Saturday, November 05, 2005

Keeping Humpty on the Wall: All the President's Media


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All the King's Media
WILLIAM GREIDER

The Nation
[from the November 21, 2005 issue]


Amid the smoke and stench of burning careers, Washington feels a bit like the last days of the ancien régime. As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed. Let the perp walks begin. Whether the public feels reassured is another matter.

George W. Bush's plight leads me to thoughts of Louis XV and his royal court in the eighteenth century. Politics may not have changed as much as modern pretensions assume. Like Bush, the French king was quite popular until he was scorned, stubbornly self-certain in his exercise of power yet strangely submissive to manipulation by his courtiers. Like Louis Quinze, our American magistrate (whose own position was secured through court intrigues, not elections) has lost the "royal touch." Certain influential cliques openly jeer the leader they not so long ago extolled; others gossip about royal tantrums and other symptoms of lost direction. The accusations stalking his important counselors and assembly leaders might even send some of them to jail. These political upsets might matter less if the government were not so inept at fulfilling its routine obligations, like storm relief. The king's sorry war drags on without resolution, with people still arguing over why exactly he started it. The staff of life--oil, not bread--has become punishingly expensive. The government is broke, borrowing formidable sums from rival nations. The king pretends nothing has changed.

The burnt odor in Washington is from the disintegrating authority of the governing classes. The public's darkest suspicions seem confirmed. Flagrant money corruption, deceitful communication of public plans and purposes, shocking incompetence--take your pick, all are involved. None are new to American politics, but they are potently fused in the present circumstances. A recent survey in Wisconsin found that only 6 percent of citizens believe their elected representatives serve the public interest. If they think that of state and local officials, what must they think of Washington?

We are witnessing, I suspect, something more momentous than the disgrace of another American President. Watergate was red hot, but always about Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon. This convergence of scandal and failure seems more systemic, less personal. The new political force for change is not the squeamish opposition party called the Democrats but a common disgust and anger at the sordidness embedded in our dysfunctional democracy. The wake from that disgust may prove broader than Watergate's (when democracy was supposedly restored by Nixon's exit), because the anger is also splashing over once-trusted elements of the establishment.

Heroic truth-tellers in the Watergate saga, the established media are now in disrepute, scandalized by unreliable "news" and over-intimate attachments to powerful court insiders. The major media stood too close to the throne, deferred too eagerly to the king's twisted version of reality and his lust for war. The institutions of "news" failed democracy on monumental matters. In fact, the contemporary system looks a lot more like the ancien régime than its practitioners realize. Control is top-down and centralized. Information is shaped (and tainted) by the proximity of leading news-gatherers to the royal court and by their great distance from people and ordinary experience.

People do find ways to inform themselves, as best they can, when the regular "news" is not reliable. In prerevolutionary France, independent newspapers were illegal--forbidden by the king--and books and pamphlets, rigorously censored by the government. Yet people developed a complex shadow system by which they learned what was really going on--the news that did not appear in official court pronouncements and privileged publications. Cultural historian Robert Darnton, in brilliantly original works like The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, has mapped the informal but politically potent news system by which Parisians of high and low status circulated court secrets or consumed the scandalous books known as libelles, along with subversive songs, poems and gossip, often leaked from within the king's own circle. News traveled in widening circles. Parisians gathered in favored cafes, designated park benches or exclusive salons, where the forbidden information was read aloud and copied by others to pass along. Parisians could choose for themselves which reality they believed. The power of the French throne was effectively finished, one might say, once the king lost control of the news. (It was his successor, Louis XVI, who lost his head.)

Something similar, as Darnton noted, is occurring now in American society. The centralized institutions of press and broadcasting are being challenged and steadily eroded by widening circles of unlicensed "news" agents--from talk-radio hosts to Internet bloggers and others--who compete with the official press to be believed. These interlopers speak in a different language and from many different angles of vision. Less authoritative, but more democratic. The upheaval has only just begun, but already even the best newspapers are hemorrhaging circulation. Dan Gillmor, an influential pioneer and author of We the Media, thinks tomorrow's news, the reporting and production, will be "more of a conversation, or a seminar"--less top-down, and closer to how people really speak about their lives.

Which brings us to the sappy operetta of the reporter and her influential source: Scooter Libby, the Vice President's now-indicted war wonk, and Judith Miller, the New York Times's intrepid reporter and First Amendment martyr. What seems most shocking about their relationship is the intimacy. "Come back to work--and life," Scooter pleaded in a letter to Judy, doing her eighty-five days in jail. "Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them." Miller responded in her bizarre first-person Times account by telling a cherished memory of Scooter. Out West, she said, a man in sunglasses, dressed like a cowboy, approached and spoke to her: "Judy, it's Scooter Libby."

Are Washington reporters really that close to their sources? For her part, Miller has a "tropism toward powerful men," as Times columnist Maureen Dowd delicately put it. This is well-known gossip in court circles, but let's not go there. Boy reporters also suck up to powerful men with shameful deference, wanting to be loved by the insiders so they can be inside too (shades of the French courtiers). The price of intimacy is collected in various coins, but older hands in the news business understand what is being sold. The media, Christopher Dickey of Newsweek observed in a web essay, "long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it."

The elite press, like any narcissistic politician, tells a heart-warming myth about itself. Reporters, it is said, dig out the hard facts to share with the people by locating anonymous truth-tellers inside government. They then protect these sources from retaliation by refusing to name them, even at the cost of going to prison. That story line was utterly smashed by this scandal. Reporters were prepared to go to jail to protect sources who were not exactly whistleblowers cowering in anonymity. They were Libby and Karl Rove--the king's own counselors at the pinnacle of government. They were the same guys who collaborated on the bloodiest political deception of the Bush presidency: the lies that took the country into war. So, in a sense, the press was also protecting itself from further embarrassment. The major media, including the best newspapers, all got the war wrong, and for roughly the same reason--their compliant proximity to power. With a few honorable exceptions, they bought into the lies and led cheers for war. They ignored or downplayed the dissent from some military leaders and declined to explore tough questions posed by anyone outside the charmed circle. The nation may not soon forget this abuse of privileged status, nor should it.

Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington. The sweet irony of President Bush's predicament is that it was partly self-induced. His White House deputies enforced discipline on reporters and insiders, essentially shutting down the stream of nonofficial communications and closing the informal portals for dissent and dispute within government. This was new in the Bush era, and it's ultimately been debilitating. It has made reporters still more dependent on the official spin, as the Administration wanted, but it has also sealed off the king from the flow of high-level leaks and informative background noises that help vet developing policies and steer reporters to the deeper news.

The paradox of our predicament is that, unlike the ancien régime, US citizens do enjoy free speech, free press and other rights to disturb the powerful. In this country you can say aloud or publish just about anything you like. But will anyone hear you? The audible range of diverse and rebellious voices has been visibly shrunk in the last generation. The corporate concentration of media ownership has put a deadening blanket over the usual cacophony of democracy, with dissenting voices screened for acceptability by young and often witless TV producers. Corporate owners have a strong stake in what gets said on their stations. Why piss off the President when you will need his good regard for so many things? Viewers have a zillion things to watch, but if you jump around the dial, with luck you will always be watching a General Electric channel.

How did it happen that the multiplication of outlets made possible by technology led to a concentration of views and opinions--ones usually anchored by the conventional wisdom of center-right sensibilities? Where did the "freedom" go? Where are the people's ideas and observations? Al Gore, who found his voice after he lost the presidency, recently expressed his sense of alarm: "I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse." The bread-and-circuses format that monopolizes the public's airwaves is driven by a condescending commercial calculation that Americans are too stupid to want anything more. But that assumption becomes fragile as other voices find other venues for expression. This is an industry crisis that will be very healthy for the society, a political opening to rearrange access and licensing for democratic purposes.

For the faltering press, the bloggers will keep sharpening their swords, slicing away at the established order. This is good, but the pressure will lead to meaningful change only if the Internet artisans innovate further, organizing new formats and techniques for networking among more diverse people and interests. The daily feed of facts and bile from bloggers has been wondrously effective in unmasking the pretensions of the big boys, but the broader society needs more--something closer to the democratic "conversations and seminars" that Gillmor envisions, and less dependent on partisan fury and accusation.

As an ex-Luddite, I came to the web with the skepticism of an old print guy. Against expectations, I am experiencing sustained exchanges with many far-flung people I've never met--dialogues that inform both of us and are utterly voluntary experiences. This is a promising new form of consent. Democracy, I once wrote, begins not at election time but in human conversation.

Establishment newspapers like the New York Times face a special dilemma, one they may not easily resolve. Under assault, do editors and reporters align still more closely with the establishment interests to maintain an air of "authority," or do they get down with folks and dish it out to the powerful? Scandal and crisis compelled the Times to lower its veil of authority a bit and acknowledge error (a shocking development itself). But while the Times is in my view the best, most interesting newspaper, it always will be establishment. For instance, it could be more honest about its longstanding newsroom tensions between "liberals" and "neocons." What the editors might re-examine is their own defensive concept of what's authoritative. It is not just Bush's war that blinded sober judgment and led to narrow coverage. In many other important areas--political decay and global economics, among others--the Times (like other elite papers) seems afraid to acknowledge that wider, more fundamental debate exists. It chooses to report only one side--the side of received elite opinion.

Readers do understand--surprise!--that the Times is not infallible. A newspaper comes out every day and gets something wrong. Tomorrow, it comes out again and can try to get it right. In essence, that is what people and critics already know. They are more likely to be forgiving if the newspaper loosens up a bit and makes room for more divergent understandings of what's happening. But as more irreverent voices elbow their way into the "news" system, the big media are likely to lose still more audience if they cannot get more distance from throne and power.

What will come of all this? Possibly, not much. The cluster of scandals and breakdown may simply feed the people's alienation and resignation. The governing elites, including major media, are in denial, unwilling to speak honestly about the perilous economic circumstances ahead, the burgeoning debt from global trade, the sinking of the working class and other threatening conditions. When those realities surface, many American lives will be upended with no available recourse and no one in authority they can trust, since the denial and evasion are bipartisan. That's a very dangerous situation for a society--an invitation to irrational angers and scapegoating. It will require a new, more encompassing politics to avert an ugly political contagion. We need more reliable "news" to recover democracy.

Canadian Empire?

Malign Neglect or Imperialism?
Nikolas Barry-Shaw

03/11/2005 - 03:58


What is happening right now in Haiti is probably Canada’s worst foreign policy crime in the last 50 years. The Canadian government helped plan and carry out the destabilization of Haiti’s elected government, culminating in the February 2004 coup d’état/kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide by U.S. Marines and Canada’s Joint Task Force 2. Since then, the coup-installed government and its death squad allies have waged an all-out war against Aristide’s Lavalas movement and its supporters with the full and enthusiastic backing of Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

Canadian police lead the UN police mission (UNPOL) responsible for training, vetting and overseeing the new Haitian National Police (HNP). Under their watch, hundreds of former Haitian Army (FAd’H) officers, death squad members and individuals who “have been involved in drug rackets, kidnappings, extra judicial killings or other illegal activities,” have been integrated into the HNP, according to the Catholic Institute for International Relations. The result has been massacres, violent and indiscriminate raids on poor neighborhoods, summary executions, attacks on journalists and peaceful demonstrators and arbitrary mass arrests. Thousands have been killed and thousands more have gone into hiding or taken exile in another country. When asked about reports of these abuses by human rights groups and mainstream news agencies, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has scornfully dismissed all evidence as “propaganda which is absolutely not interesting.”

Canada is also deeply involved in the functioning of Haiti’s justice system. Deputy Justice Minister Philippe Vixamar is a direct employee of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and was assigned to his position by the Agency. In an interview, Vixamar revealed that the U.S. and Canadian governments play key roles in the criminal justice system, including paying high-level government officials. The prison system is massively overcrowded with hundreds if not thousands of political prisoners, including Lavalas presidential candidate and Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience” Father Gerard Jean-Juste. Meanwhile, death squad leaders such as Louis Jodel Chamblain are acquitted in sham trials. Special Advisor to the PM on Haiti Denis Coderre has been exceptionally duplicitous on the matter, claiming, without apparent irony, “Canada would not get involved in Haiti’s justice system.”

