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The Bank
of North Dakota The Bank of North Dakota - the nation's only state-owned bank - might seem to be a relic. But now officials in other states are wondering if it is helping North Dakota sail through the national recession. Gubernatorial candidates in Florida and Oregon and a Washington state legislator are advocating the creation of state-owned banks in those states. A report prepared for a Vermont House committee last month said the idea had "considerable merit." Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore promotes the bank on his Web site. "There's a lot of hurt out there, a lot of states that are in trouble, and they're tying the Bank of North Dakota together with this economic success that we're having right now," said the bank's president, Eric Hardmeyer. Hardmeyer says he's gotten "tons" of inquiries about the bank's workings, including questions from officials in California, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Washington state. North Dakota has the nation's lowest unemployment rate at 4.4 percent, soaring oil production and a robust state budget surplus - but Hardmeyer says the bank isn't responsible for the prosperity. "We are a catalyst, perhaps, or maybe a
part of it," he said. "To put this at
our feet is flattering, but it frankly isn't true." The bank had almost $4 billion in assets and a $2.67 billion loan portfolio at the end of last year, according to its most recent quarterly financial report. It made $58.1 million in profits in 2009, setting a record for the sixth straight year. During the last decade, the bank funneled almost $300 million in profits to North Dakota's treasury. The bank has the advantage of being the repository for most state funds, which can be used for loans and occasional relief for private banks that need a jolt of cash during sluggish credit markets. "We think of ourselves as kind of a little mini-Federal Reserve," Hardmeyer said. The state earns roughly 0.25 percent less interest than state agencies would get from a commercial institution. The bank also pays no state or federal taxes and has no deposit insurance; North Dakota taxpayers are on the hook for any losses. The Bank of North Dakota was a cornerstone of the agenda of the Nonpartisan League, a farmers' political insurgency spawned by anger about outside control of North Dakota's credit and grain markets. Founded in 1915 by A.C. Townley, who became a Socialist Party organizer after he went broke raising flax in western North Dakota, the NPL advocated state-owned banks to provide low-interest farm loans, along with state flour mills, grain elevators, meatpacking houses and hail insurance. Supporters gained control of the legislature and the governorship within five years. The movement's power quickly waned, but two of its state-owned businesses survived - the Bank of North Dakota and a state flour mill and grain elevator in Grand Forks. From the 1940s until the early 1960s, the bank served mostly as a public funds depository and municipal bond buyer, said Rozanne Enerson Junker, author of a 1989 history of the bank. Its economic development activity has greatly expanded since. Gary Petersen, president of the Lakeside State Bank of New Town, a community on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in northwestern North Dakota, said the state bank is often willing to take a stake in local development projects. "In my experience, you make a contact with the (Bank of North Dakota), and their question is, 'How do we get this done?'" Petersen said. "They're not looking at ways to knock it down." Alerus Financial, a Grand Forks bank, has sold about $115 million of its $600 million loan portfolio to the Bank of North Dakota, both to spread its risk and provide itself with additional loan money, said Karl Bollingberg, Alerus' director of banking services. "If you're left to find other participating banks, that can be very challenging," he said. "They don't have the same interest that the Bank of North Dakota has in helping you to do deals." Mauro Guillen, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, said it is unlikely other states would open similar banks, in part because "the political culture here is very much against that kind of a thing." Some state and federal agencies, such as the Small Business Administration, already have economic development programs similar to those at the Bank of North Dakota, Guillen said. Bollingberg said the idea of other state-owned banks would also likely rouse opposition from private banks that wanted to keep their share of state deposits. "Because the (Bank of North Dakota) has been here so long, no banks know what it was like to have those deposits," he said. Hardmeyer said he, too, was always doubtful others would take up North Dakota's model, but now he's not so sure. "When I see what's going on around the country, it's not quite as far a leap as I thought it once was," he said. ___ On the Net: Bank of North Dakota: http://www.banknd.nd.gov/ |
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
Friday, 2 July 2010
By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people mostly children couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."
Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.
To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.
So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all.
If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand.
So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.
When I asked Merrill Lynch's spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that "serious analyses ... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.
How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.
So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate drenched in speculator-donations may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.
Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.
The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please make sure they never, never do that to us again."
Doubts Grow -
Dr David Kelly's"Suicide"
By Alex Newman
June 30, 2010 "New American" -- New
revelations in the suspicious suicide death
of whistle-blower Dr. David Kelly point even more
strongly to the possibility of murder and a subsequent
cover-up, according to an explosive investigation by the
British newspaper Daily
Mail.
David Kelly served as a United Nations
weapons-of-mass-destruction inspector in Iraq and as a
scientist for the United Kingdoms Ministry of
Defense. He was widely considered the worlds
foremost expert in chemical and biological weapons, even
serving as a proof reader on the British
governments intelligence report about Iraqi WMDs.
He disagreed with some of the claims and told his
superiors, but was ignored.
Seven years ago, a strange saga began when Kelly sparked
a massive scandal. He leaked details of the
governments WMD lies used to justify
invading Iraq to various journalists. His identity
was eventually revealed as the source, and Parliament
called him to testify for an investigation it was
conducting into the explosive allegations. Then, before
he could reveal even more devastating secrets, he turned
up dead.
The government, led by Prime Minister Tony Blair,
immediately quashed the regular coroners inquest
a legal requirement in cases like this. Instead,
it set up a much weaker inquiry, headed by
Lord Hutton, into the untimely death.
But as soon as the "investigation" concluded
that Kellys demise was a suicide caused
by a self-inflicted knife wound, the media began picking
the story apart, pointing out inconsistencies and asking
tough questions that still have not been answered
satisfactorily if they were addressed at all. The
inquiry has been labeled a whitewash and a
cover-up by numerous media outlets,
investigators, doctors, and researchers.
The two paramedics who were at the scene of Kellys
body went public with their belief that a severed
artery was not the cause of death, as the official report
had claimed. "I just think it is incredibly unlikely
that he died from the wrist wound we saw," paramedic
Vanessa Hunt told the British press. There just
wasn't a lot of blood. When someone cuts an artery,
whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps
everywhere." The other paramedic offered a similar
analysis.
A team of concerned scientists and doctors also banded
together to form the Kelly
Investigation Group. They, too, believed there
were serious deficiencies in the inquiry, saying the
official conclusion was highly improbable.
Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness
and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood
loss, three members of the group, all medical
specialists, wrote in a letter to the Guardian newspaper calling for the inquest
to be re-opened. To have died from haemorrhage [sic],
Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood
it is unlikely that he would have lost more than a
pint.
The team also noted that the alleged amount of pain pills
Kelly was said to have ingested would not have
contributed to his death. Only a part of one tablet was
actually found in his stomach.
Adding more doubt to the official story, documents
obtained through a Freedom of Information request showed
there were no finger prints on the knife Kelly supposedly
used to kill himself.
"Someone who wanted to kill themselves wouldn't go
to the lengths of wiping the knife clean of fingerprints,
said British Minister of Parliament
and current Transportation Secretary Norman Baker, who
wrote a book about Kelly claiming he was killed because
he might reveal more about the lies used in the run-up to
the invasion of Iraq. "It is just very suspicious.
It is one of the things that makes me think Dr. Kelly was
murdered. The case should be re-opened."
A police spokesperson acknowledged the lack of
fingerprints, but said it does not change the
official explanation.
Suspicions in the case grew even more after it was
revealed earlier this year that documents in the official
investigation had been secretly classified by the British
government for an astonishing 70 years, an unprecedented
move that fanned the flames of skepticism. All medical,
scientific, and photographic records were totally sealed
by Lord Hutton, including the post mortem.
This inexplicable secrecy can excite only suspicion
that the authorities have something very bad indeed to
hide, noted Melanie Phillips in a report for
the Daily Mail. I myself have met people
familiar with the shadowy world in which Dr Kelly moved
who are certain he was murdered. Another Daily
Mail article reported that the legal basis for the gag
order has baffled experts accustomed to such
matters.
Researchers have raised countless problems with the
official story too many to go over in
detail in one article. But some of the new information
collected by the Daily Mail in a more recent
article entitled Dr David
Kelly: The damning new evidence that points to a cover-up
by Tony Blair's government is worth recounting.
Our new revelations include the ambiguous nature of
the wording on Dr Kellys death certificate; the
existence of an anonymous letter which says his
colleagues were warned to stay away from his funeral; and
an extraordinary claim that the wallpaper at Dr
Kellys home was stripped by police in the hours
after he was reported missing - but before his body was
found, the paper reported, noting that its rigorous
and thorough investigation had turned up
evidence which raises still more disturbing questions.
The death certificate, only recently obtained, used
peculiar wording in the box meant for entering the place
of death. Instead of naming it, the certificate said
Kelly was found dead at Harrowdown Hill.
Experts say the wording alone is enough to open another
investigation, especially since there are numerous other
irregularities involving the location of Kellys
body (like heat-sensing helicopters that, based on the
official story, should have found the body when flying
over).
The death certificate also states that a coroners
inquest was performed. But it wasnt. It also lacks
a doctors or coroners signature, something
all death certificates in the U.K. are required to have.
"This death certificate is evidence of a failure
properly to examine the cause of Dr Kellys death.
It is evidence of a pre-judgment of the issue. In a
coroners inquest the cause of death would not be
registered until the whole inquiry had been completed. As
we see here, the cause of death was registered before the
Hutton Inquiry had finished, said former coroner
and law expert Dr. Michael Powers QC, who aims to have a
thorough investigation conducted.
This is remarkable, he told the paper.
To my mind it is evidence that the inquiry into Dr
Kellys death was window-dressing because the
conclusion had already been determined.
On top of the Hutton Inquirys many obvious
shortcomings, a letter received last month by one of the
doctors involved in the Kelly Investigation Group claims
Kellys colleagues were warned not to attend his
funeral. Kellys widow also said police came to the
house and tore off wallpaper, possibly searching for
listening devices, shortly after Kelly was reported
missing, but prior to the discovery of his body.
Authorities refuse to comment on the allegation.
The doctors investigating the suspicious death said
concern about Dr Kellys death will continue
to deepen until a full coroners inquest is heard,
the Daily Mail reported, adding that if such an inquest
is performed, Tony Blair might well be expected to
testify about why he went to such lengths to avoid
the normal, rigorous and respected course of this
countrys law.
Concluding, the paper noted that Blairs reputation,
as well as the reputation of the British legal system,
will continue to suffer until a proper investigation is
conducted, which is the only way the whole truth
about the Kelly affair, however uncomfortable, will
emerge.
Now, after all these years, there are hints that the
truth may finally come out. The new British Attorney
General announced earlier this month that he is
considering re-opening the investigation. Meanwhile, the
new Justice Secretary is reportedly contemplating releasing some of
the records in the case that currently remain classified.
Whether it will happen has been a matter of intense
speculation in the British press, but if these crucial
questions are ever to be resolved, a proper investigation
is a must.
Further
Testimony: DAVID KELLYS , A POLITICAL DEATH ?
By Miles Goslet
Dramatic
new testimony has heaped pressure on ministers to reopen
the investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly.
A
female colleague claims that the UN weapons inspector
could not have committed suicide as claimed, as he was
too weak to cut his own wrist.
Mai
Pedersen, a U.S. Air Force officer who served with Dr
Kelly's inspection team in Iraq, said a hand and arm
injury meant that the 59-year-old even 'had difficulty
cutting his own steak'.
Dr Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in 2003
after the Government exposed him as the source of a BBC
report questioning Tony Blair's government's case for war
in Iraq.
In
a letter to the new Attorney General Dominic Grieve
through her lawyers, Miss Pedersen also said Dr Kelly had
difficulty swallowing pills, casting serious doubt on the
Hutton Inquiry conclusion that he swallowed 29
painkillers before slitting his left wrist.
Campaigners
hope her extraordinary intervention will convince
ministers of the need for a new investigation. Mr Grieve
has already indicated that he believes the case could
merit a further inquiry.
Had
she testified at the Hutton Inquiry, Miss Pedersen would
have revealed that in the months leading up to his death
Dr Kelly was unable to use his right hand for basic tasks
requiring any strength such as slicing food because of a
painful elbow injury.
Miss
Pedersen says he would therefore have had to be a 'contortionist'
to have killed himself by slashing his left wrist, as
Lord Hutton concluded in 2004.
She
called for a 'formal, independent, and complete' review
of the case at the earliest opportunity, saying it was
the only way to achieve 'closure'.
The
letter said the absence of a full coroner's inquest into
Dr Kelly's death and 'perpetual secrecy' meant it was '
crying out' for further scrutiny.
By Dr.ED WALSH
The country is ill-served by the lack of science or business expertise among its politicians
THE DEMOCRATIC institutions of the Republic remain remarkably unaltered since the foundation of the State. This may be seen as an achievement, and in ways it is, but it provokes the question whether these are still the best choice for the governance of Ireland.
The STV (single transferable vote) electoral system, favoured in the English-speaking world when adopted by the first Dáil, is still retained, even though abandoned across the globe by every other democracy with the exception of Malta. Almost all the states of post-second World War Europe, and the new democracies of central Europe, have abandoned 19th-century parliamentary structures in favour of systems more fitting to these times. None has opted for the Irish system.
The intense crisis that now engulfs us highlights the deficiencies of Irelands system of governance. Talent is the glaring deficit. The 15 people who currently serve as Government Ministers are well-intentioned, hard-working people but generally undistinguished in terms of expertise, experience or achievement. Not one of the many Irish people who have proven themselves internationally serves in government.
Our antiquated electoral system results in the election of the large bulk of members of the Irish parliament from just some 1,000 people: members of local authorities. While a local authority may be a source of popular people, it is an unlikely source of the experienced leadership and world-class talent necessary to guide an advanced democracy.
There is some management experience at the Cabinet table: Éamon Ó Cuív managed a Gaeltacht co-operative; Eamon Ryan has a commerce degree and ran a bicycle shop and tour business; and John Gormley owned a language school. But more than half the members were in education (six teachers, one guidance counsellor, one lecturer), one is a social worker and three are lawyers.
In so far as I can establish, only one member of the Government is scientifically literate: Éamon Ó Cuív has a bachelors degree in science. I can find no evidence that a Fianna Fáil Minister has a business qualification. A company with such an unimpressive board of directors would find it difficult to attract investment or be taken seriously.
An analysis of Opposition front benches suggests that a change of government would not much alter the talent and experience deficit. Similar large numbers of primary and secondary teachers would dominate.
A Run-a-Sweetshop Rating gives a simple indicator of Government and frontbench management talent. Ten points are awarded for managing an organisation, even a sweet shop, and five points for being self employed. The Government gets 30 per cent, the new Fine Gael front bench is slightly ahead at 38 per cent (unchanged from the previous one), and Labour comes last with 21 per cent.
Labour takes the lead at 28 per cent in a Scientific Literacy Rating; Fine Gael at 15 per cent and the Government at 7 per cent. These ratings compare rather starkly with that for the Standing Committee of the Chinese Politburo, which scores 100 per cent: each of its nine members is scientifically literate.
None of the new democracies of central Europe chose to adopt the Irish electoral system. All decided to introduce some form of list system, which provides a means by which national movers and shakers can be brought into government. Typically half the seats in parliament are reserved for those who are elected, as in our case, from local constituencies and the other half from lists of well-known national figures.
As a result, when the prime minister goes to appoint ministers a wide range of proven talent and experience can be drawn upon. The list system reduces clientism and ministers can take difficult decisions with less concern about re-election. They are released from the distraction and burden of constituency work and can give undivided attention to the ministerial job and the challenge of government.
In recent years a talent deficit has developed within the Civil Service. Many of the gifted school-leavers who once competed for places in the Civil Service opted instead for the more lucrative opportunities in the private sector. This reduced influx of talent has been aggravated by private-sector head-hunting that vacuumed some of the most capable and smartest from the middle and senior ranks of the service.
Unlike the 1980s, we now have a Civil Service seriously weakened by loss of talent and leadership and disoriented by the decentralisation gambit. As a result Ministers are less likely to receive the firm guidance, astute advice and, when appropriate, the direct opposition of their civil servants.
The repeated statements made by Charlie McCreevy and his colleagues that the government, and not the civil servants, ran the country, showed either a lack of knowledge of the legal position or a disregard for it. The responsibility for safeguarding public funds and for the efficient administration of a government department lies not with the minister but with its secretary general, the head of the department.
Provision is made for facing down a minister who exceeds his or her legal authority and informing the comptroller and auditor general. In recent years, since the Haughey era, few civil servants appear to have had the courage or confidence to confront a wayward minister.
Many of Charlie McCreevys If I have it, Ill spend it initiatives could have been frustrated by a confident Civil Service. In particular the decentralisation policy, which was blatantly party-political and not in the interest of the efficient administration of government departments and deserved to have been stopped in its tracks.
Decentralisation has proven highly inefficient and a cause of distraction to the leadership of government departments. Many secretaries general have been faced with the disintegration of their teams and the loss of corporate memory. I understand that one found himself with some 40 replacement staff. The arrivals lacked the expertise to do the job and many were of an age when they had little interest in finding out.
The boards of public bodies also suffer a talent deficit. It is estimated that 2,300 people serve on the boards of the 188 national non-commercial State agencies. Many of these are ministerial appointees. Quality varies considerably depending on the minister. In some cases real effort is exerted to select capable and knowledgeable people.
However, it has been my experience that the best are more likely to be bypassed in favour of party faithful. Such people are often organisational liabilities. The solution is to limit ministerial choice to lists of competent people drawn up by an independent commission.
The current national crisis represents an opportunity for radical reform of governance and public administration in Ireland. Ireland needs it: the quality of governance cannot exceed the quality of those who govern.
Dr Edward Walsh is founding president of the University of Limerick
The IFI are delighted to be embarking
on a long-term collaboration with the Experimental Film
Club starting with a selection of film called Silent
Q. This programme brings the viewer on an unorthodox
path through some familiar areas of popular alternative
television comedy and the filmmaking of the 20th century
avant-garde. The programme includes films by Jonas
Mekas, Richard Lester, René Claire and Francis Picabia.
The groundbreaking comedy of the Goons
in England in the 1950s and the New York cultural scene
of the 1960s and '70s, as viewed through the camera of
Jonas Mekas, are rooted in well documented eras, but not
often experienced in the same breath. Their avant-garde
forbears in Dada from decades earlier may be equally
exhaustively documented, but seeing these works alongside
their descendants reveals the skeleton of Modernist
progression in a more visceral manner.
The programme starts with René
Clairs 1924 short film Entracte featuring
a host of artists creating a loose narrative string of
surreal comedic gags including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp
playing chess on a rooftop, a bearded ballerina and a
camel drawing a hearse. Two Richard Lester films, The
Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film and the
first episode of A Show Called Fred from
the 50s and 60s featuring Spike Milligan and Peter
Sellers capture the way Surrealist and Dadaist principles
were being co-opted into creating mainstream alternative
comedy. The final film Scenes from the life of
Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections by
Jonas Mekas lacks overt comedy but creates an
impressionistic and diary-like procession of cultural
characters from Andy Warhols New York scene
including many appearing at the first public performance
of the Velvet Underground.
The programme as a whole offers a
fascinating reflection on the use of random devices to
invert social hierarchies and this notion of processions
- of well known figures of a time and place in
Mekas work and more literally in the sense of the
funeral processions of Entracte and the
chasing campers in Lesters The Running, Jumping,
and Standing Still Film.
SILENT Q PROGRAMME
Total running time approx 87 mins
RENE CLAIRE & FRANCIS PICABIA'S "ENTR'ACTE"
(1924, 14 mins, b&w, 35mm screened from DVD)
RICHARD LESTER'S "THE RUNNING, JUMPING AND
STANDING STILL FILM
(1960, 11 mins, b&w, 16mm)
RICHARD LESTER'S "A SHOW CALLED FRED"
(1956, 25 mins, b&w, 16mm)
JONAS MEKAS' "SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF
ANDY WARHOL: FRIENDSHIPS AND INTERSECTIONS
(1963, 37 mins)
Tickets are available to buy at the
IFI Box Office on 01 679 3477, in person, or by clicking
[here].
U.S.A.
Guess Who Wants to Kill the Internet?
by Maidhc Ó Cathail / June 30th, 2010
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/06/guess-who-wants-to-kill-the-internet/
It would be hard to think of anyone who has done more to undermine American freedoms than Joseph Lieberman.
Since 9/11, the Independent senator from Connecticut has introduced a raft of legislation in the name of the "global war on terror" which has steadily eroded constitutional rights. If the United States looks increasingly like a police state, Senator Lieberman has to take much of the credit for it.
On October 11, 2001, exactly one month after 9/11, Lieberman introduced S. 1534, a bill to establish a Department of Homeland Security. Since then, he has been the main mover behind such draconian legislation as the Protect America Act of 2007, the Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, and the proposed Terrorist Expatriation Act, which would revoke the citizenship of Americans suspected of terrorism. And now the senator from Connecticut wants to kill the Internet.
According to the bill he recently proposed in the Senate, the entire global internet is to be claimed as a "national asset" of the United States. If Congress passes the bill, the US President would be given the power to "kill" the internet in the event of a "national cyber-emergency." Supporters of the legislation say this is necessary to prevent a "cyber 9/11? yet another myth from the fearmongers who brought us tales of "Iraqi WMD" and "Iranian nukes."
Lieberman's concerns about the internet are not new. The United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which Lieberman chairs, released a report in 2008 titled "Violent Islamist Extremism, The Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat." The report claimed that groups like al-Qaeda use the internet to indoctrinate and recruit members, and to communicate with each other.
Immediately after the report was published, Lieberman asked Google, the parent company of You Tube, to "immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations." That might sound like a reasonable request. However, as far as Lieberman is concerned, Hamas, Hezbollah and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are terrorist organizations.
It's hardly surprising that Lieberman's views on what constitute terrorism parallel those of Tel Aviv. As Mark Vogel, chairman of the largest pro-Israel Political Action Committee (PAC) in the United States, once said: "Joe Lieberman, without exception, no conditions is the No. 1 pro-Israel advocate and leader in Congress. There is nobody who does more on behalf of Israel than Joe Lieberman."
Lieberman has been well-rewarded for his patriotism to another country. In the past six years, he has been the Senate's top recipient of political contributions from pro-Israel PACs with a staggering $1,226,956.
