Elsewhere Today 459
Aljazeera:
Turkey 'hits PKK targets in Iraq'
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2007
14:00 MECCA TIME, 11:00 GMT
Turkish forces have carried out a number of limited sorties inside northern Iraq to attack Kurdish fighters during recent days, according to military sources.
Reports of the attacks came as the president of Iraq's northern Kurdish region urged the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) to end its armed campaign against Turkey.
Sources told Reuters news agency that warplanes had flown up to 20km into Iraqi territory and about 300 ground troops had advanced about 10km.
Thirty-four Kurdistan Workers' party fighters were reportedly killed in attacks on their positions between Sunday and late on Tuesday.
"Further 'hot pursuit' raids into northern Iraq can be expected, though none have taken place so far today [Wednesday]," a military official said.
However, another Turkish official told the Associated Press, on condition of anonymity, that there was no Turkish air strike in northern Iraq, but confirmed that shelling had been carried out by artillery units.
The PKK has been fighting for self-rule in southeastern Turkey since 1984 and Ankara has been angered by the group's use of bases in northern Iraq to stage attacks.
'Eliminate violence'
"We call upon the PKK to eliminate violence and armed struggle as a mode of operation," the office of Massoud Barzani, president of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, said in a statement.
"We do not accept in any way, based on our commitment to the Iraqi constitution, the use of Iraqi territories, including the territories of the Kurdistan region, as a base to threaten the security of neighbouring countries."
On Tuesday, Iraq said it would shut down the operations of the Kurdish separatists in an attempt to head off the threat of an incursion.
"The PKK is a terrorist organisation and we have taken a decision to shut down their offices and not allow them to operate on Iraqi soil," Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said.
"We will also work on limiting their terrorist activities which are threatening Iraq and Turkey," he said after crisis talks in Baghdad on Tuesday with Ali Babacan, the Turkish foreign minister.
Iraq also suggested that it would send a high-level delegation to Turkey in a few days to discuss the problem.
But the threat of a full-scale incursion remains despite the extensive diplomacy of the past few days.
'More than words'
As Babacan arrived back in Turkey from Baghdad late on Tuesday, he said: "We need more than words."
"We said that preventing the PKK from using the Iraqi soil, an end to logistical support and all PKK activities inside Iraq and closing of its camps are needed. We also said its leaders need to be arrested and extradited to Turkey."
Turkey's political and military leaders will meet on Wednesday to consider their next move after Babacan said Ankara would not flinch from military action if Iraq and the US failed to clamp down on the PKK.
Ankara is under pressure to act after tens of thousands of protesters gathered on the streets during the funerals of 12 soldiers killed at the weekend.
The mourners chanted slogans condemning the PKK and urging the government to order an incursion.
Eight other soldiers have been missing since the clashes just inside Turkey on Sunday.
On Tuesday, a pro-Kurdish news agency close to the PKK published what it said were pictures of the troops it said were being held by the group. Turkey has not yet confirmed that the soldiers have been captured.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/14FA7823-911C-4456-B8DB-6CD27C4DE07F.htm
AllAfrica:
Humanitarian Crisis Feared in North
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
22 October 2007
Dakar
In an atmosphere void of information and full of insecurity, some aid workers fear a humanitarian crisis is emerging in the troubled northern region of Niger, where thousands of people are thought to be cut off, with limited access to food, healthcare and humanitarian assistance.
"We don't have hard facts at present that a crisis is ongoing but we do fear that the risk is there that a crisis may emerge," said Niger-based Frank Smit, West Africa humanitarian planning representative for Oxfam Novib, the Dutch arm of the aid organisation Oxfam International.
Since February, attacks led by ethnic Touareg in the northern Agadez region have killed at least 45 government soldiers. Both the government and the Nigerien Movement for Justice (MNJ) militia group have laid landmines. Bandits have profited from the lack of safety by attacking convoys travelling in the vast desert region of the Aïr mountain chain.
The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 23,000 people in 11 localities north of the regional capital Agadez are inaccessible by normal routes. With the help of local organisations, UNICEF has sent convoys of food and medicine to those areas, but in all but one, "we have no reliable information that the items have reached the people," said Guido Borghese, UNICEF's deputy representative in Niger.
According to SOS Iférouane, one of the local organisations delivering the items, a six-truck convoy of goods destined for the remote northern town of Iférouane has been blocked at the village of Timia for three weeks.
"People in northern Niger are in a very difficult situation," Idrissa Bahari, president of the SOS Iférouane Initiative, told IRIN. "Frankly, it's worrying."
Local and international organisations say the combined insecurity has deterred merchants from travelling to the north and brought commerce to a halt. The northern Agadez region depends on trade to buy grain and other products, like fuel - which farmers need for pumps to water their fields. Their income depends on the sale of their products in other towns, but such movement has ceased.
In what the UN considers the poorest country in the world, where 60 percent of the population lives on less than US$1 a day, prices for some commodities have doubled or tripled. A package of milk that cost 1000 CFA francs (US$2) more than a month ago now costs up to 2000 CFA francs, said priest Doamba Mathias, head of the Catholic Church in Agadez.
Floods this rainy season aggravated the economic situation for many families, washing away their fields and animals.
"A food crisis is occurring in many villages of the Aïr," said Ahmed Amani, mayor of the Dabaga commune, some 50 km north of Agadez. "The majority of the population is vulnerable."
The town of Iférouane has been without food for weeks, Bahari said, because the route there is littered with mines.
"We haven't really had any contact with them," he said. "But during our last contact three weeks ago, people said there was nothing left to buy in Iférouane."
In some cases, residents have fled their towns in search of food and security, travelling less-known routes by camel and leaving some villages completely empty, humanitarian actors say. In other cases, people are too scared of landmines to move.
"My main worry is people who are trapped in the area because they are poor people and they have nowhere to go," Oxfam's Smit said.
Access to health care
Reliable information is hard to come by, but aid agencies suspect the situation has had a negative impact on health in the region. In Iférouane, higher than normal rates of malaria and diarrhoea are emerging, said Bahari, who is also coordinator of Agadez activities for Cadev, the national branch of the aid organisation Caritas.
In the Agadez hospital, which normally admits between five and 10 cases of malnourished children a week, 54 children arrived in the last two weeks, he added.
"Every day, the rate of malnutrition is rising."
Results of a UNICEF survey released at the end of July found that acute malnutrition levels in the Agadez region had risen sharply in previous months to 17.5 percent of children - the second highest rate in the country.
Aid agencies say the insecurity has made access to healthcare more difficult. Three of the northern region's 44 health centres have closed, according to UNICEF's Borghese, and for the rest, "we don't know if they can function properly and if medicines are arriving."
The organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) suspects the current situation has reduced people's movement and the supply of medicine. It has thus opened a program in Dabaga to supply medicine, medical care and logistical support to the commune's health centre and hopes to better assess the impact of the region's insecurity on the health of its people over the coming months.
Culture of uncertainty
Little information is available about the condition of people living in the region because foreign journalists have been prevented from entering the north and local journalists discouraged from reporting on it. The few aid agencies working in the region are hesitant to say anything that might upset the government and hamper their relief operations.
Many agencies have reduced their operations or pulled out of the region altogether. But SOS Iférouane's Bahari said the insecurity should not scare aid agencies away.
"It's one more reason to help the people who are in a very serious situation," he said. "We've been ringing the alarm bell for a long time... Every day, the situation risks getting worse."
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200710220989.html
AlterNet: Bush's Response to 9/11
Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on October 24, 2007
Introduction note by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.
They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war - and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in the old fight, eager to make sure that the "Evil Empire," already long down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall - with other states in the region visibly not far behind.
It looked like it would be a coming-out party for one - the debutante ball of the season. It would be, in fact, like the Cold War without the Soviet Union. What a blast! And they could still put their energies into their fabulously expensive, ever-misfiring anti-missile system, a subject they regularly focused on from January 2000 until September 10, 2001.
They were Cold Warriors in search of an enemy - just not the one they got. When the Clintonistas, on their way out of the White House, warned them about al Qaeda, they paid next to no attention. Non-state actors were for wusses. When the CIA carefully presented the President with a one-page, knock-your-socks-off warning on August 6, 2001 that had the screaming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," they ignored it. Bush and his top officials were, as it happened, strangely adrift until September 11, 2001; then, they were panicked and terrified - until they realized that their moment had come to hijack the plane of state; so they clambered aboard, and like the Cold Warriors they were, went after Saddam.
Chalmers Johnson was himself once a Cold Warrior. Unlike the top officials of the Bush administration, however, he retained a remarkably flexible mind. He also had a striking ability to see the world as it actually was - and a prescient vision of what was to come. He wrote the near-prophetic and now-classic book, Blowback, published well before the attacks of 9/11, and then followed it up with an anatomy of the U.S. military's empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, and finally, to end his Blowback Trilogy, a vivid recipe for American catastrophe, Nemesis: The Fall of the American Republic. All three are simply indispensable volumes in any reasonable post-9/11 library. Here is his latest consideration of that disastrous moment and its consequences as part of a series of book reviews he is periodically writing for Tomdispatch.
A Guide for the Perplexed:
Intellectual Fallacies of the War on Terror
By Chalmers Johnson
This essay is a review of The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes (Cambridge University Press, 367 pp., $30).]
There are many books entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed," including Moses Maimonides' 12th century treatise on Jewish law and E. F. Schumacher's 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a better title for Stephen Holmes' new book than the one he chose, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book. Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks - and how and why the United States has magnified many times over the initial damage caused by the terrorists.
Stephen Holmes is a law professor at New York University. In The Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an understanding - in an intellectual and historical sense, not as a matter of journalism or of partisan politics - of the Iraq war, which he calls "one of the worst (and least comprehensible) blunders in the history of American foreign policy" (p. 230). His modus operandi is to survey in depth approximately a dozen influential books on post-Cold War international politics to see what light they shed on America's missteps. I will touch briefly on the books he chooses for dissection, highlighting his essential thoughts on each of them.
Holmes' choice of books is interesting. Many of the authors he focuses on are American conservatives or neoconservatives, which is reasonable since they are the ones who caused the debacle. He avoids progressive or left wing writers, and none of his choices are from Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project. (Disclosure: This review was written before I read Holmes' review of my own book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic in the October 29 issue of The Nation.)
He concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched and insightful books on the subject, the reason why the United States responded to the al Qaeda attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an enigma" (p. 3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the books he has chosen are so well done and fair that they constitute one of the best introductions to the subject. They also have the advantage in several cases of making it unnecessary to read the original.
Holmes interrogates his subjects cleverly. His main questions and the key books he dissects for each of them are:
* Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? Here he supplies his own independent analysis and conclusion (to which I turn below).
* Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence, as exemplified in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)? While not persuaded by Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus," Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on the use of force in international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States, with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).
* How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards this book by Gordon, the military correspondent of the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of the military aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military. I would argue that Fiasco (Penguin 2006) by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks is more comprehensive, clearer-eyed, and more critical.
