unbudgeable President? Just what occurred. And yet, in our media, and inside Washington, the drumbeat for "an anticipated moment of truth" continued, as if something were actually at stake.
Take just one example. On Sunday, the Washington Post had a hard-breathing piece by no less than six of its best journalists, with the headline, "Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting."
It focused on a reported "clash" between Gen. Petraeus and his theoretical boss, Centcom Commander Adm. William J. Fallon. It seems that the two fell into a near end-of-the-world-style struggle because Fallon had begun "developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops." ("'Bad relations?' said a senior civilian official with a laugh. 'That's the understatement of the century .... If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it.'")
Naturally, Petraeus, like the President, wanted to continue to surge full strength (as we now know - not that we didn't before - from his slow-as-molasses plan to drawdown American forces). But what did that radical Fallon have in mind that led to a "schism"? According to a source who spoke to a Post reporter, it "involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010." Imagine a Centcom commander as a force slasher!
But hold on a moment. Combat forces make up, at best, less than half of all U.S. forces in Iraq; so if, by 2010, the good admiral wants only three-quarters of those combat troops withdrawn, then we're still left with at least 80,000 or more troops in that country three years from now.
Well, I'm with Eliza D - and so, evidently, was the technology of the House hearing room in which the general and the ambassador appeared on Monday. After chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton (D-MO) and various other Congressional representatives introduced the hearings for what seemed like hours, the general was finally given the floor for his "long-awaited" testimony.
His mouth began to move but in a resounding silence. The mike had failed and (except for Code Pink protesters rising from the audience to shout and be escorted out) the room fell into just about the only Iraqi silence of these past, "eagerly anticipated" months - and what a relief that was. While Skelton fumed, the announcer on MSNBC suggested, "The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq is apparently powerless over the sound system in the hearing room."
It was a moment that had Iraq written all over it. After all, has anything worked as planned or dreamed since March 2003?
Of course, fifteen minutes later the mike had been replaced (though the room lights then proceeded to flicker as if in distant communion with electricity-less Baghdad) - in Iraq, you suspect, people would have just started shouting - and the general did finally launch on his monotonal, mind-numbing, expectably boiler-plate testimony. He promised that, if all went well, American troops would be back to pre-surge levels by mid-July 2008, ten months from now, 18 months from that plan's beginning. "Progress" indeed.
The general's testimony would be dealt with in the tones of gravitas that journalists-cum-pundits and pundits-cum-pundits reserve for moments like this. Yet, given the original expectations of the Bush administration, some of the testimony Petraeus (and later Crocker) had to offer would have been little short of hilarious if the subject weren't so grim. (Good news! Four years after the invasion of Iraq, we finally have the former Baathists of al-Anbar Province, whom our President used to refer to as "dead-enders," on our side! Even better, we're arming them and all is going swimmingly!)
Buying a precious extra six-plus months for the White House, the general also suggested that it would be premature to think beyond next July, when it came to "drawdown" plans, and that we should, instead, all reconvene in mid-March 2008 for more of the same.
Sigh ...
You can, of course, already begin writing the script for that "eagerly anticipated," "long awaited," "pivotal" moment when the situation in Iraq will be predictably worse, predictably more precarious, and predictably surprising to the general and the ambassador.
As aids for his testimony, Petraeus had brought along a profusion of enormous, multicolored charts to illustrate his points. Many of them - amazingly enough - seemed to have more or less the same blue, red, or yellow lines, each of which crested about chart middle and then essentially nosedived toward the present moment.
The message was clear: Good news on the numbers! Everything's falling! You didn't need an expert - you essentially didn't need to know a thing - to find the confluence of those descending lines with the general's appearance in Washington a tad tidy.
As for me, I found it hard to believe that those charts hadn't been recycled from the Vietnam era, when Petraeus' equivalent, General William Westmoreland, used similar brightly colored, bar-coded, son-et-lumière aids to wow visiting congressional delegations with the metrics of "progress" in his war.
Now, once again, we're knee deep in the Big Metric, flooded with so many different kinds of stats that you can hardly tell one from another (though most involve dead bodies). If you remember the Vietnam era, there's a simple rule here: When the top brass hauls out the pretty charts, duck ...
In the meantime - mind you, this is Iraq where nothing has been orderly - everything was, we were assured, to proceed in an orderly fashion, summed up in the general's wonderfully tidy, if somewhat Orwellian-sounding formula, "from leading to partnering to overwatch."
Hmmm ... "overwatch." I wonder who first woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night with that lovely term on the brain? I wonder what it even means? I wonder where we'll be "overwatching" from?
Perhaps from that monstrous embassy that we've almost completed in Baghdad, the largest on this or any other planet, or from our vast permanent-seeming base towns like the one with the 17-mile security perimeter that the President visited in Iraq's western desert, but that no reporter accompanying him even thought to describe for us. (Oh, back in November 2006, that base, as a British reporter described it, already had the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, a movie theater showing the latest flicks, and two bus routes.)
Like Eliza, I'm for skipping the words at this point. After all, what does all the talk mean if, in September 2007, the U.S. is building yet another base in Iraq, this time near the Iranian border, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The military describes it as a "life support area" - don't ask me what that means - with this added definition: "[It's] not really permanent, although it will be manned 24/7 and will be used for as long as necessary."
What does all the talk mean if, as the Washington Post's indefatigable Walter Pincus noted, also on Monday, the U.S. Commerce Department is looking for a new legal adviser for Iraq with a contract running through July 31, 2008, plus two possible 12-month extensions. (There we are in 2010 again!)
This adviser is to help the poor, ignorant Iraqis as "they draft the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq's oil and gas sector." After all, as the proposal makes clear, the Commerce Department (U.S., not Iraqi) "will be providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." And "conducive" is just such a nice word! Even nicer than "sovereignty."
What do the words mean, if the far edge of Armageddon, as defined in Washington or in military-insider politics, leaves enough American troops in Iraq to fill a couple of baseball stadiums - or several gigantic bases - in 2010?
At some level, the situation seems remarkably uncomplicated, if you skip the words (and the words about the words). As has always been true, the top figures of the Bush administration remain completely unmoved by, and unmovable by, words which, as is well known, are only meant to move other people; the Republicans in Congress - after all this time, despite all the dismal polling figures - are still on bended knee to the Bush administration, so powerless that they feel incapable of striking off on their own. (Senator John Warner, R-VA, who isn't even seeking reelection, recently begged the President to please, please, pretty please, send home a few thousand troops, any troops at all, and call it a day. And, in his testimony, General Petraeus threw the Senator a carefully gnawed bone, agreeing to do just that.)
The Congressional Democrats are too weak (and divided) to change policy - and let's be honest, even if they did, this administration would undoubtedly pay no attention whatsoever to anything they mandated. The Republican candidates for President (minus the maverick Ron Paul, who isn't really a Republican at all) have bowed down low before presidential Iraq policy, as if before a pagan idol in the desert, in search of the "base vote."
Democratic candidates for President (Bill Richardson and Denis Kucinich excepted) are running "tough" (which means running scared and cautious) on Iraq. If, in 2008, the war actually proves good for business at the polls for Democrats, then, to their consternation, they'll find they've just inherited a disastrous war, that they're likely to be blamed for losing it, and that they're in charge of Hell, not the Oval Office or Congress. (And note that, out of kindness to all of you, I'm not even mentioning Iran ... though there was that nice, giant block of type over Iranian territory on a Petraeus-displayed map labeled "Major Threats to Iraq" that said: "Lethal Aid, Training, Funding.")