But what is it that bothers Lieberman so much about the internet? Could it be that it allows ordinary Americans access to facts which reveal exactly what kind of "friend" Israel has been to its overgenerous benefactor? Facts which they have been denied by the pro-Israel mainstream media.
How much faith would American voters have in the likes of Lieberman, who claims that the Jewish state is their greatest ally, if they knew that Israeli agents planted firebombs in American installations in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to undermine relations between Nasser and the United States; that Israel murdered 34 American servicemen in a deliberate attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967; that Israeli espionage, most notably Jonathan Pollard's spying, has done tremendous damage to American interests; that five Mossad agents were filming and celebrating as the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001; that Tel Aviv and its accomplices in Washington were the source of the false pre-war intelligence on Iraq; and about countless other examples of treachery?
In his latest attempt to censor the internet, does Lieberman really want to protect the American people from imaginary cyber-terrorists? Or is he just trying to protect his treasonous cronies from the American people?
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. His work has been published by Al Jazeera Magazine, Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications.
afghanistan:
Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11.
Nothing.
None of the Afghans I interviewed in November and
December of 2001 had even heard of 9/11. None had heard
of Al Qaeda. Other journalists reported the same thing.
As far as I can tell, we attacked Afghanistan for fun. To
disrupt Iran and India. To test weapons that would be
used against Iraq. To test the resolve of the American
antiwar movement. And to build an oil and gas pipeline
between Central and South Asia.
Ted Rall. Information Clearing House
Not because of 9/11.
What Is To Be Done ?
by Frank Scott
Israels most recent outrage has
meant harsh criticism from almost everywhere but
the USA. Our captive nation status continues as those who
usually echo our commands express embarrassment at
the conduct of the worlds most self righteous
regime. But Americans who demand that Israel come to its
senses need to come to their own. Nothing about Israel
will change until everything about Americas
uncritical support for Israel changes.
The blanket of distortion that covers
any Israeli crime with tales of savage terrorists
bent on annihilation were fully employed once again in
this case. When will this idiocy end? Will we hear that
the concrete on those ships was to be used by Hamas to
construct gas chambers and crematoria to carry out its
plot to exterminate the Jewish people? Continuing the
attempt of all humanity that isn't Jewish to murder the
minority of humanity that is? Under the control of
Ahmadinejad of Iran? And given the incredible garbage
that fills their heads and passes for news of the world,
how many unfortunate Americans might believe such
nonsense?
Had Iran attacked a ship in
international waters and killed nine people, the unholy
trinity of Obama-Biden-Clinton would be screeching
terrorism to the high heavens and
unleashing military violence on that nation. Shamefully,
they express blatant support or cowardly avoidance
of criticism when Israel responds to protest
against its racist rule by killing innocents and claiming
self defense. Pressure must be exercised on that renegade
nation but expecting it to come from our government under
its present status amounts to praying that
extraterrestrials will save our planet.
We need to challenge and transform the
American government and not continue useless calls for
morally just behavior from an Israeli state founded on
immorality and injustice. And for all its claims of
uniqueness , why should it be any different from the rest
of what is called western civilization? A
major part of that civilizations rise has been the
near total destruction of indigenous people while
claiming divine right and racial superiority in
colonizing every corner of the world. That world is now
under threat to the survival of all its people, as
clearly outlined by representatives of the global
majority at the Cochabamba conference . We need to heed
their call for action from the human community before it
is destroyed by the forces of division and racial
superiority whose time may be ending but who may bring
the end time for everyone else if they are
not brought under control by a united global people.
As Israels isolation grows its near
lunatic leadership is likely to become even more
unpredictably dangerous. But Americans who wish for
change need to direct their demands at the American
government . We must end foolish support for alleged
liberals and conservatives who battle viciously over how
best to help corporate capital at the expense of the
people but always come together in passionate unity
to support a foreign country and squander billions of
dollars and thousand of lives in foreign wars that
endanger the entire population here at home . All of them
need to be thrown out of office, impeached for
dereliction of duty or tried for treason. In acting
against our interests and for a foreign country they
generate more hatred for America with each
subservient act of obedience to a lobby that buys them
off and makes total mockery of our supposed democracy in
the process.
How much more can we push people to the
edge by acting as enabling therapist to a crazed state
whose American political supporters reduce us to nothing
remotely resembling a democratic nation? The next
attempted terror bomber may not be as incompetent as
the last, and there may be more after that if we do not
end our suppression of foreigners who strive for
their own freedom, while we take more freedom away from
the American people and threaten them with future
suffering beyond anything imagined now. Had that Times
Square bomber learned his craft in the USA, where Timothy
McVey learned how to kill 168 at Oklahoma City, hundreds
might have died in New York.
The lunatic fringe in Israel has become the
mainstream and armed with nuclear weapons and a cultural
narrative of eternally imminent destruction, it is a
threat to everyone and not just those in the area.
Control needs to be exercised but it will not happen
if Americans demonstrate in front of Israeli
embassies or missions. We need demonstrations to be
lodged at the offices of the alleged representatives of
the American people, with boycotts, divestitures and sanctions
against those who use our taxes, our military and our
reputation among nations to support everything
Israel does at the moral, financial and existential
expense of this nation. Those who still think appealing
to one of the two wings of the capitalist ruling party
will make a difference need to be replaced by those
who truly want radical change in this lifetime and
not in some dreamland of a fairy tale future.
There is a global struggle between
people who stand for equality of all and those who
demand the superiority of only some. The western
capitalist domination of the world is ending but its
decline becomes more dangerous a process as
mother earth suffers the strains of accumulating
private profits at the enormous cost of
humanitys loss. Palestine's striving for justice is
a major part of that struggle but it will not end
successfully until those in this country who
support a foreign state at the expense of America are
rooted out and replaced. Only democracy will help
bring peace and security to the planet, including
Palestine and all its people who wish to live as equals.
There is no hope for the cult of superiority and the
sooner we realize it is headquartered in our government,
the sooner we avoid our own demise.
Lara
Logan, You Suck
By Matt Taibbi
June 29, 2010 "Rolling Stone" -- - Lara Logan,
come on down! You're the next guest on Hysterical
Backstabbing Jealous Hackfest 2010!
I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."
Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag. And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him. According to Logan, that's sneaky and journalists aren't supposed to be sneaky:
"What I find is the most telling thing about what Michael Hastings said in your interview is that he talked about his manner as pretending to build an illusion of trust and, you know, he's laid out there what his game is That is exactly the kind of damaging type of attitude that makes it difficult for reporters who are genuine about what they do, who don't I don't go around in my personal life pretending to be one thing and then being something else. I mean, I find it egregious that anyone would do that in their professional life."
When I first heard her say that, I thought to myself, "That has to be a joke. It's sarcasm, right?" But then I went back and replayed the clip no sarcasm! She meant it! If I'm hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, "Excuse me, fellas, I know we're all having fun and all, but you're saying things that may not be in your best interest! As a reporter, it is my duty to inform you that you may end up looking like insubordinate douche bags in front of two million Rolling Stone readers if you don't shut your mouths this very instant!" I mean, where did Logan go to journalism school the Burson-Marsteller agency?
But Logan goes even further that that. See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn't even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an "element of trust" that you're supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he's got to be able to trust that you're not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?
True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?
And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan's own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world's largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.
But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon's biggest contractors?
Does the fact that the country is basically barred from seeing dead bodies on TV, or the fact that an embedded reporter in a war zone literally cannot take a shit without a military attaché at his side (I'm not joking: while embedded at Camp Liberty in Iraq, I had to be escorted from my bunk to the latrine) really provide the working general with the security and peace of mind he needs to do his job effectively?
Apparently not, according to Lara Logan. Apparently in addition to all of this, reporters must also help out these poor public relations underdogs in the Pentagon by adhering to an "unspoken agreement" not to embarrass the brass, should they tilt back a few and jam their feet into their own mouths in front of a reporter holding a microphone in front of their faces.
Then there's the part
that made me really furious: Logan hinting that Hastings
lied about the damaging material being on the record:
"Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that
there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that
just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me
I
mean, I know these people. They never let their guard
down like that. To me, something doesn't add up here. I
just I don't believe it."
I think the real meaning of that above quote is made clear in conjunction with this one: "There are very good beat reporters who have been covering these wars for years, year after year. Michael Hastings appeared in Baghdad fairly late on the scene, and he was there for a significant period of time. He has his credentials, but he's not the only one. There are a lot of very good reporters out there. And to be fair to the military, if they believe that a piece is balanced, they will let you back."
Let me just say one thing quickly: I don't know Michael Hastings. I've never met him and he's not a friend of mine. If he cut me off in a line in an airport, I'd probably claw his eyes out like I would with anyone else. And if you think I'm being loyal to him because he works for Rolling Stone, well let's just say my co-workers at the Stone would laugh pretty hard at that idea.
But when I read this diatribe from Logan, I felt like I'd known Hastings my whole life. Because brother, I have been there, when some would-be "reputable" journalist who's just been severely ass-whipped by a relative no-name freelancer on an enormous story fights back by going on television and, without any evidence at all, accusing the guy who beat him of cheating. That's happened to me so often, I've come to expect it. If there's a lower form of life on the planet earth than a "reputable" journalist protecting his territory, I haven't seen it.
As to this whole "unspoken agreement" business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she's like pretty much every other "reputable" journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she's supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you're covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard? On the campaign trail, I watch reporters nod solemnly as they hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars candidates X and Y and Z collect from the likes of Citigroup and Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland, and it blows my mind that they never seem to connect the dots and grasp where all that money is going. The answer, you idiots, is that it's buying advertising! People like George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, and General McChrystal for that matter, they can afford to buy their own P.R. and they do, in ways both honest and dishonest, visible and invisible.
They don't need your help, and you're giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. Disgustingly, that's really what it comes down to. Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly, they want to be able to say they had that beer with Hillary Clinton in a bowling alley in Scranton or whatever, that it colors their whole worldview. God forbid some important person think you're not playing for the right team!
Meanwhile, the people who don't have the resources to find out the truth and get it out in front of the public's eyes, your readers/viewers, you're supposed to be working for them and they're not getting your help. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan? Is it worth all the bloodshed and the hatred? Who are the people running this thing, what is their agenda, and is that agenda the same thing we voted for? By the severely unlikely virtue of a drunken accident we get a tiny glimpse of an answer to some of these vital questions, but instead of cheering this as a great break for our profession, a waytago moment, one so-called reputable journalist after another lines up to protest the leak and attack the reporter for doing his job. God, do you all suck!
Copyright 2010 Rolling Stone
******************************************
UPDATE ON GULF OIL:
Page last updated at 00:42 GMT, Friday, 9 July 2010 01:42 UK
By Katia Moskvitch
Russian-owned submersibles would be able to cap the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain of one of the vessels has said.
The skipper was speaking as two of the subs - which can dive to 6,000m - started a campaign of exploration at the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia.
He added that there was still time for the subs to help BP with the disaster.
The subs are searching for gas hydrates - a potential alternative fuel source - on the bed of Baikal.
Yevgenii Chernyaev told BBC News that the problem had to be addressed at the highest level.
Two oval-shaped submersibles have recently started their third season of exploration in Baikal - the world's deepest lake.
Anatoly Sagalevich of Russia's Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, which owns the vessels, said that he had an informal conversation with a BP representative asking if Mirs would be able to help stop the leak.
But he said there was no official request and no real discussions about the matter.
A BP spokesman told BBC News that the company had not had any formal contact with the Russians.
"We've had over 120,000 people come up with ideas," he said in an e-mail.
"We are looking through all of these to see which are viable. If [the Russians] want to contact us (or may have done so through some other channel), we can evaulate their idea."
Oil has been leaking from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico since a BP-operated drilling platform, Deepwater Horizon, exploded and sank in April.
And though BP says it is now able to gather some 10,000 barrels of oil a day, using a device that siphons oil up to surface ships, thousands of barrels of oil continue to gush daily from the ocean floor.
The US administration has already called the leak the biggest environmental catastrophe in the country's history.
Mr Chernyaev said that his team had held numerous discussions about the oil spill in the Gulf and the Russians would be ready to come to the rescue - but only if everything was done properly.
The subs have discovered reserves of gas hydrates on the bottom of the lake
Standing on a barge that transports the two subs after their submersion, the Mir-2 captain underlined that the subs were probably the only deep-sea vessels in the world capable of stopping the leak.
"Our subs are unique. There are two of them and they can submerge and work simultaneously. Also, they are powerful enough to work with any other additional equipment.
"There are only four vessels in the world that can go down to 6,000m - the Mirs, French Nautile and Japanese Shinkai. The Mirs are known to be the best, and we have a very experienced team of specialists," he said.
But Mr Chernyaev added that such an operation would have a chance of succeeding only if BP or the US government asked the Russian government to join efforts to stop the leak.
Mr Chernyaev said the problem had to be addressed at the highest level
"It should all be decided on the government level. Asking [Anatoly] Sagalevich [of Russia's Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, which owns the subs] to simply bring the Mirs over is nonsense. Even though we're able to go to much greater depths than where the damaged well is located, we wouldn't be able to do much on our own.
"We need a team of international specialists and we have to know all the details and probably even build a special device to attach to the subs, and all this needs time," said Mr Chernyaev.
He explained that the subs had already worked in much harsher conditions, such as the Arctic.
The submersible's pilot also said that the Russians were very surprised that BP and the US government had not asked them for help from the beginning.
"And we would not refuse to help, even though for us it would be very complicated, especially right now, when we're already working on Baikal. But it doesn't look like anyone seriously wants our help," he added.
Mr Chernyaev was one of the pilots on the first manned descent to the seabed under the geographic North Pole, carried out using the Mir mini-submarines. The expedition was widely reported as a bid to further Moscow's territorial claims in the Arctic.
The Mir submersibles can dive to a depth of about 6,000m
The two submersibles started their third season of exploration in Lake Baikal on 1 July. Over the last two expeditions, they found reserves of gas hydrates on the lake bed - which some consider a possible alternative fuel source of the future.
Gas hydrates are usually formed in permafrost or deep in the oceans. These are crystalline water-based solids; gases such as methane are trapped inside them within cages of hydrogen-bonded water molecules.
Baikal is the only freshwater basin where gas hydrates are found in its sediments. Scientists say the depth of the lake - reaching 1,637m - and extremely low temperatures of water near the lake bed both help gas hydrates form at depths exceeding 350m.
The current expedition aims to obtain important data about these findings, and is also searching for new life forms, which might be unique to Baikal.
Located in eastern Siberia, not far from the Mongolian border, the lake holds one-fifth of the planet's fresh water and many unique species of plants and animals, among them the nerpa - a species of freshwater seal.
********************************************************
UPDATE: 16TH JULY 2010
The US lawmakers at a Senate subcommittee hearing
on Thursday urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
to keep a closer eye on the dispersants used by BP to
properly analyze their effect on the ocean ecosystem in
the Gulf of Mexico.
"I don't want dispersants to be the Agent Orange of
this oil spill and I want to be assured on behalf of the
American people that this is OK to use and OK to use in
the amounts we're talking about," said Barbara
Mikulski, chairwoman of the science panel of the Senate
Appropriations subcommittee, reported Reuters.
The London-based energy giant applies Corexit to the
massive oil slick gathered both on the surface and
undersea in the disaster zone.
BP has so far used about 1.8 million gallons of the
chemical agent in the Gulf, an amount unprecedented in
the US history to be directly applied to the spill. The
EPA said preliminary results of a federal review of
Corexit pointed to no impact on marine life.
"The good news is that we've not seen signs of
environment impacts from the use of dispersants so far,"
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told legislators, urging
more scientific study. The EPA, however, is still
awaiting review of chemical's effect when mixed with oil,
and environmentalists are also concerned. "I suspect
that the toxicity impact will in fact be way worse than
reflected by the tests that are being conducted by EPA,"
because animals chosen for testing are less sensitive
than those inhabiting the Gulf, said Doug Rader, chief
oceans scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Gulf Oil Spill Could Go on Years and Years...
By F William Engdahl
25 June 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19660
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1276
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the worlds worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States could go on for years and years... many years. [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, What BP drilled into was what we call a migration channel, a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. [2] Ghawar, the worlds most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster,[3] Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocarbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planets most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April. In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well, Kutcherov adds. What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.[4]
He stresses, It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available. But taking into consideration information about the last BP giant discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.[5]
What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies myth of peak oil which claims that the world is at or near the peak of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Obama & BP Try to Hide
According to a report from Washington investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, the Obama White House and British Petroleum are covering up the magnitude of the volcanic-level oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and working together to limit BPs liability for damage caused by what can be called a mega-disaster.[6] Madsen cites sources within the US Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and Florida Department of Environmental Protection for his assertion.
Obama and his senior White House staff, as well as Interior Secretary Salazar, are working with BPs chief executive officer Tony Hayward on legislation that would raise the cap on liability for damage claims from those affected by the oil disaster from $75 million to $10 billion. According to informed estimates cited by Madsen, however, the disaster has a real potential cost of at least $1,000 billion ($1 trillion). That estimate would support the pessimistic assessment of Kutcherov that the spill, if not rapidly controlled, will destroy the entire coastline of the United States.
According to the Washington report of Madsen, BP statements that one of the leaks has been contained, are pure public relations disinformation designed to avoid panic and demands for greater action by the Obama administration., according to FEMA and Corps of Engineers sources. [7]
The White House has been resisting releasing any damaging information about the oil disaster. Coast Guard and Corps of Engineers experts estimate that if the ocean oil geyser is not stopped within 90 days, there will be irreversible damage to the marine eco-systems of the Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic Ocean, and beyond. At best, some Corps of Engineers experts say it could take two years to cement the chasm on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.[8]
Only after the magnitude of the disaster became evident did Obama order Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to declare the oil disaster a national security issue. Although the Coast Guard and FEMA are part of her department, Napolitanos actual reasoning for invoking national security, according to Madsen, was merely to block media coverage of the immensity of the disaster that is unfolding for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean and their coastlines.
The Obama administration also conspired with BP to hide the extent of the oil leak, according to the cited federal and state sources. After the oil rig exploded and sank, the government stated that 42,000 gallons per day were gushing from the seabed chasm. Five days later, the federal government upped the leakage to 210,000 gallons a day. However, submersibles monitoring the escaping oil from the Gulf seabed are viewing television pictures of what they describe as a volcanic-like eruption of oil.
When the Army Corps of Engineers first attempted to obtain NASA imagery of the Gulf oil slick, which is larger than is being reported by the media, it was reportedly denied the access. By chance, National Geographic managed to obtain satellite imagery shots of the extent of the disaster and posted them on their web site. Other satellite imagery reportedly being withheld by the Obama administration shows that what lies under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be the size of Mount Everest. This information has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public, according to Madsens sources.
The Corps of Engineers and FEMA are reported to be highly critical of the lack of support for quick action after the oil disaster by the Obama White House and the US Coast Guard. Only now has the Coast Guard understood the magnitude of the disaster, dispatching nearly 70 vessels to the affected area. Under the loose regulatory measures implemented by the Bush-Cheney Administration, the US Interior Departments Minerals Management Service became a simple rubber stamp, approving whatever the oil companies wanted in terms of safety precautions that could have averted such a disaster. Madsen describes a state of criminal collusion between Cheneys former firm, Halliburton, and the Interior Departments MMS, and that the potential for similar disasters exists with the other 30,000 off-shore rigs that use the same shut-off valves.[9]
Silence from Eco groups?... Follow the money
Without doubt at this point we are in the midst of what could be the greatest ecological catastrophe in history. The oil platform explosion took place almost within the current loop where the Gulf Stream originates. This has huge ecological and climatological consequences.
A cursory look at a map of the Gulf Stream shows that the oil is not just going to cover the beaches in the Gulf, it will spread to the Atlantic coasts up through North Carolina then on to the North Sea and Iceland. And beyond the damage to the beaches, sea life and water supplies, the Gulf stream has a very distinct chemistry, composition (marine organisms), density, temperature. What happens if the oil and the dispersants and all the toxic compounds they create actually change the nature of the Gulf Stream? No one can rule out potential changes including changes in the path of the Gulf Stream, and even small changes could have huge impacts. Europe, including England, is not an icy wasteland due to the warming from the Gulf Stream.
Yet there is a deafening silence from the very environmental organizations which ought to be at the barricades demanding that BP, the US Government and others act decisively.
That deafening silence of leading green or ecology organizations such as Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and others may well be tied to a money trail that leads right back to the oil industry, notably to BP. Leading environmental organizations have gotten significant financial payoffs in recent years from BP in order that the oil company could remake itself with an environment-friendly face, as in beyond petroleum the companys new branding.
The Nature Conservancy, described as the worlds most powerful environmental group,[10] has awarded BP a seat on its International Leadership Council after the oil company gave the organization more than $10 million in recent years.[11]
Until recently, the Conservancy and other environmental groups worked with BP in a coalition that lobbied Congress on climate-change issues. An employee of BP Exploration serves as an unpaid Conservancy trustee in Alaska. In addition, according to a recent report published by the Washington Post, Conservation International, another environmental group, has accepted $2 million in donations from BP and worked with the company on a number of projects, including one examining oil-extraction methods. From 2000 to 2006, John Browne, then BP's chief executive, sat on the CI board.
Further, The Environmental Defense Fund, another influential ecologist organization, joined with BP, Shell and other major corporations to form a Partnership for Climate Action, to promote market-based mechanisms (sic) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental non-profit groups that have accepted donations from or joined in projects with BP include Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and Audubon. That could explain why the political outcry to date for decisive action in the Gulf has been so muted.[12]
Of course those organizations are not going to be the ones to solve this catastrophe. The central point at this point is who is prepared to put the urgently demanded federal and international scientific resources into solving this crisis. Further actions of the likes of that from the Obama White House to date or from BP can only lead to the conclusion that some very powerful people want this debacle to continue. The next weeks will be critical to that assessment.
F. William Engdahl is the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order
Notes
[1] Vladimir Kutcherov, telephone discussion with the author, June 9, 2010.
[2] Ibid.
[3] F. William Engdahl, The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti, Global Research.ca, January 30, 2010, accessed in
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17287
[4] Vladimir Kutcherov, op. cit.