* How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas, the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to replace.... We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).
* What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration, as captured in Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According to Holmes, Mann's work "repays close study, even by readers who will not find its perspective altogether congenial or convincing." He argues that perhaps Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put, is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter- and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters. Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror, they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they happened to preside" (p. 107).
* Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? It is not clear why Holmes included Huntington's eleven-year-old treatise on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of books on post-Cold War international politics except as an act of obeisance to establishmentarian - and especially Council-on-Foreign-Relations - thinking. Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for homogeneity" (p. 136).
* What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror, as seen by Samantha Power in "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As Holmes acknowledges, "The humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the 1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign-policy thinking after the end of the Cold War. ... Their influence was small, however, and after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch - they were, after all, doing what they had always wanted to do - but Holmes' argument that "a savvy prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p. 157) is worth considering.
* How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war, as illustrated by Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists (Soft Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists in their support of the war on terrorism.
* How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become America's mission in the world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes is interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore, because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon "democratization" project for the Middle East.
Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most effective antidote to the kind of Islamic radicalism that hit the United States on September 11, 2001. He contends that the root of Islamic rebellion is to be found in the savage and effective repression of protestors - many of whom have been driven into exile - in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Terrorism is not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes of Fukuyama's argument, "[T]o recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom, is to invite a political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political solution" (p. 209).
The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic transitions.
* Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic, as seen through the lens of history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W. W. Norton, 2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.
* How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State, as put into perspective by John Ikenberry in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001)? This book is Holmes' oddest choice - a dated history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international institutions created by the United States after World War II, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialist in international relations, applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic and nation-building missions.
* Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in the hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo in The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final section, Holmes puts on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California, Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders, "Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p. 291).
Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to be committed to recovering the original understanding of the Constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure - that is, to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or ignore" (p. 301).
Is Islam the Culprit or Merely a Distraction?
In addition to these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden agendas and their distorting effects on rational policy-making. Some of these are: Cheney's desire to expand executive power and weaken Congressional oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his theory that in modern warfare speed is more important than mass; the plans by some of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security situation of Israel; the administration's desire to create a new set of permanent U.S. military bases in the Middle East to protect the U.S. oil supply in case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the desire to invade Iraq and thereby avoid putting all the blame for 9/11 on al Qaeda - because to do so would have involved admitting administration negligence and incompetence during the first nine months of 2001 and, even worse, that Clinton was right in warning Bush and his top officials that the main security threat to the United States was a potential al Qaeda attack or attacks.
This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive review of Holmes' detailed critiques. For that, one should buy and read his book. Let me instead dwell on three themes that I think illustrate his insight and originality.
Holmes rejects any direct connection between Islamic religious extremism and the 9/11 attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic vilification of the United States and other Western powers is often expressed in apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing religious extremism as the motivation for the [9/11] plot, whatever it reveals," he argues, "...terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to view the attack ahistorically as an expression of 'radical Salafism,' a fundamentalist movement within Islam that allegedly drives its adherents to homicidal violence against infidels" (p. 2). This approach, he points out, is distinctly tautological: "Appeals to social norms or a culture of martyrdom are not very helpful.... They are tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism is caused by a proclivity to suicidal terrorism" (p. 20).
Instead, he suggests, "The mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not Islam, or even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific narrative of blame" (p. 63). He insists on putting the focus on the actual perpetrators, the 19 men who executed the attacks in New York and Washington - 15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of them was particularly religious. Three were living together in Hamburg, Germany, where they did appear to have become more interested in Islam than they had been in their home countries. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33 on 9/11, had Egyptian and German degrees in architecture and city planning and became highly politicized in favor of the Palestinian cause against Zionism only after he went abroad.
Holmes notes, "According to the classic study of resentment, [Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)] 'every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an agent, a "guilty" agent who is susceptible of pain - in short, some living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in effigy, under some pretext or other.' If suffering is seen as natural or uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of injustice, and it will produce resignation rather than rebellion. The most efficient way to incite, therefore, is to indict" (p. 64).
The role of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a hyperbolic indictment - one that men like Atta would never have heard back in authoritarian Egypt but that came through loud and clear in their German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United States, accusing it of genocide against Muslims and repeatedly contending that the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf War in 1991 was a far graver offense than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though that had led to the death of one million Afghans and had sent five million more into exile.
The fact that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own self-destruction suggests possible irrationality on their part, but Holmes argues that this was actually part of the specific narrative of blame. Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe little or no value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to be captured after a terrorist attack involved a high likelihood that the Americans would torture the perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry (and provided several other advantages discussed below).
The United States as "Sole Remaining Superpower"
Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq. "Because Americans.... have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power" (pp. 71-72).
Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington D.C. suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.
One was to recast what had happened in terms of Cold-War thinking. "To repress feelings of defenselessness associated with an unfamiliar threat, the decision makers' gaze slid uncontrollably away from al Qaeda and fixated on a recognizable threat that was unquestionably susceptible to being broken into bits" (p.312). Holmes calls this fusion of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the 'reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a palpable enemy." He endorses James Mann's thesis that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others did not change the underlying principles guiding American foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they did the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration has managed foreign affairs so ineptly because it has been reflexively implementing out-of-date formulas in a radically changed security environment" (p. 106).
Unintended consequences also played a role, Holmes argues: "If conservative Congressmen had not blocked [Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge's nomination as Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion, then the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, would have been in no position to hijack the administration's reaction to 9/11" (pp. 93-94). Rumsfeld enthusiastically endorsed Bush's description of his "new" policies as a "war" because the Office of the Secretary of Defense then became the lead agency in designing and carrying out America's response.
There was little or no countervailing influence. "By sheer chance," Holmes writes, "Rice and Powell - no doubt orderly managers - have pedestrian minds and perhaps deferential personalities. Neither provided a gripping and persuasive vision of the United States' role in the world that might have counteracted the megalomania of the neoconservatives, and neither was capable of outfoxing the hard-liners in an interagency power struggle" (p. 94).
The costs of equating al Qaeda with Iraq and of concentrating on a military response were high. "It meant that some of the troops sent to Iraq in the first wave believed, disgracefully, that they were avenging the 3,000 dead from September 11.... Cruel and arbitrary behavior by some U.S. forces helped stoke the violent insurgency that followed" (p. 307).
American confusion about the nature of the enemy - rogue state vs. non-state terrorist organization - produced two different counterstrategies, both of which almost certainly made the situation worse. First, by focusing on a rogue state (Iraq), rather than on a non-state actor (al Qaeda), the Pentagon drew attention to what it came to call the "hand-off scenario" in which a nuclear-armed rogue state might hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who would use them against the U.S. To counter this threat, the Pentagon developed a strategy of preventive war against rogue states with the objective of bringing about regime change in them. The only way to prevent nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups - so the argument went - was to forcibly democratize Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, some of which had long been allied with the United States.
The other strategy was a return to what seemed like a form of deterrence: a "scare the Muslims" campaign. This involved a resort to massive "shock and awe" bombing raids on Baghdad with the intent of demonstrating the futility of defying the United States.
By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a substitute target - without even bothering to calculate the enormous potential costs involved - the Pentagon greatly overestimated what military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially devastating unintended consequences - particularly if any of the premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11 provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes. That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim possibility not to be wished away" (p. 10).
Complicity of the Left in American Imperialism
Holmes is also interesting on why the American Left has been so ineffectual in countering the efforts of Washington's pro-war party. Deeply guilt-ridden over the Clinton administration's failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and frustrated by the constraints of international law and United Nations procedures, some influential progressives in America had already advocated a preemptive and unilateralist turn in American foreign policy that the Bush administration hijacked. Human rights activists had heavily promoted intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo to halt ethnic cleansing - and doing so without any international sanction whatsoever. Some of them became as enthusiastic about using the American armed forces to achieve limited foreign policy goals as many neocons. Even U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright made herself notorious with her 1993 wisecrack to then Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"
Although Holmes tries not to overstate his case, he suspects that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s - at one point he speaks of "human rights as imperial ideology" (p. 190) - may have played at least a small role in the public's acceptance of Bush's intervention in Iraq. If so, it is hard to imagine a better example of the disasters that good intentions can sometimes produce. The result in Iraq, in turn, has more or less silenced calls from the Left for further campaigns of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The U.S. is conspicuously not participating in the U.N. intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The Rule of Law
As a legal scholar, Holmes is committed to the rule of law. "[L]aw is best understood," he writes, "not as a set of rigid rules but rather as a set of institutional mechanisms and procedures designed to correct the mistakes that even exceptionally talented executive officials are bound to make and to facilitate midstream readjustments and course corrections. If we understand law, constitutionalism, and due process in this way, then it becomes obvious why the war on terrorism is bound to fail when conducted, as it has been so far, against the rule of law and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances" (p. 5).
This short-circuiting of normal constitutional procedures he sees as probably the most consequential post-9/11 blunder of the Bush administration. The President's repeated claims that he needs high levels of secrecy and the ability to arbitrarily cancel established law in order to move decisively against terrorists draw his utter contempt. "By dismantling checks and balances, along the lines idealized and celebrated by [John] Yoo, the administration has certainly gained flexibility in the 'war on terror.' It has gained the flexibility, in particular, to shoot first and aim afterward" (p. 301). Although such an assumption of dictatorial powers has happened before during periods of national emergency in the United States, Holmes is convinced that the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s helped anesthetize many Americans to the implications of what the government was doing after 9/11.
Even now, with the Iraq War all but lost and public opinion having turned decisively against the President, there is still a flabbiness in mainstream criticism that reveals a major weakness in the conduct of American foreign policy. For example, while many hawks and doves today recognize that Rumsfeld mobilized too few forces to achieve his military objectives in Iraq, they tend to concentrate on his rejection of former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's advice that he needed a larger army of occupation. They almost totally ignore the true national policy implications of Rumsfeld's failed leadership. Holmes writes, "If Saddam Hussein had actually possessed the tons of chemical and biological weapons that, in the president's talking points, constituted the casus belli for the invasion, Rumsfeld's slimmed-down force would have abetted the greatest proliferation disaster in world history" (p. 82). He quotes Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor: "Securing the WMD required sealing the country's borders and quickly seizing control of the many suspected sites before they were raided by profiteers, terrorists, and regime officials determined to carry on the fight. The force that Rumsfeld eventually assembled, by contrast, was too small to do any of this" (pp. 84-85). As a matter of fact, looters did ransack the Iraqi nuclear research center at al Tuwaitha. No one pointed out these flaws in the strategy until well after the invasion had revealed that, luckily, Saddam had no WMD.