Repression is the only means of holding power available to an illegitimate government pushing through an anti-popular program, as the installed regime of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has amply demonstrated. Canada helped craft the neoliberal plan for post-coup Haiti and has played a crucial part in propping up the corrupt cabal of technocrats and supporters of the former Duvalier dictatorship that forms the interim government. As part of this plan, subsidies for Haiti’s impoverished farmers have been slashed, the minimum wage has been reduced and an extremely successful adult literacy program has been dismantled by the Latortue regime, while large businesses have been given a three-year tax holiday and ex-FAd’H soldiers have been paid the outrageous sum of $30 million in “back wages”. The ground is also being prepared for the privatization of Haiti’s state enterprises, a policy vigorously opposed by the Haitian people. The Interim Cooperation Framework (ICF), a document outlining the priorities of the “transitional government” and the donor countries, touts “private sector participation” in state enterprises and makes clear the anti-democratic nature of these reforms: “The transition period . . . provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms . . . that may be hard for a future government to undo.” Canada helped draft the ICF and has donated $147 million in support of it.

Straightforward graft is flourishing under the installed government. Early on, the Office of the Prime Minister was rocked by a corruption scandal that involved diverting 15,000 bags of rice destined for the poor of Port-au-Prince, resulting in the suspension of two high-level officials close to Gerard Latortue. Youri Latortue, nephew of the Prime Minister and security chief of the National Palace, has been dubbed “Mister 30 Percent” by the French press for the cut he takes on favours, and is reportedly involved with smuggling drugs and guns. Recently, the Haitian news service Agence Haitien de Presse revealed that the government had been writing monthly checks for 6,000 police officers, despite there being only 4,000 officers in the HNP.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this atrocious record, the Canadian government has used every diplomatic means available in an effort to provide legitimacy to the installed government. High-level Canadian officials, such as Paul Martin, Pierre Pettigrew and Denis Coderre have made numerous visits to Haiti since the coup to “underline Canada’s support of the interim government and [their] intention to remain involved for the long term.” Canada has also organized and hosted international conferences with the Latortue government and chided other nations to disburse their aid more quickly. Paul Martin has even chastised CARICOM (the group of Caribbean countries) leaders for their refusal to recognize the installed government and their continued calls for an independent investigation into the removal of President Aristide. CARICOM is not alone in its opposition to the coup: Venezuela and the 53 nations of the African Union have also withheld recognition of the Latortue regime, and the ANC, South Africa’s governing party, has launched a campaign calling for the return of democracy to Haiti.

It hardly comes as a surprise that Canadian government officials and their PR flaks to have sought to deceive the public while carrying out their nefarious dealings in Haiti. Yet the government has received help in this endeavour from some unlikely sources: various self-denoted “left” or “progressive” NGOs have misrepresented the causes of the human rights disaster in Haiti and ignored Canada’s intervention almost completely, thus becoming complicit, wittingly or not, in the government’s “perception management” operations. Pierre Beaudet’s Rabble.ca piece “Haiti: Where should the left stand?” defending his organization Alternatives’ position on Haiti is but the most recent example. While his distortions of Haiti’s history since 1995 (especially concerning the 2000 elections and after) are significant, it is Beaudet’s assessment of the present that we will look at here.

Beaudet seriously minimizes the ruthless violence of the interim government and its Canadian-trained police force, devoting all of one sentence to the repression of Lavalas and voicing only tepid opposition to it. Moreover, Beaudet prefaces his trite reference to the anti-Lavalas witch hunt with the discredited notion of Aristide using “hard nosed gangs” to “create havoc”, implicitly laying the blame on the victims. Indeed, the Lavalas movement is portrayed as little more than a gang of criminals and drug runners in Beaudet’s article. Yet the depth of support Lavalas continues to enjoy belies such characterizations. First of all, the large majority of Lavalas’ base is located in the countryside, where at least 65% of the population lives. Rural Haiti is not exactly the preserve of ganglords and drug dealers, as Dr. Paul Farmer, renowned for his work against AIDS, malaria and TB in the Central Plateau and other parts of Haiti, explains: “I personally, in all my years in Haiti, have never once seen a peasant with a gun. And almost all of the ones around these parts are members of Famni Lavalas (Aristide's party). Now I've tended to many gunshot wounds, but they've been inflicted by former soldiers, police, or people who have cars to drive - not peasants.” In the cities, Lavalas has mobilized tens of thousands of people for demonstrations many times since the coup, despite the (frequently realized) threat of police using gunfire to break up protests. Even observers as hostile as the American and Canadian embassies have acknowledged that Lavalas is still the most popular political movement in Haiti.

While rhetorically opposing imperialism, Beaudet’s actual critique of the foreign powers’ current involvement in Haiti boils down to an accusation of malign neglect: Canada has not been “generous” enough with its aid policies and the international community have failed to “clean the mess” in Haiti as promised. Yet UN troops have been trying to “clean the mess” by carrying out frequent raids into pro-Lavalas slums, with deadly consequences for the population, and contrary to Beaudet’s belief, Canada has been extremely generous to the de facto Haitian government it helped install. What is Beaudet’s criticism of Gerard Latortue’s government, an exceedingly corrupt and undemocratic administration that is repressing its political opponents on a massive scale and reordering Haiti’s economy along neoliberal lines? Merely that it has been “ineffective”.

The hypocrisy (and serviceability to power) of this stance is worth noting: Aristide was accused of having these very same flaws (undemocratic, corrupt, neoliberal) and received unrelenting condemnation from NGOs such as Alternatives, yet no such opprobrium is forthcoming from Beaudet when it comes to the U.S./Canada puppet regime. Indeed, Beaudet seems more interested in talking about “the crimes that everyone knew Aristide had committed,” than about the serious and ongoing crimes of Canada and the interim government, crimes for which we, as Canadian citizens, hold far more responsibility.

In short, Aristide is not the issue; Canada’s role as a junior partner to U.S. imperialism is the issue.


www.outofhaiti.ca

A Canadian Empire?

