Friday, August 03, 2007
Now With New Material
Revisiting the Iranian Hostage Crisis - adding some reality to an episode long exploited by the US Republican Party for partisan advantage
The Religious Shouldn't Embrace a Fake Victimhood - looking at a dubious rhetorical technique of fundamentalists of many stripes
France is Rubbish, Says Everybody - France is constantly portrayed as a basket-case in meltdown in the US and British press, but the reality is of a society healthier than theirs in almost every way
Getting Rid of a Dictator - The Old Ways Are Still the Best - the surprising and inspiring revolution that is transforming the West African state of Guinea
The Darker Side of France, the Career of Maurice Papon - an obituary for Papon, and his victims from the Shoah to the Algerian War
You can contact me for whatever reason at respond_alexblog at yahoo dot co dot uk.
Thanks for visiting! Best,
Alex Higgins
Tottenham, London
England
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Revisiting the Iranian Hostage Crisis
This is an article I wrote and posted at www.americanchronicle.com about the US-Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81 and the weird myths that have surrounded it ever since, as recently repeated by the sinister ex-Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani...
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In recent years Tony Blair has been a man with very few foreign policy successes of any kind. But there was at least one. When British Marines were captured by Iranian forces in disputed waters in March this year, then held as prisoners and used as propaganda tools by the Iranian government, Blair quickly dropped his initial, threatening tone and followed a policy of cautious engagement that helped to diffuse tension and led quickly to their safe release. Perhaps not an outright success - more of a successful exercise in harm reduction.
During the crisis, the Bush administration offered Blair the assistance of US forces and a recommended list of military options which remain unknown to the public. Fortunately Blair declined, and told Washington to shut up, as the 'Guardian' reported:
“In the first few days after the captives were seized and British diplomats were getting no news from Tehran on their whereabouts, Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do? They offered a series of military options, a list which remains top secret given the mounting risk of war between the US and Iran. But one of the options was for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran, to underline the seriousness of the situation.
‘The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf. … At the request of the British, the two US carrier groups, totaling 40 ships plus aircraft, modified their exercises to make them less confrontational.”
In under two weeks, the affair was resolved without war or deaths. The episode exposed the vulnerability of British forces in southern Iraq, but any observer who has been paying attention knew about that anyway.
Blair’s measured, life-saving approach was denounced by those who regard foreign policy only in terms of domination or submission. In their one-dimensional view of the world outside, they can either exact submission from other states through force or the threat of force, or we ourselves will be engaged in an act of craven submission to them.
In England, Conservative frontbencher Michael Gove counselled that the Iranians had been emboldened to seize the Marines after British troops began a partial withdrawal from Basra, thus displaying weakness. In the U.S., potential Republican presidential candidate and former petty tyrant of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, told an interviewer that the U.S. and Britain should immediately respond by bombing oil refineries and targeting civilian energy systems and transport in Iran. Just imagine where we would be now – and in the future - if this kind of advice were followed through to its logical conclusion. Gove apparently advocates maintaining a collapsing occupation, despised by the local population, indefinitely – because how can it be ended except by showing the weakness of the British position? Gingrich, and so many like him, advocate war – indeed war crimes - quickly and easily, without even the barest consideration of the most likely consequences.
The submission/domination view of foreign policy is sustained through a series of historical myths or, at best, a highly selective examination of the historical record. In Britain, this meme centres around such episodes as Margaret Thatcher’s resolution to defeat vastly weaker opponents at home – the IRA hunger strikers and impoverished miners - and, of course, the Munich Agreement of 1938 with Hitler, which has long since been used as a tortured analogy to justify everything from the refusal to negotiate with Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland to the abortive 1956 invasion of Egypt.
In the U.S., the myth-making focuses on such historical low points as Kennedy’s stand-off with Khrushchev, and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80. During the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy quite consciously worked to create the myth that the Soviets had backed down in the face of his resolution, knowing that his political opponents would jump on him if they learned that he had actually reached a compromise with Moscow to dismantle U.S. missiles in Turkey in return for a removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The facts are well-known by now – but the self-serving legend of results from steely pig-headedness survives because of its recurring political utility.
In the case of the Iranian hostages, this has taken a curious form, combining malice and glurge. The recent debate among Republican presidential candidates in the Ronald Reagan Library was always going to witness obsequious homage to the late president but Rudy Giuliani’s short speech on matters Persian was something else. He described the end of the crisis on Reagan’s inauguration day like this:
“Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan's eyes, and in two minutes they released the hostages.”
Trying to enter this fantasy takes some mental effort. Picture the Ayatollah Khomeini toying with President Jimmy Carter and laughing at him. Suddenly, newly-elected Reagan comes on the TV screen as the new president. The mocking mullahs wet themselves as they stare into his hard-man eyes and immediately agree to release all hostages, saying they are very sorry and won’t do it again and please be nice to us, Mr. Reagan, sir. That is the image Giuliani was presumably trying to get across. He is apparently quite serious, and no one else at the debate called him on it.
As usual, in the real world, something quite different happened. Giuliani’s fantasies of Oval Office machismo offer the United States no solutions to its security problems – just another round of bloody chaos.
For most of his presidency, Jimmy Carter took what might be called a tough policy on Iran, if you want to call supporting one of the world’s then most repressive dictatorships that. But the Shah and his notorious secret police, the SAVAK, backed to the hilt with US and British weaponry, were unable to retain power through murder and torture in the face of overwhelming popular opposition.
With the Shah overthrown, the most powerful group in the revolutionary coalition – the Shi’ite theocrats – started to manoeuvre and jail their way into controlling the new government. Popular feeling against the U.S. for supporting the Shah was strong, and in November 1979 a group of armed university students took over the US embassy in Tehran and held those inside as hostages. The more radical Islamists in the new regime supported them. The hostage-takers released 13 hostages – women and African-Americans (on the grounds they were an oppressed minority in the USA) while holding the other 52 for the next 444 days.
For Jimmy Carter, presiding over years of recession and high gas prices at home, the hostage crisis, like 9/11 for George W. Bush, came as a great big poll boost, giving him the opportunity to be a popular tough-guy president. But his initial, measured approach did not bring quick results.
Attacked from the Right for his supposed weakness he decided to take a more drastic course. He broke off diplomatic ties, ending direct talks with Iranian foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh - a regime moderate sympathetic to the hostages who pleaded with the White House to keep talking (Ghotbzadeh resigned – two years later, he would be executed). In April 1980, over the objection of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned in protest, Carter approved Operation Eagle Claw, a military raid to rescue the hostages.
Famously, Eagle Claw was a disaster. Equipment failures and sandstorms forced Carter to abort the mission without even engaging Iranian forces. Soon after the President had expressed relief that at least no Americans or Iranians had been killed, he learned that two of the aircraft had crashed with eight deaths. His poll ratings plummeted to an historical low, and the episode cost him the 1980 election. Carter had desperately opted for more machismo in his foreign policy – from huge increases in military spending to cutting off grain shipments to the Soviet Union as a protest against their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and beginning the Second Cold War – all in the vain hope of seeing off the Republican talking point that he was a weak, vacillating president. But it did him no good.
However, Carter continued to work ceaselessly for the release of the hostages. With the military option exhausted he had little choice but to use diplomatic channels, with the Jordanian regime acting as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran. The Iranian regime made a number of demands, ranging from a reasonable insistence on US non-intervention in their country to an unreasonable offer to return the hostages at a price of 24 billion dollars. Recognising the political fallout from paying such a colossal ransom, Carter had to reject demands of that sort, but he did not give up on negotiations, instead choosing to release Iranian assets in the US, billions of dollars of which he had ordered frozen in retaliation for the loss of the US embassy.
In his fine book on the moral disaster that was the Reagan administration, ‘Sleepwalking Through History’, journalist Haynes Johnson wrote of Carter that:
“He had become obsessed with the hostages. He knew each of them by name, studied their careers and family backgrounds, read the personal letters they wrote from captivity, met with their wives and children, visited family members in their homes around the country, and came to hold for them, as he later wrote, ‘deep personal feelings that were almost overwhelming’”.
After losing the election to Reagan, Carter hoped desperately to salvage his reputation by bringing the hostages home before he left the White House. As inauguration day came closer, he became practically an insomniac – the hostages dominated his waking thoughts, and he stayed awake to have them. In the end he was reduced to hoping they might be released in the final minutes of his presidency.
On Inauguration Day itself, at 6:35 in the morning, Carter’s chief negotiator, Warren Christopher, rang him from Algiers to say that a deal with the Iranians had been concluded, with Iran being granted none of its major demands. The 52 remaining hostages were coming home.
This was all happening before the Iranians had a chance to be scared of Ronald Reagan in that two-minute window Giuliani told us about. Come to think of it - where was Ronald Reagan when the deal was struck? At 7:00am, Carter put a call through to Reagan to get him ready for the moment of their release. Carter was called back by an aide who said that the president-elect:
“Had had a long night, was sleeping, and was not to be disturbed.”
“You’re kidding,” Carter replied.
“No, sir, I’m not,” the aide said.
Carter said he would call back. Reagan returned his call an hour and a half later.
Reagan joined Carter as he travelled from the White House to the Capitol. Carter was still on the phone, taking only calls about the hostages. Johnson describes the scene:
“Carter thought Reagan affable but oddly incurious as the limousine bore them along Pennsylvania Avenue. Reagan cracked a few jokes but asked no questions about the hostages. There was nothing Reagan could do about them then anyway; they were still Carter’s problem, and Carter was still obviously dealing with it.”
Carter was informed that the hostages still had not taken off from Iran as the inauguration ceremonies began. His hopes of announcing their freedom as his last act as president were gone. Instead, they were finally released into US custody minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president. The Iranian regime had long decided to release the hostages but vindictively chose to humiliate Carter first.
But the deal to release the hostages was not concluded in those minutes after Carter's presidency – it was the result of months of intense efforts by his administration, and the damage done to Iran’s international reputation through its conduct. Carter tried the sorts of measures insisted on by his opportunistic Republican opponents and the only result was death and catastrophe. But patient brokering between diplomats finally did the job. At the crucial moment the deal was struck, the Iranian government was not staring fearfully into Reagan’s eyes – those eyes were shut tight as the new president slept off the previous night, refusing to be woken for the issue that won him the election.
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References:
‘Americans offered “aggressive patrols” in Iranian airspace’, Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Michael Howard and John Hooper, the Guardian, April 7th, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2051971,00.html
For a perfect example of the domination/submission worldview at its silliest:
Ayn Rand Institute Press Release: Hostages of Iran, March 30, 2007
http://studentofobjectivism.blogspot.com/2007/04/ayn-rand-institute-press-release.html
‘If Only Newt Gingrich Were President’, Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, April 4th, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/04/gingrich/index.html
California Republican Debate Transcript, MSNBC.com, May 3rd, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18478985/
‘The Desert One Debacle’, Mark Bowden, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, May 2006, p62-77
‘Sleepwalking Trough History – America in the Reagan Years’, Haynes Johnson, pp24-40
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The religious shouldn’t embrace a fake victimhood
Sunday, May 13
Victimhood is a difficult topic. Often it’s not recognised it when it should be. People who find themselves blamelessly in hard times are frequently upbraided by others in positions of privilege and comfort for claiming a certain victim status – ethnic minorities, welfare recipients, even refugees from natural disasters, as we saw when New Orleans was destroyed.
But victimhood is also a favoured refuge of scoundrels who protect their raging egos from an acknowledgment of the hurt they do to others, instead seeing their downfall as a plot against them by their inferiors (a category which tends to incorporate a very large section of the human race). Witness the unrepentant self-pity of Richard Nixon, (Lord) Conrad Black, George Tenet, Margaret Thatcher, General Pinochet, Duke Cunningham, Slobodan Milosevic or Alistair Campbell as they scan(ned) for blame far and wide, anywhere other than themselves.
And to make it even trickier, victims can become victimisers - from the broken working man who returns home and takes out his rage on the rest of his family, to the Chechen woman made a widow by the Russian Army who has her bloody revenge as a human bomb in a street in Moscow.
In today’s Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ section, the Catholic commentator Christina Odone misuses the idea:
“In secular Britain, faith-bashing carries far more resonance and risks causing far greater damage. In this country, belief is a minority practice and believers a persecuted lot.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2078536,00.html
Religious believers are persecuted in Britain, and “their chief persecutor” is Oxford’s Professor Richard Dawkins, with whom she has just had a debate on ethics. This has serious consequences, she argues, since:
"The rabid attacks by Dawkins and his camp-followers spur even the most mild-mannered Christian, Muslim or Jew into a hard-line position."
Now, myself, I am inclined to defend religious ideas and religious belief in general from Richard Dawkins’ intemperate and often seriously misguided critique. But that’s quite another thing from arguing that Dawkins is a persecutor of religion or that the religious themselves are under some kind of attack in contemporary Britain (with the somewhat sinister corollary that the “mild-mannered” Christians, Muslims and Jews should be moving to a “a hard-line position” –like what?).
The religious are an odd kind of persecuted minority in Britain. The Church of England is the official religion of the state, and is led by the Head of State, the monarch. Bishops are allowed to sit in the unelected House of Lords and vote on legislation – and there are suggestions to broaden the variety of clergy by including those from other religious denominations. This country retains a blasphemy law, long since abolished by most other Western states. Government money funds religious schools, and the number and variety of these has substantially increased in recent years. Middle-class parents are busy pretending to be religious on Sundays in order to get their children into their school of choice. The Blair government recently passed a law on religious hatred that could be used to make many criticisms of religion a criminal offence. The Prime Minister himself, his most likely successor and the Leader of the Opposition are all regular church attenders.
For defenders of religion – and that includes me – to not recognise the many privileges, and in some cases unfair privileges, enjoyed by religion in Britain, while claiming to be groaning under the secular jackboot, seems a tad churlish.
Perhaps all the more so given the numerous recent cases where religious fundamentalists (I’m using that term quite broadly) have gone out of their way to victimise others.
The Sikh playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had to go into hiding in December 2004 after angry Sikh men took violent exception to her play ‘Bezhti’ at the Birmingham Rep theatre about a murder and a rape that takes place in a Gurdwara (Sikh temple). The theatre had gone out of its way to invite local Sikh clerics to discuss the implications of 'Bezhti', in an effort to promote a common understanding. But the exercise in dialogue merely encouraged those consulted to organise a boycott that ended up inciting a riot in which the theatre was attacked.
The British evangelical group Christian Voice went after the charity Maggie’s Centres, which provides counselling and other services to those diagnosed with cancer, for accepting money from the makers of the 'Jerry Springer: The Opera'. The charity feared for the impact of pickets outside their centres for those they treated and so returned the donation, which Christian Voice did not offer to replace.
Then of course, we had the Danish cartoon competition, when the right-wing Danish paper Jyllands-Posten invited cartoonists to submit work on the subject of the Prophet Mohammed.
Now Muslims are genuinely on the receiving end of vicious racism in Europe, as well as a spate of recent wars of aggression and massacre waged by Russia, Israel, Serbia, India, the US and Britain. Jyllands-Posten had chosen not to submit images offensive to Christians shortly before the Mohammed competition, and the exercise contained an element of bigotry, as did some of the entries.
But none of that justifies threats to murder either the cartoonists or Danish embassy staff around the world, as the blood-thirsty slogans of Islamic fundamentalists who took to the streets demanded. Indeed, imams in Denmark distributed the cartoons widely, including images they themselves had fabricated in an effort to create the maximum impact. Some of the entries to the competition were in no way hurtful – one cartoon ironically attacked Jyllands-Posten for a provocative and bigoted stunt. But irony is rarely appreciated by fundamentalists, and all cartoonists alike went into hiding.
It might be recalled that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration in 1989 of both a heavenly reward, and an earthly financial one, for the person who murdered Salman Rushdie or anyone connected to the publication of his book, ‘The Satanic Verses’, culminated in the murders of the Norwegian and Japanese translators.
Perhaps not wanting to be left out of this cross-denominational exercise, an organisation called the Hindu Human Rights Group declared in May last year that an exhibition of Indian goddesses in Asia House by the Muslim artist Maqbool Fida Husain was obscene and demanded an apology. Asia House recognised the direction this was going and swiftly closed the exhibition.
In each of these cases, religious organisations declared themselves to be the victims of offense and persecution and then proceeded to “take a hard-line” and victimise others without scruple.
Christina writes approvingly of the United States where criticism of religion “is only a faint note of discord, overwhelmed by the church choir”. But despite their relative strength, American fundamentalists use much the same rhetorical trick, only with vastly greater hypocrisy. They consistently declare themselves to be the victims of secular liberals and a persecuted majority, despite exercising enormous influence over the White House, over nominations to the Supreme Court and other judicial positions throughout the country.
Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish fundamentalists are all united in, and only in, their declarations of victimhood while simultaneously seeking power over others. Sometimes, their claims that those they seek to represent are mistreated are fully justified. But it is notable that whenever they arrive in a position of political power themselves, they invariably become ruthless and enthusiastic wielders of state coercion and violence, usually in the most pitiless and sadistic fashion possible.
Christina Odone is not one of these people, being a fairly compassionate Catholic, so she and others should avoid borrowing the kind of manipulative rhetoric used by those who really are persecutors. And Richard Dawkins can be pretty provocative, but he is not some kind of tyrant, and the religious should not be incapable of a coherent and reasoned response to his challenge to their ideas.
Religious people in Britain and Ireland are sometimes victimized, usually in the form of racist discrimination or attacks, particularly working-class Asians in northern England and Catholics in Northern Ireland. But there is no general persecution of religion here, and those of us who are religious shouldn’t be making out that there is. Better instead to try and be generous persuaders.
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France is Rubbish, Something We Can All Agree On
(This piece was written before, alas, Sarkozy's electoral victory. It did however, receive a surprising plaudit from the French government agency, Invest in France)
If you’ve never read an article in the US or British press about the state of the French economy, society and body politic, you should read one. And only one. Because when you’ve read one, you have pretty much read them all.
In fact, to do you a favour, one sentence just about covers it. Charles Trueheart, writing for the US current affairs and literary journal, ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, begins an article on French Socialist candidate Segolene Royal like this:
“France is mired in an antiquated economic and social system, overtaxed and overregulated, underemployed, congenitally immobile when not sporadically violent.”
There you have it. You can read all day about France without ever coming across a different perspective.
France has high unemployment, which has remained at a steady 8% for more than a decade. For young people it is even worse, with a 22% youth unemployment rate. Its economic growth rates are lower than most of its neighbours, and the national debt higher. France’s ethnic minorities are in large part marginalised and subject to discrimination in employment and poor social conditions, a major factor in the countrywide riots of the autumn of 2005.
These factors combine to create both a sense that France is in trouble and that major changes in social and economic policy are required - a sense of unease that all the major presidential candidates have made a part of their rhetoric.
In London, Washington and New York, the analysis of France is simple and unchanging. France suffers because it has failed to make its economy more like those of the USA and Britain. This failure is the result both of the French public who suffer from the “delusion” (to quote the ‘Economist’) that their distinctive social policies aren’t rubbish, and from the cowardice of their political class too gutless to lay out to the French public just how deluded they are. The ‘Economist’ concludes, more in sorrow than in anger:
“The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.”
That was written this time last year, but this year’s analysis hasn’t changed. Newsweek’s Rana Foroohar diagnosed the French disease thus:
“The causes are well known: An artificially high minimum wage, which discourages companies from creating new jobs. A two-tiered labor system in which its nearly impossible for younger, less-qualified workers to find secure employment. High payroll taxes and regulatory red tape that make it extremely difficult to start and run new businesses.”
These things continue because of “a magical thinking” and “an article of faith” among Europeans in general and the French in particular. Foroohar continued, “the statistics speak for themselves…” which may be true, but not leaving anything to chance, she chose her statistics from a narrow range of topics.
The US and British press are sometimes a little circumspect about the kind of change and reform they are always urging, but what they mean is France needs a government that will dismantle workers’ rights legislation, hammer the unions, slash the welfare budget, give tax breaks to foreign companies and extend the working day. Occasionally, it is acknowledged that such changes will be “painful”, but necessary. They are usually very vague about who these measures will actually cause pain to, and who they will help, for good reason.
If a tree falls down in France, the demands for such a neoliberal economic transformation are heard immediately. During the riots of 2005, Newsweek declared on its cover, with burning Parisian streets in the background: “Memo to Europe: Ready to Change Now?”
Needless to say, few mainstream US commentators appreciate such patronising gloating when directed at the US by the European media. Inside, Newsweek recommended in three separate articles changes in employment laws and a shift towards the US economic model. There was no disagreement or expression of any alternative views. Quite how or why US-style employment laws would prevent riots is left to the imagination.
Forward a couple of years and TIME magazine has a cover story on why so many young French people are leaving the country for places like London. The reason of course, is that France is so awful.
That might be something of an unfair simplification of their argument – but not nearly as unfair as their constant, one-note denigration and caricature of France.
Apparently, much of the US and British press are just incapable of acknowledging the existence of any other perspective on the French economy exceptmaybe to deplore their delusions and Gallic pride. But as many serious problems as the country has, the image of a France in crisis and a superior US-British model is the result of a very partial selection of economic and social data.
Virtually all indicators of living standards put France ahead of Britain and the US. Infant mortality in France is 4.26 per 1,000 live births (compared to 5.16 in the UK – greater than the EU average of 5.1 and 6.5 in the USA). Life expectancy in France is 79.6 years – compared with 78.38 for the British and 77.71 for the US. In UNICEF’s assessment of the well-being of children and young people in developed countries, France did not fare especially well – but by some considerable margin, Britain ranked rock bottom, just below, of course, the United States.
Poverty in France has fallen by 60% in the last thirty years – a staggering contrast with the US and Britain, where it has risen substantially since the 1970s, with limited periods of decline during the Clinton administration and Blair governments. 6.1% of the French population lived in poverty in 2001 – in the US it is rarely less than twice that, and usually more. That is without considering the fact that France has a stricter definition of poverty than the US.
The US has the worst level of hardship for its poorest of any developed country. Except Britain, where poverty exceeds that of its former colony, Ireland, and where the child poverty beats the competition. The dynamic economy of the city of London, so celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic and by TIME’s French entrepreneurs has a majority of its minors living below the poverty line:
“Forty-one per cent of children in Greater London are in poverty, compared with 31% nationally and 37% in the north-east. This is largely due to unparalleled levels of poverty in inner London: 53% of children in inner London are living in income poverty.”
French babies survive more often than ours, they go on to live longer lives, with greater happiness and freedom from material hardship. Is this worth a mention, at least somewhere in any of the coverage of France in the Anglo-American press? The fact that these figures are almost always ignored says a lot about the priorities of those who stand in judgement of France and indeed say they pity it.
How about instead of mocking France from across the Channel and the Atlantic, we take time to consider those abysmal social stats of ours? Instead of laughing at the French, we might just feel a twinge of embarrassment and shame. We might also spot a few answers to our pundits’ eternal conundrum of why the French population doesn’t want the changes we recommend.
Famously, French workers do a 35-hour week which remains popular because it gives workers the chance to spend time with their families and generally enjoy life outside of the workplace. Newsweek’s International Editor Fareed Zakaria describes “the dreary work environment in French companies” while an Economist editorial sees “a chilling lack of ambition” in the fact that most young people in France want a secure job for life. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but another view of what makes life dreary for American and British workers, and has a chilling effect on their families, is the fact that they work more hours than all their counterparts in the developed world. Zakaria wrote:
“The average Frenchman works 24 percent fewer hours than in 1970. The average American, by contrast, works 20 percent more.”
Excellent point, except Zakaria thinks it’s a good thing that American workers have had more of their time taken away from them (and for lower wages).
Take even the riots. The widespread destruction of cars and property by the young men of the banlieus that rocked France for two weeks in 2005 did reveal an ongoing legacy of unemployment, poverty and racism. But they also had a combined death toll of zero. Compare that with, say, the riots in LA in 1992, in which 54 people were killed by looters, rioters and the police.
Did the US political class courageously take on the issues brought to the surface by this outburst of destruction and violence? Not unless you count President George Bush I’s visit where he made a speech of official resolution, as his son would in New Orleans 14 years later, before disappearing back to the life to which they are accustomed.
And to continue on the subject of the “sporadically violent” French. Out of every 100,000 people, in the last year of available figures, an average of 1.64 French people were victims of murder – in Britain the number was 2.03. In the USA, it was 5.9 - still at the level of a humanitarian disaster, after a decade of falling crime rates and despite a voracious penal system that has consumed over 2 million Americans. Gun massacres are weak social indicators, but it is topical and perhaps worth noting in passing the fact that events like the Hungerford, Dunblane, Wichita, Columbine, Red Lake High School, Goleta Postal, Capitol Hill, Nickel Mines, Trolley Square and Virginia Tech massacres do not have any French equivalents.
French social life may be less dysfunctional, and French capitalism isn’t really gagging either. France is criticised for its lack of entrepreneurship and social mobility – Rana Foroohar actually wrote that social mobility in Europe “had stalled”. This is pretty staggering given that social mobility in Britain and the US is significantly more frozen than in Western Europe. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that:
“social mobility in Britain is much lower than in other advanced countries and that it is declining” and “put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries“.
Perhaps such off-base criticism of the French model is the origin of the urban legend in which George Bush declares that “the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur”. Bush didn’t really say that, but US media pundits have come close. Meanwhile, as the New Statesman notes this week, “the companies on the French CAC 40 stock-market index have pulled in record profits.”
There is plenty that is wrong with France, but it’s highly questionable whether France is in a worse state than its leading detractors in the developed world. The constant barrage of clichés in press coverage of French politics here and in the US is a lazy act of groupthink on the part of our hacks at best, and at worst a mendacious and determined pursuit of a very particular and rightly unpopular economic agenda rather blatantly reflecting the class interests of the authors.
The changes in France they want won’t be painful for them, but they will be painful for the poorest, just as they were in Michigan and Yorkshire.
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Statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, figures for 2005, and the French INSEE.
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Getting rid of a dictator - the old ways are still the best
Saturday, March 24
Almost unnoticed over here in Britain, including to people like me incidentally, who imagine that they follow news developments more closely than others, the people of Guinea in West Africa overthrew their government in February this year.
Guinea, in the fifty years since independence from its French colonial rulers, has had only two presidents, Ahmed Sekou Toure, followed by his Chief of Staff of the Army, the recently deposed General Lansana Conte.
Toure's rule ended when he died in 1984. Conte's began less than ten days later when he took control of the state in a military coup from an interim government. Conte denounced the crimes of Toure and then set about replicating them.
In 1993, in those first years of the post-Cold War era when military dictatorship was no longer so popular internationally, Conte moved towards the preferred method of contemporary Third World autocracy, which is to allow a civilian government that does what it's told and bludgeon through any elections that have to be held with a mixture of violence and fraud.
For many years, the poverty of the population has deepened, while the government has not fared so badly, joining western companies in taking its cut of the revenue of the nation's bauxite reserves.
But the long night of one-man, strongman rule in Guinea has been rudely interrupted by none other than those dinosaur throwbacks to the '70s - the trade unions, the number one force for participatory democracy in the world.
In 2006, Guinea's unions started organising major strikes in protest at low wages and the unaffordability of rice and fuel. As BBC Focus on Africa reports:
"...the stoppages gained momentum and became increasingly political, because the people were ready for change."
The strikes were followed by massive demonstrations. When Conte released a couple of his mates from jail after they were imprisoned for fraud, the insult to the injury proved too great.
A general strike was called, and government troops gunned down 59 people in their effort to put it to a stop.
Conte was forced to back down in the face of the workers' strength (this is starting to sound like some sort of socialist fantasy now... :o) but it's true, so there). He offered to appoint a new prime minister that the unions and demonstrators would find acceptable.
As all organisers of strikes should know and repeat to themselves often - just because the boss makes you an offer during a moment of weakness, does not mean he has any intention of sticking to it. Sure enough, the new Prime Minister was a Conte loyalist.
So the strikes and protests continued, and the army ramped up the violence, killing more than a hundred demonstrators. But striking miners cost the government its major source of revenue. And as February ended, the Guinean parliament, for the first time ever, blocked a presidential decree to extend martial law (effective military rule). The strikers still did not give way, maintaining their defiance.
Conte finally agreed to let the unions and civil society groups choose their own Prime Minister on February 25th.
Conte is losing his grip over a country he has ruled since 1984, not because some mighty foreign army came crashing into the place, nor from violence of any kind, but because democratic organisations of ordinary people made a stand together and refused to back down even when they were beaten, shot at and thrown in jail.
They were also helped by the lack of a major ethnic divide in Guinea - sadly unlike much of West Africa - so instead of people seeing each other as part of different groups, they were able to work together to solve a common problem.
There are a couple of popular myths-of-the-moment neatly undercut by this episode.
The first is the notion that countries will languish in dictatorship forever unless generous foreign powers - which is how the inhabitants of rich countries often like to imagine themselves - invade them; that if you are serious about opposing a dictatorhip in say Iran, then you will want to advocate some kind of attack on that country. (A similar myth sometimes found on the left is that the state can only be challenged successfully by force, as in guys with guns and bombs.)
The second is the cynical demonstrably false notion, wrongly dressed up as realism, that us regular folks have no chance of changing what they don't like in the world around them, because the powers-that-be are too powerful, and most people don't care about politics.
The brave people of Guinea just offered another historical example of how wrong that is. Hopefully the idea will catch on very shortly elsewhere. Like Zimbabwe.
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The darker side of France, the career of Maurice Papon
Monday, Feb 19
"It is unimaginable that men who for four years have fought in silence... will agree to see the forces of resignation and injustice return in any form whatsoever. We cannot live forever by murder and violence. Happiness, tenderness will have their day."
Albert Camus wrote that as an editorial for Combat de la Resistance, one of the underground papers of the French Resistance during the German occupation. Written just as Paris was liberated, it expressed a widespread hope in occupied Europe that the end of the Third Reich would not simply be followed up by a return of the old political classes but a different, freer and more democratic society.
Today the papers announce the death of Maurice Papon in Paris, aged 96. Papon is a significant figure in French history for two main reasons, both very unpleasant.
Papon's career in the civil service began in the 1930s, where he served the centre-left Popular Front government, among others. But he had no real party commitments and happily adapted to the changing times. When the Germans occupied the country in 1940, Papon went directly to the aide of the Nazis and its collaborator regime in Vichy, led by Marshal Petain.
As Secretary-General of Gironde, he served under prefect Maurice Sabatier and was given the job of "requisitioning refugees and Jews." In his obituary for the Independent, Nicholas Atkin explains that Papon:
"...oversaw the rounding up of some 1,600 Jews in the Bordeaux district, among them 223 children. These unfortunates were shipped to the transit camp at Drancy, a half-completed Parisian housing estate which served as the 'antechamber of Auschwitz'."
The fate of these people is not entirely clear, but only 2% of deported French Jews survived.
The Independent's John Lichfield notes that Papon was not motivated by a hatred of Jews.
Probably not. It was just a job - arresting Jewish children and sending them to their deaths is something in the in-tray like ordering paperclips.
In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were going to lose the war, Papon switched again and joined De Gaulle's side. It was not until 1981 that his work for the Nazis was uncovered, and not until 1997 that he finally stood trial for crimes against humanity.
In the meantime, Papon had more work to do. He became an administrator in the fourth French Republic in Corsica, then Morocco, and then Algeria.
After the Second World War, like Britain, Holland, Portugal (and the US and Russia), France had some work to do in re-establishing control over its old (or new) empire. In 1946, French troops crushed a rebellion in Madagascar with ferocious brutality. They also went to war in Vietnam against the Viet Minh rebels but were sent crashing out the country in 1956 after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The Americans tried to take up where the French left off (you probably know how that story ends...)
In Algeria, officially part of France and home to over a million French settlers who wished to keep it that way, the Empire faced a further anti-colonial struggle. A chance for Papon (winner of the Legion d'honneur in 1958) to work his magic, and he set about rounding up Algerian villagers and interning them in barbed wire camps.
He was then made a prefect of police in Paris. On October 17th, 1961, 40,000 Algerians living in France marched for Algerian independence and the police responded with one of the worst massacres in post-WWII Europe. The official death toll was 2 Algerians and one Frenchman.
The likely actual toll was around 250 Algerians. Their bodies floated down the river Seine for days afterwards.
Papon may or may not have ordered all this. But he did offer the police cover for anything they wanted to do, and tried to conceal what had happened afterwards.
Papon was elected a Gaullist MP in 1968 and may have had designs on the presidency when his role during the occupation was first exposed. But legal proceedings were blocked for years by the Socialist President, Francois Mitterand. Mitterand himself had a past in the Vichy government he didn't really want looking into, and he was no stranger to state-sponsored murder either:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/10/newsid_2499000/2499283.stm
Only when Mitterand died in 1997 did Papon finally impunity come to an end. The details of his treatment of French Jews and Algerians came out in the 1998 trial, though in the end he was only convicted of the illegal arrest of 37 Jews, and the deportation of 57 others. He served four years of his sentence before being released in 2002 on grounds of ill health.
He never expressed any remorse for any of his victims.
Maurice Papon is the personification of the "forces of resignation and injustice" Camus wrote of, who returned to power in much of Europe after the war, having happily served the other side during it. Meanwhile, the forces of hope and justice got shunted aside.
As the journalist who uncovered Papon's crimes, Michel Slitinsky, writes, Papon's death is, "first and foremost, a moment to remember his victims." Slitinsky served in the Resistance during the occupation. His family was deported. In his own way, Slitinsky, remained a force for hope and justice. That, at least, is encouraging.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Blogging - the Return
2007 is a year that looks like it might be a bad one. Another round of horrifying bloodshed in Iraq and central Africa, a nuclear arms race in North-East Asia, and soaring temperatures while we collectively shove billions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.
Bob the Angry Flower discovers the inescapable moral logic of the War on Terror
But the awfulness, as ever, squares off with the indiviudals and movements worldwide striving hard to stop wars, preserve our living standards from environmental blowback, protect human rights, challenge the enforced inequality of our unjust class-based societies, and expand real democracy and individual freedom. They notched up a few victories in 2006 and helped change election results from Italy to South America to the United States. And 2006 was a year in which the arguments of the militarists and those denying anthropogenic global warming were shown to be bankrupt in every sense before ever larger numbers of people.
So 2007 is not a lost cause! This blog is my spot for scrutinising the bad and celebrating the good... scroll down for the following articles:
Iraq - the Only Way is Out - why a Coalition withdrawal is the only option left
The Only Thing we Have to Fear is Nancy Pelosi - the ridiculous press coverage and Republican attacks on the newly elected speaker to the US House of Representatives
The Plot Behind the Plot to Kill the Pope - after an Italian parliamentary inquiry comes to a weird conclusion, the unpleasant origins of the conspiracy theories surrounding the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II
That last article was written about five months ago. Memo to myself: be less lazy in 2007,
peace and happiness all round to all readers,
Alex Higgins
Tottenham, London
England
Comments, queries and condemnation to respond_alexblog at yahoo dot co dot uk
For more Dilbert strips, see the official website.
I'm delighted to note that Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, has called for a US withdrawal from Iraq, though I disagree with his claims of US accomplishments in Iraq.
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The Iraq War - don't let this go on any longer
Cut Carbon Emissions in the New Year
Australia - Mark Lynas on the devastating consequences of a policy of denial
Iraq Withdrawal – the only way is out
Can you see a similarity between the following – insisting Coalition forces stay in Iraq until “the job is done” and accepting that Coalition forces should stay in Iraq for a few more years to stabilise the situation while also criticising the administration for gross incompetence?
The answer is that, in practice, they amount to doing precisely the same thing. The numbers of those willing to defend the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq shrink by the day, but despite widespread public disenchantment in the US and Britain, those in the political and pundit classes seriously advocating a complete break with current policy are only just beginning to find a voice.
Steve Bell explains the British government's view
Like William Raspberry, writing two years ago in the Washington Post, too many have concluded:
“Even those of us who thought President Bush made a hideous moral and military blunder in launching the war are largely sympathetic to the way he is conducting the aftermath -- not because it is particularly successful but because we can't think of anything better.”
“We can’t think of anything better” is an honest summary of many of the President’s liberal (and conservative) critics’ actual position on Iraq, but also a terrible indictment. Critics of the war should have been putting effort into better policy alternatives and making the case publicly. If progressives wish to change America and the world we ought to have something to say on the most pressing policy issues facing us - something more substantive than complaining that George Bush is a cretin.
First, it is necessary to recognize, at this very late date, that any policy based on continuing US stewardship of Iraq, even for a short period, is simply untenable.
In the aftermath of its electoral “thumping”, the White House still talks of a victory in Iraq, while Britain’s Tony Blair continues to insist that while he does not want British forces to stay, they must do so “until the job is done” . The fact that the longer they have stayed, the further those goals have become apparently doesn’t phase them.
As Britain’s most senior military figure, General Richard Dannatt, argued in an interview in the Daily Mail last month, the presence of US and British troops “exacerbates the security problems”. The argument that Coalition forces must remain in Iraq until insurgent violence ends or is substantially reduced (“a manageable level” is the sound-bite of the moment, manageable for whom is unclear) makes no more sense than to argue you will continue to rub salt into your wound until it stops hurting.
