coluichedubita: March 2008

Aljazeera:
Laos' 'lost tribe' in plea for help

Al Jazeera's correspondent Tony Birtley travelled in secret to the jungles of northern Laos in search of the last fighters of the CIA's "secret army", a remnant from the days of the Vietnam War. This is his account of his journey.

THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 2008
13:16 MECCA TIME, 10:16 GMT

The dead of night - a rendezvous on a dirt road on the fringe of a dense jungle.

I couldn't see the faces of my guides, but I could see their guns and I could feel the apprehension as they ushered me into the undergrowth and the start of what would turn out to be an unforgettable journey.

There were six of them, all ethnic Hmong; a rugged, tough people used to harsh conditions. But a people, I was soon to discover, living in fear.

We hurried into the forest - not easy in the dark - down a steep slope, across a narrow bamboo bridge over a fast-flowing river, and then upwards.

When we talked it was in a whisper; when we walked we tried not to create noise. And we tried to avoid the danger, which they told me was all around.

The danger comes from the Laos army. They are everywhere, the guides told me and ambushes are common.

In the dark, with the occasional use of a torch, we weaved our way through the undergrowth.

The darkness creates fear and apprehension but it is also strangely comforting: if you cannot see the soldiers, then it is equally hard for them to see you.

The first five hours was straight up, no deviations, and no track. Sometimes clambering for something to hold and pull myself up, other times it was all I could do to stop from falling backwards.

No such exhaustion for the Hmong; this kind of hike was normal in this hilly highland terrain of northern Laos.

Five hours and numerous stops later we reached the peak of the hill and a chance to sleep for a few hours.

We walked for another two hours beneath the dense jungle canopy, then stopped for food.

The "food" was a plant root similar to a yam, tasting like dried potato and something I came to dread in the coming days.

After two days we reached our destination, Zu, meaning village in Hmong. Not so much a village, more a gathering of bamboo shacks. But the sight which greeted me could only have come from a Hollywood movie script.

Men, women and children were on their knees, hands together as in prayer. And there were tears, floods of tears.

I was the first outsider, the first Westerner, and the first foreigner they had seen in 32 years. For some it was the first time ever. Some of the weeping men cradled guns and had grenades on their belts.

I didn't realise it then but my visit had taken on a significance I was not prepared for.

A Hmong man with a video camera filmed me. A woman dressed in traditional colourful Hmong clothes paused her sobbing and looked at me.

"Oh father, we are just widows. Our husbands, wives and children are lost. We are poverty stricken, please help us. We have no one to guide us," she said.

Everyone was shouting out. Four young men were performing a welcome dance. A young fighter, grenade launcher on his back, grenades around his waste, played an out of tune guitar.

It was hard to grasp how desperate these people were, hard to understand the drama of the welcome, the depth of their hopelessness.

This would all become clearer in the coming days – more days than I intended to stay.

The group's tears and groans continued. I felt uncomfortable putting my camera close to them to record their desperation, but realised that the world had to see this - it was the whole point of making such a journey.

Through a translator I asked if there were any women who had lost their husbands, killed by the government forces. Ten at the back stood up.

It was obvious these people had suffered a great deal, but their suffering has largely gone unnoticed.

Few before me knew what that the outside world was: the developments, the crises, technology, political leaders, foods, fads, fashion, the Oscars. Some things, perhaps, you can live without.

I gave one of the older fighters a copy of my Economist magazine. At first he smiled when he saw the colour advertisements, one for the biggest aeroplane in the world.

"So that's what they look like. They are flying over our heads all the time."

But the smiles soon turned to tears. I had never seen anyone cry over the Economist before.

"This is so sorrowful," he said. "We would like to be civilised like these pictures. We escaped and hid ourselves until today. Living so poorly. The people in these pictures are dressed in beautiful clothes, but we just live like animals."

They have lived cut off from the outside world for more than three decades, ever since the end of the Vietnam War.

Then 60,000 Hmong fought for America as part of the CIA's so-called secret army. They fought the Vietnamese and Lao communists and attacked the communist supply routes through Laos that became known in the West as the Ho Chi Minh trail.

But when the Hmong army disbanded there was a new fight, with the newly installed communist government of Laos. Many fled, and many were killed.

It was a day before I had a chance to meet the leader, the spiritual head of not just this village but of the 7,000 people I was informed are still in the jungle hiding from the Laos army.

Vang Che Chi entered the village with a procession of young fighters and blessed me, asking the spirits to keep me safe. The Hmong are animists and worship nature.

The people look to the leader for guidance to solve their misery. The leader, though, was looking to me.

It wasn't long into the interview when he dropped the bombshell: I would have to remain with them until their plight had ended. At first it seemed like a joke, before the seriousness of the situation became clear.

A series of phone calls on a satellite phone provided by Hmong diaspora confirmed that he was serious.

Their plight had gone on for almost 32 years and I began to think my departure from such a desperate place was going to be far harder than the journey to this remote corner of Laos.

As the hours wore on, my anger at the situation ebbed away, replaced by an understanding that desperation often leads people to do desperate things.

It was just unfortunate that such desperation included me.

The Hmong secret army

Hmong hill tribe recruited in 1961 by the CIA, to fight a "secret war" against the communist forces of North Vietnam

Objective was to try to block the communists' supply route to South Vietnam, known in the West as the "Ho Chi Minh trail"

More than 40,000 Hmong were killed in the years of bitter jungle fighting that followed

When the US fled Saigon in 1975, communist forces also seized control of Laos

The Hmong, abandoned by the US, allegedly became the target of retaliation and persecution

More than 300,000 Hmong fled to Thailand as refugees, many of whom were eventually resettled in the United States

But at least 7,000 Hmong are still hiding in the mountains and jungles of Laos, including some former CIA fighters, under constant threat of attack by the Laos army

Click here to read the second part of Tony Birtley's experiences

Source: Al Jazeera

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A015CB08-F309-4035-B85C-A22FEC01AF42.htm

AllAfrica: Power Projects - States,
LGs Demand Refund of $3.2bn

By Stanley Nkwazema, Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
12 March 2008

Disturbed by the inability of the regime of former president Olusegun Obasanjo to pursue the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP) to a logical conclusion, states and Local Government Councils in the country are now demanding for a refund of the $3.7billion they contributed for the implementation of the projects.

Benue State Governor, Hon. Gabriel Suswam, confirmed the demand yesterday at the investigative hearing on the alleged $16 billion spent on power sector between 1999 and 2007 without commensurate results.

He said the states and LGs resolved to have the money, which was deducted at source from the Excess Crude Oil Account by the Federal Government, returned as soon as possible.

Suswam's disclosure came just as the Minister of State for Energy, Hajiya Fatima Balaraba Ibrahim, revealed that President Umaru Yar'Adua would declare the promised state of emergency in the power sector as soon as he receives the final report of the National Economic Council and the various committees saddled with the review.

Suswam chaired both Appropriation and Power Committees of the House of Representatives at various times when he was a member of the House from1999 to 2007.

He told the public hearing that the NIPP was established following the setting up of the Excess Crude Oil Account by the National Assembly which led to the agreement between the Federal, States and Local Governments to contribute from their share to the building of power plants to service the oil producing areas in the South-south region and other parts of Nigeria.

The governor regretted that despite the billions of dollars that had gone into the project, there was not much to justify the contributions from states and local governments.

Suswam said a visit by his committee to four of the NIPP projects including the ones in Geregu, Alaoji, Papalanto and Omotosho showed that they were still struggling to get off the ground in spite of the huge investments on them.

He observed that adequate logistics were not taken into consideration in the planning of the projects, a situation which he said led to absence of the necessary gas pipelines to supply gas to the plants.

Suswam said when government realised this, it hastily imported gas pipelines, which have since been lying waste.

He told the public hearing being organised by the House Committee on Power and Steel that, "I don't think the money meant for the projects was properly applied".

The Benue State Governor said there would be no meaningful economic and social development in the country without stable power supply.

"We leaders should address the problem and go back and talk to the boys in the Niger Delta. We have to optimise the use of existing structures and urgently refurbish them.

"We need to give money and monitor how its spent and we need to maintain and scrutinise inventories. And people must be held accountable for their actions. People must be brought to book. At the end you people should make strong recommendations to Mr. President," he said.

In her testimony, the minister of state for energy said President Yar'Adua was waiting for the National Economic Council to submit its final report which would form the roadmap for the declaration of the state of emergency in the power sector.

Ibrahim described the NIPP as a mind boggling project to which a lot of money had been sunk, regretting that the work had not proceeded on schedule.

He added that various measures were being put in place to ensure improvement in power supply in the country to 12,000 megawatts by 2011.

The minister also said part of the problem with the project, which site she is yet to visit since assuming office, was that the package one of the project which was to be financed vide a Loan from Exim Bank of China to the tune of $1.6 billion may have been stalled due to the fact that the Chinese consortium, Me-ssers CGC, could not get the oil blocks it wanted in exchange for the project.

The minister agreed that mistakes had been made in the past while work had not been delivered according to plan.

She alleged that some of the consultants did not do their jobs for which they had been paid, saying such had legal implications.

The Governor of Taraba State, Danbaba Suntai, who was also present at the public hearing, however, revealed that a conflict between the contractor who had earlier submitted the proposal for the job on a Build, Operate and Transfer basis for the Mambilla Electricity Project in the state and the Chinese Consortium who subsequently got the go-ahead to implement the project had stalled the project.

Suntai, who was the Secretary to the State Government when the project was taking off, regretted that the Mambilla Electricity Project had been allowed to suffer due to the disagreement between the two contractors.

Suntai, who confirmed that his government had already awarded a major road contract that would terminate at the foot of the Mambilla Plateau, disclosed that the people of the state were pained that they were not allowed to enjoy the benefits of the project.

He said with the intervention of the House, he was hopeful that the project would be resuscitated.

Suntai added that even though a Chinese conglomerate had since been awarded the contract for the $1.46billion first package of the project, it was yet to be paid for the job.

The project, according to Suntai, was a laudale initiative, "but there is no reason why we are where we are now if the funds were properly applied."

He revealed that the then National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), now Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), had between 1982 and 1985 conducted a feasibility study by Diyam Consultants in association with Bennie & Partners of London but was inconclusive due to no detailed design data, soil investigation and lack of access road to complete the work.

He also revealed that the project was resuscitated by Obasanjo in 2005 with the appointment of Layhmeyer of Germany in association with DamTech Nigeria Limited to start work in April 2005.

The committee chairman, Hon. Ndudi Godwin Elumelu, said the House was shocked when it made an unscheduled oversight visit to Taraba State and discovered that the consultants used N200 billion to erect a bungalow that could go for a farmer's hut and directed the company, Lahmeyer, to refund the money it had collected to conduct the feasibility.

"We are serious and want to ensure that the work is done. Lahyemer should return the money to the Federal Government. They have done nothing. The company has so far collected the sum of N369, 673 million and there is nothing on ground. The soil samples for the test has been abandoned in a farmer's house in Gembu and the ground breaking ceremony was done 20 kilometres to the project site by the former president," he said.

Part of the funds so far collected by the firm which job are alleged not to have been executed include Auto Photo mapping N45m, Review of Feasibility N187m and Change from BOPT to normal contract N136m.

The committee chairman also revealed that the German company handling the consultancy job in the area had been blacklisted by the World Bank following its shady deals and alleged corrupt practices in Eastern Africa.

Elumelu's claim was corroborated by the Presidential Adviser on Energy, Mr. Joseph Makoju, who said the contract was awarded to Layhmeyer before the confirmation by the World Bank.

The former managing director of NEPA said: "Manbilla was not my brief. It was under the ministry. I was aware the contracts did receive Due Process clearance. We did not have the capacity to supervise the consultants.

"On the blacklisting of the German firm, Laymeher, the issue was after the award of the contract. It was not during the award. I have not visited Mambilla officially but the only time I did that was when the ground breaking ceremony was held," Makoju said.

He told the House committee that there were project engineers from the Federal Ministry of Mines and Power and PHCN officials attached to the various projects, saying they should be brought to answer specific questions on each of the areas.

In her submission, a staff from the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, Mrs. Iquo Umana, said since it was clear that the companies had not executed the contracts, the National Assembly should ask them to refund the money.

Copyright © 2008 This Day. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200803120196.html

AlterNet:
Are Modern Women Miserable?

By Vicki Haddock, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine
Posted on March 13, 2008

Exactly what does it take to make a woman happy?