Nikolas Barry-Shaw

Rabble.ca
03/11/2005 - 03:58

What is happening right now in Haiti is probably Canada’s worst foreign policy crime in the last 50 years. The Canadian government helped plan and carry out the destabilization of Haiti’s elected government, culminating in the February 2004 coup d’état/kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide by U.S. Marines and Canada’s Joint Task Force 2. Since then, the coup-installed government and its death squad allies have waged an all-out war against Aristide’s Lavalas movement and its supporters with the full and enthusiastic backing of Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

Canadian police lead the UN police mission (UNPOL) responsible for training, vetting and overseeing the new Haitian National Police (HNP). Under their watch, hundreds of former Haitian Army (FAd’H) officers, death squad members and individuals who “have been involved in drug rackets, kidnappings, extra judicial killings or other illegal activities,” have been integrated into the HNP, according to the Catholic Institute for International Relations. The result has been massacres, violent and indiscriminate raids on poor neighborhoods, summary executions, attacks on journalists and peaceful demonstrators and arbitrary mass arrests. Thousands have been killed and thousands more have gone into hiding or taken exile in another country. When asked about reports of these abuses by human rights groups and mainstream news agencies, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has scornfully dismissed all evidence as “propaganda which is absolutely not interesting.”

Canada is also deeply involved in the functioning of Haiti’s justice system. Deputy Justice Minister Philippe Vixamar is a direct employee of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and was assigned to his position by the Agency. In an interview, Vixamar revealed that the U.S. and Canadian governments play key roles in the criminal justice system, including paying high-level government officials. The prison system is massively overcrowded with hundreds if not thousands of political prisoners, including Lavalas presidential candidate and Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience” Father Gerard Jean-Juste. Meanwhile, death squad leaders such as Louis Jodel Chamblain are acquitted in sham trials. Special Advisor to the PM on Haiti Denis Coderre has been exceptionally duplicitous on the matter, claiming, without apparent irony, “Canada would not get involved in Haiti’s justice system.”

Repression is the only means of holding power available to an illegitimate government pushing through an anti-popular program, as the installed regime of Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has amply demonstrated. Canada helped craft the neoliberal plan for post-coup Haiti and has played a crucial part in propping up the corrupt cabal of technocrats and supporters of the former Duvalier dictatorship that forms the interim government. As part of this plan, subsidies for Haiti’s impoverished farmers have been slashed, the minimum wage has been reduced and an extremely successful adult literacy program has been dismantled by the Latortue regime, while large businesses have been given a three-year tax holiday and ex-FAd’H soldiers have been paid the outrageous sum of $30 million in “back wages”. The ground is also being prepared for the privatization of Haiti’s state enterprises, a policy vigorously opposed by the Haitian people. The Interim Cooperation Framework (ICF), a document outlining the priorities of the “transitional government” and the donor countries, touts “private sector participation” in state enterprises and makes clear the anti-democratic nature of these reforms: “The transition period . . . provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms . . . that may be hard for a future government to undo.” Canada helped draft the ICF and has donated $147 million in support of it.

Straightforward graft is flourishing under the installed government. Early on, the Office of the Prime Minister was rocked by a corruption scandal that involved diverting 15,000 bags of rice destined for the poor of Port-au-Prince, resulting in the suspension of two high-level officials close to Gerard Latortue. Youri Latortue, nephew of the Prime Minister and security chief of the National Palace, has been dubbed “Mister 30 Percent” by the French press for the cut he takes on favours, and is reportedly involved with smuggling drugs and guns. Recently, the Haitian news service Agence Haitien de Presse revealed that the government had been writing monthly checks for 6,000 police officers, despite there being only 4,000 officers in the HNP.

Despite (or perhaps because of) this atrocious record, the Canadian government has used every diplomatic means available in an effort to provide legitimacy to the installed government. High-level Canadian officials, such as Paul Martin, Pierre Pettigrew and Denis Coderre have made numerous visits to Haiti since the coup to “underline Canada’s support of the interim government and [their] intention to remain involved for the long term.” Canada has also organized and hosted international conferences with the Latortue government and chided other nations to disburse their aid more quickly. Paul Martin has even chastised CARICOM (the group of Caribbean countries) leaders for their refusal to recognize the installed government and their continued calls for an independent investigation into the removal of President Aristide. CARICOM is not alone in its opposition to the coup: Venezuela and the 53 nations of the African Union have also withheld recognition of the Latortue regime, and the ANC, South Africa’s governing party, has launched a campaign calling for the return of democracy to Haiti.

It hardly comes as a surprise that Canadian government officials and their PR flaks to have sought to deceive the public while carrying out their nefarious dealings in Haiti. Yet the government has received help in this endeavour from some unlikely sources: various self-denoted “left” or “progressive” NGOs have misrepresented the causes of the human rights disaster in Haiti and ignored Canada’s intervention almost completely, thus becoming complicit, wittingly or not, in the government’s “perception management” operations. Pierre Beaudet’s Rabble.ca piece “Haiti: Where should the left stand?” defending his organization Alternatives’ position on Haiti is but the most recent example. While his distortions of Haiti’s history since 1995 (especially concerning the 2000 elections and after) are significant, it is Beaudet’s assessment of the present that we will look at here.

Beaudet seriously minimizes the ruthless violence of the interim government and its Canadian-trained police force, devoting all of one sentence to the repression of Lavalas and voicing only tepid opposition to it. Moreover, Beaudet prefaces his trite reference to the anti-Lavalas witch hunt with the discredited notion of Aristide using “hard nosed gangs” to “create havoc”, implicitly laying the blame on the victims. Indeed, the Lavalas movement is portrayed as little more than a gang of criminals and drug runners in Beaudet’s article. Yet the depth of support Lavalas continues to enjoy belies such characterizations. First of all, the large majority of Lavalas’ base is located in the countryside, where at least 65% of the population lives. Rural Haiti is not exactly the preserve of ganglords and drug dealers, as Dr. Paul Farmer, renowned for his work against AIDS, malaria and TB in the Central Plateau and other parts of Haiti, explains: “I personally, in all my years in Haiti, have never once seen a peasant with a gun. And almost all of the ones around these parts are members of Famni Lavalas (Aristide's party). Now I've tended to many gunshot wounds, but they've been inflicted by former soldiers, police, or people who have cars to drive - not peasants.” In the cities, Lavalas has mobilized tens of thousands of people for demonstrations many times since the coup, despite the (frequently realized) threat of police using gunfire to break up protests. Even observers as hostile as the American and Canadian embassies have acknowledged that Lavalas is still the most popular political movement in Haiti.