[5] Ira Leifer, Scientist: BP Well Could Be Leaking 100,000 Barrels of Oil a Day, June 9, 2010, accessed in
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/9/scientist_bp_well_could_be_leaking
[6] Wayne Madsen, The
Coverup: BPs Crude Politics and the Looming Environmental
Mega Disaster, May 6, 2010, accessed in http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spills/The-Cover-up-BP-s-Crude-Politics-and-the-
Looming-Environmental-Mega-Disaster.html
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Tim Findley, Natures Landlord, Range Magazine, Spring 2003.
[11] Joe Stephens, Nature Conservancy faces potential backlash from ties with BP, Washington Post, May 24, 2010, accessed in http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052302164.html
[12] Ibid.
Tribes, Oil Spill and News Black Out
By Monica Davis
Native people and people of color from around the nation are organizing for the benefit of individuals affected by the Gulf oil catastrophe. News wires are reporting that, "Teresa Two Bulls, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe has asked the National Congress of American Indians to hold a meeting in New Orleans to discuss how the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has affected Native Americans in the area."
(AP)
Last week, John Boyd, President of the National Association of Black Farmers called for a meeting with BP officials. Boyd says he is concerned that black and Native American farmers and fishermen are being overlooked in the search for farmers and fishermen whose lands and fishing grounds have been polluted.
In a statement, Boyd said, "We are calling for a meeting with British Petroleum (BP) officials to discuss the losses of black farmers and fishermen. Black farmers and fishermen must be compensated at the same levels as whites. We have finished last for too long when it comes to being compensated for our business and farm losses."
Despite the health risks associated with oil clean up, minorities want a piece of the millions of dollars in cleanup and remediation contracts. Only the EPA, headed by Lisa Jackson, an African-American, seems to have considerable small/minority/SBA Section 8(a) participation on services ranging from water and soil chemistry to waste disposal. But other services include everything from skimming to cleaning wildlife refuges to dredging to create huge artificial islands (favored by the Army Corps of Engineers and thus a bane to
fisherman) food and transportation services. Black-owned public relations and marketing firms like Bright Moments in New Orleans are awaiting proposal requests to do community outreach and messaging.
(Source: www.thegrio.com/opinion/have-black-contractors-been-sidelined-in-bp-spill-clean-up.php)
Activists want to make sure that people of color are compensated for their spill related business and income losses, and that the health issues associated with contact with oil polluted animals and water are considered. The double-edged sword of accepting and working an oil remediation contract isn't lost on prospective contract recipients.
There are no hard numbers on the demographics of the people hired by BP. A look at the legal form for participants in Vessels of Opportunity program shows inquiries into the make, model, vessel capacity, and fuel capacity of the boat being used, but no questions about the race, gender or even date of birth of the trainee. Patrick Kelley, a data collector for the U.S. Coast Guard, said that while the petrochemical giant has no other method to track those employed, they have developed an informal approach to demographics: checking the spelling of the names on the agreements. Using that method, he estimates that about 200 Vietnamese or Cambodian fishers have gotten jobs, about a third of a total of about 600 hires, he said. This number represents less than18 percent of the total 3,200 people who have attended trainings and received certification to work in the cleanup. (Source: http://thelensnola.org/2010/05/24/4860/)
Reports from Grand Isle, Louisiana note an alleged news black out.
James Fox, a documentary filmmaker told a reporter that he is "a little freaked out" about a news black out which he says he wouldn't have believed, had he not seen it with his own eyes. Preliminary investigations on Grand Isle, five to ten miles from epicenter of spill, show scores of helicopters, people with badges, and an intense feeling of being watched. (www.manticoregroup.com/radio/2010/06jun/jamesfox2010.mp3)
Fox spoke with two teenaged boys whose father is working on a clean up crew. "It turns out, basically they have a complete media black out, with people being arrested for talking to the media and an aura of fear." Air space above the spill has been closed by the government. No photography is allowed; and unnamed people are arresting photographers in a state park that abuts the Gulf.
There are Allegations of Hummers, with troops in full gear, police arresting people with cameras, pulling cars over. It is still unclear as to who is arresting the people with cameras, according to people who are on the ground. Fox says it appears that BP has taken over the complete operation. People are reportedly petrified, too scared to talk, and will not make eye contact with strangers and reporters.
Rumors of martial law remain strong. "It was just eerie." In that light, what is really happening to the African American and Native American populations who have historically been targeted for civil rights abuses. Locals told Fox that the media isn't even reporting a tenth of what is going on in the Gulf. Not by a long shot.
The human catastrophe is definitely being underreported on a national level. Black fishermen, seeking jobs or contracts with the clean up crew have been brushed off. One man told a New Orleans reporter that, "They ain't hiring nobody from East Bank. We're losing everything ?
losing our business, losing our money and losing our minds."
One black fisherman stands to lose more than $100,000 a year in profits from his commercial shrimp business. This is big business and black fishermen are getting the shaft: first from the destruction of their fishing grounds; then when they do not receive remediation contracts.
What is going on with the tribes and vulnerable minorities in the Gulf Coast area? What is truth? How much money have they lost? How many of them are sick because of the oil contamination? How many people are getting sick? Are they being treated? How many have died? And who holds the key to the information gateway?
What is REALLY going on at Grand
Isle--besides a lock down?
GULF OIL WELL SOME
FACTS
It's Unstoppable
Oil Well Blowout May Never End
By Washington's Blog
June 24, 2010 "Washington's Blog" -- As I have previously noted, it is now clear that there is damage to BP's well beneath the sea floor.
Recently-retired Shell Oil President John Hofmeister told MSNBC yesterday:
The question is whether there is enough mechanical structure left at the base of the reservoir to hold the cement when they start pouring cement in [from the relief well].
***
The more oil we some coming out, the more it tells you that the whole casing system is deteriorating. The fact that more oil would be coming out rather than less oil, would suggest that the construction within the pipe is offering no resistance whatsoever, and were just getting a gusher.
Newsweek gives a balanced view regarding the
risk of a total structural failure of the well:
The likelihood of a complete collapse is difficult to assess, in part, engineers and legislators say, because BP hasnt shared enough information to evaluate the situation. But a handful of clues suggest that the company is concerned. On Friday, BP spokesperson Toby Odone acknowledged that the 45-ton stack of the blowout preventer was tilting noticeably, but said the company could not attribute it to down-hole leaks. We dont know anything about the underground portion of the well, he said. But, the stack is tilting and has been tilting since the rig went down. We believe that it was caused by the collapse of the riser. The company is monitoring the degree of leaning but has not announced any plans to run additional supports to the structure.
As many have speculated ... concerns over structural integrity are what led BP to halt top kill efforts late last month. When it was digging this particular well, the company ran out of casingthe pipe that engineers send down the holeand switched to a less durable material called liner. This may have created several weak spots along the well that would be particularly vulnerable to excessive pressure or erosion. So instead of sealing the well, the company has been focused on trying to capture the oil as it flows out the top.
At this point, some experts say, additional leaks wouldnt matter much. Its very possible that there are subfloor leaks, says [Roger Anderson - an oil geophysicist at Columbia University]. But that doesnt change the strategy moving forward. The linchpin of that strategy involves drilling relief wells that would absorb all possible leaks, both at the top and the bottom of the hulking, teetering structure. Relief wells are drilled straight down into the sea bottom. After running parallel to the existing well for a few thousand meters, they cut in and intersect the original well bore. BP is drilling two such wells, one on either side of the main well. Once they are complete, the company will use them to pump heavy fluid and cement into the main well, stopping the oil at its source. The approach usually has a 95 percent success rate.
But to work, the well must be sealed as far down as possibleif its sealed too high, oil could still escape through any leaks beneath the seal. In this case, relief wells will have to drill down to 5,500 meters, and that takes time, at least until August. The real question now is whether the entire structure can hold out long enough.
One of the dangers which
the relief wells are racing against is that the blowout
preventer (BOP) is leaning ... and might fall over.
The well casing itself is attached to the BOP. And - as discussed below - the BOP is very heavy. So if the BOP fell over, it would likely severely damage the structural integrity of the casing.
As Think Progress points out:
In a press teleconference Monday, National Incident Commander Thad Allen announced that the riser package is tilting 10 or 12 degrees off perpendicular, twice the 5.5 degree tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa:
The entire arrangement is kind of listed a little bit. I think its 10 or 12 degrees off perpendicular so its not quite straight up.
As the Times-Picayune notes:
The integrity of the well has become a major topic of discussion among engineers and geologists.
"Everybody's worried about all of this. That's all people are talking about," said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of geoscience programs at University of Houston. He said the things that BP has being doing to try to stop the oil or gain control of it have been tantamount to repeatedly hitting the well with a hammer and sending shock waves down the pipe. "I don't think people realize how delicate it is."
"There is a very high level of concern for the integrity of the well," said Bob Bea, the University of California Berkeley engineering professor known to New Orleanians for investigating the levee failures after Katrina, who now has organized the Deepwater Horizon Study Group. Bea and other engineers say that BP hasn't released enough information publicly for people outside the company to evaluate the situation.
***
When wells are drilled, engineers send links of telescoping pipe down the hole, and those links are encased in cement. The telescoping pipe, called casing, unfolds like a radio antenna, only upside down, so the width of pipe gets smaller as the well gets deeper.
The cement and layers of casing are normally quite strong, Van Nieuwenhuise said. But with the BP well, there are several weak spots that the highly pressurized oil could exploit. BP ran out of casing sections before it hit the reservoir of oil, so it switched to using something called liner for the remainder of the well, which isn't as strong. The joints between two sections of liner pipe and the joint where the liner pipe meets the casing could be weak, Van Nieuwenhuise said.
Bill Gale, an engineer specializing in fires and explosions on oil rigs who is part of Bea's Deepwater Horizon Study Group, said the 16-inch wide casing contains disks that are designed to relieve pressure if necessary. If any of those disks popped, it could create undesirable new avenues for the oil to flow.
Bea said there are also concerns about the casing at the seabed right under the blowout preventer.
Van Nieuwenhuise said he's never actually heard of oil from a blown out well rupturing the casing and bubbling up through the ocean floor. He would consider that an unlikely, worst-case scenario.
A more likely problem, he said, is that oil could find its way into open spaces in the casing string, known as the annulus, and travel up the well in areas where it isn't supposed to be. This scenario could be one reason why more oil than expected is flowing at the containment cap that BP installed earlier this month to collect the oil.
Bea is more concerned about the worst-case scenario than Van Nieuwnhuise. In an answer to a question, Bea said, "Yes," there is reason to think that hydrocarbons are leaking from places in the well other than the containment cap.
"The likelihood of failure is extremely high," Bea said. "We could have multiple losses of containment, and that's going to provide much more difficult time of trying to capture this (oil)."
Meanwhile, observers monitoring the video feeds from the robotic vehicles working on the sea floor have noticed BP measuring a tilt in the 40-ton blowout preventer stack with a level and a device called an inclinometer.
***
Bea said BP isn't sharing enough information for others to know. If there is oil and gas escaping from the sides of the well, it could erode the sediments around the well and eat away at the support for all the heavy equipment that sits above. Bea said reports that BP is using an inclinometer is significant news. "It tells me that they are also concerned," he said.
Here are videos of BP measuring the tilt of the BOP.
While the BOP weighs 40 tons, the riser package as a whole weighs over 450 tons. If the BOP and riser package fell over, it would inflict severe damage to the attached well casing.
The Houston Chronicle reports:
Money-saving measures BP took while designing the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico appear to have dogged efforts to bring the massive oil spill under control.
Documents released by congressional investigators show that modifications to the well design BP made last year included a reduction in the thickness of a section of the casing steel piping in the wellbore
The modification included a slight reduction in the specified thickness for the wall of a 16-inch-diameter section of pipe toward the bottom of the well, according to a May 14, 2009, document.
***
The condition of the well also limits how much oil and gas can flow into containment systems now being used successfully to capture some of the flow. Even if a vessel could capture all the hydrocarbons gushing from the well, some would have to be released to keep well pressure under control.
Marvin Odum, president of Houston-based Shell Oil, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell, told the Houston Chronicle last week that the integrity of the well casing is a major concern. Odum and others from the industry regularly sit in on high-level meetings with BP and government officials about the spill.
If the well casing burst it could send oil and gas streaming through the strata to appear elsewhere on the sea floor, or create a crater underneath the wellhead - a device placed at the top of the well where the casing meets the seafloor - that would destabilize it and the blowout preventer.
The steel casing used in oil wells is strong, said Gene Beck, petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M, but pressures deep in a well are powerful enough to split strong steel pipe or "crush it like a beer can."
The strength and thickness of casing walls are key decisions in well design, he said. If the BP well's casing wasn't strong enough, it may already be split or could split during a containment effort.
BP spokesman Toby Odone said the decision to reduce the pipe thickness was made after careful review. The company said it doesn't know the condition of the well casing and has no way of inspecting it.
BP is drilling two relief wells to intercept the Macondo well near the reservoir and plug it with cement. A rupture in the Macondo well casing probably wouldn't affect that effort, said Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of geoscience programs at the University of Houston.
"When they start the bottom kill the cement will try to follow oil wherever it's escaping, so it would actually hide a lot of sins in the well bore," Van Nieuwenhuise said.
So far there are no signs that the section of the pipe below the sea floor is leaking.
The blowout preventer has been listing slightly since the accident, but officials believe that may have happened when the Deepwater Horizon sank while still attached to the well via a pipe called a riser.
***
But the longer the well flows uncontrolled the more likely it is that the well casing could be damaged or the blowout preventer damaged further. Sand and other debris that flows through the pipes at high velocity can wear through metal over time, said Van Nieuwenhuise.
The chances of the well eroding from underneath and the blowout preventer tipping may seem unlikely.
"But everything about this well has been unlikely," said David Pursell, an analyst with Tudor Pickering Holt & Co
Indeed, oil industry
expert Rob Cavner says that he wouldn't be surprised if
the BOP ended up falling over entirely:
*****************************************************
FROM LAYLA ANWAR
The information is too important not to
jot down...this is a rushed post.
I just finished watching a re-run of Ahmad Mansour's Al-Jazeera
Arabic - interview with Prof.Chris
Busby. Prof Busby is a Scientist and Director
of Green Audit, and scientific secretary of the European
Committee on Radiation Risks. To find out more on Prof
Chris Busby and his work -- Google -- Chris Busby Uranium.
Prof Busby has published many articles on radiation,
uranium and contamination in countries such as Lebanon,
Kosovo, Gaza and of course Iraq.
His latest findings - which were the subject of the
program aired on Al-Jazeera are what I will focus on here.
As some of you know, Falluja is a forbidden city. It was
subjected to intense bombardments in 2004, with DU bombs
and White phosphorus, and since it has become a no go
zone - meaning that both the Iraqi puppet authorities and
the U.S invading/occupying forces do not allow anyone to
conduct any real study in Falluja. Falluja is basically
under siege.
Obviously both the Americans and the Iraqis know
something and are hiding it from the public. And this is
where Prof. C.Busby comes in the picture. He was/is
adamant to get to the bottom of what took place in
Falluja in 2004.
Being a top scientist in his field, he set out to conduct
a survey/research in Falluja whose preliminary results
will be published in 2 weeks - hopefully.
Prof Busby found many obstacles while undertaking this
project. Neither he nor any member of his team were
allowed access to Falluja to conduct interviews. He said
when the main door closes, one has to find other doors to
open. And this is what he did. He managed to gather a
team of Iraqis from Falluja to conduct the surveys for
him.
The research project was based on 721 families from
Falluja with 4'500 participants - living in both high
level and lower level radiation zones. Results were
compared to a control group - a sample of the same number
of families living in a non radioactive zone in another
Arab country. For the purpose of the study he chose three
other countries for comparison - Kuwait, Egypt and Jordan.
Before getting into the preliminary results I must note
the following :
- the Iraqi authorities threatened all the participants
of this survey with arrest and detention should they
cooperate with the "terrorists" who were
interviewing them. In other words, they were threatened
under the anti-terrorism act.
- The U.S forces prohibited Dr.Busby for gathering any
data, arguing that Falluja is an insurgency zone.
- The doctors from Falluja turned down the request to be
aired live on the Ahmad Mansour program because they had
received several death threats and feared for their lives.
In other words, the study was conducted under very
difficult and life threatening conditions. But it was
conducting nonetheless.
As the program has not been uploaded on youtube, I can't
give a word for word transcription. I took short hand
notes and memorized the rest. But I will do my best to
present all the facts I heard today.
So what is it that the US and its Iraqi puppets do not
want the public to learn ? And why are they are not
allowing any measurements of the levels of radiation in
Falluja, and why did they even forbid the IAEA to enter
Falluja ?
What exactly happened in Falluja ? What were the kinds of
bombs used ? Was it just DU or more ?
1) One thing that is very peculiar to Falluja is that the
rates of cancer have risen dramatically in a very short
space of time i.e since 2004. Examples given by Dr.Busby
:
- rate of Child Leukemia is 40 X (times) higher since
2004 than during previous years. And compared to Jordan
for instance it is 38 X times higher.
- rate of breast cancer is 10 X higher since 2004
- rate of lymphatic cancer is also 10 x higher since 2004.
2) Another peculiarity to Falluja is the dramatic rise in
infant mortality rates. Compared to 2 other Arab
countries like Kuwait and Egypt who are not contaminated
by radiation these are the figures :
- infant mortality rates for Falluja is 80 infants out of
1'000 births in comparison to Kuwait with 9 infants out
of 1'000, and to Egypt with 19 infants out of 1'000. (so
Iraqi infant mortality rate is 4 times higher than Egypt
and 9 times higher than Kuwait)
3) the third peculiarity to Falluja is the number of
genetic deformities that has suddenly exploded since 2004.
This is a subject I've already covered in the past. But
this is not the whole story, today I learned something
else. The radiation of whatever agent that was used by
the "liberating forces", not only causes
massive genetic deformities but also and this is very
important :
- it causes structural changes at the cellular level.
- which in turns means due to the genetic make up of male
infants (lack of X chromosome), male infants are more
likely to die at birth, and female infants are more
likely to survive birth with strong deformities. And here
another example is given by Dr.Busby : prior to 2003 the
birth rates in Falluja were as follows : 1050 male
infants to 1000 female infants. In 2005, there has been
only 350 male infants born - meaning that male infants do
not survive.
- as for the female infants and this is where the tragedy
lies...radiation causes change at the DNA level, which
means that these same female if they do survive, and if
they do reproduce will give birth to genetically
disfigured females and dead male infants.
- the above findings are backed by other studies
conducted on the children and grandchildren of Hiroshima
survivors (in 2007) and which show that even the third
generation exhibits genetic malformations including
disease(cancer, heart, etc...)by a rate of 50 X times. In
Chernobyl on the other hand, studies on animals in the
same area have shown that the effects of radiation have
genetically modified 22 generations. In sum radiation is
transmitted from gene to gene and has a cumulative effect
with time. (won't go into how - with cells accumulation/
memory and the working of the immune system - here. You
can read more details about that once Prof Busby's paper
is published)
- Some of the infant deformities are so grotesque that
both Al-Jazeera and the BBC who produced a documentary on
the same subject - refused to air pictures to their
viewers. Examples of deformities which Ahmad Mansour has
pictures of are :
* children born without eyes
* children with two and three heads
* children born with no orifices
* children born with brain and eye/retina malignant
tumors
* children born with vital organs lacking
* children born with missing limbs or extra ones
* children born with no genitals
* children born with severe cardiac malformation
and more...
- on that same point, doctors in Falluja were asked for
the purpose of the study to note the rates of birth
defects in the space of one month and compare to a
previous month and this is the result : in the space of
one month alone births with defects rose from 1 x day (previous
month) to 3 x day (current month designated for the study
which was February 2010)
- Uranium is fed into the blood stream through ingestion
and inhalation. The massive levels of Uranium the people
of Falluja were subjected to also accounts for the
vertiginous rise in lung, lymph nodes and breast cancers
in adults.
-there are 40 other sites (areas) in Iraq heavily
contaminated but Falluja is the WORST hit.
Already with these preliminary findings, Prof. Busby and
his team concluded that in comparison to Hiroshima and
Nagazaki - Falluja was worse. And I quote from Dr.Busby :
" The situation in Falluja is scary and
horrendous, it is more dangerous and worse than Hiroshima..."
On a side but very related note :
I mentioned these are preliminary results - why so ?
Because Prof. Busby has been harassed and has had his
research funds slashed, doors closed in his face,
threatened, (alongside other scientists who tried
conducting similar studies in the 90's in Iraq),
abandoned by the scientific community, mobbed --because
of the nature of his work on Iraq. The political
implications are enormous and dangerous for the US and
its cronies. It means that the scientific evidence for
War Crimes is right here at our fingertips...
Hence Prof. Busby's life has been made very difficult.
The research paper that he took great pains in conducting
and producing was sent to the Lancet for reviewing at the
Scientific committee level, the Lancet turned it down
saying it did not have the time to review it. Labs who
cooperated in the past to test samples - turned him down
when they found out that the samples were from Iraq. Only
2 labs are willing to test the samples for the EXACT
MATERIAL/AGENT USED IN FALLUJA - and they are willing to
do so only at a very exorbitant price - again due to the
sensitive nature of the study. Also due to lack of funds,
Prof Busby has about 20 samples from Falluja for testing
-- that he is carefully safeguarding -- is awaiting the
necessary funds to do so.
When asked by Ahmad Mansour what makes him persevere
seeing all the formidable obstacles that he has been
facing - his reply was :
" All my life, I sought the Truth, I am a
hunter of the Truth in a jungle of lies. I also have
children. Children are not only our future, they are the
carriers of future generations. For 50 years we have been
contaminating the planet (with radiation) and we pass
this legacy onto our children and grandchildren. We owe
it to the people of Falluja to find out the Truth "
When asked how he manages with no funds and doors closing
in his face - his reply was :
" I rely on the goodwill of people who send
little amounts here and there, and am also a firm
believer if the main door closes, open other ones. When
there's a will, there's a way."
Hats off to you Prof. Busby.
I urge all the people reading this post, all people of
conscience, I urge all the Iraqis (get a move on for God's
sake!) and all Arabs to contact Prof. Busby and to donate
so the samples from Falluja can be tested and the Truth
can be uncovered. And I shall end this post with a final
quote from this great dedicated man
" The Truth has wings that can't be clipped
"
*********************
Dr Douglas L Rokke, Ph.D.
Former Head of U.S. Army Radiological Laboratory and
Former Director U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project, U.S.