One of the first to record her answer to that conundrum was the Marquise du Chatelet, whom history has recollected as the jilted mistress of Voltaire. That is short shrift: The brilliant marquise was a mother, a shopaholic, a passionate lover - and most significantly, a revolutionary scientist and mathematician who suspended wooden spheres from the rafters of her country estate to test Newton's theories, and who scribbled her insights until the candles burned to nothingness, plunging her hands into ice water to jolt herself awake. Her intellectual feverishness prompted the philosopher Immanuel Kant to sneer that such a woman "might as well have a beard," and Voltaire himself, having received solo title-page credit for a book he privately admitted she practically dictated to him, declared that the marquise was a great man whose only shortcoming was having been born female.

Thus duly boxed in by the gender conventions of 18th century France - and by an unplanned pregnancy at age 43 that she presciently regarded as a death sentence - the Marquise du Chatelet brought a unique perspective to a treatise she titled "Discourse on Happiness."

To be truly happy, she ruefully concluded, "one must be susceptible to illusions, for it is to illusions that we owe the majority of our pleasures. Unhappy is the one who has lost them."

So where are we nearly three centuries later? Recalibrate for feminism, which aimed to liberate women from the constricting corsets of sexist roles. Factor in an unprecedented level of education, greater earning power, more economic independence, more reproductive control and access to virtually any career, from CEO to soldier to leader of the free world. In theory, at least, a woman's prospects for happiness have never looked brighter.

Yet the paradox: Two recent studies reveal that a majority of American women are finding the holy grail of happiness more elusive. Researchers were startled to find that women now report less happiness than in the early 1970s; and where they once indicated greater levels of happiness and life satisfaction than men, that's now reversed.

"Aha!" opposing sides in the culture wars declared, glomming onto the findings to bolster their own takes on gender conflict. But this newly identified "happiness gap" is hardly a prima facie indictment of feminism for having worsened the lot of women, given that most women adamantly oppose to a return to rigid gender roles. Nor could it be attributable mainly to the notion that men are slacking while women work a second shift - full time in the workforce and a second full-time job at home. The results show that women are spending the same number of hours working now, on average, as in the 1970s, although a greater percentage is outside work. As for housework, men have picked up a greater, though still minority, share. Much of the cooking and cleaning is "hired out" or simply goes undone (Americans now spend $26 billion more each year on restaurants than grocery stores.)

Even so, men today report spending less time on activities they regard as stressful and unpleasant than a few decades ago. Women still spend about 23 hours a week in the unpleasant-activity zone - which was about 40 minutes more than men four decades ago, and now amounts to 90 minutes more than men.

And feeling guiltier in the process.

On a recent morning, one such woman is Lisa Boucher.

A 46-year-old Brisbane resident, she dashes around the kitchen serving breakfast to her 2 1/2-year-old daughter with the phone tucked into her ear as she resolves an urgent snafu on her job as a project manager for a high-end residential construction company. There isn't a minute to spare: She must whisk her daughter to preschool, make a meeting in San Francisco, use her lunch hour to retrieve her daughter and a nanny and deposit them at home, then return to work until almost dark, whipsaw back home, throw together a quick dinner, hang out to play with her daughter, tuck her into bed, then crash - and, with luck, get sufficient sleep to do it all over again when her alarm rings the next morning.

She feels guilty that it's the nanny who gets to spend so much fun time with her daughter. She feels guilty that she no longer has time for writing or any other artistic expression. She feels guilty when her mother, who she says uses the words "you should" a lot, suggests they are too social, even though they usually take their daughter with them when they go out. She feels guilty about how infrequently the house gets vacuumed, telling her husband, "Yes, the yard looks great, but we live on the inside - the raccoons live on the outside." Truth be told, she even feels guilty about not spending more "quality time" with the primary catalyst for all that vacuuming: her husband's shedding golden retriever.

"I want to preface this by saying that you're catching me on a really crazed week. I know I'm lucky to have a beautiful, happy kid; a great job; a great husband who pitches in," she acknowledges. "But here's where I am right at this moment: Last night I just turned to him and said, 'You know what, I'm not happy in my life.

" 'I've lost my joy.' "

Having watched her own parents divorce when she was 13, forcing her homemaker mother to get a job, Boucher vowed that she would never be felled by a similar fate. "I swore that I would never depend on any man, that I would establish my own successful career, that I wouldn't let anybody into my life that much," she says. "But now I have somebody to share my life with, and what I really want most is to be able to stay home and spend time with my daughter.

"So we women broke out of the little boxes that defined us, and now it seems like everybody's trying to get back in there. I'm trying to get back in."

Boucher isn't advocating an abdication of the women's movement. What she craves is a simpler life and more time at home, even if that means selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper. But the real estate market is slipping, and she and her husband must pay down debt incurred from the purchase of his company a few years ago.

"I know I don't really want to go back into a box. I just want the time to enjoy the moments, you know? Choice is a wonderful thing, but it's such a double-edged sword. The good news is we have all these choices ... but the bad news is we've got all these choices."

Measuring human happiness is tricky science: There is no "happy thermometer" to tuck under one's tongue. So while happiness research is booming, researchers wrestle with how to measure it, and account for data dependent on self-reporting of debatable reliability (although scientists find that people who describe themselves as happier also show outward signs validating that description - for example, they smile more). In recent years, they have puzzled over why 45 percent of Republicans say they're "very happy" when only 30 percent of Democrats do, or why married people report more happiness than singles, or why an index claimed the "happiest Zip code" belongs to Branson, Mo.

But a gender-based "happiness gap" is particularly complicated, given that men tend to see "Are you happy?" as a yes-or-no proposition. For women, it's an essay question.

In one recent study, two economists at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 35 years of data from the widely regarded General Social Survey and other assessments, including the Virginia Slims American Women's Poll and the Monitoring the Future survey of teenagers.

Since 1972, women's self-described levels of happiness have fallen a few percentage points and now rest below that of men, on average, in every age category. It is particularly pronounced in those ages 30 to 44 - not coincidentally, women dealing with child rearing and aging parents, while reaching a critical point in their careers.

This drop in female happiness is pervasive - it also holds true regardless of marital status, education and employment. The only exception researchers were able to tease out was among African Americans. No one's certain why African American women report higher levels of happinness than they did in the '70s, but it's an intriguing aberration that merits follow-up.

While the gap is not huge, research co-author Betsey Stevenson said it was stunning given that by objective measures, the status of women's lives has improved in recent decades. "We would have expected their happiness to shoot up, not fall," she said.

Meanwhile, at Princeton University, another economist and a team of psychologists simultaneously stumbled across a gender "happiness gap" while analyzing dour decades worth of data on what Americans do with their time and how they feel when they're doing it.

Working-age women, for example, increasingly spend more time on paid work, caring for adults and watching TV - and less time cooking, ironing, dusting, entertaining and reading - than in the 1960s. But the data also reveals that men are spending less time on paid work and relaxing more - including watching more TV. In essence, men have gotten the knack of spending less time doing things they consider unpleasant.

Women, on the other hand, spend more time with family and friends but find it more stressful than men do. (Of course, such time often involves child or elder care, or hostessing, and could rightfully be categorized as work as well.)

Lead author Alan Krueger can only speculate on why, for example, men enjoy being with their parents while women find it more unpleasant than laundry. He told the New York Times that women typically spend time helping helping parents pay bills or plan a holiday, while "for men, it tends to be sitting on the sofa and watching football with their dad."

Both research papers raised more questions than they answered about the emotional well-being of men and, especially, of women.

Perhaps the most persuasive explanation for the happiness gap echoes Lisa Boucher's observation: Having choices means that women actually must choose. Or, as Bob Seger would put it, what to leave in, what to leave out. Acknowledge the axiom of the time-space continuum: A woman can only be in one place at a time, and any given day cannot contain more than 24 hours.

"My grandmother used to say too many choices make you sick," said Mary Nolan, taking in the view from her Financial District office. "I get this from my business bent, but I do believe we're too afraid to be wrong. We're afraid that if we make a wrong choice, we can't turn around and change it. Which is really unfortunate, because courage often comes from recognizing the wrong choice and reversing direction."

In her 30s and 40s, Nolan focused on building a successful career in insurance underwriting. "I liked my life the way it was, and I was not ready to commit to someone else and consider their needs on a 24-7 basis," she says. "When it got to the point where I couldn't have children, I no longer felt a need to be married. But then I started to really miss having a partner in my life." She found one on eHarmony.com, adding, "Waiting until I was 50 gave me a better understanding of what it means to be married."

Still, some choices are irreversible. "If I had it to do over again, I would have [had] kids," she says. "That's the only real regret I have in my whole life." But Nolan also is determined not to let "what ifs" corrode her happiness. To the contrary, she says she's the happiest she's ever been.

Sipping her morning java at a Petaluma coffee shop, Shannon Stearns says her secret to happiness also depends on making peace with what to let go of - particularly given what she calls the "totally crazed state" of her life. It's a skill she still struggles to master at age 36, as a marketing professional for CamelBak and the mother to sons Wally, 5, and Murphy, 2 1/2.

"In 1972, women were expected to contribute to the PTA bake sale and keep a clean house," she says. "Today I'm expected to help run the school auction, sell wrapping paper, catch up on all my work e-mails for two hours after my kids are in bed - the list goes on and on and on. And the scale is bigger.

"The only way I survive with a tiny fraction of sanity is that I'm getting better about saying no.

"I don't have time for friends, fitness or fashion. I'll go two weeks without checking my voice mail at work because it's a time-suck. I've given up several career opportunities because, dammit, I won't work on Fridays, and yes, three out of four of those Fridays are haircuts and doctors appointments - but the fourth Friday is taking Wally and Murphy to the park and playing safari with them. And I won't give that up for anything."

Nonetheless, Stearns admits she sometimes is haunted by remorse over what she must neglect. "My college roommate called me for my birthday in March, and I still haven't called her back. I need to at least say, 'I'm not the horrible friend that you think I am...' "

Of course, choice is relative: The spectrum narrows for poor women living paycheck to paycheck. But for the first time in history, women confront a wider array of life alternatives than men, who rarely contemplate, for example, putting their careers on hold to care for children or aging parents. We're still adjusting to this shift in the cultural paradigm.

When researchers ask teenage girls what is important to them - finding a successful job, staying close to their friends, having a family, looking good and so on - they discovered that their answer was "everything." They ranked nothing as less important than it had been in the past.

The unquestioned modern mantra is that freedom comes through maximizing choice. Swarthmore psychology Professor Barry Schwartz says that's why supermarkets stock 75 salad dressings, why a single electronics store's product line allows buyers to construct more than 6 million stereo systems. And it's why someone, somewhere is busy creating a combo MP3 player/nose hair trimmer/crème brulee torch.

"More choices are better, but more and more choices are not. Too much choice produces not liberation but paralysis," says Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less." He cites studies demonstrating that consumers are less likely to buy products - from jams to mutual funds - if they are given too many options.

The same principle applies to women's life choices.

"Even if you overcome paralysis and make a choice, you end up less satisfied than if you had fewer options," Schwartz contends. "Whatever salad dressing you choose, it won't be perfect, and you end up thinking about the ones you didn't buy. And the imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made. Not only that, but when you have no choice and things aren't perfect, you can blame the world.

"But when you have all these choices and you still feel regretful and unsatisfied, you end up blaming yourself. Hence, guilt."

The alchemy of female content may be to make bold decisions and then refuse to be tormented by the seductive lure of the untaken path.

"The reason things seemed better back when they were worse," Schwartz says, "is because people with few choices and lowered expectations could expect to be pleasantly surprised." That also might explain why the World Values Survey of 65 countries found the happiest people in Nigeria, a country lacerated with instability and poverty, while the United States lagged in 16th place.

The dark underbelly of lofty expectations is very real, says Stearns' mother, Sharon Morgan. An educational consultant and reformed former "stress cadet" who worked three jobs while raising her family - her daughter distinctly remembers going to sleep to the staccato of her mom's typewriter - she has scaled back on work to spend more time with her grandsons.

"As the ERA woke women up, I remember that initial thrill of empowerment sweeping over us," she said. "But Shannon's generation has had to face all the implications we didn't fully anticipate, and I see how incredibly hard it can be. I don't know anybody who would want to go back to the way it was, but I think those high expectations are taking a toll on women's happiness."