While rhetorically opposing imperialism, Beaudet’s actual critique of the foreign powers’ current involvement in Haiti boils down to an accusation of malign neglect: Canada has not been “generous” enough with its aid policies and the international community have failed to “clean the mess” in Haiti as promised. Yet UN troops have been trying to “clean the mess” by carrying out frequent raids into pro-Lavalas slums, with deadly consequences for the population, and contrary to Beaudet’s belief, Canada has been extremely generous to the de facto Haitian government it helped install. What is Beaudet’s criticism of Gerard Latortue’s government, an exceedingly corrupt and undemocratic administration that is repressing its political opponents on a massive scale and reordering Haiti’s economy along neoliberal lines? Merely that it has been “ineffective”.

The hypocrisy (and serviceability to power) of this stance is worth noting: Aristide was accused of having these very same flaws (undemocratic, corrupt, neoliberal) and received unrelenting condemnation from NGOs such as Alternatives, yet no such opprobrium is forthcoming from Beaudet when it comes to the U.S./Canada puppet regime. Indeed, Beaudet seems more interested in talking about “the crimes that everyone knew Aristide had committed,” than about the serious and ongoing crimes of Canada and the interim government, crimes for which we, as Canadian citizens, hold far more responsibility.

In short, Aristide is not the issue; Canada’s role as a junior partner to U.S. imperialism is the issue.


www.outofhaiti.ca

The Phoney War: Bush Program Rolls On While Democrats Dither

Watch That Pea

What the administration is doing
while you’re watching Scooter & Sammy.


by John M. Kelley


http://www.opednews.com


It seems interesting to me that while all of the Democratic voices have gone gaga over the
indictment of Scooter Libby and the nomination to the Supreme Court of Samuel Alito, the administration is continuing to tighten its control over the national economic/political process.

On the one hand you have Democrats swooning about how this is the beginning of the end for Bush and how the white knight Fitzgerald is going to slay the Neo-Con dragon. They are ecstatic that a majority of the country now sees the war in Iraq as a tragic mistake. They feel that high gas prices, stagflation and the national deficit are winning allies from independents and moderate Republican circles every day. I saw a political cartoon today that implied Rove, Cheney and Bush were all on the run and had fled the country.

On the other hand they are gearing up for a fight over Judge Alito, even before it is clear whether there should be one. The Neo-Cons are promising the nuclear option if Alito’s nomination is filibustered, while some Democrats are already promising to shut down the Senate if they can’t win. Recent polls have given them hope that they will gain public support for a filibuster if Alito can be portrayed as clearly against Roe vs Wade. The Democrats can almost smell a house majority in the 2006 elections.

Hokum, they aren’t watching the pea. First let’s talk about the things that are being ignored that are significant and then this roll the Democrats think they are on.

Taxes

For starters the new budget bill proposes $70 billion in new tax breaks for the rich while cutting $10 billion in Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and poor. A new tax code is being recommended that would tax labor more heavily then dividends or capital gains. In other words if you make money shoveling, you’ll pay a higher tax rate then the guy going by in the back of his chauffeured Rolls-Royce.

The government just allowed approximately $300 billion in offshore earnings to enter the country under a special deal that only taxes it a rate of 5%. So the government won’t find itself in the embarrassing position of having to work out special deals for its campaign donors in the future, the new tax code recommends that corporations not pay any tax on money earned overseas.

Even though most corporations pay never pay any real taxes, the corporate rate would be reduced to 31.5%, cheaper then they have ever been. Most would likely increase the payment of dividends which would be tax free to individual shareholders although not to most of the little folks who own stock through mutual funds and retirement vehicles, they would pay 15% on investments. Meanwhile the wealthy would pay a top capital gains tax on average, of 8.25%,

Setting a cap on corporate deductions for health insurance premiums would encourage more and more companies to drop their plans as health care costs continue to outpace inflation and employers squeeze for more profit. In the place of a number of current deductions for healthcare, retirement and education would be three tax exempt savings accounts for individuals which you could put up to $20,000 a year into. Great, I always have an extra 20k that I don’t need lying around to salt away in a tax free account.

In addition the abolition of certain tax breaks like the deductions for state and local taxes will hurt the little guy a lot more then the rich. The loss of the property tax deduction would wipe out any interest deduction for most small homeowners as well as increase resistance to raising local taxes at a time when the feds have shifted more of the costs to local and state governments.

While doing away with the alternative minimum tax for individuals, which at least needs to be indexed, it would also do away with the alternative minimum tax on corporations which has been virtually ignored in the press.

Media Concentration and Control

In notable but unheralded telecommunications acquisitions, SBC acquired AT&T and Verizon purchased MCI, which will yield further consolidation and concentration of telecommunication/media control. The few anti-monopoly restrictions placed on them will all expire after a maximum of 30 months allowing them to raise rates, shut out competition and restrict competitive use of access.

Meanwhile over at the Corporation of Public Broadcasting Board of Directors, the new GOP fundraiser Chairperson and Kenneth Tomlinson replacement, Cheryl Halpern is fast turning public broadcasting into a pro government propaganda machine. She hired former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Patricia de Stacy Harrison, as President. She in turn has brought along her old subordinates from the State Department Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Division (read Ministry of Foreign Propaganda) to do their magic on the American people via public television and radio. They include Tom Igsitt, Vice President for Government Affairs; Mike Levy Vice President of Communications; and Helen Mobley, director of Corporate Communications and Planning. All three have extensive overseas propaganda experience.

The Continued Removal of Corporate Responsibility

The corporate owned congress continues to feed its contributors and give the bill to the American people. Having passed bills that relieve corporate accountability for fast food and guns they now want to help the pharmaceutical industry. Stating that limiting liability is the only way to get companies to produce avian flu vaccines it is just a foot in the door to relieve them from any liability for future development of new pharmaceuticals.