Army major (retired), and former Assistant Professor of
Environmental Science at Jacksonville State University,
Florida, USA. has said in 2004 interview with John
Pilger
"Numerous times, at various meetings and conferences, the Iraqis have asked for the medical treatment protocols. They've asked for the environmental clean-up protocols which the US Department of Defense and the British Ministry of Defense have refused to do repeatedly.
With the extent of the contamination in Basra and all over Iraq where the DU was fired by the tanks and by the aircraft - over 300 tons - there's no doubt in my mind that, because that lasts forever unless it's been physically removed, that any woman or child, any soldier, any non-combatant, anybody that comes in the area that it gets into their body is going to have medical problems.
The overall effects are the fact that we used a weapon that's indiscriminate for eternity and therefore unless the environmental clean up is totally completed and the medical care is provided, the effects are permanent and lasting forever and ever and ever. That's wrong"
Tedd Weyman, Deputy Director - Research Scientist at Uranium Medical Research Centre in Toronto, Canada and Field Team Leader for Afghanistan and Iraq.On the 10th of August 2004, Tedd published a report Titled: The US and UK deploy new uranium weapons contaminating Iraq's environment, civilians and the Coalition's own troops.
As we have already found out from Doug Rokke his findings were equally as disturbing:
The recent Iraqi field samples collected by UMRC were analyzed by plasma mass spectrometer by Dr Axel Gerdes, Institute of Petrology and Geochemistry, JW Goethe University, Frankfurt. The human and environmental samples have been found to contain Depleted Uranium and abnormally high levels of the artificial transuranic isotope, 236U.
The isotope composition of Depleted
Uranium found in civilians as well as in surface soils
and water courses shows the weapons used in Iraq were
manufactured from two and perhaps three different
metallurgical sources (stockpiles of uranium metals). The
soil and water samples indicate DU was deployed in both
mechanized battlefields and urban neighborhoods where
aerial bombing took place.
The purity and quantities (abundances) of the Depleted
Uranium found in the samples of soils taken from US- and
UK-led battlefields are some of the highest levels
published since UMRC and others began independent
investigations into the use of radioactive dispersion
weapons in 1991 following Operation Desert Storm.
........................We have significant proof from
the battle fields of the Balkans, Kuwait, Iraq
and Afghanistan on the use of weapons
containing uranium. In all cases test on victims and
on recovered samples have confirmed either depleted
uranium or traces of enriched uranium.
some information from European experts. The use of Depleted Uranium (DU) was condemned in 2000 by experts from Germany namely Prof. Dr. Albrecht Schott and Prof. Dr Siegwart Horst Gunther.
In their submission to prohibit DU they stated - Given the known chemical and radiological toxicity of depleted uranium and its compounds causes damage to humans, animals and the ecological cycle, of which there is conclusive evidence we demand that the military and civilian use of depleted uranium (DU) be banned.
"The preservation of creation and the dignity of humankind forbid the use of DU. The Invasion of DU, and the compounds produced by its self-ignition due to heat, into the soil and water cycle of living communities, and the environment we live in, make them uninhabitable for thousands of years (the half-life of uranium is 4.5 billion years; uranium forms long-term radiologically dangerous decay products)".
Legal references were made in this submission as follows:
The military use of DU violates current international humanitarian law, including the principle that there is no unlimited right to choose the means and methods of warfare - Art. 22 Hague Convention VI (HCIV)
Art. 35 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention (GP1)
The ban on causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury (Art. 23 §le HCIV; Art. 35 §2 GP1), indiscriminate warfare (Art. 51 §4c and 5b GPI) as well as the use of poison or poisoned weapons)
The deployment and use of DU violate the principles of international environmental and human rights protection. They contradict the right to life established by the Resolution 1996/16 of the UN Subcommittee on Human Rights.
We demand the following individual points:
A ban an the use, development, production, transport, storage and possession of DU weapons and DU armour-plating, as well as all other military uses of DU.
Medical treatment of all victims of DU, in particular children.
Destruction of all DU weapons and means of its deployment and secure storage of the uranium in a stable chemical compound.
A ban an the civilian use of DU because of accidental future, past or present exposure to uranium or its compounds.
Decontamination of all military and civilian equipment contaminated by DU.
Decontamination of all territory contaminated by DU. This not only means theatres of war but also military practice ranges and other areas where DU has been deployed.
Conversion of the global stocks of DU in the form of Uranium Hexafluoride, approx. 2-3 million tons, from its presently insufficiently stable form into a stable Uranium Oxide and safe deposition.
Punishment of the military use of DU as a war crime (in accordance with Art. 85 §3b GP1; Art. 6b IMT Statute; Art. 2c, 3a and b ICTY Statute; Art. 8 §2b Statute of Rome).
Eradication of consequential damage caused by DU use according to customary liability principles in international (humanitarian) law.
Creation of a centre for the worldwide documentation of all DU contaminated regions, in particular theatres of war, military practice ranges, scenes of accidents, etc., and to study the DU problem.
In 2002 British expert Dr Chris Busby PhD produced a report: Review of the Home Office statement on the health consequences of exposure to depleted uranium in Kosovo.
Dr Busby was critical of the Home Office in regard to their comments:
The studies undertaken on DU in Kosovo have not detected any significant levels of DU.
Studies have not shown any significant risk to the health of the population of the province from the presence of DU.
In his response he stated:
I will demonstrate that both of these statements are incorrect and that the DoD document and its conclusions are unsafe. I will argue that this is because of bias, over interpretation of research and omission of relevant evidence. I will direct attention to evidence which shows that there is a significant health risk associated with living in areas contaminated by DU including recent evidence not available to the authors of the DoD report or the HO memorandum.
I've just read this piece by Arthur Silber - Memo
to the Victims. A powerful
essay indeed.
He kind of nails it, not fully, but quite, enough to make
the reader think...hopefully...
I say not fully, because he uses the "class"
concept...I say it's beyond class...It's all encompassing
this divide. Class does not cut it no more.
You've got to read his essay. He says what I've been
saying all those years. The "victim" is allowed
to protest only within the defined parameters imposed
upon it. I use the word IT here with deliberation.
Because the victim is ultimately objectified into an IT
that needs/must fit some category. Some ordained,
classified prerequisite. An acceptable pigeonhole.,
if you like...
Arthur Silber in his essay was referring to the Spill, or
taking the Spill as some starting point. Oh that famous
spill, and the world stopped.
I, on the other hand am referring to invasions, to
occupations...
He worded it from an American perspective, I word mine
from an Iraqi perspective that refuses to speak the
language deemed acceptable by the invader.
I touched upon this many a times. I had one post called
"On
Objectivity" on my Uncensored blog, that
post reminds me very much of what Arthur Silber is
talking about...
I had several other posts since - where I discuss
how even the discourse of outrage has to fit in
with the generally accepted conditions of how much
outrage you're allowed, of how you are to express
yourself, of which words you are to use, of how to go on
about it, of how to construct your sentences... it's like
the censors are now in your head - either issuing death
threats, or harassing you with the fate of another victim,
Gitmo or Abu Ghraib style, or tyrannizing you with the
politically correct expressions that you are to use or
not use, (and that cuts across class - that includes all
those prime goody good two shoes lefties and anti war
bullshitters), it defines the parameters, the context,
the framework of how much you can say, when to say it,
how to say it, it basically thrives on "colonizing"
the victim ideologically, out reaching its language, its
thoughts, its behavior, its ideas, its expressions, its
feelings...I say "its" because this is the
ultimate aim -- turning IT into a- asexual,
apolitical, amoral, IT . The more one can mold IT into an
IT, the better IT is controllable - weapons, torture,
ideologies including leftist class ideologies, language...all
serve that purpose...
It is not so much stripping you of your voice, it is not
so much stripping you of your individuality, it is not
only about censorship and acceptable frameworks, it goes
beyond that...It is stripping you in order to mold you
into an ACCEPTABLE DISSIDENT...
Because with this kind of White colonialism which
includes even the Marxist left, it is not about class
alone, it is not about culture, it is not about ideas,
opinions, it is about SELF.
You've got to get to the SELF. They've got to get to the
SELF. A rape of the SELF in the fullest sense of the word.
And what does a rape victim often feel ? Fear, Guilt,
Shame...
They - they as in the Other who can't accept not only
your presence but your very existence, (and this is where
I differ from Arthur Silber - he is addressing Americans
after all) will have to silence, obliterate, shut you up
by ANY MEANS POSSIBLE.
Shutting up someone comes under different forms - the
usual stuff : Threats, Torture, Rape, Killing...that is
the immediate stuff that appeals to the sense of survival.
It arouses FEAR.
But there are different ways to shut up the victim,
asides from Fear.
There is Guilt
There is Shame
There is Cajoling and Seduction
These are simple words am using...but if you think about
them carefully, you will notice that they are forms of
Manipulation, another form of getting you to silence
yourself but the trick is that they make you feel
it's coming from you and not from them.
These are ploys to DISOWN you. Re-read that. DIS-OWN you.
It means you are no longer the owner of your own
experience, land, country, idea, belief, etc...
The way they do it is very simple - really simple. They
evoke "higher ideals" - some collective
philosophical, religious, even spiritual Ideal by
which you are made to feel guilty, ashamed, remorseful
for having thought, felt, experienced what you
experienced.
It's an old trick but it works very well. I will give you
clues how it is done
Your "empathetic" listener will nod, approve,
say - I hear you, BUT
Your "sympathetic" listener will, nod, approve,
say - I hear you, BUT
Your " compassionate" listener will nod,
approve, say - I hear you, BUT
But you see - you are generalizing,
But you see - we all belong to the same "humanity"
--- after you've been ripped apart, literally...
But you see- in cases of trauma like yours, your capacity
for discernment is lessened
But you see - they really did not mean it that way
But you see - it's the intention that counts
But you see - we are all imperfect and fallible
But you see- it happens everywhere else
This is the politically correct bullshit I always refer
to...
Your interlocutor then takes offense and starts with the
shaming with :
I would have thought that a man, woman like yourself,
would act, think, feel, etc..this way
It is a pity that you generalize
I would have assumed that someone like yourself would
know better
I am sure there is truth in what you are saying but maybe
you're exaggerating here
Come on, if you look at it realistically, it could have
not been all that bad
And I can go on and on...but am just giving you little
tidbits of how the "victim" is not only
stripped physically (through Torture, Rape, Exile, etc...)
but how the victim is also DIS-OWNED and DIS-ARMED from
his/her experience.
Re-read the above sentence again.
Disowned and disarmed means neutralized in its reactive
capacity - a reactive capacity to tilt the balance again,
not necessarily in its personal favor, but in favor of
the objectivity of its own experience.
In other words - the "victim" tries very hard
to articulate, express, describe, enact, etc...the
experience and at each stage of its reactivity it is
silenced.
In fact when you come to think of it - Silence, that kind
of Silence becomes the only acceptable parameter in which
you can be heard.
And Resistance, any forms of Resistance is exactly the
opposite, It is the ability to zoom in, right where it
hurts the most.
5
Million Iraqis Killed, Maimed, Tortured, Displaced
Think
That Bothers War Boosters Like Christopher Hitchens?
By Fred Branfman
June 22, 2010 "AlterNet" -- In 1970 a Lao
villager who had survived five years of U.S. bombing
wrote: "In reality, whatever happens, it is only the
innocent who suffer. And as for the others, do they know
all the unimaginable things happening in this war? Do
they?" Do we? And if we did know about the innocent
men, women and children our leaders kill, would it matter?
Does it matter that those who justified the Iraqi
invasion in the name of the people of Iraq have largely
ignored their unimaginable suffering under U.S.
occupation, as more than 5 million civilians have been
murdered, maimed, made homeless, unjustly imprisoned and
tortured -- and millions more impoverished? Would war
supporters serve themselves and their nation if they
wrote about both the humanity and suffering of, say, just
10 Iraqi victims -- and sought to convey how each
represents at least 500,000 more? Is the suffering our
leaders inflict on innocent civilians relevant to
deciding whether to support our present war-making in
Afghanistan and Pakistan? Would it matter if the N.Y.
Times had run daily profiles and photos of Iraqi
civilian victims since 2003, as it did of U.S. victims
after 9/11?
Such questions are raised by Christopher Hitchens' recently published best-selling memoir, Hitch-22, in which he proudly claims to have helped cause the invasion of Iraq as the most prominent of a group of war hawks ("by which political Washington was eventually persuaded that Iraq should be helped into a post-Saddam era, if necessary by force), but entirely ignores the human cost that followed. No one spoke more eloquently of the Iraqi peoples suffering before the invasion. Thus his indifference to it since has been striking. The key issue is not what this reveals about Hitchens' soul but about America's. His memoir epitomizes one of the most chilling phenomena of our time: a growing nonhumanity in which our leaders and their supporters claim to wage war on behalf of a foreign people but are largely indifferent to their suffering. (Full disclosure: when Hitchens was writing his book about Henry Kissinger, he interviewed me about Kissinger's mass murder of Laotian rice-farmers.)
Citizens take on no more solemn role than when they convert a personal opinion into the political act of publicly promoting violence by their nation's leaders. Debating health care, gay marriage or Wall Street reform is one thing; promoting policies that wind up killing innocent human beings quite another. Whether they acknowledge it or not, those advocating war assume a moral responsibility for its innocent victims. Or, more plainly, they have their blood upon their hands. This blood can be easily justified in a hypothetical case of "humanitarian intervention," e.g. imagining that Bill Clinton had successfully used military force to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is also easy to justify war when only hated political leaders or groups are discussed: Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the Taliban and the civilian population, always the main victims in war, are treated as nonpeople. But an honest evaluation of war in a case like Iraq requires a far more serious moral calculus.
The Immensity of Iraqi Civilian Suffering
Taking seriously one's responsibility for promoting war in Iraq requires more than simply listing the war's human benefits, such as removing the genuinely evil Saddam, increased power for the long-suppressed Kurds and Shiites, limited movement toward free elections, a parliamentary democracy and free press. Such benefits must be weighed against the suffering of millions of innocent Iraqis, including:
-- Nearly 5 million refugees: Counting both internal and external refugees, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that nearly 5 million of Iraqs population of 24 million have been uprooted during the conflict, the N.Y. Review of Books reported on May 13, 2010. This is the equivalent of 60 million Americans by percentage of population. Five-hundred thousand are homeless squatters within Iraq, whose "settlements all lack basic services, including water, sanitation and electricity and are built in precarious places -- under bridges, alongside railroad tracks and amongst garbage dumps" according to Refugees International in March 2010. The emigration of 2-3 million Iraqis to refugee camps in Syria and other Mideast countries decimated Iraq's educated middle class, with some daughters forced to become prostitutes and sons menial laborers just to keep their families alive.
-- Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded: Estimates of dead civilians range from 100,000 documented cases by Iraq Body Count, which acknowledged in October 2004 that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording to over one million by a John Hopkins University group. A basic rule of thumb in war is that for every person killed, two have been wounded.
-- Tens of thousands of innocents imprisoned, many tortured: In an article headlined "In Iraq, A Prison Full of Innocent Men," the Washington Post reported that "100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system in Iraq," that Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi says that "most of the people they detain are innocent, but that prisoners are not permitted to prove their innocence. Conditions have been even worse in the secret torture chambers run for five years by General Stanley McChrystal, from which all outside observers including the Red Cross have been excluded. Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that "72% of Guantanamo detainees who finally were able to obtain just minimal due process -- after years of being in a cage without charges -- have been found by federal judges to be wrongfully detained." Countless innocent Iraqis have been regularly tortured.
-- Millions more who lack jobs, electricity, water and health care: Reuters reported on June 6 that "according to government statistics cited by the ICRC (the Red Cross), one in four of Iraq's people does not have access to safe drinking water." The unofficial unemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 30 percent, security is shaky, the entire non-oil economy decimated. "As recently as the 1980s, Iraq was self-sufficient in producing wheat, rice, fruits, vegetables, and sheep and poultry products. Its industrial sector exported textiles and leather goods, including purses and shoes, as well as steel and cement. But wars, sanctions, poor management, international competition and disinvestment have left each industry a shadow of its former self," the N.Y. Times has reported. It also reported on June 20 that (Basras) poorer neighborhoods, by far the majority, often have just one hour of electricity a day, a situation not uncommon in Baghdad and other regions. The temperature in Basra on Saturday was 113 degrees.
Nonhumanity, Not Inhumanity
U.S. leaders killed large numbers of civilians during World War II, of course, in an earlier age of "inhumanity" marked by the depredations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But they did so relatively openly. They did not claim, for example, that only enemy insurgents were killed at Dresden, and Americans relatively soon learned what had happened at Hiroshima. It was only as U.S. leaders constructed America's first global empire after 1945 -- increasingly waging secret, massive, illegal and unconstitutional bombing campaigns in countries like Laos and Cambodia, refusing to even acknowledge the countless civilian deaths they caused throughout Indochina, failing to help rebuild it after the war, and supporting savage local dictators and policies destroying local economies around the world -- that they created a new age of "nonhumanity." By now U.S. leaders Third World victims -- whom they have neither acknowledged nor made amends for -- number in the tens of millions.
We have entered a new Orwellian age in which continuous "fighting ... takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at," and its innocent victims are simply airbrushed out of history. Nothing symbolizes this nonhumanity more than U.S. leaders use of the term collateral damage to refer to millions of innocent human beings who have as much right to their lives as those who so mercilessly snuff them out. Generals Tommy Franks and Colin Powell say "we don't do civilians" when asked how many civilians they kill, and their countrymen are so indifferent to civilian murder that no one even asks why not. Who is in a better position to discover how many innocent men, women and children U.S. leaders kill, and help them avoid further civilian murder? The only act more nonhuman than not caring is killing civilians in the first place. U.S. indifference to civilian suffering is particularly noticeable in the case of "liberal war hawks" who justified the Iraq invasion on humanitarian grounds but then largely ignored its human costs as much as conservatives who do not even claim concern for the civilians they destroy. Slate, for example, asked an online panel of 10 such folks in March 2008 -- when civilian victims were in the millions -- to explain how they had gotten the Iraqi war wrong. While all but one (Christopher Hitchens: "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I Didn't") acknowledged error, and a number expressed pain over civilian suffering, the reasons listed for their mistakes included misjudging "Bush's sense of morality," "I wanted to strike back," "I believed the groupthink," I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be, and the "the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite." All failed to acknowledge their own moral blindness in failing to imagine what millions of their fellow Americans clearly saw: the havoc that the U.S. war-machine would inevitably wreak on innocent Iraqi civilians whatever its stated intentions or claimed benefits.
U.S. Responsibility For Civilian Suffering in Iraq
One of the panelists the diplomat Phillip Carter -- did, however, make a key point. After explaining how a former Iraqi law professor he worked with was presumably killed by Al-Qaeda, Carter wrote, "I felt guilty for not doing more to protect him. I felt guilty for not doing more to make Iraq safe. His words point to the considerable U.S. responsibility for post-invasion civilian suffering, whether caused by its own troops or others. An occupier assumes not only moral but legal responsibility for ensuring the safety of civilians in the zones it occupies. By both disbanding the Iraqi army and not using its own forces to maintain law and order U.S. leaders failed that responsibility, which was thus not merely a mistake but a war crime.
And America bears an even greater responsibility for the direct suffering it has caused. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian explored U.S.-inflicted civilian suffering by interviewing 50 American veterans who had fought in Iraq.Their book Collateral Damage reports how U.S. soldiers, unprepared for urban warfare and understandably terrified, have regularly killed, wounded, arrested and humiliated countless Iraqi civilians -- at checkpoints, by driving recklessly in convoys, in early morning searches, and by firing indiscriminately in response to IEDs and enemy fire. "The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder," Hedges writes. "Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices, and convoys race through Iraq like freight trains of death." U.S. soldiers also revealed how, though this behavior violated official rules of engagement, the rules were ignored and required reports either not filed or falsified. Collateral Damage and the N.Y. Review of Books article cited above illustrate another key point: Americans can report on civilian suffering if they choose. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has written that "when you see my byline from Kandahar or Kabul or Basra, you should not think that I am out among ordinary people, asking questions of all sides. I am usually inside an American military bubble." But there is nothing stopping him and other war supporters from leaving their bubbles to report on the civilian suffering they helped produce, any more than the N.Y. Times is prevented from taking Iraqs civilian dead as serious as American ones.
Christopher Hitchens' Memoirs: A Textbook Case of Non-Humanity
Chris Hedges' concern for
post-invasion civilian suffering contrasts sharply with
Hitchens' memoirs. Ample time has passed for
Hitchens to provide a moral reckoning of the human costs
and benefits of the invasion, and to apologize to both
Iraqi victims and the millions of antiwar Americans whose
concerns about post-invasion civilian suffering have
proven so much more accurate than his own -- and whose
personhood he so demeaned with epithets like "moral
imbeciles," "noisy morons,"
"overbred and gutless," "naive"
and "foolish."Hitchens memoirs
provide a textbook case of nonhumanity. For while proudly
bragging of helping cause the invasion, he does not even
mention let alone acknowledge responsibility for the
civilian suffering to which it led.He writes movingly,
for example, of a fine young American, Mark Daily, who
volunteered to fight in Iraq partly because of
Hitchens pro-war writings and died heroically
protecting his fellow-soldiers. But Hitchens does not
mention even one of the countless Iraqis who did not
volunteer to have their lives destroyed following the
invasion he claimed would help them. He properly
befriended Daily's parents, but does not discuss a single
Iraqi parent among hundreds of thousands whose loss is
equally great.And he does not even mention the overall
scale of Iraqi civilian suffering under U.S. occupation:
5-10 million murdered, maimed, homeless, unjustly
imprisoned, tortured and impoverished innocent civilians
have all been consigned to the dustbin of his and
America's -- history.Ignoring post-invasion civilian
suffering, of course, also allows Hitchens to avoid his
and Americas responsibility for it. He instead
admits and then excuses himself for far smaller errors, e.g.
writing that "it is here that I ought to make my
most painful self-criticisms ... What I should have been
asking Wolfowitz was `does the Army Corps of Engineers
have a generator big enough to turn the lights of Baghdad
back on?
But, not being a professional soldier or
quartermaster
I rather tended to assume that things
of this practical sort were being taken care of.The
Iraqi peoples post-invasion agony is also
trivialized by Hitchens ongoing attempts to blame
the left" for Saddam's crimes because they
failed to rally to his call to invade and occupy Iraq. By
that logic any people who hate their leader but do not
support being invaded and occupied indefinitely by U.S.
troops are responsible for their own misery.