Given this line-up of forces, how could it have been anything but "words, words, words" in Washington, even while it was death, death, death in Iraq?
What those words do, however, is fill all available space, reinforcing a powerful sense that Washington's importance in the scheme of things is the one unquestionable reality on our planet. The rest of the world hardly registers, except in the mode of frustration.
Is there a single ounce of humility anywhere in Washington? Can we even imagine that, somewhere on Earth, someone doesn't think about us?
General Petraeus, always identified as having "earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University as a young officer," is said to be a man with a high regard for his own reputation. Hasn't he noticed, then, that, for one extra star and his Warholian 15 minutes of fame, he's made himself this country's fourth commander of American forces in Iraq in less than five years?
Each of those commanders had a plan. Each was confident. Each claimed "progress." And, once upon a time, each was embraced by the President as the man to give him "advice." Ambassador Crocker is similarly the fourth American civilian viceroy to head up our caliphate of Baghdad. He now has "carte blanche" there. But carte blanche to do what?
Could these men really believe that, with them, the occupation of a crucial country in the embattled oil heartlands of the planet would finally head down the IED-pocked path of success? Is the vanity of American officials as great as that? Was it really worth turning so many Iraqis into red and blue lines, into military metrics?
To grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks behind the wheels of so many SUVs tearing down a well-populated city avenue - and all of them are on their cell phones. They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off the fenders. For them, the world is Washington-centered; all interests that matter are American ones. Nothing else exists, not really. Think of this as a form of imperial autism and the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White House and official Washington have, for a brief time, blotted out the world.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62302/
Arab News:
Sept. 11: Relevant and Irrelevant Questions
Ramzy Baroud, Aljazeera.net English
Wednesday, 12, September, 2007 (01, Ramadhan, 1428)
Osama Bin Laden has once again managed to occupy the stage and to insist on his relevance to the Sept. 11 story. In his most recent video message, released by Reuters a few days before the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bin Laden voiced some typically absurd statements, calling on Americans to embrace Islam and so forth.
What is really worth noting in Bin Laden’s message, however, is not the message itself, but the underlying factors that can be deduced from it. First, Bin Laden wished to convey that he is alive and well and thus the US military efforts have failed miserably. Second, his reappearance — a first since October 2004 — will be analyzed endlessly by hundreds of “experts” who will inundate widespread audiences with every possible interpretation — the fact that he looked healthy, that he dyed his beard, that he dressed in Arab attire as opposed to military fatigues and Kalashnikov, that he read from a paper, and so on. Conspiracy theorists are already up in arms, some questioning whether the character in the video is Bin Laden at all, and others wondering why the tape was promoted by an American terrorist watch group — SITE Intelligence Group— even before its release by Reuters, and why it didn’t make it directly to the various extremist websites first, as is usually the case.
The news and the Internet are already rife with stories that are connected with Bin Laden’s re-emergence. A prominent Muslim scholar told Agency France Press that the dyed beard is a “sign of war” according to the Salafi Islamic school to which Bin Laden belongs. Go figure. Others, who wish to highlight the fact that the US security efforts have managed to prevent further attacks on American soil, would rather emphasize factors such as Bin Laden not having made any direct threats (a supposed sign of weakness).
Bin Laden has indeed succeeded in diverting attention from the legacy and meaning of Sept. 11, 2001 by reducing it to a mere fight between a disgruntled man — whose whereabouts since the Tora Bora mountain battle remains uncertain — and a president who dragged his country into a costly, unjust and unpopular war. The reality however, is starkly different from this caricature reductionism, which the experts on “Islamic terrorism” fail to explain. For those who have shaped their careers on deciphering and decoding Bin Laden, worrying about the bigger picture would hardly be self-serving.
But indeed there is a bigger picture, one which Bin Laden’s message, and the touting of the importance of that message are unfortunately undermining. While there are lessons that must be gleaned from six years of tragic wars, terror and wanton killing and destruction, these lessons hardly include the need for a wholesale conversion of Americans to Islam (one need not pose as an Islamic scholar to claim that such a call is un-Islamic). For Bin Laden to somehow represent existing opposition to Bush’s policy would indeed be very unfortunate and would actually detract from these important lessons.
First, although they repeatedly voice grievances similar to those held by millions of Muslims (and others) around the world, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda do not speak for or represent mainstream Muslims. Mainstream Islam has historically been grounded on tolerance and moderation, qualities that Bin Laden and his fanatics hardly represent.
Second, extremism in the Muslim world may be on the rise, but this doesn’t pertain to Bin Laden and his scarce messages. The obvious fact is that extremism (Muslim or any other) is intrinsically related to areas of conflict and never happens in a vacuum or under stable socioeconomic realities. A study of suicide bombings and foreign occupations, oppression and radical interpretation of religious (or any ideological) texts, massacres, wanton killings and calls for revenge will show that each of these factors is greatly related to the other.
Third, the war on Iraq was a pre-calculated move that dates back to 1992 when Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative ilk began pushing for forceful and hostile foreign policy. Sept. 11 merely provided the opportunity to justify such a war, even though the bombers had nothing to do with Iraq.
Fourth, the combination of fear, public panic and war continue to undermine American democracy. Under the guise of an ill-defined war on terror, Americans have paid an irreversible price — more Americans have died in Iraq than on Sept. 11; the numbers wounded in Iraq top 20,000; Americans are spied on; people with integrity are losing their jobs for taking a moral stance and opposing the Bush administration; respected intellectuals are questioned at airports and community groups of conscientious citizens are monitored as security threats.
Fifth, it is America’s genocidal war on Iraq, underreported killing fields in Afghanistan and blind support and financing of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine that largely fuel terrorism and extremism and which are costing the US its so-called battle for “hearts and minds.” The obvious truth is that such a battle can never be won when an estimated million Iraqis are killed and four million are made homeless in their own country. No “hearts and minds” can be captured when Palestinians are slaughtered in Israel’s “routine” daily missions in Gaza and the West Bank, or when poor Afghani peasants are blown to bits in random “searches” for Bin Laden.
Indeed, it is in the Bush administration’s interest for Bin Laden to disseminate his messages at a time when some important and overdue questions ought to be asked. It isn’t Bin Laden and his dyed beard that should be flashing our screens on this tragic day, but also the disgraced faces of those who exploited the tragedy of a stricken nation to inflict tragedies on others.
Sept. 11 should be a day in which we remember those who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and also in Kabul, Baghdad and Gaza, so that we can work together in bringing all the culprits to account.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=101106&d=12&m=9&y=2007
Asia Times:
There's menace in Osama's message
By Michael Scheuer
Sep 13, 2007
The September 7 release of a new video statement by Osama bin Laden puts to rest, at least for now, widespread speculation that he is dead, retired or has been pushed aside by his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri [1].
With a newly trimmed and dyed beard, comfortable robes rather than a camouflage jacket, and a clear and patient speaking style, bin Laden achieved a major purpose of his speech before he said a word: he clearly showed Muslims and Americans that he was still alive, that he was healthy and not at death's door, that he spoke from secure surroundings unthreatened by the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, and that he, al-Qaeda and their allies were ready to continue the war.