For one thing, progress plateaued short of true gender equity: Women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. A study this spring by the American Association of University Women found that a year after college graduation, women earn 20 percent less than their male counterparts - an inequity that within a decade will stretch to 31 percent. Even after adjusting for parenthood, choice of field, hours worked and the like, a quarter of the gap remained. That's unlikely to enhance women's feelings of well-being.

Many women also set stratospheric expectations for themselves, and for each other - reinforced by the cult of Martha Stewart, a slew of self-improvement books, the prevalence of plastic surgery. We've come to regard our work lives, our home lives and our private lives as projects to be endlessly tweaked in pursuit of perfection.

Even those conscious of the trap still fall for it. Stevenson, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers, cops to recently loading the dishwasher because the plumber was coming. Her life partner and fellow researcher, Justin Wolfers, said, "What do you care, it's just the plumber. Do you think he'll be telling people what a dirty house we have?"

"Women need to learn not to be motivated so much by what people expect or say or think of us," she acknowledges. "The key is picking what it is we want to do well - and then not hearing the judgment of other people about the other domains."

Another factor behind the happiness differential may be that women are more prone to take their emotional temperature.

"I think a lot of women are just naturally more reflective, that they check in with themselves more than men," said Christina Whittenburg, 30, a first-grade teacher from Oakland. "Women are feelers. Men tend to be thinkers, more tied to the practical. It takes more of a shock or jolt to make them look inward. We're more likely to ask ourselves if we're happy."

And that could create its own problems, contends Darrin McMahon, a history professor at Florida State and author of the book "Happiness: A History."

For millennia, humans didn't expect to be happy in this life - that was what awaited them in the hereafter. Not until the Enlightenment did people believe they had the right to pursue happiness - today further interpreted as the right to be happy. But as John Stuart Mill cautioned, "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. ... Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness."

McMahon, whose critique is not gender specific, argues that we live in a society where we feel pressure to be happy. "When we're not, we feel like failures," he says. "What we get is the unhappiness of not being happy."

And women aren't just more self-aware - they also tend to feel more responsible for everyone else.

"Women still bear the brunt of the emotional work within the family because men just are not as alert to all the emotional cues," says Cornelia Busse, a psychotherapist in Sonoma. "They're not mining experiences with kids and relatives and friends the way women do, or worrying about them or feeling as responsible for everybody else. This is our territory, but frankly it places a huge burden on us. I think it leads us to be less happy."

While wishing men would take on more "emotional work," Busse also encourages women to stop being helicopter parents and obsessing over every personal conflict. "Ask yourself, 'What happens if I let it go and stop taking the emotional temperature of everyone in the room?' The answer probably is 'not much.' "

If nothing else, the declaration of a happiness gender gap is generating provocative conversation. The researchers themselves note that because men traditionally were less happy, perhaps women's happiness has diminished as they've entered into their world and are now bedeviled by the same woes that have long depressed men.

Or maybe the happiness gap isn't actually new at all. "Freakonomics" author and economist Steven Levitt suggests "there was enormous social pressure on women in the old days to pretend they were happy even if they weren't."

Like the Marquise du Chatelet, perhaps now we're abandoning our illusions and simply being more honest.

Vicki Haddock is a Bay Area freelance journalist and former Chronicle reporter who has written for the Magazine on the legacy of divorce, the science of criminal profiling and the mysterious death of newspaper heiress Margaret Lesher. E-mail comments to magazine@ sfchronicle.com.

© 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Magazine All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/79521/

Asia Times:
Israel raises the ante against Iran

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Mar 14, 2008

"We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons ... thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the US and Germany."
- Israeli author, Martin van Crevled, June 2007.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is on a speaking tour in the United States, putting her considerable personal charm in the service of a shrewd salesmanship - of a US war on Iran.

Although considered a dove by Israeli standards, Livni is now on a historic mission that has begun with a pre-travel warmer in the form of a highly publicized telephone call to the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, assuring him that there is direct linkage "between Iran and the terror groups".

Coinciding with the ominous news that US CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon has resigned - or been sacked - for his opposition to a war with Iran, Livni hopes to harvest a blowing wind of war against another Middle Eastern country that dares to challenge Israel's regional hegemony. It is a familiar story with a recent precedent in Iraq and a script for action, requiring high-pitched public diplomacy with the help of a vast network of sympathetic media pundits, that Israel has fully mastered.

Last week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's pressure on Israel "to honor peace obligations" fell on deaf ears and as far as Israel is concerned the so-called "Annapolis roadmap" - to have a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital - is a sideshow to a sideshow, with the central focus on the "Iran threat", just as it was on the "Iraq threat" a mere few years ago.

But, of course, the Israelis and their infinite reservoir of support in the US would rather the world fall into a Nietzschean "sham of forgetfulness" on how aptly, and cunningly, they sold the perception of Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda and even his direct connection to the September 11, 2001, atrocities.

Although the US government has conclusively found no evidence of such connections, the various pro-Israel pundits who excelled in their assignment to propagate that false image, refuse to acknowledge their error, let alone recant.

Chief among the latter is an Israeli-turned-US citizen, Laurie Mylroie, who was given free access to the US media as a "terrorism expert" prior to the US's invasion of Iraq, advertising her book on Saddam and September 11, time and again repeating the line that the September 11 attacks "had to be sponsored by a state", that is, Iraq.

In compensation for a job well done, Mylroie landed a full professorship at a US university, despite the fully questionable and empirically refuted nature of her unfounded allegations against Saddam. Who knows, maybe she is even the recipient of an Israeli medal of honor for her unique salesmanship of war.

This time, however, with the stakes on Iran relatively higher, the discrete charm of the affable Livni is fully required to pave the way for another disastrous war in the Middle East, since Israel is incapable of peace with the Palestinians and is in dire need of other pretexts to channel public attention away from its oppressive policies against the Palestinian people.

This is reflected in the Israeli government's blunt announcement of a new settlement in the West Bank, timed with Rice's visit, which must have surely sent a signal that no matter how it may be interpreted as a provocation that belies the peace process, Israel's policy of annexation and confiscation of Palestinian lands will continue unabated.

But not everything proceeds according to Israel's wishes, given the United Nations' recent condemnation of Israel's "excessive force" against the Palestinians in Gaza. Much as Livni and other Israeli officials hope otherwise, there is a limit to the gullibility of US public, who are averse toward another costly US "proxy war" on Israel's behalf. No matter how many US editorials spin their services in this direction, the fact remains there is a growing healthy concern in the US regarding the undue influence of Israel on US foreign policy.

Unfortunately, that healthy skepticism is presently staved off by a sophisticated public relations ploy on Israel's part that blames Iran for the death of the peace process and exonerates Israel, while presenting a caricature of independence-seeking Palestinians as mere proxies of Iran's "messianic fundamentalists".

Such self-serving image projections of the Iranian enemy conveniently overlook US-Iran shared interests in the region and, instead, seek desperately to paint a black and white picture of US-Iran relations as a zero-sum game. Of course, this is a harder sell, as the US and Iran both support the same regimes in Baghdad and Kabul and also have a vested interest in preventing the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

Meanwhile, amid new US allegations of Iranian subversive activities in Iraq, a fourth round of US-Iran talks has been postponed and, per an informed Iranian analyst, that is simply because the US does not want to negotiate with Iran from the position of weakness since Tehran has gained much as a result of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent trip to Baghdad. "The US should make a strategic adjustment with Iran or continue with its cold war crusade that is disfunctional because Iran and the US have common interests in the region," the analyst insisted.

So, the clever Israelis and their friends have mounted a serious campaign to convince the world that Iran is in bed with the Taliban and also with al-Qaeda, as well as with practically "every terror group opposed to the US", to paraphrase Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns at his recent talk at Harvard University.

Burns, who was the US's pointman on Iran until recently, boasted of his role in US-Israel strategic dialogue and put a complete seal of approval on Israel's warmongering policy with regard to Iran. Surely, this will earn Burns a suitable position in the next US administration, another reminder of how real change in US foreign policy is foreclosed by the recycling of complaint, pro-Israel voices in the US government. [1]

In conclusion, the waning months of the George W Bush administration represent a golden opportunity for Israel to ignite another Middle East conflict that, in essence, is rooted in Israel's structural inability to make peace with the Arab and Muslim world.

Note
1. At his Harvard talk, Burns discounted the importance of the recent US intelligence report on Iran, regarding Iran's peaceful nuclear work, and insisted the US is determined to stop Iran's development of its "nuclear weapon capability", which he defined first and foremost in terms of Iran's uranium enrichment program. He dispensed with the argument that the International Atomic Energy Agency can detect any diversion from that program, which is allowed under the articles of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, nor did Burns address the question of why the US continues to refuse giving security guarantees to Iran.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JC14Ak02.html

Clarín: "Hay cientos de escritores
que admiro que ni leen los diarios"

El escritor chileno, autor de El cartero de Neruda conversó en exclusiva con Ñ Digital y se refirió al compromiso político o a la falta del mismo que impera en la actualidad entre los escritores. También, tuvo tiempo para evocar con nostalgia los años felices de su infancia en Buenos Aires.

Por: Guido Carelli Lynch
12.03.2008

Sinónimo de letrado opositor al régimen pinochetista, Antonio Skármeta se ataja rápidamente ante la consulta telefónica. "No es posible aconsejar ni pedirle a ningún escritor que tengan actitudes políticas, porque eso depende enteramente de su mayor grado de interés o no en temas sociales", sentenció desde un lujoso hotel de Miami, en Estados Unidos, donde se encuentra para promocionar el lanzamiento en inglés de su último libro, El baile de la Victoria.

-¿Y en su caso? ¿Cómo se vincularon política y literatura?

-Vocacionalmente yo tampoco soy un escritor que hubiera tenido una especial vinculación con la política, pero son las mismas circunstancias que desbordan la política para influir de una manera violenta en mi vida y en la de mi gente. Y me refiero puntualmente a la interrupción de la democracia en Chile. A la caída en Chile de una dictadura brutal y a la necesidad que yo siempre tuve como persona, aunque fuera jardinero o escritor –no importa- de no mantenerme indiferente frente a eso y actuar. Lo que hicieron cientos de miles de chilenos es oponerse a una dictadura, trabajar políticamente para encontrar una salida.

Skármeta se refiere a su oposición en el campo intelectual, pero también a la que ejerció como representando a su país como embajador en Alemania, en la primavera democrática. El mismo destino había elegido para exiliarse en los años más duros del gobierno de Augusto Pinochet. "Pero hay palabras muy grandes, muy patéticas como 'LUCHAR' (se le escapa una carcajada). Se trata de oponerse, de trabajar políticamente para sortear una situación muy adversa para la vida del pueblo en el que naciste y al que perteneces", añadió.

-¿Pero a usted como escritor no le molestó que otros colegas hicieran caso omiso a esa realidad?

-No me molesta nadie, hay cientos de escritores que admiro que ni leen los diarios ni miran lo que está pasando. Hay otros colegas que puede que no les interese la política, y es hermoso y bueno y fantástico el trabajo que hacen. La receta de un escritor, o de cualquiera hablando en política no tiene que venir de afuera, tiene que venir de su alma, de su propia vocación.

-Sin embargo, en la actualidad los mismos autores que alguna vez se ocuparon de las problemáticas sociales parecieran haber desviado su foco de interés. Aun con las democracias consolidadas, son muy apremiantes algunos de los contextos de los países latinoamericanos...

-Tal vez dé esa apariencia por el mismo hecho de que están desmontados y desarticulados los horizontes épicos que implicaban, por ejemplo, la Guerra Fría. Hay una gran dosis de escepticismo hacia cualquier tipo de utopía y los escritores son bastante sensibles a este tipo de situaciones. Han visto como los pensamientos, o los líderes de esos pensamientos, finalmente conducen su pueblo a situaciones que los pueblos no desean. Desarticuladas estas utopías, como la del el paraíso socialista o comunista, que no son de la simpatía de los escritores que siempre quieren la libertad, se genera esta apariencia. Entre otras cosas, también, porque la experiencia de la democracia no es una experiencia traumática y entonces da la impresión de que no se mueven con urgencia.

-¿Y cómo se actúa entonces el escritor latinoamericano comprometido del siglo XXI?
-Participa como ciudadano en la medida que se va asentando con temas concretos, pero no hay una causa final que lo está moviendo y eso produce efectivamente la sensación de que los escritores no están participando políticamente. Yo no tengo dudas de que lo hacen, pero con la estridencia y la moderación que afortunadamente da la democracia.

