Elsewhere Today 476
Aljazeera:
Many dead in Somalia blast
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 06, 2008
3:07 MECCA TIME, 0:07 GMT
At least 20 people have been killed and 100 more wounded after twin explosions rocked a residential area in Bosaso, north-eastern Somalia.
The blasts on Tuesday were apparently caused by grenades which went off within two minutes of each other, officials say.
Bile Mohamoud Qabowsade, a spokesman for the information ministry in the breakaway region of Puntland said: "Twenty civilians ... have been killed and eighty others wounded, some of them seriously when violent people targeted them with heavy explosions near the seaport in Bosaso."
Bosaso, is in Somalia's self-declared autonomous region of Puntland.
Most of those killed were Ethiopians believed to be on their way to find work in the Arab Peninsula which lies across the Gulf of Eden.
Worst attack
Hospital officials described it as one of the worst attacks in Puntland and said the number of wounded was higher.
"We received about 90 wounded people and so far some of them died in the hospital," said Mohamed Yusuf from Bosaso's main hospital.
"It seems that the hospital had the busiest night and largest number of wounded people in a single incident," he said.
A witness told news agencies that residents were horrified by the carnage left from the explosions.
"We got tired as we collected the charred bodies and seriously injured people through the night," said Osman Sheik Weheliye.
Local officials said they were unsure why Ethiopians were targeted in the attack.
Ethiopia and Somalia have a long history of tense and, at times, violent relations.
Ethiopian troops are currently propping up a shaky UN-backed government in the southern part of the country.
Puntland, unlike the south of the country, has been relatively peaceful since Somalia's last functioning government collapsed in a 1991 revolt, leaving rival warlords to turn on each other and divide the nation among squabbling clans.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/621F92CA-F25B-4FE1-B0A0-E7B440E51817.htm
AllAfrica: Amid Aftershocks,
Many Bukavu Residents Sleep in the Open
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
6 February 2008
Kinshasa
Aftershocks continue to rattle the eastern town of Bukavu three days after an earthquake killed six people and injured hundreds. Many residents are still sleeping in the open for fear their damaged houses might collapse.
"We felt another series of tremors at 3pm [on 6 February]. We cannot allow people to go home and spend the night there in case their walls fall in," said Dieudonne Wafula, who is in charge of the Goma volcano observatory and travelled to Bukavu, which lies at the opposite end of Lake Kivu to Goma.
Some families have begun to receive humanitarian assistance.
"The composition of standard non-food kits has been adapted to the specific needs of the families; they include two plastic sheets, two blankets, and soap mainly," said Christophe Illemassene, spokesman for the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Bukavu's mayor, Bonga Laisi, told IRIN by telephone that some schools, shops and offices in the town had re-opened, a development that alarmed Wafula. "We have seen that schools have re-opened without advice from us experts. We would have liked only the secondary school to have re-opened to start with to save the lives of the youngest who would not be able to protect themselves during strong aftershocks."
A government delegation, comprising ministers, members of parliament and deputies, travelled to Bukavu with 14 tonnes of aid supplies and 16 doctors.
According to the mayor, only 80 households, or 400 people, had received humanitarian assistance by the afternoon of 6 February, and that distribution had to be interrupted because of unrest.
"There were occasional fights because everyone wanted to be served first. But we have taken precautions to ensure the safety of distributions and do all we can to make sure everything is done in an orderly manner under the eyes of the police," he added.
According to the OCHA spokesman, 312 people were injured in the weekend quake, 50 of whom were still receiving treatment. He added that 99 buildings had collapsed and 815 were unsafe for habitation.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2008 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200802060787.html
AlterNet: It's Not Over.
Clinton Is Ahead But Obama Remains Strong
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on February 6, 2008
Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) remains the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential contest, even though Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) won more states on Super Tuesday, when 22 states held Democratic primaries and caucuses.
While the vote count is not yet final in some states, notably California, Clinton won strong victories in many large states, such as New York, New Jersey, Arizona, and Massachusetts - and she was leading in the early returns in California. She also won Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. All told, Clinton won in eight states.
In contrast, Obama won 13 states, according to his campaign, including most Western states holding caucuses. Those states are Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota and Utah.
Various news organizations have different estimates of the delegate count, but Clinton is clearly ahead in these scenarios. The New York Times said Clinton has 656 delegates compared to 558 for Obama. The Washington Post, whose estimate does not include super-delegates - party officials and other Democratic luminaries who comprise about 21 percent of all delegates - said Clinton has 412 delegates compared to 381 for Obama.
The Obama campaign said on Tuesday night that it leads Clinton by 43 delegates - not counting California - with 677 delegates, compared to Clinton's 634 delegates. That estimate includes super delegates.
A more objective appraisal will not emerge for several days, however, until California's results are known and all the state tallies are analyzed.
Thus, while Super Tuesday appears to have moved both parties closer to picking candidates, it seems that voters - particularly Democrats - can look forward to more campaigning, debates and voting in long-ignored states, making the eventual nominee the result of the most informed and participatory process in decades.
Both Democratic candidates saw positives in Super Tuesday's outcome, although the Obama campaign may have been working a bit harder than the Clinton campaign to spin the results in its favor.
"The polls are just closing in California, and the votes are still being counted in cities and towns across America," said Barack Obama, addressing supporters in Chicago. "But there is one thing on this February night that we do not need the results to know. Our time has come."
"Tonight is your night. Tonight is America's night," said Hillary Clinton, addressing her supporters in New York. "In record numbers, people voted not just to make history, but to remake America."
While election officials will certify vote totals and party officials will parse the results and award delegates in coming days, the bottom line is that the contest may take a month or more before the nominee is chosen.
In fact, on Monday, Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn suggested that the nominee might not be selected until early March, when Ohio and Texas vote.
"There are a lot of states that are good for her," Penn said, citing Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas as Clinton strongholds, which hold their nominating contests on March 4, April 22 and March 4, respectively. "Those are large states with a lot of delegates."
"We will enter, after Feb. 5th, a different stage of the campaign," he said. "There will be a comparison of records, more one-on-one debates ... It will be a different campaign than we have seen (on Super Tuesday) with a lot of voters making fast decisions."
Penn was suggesting that Clinton's strength in large states will eclipse any gains made by Obama in 10 smaller states that have contests in the next four weeks. Those 10 states and locales are: Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington, Virgin Islands, Maine, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Hawaii and Wisconsin. Most of these states are seen as leaning toward Obama, for various reasons, from the electorate's make-up, to political beliefs to campaign organization and endorsements.
In coming days, pundits will analyze the exit polls to assess the candidates' various strengths and weaknesses. An early take suggests that the strengths exhibited by Clinton all along, such as her appeal among working women, seniors and Latinos, held up on Super Tuesday, despite last-minute polls suggesting Obama would neutralize those segments of the electorate in Tuesday's voting.
In California and Arizona, for example, it appears that Obama did make more progress with Latino voters. However, his gains were not sufficient to offset Clinton's strong ties within that broad community. Moreover, Obama's vaunted youth vote did not materialize in numbers sufficient to offset Clinton's popularity among her base.
Political scientists say the Democratic nomination is moving into uncharted territory with few precedents. During the past two decades, the party's nominee was largely chosen by this stage in the nominating process. What is unprecedented is how an ongoing contest will engage voters - now and into the fall - and whether a long contest will hurt the nominee as the country moves into the fall election, academics say.
Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said it was possible that the record voter turnout of Democrats in the primary season would carry over into the fall, unless the nominee discouraged a large segment of primary voters.
"Logically, there should be a connection," he said. "If people are energized or upset and turn out in large numbers in the winter, there's a decent chance we'll see the same phenomenon in the fall. Of course, lots can happen in the intervening months. Voters can get disillusioned with their choices, old issues can deflate, etc. So you never know."
What is clear, after Super Tuesday, is that the Democratic nominating contest is still in play and states that have sat on the political sidelines for years will be making historic choices. So far, Democratic turnout has been far larger than the Republican side of the aisle. Indeed, with so few recent historic precedents, perhaps many Democrats rightly think that their choice in coming weeks is not just deciding the nominee, but the next president.
Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/76123/
AlterNet:
Where Would Obama Take the Nation?
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on February 6, 2008
Among the recent flood of celebrity endorsements, one that has received little attention came in a Washington Post op-ed by President Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, explaining why she's backing Barack Obama.
Her principal argument was that she believed Obama could help this generation of Americans pull together to address worsening problems and "leave America a better, stronger place than the one it found," like her grandfather's generation did.
But Susan Eisenhower also recalled her grandfather's great insight, the warning in his farewell address about the danger looming from the "military-industrial complex" and the potential that democracy might become the "insolvent phantom of tomorrow." [Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2008]
When combined with the endorsements of President John F. Kennedy's daughter Caroline and his surviving brother Edward Kennedy, this Eisenhower support suggests that heirs to leaders from that earlier era see something in Obama that gives them hope that he can get the United States back on track with an earlier vision of America.
In Obama's rhetoric, there are echoes of both Eisenhower's cautionary advice and Kennedy's famous speech at American University on June 10, 1963, when the President spoke about "the most important topic on earth: world peace."
Kennedy continued: "What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
"I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time."
While recognizing the daunting challenges then presented by the Soviet Union, Kennedy went on to say: "So, let us not be blind to our differences. But let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. ...
"For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
Ending a War Mindset
Of the five remaining major candidates for President, only Obama seems to offer that kind of direction for resolving disputes through negotiations, not ultimatums.
In the Jan. 31 debate in Los Angeles, he not only criticized Hillary Clinton's vote authorizing George W. Bush to invade Iraq but he disputed the critique now prevalent in opinion circles of Washington, that the war was a good idea, just poorly executed.
"I don't want to just end the war (in Iraq), but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place," Obama said.