As usual, this message was wrapped in an as-Sahab Productions video displaying high-level production values [2]. Some of the substance of bin Laden's speech was partially new to him specifically, but the West's failure to analyze what he and his lieutenants have been talking about for the past few years was repeatedly displayed by such foreign policy experts as a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and New York Times journalist David Brooks, both of whom suggested that bin Laden sounded like a left-wing, 1960s Marxist blogger.
The Islamist expert Walid Phares even described him as "Trotskyite". Speeches by bin Laden and other senior al-Qaeda leaders are intended to have an accumulating impact; that is, most of their major speeches and statements build on those that have preceded them over the past decade. Bin Laden and his associates assume, perhaps incorrectly, that their Western foes will not treat each statement, speech and interview as an isolated and unconnected event.
The commentators mentioned above and many other pundits - both right and left on the political spectrum - have described bin Laden's speech as something new and a blatant attempt to remain relevant in the contemporary world. That is incorrect. Bin Laden has talked previously on numerous occasions about the negative factors of capitalism and the inequities and fragility of the US economy; many of his post-September 11, 2001, speeches featured his bleed-America-to-bankruptcy scheme, as did several of his interviews before September 11.
In addition, Zawahiri and Azzam al-Amriki (the US citizen Adam Gadahn) have repeatedly spoken in detail about these themes [3]. Indeed, Zawahiri's extensive February 2005 essay, entitled "The Freeing of Humanity and Homelands Under the Banner of the Koran", marked the start of al-Qaeda's now well-developed campaign of trying to support and deepen already existing anti-Americanism among non-Muslim groups - such as anti-globalists, environmentalists, nuclear disarmament activists, anti-US Europeans and other "oppressed people".
These two men also have focused on the imperfect state of black-white race relations in the United States and championed the Islamic ideas of Malcolm X. And bin Laden - possibly for the first time - hit on this theme in his September 7 statement. "It is more severe than what the slaves used to suffer at your hands centuries ago," bin Laden said regarding conditions for white and especially black US soldiers in Iraq. "And it is as if some of them have gone from one slavery to another more severe and harmful, even if it be in the fancy dress of the Defense Department's financial enticements" [4].
Western officials and journalists have also concluded that there is no "overt threat" in bin Laden's new message. Unless these experts truly believe that at some point in time bin Laden is going to explicitly state the time and location of an attack, it is hard to understand how they came to that conclusion. If Americans do not convert to Islam, said bin Laden - and he probably is not expecting many takers - our duty "is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you".
That seems a clear threat. Moreover, bin Laden's prolonged discussion of his conversion offer is also clearly threatening in that it is an action demanded by the Prophet Muhammad of Muslims before they attack their enemy. As for another pre-attack requirement - multiple warnings - Zawahiri and Gadahn have fired a great number of warnings at the United States this year.
Finally, the new message's text and bin Laden's dyed beard seems to have persuaded some Western commentators to superimpose their fascination with celebrities and egos onto bin Laden. Since September 7, for example, Harvard's Noah Feldman - among others - described bin Laden's cleaned-up personal appearance and the text of his statement as an effort by the al-Qaeda chief to put himself in a position to claim that "I was responsible for the American disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan," attributing a huge dose of egotism to bin Laden's performance.
In reviewing the tape, such egotism is hard to find. The first person "I" is used by bin Laden as a necessary part of his offer to Americans to convert to Islam. He makes himself a central player only because he is volunteering to guide Americans to Allah. Asking Americans to "lend me your ears" to hear God's message and then saying "I invite you to embrace Islam" constitute the role bin Laden lays out for himself in this speech.
This point is made not to argue whether or not bin Laden is egotistical, but to suggest that it would be unwise to believe that our seemingly inevitable withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan will be seen by Muslims or identified by al-Qaeda's chief as victories for bin Laden. Instead, they will be seen by Muslims and publicized by bin Laden - as he did after the Afghans' 1989 defeat of the Soviets - as victories for Allah and Islam; al-Qaeda will give the major portion of credit to Iraqi and Afghan mujahideen.
It is imperative, from bin Laden's perspective, that Muslims worldwide see US disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan as Allah-granted victories for Islam and faithful Muslims. This perspective of "God's victory" will further erode defeatism in the Muslim world and galvanize far more support for the jihad than any bin Laden claim of glory for al-Qaeda's efforts. Indeed, such a claim would undercut much of what bin Laden has accomplished, and he knows it.
Notes
1. Osama bin Laden, "The Solution," as-Sahab Productions, September 7, 2007. It is worth noting that bin Laden also spoke in the plain and direct manner of his pre-US presidential election speech of October 2004. The September 7 speech was without lengthy quotations from the Quran, stories from Islamic history, or quotations from the Hadith. Interestingly, at the end of the talk he drew the attention of Christians to the similar beliefs that they and Muslims share regarding Jesus and his mother Mary, and railed against what he called "the fabrications of the Jews" against Mary. Having previously railed against Christians as the "crusaders of the cross," this passage is something of an anomaly for bin Laden.
2. When bin Laden did speak, the substance of his talk demonstrated that he is still what Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett have described as a "news junkie", and that he is completely capable of sating his desire by following the adventures of US interest rates and mortgage defaults while likely inhabiting the terrain of Pakistan's North-West Frontier.
3. Two of al-Qaeda's post-September 11 electronic journals - al-Nida and al-Ansar - also published several analytical essays on these issues.
4. It seems fair to conclude that the American citizen Adam Gadahn has contributed to broadening al-Qaeda commentary vis-a-vis US economic and social affairs. Born and reared by parents who propounded the beliefs of the US "hippy generation" that came of age in the 1960s, Gadahn may well have imbibed an animus against capitalism and a taste for analyzing US history via the purported conspiracies of capitalists. These seem to have seeped into bin Laden's rather overdone criticism of capitalism. That said, the critique of capitalism in bin Laden's new message and other statements by Zawahiri and Gadahn have less to do with the traditional leftist-socialist description of capitalism's evils and inevitable demise, and more to do with emphasizing the ability of Islam to rectify societal evils, promote social and economic equality and even lower taxes to a limit "totaling 2.5%".
Michael Scheuer served as the chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is now a senior fellow at The Jamestown Foundation.
(This article first appeared in The Jamestown Foundation. Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2007 The Jamestown Foundation.)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II13Ak05.html
Guardian: Threatened species Red List
shows escalating 'global extinction crisis'
Alison Benjamin
Wednesday September 12 2007
Corals and seaweed have joined the ranks of threatened species, and more apes and reptiles are now facing extinction according to the World Conservation Union, which warns of a "global extinction crisis".
The conservation group's annual Red List of threatened species, published today, found that the extinction crisis had escalated in the last year with 16,306 species now at the highest levels of extinction threat, equivalent to almost 40% of all species in the survey.
A quarter of all mammals, a third of all amphibians and one in eight birds on the 2007 IUCN Red List are in jeopardy.
More than 180 species have been added since 2006 to the ranks of those classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable.
IUCN director general Julia Marton-Lefèvre warned that this year's list showed how efforts to protect species were inadequate and that a concerted effort by all levels of society was needed to prevent their widespread extinction.
"The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing and we need to act now to significantly reduce it and stave off this global extinction crisis," she said.
Despite reports of its demise, the Yangtze river dolphin is classified as critically endangered (possibly extinct). Although the last documented sighting of the dolphin was in 2002, further surveys are needed before it can be definitively classified as extinct, said the IUCN. A possible sighting last month is being investigated by Chinese scientists.