With this book, Stephen Holmes largely succeeds in elevating criticism of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East to a new level. In my opinion, however, he underplays the roles of American imperialism and militarism in exploiting the 9/11 crisis to serve vested interests in the military-industrial complex, the petroleum industry, and the military establishment. Holmes leaves the false impression that the political system of the United States is capable of a successful course correction. But, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. To take up these subjects, however, moves the discussion into largely unexplored territory. For now, Holmes has done a wonderful job of clearing the underbrush and preparing the way for the public to address this more or less taboo subject.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy - Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2007).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/65838/
Asia Times:
No end in sight of the Kurdish fight
By Sami Moubayed
Oct 25, 2007
DAMASCUS - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears willing to give diplomacy a chance, although he now has a mandate from the Turkish Parliament to launch military attacks on Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels harbored in northern Iraq.
That mandate is supported by all ranks within the Turkish army and politicians from every end of the political spectrum in Ankara. In response, the PKK has said it would stop cross-border attacks if the Turkish government called off its military invasion.
History and logic say that the PKK promise should be treated with skepticism, and nobody knows that better than Erdogan, who, while playing along with US pleas for restraint, is personally convinced that the PKK will continue to be a problem for Turkey.
The PKK's roots
The Kurds are a dominant minority in Turkey, comprising 9 million of the country's 60 million people. Kurdish nationalists, who dream of creating the State of Kurdistan, envision 55% of it on Turkish territory.
They have been a problem for every Turkish administration since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. As a result, consecutive Turkish governments banned the use of Kurdish in schools, on radio and television. Kurdish families were also prohibited from giving Kurdish names to their children, and violation of these regulations was considered a criminal offense, punishable with up to five years in prison.
Kurdish political parties were also banned, and Kurdish separatists were arrested and persecuted for their views. Kurdish rebellions broke out in 1925, 1930 and 1937-1938. Various states, like Greece, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have extensively used the "Kurdish card" against Turkey over the past 50 years. As a result of continued foreign meddling, the PKK was born in 1978.
Originally named the Ankara Democratic Patriotic Association of Higher Education, it had a large student membership, and was headed by Abdullah Ocelan. What started out in Ankara mushroomed to southeast Turkey, which has a large Kurdish population.
The PKK in its present form came out with an inauguration manifesto, which it called "Declaration of Independence", on October 27, 1978. It adopted a heavy revolutionary communist ideology, influenced by Mao Zedong's "people's war" in China, and aimed at creating an independent socialist State of Kurdistan on territory controlled by Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. The communist influence remained strong until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The main target of PKK military activity has always been Turkey. Tactics have included ambush, sabotage, riots, protests, suicide bombings and target assassinations.
The militants' most notorious acts have been the assassination of prime minister Nihat Erim in July 1980 and the bombing of the Turkish consulate in Strasbourg, France, in November 1980. The Turkish Ministry of Justice says that during the years 1984-1998, 35,000 people were killed by the PKK, 17,500 of them being assassinations. Another 1,000 people were assassinated in 1999.
When interrogating arrested members of the outlawed organization, Turkey realized that 86% of them joined due to poverty, with a family income of less than US$380 per month. Sixty percent are high school drop-outs.
Given its record, it is no surprise that the US, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization branded the PKK a "terrorist organization". PKK assets in the US were frozen by the US Treasury in 2004.
According to Robert Olson, author of books on Turkey's relations with Iran, Syria, Israel and Russia, Turkey spends an estimated $8 billion a year to combat the PKK rebellion.
When pressure became too strong for the rebels, they fled to neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan after the establishment of its autonomy at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. They were received with open arms by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, who subsequently became the presidents of Kurdistan and Iraq respectively.
The rebels were allowed to set up base in the mountainous regions, where they hide out in caves, making air operations difficult for the Turkish military.
The PKK has an annual budget of $86 million, mostly tapped through private donations from wealthy Kurdish businessmen and revenue from narcotic trafficking. According to the French, 80% of heroin in Paris is smuggled into the country by the PKK. There is a sizeable Kurdish community scattered around Europe and at certain stages several of its heavyweights have been sympathetic to the PKK.
Germany alone has about 400,000 Kurds, France has 60,000 and Sweden has 10,000. Smaller communities can be found in Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Italy.
According to reports, 14.7% of the PKK's Kalashnikov assault rifles come from China, 3.6% from Hungary and 3.6% from Belgium. Nearly 46% of "assassination weapons" have traceable serial numbers from Russia, with 13.2% from Great Britain and 9.4% from the US. Grenades (19.8%) come from the US, and 60.8% of mines come from Italy.
The turning point in the PKK's history was 1999 when its founder and leader Abdullah Ocelan was apprehended by the Turks, in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency, in Kenya. He was carrying a Cypriot passport in the name of Mavros Lazaros. He was tried and sentenced to death by a Turkish court but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2002.
Since then, the PKK has operated with no strong leadership and as a result has lost much of its power base both within Turkey and abroad. It declared a truce in 2006, but Erdogan refused to commit to it, saying: "A ceasefire is done between states. It is not something for a terrorist organization."
The Turks expected the United States, with which it had cooperated in the past to combat communism and Islamic fundamentalism, to take serious action against the PKK after September 11, 2001.
Too busy fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq, the US has done very little to root out the PKK. In fact, it turned a blind eye, not wanting to upset its two strong Kurdish allies, Barzani and Talabani. In October-November 2004, the Turks mobilized on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan, planning for an invasion by 20,000 troops. That was halted by the Americans.
For now, the world is waiting to see what American diplomacy will lead to with regard to the PKK. Although Washington brands the group as "terrorist", the US has much to gain from a continued PKK presence in Iraq. One clear advantage is appeasement of Kurdish politicians like Barzani and Talabani, who are needed for the political process in Baghdad. The second reason is that Washington cannot, even if it wished, combat another guerrilla movement, with so much already on its hands: al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and Ba'athists fighting US troops in Iraq.
According to The New Yorker, the US government and Israel support the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, the Iranian branch of the PKK, that works against the Islamic government in Tehran. Murat Karayilan, a senior PKK militant, was once quoted in an interview with The Daily Telegraph of London as saying that the US has had direct contact with the PKK in northern Iraq. That was confirmed last year by Ali Larijani, the former senior nuclear negotiator under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Such facts are well-known to the Turks, and their patience has limits. Unless the US steps in soon to help resolve the PKK problem, it risks Turkey walking out of the "war on terror" and halting US use of a Turkish air base that is a vital conduit for supplying US forces in Iraq.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ25Ak03.html
Guardian:
Turkey kills 34 Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq
Mark Tran and agencies
Wednesday October 24, 2007
Turkish aircraft and helicopter gunships today attacked Kurdish fighter positions along the mountainous border area with Iraq.
Several F-16 warplanes loaded with bombs took off from an air base in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, local media reports said.
Earlier, Reuters reported that in the past few days war planes had flown as deep as 13 miles into Iraqi territory and some 300 ground troops advanced about six miles, killing 34 fighters from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK).
"Further 'hot pursuit' raids into northern Iraq can be expected, though none have taken place so far today," a military official said, adding that all Turkish troops involved in the operations in the past few days were now back in Turkey.
Officials said the sorties were small, similar to those conducted in the past across the mountainous border, not the large-scale offensive that US and Iraqi authorities are trying to avert.
Turkish troops also shelled suspected Kurdish positions across the border as recently as last night.
The reports of small-scale raids into Iraqi Kurdistan came as Turkey's civilian and military leaders met to discuss the scope and duration of a possible large-scale offensive, amid mounting pressure for action.
Several newspapers printed pictures of eight missing soldiers, allegedly held hostage by the separatist fighters.
During funerals for 12 soldiers yesterday, tens of thousands of mourners chanted slogans, urging the government to order an offensive against Kurdish fighters.
The Turkish national security council, under the chairmanship of the president, Abdullah Gul, was due to discuss possible economic measures against Iraqi Kurdistan as a way of putting pressure on the PKK.
"The prime minister has indicated this meeting could produce economic sanctions - for example, cutting off electricity to northern Iraq or the closure or slowing down of traffic at the Habur border gate," Suat Kiniklioglu, an MP from the ruling AK party, told Reuters.
Northern Iraq depends heavily on Turkey for power, water and food supplies. The Turkish government has frequently voiced its exasperation at the failure of the US and the Iraqi authorities to crack down on Kurdish fighters operating out of northern Iraq. Sanctions against the Iraqi Kurds would be designed to make them tackle the PKK.
US officials yesterday publicly rebuked Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq for failing to curb the Kurdish fighters based in the autonomous region.
"We are not pleased with the lack of action," David Satterfield, the US state department's senior Iraq adviser, told reporters in Washington.
He said Kurdish leaders had to take responsibility for dealing with the fighters, although he did not go as far as calling on them to take military action against the PKK.
Pressure on the Iraqi government to rein in the fighters is causing friction between Baghdad and the PKK, which has criticised the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, for labelling the movement as terrorist.
"It's shameful for al-Maliki to call us terrorists while at the same time maintaining that Iraq is a democracy," said a PKK spokesman. "He's giving in to pressure from the Turkish regime.
Turkey, which has Nato's second biggest army, has deployed as many as 100,000 troops, backed by tanks, F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gunships, along the border in preparation for a possible large-scale incursion.
Turkey's parliament last week approved a military attack, and the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said yesterday his country "cannot wait forever" to strike at the PKK.
The European Union today repeated its condemnation of attacks on Turkey launched by Kurdish fighters hiding across the border in Iraq, but urged Turkey and Iraq to work out joint measures to end the hostilities.
Turkey is negotiating to join the EU and the Turkish government has to consider the damage that military action could inflict on accession talks.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,,2198148,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Deux journalistes
passés à tabac "sur ordre" d'un ministre
RD CONGO - 23 octobre 2007 - par AFP
Une organisation locale de défense de la presse en République démocratique du Congo (RDC) a dénoncé mardi le "passage à tabac" de deux journalistes d'une chaîne de télévision privée par des policiers sur ordre d'un ministre, dans une "lettre ouverte" au chef du gouvernement.
Journaliste en danger (JED), "vient par la présente lettre élever une vive protestation contre le passage à tabac, lundi 22 octobre, de deux journalistes de la chaîne de télévision privée Horizon 33 (proche du pouvoir) par des policiers sur ordre express de monsieur Sylvain Ngabu, ministre d'Etat en charge de l'Enseignement supérieur et universitaire".
Selon JED, M. Ngabu reprochait à Eustache Namunanika et Didier Lofumbwa, respectivement journaliste et cameraman à Horizon 33, d'avoir donné la parole à un responsable d'une université publique suspendu par le ministre, lui-même interviewé dans le même reportage.
Convoqués lundi au cabinet du ministre, les deux journalistes se sont longuement expliqués auprès de lui sur leur souci d'informer "objectivement" l'opinion en diffusant "les deux sons de cloche", selon JED.
"Furieux, le ministre d'Etat a fait monter dans son bureau les policiers commis à sa garde et leur a ordonné de +corriger+ les deux journalistes", qui ont été "copieusement battus avant d?être jetés, comme des malfrats, hors du ministère", rapporte JED.