At the centre of widely expressed hopes for US-engineered stability in Iraq is the training of a new Iraqi Army and police forces. This policy began in 2003 and its near-total failure in the last three years should have led to the conclusion that it is a non-starter. The Australian paper The Age reports on the current state of the police for instance:
“At least 20 per cent of those joining the police force were quitting each year. It said record keeping was so poor that it was not known how many police on the payroll were still reporting for duty. But up to 40 per cent of police were believed to be absent.”
In February this year, the Pentagon stopped publicizing the figures for battle-ready Iraqi army units, just as the number had reached zero, a decrease of one from the previous year. The reason is that recruits consist largely of those who are as unwilling to be used to fight in an American war as they were to be cannon-fodder for Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003 but need a job, and those who join seeking the military hardware and know-how for their own purposes, which can and do include killing Coalition soldiers.
On May 24th, the New York Times reported that:
"The headlong, American-backed effort to arm tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and officers, coupled with a failure to curb a nearly equal number of militia gunmen, has created a galaxy of armed groups, each with its own loyalty and agenda, which are accelerating the country's slide into chaos."
The Times’ story was illustrated by the case of the Iraqi 16th brigade which was supposed to guard an oil pipeline on behalf of the Ministry of Oil at Dawra near Baghdad last year, but whose members instead chose to use their weapons to support the insurgency and execute those collaborating with the government. In such ways are tax-dollars spent.
A few weeks ago, Reuters reported:
“Gunmen in Iraqi police uniforms rounded up as many as 100 men at a government building in central Baghdad on Tuesday, in what may be the biggest mass kidnap seen in a city becoming used to such violence.”
Surveys of Iraqi opinion – for those who regard democracy in Iraq as something other than a rhetorical flourish to give the Republican Party moral standing it does not have – consistently show the demand of a majority for the US to start leaving.
Furthermore, Iraqis – like General Dannatt - regard the Anglo-American presence as part of the problem – “Almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents”, reported Associated Press in September.
Iraqi calls for withdrawal are echoed by the sentiments of opinion polls among the British and US public, and in the US army itself. Who is missing from this popular consensus that stretches from Seattle to Basra?
Once we appreciate that the only way is out the question is how to quit and give the greatest opportunity for a less violent Iraq to emerge, leave the least bitterness and hatred, and fulfill some of the basic obligations the US and Britain have to Iraqis for the harm that has been done. The task is not easy, but a well-handled withdrawal offers the greatest hope.
Last month, staff at TIME magazine put together a to-do list for a withdrawing US army under the sober heading ‘The End of the Illusion’. With exceptions, the recommendations are essentially to try out policies that have already failed and then unleash a last round of “aggressive counterinsurgency tactics” against the Mahdi Army and the Sunni insurgency. Such suggestions show that the illusion has not ended for some, either about the effectiveness of such tactics, or the unmentioned brutality they involve. ‘Smash and Run’ will deliver piles of corpses and earn much further hatred and contempt for the United States, but little else.
An alternative, costed approach is outlined in Harpers’ magazine by George McGovern and William Polk. They suggest a six-month period of withdrawal of US forces from December and the creation of an international peace-keeping buffer force consisting of troops drawn from Islamic countries such as Indonesia and Morocco. A UN-led force has been a popular idea in Iraq since 2003, and this plan enjoys wide support among Sunni and Shia parties. Such a force would not attempt counter-insurgency raids but would act to prevent sectarian slaughter and protect civilians at risk. Under the McGovern/Polk plan the construction of a new Iraqi army would be abandoned and instead the focus would be on the gradual creation of a national police force from disparate local units. Such proposals could, as others have suggested, be put to popular referendum.
The US and British governments should then put up generous sums of money – and generosity would be a wise purchase of goodwill – to fund reconstruction through a transparent process as well as funds for removing explosive and radioactive ordinance, running healthcare and judicial systems, demolishing military bases, repairing cultural sites and making condolence payments to the victims of the war. There is a cost to this ($7-10 billion), but one vastly less than years of war – and the positive blowback of doing the right thing for once is hard to put a price on. Such a plan also offers Americans and Iraqis the ultimate gift of loved ones still alive, who will otherwise die.
Those who opposed this war or have watched it unfold with ever-greater dismay can “think of something better” and should push for a new course from the new Congress, and the other Coalition governments.
William Raspberry, Occupation Hazards, Washington Post, December 27th 2004. In fairness, the piece is mainly critical of calls for greater brutality by US forces in Iraq. (link)
Blair defiant over Iraq strategy, BBC Online, October 18th, 2006 (link)
Sarah Sands, Sir Richard Dannatt, - A Very Honest General, Daily Mail, October 12th, 2006 (link)
Brendan Nicholson, US Intelligence Reveals Extent of Iraq Carnage, The Age, November 11th, 2006 (link).
Aseel Kami, Dozens Snatched in Mass Kidnap at Iraq Ministry, November 14th, 2006 (link) (Also featured at www.davidcorn.com)
Barry Schwied, Poll: Iraqis Back Attacks on U.S. Troops, Associated Press, September 28th, 2006 (link)
Aparisim Ghosh, The End of the Illusion: 5 Ways to Prevent Iraq From Getting Even Worse, TIME (European Edition), October 30th, 2006
George McGovern and William Polk, ‘The Way Out of Iraq’, Harper’s Magazine, October 2006
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The only thing we have to fear is Nancy Pelosi
Scenes from the US Congressional elections
(This article was written shortly before the Congressional elections which of course saw a Democratic victory and an end to Republican control of both the House and the Senate. The weird press coverage and right-wing attacks on Nancy Pelosi have continued much as before, however...)
“This is the moment to say that there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of 'em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn't become the speaker.”
So said an impassioned Republican star-hack Sean Hannity to his audience on his radio show on August 29th [2006]. You may be considering throwing your own body beneath a tank in the cause of keeping Ms. Pelosi’s hand from the gavel in the US House of Representatives after the elections on November 7th. But chances are you are wondering quite what Pelosi could have done, or be about to do, to warrant such alarm.
It’s fluff of course – Sean Hannity is no more willing to actually fight or die in this cause than in the Iraq War which he champions and fears might be ended sooner rather than later. But turning Ms. Pelosi into an object of irrational fear is one of the closest things to a trump card in a terrible hand that the Republican Party has.
Why should you fear Nancy Pelosi? Former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, explains what is at stake:
"Republicans are right to favor traditional American conservative social values, and the left is completely wrong to put San Francisco left-wing values third in line to be President by electing Nancy Pelosi to speaker of the House."
Ah-ha! Nancy is from San Francisco! Now it’s not like Mr. Gingrich to put his fellow Americans down, but you have to draw the line at San Francisco. So what kind of social values – which essentially translates as attitudes towards sex – does this decadent woman represent? The National Catholic Reporter explains:
“Nancy Pelosi, mother of five, grandmother of five, refers to herself as a “conservative Catholic.” [a somewhat contentious self-description, the NCR notes]…Upon graduation in 1962, she married Georgetown University graduate Paul Pelosi. The couple moved first to New York and then to San Francisco , Paul Pelosi’s hometown. It was a fast-track family: five children in six years. Pelosi was a full-time mother -- babies and carpools, laundry, homework and getting dinner on the table took priority.”
But enough of this orgy of immorality.
Unlike the San Francisco swinger Pelosi, Newt Gingrich is married to his third wife. How he got there is described in Bryan Harris' 'The Sanctity of Marriage Handbook'. Newt's first marriage to Jackie Battley was interrupted to have an affair with Anne Manning, who later explained to Vanity Fair: “We had oral sex… He prefers that modus operandi because he can then say, ‘I never slept with her’” – a line of defence he would later regard as contemptible when used by Bill Clinton. But it was not until Jackie was in hospital with cancer that he delivered divorce papers to her, leaving her for Marianne Ginther. This second marriage ended following a six-year affair with his Congressional aide, the 23-years-younger Callista Bisek. Newt and Callista married in 1999.
This man berates the personal values of Nancy Pelosi. Preposterous? Outrageous? Like a man who strongly supported a war but used the privilege of his class to avoid fighting while the less fortunate were sent to die and then failed to perform even the cushier service he opted for and later poses as a war leader? That kind of outrageous? Or a man who privately switched off the life support of his father, then uses Congress as a public platform to call Michael Schiavo a murderer for asking to remove the feeding tube from his brain-dead wife (Tom Delay, in case you were wondering)? Outrage is an exhausting business – we are dealing with people who exhibit no sense of shame whatsoever. They may know full well that the cedar-like beam in their eye is out of all proportion to the splinter in their neighbour’s eye. It’s just they do not care and don’t expect their supporters will notice, not least since the press will rarely bother to point it out. Recall that Republican Representative Mark Foley, who so recently resigned after years of sexually harassing 16 year-old interns, was the co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. But of course!
Another line of attack has been put forward by the likes of Pat Buchanan, the American Spectator – the magazine that brought us so many exclusives of the few misdeeds President Clinton didn’t actually commit – and Americans for Truth, an organization that promises to keep us informed of the “homosexual activist agenda”. (The homosexual activist agenda, I can reveal, by the way – it’s for the like of Americans for Truth to leave them alone). These bold truth-tellers point out that Pelosi has marched on Gay Pride parades. At these parades the infamous North American Man-Boy Love Association also had members marching. So you see, Nancy Pelosi is more or less marching alongside them… You see how that works? And come to think of it, where were you in San Francisco on that day?
Writes Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator, “a moment like this unintentionally reveals the mindset of what Representative Pelosi and her fellow Democrats may really think but can't -- yet – support”. Which is for Congressmen to molest teenagers, in case you hadn’t caught his drift. Fortunately, as we have already noted, Republicans are still in charge of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.
Since senior Republican Congressmen, including the current speaker Dennis Hastert were aware of Mark Foley’s treatment of his interns and had been for some years, the Party struggled to prevent a ripple of revulsion traveling across the electorate. One ploy was to hint that the real villains of the Foley scandal were in fact congressional Democrats who, in this theory (a generous description), could have known themselves of Foley’s conduct and chosen to conceal what they knew until weeks before the elections. The devil-woman Pelosi had struck again!
This theory had more than one major flaw, and one in particular, as even CNN’s rarely-troubled Wolf Blitzer made a point of noting in this precious exchange with Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican of North Carolina:
McHenry: Well, look, all the fact points lead to one question: Did Rahm Emanuel or Nancy Pelosi have any involvement on the strategic or tactical level? …
Blitzer: Do you have any evidence at all that Democrats or others might have been behind the timing of this scandal?
McHenry: Look, let’s be honest…
Blitzer: Do you have any evidence to back that charge up?
McHenry: No, no, actually, if the Democrats had any issue with saying this, putting all the facts out on the table, they would say, certainly, I’ll testify under oath that I had no involvement in it. They’ve said no.
Blitzer: Well, you don’t have any evidence, though, right?
McHenry: Well, look at the fact points.
Blitzer: Yes or no, do you have any evidence, Congressman?
McHenry: Do you have any evidence that they weren’t involved?
And do you have any evidence that you aren’t a terrorist? Can you prove that you don’t sell cocaine to children? Can you demonstrate beyond doubt that you have never sacrificed kittens to Satan?
In less slime-covered quarters such as CBS’ Sixty Minutes, presenter Lesley Stahl challenged Pelosi for being rude. The CBS website explains:
‘As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, she keeps promising that if she becomes Speaker, she would bring civility back to Washington: just not now. Pelosi has called her Republican colleagues “immoral" and "corrupt,” and has said they're running a criminal enterprise. "I mean, you're one of the reasons we have to restore civility in the first place," Stahl remarks.’
Pelosi even called the President “incompetent” after all he did to serve the people of New Orleans in their time of need. And the real clincher? This:
‘Here is what she said about the president’s handling of Hurricane Katrina: "The president said he's going to lead the investigation into what went wrong. He need look only in the mirror, for starters."’
Someone said that! In Washington! It’s almost like curse words! One can appreciate that the avoidable destruction of a major American city and the deaths of 1,800 people might make everyone a bit upset but that doesn’t mean we should we all high and mighty and try and hold public officials to account, people.
Ms. Pelosi’s rather neat reply to this one-sided obsession with civility was, "Well actually, when I called them those names, I was being gentle. There are much worse things I could've said about them."
Ms. Stahl replied with catty scorn, “Oh really? It’s hard to imagine.”
To help her imagination out, I suggest Ms. Stahl look back for the newsreel of when Dick Cheney visited New Orleans for a photo-shoot and was greeted with a loud “Go fuck yourself!” from a resident filled with justifiable anger, pointedly quoting Cheney himself incidentally. (That resident filmed his epic trip to berate the Vice President here).
Nancy could also have called George W. Bush a “major league asshole”, which was his description of Adam Clymer of the New York Times. She might have said she was going to fuck the president like he had never been fucked before as White House strategist Karl Rove briefed a subordinate in the presence of journalist Ron Suskind. She might have said that Michael J. Fox is faking the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease to assist the Democrats, or stated loudly and repeatedly that bereaved widows of 9/11 who clash with the White House over security policy enjoy the deaths of their husbands, or engaged in mock tears at the news of suicides among internees at Guantanamo Bay, or demanded the execution of the editor of the New York Times (again) - as we have so recently heard from the prominent and popular Republican pundits Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.
But maybe they were all just following the terrible example set by Pelosi herself.
Or maybe Pelosi is actually pretty civil.
The hard men of the Republican Party have good reason to be afraid of her, even if no one else does. The fear has little to do with Ms. Pelosi’s views on Iraq (she voted against the war), abortion (she favours the legal status quo), the Patriot Act (she voted in favour but now regrets it), the minimum wage (she favours freezing Congressional salaries until it is raised), healthcare (she wants a renegotiation of the Bush prescription drug programme which allows pharmaceutical companies to grossly overcharge Medicare) or anything else. When asked what is most important about retaking the House, Pelosi says “subpoena power” – the authority to hold investigations into corruption and criminality and demand that public officials give evidence. That is what they find scary. That and the fact that the Republicans would have lost the stranglehold on all three branches of the United States government that has permitted them to run Washington like an out-and-out racket for so long.
This 109th Congress, described neatly by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi as: “a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable” – all that could be coming to a well-deserved end.
A Congress that legalised torture, broke the back of the safeguards of the US Constitution, has not lifted a finger once for working-class Americans while increasing the salaries of its members, has not held one serious investigation into the administration’s handling of Iraq, invites fiction writers to testify on why global warming is not really happening and engaged in a world-historical spending spree on unending war and a fiesta of soft corruption - that Congress may be coming to an end. The White House, Republican Party and Beltway pundits don’t really fear Nancy Pelosi – they are afraid of the American electorate crashing their party and being real kill-joys.
Some others who wrote about these issues: Newsweek, Eric Boehlert and Glenn Greenwald.
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The Plot Behind the Plot to Kill the Pope
"I never believed in the so-called Bulgarian connection" Pope John Paul II
John Paul II recovers from shot-wounds
'Loose Change', speculates Nancy Jo Sales for Vanity Fair (August 2006), "just might be the first Internet blockbuster". At least 10 million people have watched the number 1 movie on Google Video's top 100. Put together by bright young things Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas and Korey Rowe, Loose Change is an 80-minute documentary ensemble of factoids with an MTV-style soundtrack assaulting the boring official version of the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001.
It's an impressive feat, quite watchable, well put together - just wrong on virtually every point of fact. I prefer the website Loose Trains which offers evidence to support its theory that the World Trade Center was not in fact destroyed by hijacked aeroplanes at all, but by hijacked trains, a truth the US ruling class has cleverly concealed from us. The tragedy of 'Loose Change' is to see all that talent and energy put into following an empty, implausible line of enquiry. There is so much real injustice and deceit to expose in this world, it's a great loss when people who could focus on real crimes seek to endlessly pursue non-existent evidence of conspiracies that never took place.
If the Bush administration only had anything near the collective presence of mind to carry out something as sophisticated as the 9/11 attacks, who knows, they might have been capable of getting their act together on the day and actually have saved some lives from the murderous hijackers, rather than failing to save a single one. While I enjoy debunking conspiracy speculation, there is a certain futility to it. Lines of conspiracy speculation have an astonishing capacity for endurance despite the paucity of evidence that might give them life.
"The giggle test"
On March 2nd 2006, an Italian parliamentary commission led by Senator Paolo Guzzanti concluded, "This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul." Now there's a throwback for fans of the '80s.
On May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, a member of a Turkish fascist paramilitary outfit, the Grey Wolves, waited for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square, then shot him four times in the arm and stomach, but was prevented from murdering him as members of the crowd restrained him. By way of explanation, a letter found in Agca's pocket informed us that "I, Agca, have killed the Pope so that the world may know of the thousands of victims of imperialism." It was not immediately obvious how the murder of the Pope would draw attention to the victims of imperialism, except possibly the victims of the Grey Wolves, who moonlighted for US imperialism in Turkey. Agca himself had previously murdered Abdi Ipekci, the editor of the Turkish liberal paper Milliyet in 1979. Still his statement made as much sense as anything else he has ever said on the subject.
John Paul II in St. Peter's Square after he was shot
The backdrop to the Polish Pope's near-death was growing unrest in Poland, as the dock-workers' union Solidarnosc (Solidarity) was proving a potent challenge to the Jaruzselski dictatorship and the Soviet Empire itself. The Pope's open support for Solidarity and for Polish nationalism was reawakening popular unrest. So, was it much of a stretch to speculate that Agca's attempt on the Pope's life was part of a larger conspiracy hatched in Moscow by the KGB, maybe through its Bulgarian allies?
Abdi Ipekci's memorial in Istanbul John Paul II meets Lech Walesa in 1981
Well, yes it was. Quoted in Vanity Fair by Craig Unger, Frank Brodhead, an author of a book with Edward Herman on this very subject explained: "It just doesn't pass the giggle test. Agca, the shooter, had been deeply embedded in a Turkish youth group of the Fascist National Action Party known as the Gray Wolves. It would seem illogical that a Turkish Fascist would work with Bulgarian Communists."
And vice versa, a literal loose cannon like Agca would have made an odd choice for Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence agencies. So as a theory, the notion of a Kremlin conspiracy struggled to get the past the obstacle of plausibility.
"A Lot of it Was Made Up"
But as all students of conspiracy stories know, that's really no obstacle at all. The theory went like this - Agca, who had travelled through Stalinist Bulgaria and was connected to Balkan drug smugglers, had been hired by agents of the Bulgarian regime's intelligence (themselves acting at the behest of Moscow's KGB) to assassinate the Pope. The theory was largely developed and propagated by a number of American neo-conservatives who were then crawling up the Reagan White House - Claire Sterling, Paul Henze and Michael Ledeen - and became something of an obsession of the CIA as led by William Casey (who loved conspiracy theories involving the Russians) and the wholesome Italian intelligence agency, SISMI. The motive for the assassination plot centred on the Pontiff's support for Solidarity and Polish independence, though Claire Sterling initially suggested that the plan was to split Turkey from the Western military alliance NATO by inspiring one of its sons to kill the Pope and thus alienate Christian Europe.
Plausibility was a problem since not only did this plan involve hiring a violently anti-Communist assassin to kill on behalf of the USSR, it involved the Russians taking an extraordinary risk that could easily have inspired a wider revolt in Poland. And it seemed, in Sterling's original version, to rest simultaneously on Agca being identified as the killer while hoping he would nobly remain silent about his Communist masters if captured.
Ultimately though the theory suffered from a lack of actual evidence. The CIA spent a solid decade investigating the subject at Casey's behest and couldn't find anything - for which it was attacked by our neo-conservative friends, since failure to produce evidence to support their arguments is considered to be an act of treachery/weakness/liberalism rather than evidence they might be wrong about something, or indeed virtually everything.
William Casey was very much of this mindset. Reagan's head of the CIA had read Claire Sterling's book, The Terror Network, which made the argument that virtually all guerrilla and paramilitary organisations that she could think of were part of a cohesive global network created and funded by the Soviet Union. The Terror Network included the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Salvadoran FMLN, the lot. (Take an example, the Provisional IRA were initially quite anti-Communist and in large part funded by Irish-American conservatives, but only boring people make those kinds of observations). "There is massive proof", Ms. Sterling wrote, a bombastic assertion inversely proportional to the actual proof, "that the Soviet Union and its surrogates, over the last decade, have provided the weapons, training and sanctuary for a worldwide terror network aimed at the destabilisation of Western democratic society." Sterling would later write about the Bulgarian connection for Reader's Digest and the New York Times.
Casey urged the CIA to take this seriously - "Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush," he instructed the national-intelligence officer for the Soviet Union after he offered a more realistic assessment of Soviet covert intervention abroad, as Bob Woodward records in 'The Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987' (p125). Casey growled, "I paid $13.95 for this [Sterling's book] and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year."
Problems for the Terror Network thesis included the fact that Soviet intelligence sometimes provided information on the activities of paramilitary organisations to the CIA. For instance, Woodward noted: "There were some cases in which they had actually discouraged terrorism. The U.S. ambassador to Nepal had been warned by the Russians of a kidnap plot by four Arabs. The Bulgarians had let the West German police arrest a member of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang in 1978." There was another problem - a lot of the evidence cited by Sterling for global Soviet perfidy was actually disinformation originally created by the CIA for propaganda purposes. Casey's analysts spotted the irony and winced. Woodward wrote: "It turned out that a small part of Claire Sterling's information had come from an Italian press story on the Red Brigade. The story was part of an old, small-scale CIA covert propaganda operation."
Not just a small part, actually. Then CIA Head of Soviet Affairs Melvin Goodman explained to Adam Curtis in the BBC documentary series, 'The Power of Nightmares' (transcript):
Goodman: And when we looked through the book [Sterling's], we found very clear episodes where CIA black propaganda—clandestine information that was designed under a covert action plan to be planted in European newspapers—were picked up and put in this book. A lot of it was made up. It was made up out of whole cloth.
Curtis: You told him [Casey] this?
Goodman: We told him that, point blank. And we even had the operations people to tell Bill Casey this. I thought maybe this might have an impact, but all of us were dismissed. Casey had made up his mind. He knew the Soviets were involved in terrorism, so there was nothing we could tell him to disabuse him. Lies became reality.
Curtis: In the end, Casey found a university professor who described himself as a terror expert, and he produced a dossier that confirmed that the hidden terror network did, in fact, exist.
Old falsehoods were elevated to official truths fitting as they did with a political agenda of military build-up and the deliberate escalation of Cold War tensions. The complexities of guerrilla wars in the Third World and violent, radical political movements were reduced to a frightening and easily digestible - albeit false - notion of the Soviet Union as a puppet-master of an international terrorist network incorporating Neslon Mandela, Yassir Arafat, Gerry Adams and whoever. Which was handy, because it meant the US government could justify itself in fighting and destroying its chosen enemies rather than addressing their demands from El Salvador to Angola to the West Bank. The facts were made to fit the policy.
Any connection with the build-up to the Iraq War is not coincidental or unintended.
"Complicated and demonic"
Back in Rome the thin plot struggled to thicken. Initially Agca claimed to be a member of the Palestinian leftist guerrilla organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (who in turn claimed that they had no idea who Agca was). But after meeting members of the Italian intelligence agency SISMI in prison in November 1982, he changed his story, claiming to have been an assassin working for Bulgarian intelligence at the behest of the Russians.
Having peered behind the curtain at Langley and taken a look at the wrangling between fact and fiction within the CIA, some explanation about the state of Italian intelligence might also be useful. In December 1969, a bomb exploded in Milan's Banco dell'Agricoltura, killing 16 people. This atrocity was the beginning of a series of bombings carried out by far-right sorts connected to Italian intelligence. Coming after the strong performance of the Italian Communist Party in the 1968 elections, the bombings were part of a deliberate policy of creating a violent society on edge - Strategia della Tensione. Those carrying out the bombings sought to have their violence blamed on left-wing paramilitaries such as the Red Brigades, and so create an atmosphere in which the military could seize power and establish a dictatorship which could physically destroy the Italian left. A real conspiracy, after all.
Those implicated in the Strategy include elements of SISMI, Propaganda Due, P2 for short, (a secret society of military officers, spooks, politicians and industrialists who fancied themselves as a dictatorship-in-waiting) and various fascist paramilitaries. We still don't have a full accounting of who-killed-who during this period of recent Italian history, and only a little solid information on the Strategy of Tension. Some emerged in a 2000 parliamentary investigation carried out by the left-leaning Olive Tree coalition as well as other commissions and court cases. An investigation into the Banco dell'Agricoltura bombing by Magistrate Guido Salvini alleged CIA and NATO involvement, as William Pfaff quoted him in Jewish World Review:
"...the Americans knew in advance about this and other bombings of the period, and they actively supported a strategy of tension designed to destabilize the state and create the conditions for a military coup."
Pfaff notes that just such a coup had taken place in Greece 18 months previously, with covert US support. And Agca's own Grey Wolves in Turkey formed part of the Turkish equivalent to the Italian Strategy of Tension, killing at the behest of Turkish army officers in the hope of destabilising the country and creating the conditions for General Kenan Evren's coup of 1980 (the General was the director of Counter-Guerilla, a happy bunch of people who worked the Grey Wolves).
Daniele Glasnier and Christian Nuenlist's parallel history of NATO and the Warsaw Pact also describe an actual connection between NATO clandestine organisations and right-wing paramilitary terror in Italy:
"Italian judge Felice Casson discovered the secret NATO army in summer 1990 in Rome while researching acts of right-wing terrorism in the archives of the Italian military secret service. He concluded that in Italy there were clear links to terrorist operations. During the Cold War, the United States and Great Britain feared the strong Italian Communist Party (PCI), in alliance with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), might weaken NATO from within. Therefore, as Judge Casson explained in a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary on Gladio, a strategy of tension was employed to weaken the political parties on the left, in Italy, and beyond. Casson added,
'That’s to say, to create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies. While this strategy was being implemented, it was necessary to protect those behind it because evidence implicating them was being discovered. Witnesses withheld information to cover right-wing extremists.'
'According to Casson, the best documented case of this complicated and demonic strategy of tension occurred in the village Peteano in 1972 where three members of the Italian paramilitary police, the Carabinieri, had been killed by a car bomb. For many years, this terrorist attack was blamed on the Italian left-wing terror organization Red Brigades until Casson reopened the case and found right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra had carried out the crime."
The Strategy of Tension continued throughout the 1970s and appeared to stop shortly after the Bologna Massacre, when 85 people were killed by a bomb placed in Bologna Station in August 1980. The government initially blamed the Red Brigades, but police suspicion later fell on far-right paramilitary Ordine Nuovo. Two SISMI agents as well as P2's Licio Pelli were convicted for obstruction of justice in the course of the investigation. The Strategy of Tension was, fortunately, a failure in attempting to shut down democratic institutions in Italy, such as they were and are. But the attempt to make political capital out of the attempted killing of Pope John Paul II just a year after the Bologna Massacre could be seen as a watered-down continuation of the same tactic.
The aftermath of the Bologna Massacre, August 2nd, 1980. To this day, the hands of the clock remain at 10:25am, when the bomb detonated. A composing festival is held each year in the town's Piazza Maggiore on August 2nd.
"The Devil is Within"
On the basis of Agca's testimony, Italian authorities arrested a Bulgarian reporter, Sergei Antonov, who was accused of being the spy who masterminded the plot. After a three-year trial, Antonov was found not guilty in March 1986. Meanwhile Agca's court testimony veered in new directions, including the claim that he was in fact Jesus Christ.
This new claim was developed somewhat in 2005. Agca was released from prison in Italy, pardoned by the President at the request of a forgiving John Paul II in 2000, the Jubilee Year. He was extradited to Turkey where he was promptly jailed for the murder of Abdi Ipekci and bank robberies carried out in the 1970s. In March 2005, Agca told the Italian paper La Repubblica (link in Italian) that the conspirators had in fact been Vatican insiders who had identified Agca as the second coming of Christ and arranged for their Messiah to kill the Pope:
"Without the help of priests and cardinals I wouldn't have been able to carry out my attack. The devil is within the Vatican."
The case was complicated further with the abduction by unknown persons of 15 year-old Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of an employee of the Vatican. Emanuela disappeared in June 1983. Among the collection of callers who contacted the police claiming to know of her whereabouts was one demanding Agca's release. After he stopped calling there was no trace of him, or Emanuela, whom he may or may not have kidnapped, ever again.
Emanuela's abduction, which probably has little or no relation to the attempted assassination of the Pope, was nonetheless woven into the story, and Agca made sinister reference to it in his Repubblica interview:
Q: They say it's because there is still some uncertainty in the Emanuela Orlandi case.
Agca: In the 1980's, certain Vatican supporters believed that I was the new messiah and to free me they organized all the intrigue about Emanuela Orlandi and the other incidents they won't reveal."
He claimed in the same interview that "nobody in the world knew of my attempt."
Ferdinando Imposimato, an Italian ex-magistrate who has long pursued the Bulgarian connection claimed that Agca had told him in many private conversations over a period of four years, from 1997-2000, that he had shot the Pope as part of a Communist plot. Typically, Agca additionally claimed that the murder of a Vatican Swiss Guard in 1998, Colonel Alois Estermann was also linked to this increasingly intricate intrigue. (For your information, Estermann had been a plainclothes Swiss Guard on the scene of Agca's murder attempt who had run to protect the Pope. He was murdered by an angry subordinate 17 years later, Corporal Cedric Tornay, who then committed suicide.) Precisely who Agca was implicating in Estermann's murder was unclear, especially since the Soviet Union was now 6-years deceased.
How does Imposimato explain Agca's constantly changing stories? He argued that the Agca was visited by Bulgarian agents in prison, in Italy, who made him change his story - in 1983.
A week after the Repubblica interview, Turkish Weekly reported that Agca denied accusing Vatican insiders of conspiring to kill the Pope in the previous week:
“Although I did not personally talk with any journalist, some false news has been published in local and foreign newspapers. I ask permission to meet with European, U.S. and Turkish media to correct these misunderstandings, and to send peace and friendship messages to the Christian world."
The reasonable interpretation of this is Agca is either mentally ill with homicidal inclinations at best, or a manipulative, pathological liar and cold-blooded murderer at worst. The fact that the Bulgarian-KGB conspiracy theory has rested so heavily on his testimony tells us a lot about its likelihood.
But the fantasies inspired by his actions have spread and now have a life of their own, buoyed by the loud speculation of the very right-wing in the United States and Italy. The CIA continued to investigate the Bulgarian connection for about a decade before coming to the conclusion there was no evidence for it.
As Rupert Cornwell wrote recently for the Independent: "In October 1991, a senior CIA analyst on Soviet affairs told a senate committee the agency had earlier come up with no hard evidence of Soviet involvement..." But the demands of those who believed their own propaganda were not satisfied - "...only for his superiors to alter the report's main judgement and 'stack the deck' in favour of Russian complicity. Sections of the report expressing doubts and counter-arguments were erased, and the finished project was sent to the White House and the Pentagon, avid to nail the Kremlin."
Quoted by Craig Unger in Vanity Fair, Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post agrees: "I became convinced... that the Bulgarian connection was invented by Agca with the hope of winning his release from prison... He was aided and abetted by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the United States and William Casey's Central Intelligence Agency which was a victim of its own disinformation campaign."
Should we even be slightly surprised that this same intelligence agency failed to predict the imminent collapse of the USSR itself? Or that under George Tenet just over a decade later, it would ignore the advice of its best analysts and intelligence assets, alter their conclusions, and serve the White House with the evidence on Iraq that it was looking for?
Or surprised that Senator Paolo Guzzanti of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party ran a investigation that succeeded in concluding, "beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to commit a crime of unique gravity"? The commission argues that the conspiracy was initiated not by the KGB but by Soviet military intelligence. They claim computer analysis of photographic evidence proves that Sergei Antonov was in St. Peter's Plaza at the time of the shooting and that recently released East German Stasi files provide further corroboration. Quite what they make of the key witness, Agca's claim to be Jesus isn't clear. Maybe it fits in somewhere. Along with the abduction of Emanuela Orlandi and the murder of Alois Estermann. Reuters reported Bulgarian Foreign Ministry spokesman Simitar Tsanchev complaining: "For Bulgaria, this case closed with the court decision in Rome in March 1986."
No, but we might be wearily surprised that journalists in prestigious newspapers still take seriously claims made by such ideologues and professional conduits of misinformation as Claire Sterling and Michael Ledeen. For the best part of a decade, the media in Western Europe and the USA has given credibility to a self-serving conspiracy theory, and many continue to this day to frame the issue as though the available evidence doesn't bring it down. And it's hardly the only case of the most prestigious news sources buying into spurious lines of speculation. In an e-mail interview with Michael Dobbs in which the main point of discussion were the false allegations made about Senator John Kerry's war record during the 2004 presidential campaign, a participant noted a real connection:
Clinton, Md.: How is it a group with an agenda can set the framework in which a story is reported? How does the media allow itself to be highjacked? For example, 21 years ago, a group of nutters, including the New York Times reporter, were spreading the tale that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. You, Edward Herman and an ABC 20/20 reporter were the only ones to investigate and report the truth. The same situation happened here with Swift Boat lies.
Pope John Paul II sometimes speculated about unseen actors behind the attempt on his life and appears to have made contradictory statements as he neared the end of his life. He always firmly believed that his near-death represented a clash between supernatural forces. But when he finally visited Bulgaria in May 2002 he declared to a crowd in Sofia: 'I never believed in the so-called Bulgarian connection because of my great esteem and respect for the Bulgarian people'. Not an argument by itself perhaps, but a welcome laying to rest of idle speculation.
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Articles and Books used for this article:
'The Man Who Nearly Killed the Pope', Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, January 13th 2006
'America's "Strategy of Tension" in Italy', William Pfaff, Jewish World Review, March 18th, 1998 (link)
'Swiss Watchers', Thomas Smith Jr., The Guardian, April 5th, 2005 (link)
'The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed', Craig Unger, Vanity Fair, July 2006 (link)
'Agca Denies Accusing Vatican of Complicity in Pope Shooting', Associated Press, The Journal of the Turkish Weekly (link)
'Italian Panel: Soviets Behind Pope Attack', Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, March 2nd, 2006 (link)
Soviets 'Had Pope Shot for Backing Solidarity', Adrian Bloomfield, The Daily Telegraph, March 3rd, 2006 (link)
'Man Who Shot the Pope to be Freed', Associated Press, China Daily, January 1st, 2006 (link)
'The Veil: Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987', Bob Woodward, 1987
'Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media' (1986), Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, chapter 4: The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope
'Secret Warfare - Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies', edited by Daniele Ganser and Christian Nuenlist (link here and here)
Wikipedia entries on Mehmet Ali Agca, John Paul II, Emanuela Orlandi, Alois Estermann, the Strategy of Tension, the Bologna Massacre, P2 and Operation Gladio
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
A Fair and Balanced Take on World Events
www.sauer-thompson.com/
Seymour Hersh on the Bush administration's deliberations over Iran
Iranians need freedom, but not a war - Iranian Women's Rights Campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Shirin Ebadi, speaking in February 2005
"Instead, the most effective way to promote human rights in Iran is to provide moral support and international recognition to independent human rights defenders, and to insist that Iran adhere to the international human rights laws and conventions that it has signed. Getting the Iranian government to abide by these international standards is the human rights movement's highest goal; foreign military intervention in Iran is the surest way to harm us and keep that goal out of reach."
Like many other blogs, it can go for long stretches without being updated - partly because I have had restricted access to the Internet for a few months for rather mundane reasons. Unlike many much braver bloggers in Iran and China who risk prison and worse with every post.
Still, if you scroll below, in addition to customary updates from bugbears of mine - the Iraq War and the genocide in Darfur - are the following articles which you may or may not be interested to read:
Marlboro Man Comes Home From War: - photographed during the second major assault on Fallujah, US Marine Corporal Blake Miller's face was splashed over the US press in November 2004 and used to advertise American machismo. But what happened when he came back home from Iraq? Updated
Nuclear Power - Still a Bad Idea: Global warming may force some hard choices on us, but even on second consideration nuclear power is a mistake we should avoid making again. Updated
Preacher Comforts - the Wrath of Pat Robertson: The US televangelist who preaches some really bad news (especially to the poor) and the morass of corruption over which he presides. Updated
Yes it Hurt, Yes it Worked? The infiltration of Irish republican paramilitary groups by British intelligence - like many of Britain's pioneering counter-insurgency tactics since World War Two - is often uncritically admired in US political circles, while touted here as a success story and a model for the War on Terror. In reality, the results of Britain's Dirty War in Northern Ireland are more ambiguous and morally indefensible. The story of a lot of murders...
Just Push the Button: The disgraceful bombing of the Pakistani village of Damadola should prompt a reconsideration of the tactic aerial assassination as practiced by the governments of the US, Israel and Russia.
Thanks for visiting. Any comments of any description will be given due consideration at respond_alexblog at yahoo dot co dot uk.
Alex Higgins
Tottenham, London, England
You can read Dilbert cartoons at Scott Adam's website
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Iraq - This has been happening for three years
Look back in anger - when US media outlets drunk on victory, spurned caution and lapped up Bush's flight-suit stunt on the USS Lincoln.