The Illinois senator apparently was referring to his readiness to hold discussions with U.S. enemies without preconditions, a position that Clinton has called naïve and a sign of his inexperience.
Meanwhile, on the Republican side, the leading contenders - John McCain, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee - are competing over how enthusiastically to embrace Bush's Iraq War and how lavishly to finance the Pentagon and its many military contractors.
The Republicans are advocating locking in military spending at four percent of the gross domestic product or higher, essentially guaranteeing that Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" will remain a well-financed fixture in American politics.
The four-percent-or-higher sum is roughly the amount that President Bush is recommending for the next fiscal year, which when expressed in dollars and adjusted for inflation is the highest military spending since World War II. [NYT, Feb. 4, 2008]
Obama is the only major candidate left in the race who sounds like he would even contemplate changing this dynamic, by negotiating with enemies and looking for ways to avoid the bellicosity of the Bush years.
Constitutional Vision
Obama also may have the most sophisticated understanding of the U.S. Constitution and how the Founders structured this complex system of checks and balances to protect individual liberties and to compel reasoned debate.
A Harvard-educated lawyer who has lectured on the Constitution, Obama devoted a chapter in his memoir The Audacity of Hope to a discussion of how constitutional principles apply to today's political challenges.
In the chapter, Obama doesn't do what many politicians do, cite the Constitution to support some favored position. He views the Constitution instead as an ingenious device that compels debate and compromise, while protecting individual liberties.
"The answer I settle on - which is by no means original to me - requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had," Obama writes.
"The genius of Madison's design is not that it provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building's construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what's right. It won't tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.
"What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery - its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights - are designed to force us into a conversation, a 'deliberative democracy' in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.
"Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible."
Obama continues: "The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. ...
"It's not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.
"The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstractions and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history, theory yielded to fact and necessity."
Kumbayah?
While some Democrats mock Obama for the naivety of his "Kubayah" goal of bringing sides together, his thinking is infused by this view of the Constitution.
Obama acknowledges that his constitutional analysis seems "to champion compromise, modesty, and muddling through; to justify logrolling, deal-making, self-interest, pork barrels, paralysis, and inefficiency - all the sausage-making that no one wants to see and that editorialists throughout our history have often labeled as corrupt.
"And yet I think we make a mistake in assuming that democratic deliberation requires abandonment of our highest ideals, or of a commitment to the common good. ... For most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, and argument that allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices, not only about the means to our ends but also about the ends themselves. ...
"In sum, the Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to reason, the ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community. And the amazing thing is that it's worked."
If Obama wins the Democratic nomination and manages to gain the White House, the American people would be getting a President with a subtle grasp of the nation's founding document.
That would be in stark contrast to Bush, who claims, in effect, that the 9/11 attacks gave him unlimited powers to suspend the Constitution and its concept of inalienable rights for the duration of the open-ended "war on terror." [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]
It is less clear how the other candidates feel about Bush's expansive presidential powers. The Constitution has not become a significant issue in the dozens of debates - although the Republican contenders have generally endorsed Bush's actions and his choices for Supreme Court justices and the Democrats have been more critical.
Truth Commission
Another issue that mostly has remained outside the frame of the presidential debate is the question of releasing historical records from both the Cold War and the more recent era of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, from the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979 to the Iraq War.
Reliable information about this history would be crucial both for fulfilling the Eisenhower-Kennedy vision of reducing the power of the war-makers and for understanding the secret relationships that developed between America's political-business elites and the countries of the Middle East.
When taking office in 1993 - as the first President elected after the end of the Cold War - Bill Clinton had a unique opportunity to create "a truth and reconciliation commission" to give the American people this history. But he viewed the potential battles over the past as a distraction from fights he planned over his domestic agenda for the future.
Upon succeeding Clinton in January 2001, George W. Bush derailed laws that would have required the swift release of historical records, including those from the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
After 9/11, Bush expanded those secrecy provisions, essentially giving to former Presidents, Vice Presidents and their descendents permanent control over historical records relating to foreign policy and similar sensitive issues.
In other words, at some future date, Jenna Bush might have control over 20 years of American history, from her grandfather's 12 years in office and her father's eight.
On this front, it's unclear what Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would do if one of them becomes President. From the record of her husband - and her own tendency toward secrecy - it might be expected that Sen. Clinton would be less likely to open up government files than Obama would be.
But one of the questions that someone might put to Sen. Obama during the campaign is whether his eloquent statements about how the Founders asked questions and valued facts would extend to appointing a truth commission for the United States.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book is Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/76116/
AlterNet: The World's Dump:
Ocean Garbage from Hawaii to Japan
By Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden, The Independent UK
Posted on February 6, 2008
A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris - in effect the world's largest rubbish dump - is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.
The "soup" is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk - which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags - is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
Mr Moore, a former sailor, came across the sea of waste by chance in 1997, while taking a short cut home from a Los Angeles to Hawaii yacht race. He had steered his craft into the "North Pacific gyre" - a vortex where the ocean circulates slowly because of little wind and extreme high pressure systems. Usually sailors avoid it.
He was astonished to find himself surrounded by rubbish, day after day, thousands of miles from land. "Every time I came on deck, there was trash floating by," he said in an interview. "How could we have fouled such a huge area? How could this go on for a week?"
Mr Moore, the heir to a family fortune from the oil industry, subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist. He warned yesterday that unless consumers cut back on their use of disposable plastics, the plastic stew would double in size over the next decade.
Professor David Karl, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii, said more research was needed to establish the size and nature of the plastic soup but that there was "no reason to doubt" Algalita's findings.
"After all, the plastic trash is going somewhere and it is about time we get a full accounting of the distribution of plastic in the marine ecosystem and especially its fate and impact on marine ecosystems."
Professor Karl is co-ordinating an expedition with Algalita in search of the garbage patch later this year and believes the expanse of junk actually represents a new habitat. Historically, rubbish that ends up in oceanic gyres has biodegraded. But modern plastics are so durable that objects half-a-century old have been found in the north Pacific dump. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere," said Tony Andrady, a chemist with the US-based Research Triangle Institute.
Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.
According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. Syringes, cigarette lighters and toothbrushes have been found inside the stomachs of dead seabirds, which mistake them for food.
Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic,
Dr Eriksen said the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles - the raw materials for the plastic industry - are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. "What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It's that simple," said Dr Eriksen.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/76056/
Guardian:
It ain't over yet
Jonathan Freedland
February 6, 2008
So: it ain't over. Bill Clinton, regarded as a political analyst with almost supernatural abilities, was saying a fortnight ago that the Democratic nomination would be wrapped up on February 5 - but my calendar says today is February 6 and this contest is as unresolved as ever. The delegate count is pretty even and the night did not yield a clear,
psychological victor. Yes, Hillary Clinton won the big prizes of California, Massachusetts and New Jersey, but Barack Obama won more states, including the always-cherished Missouri. Narrowly, it was a better night for Clinton, which will mean that Obama's phenomenal week of momentum will have been slowed. But otherwise, it's stalemate. Which means the next period is fraught with risks for the Democrats, even if last night offered some reasons for good cheer too.
First, the risks. Democrats could spend the next few weeks or even months continuing to take lumps out of each other while, on the Republican side, the field clears and the party's presumptive nominee starts making a national case for himself in readiness for November. He can pose as a future president while his Democratic rivals are still mud-wrestling.
The consolation here is that that did not happen as neatly as it might have yesterday, with John McCain failing to sweep the board and seal his own nomination. So while the Democrats will still be fighting among themselves, so will Republicans - at least for a while. Also, some Democrats believe the fact that the energy and buzz is all on their side only helps their cause, on the "all publicity is good publicity" principle. That's arguable.
A greater fear, surely, for Democrats is that Super Tuesday suggests a fracturing of the party's fabled coalition along racial and gender lines: white women lining up for Hillary Clinton, African-Americans and men for Barack Obama. Clinton's success in those states with large Hispanic populations indicates a bloc she can rely on, part of which (the older part) remains out of reach for Obama. If the battle gets rancorous over this next phase - as it did, for example, in South Carolina - there's a risk that Democrats could turn on each other in a way that won't easily be healed by November. And there is no politics more poisonous than identity politics. The eventual Democratic nominee could face an angry wing of the party as hostile to him or her as the conservative hardcore of the Republicans are to McCain.
There is a related factor that I've wondered about since I saw the devotion of the Obama crowds for myself. If he eventually loses, will there not be a tidal wave of disappointment, one to match the wave of euphoria he rides currently? Will there not be young voters and African-Americans who would conclude that the true lesson of 2008 is not "Yes, We Can" but "No, We Can't"?
Similarly, the Obama camp must be wondering why polls showing him drawing level in states like Massachusetts, California and New Jersey did not pan out: Hillary won all those contests easily. Could this be evidence of a persistent Bradley effect, named for the African-American politician who polled well only to fall short on election day - suggesting some white voters will say they're going to vote for a black candidate even when they won't? If such an effect does exist, that will give many Democrats pause as they consider Obama's electability in a general election.
The good news for the party is they have two candidates who have already shown remarkable resilience. The adoration showered on Obama over the last week would have felled many a politician, but not Hillary. She is the unhip candidate in this election, but she is still pulling in millions of votes.
The key question for Democrats is whether they can ensure all the energy currently generated by this extraordinary primary season is harnessed in favour of the eventual nominee and against the Republican opposition - and not turned inward into a fratricidal war. In 1968, the Democrats fought a stirring, passionate internal contest but they did not heal their wounds in time to win. (Admittedly, that campaign took a tragic turn with the assassination of Robert Kennedy.) The result was the election not of a Democrat, but of President Richard Nixon.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/
jonathan_freedland/2008/02/it_aint_over_yet.html
Jeune Afrique:
Paris apporte son soutien à Deby
TCHAD - 6 février 2008 - AFP
La France a apporté mardi un soutien clair au président tchadien Idriss Deby Itno, affirmant qu'elle ferait si nécessaire son "devoir" pour protéger son régime, alors même qu'il semblait contrôler la situation militaire et indiquait vouloir poursuivre les rebelles.