But, in any event, it is obvious that pre-invasion issues
are entirely separate from his and Americas
responsibility for the unspeakable civilian horror that
has followed it. As Iraq Body Count has noted, Amnesty
International
estimated that violent deaths
attributable to Saddam's government numbered at most in
the hundreds during the years immediately leading up to
2003. Those wishing to make the "more lives
ultimately saved" argument will need to make their
comparisons with the number of civilians likely to have
been killed had Saddam Hussein's reign continued into
2003-2004, not in comparison to the number of deaths for
which he was responsible in the 1980s and early 1990s.We
have words to describe the act of seeking moral acclaim
for helping an individual whose life one harms
hypocritical or shameless come to
mind. But we lack even the thought-category to describe
claiming moral credit for aiding an entire people while
ignoring ones responsibility for the broken lives
of millions of them.Many Americans may find themselves
called upon to invent such words in coming years, as the
mentality that has treated millions of foreigners as
nonpeople increasingly affects American lives at
home.
Nonhumanity Abroad, Nonhumanity At Home
In today's interconnected world, the West ignoring its civilian victims is increasing both terrorism and mass displacements of political and economic refugees. Increased terrorism and anti-illegal immigrant hysteria threaten American lives, political chaos and increasing police-state measures such as the wiretapping of U.S. citizens and Arizonas recent immigration law. U.S. leaders nonhumanity abroad is increasingly affecting domestic security at home.
The most fundamental question for Americans is whether they too will be treated as nonpeople by U.S. elites should America now be entering a period of long economic decline and resulting political instability -- as has already occurred for those homeowners tricked out of their life savings by Wall Street. Will America respond to hard times as it did in the 1930s by expanding the safety net, taxing the rich and spending to combat unemployment? Or will its elites move to secure their own wealth and respond to the protests this will inevitably create with harsh measures?
Any American who tries to look at U.S. leaders from the perspective of a Lao refugee, an innocent Iraqi prisoner, a Haitian slum-dweller or a Helmand housewife terrorized at the prospect of the next U.S. offensive, can only shudder at such questions.
Active Denial Technology is a breakthrough non-lethal technology that uses millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary from relatively long range. It is expected to save countless lives by providing a way to stop individuals without causing injury, before a deadly confrontation develops.
The technology was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of Defense's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate. Approximately $40 million has been spent on this technology over the past ten years.
In July 2005 it was reported that the Active Denial System would be deployed to Iraq before the end of the year. Under an initiative called Project Sheriff, troops will receive a total of 15 vehicles. These deployments did not take place, and as of early 2007 the initial deployment was slated no sooner than 2010.
This non-lethal technology was developed in response to Department of Defense needs for field commanders to have options short of the use of deadly force. Non-lethal technologies can be used for protection of Defense resources, peacekeeping, humanitarian missions and other situations in which the use of lethal force is undesirable. The system is intended to protect military personnel against small-arms fire, which is generally taken to mean a range of 1,000 meters. The system is described as having a range of 700 yards.
Countermeasures against the weapon could be quite straightforward for example covering up the body with thick clothes or carrying a metallic sheet or even a trash can lid as a shield or reflector. Also unclear is how the active-denial technology would work in rainy, foggy or sea-spray conditions where the beam's energy could be absorbed by water in the atmosphere.
Active Denial Technology uses a transmitter to send a narrow beam of 95-GHz millimeter waves towards an identified subject. Traveling at the speed of light, the energy reaches the subject and penetrates less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin, quickly heating up the skin's surface. The 95-GHz energy penetrates 1/64 inch into the skin and produces an intense burning sensation that stops when the transmitter is switched off or when the individual moves out of the beam. Within seconds, an individual feels an intense heating sensation that stops when the transmitter is shut off or when the individual moves out of the beam. According to reports, a 2-second burst from the system can heat the skin to a temperature of 130° F. At 50 °C, the pain reflex makes people pull away automatically in less than a second. Someone would have to stay in the beam for 250 seconds before it burnt the skin,
Despite the sensation, the technology does not cause injury because of the low energy levels used. It exploits a natural defense mechanism that helps to protect the human body from damage. The heat-induced sensation caused by this technology, is nearly identical to the sensation experienced by briefly touching an ordinary light bulb that has been left on for a while. Unlike a light bulb, however, active denial technology will not cause rapid burning, because of the shallow penetration of the beam and the low levels of energy used. The transmitter needs only to be on for a few seconds to cause the sensation.
Air Force scientists helped set the present skin safety threshold of 10 milliwatts per square centimetre in the early 1990s, when little data was available. That limit covers exposure to steady fields for several minutes to an hour - but heating a layer of skin 0.3 mm thick to 50 °C in just one second requires much higher power and may pose risks to the cornea, which is more sensitive than skin. A study published last year in the journal Health Physics showed that exposure to 2 watts per square centimeter for three seconds could damage the corneas of rhesus monkeys.
Testing
Humans and animals are being used in the test program. All testing is being conducted with strict observance of the procedures, laws and regulations governing animal and human experimentation. The tests have been reviewed and approved by a formal Institutional Review Board with oversight from the Air Force Surgeon General's Office. The testing is being conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate.
Military and civilian employees have volunteered for these tests. Prior to participating in the program, all volunteers are fully informed of the purpose and nature of the tests and of any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts expected from the research. Other than minor skin tenderness due to repeated exposure to the beam, there are no lasting effects. An institutional review board has determined that the risk level is minimal. No pay is received for participation, and volunteers may withdraw at any time with no negative personal or professional ramifications. Many of the project scientists are volunteers for the study. These tests, which are being conducted at Kirtland Air Force Base south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, employ more realistic military field conditions, following several years of successful and safe laboratory testing. These field tests are the first to expose an entire test subject to the energy beam.
These tests demonstrate the technology, gather additional data on effects in realistic conditions, and allow the military benefits to be assessed.
Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a leading newsletter on non-ionizing radiation, calls VMADS a "significant development" in directed energy weapons. However, he says that possible injuries, particularly to the eye, could lead to stopping further development and actual deployment of the device-as the Pentagon did in the mid-1990s when it was trying to develop blinding lasers. "The real question is whether it will go the way of the lasers," Slesin says. Like laser, exposure to the microwave beam could cause eye damage. "People will get out of the beam, but [injury to the eyes] depends on how much exposure they get," Slesin says. Slesin also notes that "the only people who are doing health research on the effects of electromagnetic radiation are the people who are developing this weapon-the Air Force Lab. . . . They're the only people who have any money in the United States to do research on the health effects, and they're in firm control of the [safety] standard-setting process. . . . That's a clear conflict."
As of early January 2007, the US Air Force's 820th Security Forces Group at Moody Air Force Base, GA, was the first unit selected to conduct the V-MADS' extended user evaluation portion of the advanced concept technology demonstration process. The process is designed to expedite the transfer of advanced technologies to the warfighters. by evaluating the system under a series of realistic combat scenarios to determine its potential effectiveness in a deployed environment.
Operational System
Officials have begun examining appropriate platforms on which to deploy the technology. Currently, planning is underway for a vehicle-mounted version. Future versions might also be used onboard planes and ships. The vehicle-mounted version will be designed to be packaged on a vehicle such as a High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, more commonly referred to as a Humvee). Power would be provided by a turbo-alternator and battery system. Researches say they have made technological break through on power supplies to run such weapons even when mounted on vehicles or aircraft.
This technology and its proposed use in an operational system have been given a preliminary weapons legal review as required by Department of Defense Directive 3000.3 "Policy for Non-Lethal Weapons," and the United States' treaty - obligations. This preliminary review found that further research, development, and testing of this technology is permissible. As required by law, a final, comprehensive legal review will be completed prior to entering the acquisition cycle.
Organizations involved
Two primary organizations are executing this program: the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate at Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Air Force Research Laboratory is developing the technology with funding from both the Air Force and the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.
From the Air Force Research Laboratory, two directorates are involved: the Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, and the Human Effectiveness Directorate at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. The former works technology development and testing; the latter is in charge of biological effects research.
There are three primary contractors: Raytheon AET in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is the systems integrator, CPI (Communications and Power Industries) in Palo Alto, California, is the source developer, and Veridian Engineering in San Antonio, Texas, is performing biological effects research.
Other organizations and agencies that are involved in the this project include the Air Force Force Protection Battlelab at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; the Marine Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia; the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida; and the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
The Air Force's Electronic Systems
Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, will
manage acquisition of the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial
System based on this technology.
The Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System concept
INDONESIA
TheBlackList Moderator [theblacklist-moderator@riseup.net
]
From: "Tapol" <tapol@gn.apc.org>
Monday, June 21, 2010
President Obama: What Would Your Mother
Say?
By Eben Kirksey
President Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently
canceling his visit there for the second time this
year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural
anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping
economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she
were still alive, she might well be disappointed in her
son. As President Obama turns his attention to the oil
spill in the Gulf, the U.S. Congress is reminding him of
other important issues in a seemingly remote corner of
Indonesia. A resolution introduced by Rep. Patrick
Kennedy (H.Res. 1355) calls attention to the human rights
problems in West Papua, the half of New Guinea that was
invaded by Indonesia in 1962.
In the Presidents autobiography, Dreams from My
Father, he recalls a conversation with Lolo Soetoro, his
step-father who had just returned home after a tour of
duty with the Indonesian military in West Papua. Obama
asked his step-father: Have you ever seen a man
killed? Lolo responded affirmatively, recounting
the bloody death of weak men. Ann Soetoro
never spoke out publicly about Indonesian atrocities in
West Papua, but she divorced her husband shortly after he
came back
from the frontlines of this war.
Papuan intellectuals and political activists, kin of the
weak men have read Obamas autobiography
with keen interest. They still embrace the message of
hope from the Presidential campaign and the slogan,
Yes We Can. Perhaps it is time for those of
us who were drawn in by the slogan Yes We Can
to remind the President that grassroots political
movements still have power.
Many people, including some anthropologists, do not know
the difference between West Papua* and Papua New Guinea.
The subject of several classic anthropology books
from Margaret Meads Growing Up in New Guinea to
Marilyn Stratherns Gender of the Gift the
independent nation of Papua New Guinea is familiar to
almost anyone who has taken an introductory anthropology
class. Indonesia is also well known among academics who
study culture or politics. Cultural
anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us tales of Balinese
cockfights and Javanese religious systems, and political
scientist Benedict Anderson famously wrote about imagined
communities and power in Indonesia. At the edge of
national and scholarly boundaries, West Papua, in
contrast, falls through the cracks.
Anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines should
join human rights advocates and others in noticing West
Papua. Amnesty International is currently working with
Representative Kennedys office to pass his
Resolution which calls attention to many pressing
problems: Whereas
Amnesty International has identified numerous prisoners
of conscience in Indonesian prisons, among them Papuans
such as Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage, imprisoned for
peaceful political protests including the display of the
morning star flag which has
historic, cultural, and political meaning for
Papuans
"
Whereas a
Human Rights Watch report on June 5, 2009, noted
torture and abuse of prisoners in jails in
Papua is rampant;
and Whereas
prominent Indonesian leaders have called for a national
dialogue and Papuan leaders have called for an
internationally-mediated dialogue to address long-standing
grievances in Papua and West Papua.
If passed, this
Resolution would give President Obama some issues of
substance to talk about with Indonesian leaders once he
does make a return trip to Southeast Asia. Resolutions
are non-binding acts that convey the sentiments of
Congress.
Transnational companies have been lobbying for stronger
military ties with Indonesia. The same company that
brought us the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP, has a
huge natural gas field in West Papua called Tangguh.
Starting this year, BP is scheduled to start shipping
super-cooled gas from this site (liquid natural gas or
LNG) to North America where it will be piped into the
homes of millions in California, Oregon and other
westerns states.
BP has been a major donor to the U.S.-Indonesia Society,
The U.S.-Indonesia Society is also supported by Freeport
McMoRan, a company that operates one of the worlds
largest gold and copper mines in West Papua. Americans
must reckon with the foreign entanglements of the
companies supplying the U.S. natural resources and should
question the
politicians who have led the United States into a series
of environmental catastrophes and debacles on foreign
soil.
Who the official cosponsors of Kennedys Resolution
on West Papua are
is public knowledge.
S. Eben Kirksey is a cultural anthropologist who earned
his Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Freedom in Entangled Worlds, his forthcoming book,
published by Duke University Press, explores the social
and political dynamics of West Papuas independence
movement from 1998 till 2008.
Source: http://anthropologyworks.com/
For years, Rem Koolhaas's striking designs went unbuilt. Now his creations are sprouting up everywhere. He tells Susie Rushton about his first London building, and why iconic towers are over
Monday, 21 June 2010
Rem Koolhaas puts his mobile phone in the middle of the wooden café table between us, picks up two teacups and a glass of melting ice cubes, and arranges them in a circle around it.
The phone is barely visible. "So, this is the entrance here," he says, pointing into a tiny crevice between the cups, "and as you can see it's completely surrounded by other buildings, so from any angle you can only see fragments of it." The teacups represent the historic streets of Bank, in the heart of the City; the glass is St Stephen Walbrook church, designed by Christopher Wren and built in 1672. The mobile phone is playing the role of Koolhaas's new HQ for Rothschild bank, due to open next year. "It's a very nice site," he explains, lightly, in perma-ironic, Dutch-inflected tones. "Because it's such a dense site, it has an incredibly radical relationship with the city." Even more incredibly, when it opens next year the Rothschild building will be Koolhaas's first in London even though he's lived in the city, on and off, since the 1960s, when he studied at the Architectural Association, just around the corner from where we're sitting on a sunny afternoon in Bloomsbury.
Koolhaas surely understates the importance of this building, which began life back in 2006, at the height of the boom. In the current climate, famous architects haven't had much to boast about. The calamitous effects of the credit crisis have wrecked the real estate industry and the economic underpinning of mega-projects. Architecture is a notoriously cyclical industry, but the current bust has hit the profession particularly badly. Most firms have laid off hundreds of workers as the stream of commercial clients and the speculators who finance their buildings dried up. Libeskind, Gehry, Foster name any gilded name specialising in "iconic" towers all have had prestigious projects either binned or put on hold. And although for most of his career Rem Koolhaas was, famously, an "unbuilt" architect, in the last decade his avant-garde designs were actually coming to life. Most notable have been Porto's concert hall, Seattle's Public Library, stores for Prada in Seoul, New York and LA, the 9-storey Wyly Theatre in Dallas, with its transformable auditorium, and the 54-floor CCTV building in Beijing a mammoth structure resembling a twisted bridge finished just in time for the Olympics.
His buildings don't swirl or blob like a Gehry or a Hadid. A Koolhaas building is often block-shaped, unprepossessing from a distance, but fun to interact with. In common with his starchitect peers, his designs are inevitably called "iconic".
But Koolhaas thinks
this is a term that has lost its currency in the
recession. "We've been able to step away from the
iconic domain," he says, apparently relieved. When I
ask him about the effects of the crash on his firm, he
acknowledges that many projects in Dubai "went up in
smoke". But the Office for Metropolitan Architecture
(OMA), the firm Koolhaas founded in his native Rotterdam
in 1975, has global tentacles. "Because we're in
Europe, China and America, we can really see the
inequality of different economic conditions. It simply
moved its grip to regions less affected by the banking
crisis, notably North Africa and Hong Kong, and we just
opened a new office in Asia. We shifted rather than
diminished." But besides shifting attention east and
south, Koolhaas has also continued to move forward by
diversifying his work which isn't much of a
stretch given that he, above all other architects, has
always been engaged with work other than designing actual
buildings.
Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de
Graaf as part of their collaboration with OMA, the sphere
holds a convention centre, hotel rooms, apartments,
offices and retail space.
Even after he won the Pritzker Prize 10 years ago, Koolhaas remained the maverick of architecture, a figure who refused tosee his craft as a force for social improvement, but instead celebrated the chaos of urban life. His books were for a long time more famous than his buildings. His first, Delirious New York (1978), theorised on the subject of Manhattan's skyscrapers; an entire library of fat, frenetic and often very funny books followed, at least two of which have been counterfeited by fans in Iran and China.
Some years ago Koolhaas opened a separate think-tank company, AMO, (named as the mirror image of OMA) to focus exclusively on his non-bricks-and-mortar projects, from catwalk shows for Prada and Miu Miu to creating a plan for decarbonising Europe's power grid, a project for the EU.
So as other
architects scrambled to diversify in order to keep their
firms afloat in choppy economic waters, Koolhaas has
simply continued the extracurricular work for which he's
always been known. Yes, he tells me, there are surviving
building projects, including an educational campus in
Doha and a cultural centre on the West Kowloon campus in
Hong Kong among others, but it can't hurt in the current
atmosphere to be known as the guy who creates more than
just vanity skyscrapers for ambitious city-states and
corporations.
The new Science Center in Hamburg designed
by Rem Koolhaas
His latest mission is defending an unpopular cause: Dubai.
. "There is a massive sense of condescension towards the people there," he starts. More than any other place, to the Western media Dubai and the Gulf came to symbolise the hubris of the boom era. The schadenfreude response to Dubai's fall after 2008 is of a piece with anti-Arab sentiment, he believes, one that judges the Gulf to have been naïve in believing it could build world-class metropolises. "The speculation might have disappeared, but what remains there is nothing to be sneezed at. Fifteen years ago, Dubai was very modest. Now we have clear evidence of an Arab [version of] modernity. That in itself is a huge achievement."
Called Al Manakh (meaning both "market" and "climate"), the book is a collection of 140 articles and interviews about the situation on the ground. "Many [Western] people went there for the first time [after the 2008 crash] and saw it as something that happened in one go, and therefore representative of a contemporary absurdity. It was a patchwork of outrageous convictions, aesthetics, labour, religion... everything. But if you looked more carefully at each of those aspects, there's more to say." It's not the first time he has said the unsayable about Dubai: an earlier publication attempted to challenge criticism of a migrant underclass exploited by construction firms. In the latest book, one article examines how migrant workers from Kerala have transformed entire villages back home from pay earned in the labour camps. "Westerners don't really want to understand [Dubai]. But I think it's also part of a bigger Western trauma, which is that we are no longer in charge. We still try to maintain our status, but we've basically lost it."
Koolhaas believes his affinity with the Gulf region comes from a period of childhood spent in another Muslim nation, Indonesia. "It felt very familiar to me," he says. Although every architect you'd care to name went there to build unfettered symbols of wealth over the last decade, most producing work routinely described as highly vulgar, OMA's interest in the Gulf has not been purely commercially driven, he insists. "It wasn't just about [looking for] a situation to exploit, but as a form of engagement."
Beyond the Arabian Gulf, he argues, the crash of Western markets might have actually been a good thing for architecture in general, grown plump as it had with speculation and globalised aesthetics.
"We're very glad that what I call the "YES" regime which means the Yen, the Euro and the US dollar which began in the 1980s and that dictated every value in every country, has finally come to an end. And I think it's a very good thing that the state is becoming responsible again after a long time of deregulation.
"In architecture certain things have become possible again. I was giving a lecture the other day and I showed a really unglamorous picture of an architect in the 1980s, holding a blueprint, really badly dressed, and behind him there is housing being built, disappearing into the horizon. That kind of architect is almost unthinkable until recently, but maybe that is coming back. Now we're expected only to design "the exceptional" and, to me, that's very uncomfortable. In a serious climate, [people are] more susceptible to serious ideas."
Koolhaas glides easily between the construction site, the fashion catwalk, publishing and consulting on the development potential of entire nations. An unlikely new client is Libya, specifically "a subtle group of people around the [Gaddafi] son there who want to pull the country toward Europe." Koolhaas has been engaged not to build but to develop the Libyan Sahara for tourism: "It's preservation," he explains, if one begins to imagine mechanized buildings rising from the sands, "We don't always want to build. We've found ways other than building to address situations."
If his apparent omnipotence makes him the ideal consultant for ambitious leaders of developing countries, established Europe also wants Rem's opinion. This year he was engaged by the EU to join a think tank of 11 wise Europeans to propose "ideas for the Union by 2030," the results of which are to be presented to Herman Van Rompuy this month. ("I am pro a European army. Without it, Europe accepts a diminishing of its role.") Taking the EU in hand isn't new to Koolhaas; in 2002, AMO created a new flag for the community, a brightly coloured "bar code" that was a composite of the colours of every member state; Austria used it as a logo during its 2006 Presidency. As a longstanding consultant to the EU brand, what does he make of the forces that currently threaten to bring down the ideal of a rainbow superstate?
"The problem of Europe is that it has a structure that was initiated but never completed. It has been receded by stealth; originally, it was driven by very intelligent people who put something in place that worked on their terms. But now there is a new generation of leaders who are more involved in running their own countries. Europe became an alibi for what was a problem in those individual countries. The current situation is an outcome of that there are no defenders, only critics. So it can no longer evolve. It's crystal clear to me."
Cantilevered building by rem koolhaas designed to provide a better view towards madison square park in the flatiron district.
It's easy to fall into wide-ranging conversation with Koolhaas, who at 64 works a disarmingly stylish look, in head-to-toe Prada, and a slender figure honed by a rigorous daily swimming schedule. He so obviously enjoys his role as intellectual-for-hire that often one can entirely forget about the buildings.
Seeded in the boom years, they are continuing to sprout up. Next year his design for a Maggie's cancer care centre in Glasgow will open, to be followed by a revamp of the Commonwealth Institute in west London. But curious pedestrians can already view his first British major building.
Intrigued by the design for Rothschild, as represented by teacups and a mobile phone, the day after our interview I take the short journey to Bank to see if there are any obvious signs of his new creation. Armed only with the name of a nearby lane, I'm concerned I might not be able to locate the site. I needn't have worried. When I emerge from the Tube at Bank, the roads are closed to traffic, enormous yellow low-loaders blocking the way as cranes are winched up into the sky, starting the final effortful months of "topping out" the tower.
Just as Koolhaas described, its position in the midst of the ancient city means it is only visible in glimpses. It's a building that doesn't so much alter London's skyline as colour in the gaps: a flash of pale greenish-silver glass seen down narrow Georgian streets. One of the greatest architects of his generation is finally about to make his mark in Britain. Just don't call it "iconic".