"Un tel comportement (...) est inacceptable et indigne d'un membre d'un gouvernement issu des premières élections libres et transparentes (2006) depuis plus de 40 ans" dans l'ex-Zaïre, souligne JED dans son courrier au Premier ministre Antoine Gizenga.
JED demande à M. Gizenga de "se désolidariser" de son ministre, issu comme lui du Parti lumumbiste unifié (Palu), troisième parti représenté à l'Assemblée nationale.
Cette agression des deux journalistes a été également dénoncée par l'Observatoire des médias congolais (OMEC), un organe qui veille au respect de l'éthique et de la déontologie professionnelle en RDC.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP65607deuxjertsin0
Mail & Guardian:
Masses flock to Dube memorial service
Thembelihle Tshabalala and Sapa | Johannesburg, South Africa
24 October 2007
A crowd of about 500 bereaved music fans thronged in the scorching sun outside music venue the Bassline in Johannesburg's Newtown cultural precinct on Wednesday for the memorial service of slain South African reggae icon Lucky Dube.
Inside were another 1 000 fans, family members and friends of the singer who was shot dead last Thursday during an apparent hijacking in Rosettenville, south of Johannesburg.
The three-hour memorial service - in celebration of a life "lived with a purpose", in the words of Dube's long-time keyboardist Eugene Mthethwa - was scheduled to start at 11am but only got under way about 30 minutes later as fans jostled for space.
The MC, fellow musician Sipho "Hotstix" Mabuse, opened the ceremony with a prayer, and a song of praise was performed by members of the Shembe Nazareth Church to which Dube belonged. Mabuse called Dube a hero in South Africa and the rest of the world.
Job Dube, a family representative, paid tribute to the singer and said the Dubes had lost more than just a family member. "Lucky was a pillar of the Dube family," he said.
Dube's spiritual presence was felt when his band performed two of his songs, Rastas Never Die and Shembe Is the Way - to which crowd members, many in tears, sang along.
Dube this year alone performed in 81 overseas concerts, and Gallo Records South Africa CEO Ivor Haarburger described him as an "amazing performer".
"I've been in Lucky's career and life for more than 20 years and he was quiet and reserved," he said.
The service was also attended by singer Thandiswa Mazwai and actress Lilian Dube, and letters of condolence from the presidents of The Gambia and Senegal were read.
Mbaqanga singer Bhekumuzi Luthuli was clearly deeply moved by Dube's death as tears streamed down his face during a performance of one of his own songs.
"I loved Lucky. I am crying because I don't know who did this and I am sorry to say this, but I need to say it so I can heal. We must revisit the justice system and bring back the death sentence because the people who killed Lucky will be arrested, but Lucky will never come back," he said to loud applause from the crowd.
Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said the working class and the poor are the main victims of crime in South Africa. The death of Dube should be a wake-up call for South Africans to unite against crime.
"This atrocity highlights the grim reality of the daily carnage on our streets, the main victims of which are working people and the poor," he told mourners.
Vavi quoted from one of Dube's popular songs, saying the words underline that everyone can be affected by crime. The lyrics read in part: "Do you ever worry about leaving home and coming back in a coffin, with a bullet through your head?"
South African queen of gospel Rebecca Malope told the Mail & Guardian Online afterwards that the memorial service was conducted in a way that Dube would have liked. "He was passionate about music and this is the best way that we can ever commiserate [with] his death and celebrate his life," she said.
Three hours of music and tributes to a great artist whose music advocated peace were hardly sufficient for a large number of Rastafarians gathered outside the Bassline, who carried on chanting and singing along to Dube's songs, played after the ceremony on a big-screen television outside the venue.
"Lucky is survived by his mother, Sara; wife, Zanele; and his seven children, Bongi, Ninkululeko, Thokozani, Laura, Siyanda, Philani and baby Melokuhle; one brother and three sisters. Lala kahle, Mtima [Rest in peace, Mtima]," read the memorial programme handed to mourners.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=322957&area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__national/
Mother Jones:
Al Qaeda: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Bush administration propaganda notwithstanding, Al Qaeda was not a factor in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. But it is now—and any withdrawal plan needs to deal with the demons we helped create.
Peter Bergen & Paul Cruickshank
October 18 , 2007
A gathering threat from Iraq, a safe haven for Al Qaeda; stockpiles of chemical weapons in the hands of forces hostile to the United States; Iraqi terrorist groups capable of attacking American allies and even, perhaps, the homeland itself. That was the utterly false portrait of Iraq that the Bush administration painted in constructing a rationale to invade. Four and a half years later, Bush is once again touting the threat from terrorists in Iraq as the key justification for continuing the war in Iraq. But in a hideously ironic twist, what was once fiction is now a dangerous fact on the ground. The president is still wrong when he claims that withdrawal would mean "surrendering the future of Iraq to Al Qaeda"; the group's few thousand fighters have no chance of ever taking over the entire country. But it is now deeply entrenched in Iraq and is carrying out scores of attacks each week, some of them using chemical weapons—chlorine-gas bombs. Al Qaeda has used Iraq as a training ground for thousands of jihadist terrorists, and it has said it will use its stronghold there as a base from which to attack the United States. As the nation wrestles with the question of how to execute the inevitable withdrawal, it is incumbent on all of us to ask the questions the Bush administration has not: What exactly is Al Qaeda in Iraq? How dangerous is it really, to Iraqis and to Americans? And how can it be fought or contained? Using Al Qaeda's Iraq presence as a propaganda tool is inexcusable and irresponsible. But so is ignoring it.
al qaeda didn't establish itself in Iraq until October 2004—more than 18 months after the U.S. invasion—when the notorious Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fused his group with Osama bin Laden's organization. Back in 2002, Zarqawi's ragtag band of around 25 foreign fighters—mostly hardline Salafist Sunnis on the run from the authorities in Amman—had set up shop in Kurdistan under the auspices of Ansar al-Islam, a small Kurdish Islamist (and deeply anti-Saddam) group. Like bin Laden, Zarqawi had been a jihadist in Afghanistan, but he kept his distance from Al Qaeda and until 2002 sought to attack only Israeli, Jewish, and Jordanian targets—the near enemy, in jihadist parlance, not the far enemy, a.k.a. the United States. The Bush administration blithely ignored this fact when it made Zarqawi the core of its case for a "sinister nexus" between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In his infamous address to the United Nations in February 2003, Colin Powell argued that "Iraq today harbors a deadly network headed by Abu Musabal-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden." Powell claimed that Zarqawi's forces were operating (and getting bioweapons training) in Kurdistan with Saddam's approval, even though the area was essentially out of Baghdad's control thanks to the U.S.-imposed no-fly zone.
When the far enemy came to his terrain in 2003, however, Zarqawi did begin attacking coalition forces as well as international institutions—to devastating effect. One of the group's bombs killed the U.N. special envoy to Iraq while another left 19 Italians dead, the two attacks together serving to deter much of the international community from getting involved in Iraq.
But Zarqawi's biggest impact was in provoking sectarian warfare. On August 30, 2003, his group—still not affiliated with Al Qaeda—exploded a massive car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in Najaf. Among the 125 dead was one of Iraq's top Shiite clerics. Then in 2004, U.S. forces released a letter they said Zarqawi had written to Al Qaeda associates in Afghanistan; though the letter's authenticity is disputed, its content is consistent with Zarqawi's other statements. The letter argued that getting Shiites to attack Sunnis was crucial to bolstering the Sunni insurgency because Sunnis "have little expertise or experience" in fighting and "most of the groups are working in isolation with no political horizon.
"The Shia in our opinion are the key to change," it continued. "I mean that targeting them...will provoke them to show the Sunnis their hidden rancor. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death."
By this time, a closer alliance made sense to both Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wanted a foothold in the Iraqi insurgency, seeing it as the cause célèbre for jihadists worldwide, while Zarqawi presumably recognized the power of Al Qaeda's global brand. After months of negotiations, Zarqawi released an online statement on October 17, 2004, promising obedience to Al Qaeda's leader: "By God, O sheikh of the mujahideen, if you bid us plunge into the ocean, we would follow you. If you ordered it so, we would obey!" (Since Zarqawi's death in June 2006, his successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri—an Egyptian operative thought to have ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command—has deepened cooperation with Al Qaeda's top leadership.)
Zarqawi's strategy has, unfortunately, proved wildly successful. It was his group's February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a sacred shrine for the Shiites, that tipped Iraq into full-blown civil war. As Sunnis faced growing Shiite violence, Al Qaeda in Iraq—largely made up of foreign volunteers as late as 2004—dramatically increased its local membership; it now has at least 3,000 fighters, and according to Edward Gistaro, a top U.S. intelligence official, around 90 percent are Iraqi.
Though smaller than most insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq—often referred to as aqi—has been punching above its weight, contributing more significantly to the bloodshed than is generally understood. Mohammed Hafez, author of the authoritative 2007 book Suicide Bombers in Iraq, says the U.S. government has counted more than 800 suicide bombings in Iraq to date; because of improvements in American armor, more and more of them are directed against Shiite civilians, and an estimated 10,000 people have been killed. The military estimates aqi has been responsible for up to 90 percent of those attacks.
Of all the Sunni insurgent groups, aqi is also the only one that has declared an interest in targeting Americans outside Iraq. Its current leader, al-Masri, declared last November that "we will not rest from jihad until we have blown up the White House." Zarqawi himself believed that establishing a stronghold in Iraq would provide "strategic depth and reach" for jihadists throughout the Middle East. If that failed, he wrote in the 2004 letter, "we pack our bags and search for another land, as is the sad recurrent story in the arenas of jihad."
To be sure, aqi currently poses less of a threat to the U.S. homeland than Al Qaeda Central in Pakistan—in part because Al Qaeda's safe haven there is considerably more reliable. Inside Iraq, Al Qaeda constantly faces attack from the U.S. military, and the country's relatively flat terrain makes it difficult to conceal training camps. The lack of operational safety has meant that only the most committed and hardcore jihadists are willing to go to Iraq, limiting aqi's numbers.
Still, it is an oversimplification to maintain that the central front of the war on terror is either in Iraq, as many Republicans insist, or on the Afghan-Pakistan border, as Democrats are fond of saying. The sad fact is that today there are two key havens for Al Qaeda: Iraq and Pakistan's tribal areas.
Ironically, perhaps the most effective force working against Al Qaeda in Iraq is Al Qaeda itself. The barbaric violence, radicalism, and extreme puritanism of its recruits have turned off many Iraqi Sunnis. In some areas, aqi imposed Taliban-style restrictions on local people and kidnapped and beheaded civilians as well as fellow insurgents. Tensions between aqi and homegrown insurgent groups—composed mostly of former Iraqi Army troops and Sunni tribals—were rising as far back as 2005, when aqi intimidated Sunnis to boycott the national election.