L'inquiétude grandissait par ailleurs sur le sort des habitants de la capitale, où les combats du week-end dernier auraient fait 1.000 blessés et provoqué l'exode de 15.000 à 30.000 personnes vers le Cameroun et près de 3.000 au Nigeria.
Lundi, la France avait indiqué espérer "ne pas avoir à intervenir plus avant" militairement. Mardi, le président Nicolas Sarkozy a été plus ferme, en affirmant que "si la France doit faire son devoir (au Tchad), elle le fera".
Des déclarations consécutives à l'adoption par le Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU, lundi, d'une déclaration non contraignante, dans laquelle il appelait "les Etats membres à apporter leur soutien au gouvernement du Tchad".
La capitale était calme mardi soir pour la deuxième journée consécutive. "La ville est entièrement sous notre contrôle", avait déclaré dans la matinée à l'AFP le général Mahamat Ali Abdallah, commandant des opérations de l'Armée nationale tchadienne (ANT).
Mardi, sous la pression diplomatique, la rébellion a indiqué accepter le principe d'un cessez-le-feu, rejeté de manière cinglante par les autorités.
La situation humanitaire monopolise de plus en plus l'attention de la communauté internationale. Les affrontements ont fait au moins un millier de blessés, selon le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge (CICR). A N'Djamena l'hôpital général "de référence" tente, sans moyens ni électricité, de soigner les blessés, militaires et civils.
Les Tchadiens continuaient d'affluer vers le Cameroun. Une équipe du HCR arrivée lundi soir à Kousseri, petite ville camerounaise située en face de N'Djamena, a estimé "qu'entre 15.000 et 20.000 personnes ont passé la frontière au cours des derniers jours". De son côté, le CICR a indiqué qu'au moins "30.000 personnes auraient déjà fui", la plupart étant regroupées dans un centre artisanal et une école de Kousseri "dans des conditions de plus en plus précaires".
La Commission européenne, qui craint une "crise humanitaire grave" au Tchad, a annoncé mardi une aide d'urgence de 2 millions d'euros pour les personnes déplacées ces derniers jours par les combats. Mardi soir, les autorités tchadiennes ont appelé à la télévision les dizaines de milliers d'habitants de N'Djamena qui ont fui les combats à "revenir immédiatement" en l'absence désormais de "menace".
"Nous demandons à nos compatriotes qui ont été inquiétés et obligés de quitter la capitale de revenir immédiatement", a déclaré à la télévision nationale le général Mahamat Ali Abdallah, commandant des opérations de l'Armée nationale tchadienne (ANT), marquant ainsi la reprise des programmes interrompus depuis samedi.
Par ailleurs quelque 1.182 ressortissants étrangers ont été évacués du Tchad vers Libreville depuis le début de l'opération samedi, a indiqué mardi à l'AFP l'état-major des armées françaises.
L'ambassade saoudienne au Tchad a évacué tout son personnel à la suite de la mort de l'épouse et de la fille d'un employé lors de combats à N'Djamena.
Après l'ONU, la France, et les Etats-Unis, la Russie a elle aussi condamné le raid rebelle.
Mardi, les membres d'une force de 3.700 hommes de l'Union européenne, l'Eufor, destinée à la protection des réfugiés du Darfour et de déplacés des pays voisins, ont décidé de maintenir la suspension du déploiement, décidée vendredi, à l'issue d'une réunion des ambassadeurs des 27 pays de l'Union européenne.
Présenté comme une agression inspirée par le régime soudanais, le raid des rebelles illustre, selon les analystes, la volonté de contrôle des ressources pétrolières. La production nationale quoique limitée représente une véritable manne pour ce pays parmi les plus pauvres d'Afrique.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP63748parisybedne0
Mail & Guardian:
Sex work or no work
Rory Carroll
05 February 2008
What Natasha does on the bed in the dingy room with flaking orange paint so shames her she cannot bring herself to use the word. She calls it “so and so” and sells it here from midday to midnight, six days a week.
On a very good day she makes £45. With each 30-minute session earning £2,50 that works out at 18 different men, many drunk, some violent. She tries to forget the very good days.
“I don’t want to be with a strange man who wants to kiss your whole body. Some suck you up and leave red marks. It’s ugly.” Natasha shuddered. “Ugly, ugly, ugly.”
Three years ago she won two beauty contests and was runner-up in another two, including Miss Best Legs, on Nicaragua’s impoverished Caribbean coast. With dreams of modelling she boarded a bus for the distant capital, Managua.
But Nicaragua has not fully recovered from its 1980s war and remains the second-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti. Economic necessity kills many dreams.
Now 19, she is a veteran of Salvadoreno, a bar and brothel in a tough barrio known as Costa Rica. The days pass in a miasma of beer, sweat and perfume. “I would not wish my worst enemy to be here,” she said. “This is the worst thing you can do.”
Not quite, it turns out. There is an even worse alternative: doing nothing. Two months ago police raids shut brothels across the city, expelled clients and sent sex workers home. The leftwing Sandinista government billed the crackdown as a socially progressive effort to protect women from exploitation.
The would-be beneficiaries did not see it that way. Their work, however ghastly, was a ticket out of poverty. Dozens of prostitutes from Salvadoreno led a revolt against what they said was a violation of rights. Emerging from the shadows of their trade, they went public and mounted an unprecedented media campaign to overturn the ban. Astonished by the protests, the authorities relented and within a week the women were back at work.
The Managua-based Central American Health Institute, an NGO that funds medical treatment and disease prevention and is known by its Spanish initials ICAS, welcomed the end of the crackdown.
“That sort of repression drives the trade further underground and makes the women less accessible to us,” said Zoyla Segura, a health worker. “This protest was something positive because it showed an awareness of their rights.”
Profiting from the earnings of prostitution is illegal but authorities have long turned a blind eye to the bars, massage parlours and strip clubs which employ most of the city’s estimated 1 500 sex workers.
Salvadoreno, a courtyard of plastic tables where men drink knee-high bottles of beer, has been operating for 35 years. Traders wander in, hawking snacks, baby clothes and pirated DVDs. Everything is for sale, including the waitresses who provide servicios in the seven bedrooms adjacent to the bar.
Sex costs $7,50, of which $1,50 goes to the business and the rest is pocketed by the prostitute, said Marta Lorena, the manager. “We have 25 chicas working here. It’s good money for them and for us.”
Though she has gained weight from sipping endless sodas Natasha, who did not want her surname published, retains beauty pageant glamour and is the most sought-after chica. Her earnings support her mother, aunt and younger brother in Bluefields, a sleepy, humid town which feels more Jamaican than Nicaraguan. Even on a quiet day she earns more than a doctor or teacher. On Sunday, her day off, she studies banking at a university, but graduation is at least five years away.
The relative privacy of the work is a consolation. “There are bars where you dance naked and you’re touched up courtesy of the house.” Natasha has declined work at more upmarket brothels that pay more for a session but have a lower turnover.
“For now this is my life,” she said, gesturing to the rumpled bed, bare light bulb and cracked walls. When a client is especially repellent she urges him to hurry up. If one turns violent she shouts and bar staff come to her aid.
“Three years and I’m still not used to it. You can imagine what it was like on my first day. I’d just had one boyfriend before coming here.”
By chance last year the ex-boyfriend visited the bar and spotted her. “I was so ashamed. I ran out and cried and cried. I hope never to see him again.”
Other men from Bluefields have also recognised her.
“I don’t care if the whole of my town knows I’m here but not my family, not my mum. I told her I’m married and that my husband gives me the money.
“That’s a lie.”
© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2008
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=331504&area=/insight/insight__international/
New Statesman:
Saint or charlatan?
In the 1920s Marcus Garvey rose from obscurity to become the most famous black man on the planet. So why has the memory of this titanic figure faded?
Kevin Jackson
Published 31 January 2008
As the title of Colin Grant's gripping and sympathetic biography spells out, the chap in the chapeau is Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940): Jamaican-born printer, publisher, editor, poet, orator, political theorist, sometime director of a commercial line of passenger ships, key prophet of the Back to Africa movement and, in the eyes of some, reincarnation of John the Baptist. There is no call for squeamishness about using the term "Negro" when discussing his astonishing career, provided it be spelled with the appropriate capital letter, as it was very much Garvey's own favoured term. "Set at defiance the designation of 'nigger' uttered even by yourselves," he rebuked his readers in an early work, "and be a Negro in the light of the Pharaohs of Egypt, Simons of Cyrene, Hannibals of Carthage, 'Ouvertures and Dessalines of Hayti [sic] . . . who have made, and are making history for the race." Garvey was a proud man, and, for him, Negro was a proud word.
He had good cause for pride. After an impoverished childhood and wandering early manhood, Garvey suddenly found himself, for a brief, heady period in the 1920s, far and away the most famous Negro in the world - a title that was soon to be taken from him by Paul Robeson (he criticised the great actor for taking what he saw as demeaning, stereotyped roles) and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. (Garvey had initially hailed him and spread the belief that Selassie might be the legendary African leader hinted at in holy scripture; he then turned angrily against him for what he saw as Selassie's cowardice in the Italian-Abyssinian war.) Nowadays, it seems a fair bet that most white folks - to use another racial idiom of Garvey's glory years - will barely have heard of Garvey, save perhaps as a figure who keeps being namechecked by reggae artists. In his stirring song "So Much Things to Say", Bob Marley vows never to forget that "they stole Marcus Garvey for rights". And yet, for a couple of decades after his death, almost everyone, black folks and white folks alike, forgot the lost prophet.