The IUCN report had just one success story. Mauritius Echo Parakeets have been downlisted from the "critically endangered" category to "endangered" after conservation measures led to 139 birds bred in captivity being successfully released into the wild.
Deputy head of IUCN's species programme, Jean-Christophe Vié, said an improvement for only one species was "really worrying" in the light of government commitments such as the 2010 target to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss.
Corals were assessed and added to the Red List for the first time, and two corals found in the Galapagos have entered the list in the "critically endangered" category and one in the "vulnerable" category. The rise in sea temperature caused by the effects of El Niño and climate change are identified as the main threats.
Ocean warming also threatens seaweeds around the islands, with 10 classified as critically endangered, six of which are highlighted as "possibly extinct". The seaweeds are also affected by overfishing which removes predators from the food chain, resulting in an increase in sea urchins, which overgraze the algae.
Gorillas and orangutans face a particularly grim future after the discovery that more than 60% of Western Lowland Gorillas in Africa have been wiped out by the Ebola virus and the commercial bushmeat trade, and forest clearance for oil palm plantations, along with illegal logging, continue to seriously threaten the survival of orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo.
The Gharial crocodile has been uplisted from "endangered" to "critically endangered" following the discovery that there are less than 200 breeding adults left in the wild. The report said that excessive irreversible habitat loss in Nepal and India following the construction of dams and irrigation canals had wiped out more than half the crocodile's population in the last decade.
Other particularly threatened animals include the Eastern Chimpanzee, found in central and east Africa, which faces habitat loss, poaching and disease, and Speke's Gazelle whose numbers have been decimated by hunting, drought and overgrazing across the grasslands of Somalia and Ethiopia.
Two Mexican freshwater turtle species and a rattlesnake species are among the 700 reptiles added to the list this year after a major assessment in Mexico and North America. The Santa Catalina Island Rattlesnake, caught by illegal collectors and eaten by feral cats, is the most endangered new entry.
The brightly-coloured Banggai Cardinalfish, collected for the international aquarium trade, is one of 1,200 endangered fish on the list.
Vultures in Africa and Asia are among the most endangered birds with five species, including the Red-headed Vulture and the Egyptian Vulture, reclassified this year. Lack of food, due to habitat loss, a reduction in grazing mammals and the increasing use of drugs to treat livestock are to blame for the vultures' rapid decline.
The Red List examines just over 40,000 species, around 12% of the 15m species in the world.
Around 70% of the world's assessed plants are on the 2007 Red List. The Woolly-stalked Begonia, a Malaysian herb, was the only species declared extinct this year bringing the total number of extinct species to 785. A further 65 species now exist only in captivity.
Chair of the IUCN's species survival commission, Holly Dublin, said it showed how environmentalists alone could not save endangered animals and plants.
"The challenge of the extinction crisis also requires attention and action from the general public, the private sector, governments and policy makers to ensure that global biodiversity remains intact for generations to come," she said.
The IUCN report stressed how the rapid disappearance of species had a direct impact on people's lives. Declining freshwater fish, for example, deprived rural poor communities of their major source of food and their livelihoods.
Jane Smart, head of the IUCN's species programme, said: "Our lives are inextricably linked with biodiversity and ultimately its protection is essential for our very survival."
Conservation charity, WWF, said the increasing number of threatened species on the IUCN Red List demonstrated how the planet was being pushed to its limits.
"We're at code red," said Dr Mark Wright, chief scientist at WWF-UK. "The plight of the world's species is a mirror on the state of the planet. Species are under enormous pressure as we systematically destroy their habitat or overexploit them for our increasingly demanding lifestyles.
"We urgently need to reverse this trend and start living within the planet's natural resources - not just for the wellbeing of these threatened species but also for our own."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/12/internationalnews.greenpolitics
Jeune Afrique:
Au Maghreb, un ramadan sous la menace d'Al Qaïda
MAGHREB - 11 septembre 2007 - par AFP
Le Maghreb se prépare avec anxiété à l'arrivée du mois sacré du jeûne musulman du ramadan, placé cette année sous la menace d'Al-Qaïda, après deux attentats meurtriers en Algérie.
La Branche Al-Qaïda au Maghreb Islamique (BAQMI, ex-GSPC), qui a revendiqué les attentats suicide de Batna (22 morts - 6 septembre) et Dellys (30 morts - 8 septembre), dans l'est algérien, semble décidée à relancer ses attaques armées en Algérie, après trois ramadans relativement calmes.
La BAQMI, qui s'est aussi manifestée en 2007 en Tunisie, au Maroc et en Mauritanie, est affiliée depuis septembre 2006 à la nébuleuse terroriste mondiale d'Oussama ben Laden.
Elle veut unifier sous sa bannière les groupes islamistes armés du Maghreb (Libye, Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc et Mauritanie) et du Sahel (Niger, Mali).
Après les attentats de Batna et Dellys, les autorités algériennes, inquiètes, ont annoncé un renforcement du dispositif sécuritaire sur l'ensemble du territoire pendant le mois de jeûne, qui doit commencer mercredi ou jeudi, selon que le croissant lunaire, déterminant le début des mois musulmans, est observé ou non mardi.
"Nous avons fait une évaluation de la situation (après les attentats de Batna et de Dellys) et s'il faut renforcer le dispositif, nous le ferons", a déclaré à la presse le directeur de la Sûreté nationale algérienne Ali Tounsi. "Vous allez être surpris par les mesures de sécurité qui seront prises cette année pendant le ramadan", a-t-il insisté.
Des mesures strictes de sécurité - barrages de police et gendarmerie renforcés à l'entrée et dans les villes, fouilles plus nombreuses à l'entrée des établissements publics et dans les transports en commun - sont prises habituellement pendant le ramadan pour permettre à la population de se déplacer et participer aux longues veillées familiales traditionnelles.
Les Algériens, encore sous le choc, affirment appréhender le ramadan de cette année comme jamais durant les trois dernières années.
"La donne a changé avec Al-Qaïda et les kamikazes. Il y a désormais un réel danger que le ramadan soit de nouveau mis à profit pour intensifier les attentats terroristes, sous prétexte que Dieu aurait promis le paradis à ceux qui tombent au Djihad (guerre sainte) pendant ce mois sacré", craint Halim, chauffeur de taxi.
Un officier de police, Tahar, balaie pour sa part ces craintes, en affirmant que les islamistes qui sont "connus et fichés", selon lui, n'ont aucune chance de pouvoir relancer le terrorisme dans les villes.
Depuis 2003, les ramadans étaient relativement calmes en Algérie comparés aux précédents, marqués par des attentats dépassant en moyenne 200 morts. Le ramadan 2006, avec 27 tués au total, avait été parmi les plus calmes des trois dernières années. Le ramadan 2005 avait totalisé 65 morts.
Le Maroc a mis depuis le 6 juillet l'ensemble de ces forces de sécurité en état d'alerte maximum pour contrer une "menace terroriste avérée" émanant de la branche maghrébine d'Al-Qaïda, selon les autorités.
Le 11 mars, et les 10 et 14 avril, six kamikazes se sont fait exploser à Casablanca et un septième a été abattu par la police avant d'actionner sa ceinture d'explosifs.
La Tunisie, théâtre d'affrontements sanglants en décembre-janvier, près de Tunis, entre forces de sécurité et éléments salafistes infiltrés d'Algérie, observe une vigilance tous azimuts.