In March of this year, aqi assassinated the leader of a key Sunni insurgent group, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, after he refused to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq, aqi's latest nom de guerre. Shortly afterward, a commander of the 1920 Brigades told the London Arabic daily Al Hayat that aqi's actions had "left resistance groups with two options: either to fight Al Qaeda and negotiate with the Americans, or fight the Americans and join aqi, which divides Iraq. Both options are bitter."
A month later, the major insurgent group Islamic Army of Iraq issued an online communiqués condemning aqi. It is worth quoting in some detail:
"These people became insolent against us and wrongly and hostilely killed some mujahideen brothers from this group, more than 30 to date...Indeed, Sunnis in general have become a legitimate target for them, especially the wealthy.... Anyone who criticizes them or goes against them and demonstrates their error in such actions they try to kill...[We] appeal to Shaykh Osama Bin Laden, may God Almighty preserve him... Let him vindicate his religion and honor and take legal and organizational responsibility for the Al Qaeda organization."
By this summer, various insurgent groups had formed the Jihad and Reform Front to combat aqi, and fierce fighting between insurgent and aqi forces was raging in several Baghdad neighborhoods.
Nowhere has this schism been more evident than in Al Anbar province, the Sunni-dominated region to the west of Baghdad whose population centers of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Haditha serve as gateways to the western desert. By the summer of 2006, aqi had become, according to a U.S. Marine intelligence report authored by Colonel Peter Devlin and obtained by the Washington Post, "the dominant organization of influence" in the province, more powerful than the Iraqi government and U.S. troops "in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni." It was, he wrote, "an integral part of the social fabric of western Iraq," so deeply entrenched that there was no longer the option of defeating it with a "decapitating strike."
To counter this dangerous reality, Devlin proposed creating a local paramilitary force to protect Sunnis and strengthen the police. In the months that followed, the U.S. military did just that, persuading or paying the region's tribes to work with them in fighting aqi. They gained a crucial ally in Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, whose father had been assassinated by aqi and who subsequently helped organize the Anbar Salvation Council, a coalition of tribal leaders opposed to aqi. (Sheikh Sattar himself was killed on September 13, with aqi taking credit.)
A number of offensives in November by U.S. and Iraqi troops weakened aqi and helped convince the tribes that the tide was turning; the U.S. has also promised to funnel some $300 million in aid into the region, likely through tribal sheikhs. The sheikhs in turn instructed their followers—many of them former insurgents—to join the police force, swelling its number from a paltry 3,500 in October 2006 to more than 20,000 in June of this year. Today, the "Anbar Awakening" has become Exhibit A in the Bush administration's argument for why the war is winnable (see "Miracle in Ramadi?"); in other words, by shooting itself in the foot, aqi has handed the White House its sole pr victory in Iraq.
As history shows, this kind of self-defeating behavior by radical Islamists is not uncommon. In Algeria during the 1990s, a collection of Islamist groups battled the military regime. But the radical gia soon broke away from the more moderate fis and began to target anyone who disagreed with its hardcore "takfiri" ideology, helping to precipitate a civil war that left more than 100,000 dead. By 1997 the Islamist insurgency was so fractured and unpopular that it imploded—a process accelerated by the termination of its key mouthpiece, the London-based journal Al Ansar, whose editors could no longer keep up with the infighting.
Yet Algeria only offers so many parallels. aqi's pioneering manipulation of the Internet means that it is in no danger of losing its ability to issue communiqués. Unlike the Algerian gia, aqi seems to be waking up to the fact that violent excesses such as executing ice cream vendors (because there were no sorbets at the time of the Prophet) might not be good for their cause. In a July video, Al Qaeda Central's al-Zawahiri pointedly reminded aqi that "unity is the gateway to victory."
But the most crucial difference between Iraq and Algeria is the role of sectarian conflict, which was largely nonexistent in Algeria. In Iraq, Shiite on Sunni violence legitimizes Al Qaeda's hardline approach, and it is no coincidence that wherever sectarian conflict rages, aqi remains strong. Unfortunately, the civil war is likely to provide fuel for aqi for some time, saving it from collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes.
could an american withdrawal help starve Al Qaeda of oxygen? Some have argued that pulling the troops would automatically weaken the terrorist group's power by erasing its main raison d'être. And clearly, Al Qaeda and other jihadists have benefited enormously from the occupation, which has increased their recruiting exponentially.
In a study published in Mother Jones in March, we found that the global rate of fatal jihadist attacks had increased by 265 percent outside Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Four months later, the administration's National Intelligence Estimate concluded that aqi "helps Al Qaeda energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." aqi seems to have, among other things, developed into an effective fundraising apparatus for Al Qaeda Central, using kidnappings, oil smuggling, and other criminal activities; insurgent groups as a whole are raising up to $200 million each year, according to the U.S. military. (The 9/11 operation cost only $500,000.)
A rapid and total withdrawal from Iraq, however, is not going to deflate jihadist energy around the world anytime soon, whereas it will strengthen Al Qaeda in Iraq immediately, removing its top military adversary and potentially increasing the sectarian violence that drives Sunnis into its arms. Colonel Pat Lang, a former top official at the Defense Intelligence Agency who is a critic of the Bush administration (and an Arabic speaker), argues that to counter that threat the United States should leave at a minimum a force of around 30,000, including a reinforced division of around 20,000 soldiers, thousands to handle supply and logistics, and around 500 Special Forces. Others argue for an even larger contingent, in the high tens of thousands, or for accelerating U.S. aid to Sunni tribes.
Whatever the strategy ultimately chosen, there is no doubt that the bomb-making and urban-warfare skills developed by veterans of a jihad against the most effective fighting force in history will help sustain terrorist groups for at least a generation. This fact alone makes the Iraq War perhaps the largest strategic blunder in recent American history. But it also makes it even more vital for the United States to now pursue the right policies.
Miracle In Ramadi?
The Bush administration says the recent "Anbar Awakening" heralds a new way of winning in Iraq. The truth is more complicated.
Truthiness Truth
Anbar is evidence of the surge's success and that of General David Petraeus. Bush benefited from lucky timing. Sunni tribes fed up with Al Qaeda's extremism began an anti-AQI campaign in September 2006, 4 months before the surge was even announced. As things improved, the White House eagerly took credit.
The Anbar model is being replicated all over central Iraq, including Baghdad. It's only working in places where a majority of both residents and police are Sunni; in other areas, Sunnis view the mostly Shiite police as death squads in uniform.
Sunni tribes are on our side now. Maybe, but there's no guarantee they won't switch back. 93 percent of Iraqi Sunnis think attacks on U.S. forces are justified.
Defeating Al Qaeda is the start of pacifying Iraq. AQI makes up no more than 5 percent of the Sunni-led insurgency. And while the group did its best to stir up sectarian violence, the conflict now has momentum of its own.
Anbar is a model province. Parts of Ramadi and other major cities lie in ruins; municipal services and local governments are almost nonexistent. Changed military tactics won the day.
In General Petraeus' words, "What happened in Anbar is politics."
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/11/iraq-war-al-qaeda.html
New Statesman:
Who's afraid of Michael Moore?
John Pilger argues the spirit and humanity of Moore's film-making shames the supine American media. Brian Cathcart on how good journalism can be both right and wrong plus Michael Moore: hero or villain?
John Pilger
Published 18 October 2007
In Sicko, Michael Moore's new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject "socialised medicine" as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were "anti-American".
Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive fare wells to Reagan when he died three years ago. "Many people believe," said Gavin Esler on the BBC's Newsnight, "that he restored faith in American military action [and] was loved even by his political opponents." In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan "embodied the best of the American spirit - the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are".
Such drivel about a man who, as president, was responsible for the 1980s bloodbath in central America, and the rise of the very terrorism that produced al-Qaeda, became the received spin. Reagan's walk-on part in Sicko is a rare glimpse of the truth of his betrayal of the blue-collar nation he claimed to represent. The treacheries of another president, Richard Nixon, and a would-be president, Hillary Clinton, are similarly exposed by Moore. Just when there seemed little else to say about the great Watergate crook, Moore extracts from the 1971 White House tapes a conversation between Nixon and John Erlichman, his aide who ended up in prison. A wealthy Republican Party backer, Edgar Kaiser, head of one of America's biggest health insurance companies, is at the White House with a plan for "a national health-care industry". Erlichman pitches it to Nixon, who is bored until the word "profit" is mentioned.
"All the incentives," says Erlichman, "run the right way: the less [medical] care they give them, the more money they make." To which Nixon replies without hesitation: "Fine!" The next cut shows the president announcing to the nation a task force that will deliver a system of "the finest health care". In truth, it is one of the worst and most corrupt in the world, as Sicko shows, denying common humanity to some 50 million Americans and, for many of them, the right to life.
The most haunting sequence is captured by a security camera in a Los Angeles street. A woman, still in her hospital gown, staggers through the traffic, where she has been dumped by the company (the one founded by Nixon's backer) that runs the hospital to which she was admitted. She is ill and terrified and has no health insurance. She still wears her admission bracelet, though the name of the hospital has been thoughtfully erased.
Later on, we meet that glamorous liberal couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is 1993 and the new president is announcing the appointment of the first lady as the one who will fulfil his promise to give America a universal health-care. And here is "charming and witty" Hillary herself, as a senator calls her, pitching her "vision" to Congress. Moore's portrayal of the loquacious, flirting, sinister Hill ary is reminiscent of Tim Robbins's superb political satire Bob Roberts. You know her cynicism is already in her throat. "Hillary," says Moore in voice-over, "was rewarded for her silence [in 2007] as the second-largest recipient in the Senate of health-care industry contributions".
Moore has said that Harvey Weinstein, whose company produced Sicko and who is a friend of the Clintons, wanted this cut, but he refused. The assault on the Democratic Party candidate likely to be the next president is a departure for Moore, who, in his personal campaign against George Bush in 2004, endorsed General Wesley Clark, the bomber of Serbia, for president and defended Bill Clinton himself, claiming that "no one ever died from a blow job". (Maybe not, but half a million Iraqi infants died from Clinton's medieval siege of their country, along with thousands of Haitians, Serbians, Sudanese and other victims of his unsung invasions.)
Deft and dark
With this new independence apparent, Moore's deftness and dark humour in Sicko, which is a brilliant work of journalism and satire and film-making, explains - perhaps even better than the films that made his name, Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 - his popularity and influence and enemies. Sicko is so good that you forgive its flaws, notably Moore's romanticising of Britain's National Health Service, ignoring a two-tier system that neglects the elderly and the mentally ill.
The film opens with a wry carpenter describing how he had to make a choice after two fingers were shorn off by an electric saw. The choice was $60,000 to restore a forefinger or $12,000 to restore a middle finger. He could not afford both, and had no insurance. "Being a hopeless romantic," says Moore, "he chose the ring finger" on which he wore his wedding ring. Moore's wit leads us to scenes that are searing, yet unsentimental, such as the eloquent anger of a woman whose small daughter was denied hospital care and died of a seizure. Within days of Sicko opening in the United States, more than 25,000 people overwhelmed Moore's website with similar stories.