100,000 families flee sectarian violence
The Haditha Massacre - a TIME special investigation
Haditha, the London Times reports
Air war in Iraq stepped up
US plans "new liberation" of Baghdad
Most troops want to leave Iraq in 2006, Iraqis strongly opposed to ongoing presence of Coalition
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Darfur - And so has this
www.darfurgenocide.org
The genocide continues - and so do international protests
Janjawid Militias Take the War Into Eastern Chad
Chad Massacre: A Photo Essay, Human Rights Watch, Panos Pictures
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Temperature Rising
NASA Earth Observatory
Rich world media starts to notice, David Attenborough and Al Gore make movies
(Supporting Al Gore's new movie doesn't mean you have to forgive him everything...)
Fox News continues to mislead viewers on global warming
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Some Headlines From Around the World
Success for popular revolution in Nepal as King restores parliament, International Herald Tribune
Permanent ceasefire in the Basque Country, BBC News
Atrocity in Timor Leste, old and new, Washington Post and Time Magazine
Huge demonstrations by Hispanic immigrant workers in USA for rights, dignity, Associated Press
Unrepentant CNN uses white suremacist source in Hispanic scare story, Huffington Post
Amnesty International Reports, Bush adminstration goes on counter-offensive against human rights group, AP
Sri Lanka on brink of war again, Christian Science Monitor
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Marlboro Man comes home from war
In Iraq, even stage-managed photo opportunities become stories of tragedy and horror. In one pose for the cameras we have on the left, a beaming British Prime Minister. On his right, Corporal Gordon Pritchard chats with him amiably. The photograph was taken at Shaibah logistics base, south of Basra in the British zone of occupation on December 22nd, 2005.
It’s a good photo from a Prime Ministerial standpoint – there he is, on the ground with the troops, dressed smart/casual – he has taken off the tie (man of the people, ordinary bloke, one of us) but retained a suit (professional, statesmanlike, determined). He is depicted having a laugh with one of us regular folks, but at the same time, a tank in the background reminds us of the power he wields and the responsibilities he has.
But such presentation skills are stretched to the limit by the bloody facts of the Iraq War. Corporal Pritchard has since been killed by a roadside bomb on January 31st this year, becoming the 100th British soldier to die in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. For Tony Blair, life has carried on much the same and – frankly – he is rather annoyed at being made to go over old ground when reporters persist in asking questions about the decision to go to war.
The photo was a routine public relations job, but try as he might, the Prime Minister struggles to get back to old routines, because people just keep on dying in Iraq. Now the photograph is a symbol of something else – the fact that there is no business as usual for as long as the Coalition stays in Iraq.
Another famous photograph to emerge from this war has also been shown to be worth many thousands of words. On November 9th, 2004, an exhausted, grimy, unshaven and slightly injured US Marine, Lance Corporal Blake Miller was photographed by Luis Sinco of the Los Angeles Times on the second day of a major assault on the city of Fallujah. Miller recalled the circumstances of the shot for the San Francisco Chronicle:
As Miller remembers that day, he was on a rooftop taking fire and calling for support on his radio - a 20-pound piece of equipment that he had to lug around along with nine extra batteries, hundreds of extra rounds of ammunition, and a couple of cartons of cigarettes.
As insurgent bullets from a nearby building pinged off the roof, a horrified Miller heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind him. He raised his rifle -- and barely had time to halt when he saw it was embedded Los Angeles Times photographer Luis Sinco.
Sinco himself thought little of the close-up of Miller’s weary face with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and filed it last among all the photographs he sent home, imagining that editors were looking for action shots. But the photo of Miller proved enormously popular back in the USA.
The picture was dubbed ‘Marlboro Man’ and around a hundred newspapers ran with it. It prompted a stream of slightly-scary commentary on the unique greatness of American manhood and much patriotic homo-eroticism. Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, the New York Post, declared tastefully that “Marlboro Men kick butt in Fallujah” while the normally more level-headed Dan Rather at CBS News gushed:
"Did you see it? The best war photograph of recent years is in many newspapers today. ...See it, study it, absorb it. Think about it. Then take a deep breath of pride. And if your eyes don't dampen, you're a better man or woman than I."
Miller's gunnery sergeant walked up to him, grinning, and said: "Would you believe you're the most famous f -- Marine in the Marine Corps right now? Believe it or not, your ugly mug just went all over the U.S."
Aside from being an indirect public relations boost for the tobacco industry, the Marlboro Man picture proved to be something of a diversion from less aesthetic news for the US media. November 2004 was the bloodiest month of the entire Iraq War for the US army to date, with 137 soldiers being killed in all, and 50 of them in the attack on Fallujah. The death toll for Iraqis must have been huge, but for them there is no reliable body count since it remains Coalition policy to make no attempt to keep track of Iraqi civilian deaths as we kill them. We also now know that the US army chose to use napalm and white phosphorous in residential areas in the military offensives of that month.
Miller’s photograph became a feel-good propaganda picture, but almost every aspect of the reality behind it is troubling. Take the moment he was captured on camera, by the Marine’s own account, for instance:
Miller returned to his radio, guiding two tanks to his position. When they opened fire, he said, the thunder left his body numb -- but the building housing the attackers had collapsed. Later, he said, they would find about 40 bodies in the rubble.
Blake Miller was not asked about the use of his face to sell the bloodiest month of the war to the US public, and it is a role he is not especially comfortable with. A number of media outlets in the US decided to follow the story of Marlboro Man, and in doing so his experience has offered an unintended, devastating insight into George W. Bush’s war.
Back at home in Kentucky, Iraq was still taking its toll on Miller:
"...one day, while visiting his wife at her college dorm in Pikeville, Miller looked out the window and clearly saw the body of an Iraqi sprawled out on the sidewalk. He turned away."
He had already been experiencing nightmares, but hoped that his hallucination would be just a passing phase. Turning to his wife, Jessica, he said:
"I said, 'Look, honey, I just got to get out of here.' I couldn't even tell her at the time what had happened," he said. "(I thought), 'Well, that's it. That's my little spaz I'm supposed to have that the psychiatrists were talking about ... I'm glad I got it out of the way."
Blake soldiered on and had married Jessica in June. But Jessica began to suspect her husband was unwell by the way he tightened his arms around her neck when he was asleep.
In September, Miller found himself deployed to a scene of potential urban warfare once again, but this time in the United States itself - in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"I really didn't want to go. ... There was a possibility we would be shooting people," he said. "We could be going into another (urban warfare) environment just like Iraq, except this would actually be U.S. citizens. Here we go, Fallujah 2, right here in the states."
On board the USS Iwo Jima off the Gulf Coast he went up on deck for a cigarette and passed a sailor who did a whistle imitation of a rocket-propelled grenade shooting through the air. Miller explained to Editor and Publisher magazine (link unavailable to non-subscribers):
"For anybody to duplicate that sound," Miller said, "they've had to hear it. Without even knowing what I'd done until after it was over, I snatched him up, I slammed him against the bulkhead, the wall, and took him to the floor, and I was on top of him."
And to the San Francisco Chronicle:
"I don't remember grabbing him. I don't remember putting him against the bulkhead. I don't remember getting him down on the floor. I don't remember getting on top of him. I don't remember doing any of that s -- ," Miller said. "That was like the last straw."
Miller was given a medical review and diagnosed with PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - and was told he would be a danger to himself and other Marines if he carried on serving in the army. On November 10th 2005 – a year and a day after the photograph that made him the front-page story across the country, he was given an honourable discharge from the Marine Corps.
Photo by Michael Macor for the Chronicle
Friends and family all report that Miller rarely laughs the way he did before being deployed in Iraq, that he is quieter and loses his temper more easily. The nightmares are more intense and his trigger finger twitches in his sleep.
Miller was born in Pike County in eastern Kentucky, where economic opportunities are limited and the best paying jobs for working men are in the coal mines. He first started working, aged 12, at a car wash and later began training as a car mechanic. At the age of 18, he was approached by a recruiter for the Marines who could offer him the chance to train in vehicle repair for free – and not just that, but also insurance, a house and the chance to go to college.
Photo by Michael Macor for the Chronicle
"There ain't a goddamn thing around here… My whole life, all I did was watch my old man bust his ass… My whole life, all I've ever known is working on cars, doing body work, cutting grass, manual labor, you know? It was something different… You always hear those commercials -- it's not just a job, it's an adventure. It was, you know?"
The tragedy is that the US military is the only institution that offers many less well-off Americans exciting opportunities, and help going to college, but only does so at a steep price – you must submit to its cruelties and be willing to get yourself killed or crippled in the government’s pursuit of its foreign policy, justified or not.
"I thought, 'Well, damn, that's amazing,' " Miller said. "Hell, here I am, 18 years old -- I can have all this in the palm of my hands just by giving them four years."
Offered a too-good-to-be-true opportunity, Miller began his training in November 2002, about four months before the Iraq War began.
Miller has been vague about the details of combat that have damaged him and does not discuss the weeks in Fallujah after the second major US assault on the city began. Like many soldiers, he feels that civilians who have not seen war before cannot grasp the experience:
"I could tell you stories about Iraq that would make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," he said. "And I could tell you things that were great over there. But that would still not tell you what it was actually like. You had to be there and go through it to really understand."
He has described briefly being ambushed, being injured with shrapnel, seeing a cat sleeping in the open chest of an Iraqi corpse, of meeting a friend he made during his training, Demarcus Brown, just before the attack on Fallujah, and later learning that Brown had been killed.
Much of the damage seems to have been done by the more mundane but stressful everyday experiences of a military tour of Iraq – the constant strain of expecting to be shot at or bombed. He told CBS News about the adjustment to civilian life:
"For the most part, I mean, it was a big adjustment [when I got home] just trying to get in that mindset of being able to just roam, run around without fear of being shot at or where to look for danger. ... It's unexplainable. I mean, just to go from that mindset to being able to walk around freely and just enjoy it."
An incident related in the Chronicle report gives an impression of how widely and deeply this affects soldiers: “When he and his buddies reacted to a truck backfire by dropping into a combat stance and raising imaginary rifles, well, that was to be expected.”
To appreciate how universal this kind of experience is for soldiers, consider these two examples of British soldiers who were sent to Northern Ireland, both taken from Aly Renwick’s book about soldiers returning from the Irish War, ‘Hidden Wounds’:
“When I went back on leave, the first day I went out shopping with my sister we were walking down the street and a car came past and backfired. Before I knew what I was doing I’d jumped over a garden wall and was crouching down behind it. My sister burst into tears. She said it was horrible to see me like that.” (p60-1)
“…one night in Northern Ireland, in July 1990, the snap of a beer can opening up finally unhinged Alex. Brandishing a pistol, he threatened to shoot the other members of his company, then himself. An Army psychiatrist told him he was suffering from PTSD, but the prosecution at his courtmartial rejected the idea and he was sentenced to two years in prison.” (p52)
The reality of Miller’s psychological condition, the near death of the cameraman, the bloody assault on the building just across the street are all part of the true story behind the photograph. And there’s something of a story behind that cigarette which evoked such nostalgia for past Marlboro advertising campaigns.
Miller started smoking when he was twelve and was smoking about a pack and a half of cigarettes every day until he prepared to leave for Iraq, when he started smoking two and a half packs. By the time he arrived in Iraq, he was smoking practically the whole time - a very substantial five and a half packs a day. The cigarette in the photo is less a symbol of old-fashioned machismo than an abnormally excessive drug habit to cope with constant stress and anxiety. Heavy smoking is something a family tradition and The Chronicle notes that most of the men in Miller’s family died of cancer before reaching the age of 40. Miller has cut back to his pre-war smoking level since coming home and has plans to quit.
Back home in Kentucky, Miller’s family reacted to the sight of his photo in the national newspapers with a certain amount of relief to see him alive and relatively unhurt. But the patriotic fervour that surrounded the picture seems to have left them cold. Jessica told the Chronicle:
"Some people thought it was sexy, and we thought, 'Oh, my God, he's in the middle of a war, close to death.' We just couldn't understand how some people could look at it like that… But I guess for some people it was glory, like patriotism."
She also lamented their failure to come to terms with the darker reality behind the picture:
"But when it comes out and there's actually a personality behind that picture, and that personality, he has to deal with all the war, and all he's done, people don't want to know how hard it actually is," she said. "This is the dark side of the reality of war. ... People don't want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD."
Miller certainly doesn’t see his war as sexy and is insistent that he is not a hero. Reluctantly made to leave the Marines Corps and left to come to terms with his experience, Miller has been questioning the value of the war. The media’s Marlboro Man not only has PSTD, he isn’t sure about the war any more either.
Shortly before the attack on Fallujah, Miller rang his adoptive grandmother, Mildred Childrers and asked her, “How can people go to church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?”
She explained to the Chronicle that Miller struggled to reconcile his values with the war, "He was raised where that's one of the Ten Commandments, do not kill… I think it's hard for a soldier to go to war and have that embedded in them from small children up, and you go over there and you've got to do it to stay alive."
As Miller has told reporters, whatever rationalisations you might have for it, the actual experience of killing people is a frightful thing:
"You see movies where somebody gets shot. It's nothing to see somebody get shot; that's just a movie… But when you see it in real life, it's completely different ... the feeling you have afterward is completely different. Even when you're being shot at, and you're returning fire ... whether you've hit anybody or not ... it's knowing that you're actually shooting at somebody. At the time you don't think about it... but afterward, it's mind-boggling, it really is."
A survey of US troops in Iraq by the polling company Zogby International revealed an increasing lack of support for the continuation of the war, but the majority of US soldiers accept much of the Bush administration’s rationale that the war against the Iraqi insurgency is somehow connected to fighting a terrorist threat to the United States itself. This comes through in some of Miller’s interview statements, but even then he is questioning the President’s position:
"When I was in the service, my opinion was whatever the commander in chief's opinion was," he said. "But after I got out, I really started thinking about it. ... The biggest question I have is how you can make war on an entire country, when a certain group from that country is practicing terrorism against you. It's as if a gang from New York went to Iraq and blew up some stuff, and Iraq started a war against us because of that."
Miller has the imagination to look at that from an Iraqi point of view:
"I mean, how would we feel if they came over and started something here?" he asked. "I'm glad that I fought for my country. But looking back on it, I wouldn't do it all over again."
For the time being, Miller’s main public commitment is to draw attention to the psychological damage done to US soldiers who have returned from Iraq and appeal for public understanding. As army friends have contacted him in distress with their own waking nightmares, he has become more aware of the extent of both his problem and theirs:
"What the hell are those people going to do once they get out? They ride it out until they get an honorable discharge, and then they're never diagnosed with anything," Miller said. "How the hell are you going to do anything for them after that? And that's how so many of these guys are ending up on the damn streets,” he told the Chronicle.
And the Seattle Times: “The biggest reason I did this interview is because I want people to know that PTSD is not something people come down with because they're crazy. It's an anxiety disorder, where you've experienced something so traumatic that you were close to death… A lot of Vietnam vets suffered from PTSD, but nobody took the time to understand or help them. Now, some of those guys are living on the street. You look at… where they are now ... that hurts."
Whether he will come out more decisively against the war or not remains to be seen. For now he moots his doubts and leaves it at that:
"That's just my opinion. It blows my mind that we've continued to drag this out."
That last sentence certainly sums up many of my own feelings.
[Note: Corporal Alex Findlay of the Scots Guards later received £100,000 from the Ministry of Defence in an out-of-court settlement and the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the army had treated him unfairly having failed to recognise his mental condition]
Update: In his most recent interview for the Los Angeles Times, Blake Miller and his wife, Jessica, both express outright opposition to the war in Iraq. I wish both of them the very best for the future.
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Sources and links:
'Marlboro Man' in Iraq War Photo Suffers from PTSD, Editor and Publisher Magazine, January 4th, 2006 (link to excerpt at CommonDreams.com):
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0104-08.htm
'Former Marine is "Marlboro Man" no more', Jim Warren, Knight Ridder Newspapers, January 22nd, 2006: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002754628_marlboro22.html
'The War Within', Matthew B. Stannard, San Francisco Chronicle, January 29th, 2006:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/MNGMHGVCEV1.DTL
'Blair met 100th war death soldier', BBC Online, February 1st 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4670602.stm
'"Face of War" speaks', Harry Smith, CBS - the Early Show, February 8th, 2006:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/07/earlyshow/main672157.shtml
'U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% say end war in 2006', Zogby International Polling Company, February 26th 2006: http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075
British military casualties in Iraq, BBC Online, March 3rd, 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3847051.stm
'Hidden Wounds: Problems of Northern Ireland Veterans and Civvy Street', Aly Renwick, 1999
'Oliver's Army: A History of British Soldiers in Ireland and other Colonial Conflicts', Aly Renwick: http://www.troopsoutmovement.com/oliversarmy.htm
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Nuclear Power – still a very bad idea
‘Nuclear power, no thanks!’ ran a rather sweet little campaign slogan in the 1980s. Just a polite “no thank-you” - as if we were ever asked and as if Margaret Thatcher was going to say, “Oh, alright then, we won’t have nuclear power. What good manners you have – manners will get you everywhere in life.”
The world-historical disaster presented by global heating is so serious that it is reasonable to discuss highly undesirable solutions. And, as the environmentalist Mark Lynas cautions, it is important that the green movement should not become divided on this issue. But even after second thoughts, nuclear power remains an extremely dangerous energy source, and one not necessary to meet the present environmental emergency.
Obviously the nuclear industry has a stake in pushing itself as vitally relevant to climate change, and Tony Blair’s notoriously pro-nuclear government could not be expected to resist them. For less self-serving – and therefore interesting - arguments, the case for nuclear power was put in the pages of the Independent back in 2004 by environmentalists James Lovelock, a scientist, and Hugh Montefiore, the former Anglican Bishop of Birmingham who resigned from his position as a trustee to Friends of the Earth in order to make advocate nuclear energy.
But what is surprising is just how weak their case is. Both, quite correctly, ask us to contemplate the fearful consequences of our current use of fossil fuels – rising sea levels, cities looking like New Orleans does now, refugees from coastal areas, frequent and catastrophic weather events and worse. Lovelock suggests that the refugees “may then reflect that they could have avoided their miseries by the safe use of nuclear energy.”
Both consider but play down alternative energy sources - “biomass” fuels (chicken poo, straw etc.), “clean coal technology”, hydrogen and, in particular, wind turbines - as either uneconomical or unable to meet demand. Both skirt around questions of safety – and neither mention Chernobyl except, in Lovelock’s case, in order to reassure us that the wildlife around the former Soviet nuclear power plant is doing awfully well. The dangers of wind turbines, on the other hand, are brought to our attention – Montefiore points out that they “will scar the landscape and coastline, to say nothing of the problems caused to radar.” Lovelock states that all energy sources have their dangers and “even windmills are not free of fatal accidents”. Montefiore expresses confidence in the new design of nuclear power stations and argues that they will produce less toxic waste, and will be better able to deal with it.
Both express almost total disregard for the concerns of the public whom, as they acknowledge, are at best sceptical of nuclear power. “What at first was a proper concern for safety has become a near pathological anxiety,” writes Lovelock, “much of the blame for this goes to the news media, the television and film industries, and fiction writers.” Montefiore agrees, “[nuclear power] lacks public acceptance, due to scare stories in the media and the stonewalling opposition of powerful environmental groups.”
Their treatment of safety issues is really quite callous. It is true that “even windmills are not free of fatal accidents” but that makes as much sense as arguing that “even post offices are not free of fatal accidents”. There really is no comparison between windmills and nuclear power when it comes to safety. Lovelock reminds us that “life began nearly four billion years ago under conditions of radioactivity far more intense than those that trouble the minds of certain present-day environmentalists”. Which is, frankly, a ridiculous point. If other life forms can cope with the radiation, lucky them. And how fortunate that would be for us, if only we were pre-cellular organisms from an earlier geological eon. But we aren’t – we’re human beings and we sicken and die from the by-products of nuclear power.
Cartoon by Gary Oliver.
In a special edition of New Internationalist (September 2005), is a feature with photographs from nuclear power’s Ground Zero. One picture is from Novinki Asylum in Minsk, capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus. Taken in 1997, it shows a room full of young boys, all of them unable to walk, so they slide, crawl and roll around the floor instead. Like the other children in the asylum, they are mutants, abandoned by their horrified parents at birth and handed over to the tender care of the state. Another photo from Minsk’s Children’s Home Number One shows three year-old Yulya who has what at first glance looks like two heads. Yulya has an enormous growth coming out the back of his head, about the same size as his skull. Inside that growth is his vulnerable brain. Yulya, like many of the children at Children’s Home Number One, was abandoned at birth.
Photographs by Paul Fusco and available online at http://www.newint.org/.
After the explosion at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, 25% of the territory of the neighbouring republic of Belarus became uninhabitable for human beings due to the level of radiation. A generation of children are growing up with terrible diseases and horrible deformities in the state hospitals and asylums of Belarus, with no adults willing to be their parents. They are not a scare story and they most certainly do not benefit from any excess of media attention or powerful lobbyists.
Photo: Chernobyl Children's Project International
In addition to the thousands of deaths already caused by the Chernobyl disaster – and the many hundreds of thousands of cancers, both present and future – the ruined power plant may yet have more in store, as Adam Ma’anit wrote in the New Internationalist’s nuclear power edition:
“Few realize that the majority of the reactor’s fuel is still intact and active. The concrete and steel sarcophagus covering it was never meant to be permanent. Cracks have already begun to emerge and radioactive seepage has been detected in groundwater. Alexei Yablokov, a leading Russian scientist and president of the Centre for Russian Environmental Policy, warns that a second Chernobyl disaster could be in the making without urgent repairs. ‘If it collapses, there will be no explosion, as this is not a bomb, but a pillar of dust containing irradiated (cancer-causing) particles will shoot 1.5 kilometres into the air and be spread by the wind.’ Yablokov reports that already small luminescent chain reactions have been observed as rain and snow mix with the reactor’s fuel exposed through cracks in the casing.”
But wind turbines are pretty scary too, right?
Chernobyl - a city without people. Photo by Peter Finn for the Washington Post
Elsewhere in the world, the advocates of nuclear energy corporations have often argued that while the shambolic, secretive and callous rulers of the Soviet Union might be expected to compromise safety standards, not so their responsible western counterparts. In case anyone apart from Tony Blair is determinedly naïve enough to believe them, it is worth going over some of the facts.
The second most famous nuclear disaster took place in 1979, when equipment failures led to the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power station in Middleton, Pennsylvania.
Happily, there were no immediate deaths, but twenty-seven years after the event, astonishingly little attention has been paid to the question of whether anyone has died since, as Joseph Manango pointed out in an article for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 2004. Manango writes that at the time, there were few attempts to measure precisely how much radiation escaped and at what dosage in the affected areas. Also, studies have generally not examined areas beyond a ten mile radius of Three Mile Island, often do not take into account wind direction in assessing the likely level of dosage and have shown little interest in diseases possibly connected to radioactive elements. This, Manango notes, is not dissimilar to the lack of interest shown by researchers in previous decades to the public health impact of nuclear weapons testing, now known to have caused large numbers of fatalities but previously thought to have been safe.
Time Magazine cover, April 1979
The circumstantial evidence looks pretty grim. Data from the annual volume ‘Vital Statistics of the United States’ produced by the National Center for Health Statistics show a significant and unexpected increase in infant mortality and low birth weights among babies born in Dauphin County in 1979, where the Three Mile Island plant is situated – a 28% increase for babies less than one year old and a 54% increase for babies less than one month old. In further bad news, Manango summarises:
“In 1990-1991, a team of researchers from Columbia University, supported by the fund, published two articles on cancer rates before and after the accident in the population living within 10 miles of the plant. Using hospital records, the group found that newly diagnosed cancer cases rose 64 percent, from 1,722 in the period 1975-1979, to 2,831 in 1981-1985. Substantial increases occurred in the number of cases of leukemia, lung cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and in all cancers in persons under age 25.”
Only one peer reviewed study by epidemiologist Stephen Wing insisted on a link between radiation and cancer around Three Mile Island but the lack of investigation into the increase in cancer and infant mortality rates itself is disgraceful. So much for the hysteria that the nuclear industry is supposed to find such a hardship.
Map: United States Disaster Preparedness Institute (2000) Outer ring shows areas of high cancer risk in the event of a meltdown at Three Mile Island. It is 320 miles from the reactor.
In 1966 a possibly more serious incident in the US prompted officials in Michigan to seriously consider the evacuation of Detroit – and since the levees burst on 17th Street Canal in New Orleans, no one is any longer in a position to laugh off the idea of a major American city being wiped out - when a nuclear reactor in Monroe, Enrico Fermi I, 40 miles south of Detroit went into partial meltdown. The incident was unheard of until the following decade when the engineer John G. Fuller, who had witnessed the meltdown, published an account with the title "We Almost Lost Detroit".
Three months after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, recently graduated nuclear engineering student David Lochbaum began a career in nuclear power plants across the United States in which he examined thousands of accident reports.
Writing for a volume of ‘Everything You Know is Wrong’, he gives a series of examples of unpublicised accidents in US nuclear power plants.
On one occasion in 1968, operators at an unnamed research nuclear reactor sought to cut open a pipe along which irradiated water flowed, while working on the cooling system. To save time, they decided to block the pipe using a basketball wrapped with duct tape. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the pressure of the water forced the basketball out of the pipe with the result that 14,000 gallons of the water spilled out into the plant basement in about five minutes. Had the reactor pool gate not been closed, much more water would have poured out, leaving the plant workers with much less of the protection from the radiation of the fuel assemblies that the water provides.
Lochbaum adds dryly: “The nuclear industry has made tremendous improvements in safety since 1968… Two basketballs would be used today.”
In July 1981, a power plant in the centre of New York state – Nine Mile Point Unit 1 – ran out of space for irradiated water and so the workers had to allow the water to flood the basement to a depth of about four feet. But the basement also contained 150 metal drums containing 55 gallons of solid radioactive waste which tipped over and spilled as then basement was flooded. Workers then poured 50,000 gallons of the contaminated water into Lake Ontario, while attempting – and failing – to decontaminate the rest. Three months later, the plant’s owner informed the government Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the NRC) about dumping radioactive waste in Lake Ontario.
Eight years later, in 1989, the industry’s own regulatory body, the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations condemned the Nine Mile Point station for still having a basement flooded with irradiated water. The NRC investigated following a television report that used the leaked INPO report, apparently unable to investigate of its own accord during the previous eight years. Says Lochbaum:
“The NRC inspectors estimated that the radiation fields in the basement approached 500 rem per hour. A lethal radiation dose is 450 to 600 rem. Thus, an employee would have received a fatal dose by working in that basement for only an hour.”
In 1984, the NRC gave an estimate of the probability of a major nuclear accident in a US power plant:
“The most complete an probabilistic risk assessments suggest core-melt frequencies in range of 10-3 [one in one thousand] per reactor year to 10-4 [one in ten thousand] per reactor year. A typical value is 3x10-4 [three in ten thousand]. Were this the industry average, then in a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of accident would be 45 percent.”
That is, just under a 50-50 chance over a twenty year period of a core meltdown that could release enough radiation to kill millions of people. We were lucky.
And what of our very own British Nuclear Fuels? A former Minister for Energy in James Callaghan’s government, Tony Benn once claimed that he had never been lied to by anyone as much as by BNF. And probably not without reason.
The Sellafield nuclear processing plant in Cumbria has been a long-running sore in Anglo-Irish relations (as though another were necessary!) since dumping radioactive waste into the Irish Sea during the 1940s and 1950s as Britain pursued its very own atom bomb turned it into one of the most toxic stretches of water in the world. Both the Irish and Norwegian governments have asked Britain to close the plant down, and this remains the official policy of both governments.
In 1998, a portion of a garden in the village of Seascale was dug up and disposed of after two dead, radioactive pigeons were found there. Pigeons had been roosting on the buildings of the Sellafield nuclear power station in Cumbria. The irradiated pigeons prompted a minor alert, made worse by their excretion of radioactive droppings. More recently, and more seriously, as Adam Ma’anit writes:
“In April of this year, enough nuclear waste to ‘half-fill an Olympic-size swimming pool’ leaked from a cracked pipe at the UK Sellafield plant in Cumbria. The leak remained undetected for nearly nine months.”
A rusting barrel of British nuclear waste from the 1950s slowly releases toxic waste into the sea. Photograph from Greenpeace.
Major accidents have also taken place in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Japan, India and Sweden. Nuclear power is extremely dangerous when it goes wrong. But even when there are no accidents, it still kills people. This is what is exceptional about nuclear power as an energy source – even when it functions as it supposed to, there are still fatalities. (And to reiterate the earlier point, to compare it’s safety record to that of wind power is like comparing the safety record of cigarettes with that of porridge.) As the environmentalist George Monbiot writes, “The daily discharges from a plant like Sellafield probably kill several dozen people a year.”
Lochbaum sums up bluntly: “These stories suggest why nuclear power is like a sausage: The more you know about how it’s made, the less likely you are to like it. They also explain why so many people around the world are nuclear vegetarians.”
A citizen of Florida protests (whoseflorida.com)
In addition to the notorious internal safety problems nuclear power stations are faced by major external threats from the 21st century. One of these is, ironically, global warming itself. Further increases in the world’s temperature are, unfortunately, unavoidable, along with unpredictable heat waves like that which killed thousands of people in Europe in the summer of 2003. Rising temperatures have forced power stations to consider shutting down.
The French government has avoided closures by allowing its nuclear industry to violate the country’s laws that compel power stations to shut off their reactors when the internal air temperature rises above 50 degrees centigrade. Stations are also required to shut down if there is an insufficient flow of water from local rivers and streams. As the summers become hotter, France’s dependency on nuclear power threatens to become truly disastrous.
The second external threat has taken a new urgency since September 11th 2001. It is not true that nothing will ever be the same after 9/11 (and the nuclear industry’s complacency concerning terrorist threats is one example of reliable continuity) but one thing that certainly did change on that day is our appreciation of how civilian technology can be turned into the means of indiscriminate slaughter of civilians by those inclined to use it that way. The threat is even more acute if those planning an attack are fully prepared to kill themselves at the same time. The editor of the Ecologist, Zac Goldsmith, wrote that about a week before 9/11 the director of the French nuclear energy company Cogema, had responded to a prescient question about the risk of an airborne attack on a nuclear power station by saying “it is forbidden to fly over it [a nuclear power station] at low altitude.” Which is no doubt a major deterrent to the supporters of Osama Bin Laden.
While many power stations are designed to withstand even a direct hit by a commercial aircraft, there is only one way to find out if they really do. As the IRA once reminded Margaret Thatcher after a failed attempt to kill her, some people only have to be lucky once. There are many weaker links in the industry – the transport of radioactive materials and waste, for instance, and uranium mines. Civilian research reactors also provide opportunities for the theft of weapons-grade uranium. The risk is huge. And in addition to this, nuclear power provides a well-known shield behind which governments can pursue ambitions to develop nuclear weapons, which increases the strength of the case for outlawing nuclear power altogether.
Now it is possible to try and make the case that nuclear power is a necessary evil, but no one should make the claim that it is safe. Those advocating nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions should at least concede that their proposed solution will mean the deaths of thousands of people from the effects of radiation, possibly many more in the worst case scenarios.
An Australian cartoon attacking former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke and below a more recent poke at the lamentable current holder of the post, John Howard, by Peter Nicholson.
But does nuclear power offer a way to reduce the Greenhouse Effect? And is it the best or only way?
It is worth noting that the generation of electricity only accounts for about 16% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions - the rest comes from industry and transport. 16% is significant but it is the greatest possible reduction in emissions offered by a wholesale shift towards nuclear power. In and of itself, nuclear power cannot bring about the 60% reduction in CO2 emissions called for by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, though it might be able to make a contribution.
Also, it is not true that nuclear power is ‘carbon neutral’ as Ma’anit writes:
“The nuclear process employs energy-intensive industries dependent on vast quantities of fossil fuels. Uranium mining, enrichment and transport across the globe; the construction and decommissioning of facilities; and the processing, transport and storage of radioactive wastes. All these consume huge amounts of carbon-based energy such as oil and coal.”
The overall process of producing nuclear energy is considerably dirtier than renewable energy, (even if we do not take into account radiation).
The fuel is another problem. As with fossil fuels, the world’s supply of economically viable uranium is running out and is expected to be entirely depleted within 30 or 40 years. If the number of nuclear reactors increases substantially, the uranium will run out sooner. If enough nuclear reactors are built to make a dent in global carbon emissions, then the demand on the world’s uranium supply may consume it all within a matter of years.
The problems posed by nuclear power might be mitigated by new technology developed at very considerable cost, adding to the already colossal amounts of public money constantly soaked up by the industry. By 1992, the 30 most industrialised countries had spent $318 billion on research and development into nuclear power. Between 1948 and 1998, the US government spent $67 billion dollars on what it could get from the atom (not including the Bomb) while neighbouring Canada spent $14.5 billion from 1953-2002. France has kept its costs down by exempting the nuclear industry from paying normal rates of accident insurance – otherwise the cost would be no less than 300% higher.
Britain is currently in the process of decommissioning its ageing nuclear plants. In 2004, British Nuclear Fuels admitted that the costs of the clean-up operation would be £34 billion. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority gave an initial estimate of £56 billion. An article in the Independent on January 3rd this year put the cost of the clear-up at £70 billion and former environment minister, Michael Meacher, added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was somewhere in the order of £70bn or £80bn.” This may still be an underestimate. The headline story in the Independent’s January 24th edition put the potential figure at £85 billion. This does not include the cost of the ten new proposed reactors, or any of the other costs of the last fifty years. People complain about the costs of the Millennium Dome, but at least the government did not have to spend £85 billion after it closed just to stop it from killing members of the public. The decision of where to put the highly toxic waste has yet to be made.
These kinds of costs are particularly relevant given that Lovelock and Montefiore cite alternative sources of energy as “uneconomical”. All over the world, nuclear power companies survive only through public subsidy – and in doing so, the relentlessly suck up money that might instead go to research and development into more promising technology. Alternative energy sources – wind, wave and solar power – all have their own problems, of course, but given the enormous costs and difficulties presented by nuclear power with its many hazards – why not instead put resources and effort into them? Adam Ma’anit again:
“While the nuclear and fossil-fuel industries have benefited from decades of exceedingly generous levels of government (read taxpayer) subsidies, renewables have barely had a look-in. Take Europe, for example. Last year an estimated $18 billion in direct subsidies were dished out to energy companies. Of this a mere $300 million went to renewable energy companies. Approximately $1.3 billion went to nuclear, and the rest went on fossil fuels. This does not include the generous indirect subsidies such as regulatory concessions, tax breaks and liability insurance write-offs (particularly important to the nuclear industry)”
As George Monbiot wrote, the dilemma presented by advocates of nuclear power is misleading:
“When Lovelock claimed that ‘only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy,’ he was wrong on two counts. It is not the only one, and it is not immediately available. A new generation of nuclear power stations can only be built with government money: the private sector won’t take the risk. It would take at least ten years, and it would cost tens of billions of pounds. The government will not spend this money twice: it will either invest massively in nuclear generation or invest massively in energy-saving and alternative power… So the dilemma established by James Lovelock and explored by Tony Blair and his incoherent ministers is a false one. There need be no choice between two kinds of mass death. We are still permitted to choose life."
Energy conservation offers a way to scythe through rates of carbon emissions and while renewable energy technology needs development, there are existing environmentally-friendly technologies for generating electricity that work already. Despite the puny amounts of money invested in them, the wind and solar sector continues to grow year on year. A future where a solar panel on each house or in smaller communities, a handful of wind power turbines provide electricity without any need for power stations at all is a possibility. But we need to put the money into safe, renewable energy now.
There is no need for the green movement to split on this one, because we are mostly pretty solidly united in opposition to nuclear power, and we have public opinion on side. It is those trying to break a consensus that has a solid factual and moral foundation with dubious arguments that risk dividing us.
Update: Tony Blair has pre-empted his own review into energy policy to announce that nuclear power is back "with a vengeance" (his choice of words).
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Preacher Comforts - The wrath of Pat Robertson
Uncomfortably soon after calling for the murder of the president of Venezuela, US televangelist and former candidate for the presidency Marion Gordon Robinson (whom we know as Pat Robertson), successfully caused a personal rift between himself and another government.
Pat Roberston had been involved in negotiations with the Israeli government for the creation of a Christian fundamentalist theme park in Galilee as part of coalition of evangelicals seeking to raise $50 million for this purpose. It is a big deal, as an Associated Press article notes:
"Tourism Minister Avraham Hirschson predicted it would annually draw up to 1 million pilgrims who would spend $1.5 billion in Israel and support about 40,000 jobs".
Israeli governments have long courted Christian fundamentalists in the United States, both for the tourism they can provide, and the powerful leverage they have over the Republican Party and the US political class. It has always been a potentially awkward alliance of convenience, given that many US evangelicals are not well-disposed towards Jewish people, and given that the US religious right can be hard to manipulate as parts of it follow no one's agenda but their own.