Tras el clímax, la intensidad de la conversación se va apagando, merece una tregua. No todo en la vida de Skármeta es política y literatura. Sus letras, por caso, sirvieron para darle forma a un disco que el otrora ladero de Vinicius, Toquinho, ideó con sus letras. También, parte del mundo Skármeta –y su acento lo delata- reside en Buenos Aires.

-Alguna vez dijo que Buenos Aires había gravitado en su literatura. ¿Qué recuerdos lo asaltan?

-Esa afirmación es absolutamente verdadera. Mi amor por Buenos Aires es fuertísimo porque allí pasé mi niñez. Allí dejé de ser un niño solitario, ensoñado, volcado hacia la lectura y los libros. En Buenos Aires colectivicé mi intimidad al descubrir el barrio. Todo sucedió en Belgrano, donde fui a una escuela primaria verdaderamente de lujo, donde detectaron y promovieron mi interés por la literatura, me estimularon. Fue una época tan tremendamente feliz, tan plena, de descubrimiento de la literatura, de las primeras sensaciones prepúberes. Salí de mí hacia algo de mí que era algo más rico que eran los otros, eso....". Nada más, nada menos.

Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/03/12/01626073.html

Guardian: Either Labour
represents its core voters - or others will

The budget suggests that Brown and Darling have failed to recognise the cost of ignoring working-class alienation

Seumas Milne
Thursday March 13 2008

You'd never know it from the way these things are discussed by politicians and the media, but most people in Britain - 53% at the last count - regard themselves as working class. And however hard it may be to agree on definitions of class, that majority is reflected across a range of statistical breakdowns of modern British society. Getting on for 40% of the workforce are still manual workers, for instance; add in clerical workers and you're getting on for two thirds.

Yet despite the fact that class continues to dominate the country, it's treated almost as a taboo by the political elite. Even when working-class life does make it into medialand, it's typically in the form of contemptuous "chav" caricatures, as in the comedy show Little Britain. And when politicians do stray into class territory, they use euphemisms like "hardworking families" or proxies such as child poverty - the object of Alistair Darling's best pitch to his own party in yesterday's budget.

So the BBC's decision to commission a series of programmes about the marginalisation of the working class in New Labour's Britain should have been a rare opportunity to shine a light on the heart of modern life. Instead, under the banner of "The White Season", the programmes have been focused entirely on the impact of immigration and race on the white working class, as if it were some sort of anthropological study of an endangered tribe.

The message was unmistakeably clear in the series trailer, where a shaven-headed man's face is blacked up with writing by brown hands over the words: "Is white working-class Britain becoming invisible?" White working people were being written out of the script, we were given to understand, and multiculturalism and migration were to blame. But in reality, it is the working class as a whole, white and non-white, that has been weakened and marginalised in the past two decades. By identifying the problems of the country's most disadvantaged communities as being about race rather than class, the BBC has reinforced stereotypes and played to the toxic agenda of the British National Party.

It's also wrong. Of course, mass immigration in the past few years - overwhelmingly from eastern Europe - has had a disproportionate impact on working-class communities: in housing, public services and pay. The government has deliberately used the unregulated European Union influx as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy, and employers have ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages. No one should be surprised if demoralised and powerless people reach for the nearest scapegoat - and it's no coincidence that some of the worst racism is found in the most economically deprived areas.

But it wasn't immigration that ripped the guts out of working-class Britain, white and non-white. It was the closure of whole industries, the rundown of manufacturing and council housing, the assault on trade unions, the huge transfer of resources to the wealthy, the deregulation of the labour market, and the unconstrained impact of neoliberal globalisation under both Tories and New Labour. Almost none of that has had a look-in so far in The White Season.

Hopes that Gordon Brown would take the government in a different direction look increasingly forlorn. Labour MPs who invested heavily in Brown are now concluding that Brownism is little more than Blairism without the glitz. Diehard Blairite ministers such as the new work and pensions secretary James Purnell, and business secretary John Hutton, have been given free rein to promote an aggressive pro-corporate and privatisation agenda. Hutton's declaration this week that Labour should celebrate "huge salaries" and individualism was almost a parody of the early days of high Blairism. But Brown himself went out of his way on Monday to commit the government to accelerated privatisation in health, education and welfare.

Meanwhile, Darling's budget confirmed his watering-down of the plan to tax the non-dom super-rich and his retreat on capital gains tax under corporate pressure, while Brown has resolutely resisted demands from trade unions and Labour MPs to give equal rights to agency and temporary workers as a way of relieving some of the worst abuse of migrant labour to undercut existing pay and conditions. The prime minister will only allow the issue to be considered by a commission with an employers' veto. Corporate lobbying has also seen off the threat of a windfall tax on the grotesque profits of the energy companies - which could have given Darling some of the cash he would need to halve child poverty by 2010.

With a gathering economic crisis likely to deliver lower growth next year than Darling predicted and a continuing squeeze on public-sector pay, the political price of Labour's failure to deliver for its core voters can only grow. The New Labour outriders used to argue that working-class voters could be taken for granted because they had nowhere else to go. Since the 2005 general election, that can no longer wash. Of the four million votes Labour lost, the largest number were from the working class, north and south, white and non-white. As Jon Cruddas, who ran a powerful challenge for Labour's deputy leadership last year, points out: "Those voters didn't go to the Tories, they went to the nationalists, the BNP, the Liberals and Respect - or they stayed at home".

Blairites who insist Labour must once again concentrate on swing voters in southern marginals and "run up the flag" to pacify the rest are, he argues, 15 years out of date and threaten the social coalition needed to win - which can only be rebuilt by focusing far more on housing, insecurity at work, inequality in public services and public-led investment in deprived areas. This is the faultline that is now emerging in the parliamentary Labour party, with the revived centre-left around the pressure group Compass increasingly making the running and Brown tilting unmistakeably towards the Blairite right.

The next test of where this is leading will be the local elections in May, when the BNP, among others, is expected to make significant gains. Unless Labour is prepared to represent the interests of increasingly angry working-class voters, others will certainly fill the vacuum - and the ever narrower three-party stitch-up risks blowing up in the faces of the whole political class.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/13/budget.economy

Jeune Afrique: "Diamants contre armes"
ou comment Taylor contrôlait les rebelles du RUF

LIBÉRIA - 12 mars 2008 - par AFP

Un compagnon d'armes de l'ex-président libérien Charles Taylor a raconté mercredi, devant le Tribunal spécial pour la Sierra Leone, comment ce dernier contrôlait les rebelles ayant dévasté le pays entre 1991 et 2001, marchandant ses livraisons d'armes contre des diamants.

Charles Taylor, premier chef d'Etat africain jugé par un tribunal international, comparaît pour crimes de guerre et crimes contre l'humanité.

Joseph Marzah, "Zigzag Marzah" de son nom de guerre, combattait dans les rangs du groupe rebelle de Charles Taylor (le NPFL, Front national patriotique du Liberia) qui avait le contrôle d'une grande partie du Liberia avant son élection à la présidence en 1997.

Au début des années 1990, Charles Taylor l'avait chargé de livrer des armes, notamment des AK-47 et des roquettes, et des munitions aux rebelles sierra-léonais du Front révolutionnaire uni (RUF).

"Il n'y avait pas de RUF. De Freetown au Liberia, il n'y avait qu'une seule organisation, qui répondait (aux ordres de) Taylor", a-t-il estimé "Parfois, nous recevions des munitions de White Flower (le palais présidentiel libérien à l'époque, ndlr) ou d'un avion russe (...) Sur l'ordre de Charles Taylor, j'emmenais parfois certains d'entre elles directement vers la Sierra Leone", a-t-il expliqué.

A l'époque, la Sierra Leone était ravagée par une guerre civile brutale déclenchée par les rebelles du RUF, qui tua 120.000 personnes et laissa des milliers de mutilés, entre 1991 et 2001.

Selon l'accusation, Charles Taylor, dirigeait en sous-main le RUF afin de contrôler les ressources abondantes, notamment en diamants, de la Sierra Leone.

Joseph Marzah a longuement raconté à l'audience comment il avait participé aux attaques sanglantes des RUF sur des villages dans l'est de la Sierra Leone puis comment il avait intégré leurs rangs tout en continuant de prendre ses ordres auprès de Taylor.

"De nombreuses fois, j'ai escorté des diamants vers Charles Taylor. Lui-même peut vous raconter, s'il dit la vérité (...) J'ai escorté des diamants dix à quinze fois", a-t-il ajouté.

"Il y en avait un qui avait une forme de tête humaine, de la taille d'une (photo de) passeport. Je suis venu avec Mosquito (Sam Bockarie, l'un des leaders du RUF, ndlr) ... nous avons emmené le diamant à White Flower pour le donner à Charles Taylor", a-t-il précisé.

"Charles Taylor a été impressionné" en voyant ce diamant d'un diamètre de 5 centimètres. Il nous a même donné de l'argent. Nous avons ramené assez de munitions en Sierra Leone".

Selon lui, Charles Taylor était constamment en contact avec les chefs du RUF par téléphone satellitaire et liaison radio. Certains venaient fréquemment à Monrovia pour lui livrer des diamants et repartir avec des armes.

Selon le procureur, l'accusé a ainsi amassé une fortune de 600 millions de dollars.

Le témoin a aussi détaillé les techniques utilisées pour terroriser les civils. Lors de la guerre au Liberia, "on avait l'habitude de monter des embuscades", a-t-il expliqué. "Au check-point, nous utilisions des intestins humains et parfois nous mettions des têtes sur des bâtons, pour que les gens aient peur".

Des techniques également courantes en Sierra Leone. Joseph Marzah a ainsi raconté avoir tué "plus de cent" civils et des bébés lorsqu'il faisait partie d'une unité formée par Charles Taylor s'appelant "Pas de bébé en vue".

"Ce n'est pas difficile. Vous les lancez contre un mur, les jetez dans un trou ou dans la rivière et ils meurent. Après, vous faites un rapport à Charles Taylor", a-t-il expliqué.

"Tant de femmes enceintes ont été ouvertes" avec des couteaux, a-t-il dit. Ces exécutions eurent aussi lieu en Sierra Leone, "de Koindu (est) à aussi loin que Waterloo, lorsque nous avons envahi la ville" de Freetown.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP00148diamafuruds0

Mail & Guardian:
Court told of brutal tactics incited by Charles Taylor

Alexandra Hudson | The Hague, The Netherlands
13 March 2008

A witness calling himself Charles Taylor's death squad commander told a court on Wednesday he killed men, women and babies on the former Liberian leader's orders and supplied arms to rebels in Sierra Leone.

Taylor, once one of Africa's most feared warlords, faces charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up to try those most responsible for the 1991 to 2002 conflict.

More than 250 000 people died in intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Prosecutors say Taylor, then president of Liberia, wanted to plunder neighbouring Sierra Leone's diamonds and destabilise its government by controlling and arming rebels.

In harrowing testimony, Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, a Liberian who joined rebels loyal to Taylor and rose through the ranks to become a trusted aide, told of an ingrained culture of brutality among Taylor's henchmen.

Former rebel leaders who fell out of favour with Taylor met horrific ends. Marzah told how he and others dismembered the body of one notorious leader, "Superman", and took his severed hand to Taylor who gave them "cigarette money" as a reward.

They then cooked and ate "Superman's" liver.

Marzah said he had earlier served with the Taylor-backed National Patriotic Front of Liberia rebels and had made road checkpoints out of human intestines with severed heads mounted on sticks.

Asked whether Taylor ever saw such checkpoints, he said: "He was aware. He made us understand that you have to play with human blood so that enemies would be afraid."

Marzah is the 20th witness for the prosecution since Taylor's trial began in earnest at the start of January.

Marzah also told of killing civilians viewed as loyal to rival rebel groups and said he had murdered women with pen knives and drowned and bludgeoned babies without conscience, doing so for Taylor.

"I regret nothing," the 49-year-old said.

Arms running
Marzah also said he took weapons, some stored at Taylor's presidential mansion, to Sierra Leone on up to 40 occasions and returned to Liberia with diamonds which he handed to Taylor.

One diamond was five centimetres long.

"When we took it along, Charles Taylor was impressed. He even gave us some money. We took enough ammunition back to Sierra Leone," said Marzah.

More than 250 000 people died in intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, thousands had their limbs hacked off by drug-crazed rebels, many of them children.