Le secrétaire général du Rassemblement Constitutionnel démocratique (RCD, au pouvoir) Hédi Mhenni, a souligné "la nécessité de demeurer vigilants pour préserver les acquis du pays" après les derniers attentats de Batna et de Dellys.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP73947aumagadaqla0#
Mail & Guardian:
The absent human face
What I like: black consciousness leader Steve Biko provided the tools to overcome racism
Rupert Taylor: COMMENT
11 September 2007
Despite all that can be said for how far South Africa has come from its apartheid past, one issue continues to haunt the present - that of racial injustice. Not that one would readily know it, as it is something which even South Africa’s leading public intellectuals do not seem to see or speak about. Paradoxically, it was concern over this very issue that informed Steve Biko’s prescient vision of bestowing a “more human face” on South Africa.
At the heart of Biko’s I Write What I Like and the tenets of black consciousness is a recognition of the centrality of the evil of white racism: that under apartheid, the most important political and sociological fact about South Africa was that it was a racially unjust society in which almost all white South Africans gained power and privilege because black South Africans were exploited and excluded. Biko spoke about the many costs - both materially and spiritually - of what it meant to be black and to be poor under apartheid.
Has South Africa moved beyond this? The answer is a resounding “no”. There continues to be a huge imbalance between the number of poor blacks and rich whites. Even now the income of the average white household is about five times greater than that of black households; the difference in net worth between black and white South Africans at the same income level is even larger.
To point to the emergence of a black middle class is somewhat premature, as it is built on income as opposed to wealth. As Charles W Mills puts it in The Racial Contract, “wealth is more important than income in determining the likelihood of future racial equalisation, since it has a cumulative effect that is passed down through intergenerational transfer, affecting life chances and opportunities for one’s children”.
Consider too how justice has been served by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is not just that the handling of the case into the murder of Biko made a mockery of the rule of law, but that more broadly the commission’s final report actually offered, as argued by Mahmood Mamdani, a “diminished truth” that failed “to open a social debate” about the future. This, it can be argued, is directly attributable to the TRC’s failure to seek racial justice.
It is against such a background that some 10 years into the new South Africa, a Pretoria High Court judge, in handing down a fine of a mere R36 000 to a white farmer who mowed down a black worker with his truck, could in all seriousness maintain that this was not a racist judgement.
In the context of these observations, can one genuinely say that today the lives and life chances of black citizens are equal to those of their white compatriots? That all black South Africans are accorded just treatment? The point here is simple: to the extent that black lives remain less valuable - materially and spiritually - than white lives, racial injustice persists.
Then why have public intellectuals been so silent? It would seem that many public intellectuals have become overly concerned to serve a largely unimaginative technocratic policy-oriented role in the service of state designs rather than to raise questions that might expose the false or incomplete deracialisation of apartheid.
Public intellectuals have not articu-lated a clear conceptualisation of what defines and constitutes racial injustice - let alone proposed how it could best be addressed. And yet liberal democracy, with its commitment to formal equality and neutrality, cannot simply be taken to stand above or apart from systemic racism. Democracy itself actually remains confronted by an unfinished struggle to secure racial justice.
What is needed here is a conceptual point of entry - beyond a discourse that smacks of superficial reconciliation or nonracial pretence - to start talking about the many ways in which race matters, to close the gap between democratic ideals and the reality of continuing racial injustice.
Steve Biko did provide the conceptual tools to come to terms with race and to secure racial justice. Biko provides a powerful critique of white racism that pushes his readers, whatever their background, to confront racial politics consciously and to avoid incorporation into racially loaded Western frameworks that disregard and disrespect black people’s experiential realities. The ends of Biko’s critique are that we all arrive at “the glittering prize” of a “true humanity”.
To get there, as was the case when Biko wrote, white South Africans need to rise above a will to innocence concerning the history and continuing presence of white racism, embrace higher personal standards of citizenship tied to recognising racial injustice in their own lives and openly acknowledge that there is not one single institution in this country that is untainted by racism. Black South Africans must fully assert their self-worth, fight against all forms of white superiority and reject any moves towards artificial integration.
More generally, all South Africans need to promote more open debate that will enable mutual respect, genuine reconciliation and space for greater diversity and dissent - forms of engagement that must, in Biko’s words, “inevitably exhibit African values and be truly African in style”.
If the depth of Biko’s work had been more firmly appreciated and acted upon before now (instead of being parodied as representing a black essentialism or anti-white politics), there is every reason to suppose that South Africa would be a much stronger and more just society today.
When Mamphela Ramphele was vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, she remarked: “The Black Consciousness Movement after 1976, in my view, stagnated. It lacked the intellectual leadership to take it to the next level, from black solidarity to really being an agent of truly non-racial transformative politics.” There is still a need, 30 years after Biko’s brutal murder, for today’s public intellectuals to provide such leadership.
Rupert Taylor is a professor of political studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=318862&area=/
insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/#
Página/12:
Palabras sobre papel
Por Enrique Medina
Miércoles, 12 de Septiembre de 2007
Decir que Claudio es sutil y generoso es no decir nada si no ejemplifico o defino. Y voy al intento: En aquellos días de “tumberos” donde pasamos nuestra infancia en los institutos de menores, yo soñaba con ser un Martino o un Boyé como canta el tango (para actualizarme debería decir Maradona, pero como escribo para mi amigo prefiero precisión en el testimonio). El, en tanto, se contentaba con ser “director técnico” del equipo, y poeta, algo curioso por no decir estrafalario, según nuestro compañero Juan Carlos Miño, el mejor wing derecho de todos los tiempos en todas las tumbas.
De modo casual, a un paso de la basura, yo encontraba bollos de papel bien apretados en los que se leían observaciones apuntadas al descuido sobre mis debilidades como jugador de fútbol. Era Claudio aconsejándome, sutil y generosamente. Como este detalle nunca me resbaló, está fijo en mi primera novela. Pasó el tiempo y no hubo fútbol sino esfuerzos, luchas, complicaciones y los etcéteras del caso. Relato el hecho porque, además de venir a cuento (poesía, debe leerse), intuyo que ese recuerdo se cierra, al cabo de una vida y para mi satisfacción, cuando vuelvo a recoger aquel mensaje en el piso, hoy ya no tan apretado, pero sí lleno de la misma sutileza y generosidad de entonces, y lo despliego, y aliso sus arrugas, palabras en papel qué más, y leo: “Existencial, Claudio Justo Barbosa, Editorial Armerías”.
Este libro que Claudio nos concede, y repito, sutil y generosamente, no es sólo papel escrito sino el latir, el pulso de un ser que se emparienta con el Walt Whitman de “¡Lector, en tus manos no tienes un libro, tienes un hombre!”; y de Tomasi di Lampedusa: “El que se estaba muriendo no era un hombre sino un abuelo, cosas bastante distintas”; y de D. H. Lawrence: “Cualquier cosa hecha por el hombre y hecha vívidamente vive a causa de la vida depositada en ella”... Las referencias no son halagos vanos, desmenuzan, acortan, muestran el atajo furtivo que lleva al centro del Aleph borgeano para detectar metas, secretos, ocultos misterios.
La poesía de Claudio Barbosa está escrita desde el dolor circunstancial que la cotidianidad nos depara y desde el dolor permanente que cuestiona la existencia. El mismo precisa: “Al concluir un poema siento la felicidad de haber liberado sentimientos. Creo que es válido, algunos escriben desde el alcohol y la droga, otros desde el delirio o la locura o, como Alberto Girri, simplemente desde las ideas y la observación lúcida de la vida que transcurre a su alrededor. Personalmente, creo en definitiva que hacer poesía es siempre doloroso, acaso ¿hay algo más perturbador que la condición humana?”.