For further reading:
'S, M, L, XL' by Rem Koolhaas (Monacelli Press)
The Runaway
General
(STOPPRESS ! Added: Sunday, 27
June 2010, 09:44 AM Mecca time, 06:44 AM GMT
One of the best 'sc**w you' resignation letters I've seen
in a long time. He managed to publish it in the Rolling
Stone magazine as well: Ready, Fire, Aim ...
Well done soldier.
MJ, Perth, Australia.)
Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan,
has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off
the real enemy: The wimps in the White House - update
June 23rd McChrystal has been sacked by Obama
By Michael Hastings
This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010,
on newsstands Friday, June 25.
June 22, 2010 "" -- 'How'd I get screwed
into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley
McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the
commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is
sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in
Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our
NATO allies to keep up the fiction, in essence,
that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over
a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive
property of the United States. Opposition to the war has
already toppled the Dutch government, forced the
resignation of Germany's president and sparked both
Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of
their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the
French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in
Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says
his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come
with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
On the ground with the Runaway General: Photos of Stanley
McChrystal at work.
The general stands and looks around the suite that his
traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale
operations center. The tables are crowded with silver
Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the
hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to
provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications.
Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual blue tie,
button-down shirt, dress slacks McChrystal is way
out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers
says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can
imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants,
rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too
"Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his
favorite beer) to Bordeaux,
Talladega Nights
(his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the
public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt
comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of
the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the
Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
The Spill, The Scandal and the President: How Obama let
BP get away with murder.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?"
McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two
massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into
question the general's assurances that he can wrest it
from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed,"
Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he
is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of
Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have
the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on
you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can
destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his
voice.
Looting Main Street: Matt Taibbi on how the nation's
biggest banks are ripping off American cities.
"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of
people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this
room could do it."
With that, he's out the door.
"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of
his aides.
"Some French minister," the aide tells me.
"It's fucking gay."
Get more Rolling Stone political coverage.
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to
prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire,
a French military academy. The general prides himself on
being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his
brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has
been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short
time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a
stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer
session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal
dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated
by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted,"
saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan."
The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president
himself, who summoned the general to a terse private
meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal
seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in
Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he
might get today, and how he should respond. "I never
know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's
the problem," he says. Then, unable to help
themselves, he and his staff imagine the general
dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?"
McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you
say: Bite Me?"
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately
set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise
on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on
what led us to invade in the first place. "I want
the American people to understand," he announced in
March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to
disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and
Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to
Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001.
Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan
then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan
and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had
met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the
first time a top general had been relieved from duty
during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman
fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean
War.
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his
new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect.
The general first encountered Obama a week after he took
office, when the president met with a dozen senior
military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the
Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting,
McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and
intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their
first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office
four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan
job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute
photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama
clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's
the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't
seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his
personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory
for a controversial military strategy known as
counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the
new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that
attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech
violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in
failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of
ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live
among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or
build from scratch, another nation's government a
process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires
years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially
rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its
funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides
of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace
Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the
theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly
gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists,
military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed
"COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this
influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the
perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a
general with enough charisma and political savvy to
implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did
it with the same fearlessness he used to track down
terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates,
be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then
take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last
June, the general conducted his own policy review,
ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous
report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was
dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops
swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by
nearly half we were in danger of "mission
failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal,
they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to
charges of being weak on national security unless he did
what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon,
and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's
ass.
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops,
Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the
strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful,"
McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews.
"I was selling an unsellable position." For the
general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics
a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington
insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a
prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would
plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening
international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN
strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,"
says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading
critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with
McChrystal. "The idea that we are going to spend a
trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic
world is utter nonsense.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what
he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point,
the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the
war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're
in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap
American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of
operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the
words "victory" or "win," Obama
announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops
to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had
requested. The president had thrown his weight, however
hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in
southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of
success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S.
troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled.
Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest
country on earth has failed to win over the civilian
population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from
intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military
operation of the year a ferocious offensive that
began in February to retake the southern town of Marja
continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself
to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June,
Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest
war in American history and Obama has quietly
begun to back away from the deadline he set for
withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The
president finds himself stuck in something even more
insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked
into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic,
mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project
he explicitly said he didn't want.
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of
counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages
to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more
like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to
look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,"
says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of
operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in
an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his
staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to
tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife,
Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq
War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30
days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding
anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle
along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci"
place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised.
"He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was
dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers,
spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and
outright maniacs. There's a former head of British
Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces
commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two
dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They
jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the
name from the South Park-esque sendup of military
cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do
attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving
in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the
culture of the International Security Assistance Force,
as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had
taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at
Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops.")
McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King
and other symbols of American excess, expanded the
morning briefing to include thousands of officers and
refashioned the command center into a Situational
Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled
after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also
set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for
sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each
morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend
around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's
a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around
him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the
ability to go without sleep and food translates into the
possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.
By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is
completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed
with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while
McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred
song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!"
they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their
Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team.
"All these men," he tells me. "I'd die for
them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of
combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit
group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S.
policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are
in indisputable command of all military aspects of the
war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or
political side. Instead, an assortment of administration
players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S.
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to
Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor
Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to
mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host
of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the
mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic
incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to
call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and
credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes
the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports
McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create
governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department
budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State
Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the
problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to
talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the
diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star
general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown"
who remains "stuck in 1985." Politicians like
McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have
a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press
conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows.
Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary
Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner
circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the
strategic review," says an adviser. "She said,
'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.'?"
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the
official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The
Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member
of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing
rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him
dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in,
pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is
COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit."
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his
BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke,"
he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He
clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud,
then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not
bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg,"
an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial and strained
relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S.
ambassador. According to those close to the two men,
Eikenberry a retired three-star general who served
in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 can't stand that
his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's
also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies,
refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy
in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic
equivalent of the general. The job instead went to
British Ambassador Mark Sedwill a move that
effectively increased McChrystal's influence over
diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In
reality, that position needs to be filled by an American
for it to have weight," says a U.S. official
familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January, when a
classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The
New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was
prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of
McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai
as "not an adequate strategic partner," and
cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be
"sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We
will become more deeply engaged here with no way to
extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short
of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness
and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable.
"I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd
never said anything like that to us before," says
McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by
the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the
history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you
so.'?"
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of
diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is
McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke,
who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is
relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of
counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and
since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people,
McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past
few months, he has accompanied the president on more than
10 trips around the country, standing beside him at
political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February,
the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal
even drove over to the president's palace to get him to
sign off on what would be the largest military operation
of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the
president was sleeping off a cold and could not be
disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal
finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense
minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the
president from his nap.
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's
counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible
government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot
leader we've backed a danger that Eikenberry
explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team
McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal
partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past
year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At
times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's
desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S.
soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General,"
he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we
were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the
mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him
throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and
Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four
brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to
different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a
sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his
superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes
to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S.
military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His
class was the last to graduate before the academy started
to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson," as
it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone,
hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly
trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were
celebrated with a tradition called "rat fucking,"
which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or
mud, covered in shaving cream. "It was pretty out of
control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who
went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from
2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls
"huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers
with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen.
Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of
the campus dissidents a dual role that taught him
how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while
thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He
accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking,
partying and insubordination a record that his
classmates boasted made him a "century man."
One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding
McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case
of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking
almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected
to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where
unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and
I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while
Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began
dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a
serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as
brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular:
As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point
literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories
that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would
confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer
complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops
to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy
he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note,"
a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears
to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president.
It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the
assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House:
"The President strode in smiling. From the right
coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew
forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had
succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an
Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam.
"We really felt we were a peacetime generation,"
he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that
didn't feel like that big of a deal." So McChrystal
spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in
Special Forces school and became a regimental commander
of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous
position, even in peacetime nearly two dozen
Rangers were killed in training accidents during the
Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most
soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go
into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming
systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to
revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He
introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to
qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and
forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly
marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his
inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government and then at the Council on Foreign
Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits
and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he
moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the
skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West
Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid
military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a
highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you
far especially in the political chaos that
followed September 11th. "He was very focused,"
says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to
know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality
has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been
over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman
during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like
a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander
with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff
happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad,
McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the
president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that
major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was
during his next stint overseeing the military's
most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and
Delta Force that McChrystal took part in a cover-up
that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger,
was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan
in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating
the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of
Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified
recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman
had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later
claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough
a strange excuse for a commander known for his
laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later,
McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command,
specifically warning that President Bush should avoid
mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the
circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public,"
he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment"
for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly
helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions,"
wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the
Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added,
because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and
Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even
if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of
command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was
promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a
scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama
in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch,
prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar
litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked
through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the
scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported
seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the
experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried
to prevent detainee operations from being placed under
his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political
swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009,
as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his
staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and
the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a
ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way
back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal
a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind
of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab,
McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi"
commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when
his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He
speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking
official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely
interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod
and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made
set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and
four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote
from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are
only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go
beyond them.") He went out on dozens of nighttime
raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top
commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with
almost no entourage. "The fucking lads love Stan
McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in
Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone
would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be
like 'Who the fuck is that?' And it's fucking Stan
McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely
successful as head of the Joint Special Operations
Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's
darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and
captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "JSOC was a killing
machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of
operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of
killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks,
targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down
often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally
shunned by the military. "The Boss would find the 24-year-old
kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree
from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors
humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked
with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in
Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey you fucking
muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to
work together with these guys.'?"
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for
counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated
instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the
Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units
in Afghanistan from four to 19. "You better be out
there hitting four or five targets tonight,"
McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway
at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have
to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact,
the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the
disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the
first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some
90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009
a record that has created tremendous resentment
among the very population that COIN theory is intent on
winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid
ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and
allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted
in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus,
killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number
of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued
some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian
casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in
a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls
it for every innocent person you kill, you create
10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their
reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air
power and severely limited night raids. He regularly
apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and
berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths.
"For a while," says one U.S. official, "the
most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of
McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF
command has even discussed ways to make not killing into
something you can win an award for: There's talk of
creating a new medal for "courageous restraint,"
a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the
gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new
marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his
own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers
complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?"
says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years
in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick
McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put
soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real
soldier will tell you the same thing."
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM
a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar
to confront such accusations from the troops
directly. It was a typically bold move by the general.
Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from
Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked
McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am
writing because it was said you don't care about the
troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves,"
Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm
saddened by the accusation that I don't care about
soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes
both personally and professionally at least I do.
But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at
the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his
own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went
on a foot patrol with the troops not some bullshit
photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live
operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from
Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A
23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram one of
the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with
had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third
man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo
was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's
memorial service. "He started to look up to you,"
Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it
down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt.
Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat
Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on
patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high
blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers
here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of
both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's
death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission
to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting
that it was often used as a combat position by the
Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to
avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied.
"These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt.
Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in
them."
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the
platoon was given. "Patrol only in areas that you
are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend
yourselves with lethal force," the laminated card
reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the
world to fight, that's like telling a cop he should only
patrol in areas where he knows he won't have to make
arrests. "Does that make any fucking sense?"
asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a
fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself:
What are we doing here?"
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal
intended they've been distorted as they passed
through the chain of command but knowing that does
nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground.
"Fuck, when I came over here and heard that
McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our
fucking gun on," says Hicks, who has served three
tours of combat. "I get COIN. I get all that.
McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But
then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his
directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they're
all fucked up either because somebody is trying to
cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it
themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing."
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath
a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some
two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. "I ask
you what's going on in your world, and I think it's
important for you all to understand the big picture as
well," McChrystal begins. "How's the company
doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody?
Anybody feel like you're losing?" McChrystal says.
"Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we're losing,
sir," says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. "Strength is leading when you just
don't want to lead," he tells the men. "You're
leading by example. That's what we do. Particularly when
it's really, really hard, and it hurts inside." Then
he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency,
diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard.
He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he's careful
not to bullshit the men. "We are knee-deep in the
decisive year," he tells them. The Taliban, he
insists, no longer has the initiative "but I
don't think we do, either." It's similar to the talk
he gave in Paris, but it's not winning any hearts and
minds among the soldiers. "This is the philosophical
part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries
to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from
infantry companies."
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration
boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed
to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they
detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be
able to fight like they did in Iraq, like they had
in Afghanistan before McChrystal. "We aren't putting
fear into the Taliban," one soldier says.
"Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded
thing," McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated
maxim that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan.
"The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that
didn't work."
"I'm not saying go out and kill everybody, sir,"
the soldier persists. "You say we've stopped the
momentum of the insurgency. I don't believe that's true
in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain
ourselves, the stronger it's getting."
"I agree with you," McChrystal says. "In
this area, we've not made progress, probably. You have to
show strength here, you have to use fire. What I'm
telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do?
You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?"
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent
who doesn't have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a
civilian. "That's the way this game is,"
McChrystal says. "It's complex. I can't just decide:
It's shirts and skins, and we'll kill all the shirts."
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he
hasn't succeeded at easing the men's anger. He makes one
last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death
of Cpl. Ingram. "There's no way I can make that
easier," he tells them. "No way I can pretend
it won't hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. .
. . I will tell you, you're doing a great job. Don't let
the frustration get to you." The session ends with
no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have
sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of
his own men aren't buying it.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on
McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any
success here was Genghis Khan and he wasn't
hampered by things like human rights, economic
development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine,
bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest
Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's
nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American
misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like
other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that
counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy,
expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are
confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he
somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody
fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S.
homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda,
which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching
150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and
water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying
to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and
building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all
very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a
former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in
the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital
interest there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in
Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a
high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant
moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very
much in command both in Kabul and in Washington.
In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and
dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai.
The two leaders talk about how great their relationship
is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties.
They mention the word "progress" 16 times in
under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still,
the session represents the most forceful commitment that
Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There
is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have
made in recent years in education, in health care
and economic development," the president says.
"As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed
lights that would not have been visible just a few
years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make.
During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush
administration had no real progress to point to,
officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of
success. "It was one of our first impressions,"
one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad
at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many
lights shining brightly." So it is to the language
of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned
talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like
health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years
ago they would have mocked. "They are trying to
manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of
victory because victory is not even defined or
recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense
analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political
adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's
the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic
purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get
run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are
not going to become great in the near future."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer
little deterrent to a military determined to stay the
course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the
rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to
reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan.
"If Americans pulled back and started paying
attention to this war, it would become even less popular,"
a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism,
however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency
from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw
troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes
to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.
"There's a possibility we could ask for another
surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here,"
a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White
House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress,"
McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of
counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been
planning to launch a major military operation this summer
in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the
Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a
decisive turning point in the war the primary
reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from
Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging
that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the
general announced that he is postponing the offensive
until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah
or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal
calls a "rising tide of security." The Afghan
police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize
control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90
million of aid into the city to win over the civilian
population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to
explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic
operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's
not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be
doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that
doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to
be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja.
"The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says
a military official. "We have to remove them, but we
have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the
population." When Vice President Biden was briefed
on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was
shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan
of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This
looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S.
officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay
underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency.
After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too
strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly
attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over
the Afghan people do not want us there. Our
supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to
delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid
championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things
worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates
the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts
University who has studied the effect of aid in southern
Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption,
delegitimizes the government and creates an environment
where we're picking winners and losers" a
process that fuels resentment and hostility among the
civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has
succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the
primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.
There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids
using the word "victory" when he talks about
Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really
possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
This article originally appeared in RS 1108/1109 from
July 8-22, 2010.
Copyright 2010 Rolling Stone;
Re WHISTLEBLOWERS
Whistleblower website WikiLeaks says it will
release another secret recording of a US military attack
in which American warplanes "massacre" Afghan
civilians.
Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange says he has obtained a
video of the US killings around the east Afghanistan
village of Gerani in 2009 in which more than 140 Afghan
civilians, including 92 children, were slaughtered, UK
media reported on Wednesday.
"The clip will show previously classified footage
from US warplanes that had been tapped to bomb Taliban
positions in Farah province, Afghanistan last year,"
the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph quoted a
WikiLeaks "email sent to supporters."
"The Afghan government said at the time that the
strikes by F-18 and B1 planes near Gerani killed 147
civilians. An independent Afghan inquiry later put the
toll at 86," the paper added.
Assange fears the website might come under attack after
US authorities said they were searching for the site's
founder following the arrest of a US soldier accused of
leaking the Afghanistan video and another of a US attack
in the Iraq capital Baghdad in which a number of other
civilians were killed, The Guardian, another
British daily reported Wednesday.
WikiLeaks' release of the Baghdad video in April drew
worldwide fire over the US military's indiscriminate
killings in Iraq.
The website is reportedly preparing the film of the
Afghan village bombing described by the UK media as
potentially harrowing.
The American military officials had initially said that
they had bombarded Afghan militants' strongholds but
later admitted to "mistakes" in the attacks.
The US has reportedly used mass-killing weapons in the
operation, including 1,000 kilogram bombs and others that
burst before touchdown to maximize casualties.
It also failed to check whether or not women and children
were sheltered in the buildings.
GHN/HRF/MB
ENVIRONMENT AND AGRICULTURE
Corporate farming for the rich International agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, UK pension funds, foundations and individuals have been snapping up some of the world's cheapest land, in Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Congo, Zambia, Uganda, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mali, Sierra Leone, Ghana and elsewhere. Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007. Any land investors cant buy is leased for about $1 per year per hectare. In many cases, the contracts have led to evictions, civil unrest and complaints of land grabbing, John Vidal reports in UKs Guardian [1].
Nyikaw Ochalla, an indigenous Anuak from the Gambella region of Ethiopia now living in Britain but in regular contact with farmers in his region, told Vidal [1]: All of the land in the Gambella region is utilised. Each community has and looks after its own territory and the rivers and farmlands within it. It is a myth propagated by the government and investors to say that there is waste land or land that is not utilised in Gambella.
The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands .People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry.
Indian companies, backed by government loans, have bought or leased hundreds of thousands of hectares in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal and Mozambique, where they are growing rice, sugar cane, maize and lentils to feed their domestic market.
The Ethiopian government denied the deals were causing hunger and said that the land deals were attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign investments and tens of thousands of jobs. A spokesman said that Ethiopia has 74 m hectares of fertile land, only 15 percent is currently in use. Of the remaining land, only 3 to 4 percent is offered to foreign investors.
Local government officers in Ethiopia said that foreign companies were not being charged for water, and in Awassa, the al-Amouni farm set up by Saudi billionaire businessman, Ethiopian-born Sheikh Modhammed al-Amoudi, uses as much water a year as 100 000 Ethiopians.
Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern emirate states, Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, are thought to be the biggest buyers of African land. In 2008, Saudi Arabia, one of the Middle East's largest wheat-growers, announced it was to reduce domestic cereal production by 12 percent a year to conserve water. The government earmarked US$5 bn to provide loans at preferential rates to Saudi companies to invest in countries with strong agricultural potential.
Saudi Arabia is also leasing land from other countries such as Pakistan [7], already water-stressed, water-depleted. Ayesha Siddiqa, a strategic and political analyst said the idea is for individual landowners to lease to investors, opening the door to large-scale corporate farming. Big landowners who are now renting out their land to small farmers will throw them out and put it up to the highest foreign bidder, she said, predicting that small landholders with 5-10 acres would be bought out, and landlessness and rural poverty will increase.
Land grab has indeed intensified since the 2007/8 food commodity price crisis. The international not-for-profit organization Grain produced a comprehensive report warning that [2]: If left unchecked, this global land grab could spell the end of small-scale farming and rural livelihoods.
The Asian Peasant Coalition (APC), with 15 million members in 26 peasant organizations and 6 other supporting non-government organizations from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, launched an Asia-wide protest against the global land grab in July 2009 [8]. It said that state terrorism and widespread land grab in poor Asian countries took place at the height of the financial crisis.
The APC represents farmers, landless peasants, dalits, forests peoples, indigenous people, agricultural workers, herders, pastoralists, and the women and youths across these sectors [9].
Approximately 365 million people in Asia derive their livelihoods from land, but, landlessness in Asia is worsening at an alarming rate over past decade, owing to [8] the greater degree of integration of Asian countries with the global market, and increasing demands for land by big corporate interests. Landlessness among Asian peasants is very high: 49.6 percent in Bangladesh, 22 percent in India, 10 percent in Nepal and almost 75 percent in Pakistan and the Philippines, and the trend is growing, according to Danilo Ramos, APC secretary general.
More than 100 cases of land grab have been compiled by Grain. Land grabbers are driven by two different agendas, but they eventually converge.
The first agenda is food security. A number of countries that rely on food imports see outsourcing food production in foreign land as a long-term strategy to feed its own people cost-effectively, instead of having to pay the high prices in the world commodity markets. Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, India, Korea, Libya and Egypt, fall into this category. Foreign governments are buying up farmland in countries like Sudan, Cambodia, and the Philippines that depend on food aid delivered by the UN World Food Programme.
The second agenda is financial return, in particular, as the result of the financial meltdown of the housing and stock markets in 2007/8, investment fund managers have been turning to food and agricultural commodities and derivatives [3]; and coincidentally, agricultural land and produce are also seen as good sources of revenue.
Where these tracks come together [2] is that in both cases it is the private sector that will be in control. In the drive for food security, governments take the lead through a public policy agenda.. But while public officials negotiate and make the deals for land contracts, the private sector is explicitly expected, and even encouraged, to take over. It is effectively a new colonialism by transnational corporations.
China, for example, has been remarkably self-sufficient in food, though at a cost of using so much fertilizers that its soils are ruined, and its waterways putrid with pollution [10, 11] (Chinas Soils Ruined by Overuse of Chemical Fertilizers, China's Pollution Census Triggers Green Five-Year Plan, SiS 46). The Chinese government has been gradually outsourcing its food production well before the global food crisis. Some 30 agricultural cooperation deals have been sealed to give Chinese firms access to foreign farmland in exchange for Chinese technologies, training and infrastructure development funds, not only in Asia but all over Africa.