The California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organising Committee despatched volunteers to go on the road with the film. "From my sense," says Jan Rodolfo, an oncology nurse, "it demonstrates the potential for a true national movement because it's obviously inspiring so many people in so many places."
Moore's "threat" is his unerring view from the ground. He abrogates the contempt in which elite America and the media hold ordinary people. This is a taboo subject among many journalists, especially those claiming to have risen to the nirvana of "impartiality" and others who profess to teach journalism. If Moore simply presented victims in the time-honoured, ambulance-chasing way, leaving the audience tearful but paralysed, he would have few enemies. He would not be looked down upon as a polemicist and self-promoter and all the other pejorative tags that await those who step beyond the invisible boundaries in societies where wealth is said to equal freedom. The few who dig deep into the nature of a liberal ideology that regards itself as superior, yet is responsible for crimes epic in proportion and generally unrecognised, risk being eased out of the "mainstream", especially if they are young - a process that a former editor once described to me as "a sort of gentle defenestration".
None has broken through like Moore, and his detractors are perverse to say he is not a "professional journalist" when the role of the professional journalist is so often that of zealously, if surreptitiously, serving the status quo. Without the loyalty of these professionals on the New York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions "of record", the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a million people would be alive today. Deployed in Hollywood's sanctum - the cinema - Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 shone a light in their eyes, reached into the memory hole, and told the truth. That is why audiences all over the world stood and cheered.
What struck me when I first saw Roger and Me, Moore's first major film, was that you were invited to like ordinary Americans for their struggle and resilience and politics that reached beyond the din and fakery of the American democracy industry. Moreover, it is clear they "get it" about him: that despite being rich and famous he is, at heart, one of them. A foreigner doing something similar risks being attacked as "anti-American", a term Moore often uses as irony in order to demonstrate its dishonesty. At a stroke, he sees off the kind of guff exemplified by a recent BBC Radio 4 series that presented humanity as pro- or anti-American while the reporter oozed about America, "the city on the hill".
Whiny jealousies
Just as tendentious is a documentary called Manufacturing Dissent, which appears to have been timed to discredit, if not Sicko, then Moore himself. Made by the Canadians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, it says more about liberals who love to face both ways and the whiny jealousies aroused by tall poppies. Melnyk tells us ad nauseam how much she admires Moore's films and politics and is inspired by him, then proceeds to attempt character assassination with a blunderbuss of assertions and hearsay about his "methods", along with personal abuse, such as that of the critic who objected to Moore's "waddle" and someone else who said he reckoned Moore actually hated America - was anti-American, no less!
Melnyk pursues Moore to ask him why, in his own pursuit of an interview with Roger Smith of General Motors, he failed to mention that he had already spoken to him. Moore has said he interviewed Smith long before he began filming. When she twice intercepts Moore on tour, she is rightly embarrassed by his gracious response. If there is a renaissance of documentaries, it is not served by films such as this.
This is not to suggest Moore should not be pursued and challenged about whether or not he "cuts corners", just as the work of the revered father of British documentary, John Grierson, has been re-examined and questioned. But feckless parody is not the way. Turning the camera around, as Moore has done, and revealing great power's "invisible government" of manipulation and often subtle propaganda is certainly one way. In doing so, the documentary-maker breaches a silence and complicity described by Günter Grass in his confessional autobiography, Peeling the Onion, as maintained by those "feigning their own ignorance and vouching for another's . . . divert[ing] attention from something intended to be forgotten, something that nevertheless refuses to go away".
For me, an earlier Michael Moore was that other great "anti-American" whistleblower, Tom Paine, who incurred the wrath of corrupt power when he warned that if the majority of the people were being denied "the ideas of truth", it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words" and we call "the media". That time is again overdue.
www.johnpilger.com
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710180029
New Statesman:
Truth, lies and fools
Brian Cathcart argues that good journalism can be both right and wrong - at the same time
Brian Cathcart
Published 18 October 2007
Piers Morgan, writing in the New Statesman a couple of years ago, looked back upon his departure from the Daily Mirror, when he was sacked after his paper published fake photographs of British soldiers mistreating Iraqis. Pointing out that other evidence had subsequently emerged of British abuses in Iraq, and that no one had ever been convicted of perpetrating the hoax that fooled him, Morgan declared: "I wonder sometimes if it would be impertinent to ask for my old job back."
It is not the only occasion on which he has aired the idea that events had justified his decision to publish the photos, even though almost no one seriously contends today that they were genuine. Morgan's view seems to be that it can be right to make an assertion in print based on bad evidence providing other, better evidence eventually comes along to support the assertion. In other words, he got it wrong but he was right anyway.
Similar arguments are sometimes heard in support of the Andrew Gilligan news reports on the "sexing up" of the Iraq dossier, and they are topical again today. With Al Gore found guilty by a high court judge of nine errors of fact in An Inconvenient Truth, with Michael Moore's hotly contested health-care documentary Sicko opening here, and with the Court of Appeal pronouncing on a landmark case about journalistic responsibility, right and wrong and fact and fiction are suddenly on the agenda.
The anger generated by these debates can be terrifying. Dip into the internet for guidance on how far you can trust Sicko and you will be caught in a blizzard of detailed accusation and counter-accusation on such matters as the cost of Cuban health care, Canadian hospital waiting lists and the privatisation of the NHS.
And the outrage can have an almost drunken quality, with the entire credibility of an argument supposedly hanging on the smallest detail of disputed evidence. It calls to mind Christopher Hitchens's sweeping verdict on Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11: "To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental."
Behind such polemics is an assumption that seems like nothing more than a piece of common sense: that people should get their facts right. Journalism and documentary-making are about the truth - otherwise they would be called fiction - and if either of them presents untrue information, it is betraying its reason for being.
Al Gore, as he basks in his Nobel glow, should be thinking about this. When someone with his resources makes nine certifiable errors, most of them of overstatement, there can be no excuse, and along with his scientific advisers and researchers he has to take responsibility for any damage to his cause. Gore may console himself that Mr Justice Barton said the film was still "broadly accurate" and with caveats could be shown in schools, but he knows that its impact is blunted and he can't blame his critics for that.
Life is complicated
Yet the idea that people must always get their facts right, like almost everything that is labelled common sense, is incomplete and unsatisfactory. Life is more complicated than that, so, perhaps surprisingly, there are grey areas between right and wrong.
For one thing, journalism inevitably makes mistakes: producing large newspapers every day or every week is not like producing Fabergé eggs, and readers and lawyers have to understand that you can't hang around until every detail is perfect. In that context, it is normal to get things wrong occasionally. For another, if someone is withholding information on a matter of public interest without adequate explanation, then speculative journalism based on the available facts is perfectly justified, indeed natural - even if it may eventually prove to be wrong.
By way of example, the early years of the Deepcut scandal, involving the deaths of young soldiers in a training camp, were marked by excessive official secrecy. Some stories published in the press on the basis of the few facts available were wrong, but they ultimately performed the useful purpose of pushing the Ministry of Defence into greater openness. It's not a general licence to make things up, but it's a case where a greater good can be served by speculative reporting.
The courts, too, have found that journalists can be right and wrong at the same time. In the past fortnight, the Court of Appeal broke new ground by upholding what is called a Reynolds defence in a defamation case brought against the author Graeme McLagan over a book about police corruption called Bent Coppers.
The judges ruled that McLagan had the right to publish certain allegations, even though he could not be sure they were true, because it was a matter of public interest and he could show he had behaved responsibly. The Reynolds defence had previously been used successfully by newspaper journalists, and this ruling set aside an objection that the authors of books had the time to get all their facts right.
Does all of this mean that Piers Morgan should get his job back at the Mirror? No. As he well knows, he gambled on the validity of those photographs, lost, and paid an appropriate price for the damage to his paper's reputation. Only if he were to prove that the pictures are real could he expect his case to be reopened, and he can't.
The test in all these grey areas between right and wrong, as the judge who first upheld the Reynolds defence in 1999 laid down, is whether the wrong thing is stated knowingly or with malice or recklessness, and whether the journalist has acted conscientiously or responsibly.
Lord Nicholls went on to provide a helpful list of ways of judging the latter. Was enough done to test the quality of the information? Was there an urgent need to publish? Did the writer or newspaper present it as fact, or with caveats? Was the other side of the story presented?
Piers Morgan would not pass those tests. Nor would Al Gore (he would fail on the first). Nor, in my view, would Andrew Gilligan in the sexed-up dossier case. But Graeme McLagan passed them all, proving that in the right circumstances we have a right to be wrong.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710180030
New Statesman:
Michael Moore: hero or villain?
Interviews by Jonathan Beckman
Published 18 October 2007
Ken Loach, film-maker (below left)
The films Michael Moore makes are important and valuable. Public consciousness in the States is so driven by the right-wing media that it is very hard to penetrate it. He has done that very successfully. Moore understands how to communicate to North Americans in a way Europeans like myself do not. I would defend his position, his way of working and his way of presenting ideas, but we should understand that they are made for an American audience.
People may charge him with cutting corners but the central theses of his films obviously stand up. If his critics want to expose hypocrisy, why not attack Fox, CNN and the rest of the right-wing media? Moore is the only populist communicator against the war.
Nick Ferrari, radio presenter
His films should come with a government health warning. They are strewn with falsehoods and have as much relevance to global affairs as a Carry On film. Moore is successful because the bigger the lie, the more you tell it, the more people will believe it. If you cook up a conspiracy involving Bush, the Taliban, the Saudis and Osama Bin Laden, many people will believe it because they can't accept the truth. Michael Moore is like Blue Peter - once they've lied, you can't believe anything they say again.
Saira Khan, TV presenter (right)
He raises issues not normally addressed in the US and makes people see both sides of the coin. Generating controversy on big issues is healthy.
Donal Macintyre, investigative reporter
Moore has the satirist's knife of Swift and the popular touch of Kelvin MacKenzie. I don't believe he "manufactures dissent", but I think even he would agree that he manicures it - or redirects it to those parts of the corporate or political anatomy where it really hurts. For ten years, UK TV commissioning editors have been trying to find a British version of Michael Moore. They have found bits of him in Mark Thomas, Bremner, Bird and Fortune and Adam Curtis, but inevitably they've failed. He is a one-off.
Sean Langan, director, Fighting the Taliban and Meeting the Taliban
Michael Moore's production company contacted me when he was making Fahrenheit 9/11 in late 2003. They wanted to buy footage of American soldiers criticising the war. I was in Iraq at the time, and had lots of footage of soldiers openly attacking the whole war. But I also had footage of soldiers backing the war, and suggested Michael Moore should come out to Iraq and - as a documentary film-maker - see things with his own eyes before making up his mind. He declined my invitation, and so I declined to sell him my footage. Unfortunately, this slightly cavalier approach has ultimately got in the way of his films, and has been exaggerated by his detractors, many of whom are paid and are happy to lie when accusing him of falsehood. And yet, despite his faults, Michael Moore is still the most important documentary film-maker working in the world today. Fahrenheit 9/11 is one of the most important documentaries of all time.