The process of rediscovery only began a quarter of a century after Garvey's death, when his mortal remains were respectfully taken from St Mary's Catholic Church in Kensal Green, north-west London, and reburied in Kingston, Jamaica. Edward Seaga, later Jamaica's prime minister, made it official that Garvey was now to be regarded as the country's first national hero. The dead prophet's former enemies came to rue their earlier hostility: as an angry young Marxist, the Trinidadian historian C R James had dismissed Garvey's ideas as "pitiable rubbish"; in his mature years, he eulogised the same man as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. That sentiment would be echoed by many intellectuals in the new nations of Africa, and by countless Americans during the years of Black Power and afterwards.
In the American academies and among the less formal students of black history, Garvey's life and thought are the raw materials for a whole industry, but many of its products remain unread save by interested parties. One problem, as Colin Grant notes, is that commentators on Garvey - today, just as in his lifetime - are split into opposing camps: those who want to revere him as a saint, and those who want to revile him as a charlatan. One of the many virtues of Grant's monumental biography is that it brings Garvey's reputation away from the heat of infighting and into the cooler air of mainstream history. Grant writes with the quiet authority of a historian who has done a colossal amount of research, much of it in primary sources, and knows the smells and tastes of his period as if he had lived through it. He is slow to pass judgement, but when he does so, the verdict carries real weight.
Although Garvey's Jamaican origins are of some importance to understanding his character, the larger part of Grant's narrative here, well over 300 pages, is devoted to the period of his American exploits, from March 1916 when he arrived in New York, poor, unknown and without prospects, and headed straight for Harlem, to December 1927, when he was deported after serving two years for fraud in a brutal jail in Atlanta - the Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, so to speak, of his generation. By then every Harlem resident knew his prison number, 19359, and many used it as a lucky lottery number. The years in between had been, by any reckoning, a decade of dazzling accomplishment.
With bewildering rapidity, Garvey rose from being a so-so street orator to a public speaker of supernatural eloquence, with a voice "like thunder from Heaven", capable of filling Madison Square Garden and holding every spectator rapt, even the ones who had come to mock. He founded a black newspaper that soon became the most influential of its then-thriving kind. He transformed his pan-African organisation, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, into a thousands-strong body that soon rivalled its more moderate counterpart the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). He decided that what the Negro race really needed was its own fleet, which he named the Black Star Line, and managed to persuade countless thousands of African Americans that this was their dream, too. People who could barely afford canned food would buy shares, and (though the story ended in tears) they lived to see Black Star Liners being sailed under black captains, and were thrilled. No wonder Garvey could ride in triumph through Harlem in a great open car, sporting quasi-military finery and a tricorn with white feathers.
As with so many world-historical figures, Garvey needed luck as well as talent. He had the right message for the right audience, especially after 1919, when the black population of the United States, keenly aware of the exceptional gallantry with which their brothers had just fought in a white folks' war, reasonably expected President Woodrow Wilson and others to arrange for a little payback. Not only did those rewards not come, but conditions actually grew worse. Spurred on by the success of D W Griffith's Birth of a Nation (read it and wince, film buffs), the previously dwindling Ku Klux Klan made a horrifying comeback, and an epidemic of lynching broke out across the South. Meanwhile, in the fine old tradition of compounding injury with insult, the authorities - with J Edgar Hoover among the leading villains - set about branding outspoken blacks as obvious reds. Grant's account of this red scare period, a full-scale dress rehearsal for the McCarthy era, is particularly thoughtful. In reality, considered in the terms of the conventional left-right spectrum, Garvey is impossible to place: in later years, he was accused of being far too conservative.
One of Garvey's main rhetorical themes - Grant wittily calls it "tough love" - was that the Negro was his own worst enemy. (With enemies like Hoover and the KKK, however, it is fair to say the competition was pretty stiff.) He was certainly not always his own best friend. More often than not, he would alienate the very people who should have been his most potent allies, such as the formidable W E B Du Bois, the patrician, Harvard-educated leader of the NAACP, clearly a good deal more intelligent than Garvey, but without a shred of Garvey's powers to sway a crowd. Worse still, when the whole Black Star Line business fell ingloriously to pieces and he was brought to trial on charges of fraud, Garvey made the fatal error of acting as his own lawyer, even though his legal training amounted to a few night classes at Birkbeck College when he had lived in London as a young man. He went to jail, and though he made fitful attempts at launching a second act to his career he was a broken man. He returned to England, fell ill, lived long enough to read premature accounts of his death by a stroke, and then died a real, cold and lonely death.
A truly remarkable tale, and Grant does not squander an ounce of its dramatic potential: at times, his history reads like a first-rate novel. His Garvey is neither saint nor charlatan, though often a good deal closer to the former than the latter. (Was Marcus indeed "stolen for rights", as Marley sang? It seems likely.) Garvey's enemies were baffled to find that the collapse of the Black Star Line did little to diminish his popularity, even among people who had been financially stung. Those humble folk saw what slicker, nastier people could not: that the commodity Garvey had actually obtained for them was not a few dodgy boats, but a timely burst of self-respect.
He was a dreamer and a boaster, no doubt, but, whatever his enemies maintained, he was no scoundrel. Grant's book is a fine and valuable monument to his memory.
Kevin Jackson is the author of the BFI monograph on David Lean's film "Lawrence of Arabia". He is currently writing a biography of John Ruskin
http://www.newstatesman.com/200801310047
Página/12:
Pando comenzó su gira por el interior
EMPEZO EN CORRIENTES EL JUICIO ORAL A CINCO REPRESORES DE LA DICTADURA
Las mujeres de los represores, acompañadas por Cecilia Pando, encabezaron las provocaciones dirigidas a los familiares de las víctimas. Hubo incidentes dentro del juzgado y en la calle. En la audiencia se leyó la acusación, se reforzó la imputación por asociación ilícita y la imprescriptibilidad de los delitos.
Por Carlos Rodríguez
desde Corrientes
Miércoles, 06 de Febrero de 2008
En un marco de tensión permanente entre los familiares y amigos de las víctimas –acompañados por integrantes de las organizaciones de derechos humanos– y un grupo de personas que apoyó de viva voz a los represores –entre las que destacaba la activista Cecilia Pando– se leyó ayer la acusación en el juicio oral por crímenenes cometidos durante la dictadura militar en el Regimiento de Infantería 9 de esta ciudad. Los acusados son el capitán retirado del Ejército Juan Carlos Demarchi, los coroneles Horacio Losito y Rafael Manuel Barreiro, el oficial de la misma fuerza Carlos Roberto Piriz y el gendarme Raúl Alfredo Reynoso, quienes estuvieron presentes en la sala para escuchar cómo se los incriminaba por la privación ilegal de la libertad y los tormentos sufridos por 15 de las decenas de personas que estuvieron cautivas en un galpón del RI-9 que funcionó como centro clandestino de detención. Se dijo que los cinco acusados presentes, el también imputado en ausencia general retirado Cristino Nicolaides, otros represores ya fallecidos y algunos que todavía no pudieron ser identificados por sus víctimas formaron “una empresa criminal creada por la dictadura militar” para desarrollar “una actividad delictiva en forma clandestina”. Es el primer juicio oral por violaciones a los derechos humanos durante la dictadura en el interior del país.
–¿A usted qué le parece este juicio?
–Me parece bien que la Justicia empiece a juzgar los crímenes cometidos en Corrientes por la dictadura militar.
–¿Qué crímenes? ¿Qué dictadura militar? Acá hubo una lucha contra el terrorismo subversivo. Además, esto no es Justicia, esto es un circo. Ellos (por los militares acusados de delitos de lesa humanidad) defendieron la patria y el juicio es un verdadero circo.
La que empezó el interrogatorio fue Patricia Mariño de Barreiro, la esposa del coronel Rafael Manuel Barreiro. A la mujer no le parecieron muy satisfactorias las respuestas de Página/12, pero no se amilanó en ningún momento, siguió con su prédica: “Yo lo que quiero es que se diga la verdad. Que se hable de todo, no de una sola parte. El periodismo sólo repite lo que dice el gobierno de turno, que sólo quiere condenar y humillar a los militares que defendieron la patria”.
Acompañada por sus cuatro hijos, la mujer comenzó temprano, en la calle, con sus voces de apoyo ante la llegada de los detenidos: “Tranquilo viejo”, “Fuerza Puchi”, “Viva la patria”, “Vamos Piriz”. Los gritos siguieron en la sala de audiencias, en cada cuarto intermedio. Los hijos de Barreiro levantaban los brazos, sin gritar, como si festejaran un gol virtual. Lo hicieron para “celebrar” el ingreso de los acusados al recinto.
En la calle, varios centenares de personas, movilizadas por Barrios de Pie y los organismos de derechos humanos, se plantaron sobre la calle Carlos Pellegrini al 900, detrás del vallado policial, para exigir justicia por las violaciones a los derechos humanos ocurridas en la provincia. Los familiares y amigos de los represores también hicieron lo mismo. Unas 70 personas, con rosarios y escarapelas a lo French y Beruti, entonaron el Himno Nacional y rezaron un Padrenuestro.
Los nostálgicos de la dictadura se mostraron agresivos ante la presencia de la diputada Victoria Donda, nacida en la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada durante el cautiverio de su madre desaparecida, y trinaron por la presencia, en apoyo a las víctimas del terrorismo de Estado, de la monja Martha Pelloni, de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora y del subsecretario de Derechos Humanos de Corrientes, Pablo Vassel. Los amigos de la represión contaron con el apoyo de Cecilia Pando, que poco menos quería “prohibir” el ingreso de Pelloni a la sala de audiencias. “Esta es una jornada de alegría, no hay que entrar en el juego de ellos”, respondió Victoria Donda.