Pat Robertson has long overcome the conflict of interests between God and Mammon, and usually resolves to serve the latter master. But it appears he couldn't help himself and following Ariel Sharon's devastating stroke, he boldly announced that it was none other than a very political act by God. God was OK with General Sharon's destruction of Beirut and the Lebanon War, but a partial withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has provoked the Almighty to loose the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, Robertson
"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or the United States of America'. "God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone.'"
We have it on Robertson's authority that God proposes a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (guess who doesn't get a state), and that even a slight deviation from this course by a Prime Minister who has been seeking to deny political autonomy to the Palestinians by force for his entire public career must be rejected. Roberston also drew attention to the possible work of the Lord in the murder of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, expressed some surprise at this remark since Pat Robertson was a personal friend of Ariel Sharon - indeed Robertson had said "Sharon was personally a very likeable person" while explaining why the Lord God struck him down. And a miffed Avi Hartuv, a spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, announced that the Israeli government would seek to work with other, nicer fundamentalists instead:
"We will not do business with him, only with other evangelicals who don't back these comments. We will do business with other evangelical leaders, friends of Israel, but not with him. We want to see who in the group supports his statements. Those who support the statements cannot do business with us. Those that publicly support Ariel Sharon's recovery ... are welcome to do business with us. We have to check this very, very carefully."
Alternatively, Hartuv might check very, very carefully in the mirror and consider what an alliance with such people in the first place tells us about the state of Israeli politics.
With a lot of money at stake, Robertson responded on January 9th with an apology addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister's son, Omri Sharon, in praise of his stricken father, calling him a "kind, gracious and gentle man". As for his unfortunate God-gave-him-a-stroke remark, he said:
"My concern for the future safety of your nation led me to make remarks which I can now view in retrospect as inappropriate and insensitive in light of a national grief experienced because of your father's illness."
"Inappropriate", "insensitive", but not actually false - it is a typical Pat Robertson retrospective retraction. He issues an apology that skirts the issue, claims only the highest principles and does not indicate that his actual opinion is any different to what he said it was. Why can he "now view in retrospect" his remarks as inappropriate? Could it be the threat to his business deal with the Israeli government? But it was apparently enough, and the previously enraged Israeli government got over it, with Ambassador Ayalon declaring:
"Israel respects Rev. Robertson and accepts his apology, which reflects his true friendship and support for the state of Israel."
Incidentally, Pat Robertson is not a 'Reverend' - he resigned from ordained ministry as a Baptist pastor in 1988. But the main thing is that everyone is friends again and its back to business as usual.
Meanwhile, Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a group of liberal religious and non-religious people who seek to challenge the rise of the Religious Right in America protested that Robertson, "has a political agenda for the entire world. He seems to think God is ready to take out any world leader who stands in the way of that agenda."
Indeed, and if God isn't willing to whack someone, Robertson is prepared to call for some human agency to step in instead. Back in August 2005, Pat Robertson was discussing the situation in Venezuela. What would Jesus do? Would he invade Venezuela and impose a military occupation to control its petroleum industry? Or would he merely murder its repeatedly elected president, Hugo Chavez? Other options went without consideration:
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Some kind of constructive relationship between Washington and the Venezuelan public's choice of government (which Robertson is presumably going to carry on calling a strong-arm dictatorship no matter how many elections or plebiscites it holds) would presumably be as outlandish as a modest two-state settlement for the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Robertson's endorsement of violence caused considerable outcry in the US and prompted a formal complaint - and extradition charges - by the Venezuelan government. Two days later, Robertson was discussing the same matter on The 700 Club:
Wait a minute, I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, "take him out," and "take him out" can be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP, but that happens all the time.
We could quibble about the subtle non-difference between asking covert forces to 'take someone out' and to assassinate that same person - the former is often used as an official euphemism for the latter anyway. But we needn't bother - here are those key statements again:
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it." (Pat Robertson, August 22nd)
"Wait a minute, I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, 'take him out' ..." (Pat Robertson, August 24th)
Robertson was not misinterpreted by Associated Press, in fact he had succeeded in misquoting himself, presumably imagining that no one would check to see what he actually said to millions of his own viewers two days previously.
By the afternoon of August 24th, Robertson had released a press statement in order to clarify his views. This statement conceded that he had used the word "assassinate", though omitted to mention that he had publicly denied just that only a few a hours previously. He apologised and now characterised his comments like this:
“I adlibbed a comment following a very brilliant analysis by Dale Hurd of the danger that the United States faces from the out-of-control dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. In this story, Col. Chavez repeatedly claimed that Americans were ‘trying to assassinate him.’ In my frustration that the U.S. and the world community are ignoring this threat...”
Etc, etc. Well it's very understandable. We all get frustrated. Sometimes turning to prayer can help us to... oh wait.
So what were Robertson's actual views on Venezuela, free from AP's malicious distortions? They were this:
"If you look back just a few years, there was a popular coup that overthrew him [President Chavez]; and what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing; and as a result, within about 48 hours, that coup was broken, Chavez was back in power. But we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent."
The eccentric claim that Venezuela is "a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism" throughout South America we will put aside with the cold silence it deserves (although anyone who has any information on South America's vast, embittered but previously unheard of Muslim population is welcome to send it this way). But consider Robertson's claim that the State Department was at fault for lacking commitment to a military coup against Venezuela's new constitutional set-up, endorsed by a popular referendum in 1999.
The reason why this "popular coup" was "broken within 48 hours" was because it was deeply unpopular and a genuine, spontaneous, popular revolution by Venezuela's poorest came to the rescue of democracy in their country, overthrowing the two-day dictatorship. The US State Department tried to help the would-be dictatorship by offering diplomatic recognition as no other government in the world did, as well as resorting to some of Robertson's preferred covert methods. But that is still not enough for the man of God. Only fulsome support for the overthrow of an elected government can appease him. It's tough love.
"I am a person who believes in peace, but not peace at any price," Roberston explained. And the price of tolerating democracy in Venezuela, or even failing to wreck it, is just too high.
Few recent events have brought out such a stream of unpleasantness from religious fundamentalists as the destruction of New Orleans when its criminally inadequate levee system collapsed in the face of Hurricane Katrina last September. Consider some of the following:
"The whole parade of drunkenness, homosexuality and passions of the flesh was just washed away." Revered Philip Benham of Operation Save America
"In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion. Providence punishes national sins by national calamities." Steve Lefemine of Columbia Christians for Life
"This act of God destroyed a wicked city. From Girls Gone Wild to Southern decadence, New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin... The day Bourbon Street and the French Quarter was flooded was the day that homosexuals were going to be celebrating sin in the streets... We're calling it an act of God." Michael Marcavage, Repent America
They were joined by Alabama's Senator Hank Erwin (Republican - surprise!):
Joe Scarborough: I am joined right now by Alabama State Senator Hank Erwin.
Senator, thank you for being with me tonight. You—you...You have said a lot of things that have shocked a lot of people. Explain to me why you think that Katrina was God‘s wrath.
Senator Hank Erwin: Well, I think, if you look at what‘s going on, this whole region has always known that, with the church, that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are known for sin.
And if you go to a church and you read your Bible, you are always told avoid sin and that there‘s judgment for sin. And I just think that, in my analysis—and I can‘t speak for everybody, but I believe that, if you look at the factors, that you had a city that was known for sin—the signature of New Orleans is the French Quarter, Bourbon Street. It is known for sin. And you have a Bible that says God will judge sin, you can put two and two together and say, it may not be the judgment of God, but it sure looks like the footprint.
Scarborough: I have got to ask you this, Senator. I was on the ground in Mississippi. We certainly saw the pictures out of Louisiana. I saw young children, 15-month-old babies, who were suffering. I saw, in New Orleans, young children. I mean, you look on TV, you see young babies dying on the sidewalk of heat exhaustion. Certainly, these babies aren‘t sinful, are they? Should they be made to pay for the sins of tourists from Florida that go over and gamble in New Orleans and Biloxi?
Erwin: Well, I think you need to understand that, whenever—wherever sin goes, the sins of a few can affect the innocence of many...
Scarborough: But, you know, Senator—you know, Senator, though, I mean, the thing about the New Orleans—the New Orleans storm is that it was the French Quarter that seemed to be spared of devastation.
Erwin: Well, I understand that, and I think the Lord sent them a message that we need to turn around or we may have another hurricane come.
Others felt that, regardless of whether or not God was involved, it was still important to point out that the people of New Orleans were scum:
"The root cause of crime is a lack of moral character. You know, we saw a good example of that in the New Orleans situation in the inner cities. I've done a lot of work in the inner cities, and I have to tell you that crime and out-of-wedlock birth, black folks having babies without being married, and stuff like that is out of control. And it's not because they lack material things but because not all, not all, not all... but most of them lack moral character. Look what they did to the Dome. In three days they turned the Dome into a ghetto." (Reverend Jesse Lee Patterson, speaking on Fox's Hannity and Colmes show)
As all fundamentalists know, the love your neighbour thing isn't supposed to be taken literally. Could Pat Robertson pass up such an opportunity to discern a Divine message in the hurricane and interpret it for the US public? No, he could not:
"But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?"
Is there a link between the Bush administration's inability to save a single life on September 11th and its shameful response to the destruction of New Orleans? There is actually - the connection lies in official incompetence and the low priority it ascribes human life. But that wasn't the point that Pat Robertson was implying.
On September 13th, 2001, he had been discussing the implications of the massacre two days previously on The 700 Club, along with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority (who are neither moral, nor representative of the majority). Falwell notoriously declared:
"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face, and say, ‘You helped this happen’."
To which Robertson said, "Well, I totally concur." This view - not totally dissimilar to the views of Osama Bin Laden and the perpetrators of 9/11 - went down very, very badly. Shortly afterwards, Falwell dissembled and Robertson backpedalled, claiming that he hadn't really been listening to what Falwell was saying. But Robertson's statement hinting at a connection between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in God's anger at the slow progress in the implementation of the religious right's political programme suggests his views on this matter are pretty consistent and much the same as Falwell's.
David Wasserman, the Boston Globe (available at Dan Cagle's political cartoons)
In fact, when Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida, started to host Gay Days in 1998, Robertson issued a warning/threat to the city:
"I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you. ... [A] condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs, it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor."
He had a similar warning to the people of Dover in Pennsylvania when in November last year they voted out the school board that had been trying to compromise the teaching of evolutionary biology. Following a lawsuit brought by concerned parents, the school board members were condemned by Judge John E. Jones, a religious conservative, for lying to the court (in his words, they “either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions”). Roberston told Dover residents not to look to God for help in the face of natural disaster since they had ignored his divine injunction against the fossil record:
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."
And in case you think you can protect yourself by turning to God, don't be so sure that will help, because Robertson believes that several Protestant denominations not his own are in fact in league with Satan:
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."
No, indeed. When not busy pronouncing righteously on the true meaning of other people's deaths, there is a good chance Robertson will be helping to kill people for real. He harbours no doubts as to what Jesus would do with regard to the pitiless war in central Iraq and accuses those who do of treachery:
"We've won the war already, and for the Democrats to say we can't win it -- what kind of a statement is that? And furthermore, one of the fundamental principles we have in America is that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and attempts to undermine the commander in chief during time of war amounts to treason. I know we have an opportunity to express our points of view, but there is a time when we're engaged in a combat situation that carping criticism against the commander in chief just doesn't cut it."
As a point of information, it is not "the Democrats" who say that the Iraq War cannot be won - in fact many of the leading figures in the Democratic Party including possible future presidential candidates such as Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden remain committed to military victory. It is senior military officials and intelligence analysts who have concluded that the war in Iraq is lost, and it is the people of Iraq who are calling for US withdrawal. And if it is true, as Robertson claims, that "attempts to undermine the commander in chief during time of war” should be regarded as “treason" and that this is a “fundamental principle” of the United States, then it is a fundamental principle shared with the very worst sorts of government.
But at the more practical level of killing, in the 1980s Robertson used his TV studio, the Christian Broadcasting Network to raise millions of dollars for the Contras - the fascist mercenary army that waged a merciless war against the wretched of Nicaragua for a decade. At the same time, he was applauding their counterpart in Guatemala, General Rios Montt, an authentic "strong-arm dictator" whose regime committed actual genocide against that country's majority indigenous population. Which puts his complaints about the elected Venezuelan government into useful perspective.
Robertson also reached out to the ruling kleptocrat of what was then Zaire, General Sese Seko Mobutu, one of the worst mass-murderers in recent African history. And with Mobutu, as with other dictators, he had the chance to pursue fraudulent business deals, which are another specialty of his. The great US muck-raker Greg Palast took a peek into the Robertson finances for The Observer:
"The combination of ministry and Mammon has provided Robertson with a net worth estimated at between $200m and $1 billion. He himself would not confirm his wealth, except to tell me that his share of the reported $50m start-up capital for the bank is 'just a small investment for me'."
Neil Volder of Robertson Financial defended this vast accumulation of wealth by noting Robertson's donations to charity, including raising $7 million for his own charity, Operation Blessing, to assist Rwandan refugees in the aftermath of the genocide in the 1990s. Operation Blessing had planes running medical supplies in and out of a camp for Rwandan refugees in Goma in the Congo. Palast noted the contradiction between Volder's claim of $7 million and Robertson's own claim of $1.2 million. But more importantly, he noted that the planes actually had a distinctly non-charitable purpose:
"...investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."
Robertson's ingratiation with the worst regime in Africa (not his only business venture to involve co-operating with and had earned him access to Congolese mining interests and while raising money for Rwandan refugees, he was in fact using the money to supply his diamond mines. Volder argued that the planes had turned out to be unable to run medical missions and so by providing employment to Congolese workers, Robertson was doing the next best thing - he had 'freed the people of the Congo from lives of starvation and poverty'.
The mines went bust, like most every other business project Pat Robertson has launched from vitamins to oil and so this sterling work for Africa’s poorest soon came to an end. But there is a major exception to the string of failed business operations - religion, the only thing he has got to turn a profit. And its tax-deductable, too.
Much of Pat Robertson's performance consists of faith-healing, but of a very particular kind. Describing his performances as part of an investigation into fraudulent faith-healers in the 1980s, James Randi wrote:
He and his sidekick, Ben Kinchlow, bow their heads and tune in to receive a "Word of Knowledge" from on high. In turn, they each describe what they ask us to believe they are being told directly by God. One announces that someone in the audience has "a tightening of the chest" that is now being healed. The other says that a viewer somewhere "has a headache". Or:
"I have a word of knowledge that someone has trouble with tracheotomy. God is miraculously healing it! ... I see stomach pains at this moment. The Lord has healed you."
This routine generally avoids mentioning anybody specific in the audience. We get the same pattern of non-falsifiable information when it comes to Words of Knowledge from across the USA:
"There is a woman in Kansas who has sinus. The Lord is drying that up right now. Thank you, Jesus. There is a man in financial need - I think a hundred thousand dollars. That need is being met right now, and within three days, the money will be supplied through the miraculous power of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Jesus! There is a woman in Cincinnati with cancer of the lymph nodes. I don't know whether it's been diagnosed yet [Note - that's handy], but you haven't been feeling well, and the Lord is dissolving that cancer right now! There is a lady in Saskatchen in a wheelchair - curvature of the spine. The Lord is straightening that out right now, and you can stand up and walk!"
Stay tuned after the commercial break folks, or risk missing out on the cure. Al Franken pointed out the obvious in "Lies - and the Lying Liars who Tell Them":
"You turn on the 700 Club and you hear Pat Robertson say, "there's a woman in Ohio who's just been cured of her diverticulitis. Praise God!"
... And frankly, it doesn't make much sense to me. I mean, if God can tell Pat Robertson that it's a woman, in Ohio, and it's diverticulitis, and it's been cured - why can't he tell Pat Robertson the woman's name? And her address? It makes no sense whatsoever." (p278)
Except that it makes a lot of sense if we suspect Robertson of conscious fraud. James Randi asked him to provide evidence of a single cure he had elicited in his years of hands-on faith-healing. He ignored the repeated request even when it came from a friend of Randi's who claimed he had close ties to Robertson and spent eight months pursuing the question.
A former associate of Robertson's who worked on his show, Gerry Straub, became disillusioned and wrote a book, 'Salvation for Sale' relating the following incident:
"[Pat Robertson] stopped when he reached a man sitting in a wheelchair. The elderly man looked as if he were moments away from death's door. Emaciated and jaundiced, his head and hands shook constantly... Someone pushing his wheelchair whispered to Pat about the man's condition and that he wanted to see the show in person before he died. The man hadn't walked in months... Pat... laid hands on him as everyone prayed for a healing. ... At Pat's urging the man stood up. The people cheered as the man took a couple of very shaky, small steps. While everyone applauded God, I feared the man might fall."
As Randi relates, this is very typical of fraudulent faith-healing stunts. A disabled person performs an action they are actually capable of, and the healer takes credit for it. A person who is just able to count the fingers on a hand in front of their face but who fits the medical definition of blindness is declared to be blind and then to be cured when they count the healer's fingers. Someone in a wheelchair who could take a few steps, is asked to do so before an audience lulled into believing they are witnessing the impossible. Faith-healing fraud requires some skill, but it's not so hard when you know how.
Straub followed up the case. The man who stepped out of the wheelchiar on The 700 Club died ten days later. "We reported his 'healing' but not his death," Straub wrote.
In terms of profit, faith-healing fraud is in the same league as smuggling narcotics. Palast writes:
In a taped segment, a woman's facial scars healed after her sister joined the 700 Club (for a donation of $20 a month). A voice intoned: 'She didn't realise how close to home her contribution would hit.' It ended: 'Carol was so grateful God healed her sister, she increased her pledge.' The miracles add up. In 1997, Christian Broadcast Network, Robertson's 'ministry', took in $164m in donations plus an additional $34m in other income. The tidal wave of tax-deductible cash generated by this daily dose of holiness paid for the cable channel - which was sold in 1997 to Rupert Murdoch, along with the old sitcoms that filled the remaining broadcast hours, for $1.82bn.
Some might be tempted to view those who send their cash to Pat Robertson in the hope of a cure for some condition as self-deluding fools who ask for what they get, but such harsh judgements should be avoided. Profiteering off desperate people through the exploitation of their emotions, sickness, grief and religious beliefs is inexcusable.
The mailing lists of millions of people who will pay for hope offer a huge market for those in that business – and many would be willing to pay for access. Robertson appears not to have avoided the temptation and was accused by the IRS of using the mailing list to promote his business in vitamin tablets. Various groups running in his name have been accused by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) of abusing their mailing lists for commercial and political purposes, which is illegal. This prompted an FEC investigation into the Christian Coalition, which Robertson founded in 1988 following his failed bid for the White House. The Christian Coalition was accused by a unanimous bi-partisan FEC panel of providing mailing lists to the election campaigns of Colonel Oliver North and Senator Jesse Helms, paragons of Christian virtues both.
Five years later, in 1999, the FEC lost its case with the judge concluding that there was insufficient evidence of "illegal co-ordination". Palast provides a possible reason for this:
"...the government will never see all of the documents. Judy Liebert, formerly chief financial officer for the Christian Coalition, told me that she was present when Coalition president [Ralph] Reed personally destroyed crucial documents. When Liebert complained to Robertson about 'financial shenanigans' at the Coalition, 'Pat told me I was "unsophisticated". Well, that is a strange thing for a Christian person to say to me.' The Coalition has attacked Liebert as a disgruntled ex-employee whom it fired. She responds that she was sacked only after she went to government authorities - and after she refused an $80,000 severance fee that would have required her to remain silent about the Coalition and Robertson.
Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed took particular credit in seeking to alter election outcomes for school boards, once unwisely declaring: "I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you are in the body bag. You don't know until election night."
In yet another expample of a gaff interfering with Robertson Financial, that same year, 1999, the Royal Bank of Scotland was forced to abandon a potentially very lucrative deal with Robertson following protests, particularly after he described his alarm at the power of Scottish gay people, "in Scotland you can't believe how strong the homosexuals are... [Scotland] could fall right back to the darkness very easily."
Palast also notes there is something a little odd in Robertson's electioneering for the Republican Party and dealing with British banks since has written extensively on how both are doing the work of Satan in the world. Business has trumped principle, both noble and warped, in other cases - notably with Robertson's attempt to set up a huge Internet company in China, where service to Mammon was again accompanied by service to dictatorship, in this case one of the Communist variety which Robertson and his ilk claim to object to strongly in principle, if not so much in practice.
But in a number of books written in the 1980s and early 1990s, Robertson has been one of the leading proponents of the idea that a small, long-defunct German philosophical society from the 18th century, the Illuminati, were in fact the leaders of an ongoing global conspiracy to dominate the world and destroy Christianity which continues to this day. Variants of this theory see the Illuminati as a diabolical and highly sophisticated conspiracy working through Communists, Jews, bankers, socialists, capitalists, liberals, the CIA, aliens, the Trilateral Commission, George Bush Senior, homosexuals, Karl Marx, free-masons, the Kremlin, demons and who knows what else. One version of this is outlined in Robertson's 1991 book, 'New World Order', as Palast summarises:
There is an Invisible Cord that can be traced from the European bankers who ordered the assassination of President Lincoln, to Karl Marx, to the British bankers who funded the Soviet KGB. They are members of the 'tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer'.
The person helping to bring on the reign of Lucifer, Robertson declared, was none other than US President George H. W. Bush. This might be considered a pardonable exaggeration considering Bush Senior's record in public office, but oddly enough when it came to the 1992 election campaign, Robertson backed Lucifer's servant, Bush, over Bill Clinton, presumably because Clinton was even more committed to Satan – a sort of better-the-Devil-you-know thing.
As Pat Robertson might say, what does the Bible tell us about all this? And the answer is that it tells us many things, but these might be especially helpful:
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inside are ravening wolves. You will know them by their fruits."
"In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up."
"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
Good points, well made.
Update: Readers may be unsurprised to learn that Pat Robertson has said some unwise and untrue things since the above article was written, including the claim that God has warned him of storms on US coasts in 2006 (a fairly safe prediction) and the boast that he can lift 2000 pounds on a leg-press in a promotional exercise to sell his new line of protein drinks. Mike DeBonis addresses that claim for Slate magazine.
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Yes it Hurt, Yes it Worked?
Denis Donaldson was found on Tuesday April 4th with shotgun wounds in his chest, lying dead in the messy, isolated cottage in County Donegal to which he had been reduced. As soon as his death became public knowledge the implications for the new initiative by the British and Irish governments to get the Northern Irish assembly in Stormont running again became obvious and speculation about the extent of the IRA's involvement in Donaldson's murder began.
[Picture: Denis Donaldson in between Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams, and again in earlier but not much happier times]
Denis Donaldson was a long-serving IRA member, an H-block prisoner who helped to organise the resistance of the other prisoners to their treatment and categorisation as regular criminals - he can be seen next to Bobby Sands himself in an iconic photograph of the IRA's most famous martyr. He later became a significant political strategist within Sinn Fein. But from the mid-1980s he was also recruited as a paid agent for the British government. This contradiction collided with itself when he was arrested in 2002, accused of running an IRA spy ring at Stormont that had taken classified documents from the Northern Ireland Office. He denied the charges - which were dropped - and made accusations against the police, some of whom apparently responded by threatening to expose him as their agent. He subequently confessed that he had, in fact, been a spy for the British.
Until the 1997 ceasefire such a confession would have earned an automatic death sentence from the IRA's internal security division, (the 'Nutting Squad' as it is affectionately known within the IRA - 'nut' meaning 'head', into which two bullets would be fired according to standard procedure). The execution would be preceded by an intensive debriefing session, usually involving torture, followed by a tribunal (no appeal) and sometimes accompanied by a final statement of remorse for the act of treachery, real or otherwise, from the doomed defendant.
But with the war over and the IRA publicly committed to disarmament and demilitarisation so as to allow Sinn Fein's participation in the Northern Irish government, Donaldson was merely expelled from Sinn Fein after an interview in which, according to its president, Gerry Adams, he divulged little. The IRA informed him that they would not seek to kill him. Donaldson disappeared after that, but he was tracked down by Hugh Jordan, a journalist from the Sunday World, in December in a cottage in Donegal that lacked both electricity and running water. "I did ask him," wrote Hugh Jordan, "about his future and ask him what the future held for him now and he said 'this is it'...". Any British Asians and Islamic militants abroad who have been approached by British intelligence handlers seeking to hire them would be unwise not to consider Denis Donaldson and ask what awaits them when their services are no longer required.
Tony Blair and the Irish Taioseach Bertie Ahern accepted the Provisionals' denial of responsibility and resolved not to let the issue detract from their initiative to revive Stormont. Donaldson may have been murdered by dissident Republicans or by former colleagues acting independently from the IRA Executive and Army Council - we are left to speculate for the time being.
This month's edition of the Atlantic Monthly (April 2006), by coincidence, features an investigation by Matthew Teague into the infiltration of the PIRA by British intelligence, including an interview with the unfortunate Donaldson, whom Teague records expressing shock at revelations of the treachery of other significant IRA members, "I still can't believe it... My God." Teague, whose article was written after Donaldson's role as British agent had been exposed but before his murder, wrote presciently his "face seemed thin and gray, the face of a man who senses his end looming."
Teague's article is interesting and contains some powerful revelations. Some of his conclusions, however, need to be challenged, reflecting as they do a consensus among many British - and US - media pundits and political figures that British counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland was largely a success story, offering a model for other governments to emulate in the age of the War on Terror. In fact, ever since British troops arrived in Iraq, media commentators have practically beamed with pride as they reminded audiences that the British Army would be putting to use the lessons drawn from its Irish experience, often with disparaging references to the comparative naivety and clumsiness of the Americans. You could almost imagine from such commentary that Northern Ireland was some sort of Great British achievement like Concorde or the Beatles.
Acknowledging some of the ugliness of British policy, Teague nonetheless writes in this vein: "But here's this: it worked. British spies subverted the IRA from within, leaving it in military ruin, and Irish Republicans - who want to end British rule in Northern Ireland and reunite the island - have largely shifted their weight to Sinn Fein and its peaceable, political efforts. And so the Dirty War provides a model for how to dismantle a terrorist organisation. The trick is not to mind killing, and to expect dying."
That last sentence demands clarification. The trick for Britain's intelligence agencies was not to mind other people getting killed and to expect other people to die - and, for sure, they didn't mind one bit, (a whistle-blowing minority excepted). Those charged with infiltrating Irish paramilitaries often avoided putting themselves at risk and relied on recruiting others to do the dirty work of the Dirty War - and they proved perfectly willing to dispense with those they recruited.
The broader historical claims made by Teague are, in my view, largely wrong. That British intelligence has been successful in its penetration of republican (and loyalist) paramilitaries is certainly true.
The claim that this left the PIRA in military ruin is not. In 1969, the old IRA had been barely able to get together any guns made within the previous two decades as they sought to repel loyalist and police attacks on Catholic homes in Belfast. The IRA in 1969 was in fact exactly what the British government claim they want it be now - a largely demilitarised force committed to participation in normal political processes. But by 1996, during a breakdown in the IRA ceasefire, they were able to successfully detonate a 500-pound bomb that ripped out the heart of Manchester city centre (killing no one fortunately, but injuring some). The police successfully rounded up most of the IRA cells in England during the mid-1990s, but it is hard to argue that the Provisional IRA were not a potent paramilitary force at the time of the 1994 ceasefire. Nor is it likely that John Major's government would have negotiated with Sinn Fein even to the limited extent that it did if it had harboured the hope that the IRA could be defeated.
[Manchester City Centre after the 1996 IRA bomb]
The claim that the British government was responsible for the shift in Republicanism from physical force towards the political prospects of Sinn Fein is partially true, but mainly in perverse and ironic ways. After successfully gaining control over the IRA in the late 1970s, Gerry Adams set himself against the idea of participation in elections. This policy changed dramatically however, following Margaret Thatcher's hardline, merciless stance towards the Republican hunger strikers in 1981 which radicalised Irish nationalism like no event since the Bloody Sunday massacre. When Bobby Sands was elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh South shortly before dying from starvation, Adams recognised the electoral potential of Sinn Fein - and in this sense the British government can claim credit for the rise of Sinn Fein, though it wisely chooses not to. It could also be said that the British government acted to enhance this process by not assassinating Gerry Adams or many prominent Sinn Fein figures, working on the assumption that it would one day negotiate with the Adams leadership. Secret negotiations with Sinn Fein actually began in the mid-1980s at a time when Thatcher's government and the right-wing press were declaring solemnly that such a thing would be outrageous and unthinkable, and pillorying those like Ken Livingstone who favoured talks as the beginning of a negotiated settlement to the war.
[Picture: British policy did encourage the IRA to engage in the electoral process - but not in the way intended]
There are many reasons why the bulk of the Republican movement moved from a strategy of "armed struggle" towards "constitutionalism" and agreed to a ceasefire in 1994 (almost 20 years after the debacle of the 1975 ceasefire which had left most Republicans convinced that the British government had tricked them into insincere negotiations and firmly set against talks until the British indicated they wanted out).
By the mid-1990s the Irish War had been going on for well over two decades, seemingly without solution. The Gerry Adams wing of the IRA were young men when they took control of the Provisionals in the 1970s but middle-aged or older, often with families, by 1994 and accordingly less belligerent. The Catholic population of Belfast was on the receiving end of a marked increase in sectarian murders by loyalist death squads in the mid-1990s, which increased pressure from the IRA's long-suffering support base for a ceasefire. The near outbreak of sectarian civil war in 1993 following the botched IRA bombing of the Shankill Road fish shop and the loyalist's brutal response, the Greysteel massacre, also made the continuation of the war appear an increasingly bad option for everyone. Meanwhile, in conjunction with sections of the Catholic Church, prominent Irish-Americans and other Northern nationalists like John Hume, Gerry Adams had long been developing an alternative political strategy based on a pan-nationalist political challenge to the British government and Unionist parties for a negotiated settlement. This plan coincided happily with the increasing openness of the Irish government and the White House as Irish PM Albert Reynolds and US President Bill Clinton mollified Dublin's and Washington's previous strong hostility to the IRA. Finally, the British government itself was more prepared to drop its long-standing opposition to formal negotiations with Republicans. But for Britain to claim credit for a peace process that emerged primarily as the initiative of Irish nationalists no less than 25 years after entering into a pointless war of choice to destroy what was then a barely-existent IRA, touting the Dirty War as the strategy that paid off, would be an intolerable piece of chutzpah.
But if the acclaimed success of the British infiltration strategy is dubious, what is also worth revisiting is what this internationally-renowned model of killing and dying actually involved. As Teague quoted his principal interview subject, former British agent Kevin Fulton, saying, "it was a lot grayer and darker... Darker even than people can imagine."
A good a place to start as any is the 1991 murder of Margaret Perry, followed by the murder of some of her murderers.
Gregory Burns hailed from a Catholic background in County Armagh but made the unusual choice of trying to join the Ulster Defence Regiment, a Northern Irish part-time army unit formed out of the notoriously brutal and sectarian B-Specials which were technically disbanded in 1972. His application was turned down, but he has approached by British intelligence eager for Irish Catholic recruits and asked to become an agent inside the IRA. He agreed and was recruited alongside two of his friends, Aidan Starr and Johnny Dignam. His brother Sean, incidentally, had joined the IRA and been killed by a special RUC unit in 1982. Though married, Gregory began an affair with 26 year-old Irish civil servant Margaret Perry, who came from a family with long-standing Republican connections. But he was not adept at keeping quiet and proved unable to keep his work for the British secret. When Margaret found out, he became afraid that she would blow his cover and tell the IRA. He tried to fob her off, claiming that he was actually an IRA plant inside British intelligence but she wasn't convinced.
Desperate, Gregory turned to his British handlers in the Force Research Unit. A spy network within a spy network, the Force Research Unit was a highly secretive division of Army Intelligence, its existence unknown to much of the British Army and police. It was also a thoroughly murderous outfit, run by the ruthless Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Kerr. An investigation by Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor for the Scottish paper, the Sunday Herald, drew information from some of Kerr's disillusioned subordinates: 'Burns contacted us and told us the game was up. He said he'd been compromised and he, Starrs and Dignam wanted out.'
[Brigadeer Gordon Kerr]
Burns, Starrs and Dignam imagined they would be whisked away from Northern Ireland into retirement, provided security and given new identities. But their faith in the Force Research Unit turned out to be grossly misplaced. Lt-Colonel Kerr appears to have decided that the three were not important enough as agents to justify the effort and expense, as Mackay's sources relate:
'Resettling agents is part of the deal. Who on earth would agree to work as an agent for the Brits inside the IRA if they knew that if they were rumbled we'd abandon them and let them die? But Kerr wasn't having any of it. He said it was all Burns's own fault and he should get out of the mess himself.'
This left Burns in a desperate position, since if Margaret alerted the IRA of what he was up to, he faced torture and execution at the hands of the Nutting Squad. The FRU whistle-blowers suggest that Kerr was pretty clear on his advice on what to do about her: "He said he should silence Perry." If so, this surely counts as a very direct incitement. To avoid ambiguity about his situation, Burns made it clear he might find himself forced to do just that:
'Burns was horrified and came back saying that if he wasn't pulled out of Northern Ireland, he'd have to kill the girl. Kerr was told about this and he spoke to Burns's handlers telling them to let Burns know the FRU could not be threatened.'
Gregory Burns booked himself into a hospital in the Irish Republic for treatment of an earlier arm injury, rang Margaret and told her that he wanted her to see him and talk. She agreed and took up the offer of Dignam and Starr to take her there. Along the way, they took her out into a forest in County Donegal and beat her to death.
The Prime Minister John Major declared, "The IRA's actions demonstrate yet again the true nature of terrorism". Indeed, but unknown to the public then - and possibly unknown to him - was that the episode consisted of more than the IRA's actions and also demonstrated the true nature of British policy in Northern Ireland. Yet again.
There is another macabre twist to this story. For those suspected of being British agents, whether they were or not, there were few scenarios as terrifying as being interrogated by Freddie Scappaticci, blindfolded and listening to him whispering, as he did to Kevin Fulton: "I know what yer done, boyo. The IRA hunts down all snitches and executes them. Two quick bullets in the brain. Remember the boy from County Armagh who left behind the pregnant wife. Remember the boy from County Louth who left seven children mewling for a father. Remember them all."
Doubt Sinn Fein will be putting that speech in a manifesto any time soon. But while Scappaticci delivered some version of this into the ears of an unknown number of now dead people, terrifying British agents on behalf of the Nutting Squad, he himself was - a British agent. And had been since 1978, following a dispute with other Provisional members in which he was beaten.
Scappaticci was designated within the IRA as an official "hard bastard", meaning that he carried out actual killings and in considerable number. A description of his career at the website of British Irish Rights Watch notes that he is suspected of involvement in the killing of Paul Valente, Maurice Gilvarry, Patrick Trainor, Vincent Robinson, Anthony Braniff, John Torbett, Seamus Morgan, Patrick Scott, James Young, Brian McNally, Kevin Coyle, John Corcoran, Catherine and Gerard Mahon, Damien McCrory, Frank Hegarty, David McVeigh, Charles McIlmurry, Thomas Wilson, Eamonn Maguire, Francisco Notorantonio, Joseph Fenton, John McAnulty, Paddy Flood, Tom Oliver, Rory Finnis, Robin Hill, Gerald Holmes, Christopher Harte, James Kelly, James Mulhern, Michael Brown, Caroline Moreland and Joseph O'Connor among others.
Most of these people were accused by the IRA of being British agents or police informers (some may not have been in actual fact), and all were killed while Scappaticci was himself a British agent, being paid a reported figure of £80,000 a year, most of which was paid into an account in Gibraltar for future use. The exceptions are Joseph O'Connor, a member of the Real IRA who was apparently killed in 2002 to prevent him revealing Scappaticci's services to the British and Francisco Notorantonio whose notorious murder we will come to shortly. Running through the names we can appreciate the fullness of Matthew Teague's statement that a willingness to kill and die was essential to the infiltration strategy. He writes:
"Some British press reports estimate he killed as many as forty people. A former British spy handler who worked at the time of Scapaticci's rise - a man who now goes by the name Martin Ingram - puts the death toll lower, but still 'well into the tens', including other [British] agents. He said it all fit into the larger British strategy. 'Agents have killed, and killed, and have killed,' Ingram told me. 'Many, many, many people.'"
After much speculation, the psuedonymous Martin Ingram named Scappaticci as the true identity of Agent Steak Knife, a tastefully codenamed British operative within the upper echelons of the Provisionals who stands accused of much.
Two names from BIRW's Steak Knife death list stuck out for me - Caroline and Gerard Mahon, since they were a married couple, put to death together on September 8th, 1985. I decided to find out their story. As it happens, their fate was investigated by the BBC's Mark Urban for his book, 'Big Boy's Rules' about SAS shoot-to-kill operations against IRA volunteers. The Mahons were Republican sympathisers who allowed their home to be used by IRA volunteers as a safe house. In 1984 they had been arrested and threatened with jail for non-payment of fines. But RUC Special Branch saw their potential as informers and in their rather desperate situation, the Mahons agreed to work for them in return for being spared prison.