Para Barbosa, la poesía ha sido en toda su vida el asta inamovible que le permitió afrontar contra los vientos del apocalipsis las convicciones que caracterizan su vida de creador. Así lo vieron en el año 1993 Jorge Calvetti, Hamlet Lima Quintana y Héctor Negro cuando le otorgaron el primer premio en el Certamen de Poesía Luis Pasteur. No podía escapárseles a ellos el lenguaje sobrio y metafórico que el poeta logra: “y sólo para la sed azul del árbol, las gotas de los pájaros cansados”, del poema “Sed”; o “luego vinieron verticales ansias partiéndonos en dos sobre el arado y el surco abierto se quedó esperando la sangre derramada del costado”, de “Ensimismados”; o “Por esta ausencia de tu sombra y de tu paso, camino sin andar para encontrarte”, de “Ausencia”.
Existe la guerra, la traición, la sangre que no vuelve y causa la muerte, lo genial y lo atolondrado, existe el segundo que nos hace creer en la felicidad suprema siendo apenas un segundo, y existe un papel arrugado en el piso que alguien me empuja a agarrarlo y leerlo, y leo la simpleza de Catulo: “Odio y amo. Tal vez preguntes por qué lo hago. No lo sé, pero siento que es así y sufro”. Era un librito viejo, creo que de la editorial TOR, que me había regalado Claudio en la tumba mientras escuchábamos por radio la primera pelea de nuestro César Brión contra Joe Louis. El negro ganó por puntos y yo perdí unas monedas en la apuesta con Miño; Claudio, para sacarnos de lo trivial, nos señalaba las virtudes del poema de Catulo. Las mismas que él ejercitaría más tarde; hoy, en este libro.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91238-2007-09-12.html
The Independent:
The 'proxy war': UK troops are sent to Iranian border
British soldiers return to action as tensions between US and Iran grow
Exclusive by Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
Published: 12 September 2007
British forces have been sent from Basra to the volatile border with Iran amid warnings from the senior US commander in Iraq that Tehran is fomenting a "proxy war".
In signs of a fast-developing confrontation, the Iranians have threatened military action in response to attacks launched from Iraqi territory while the Pentagon has announced the building of a US base and fortified checkpoints at the frontier.
The UK operation, in which up to 350 troops are involved, has come at the request of the Americans, who say that elements close to the Iranian regime have stepped up supplies of weapons to Shia militias in recent weeks in preparation for attacks inside Iraq.
The deployment came within a week of British forces leaving Basra Palace, their last remaining base inside Basra city, and withdrawing to the airport for a widely expected final departure from Iraq. Brigadier James Bashall, commander of 1 Mechanised Brigade, based at Basra said: "We have been asked to help at the Iranian border to stop the flow of weapons and I am willing to do so. We know the points of entry and I am sure we can do what needs to be done. The US forces are, as we know, engaged in the 'surge' and the border is of particular concern to them."
The mission will include the King's Royal Hussars battle group, 250 of whom were told at the weekend that they would be returning to the UK as part of a drawdown of forces in Iraq.
The operation is regarded as a high-risk strategy which could lead to clashes with Iranian-backed Shia militias or even Iranian forces and also leaves open the possibility of Iranian retaliation in the form of attacks against British forces at the Basra air base or inciting violence to draw them back into Basra city. Relations between the two countries are already fraught after the Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized a British naval party in the Gulf earlier this year.
The move came as General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, made some of the strongest accusations yet by US officials about Iranian activity. General Petraeus spoke on Monday of a "proxy war" in Iraq, while Mr Crocker accused the Iranian government of "providing lethal capabilities to the enemies of the Iraqi state".
In an interview after his appearance before a congressional panel on Monday, General Petraeus strongly implied that it would soon be necessary to obtain authorisation to take action against Iran within its own borders, rather than just inside Iraq. "There is a pretty hard look ongoing at that particular situation" he said.
The Royal Welsh battle group, with Challenger tanks and Warrior armoured vehicles, is conducting out regular exercises at the Basra air base in preparation for any re-entry into the city. No formal handover of Basra to the Iraqi government has yet taken place and the UK remains responsible for maintaining security in the region.
The Iraqi commander in charge of the southern part of the country, General Mohan al-Furayji, said he would not hesitate to call for British help if there was an emergency.
While previous US military action has been primarily directed against Sunni insurgents, it is Shia fighters, which the US accuses Iran of backing, who now account for 80 per cent of US casualties.
For the British military the move to the border is a change of policy. They had stopped patrols along the long border at Maysan despite US concerns at the time that the area would become a conduit for weapons into Iraq.
The decision to return to the frontier has been heavily influenced by the highly charged and very public dispute with the United States. British commanders feel that they cannot turn down the fresh American request for help after refusing to delay the withdrawal from Basra Palace. They also maintain that the operation will stop Iranian arms entering Basra.
Brigadier Bashall said: "We are not sitting here idly at the air bridge. The security of Basra is still our responsibility and we shall act where necessary. We are also prepared to restore order in Basra City if asked to do so."
The US decision to build fortifications at the Iranian border, after four years of presence in Iraq, shows, say American commanders, that the "Iranian threat" is now one of their main concerns.
Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, commander of the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said 48 Iranian-supplied roadside bombs had been used against his forces killing nine soldiers. "We've got a major problem with Iranian munitions streaming into Iraq. This Iranian interference is troubling and we have to stop it," he told The Wall Street Journal this week.
Meanwhile at a conference in Baghdad on regional co-operation, Iran claimed the US was supporting groups mounting attacks from Iraqi territory in the Kurdish north.
Said Jalili , Iran's deputy foreign minister, last night said: "I think [the US and its allies] are going to prevaricate with the truth because they know they have been defeated in Iraq and they have not been successful. And so they are going to put the blame on us, on the other side."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2953462.ece
The Nation:
A General Dissembles
truthdig by Robert Scheer
[posted online on September 12, 2007]
Of course, Gen. David Petraeus predicts success in the Iraq War. What wonders couldn't generals achieve with more troops and more time? The battle is always going well until it is lost, and then they blame defeat on the politicians and the public.
There's no shortage of retired generals who will tell you we could have won in Vietnam, if only we had sent more troops, or bombed the dikes in the North, or been willing to kill more than the 3.4 million Vietnamese who died along with 59,000 American soldiers. Instead, the politicians and public, led by that bleeding heart President Richard Nixon, lost the will to win. Thus, the dominos fell to communism, and Red China and Red Vietnam now rule the world by dint of military force. Have you been to Wal-Mart lately? The triumph of communism is total.
Once again, we have a general repeatedly promising to save western civilization by turning the corner in yet another intractable and unnecessary foreign war. Back on Sept. 26, 2004, in the weeks before the midterm congressional elections, Petraeus took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post to make sure the voters didn't vote wrong. Despite appearances, he claimed the war in Iraq was going very well: "I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up," Petraeus wrote. "The institutions that oversee them are being re-established from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously ... there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security, something they are keen to do."
So keen, it makes one's heart swell. So keen that three years later, after the expenditure of $450 billion more in taxpayer funds, and more US troops in proportion to the Iraqi population than, at the height of the Vietnam War, we had in Vietnam, the good general now insists it would be disastrous to even think about bringing any American troops home before next summer.