From Kazakhstan to Queensland, and from Mozambique to the Philippines, a steady and familiar process is under way, with Chinese companies leasing or buying up land, setting up large farms, flying in farmers, scientists and extension workers, and getting down to the work of crop production, Grain reports [2]. Most of Chinas offshore farming is dedicated to rice, soybean, and maize, along with biofuel crops like sugarcane, cassava or sorghum.
The Gulf States, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have neither the water nor the soil to produce food. But they have plenty of oil and money. Because they depend on food imported mainly from Europe, and their currencies are pegged to the US dollar, the simultaneous rise in food prices on the world market and the fall in the US dollar have boosted their import bill from US$8 bn to US$20 bn within the past five years. Given that water is already in short supply, the Saudi government decided to stop growing wheat, their main staple, by 2016, and instead, to grow it elsewhere and ship it back.
The United Arab Emirates, similarly, under the aegis of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), banded together with Bahrain and the other Gulf nations to formulate a collective strategy of outsourcing food production, particularly to Islamic countries, where they will supply capital and oil contracts in exchange for guarantees that their corporations will have access to farmland and export the produce back home. The most heavily targeted states are Sudan and Pakistan, followed by a number of south-east Asian countries - Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam as well as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uganda, Ukraine, Georgia, Brazil and so on.
Within food industry circles, Japanese and Arab trading and processing corporations have are the most involved.
Japanese firms already own 12 m ha of farmland abroad for the production of food and fodder crops, some of that in China, where in 2006, Asahi, Itochu and Sumitomo began leasing hundreds of hectares of farmland for organic food production for the Chinese and Korean markets. In 2007, Asahi expanded to develop the first Japanese dairy farm in China. A year later in September 2008, Asahi took advantage of the melamine milk tragedy to launch its first liquid milk product at a 50 percent mark-up.
Japanese firms have also targeted Brazil. In late 2007, Mitsui bought 100 000 ha of Brazilian farmland for soybean production.
The finance industry is getting in on the act. Throughout 2008, an army of investment houses, private equity funds, hedge funds and the like have been targeting farmlands throughout the world [2], with the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development greasing the way for this investment flow and persuading governments to change land ownership laws to ease the transactions. As a result, land prices have started to climb.
Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have taken control of Chinas livestock industry; its biggest piggeries, poultry farms and meat processing plants, including rights to the farmland. New York-based BlackRock Inc, one of the worlds largest money managers with nearly US$1.5 trillion on its books, set up a US$200 m agricultural hedge fund, of which US$30 m will be used to acquire farmland around the world. Morgan Stanley, which nearly joined the queue for a US Treasury Department bail-out, bought 40 000 ha of farmland in the Ukraine, where Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment house has acquired rights to 300 000 ha. Meanwhile, Black Earth Farming, a Swedish investment group, acquired control of 331 000 ha of farmland in the black earth region of Russia, where Alpcot-Agro, another Swedish investment firm, also bought rights to 128 000 ha. Landkom, the British investment group, bought 100 000 ha of agricultural land in Ukraine and vows to expand to 350 000 ha by 2011. All these land acquisitions are for producing grains, oils, meat and dairy for those in the world market who can pay.
Not surprisingly, the food crisis worsens for the poor. At the end of 2009, over one billion of the worlds population are critically hungry, with 24 000 dying of hunger each day, more than half of them children. The United Nations Food Programme faces a budget shortfall of US$4.1 billion [12, 13]. Food prices have remained high despite the economic downturn, and extreme weather patterns affecting production are causing more hunger.
Many commentators rightly blame the deregulated financial speculation in the global agricultural commodities markets for precipitating the 2007/8 world food crisis [3], and the ensuing land grab has almost certainly made it worse.
However, other more serious, longer term threats to food security are in danger of being overlooked, which no amount of land grab can insure any country or individuals against.
Veteran world watcher Lester Brown reminds us that many past civilizations collapsed on account of shrinking food supplies, and we may well meet the same fate from [14] our failure to deal with the environmental trends that are undermining world food economy - most importantly failing water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures.
Our agriculture and food system has been showing signs of collapse [14, 15], with world grain yields falling to meet demand most years since 2000, and reserves reached their lowest in 50 years. Growth in yields has slowed despite record amounts of fertilizers being applied [16]. In the major croplands of the world China, India and US, which contain half the worlds population - industrial farming practices have severely depleted underground water, dried out rivers and lakes, eroded topsoil, and decimated wild life with fertilizers and pesticides run-offs. Most alarming is the recent disappearance of bees and other pollinators (see [17] Mystery of Disappearing Honeybees and other articles in the series, SiS 34).
At the same time, world oil production has passed its peak [18] Oil Running Out (SiS 25) with the peak of natural gas not far behind [19]. Conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels (especially in the manufacture of N fertilizers), as well as water.
In addition, climate change has emerged as a major threat to agricultural productivity. Direct field monitoring showed that crop yields fell 10 percent for each °C rise in night-time temperature during the growing season [20]. The International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that wheat yields in developing countries will drop 30 percent by 2050, while irrigated rice yields will drop 15 percent [21]. Climate change may hit the developing world harder, but the developed world is not immune. Increasing frequencies of drought, flood, and storm associated with climate change will devastate crops and livestock, and spells of extreme heat are also damaging as plants will start to deteriorate at about 32 °C. The yields of corn, soybean and cotton could fall by 30 to 46 percent under the slowest warming scenario, or 63 to 82 percent under the fastest warming scenario.
The scramble for biofuels by developed nations was a major factor in precipitating the 2007/8 food crisis [3] and the ensuing land grab, as described here. Policies supporting biofuels such as those of the EU and US are grossly misguided.
The US imported 19.5 million barrels of petroleum a day in 2008, which made up 57 percent of its total consumption [22]. In 2008, 9 billion gallons of ethanol were produced from 33 percent of the corn harvest subsidized at US$ 6-7 billion, to supply just 1.3 percent of the countrys oil consumption. It takes 1 700 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol [23]. Even if all 341 Mt of corn in the US were to be converted into ethanol, it would provide only 5 percent of the total oil consumption in the country, leaving nothing for livestock feed or food [24].
The US is a major exporter of corn accounting for over 60 percent of the worlds export. Globally, the scramble for ethanol from corn and sugarcane and biodiesel from soybean, oilseeds, oil palm and jatropha resulted in accelerated deforestation (with large CO2 emissions) as well as forced evictions [25, 26] (Food Without Fossil Fuels Now, SiS 42) and land grab.
Biofuels from crops not only jeopardize food production; they are highly unsustainable, requiring huge inputs of fertilizers and pesticides as well as water, depleting soil fertility, accelerating soil erosion and generating a great deal of polluting wastes. A realistic energy accounting shows that all biofuels except one require more energy input in fossil fuels than the energy in the biofuel product. In other words, they have net negative energy returns and hence result in more CO2 emissions than just using the fossil fuels [24]. The energy returns for the major biofuels are: corn ethanol -46 percent, switchgrass -68 percent; soybean biodiesel -63 percent; and rapeseed biodiesel -58 percent. Even palm oil produced in Thailand has a -8 percent net energy return. The only exception is ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil, with a positive energy return of 128 percent [27], though it is still unsustainable in other respects.
Are genetically modified (GM) crops desperately needed for feeding the world and saving the climate as proponents claim? A three-year assessment by 400 scientists, policymakers and non-government organization representatives IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) [28] concluded that GM crops are at best irrelevant for food security and poverty alleviation, and small scale agro-ecological farming is the way ahead [29] (GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the World, SiS 38).
GM crops are actually much worse than the high input green revolution varieties they replace, as documented by the large dossier of evidence we have accumulated over the years [30, 31] (The Case for A GM-Free Sustainable World, GM Science Exposed, ISIS publications). They require more fertilizers, more pesticides, more water, but yield less. GM crops are less resilient to environmental stresses, pests and diseases and hence highly vulnerable to climate change. But they cost more because of the corporate monopoly developed around gene patenting [32] US Farmers Oppose 'Big Ag' in Anti-Trust Hearing (SiS 46). After 15 years of allowing GM varieties to take over its major crops, the United States is facing ecological meltdown [33] (GM Crops Facing Meltdown in the USA, SiS 46). The same has happened with the introduction of GM cotton in India, where, in addition, it has accelerated farm suicides by increasing farmers indebtedness [34] (Farmer Suicides and Bt Cotton Nightmare Unfolding in India, SiS 45). Above all, genetic modification introduces specific hazards as I have indicated for more than ten years [35] (Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare, ISIS publication). Many scientists now acknowledge those hazards, some having done their own studies to find out [36] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40).
There is no alternative to addressing the serious long
term threats to food security other than a decisive and
comprehensive shift worldwide to organic
agriculture and localized food and energy systems (see [37,
38] Food
Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free ,
Green
Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050, ISIS/TWN
publications)
oil spill gulf of mexico
An estimated 3.4 million gallons are spewing out daily with no end in sight while toxic oil and dispersants are killing all ocean life
Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri interviews Ohio scientist Mike Castle on what can be done instead
It seems unbelievable that after almost six weeks of concentrated effort from the most technologically sophisticated staff and scientists of BP (ex British Petroleum, relaunched Beyond Petroleum!) that the catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizons off-shore oil rig explosion is still spreading out of control. It has devastated the entire Gulf of Mexico, Florida, and entered the Atlantic Ocean, traveling along the coast, up to New Jersey and New York. This is no spill; it is already far worse than the 1989 ExxonValdez tanker accident. Some scientists estimated that 3.4 million gallons are coming out of 3 plumes daily [1]. To-date this means 156.4 million gallons of crude oil, and counting; no wonder it is being called an underwater oil volcano.
Thats not all. There are new reports that another crude oil plume, 22 miles long by 6 miles wide, has been found going in another direction (West) [2], 3,300 feet [below the surface], with the greatest concentration of hydrocarbons at about 1300 feet suggesting the highest level of environmental pollution from the BP disaster may be located out of sight in the Gulfs deep waters. It was discovered by David Hollander, associate professor of chemical oceanography, University of South Florida, the lead investigator of a research mission sent to the Gulf of Mexico [2, 3]. They fear it is the result of BPs unprecedented use of chemical dispersants applied underwater at the well site. Professor Hollander said this raises [2] more fears that oil combined with dispersant toxicity may lead to a dangerous situation for fish larvae and other creatures that filter ocean water for food.
Despite 11 deaths from the initial rig explosion and the gravity of the ecological disaster, the worst of its kind in US history, not one person has been fired or held accountable. The cozy, on-going revolving door policy between corporations and government officials means that safety, precaution, and accountability are not part of the picture [4, 5].
BP also continues to spray highly toxic dispersants that are wrecking additional ecological havoc, exacerbating an already critical situation [6]. One dispersant is the chemical solvent known as Corexit 9500, banned in Europe. It is spreading the crude oil and chemical toxicity over a far wider area, and traveling on the Gulf and ocean currents. The impact and extent of the devastation underwater is far worse, but unseen by satellite tracking. The ecological catastrophe is highly likely to become transAtlantic. A short ABC-TV news item showing the underwater spread of the crude oil and dispersants on their regular national program Good Morning America 25 May 2010 should be seen by everyone and shared widely [7].
The photographs posted by the Boston Globe on 24 May are also heart wrenching [8]. There is no doubt that our entire ocean food chain has been poisoned. It will take time to document the full extent of the environmental and health impacts perpetrated by gross negligence and a total disregard of the Precautionary Principle [9]. And, all those who are involved in any kind of miniscule and, so far, inept and extremely dangerous clean up are already becoming ill. This includes hired paid workers and volunteers from environmental organizations, who have not been informed by BP or anyone else of the environmental health hazards they face. And nothing is getting even remotely fixed while the epic environmental tragedy keeps unfolding. Birds, fishes, turtles, dolphins, whales and other sea creatures, the entire ecosystem is facing a far worsening crisis with every passing day. Toxic crude oil has hit land in Louisiana. In one area, Plaquemines Parish, there are video reports that all life in the ocean is dead [10]. Dead turtles and dolphins are already washing up onto the Gulf shore; but the real extent is not being reported by mainstream news. Apparently BP is forbidding news crews access to the off-shore site; it is making the rules, not the US Coast Guard. BP has also refused to use less toxic dispersants [11]. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, The New York Times has reported numerous conflicts of interest [12].
An urgent report Its raining oil in Florida [13], on 25 May, noted raindrops of black crude oil carried on bands of storm clouds from the Gulf of Mexico. Until late on Tuesday 25 May, there was a live feed of the underwater crude oil spew. This live, streaming video was cut off, after a new eruption/explosion began. The last report was posted on Youtube [14].
Dr. R. Michael Castle, one of the top independent polymer chemists in the US, has been following this nightmare of incompetence and greed as he told me, since the oil rig explosion last month on April 20. Castle is also the author of The Methodic Demise of Natural Earth, an essay on what is happening to our planets environment with the out-of-control and illegal spraying of highly toxic aerosol Chemtrails over the past twelve years [15]. He is further the author of the 2003 Unified Atmospheric Protection Act (now tied up in Congressional committee) [16].
With his extensive polymer chemistry background, Dr. Castle clearly understands the enormous ecological chemical devastation that is continuing unabated. The following are my conversations with him on 25 and 29 May 2010.
What can be done? he said. Firstly, dont set off any nuke! [This is still under consideration [17]. ] Do not do that. This is sheer madness. In no way will this fix anything. It will do irreparable and long-term massive harm. Radiation damage would devastate the immediate area and the rest of our planet. [Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are still monitored 65 years after the US military dropped atomic bombs on civilians.]
Secondly, for emergency clean-up crews exposed to the crude oils benzene vapors, they must be informed about the consequences of working there. Many of them are neither trained properly, nor know what serious health damage can result. [This is another unfolding scenario like what the 9/11 First Responders experienced, when they were told by public officials that it was safe to breathe the toxic air at Ground Zero in New York City.]
Thirdly, according to Dr. Castle, the dispersant contains ethylene oxide surfactants [that allows for increased spreadability]; and, one of them, 2-butoxy ethanol is a water soluble glycol ether. These are known to coat fish gills [that help absorb oxygen from the water]. Due to this toxic action, the fish then die, because they cannot get available oxygen. This is in addition to all sea life suffering from benzene poisoning.
1. Stay out of the water. Protect yourself from the hazardous vapors and carcinogenic effects of benzene. Benzene cuts off oxygen to the body (its water soluble) and is a known cause of leukemia blood cancer.
2. Use organic coconut oil or organic coconut butter. These are safe and natural plant ingredients that are bioactive and will coat the skin and protect it. Rub it on your hands, and face, and neck. It creates a protective film against benzene. Do not rub or wash it off, as it helps reverse the toxins many effects on the body.
3. Also, use a capful of Willards XXX Dark and rub it on arms and hands. This will also naturally protect the body. This is made of lignite coal in water and is another natural way to shield the body from toxins. [Dr. Castle has no financial ties with this company/product.]
4. I repeat: Do not send any emergency hazard clean-up teams to the Gulf who are uninformed and do not realize the extreme damage these poisons can do short and long term.
5. AmeriHaz can be safely used to gather up the crude oil that is already causing such ecological damage.
Castle developed AmeriHaz in 1996, an inert polymer, to deal in a truly safe manner with cleaning up serious crude oil leaks and out-of-control dispersals of highly dangerous chemicals. I wanted to create a product that could absorb any devastating spill (its really the very wrong word for what is happening in the Gulf. A spill is something very minor). This is catastrophic in its scope, he told me. This is an inert polymer product that will encapsulate this crude oil, so it wont be picked up systemically in anything else. It literally locks up PAHs [polyaromatic hydrocarbons] that are precursors of benzene. He has given a demonstration for Ohios TV news channel on how it works [18].
Castle also recommends using crushed, pebble-size lignite coal all along beaches, marshes, and estuaries. This will help detoxify the benzene (that is naturally soluble in water) because it is extremely toxic in crude oil.
These are realistic solutions that can actually begin to remedy the effects of this catastrophe, if those people in charge really do care about saving the Gulf, an area still in trauma from the post-Hurricane Katrina debacle where there was really no help for those in most need.
Finally, an international boycott of all BP products
should be instituted immediately. The untapped power of
the consumer pocketbook should be used. When their CEO
says this is a modest event, the company
should not get any more money from already very strapped
consumers.
Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri is an environmental writer
and the author of the highly acclaimed book, The
Uterine Crisis. The Ecologist notes: this
book is an inspiration.
1. Gulf of Mexico oil volcano gushes 3.4 million gallons of oil a day. The Real Agenda, accessed 31 May 2010,
2. New giant oil plume discovered in Gulf,
Video. Lynne Hermann, GlobalResearch.ca, 28 May 2010,
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&id=19409;
This plume has also been found by another investigative
team led by Professor James H. Cowan Jr., Louisiana State
University: Third oil leak in Gulf,
Fellowship of Minds, 29 May, 2010, http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.
com/2010/05/29/third-oil-leak-in-gulf
3. Gulf oil spill: real disaster might be
lurking beneath the surface, Mark Sappenfeld,
The Christian Science Monitor, 16 May 2010: www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0516/Gulf-oil-
spill-real-disaster-might-be-lurking-beneath-the-surface
4. Lendman S. Falsified oil rig inspection & other
improprieties. US Inspector General Report, rense.com,
27 May 2010, www.rense.com/general91/fasl.htm
5. Leopold J. Why Isnt BP Under Criminal
Investigation? GlobalResearch.ca, 29 May 2010, www.
globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&id=19415
6. Allen E. Why BP refuses to stop using chemical
dispersants. Rense.com, 28 May 2010: www.
rense.com/general91/save.htm
7. What BP does not want you to see. 24 May 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/bp-oil-spill-continues
-gulf-mexico-frustration-mounts/story?id=10726217;
and
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_
email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
8. Oil reaches Louisiana shore, The Big Picture, 24 May 2010,
www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html?camp=localsearch:on:twit:bigpic
9. Perlingieri IS. Worldwide environmental crisis. gone missing: The Precautionary Principle. GlobalResearch.ca, 11 Feb. 2009, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&id=12268
10. Twenty-four miles of Plaqeumines Parish is destroyed. everything is dead, Billy Nungesser, 21 May 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxRWqpc77Ms&feature=player_embedded
11. BP refuses EPA order to switch to less-toxic oil dispersant, Margot Roosevelt and Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times, 23 May 2010, www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-20100523%2C0%2C907236.story
12. Ian Urbina. Conflict of interest worries
raised in spill rests, Ian Urbina, New York
Times, 20 May 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/science/earth/21conflict.html;
See also Stephen Lendman. BP and the Administration
Lies, Deceit, and Cover up in the Gulf. 22
May 2010: www.rense.com/general90/bpp.htm
13. Its raining oil in Florida, Eve. Fourwinds10.com,
http://fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/environment/pollution/news.php?q=1274767889
14. Philippe Cousteau Jr. and Sam Champion take
hazmat dive into Gulfs oily waters.flv
You Tube, 25 May 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Wp4ZkEpO4
15. Dr. R. Michael Castle. The methodic demise
of natural earth. 26 June 2009: www.newswithviews.com/guest_
opinion/guest154.htm
16. The Unified Atmospheric Preservation Act, Revised
March 4, 2010, http://anticorruptionsociety.files.wordpress.
com/2010/04/the-unified-atmospheric-preservation-act.pdf
17. energy expert: nuking oil leak
only thing we can do, Daniel Tancer,
the raw story, 29 May 2010, http://
rawstory.com/rs/2010/0529/energy-expert-nuke-oil-leak/
18. Central Ohio scientist wants to help Gulf
oil spill, ONNtv.com, 17 May 2010, www.10tv.com/live/content/
onnnews/stories/2010/05/17/story-scientist-oil-spill-columbus.html
AUSTRALIA:
John Wilson's campaign to ensure Jury Trials are
available at all times to citizens on Trial has been
highlighted in previous issues of The Handstand. Here is
his final speech during his own Trial : http://www.rightsandwrong.com.au/index.html
HIS
HONOUR: Thank you Mr Crown. Mr Wilson well take the
morning adjournment at 11.30 but youve got quite a
bit of time until then. Im not stopping you at 11.30,
Im just inviting you to start your address now.
ACCUSED: I hope not to take very long its a very
simple procedure.
HIS HONOUR: Yes certainly. Mr Wilson if you want to, use
the lectern up that end and just move as much of your
gear as you need to address up to that end, just so
youre closer to the jury.
ACCUSED:
Yeah Id like to be.
HIS
HONOUR: Thats how its usually done.
ACCUSED:
Ive got an awful lot of stuff here just hold on.
HIS
HONOUR: If there is anything youve forgotten during
your address youre perfectly welcome to go back and
get it.
ACCUSED:
Gday. You are my judges and you are to judge if I
have done
wrong.
The word guilty means I have done wrong, the indictment
has got three
supposed
offences and each offence has got two components, the
actual doing
of
it and the guilty mind and you cannot find me guilty
unless you decide my
intentions
were evil and to do wrong.
So
there are two principal elements to this, well actually
the fundamental one is
who
owns 331 North Rocks Road and have I been lawfully
dispossessed. Now
the
unfortunate thing is that you have not been allowed to
investigate the law or
to
find out about the law and so our most important law that
we have in our
country
is English common law because thats where we get
all our values, all
our
rights and the most fundamental right we have was
actually guaranteed in
Magna
Carta and Magna Carta very definitely says, that no free
man shall be
taken
indeed imprisoned or exiled or outlawed or dispossessed
or destroyed in
any
way nor will we pass over him, nor will we send over him
unless by the lawful
judgment
of his equals, which is the law of the land and upon that
basis any
dispossession
procedures can only be done by trial by jury, it cannot
be done
summarily
and yet our rights to what is our birthright has been
eroded gradually
over
many years and so I hope Ive got across to you that
its the same with
every
foreclosure, absolutely every single foreclosure that has
happened in this
country
where people are being thrown out of their homes, they
are being
dispossessed
of their homes not lawfully not by our laws not by
English common
law.
The
way you undermine English common law is by brining in
statute laws
through
the parliaments and if any of those statute laws are
against common
right
then common law judges those to be void. It might sound a
poetic way of
saying
it but that is our essential element in our free society
where were are free
men,
we are sovereign human beings and we all have inalienable
rights,
inalienable
meaning they cannot be taken away, we cannot even give
them away
and
the most fundamental right is to be judged by our equals,
which is a jury and
a
jury are the only people who have jurisdiction in a court.