But when the IRA discovered that a gun previously stored at the Mahons had been tampered with, their service for the RUC came to an end. The couple were abducted and confessed after interrogation. They were then driven to Turf Lodge in Belfast where Gerard Mahon was executed in front of Caroline, shot in the face and then in the back of the head. Caroline apparently struggled free and tried to run away but was cut down with machine-gun fire into her back.
For their efforts, Special Branch had paid them £20 a week. In the event of an emergency, the Mahons were given a 'panic button', a device to summon police assistance, but they didn't get the chance to use it.
Special Branch's recruitment of vulnerable people, with paltry rewards for a job with a low life expectancy, would be an unpleasant business in itself but 'Lost Lives', an encyclopedia of all those killed in the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1967-99, offers an even more dismal twist to the story. Four years later when the IRA were interrogating the late Joe Fenton, another Special Branch agent, he confessed that when he came under suspicion, his intelligence handlers had advised him to shift attention from himself by outing the Mahons, presumably sacrificed as agents of lesser value.
British agents within the PIRA who began to arouse suspicion among their colleagues were often told by their handlers to shift the focus from themselves on to others, a ploy that had the added benefit of encouraging IRA members to be suspicious of, and kill each other. Sometimes a British agent might, unknowingly, get another agent killed in this manner. Martin Ingram told Neil Mackay:
"To protect Provos working for us, we would teach an agent to pass of any suspicion on him onto another IRA man. The agent would tamper with explosives or guns owned by another Provo. That would cause the operations the target was part of to go wrong and he'd be suspected of informing or executed. We got rid of a good, few top IRA men that way."
Thus the IRA's ruthless internal security was used against it and the Nutting Squad became England's unsuspecting (or sometimes knowing) executioners by proxy. Clever, in a horrific sort of way.
When in October 1987 the Force Research Unit learned that Steak Knife himself was threatened by a loyalist death squad, the FRU used its agents in the Ulster Defence Association to direct the assassins to another target, Francisco Notorantonio. He was a 66 year-old retired taxi driver, whose association with the IRA had ended three decades previously, prior to the outbreak of the 1969-97 war. On October 9th, UDA men broke into Francisco's home in West Belfast's Ballymurphy estate at 7:30 am and killed him as he lay in bed, firing shots at his 16 year-old grandson on the way out.
According to the account of inside sources who spoke to the respected Irish journalist
Ed Moloney, one of the leading historians of the conflict and the modern IRA, this murder by the UDA was explicitly sanctioned and authorised by senior officials in MI5 and the FRU at a meeting at Thiepval barracks..
At the time Gerry Adams protested that, "I find it very strange indeed that this area was crawling with Crown forces yesterday. They swamped the place and local Sinn Fein councillor Sean Keenan was stopped twice. Yet today there was no one around and armed men were able to come in and out of the area." This might have seemed like Republican paranoia at the time, but Adams was right to be suspicious as, not for the first time, Republican complaints of British collusion with loyalist paramilitaries have turned out to be justified.
[Picture: The Ulster Freedom Fighters, a cover name for the UDA, in self-congratulatory mood]
For a British agent working inside the IRA to appear credible to others meant that he or she would have to participate fully in military operations. This meant that British agents would have to, among other things, attack British soldiers and RUC officers, killing them if necessary. This is not a point that those praising the efficacy of British counter-insurgency like to emphasise - that it means killing people on your own side, our boys (and girls) in uniform whose slaughter by Irish paramilitaries the British tabloids angrily denounced and demanded vengeance for.
Here lies one of the most extraordinary revelations in Teague's article. Kevin Fulton, a Catholic man from Newry who joined the British Army, was asked instead to become a spy and infiltrate the Provisionals. He became an expert bomb-maker and in 1993 was working with a team of others in this profession on making roadside bombs that were triggered by photo-sensors, designed for use on roadsides against Army vehicles. Fulton's handlers thought that by aiding his bomb-making efforts they could control the kind of technology the Provisionals used, and so have the edge on them. To this end, they provided Fulton with bomb-making expertise that would address the major flaw in the photo-sensor bomb (it could be unintentionally triggered by headlights from civilian cars or camera flashes). And so they gave Fulton "a new technology - the infrared flash".
This was state-of-the-art stuff, and had to be specially imported from the USA. MI5 got to work "to facilitate an undercover IRA shopping mission to New York, and an MI5 officer flew across the Atlantic on the Concorde to make arrangements with American services in advance of Fulton's arrival". They had to clear it with US authorities to see if it was OK for an Irish paramilitary organisation to shop for bomb-making technology on their soil. The all-expenses paid trip went ahead and Fulton returned to Ireland ready to make a new generation of anti-vehicle devices. As they say in the USA, see what your tax dollars pay for!
The infrared bomb was a hit - on this occasion British intelligence really did produce something that has been taken up the world over, but you can expect they will be rather modest in taking the credit for it. Infrared bombs were widely developed by the IRA and soon by other paramilitary organisations around the world who were impressed by the results. Most notably, the new technology has been developed by the Iraqi mujahideen who have used it for, among other things, blowing up British armoured vehicles in Al-Amarah province (which Blair's government has tried to blame on Iran).
RUC officers Colleen McMurray and Paul Slaine were killed and injured respectively on March 27th 1992 when their patrol car was hit a rocket triggered a photo-sensitive device hidden in a car parked by Newry Canal. Paul Slaine lost both legs. The coroner said of Colleen McMurray that she was, "A young woman from the island of Ireland [who] represents an ideal of Irish nationality worldwide. Colleen McMurray was brutally murdered by men who claim to be in pursuit of such an ideal".
More specifically, she was murdered by Kevin Fulton who parked the vehicle and readied the device, and who was working undercover for MI5. Speaking to The Atlantic, Fulton explained that killing Colleen McMurray was one of the few deaths he really regretted, on account of her being a woman. (By way of unhappy coincidence, Colleen's husband, Ivy Kelly, was one of nine officers killed in an IRA mortar attack on the RUC barracks in Newry in 1985.)
What ends precisely justified these relentlessly horrible means? The defence for all this, as for the entire British military presence in Northern Ireland, was that it, somehow, saved lives overall, even if it meant killing a lot of people. Did the intelligence provided by infiltration of Irish paramilitaries save any lives?
The answer is yes and no. There were occasions when the intelligence gathered was used to prevent attacks. An intelligence tip-off led to the capture of the ship the Eksund in 1987 which was carrying an enormous shipment of arms from Libya, including ground-to-air missiles that would have given the IRA the capacity to shoot down helicopters. The Eksund delivery was intended to help with a planned massive IRA offensive against British military targets modelled on the Tet Offensive of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front against the US Army in 1968. The interception of the Eksund meant that this never happened (and the PIRA never succeeded in shooting down a British helicopter). British agents such as Fulton would occasionally act to sabotage bombing missions by producing dud devices or tipping off police, but any operation that went badly wrong would always lead to an internal IRA investigation in an attempt to discover infiltrators or informers. Ironically, the Force Research Unit may have also used intelligence from its agent in the Ulster Defence Association, Brian Nelson, to prevent a loyalist assassination attempt against Gerry Adams, with whom the British government was engaged in secret talks.
But even for handlers who had any intention of saving lives with the intelligence they had, they had to make choices of when to stop an attack and risk blowing the cover of their agent and when to allow it to go ahead and risk the consequences of permitting deaths knowing they could have been prevented. On August 15th 1998, a bomb placed by the breakaway Republican paramilitary group, the Real IRA, in a busy Omagh street exploded early as a parade being watched by visiting schoolchildren was in progress. The 29 subsequent deaths made it the second bloodiest day of the conflict (after May 17th 1974, when loyalist bombs in County Monaghan and Dublin killed 33 people). But there is a well-founded suspicion that the RUC had advance knowledge of a forthcoming Real IRA bomb attack but chose this as one of the operations they would not disrupt.
The whole line of defence, however, works on the assumption that saving lives was the principal aim of the infiltration strategy, which is wilfully naive. To take one example of an operation Freddie Scappaticci may have betrayed - a planned IRA attack on British troops stationed in Gibraltar in 1988. British intelligence were tipped off and they followed the movements of Sean Savage, Daniel McCann and Mairead Farrell as they brought a car bomb and made their preparations. The tip-off gave the British government the opportunity to ensure no one was killed by arresting the IRA team as they went through checkpoints in and out of Gibraltar.
But Margaret Thatcher's war with the IRA had nothing to do with saving lives and the decision was instead made not to arrest the trio but to have the SAS execute them. However the Thatcher government later sought to portray the incident, the fact that SAS men had pumped bullets into the unarmed Farrell, McCann and Savage as they tried to surrender in a frenzied, merciless and very public execution, found its way back to Ireland. The incident revitalised the anger and morale of the IRA, demoralised by the Enniskillen bombing of the previous year, in which an IRA bomb outside a police station had killed 11 Protestant civilians at a nearby memorial service. The Gibraltar killings triggered a gruesome series of killings in Ireland itself when loyalist extremist Michael Stone carried out a one-man rifle-and-grenade assault on those attending the funeral of Mairead Farrell and two British soldiers were beaten and shot to death after accidentally stumbling into a funeral of one of Michael Stone's victims.
To get to the point, infiltration of Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries was not a strategy for saving lives or ending the war but exercising effective British control over "an acceptable level of violence" (in the words of Home Secretary Reginald Maulding). As the British Irish Rights Watch annual report for 2005 describes, the infiltration strategy generally got in the way of saving lives:
"Both republicans and loyalists have been literally getting away with murder for years and hundreds of lives have been lost and blighted because the hunger for intelligence took precedence over the duty of the security forces to uphold the law and protect the right to life."
Furthermore, BIRW continues to cite ongoing collusion between the army, police and paramilitary groups and the protection of agents within them as a continuing source of human rights violations and the obstruction of justice:
"...Nor is collusion a thing of the past. Despite repeated denials by the authorities, it has emerged that an informer was involved in the brutal murder in 2000 of Andrew Robb and David McIlwaine, and possibly was being protected. There is also a lingering fear that protection of an informer is hampering the police investigation into the murder of journalist Martin O'Hagan in 2001." (BIRW Annual Report 2004, p11)
"However, until the government, the Northern Ireland Office and the security forces truly face up to the fact that the paramilitaries were not so much tackled as managed and manipulated in Northern Ireland, and that collusion became institutionalised, then untouchable warlords will continue to terrorise the individuals, families and communities who live at the sharp end and suffer the consequences of these disastrous policies." (BIRW 2005, p9, emphasis added)
One ugly possibility is that the British used intelligence from its agents in paramilitaries to enhance the killing they did, rather than reduce it. This is known to be to the case with some loyalist groups such as the Ulster Defence Association, whose members were the beneficiaries of both weapons, intelligence and suggested targets from sections of the RUC and the Army, acting in both individual and official capacity. But it might also have served cynical British strategists for the IRA to kill more people, particularly civilians, in order better to discredit them, or perhaps discredit the option of armed struggle among Republicans. This remains a subject of speculation, though it is not merely fanciful, since many previously unproven suspicions of the Dirty War have been confirmed by subsequent investigations or the release of new information. Ed Moloney speculated in the Daily Telegraph:
"It was around this time, in the late 1980s, that the infant peace process was struggling to find its feet. Those, such as Gerry Adams, who wished to push the organisation into politics faced the enormous problem of persuading IRA militants to put away their guns. One factor that did weaken the hardliners was a seemingly endless series of botched IRA operations that killed civilians. Is it possible that Steaknife had a hand in any of these bungled operations, one effect of which was to make a political path more acceptable to the IRA rank and file? The Irish government, for one, is privately terrified that any probe of Steaknife will highlight precisely this sort of allegation." (Emphasis added.)
Martin Ingram told Neil Mackay that he knew of specific cases when British agents in the Provisionals had carried out bomb attacks on civilian targets, with the foreknowledge of their handlers. Usually in these cases, he said, an effort was made to limit the effectiveness of the bombs:
"We did try to limit the success of 'sanctioned' operations by sending undercover soldiers to IRA arms dumps to inject the explosives that were going to be used with chemicals that substantially reduced the capacity to kill. The Provos would plant the bomb and it would be allowed to go off even though we knew its location and timing. Sometimes, the bomb had been chemically deactivated sufficiently and no lives were lost, but at other times we hadn't put in enough chemicals and people died. Either way the Provos thought the operation had gone off successfully and our agent wasn't fingered."
It is possible to think of another example of a government using infiltration to manage and manipulate its paramilitary enemies, appropriate for the age of Osama bin Laden. The military rulers of Algeria who suspended the electoral process after the Islamist FIS party won the 1991 elections, relied heavily on infiltrating Islamist guerrillas to turn them against each other, and to carry out atrocities on civilians that would discredit them. As a result, the most horrendous massacres were perpetrated across the country without it being possible in many cases to even know who the perpetrators were, let alone why they did it. As a model for addressing the Bin Ladenist threat it is one that can appeal only to those who have no principled objections to the commission of crimes against humanity.
That any of the above ever happened was a disgrace, but what should worry us now is, as much as we know about the Dirty War in Northern Ireland, the present authors of the War on Terror in Washington and London do not see it as criminal or even as a folly not to be repeated. They see it as the height of sophistication in modern counter-insurgency. And those responsible - as Gerry Adams might say, "they haven't gone away, you know." Rather they have been rewarded and promoted, like Lt-Colonel Gordon Kerr, now Brigadeer and appointed to Beijing as Britain's defence attache to the up-and-coming Chinese dictatorship, whose methods of internal security he can no doubt appreciate, having used quite a few of them himself.
But what has it all achieved that could not have been better achieved by opening up the space for all-party negotiations in 1969? Apart, of course, from the long string of bloodied hands, corpses and funerals?
"Two quick bullets in the brain. Remember the boy from County Armagh who left behind the pregnant wife. Remember the boy from County Louth who left seven children mewling for a father. Remember them all."
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Sources and links:
"The war is over for me... but is it over for Ian Paisley?" - The Monday Interview, Gerry Adams, David McCittrick, The Independent, April 10th, 2006
The Spy's Tale - The Life and Death of Denis Donaldson, David McKittrick, The Independent, April 6th, 2006
The Execution - How an IRA man turned British spy met his brutal end, David McKittrick, The Independent, April 5th 2006
Double Blind - The untold story of how British intelligence infiltrated and undermined the IRA, Matthew Teague, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2006
Agent died of chest gunshot wound, BBC Online, April 5th, 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/northern_ireland/4877944.stm
Profile: Denis Donaldson, BBC Online, April 4th, 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/northern_ireland/4877680.stm
The murky world of informers, BBC Online, April 4th, 2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/northern_ireland/4877704.stm
British army allowed IRA to bomb Ulster Pub, Neil Mackay, The Sunday Herald, December 17th, 2000, http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/fru23022k1b.html
How Britain's master spy left Ulster double agents to die, Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald, February 16th, 2003: http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/shkerr.htm
'Spy' trio held 'to save Trimble', BBC Online, December 9th, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/northern_ireland/4513324.stm
Why MI5 sanctioned the murder of a pensioner, Harry McGee, Sunday Tribune, June 23rd, 2002, http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/licence/harryMcGee.html
Panaorama missed the real story of collusion in Ulster, Ed Moloney, Sunday Tribune, June 25th, 2002 http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/licence/edMoloney.html
Francisco Notarantonio, British intelligence sanctioned 1987 killing of prisoner to protect IRA agent, Ed Moloney, November 19th, 2000 http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/fru12022k1k.html
Britain's Tame Death Squads, Niall Stanage, The Guardian, http://www.serve.com/pfc/fru/licence/niallStanage.html
Big Boys' Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA, Mark Urban, 1992
British Counter-Insurgency - From Palestine to Northern Ireland, John Newsinger, 2002
A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney, 2002
Killing Rage, Eamonn Collins, Mick McGovern, 1997
'Lost Lives - The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles', David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeny and Chris Thornton, 1999
'Ten-Thirty Three - The Inside Story of Britain's Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland', Nicholas Davies, 1999
'The IRA', Tim Pat Coogan, 2000 edition
British Irish Rights Watch, annual reports 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, Jane Winters
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Just Push the Button
Try this as a proposition – you receive intelligence that a group of senior al-Qa’ida operatives are gathering for a dinner in a house in Camden. An unmanned probe armed with air-to-surface missiles is hovering over North London. Maybe you can get a direct hit on the house, but even presuming the missiles hits their target, and presuming that your intelligence is accurate, you will kill civilians - men, women and children - right along the street.
Do you fire? Of course you don’t. What if it wasn’t London – what if it was Leicester, or Hamburg, or Amsterdam, or Sydney, or Chicago, or New York? I think not. It probably wouldn’t enter your head to try and bomb a place like that.
But what if it was a village in Waziristan in northern Pakistan?
That, apparently, is just fine.
[Source, CBS News]
On January 14th, either an unmanned CIA Predator drone or USAF aircraft (it is not known to the public which - most reports talk about drones though there are eyewitness claims of jets flying overhead) fired missiles at the Pakistani village of Damadola in the Bajur region to the northwest of Islamabad in an effort assassinate al-Qa’ida operatives who were thought to be gathering there for a celebration of Eid ul-Adha. The primary target was Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian expounder of radical Islamist chauvinism and al-Qa’ida’s second most important strategist and ideologist. Al-Zawahiri was previously imprisoned in Egypt in the aftermath of the assassination of dictator Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 by members of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad (whose method of choice in that assassination was not entirely different to that of the CIA in Damadola – hurling grenades and firing assault rifles into a crowd at a packed auditorium) and has since become a mentor to Osama bin Laden after meeting him in the Sudan in 1991.
A report by Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul for the Observer related the aftermath of the CIA’s sledgehammer hit-job in Damadola:
“Yesterday some of the results of the strike were very clear: three ruined houses, mud-brick rubble scattered across the steeply terraced fields, the bodies of livestock lying where thrown by the airblast, a row of newly dug graves in the village cemetery and torn green and red embroidered blankets flapping in the chilly wind. Four children were among the 18 villagers who died in the brutally sudden attack on their homes.”
President George Bush has found other things to do so far than issue a response to the outrage across Pakistan – thus serving to confirm the impression many already have of his regard for human life, and more worryingly, that of Americans and the West in general. Instead, as ever in times of crisis, disgrace and disappointment, the White House offers us Scott McClellan:
''We are engaged in a war on terrorism against a deadly and determined enemy, an enemy that continues to target innocent civilians. In this war, we go out of our way to target the enemy, to target the terrorists, those who want to do harm to innocent civilians in Pakistan, in that region, in the United States. We work very hard to minimize the loss of civilians. And we go out of our way to minimize civilian loss."
No they do not. You can’t go out of your way to “minimise civilian loss” and rocket villages from the air as a tactic of assassination. It’s an either/or – either you minimise civilian losses and eschew such a brutal tactic, or you bomb villages from the air on the basis of an intelligence tip-off.
There is no use pretending that these were accidental or unintended deaths. You cannot fire missiles into homes or residential areas and then claim that you didn’t really want to kill the civilians inside – it is a distinction without a difference. If you bomb houses deliberately you are directly responsible, morally - and legally - for the resulting carnage, just as al-Zawahiri’s brothers-in-arms are responsible for the death of every unfortunate who happened to be standing next to President Anwar Al-Sadat. The fact that bin Ladenists frequently target civilians and slaughter them without pity or remorse neither changes the facts of the Damadola airstrike, nor excuses it.
Eyewitness accounts recalled the attack in an Associated Press report:
"My entire family was killed, and I don't know whom should I blame for it," said Sami Ullah, a 17-year old student, as he shifted debris from his ruined home with a hoe. "I only seek justice from God."
….
"I ran out and saw planes were dropping bombs," said [Shah] Zaman, 40. "I saw my home being hit… I don't know who carried out this attack and why. We were needlessly attacked. We are law-abiding people. I think we were targeted wrongly," he said.
What, then, of the CIA’s intelligence? For an intelligence agency that did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, that did not catch on to the significance of the intelligence it held prior to 9/11 until several rather crucial hours after the event but which did predict that Coalition forces invading Iraq would discover unconventional weapons programmes and mighty stockpiles of raw materials for the same – it was really too much to expect that their tip-off on Damadola would turn out to be spot on. The Observer’s report continued:
"Yet evidence emerging appeared to indicate that, though the technology that guided the missiles to their targets at 3am on Friday was faultless, the intelligence that had selected those targets was not. Even as American military and intelligence sources spoke of the possible death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command of al-Qaeda and the man considered to be the brains behind the militant group's strategy, Pakistani officials said that there was no evidence any 'foreigners', shorthand locally for al-Qaeda fighters, were among the 18 victims, though they said that 'according to preliminary investigations there was foreign presence in the area'."
Burke and Gul had no evidence to report from Damadola to suggest that al-Qa’ida operatives were being sheltered there:
"In Damadola itself, locals said they had never sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born ex-doctor.
'This is a big lie... Only our family members died in the attack,' said Shah Zaman, a jeweller who lost two sons and a daughter in the attack. 'They dropped bombs from planes and we were in no position to stop them... or to tell them we are innocent. I don't know [al-Zawahiri]. He was not at my home. No foreigner was at my home when the planes came and dropped bombs.' Haroon Rashid, a member of parliament who lives in a village near Damadola, told The Observer that he had seen a drone surveying the area hours before the attack."
A few days after the attacks, anonymous Pakistani officials informed Associated Press that the strike on Damadola had in fact killed some Bin Ladenist strategists, including an Egyptian bomb maker Midhat Mursi, al-Zawahiri’s son-in-law, Abdul Rehman al-Misri al-Maghribi and Abu Obaidah al-Misri, described as “al-Qaeda's head of operations in Kunar province” in Afghanistan.
Those expecting this overly convenient report to falter under scrutiny did not have long to wait. On January 20th, Pakistani Prime Minister told reporters in New York that an official probe had found no “tangible evidence” that al-Qa’ida members had been killed in the airstrike.
[Shah Zaman lost three children in the attack, source: USA Today]
So – a village was bombed on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. What should we expect – an apology? A public inquiry? A resignation from someone responsible? Compensation for the victims? Legal proceedings against the perpetrators? An admission of error? Dream on – we don’t live in that kind of world.
The closest to an official apology was volunteered by Senator John McCain – “It's terrible when innocent people are killed; we regret that.” But in reality it was barely an apology at all, so much as an expression of squeamishness at a job badly done. He continued, "We apologize, but I can't tell you that we wouldn't do the same thing again. We have to do what we think is necessary to take out al Qaeda, particularly the top operatives. This guy [al-Zawahiri] has been more visible than Osama bin Laden lately."
We’re sorry, but we’ll go right ahead and do it again if we get the chance… Then what is the Senator sorry for? Given the fact that McCain has sought to distance himself from the Bush administration on a number of issues, his reassertion of the US executive’s right to bomb other countries as it alone sees fit, without being accountable to anyone, including Congress, is instructive. Capturing those responsible for atrocities such as the East African embassy bombings or the 9/11 massacres is an important and necessary objective. But it is certainly not the case that anyone in Langley or the Pentagon or the White House has the right to bomb a village in Pakistan on the grounds that “we have to do what we think is necessary”.
Senator McCain was certainly more eloquent than his Senate colleague Evan Byah, who compared Waziristan to ‘Indian country’ where previous governments of the United States also felt that anything went: "Now, it's a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do? It's like the Wild, Wild West out there. The Pakistani border is a real problem."
The possible infiltration of what remains of al-Qa’ida and associated groups into Waziristan certainly has presented a challenge for the Pakistani and US governments. The search for al-Qa’ida operatives is taking place in a large, porous, mountainous region 1,000 miles long and 200 miles wide, inhabited by fiercely independent and well-armed tribes who resent the forces of the Pakistani authorities, let well alone those drawn from elsewhere. An attempt to elicit information and assistance from people in Waziristan in tracking down internationally-wanted criminals would require an intelligence operation of subtlety and tact.
[Source: BBC News Online]
To date, the governments of Pakistan and the United States have shown themselves both interested in, and capable of, neither. Under General Musharaff, the Pakistani regime has succeeded in creating a military quagmire within its own borders.
Pakistani troops re-entered Waziristan for the first time in 55 years in July 2002, negotiating carefully with local tribes and offering development funds in return for assistance. However, once military operations began, relations quickly broke down between the army and local people as the BBC’s correspondent in Islamabad, Zaffar Abbas, explains:
“…once the military action started in South Waziristan a number of Waziri sub-tribes took it as an attempt to subjugate them. Attempts to persuade them into handing over the foreign militants failed, and with… mishandling by the authorities, the security campaign against suspected al-Qaeda militants turned into an undeclared war between the Pakistani military and the rebel tribesmen.”
What had begun as a kind of policing operation has transformed the region into a war zone, particularly after a major escalation in March 2004 with Pakistani forces deploying artillery, bomber aircraft and helicopter gunships against its own citizens. Large and uncounted numbers of local people have been killed, while scores of Pakistani soldiers sent into the war zone have not returned alive. Relations between the Pakistani authorities and locals have deteriorated irretrievably and Islamabad appears stuck for ideas except for more of the same.
The impact of the Damadola airstrike has been disastrous for US-Pakistan relations – from a tactical point of view, it is a further set-back in the War on Terror. The Pakistani dictatorship has re-affirmed its close relationship with Washington, but General Musharaff was forced to condemn the US airstrike and to insist that such operations will not be repeated. Co-operation between US and Pakistani forces was already difficult because of popular hostility to the idea in Pakistan and Islamabad’s denials that US forces operate on Pakistani soil are harder to maintain.
But will the kind of atrocity committed in Damadola be repeated? Or has the tactic of aerial assassination now been discredited by the political blow-back? Unfortunately, it probably hasn’t been.
Targeted aerial assassination has a suitably appalling history – unlike most methods of assassination, it virtually guarantees civilian deaths every time, regardless of whether the target is killed or not. Precursors of modern targeted assassinations include the somewhat less precise Israeli Air Force raid by a squadron of F-15 fighter planes in Tunis on the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, killing 75 people in 1985, and the USAF raid on a range of military and intelligence targets in Tripoli in Libya. Partly an effort to kill the now-officially-in-favour dictator Colonel Qadaffi, the bombs missed the Colonel but killed his adopted daughter, aged 1, along with more than a hundred other Libyans. US bombs went astray, as they do, and hit a hospital and the French embassy amongst other things.
[A UN Security Council Resolution condemnation of the bombing of Tunis can be read here, at the Israeli Foreign Ministry's website]
The Russian government has also adopted the tactic in both of its horrendous wars in Chechnya, successfully murdering Chechen president General Dzhokhar Dudayev in April 1996. (Chechen President Alsan Mashkadov was also murdered in March 2005 possibly by the Russian secret police, the FSB, though quite how he was killed is still not fully known.)
Boris Yeltsin’s dilapidated regime made numerous efforts to kill Dudayev from 1991 onwards, and his assassination was elevated to the principal Russian strategy in quashing Chechen hopes for independence. After numerous failed attempts, including planting a conventional explosive that killed two Chechen policemen and an escort driver, Dudayev was finally killed when a Russian reconaissance planes picked up the signal from a satellite phone he was unwisely using, and further aircraft were called in for the kill, using precision weaponry.
Moscow’s technological innovation in homicide, in a war otherwise noted for official incompetence and exposing everything that is wrong with the Russian army, proved to be an inspiration to Washington as Richard Belfield wrote in his book on official assassination programmes since the Second World War, ‘Terminate with Extreme Prejudice’:
“The use of missiles in this way marked a quantum leap in assassination practice. The rich nations no longer need to worry about defectors and bad publicity. Advanced electronics means that missiles are now used to assassinate individuals, remotely and at a distance, where previously the assassin had needed to be close up. The problem of the squeamish assassin has been addressed: killing is now done at one-stage removed, neat and far less stressful for those on the frontline.” (p54)
This dream of the clean kill from the air came true for the CIA in Yemen in November 2002 following a year-long pursuit of Qaed Senyan al-Harithi in conjunction with Yemeni authorities. Al-Harithi was formerly a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden and was suspected of organising the attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 US navy servicemen in the summer of 2001 while anchored in Aden Harbour. The CIA caught up with al-Harithi and tracked him as he travelled in a taxi through the Yemeni desert with five other men.
The assassins got a signal from a mobile phone used by the one of the occupants in the car, confirming their identity, and, operating a Predator drone from an unknown US army base, they fired an anti-tank Hellfire missile which killed all the occupants of the vehicle and left the taxi a blackened wreck in the middle of a desert.
Graphic: BBC News Online
Aside from al-Harithi, precisely who the occupants of the taxi were is unclear - their specific offences were will never be established by any court. One was known to be an American citizen. The operation was widely regarded in the US media and political circles as justifiable and a success. But aside from the dubious moral legitimacy and illegality of out-of-court execution, it established an unfortunate precedent of allowing the US government to resort to assassination anywhere in the Third World and sustained illusions of the prospects for a comparatively clean kill through airstrikes (or as clean as such a line of work could be). But few aerial assassinations reach even this level of cleanliness. And major US targets such as bin Laden were not slow to learn the lesson of the killings of al-Harithi and Dudayev – keep your mobiles switched off.
The use of the tactic in Iraq from the time of the First Gulf War onwards provides a more realistic and disturbing overall picture. During the 1991 Gulf War, the USAF attempted to assassinate Saddam Hussein by bombing a concrete bunker in the Al-Amariya district of Baghdad on the night of February 13th 1991. Neither he, nor any senior government officials were in the bunker, nor even any young men of military age, since the complex had long been used as a civilian air-raid shelter for women, children and the elderly, with unknown hundreds of families seeking protection there. A single missile – a smart-bomb as they are known, with laser-guiding technology - penetrated the reinforced concrete surrounding the air vent and a second went deep into the interior.
The women, children and elderly people inside were either incinerated or boiled alive in temperatures that soared into many hundreds of degrees centigrade. While I was in Iraq in the summer of 2001, I had the opportunity to visit the shelter, which is now a memorial for the dead (and in some respects was also a tasteless propaganda monument to Saddam's regime). The walls are still marked with the various human forms burned into them, mostly the hands of people desperately trying to escape the oven in which they were trapped, and also some human faces of people screaming, one with a clearly visible eye that still stares out at the living. A mere handful had survived, having been blown out of the shelter by the explosion while God only knows what the rest endured. Some four hundred dessicated corpses were removed from the shelter.
That should have been sufficient to end discussion of targeted assassinations by aircraft. But it was not. Two years later, a new White House occupant sought to make his mark on the global scene, and took the opportunity to bomb Baghdad in another stab-in-the-dark attempt to assassinate the Iraqi tyrant. Richard Belfield describes the effort:
“Fast forward to 16 June 1993. Twenty-three Tomahawk Cruise missiles were fired from US Navy warships in the Gulf and the Red Sea. Their target was the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Once the missiles left the sea, they hugged the land through TERCOM (terrain counter matching) and were then guided to the target through a series of advanced electronics called DSMAC (digital scene matching area correlation). This abundance of acronyms (so loved by the military everywhere) is supposed to guarantee an accuracy of ten metres. In the event three missiles completely missed their targets, hitting nearby houses, killing eight, including one of Iraq’s leading artists, Layla al-Attar. Clinton’s popularity ratings jumped eleven points the next day, which at a million dollars a missile is PR money well spent.” (p150)
And so, a botched assassination attempt that killed civilians resulted in positive political blow-back for the Clinton White House. What sort of lessons were US presidents meant to draw from that?
The very first shot fired of the Iraq War beginning March 20th, 2003, was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein from the air - which failed to do so and killed a civilian. The hope was, that by decapitating – to borrow their word - the regime on the first day, the US army could proceed to invade relatively peacefully and govern Iraq through a reformulated Ba’athist administration. It was a strategy that prompted peace movement researcher Milan Rai to suggest that the whole war could be seen as an extension of a failed policy of assassination, and the 2003 invasion as an unusually destructive and ambitious assassination attempt taken to its logical conclusion - "This is the most costly, dangerous and reckless assassination attempt in world history".
During the invasion of Iraq, as a Human Rights Watch report, “Off Target”, found, there were at least 50 aerial assassination attempts of Iraqi government officials. Incredibly, not a single one succeeded in killing their intended target – that is zero. Civilians were less fortunate, and many perished in these failed hit-jobs.
[Al-Mansur district, Baghdad, source: Human Rights Watch]
Most famously, on April 7th 2003, an intelligence tip-off that Saddam Hussein was dining in a restaurant in the al-Mansur district of Baghdad prompted a raid by a B-1B Lancer firing 2,000 pounds of satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, a collection of expensive hi-tech equipment and clever acronyms that levelled the restaurant and much of the surrounding residential area. The intelligence was wrong (again), and Saddam Hussein survived to be captured eight months later by US Marines near Tikrit, hiding in a hole. At least 18 Iraqi civilian corpses, however, had been pulled from the rubble back in al-Mansur.
One of several attempts to kill Saddam Hussein, the administration had already claimed to have hit the dictator at the time they tried again at al-Mansur. The HRW report quotes a US intelligence official saying, “just in case he didn’t die, let’s have him die again”. How seriously does that remark indicate that they took their own intelligence before ordering a strike that killed 18 people, who had as much right to their lives as you do? And, as ever, the Pentagon found itself confident enough in its intelligence-gathering capabilities to order a raid on a residential area but became very modest about those same capabilities when asked by journalists to assess the civilian losses. They defended the strike, however, as one that “demonstrated US resolve and capabilities”. Quite what they had actually demonstrated is another matter, but what did become clear is that the USAF ability to hit a specific location accurately far outstrips its ability to locate particular human targets even using the most sophisticated techniques in tracking satellite phones available.
[Source of satellite photograph, Human Rights Watch]
This brings us back to Scott McClellan (who has since resigned and been replaced by Fox News anchor, Tony Snow), attempting to convince us of the Bush administration’s pains to reduce civilian losses, a claim that does not survive scrutiny, as we have seen. Aerial assassination, as practised for over a decade in Iraq, has a very consistent track record – the supporting intelligence almost always turns out to be wrong, the actual target almost always evades death, and civilians are almost always killed either way. There is only one reasonable conclusion to draw from this – aerial assassination should be dropped as a tactic and made explicitly illegal, both in the US and internationally, to the extent that is not already.
By rocketing Damadola and offering no hint of consequences for those responsible, the US government has signalled a lack of interest in, and contempt for, the lives of Pakistanis - a country that is supposed to be a US ally. It is a message that people across that country have not failed to notice. No one in the USA or Britain would consider an aerial assassination attempt in their own neighbourhood to be acceptable – neither should we accept them when the neighbourhoods are in central Iraq or northern Pakistan.
________________________________________________________________________
Sources and links:
Pakistanis say 17 Killed in Airstrike, Associated Press, January 13th 2006
The drone, the CIA and a botched attempt to kill bin Laden's deputy, Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul, The Observer, January 15th 2006
Can Karen Hughes spin the CIA’s attack in Pakistan?, David Corn, The Nation, January 17th 2006
Pakistan Probes 'al-Qaeda' Deaths, BBC News Online, January 19th 2006
Pakistan: US Airstrike Can’t be Repeated, Munir Ahmad, Associated Press, January 20th 2006
Pakistan PM: No Evidence of al-Qaida Dead, Bradley Brooks, Associated Press, January 20th 2006
Making Enemies in Pakistan, Derrick Z Jackson, The Boston Globe, January 21st 2006
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pakistan’s Undeclared War, Zaffar Abbas, BBC News Online, September 10th 2004
US: Hundreds of Civilian Deaths in Iraq Were Preventable, Human Rights Watch, December 12th 2003
Off-Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, HRW, December 2003
Blitz Coup, Milan Rai, J-n-V.org, March 18th, 2003
US Drones Take Combat Role, Keith Somerville, BBC News Online, November 5th 2002
Position Paper: Israel’s Assassination Policy: Extra-Judicial Executions, B’Tselem
Books:
Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, Richard Belfield (2005)
Al-Qaeda – The True Story of Radical Islam, Jason Burke (2004)
Chechnya – A Small Victorious War, Charlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (1996)
Sunday, January 01, 2006
New Years' Revolutions
Cutting to the Chase - Police car chases are the staple of prime time TV entertainment, but in reality they are rarely necessary and kill a lot of innocent people - the evidence shows that the public are safer when the police slow down...
Giving our Consent - Why do rapists get away with it so often, and why isn't the British public more aware of the scale of the problem?
Just a couple of pieces from me for now, but more are on the way... And in addition to these, I am very pleased to have two pieces from other contributors.
White Riot - A lot of people have asked me about the racist riots in my country of origin and being hard-pressed for time I did what a large number of her friends have done - e-mailed Vanessa Badham who is currently staying in Wollongong, New South Wales to ask her. She has sent back a very readable report/opinion piece, which I urge you to read.
Rebels Without a Cause - And we have a piece by Daniel Simpson on the war in northern Uganda, from which he returned recently after writing stories for Associated Press. Daniel previously worked for the New York Times reporting from the former Yugoslavia and resigned from that paper for the noblest of reasons, having been singled out by the US ambassador in Belgrade as an asker of awkward questions.