Taylor, now 60, went into exile in Nigeria after he was overthrown in 2003 and was handed to the court after international pressure was put on the Nigerian authorities.

His trial was moved to The Hague because of fears it could reignite instability if held in Sierra Leone.

He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=334541&area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/

Mail & Guardian:
Aspiration with nowhere to fly to

Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT
10 March 2008

I was in Senegal for a few weeks, and was assisted by an able and creative young man. For a while, I wondered why he did not react to my text messages. His French was good. He dressed well, if rather flashily in my Anglophone view. We had a fight when I asked him for receipts and I realised he could not read.

One of the things I was curious about was those people who risk life, lungs and thousands of family dollars to get to Europe. All the news-papers talked about “desperation”. It did not make such easy sense.

You have young Congolese men going to Angola with $5 000 to get on a ship to Brazil —not to find an economic future in one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but to work in Brazil and find their way to France.

In Senegal’s Mbour, a kind of touristy Franco-African village, young men lift weights and run on the beach every day, training to cross the Sahara. They train as if they are planning an international sporting career, with commitment and pain. They talk, and plan and share intelligence. It has become a movement. France is no longer the place to go - it is Italy and Spain. One group says “Barça or die”. They take vows that if they do not get to Barça, they are prepared to die.

Now, none of these young men is starving. Many of them have educated parents: three meals a day. I interviewed one guy who had a chicken business supplying Mbour tourist hotels with eggs.

But he lived with his sister. A 22-year-old man lived with his sister, and had to account to her for his movements. His business was too undercapitalised to grow, so he did not make enough money to strike out on his own.

Every morning he wakes up at 4am to train. He likes traditional tonics and purgatives to remove toxins. He does not drink or smoke. He likes ganja, but once a week - for thinking and meditating. He likes to come to the beach to meditate and pray on his own on Sunday nights. I asked him if he liked the French. He said no. He has contempt for them.

He had a lover, an older French woman in Mbour, but he left her. She was a Jezebel, he said. Women remove your focus. They dissipate your energy. He likes sex when he does not have to ejaculate, and keeps his energy. Every Friday, he fasts. Once, he fasted for a week, drinking only water, baobab juice and traditional medicine.

Once, he made his way to Mali, but ran out of options there. He was vague — some contact person did not materialise.

If you walk through the streets of Dakar or Nairobi or Douala, there they are. Well dressed, in well-selected second-hand clothes. Often religious, often Rastafarian, sometimes they organise around mystical traditional religions - like Mungiki in Kenya. They own nothing and have no prospects. Most have only high-school education or less. They cannot afford to marry or to live in any meaningful way on their own.

If you asked them what they are able to do with the full measure of their will and muscle, they will have no answer. We have seen riots in Cameroon, Ouagadougou and Senegal. In Kenya, millions of them voted for the first time, and were at the centre of the violence, especially in the Rift Valley.

The urge to fight, to kill, to die on a boat on the way to France, is all about becoming a man. If there is an insurmountable humiliation, it is to be a human person with no control over your destiny, to have nothing on which to focus your abilities. Drugs may help, making you dazed and diluted. Your life is focused around dealing with all your pent-up anger.

Your hear about them everywhere, a zealous and often disciplined new tribe of young men living in nations too slow and static to challenge them.

I met a woman in Rwanda who told me she had to sell her major assets to send her sons to the United Kingdom to work as unskilled labourers. Her sons, all in their twenties, all university educated, were beginning to threaten their father with violence. He did not want them to go out at night. This was a year after the genocide - he was terrified for them. He built a house for them in his compound. He threatened them with money and violence. “Stay still.”

About a year ago, in Togo, I spent the night in the home of a polite young soccer player and his widowed mother. His bedroom was full of things that did not work: a dead television on a shelf; a blank old 486 computer on a desk; a little set of pretty coloured pens that had all run out of ink. Everything except the bed was an aspiration that did not function.

In the morning, as I lifted the mattress to tuck the sheets in, I saw a gun, thick and cold, sitting on the boards beneath.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=334294&area=/columnist_wainaina/

Mother Jones:
Exclusive: Inside Gitmo with Detainee 061

Shortly after German-born Murat Kurnaz arrived at Camp Delta, intelligence reports show the plan was to let him go. What happened?

By Mariah Blake
March 10, 2008

IT WAS LATE September 2002, and construction crews were just finishing work on the main prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when three German intelligence agents arrived on the island aboard a U.S. military plane.

The reason for their visit was sensitive. The Pentagon was still arguing that those held at Guantanamo were "the worst of the worst" and "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," but behind closed doors CIA officials were coming to the conclusion that a number of detainees had no links to terrorism, and were working on a list of prisoners to be set free.

One of the detainees being considered for release was Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen who had been pulled off a bus in Pakistan the year before and turned over to U.S. forces. Since then, American security agencies hadn't turned up any evidence that he belonged to a terrorist group or posed a threat to the United States. But before clearing his release, the CIA wanted the Germans to interrogate him and offer their stamp of approval.

After they arrived, the agents were led out to a trailer near the dusty sprawl of cell blocks known as Camp Delta. Inside, the air conditioner was on full blast, and Kurnaz, a stocky young man with blunt features and a thick red beard, was seated on one side of a long table, his hands and feet shackled to a ring in the floor. The men took turns questioning him—about the nightclubs he frequented in his wilder years, about his reasons for embracing Islam, about his journey to Pakistan and the heavy boots he bought before leaving—while a hidden camera rolled in the background.

All told, they spent 12 hours with him over two days, concluding by the end that he simply found himself "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and "had nothing to do with terrorism and al-Qaida," according to German intelligence reports.

They discussed their findings with CIA and Pentagon officials, then boarded a plane back to Germany. During a stopover in Washington, D.C., one of the agents visited the local branch of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, and reported back to headquarters via a secure phone line, saying: "USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven. He should be released in approximately six to eight weeks." A few days later, a Pentagon release form for the detainee was printed and awaiting signature.

"At that point, the picture was clear," says Lothar Jachmann, a retired spy who headed the intelligence-gathering operation on Kurnaz for Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and was briefed on the Guantanamo visit by one of the agents. "We had nothing on him, and we had gotten feedback that the Americans had nothing on him either. The plan was to let him go."

But Kurnaz was not set free. Instead, he spent another four years languishing at Guantanamo, where he was repeatedly designated an "enemy combatant," despite evidence showing he had no known links to terrorist groups.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees often argue that their clients are being held based on thin intelligence, but Kurnaz's case is the first where the record clearly shows that evidence of innocence was ignored to justify his continued detention. His story, pieced together from intelligence reports, newly declassified Pentagon documents, and secret testimony before the German Parliament—much of it never before reported in the United States—offers a rare window into the workings of the secretive system used to hold and try terrorism suspects.

MURAT KURNAZ, the son of Turkish immigrants, was born and raised in Bremen, a rainy north German port city, where he lived with his family in a simple brick row house. His father, Metin, worked the assembly line at a Mercedes Benz plant, while his mother, Rabiye, stayed home with him and his two younger brothers. On Fridays he and his father attended the neighborhood Kuba Mosque, a storefront sanctuary with a barbershop, bookstore, and cavernous teahouse where old men in crocheted skullcaps huddle around plastic tables.

Mosque-goers remember Kurnaz as a shy, quiet boy who didn't take much interest in religion. "He was a normal Muslim Turk, who prayed once in a while, but was not very observant," says Nurtekin Tepe, a local bus driver, who has known Kurnaz since he was a child. Instead, Kurnaz spent his time watching Bruce Lee movies, dreaming about motorbikes (he hoped to get one and drive it 110 miles per hour on the autobahn), and lifting weights, often with his neighbor, Selcuk Bilgin, who had many of the same interests, though he was six years older.

This began to change in the fall of 2000. Kurnaz, then 18, was working as a nightclub bouncer; Bilgin had a dead-end job at a supermarket. Some of their friends had started getting in trouble with the law. Feeling there must be something more to life, both men began to take a deeper interest in Islam. Before long, they had cut pork from their diets, grown their beards long, and started attending a new mosque, Abu Bakr, which was located in a dingy, fluorescent-lit office building near Bremen's main train station and preached a strict brand of Sunni Islam.

Around this time, Kurnaz also started searching for a Muslim bride, and in the summer of 2001 he married Fatima, a young woman who hails from a rural Turkish village. The union was arranged by relatives, and the couple met only once before the ceremony. The idea was to bring her to Germany as soon as her paperwork was sorted out. Meanwhile, Kurnaz and Bilgin made plans to travel to Pakistan. The reason for the trip has been a matter of much debate, but Kurnaz claims he was worried that he didn't know enough about Islam to be a good Muslim husband and wanted to study the Koran before Fatima's arrival.

The flight was scheduled to depart Frankfurt on October 3, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, but even before Kurnaz and Bilgin boarded the plane their plans began to unravel. Bilgin was stopped at passport control because of an outstanding $1300 fine levied after his dog ran away and attacked a bicyclist. Unable to pay, he called his older brother, Abdullah, in Bremen and asked him to wire the money. Instead, Abdullah phoned the Frankfurt police and urged them not to let Bilgin fly. "My brother is following a friend to Afghanistan to fight the Americans," he said, according to police reports. "He was stirred up in a Bremen mosque."

Questioned by police a few days later, Abdullah, who unlike his brother has a poor grasp on German, said his words had been taken out of context; he'd feared Kurnaz and Bilgin might get caught up in the conflict, but didn't know for a fact that they had plans of fighting. But by that time, the wheels were already in motion. Bilgin was arrested and Bremen police launched a criminal investigation into him, Kurnaz, and two other men who attended Abu Bakr. Germany's domestic intelligence agency also got in on the act, sending an undercover agent to the mosque to ferret out information.

Meanwhile, Kurnaz, who had gotten on the plane without Bilgin, was traveling through Pakistan, unaware of the commotion his departure had caused.

ON DECEMBER 1, 2001, Kurnaz boarded a bus to the airport in Peshawar, a smoggy city on the country's northwest border, where he says he planned to catch a plane back to Germany. Along the way, the vehicle was stopped at a routine checkpoint. One of the officers manning it knocked on the window and asked Kurnaz something in Urdu, then ordered him to step off the bus.

Kurnaz expected to show his passport and answer a few questions before being sent on his way. Instead, he was thrown in jail. A few days later, Pakistani police turned him over to U.S. forces, who transported him to Kandahar Air Base, a military installation in the southern reaches of Afghanistan. The Taliban had recently been driven from the region, and the base, built on the rubble of a bombed-out airport, was little more than a cluster of bullet-pocked hangars and decrepit runways. Despite the subzero temperatures, prisoners were kept in large outdoor pens, and a number of them later claimed they were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics. Kurnaz says he was routinely beaten, chained up for days in painful positions, and given electric shocks on the soles of his feet. He also says he was subjected to a crude form of waterboarding, which involved having his head plunged into a water-filled plastic bucket. (The Pentagon, contacted more than a dozen times by email and telephone, would not comment on Kurnaz's treatment or any other aspect of his case.)

One morning about two months after his arrival in Afghanistan, the detainee was roused before dawn and issued an orange jumpsuit. Then guards shackled and blindfolded him and covered his ears with soundproof earphones before herding him onto a military transport plane.

When the plane touched down more than 20 hours later, Kurnaz was led into a tent where soldiers plucked hairs from his arms, swabbed the inside of his mouth, and gave him a green plastic bracelet with number that would come to define him: 061. Finally, he was led to a crude cell block with concrete floors, a corrugated metal roof, and chain-link walls, which looked out on a sandy desert landscape. Inside his cell, he found a blanket and a thin green mat, a pair of flip-flops, and two translucent buckets, one to be used as a toilet and the other as a sink. He had no idea where he was.

Kurnaz later learned that he landed at Camp X-Ray, a temporary holding pen used to house Guantanamo detainees during the four months when the main prison camp was being built. Even before construction was done, Pentagon officials began to suspect that Kurnaz didn't belong there. On February 24, 2002, just three weeks after his arrival, a senior military interrogator issued a memo saying, "This source may actually have no al-Qaida or Taliban association."

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2002, the three German agents arrived at Guantanamo to interrogate detainee 061. During the trip, they were assigned a CIA liaison, identified only as Steve H., who briefed them on their mission and kept tabs on the interrogations.