The only way that any
proceedings
can go ahead summarily without a jury is by the consent
from both
parties
to be without a jury.
Ive
been fighting in the courts for fourteen years, it
started off as a very, very
simple
case in which I just put forward the fact that variable
interest rates are
uncertain
terms of contract, and therefore that is a bad part of a
contract. And all
I
wanted to do, I wanted to, I wanted to keep the contract
in place, I said okay,
what
we want to do is sever the bad part from the contract to
keep it viable. That
unleashed
a whole can of worms like you wouldnt believe,
because instead of
there
being a five minute court case based upon the truth of
one word, it became
entangled
in so much lies and corruption and sheer treason, because
when we
are
denied our right to trial by jury, then it is treason.
Because trial by jury is
democracy,
this is where you rule, you are the people, you are in
the hot seat,
you
decide whether to punish people for doing wrong, or
reward them for doing
right.
Even in the coronation oath, it says quite clearly that
evil doers should be
punished
and people who do well should be rewarded.
That
was a very simple case, and based upon that fact, well
those two facts that
number
one, we can only be dispossessed by our equals, by a jury,
and then
coming
back to the very truth of one word, which is
variable, and I hope Ive got
across
to you that our law is called common law, which is the
law of the people,
by
the people, for the people, which is superior to any
statute law, and this is why
the
juries nullify bad laws. When a bad law is presented to a
jury, and they say
yes
thats not right, thats against common right,
no were not going to take any
notice
of it, they nullify it. So the way the banks and the
judges have got around
that
is by nullifying juries, they have nullified the juries.
They have now brought
in
that no, you dont have the right to trial by jury,
all these offences and so forth
will
be tried summarily, and that is so incredibly contrary to
what is right and fair
and
just in our society.
People
have been fighting wars for the right to trial by jury.
The Declaration of
Independence
in America, if you read that, it says very, very clearly
that one of
the
main grounds for the War of Independence was the fact
that they were
denied
trial by jury. But youre not supposed to know that,
youre supposed to be
locked
away, isolated from any research, finding out for
yourself our history, our
birth
rights. And coming to the Declaration of Independence
where Thomas
Jefferson
said that, you know, these are the grounds for the War of
Independence.
He also went on to become the third president of the
United
States
and one of his classic comments was that I believe
trial by jury to be the
only
anchor that can hold a government to the principles of
its constitution. That
still
applies now. When a government loses track and takes away
our rights,
fundamental
rights, to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of
happiness, then
thats
when the jury come in. The jury is the defenders of our
liberties. But once
you
nullify the juries, then youve got tyranny. Thomas
Jefferson also said that
when
the people fear the government, you have tyranny, and
when the
government
fear the people, you have liberty. Hes a wonderful
man, he came
up
with so many wise things and there are so many axioms
that defend our
rights,
and when they bring in these supposed laws and say
This will be tried
summarily,
and they do it all the time. They put people in prison
time and time
and
time again with not even allowing them to know about
their right to trial by
jury.
I would say everyone in prison in Australia is imprisoned
unlawfully,
absolute
unlawfully, because theyve never been given the
opportunity to have
trial
by jury, okay, and I could say if you dont want
trial by jury, you sign a
memorandum
of consent saying No I dont want a jury,
and thats got to come
from
both sides, okay. And even if they do get a jury, the
jury are so hamstrung
that
the jury is just a puppet in the hands of the judge. The
Magna Carta also
says
that unless by the lawful judgment of the
jury.
Now,
the jury not only decide if theyve done right or
wrong, but they also impose
the
penalty, the sentence, but they said No, no, the
judges do the sentencing,
not
the way our laws, not without the consent of both parties.
These are such
fundamental
issues of two things, common law regarding what is a
contract, and
Id
say variable renders a contract void and
uncertainly, so there is no contract,
okay.
And then the other thing is the right to trial by jury.
Trial
by jury is actually a Christian institution because if
you read in Matthew, Im
not
a big Bible basher, but where you want our laws, our laws
are based upon
the
Bible, its always been that way. Our laws come from
England and you read
the
ancient charters and it all starts off with a reference
to God, and all that sort
of
stuff. Thats where our values come from, so it says
in Matthew that if youd
got
a dispute with a neighbour, you go and talk to them man
to man. If you could
just
settle it, fair enough, youve gained a friend, but
if theres no settlement, then
you
take it to, the correct word is ecclesia,
thats the original Greek word in the
Bible.
Ecclesia has got basically the meaning of an
assembly, it also means
church.
So when you have a dispute which you cant settle
man to man, you
take
it to an assembly, okay, where the jurors swear an oath,
because thats
what
jury means, jurors is the Latin word for right, oath, law,
you are an assembly
of
law. Thats why I started off by saying, I quoted
Paul Newmans famous
address
to the jury, he said you are the law, because you are an
assembly of
law,
you are sui juris, you are your own masters, you are free
men, you are
sovereign
human beings, and then you assemble. And the oath is you
ask God
for
help, says So help me God.
I
asked JPs, lawyers, whatever the - what does this mean
So help me God and
they
look at you like that, it means so help me God. Because
it goes on to say in
Matthew
that when two or more are gathered in his name, he is
amongst them,
so
thats what the importance of a jury. This is the
way we got our Christian
values
of whats right and whats wrong, to defend our
families, ourselves, our
future
generations, you know. This is why, this is the most
important jury trial in
Australias
history because gradually over time, any understanding
that people
had
of their values has been eroded. You are being kept in
the dark, youre not
being
told, youre not being told history. Youre not
being told basic laws.
Perhaps
one of the Bible elements of my case is my website,
because my
website
not only talks about the law and ..(not transcribable)..
down the law for
you
to read, but it also shows my intention. When I started
off the trial, I said I
could
be a fat cat, I was quite a while a dentist and so
forth, but thats not why
were
here, were here to help each other.
Anything
I can do, Ill continue to do it. So getting back to
the actual indictment,
the
first indictment says that, it claims that 331 North
Rocks Road is the dwelling
house
of Kamal Issa. That is absurd because he has never been
granted lawful
possession
of the property, no, because we have this fundamental law
which
says
No free man shall be dispossessed unless by the
lawful judgment of his
equals,
boom, boom. And yet they do it time and time - all these
dispossessions
and
foreclosures where the sheriffs come along and throw the
family out of the
house,
its all wrong because its not lawful,
its not legal. But the media are not
going
to tell you anything. In fact theres a fellow
called - a name which escapes
me,
but basically this American Tom Duderhausen(?) or
something like that, he
said
that there are four boxes for the liberty. He said the
first one is a soap box,
the
second one is the ballot box, the third ones a jury
box, the fourth ones the
ammo
box, and he said theyve got to be used in that
order. The soap box is
pretty,
pretty useless because thats having marches and
having meetings and
media
and so forth, but theyre a waste of time, because
fundamentally theres
no
media coverage of this trial, which is such an important
trial, because the
media
do not intend people to know.
So
forget the first box. The second box is the ballot box
where you say okay,
well
elect representatives, go into Parliament to parley, to
talk and draw up
statute
laws for our protection and so forth, and so you can
forget that, because
what
is the result, the Parliaments have been producing these
laws that take
away
our rights, an overall common law, a contract law and a
right to trial by jury,
they
are bad laws.
Then
the third box comes in, the jury. The jury is there
because that is the
people,
that is trial by the country, that is the glory of
English common law.
Theres
so much written praising the value of trial by jury in
the protection of our
community,
of our values, our property, et cetera.
So
this is where the jury comes in, to nullify those bad
laws. And you might have
seen
a little photograph but I had a big sign saying
Juries nullify bad laws and I
come
back to the same point, the way you get around that is by
nullifying the
juries
and thats whats happened now.
Ive
been stopped before but before the Consumer Credit Act
came in, which was
totally
against the common law of having certainty of terms, okay,
the existing
law
before that which was repealed was the Moneylenders and
Infants Loans Act
which
said that The contract shall show, going
right down to a date of making
loan,
the amount of principal and then the total amount
of interest to be paid,
thats
conclusive and thats it. And then the Consumer
Credit Act came along
and
said No, were wiping all that. Were
going to say were going to have a
variation
of the terms of the contract and they get away with
it because people
are
kept in the dark. Youre not told about it.
Youre not told about common law,
they
just bulldoze ahead.
In
fact, that then becomes a license to steal because when
you have a document
purporting
to be a contract which is not a contract because it
doesnt satisfy the
essential
elements that make up a contract that is fraud and when
you obtain
money
by fraud that is stealing coming back again to the Bible,
commandment
number
8, Thou shalt not steal and yet here is a
license to steal right in acts of
Parliament.
And this is what the jurys supposed to come along
and say No,
thats
wrong, we nullify that, but its not being
allowed to happen and this is
what
the situation is were in at the moment.
So
the first case I have in the Supreme Court was with..(not
transcribable)..and
this
first judge, he was called Master Greenwood, youll
find all these transcripts
and
judgments on my website. Thats why I put it there,
so people can read it
and
say If this blokes a whole lot of guff,
you know, well find out for sure. But
the
whole reason for my website is to teach people, and again
Thomas Jefferson
said
if people dont know how to govern themselves then
educate them and
thats
what weve got to do, weve got to educate each
other. Weve got to learn
the
lessons of history, otherwise--
This
chap, Master Greenwood, he had it all laid out. We went
through a sham
thing.
I didnt know what summarily meant, I just thought
summarily meant
something
thats going to be over and done with quickly, you
know, and only
when
I realised that Hey, the truth is not being upheld
here this fellow has
turned
around and said No, the rate is indeed
certain and I thought blow me
down,
the word is variable and then I went right through
to the High Court and
thats
why these volumes are so - Ive got two rooms full
of material. If I go into a
project
I want to be sure of the facts and the truth before I
continue it. I dont
want
to be shot down.
So
this is why Ive maintained that this continual
hammering going into the court,
going
into it. When the policeman says Well take
you to court I said Beauty,
thats
where I want to be because thats where we fight for
our rights. They say
Ha,
ha, ha, you wont get a jury anyway and
thats the way it is. But weve got
to
get back our right to trial by jury and on my website -
sorry, the only thing I
worry
about is that Im not doing enough to get the story
across, you know. It
would
be nice to have an eloquent speaker, you know, who
Ive come across a
few
people who are absolutely wonderful. You could sit and
listen to them for
hours,
you know, because theyve got the charisma and
theyve got presentation.
That
would be nice, but you know, as John Wayne says A
mans got to do what
a
mans got to do.
Anyway,
so this is why my website has got a whole feature on
Magna Carta and
in
particular on the Magna Carta Monument down in Canberra,
and as Ive said
before
everyones got to go there, every schoolkids
got to go there, got to realise
the
importance of our heritage of protecting ourselves
against thieves and
traitors.
Im fairly colourful in my expression and I remember
one little essay I put
in
when I was at high school and I just thought This
teachers putting in an essay
on
the atomic bomb and I said Ill go to
town on this and I wrote such a
colourful
thing, you know, he thought it was great.
But,
like, say, to get the message across youve got to
be assertive and youve
got
to draw attention to it and this is what Ive tried
to do on the website, draw
attention
to our freedoms, our laws, as opposed to those who would
destroy us
and
enslave us, thats the operative - this is why the
Magna Carta says No free
man
because we are free men. The opposite of being free men
is being slaves,
being
told No, you will not look at the law. No, you will
not do this, you know,
and
if you accept that and say Yes sir, no sir, three
bags full, sir you are not a
free
man, you havent got your own will.
So
the whole issue - Ive done that one, Ive done
that one. Thou shalt not steal,
Ive
done that one, okay, and Ill just finish it off by
saying that our fundamental
laws
are based upon four ancient charters, theyre only
ancient because they
were
done by good men years and years ago. The first one was
Magna Carta,
the
second one is Petition of Rights(as said). Now the reason
the Petition of
Rights
was brought in was because they were having court cases
in England
where
the right to trial by jury was being ignored and
disregarded and so forth
and
an essential part of the Petition of Right is to say that
any awards, doings or
proceedings
contrary to the points of the charter shall not be drawn
into
consequence
or example, so in other words its said quite
clearly that when you
have
a court case where trial by jury is ignored then any
judgments, any awards,
any
proceedings in those cases are illegal and void, they are
not to be taken any
notice
of, no consequence or example.
The
third one is habeas corpus, this again stresses the
importance that no free
man
shall be dispossessed by, blah, blah, blah, and it
actually imposes penalties
on
any judges and awards those damages to the aggrieved
because by having
the
Star Chamber the judges were just taking over the whole,
they were even
imprisoning
the lawyers who stood up for the rights of the clients,
thats how
draconian
it was. And this habeas corpus said This is
absolutely intolerable.
We
cannot allow it.
Then
the fourth pillar of our English common law is called the
Bill of Rights, 1688.
But
you listen to any politician, any lawyer and theyll
say oh Australian hasnt got
a
Bill of Rights. That is a dead set lie, absolute dead set
lie because we have
inherited
these fundamentals of English common law and in fact
its already
stated,
Ill get the book and when I show this to lawyers
they clam up they say -
this
is called the Imperial Acts Application Act boom, boom
and it says that
constitutional
enactments in Australia are, here it is - Magna Carta -
it goes on,
statute
and monopolies, petition of right Habeas Corpus, Bill of
Rights, Act of
Settlement,
Treason Act and yet they say, Oh no we havent
got a Bill of Rights.
All
youve got to do is wave that under their noses
because we do have a Bill of
Rights
and its all based upon this fundamental issue that
no free man should be
taken
or imprisoned or exiled or outlawed or dispossessed or
destroyed in any
way.
The
issue of me being a registered dentist came up and I said,
Yes my
livelihood
has been destroyed, but not by the lawful judgment of a
jury and
Magna
Carta protects that and if you read the old English words
it talks about
tools
of trade and all this sort of stuff because our
livelihood is protected but as
far
as the banks and judges are concerned, no, no were
just going to wipe you
out
if you raise any resistant to us were going to
bulldoze you, were going to
destroy
you, were going to take your property. No trial by
jury were going to
destroy
your livelihood, no trial by jury.
Again
going back to the Magna Carta Monument, one simple little
paragraph on
the
Magna Carta Monument says, Magna Carta is now seen
as a traditional
mandate
for trial by jury, justice for all, accountable
government and no arbitrary
imprisonment
but even in the course of these proceedings when I was
brutalised
and
so forth on 16 July you heard the soundtrack, I was just
put in gaol, no trial
by
jury, six weeks boom, boom. Its just on the whim of
a magistrate and so
many
people have been imprisoned left, right and centre,
theyre being arrested
and
when you say to the police, you say, Have you got a
warrant for that arrest
Oh
we dont need a warrant were the police
youre the police state and they
bring
in these laws called the Uniform Civil Procedures Rules
and so forth which
take
away your rights and they say, Oh no thats
the law youve got to abide by
that,
youve got no say in the matter it just goes
on and on and on that we are
just
being wiped out and this is actually a war that is going
that people dont know
is
going on because theyre being dumbed down,
youre not allowed to know.
Getting
back to the indictment, Im sorry its a bit
messy. Here we go, number
one
of the indictment is all founded upon an assertion that
331 North Rocks
Road
is the dwelling house Kamal Issa. Well it only becomes
someones
dwelling
house is they lawfully secure possession and that has not
been done.
The
second one goes on to talk about with intention to cause
the said
Andrew
Scipione into fear. Now I put in a subpoena for Andrew
Scipione to
come
and answer questions but the whole thing falls flat
because that subpoena
was
overturned, they said no, no you cant bring Andrew
Scipione in to verify
make
true this actual charge. So the whole thing falls flat
and then youve got to
work
out, judge my intentions on every single thing
thats happened.
Thats
what its all about, youve got to determine my
mental attitude and my
intentions
and I hope Ive got it across to you that when I
said I was going to burn
down
my property, now why was that said, what was the
motivation. Was I really
going
to burn down the property, if I was going to burn down
the property why
would
I tell everybody its just nonsense. Why would I
send an email to literally
thousands
of people around the world, literally thousands of people
including the
Attorney
General, the home secretary, members of parliaments, the
sheriffs,
absolutely
everyone and even the email which has been put in
evidence which
went
to Ryan Ratcliff you know that was a copy and paste of an
email it starts off,
Dear
Freedom Fellow Fighters it doesnt start off
with, Dear Ryan Ratcliff no
so,
thats the whole idea, this is the campaign
Ive been trying to get before a
jury.
Even now theyve got me on other cases, theres
not going to be any trial
by
jury they say, You wont get a trial by jury
in that and I said you know they
want
to declare me an outlaw. I know you dont like me
referring to it but thats
the
situation, they have us tried before we are found guilty
of anything
We
are being punished without the lawful judgment of our
equals, without any
consideration
of law and justice and mercy it doesnt come into it,
its a police
state
and then so - this is why this is an important case,
weve got to put our feet
down
because Im talking to my equals, Magna Carta says
lawful judgment of
your
equals. I am a free man, I am a sovereign human being,
you are free men
and
free women you are sovereign human beings you know to put
it dramatically,
the
fate of Australia is in your hands. If you decide, yes
were just going to find
him
guilty, so youre handing our country over to the
banks and judges its as
simple
as that and going back again to Thomas Jefferson one of
his - another
famous
quotes is,
The
germ of the destruction of our nation lays in the power
of the
judiciary
an irresponsible body working by day and by night,
advancing
their
noiseless step across the field of jurisdiction like a
thief.
He
nailed it and he said, Theres more danger to
our country from the banks
than
there is from any armies. Youve got to look
at these things, youve got to
learn
and if you dont learn, youve got no
foundation to give any assessment on
anything.
It doesnt matter if youre planting roses in
your garden you know
youve
got to know how to do it and so when youre on a
jury, youve got to know
how
to do jury work.
The
third charge is virtually a repeat of the second charge,
the same essence.
So
in the second charge it nominates Andrew Scipione but
they wont allow
Andrew
Scipione to come to court and answer questions. I
cant face
Andrew
Scipione and in the other part is so waffly that
its just - I dont know how
they
can even come up with it, a description like it. In any
way that reasonable
persons
would regard as menacing, harassing or offensive. Well
what do you
think,
can I talk the reasonable - the reasonable person in the
witness there,
bring
forth the reasonable persons and I can ask them if they
consider that to
menacing,
harassing and offensive. Where are they, its just a
total fabrication.
This
is just another page, front page of my website and so the
Magna Carta, so
thats
what I want you people to do, Ive put the disc of
my website in intending
for
the jury to research and have a look at it, you know, but
youre not allowed to
do
that. As far as going back to what is a contract I hope I
have dispelled any
thought
that this in any way could constitute a contract. It is
so farcical, it is
against
common law, it doesnt even resemble a contract in
form. Now when you
sign
a contract you ought to sign every page. Okay, it
doesnt happen, so this is
a
total - and then as far as any registering of titles and
so forth, that can only be
done
if there has been a transfer of possession and there has
not been. They
just
bulldoze ahead. They say, Oh no, we had this procedure in
the court, no trial
by
jury, but a judge has just struck out my defence,
wont allow me to talk and
you
know, the definition of a kangaroo court is a court that
acts unfairly or
dishonestly
or disregards legal rights or disregards legal procedures.
So
the legal rights are quite a simple thing, you know,
denial of trial by jury. But
then
when you challenge the jurisdiction of the court that is
a legal procedure.
That
is a dead set legal procedure and it mandates that as
soon as you
challenge
the jurisdiction of the court there is peremptory
mandatory absolute
immediate
stay of proceedings until the jurisdiction of the court
is determined by
a
special jury. But they disregard that. On every element
of every case that Ive
been
in for the last 14 years has been a total sham, denial of
our rights and the
result
is that its just not me suffering, its
everyone suffering. Its your
neighbours,
your children. And they have been evicted from our homes
unlawfully.
So this is why this case is so important. So either we
stand up for
our
rights or we dont have any. I think the popular
expression is if you dont
exercise
your rights you havent got any and what were
supposed to have is our
sheriffs
protecting us. Theyve got no intention of
protecting us. I just asked Mr
Flexman
and I said, you know, isnt your duty, your written
duty to ensure that
people
exercise their rights in court in safety. Mute about that.
I said, when your
rights
to trial by jury is denied isnt your responsibility
or your duty to go and
arrest
that judge or magistrate. Oh no, weve got to do
what were told by the
judge
or magistrate.
It
just cuts the ground from under our justice system.
Its fallen in a heap
because
it does not go back to what is our basics of Magna Carta.
The fact that
we
cannot be imprisoned, we cannot be destroyed, we cannot
be dispossessed
unless
by a jury. But theyve made these statute laws,
which is were going to
wipe
out trial by jury, were going to nullify juries. By
nullifying juries, juries cant
nullify
our bad laws. Its as simple as that. Its a
simple tactic of war and thats
what
were in, were in a war.
Ill
see if theres anything else. Going back to the -
before I actually got in time
into
internet with the website this is how I got my little
message across. I put that
in
but I didnt get anywhere. So, going back to the
indictment. Youve got to find
me
guilty or not guilty. Guilty means I have done wrong. In
your assessment of
the
facts and the law that I have done wrong. Thank you.
HIS
HONOUR: Thank you Mr Wilson. Well take the morning
adjournment now
ladies
and gentlemen and after that I shall sum-up. You might go
with the officer.
SHORT
ADJOURNMENT
FOR SUMMING-UP SEE SEPARATE
TRANSCRIPT
UPDATE:27th June 2010:
Dear Jocelyn,
Thanks for the email....and, yes, the Judge's Summing Up to the Jury transcript is being withheld along with the transcripts for the last two days. Here is what my local MP has managed to achieve in chasing them, which came from Luke_Beck@agd.nsw.gov.au :
Dear Electorate Office
I write to further to our telephone conversation this morning.
The Attorney General has received representations from Mr Merton MP on behalf of Mr John Wilson regarding his request for transcript of proceedings in R v John Wilson in the District Court.
The Attorney's office has asked the Department to advise Mr Wilson directly of the status of his request. The Department can advise that Mr Wilson's request is currently being processed and the requested transcripts should be provided to his email address as request on or about 8 July 2010.
Given that the Department does not have contact details for Mr Wilson, it would be appreciated if someone from your office could telephone Mr Wilson to pass on this advice.
The Attorney will provide a formal written reply to Mr Merton MP in due course.
Yours sincerely
Luke Beck
Community Relations Officer
Department of Justice and Attorney General
(02) 8688 6652