Jon Snow, broadcaster
A Bush presidency has necessitated a Michael Moore. He does what he does and what he does makes people think. There is not a factual film in the world that you cannot pick to pieces.
Peter Oborne, political journalist
Michael Moore is a disappointment. His admirers present him as a challenging alternative to the mainstream media. In fact, he is the exact mirror image of the institutions that he attacks. His methodology is flip, vacant and intellectually dishonest. I went to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 in expectation of a serious critique of the Bush presidency and the disastrous Iraq escapade. What we got was a bad film that relied on cheap stunts and emotional manipulation to make its points.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710180031
New Statesman:
All is not tranquil in Switzerland
Joy Charnley and Malcolm Pender
Published 23 October 2007
Switzerland's election battle was marked by distortion and xenophobia. For now rightwing populism is set to play a major role
The notion that nothing ever really happens in Switzerland, and certainly not in Swiss politics, was challenged in 2003 by the advent of the millionaire Christoph Blocher to the Federal Council.
The Federal Council is the government of Switzerland and is a sort of permanent coalition of seven members drawn broadly pro rata from the four main political parties who between them poll over 80% of the popular vote.
The composition of the Council which had existed since 1959 was disrupted when in 2003 the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), emerged from the parliamentary election as the largest party (27%) and claimed an additional seat for its leader Blocher at the cost of a seat held by one of the other main parties. It may not have been a revolution, but in Swiss terms it represented a fairly substantial avalanche.
Blocher, like Gordon Brown a son of the manse, made a fortune from his involvement in the Ems-Chemie company and has become one of the richest men in Switzerland.
From the 1970s he has been politically active, at local level and in the capital Berne, and his involvement, both political and financial, in the SVP has transformed the party over the last thirty years from one which spoke for farmers and small businesses in German-speaking Switzerland into a right-wing populist party for the whole of Switzerland which since 1975 has trebled its share of the popular vote.
Its rise coincides with the advent of factors damaging to a traditionalist perception of Swiss identity: international concern in the mid-1990s at Swiss immigration policy during the Second World War and the role of Swiss banks during the Nazi period effectively deconstructed reassuring views of recent Swiss history; large numbers of foreign workers in the Swiss economy, many of them seeking Swiss nationality; the increasing power of the EU with which Switzerland, although not a member, has many formal bi-lateral arrangements.
Blocher never tires of reminding his listeners that traditional Swiss values are under threat but ironically his stance and method of campaigning have been responsible for the introduction of an abrasive polarization quite alien to the Swiss political scene, the central feature of which is decision-making by consensus.
The SVP, strongly anti-welfare but content with the massive subsidies paid by Berne to Swiss farmers and stridently anti-EU despite the huge amount of Swiss trade with the EU, conducted an electoral campaign marked by distortion and xenophobia which led to disturbances in Lausanne and riots in Berne and elicited unfavorable comment from the UN.
But it seems to be in tune with a large section of the Swiss electorate, increasing its share of the vote in Sunday’s election by 2% to 29% and it now has a lead of some 10% over the next largest party, the Socialists (SP). It remains to be seen what influence this will have on the elections to the Federal Council on 12 December. Blocher’s rightwing populism is going to play a major role in Swiss politics for the immediately foreseeable future.
Joy Charnley lectures in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). Her research focuses on the work of contemporary women writers in French-speaking Switzerland.
Malcolm Pender is Emeritus Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Strathclyde. He has published extensively on German-speaking Swiss writers.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710230002
Página/12:
El atentado
Por Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky*
Miércoles, 24 de Octubre de 2007
Los juicios a los represores del ’76 del terrorismo de Estado recién comienzan. En el primero desapareció un testigo –López–, y a pesar de los esfuerzos por recuperar su cuerpo vivo o muerto, todas las intenciones fueron inútiles. López desapareció. Y esfuerzos por buscarlo se hicieron y se siguieron haciendo hasta hace pocos días frente a una denuncia.
Yo escribía en estas mismas páginas, en un artículo que titulaba “Irradiación”, en enero del 2007, que los juicios recién comenzaban. La desaparición de López fue una tarea que actuó por “irradiación”. La ultraderecha –maestra en producir la subjetividad del miedo y el terror– está ganando su primera batalla. Producir terror en los futuros testigos y una imagen de capacidad de organización. A López se lo tragó la tierra. También decía que había que investigar a fondo el desmantelamiento de toda la estructura represiva vigente. De lo contrario, los trescientos juicios venideros podrían convertirse en un infierno del terror ciudadano. La ultraderecha revela tener un aparato logístico muy bien organizado, con tácticas y estrategias muy claras. Aquí no hay improvisación. Por el contrario, existe gente pensante y grupos de tareas organizados.
La intención es clara: aterrorizar e intentar evitar juicios futuros o disminuirlos a un número mucho menor.
Existe una idea que circula que dice que no puede haber reconciliación hasta que no se enjuicie a todos los represores de la dictadura. Creo que es más una expresión de deseo que otra cosa. No habrá en la Argentina reconciliación, y a eso hay que acostumbrarse... pese a que nos duela.
El viejo comunista Santiago Carrillo decía hace pocos días que en España hubo muchos cambios. Pero que algo permaneció inmutable, igual a sí mismo, desde Franco a hoy. Carrillo se refería al “falangismo”.
El problema de la represión y de los represores adquiere un alto nivel de complejidad para comprenderlo.
El asesinato a mansalva de los tres policías en La Plata reveló un grado de crueldad y de sadismo poco comunes. Las 36 puñaladas y el fusilamiento de las víctimas algunos lo leyeron como un mensaje mafioso. Las declaraciones que he escuchado por todo tipo de especialistas son confusas e invariablemente poco claras y temerosas. Desde un “tumbero” que manejaba bien los cuchillos hasta mensajes para los organismos de seguridad. Solamente escuché la voz del Presidente que lo relacionaba con un sector de gente que se podía oponer a su política de los derechos humanos. Y lo ha repetido varias veces.
Esta vez la ultraderecha cambió de táctica. Lo de López era un mensaje a los testigos futuros. Aquí el móvil parece buscar un terror más grande. A pocos días de las elecciones y de la reanudación de los juicios, produce un atentado criminal que intencionalmente no parece claro.
Esa es su misión. La fuerza de la irracionalidad que puede producir pánico y terror.
Ya no hay sujetos claros como López, ahora puede haber crímenes y atentados en cualquier lado. Decía David Cooper, ese gran antipsiquiatra inglés, que toda conducta irracional cobra inteligibilidad si se la lee en un espectro de relaciones más amplias. La ultraderecha está intacta. Con su logística intacta, y sabe muy bien cómo producir terror. El Presidente también lo sabe muy bien. Se paralizaron varios actos políticos. Hubo reuniones también entre los políticos. Me arriesgo a decir que el mensaje mafioso es muy claro: “No jodan más con los juicios porque nosotros vamos a seguir actuando”. Es mi opinión. Creo no equivocarme cuando digo que reconciliación no habrá nunca. Como no la hubo ni habrá en España si se iniciaran juicios a los crímenes que cometió el franquismo.
Un día un comisario soviético me dijo en Moscú, en 1971: “Nosotros jamás perdonaremos que los alemanes nos mataron 25.000.000 millones de personas. Nunca los perdonaremos. Jamás”.
Como decía antes, la represión es una problemática de alto nivel de complejidad. El voluntarismo no sirve. Es complejo y así hay que estudiarlo, en su máximo nivel de complicidad. No podemos sorprendernos más frente a estos crímenes aberrantes. Llevan la lógica del falangismo. Por eso dice Carrillo, ese viejo comunista español, “la derecha se opone a revisar la historia con el argumento de que solo servirá para abrir viejas heridas y romper el consenso”.
* Psicoterapeuta, autor, director y actor teatral. Entre sus numerosas obras se encuentran El Señor Galíndez, Potestad y La muerte de Marguerite Duras.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-93438-2007-10-24.html
The Independent: Mother nature's revenge
against human development
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 24 October 2007
Everyone who comes to southern California learns to be afraid of the Big One, the earthquake that will level everything. But even major tremors do not present such an immediate, visceral and terrifying threat as wildfires, which strike with shocking regularity and are getting worse.
This week's inferno, raging all the way from the Santa Barbara foothills to the Mexican border, has many immediate causes – notably, freakishly strong desert winds that have acted like a blowtorch on a region undergoing an unprecedented drought – but it is also part of a long-standing clash between natural weather cycles and the whims of human development.
"This is mother nature versus human nature," said Bill Patzert, a renowned climatologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's about too much development and too much fire suppression building up fuel over the past 50 years... In some ways this is the great war that will be fought here in the 21st century."
It has been four years since the previous devastating fire, which killed 23 people and destroyed thousands of homes in the same outer suburbs under threat now – on the mountainous edges of San Diego and the great Los Angeles metropolis. In Malibu, where this week's fires started with a couple of downed power lines, houses get torched every two to three years. Three times over the last century, the star-studded beach community has been consumed entirely.
The last time southern California underwent a significant pattern of drought and fire, though, it was the 1950s and the population of the region was no more than three million. Now the region is home to 20 million people – many of whom are building houses on the chaparral-covered hills and mountains where fire is part of the natural cycle.
This fire season has been at least three years in the making, ever since record rainfall in 2004 spurred a major growth in vegetation. That vegetation has been drying out ever since, because the record rain was followed by the worst drought. Last year, LA received less than five inches of rain, putting it on a par with Death Valley, five hours' drive away in the Mojave desert.
The region has been tinder-dry for months. Back in April, the largest area of public land in Los Angeles, Griffith Park, went up in flames, threatening the city zoo, the city observatory and the Hollywood sign, among other landmarks. Over the summer, though, the region largely dodged a bullet, with no major fires despite a continuing dearth of rain. If disaster was going to strike, this was the obvious time of year, because it is the beginning of the season when hot, dry desert winds known as Santa Anas blow in from Nevada and Utah. Usually, Santa Anas are mild and last a day at most. This time, they have lasted three days and gusted with the force of a minor hurricane – what Dr Patzert calls "Godzilla-sized" Santa Anas.
"The Santa Ana season goes through January and February," Dr Patzert said. "We're still super-duper dry. So this might just be a preview of coming attractions."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3090313.ece
ZNet | Latin America
City of Terror
Painting Paraguay's 'casbah' as terror central
by April Howard and Benjamin Dangl; EXTRA!; October 23, 2007
When we arrived in Ciudad del Este, we were petrified. After all, we were in the Paraguayan city known in the American press as a "Jungle Hub for World's Outlaws" (L.A. Times, 8/24/98), and a "hotbed" "teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers" (New York Times, 12/15/02).