Los cargos
En la acusación, que ahora será llevada en el juicio por los fiscales Germán Wiens, Jorge Auat y Flavio Ferrini, se hizo una larga exposición de argumentos tendientes a probar que los imputados conformaban “una asociación ilícita”. En ese sentido, se dejó sentado que hay “razones suficientes como para que se los condene por asociación ilícita agravada, en concurso real con privación ilegal de la libertad agravada, abuso funcional, aplicación de severidades, vejaciones, apremios ilegales y aplicación de tormentos”. En la imputación se dejó planteado que “dentro de una asociación lícita, en este caso el Ejército y otras fuerzas de seguridad del Estado, puede gestarse una asociación ilícita con el objetivo de cometer hechos delictivos como los cometidos en Corrientes”. De esa forma, la fiscalía se anticipó a contrarrestar argumentos que seguramente van a ser expuestos por los abogados defensores.
Del mismo modo, se citaron párrafos de fallos de la Corte Suprema de Justicia con definiciones técnicas acerca de cuándo corresponde aplicar la calificación legal de “asociación ilícita” y sobre todo acerca de la imprescriptibilidad de los delitos de lesa humanidad. Sobre el punto, se recordaron párrafos enteros del fallo del máximo tribunal en la causa contra el agente de inteligencia chileno Enrique Arancibia Clavel, condenado por el asesinato en Buenos Aires, en el año 1974, del general Carlos Prats y su esposa. En ese marco, las mayores imputaciones recayeron sobre el capitán Juan Carlos Demarchi, aunque también se hizo mención a la responsabilidad mediata, como jefe de la Brigada de Infantería 7, del general Cristino Nicolaides, quien estuvo a cargo de la Subzona de Seguridad 23, de la que dependía el RI-9 de Corrientes. Como Nicolaides está ausente por enfermedad, el tribunal omitió ayer la lectura de las partes que lo involucran en forma directa, para respetar su derecho de defensa en juicio. Ayer tampoco estuvieron en la audiencia sus abogados defensores.
El que debutó ayer en el juicio, como defensor de Demarchi, fue el abogado porteño Eduardo San Emeterio, quien arrancó demostrando que no se va a andar con chiquitas. Con un discurso propio de la dictadura, le pidió al tribunal, sin nombrarlas, que se retiraran de la sala de audiencias las dos representantes de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora, Taty Almeida y Angela Boitano. El letrado alegó que los pañuelos de las Madres, a los que tampoco nombró como si hacerlo fuera pecado, tenían “un significado político”. El presidente del tribunal, Víctor Alonso, cortó en seco la intervención de San Emeterio: “No hay nada en la sala que tenga connotación política. Le ruego que no vuelva a interrumpir la audiencia con este tipo de intervenciones”.
La sala estaba dividida. De un lado, los familiares de las víctimas. Del otro, los amigos de los represores. Al finalizar la audiencia, la mujer de Barreiro y Cristina Losito, la esposa del coronel Horacio Losito, volvieron a manifestarse a los gritos. Recién allí el presidente del tribunal, Víctor Alonso, les advirtió por primera vez: “Si siguen alterando el orden, les voy a prohibir la entrada”. Las provocaciones siguieron en la calle.
“No hay que hacerles caso. Lo que les pasa es que están perdiendo los privilegios y la impunidad. Eso es algo que no pueden soportar”, comentó Martha Pelloni mientras se retiraba “feliz de que en Corrientes se empiece a hacer algo de justicia”.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-98532-2008-02-06.html
Página/12: Joven argentino, si estás divorciado
no serás embajador pero sí general
Defensa derogó los reglamentos que indagaban sobre la vida privada de oficiales y suboficiales de las Fuerzas Armadas. De hecho, incidían en la carrera militar.
Por Nora Veiras
Miércoles, 06 de Febrero de 2008
“La fealdad manifiesta”, definida según los criterios estéticos de almirantes, generales o brigadieres, era impedimento para ingresar a las Fuerzas Armadas, al igual que la calvicie o tener rasgos orientales. Esas arbitrariedades fueron sepultadas ya entrada la democracia, pero otras que hurgan en la intimidad y las relaciones personales, forjadas en la comunión con la Iglesia Católica, seguían vigentes hasta ahora. La ministra de Defensa, Nilda Garré, ordenó la derogación de los reglamentos que establecen, por ejemplo, que “para el personal militar soltero, se entiende una situación regular (de familia) mantener su soltería sin convivir con una persona del sexo opuesto” y para el personal viudo “mantener su situación de viudez y sin vivir con una persona del sexo opuesto”. Separados y divorciados tenían que precisar hasta la carátula del expediente judicial que seguía el trámite y, de hecho, esa “irregularidad” incidía en forma negativa en sus posibilidades de ascenso.
El año pasado, la Cámara de Diputados aprobó, por 154 votos a 2, la derogación del Código de Justicia Militar que, entre otras cosas, establece la degradación, destitución y prisión para los homosexuales. Falta la media sanción del Senado, por lo cual en los papeles los gays y lesbianas todavía pueden ser expulsados de las Fuerzas Armadas. En el marco de la política de asimilar a oficiales y suboficiales a los parámetros de la sociedad civil, el año pasado Garré también derogó los reglamentos que impedían el casamiento entre oficiales o suboficiales de distinto rango. “Usted tiene que deshacer esta situación; la sociedad militar no lo ve bien”, escuchó el sargento del Ejército Néstor La Veglia al regresar, en 1993, de una misión de paz en Croacia. “La situación” era su unión de hecho con la ex mujer de un mayor retirado. Cuarenta y cinco de arresto y la quita de la mitad del sueldo fueron las primeras sanciones para castigar la “irreverencia”. Tres años después, tras sucesivos expedientes, le ordenaron la baja.
En uno de los reglamentos que derogó Garré, cuyas respuestas tienen valor de declaración jurada, se lee: “El personal casado determinará. Inciso a: se encuentra separado/a de su cónyuge (tachar lo que no corresponda) b: No me encuentro separado/a, c: Estoy separado/a, legalmente divorciado/a (agregue copia autenticada de la respectiva sentencia) d: Estoy separado/a de hecho (exprese desde cuándo, ha iniciado trámite judicial Sí o No). En caso afirmativo exprese carátula del expediente, juzgado, secretaría y estado actual del mismo. En caso negativo exprese las causas por las que no lo ha hecho”. Para el personal soltero, los formularios preguntan: “¿Convive con otra persona (de distinto sexo) en carácter de unión de hecho? Sí o No. En caso afirmativo exprese desde cuándo, especifique nombre, apellido, número de documento y actividad del conviviente”.
Cada oficial tiene tres legajos: uno personal, uno de familia y otro de salud. Los detallados expedientes son considerados para el ascenso y, en la práctica, el estado civil sigue siendo todavía un obstáculo para muchos. “A igualdad de mérito, si hay uno casado y otro separado, seguro que es elegido el que tiene un matrimonio como Dios manda”, explica un oficial que recuerda otro requisito que hasta ahora existe: la llamada “venia de enlace”, es decir el permiso que pide un militar que se va a casar. El trámite implica la autorización para que la fuerza investigue al cónyuge.
La resolución de Defensa apunta a dejar sin efecto estos anacronismos que se fundan en la concepción de la “familia militar”. En los fundamentos, Garré cita el fallo de la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación que, en 1986, al pronunciarse sobre el divorcio, sostuvo respecto de la familia que “las formas que esta institución ha adoptado son las más variadas, como nos lo enseñan la antropología y la historia”. También menciona el Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos y la Convención Americana sobre Derechos Humanos, que “establecen el derecho de toda persona a la protección contra injerencias arbitrarias o abusivas en su vida privada y advierte que “las Fuerzas Armadas carecen de facultad para reglamentar sobre las relaciones de familia, pues ésta es una facultad privativa del Congreso Nacional”.
“Se subraya la garantía de los ciudadanos militares (en todas las jerarquías de oficiales y suboficiales) para ejercer sus derechos ciudadanos sin ser sometidos a clasificación alguna u obligación de responder a interrogatorios acerca de su vida privada”, destacó Defensa. La modificación de las normas que moldearon el pensamiento y la vida castrense al compás de los mandatos de la Iglesia Católica tributa a la intención oficial de suprimir el obispado castrense como la única fuente de contención espiritual de los uniformados.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-98533-2008-02-06.html
Página/12:
Gana McCain y aguanta Hillary
CLINTON RETUVO ESTADOS CLAVE COMO NUEVA YORK, PERO FALTA CALIFORNIA
Mientras Barack Obama se imponía en los distritos con fuerte afluencia de votantes negros, Clinton se llevaba estados clave como Missouri y Massachusetts, donde el clan Kennedy había arrojado su apoyo en favor de Obama. Entre los republicanos John McCain se llevaba los estados principales: Nueva York, Illinois y Nueva Jersey.
Miércoles, 06 de Febrero de 2008
En el “supermartes” donde se votan primarias en 24 estados, la batalla demócrata entre Hillary Clinton y Barack Obama tenía ya una vencedora en el estado clave de Nueva York, pero a falta de resultados del estado de California, era difícil pronosticar al ganador de la jornada. Por el lado republicano, McCain fue el gran vencedor al imponerse en los estados principales.