Much of the questioning the first day focused on why Kurnaz would choose to travel to Pakistan when war was brewing in the region. The detainee explained that a group of Muslim missionaries had visited his mosque and told him about a school in Lahore where he could study the Koran. But when he arrived there, he found people were suspicious of him because of his light skin and the fact that he spoke no Arabic. Taking him for a foreign journalist, the school turned him away. So he wandered around, staying in mosques and guesthouses, until he was detained near Peshawar (something he also attributed to his light skin and the fact that he spoke German but carried a Turkish passport).

The German agents came away with mixed opinions, according to testimony they later gave before a closed session of German Parliament. (Many other details of their trip were also revealed through that hearing, transcripts of which were obtained by Mother Jones.) The leader of the delegation, who worked for the foreign intelligence service, the BND, saw Kurnaz as a harmless and somewhat naive young man who simply picked a bad time to travel. One of his colleagues, a domestic intelligence specialist, argued it was possible that Kurnaz was on the path to radicalization. But everyone agreed it was highly improbable that he had links to terrorist networks or was involved in any kind of terrorist plot, and none of the agents voiced any objections to letting him go.

Given this fact, Steve H. proposed releasing Kurnaz and using him as a spy, part of a joint operation to infiltrate the Islamist scene in Germany. The German agents apparently took this suggestion to heart, because on day two of their visit, they arrived at the interrogation trailer bearing a chocolate bar and a motorcycle magazine, and asked the detainee point-blank whether he would consider working as an informant. He agreed. (Kurnaz later claimed that he had no intention of actually spying—that, in fact, he would "rather starve to death"—but thought feigning interest might hasten his release.)

That evening, the agents were invited to dinner with the deputy commander of the prison camp. The leader of the delegation later testified that he discussed Kurnaz's case with him, and according to an investigation by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, after the meal, the American official sent a coded message to the Pentagon. A few days later, on September 30, the release form for Kurnaz was printed out. The cover memo, obtained by Mother Jones, notes that Pentagon investigators had found "no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat toward the U.S." and that "the Germans confirmed that this detainee has no connection to an al-Qaida cell in Germany."

AROUND THE SAME TIME, in October 2002, German police suspended their investigation into Kurnaz and his fellow suspects. No evidence of criminal wrongdoing ever surfaced. "We tapped telephones, we searched apartments, we questioned a large number of witnesses," Uwe Picard, the Bremen attorney general who led the probe, told me when we spoke in his office, an attic warren stacked waist-deep in files. "We didn't find anything of substance."

But police did turn up some troubling bits of hearsay. One of the students at a shipbuilding school Kurnaz attended told investigators that Kurnaz had "Taliban" written on the screen of his cell phone. Then there were the comments of Kurnaz's mother, who, when questioned by police days after her son's disappearance, fretted that he had "bought heavy boots and two pairs of binoculars" shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Seizing on these details, the German media dubbed Kurnaz the "Bremen Taliban." This was clearly unsettling to German officials, who just one year after the 9/11 attacks were still reeling from the revelation that three hijackers lived and studied in Germany without ever catching the attention of police or intelligence agencies. Many politicians had serious qualms about letting the German Turk back into the country.

The first sign of these doubts came in the form of a classified report on the Guantanamo visit, which was issued on October 8, 2002, and circulated through the top ranks of the German government. It argues that releasing Kurnaz and using him as a spy would be "problematic," in that he had "no access to the Mujahideen milieu." It also notes, "In light of Kurnaz's possibly imminent release, we should determine whether Germany wants the Turkish citizen back and, given the expected media attention, whether Germany wants to document that everything possible was done to prevent his return."

Three weeks later, Kurnaz's case was discussed at the presidential round, a standing Tuesday meeting held at the Germany Chancellery and attended by top officials from the foreign and interior ministries as well as the German security services. The group decided to block his return, and on October 30 the interior ministry issued a secret memo with a plan for keeping him out of the country, which involved revoking his residency permit on the grounds that he had been abroad for more than six months. Germany's domestic intelligence agency later notified the CIA in writing of the government's "express wish" that Kurnaz "not return to Germany."

FOR KURNAZ, the next two years were a blur of interrogations and hours spent locked in his cell. At one point, he claims guards roused him every few hours, part of a coordinated sleep-deprivation campaign dubbed Operation Sandman. He also says he was subjected to pepper-spray attacks, extreme heat and cold, and sexual humiliation at the hands of a scantily clad female guard, who he says rubbed herself against him.

On occasion, he says, punishments were doled out arbitrarily. Each morning a guard would appear at Kurnaz's cell door and ask him to shove his blanket through the slot. Even when he did so, he claims, he was sometimes accused of not cooperating and given a stint in solitary confinement.

Still, the detainee continued to plead his innocence, telling interrogators at one point that the idea of someone thinking he wanted to fight the Americans "made him feel sick," according to Pentagon intelligence reports. He also offered repeatedly to take a lie detector test. When asked what he would do if released, he said he would bring his wife to Germany and buy a motorcycle.

Then in June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. courts had the authority under federal law to decide whether those held at Guantanamo were rightfully imprisoned. In a bid to keep detainees out of the U.S. justice system, the Bush administration created the Combatant Status Review Tribunals to determine whether detainees had been properly labeled enemy combatants.

Three months later, on September 30, 2004, Kurnaz was led out to one of the interrogation trailers on the fringes of Camp Delta, the main prison complex at Guantanamo. Inside, under the glare of florescent lights, sat three high-ranking military officers at a long table. The "tribunal president," or judge, was in a high-backed chair in the middle. At his side was Kurnaz's "personal representative," who was assigned with helping the detainee argue his case, though he hardly said a word during the proceedings. As for the charges, the only information Kurnaz was given was a summary of the unclassified evidence, which the prosecutor—or "recorder" in Guantanamo parlance—reeled off at the beginning of the hearing. Most of it was circumstantial, like the fact that Kurnaz had flown from Frankfurt to Karachi just three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and that he allegedly received food and lodging from the Muslim missionary group Tablighi Jamaat. (An apolitical movement with more than 70 million members, it has no known terrorist links, but intelligence agencies worry that its strict brand of Sunni Islam may make it an ideal recruiting ground for jihadists.)

But Kurnaz was hit with one more serious allegation, namely that he was "a close associate with, and planned to travel to Pakistan with" Selcuk Bilgin, who the recorder said "later engaged in a suicide bombing." Clearly shaken by this charge, Kurnaz interrupted the session, blurting out, "Where are the explosives? What bombs?" according to transcripts of the hearing, which are not verbatim. The tribunal president responded that the details of Bilgin's fate were classified. Then he asked if the detainee wanted to make a statement. Kurnaz replied, "I am here because Selcuk Bilgin had bombed somebody? I wasn't aware that he had done that." Then he gave a meandering speech, mostly a reprise of things he had said during interrogations.

When he was done, the tribunal president asked him if he had anything else to submit, though it's unclear what more he could have offered; detainees are allowed only limited documentary evidence, and calls for witnesses are generally denied. (Even if prisoners could present more information, it would likely be trumped by the government's evidence, which, under the tribunal rules laid out by the Bush administration, is presumed to be "genuine and accurate.") Kurnaz said simply: "I want to know if I have to stay here, or if I can go home…If I go back home, I will prove that I am innocent."

Later that day, the tribunal determined by a "preponderance of evidence" that Kurnaz had not only been properly designated an enemy combatant, but that he was a member of Al Qaeda. According to the classified summary obtained by Mother Jones, the decision was based almost exclusively on a single memo, written by Brig. General David B. Lacquement shortly before the tribunal convened.

A version of that memo was recently declassified, albeit with large swaths redacted. Among the "suspicious activities" it said Kurnaz engaged in while at Guantanamo: He "covered his ears and prayed loudly during the U.S. national Anthem" and asked how tall a basketball rim was "possibly in an attempt to estimate the heights of the fences." U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who reviewed the unredacted version, later wrote that it was "rife with hearsay and lacking in detailed support for its conclusions."

In contrast to Lacquement's memo, at least three assessments in Kurnaz's Pentagon file point to his innocence. Among them is a recently declassified memo, dated May 19, 2003, from Brittain P. Mallow, then commanding general of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, a Pentagon intelligence unit that interrogates and collects information on detainees. It states the "CITF is not aware of evidence that Kurnaz was or is a member of al-Qaida" or that he harbored anyone who "has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit acts of terrorism against the U.S." But the tribunal found these exhibits were "not persuasive in that they seemingly corroborated the detainee's testimony." In other words, the Pentagon's own evidence was ignored because it suggested the detainee was innocent.

What of the allegation that Kurnaz's would-be traveling companion, Selcuk Bilgin, carried out a suicide attack? As it turns out, Bilgin is alive and residing in Bremen with his wife and two small children. I tracked him down in early January with three phone calls and a visit to his parents' home, and we met a couple weeks later at his lawyer's office near the city center. A stocky man with large, dark eyes and a wiry beard, he arrived in a white Audi station wagon with car seats in the rear and was wearing olive cargo pants with a thick black jacket that cinched at the waist. Following his arrest in Frankfurt, he explained, he was held for a few days and then released. "After that, two people from the intelligence services came to talk to me," he told me. "Some journalists called. Then I just went on with my life."

Indeed, Bilgin was never charged with any crime, although he was initially suspected of influencing Kurnaz to go to Afghanistan and fight. (Kurnaz's parents also blamed him for their son's ordeal, and the two men no longer speak.)

As for the attack Bilgin was accused of carrying out, identified by the Pentagon as the "Elananutus" bombing, it never registered with the media in Germany or the United States (though there is a record of a November 2003 attack on an Istanbul synagogue, allegedly by a man with a similar sounding name—Gokhan Elaltuntas). The Pentagon never bothered to run that allegation by German police; German intelligence agencies were apparently kept out of the loop, too.

"A suicide bomber?" Jachmann, who led the intelligence gathering on Bilgin and Kurnaz, asked incredulously when I explained the allegations. "As far as we knew, he was living right here in Bremen the whole time."

A WEEK AFTER HIS tribunal, Kurnaz received a visit from a balding thirtysomething man with wire-rimmed glasses who handed him a piece of paper with a handwritten note on it. It read, "My dear son, it's me, your mother. I hope you're doing well. This man is Baher Azmy. You can trust him. He's your lawyer."

In the three years he had been at Guantanamo, this was the first word Kurnaz had heard from his family. Afraid that the letter would be taken from him, he crumpled it up and stuffed it under his shirt.

Azmy also delivered a second piece of news: He had filed suit against the Bush administration on Kurnaz's behalf.

Three months later, in January 2005, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green delivered a ruling on Kurnaz's claim, and those of 62 other prisoners, challenging the legality of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Finding that the tribunals were illegal, she used Kurnaz's case to illustrate the "fundamental unfairness" of the system, particularly its reliance on "classified information not disclosed to the detainees." (Most of the passages of the ruling dealing with his case were themselves classified until recently, though they were briefly released through a Pentagon slipup and reported by the Washington Post in March 2005.) Green also argued that the tribunal's choice to ignore evidence of Kurnaz's innocence was among the strongest signs that the tribunals were stacked against detainees.

But in the end the ruling was just one salvo in an ongoing legal struggle over whether detainees can plead their cases in U.S. courts and had little impact on Kurnaz's situation. In early November 2005, when the Administrative Review Board (ARB), which conducts annual reviews of detainees' status, took up his case again, it voted unanimously to uphold his designation as an enemy combatant. According to internal Pentagon emails obtained by Mother Jones, the board failed to weigh evidence submitted by Kurnaz's lawyers, including a notarized affidavit from Bilgin, which showed that a central charge against the detainee—his alleged association with a suicide bomber—was verifiably false.

Around this time, the tides began to turn on the other side of the Atlantic. German media had gotten wind of their government's role in Kurnaz's continued detention, and scandal was brewing. Politicians who had pushed to keep him out of the country were suddenly scrambling to distance themselves from the decision.

Then, in late November, Angela Merkel took over as German chancellor. Though a friend of the Bush administration, she has made no bones about her opposition to the indefinite detentions at Guantanamo. During her first visits to the Oval Office, in January 2006, she pressed President George W. Bush on Kurnaz's case, the first in a string of negotiations over his fate. In June of that year, the Administrative Review Board reconvened and decided that, after nearly five years of imprisonment, detainee 061 was no longer an enemy combatant.

ON AUGUST 24, 2006, a C-17 cargo plane touched down at Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. military installation 44 miles southwest of Frankfurt. Shackled to the floor in its cargo hold was detainee 061, his face wrapped in a mask and his eyes covered by goggles with blacked-out lenses. Standing watch over him were 15 American soldiers.