As ever all feedback, comments, fact-checking, scrutiny, and the like is welcom and appreciated (you can e-mail at respond_alexblog at yahoo dot co dot uk). Wishing all readers a very happy new year or at least one better than 2005...
Alex Higgins, Tottenham, London, England
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How the world stayed much the same in 2005
Iraq - The US and Britain's folly and shame just won't go away
The cost of the war in US dollars - watch it go up every second here
The cost of the war in Iraqi lives - 100,000 still best estimate (as of last year, certainly higher by now)
The cost of the war in Coalition soldiers' lives - 2,376 - 17 every week
Read...
Seymour Hersh on Bush administration plans to escalate the air war over Iraq
George Monbiot on the use of napalm and phosphorous by US forces in Fallujah
Dahr Jamail on Coalition attacks on Iraqi hospitals
Beatriz Saldivar from Mexico holds a poster of her family member Sergeant Daniel Torres who was killed in combat in Iraq last April outside the U.S. embassy in Madrid Dec. 17, 2005.
Sign a petition for a negotiated end to the war at IraqPeaceTalks.org
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Kashmir - the scandalous limits of international disaster relief
Justin Huggler - Failures on the road to disaster
New Orleans - richest ruling class in world history leaves its poor out to dry
Mike Davis - The Predators of New Orleans
Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot - 25 questions about New Orleans
USA Today - toll rises as New Orleans evacuees find dead in their homes after official search called off
Darfur - what left to say?
Johann Hari: No one left to kill
Protect Darfur: Sudanese people 'live in fear'
Protect Darfur: "UK shame" as Darfurian refugees sent back to their tormentors
Photos from Philip Cox
Planet Earth - 2005 is the hottest year on record
The Met Office and university of East Anglia - Statement on the Climate of 2005
Torture - Still a bad thing
Jack Straw lied to the parliamentary select committee
Amnesty takes a trip with Jack Straw
Do something about all this...
Rising Tide, GreenPeace, Make Poverty History, Voices in the Wilderness (USA), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Protect Darfur, Iraq Occupation Focus, Not in our Name , B'Tselem, Free Burma Coalition, Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Free Tibet, Passion of the Present, Camapign Against the Arms Trade, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, Trade Union Conference, Iraq Union Solidarity Camapign, Indymedia, etc. etc - try the links in the margin!
For a democratic, global revolution - not a dream but a moral and practical necessity long overdue...
A world to win, and all the above to lose...
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White Riot
Vanessa Badham gives her own account of the racist riots in Sydney and Australian race relations. Her piece is unedited, but I have provided links that provide more information on the points she has made - and I agree with her on every one.
Two young men who "looked Middle Eastern" hide in a bus while others jeer at them,
I was first alerted to the trouble brewing in Cronulla not by the media but by an old friend from school whom I encountered in an all-night bar in Sydney last Saturday night. Around four in the morning, and after some hours of heavy drinking, dawn was pouring into the rammed, throbbing confines of Gilligan's on Oxford Street and I barely comprehended why Kris was showing me a text on his mobile phone which read something like "All you Aussies out there, come down to Cronulla
Beach tomorrow so we can reclaim our land". He had been sent it by a dodgy relative and I thought nothing of it.
[The Sunday Mail on the role of text messages in organising the riot]
Recovering from my inevitable hangover the next day, I was contacted late in the afternoon by my friend Alison, who was ringing to apologise that she wouldn't be able to meet me for dinner that night, as the police had advised all citizens of Cronulla (where she lives) to stay indoors. "Eh?" asked Badham, flicking on the television to see the smashed windows and racist thugs wearing t-shirts reading "ethnic cleansing squad" amongst other racist epithets ("Mohammed is a camel-fucker" was another) churning up the streets.
Cronulla is in suburban Sydney, in the South East. It is in a local government area called the Sutherland Shire. "The Shire", as it's known, has the lowest amount of ethnic diversity of any local
government area in Australia - a mere 9% of the inhabitants do not identify as Anglo-Saxon. It is also where I went to school. Those of you who have heard me tell stories about school may remember that our school captain wrote in the yearbook that he hated "Asians", we had a
rapist in our year and the worst excesses of the binge-drinking, violently masculine Australian suburban culture were what you could expect at any party where alcohol and nitrous oxide bulbs were involved. It is an area whose inhabitants never leave - if you grow up there, you are statistically unlikely to choose to live anywhere else, and it's dominated by an enormous shopping mall, Miranda Fair, that employs just about everybody.
You can understand why I got the hell out and fast.
"Shire people" aren't all bad, of course, but there are quite a lot who are not very nice. Certain values - like tolerance, compassion, multiculturalism - are not encouraged by the local culture. Materialism, prejudice and bigotry are quite popular. To be successful in the Shire is to have an SUV, a plasma TV, a two-storey house with a swimming pool, go to a lot of barbecues, watch rugby league and pop out some kids with names like Taylah and Brody.
The Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, believes that The Shire is "a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about".
John Howard is, of course, the same man who in 1988 made explicit calls for Asian immigration to Australia to be "slowed down" because it was "divisive". He is the same man who, since becoming Prime Minister, will not say "Sorry" to Aboriginal people for the genocide of their people
on which the modern nation of Australia has been built. He is the same man who called teaching the history of the government-run kidnapping of Aboriginal children (the "stolen generations") "a black armband view of history". John Howard ran an election campaign in 2001 on the (completely false, and proved so) accusation that asylum seekers coming to Australia were throwing their children in the ocean to force the Australian navy to rescue them. John Howard turned back a ship called the Tampa from Australian waters when it was found to be carrying asylum-seekers rescued from a sinking ship, and paid the government of Nauru to take them at phenomenal, unnecessary cost to the Australian taxpayer. His famous policy call on immigration and aslyum was "‘We will decide who comes to Australia and the manner in which they come." There are, of course, THOUSANDS of other examples of John Howard's racism. Type the words "John Howard racism examples" into Google and you'll get 152,000 hits (and a lead news story).
[Note: I checked this and got no fewer than 2.54 million hits, AH]
So combine a white, materialistic enclave in otherwise very multicultural Sydney with a Prime Minister who has made racism into public policy. "Asians" are no longer John Howard's bugbear in the way that Arabs and Muslims are - the "war on terror" is very easy to join if the enemy aren't white. While all terrorism suspects are of "Middle Eastern appearance", according to the news, rather a lot of white folk in the Sutherland Shire believe it's positively patriotic to rip hejabs off Muslim girls. To be fair, it's not just in the Shire - there are a lot of white folk throughout Australia who are happily letting John Howard convince them, every election time, that bigotry is patriotism.
Two men being attacked by racists at Cronulla Station, photo SMH
Now imagine that you're part of Sydney's Lebanese-Australian community. You're as likely to be a Maronite Catholic as a Muslim, and your family could have been here for 60 years, but you've grown up in a country with a tradition of racism (evidence: lots of dead Aboriginal people, the "White Australia" immigration policy that didn't end until the 1960s) and you've been called a "leb" your whole life. You are considered "shifty", "greasy", "oily", "violent" by a vocal minority of the community but in John Howard's Australia, it's that vocal minority that has the government's ear - and the mouths of the right-wing talkback radio hosts. Rather typically, some of the youth of your oppressed ethnic minority defend their beseiged identity by forming gangs.
A couple of years ago, some Lebanese-Australian boys gang-raped some girls. The right-wing media had a field day - as if rape was PURELY a Lebanese-Australian activity, ALL Lebanese-Australians must be rapists and OUR WOMEN WERE NO LONGER SAFE. Of course, as I mentioned before, my Sutherland Shire high school had a rapist, but he was white and never made the papers. The tabloids and the radio hosts happily played to community paranoia that Lebanese-Australian gangs were out to out rape us all, the gangs resented the it, and tension between elements of the community began to build to a violent level. The masculine culture of the White Shire loves an excuse for violence, and the misplaced patriotism of "protecting our women" and teaching those terrorists/Muslims/Lebanese-Australian kids a lesson was the excuse.
[ABC News investigation into racism against Lebanese in Australia following the hysterical responses to the gang-rape case]
The riots have NOT come out of nowhere - there have been years and years of skirmishes between angry Lebanese-Australian gangs and packs of opportunistic white racists on the streets of suburban Sydney. These tensions have been broadened and magnified, of course, by a government and media fuelling a justification for the military circus in Iraq by Muslim-bashing, the terrorism furphy and the electoral virtues of racism. White supremacists seized on their opportunity to ignite trouble and in the heat and frustration of a humid Sydney summer, text messages flew around a ready group of potential rioteers, already encouraged towards active participation in violence by John Howard's favourite talkback radio host, the truly slug-like Alan Jones. One of my students, who happens to live in the Shire, went out to see what the noise was about and ended up with a glass bottle smashed into his leg, with bloody results.
[Click here to read a report by The Age on Alan Jones' role in nurturing white racism among his listeners]
Don't Over-Complicate Riots: PM, Sydney Morning Herald
Since the original violence of the other weekend, there have been other, smaller skirmishes, the onset of an even nastier vendetta, a few arrests and a refusal from the Prime Minister to condemn the violence as racially motivated. Apparently, there will be no damage done to Australia's reputation in the international community - which would, of course, explain why fifty of you emailed me about this when it happened.
[Indymedia in Sydney - careful before reading those comments...]
On behalf of all Australians who love multiculturalism and deplore violence (and we are, I believe, the majority) I would like to say SORRY SORRY SORRY I AM SO EMBARRASSED PLEASE DON'T HATE ME I DO WHAT I CAN I PROMISE. I say this very loudly - so the whole world and my less enlightened compatriots will hear it.
Visit lovely Australia...!
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Cutting to the Chase
Car chases are popular. Any action film since Bullit and The French Connection that is running out of plot can always stick one in somewhere. Any television network seeking to fill a time slot can always commission a documentary of real life car chases, perhaps with a reporter in the back of a police car. Pick up a copy of Grand Theft Auto and you can have a virtual go yourself, smashing your way round the streets of the fictional San Andreas with the radio blaring, while the pixel-citizens jump out your way and yell pre-programmed abuse at you. One website, www.pursuitwatch.com even allows TV viewers in the Los Angeles area to receive a text message whenever there is a live high speed police car chase on the box, so fans of real-life chases don't miss any of the action. The site tells its readers that:
You can expect to see about 4 chases per month on live television. When you get the alert, you'll know a chase can be seen on your TV as it happens. This service now is totally free!
In action films a standard device is for cars to hurl through a market-place and knock over the stalls. Another one is to avoid hitting a woman with a pram by an inch. High speed boy-racers drive over ramps, gaps in bridges, on their side, spin 360 degrees in the air. Bad guys also drive off cliffs and into deep ravines where they explode in a ball of fire, while incompetent police cars tend to slam into each other as the cunning hero outwits them. Near-impossible stunts, near misses, comedy moments (like James Bond driving a tank through a lorry carrying mineral water in the centre of St. Petersburg in Goldeneye), a driver trying to flee his pursuers and simultaneously fight off someone in his vehicle - seen it all before. One device action film-makers don't use, however, would be the high speed chasers running straight through a pedestrian.
By comparison, a computer game like Grand Theft Auto is more realistic, in as much as when you drive around a city at high speed you stand a high chance of killing virtual by-standers - and you do.
Walking past a bus shelter near Monument Way, off Tottenham High Road earlier this week, just round the corner from my house, I was struck by a Witness Appeal Board, asking for anyone with information on this incident:
ON SAT 12TH NOV 05 AT 12:44PM A FATAL ROAD COLLISION OCCURRED BETWEEN A POLICE VAN AND A PEDESTRIAN
By "collision between", they cannot mean that the pedestrian drove into the van. Clearly the police had run him down. Who was he? What happened? If you were there, you could ring up and give the police information about themselves in strictest confidence.
Life Style Extra at Sky.com, ran a short piece announcing that Ali Korkut Kanidagli, a man in his early twenties from North London, was killed after a police van "ploughed into two men in Tottenham, north London, on Saturday afternoon". The second man is recovering in hospital, and a policewoman in the vehicle was being treated for whiplash injuries. Scotland Yard announced that there would be an investigation by the Directorate of Professional Standards, and the matter had been referred "as a matter of course" to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
The IPCC's website states that Ali was killed when a police van responding to an emergency call span out of control and careered on to the pavement. Neither they, nor the British Transport Police Federation website states how fast the van was going.
This incident so very close to home, or at least my home, is not an isolated one. In June this year, Home Office Minister Hazel Blears admitted in a parliamentary answer to an astonishing 60% increase in injuries and deaths involving police cars in England and Wales last year. In a period of twelve months from 2003-4, there were 2,000 casualties involving police cars, and 31 deaths - an increase of 11 deaths and 700 injuries from the previous year.
In 2004, Sir Alistair Graham, chairman of the now disbanded Police Complaints Authority, complained of an "unacceptable death toll" from police vehicles. Then, there were 27 fatalities from April 2003 to March 2004: "In my view, still to have the number of fatalities around the 30 mark, which is probably what we are looking at this year, is an unacceptable death toll." By comparison, in the 1997-8 period, there were nine such deaths. Accidents involving police vehicles, Sir Alistair noted, now accounted for one in a hundred of all traffic accidents. In 2003, the PCA had issued much the same warning - that the death toll from these accidents was "far too high". 31 people had died in the previous year, though the PCA then said that this represented an encouraging decrease from 42 the year before that. The Home Office has responded to these trends by defending current practice - "Emergencies do call for an urgent response".
The number of accidents involving police vehicles is huge. In 1997, for instance, there were a jaw-widening 27,721 incidents in total - that in a year of relatively low fatalities. This reflected a general increase in such accidents throughout the 1990s and in previous decades. Much of this followed from the exemption of the police and other emergency services from speeding limits. Audrey Farrell, in 'Crime, Class and Corruption: The Politics of the Police', wrote in 1992:
"Police cars in London alone were involved in accidents at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a year in the 1970s. After the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act waived speed limits for emergency vehicles the police car accident rate moved up to over 4,000 a year in the 1980s and in 1988 they were involved in 5,400 accidents. In London the accident rate involving personal injury with police cars is two and a half times that of taxi cabs."
High speed car chases and speeding by police vehicles in response to emergency calls carry a high risk and take a heavy toll. Does the need to respond to emergencies as soon as possible and pursue criminals on the roads justify the risks? The evidence suggests that in the majority of cases, the answer is no.
Farell cites a Home Office study carried out (now over 20 years ago) in 1984, 'Crime And Police Effectiveness', which found that:
"It is now recognised that the advantages of fast response are less than had been previously supposed... in most major cities the police can get to the scene of a crime within minutes... a large American study found that no more than 3 percent of crimes reported to the police resulted in arrests which could be attributed to the speed with which a patrol reached the scene of the crime... Where offenders are disturbed in the course of crime, they can make good their escape... in seconds rather than minutes."
So in only a very small minority of cases could speeding be justified. For the overwhelming majority of cases, the minutes saved by driving dangerously fast are not worth the risk to everyone involved.
High speed pursuit, too, is rarely worth it - and sometimes police departments themselves have come to the same conclusion. In November 2003, East Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire police were issued with new guidelines prohibiting high speed car chases, instead suggesting other methods of dealing with criminals fleeing in vehicles, such as helicopters and the use of Stingers (devices that puncture car tires). The decision followed a PCA investigation that studied over 80 incidents in which 90 people were killed. Humberside police said that the guidelines had, in any case, "been their policy for some time" (BBC Online).
In Australia this year, the Sydney Morning Herald carried out an investigation into police car chases in the state of New South Wales highlighting the fact that the police in NSW resorted to car chases more often even than the notorious Los Angeles force:
The Herald investigation revealed police made four times as many high-speed pursuits as Los Angeles, the reputed car-chase capital of the world. Mostly they were chasing traffic offenders, rarely suspects in serious crime.
Police in NSW were also involved in more fatal pursuits than police in other states, after taking population and other factors into account. Many of those killed were innocent passers-by, including children. [Emphasis added]
The investigators, Debra Jopson and Gerard Ryle, looked into the subject following the death of Tabatha Berg in January 2004. Tabatha, aged 3, was asleep in the back of her parents' car when a Holden fleeing New South Wales police came driving at speed in the opposite direction on the wrong side of road - the businessman inside (also killed) was fleeing a pursuing police car. Tabatha joined Laura McGrath, 18, who pulled over after hearing police sirens and was killed by a 15 year-old joy-rider who drove straight into her, Mansae Paea, 17, who dropped his parents off at church and was then hit by a car fleeing the police and Christopher Kopff, 24, whose vehicle was hit a by a police car driving on the wrong side of the road trying to join the pursuit of a suspect.
Reporters Jopson and Ryle noted that New South Wales police did not even keep a record of by-standers killed in police pursuits - "The number of passers-by killed in the course of a police pursuit in NSW is one toll state authorities do not publish". They incorrectly gave the figure of fatalities as 9 in 10 years. After further investigation, they found that the actual figure is 54.
In defence of police practice, Deputy Commissioner Dave Madden responded to the fallout from Tabatha's death by arguing that: "If we discontinued pursuits we would be giving a green light to any criminal, any hoodlum or any offender that knows all they have to do is speed up to get away from police, and they are right." But in fact, as Humberside Police in England have found, there are other, less dangerous options and the need to arrest "any hoodlum", in Mr. Madden's choice words, doesn't justify the high risk of killing innocent people and contributing further the most common cause of violent death - traffic accidents.
The pointlessness of many such chases is illustrated by the example of Matthew Robertson, 19, and Dylan Raywood, 17 who were trying to escape police through a suburb in south-west Sydney and drove into a gum tree in February this year. Both were killed. Another young man in the car escaped. Matthew and Dylan were known to the police - if the police had considered the risk and called off the chase, it would not have been beyond them to find the two teenagers later and arrest them. Instead, they pursued them to their deaths, to the outrage of local residents - already angry after the injury of another police suspect fleeing police who drove into exactly the same tree a few weeks previously.
The case with the biggest impact on Sydney was that of a 17 year-old Aboriginal boy, Thomas Hickey who was killed while riding a bicycle, which tipped forward, throwing him off and leaving him impaled on the spikes of a metal fence. His family and local residents believed, rightly or wrongly, that a police car's pursuit of Hickey had led to the accident. His gruesome death, combined with years of anger at racist police conduct and high rates of Aboriginal poverty prompted fierce riots in Redfern, Sydney's largely Aboriginal district.
Thomas "TJ" Hickey
Cameron Murphy, the president of New South Wales' Council for Civil Liberties, welcomed a new investigation by the state's slothful police watchdog following the Sydney Morning Herald's reporting:
"It is long overdue that there was an inquiry into this issue. We have had many tragic and terrible events that have resulted in loss of life that could have been avoided. I think it is a tragedy if someone has committed a relatively minor crime and that results in the death of a police officer who is trying to apprehend them, or an innocent person who is driving on the road, or even the suspect."
Writing for Atlanta Magazine Online, Doug Crandell notes that in the USA:
"According to the FBI, police pursuits are responsible for about one death every day, including roughly one law enforcement officer every 11 weeks. At least 10 people have died as a result of high-speed chases in metro Atlanta and Augusta since last year."
In the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in July 2002, John Hill wrote in an article entitled 'High-speed police pursuits: dangers, dynamics, and risk reduction':
Available data indicate that the number of pursuits continues to increase, as well as the number of pursuit-related injuries and deaths. A traffic accident constitutes the most common terminating event in an urban pursuit, and most people agree that these pursuits should be controlled. ...Some research indicates that police pursuits result in about 350 deaths per year and the number of pursuits increases each year. One organization estimates that about 2,500 persons die each year as a result of police pursuits and that another 55,000 are injured. Although some law enforcement sources argue that these estimates are exaggerated, they concede that the 350 figure may be too low. [Emphasis added]
Again, note that the death toll is not being properly counted - a staggering admission of callous conduct on the part of US law enforcement agencies. Doug Crandell wrote from some personal experience:
My 9-year-old daughter had just asked me what she needed to do to get a college scholarship. I suppose our conversation could have been about anything and it too would’ve stuck in my mind forever. But her ironic line of questioning still haunts me and fuels my anger—pushing me to research the law en-forcement policies that nearly put my daughter in mortal danger. I would later be stunned to discover that about one person dies every day as a result of police pursuits, the majority of which begin after routine traffic violations.
In our case, a fatal crash was narrowly avoided. At the risk of sounding the braggart, it was my defensive driving skills that kept us alive, not the police’s experience or standard operating procedures designed to keep innocent civilians safe. I did my best to crank the steering wheel as far left as I could and to offer to the fleeing motorist only the passenger’s side front corner of the car as a deflected target. As I did so, the truck clipped us hard and shot off into a gas main and then a nearby yard before the cops dragged the driver out of the vehicle and quickly arrested him. We’d avoided the dreaded head-on collision that certainly would have injured us severely or—and I can still barely let myself think of it—killed my child.
...No less than eight Cobb County police officers arrived on the scene. We were ordered onto the sidewalk by one, and just moments later, another approached and de-manded that we get back into our vehicles. I pointed to our totaled car and explained that we were involved in the accident. He made no effort to recognize our predicament and didn’t seem to notice that I was clutching a visibly shaken fourth-grader at my side.
In England, Robert Scutts today continues to suffer from serious memory and balance difficulties. In 1995, then only 17, he was hit by a police car driving over the speed limits. His father, Jeremy, recalls:
"Robert ran out at the pedestrian crossing to catch his bus. He either didn't hear the police siren, or couldn't tell which direction it was coming from. The car was on him before it saw him. He was going to university and then join the air force. As it was, he didn't even finish his A-levels."
The police car had been responding to call to pursue burglars, (who were running on foot). Jeremy Scutts was taken to see Robert as he lay in a coma in hospital. The police drove him there - at more than 80 miles an hour. "I really think police cars should take into account the level of the incident they are responding to. Even when the police drove us to the hospital to see Robert, the officer was going 80mph. I kept thinking what might happen if another car pulled out."
And so on. "Sadie was a lovely, healthy child and she has been reduced to someone who will have to struggle for the rest for the rest of her life unnecessarily," Brian Stevens, a steelworker from Newtown in Birmingham told the BBC. His daughter Sadie, 11, had her leg below her right knee amputated after being run down by an armed response vehicle in February 2004. Her family welcomed the efforts of readers of a local newspaper, the Evening Mail, to raise money for Sadie, since "While she will get some state support, it can be slow to materialise and equipment provided is not always top of the range." Not always top of the range - unlike the vehicle that crippled her. Pc James Hibbert, who admitted driving without due care and attention, was fined £400 and ordered to pay £700 costs.
Accidents can occur while police are trying to carry out useful parts of their job as best they can, but much of this conduct is simply callous and indefensible. In many cases, police break speed limits and take risks with the lives of others for its own sake. Farell quotes a Policy Study Institute Report, 'Police in Action' which stated that car chases "offer a kind of excitement that police officers particularly hanker after." And again from an Inquest report, 'Death in the City':
A key ingredient in modern police culture is the car chase... The usual impulse which leads to cars racing through built up areas at 100 mph is not aggression but boredom. The car chase is one of the rare opportunities for mobile patrols to feel that they are seriously involved in maintaining law and order." [Emphasis added]
For the less conscientious, speeding offers bored, frustrated officers the chance to feel like they are making a difference to crime rates (even though they rarely do in reality), that they are in charge, that they are being real cops like the ones on television. Saying that, as already noted, the police themselves pay a heavy price for their work on the roads, as a look through the list of police officers killed while on duty demonstrates.
But if some police officers and governments can be criticised for a careless attitude towards public safety, they are perhapds joined by television producers and members of the public who have made the car chase something of a rather unpleasant fetish. I am not referring to silly films like David Cronenberg's Crash, but to sensationalist documentaries such as Cops.
In February 2003, Jim Hahn, then Mayor of Los Angeles, gave a press conference to deliver the message that car chases were not a spectator sport:
"Police pursuits are not entertainment. They're certainly not a video game. They are life-and-death situations that put drivers, police officers, pedestrians, other innocent members of the community at risk."
Hahn's particular concern was that some of those fleeing the police were driven on by the special attention and live television coverage they received. But what of the fact that by making car chases into entertainment, viewers are choosing to ignore the human cost - and blithely accepting the notion that most of these pursuits are actually necessary or beneficial to the public at large? The reality is that, overall, the public are safer when the police drive more slowly, and keep to the speeding laws they are usually required to enforce.
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Rebels Without A Cause
By Daniel Simpson
“When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.” (African proverb)
Ugandan night commuters
GULU, Uganda - What can atone for the mutilated children who’ve learned to smile without lips, to clasp pens with stumpy limbs and even to flirt with forgiveness? For the militia of abducted villagers and teenage gunmen terrorising northern Uganda, the first step towards justice crushes an egg.
On a knoll outside Gulu, a bustling town on the frontier of Africa’s most neglected war zone, 60 former rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) line up to repent of their crimes at a traditional cleansing ceremony. All have recently surrendered to the government, or been captured in skirmishes with Ugandan troops. Their right feet are bare. On their left, some sport battered flip-flops; others the footwear of choice for guerrillas across the continent: green wellington boots.
Wailing ululations from local tribeswomen crescendo above a bassline beat out by a drummer in a “50 Cent” T-shirt as the procession of LRA commanders, footsoldiers and their child brides hobbles towards a solitary egg, propped up in the dust by a forked stick. The first foot cracks its shell, smearing the branch with a slimy coating for the others to tread on before shaking hands with a tribal chief clad in white robes and a pinstriped jacket. Reconciliation is officially under way.
“This is just a peace-building measure to build confidence, to let them come back, let us have peace and then people are going to talk,” explained Rwot David Onen Acana II, who was crowned paramount chief of the Acholi tribe in January after studying conflict resolution strategies at Birmingham University. “An egg symbolises purity and innocence and yet there is life in it, so we do this as a means of purification and indicating the innocence of these people because they were taken against their will.”
The LRA doesn’t accept recruits; it kidnaps them. Tens of thousands of abducted Acholis, a substantial proportion of them children, have kept the northern insurgency alive for 19 years. Their obedience is secured at gunpoint, sometimes accompanied by orders to commit atrocities as grotesque as murdering their own families and eating the boiled corpses.
Aftermath of LRA atrocity in northern Uganda
Those not cowed by guilt or fear are brainwashed with a concoction of apocalyptic Christianity and tribal spiritualism cooked up by the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, who claims to be a prophet. The rebels have issued no demands except to say they’re purifying the north to govern in accordance with the Ten Commandments, most of which they ignore.
The tide could be turning, however. Government offers of amnesty, plots of land and a stipend from the state have enticed thousands of LRA fighters out of the bush over the past year, including a wave of high-profile defections. Mr Kony’s charismatic spokesman and his dreadlocked director of operations were both lined up in penance before Mr Acana, but the warlord holding northern Uganda to ransom remains at large, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) prepares to indict him for crimes against humanity.
Opposed from the outset by the United States, which has undermined its attempts to hold war criminals to account in Burundi and Sudan, the new court has much to prove. When the Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, asked the ICC to intervene last year, prosecutors seized on their first major case, but the implications are stark for an ongoing conflict that can only be resolved peacefully by making rebels an offer they can’t refuse. The struggle to end the war is now at odds with efforts to put international outlaws on trial.
Humanitarian relief organisations are as upset as the Ugandan mediators who accompanied Mr Acana to The Hague in March to plead for a delay in proceedings. The ICC might be a good thing in principle, argues Oxfam, but if four people out of five in northern Uganda have been driven from their land, alleviating their suffering ought to trump what other critics dub “international law fundamentalism”. Having previously announced that indictments were imminent, the court now says it has no timetable for prosecuting Mr Kony and his top lieutenants. In Gulu, confusion reigns.
“There are definitely institutionalised tensions between the ICC, the amnesty process and conventional approaches to peace-building, which are by and large geared to rewarding the most violent to stop them being violent,” said Dr Tim Allen, a specialist on East African conflicts at the London School of Economics. “But the aid agencies complaining about this come across as daft: they’re now campaigning against the court they helped to set up.”
Aid workers and tribal elders also lobbied President Museveni to pass an amnesty law underpinned by traditional justice rites that hark back to days when warriors bent spears to cement a truce. Sceptics, both Acholi and Western, have questioned the utility of these ceremonies in confronting cannibalism, sex slavery and mass mutilation, but Mr Acana is a keen advocate.
“This process is not yet conclusive,” said the soft-spoken chief after overseeing the cleansing. Public truth-telling rituals would follow, he continued, with the local community deciding whether to demand redress, as happens at the open-air village courts which cross-examine Rwandan genocide suspects. “Those who will be singled out will have to go through this traditional process until we reach a point of compensation and reconciliation and that is where forgiveness comes in.”
Surprisingly few speak openly of revenge. Geofrey Obita was 16 when rebels hacked off his lips, ears and fingers and stuffed them into his pocket, together with a letter warning all Acholis to expect the same treatment if they collaborated with the government. Hunched on a Gulu veranda over a bottle of soda, which he sips through clenched teeth via a straw, Geofrey insists he bears no grudge against the younger boys who ambushed him two years ago.
Children who have fled the war for the cities and refugeee camps
“I have forgiven them, because even if I catch them, my ears and my fingers are not going to grow back,” he said. “There is an amnesty, so I can do nothing to them.”
Others are less charitably inclined. Fearing reprisals were they to return to their old homes, senior rebel defectors live in Gulu barracks. Resentment festers in the surrounding region, where the government has herded 1.5 million people into fenceless concentration camps patrolled by Ugandan soldiers and kept alive on food handouts from the United Nations, which describes the conditions as “sub-human”. Swollen stomachs and glazed eyes betray the prevalence of disease and malnutrition; alcoholism and prostitution are rife. Demobilised LRA commanders, meanwhile, get armed guards, mobile phones and monthly allowances of up to £200.
“In the bush, these people show no mercy,” a local relief worker protested. “I think they should expect the same after all they’ve done to us.”
Tempting as it may be to have faith in cults of collective healing, it is unclear what power they possess. From the perspective of the penitents waiting under a mango tree for their absolution, it’s largely a question of going through the motions of a ritual more commonly performed to welcome back relatives who’ve been away from home.
“It has been done since time immemorial by our ancestors and elders and the paramount chiefs are obliged to carry out their duty,” explained Joaquim Opoka, a 54-year-old former headmaster who served 10 years in the LRA as secretary, general dogsbody and occasional infantryman. “That is why they have summoned us.”
The message of redemption is broadcast widely. Three nights a week, repentant rebels take to the airwaves of Mega FM to beg their former cohorts to join them in laying down arms. “Kony come home,” warbles the chorus of a song in heavy rotation on Gulu’s most popular radio station. Everyone should be eligible for amnesty, believes Mr Acana, no matter how serious their crimes.
“Kony can return and lead a normal life here,” he said. “It might only be his own feelings of guilt that can drive him away.”
Wary of rushing to judgment, some anthropologists argue that Western conceptions of punitive justice are just as alien to Acholi beliefs as tribal rituals might seem to supporters of the ICC.
“We have to really understand how they’ve come to define and practise justice before we dismiss it,” cautioned Dr Erin Baines, a Canadian academic who came to Gulu to study traditional healing rites. “I remember a woman once said to me: ‘First the whites came as missionaries and they brought for us religion. Then the colonialists came and they brought for us the state and boundaries. And now the ICC is here to bring us justice. We know what justice is’.”
Injustice has prevailed in the north since President Museveni fought his way to power in 1986 and took revenge on Acholis for their involvement in earlier massacres of southerners. The vicious rivalry between north and south is rooted in imperial policies of divide and rule: when the British colonised Uganda, they told Acholis they were born warriors and sent them to join the King’s African Rifles; southern tribesmen staffed the administration.
Since Uganda gained independence in 1962, the balance of power has swung by coup and countercoup, from the tyrannies of Idi Amin and Milton Obote to President Museveni’s civil war. Aid workers and Acholis alike accuse the president of exploiting the LRA rebellion to subjugate the north while the rest of the country enjoys relative stability and prosperity. The war also allows him to maintain a semi-militarised state, despite calls for cuts in defence spending from the international donors who supply half of his government budget.
“Is it chaos or conspiracy? In the end it’s probably a bit of both,” said Jim Terrie, senior East Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group. “Museveni’s scared of talks because they open a Pandora’s box of northern grievances. He’s only really interested in a resolution on his terms.”
Foreign powers have largely left him to it. The war festered for 17 years before the United Nations spoke of moral outrage; until then, Western governments were more interested in touting Uganda as an African success story. President Museveni’s economic reforms have earned him plaudits from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, while President George W. Bush has hailed his efforts to combat AIDS and added the LRA to the State Department list of terrorist organisations.
Earlier this year, Washington presented President Museveni with a fleet of trucks worth $800,000 as part of an ongoing programme of military aid. Having urged the ICC to investigate allegations of torture, rape and other abuses by the Ugandan army, human rights activists also want America to rein in its ally.
“The Bush administration must ensure that Mr. Museveni does not interpret continuing U.S. support, including military assistance, as a blank cheque to violate civil and political rights and avoid his responsibility to protect civilians,” Human Rights Watch said in January.
Military success for the government generally gives Acholis fresh reason to mourn. The most brutal phase of the war followed Operation Iron Fist, the biggest Ugandan offensive to date, which pushed the rebels back over the border from their southern Sudanese hideout in 2002. Supply lines from Khartoum were cut, so the LRA took to looting northern Uganda. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly from the tens to the hundreds of thousands.
The search for a peaceful outcome hobbles on. Government mediator Betty Bigombe telephoned Mr Kony last month to renew truce talks, which collapsed in February after the LRA’s chief negotiator, Sam Kolo, negotiated his own surrender.
Ms Bigombe, a World Bank consultant who has dealt with the rebels since 1994, describes Mr Kony as a man with multiple personality disorder. The cult leader seems friendly, others report, until the spirits begin to talk through him.
"On good days, he talks to God and on other days he thinks he is God," the State Department’s Donald Yamamoto told U.S. lawmakers earlier this month when a Congressional committee questioned whether Mr Kony was a rational actor. Either way, President Museveni has yet to come up with a coherent peace offer.
Nobody seems to know what the rebels want. Not even Mr Kolo, their former spokesman.
“I’m no longer in the LRA,” he replied when confronted in a bar after the cleansing ceremony. “Please go and ask Joseph Kony.”
Never too young to learn
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Link to anarchists in Uganda!
"Uganda has become a basket of War criminals, dictators, Social parasites, liars(Cadres), bent politics and state wankers. Uganda anarchists are fed up of this basket. Anarchism is the only remmedy that can heal our people. We believe in a system that has no leadership but delegates elected and appointed by the populace. Delegates that can be re-called at short notice when delegation is turned into power. A democracy that is built from the grassroot and managed by grassroot people. A system that is accountable to its people. We don't believe in national passports or national borders. Our task is to inform the masses but not tell them what to do."
Poster condemns the Ugandan government's role as a protector of US strategic and economic self-interests in Central Africa
Amnesty International film on war crimes in Uganda
A demonstration is attacked by state forces in Uganda, Indymedia South Africa
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Giving our Consent
"Three or four times a year, we in Britain go through a ritual known as Outcry Over Judge's Remarks in Rape Case" wrote the political commentator Joan Smith in 1990 and in keeping with this tradition, we have the slightly eye-brow-raising tone of news coverage following the collapse of a rape trial in Wales where the prosecution threw the towel in once it was clear the woman in question was unable to remember whether she had given consent or not.
At Swansea Crown Court, Judge Roderick Evans ruled that "drunken consent is still consent", Genevieve Roberts writes for the Independent (Nov 24th) and instructed the jury to return a not-guilty verdict even if they disagreed with it. Since the woman conceded under questioning that she could not remember whether she had consented or not, prosecution barrister Huw Rees felt there was no longer evidence of a rape. The defence could argue its case that the accused man had merely decided to have sex with a paralytic 21 year-old he didn't know in the corridor outside her home after obtaining her permission, which is not illegal, though it's not something you'd write on your CV either.
The woman in question attended a party at Aberystwyth University where she drank two shots of vodka and two glasses of wine. She became ill, threw up and slipped over in the University arts centre toilets, then staggered out for some fresh air - "I was in an awful state. I have never been that drunk in all my life... I was losing all focus and feeling very dizzy." She told the court that a concerned woman had urged her to go home accompanied, and so she returned to her flat alongside a part-time University security guard whom she had not met before. She claimed she could remember looking for her keys, then lying on the floor and that she "could feel that something was happening", though she was not fully conscious.
But she did not know what exactly, and two days later went to a university counsellor. After the Dyfed-Powys Police investigated and questioned the security guard, she discovered for the first time that she had had sex. She maintains that, "If I had wanted to sleep with him I would have taken the few steps to my bedroom."
Maybe there was a rape, maybe there was not. Perhaps the security guard's actions took him right to the edge of the law but not quite over. Since the woman was drifting in and out of consciousness, it seems likely that the defendant was in fact breaking the law under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which stipulates that an unconscious woman is unable to give consent. Huw Rees has been asked to submit a report to the Crown Prosecution Service to explain his reasons for calling off his own prosecution. Vera Baird, a criminal QC, Labour MP and head of the All Party Parliamentary Groups for Domestic Violence and the group for Survivors of Sexual Abuse, argues that Judge Roderick Evans' decision was incorrect.