All of these laws tote personal responsibility while totally ignoring the constant marketing barrage people are subjected to, starting in childhood to buy their products, the valuing of profits before negative impacts or outright deceptive practices used to increase sales. I wonder if my heirs can sue if the weight loss medicine I am using causes me to become so depressed I shoot myself.

The Growth of the Police State

Right now the President and Vice President continue to argue for the right to torture people at their discretion. The President continues to hold American citizens in seclusion without charges, trial or access to a lawyer. He maintains that the government continues the need to secretly invade American homes, search them and not tell anyone until much later. The man who advised the administration on how it could avoid war crimes prosecution is now the Attorney General and the head of the death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua is in charge of all intelligence foreign and domestic in the United States.

We learn that in addition to people being picked up and send to countries where they can be tortured by other governments our own government is now maintaining secret prisons abroad where they presumably are exempt from any standard of civil rights or humane treatment. In Guantanamo, 21 prisoners who have been held almost four years without charges or trial are being subjected to forced feeding through nose tubes while strapped to beds so they can’t pull them out and choose death over their hopeless existence. Acts the Secretary of Defense calls “some people chose to go on diets for various reasons”.

Forget the battle over Chief Justice Roberts and nominee Alito’s views are on abortion. That pales next to their well-documented beliefs on the supremacy of the corporation and the total faith in the dictatorial powers of the Presidency. These are the votes that can install the Divine Right of Kings and primogeniture succession in America. Add to that the international judgment that the United States ranks 22nd in its freedom of the press and you are looking at an increasingly closed society.

Last week the President states that his plan for dealing with the avian flu was to offer more liability protection and subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to gear up vaccination production. They at their humanitarian best said they didn’t think it would be worth it for a one-time disease. A projected 200 million people would die in a world wide pandemic. Anybody need another reason for a national healthcare program.

Basically, the President said his goal was to get 20 million vaccines available for first responders including the military. If you include professional healthcare workers (7 million alone), medical support staff, firemen, police, military and their families that means the other 280 million people are on their own. One public health official put it this way (I paraphrase) “local governments will primarily be on their own. A pandemic could last from 1-3 years during which time many people would be out of work, have trouble obtaining food and other basic necessities. Hospitals would be overwhelmed with schools and stadiums being used as makeshift medical facilities. Morgues would not be able to handle the numbers of dead.” Estimates talk of deaths in the millions in the U.S. alone. The Presidents plan seems to be, put federal and National Guard troops around an infected area and let them ride it out.

Bush’s Alcoholic Mastery of Denial Will Not Surrender

What the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that by going to the wall on the Alito nomination is they can only lose on all accounts. While both sides can fill their coffers for the 2006 elections and unify their bases by a full scale fight, a democratic filibuster in the Senate followed by a Republican nuclear option it is a self destructive strategy. Between the enmity that it will create with moderate Republicans and the filibuster gone, the Republican arm-twisting machine will move into full throttle before the next election occurs. The filibuster will be useless on every other issue that comes up.

Once used the nuclear option will push the Republican party past the point of no return. The Republicans will be faced with the prospect of a Democratic majority using it in revenge or insuring the Democrats never come to power again. Republicans will hammer them with it on every issue. The corporations, the religious right and the neo-con militarists will want to push through everything they can in case there is a public backlash against the house, and the party will want to limit the ability for Democrats to win and be willing to push through repressive changes in the Voting Rights Act before the next election. Moderates will be forced by the need for contributions and base solidification to march to the beat of the far right. It will be a scorched earth policy.

A better strategy would be to thoroughly expose all of Alito’s beliefs about abortion, executive power, corporate power and other views repugnant to the citizenry. Claim the moral high ground and vote as a party against him if that is what it takes to stake out a position to move forward from. There is still a majority to protect Roe vs Wade and we won’t be powerless to filibuster even more repugnant legislation that the administration surely will try to push through if the nuclear option is used. Having not used the filibuster on the supreme court nominee the Republicans will be hesitant to use the nuclear option on anything less.

Secondly, the Libby/Rove prosecution/investigation is likely to be obstructed for years (anybody remember Whitewater). Claims of Executive Privilege and Classified information will stall the investigation and trial to a crawl. Libby may finally go to jail, but certainly with a promise of a pardon on Bush’s last day in office which will be about the time he actually has to show up there and for Rove, the same. The Bush family has a history of being very forgiving of those who participated with them in crimes against the country. Even if Cheney resigns, possible but doubtful, Bush will probably stumble on to the end of his term alone, isolated and paranoid. That in and of itself is a scary scenario.

Over at the U.N John Bolton is going full speed ahead to destroy any official world opposition to U.S. policy in that body. Bolton and Rice are fomenting expanding the Iraq war to Syria and have driven Iranian leaders backwards into a theocratic frenzy suggesting to them that they have nothing to lose by becoming more militant. The Iranians are angry, paranoid and threatened. Their reactions are unifying the world along cold war lines with the U.S. again dominating the discussion and direction.

Opposite of Bush’s promise, the Iranian hardliners have grown in power. They know a war with the United States involving Syria as well is their best chance of survival internally and would unite much of the Muslim war against the U.S. In response Bush has indicated a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons. Even if used against buried military targets with limited loss of life and no collateral damage, it would outrage the world and explode the anger of a billion Muslims, many who would be willing to carry the terrorist war to America.

The history of the Bush administration is when questioned refuse to answer, when caught lie, when cornered get do something more extreme to change the subject, but never, never give up. Expanding the war to Syria and Iran, using massive bombing, nuking the Democrats in the Senate over abortion, pushing through a tax plan that favors corporations and the rich while further limiting their liability, expanding media consolidation and propaganda efforts while further crushing dissent are quite frankly all things that will gain support on the right among the radical theocratic, ideological and corporate bases.

Bush is most likely an untreated alcoholic who is either actively drinking or on a dry drunk. Alcoholics in this position resort to megalomania as long as they have the resources to maintain their illusion, and presidents have a lot of resources for self delusion at their disposal. When they become overwhelmed by the consequences of their actions they resort to blame, rage and destructive actions. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on the other hand are hard-core ideologues who are willing to sacrifice any number of people to execute their plans for world domination.