Al cierre de esta edición, Clinton se imponía en su estado, Nueva York, por un margen de tres a uno y la cadena CNN la proyectaba como ganadora en base a las encuestas en boca de urna. Nueva York aporta 232 delegados, el segundo botín más grande de la elección después de California. Clinton también ganó en los estado sureños de Arkansas, donde su marido fue gobernador; Tennessee, el estado de Al Gore, y Oklahoma. También marchaba con ventaja en la populosa Nueva Jersey, en el estado clave de Missouri y Massachusetts, tierra del clan Kennedy, que había apostado fuerte en favor de Obama. En tanto, el senador de Illinois había ganado en su estado y en otros dos con un fuerte componente de voto negro, Georgia y Alabama, donde los votantes de color apoyaron a su candidato en una proporción de ocho a uno. Al arrasar con el voto negro, Obama quedó expuesto a ser considerado como un candidato de una minoría étnica, lo cual podría ahuyentar a otros electorados. Sin embargo, ayer Obama vencía en dos estados de la costa este, Connecticut y Delaware, con fuerte apoyo de votantes blancos.
Antes de llegar a California, Clinton parecía mejor posicionada en el supermartes. Había ganado los estados que tenía que ganar sí o sí, Nueva York y Nueva Jersey, y había hecho una elección relativamente buena en Illinois, donde Obama jugaba de local.
Al cierre de esta edición, Clinton había estirado su ventaja en delegados de 40 a más de 70 delegados, aunque el parcial de 295 delegados para la senadora de Nueva York estaba muy lejos de los 2000 necesarios para asegurarse la nominación.
En la elección Republicana el gobernador de Arizona, John McCain, se impuso en Nueva York Illinois, Nueva Jersey, Connecticut y Delaware, y se imponía en Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama y Montana. Mientras tanto Mike Huckabee se le birlaba el voto conservadora Mitt Romney. Huckabee ganó en West Virginia y Arkansas y se imponía en Missouri, Georgia y Minnesota. Ronmey sólo ganó en su estado, Massachusetts.
En total de delegados, McCain marchaba al frente de los republicanos, con 309 delegados, seguido por Romney, con 99, y Huckabee, con 54.
Obama, el carismático candidato negro de 45 años, hizo ayer mismo campaña en New Jersey, Connecticut y Massachusetts, y luego voló de Boston a Chicago, donde votó en una escuela primaria. El senador dio una docena de entrevistas a programas de radio en las últimas horas para atraer a los indecisos. Se mostró con el perfil de ser quien romperá con las políticas del presidente Bush y el mejor posicionado para enfrentar al nominado republicano en noviembre.
Hillary Clinton, al igual que Obama, pasó como un huracán por varios estados clave en menos de 48 horas, con la esperanza de captar cada último voto antes del cierre de los comicios. Clinton, de 60 años, estuvo cerca de su casa (en Nueva York), haciendo paradas ayer en Connecticut y Massachusetts y en sets de programas de televisión antes de ir a votar en la ciudad neoyorquina de Chappaque. Hillary ganó ayer en Oklahoma.
La incógnita estaba en el estado dorado: California, estaban habilitados para votar 3 millones de 13 millones que representan esa primera minoría. Es el que aporta más delegados para la convención del próximo agosto.
De Missouri, de Arizona, de Minnesota, de todo el país llegaban historias que confirman una movilización política sin precedentes en la memoria reciente. La consecuencia es que Estados tan apáticos en el pasado como la propia California, Alabama, Nuevo México y otros muchos de los 24 que votaron ayer esperaban alcanzar récord de participación, como ha ocurrido antes en todas las citas electorales desde el 3 de enero.
Esto es en parte mérito de George Bush, que parece haber agotado un largo ciclo conservador y la paciencia de sus compatriotas. Pero, sobre todo, es mérito de los dos candidatos demócratas, que con una campaña extraordinariamente competida y prometedora de cambio –aunque de distinto grado y características– ha devuelto la ilusión a muchos ciudadanos.
La carrera por la Casa Blanca está cada vez más enfocada a la personalidad y el estilo ejecutivo de los candidatos, más que a la ideología o asuntos como Irak: todos los sondeos reflejan que los votantes demócratas e independientes quieren que el próximo presidente solucione el sistema de salud y mejore la economía.
Trescientos millones
La carrera a la Casa Blanca ya costó más de 300 millones de dólares. El candidato que más gastó en su campaña hasta ahora es el empresario multimillonario Mitt Romney. Según datos del Center for Responsive Politics, una ONG norteamericana, el gobernador de Massachusetts gastó más de 86 millones de dólares. Sin embargo, no le alcanzó para subir en las encuestas. Su rival, John McCain, no llegó a utilizar ni la mitad del dinero, pero cada vez se afianza más como el favorito del Partido Republicano. Del lado demócrata, Hillary Clinton fue la que más recaudó en toda la elección. Llenó sus arcas con más de 115 millones de dólares, pero sólo gastó unos 77,7 millones de dólares. El otro candidato demócrata, Barack Obama, le pisa los talones. Gastó un poco más que ella, 83 millones de dólares, pero recaudó un poco más de 102 millones de dólares. Lo que muchos no se esperaban es que el aparato industrial-militar se volcara a los demócratas, especialmente a la ex primera dama.
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-98549-2008-02-06.html
The Independent: Democrat rivals
trade victories while McCain storms on
By Andrew Gumbel in Phoenix, Arizona
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton did just well enough to retain an edge over Barack Obama – she won the highly competitive states of Massachusetts and New Jersey, and took the grand prize of California – but faces a huge challenge in the contests to come because she no longer has the momentum and is falling far behind in the fund-raising race.
Senator Obama was projected to win as many as 14 of the 22 Democratic Super Tuesday races, including Georgia, Connecticut and his home state of Illinois, and a narrow win in the bellwether state of Missouri.
Senator Clinton took the most populous of the 22-states and maintains a lead in the all-important tally of delegates but Senator Obama is close behind with fresh momentum as the Democratic race moves into territory where he would seem to have an edge.
The one unambiguous loser of the night was Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts who not only fell short in must-win states like California and Missouri, but also lost significant ground to Mr Huckabee, who swept the conservative vote – and the election – in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and West Virginia.
Senator McCain had hoped the 24 Republican primaries and caucuses – an unprecedented cascade of races on a single day – would act as a steamroller flattening all opposition and making him the de facto nominee seven months before the party convention.
It didn't work out that way, because of a groundswell of opposition from the conservative wing of the party who have accused Senator McCain, a ruggedly independent-minded politician who is not shy of cutting deals with Democrats in the Senate, of betraying their values and failing to be a loyal team player.
Still, it is well-nigh impossible to imagine either Mr Romney or Mr Huckabee catching up with him as the state-by-state contests continue. If both challengers stay in the race, they are surely doomed to split the conservative vote between them and make their cause even more futile. Both vowed last night to keep fighting.
Senator McCain, for his part, fully embraced the "frontrunner" label for the first time as he addressed his supporters in a hotel ballroom in Phoenix, Arizona. He had never minded being labeled an underdog, he said. "But tonight," he went on to growing cheers, "I think we must get used to the idea that we are the Republican frontrunner for the nomination." Chants from the back of the room echoed the slogan: "Mac is back! Mac is back!"
The Arizona Senator won one big prize after another – New York and the rest of the northeastern states apart from Massachusetts, Illinois, Missouri, Arizona, and California. He was gracious about recognising his Republican opponents, but also put in a plug for his own conservative bona fides. If he snags the nomination, he said, "our conservative philosophy and principles? will win the votes of a majority of the American people and defeat any candidate our friends on the other side nominate".
His campaign aide Steve Schmidt was rather less gracious about Mr Romney, describing his Super Tuesday performance as a "debacle". "If Mitt Romney were a ship, he'd be the Titanic," he said. Mr Romney won his home state of Massachusetts, Minnesota and the Mormon stronghold of Utah, but little else of significance.
Mr Huckabee, for his part, clearly believed his performance gave him, not Mr Romney, the mandate to keep campaigning. "Over the past few days, a lot of people have been trying to say this is a two-man race," Mr Huckabee told supporters at his Arksansas headquarters. "Well, you know what, it is - and we're in it!"
The picture on the Democratic Party side was much harder to read. Senator Clinton emerged from Super Tuesday with more delegates, but is unlikely to win the battle of perceptions as the primary season continues. She has done nothing but lose ground in the past few weeks, while Senator Obama has roared from behind in state after state to become either hotly competitive or surpass her altogether.
Many television pundits called the contest a dead heat, but the momentum remains with the Illinois Senator. He is expected to do well in contests later this week in Nebraska, Louisiana and Washington state and is likely to thrive in the close-to-the-ground "retail politics" environment that a less crowded primary calendar will allow.
Senator Clinton's problem in the money stakes is that many of her contributors have already given the maximum and cannot legally open their wallets to her again. Senator Obama, by contrast, has raised his cash largely from low-dollar contributors, only 3 per cent of whom have hit their maximum to date. In January alone, he raised $32 million, compared with about $13 million for Senator Clinton.
For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/
democrat-rivals-trade-victories-while-mccain-storms-on-778741.html
The Nation:
Bush's Budget Legacy
truthdig by Robert Scheer
[posted online on February 6, 2008]
Curb your enthusiasm. Even if your favored candidate did well on Super Tuesday, ask yourself if he or she will seriously challenge the bloated military budget that President Bush has proposed for 2009. If not, military spending will rise to a level exceeding any other year since the end of World War II, and there will be precious little left over to improve education and medical research, fight poverty, protect the environment or do anything else a decent person might care about. You cannot spend well over $700 billion on "national security," running what the White House predicts will be more than $400 billion in annual deficits for the next two years, and yet find the money to improve the quality of life on the home front.
The conventional wisdom espoused by the mass media is that Bush's budget is a lame-duck DOA contrivance, but that assumption is wrong. The 9/11 attacks have been shamefully exploited by the military-industrial complex with bipartisan support to ramp up military expenditures beyond cold war levels. This irrational spending spree, which accounts for more than half of all federal discretionary spending, is not likely to end with Bush's departure. Which one of the likely winners from either party would lead the battle to cut the military budget, and where would the winner find support in Congress? Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have treated the military budget as sacrosanct with their Senate votes and their campaign rhetoric. Clinton is particularly clear on the record as favoring spending more, not less, on the military.