On the tarmac, he was handed over to German police, who asked that his handcuffs be removed. Then they escorted him to a nearby Red Cross installation, where his family was waiting.

The reunion was bittersweet: His mother couldn't stop crying, and his father was so withered and gray that at first Kurnaz mistook him for an older uncle. During the car ride home, a journey of more than 250 miles, Kurnaz learned that his wife, Fatima—the reason he says he traveled to Pakistan—had filed for divorce. All those years with no word from him were more than she could handle. Later in the trip, his father pulled over at a rest stop and his mother poured him some coffee from a thermos in the trunk. Kurnaz was so busy marveling at the stars, which had been drowned out by the floodlights at Guantanamo, that he forgot to drink it.

Kurnaz's homecoming created a clamor in Germany. By early 2007, the widening scandal was threatening to topple Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who as head of the Chancellery under the previous administration was the highest official to formally approve the plan blocking Kurnaz's return. Around the same time, a special investigative committee of German Parliament began probing Berlin's role in Kurnaz's continued detention. The ongoing inquiry has hit some stumbling blocks: CIA transcripts related to the case vanished, and an electronic data system with vital intelligence information was mysteriously erased.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs the legality of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, Kurnaz's ordeal is emerging as a key exhibit. Attorney Seth Waxman, who delivered oral arguments on detainees' behalf last December, wrapped up his comments by recounting the salient details of Kurnaz's case—a move intended to drive home his claim that the tribunals are an "inadequate substitute" for due process. A decision in the case is expected early this summer.

A reluctant political figure, Kurnaz has done his best to stay out of the fray, turning instead to his old interests. Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which kept tabs on him after his return, found only one item of note—that he had bought a motorcycle. (He has since shaved off his beard in favor of a biker mustache, started lifting weights again, and bought a cherry-colored Mazda RX-8 with double spoilers, custom alloy wheels, and black-and-red racing seats.) He has also written a memoir, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, which came out in Germany last year. An English version, with a foreword by rocker Patti Smith, is scheduled to be released in the United States in April, and a movie deal is already in the works. The television newsmagazine 60 Minutes has negotiated an interview exclusive timed to correspond with the book's release. (Kurnaz declined to be interviewed for this story because of that arrangement.)

A plainspoken account, Five Years of My Life focuses on the daily humiliations and surreal texture of life at Guantanamo, a place where iguanas roam the cell blocks and trials take place in the same rooms as interrogations. In the closing pages, Kurnaz explains why he chose to speak out. "It's important that our stories are told," he writes. "We need to counter the endless [official] reports written in Guantanamo itself. We have to speak up and say: I tried to hand back my blanket and got four weeks in solitary confinement." But Kurnaz doesn't dwell on his own suffering. Instead he turns the spotlight on the plight of other detainees, including the ones who are still being held. "While I sit here eating chocolate bars and peeling mandarin oranges, they are being beaten and starved," he writes. "I can eat, drink and sleep much the same as I did five years ago, but I never forget that people are being abused in Cuba."

Click here for a timeline of Kurnaz's case.

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/murat-kurnaz.html

New Statesman:
The war that changed us

It began with a blinding flash and promises of speedy victory. Five years on the mission far from accomplished. Neal Ascherson opens this Iraq Special

Neal Ascherson
Published 13 March 2008

The show began with blinding flashes, heart-stopping thunder, sparks which had been palaces and hovels soaring up to decorate the night sky. The Shock and Awe military tattoo had started. It was only a few weeks until its climax as the great black evil one, suddenly floodlit, bowed to the crowd and fell slowly forward on his face.

Author, director! In flier's kit, backed by a chorus line of cute American sailors, the boss advanced downstage to harvest the cheers. "Mission accomplished!" But the noise was not all applause and was not coming from the audience and seemed, improperly, to persist. Something was wrong. Would the audience please remain in their seats until a technical problem with the exit was sorted? We are still there.

What have we done to Iraq? Until we are allowed to escape from the arena, it is impossible to look back and guess. What has Iraq done to us? Here it is easier to study the damage. The fearful act of 9/11, the utter success with which that spear of hatred pierced America's heart, left the United States a smaller country. But by joining in the retaliations for that act, Britain also became smaller. "Britishness", supposed to be a brand or a list of values, was already in a poor state. Iraq - and Afghanistan - diminished the probity and reliability of the United Kingdom in almost all its overseas dealings. In European but also Atlantic affairs, the UK has become a slighter, less interesting partner in the past five years.

At home, if that's the right term for a house that has become so draughty and noisy, democracy has diminished. In the vapid lists of "British values" served up by the Prime Minister and his supporters, "fair play" always recurs. It is not fair for civilians in Peterborough to abuse RAF men and women in uniform because of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the government has not played fair with the public, or even with the politicians, over those wars. The citizens are aware that they have been lied to and misled, that the independence of the British state has been rendered hollow, that control of the executive through parliament has become an old bedtime story told to make them close their eyes, that the five-year narrative of British military success in those two countries - still ela borated every day in the media - is no more than propaganda to conceal long-term mission failure, that a people can march in millions and be ignored.

All Blair's fault? All caused by what John Major's election team used to call the "Tango Bravo Factor"? Not entirely. Every one of these offences originated before 2003, some in new Labour's handling of power from 1997 onwards and others inherent in Britain's archaic institutions. The importance of Iraq was that it violently accelerated democratic decay and linked it to a short-term crisis in government ethics. People felt the jar of wheels falling off and asked: "Why are we being lied to?" Then they asked: "Who will tell us the truth about these wars and speak for us?" It's wrong to say that nobody did. At different moments, individuals such as Sir Menzies Campbell, Robin Cook or George Galloway spoke truth both to power and to the people. But none of them was able to wipe away the sense of national and personal humiliation that Iraq has left behind. Too many big men and women, who could and should have spoken out too, kept silent.

So Britain is smaller abroad. For the first time (as many commentators have pointed out), Britain abandoned its balance-of-power tradition and identified completely with the foreign policy of a stronger state. The UK was not the victim of 9/11 and had no direct motive for armed conflict with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, let alone with Saddam Hussein. The decision to go along with American retaliation through regime change did not defend British interests in the region but sacrificed them.

Sir Geoffrey Howe, speaking a few days after 9/11, listed four conditions that could justify American military action. These were that the action should be deterrent or self- defensive and not retaliatory, that there should be hard evidence of the target's responsibility for the 2001 atrocity, that long-term international support could be guaranteed and that any attack should be accompanied by a new effort to solve the Palestine question. None was fulfilled. Blair did attempt to link a token Middle East initiative to his support for Bush over Iraq, but it was never - could never have been - taken seriously by either Israel or the United States.

In spite of these omens, Tony Blair took Britain to war. His rhetoric changed from "humanitarian rescue" to "the defence of civilisation and civilised values". Many voices, from foreign statesmen to our own Foreign Office, tried to warn him that George W Bush and the neocons were an entirely new species of American leadership. It would be a fatal mistake to think he could steer and persuade them, as he had persuaded Bill Clinton and his White House over Kosovo in 1999.

Uncritical loyalty

Blair ignored them. The statesmen shrugged. The Foreign Office put its face in its hands, suddenly feeling very old. For 50 years, British diplomats had acted as the rearguard, preventing Britain's long retreat from power from turning into a rout. Now this! In the years that followed, the FO watched Blair govern from a sofa; few if any of its careful, brilliant position papers reached him or his inner circle. The vital connections between a prime minister and the "great offices of state" - Foreign Office, Home Office, Treasury - fell into neglect.

What has Britain got out of the Iraq War? Uncritical loyalty is always abused. The June 2003 extradition agreement deman ded by the US is a horrifying abdication of legal self-respect. Perhaps the most shaming, revealing moment came when Donald Rumsfeld placed his tactless call to London on the eve of war, suggesting that British troops were not really needed for the fighting and that if Blair was under pressure at home, they could restrict themselves to rear-area guard duties. But the British did fight, and Britain's reward has been to be loathed and dismissed throughout the Muslim world as America's poodle, to suffer a small but very painful Islamic terror campaign at home, and to lose credibility in Europe. It is noticeable, for example, that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are now given much warmer welcomes in Washington than British visitors; German and French opposition to the Iraq War in 2003 turns out to have cost them nothing in American attention. (One of the most stubborn British myths is that the Americans want the UK to remain semi-detached from Europe, loyally preventing the formation of a rival superstate. On the contrary, the Americans have always wanted Britain to get closer in there, and they long for a coherent EU with a single voice.)

So the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the relationship less "special" than ever. Britain is weaker and more suspect in the world, and therefore less useful to American policies. Even the promised Trident warheads, token of renewed British nuclear dependence, are held up because the Americans have apparently used the wrong detergent to clean them up. Meanwhile, British forces have retreated into Basra airbase - the longest wait for a return flight in history - and in Afghanistan they do their best in a pointless war that everyone knows will be settled by a deal between the Pashtun and the other warlords.

How about the impact of the Iraq War on Britain itself? More accurately, how has this highly unpopular war affected the political climate, especially on the left? Organised pro-test against wars, especially expeditionary ones, has a long history in Britain. None of those movements succeeded, and yet the legacy of the protest has sometimes been as potent as that of the war itself. The "pro-Boer" campaigns against the South African war were a nursery for radical Liberal and socialist policies in the next generation. The "Law Not War" protest against the Suez invasion in 1956 abruptly ended the innocence of the postwar young, who had not imagined that the police could club women or that a British government could use criminal deceit to invade another nation. The Vietnam demonstrations were an induction into the social critique of the 1960s, even if the marchers learned little about Vietnam.

But "Not in My Name" was not the same as "Law Not War". To start with, these demonstrations were far bigger. They were also peaceful, marches of the non-marchers, whereas the Suez crowds tried to storm Downing Street and fought the police. Last, but very important, the Iraq protest had almost no articulation within parliamentary democracy. In 1956, the main opposition party - Labour, headed by Hugh Gait skell and Aneurin Bevan - used the whole labour movement infrastructure to pull people out on to the streets. In 2003, the Tories completely failed to recognise that the Iraq War was not a matter of "supporting our boys", but a menace to international order and a threat to their vision of Great Britain as a sovereign and independent state. A few - Malcolm Rifkind and Geoffrey Howe among them - saw what was at stake. But by refusing to support the Liberal Democrats and Labour rebels against the war, let alone to endorse the sea of outraged citizens with banners, the Conservatives betrayed their principles and, perhaps, their country.

Hate figures

War, which had rescued Margaret Thatcher's popularity in 1982, did the opposite for new Labour. Tony Blair became a hate figure in the same working-class parts of the United Kingdom that had once anchored their politics on hatred of Thatcher. But his grand "modernisation" project has driven ahead apparently undeterred; under Brown as under Blair as under Thatcher and Major, public services continue to be devolved to private speculators in spite of an accumulating pile of failures. New Labour's migration to the right leaves formations like the Scottish National Party commanding the social-democratic heights. At the 2005 elections, this convergence with the Tories made Tony Benn write in his diaries that "it's like three managing directors competing for the job of running Tesco's".

Has the war hastened the process? New Labour operates within exactly the same dialectic as Thatcher's governments did: as the state retreats from public service, so it advances its powers of social control. More "freedom of choice" for the consumer turns out to mean less freedom for the citizen. Fewer subsidies means more policemen. The Iraq War tempted the Blair governments and especially their home secretaries to snatch up the "war on terror" fantasy and use it to justify one repressive measure after another: extended detention without trial, new powers to search, bug and deport, the national identity database scheme, the crackdowns on asylum-seekers and immigrants, and all the other threatened or real erosions of civil liberty.

No wonder Baroness Thatcher said that new Labour was her greatest achievement. No wonder Tony Benn, looking back at the long disaster of the Iraq War, observes that, for the first time ever, the public has ended up to the left of a Labour government. Could this be the same party that, within months of winning power back in 1997, boldly handed over so much of the central state's authority to Scotland and Wales?

The outlook, after five years of war in Iraq and seven in Afghanistan, is dingy. Gordon Brown has missed the un repeatable opportunity for a new prime minister to de-nounce the war and promise "never again" for a slave rela tionship with an American president. Had he done so, he would have "spoken for Britain", transforming politics and his own prospects overnight. As it is, there are actually more Establishment voices in the US confessing that the Afghan and Iraq ventures are hopeless than there are in Britain. The longer we cling to false optimism, the harder it will be to extract ourselves from this mess.