Given this administrations willingness to ignore public opinion and forge on in spite of its mistakes, exposed lies and corruption it is not a far stretch to imagine what kind of power it might try and seize in case of a national emergency like a flu pandemic. If you think the last two elections have been a farce, what about no election because of a pandemic, what about the suspension of congress and the prohibition of any public gathering enforced by the military. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but then again maybe anybody who believes this administration is on the run hasn’t been reading past the headlines.


www.mytown.ca/johnkelley

John Michael Kelley is a teacher, philosopher, writer, artist, political activist, singer of ballads, rebellious Irishman and agent for change who worries daily about the world he is leaving for his grandchildren.

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Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Israel's Gaza Blitzkrieg


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Toufic Haddad reports on Gaza after “disengagement”

The Ongoing Occupation


Socialist Worker
November 4, 2005 | Page 4

ISRAEL CARRIED out a week of attacks against Palestinians in the largest offensive yet since completing “disengagement” from the occupied territory of Gaza.

Western news reports concluded that Palestinians had rejected Israel’s offering of “peace” and self-rule, focusing in particular on an October 26 suicide bombing carried out by the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in the Israeli town of Hadera, which killed five Israelis.

But the bombing was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a leader of Islamic Jihad three days before--an act that the Israeli military knew would provoke a response. In the days that followed, Palestinian forces in Gaza fired rockets at southern Israel, and Israel responded with air strikes that killed nine people, most of them bystanders.

This unequal military balance and the U.S. media’s bias were both factors in Israel’s so-called “disengagement” from Gaza, which provided the backdrop to the renewed violence. Here, TOUFIC HADDAD, co-editor of a forthcoming book on the Palestinian Intifada who recently returned from the Occupied Territories, explains what “disengagement” was really about.


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THE LAVISH praise Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon received for his Gaza “disengagement” plan was enough for one Israeli journalist to call him “the most warmly courted, popular new star” that “the world’s red carpets are waiting for.”
The compliments may have cleansed the name of a man associated with some of the worst war crimes committed against the Arab and Palestinian people. But disengagement itself--completed September 15 with the evacuation of the last of 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip--is likely only to open up the potential for yet more Arab blood to be shed in the future.

This is because “disengagement” had little to do with ending the occupation of Gaza--or “reinvigorating the peace process,” as was widely claimed by Israel, its allies and much of the corporate media. Rather, it was precisely intended to preclude both of these possibilities.

Is that an exaggerated or unnecessarily pessimistic judgment? Just look at what Sharon’s right-hand man, Dov Weisglass, had to say about the motivations for disengagement, to the Israeli paper Ha’aretz in October 2004. “The significance [of disengagement] is the freezing of the political process,” Weisglass said. “And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?”


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I RECENTLY returned from the Gaza strip, where I witnessed the Israeli disengagement from start to finish. The experience provided me a wide range of feelings and insights. Perhaps the strongest impression I was left with is how Gaza today represents a colonial laboratory for developing and implementing cutting-edge methods of human control and oppression.
It used to be that if an occupying power were unable to control an area due to local resistance, the occupiers would be forced to retreat from these areas. But that isn’t the case with respect to Gaza.

It’s true that the Palestinian resistance that developed in the Gaza Strip during the past five years of the Intifada (or uprising) destabilized Israel’s strategic control. Particularly with the Palestinians’ development of medium-range firepower, such as homemade mortars and primitive rockets, Israel’s strategic control over the Gaza Strip was slipping.

Israel’s answer was to devise new means to control Gaza more effectively from afar, using disengagement to consolidate its grip.

To begin with, the entire Gaza Strip remains entirely surrounded by an electronic fence and watchtowers, ensuring that its 1.4 million Palestinians don’t leave the congestion and squalor of their towns and refugee camps.

Then there’s the ever-present buzz of unmanned drones that criss-cross the skies of Gaza. In recent years, these drones have been increasingly fitted with U.S. made “Predator” missiles--which at the touch of a button pressed by someone in a room miles away, ensure instant death to whomever they target.

There is the enormous blimp that hovers above Gaza’s borders, not to mention the well-armed Israeli naval vessels prowling off Gaza’s coast.

But these are only the more tangible representations of Israeli control. There are also less visible means, including a kilometer-long wall that Israel is preparing to build into the sea, below sea-level along Gaza’s coast. Or the 650-meter buffer zone Israel wants north of the strip.

Gaza’s population registry still remains in Israel’s hands. The Palestinian Authority is still not authorized to issue personal identity cards--meaning, essentially, that Israel still controls who legally exists there. Today, there are an estimated 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza with no form of identification--who, hence, are unable to leave and re-enter their homeland, whether for educational, medical or family reasons.

There’s the question of border crossings in general, which Israel still demands direct control over. This one feature of Israeli rule essentially gives it control over all goods and people which enter or exit the strip, leaving the economic future of Gaza in the hands of Israeli generals. Israel can cut off a whole range of essential goods, from gasoline to medicine, from car parts to generators, and Gaza will continue to be a place where Israeli producers dump their goods on a captive market.

If these structural constraints weren’t enough, there are a host of other political and social concerns.

To begin with, Gaza lacks sources of clean water. Not only has Israel tapped the flow of underground water east of Gaza, resulting in the seepage of sea water into Gaza’s coastal aquifer, but Israeli settlements also over-pumped the existing aquifer, essentially leaving Gaza’s water a briny mixture that causes high rates of kidney failure.

Israel has also left Gaza economically destitute. Palestinian laborers have been prevented from getting to work inside Israel--resulting in 35 percent unemployment--and many workplaces inside Gaza, such as garages and metal workshops, were targeted during the incursions of the past year, with the excuse that they were involved in weapons production.

In this respect, it’s clear that Israel left an enormous physical mess behind in Gaza. Not only did it demolish huge swaths of the territory’s arable lands, and the homes of 25,000 people (particularly in southern Gaza), but it destroyed the settlements themselves when the army withdrew. This has left upwards of 25 percent of the Gaza Strip looking like an earthquake hit it--with the Palestinians forced to clean up the mess.