Another photograph of a paralytic woman - the sort of picture the press are always using to illustrate excessive drinking
What the case does illustrate, either way, is how staggeringly easy it is to rape someone and get away with it. Men who fancy both their chances and the woman on the other side of the room might take note - and a significant number do. Since only 10% of reported rapes - themselves a small percentage of the total - are brought to court, and of these the conviction rate is 5.6%, the chances of getting away with it are already high. The key is to be careful in choosing your victim.
Some of these prejudices were brought to the public attention this week by an ICM poll commissioned by Amnesty International as a part of Amnesty's campaign against violence towards women, the results of which suggest that some old arguments need to be gone over again. The poll found that:
"...a third (34%) of people in the UK believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has behaved in a flirtatious manner. For instance, more than a quarter (26%) of those asked said that they thought a women was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was wearing sexy or revealing clothing, and more than one in five (22%) held the same view if a woman had had many sexual partners. Around one in 12 people (8%) believed that a woman was totally responsible for being raped if she’d had many sexual partners.
Similarly, more than a quarter of people (30%) said that a woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if she was drunk..."
These are views people are less likely to hold when considering other forms of violent crime such as assault or mugging, where the victim is rarely deemed to be responsible even if they were drunk or wearing stilettos or winked at the criminal who attacked them. Just over a fifth of the survey's respondents thought that women were responsible, either partially, or for a particularly harsh 5% completely responsible, if they were raped while walking along a deserted street at night. It is a minority who still hold these kinds of views, but a substantial one for a rapist in court to work on. It is possible that this view is reinforced by the media predilection for illustrating almost every article on binge drinking with loud, vomiting or unconscious women, even when the story is about men. (Hence the photographic examples in this article...)
The number of recorded rapes in Britain in the last year was 12,867. This is itself a small fraction of the total - police estimate about 15% of the total. The British Crime Survey, generally regarded as the most accurate source of statistics on crime puts the estimated a figure of rapes in Britain at 80,000 a year, a figure which almost no one in the ICM poll was close to getting.
80,000 rapes a year is almost reminiscent of Bosnia or Vietnam in wartime. It is a truly awful figure of unrecognised suffering up and down the country.
'...when I was at the house of a friend, a Ripper murder was reported on the news and my friend's mother made a contemptuous spitting noise as the faces of the Ripper's victims came up on the screen, including Mum's. "They deserve everything they get," she said.' (p65)
This view was more widely held than many appreciate, and extended to some of the police working on the investigation, one of whom openly told journalists at a press conference that the Ripper's victims were sluts. The police released a statement in 1982:
"...the Ripper, having previously murdered prostitutes, is now seeking victims among innocent women." ('Crime, Class and Corruption: The Politics of the Police', Audrey Farrell, 1992, p128)
The wordlview of a serial killer and his pursuers in the police was not so very far apart on that issue. Recall that prostitution is not a criminal offence in Britain, nor was it then.
Rapists benefit not only from the view that some women deserve whatever they choose to do to them, but also from popular perceptions about the kinds of people who commit this crime of opportunity, as Cochrane wrote:
'The myths surrounding rapists - that they are wild-eyed types with shifty eyes and unkempt beards - are another factor that lets women down in court. It is very difficult for an accuser who has been drinking to secure a conviction against a defendant who is smartly turned out, holds down a job and has a girlfriend.'
Most rape is committed by a person known to the victim, another aspect of the crime where public opinion lags behind the reality. In fact, in Britain, it was not until 1992 that rape within marriage was even made illegal.
The onus falls on the rest of us to consider how we can expose the sexual assault of women and young girls that takes place in our midst on a large scale and bring the perpetrators to account for their crimes, because it will not happen by itself. Getting the responsibility of the rapist and the victim in some perspective would be a good place to start.
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Friday, October 28, 2005
The Unbearable Heaviness of the Left-Wing Blogger
Whatever happened to the heroes? - The US army killed their own poster boy last year in Afghanistan then lied about it, as the parents of Pat Tillman have angrily told the press. This is a story about the many revelations that have emerged from the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who joined the US Army Rangers in 2002
Mission from God - George Bush has often made the immodest claim that his policies and political career are a reflection of the will of God, no less, sometimes quite belligerently. So why did the White House try to deny it?
The Fight Against Al-Jazeera - how supporters of the Iraq War misunderstand and misrepresent the Arab televsion network, siding with the network's multiple enemies in the Gulf
Perhaps more soon, and more up-to-date soon...
Alex Higgins, writing from Tottenham, London, England
Should you wish, e-mail me at Respond_Alexblog at Yahoo dot co dot uk
Link to the official Dilbert website here
Whatever happened to the heroes?
"If this is what happens when someone high profile dies, I can only imagine what happens with everyone else." Mary Tillman, mother of Corporal Pat Tillman, killed April 22nd, 2004 in Afghanistan.
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As a hero of George W. Bush's wars, Pat Tillman was perfect. A square-jawed Californian football star, voted Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year at Arizona State University in 1997 (where he also scored a 3.84 grade average out of a possible 4 and went on to do an MA in history), he broke records for the Arizona Cardinals with 224 tackles in one season. (I know almost nothing about American football, so I can't honestly tell you how good that is...)
Emotionally affected by the September 11th massacres, he turned down a $3.6 million contract for the Cardinals, decided to enlist and joined the Army Rangers (salary $18,000 a year) in June 2002 alongside his brother Kevin in the hope of pursuing Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of south-east Afghanistan. The Bush administration was delighted, and Donald Rumsfeld wrote him a personal letter of gratitude. Tillman made only one public statement about his reasons for joining up, saying among other things:
"I play football, and it just seems so goddamn--it is--unimportant compared to everything that's taken place... My great grandfather was at Pearl Harbour and a lot of my family has... gone and fought in wars. And I really haven't done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that goes."
Tillman, as a member of A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, participated first in the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 and after that was deployed in Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan, where on April 22nd, 2004, he was killed. The Pentagon issued an edifying account of his final heroism as he and his men fought al-Qa'ida: "Through the firing, Tillman's voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground."
The White House issued a statement to say that the President's thoughts and prayers were with the Tillman family. Pat was awarded the Purple Heart and the Silver Star posthumously. His memorial service in San Jose was attended by 3,500 people and broadcast nationwide, with eulogies from the likes of Arizona Senator John McCain.
His example has been held up by numerous right-wing commentators as a paragon of noble sacrifice, a challenge to today's youth - "an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror” in Bush's words. The ultra-right-wing hack Ann Coulter, in a book on why you should never talk graciously to liberals (a category she defines very broadly), hailed Pat as “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be” sounding like a 1930s Aryan racial theorist. Pat Tillman was perfect.
Too perfect. Shortly after the memorial service and ever since, facts have emerged that have shown that this view of the life and death of Pat Tillman is substantially fictional. Among them:
* Pat was not killed by Afghan rebels or Islamists but by his fellow troops - in fact, it seems unlikely that there were any hostile fighters in the area when he was shot;
* Pentagon officials lied directly and repeatedly to Pat's mother and father about his death, while issuing statements they knew to be false to the public.
More recently it has emerged that:
* Senior officers in command of Pat's platoon have engaged in an extensive cover-up of the circumstances of his death, including deceiving investigators, rewriting internal reports, and destroying physical evidence;
* Pat Tillman's politics were very different to what his right-wing admirers have imagined - he was an opponent of Bush and planned to vote for Senator John Kerry in the November 2004 elections and urged other soldiers to do so too;
* Pat was an opponent of the Iraq War and criticised it strong terms among his fellow soldiers;
* Pat was an "avid reader" of America's fiercest foreign policy critic, MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, and a meeting was arranged between him and Chomsky for after he returned from Afghanistan.
The army's initial statement that Pat Tillman was last "heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy" was a cruel parody of what they knew to be the truth. Pat had indeed used his last words urging his fellow soldiers to "take the fight to the enemy" in the sense that he had pleaded unsuccessfully for them to stop shooting him - "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat fucking Tillman, dammit".
Robert Collier, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed along with Pat's parents thousands of pages of documents, trying to piece together Pat's last day, from which much of the following information is drawn, along with Andrew Buncombe's feature for the Independent, 'The life and death of American icon'.
On April 22nd last year, Tillman's company were travelling in Humvee towards the village of Manah, but stopped outside Sperah, 25 miles south-west of the city of Khost when one of the Humvees broke down. The commanding officers decided to split the platoon over the objections of its leader, Lieutenant David Uthlaut, so that one half stayed with broken vehicle and the other half pressed ahead. This meant that half a unit was being sent into hostile territory in broad daylight, which is, to the say the least, a break from conventional military strategy which advises always using the cover of night in such circumstances. Still, that's the 'can-do' spirit. It is not known who made this decision - possibly Captain William Saunders or Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffrey Bailey. “It was dumb to send us out during daylight,” said platoon member Russel Baer to the Chronicle.
Pat's unit drove ahead, while his brother Kevin waited with the second for an Afghan truck to carry the broken Humvee, which arrived about a quarter of an hour later. The two groups were unable to see each other and lost radio contact. The delayed second group came under fire and the platoon made the probably incorrect assumption that they were being ambushed by Taliban guerrillas.
Pat, accompanied by a soldier of an allied Afghan militia (who is not named in the press reports and whose fate is one of the most neglected parts of this story), climbed up a nearby hill in an attempt to get a view of who was firing on the other half of the platoon and shoot back. But a vehicle from the other unit that had sped ahead caught up with Pat's unit and mistook Pat and his Afghan companion for the enemy. The Afghan soldier started shooting across the ridge over them at what he presumably then thought to be hostile fighters. While he was recognised by the driver of the vehicle from the second unit as an ally (they were about 65 metres away - though the range is a disputed detail), the driver failed to halt the fire of his companions in time.
The soldiers from the second unit started "shooting wildly, without first identifying their target, and also shot at a village on the ridgeline." Pat waved his arms, yelled and set off a smoke grenade in an effort to identify himself and the firing came to a halt - but not before the Afghan militia fighter beside him was killed. Tillman stood up and began talking to his surviving companion.
Then the firing resumed and he was "hit in the wrist with shrapnel and in his body armor with numerous bullets" His companion later testified:
"I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat f—ing Tillman, dammit.' He said this over and over until he stopped... I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was … I saw his head was gone.”
Pat Tillman was killed by three bullets that went into his forehead. If this account of events is accurate, it clearly goes beyond a tragic friendly fire mishap to culpable negligence bordering on second degree homicide.
Testifying to official investigators, local Afghan militia leaders denied that there had been any hostile fire. "It was just the Americans and the [allied] militiamen shooting at each other - just a terrible mistake", said Karim Khan, the Sperah area security chief, to which his deputy, Yusef Din, concurred: "There was an explosion and the two sides thought it was a Taliban attack. It wasn't - it was just the two sides attacking each other."
Back in Washington, faced with a massive escalation of the Iraq War that month, which raised the serious prospect of US military defeat for the first time, the Pentagon learned almost immediately that the US army had just killed its most famous and popular recruit. But a public relations disaster was instead turned into a triumph, if only temporarily - simply by fabricating an alternative account of Pat Tillman's death with a more uplifting ending. In this version, Pat was cut down by Taliban fighters in the heat of battle, while urging his men onwards.
CNN reported the inspiring tale:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed Thursday while serving as an Army Rangers soldier on a mission in southeastern Afghanistan, Pentagon officials have told CNN. He was 27.
Pentagon sources confirmed that a soldier killed during an ambush on a coalition combat patrol, reported in a U.S. Central Command release, was Tillman.The incident took place at 7:30 p.m. local time Thursday near the village of Sperah, 40 kilometers southwest of Khowst.
"The enemy action was immediately responded to by the coalition patrol with direct fire and a firefight ensued," the release said. "During the engagement, one coalition soldier was killed and two wounded." It also said an Afghan Militia Force soldier was killed and that "the enemy broke contact during the engagement."
Many press reports gave a similar story. Politicians stepped in to deliver the wholesome lessons of a life well lived, and not lost in vain:
Sen. John Kyl released a statement calling Tillman "a great American hero in the truest sense. He had already given up so much, including an incredible football career and loving family, to fight for his country in the war on terrorism. His patriotism and courage are an inspiration and we are grateful for his ultimate sacrifice."
Rep. Jeff Flake said, "Pat Tillman exemplified the sacrifice, selflessness, and service of the U.S. military. Nowadays, genuine role models in professional sports are few and far between, but Tillman proved that there are still heroes in sports."
Pat, assumed to be a conventional stalwart of American nationalism, was portrayed across the conservative blogosphere as a reason for other young people to make themselves into sacrifices, often with the unsubtle implication that what is wrong with America's youth today is a selfish unwillingness to get inside a body-bag. One commentator on one of these sites informs us that Pat "reminds us that our cause is even nobler than we believe". Another that:
"My daughter, a tall blond, blue eyed, all american high school sports star, decided to join the Marines instead of modeling. She was inspired by Pat Tillman's sacrifice and his love of country. She is in basic right now. I've never been so scared, and yet so proud."
Another actually felt the need to remind readers that Pat's death was not an entirely good thing, even though it offers such a great opportunity to persuade people to go and get killed in Iraq - "On one level, this is not good news..." On one level! That would be the level where he died, presumably.
And so on and so forth.
Tom Danziger - see Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons
Then, five weeks later, with the memorial service over and the 75th Ranger Regiment about to return from Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced that another investigation had found that it was "probable" that Pat had been killed in a friendly fire incident (they knew full well that it was a good deal more than probable - it was a fact). This news hit Pat's parents hard, but as more details emerged, they became outspoken in their anger, fully aware of what the Department of Defense had done and why. Patrick Tillman Senior, Pat's father, told the Washington Post:
"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."
His mother, Mary agrees (Patrick and Mary are divorced but have pursued their son's case together):
"We should not have been subjected to all of this. This lie was to cover their image. I think there's a lot more yet that we don't even know, or they wouldn't still be covering their tails."
The Washington Post's investigation in May this year, entitled, "Tillman's Parents Are Critical of Army; Family Questions Reversal on Cause of Ranger's Death" also prompted a letter from Pat Tillman Sr. in which he stated that the word 'critical' was an "understatement" of how they felt.
The first investigation into Pat's death began within 24 hours of it happening and appears to have been an actual homicide inquiry carried out by an officer in his battalion. This report was completed in a couple of weeks, on May 4th, concluding that the soldiers responsible had shown "criminal intent", committed acts of "gross negligence" and should receive disciplinary measures. This investigation has never been made fully available to the public and, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
"For reasons that are not clear, the officer’s investigation was taken over by a higher ranking commander. That officer’s findings, delivered the next month, called for less severe discipline."
Patrick Tillman Sr. said of the Pentagon's non-investigations in his letter to the Washington Post, again insisting that the Post had not fully reported his point of view:
"I characterized the second and third investigations as "shams." The first one -- a homicide investigation -- may have been accurate, but the results were changed by superiors after the investigating officer refused to alter them. I did not say the Army "botched" the investigation. I said it deliberately falsified baseline facts, -- e.g., distance, light conditions, details perceived before and while firing, and the identification of 'friendlies'."
The anonymous officer who carried out the first investigation expressed his anger at the decision by his superiors to ignore his conclusions in testimony given in November 2004:
“...watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought … was a lesser of a punishment than what they should’ve received. And I will tell you, over a period of time … the stories have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals.”
He further testified that soldiers were permitted to alter crucial details in the report in order to avoid the implication of culpability. The decision concerning the punishment of those responsible was delegated to Captain William Saunders - even though Saunders had himself received a reprimand over the incident and was initially threatened with perjury charges when falsehoods in his initial testimony to the investigation were exposed. Saunders was granted immunity from perjury charges and given permission to change his initial testimony. As Mary Tillman told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It seems grossly inappropriate that Saunders would determine punishment for the others when he shares responsibility for the debacle.”
Two days after Pat's death, soldiers in his platoon destroyed all the physical evidence, including removing Pat's bullet-ridden body armour and uniform and burning them, a fact confirmed by Brigadier General Gary Jones, an Army investigator. Such conduct in general is not uncommon, incidentally - particularly in cases where US soldiers kill civilians, physical evidence is manipulated - weapons placed in the hands of civilian corpses, for instance. As Mary Tillman says, insightfully: "If this is what happens when someone high profile dies, I can only imagine what happens with everyone else."
One unanswered question is how high the decision to suppress the facts about Pat Tillman's death went. Army Ranger commanders were all informed that Pat had been killed by his own soldiers within 24 hours. General John Abiziad, commander of US forces in Afghanistan was informed on April 29th. The following day Abizaid gave this statement in a press briefing:
''While I was in Afghanistan yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to First Lieutenant Dave Hutman [sic] . . . He was the platoon leader of Pat Tillman. I asked him yesterday how operations were going. I asked him about Pat Tillman. He said, 'Pat Tillman was a great Ranger and a great soldier, and what more can I say about him?' . . . I also probably bear some understanding that (the) lieutenant I was talking to . . . was still nursing a large number of wounds that he sustained in that firefight where Pat Tillman lost his life."
"What more can I say...?" Any suggestions?
Mary and Patrick Tillman and the general public were first given an inkling of the truth on May 29th, a full month later. When was Donald Rumsfeld informed? When did the White House find out? Could it really be that Rumsfeld and/or Bush, who had made personal statements on Pat's decision to enlist and the significance of his death, were not informed of what the US army command in Afghanistan knew? Particularly in Rumsfeld's case, it seems unlikely.
Max Blumenthal writes for Yahoo News:
"The fact that when Tillman first joined the Army, Rumsfeld personally commended him with a signed letter seems especially relevant now. If Rumsfeld knew the nature of Tillman's killing in April, 2004, he undoubtedly directed the cover-up. And if Rumsfeld directed the cover-up, Karl Rove was aware of it, if not actively involved in exploiting it."
Mary Tillman agrees: “If Pat was on Rumsfeld’s radar, it’s pretty likely that he would have been informed right away after he was killed.”
Mary and Patrick Tillman have to date chosen not to associate their case with the anti-war movement and have instead asked Senator John McCain, a rival of Bush's within the Republican Party and prominent supporter of various military causes, to press for further investigation. Whether McCain is prepared to hold Senate hearings in which Donald Rumsfeld is compelled to testify remains to be seen.
The San Francisco Chronicle investigation sifted through thousands of pages of documents in the possession of the Tillman family relating to the case, and it was here that a more interesting picture of Pat Tillman's political outlook has emerged.
Pat was an independent thinker, not easily put into any category, and as with many people, his politics were likely in a fluid state - able to change one way or another. He read widely and his reading included a lot of Winston Churchill, while his political heroes included John McCain, which in part prompted his parents to turn to McCain for help.
Shortly after the news of Pat's death was reported in the US, some anti-war voices responded to the eulogies with unwise disparagements of Pat's character, which were, as ever, widely circulated by conservatives as evidence of the left's heartlessness and general moral depravity. They included an article in a student newspaper in which Pat was described as an idiot "acting out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies" who received his due, various comments posted at US Indymedia and a cartoon by Ted Rall in which Tillman requests that he be allowed to kill Arabs as quickly as possible. Certainly, judgements to the effect that Pat was a stupid racist have turned out to be wide of the mark, and in rushing to condemnation his critics missed the big story and handed a gift to the right, already buoyed by fantasies of glory in combat.
Pat is now known to have adamantly opposed the Bush administration, intending to vote for Senator John Kerry in November 2004. He also urged other soldiers to do the same. On Iraq, he is known to have strongly disparaged the US invasion in which he was compelled to actively participate against his wishes. Fellow soldier Russell Baer has said:
“We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”
(Baer has since been honourably discharged from the US Army Rangers)
When Pat joined the US army he gave a broadly apolitical speech with some patriotic themes citing personal and emotional reasons for wishing to enlist, but he never made any other public statement. The Pentagon, eager to use Pat as a recruiter and advert, made many offers to him, urging him to engage in extensive public relations for them - possibly hundreds of times - but he declined on each occasion. He certainly shunned any special attention and would not have appreciated some of the subsequent attempts to turn him into Captain America.
Most surprisingly, Pat was an "avid reader" of Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent, radical left critics of the US political system, regarding him as "a favourite author". The Chronicle reported, citing Mary Tillman, that a friend of Pat's contacted Chomsky in order to arrange a meeting between the two of them. The meeting was prevented only by Tillman's death.
Ann Coulter was challenged by Alan Coombes, one of the Fox Channel's very, very few in-house liberals, on whether she would withdraw her praise of Pat now that his anti-war and left-wing sentiments had been revealed, and given that she had written an entire book explaining that such people should be treated with total contempt? Along with Republican hack Sean Hannity, she simply refused to believe that Pat Tillman was anything other than the icon of right-wing America's imagination. ("Why does Ann hate America?" responded one blog commentator).
It is tempting to wonder what would have happened if Pat hadn't been killed in Afghanistan. Would he have become more radical? Would he have made public his criticisms of George W. Bush and the Iraq War? Would he have become a kind of Mohammad Ali for the 21st century - a sporting icon who challenged authority and radicalised his fans? Sadly, these questions cannot be answered and the opportunity is forever lost. As Chomsky wrote in an e-mail to me: "His death was tragic. I am also very sorry not to have had the chance to meet him."
Patrick Tillman Sr. is still demanding answers but has despaired of getting much honesty from the Department of Defense:
"Maybe lying's not a big deal anymore. Pat's dead, and this isn't going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has."
Ending with Mary's words, ''Pat had high ideals about the country. That's why he did what he did. The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."
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Sources:
"FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH: New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman’s death", Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 2005
'A Cover-Up At The Highest Levels', Max Blumenthal, Huffington Post, Sep 26, 2005
Hannity, Coulter "don't believe" that Tillman liked Noam Chomsky, opposed Iraq war; Tillman's mother disagrees, Media Matters.org, September 29, 2005
'Shame on the Army', Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe, May 25th, 2005
'Tillman's Parents are Critical of Army - Family Questions Reversal on Cause of Ranger's Death', Josh White, Washington Post, May 23rd, 2005
'The life and death of an American icon', Andrew Buncombe, Independent, December 11th, 2004, pp40-1
'Tillman killed in Afghanistan', CNN, April 23rd, 2004
'Tillman's Tower', Norman J. Fulkerson (jingoist propaganda piece)
Pat Tillman's Wikipedia entry
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Teaching to the Test
"Critics of testing contend it distracts from learning. They talk about 'teaching to the test'. But let's put that logic to the test. If you test a child on basic math and reading skills and you're 'teaching to the test,' you're teaching math and reading." (George W. Bush)
Here's some recent experience of mine. I'm not writing this to criticise a school or its staff, who have very little option but to do as we are required by law, but to criticise the current trend favouring constantly putting children to the test, including a routine of public examinations, among politicians and the public.
Like many children, Ania (name changed, as with all others) fears school. She is 5 years old. Her Mum told me that every day she tells her that she doesn't like school, pleads with her not to send her. Every day for weeks, she would start sobbing in class, asking for her Mum, and her teacher or teacher assistants tried to think of ways of calming her down.
Many children who are new to school, or new to a particular school behave like this. In the worst cases, it goes on for weeks before the children stop crying and start to settle into the class. This is rarely, I suspect, because they have come to like school, more that they have got used to the idea that they will be going no matter what they think. Like children learning to swim, sometimes they want to wade in, sometimes their courage deserts them and they want to hold on to the side of the pool - but at school it is more a matter of being thrown right in.
(On one occasion, we had a boy in Year 2 who was allowed to go home at 12 o'clock each day for a few weeks as he got used to school. Other times, we have invited parents to come and help out in the class.)
Early in the school year, the children in the class are faced with their first spelling test. The teacher has put strips of paper on their tables and reads out a list of basic words which the children are meant to have memorised. I'm sat with one group of children whom the teacher expects will not do well. My job is to try and help them think about the sounds of the word so that they can put down the correct letters - "Cat - cu - a - tu, Go - gu - oh. what letter makes a 'gu' sound?" - and so on.
The test started and it was a no-go for my group. Four out of five of them had not the slightest idea what they were doing - they were baffled at the request to write down numbers and then write the spellings by each one. As they fell further behind, I tried to encourage them to think about the words as the teacher read them out. Besnik is keenest for me to help him:
"Up", I told them (pointing to the roof in the gesture of 'up', "Uh - pu. What letter makes an 'Uh' sound?"
"Huh?"
"What letter makes an 'uh' sound? Write it there."
"Where, Mr. Alex?"
"Never mind - er... 'Like'... no 'On' - Oh - nnn. What makes an 'oh' sound?"
"Oh - where do I write it? Here?"
"There."
"Number four?" Besnik wrote the letter 'O' down but didn't understand my encouragement to write down the second letter, because he had no idea what he was doing. The words kept coming at us, and we fell further behind. Cahil and Ania are copying Besnik and struggling to understand what is going on. Sumita and Mira are working on their own, writing down words on their bits of paper. Their words have no connection to anything they are being asked to write, but there you have it.
The whole thing is going so fast, there's no time to take the children aside and explain what it is that is actually being asked of them. Cahil reached for the alphabet cards on the table in front of him but I told him to put them back because it was a test. I tried telling him what to do again, very gently, not giving any sense of annoyance or pressure. But confused, the tears started rolling down Cahil's cheeks and he whimpered quietly to me, "I want my Mummy."
I told him not to worry and gave the usual assurance that it wasn't long before his Mum would be here, and that the test would be over soon and the rest of the afternoon would be easier. Ania, who was watching started to sniffle jerkily at the sight of Cahil crying for his mother. Meanwhile, the words of the test kept coming.
Sensing the pointlessness of continuing, I got up to ask the teacher if there were many more words to do (there were). She gave me a copy of the list and suggested that I did it myself at Cahil's table.
Having me read out the words wasn't going to make anything better. I asked Cahil, Besnik, and Ania to write out the numbers 1-5, chose several easy words, read them out and just gave them each letter, sounding each one out, so they might have some idea of what was being asked of them. Cahil was still quietly tearful, as was Ania, while Besnik took up all my attention, being the only one still interested in trying to carry on.
Finally, I decided to ask them to spell my name. Cahil started writing again, asking me for the letters. I sounded out 'Alex' and wrote it down, then I started doing the same with their names. "I know how to spell my name!" said Cahil, cutting me off and showing me. Then, thankfully, it was over and time to go to the school library.
We lined up. Ania started crying louder. I gave her the usual reassurances and told her she could hold my toy rabbit if she wanted (she didn't) then tried quietly telling her that she needed to stop crying - not a very sympathetic thing to say, but I wondered if she might respond to it (she didn't). The teacher took her out of the line and asked her to keep a watch on the other children for her, pointing them out if they started talking. That worked - she sort of agreed, stopped crying and held the teacher's hand. Cahil wanted to hold my hand. I let him and we trooped out together.
Perhaps these children could have had the concept of their first spelling test better explained to them beforehand. Although, frankly, if they were confused as to what they were being asked to do and why, they should not be alone. These children do not yet know how to read very much or write very much at all. More importantly, they don't know why reading or writing actually matters - why it is something they would actually want to do, if they knew how.
And schools rarely give children any reason to want to, either. Their first introduction to the world of words comes in the form of skills exercises that have no interest value for them and serve to make them feel incompetent and stupid. This is why the advocates of testing children are so wrong. George Bush's riposte to testing's critics is to state that if children are being "taught to the test" then they will be learning what is required of them. What this mantra does not appreciate is that testing is more often than not, actively destructive of learning.
Imagine a scientist giving a monkey or a blue-jay a puzzle to solve and then banging the nearest wall with a sledgehammer, then wondering why his test animal fails to even go near the puzzle let alone solve it. The pressure of testing puts children, especially little children, on the defensive, on edge, wondering what it will take to get the grown-ups to stop quizzing them. It is a major factor in alienating children from school, and more importantly, from their initial desire to learn about the world around them, which young children are famous for having. As someone who has gone into the education system with the desire to help children, it is frustrating to realise that a lot of the time, what I am actually doing is bullying and tormenting them, in one way or another.
Later, I was asked to take some of the Year 1 children out of class, one at a time, to test them on their reading. We would go through a list of words they are supposed to be able to read, ticking the boxes, or not, as we went along and the children tried to read them out.
I decided to be as gentle as possible. Speaking very softly, I gave each child an idea of what they were going to be asked to do, and told them that if they didn't know a word, they should just say so and we would move on - and that it didn't matter. If they gave a wrong answer, I didn't tell them and moved straight on. I pointed to each word with a pencil, and instead of ticking words they got right, put only the faintest mark beside them in the hope they would not notice that I was recording what they got right and wrong. (It may have worked with some children, but others knew full well what was going on).
Despite such an effort to be gentle, the tension and the fear was still clearly there. One little girl, Kiara, threw her head back and released an almighty sigh as we finished the test and the pressure was lifted.
Some weeks later, I was in a Year 3 class (ages 7-8) which, like the rest of the school, was trying out some new maths tests. On the first question of the easier test, the children were asked to fill out a table with numbers from 1-40. Then, they would colour in specific sqaures according to the instructions. One of these told them to colour in any 1-digit odd number in the fourth column from the right. This presumed, firstly, that the children knew what was meant by "digit", "column", "odd", "fourth from the right" and followed all these instructions correctly.
Few in fact, without heavy-handed assitance from me, even decided to actually read the question - they abandoned the effort early. While most children knew what an odd number was, the idea of digits was still confusing - all the children I spoke to presumed that a 2-digit number meant a number with a 2 in it.
Once all of these confusions had been dealt with, we were left with one final problem - there was no single-digit odd number in the fourth column from the right. Trying to figure it out myself, I was baffled at first, but checking several times, realised that it must be either a mistake or a trick question.
Trick questions are designed to catch out children who don't really know what they are doing. And for that reason, they rank among the cruellest and most pointless thing that is done to children in schools. What does it do to the confidence of children when they know that tests are supposed to catch them out and show them up - in short, humiliate them for what they don't yet understand? A child - or an adult - who has a very good understanding of the basic concepts may enjoy the challenge of attempts to catch them out. But imagine a child still struggling to understand the concepts involved, getting to the end of the question and discovering that what they are being asked is impossible. Unless they are confident enough to know that they are being tricked, they will make the assumption that they must have got it wrong, even when they haven't, and feel that all their thinking was for nought.
After all, how would you respond to an adult asking you a deliberately deceptive question about a subject they knew you had only a limited grasp of? Depending on how eager they were to show you up, you might respond with a confused "Huh?" or you might tell the questioner where to get off. With children it is much the same - only we punish them for it.
One line trotted out in defence of all this is that critics of testing display "the soft bigotry of low expectations". The logical problem with this all-too-covenient line is that it could be used to defend any form of testing, no matter how absurd, inappropriate or detrimental to children's learning. Anyone protesting at even the most bizarre and punitive testing imaginable can be dismissed as having low expectations of the children. But to make it clear, critics of testing do not think that the children are stupid, we think the tests are.
Returning to President Bush's assertion that teaching to the test effectively teaches children English and maths. This is only partly true, in that it is hard for children to learn absolutely nothing at all in the process, though not unheard of - but what teaching to the test mostly teaches is that reading, writing and maths constitute an immensely tedious, stressful and painful experience. What should be a source of joy and an outlet for personal expression - writing what you think, reading things that interest you, looking at how numbers behave and how that affects the world around us - becomes a source of drudgery and personal embarassment, a chore dragged out of most children involuntarily.
There are many different possible approaches to education. One of these is highlighted by the test that Karia did. Most children in her class got very few of the words they are supposed to know by now - including common words like "come", "was", "go" even "the" - a source of anxiety to their teacher. But what words could they read? The answer was quite interesting - every child in the class could read the word "mum" (in the US, "mom"), and most could read "dad", "cat" and "dog".
These words are not harder to read than the ones they got wrong or more common - the difference seems to be is that they are more appealing, more interesting as words as far as children are concerned. Children learn these words more easily, because they are more familiar with the ideas behind them - words like "mum" and "cat" mean something to them. So why not let the learning of little children start, not with what adults think they should know at their age, but with what directly interests the children?
The famous New Zealand teacher, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, did just this in the 1950s when she worked with poor, indigneous Maori children - she would ask individual children what they were frightened of, or what they dreamed about, and then write their favourite words on special cards that she gave them to keep. If the word meant enough to them, they were usually able to learn it almost immediately. That way, when the children came to writing, it was not just a task that the teacher was making them to do, and they would have to do or else miss playtime - it was something that came from the heart. They would write about fighting, kissing, ghosts, wild pigs, bombs, crying, laughing, what they thought of their teacher (not always flattering) - things that meant something to them. And they wrote things like this (I have put these up on this website before, but here they are again):
I went to the river and I kissed Lily and I ran away. Then I kissed Phillipa Then I ran away and went for a swim.
Our baby is dead. She was dead on Monday night. When mummie got it.
Testing does not produce writing like that. It does not belong at the heart of the modern educational system, but in the same chapter of history as the cane.
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Southern discomfort
As is well known, the Deep South is afflicted by high levels of poverty compounded by government neglect and corruption - in Italy, that is - as a recent article for Newsweek by by Barbie Nadeau(September 26th 2005) reminds us.
Medical News Today began an article this August:
If southern Italy was thought of as an independent European country, it would be the European country with the highest poverty rate, weighted for national income, say two Italian researchers in an article in this month's open access medical journal PLoS Medicine. And the high poverty rate in the south, they argue, is one of the reasons why the health and social and educational wellbeing of children in the south is worse than that in the north.
Running through the statistics from the Newsweek article of life for the poor, south of Rome:
"Infant mortality in the first 28 days of life is 5.7 per 1,000 live births - four times higher than in the northern provinces and double the european median. The dropout rate for primary-school students - through grade eight - is 24 percent, 2.5 times higher than the rest of Europe... 7.3 million residents in southern Italy make less 521 Euros a month, and half of those live on less than 435 Euros a month, according to ISTAT, Italy's national statistics institute. ... unemployment hovers between 30 and 50 percent and shows little signs of improving."
Maurizio Bonati of the Mother and Child Health Laboratory in Milan told the magazine:
"We're talking about people who cannot buy simple groceries, who cannot buy milk for their children, who cannot find nourishment when they are pregnant."
The impact of this on young people was a subject of a study by the prominent children's health expert, Giorgio Tamburlini of the Institute for Child Health Burlo Garofaloin Trieste, which:
"...found that 17 percent of children and adolescents in southern Italy suffer from mental-health problems including depression, suicide and eating disorders like anorexia."
The divide between the industrialised northern and more argicultural southern Italy has historical roots - as late as 1960, as Barbie Nadeau writes, public anger finally prompted the Italian government to end a situation where 15,000 people literally lived in caves in the province of Basilicata (the landscape used in Mel Gibson' depiction of Jesus' execution, 'The Passion').
In 2000, the European Union and the Italian government together allocated US $50 billion to invest in the Mezzogiorno over a period of six years, which raises the obvious question of why it has yielded such poor results. Nadeau's piece suggests some answers - Prime Minister Silvio "Mussolini never murdered anybody" Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, has allocated more than half of this money in the province of Campania for recontructing parts of Naples, and in development "along the already rich Amalfi coastline". Thus, much of the money has gone into commercial development rather than public services for the poor. "There are hotels in the south that can demand 500 Euros a night, and families live on less than that just a few kilometers away", says the owner of the Andrisani Enoteca, Francesco Loporfido. Italian capitalism is also noted for high levels of corruption, with some estimates of mafia control of southern businesses being between 30 and 40 percent.
George Tamburlini, discussing solutions (pp 22-4) for dealing more generally with the effects of social inequality on health for Entre Nous, a magzine on maternal health, outlines the most obvious solution:
Targeting poor people is probably the most direct way of reducing disparities. Providing better infrastructure and services in urban slums and poor rural areas, to households which bear the burden of disabled people or critically vulnerable children, or to marginalised ethnic minorities, may all contribute to counteract the inverse care law...
...Policy-makers and health professionals should call for investments in sectors such as education, nutrition, environment and community development to reduce the impact of poverty on reproductive
health. More equitable health financing and provision systems can alleviate the effects of societal inequity, but quality of health services must be ensured in order to achieve real health gains.
In the meantime, a bad situation is not changing for the better. Says Maurizio Bonati, "Especially in the south, people feel that is their destiny to remain poor."
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Mission from God
Old news, a fellow peace activist told me when the Independent ran on its front page the not-so-revelatory-revelation from an upcoming BBC documentary that George Bush had claimed that God had personally commanded him to invade Iraq, among other requests. What next, he asked - would the BBC run a story telling us that no WMD had been found in Iraq?
The new BBC series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 'Elusive Peace - Israel and the Arabs' included an interview with Palestinian Authority negotiator Nabil Shaath in which he claimed:
"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did.'
Certainly this is not a new claim. What should surprise us (a bit) then, is that the White House has issued a denial, with its increasingly desperate spokesman Scott McClellan informing reporters that: "He's never made such comments."
This is not an honest administration by any stretch of the imagination, but really - what is this? Never made such comments? Not just this one, but never anything like it? Not only is it very likely that George Bush made that particular remark, or something like it, but he has certainly made "such remarks" rather often.