That's at least another $150 billion and many more Iraqi and US lives wasted. But wait-Ryan C. Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, also testified before Congress this week with Petraeus, and he has more good news about what he still celebrates as the "liberation of Iraq." Remember that Bush Administration promise that the oil-rich Iraqis would pick up the check for the cost of their liberation? Well, Crocker is bullish on that front: the Iraqi economy is on schedule to grow by 6 percent, according to his testimony. Perhaps he is referring to the additional money dumped into Iraq's economy by American taxpayers chipping in for the surge.
He certainly wasn't basing his estimate on any improvement in Iraqi oil production or any other economic component. As the International Monetary Fund reported last month in its annual review of Iraq's economy, "Economic growth has been slower than expected at the time of the last (review) mainly because the expected expansion of oil production has failed to materialize." In case you haven't noticed, oil is the Iraqi economy, yet a recent GAO report stated an additional $57 billion in US tax dollars will be needed to bring oil and electricity production to the level where it can satisfy Iraq's domestic demand by the year 2015.
Ambassador Crocker actually had the nerve to compare the bloody religious fratricide in Iraq, which our inane invasion unleashed, to the American battle over state's rights, once again reducing the complexities of world history to an easily understood but totally irrelevant example from the American experience. In that case, a better analogy might have been made to the American Indian wars, given that the only thing the United States has been able to do effectively in Iraq is unleash superior firepower. At the current rate, Iraq will be liberated when there are no Iraqis.
Perhaps that is why this week's ABC/BBC poll shows that 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the surge and that 60 percent believe attacks on US forces are justified. And 93 percent of Sunnis, whom the general and ambassador claim are joining our side, want to see us dead.
As for optimism, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, as opposed to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the surge-which almost 70 percent of Iraqis believe has "hampered conditions for political dialogue, reconstruction and economic development."
So, ambassadors and generals lie. Get used to it.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070924/truthdig
ZNet | Economy:
The Age of Disaster Capitalism
by Naomi Klein; The Guardian/UK; September 12, 2007
The following is excerpted from Naomi Klein’s recently published book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush’s solution was for the government to deconstruct itself - hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other. Bush’s budget director, the think-tank ideologue Mitch Daniels, pronounced: “The general idea - that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided - seems self-evident to me.” That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) - the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks - described his new place of work as “an oversized entitlement programme”. Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an end to Bush’s project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.
For a while, that even seemed to be the case.” September 11 has changed everything,” said Ed Feulner, old friend of Milton Friedman, the guru of unfettered capitalism and president of the Heritage Foundation, 10 days after the attack, making him one of the first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world. After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of more than 20 years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue operation, air-traffic controllers didn’t notice the off-course planes in time, and the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.
The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had been Ronald Reagan’s attack on the air-traffic controllers’ union and his deregulation of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors. After the attacks, the inspector general of the department of transportation testified that the airlines, which were responsible for security on their flights, had skimped significantly to keep costs down.
On September 10, as long as flights were cheap and plentiful, none of that seemed to matter. But on September 12, putting $6-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport security seemed reckless. Then, in October, envelopes with white powder were sent to lawmakers and journalists, spreading panic about the possibility of a major anthrax outbreak. Once again, 90s privatisation looked very different in this new light: why did a private lab have the exclusive right to produce the vaccine against anthrax? Had the federal government signed away its responsibility to protect the public from a major public health emergency? Furthermore, if it was true, as media reports kept claiming, that anthrax, smallpox and other deadly agents could be spread through the mail, the food supply or the water systems, was it really such a good idea to be pushing ahead with Bush’s plans to privatise the postal service? And what about all those laid-off food and water inspectors - could somebody bring them back?
The backlash against the pro-corporate consensus only deepened in the face of new scandals such as that of Enron. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Enron declared bankruptcy, leading thousands of employees to lose their retirement savings while executives acting on insider knowledge cashed in. The crisis contributed to a general plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when it came out that it was Enron’s manipulation of energy prices that had led to the massive blackouts in California a few months earlier. Friedman, aged 90, was so concerned that the tides were shifting back toward Keynesianism that he complained that “businessmen are being presented in the public as second-class citizens”.
While CEOs were falling from their pedestals, unionised public sector workers - the villains of Friedman’s counter-revolution - were rapidly ascending in the public’s estimation. Within two months of the attacks, trust in government was higher than it had been since 1968 - and that, remarked Bush to a crowd of federal employees, is “because of how you’ve performed your jobs”. The uncontested heroes of September 11 were the blue-collar first responders - the New York firefighters, police and rescue workers, 403 of whom lost their lives as they tried to evacuate the towers and aid the victims. Suddenly, America was in love with its men and women in all kinds of uniforms, and its politicians - slapping on NYPD and FDNY baseball caps with unseemly speed - were struggling to keep up with the new mood.
When Bush stood with the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero on September 14 he was embracing some of the very unionised civil servants that the modern conservative movement had devoted itself to destroying. Of course, he had to do it (even Dick Cheney put on a hard hat in those days), but he didn’t have to do it so convincingly. Through some combination of genuine feeling on Bush’s part and the public’s projected desire for a leader worthy of the moment, these were the most moving speeches of Bush’s political career.
For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector - state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.
But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.
What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.
It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions - the war on terror - built to be private from the start. This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch - a power-grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed “a rolling coup”. Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.
Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security, privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. “When the IT industry shut down, post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government,” said Roger Novak of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security companies. Now, he says, “Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, ‘How do I get a piece of that action?’”
It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.
Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of US foreign or domestic policy. The mantra “September 11 changed everything” neatly disguised the fact that for free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now the Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing. As the New York Times observed in February 2007, “Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government.”
And so, in November 2001, just two months after the attacks, the department of defence brought together what it described as “a small group of venture capitalist consultants” with experience in the dotcom sector. The mission was to identify “emerging technology solutions that directly assist in the US efforts in the global war on terrorism”. By early 2006, this informal exchange had become an official arm of the Pentagon: the Defence Venture Catalyst Initiative (DeVenCI), a “fully operational office” that continually feeds security information to politically connected venture capitalists, who, in turn, scour the private sector for start-ups that can produce new surveillance and related products. “We’re a search engine,” explains Bob Pohanka, director of DeVenCI. According to the Bush vision, the role of government is merely to raise the money necessary to launch the new war market, then buy the best products that emerge out of that creative cauldron, encouraging industry to even greater innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector supplies all manner of solutions.
The department of homeland security, as a brand-new arm of the state created by the Bush regime, is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government. As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the department of homeland security, explained, “We don’t make things. If it doesn’t come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it.”
Another is Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa), a new intelligence agency created under Donald Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA. This parallel spy agency outsources 70% of its budget to private contractors; like the department of homeland security, it was built as a hollow shell. As Ken Minihan, former director of the National Security Agency, explained, “Homeland security is too important to be left to the government.” Minihan, like hundreds of other Bush administration staffers, has already left his government post to work in the burgeoning homeland security industry, which, as a top spy, he helped create.
Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market - from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security declares, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon,” which conveniently means that the security services required must protect against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And it’s not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale response - not with Cheney’s famous “1% doctrine”, which justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance, because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install detection equipment.
Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.
That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors, a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.