And you happy, angry millions who flooded the streets five years ago - what do you feel now? "Not in My Name"? But a few days later it was done in your name, in spite of your passion. Blair pretended to take no notice; the next election did not throw him out; the killing has not stopped.

Does that mean that it's time to shrug and move on, that all passion against unjust war is futile? I don't think so. Demonstrations frighten governments more than they admit. Those who take part in them are changed, remembering a sense of strength that can last a lifetime. Meanwhile, the world has not moved on, but continues to burn; the madmen on all sides do not shrug but are laying new plots. Marchers with a passion for justice will be needed again, perhaps sooner than we think.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200803130025

Página/12:
Estrategia continental

Por Boaventura de Sousa Santos *
Jueves, 13 de Marzo de 2008

Acerca de la incursión del ejército colombiano en territorio de Ecuador, para eliminar a un grupo de guerrilleros de las FARC, parece estar todo dicho; más aún si aparece como un caso cerrado, exitosamente cerrado. Pero la verdad es que no es así. Lo que se revela sobre la situación es tan importante como lo que se oculta.

Primer ocultamiento: los procesos políticos en América latina cuestionan el control continental que EE.UU. necesita para garantizar el libre acceso a los recursos naturales de la región. Se trata de una amenaza a la seguridad nacional de EE.UU. que, ante el fracaso inminente de las respuestas “consensuadas” (libre comercio y concesiones para las bases militares), busca tener una respuesta firme y unilateral. Es decir, la guerra global contra el terrorismo llega al continente –llegó con el Plan Colombia pero la incursión en Medio Oriente provocó algún atraso– y asume aquí las mismas características que ha adquirido en otros continentes: utilizar un aliado privilegiado (sea éste Colombia, Israel o Pakistán), a quien a lo largo del tiempo se provee con la ayuda militar e información de espionaje sofisticado que lo pone al abrigo de represalias y le permite acciones dramáticas de bajo costo y un éxito certero; se incita al aliado al aislacionismo regional como precio a pagar por la alianza hegemónica.

La guerra contra el terrorismo incluye acciones muy visibles y otras secretas. Entre las últimas están los actos de espionaje y de desestabilización; Bolivia, Venezuela, la triple frontera (Paraguay, Brasil, Argentina) son los blancos privilegiados. En Bolivia, becarios norteamericanos de la Fundación Fulbright son llamados por la Embajada de EE.UU. para dar información sobre la presencia de cubanos y venezolanos y movimientos indígenas sospechados; mientras, los separatistas extremistas de Santa Cruz son entrenados en la selva colombiana por los paramilitares. Nuevos hechos: en las acciones de desestabilización pueden participar empresas militares y de seguridad privada, contratadas por EE.UU. bajo el paraguas del Plan Colombia que, además, las dota de inmunidad diplomática y por lo tanto impunidad ante la Justicia nacional.

Segundo ocultamiento: la verdadera amenaza no son las FARC. Son las fuerzas progresistas y, en especial, los movimientos indígenas y campesinos. De hecho, la permanencia de las FARC es fundamental para mantener la justificación de la guerra contra el terrorismo y generar un clima de miedo y una lógica bélica que bloquea el ascenso de las fuerzas progresistas, denominadas Polo Democrático de Colombia.

Por la misma razón, la intervención humanitaria a favor de los rehenes tuvo que ser desmantelada para que no obtuviera rédito político Hugo Chávez. Las fuerzas políticas progresistas amenazan la dominación territorial de EE.UU. a través de medidas que buscan fortalecer la soberanía de los países sobre los recursos naturales y alterar las reglas de la distribución de los beneficios de su explotación.

Pero la mayor amenaza proviene de aquellos que invocan derechos ancestrales sobre los territorios donde están esos recursos, o sea, de los pueblos indígenas. En relación con esto es elocuente el informe Tendencias Globales-2020, producido por el Consejo Nacional de Información de EE.UU., sobre los escenarios de amenaza a la seguridad nacional del país. En el informe se afirma que las reivindicaciones territoriales de los movimientos indígenas “representan un riesgo para la seguridad regional” y son uno de los “factores principales que determinarán el futuro latinoamericano”. Tomando como ejemplo las luchas indígenas de Chiapas, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile y sur de Argentina, se dice que “en el inicio del siglo XXI existen grupos indígenas radicales en la mayoría de los países latinoamericanos que en 2020 podrán crecer exponencialmente, obteniendo la adhesión de la mayoría de los pueblos indígenas... Estos grupos podrán establecer relaciones con grupos terroristas internacionales y grupos antiglobalización... que cuestionarán las políticas económicas de los liderazgos de origen europeo”.

A la luz de esto no sorprende que el presidente del Perú se pregunte “si no habrá una internacional terrorista en América latina”. Tampoco sorprende que actualmente centenares de líderes indígenas de Perú y de Chile hayan sido imputados al abrigo de leyes antiterroristas promulgadas en estos y otros países (por presión de EE.UU.) por defender sus territorios. La estrategia queda entonces delineada: transformar a los movimientos indígenas en la próxima generación de terroristas y, para enfrentarlos, seguir las recetas señaladas en el informe: tolerancia cero, refuerzos para gastos militares, estrechamiento de las relaciones con EE.UU. La responsabilidad de las fuerzas políticas progresistas es lograr que esta estrategia fracase.

* Doctor en Sociología del Derecho, profesor de la Universidad de Coimbra (Portugal).

© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar |Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-100577-2008-03-13.html

The Independent: More borrowing, more tax
on drivers and drinkers, but reward for pensioners

By Hamish McRae, Business Journalist of the Year
Thursday, 13 March 2008

If you want to understand what is happening don't listen to the words; look instead at the numbers. It was curious, wasn't it, listening to the Budget speech yesterday. The words were the same as in the previous 10 Budgets: the self-congratulation, the repeated references to stability, the announcements of footling little bits of spending and of targets for 2050 and the glossing over of the bad news in the big numbers. But the person saying those words was different. It was almost as though the new Chancellor was reading out a speech written by someone else, his predecessor. Indeed I suspect in large measure that is what happened.

For those of us trying to get to grips with what matters and what does not, this is good news. We don't need to learn how the new Chancellor thinks, for we can simply apply what we know about the old one. And the prime rule is to ignore the words and focus on the numbers. So what do they tell us?

Start with the economic forecast because if that goes wrong, everything else goes wrong too. Alistair Darling cut the growth forecast for this year to 1.75-2.25 per cent, and the one for 2009 to 2.25-2.75 per cent. The immediate comment of most people is that this is overoptimistic. The consensus forecast for 2008 is 1.7 per cent, so below the bottom end of the Treasury's range.

Actually I am not too bothered about that for two reasons. One is that the Treasury has a good record on forecasting growth, so its view deserves to be taken seriously. The other is that growth is running at 2 per cent annual rate, spot on the mid-point of the range, and looks set to continue for the first half of the year at least. What concerns me much more is the forecast for 2009. That seems to me to be far too optimistic. The consensus is predicting a slight lift to 1.9 per cent, and I would not be surprised if growth in 2009 turns out worse than 2008. Were that to happen we really would be in a jam.

We are in a jam already this year. Borrowing is going up and is projected to rise to £43bn, which is 3.2 per cent of GDP. That is higher than the Maastricht ceiling of 3 per cent, though this was not mentioned in the speech. But even this seems overoptimistic, particularly on the revenues side. The Treasury has a poor record on forecasting tax revenue and has, I think, made its habitual mistake again. It thinks, for example, that corporation tax will rise next year, from £47bn to £52bn. Can that really be right in the face of a global slowdown? It accepts that stamp duty will fall, but housing activity has already fallen by one third. It thinks VAT revenues will rise, from £80.5bn to £83.8bn, which sounds too optimistic.

All that is in the main tables in the Financial Statement and Budget Report. Have a look at the borrowing numbers, which take into account support for Northern Rock, and things get really scary. On page 200 of the FSBR, I saw that once you allow for Northern Rock they have to borrow £59.3bn in the coming financial year. Other odds and ends bring the number balloons to £78.8bn. That is the net financing requirement for 2008-09, see table C13, page 201. Yelp.

I find it bizarre that when there are these very big numbers that need to be explained, the Chancellor spends his speech talking about spending an extra £10m over five years on teaching science. It is insulting for him to think that the British public is so innumerate that we will be impressed by couple of million a year of spending and not need to have the £78.8bn of borrowing explained to us.

That is this coming year. Come 2009 it is all supposed to get better. Well, maybe it will. Maybe global growth will rebound. Maybe tax revenues will recover. Maybe borrowing will come back down. But that did not happen in the last global downturn, or the one before, or the one before that. Reality says the Government is going to end up borrowing a lot more over the next two or three years and that extra debt will hang over the country not just for the rest of this parliament but the one beyond that and the one beyond that.

Add in all the off-balance sheet liabilities, such as public-sector pensions and privately financed hospitals, and the British taxpayer faces a decade of slog coping with this mountain of debt. The trouble is, we have our own debts too.

©independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/
more-borrowing-more-tax-on-drivers-and-drinkers-but-reward-for-pensioners-794990.html

ZNet:
The Fall of the American Consumer

By Barbara Ehrenreich
March, 13 2008

How much lower can consumer spending go? The malls are like mausoleums, retail clerks are getting laid off, and AOL recently featured on its welcome page the story of man so cheap that he recycles his dental floss - hanging it from a nail in his garage until it dries out.

It could go a lot lower of course. This guy could start saving the little morsels he flosses out and boil them up to augment the children's breakfast gruel. Already, as the recession or whatever it is closes in, people have stopped buying homes and cars and cut way back on restaurant meals. They don't have the money; they don't have the credit; and increasingly they're finding that no one wants their money anyway. NPR reported on February 28 that more and more Manhattan stores are accepting Euros and at least one has gone Euros-only.

The Sharper Image has declared bankruptcy and is closing 96 U.S. stores. (To think I missed my chance to buy those headphones that treat you to forest sounds while massaging your temples!) Victoria's Secret is so desperate that it's adding fabric to its undergarments. Starbucks had no sooner taken time off to teach its baristas how to make coffee than it started laying them off.

While Americans search for interview outfits in consignment stores and switch from Whole Foods to Wal-Mart for sustenance, the world watches tremulously. The Australian Courier-Mail, for example, warns of an economic "pandemic" if Americans cut back any further, since we are responsible for $9 trillion a year in spending, compared to a puny $1 trillion for the one billion-strong Chinese. Yes, we have been the world's designated shoppers, and, if we fall down on the job, we take the global economy with us.

"Shop till you drop," was our motto, by which we didn't mean to say we were more compassion-worthy than a woman fainting at her work station in some Honduran sweatshop. It was just our proper role in the scheme of things. Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying. Remember Bush telling us, shortly after 9/11, to get out there and shop? It may have seemed ludicrous at the time, but what he meant was get back to work.

We took pride in our role in the global economy. No doubt it takes some skill to make things, but what about all the craft that goes into buying them - finding a convenient parking space at the mall, navigating our way through department stores laid out for maximum consumer confusion, determining which of our credit cards still has a smidgeon of credit in it? Not everyone could do this, especially not people whose only experience was stitching, assembling, wiring, and packaging the stuff that we bought.

But if we thought we were special, they thought we were marks. They could make anything, and we would dutifully buy it. I once found, in a party store, a baseball cap with a plastic turd affixed to its top and the words "shit head" on the visor. The label said "made in the Philippines" and the makers must have been convulsed as they made it. If those dumb Yanks will buy this ...

There's talk already of emergency measures, like making Christmas a weekly holiday, although this would require a level of deforestation that could leave Cheney with no quail to hunt.

More likely, there'll be a move to outsource shopping, just as we've already outsourced manufacturing, customer service, X-ray reading, and R & D. But to whom? The Indians are clever enough, but right now they only account for $600 million in consumer spending a year. And could they really be trusted to put a flat screen TV in every child's room, distinguish Guess jeans from a knock-off, and replace their kitchen counters on an annual basis?

And what happens to us, the world's erstwhile shoppers? The president recently observed, in one of his more sentient moments, that unemployment is "painful." But if a pink slip hurts, what about a letter from Citicard announcing that you've been laid off as a shopper? Will we fill our vacant hours twisting recycled dental floss onto spools or will we decide that, if we can't shop, we're going to have to shoplift?

Because we've shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16850

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Thursday, March 13, 2008

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