John McCain, who previously distinguished himself as a deficit hawk and was almost in a class by himself in taking on the rapacious defense contractors, has thrown in the towel with his inane support for staying in Iraq till "victory," even if it should take a century. It is simply illogical to call for fiscal restraint while committing to an open-ended war in Iraq that has already cost upward of $700 billion. Bush's request for $515.4 billion for the Defense Department doesn't even include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which accounted for nearly $200 billion over the last budget year and which will cost at least $140 billion in 2009. Add to those numbers $17.1 billion for the Department of Energy's weapons program and over $40 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and other national security initiatives spread throughout the federal government, and you'll see that my $700 billion figure underestimates the hemorrhaging.
McCain knows, and has frequently stated as a Senate watchdog, that much of the military spending is wastefully superfluous for combating terrorists who lack any but the most rudimentary weapons. Bush totally betrayed his campaign 2000 promise to reshape the post-cold war US military when he seized upon the 9/11 attack as an opportunity to reverse the "peace dividend" that his father had begun to return to taxpayers. Instead, Bush II ushered in the most profligate underwriting of weapons systems that are grotesquely irrelevant for combating terrorism.
The US already spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military, without a sophisticated enemy in sight. The Bush budget cuts not a single weapons system, including the most expensive ones, those designed to combat a Soviet military that no longer exists. Those sophisticated weapons have nothing to do with combating terrorism and everything to do with jobs and profits that motivate both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is not known whether Osama bin Laden even possesses a row boat in his naval arsenal, but that won't stop Joe Lieberman from pushing, as is his habit, for an increase in the defense budget to double the funding for the $3.4-billion submarines built in his home state of Connecticut. Nor does the collapse of the old Soviet Union-and with it the need for enormously expensive stealth aircraft to evade radar systems the Soviets never built-dissuade Congressional supporters of those planes from pushing for more, not less, than Bush is requesting. Nor does wasting an additional $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense have anything to do with stopping terrorists from smuggling a suitcase nuke into this country.
The centerpiece of the Bush legacy is a "war on terror" based on a vast disconnect between military expenditures and actual national security requirements that the presidential candidates all fully understand. The question is whether the voters and media will force them to face that contradiction or whether we're in for more of the same-no matter how much the candidates go on about change.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/scheer
The New Yorker:
A Strike in the Dark
What did Israel bomb in Syria?
by Seymour M. Hersh
February 11, 2008
Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.
Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.
Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.
The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.
At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. “The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”
It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”
However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.”
Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.
A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”
Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”
Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.
The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:
How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?
He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”
When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.
Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”
Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)
Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”
A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.” The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”
Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.
When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”
Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.” However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”
Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”
The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.
But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)
According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. (It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.
Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”
If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?
During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.
One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”
Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)
The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”
The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”
On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.
The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”
A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”
Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.
It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.
Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.)
There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.
Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.
The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.
The senior Israeli official, asked whether the attack was rooted in his country’s interest in Syria’s radar installations, told me, “Bullshit.” Whatever the Administration’s initial agenda, Israel seems to have been after something more.
The story of the Israeli bombing of Syria, with its mixture of satellite intelligence, intercepts, newspaper leaks, and shared assumptions, reminded some American diplomats and intelligence officials of an incident, ten years ago, involving North Korea. In mid-1998, American reconnaissance satellites photographed imagery of a major underground construction project at Kumchang-ri, twenty-five miles northwest of Yongbyon. “We were briefed that, without a doubt, this was a nuclear-related facility, and there was signals intelligence linking the construction brigade at Kumchang-ri to the nuclear complex at Yongbyon,” the former State Department intelligence expert recalled.
Charles Kartman, who was President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for peace talks with Korea, told me that the intelligence was considered a slam dunk by analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency, even though other agencies disagreed. “We had a debate going on inside the community, but the D.I.A. unilaterally took it to Capitol Hill,” Kartman said, forcing the issue and leading to a front-page Times story.
After months of negotiations, Kartman recalled, the North Koreans agreed, under diplomatic pressure, to grant access to Kumchang-ri. In return, they received aid, including assistance with a new potato-production program. Inspectors found little besides a series of empty tunnels. Robert Carlin, an expert on North Korea who retired in 2005 after serving more than thirty years with the C.I.A. and the State Department’s intelligence bureau, told me that the Kumchang-ri incident highlighted “an endemic weakness” in the American intelligence community. “People think they know the ending and then they go back and find the evidence that fits their story,” he said. “And then you get groupthink—and people reinforce each other.”
It seems that, as with Kumchang-ri, there was a genuine, if not unanimous, belief by Israeli intelligence that the Syrians were constructing something that could have serious national-security consequences. But why would the Israelis take the risk of provoking a military response, and perhaps a war, if there was, as it seems, no smoking gun? Mohamed ElBaradei, expressing his frustration, said, “If a country has any information about a nuclear activity in another country, it should inform the I.A.E.A.—not bomb first and ask questions later.”
One answer, suggested by David Albright, is that Israel did not trust the international arms-control community. “I can understand the Israeli point of view, given the history with Iran and Algeria,” Albright said. “Both nations had nuclear-weapons programs and, after being caught cheating, declared their reactors to be civil reactors, for peacetime use. The international groups, like the U.N. and the I.A.E.A, never shut them down.” Also, Israel may have calculated that risk of a counterattack was low: President Assad would undoubtedly conclude that the attack had the support of the Bush Administration and, therefore, that any response by Syria would also engage the U.S. (My conversations with officials in Syria bore out this assumption.)
In Tel Aviv, the senior Israeli official pointedly told me, “Syria still thinks Hezbollah won the war in Lebanon”—referring to the summer, 2006, fight between Israel and the Shiite organization headed by Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah knows how much that war cost—one-third of his fighters were killed, infrastructure was bombed, and ninety-five per cent of his strategic weapons were wiped out,” the Israeli official said. “But Assad has a Nasrallah complex and thinks Hezbollah won. And, ‘If he did it, I can do it.’ This led to an adventurous mood in Damascus. Today, they are more sober.”
That notion was echoed by the ambassador of an Israeli ally who is posted in Tel Aviv. “The truth is not important,” the ambassador told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.”
There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran. When I visited Israel this winter, Iran was the overriding concern among political and defense officials I spoke to—not Syria. There was palpable anger toward Washington, in the wake of a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded, on behalf of the American intelligence community, that Iran is not now constructing a nuclear weapon. Many in Israel view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat; they believe that military action against Iran may be inevitable, and worry that America may not be there when needed. The N.I.E. was published in November, after a yearlong standoff involving Cheney’s office, which resisted the report’s findings. At the time of the raid, reports about the forthcoming N.I.E. and its general conclusion had already appeared.
Retired Major General Giora Eiland, who served as the national-security adviser to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told me, “The Israeli military takes it as an assumption that one day we will need to have a military campaign against Iran, to slow and eliminate the nuclear option.” He added, “Whether the political situation will allow this is another question.”
In the weeks after the N.I.E.’s release, Bush insisted that the Iranian nuclear-weapons threat was as acute as ever, a theme he amplified during his nine-day Middle East trip after the New Year. “A lot of people heard that N.I.E. out here and said that George Bush and the Americans don’t take the Iranian threat seriously,” he told Greta Van Susteren, of Fox News. “And so this trip has been successful from the perspective of saying . . . we will keep the pressure on.”
Shortly after the bombing, a Chinese envoy and one of the Bush Administration’s senior national-security officials met in Washington. The Chinese envoy had just returned from a visit to Tehran, a person familiar with the discussion told me, and he wanted the White House to know that there were moderates there who were interested in talks. The national-security official rejected that possibility and told the envoy, as the person familiar with the discussion recalled, “‘You are aware of the recent Israeli statements about Syria. The Israelis are extremely serious about Iran and its nuclear program, and I believe that, if the United States government is unsuccessful in its diplomatic dealings with Iran, the Israelis will take it out militarily.’ He then told the envoy that he wanted him to convey this to his government—that the Israelis were serious.
“He was telling the Chinese leadership that they’d better warn Iran that we can’t hold back Israel, and that the Iranians should look at Syria and see what’s coming next if diplomacy fails,” the person familiar with the discussion said. “His message was that the Syrian attack was in part aimed at Iran.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa_fact_hersh/
ZNet:
Exit Poll
By Tom Engelhardt
Source: TomDispatch
February, 06 2008
"Drawing from the best resources on national and local platforms, Fox will bring together America's two greatest passions - politics and football." So said Marty Ryan, Fox News executive producer of political programming, describing that network's addition of a three-hour "Super Tuesday political preview" to the usual day-long football festivities. In that way did Fox News manage to catch the zeitgeist of the moment, creating a 24/7 spectacle of super-entertainment by merging the number-one top-draw extravaganza, Super Bowl Sunday, with the mid-week surprise of a writer-starved TV season, Super Tuesday.
Each was guaranteed to be a dawn-to-midnight entertainment spectacular. Each was to be a talkathon of experts and pundits (including the Las Vegas odds-maker Fox interviewed Sunday who was "handicapping" both events in more or less the same breath), interspersed with mega-ads and mega-ad stories, as well as some thrilling action, leading toward results that, in each super-case, we, the viewers, would sooner or later have known, even if no one had said a word. Don't be surprised, if, on this Super Tuesday, you see Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, and Jimmy Johnson calling the shots alongside the Fox News crew. After all, the "showdown" under the dome of the University of Phoenix Stadium was to be followed two days later by what ABC News termed a "showdown coast to coast." (Normally, O.K. Corral-style "showdown" logos have been reserved for cruise missile shoot-outs on Main Street with global perps like Saddam Hussein.)