Faced with a slightly awkward controversy, Nabil Shaath had downplayed his remarks, arguing that he did not believe Bush meant what he said quite literally, but without substantially changing his account.
The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, had already reported this story back in June 2003, when Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas had said in passing in a speech he gave at Aqaba to various Palestinian political groups that Bush had told him and others:
"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."
The speech was not an attack on Bush, but rather designed to reassure Palestinian radicals that Washington's Road Map strategy was the Palestinians' best hope. (Quick - when was the last time you heard about the Road Map'?)
Veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, in his book on the decision-making behind the Iraq War, Plan of Attack, also records "such comments".
On page 379, Bush is quoted offering the somewhat contradictory statement of his conduct on the day the invasion began: "Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will... I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, I pray that in my case that I be as a good a messenger of his will as possible". He added, "And then of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness." He may need to get working on that last one.
In an interview in December 2003, Woodward asked him if he had sought advice on prosecuting the invasion of Iraq from his father. George Bush Senior famously rejected the neo-conservative vision of transforming the Gulf region by occupying Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War in favour of returning to the previous (and comparably immoral) policy of relying on Saddam Hussein's fascist regime to stabilise Iraq.
In part of his reply, Bush said that he had not really discussed the Iraq War very much with his biological father: "You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength, there is a higher father that I appeal to." So which higher father would that be then, Mr. McClellan? Dick Cheney? Karl Rove? These statements are not explained as standard Christian prayers for personal strength and guidance, rather they fit a pattern of statements in which Bush sees himself as possessing a unique divine role in history.
Years before, Bush had told the Texan evangelist James Robinson that his decision to run for president was a response to God's calling: 'I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.' (Does Bush still modestly sense that his country needs him, now that his country senses it does not?)
Speaking to a group of Amish in July 2004, the President informed them, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job," as reported by the Lancaster New Era in Pennsylvania.
Charles Pugley Fincher
An image of a president who sees his actions and God's will in the world as the same thing is consistent with accounts of Bush's management of the White House in which aides have described a president who frequently conflates his will with God's, and an atmosphere in which staffers are reluctant to give the president bad news for fear that he will make them regret telling him - such as reports of failings in the federal response to the avoidable destruction of New Orleans, for instance.
In June 2004, Doug Thompson reported for Capitol Hill Blue in a remarkable but neglected piece that:
'President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.
'In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
...
'In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
...
'God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”
'“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”'
Doug Thompson's article shed new light on the departure of CIA director, George Tenet, who issued a statement of resignation, citing "personal reasons" in June 2004. Apparently, Bush decided to sack Tenet after he expressed minor disagreement with the President, exploding with the words "That's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now." The following day, according to Thompson's account, Bush told shocked aides that George Tenet had voluntarily resigned - which they knew not to be true - and that his departure was "God's will".
Bush makes the kinds of remarks mentioned here for two reasons. The first is that many of them play very well with Christian fundamentalist voters and with the American right in general who admire such sentiments for much the same reasons as American and European liberals resent them. Bush's speeches, carrying heavy religious imagery and vocabulary, are often scorned by the secular-minded in the US and on this side of the Atlantic as moronic. While this is true, it is also true that they constitute a highly successful and calculating political strategy that has helped garner popular relgious sentiments in the US to the benefit of the Republican Party. Similarly, Bush's speechwriters do not employ public religiosity because they do not understand how much it aggravates secular liberals and left-wingers, but because they know it will, and they know this will delight their grassroots supporters. To the religious left, Bush's remarks are also highly offensive, but they do not constitute a large enough constituency to bother the White House.
Newsweek cover, March 2003
The second reason is that Bush actually believes his own words and does see himself as personally carrying out God's will, so that his religiosity serves as an ideological crutch for phenomenal personal arrogance, vindictiveness, thoughtlessness and monomania.
Bob Woodward's mild prompting of Bush produced the following exchange (Plan of Attack, p420):
We turned to the question of doubts. I quoted what Tony Blair recently had said at his party's annual conference: "I do not at all disparage anyone who disagrees with me." Blair had also said he had received letters from those who had lost sons in the war who wrote that they hated him for what he did. I quoted Blair, "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that they don't suffer any doubt."
"Yeah," President Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."
"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"
"No. And I'm able to convey that to the people." To those who had lost sons and daughters, he said, "I hope I'm able to convey that in a humble way."
In my humble way, Mrs Sheehan, I have no doubts whatsoever about deploying your late son, Casey, in Najaf last year, nor have I ever seriously considered whether it was the right thing to do. Would you buy it?
All this we already knew. What is slightly surprising is that the White House bothered to lie about it, when their denial is so easily refuted. They could have ignored the minor controversy, or just complained that the British press doesn't understand US religious values, but instead they issued a categorical and implausible denial that Bush wouldn't even say such a thing, ever.
Possibly, such a nervous twitch indicates that they no longer think the US public would respond well to the idea that the President believes that his catastrophic war in Iraq is part of a divinely-ordained mission for which he was appointed. Which is what he thinks.
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The Fight Against Al-Jazeera
They prod and hint, you decide. Fox News brings you a photograph of the hapless US Marine Corps Captain Joshua Rushing. Below is the caption 'TRAITOR?' Cut to commercial break - and while the ads start plying you to buy things you don't need, viewers of Fox can decide for themselves, on the basis of almost no information, whether they hate Captain Rushing or not. In this way, does Fox empower its viewers to hate someone they've never met before and may know nothing at all about.
You may have come across Capt. Joshua Rushing before if you have seen The Control Room, the documentary on life inside the Arab world's most-watched and most independent television network, Al-Jazeera (literally 'The Island' or 'The (Arabian) Peninsula') from its headquarters in Doha, Qatar. Rushing was the oddly likeable public relations man for US Central Command in Doha, whose job it was to rehash the Bush administration's line to Al-Jazeera's journalists as the invasion of Iraq proceeded in the spring of 2003. Over the course of the film, however, it was clear that far from convincing anyone, Rushing himself was being changed by his experience of working with Arab journalists. At the end of the film he conceded that US media representations of the Palestinians were unfair, for instance, and expressed the wildly optimistic view that he might be able to do something about it when he returned to the US.
Rushing does not withdraw his support for the Iraq War at any point in the movie, but does express his self-doubt very openly - something you are not supposed to do if you want to be a PR zombie. He is shown questioning himself over why he felt more upset at footage of dead US soldiers than dead Iraqi civilians: "It upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe we can live in a world without war yet."
Rushing's appearance in the Control Room earned him limited celebrity status among its viewers, and enemy status among the US Marine Corps' most senior officers.
Rushing went on to give follow-up television interviews, and it was at this point that the Pentagon decided that "He was way too far in the opinion realm", in the delicate words of Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Kay, deputy director of public relations for the Marine Corps. Rushing was barred from giving further interviews. His wife, Paige Rushing, complained to the press - and so the Pentagon asked Rushing to keep her quiet as well.
Other military PR personnel complained about the treatment of Rushing on the obvious grounds that it was bad PR - Rushing had done a good job for the US army, they argued, by convincing Arab audiences that US military personnel could be honest and thoughtful.
Rushing has now resigned from the US army and has taken up a job with Al-Jazeera International, the station's new English language project. It was this that prompted Fox to ask its viewers whether or not he should be considered to have committed no less than an act of treason.
So what did Rushing say that went out too far into the realm of opinion, as opposed to the highly objective position of the White House? It wasn't just his discomfort with images of death from Iraq or his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was rather the fact that he helped to normalise Arab opinion by engaging in conversations with Arab journalists as though their points of view might be reasonable. He challenged the official view of the Al-Jazeera network and in so doing, unintentionally opened the way for serious consideration of popular Arab political views by western viewers.
This is what Rushing told Village Voice in May:
"People don't understand what a complex organization Al Jazeera is. They say it's all Islamists, or Ba'athists, or Arab nationalists. You have all that, but you have really progressive voices too. Al Jazeera shows it all. It turns your stomach, and you remember there's something wrong with war."
Compare this with Donald Rumsfeld's view of the network (hilarious unintentional irony included):
"It seems to me that it is up to all of us to tell the truth, to say what we know and what we don't know and recognise that we are dealing with people [the Al-Jazeera network] who are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case. And to the extent people lie, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn't take very long for that to happen in dealing with people like this."
Such an hysterical view of Al-Jazeera as a station of pathological and committed liars has been repeated by the Secretary of Defence elsewhere:
"Truth ultimately finds its way to people's ears and eyes and hearts and I don't worry about that over the long-term. Does it make me sad to see television saying things that are flat not true and people printing things in that part of the world that are flat not true, children being taught things that are flat not true? Yes, it bothers me."
Truth ultimately finds its way to people's ears and eyes and hearts... we can only hope. Anyway, it is possible to see where Rushing's opinions diverge from the expressed views of the Pentagon and Department of Defence.
The slightly more sober State Department echoed these sentiments, with its spokesman Richard Boucher informing us in April 2004 (a time when they had every reason to divert the public gaze from events in Iraq): "On Iraq they have established a pattern of false reporting."
In a bleak political landscape, Al-Jazeera represents a major positive development for the Arab world - a popular news channel that is allowed to operate freely, exposing some of the corruption, deception and brutality of its ruling cliques, dictatorships and the uninvited great powers endlessly crashing into the place. For the first time, diverse political opinions from across the region are being given an airing - little wonder then that the network has won the undying enmity of so many.
That the US government should hate it too is also not surprising given that the US political, military and economic role in the region is so unpopular. But Washington's hostility to Al-Jazeera reveals the untruthfulness of the Bush administration's claim to support the spread of democracy in Arab countries.
The Control Room gives some examples of political opinions of Al-Jazeera staff. We do not find supporters of Osama Bin Laden or people who want to throw Jews into the Mediterranean or the cartoon Al-Jazeera that exists in the mind of American ultra-nationalists. Instead we find such views as those expressed by journalists like Hassan Ibrahim, who mocks Arab anti-Jewish paranoia for instance:
"See the problem with the Middle East is everything is an Israeli conspiracy - everything! If a water pipe breaks in the centre of Damascus it will be blamed on the Israelis - instead of blaming it on our own incompetence."
Al-Jazeera is in fact the first Arab television network to employ Israelis on its staff. In a debate with a colleague on how US military dominance of the region can be stopped, Hassan expresses confidence in the US constitution and American people:
"The question is, who's going to stop the United States? Who is going to do that? You need a new group. A powerful group."
"The United States is going to stop the United States. I have absolute confidence in the American constitution. And I have absolute confidence in the ability of the American people. The United States people are going to stop the United States Empire."
In condemning Al-Jazeera as malicious propagandists, the Bush administration aligns itself with some pretty ugly company. In July 2004, the gruesome Algerian government put a stop to the reporting of Al-Jazeera's correspondent in Algiers and even shut down power stations to prevent the broadcast of unwelcome reports. The network was temporarily banned in Bahrain in 2002 after the dictatorship decided its broadcasts were biased against the governments - and indeed the whole countries - of Bahrain and Israel. Conversely, Al-Jazeera has been accused by Islamists of being biased towards Israel by giving too much broadcast time to Israeli spokesmen and they have dubbed the network "Al-Khinzeera" - "the Pig" - a particularly serious insult coming from them.
In 2003, Al-Jazeera became the first international television network to report on the unfolding genocide in Darfur by the Sudanese military-Islamist regime against the black Africans in the west of the country, or zurga ("niggers"), as their killers call them. The butchers of Khartoum responded by arresting Al-Jazeera's correspondent and kicking him out of the country in December 2003, shutting down the network's operations in the capital. The Sudanese regime made the rather familiar accusation that it produced reports "stuffed with false information and poor biased analyses". Touchy people, obviously.
When Boucher and Rumsfeld declared that Al-Jazeera was misrepresenting the situation in Iraq, they were in agreement with Saddam Hussein, whose Iraqi Ministry of Information initially banned the network's Tayseer Allouni (more on him further down) and Diyar Al-Omari from the country. The US-appointed Iraqi Interim Government, under Iyad Allawi, followed directly in Saddam Hussein's footsteps in re-imposing temporary bans, claiming that the station was giving Iraq a bad image and inciting the mujahideen to attack Coalition troops. In April 2005, the Iranian regime became another ally against Al-Jazeera and banned it, accusing it of inflaming unrest among Iran's Arab minority in the south-west of the country (not two years after Iranian secret police beat to death the Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi, incidentally) . And so on and so forth.
In such inglorious company does the Bush administration find itself - with every spook, ghoul and reactionary that haunts South-West Asia and North Africa in deciding that a television station is a cause of the region's problems.
The US hatred of Al-Jazeera has a positively lethal ring to it. On April 8th, 2003, as US forces began to enter the city, a US A-10 Warthog fighter plane bombed Al-Jazeera's Baghdad headquarters, killing their correspondent Tarek Ayyoub. This was not the first time the US airforce had bombed an Al-Jazeera station, and this time the network had taken the precaution of providing the US government with detailed information of their position so as to avoid a repeat of what happened in Kabul.
Responding to queries about the killing of Tarek Ayyoub, the official US response was its aircraft had come under hostile fire from the Al-Jazeera building - a claim for which there is no evidence. Combined as it was with a US artillery assault on the Palestine Hotel where Reuters correspondent Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso of a Spanish network were killed by US tank fire, Al-Jazeera personnel drew the conclusion, justified or not, that they the US government had deliberately decided to hit them and other journalists.
[Update - a Spanish judge has issued a warrant for the pilots who killed Jose Couso]
Republican congressman for the state, Trent Franks, also complained, arguing that "It is insane policy to allow al-Jazeera to film Arizona's unsecured border with Mexico and then broadcast it to the very people who perpetrated 9/11." You see - if Bin Ladenists were watching they might seek to exploit the weaknesses of the Arizona border patrols and thus slip into the US via Mexico. Presumably, CNN, Fox, the BBC etc. should also be forbidden to report on all policing and social issues lest terrorists exploit anything they see in the footage. But only Al-Jazeera is lumbered with the image as Terrorist TV. The project was abandoned and the Minutemen declared an "anti-terrorist victory" in their moronic official statement - "The world's most prolific terrorism television network has cancelled its recon operation at the Arizona/Mexico border."
Currently the Bush administration is seeking to undermine Al-Jazeera with more subtle tactics than incitement or firing missiles in its direction. Steven Weisman reported for the New York Times in January this year that relations between the US government and Qatar's monarchical despotism were good:
"The tiny state of Qatar is a crucial American ally in the Persian Gulf, where it provides a military base and warm support for American policies."
Indeed, the country's capital, Doha, was used for the World Trade Organisation's fourth ministerial meeting in 2001 so that the delegates could take advantage of Qatar's protestor-free streets, public protest being illegal. But one issue was spoiling this picture of harmony:
Yet relations with Qatar are also strained over an awkward issue: Qatar's sponsorship of Al Jazeera, the provocative television station that is a big source of news in the Arab world.
...The pressure has been so intense, a senior Qatari official said, that the government is accelerating plans to put Al Jazeera on the market, though Bush administration officials counter that a privately owned station in the region may be no better from their point of view.
"We have recently added new members to the Al Jazeera editorial board, and one of their tasks is to explore the best way to sell it," said the Qatari official, who said he could be more candid about the situation if he was not identified.
Meanwhile, other western governments have put pressure on Al-Jazeera. Canadian authorities announced their intention to monitor Al-Jazeera 24 hours a day and pressure distributors into censoring "abusive comments", one of those broad categories that helps censors cover a multitude of (their) sins. In Spain, the judge Baltasar Garzon (who has made better decisions in his career, such as issuing arrest warrants for General Pinochet and Henry Kissinger) issued a warrant for Al-Jazeera reporter Tayseer Allouni in September 2003, charging Tayseer with supporting al-Qa'ida. Pleading not guilty, Tayseer was jailed for collaborating with al-Qa'ida - the principal evidence for which was that he had interviewed Osama Bin Laden (prior to 9/11). The judgement of the court was criticised by Reporters Sans Frontieres. Allouni suffers from heart disease and was denied leave to attend his mother's funeral in Syria.
Al-Jazeera has yet to make to make a profit despite an international audience somewhere between 30 and 50 million viewers. As a result it is dependent in more ways than one on the subsidy and patronage of the Qatari regime. Privatisation could affect Al-Jazeera in a number of ways, though as Steven Weisman wrote, the White House may still be unsatisfied by a broken and less well-protected station. The Bush administration has also set up a rival station to get its own message across, Al Hurra. The New York Times dryly notes that "administration officials say it has yet to gain much of a following."
A legitimate line of criticism of Al-Jazeera is that its actual reporting lacks professionalism - for instance, during the invasion of Iraq, the network reported a number of rumours with little verifiable substance. As Al-Jazeera expands and sets up its English-language channel, Al-Jazeera International, many at the network hope to address this problem and improve the quality of their journalism. Saying that, more established media outlets are in a poor position to criticise.
Only last month, numerous Western media outlets reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina gave credence to numerous lurid stories of murder, rape and violence in New Orleans among its beleaguered survivors, the great bulk of which have turned out to be unsubstantiated rumours. Otherwise powerful coverage of the neglect and betrayal of the New Orleans poor by the US government and the chaotic scenes faced by those trying to save lives was undermined by this credulous reporting that served to reinforce racist images of the victims as animal-like. This is not to mention other episodes, such as the continued regurgitation by western journalists of White House garbage on the subject of Iraq, both before the invasion and ever since. As the New York Times discovered, for instance, Al-Jazeera is far from the only news service that needs to monitor its reporting. And the NYT is at least distinguished by its surface-scratching introspection, absent in many other publications and news outlets.
Hopefully Al-Jazeera will continue to grow as a challenging news service and a force for freedom of speech across Arabic-speaking countries, but it's numerous enemies are a determined and ruthless bunch. It is important that all of them lose in their efforts to quash the emergence of independent voices as badly as they deserve to.
Some links for more information (most sources are available through links in the article):
Friends of Al-Jazeera campaigns for freedom of speech in South-West Asia.
Reporters Without Borders
US Presses for Censorship of Jazeera TV, Human Rights Watch, 2001
Under Pressure, Qatar May Sell Jazeera Station, Steven Weisman, New York Times, Jan 30th, 2005 (registration required)
Petition for Tayseer Allouni (in French)
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Guns Don't Kill People, Newsweek Does
In its May 9th edition, the US magazine Newsweek published a short report by the investigative reporter Michael Isikoff and its security correspondent John Barry on expected features of an upcoming internal military investigation into the treatment of prisoners in Camp X-Ray at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay in a US-occupied part of Cuba (long story). The report included an allegation from an anonymous source that a US interrogator had flushed a copy of the Qur'an down a toilet, an allegation not included in other FBI e-mails that Isikoff and Barry had reviewed.
Link to spoof here
The report was publicised by political and religious figures in Pakistan and prompted large protests and riots aimed at the US presence in Afghan cities such as Jalalabad and Kabul, at the end of which at least 15 people were dead. In the tense political situation, Newsweek's source, a Pentagon official, stated that he was no longer sure in which document he had read the allegation and whether it would be in the US Couther Command (SouthCom) report on ill-treatment of prisoners in Cuba and Afghanistan as he had previously said. On May 16th, amid heavy criticism from the Pentagon and the White House, Newsweek editor Mike Whitaker retracted the story and issued an apology.
A few relevant facts:
1) The Pentagon has since confirmed a number of cases where the Qur'an has in fact been desecrated by interrogators and guards at Guantanamo Bay.
2) The Pentagon was shown the Newsweek story in advance and made no comment on the allegation concerning the Qur'an.
3) The specific allegation about the Qur'an being flushed down the toilet was almost certainly true, and may have happened on several occasions.
4) That allegation, did, as the report accurately predicted, feature in the SouthCom report on its completion.
5) Those killed in the rioting were mostly killed not by the rioters but by the Afghan police, firing on them.
Before going any further, here is the original Newsweek story in full, since few people have actually had the chance to read it despite widespread discussion of its contents - or at least one portion of one of its sentences:
Gitmo: SouthCom Showdown
Newsweek
May 9 issue - Investigators probing interrogation abuses at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qur'an down a toilet and led a detainee around with a collar and dog leash. An Army spokesman confirms that 10 Gitmo interrogators have already been disciplined for mistreating prisoners, including one woman who took off her top, rubbed her finger through a detainee's hair and sat on the detainee's lap. (New details of sexual abuse—including an instance in which a female interrogator allegedly wiped her red-stained hand on a detainee's face, telling him it was her menstrual blood—are also in a new book to be published this week by a former Gitmo translator.)
These findings, expected in an upcoming report by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, could put former Gitmo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller in the hot seat. Two months ago a more senior general, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, was placed in charge of the SouthCom probe, in part, so Miller could be questioned. The FBI e-mails indicate that FBI agents quarreled repeatedly with military commanders, including Miller and his predecessor, retired Gen. Michael Dunleavy, over the military's more aggressive techniques. "Both agreed the bureau has their way of doing business and DOD has their marching orders from the SecDef," one e-mail stated, referring to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Sources familiar with the SouthCom probe say investigators didn't find that Miller authorized abusive treatment. But given the complaints that were being raised, sources say, the report will provoke questions about whether Miller should have known what was happening—and acted to try to prevent it. An Army spokesman declined to comment.
-Michael Isikoff and John Barry
Editor's Note: On May 16, Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker issued the following statement: "Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay."
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
Being as familiar with the Bush administration as tediously as many of you already are, we really should all be beyond the stage of expressing surprise to learn that its various spokespeople have acted dishonestly and without shame.
And yet, there is still something about the total lack of scruple in the claims the White House made to our faces that can prompt an involuntary widening of the mouth. The spectacle of someone who acts as though they have no concept of shame in their mental world is really awesome to behold.
For this reason, let us return again (and again and again) to the Newsweek/Qur'an abuse/White House sordidness. Now that it is fairly well established that the short Newsweek story that noted in passing that flushing a Qur'an down the toilet was used as an interrogation and punishment technique in the internment camp at Guanatanamo Bay was accurate in substance and detail, re-visit these:
"Newsweek hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage they have done to this nation or those that were viciously attacked by those false allegations."
That's Bryan Whitman, spokesman for the Pentagon - who added that the Newsweek story was "irresponsible" and "demonstrably false". Care to demonstrate its falsity for us, Bryan?
“They printed a story based on an erroneous source or sources that was demonstrably wrong and that resulted in riots in which people were killed.”
That's Lawrence Di Rita, chief spokesman for the Pentagon, who also claims the ability to demonstrate that the story was false. The world awaits this demonstration too. Di Rita also said of the anonymous Pentagon source:
"People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"
And then: "The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”
Scott McClellan, the spokesman for the White House. We can particularly enjoy the implication that the image of the United States abroad was doing just fine before Newsweek came along and spoiled everything. MSNBC News reported that the White House helpfully suggested to Newsweek ways that it could make up for the damage they accused it of causing:
"The administration called on Newsweek to explain how it got the story wrong and to report on U.S. military practices intended to ensure that the Quran is handled with respect. The State Department told its embassies to spread the word abroad that America respects all religious faiths."
What is perhaps most interesting, from the point of view of a psychologist studying human behaviour, is the way these people express outrage with such passion and indignation as though they are the injured party, when the reverse is the case.
What is merely dismal is the way that so much of the media and the blogosphere took their cue from these people and helped create an atmosphere in which a prominent news magazine decided on a cowardly retraction of an accurate news story. Alongside the official, gleeful effort to land a kick on Newsweek as it stumbled, the media bullies of American ultra-nationalism quickly leapt at the chance to take on a weaker opponent, as they always do.
This is from Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, talking to the National Conservative Student Conference:
'And we see it in the media obsession with the abuses at that prison in Iraq or with the alleged abuses in Gitmo, where there's this implicit suggestion that it makes us just as bad as the people we're fighting. And this story about the alleged Koran flushing down at Gitmo -- my friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg, I think, had the most memorable take on the story, which is: How is it possible to flush a Koran down a toilet? Especially since the EPA has mandated these environmentally correct, small-flush toilets -- you're lucky to get a pamphlet down there, let alone a whole book. And as Jonah says, what the scandal should have been -- all of America should have been rising up as one saying, "What are we doing giving the terrorists our very best toilets down there in Gitmo?"'
Not laughing? Aw shucks, can't you take a joke? Perhaps Mr. Lowry will be delighted to learn that many Guantanamo prisoners, including shepherds past their 80th year and guilty of no offence whatsoever, are denied access to the toilet and left to wallow in their own excrement? (As described by an internal, unpublished CIA investigation, quoted in Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command). The conference was advertised as an opportunity to "Gain a better understanding of conservative principles." Perhaps we might take their word for it.
Blogs for Bush urged its readers:
"Spread the word - send this linked article [on Newsweek's retraction] to everyone you know; if you run a blog, link it and report on it. Don't let our near-treasonous MSM [Mainstream Media] betray our brave men and women in Iraq."
Read those statements again and then compare them with this letter written by the London director of Human Rights Watch, Steve Crawshaw, to the Independent:
"The Newsweek reference was far from new: we have repeatedly heard credible allegations about American interrogators mistreating copies of the Koran - tearing out pages, or throwing it into the toilet - for more than two years." (Emphasis added)
Human Rights Watch is not an underground organisation - it sends copies of its investigations to government departments complete with lists of recommendations and they appear on its website - www.hrw.org. They are however, regularly and reflexively unread and ignored - as when Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, then commander of US ground forces in Iraq, laughed in Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow's face when Snow asked if the General had read a HRW report on unlawful killings of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad by US soldiers.
Returning to Lawrence Di Rita's statements to the press, journalist David Corn performed a pretty devastating fact-checking exercise. DiRita on May 17th:
Q: Larry, just to be clear, there have been numerous allegations by detainees who have been released --
MR. DI RITA: Mm-hmm.
Q : -- by attorneys who have talked to detainees, alleging mistreatment of the Koran, including instances where it was supposedly thrown into a toilet. Are you saying that none of those allegations were credible, and that none of them have -- have any of them been investigated, and were any substantiated?
MR. DI RITA: We've found nothing that would substantiate precisely -- anything that you just said about the treatment of a Koran. We have -- other than what we've seen, that it's possible detainees themselves have done with pages of the Koran -- and I don't want to overstate that either because it's based on log entries that have to be corroborated.
A few days later, on May 26th, when certain public revelations no longer made such a blatant falsehood passable, DiRita back-tracked, telling reporters:
"First off, I'd like you to know that we have found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Koran down a toilet. We did identify 13 incidents of alleged mishandling of the Koran by Joint Task Force personnel. Ten of those were by a guard and three by interrogators."
So after acknowledging that copies of the Qur'an were purposefully damaged as a method of interrogation and punishment - a point that considerably reduces the Bush administration's scope for indignation at the press - Di Rita is left with the somewhat more pathetic insistence that at least no Qur'an was flushed down a toilet, (in case we had forgotten that Newsweek was meant to be the principal villain here).
One thing illustrated by this episode was the way that the principal media outlets act together as a herd, often with the White House acting as the shepherd. Discussion narrowed at the behest of those like DiRita, who were in a spot of trouble, on to the issue of whether anyone at Guantanamo had actually stuffed a Qur'an down a toilet - six words in an article that mentioned several other violations of international humanitarian law. Note also the last sentence of the Newsweek article, "An Army spokesman declined to comment." That is, the Pentagon were given the chance to read the article and comment on this matter before publication, but chose not to, despite their later insistence that the allegation was an outrageous falsehood, demonstrably so, and was damaging to image of the United States abroad.
What's more, despite the absurd claim from the right that the not-particularly-liberal media are going out of their way to challenge the President, this episode shows that the reverse is true - Newsweek went out of its way to show deference to the Pentagon.
So was the only claim that the White House and Pentagon were left clinging to after their pre-emptive assault on the media landed them in a quagmire - that the Qur'an was not actually put into a toilet - true? Probably not. In a joint piece for the International Herald Tribune, Saman Zia-Zarifi, the deputy director of the HRW Asia division and John Sifton an HRW Afghanistan researcher restated:
For more than two years before the magazine ran its story, newspapers in the United States, Britain and throughout the Muslim world published interviews in which detainees held by the United States at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq claimed that their guards and interrogators had denigrated Islamic religious symbols and, in particular, desecrated copies of the Koran by kicking them across the floor, tearing out pages and tossing them into toilets. Several former detainees held by U.S. forces in Afghanistan told Human Rights Watch how prisoners at the U.S. air base in Kandahar protested after a guard allegedly kicked a copy of the Koran while searching a cell.
It is almost certain that those cases the Pentagon claims to have investigated do not represent the sum total. The allegation seems particularly credible given what we know for certain of actual treatment of prisoners in Camp X-Ray, and the research of HRW and the International Committee of the Red Cross which attempted to publicise cases involving damaging copies of the Qur'an back in 2002. Released British detainees of Camp X-Ray have also stated:
"...when Korans were provided, they were kicked and thrown about by the guards and on occasion thrown in the buckets used for the toilets. This kept happening. When it happened it was always said to be accident but it was a recurrent theme".
New York attorney Mike Falkoff told the BBC that in August 2003, when a camp guard had stamped on a copy of the Qur'an, 23 prisoners had attempted to commit suicide en masse in response. A similar incident provoked a hunger strike among internees in May this year until an apology was issued over the camp's loud-speakers.
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Excerpts from New York times, displayed at Wikipedia
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When the SouthCom report was published on May 26th, the allegation about the Qu'ran in the toilet was included, just as Mike Isikoff and John Barry's original article had told us it would.
Perhaps Bryan Whiteman and Lawrence Di Rita will at some point demonstrate that these mutiple claims are false as they stated categorically that they could do, but don't wait up.
As with Dan Rather's report for CBS on Bush's National Guard service, with Andrew Gilligan's report for the BBC on Blair's statements on Iraqi Weapons programmes or with Piers Morgan's decision to show faked photographs of actual British army torture in Iraq - a government in trouble saw in the Newsweek story an opportunity to exploit a journalistic mistake and to divert attention from their own misdeeds while intimidating an already pretty conformist media. But while the Bush administration's apologists were well able to get across their version of events loudly, this time the bad faith was also widely exposed - and for once an attempt to bash the media backfired somewhat.
The White House criticised the media for using anonymous sources, a practice that bothers them for obvious reasons - it is the only way the public can hear the objections and protests of the employees of secretive and unaccountable institutions. Such criticism was particularly absurd coming from the White House which regularly leaks information to journalists via anonymous individuals in backroom briefings (among many, many other violations of journalistic ethics - such as inserting propaganda articles and TV broadcasts directly into the mainstream press). Not oblivious to these hypocrisies, Scott McClellan was challenged by the White House press corps:
Q: In context of the Newsweek situation, I think we hear the caution you're giving us about reporting things based on a single anonymous source. What, then, are we supposed to do with information that this White House gives us under the conditions that it comes from a single anonymous source?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to.
Q: Frequent briefings by senior administration officials in which the ground rules are we can only identify them as a single anonymous source.
MR. McCLELLAN: Ken, I know that there is an issue when it comes to the media in terms of the use of anonymous sources, but the issue is not related to background briefings. But I do believe that we should work to move away from those kind of background briefings. ...
But there is a credibility problem in the media regarding the use of anonymous sources, but it's because of fabricated stories, and it's because of situations like this one over the weekend. It's not because of the background briefings that you may be referring to.
Q: What prevents this administration from just saying from this point forward, you will identify who it is that's talking to us?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, in terms of background briefings, if that's what you're asking about, which I assume it is, let me point out that what I'm talking about there are officials who are helping to provide context to on-the-record comments made by people like the President or the Secretary of State or others. ... And as I said, one of the concerns is that some media organizations have used anonymous sources that are hiding behind that anonymity in order to generate negative attacks.
Q: But to our readers, viewers and listeners, I think it's all the same.
MR. McCLELLAN: And then you have a situation -- you have a situation where we found out later that quotes were attributed to people that they didn't make. Or you have a situation where you now learn that a single source was used for verifying this allegation -- and that source, himself, said he could not personally verify the accuracy of the report. ...
Q: With all due respect, though, it sounds like you're saying your single anonymous sources are OK and everyone else's aren't.
Read the rest here.
Making our way through the multiple, dense levels of bad faith on show here, leaves us with one of the least investigated aspects of this whole story. As Scott McClellan told us earlier, "People have lost their lives".
Which people? And who killed them? And what, if anything, does a Newsweek report have to do with it?
On May 6th, former Pakistani cricketer turned political opportunist Imran Khan brandished Newsweek's report at a press conference, announcing "This is what the U.S. is doing, desecrating the Qur'an." The particular allegation concerning the toilet was hardly central to Khan's point, and he could have cited any number of different reports of similar allegations. Newsweek, incidentally, was banned in Pakistan in November 2004 becuase of an article about the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamist in the Netherlands last year (an issue of Newsweek was also banned in Bangladesh in 2003 following an article about misogyny in the Qur'an).
How a Fire Broke Out
Picking up where Mr. Khan left off, other politicians and clerics in Pakistan issued similar statements and prompted angry protests, particularly among those who regard damage to the Qur'an as more heinous than torturing human beings:
"We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive," says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week's protests took place. "But insulting the Qur'an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate."
The first riot took place in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on May 11th. BBC Online describes it like this:
"At least four people have died and many were hurt after police fired shots to disperse anti-US protests in the Afghan city of Jalalabad, officials say."
The indication is that the Afghan police fired on an unarmed crowd in a small but deliberate massacre. In what circumstances they opened fire is left unsaid. Despite US protestations that allegations concerning the Qur'an would be investigated, the circumstances in which people were actually killed apparently aroused the interest of almost no one. The following day, May 12th, the BBC reported on three more deaths:
"Two people died in a shooting near the city of Jalalabad. Another person was killed west of the capital, Kabul."
Who shot who? Isn't the BBC even curious? Virtually every media outlet and even Human Rights Watch talk of people being killed in riots without informing us who did the killing - the rioters or the authorities, or both. On May 13th, we have a more specific account:
"Another three people were killed in the north-eastern province of Badakhshan after police opened fire on what reports described as a large group of protesters who were shouting 'Death to America!'."
But on May 13th, police also appeared to number among the casualties as protestors returned the fire:
"Police officers are reported to be among four dead in Ghazni province, 150km south-west of the capital, Kabul, after security forces clashed with protesters. Interior ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal told the BBC that some of the demonstrators involved in the Ghazni protest were armed with AK 47s and handguns. 'They tried to attack the governor's house and office', he said, 'and fired on police and afghan army troops.'"
One of the few categorical, though possibly inaccurate, statements on the matter came breezily in this report from MSNBC News:
The White House blamed the magazine’s account for triggering deadly anti-American protests in Afghanistan last week in which police fired on demonstrators and killed about 15 people. (Emphasis added)
The Afghan police are a part of a security apparatus created by the United States government, other Coalition powers and local Afghan allies of Coalition forces. So Scott McClellan might have said that "People have lost their lives - because our Afghan partners shot them". At the very least, the conduct of Afghan police should be investigated to help develop more humane policing.
The whole epsiode is a case-study of how the American right's propaganda can turn an entire issue upside down with extraordinary effectiveness. So many have so much to be ashamed of. Mike Isikoff, John Barry and Michael Whitaker were among the few who didn't - but they were the only ones to offer an apology.
Inner-City on Fire
[Note to readers - this article was originally written for a US readership. By way of an update, the Parisian authorities have since dealt with the problem of Africans living in unsafe homes by throwing them on to the streets while they try to come up with a solution, resulting in African-style refugee camps in the streets of the French capital]
In the afternoon of March 25th, 1911, passers-by saw what seemed to be an effort by workers of the Triangle Company to throw out bundles of cloth from the windows of the 8th floor - until they realized they were actually witnessing factory girls throwing their own bodies out on to the street below as a fire raged inside. When it was over, 146 workers were dead.
The Triangle workers who had been killed - mostly women, earning $6 dollars a week for their pains - spent their day, like half of all New York's laborers then, above the seventh floor. As fire fighters arrived to put out the blaze they discovered to their horror that the water from their hoses did not reach past the seventh floor. Their ladders only went as far as the sixth or seventh floors too - and the women had to jump from the 8th to grab the tops of the ladders. Some made it, others missed.
The victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Inside the building, there were further disappointments. The 27 emergency buckets of water on the eighth floor were all used to no effect. In violation of the law, the Triangle Company kept its doors locked during the day, and its workers died pressed up against the exits. The doors that did open happened to open inwards rather than outwards - a further illegality - so when desperate workers rushed to the exits and pressed against the doors, they may as well have been locked. For many there was only one way out. In scenes with a modern resonance New Yorkers won't need reminding of, The New York World reported:
"From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death - girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped."
One of the elevator operators tried to take down as many as he could - but the elevator didn't fit many. And as they descended, they could hear the thuds of women above, throwing themselves down the shaft. The coins from the pockets and their blood dripped down on to the lucky few. Police later took 25 bodies from out of the elevator shaft.
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a landmark in US labor history. 100,000 people marched in a memorial parade down Broadway and the sense of anger about what had happened was palpable. It wasn't just an accident - it was an easily avoided tragedy and a scandal that reflected the neglect of New York's workers by the employing class.