In a remarkably short time, the suburbs ringing Washington, DC became dotted with grey buildings housing security “start-ups” and “incubator” companies, hastily thrown together operations where, as in late-90s Silicon Valley, the money came in faster than the furniture could be assembled. Whereas in the 90s the goal was to develop the killer application, the “next new new thing”, and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new “search and nail” terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the department of homeland security or the Pentagon. That is why, in addition to the start-ups and investment funds, the disaster industry also gave birth to an army of new lobby firms promising to hook up new companies with the right people on Capitol Hill - in 2001, there were two such security-oriented lobby firms, but by mid-2006 there were 543. “I’ve been in private equity since the early 90s,” Michael Steed, managing director of the homeland security firm Paladin told Wired, “and I’ve never seen a sustained deal flow like this.”
Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic fashion. One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 30m of which have been installed in the US, shooting about 4bn hours of footage a year. That created a problem: who’s going to watch 4bn hours of footage? So a new market emerged for “analytic software” that scans the tapes and creates matches with images already on file.
This development created another problem, because facial recognition software can really make positive IDs only if people present themselves front and centre to the cameras, which they rarely do while rushing to and from work. So another market was created for digital image enhancement. Salient Stills, a company that sells software to isolate and enhance video images, started by pitching its technology to media companies, but it turned out that there was more potential revenue from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. And with all the snooping going on - phone logs, wire-tapping, financial records, mail, surveillance cameras, web surfing - the government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in information management and data mining, as well as software that claims to be able to “connect the dots” in this ocean of words and numbers and pinpoint suspicious activity.
In the 90s, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, mobile phones and web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the cooperation of privatised phone companies and search engines, whether it’s Yahoo assisting the Chinese government to pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the US National Security Agency to wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice that the Bush administration claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise of globalisation, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned hi-tech fence on the border between Mexico and the US, worth up to $2.5bn for Boeing and a consortium of other companies.
As hi-tech firms have jumped from one bubble to another, the result has been a bizarre merger of security and shopping cultures. Many technologies in use today as part of the war on terror - biometric identification, video surveillance, web tracking, data mining - had been developed by the private sector before September 11 as a way to build detailed customer profiles, opening up new vistas for micromarketing. When widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies stalled many of these initiatives, it caused dismay to both marketers and retailers. September 11 loosened this log jam in the market: suddenly the fear of terror was greater than the fear of living in a surveillance society. So now, the same information collected from cash cards or “loyalty” cards can be sold not only to a travel agency or the Gap as marketing data but also to the FBI as security data, flagging a “suspicious” interest in pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Middle Eastern travel.
As an exuberant article in the business magazine Red Herring explained, one such program “tracks terrorists by figuring out if a name spelled a hundred different ways matches a name in a homeland security database. Take the name Mohammad. The software contains hundreds of possible spellings for the name, and it can search terabytes of data in a second.” Impressive, unless they nail the wrong Mohammad, which often seems to happen, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the suburbs of Toronto.
This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans, becomes harrowing. One false identification coming out of any of these electronic fishing expeditions is enough for an apolitical family man, who sort of looks like someone whose name sort of sounds like his (at least to someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Muslim culture), to be flagged as a potential terrorist. And the process of putting names and organisations on watch lists is also now handled by private companies, as are the programs to crosscheck the names of travellers with the names in the data bank. As of June 2007, there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National Counterterrorism Centre. Another program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), made public in November 2006, has already assigned a “risk assessment” rating to tens of millions of travellers passing through the US. The rating, never disclosed to passengers, is based on suspicious patterns revealed through commercial data mining - for instance, information provided by airlines about “the passenger’s history of one-way ticket purchase, seat preferences, frequent-flyer records, number of bags, how they pay for tickets and even what meals they order”. Incidents of supposedly suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger’s risk rating.
Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the US or even arrested and named as an “enemy combatant” based on evidence from these dubious technologies - a blurry image identified through facial recognition software, a misspelled name, a misunderstood snippet of a conversation. If “enemy combatants” are not US citizens, they will probably never even know what it was that convicted them, because the Bush administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defence.
If the suspect is taken, as a result, to Guantánamo, he may well end up in the new 200-person maximum-security prison constructed by Halliburton. If he is a victim of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme, kidnapped off the streets of Milan or while changing planes at a US airport, then whisked to a so-called black site somewhere in the CIA’s archipelago of secret prisons, the hooded prisoner will likely fly in a Boeing 737, designed as a deluxe executive jet, retrofitted for this purpose. According to the New Yorker, Boeing has been acting as the “CIA’s travel agent” - blocking out flightplans for as many as 1,245 rendition voyages, arranging ground crews and even booking hotels. A Spanish police report explains that the work was done by Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary in San Jose. In May 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a lawsuit against the Boeing subsidiary; the company has refused to confirm or deny the allegations.
Once the prisoners arrive at the destination, they face interrogators, some of whom will not be employed by the CIA or the military but by private contractors. According to Bill Golden, who runs the job website IntelligenceCareers.com, “Over half of the qualified counter-intelligence experts in the field work for contractors.” If these freelance interrogators are to keep landing lucrative contracts, they must extract from prisoners the kind of “actionable intelligence” their employers in Washington are looking for. It’s a dynamic ripe for abuse: just as prisoners under torture will usually say anything to make the pain stop, contractors have a powerful economic incentive to use whatever techniques are necessary to produce the sought-after information, regardless of its reliability.
Then there is the low-tech version of this application of market “solutions” to the war on terror - the willingness to pay top dollar to pretty much anyone for information about alleged terrorists. During the invasion of Afghanistan, US intelligence agents let it be known that they would pay anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 for al-Qaida or Taliban fighters handed over to them. “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams,” stated a typical flyer handed out by the US in Afghanistan, introduced as evidence in a 2002 US federal court filing on behalf of several Guantánamo prisoners. “You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces…This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”
Soon enough, the cells of Bagram and Guantánamo were overflowing with goat herders, cab drivers, cooks and shopkeepers - all lethally dangerous, according to the men who turned them over and collected the rewards.
According to the Pentagon’s own figures, 86% of the prisoners at Guantánamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after the bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners from Guantánamo (out of 759 held between 2001 and the end of 2006). The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been freed or cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries. It is a track record that is a grave indictment of the quality of intelligence produced by the administration’s market-based approach to terrorist identification.
In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business. Yet what is most striking is how little the security boom is analysed and discussed as an economy, as an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison. When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information, but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.
When new economies emerged in the past, from the Fordist revolution to the IT boom, they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of wealth were also altering the way we as a culture worked, the way we travelled, even the way our brains process information. The new disaster economy has been subject to none of this kind of far-reaching discussion. There have been and are debates, of course - about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition - but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors - rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.
Part of the problem is that the disaster economy sneaked up on us. In the 80s and 90s, new economies announced themselves with great pride and fanfare. The tech bubble in particular set a precedent for a new ownership class inspiring deafening levels of hype - endless media lifestyle profiles of dashing young CEOs beside their private jets, their remote-controlled yachts, their idyllic Seattle mountain homes. That kind of wealth is being generated by the disaster complex today, though we rarely hear about it. While the CEOs of the top 34 defence contractors saw their incomes go up an average of 108% between 2001 and 2005, chief executives at other large American companies averaged only 6% over the same period.
Peter Swire, who served as the US government’s privacy counsellor during the Clinton administration, describes the convergence of forces behind the war on terror bubble like this: “You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets.” In other words, you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.
Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is now available. Visit her website at www.naomiklein.org
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=13754
posted by attilav at 18:41
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