The U.S. media's portrayal of this city, the center of a zone on the frontiers of Argentina and Brazil known as the Tri-Border Area, left us expecting to see cars bombs exploding, terrorists training and American flags burning. We soon realized that picture painted by U.S. media was inaccurate. In the Cold War, Washington and the media used the word "communism" to rally public opinion against political opponents. Now, in the post– September 11 world, there is a new verbal weapon—"terrorism." Despite a lack of evidence, Washington and the media are asserting links to terrorism in the Tri-Border Area to advance their agenda in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left.
The rumors date back to two anti-Semitic bombings in Buenos Aires in the 1990s—a 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy and a 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. Ciudad del Este, with its large Arab population, made an easy scape-goat. Though the attacks were never proven to be connected to Ciudad del Este, journalists since the bombings have had Washing-ton's go-ahead to promote the unverified hypothesis that Hez-bollah (or any other Middle Eastern group designated as a terrorist organization) is finding refuge in the Tri-Border Area.
Ciudad del Este has been described (New York Times, 8/24/98) as "a capital of institutionalized smuggling that today flows back and forth to other Latin nations, Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East." That's not necessarily inaccurate, as far as it goes—there is a lot of smuggling and organized crime in the Tri-Border Area—but U.S. coverage of Ciudad del Este is marked by a combination of sensationalism and xenophobia.
Mixing orientalism with fears of illegal immigrants, the L.A. Times (8/24/98) called the city a seething "Latin American casbah" with "tens of thousands of small-time smugglers, as brazen and numerous as illegal crossers at the U.S. border." In "alleys dense with tables of pornographic videos," New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg (10/21/02) found an "alarming enclave of lawlessness," a "filthy and disgusting" place where "everything is illegal." The New York Times (8/24/98) described the "jungle hamlet" as a "slow-motion riot" of "urban mayhem," with "predatory street kids" and a "trash-strewn downtown."
Of late, another theme has been creeping into reports on Ciudad del Este: the spectre of terrorism. In the words of the New York Times (8/24/98), the area is not just a "magnet for organized crime" but "a danger to the entire continent." The Tri-Border, the paper reported, is "a free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism." The L.A. Times (8/24/98) put it simply: It is "a prototypical laboratory for developing a base for bad guys."
Missing evidence
What's missing from the pieces painting the Tri-Border Area as a hotbed of terrorism is evidence. Paraguayan officials protested accusations that Ciudad del Este was funding Hezbollah. "There's no proof, only suspicions," Washington Times journalist Mike Caesar (10/26/01) quoted officials as saying.
Nearly every article reporting on Islamic terrorism in the Tri-Border Area is honeycombed with qualifying language indicating that, despite a lack of clear evidence, U.S. officials say that there are probably links to terrorist organizations in the Tri-Border Area. The New Yorker's Goldberg perhaps went the farthest in his claims that the Tri-Border region hosts a hard core of terrorists, a community under the influence of extreme Islamic beliefs; Hezbollah runs weekend training camps on farms cut out of the rain forest of the Triple Frontier. In at least one of these camps, in the remote jungle terrain near Foz do Iguaçu, young adults get weapons training and children are indoctrinated in Hezbollah ideology—a mixture of anti-American and anti-Jewish views inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Goldberg's certainty about these claims—for which he supplied scant evidence—is reminiscent of a later article he wrote as the U.S. government was gearing up for a war in Iraq (New Yorker, 2/2/03), confidently linking Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The article was gratefully cited by the Bush administration to further their argument for war. Veteran muckraker Alexander Cockburn (CounterPunch, 3/28/03), pointing out various inaccuracies in that article, described it as "a servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence: 'Build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than the reverse.'"
Though the press reports might not have had much evidence, they ensured that further unverified reports of terrorism in the Tri-Border Area could point to those news accounts as proof of a sort, however hollow. The Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress released an official report (7/03) titled Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America. Using thinly sourced media accounts to gloss over the lack of proof linking the early '90s bombings to the Tri-Border Area, the report glibly summarized the next 10 years: "Since the1994 attack, Islamic terrorists in the TBA have largely confined their activities to criminal fundraising and other activities in support of their terrorist organizations, including plotting terrorist actions to be carried out in other countries."
Using media reports (among them the New Yorker, New York Times and L.A. Times articles cited above) as its conclusive evidence of terrorist groups in the region, the report concluded with a section titled "The TBA as a Haven and Base for Islamic Terrorist Groups." The bulleted finale stated that "various Islamic terrorist groups, including the Egyptian Al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad) and Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, probably have a presence in the TBA; Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda are probably cooperating in the region, but definitive proof of this collaboration, in the form of a specific document, did not surface in this review." Indeed, proof that the Shiite Hezbollah was working with the ferociously anti-Shiite Al-Qaeda would be remarkable news.
A new generation of rumors
The Library of Congress report's release prompted a flurry of new coverage, citing the report as solid evidence of terrorism links in the TBA. The most confident officials declared their conviction that Paraguay's "illicit activities help finance global terror": "That is fact, not speculation," insisted U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. James Hill, without offering any substantiation (Miami Herald, 8/15/03). In the same report, an anonymous Bush administration official was more cautious. "There's no solid evidence that Al-Qaeda is still present in the region, but 'we want to do the work of prevention and reduce the flows of money to Hezbollah and Hamas. . . . As terrorists flee the hot spots in the world, we don't want them to see places like the Tri-Border Area as potential safe havens.'"
The master of hypothesis verification himself, Donald Rumsfeld, took another approach: ignore the topic altogether. When Rumsfeld visited Asunción in August 2005, he talked about using the Paraguayan military to save bordering Bolivia from the leftist influence of Venezuela, but never mentioned terrorism in the Tri-Border Area. At the time, the Washington Post (8/17/05) reported that "Defense officials said [the TBA] might also harbor groups that finance international terrorism. One Defense official . . . said Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, 'get a lot of funding' from the Tri-Border Area."
The issue received steady coverage in 2006. In a June 3, 2006 Associated Press report, Western intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, claimed that if Iran were cornered by the United States, it could use a Hezbollah network based in the TBA to direct terrorist attacks. Again, no evidence was offered, and the Paraguayan government protested the unverified report. On August 3, 2006, Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant treasury secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, practiced his verbal gymnastics when talking about "a broad series of new measures aimed at uncovering money-laundering rings that [U.S. officials] believe are funding Hezbollah and other radical groups." "I am highly confident that's the case," Glaser said (Washington Post, 8/2/06). "We believe there is evidence."
By the end of the year, the U.S. government was ready to take action in an environment saturated with media coverage, if light on evidence. On December 6, 2006, "The U.S. Department of the Treasury . . . designated nine individuals and two entities [in the Tri-Border Area] that have provided financial and logistical support to the Hezbollah terrorist organization" (paraguay.usembassy.gov, 12/6/06). These claims were rejected by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. As of August 7, 2007, an article describing the designation was still the top article of the "Latest Headlines from the Americas" section of the U.S. embassy site. The article, titled "Hezbollah Fundraising Network in the Triple Frontier" and dated December 6, 2006, appeared on the front page of the site without a date, misleading readers to believe that it was a current article. Next on the list of news stories was an article dated July 10, 2007.
Seeing for ourselves
To see what was really happening in Ciudad del Este today, we set out into the sunny heat of the city to hear what Paraguayans had to say. The press attaché for the governor of Alto Paraná, the state where the city is located, was shocked to see us: In spite of all the media coverage this city had received in the international media, we were the first two foreign journalists to speak with him. He denied any terrorist activity in the area.
Others were similarly dismissive about claims about terrorist groups. Local vendors and farmers calmly described the mafia activities, drug trafficking and arms smuggling going on in the area, but were quick to point out that there were no links with foreign terrorist groups. A Syrian businessman we spoke with ridiculed the claims, saying Middle Easterners in the area left their home countries to escape violence and war. In a country that ran rampant with rumors, no one seemed to believe the claims of terrorist links for a second.
There are a number of plausible reasons the region has been portrayed as a terrorist stronghold. One is that the current Paraguayan government is one of the Bush administration's last allies in a region that is increasingly shifting to the left. It is strategically located in the heart of South America, between the politically and economically more powerful countries of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia. An alliance with the Paraguayan military, justified by an internal threat, can only help expand the Pentagon's reach in the area.
The Mideastern community in Ciudad del Este makes it potentially easier for Washington to claim a threat of terrorism if the need for a military intervention arises. The area is also rich in natural resources: Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves are right next door, and the largest fresh water aquifer is under Paraguay's soil.
Misinformation to militarization
The media misinformation campaign transformed into a military campaign when hundreds of U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay in July 2005. After Washington threatened to cut off millions in aid to Paraguay if its Senate refused the military's entry, the legislature voted to allow U.S. troops to train Paraguayan military. When the U.S. troops arrived in the country, U.S. funding for counter-terrorism to Paraguay soon doubled, and repression against rural farmer movements subsequently increased.
The media portrayal of Paraguay has facilitated the repression of some of the most powerful protest movements in the country. Small farmers in rural Paraguay are being forced off their land—and in some cases tortured and killed—to make way for the booming soy industry (Upside Down World, 7/17/06). Analysts in Paraguay believe the increased violence against farmers is linked to the presence of U.S. military.
"The U.S. military is advising the Paraguayan police and military about how to deal with these farmer groups," Orlando Castillo of Service Peace and Justice, a Latin American human rights organization, explained: They are teaching theory as well as technical skills to Paraguayan police and military. These new forms of combat have been used internally. . . . U.S. troops form part of a security plan to repress the social movement in Paraguay. A lot of repression has happened in the name of security and against "terrorism."
University of Brasília historian Luiz Moniz Bandeira told the Washington Times (10/25/05), "I wouldn't dismiss the hypothesis that U.S. agents plant stories in the media about Arab terrorists in the Triple Frontier to provoke terrorism and justify their military presence."
The U.S. Embassy in Asunción denied that the U.S. military is linked to the increased repression against farmers. In December 2006, the Paraguayan Senate voted against renewing the legislation granting the U.S. troops freedom to operate in the country.
Upon leaving Ciudad del Este, we saw children playing baseball in a park, couples walking hand in hand, people fishing in a nearby river and Brazilians on vacation snapping photos. It looked like any other sleepy Latin American city on a Sunday. Given the history of U.S. intervention in the region, we have no reason to trust what is being said in most foreign media about this city. For the last hundred years, the U.S. has been accusing Latin Americans of lawlessness and terrorism. It is easy to make those accusations about places that most North Americans are unlikely to go. Our job, as conscientious news readers, is to ask for evidence and be skeptical of the hype.
April Howard is a journalist, translator and history teacher. Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007). April and Ben are both editors at UpsideDownWorld.org a website on activism and politics in Latin America.
This article was originally printed in September/October 2007 issue of EXTRA!
the Magazine of Fairness and Accurary In Reporting, The Media Watch Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=14112
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