By the time you read this, you'll probably already know more about the immediate American political scene than I do. You may know whether Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney was the Eli Manning (or Tom Brady) of politics. Maybe you'll have stayed up as network news and cable outfits analyzed the election into the morning hours as if this were November 4th.
That, in itself, will be unprecedented. In 2004, the networks relegated (somewhat less) Super Tuesday to intermittent news updates. This time, with Charles Gibson anchoring ABC News' five hours of coverage, it will be another "historic occasion" in the "election of our age." There's already been the Huckabee ambush in Iowa, the McCain return from the politically dead in New Hampshire, the fall of America's Mayor in Florida, and round-the-clock Obamania, not to speak of endless media and pollster mis-predictions, which only provided yet more riveting stories for the race of the century.
Let's face it, for media and candidates alike Primary 2008 has been Survivor, The Amazing Race, American Gladiator, The Apprentice ("You're fired!"), and American Idol rolled into one - and a ratings wonder as well in which nothing fails. Two testy opponents meet elbow to elbow in a debate in Hollywood - with the camera flicking to the star-studded audience as if it were the Oscars... Gasp! Is that really George from Seinfeld? - and no sparks fly; yet the story has wings anyway. Barack and Hillary were cordial! Were "a black man and a white woman" the "perfect future running mates"? Could they team up as "a Democratic dream ticket"? Or would they be back at each other's throats, just the way John McCain and Mitt Romney have been?
It couldn't matter less, not when everything in Campaign 2008 glues American eyeballs to screens without a writer in sight. Who needs on-strike vendors of fiction when a teeming crew of stand-up pundits is eternally on hand to produce political fictions at a moment's notice? Can anyone deny that more of them have been predicting, projecting, suggesting, insinuating, bloviating, and offering authoritative conclusions than at any time in our history? If that isn't "historic," what is, even if so many of their predictions prove wrong in the morning light?
It's been feeding-frenzy time in medialand - and it's your enthusiasm off which the media's been feeding.
The Enthusiasm of the Young
Let me take a shot at creating a minor countercurrent in the flow of superduper-commentary by taking The Pledge. Here and now. On this very spot.
In this piece, I swear that I will not "handicap" any primary race, nor predict who is going to win Super Tuesday in either party. I will not handicap the race to the conventions. I will not speculate on who will be the vice-presidential candidate for whom in the fall, or who will win the presidency in November and enter the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, and I will not discuss polling results, nor mention a margin of error.
Don't think this is easy. I'm just as addicted as any other red-blooded American. After all, this election is the media equivalent of a barreling train. And not Amtrak either. Think the Japanese bullet train or the French TGV. If I fall off the proverbial caboose, it's going to hurt and yet it's so hard not to. Just the other day - and I had already vowed to reform - after checking out a range of reliable reportage and punditry, I assured my bored wife and son, with all the authority that the political wisdom of our age bestowed on me, over dinner no less, that John Edwards would be in the election for keeps, no question about it; that he could well be the kingmaker at the Democratic convention. It was a slam dunk - until, that is, he dropped out so that history could "blaze its path"! But, hey, even if he didn't oblige, there were always those superdelegates! They could still save the kingmaking day and keep the media express rolling right into the Democratic convention.
Anyway, think of this dispatch as an exit poll of a different kind, starting with this question: What exactly do most Americans want to exit from?
Recently, the Washington Post's online columnist Dan Froomkin noticed this little tidbit: While George W. Bush proudly exhibits Saddam Hussein's captured pistol in a small study off the Oval Office, his pal Dick Cheney has "on display at his residence a piece of the house where Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, was killed."
Call that exit-poll symbolism. The imperial President and Vice President, the "one percent solution" guys, the we-don't-torture waterboarding folks, exhibit as memorabilia a gun and rubble. That pretty much sums up their legacy, the one that, on January 20, 2009, they'll dump on a populace only 19% of whom believe their country to be "on the right track." When it comes to guns 'n rubble, give them credit: They managed to set the oil heartlands of the planet ablaze, ensuring that oil prices would go sky high; they turned the two countries they tried their "nation-building" hand at - Afghanistan and Iraq - into the world's leading purveyor of opiates and a charnel house.
If they had had their way, they surely would have left much of the planet in ruins. As a hurricane showed, facing ruins at home, they were incapable of rebuilding even a single city, no less whole nations. Everywhere they turned, they proved not builders but dismantlers; not investors but looters (along with their crony corporations and private security firms). Domestically, they ruled by a politics of fear. They committed crimes with alacrity and - possibly the greatest crime of all -- fiddled while the glaciers melted. They were the Republicants - and darn proud of it - in a country that had once prided itself on its can-do tradition. (And, since 2007, a Democratic Congress, voted in to do something before the rubble spread, turned out to be a body of Democraticants as well.)
You want an exit poll? Well, here it is: Americans are now stuck in the world that George W. Bush had a major hand in crafting and a sizeable majority of them, sensing doom, want out.
All of this, however, can only be blamed on Bush and his pals at our peril. After all, they simply tapped into a deep vein of American exterminatory fears. In the "good times" of the 1990s, those fears were less obvious. In a sense, most people probably didn't know they had them. But look at the young today and you can sense how they've been ensnared in an exterminatory grid of some sort. For them, dreams of the future have essentially been replaced with dystopian fears of global warming, global pandemics, global depressions, and other forms of planetary doom and disaster. Through no fault of their own, they have been living without hope.
In this election, Barack Obama in particular has seemed to show a number of them a possible exit and, beyond it, a little daylight, a tiny swatch of blue sky (as, for a smaller number of young people on the right, did Republican candidate Ron Paul). If, of course, you can't imagine building, or saving, or investing in something for your children or grandchildren (no less someone else's), then it's hard to imagine doing anything lasting. To lack a future is to have an enormous weight of despair placed squarely on your shoulders. If, even for a moment, it seems to lift, you suddenly feel free to dream; hence (I suspect) the burst of enthusiasm and hope seen this year - and the outpouring of new primary voters which has gone with it.
I had my own youthful moment in which a sense of doom lifted and it was indeed a liberating feeling. Back in my day, there was only one danger to life as we knew it - nuclear war (which, in the twenty-first century, has to elbow its way into a roiling queue of world-ending possibilities for its 15 seconds of exterminatory fame). When the Atomic Test Ban Treaty of 1963 finally drove nuclear tests out of sight and out of mind, the nuclear issue disappeared from political debate and popular culture. The last end-of-the-world films of that era appeared in 1964, just as bomb-shelter and civil defense programs were heading for the graveyard. By 1969, the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy had even eliminated "nuclear" from its own name. And, for a brief period, you could look to the future with a sense of hope, which was exhilarating.
Think, in this context, of the import of that affirmative call-and-response chant Barack Obama so often uses with crowds of young supporters at his rallies: "Yes, we can...!" "Yes, we can...!"
At my age (63), I tend to be struck by the lack of objects in Obama's uncompleted sentences: Yes, we can... what exactly? But who can deny the chant's appeal, conjuring up as it does a can-do future and, implicitly, a past America in which "we can" seemed like a given. These days, newspaper headlines like this one from the Washington Post are commonplace, no matter what part of the government is under scrutiny: "U.S. Park Police Rebuked for Security Lapses: Force plagued by low morale, poor leadership and bad organization has failed to adequately protect iconic landmarks, government report shows." (And remember, it's the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Memorial we're talking about.) So the sense that "we" can "do" anything is bound to be refreshing.
You can't help being moved, because you know that, underneath a rising tide of youthful enthusiasm lies the vortex - a United States, and possibly a planet, transformed beyond recognition. In such a situation, even a hint that the burden of futurelessness might be lifted should send anybody searching the sky for a good omen, for a dose of - in the mantra of every candidate at this moment - "change." That's why another vague Obama formulation - that he represents "the future," not the "past" - is potentially so powerful. When was the last time an American presidential candidate invoked the future and seemed to mean it?
That perhaps helps account for the upwelling of enthusiasm in our electoral moment, even after the elections of 2000 and 2004.
A Torrent of Enthusiasm
None of this, however, can account for the media enthusiasm that has accompanied it and is easy enough to mistake for its matching mate.
The media is, in Todd Gitlin's classic tag from his book Media Unlimited, "the torrent." Its images, its soundscapes flood through our everyday world, a surging river that never stops even when we officially turn off our machines. In a sense, the media has neither future, nor past. Instead, it devours both in an eternal present and still remains hungry. In our Super Bowl/Super Tuesday culture, all those pundits, talking heads, reporters, and entertainers collectively might be thought of as if they were the mad spawn of Anne Rice and Rupert Murdoch, swarming to a source of blood that, in this election season, is your enthusiasm, as well as any momentary hopes you may have for the future. Their enthusiasm is to bite deep into your enthusiasm and suck it dry.
They, too, are chanting: Yes, we can...! Yes, we can...! They'll happily chant it until a new administration enters the White House in January, inheriting that pistol and that piece of rubble, inheriting an American world in deep trouble and a planet spinning on a dime. And then they'll take their enthusiasm off to another eternal present where children are being shot up by some maniac, or giant buildings are collapsing into dust, or some celeb is heading for the nearest dry-out clinic. They'll walk away happy into another present, leaving the rest of us high and dry. Yes, they can...!
And now, yes I can... pop the popcorn in that hot-air popper, melt the butter, and settle in front of my TV with my crucial electoral tool, the channel zapper, in hand to prepare for the most epic battle of all, Super Tuesday, not to speak of all the epic, historic, thrilling battles to come. Don't call me for the next few months, I'll call you.
Just for a moment, though, let me turn that screen black, step out, head for my local polling place, and... well, you know... make the epic gesture.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16432
posted by attilav at 18:23
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