Last but not least, Israel hasn’t ended its military assaults within Gaza itself, carrying out no less than five assassinations against Palestinian resistance activists since disengagement. At least 42 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire throughout the Occupied Territories, and scores of others were left wounded.

And none of this even addresses Israeli policies in the West Bank--the continued construction of Israeli settlements, or the final sealing off of various Palestinian towns through the construction of Israel’s apartheid wall.


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THESE MACHIAVELLIAN forms of control, together with a disfigured wasteland of physical destruction, extreme poverty and continued colonial oppression, have ensured that nothing substantive has changed in Gaza.
What has changed, however, is the international perception of this reality--including among many liberals and large sections of the left that believe “a solution” for Gaza has been found. As a result, they accept U.S. and Israeli arguments that Palestinians must now “establish law and order” and “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure.”

Now is the time to raise awareness that the 38-year occupation of Gaza has not ended, but has merely entered a new stage--a stage that is potentially far more dangerous precisely because of the misperceptions surrounding disengagement and Gaza’s status. Israel understands this all too well, recently setting up artillery posts on the periphery of Gaza and openly threatening--in leaflets dropped by airplane on Gazan communities--to shell civilian areas.

It is our responsibility to make sure everyone knows the reality of Gaza--before Israel is permitted to make good on these threats.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

"Celebrating" George's Election "Victory"

The World Can't Wait
By Russ Baker


TomPaine.com
November 1, 2005


Patrick Fitzgerald’s indictment of Scooter Libby for lying about how he learned of the Valerie Plame affair is an interesting and important development. But the narrowness of that focus, absent further developments, shows again the limitations of “the system” in confronting the sheer magnitude of an entire government subverted, and with it a proud people, from all that we once revered.

For those disturbed by the deceit and the intrigues, the reckless warmongering, the wholesale looting of the common trust to benefit the privileged, the clampdown on rights and liberties, the unconscionable enthusiasm for torture, the embracing of a Know-Nothing attitude toward science, the hastening of environmental collapse, the buying of the legislative process and the neutering of the judicial one, waiting for indictments is no longer sufficient.

One difficulty with opposing the current malefactors of power is that they are so venal, so mean-spirited, so incompetent on so many fronts that it’s hard to focus the public’s attention on the true magnitude of the threat, which dwarfs any single instance of wrong-doing, as egregious as this or that outrage may be. Essential to any successful anti-Bush campaign is the constant reminder that the president and his cronies are dangerous across the board, from the selection of a science textbook in a small town in Kansas to the mobilization of the “shock and awe” war machine for political purposes.

What to do? Tomorrow, on the one-year anniversary of George W. Bush’s contested re-election victory, many Americans will go the direct action route, taking off from work and from school to make their voices heard and their faces seen.

At locations throughout the country, gatherings and marches will sound a wake-up call. Some of those endorsing “The World Can’t Wait: Drive out the Bush Regime” are Gore Vidal, Cindy Sheehan, Cornel West, Studs Terkel, Alice Walker and Harold Pinter. But in such times, of course, you don’t need celebrity endorsements.

It’s possible that the turnout will be underwhelming. It is possible that these events will make no difference at all. Many former activists find themselves discouraged by the prospects of direct expression, or are just too busy—or too comfortable.

But then again, the world has copious examples, from Argentina to Ukraine, where crowds gathered, and chanted or banged pots, and began to change history. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a return to the honored tradition of democracy speaking directly.

Increasingly, we’re seeing signs that the American public is fed up. Polls show Bush’s approval ratings at near-record lows. And a combined and weighted set of fifty statewide surveys from SurveyUSA shows that that just 29 percent of American adults think the country is going in the right direction. A remarkable 66 percent think it is going in the wrong direction. And given all the red state/blue state rhetoric, it’s particularly striking that in not a single state do 50 percent of adults believe the country is on the right path. And in 25 states, fewer than 30 percent of adults think so.

We’ve seen growth of a variety of protests from mainstreamers, including the families of those who have died or been injured in Iraq. Even the iconic soccer moms and NASCAR Joes are leavening the mix with the more eccentric birds of plumage who usually come out. And to be sure, the vanguard of popular movements often includes some more strident and conspiracy-minded elements whose viewpoints don’t necessarily reflect the broader sentiments.

As for tomorrow: One day will not in and of itself a difference make. But it could be the invitation to the dance, the tantalizing seeds for a gradual mass awakening, a slumbering beast beginning to rouse itself.

In New York City, participants will gather at noon in Union Square, and then march up 8th Ave. But essentially, the organizers are asking people, wherever they live, to skip work, skip classes and converge on public spaces, from town squares to major downtowns. For those interested, more information can be found at www.worldcantwait.net.

Recent examples of civic participation at its best include nationwide vigils held last week in recognition of the 2,000-troop death milestone. And we’re seeing, thanks to the Internet, a rapid growth in petition campaigns on a host of issues. With the spectacle of Rosa Parks, a woman who wouldn’t get up from a bus seat, lying in honor this weekend in the Capitol Rotunda, we’re reminded that there’s scarcely a more honorable pursuit than putting one’s principles into action.

- Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker is a longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is the founder of the Real News Project, a new organization dedicated to producing groundbreaking investigative journalism. He can be reached at russ@russbaker.com.

U.N. Security Council Sidles to War in Syria



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Another Trojan Horse from the UN?

Bashing Syria
By LINDA S. HEARD

November 1, 2005

It's happening all over again. This time Syria has received the kiss of the White House don just as laid-out in the 1996 neo-con rule book "Clean Break", conceived on the bidding of none other than the Israel far-right's chief thug Benjamin Netanyahu.

The fact that the cabal is religiously sticking to its agenda is predictable but it's, surely, shocking that world leaders seem bent on bowing to the Bush bullies like a bunch of sycophantic schoolboys even as the Italian premier Berlusconi is saying his mea culpas over Iraq.

On Monday, the UN Security Council (UNSC) voted on a resolution, originally designed to threaten Syria with sanctions should it fail to cooperate with the UN team investigating the assassination of Rafik Hariri, headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.

Ostensible Syrian allies Russia, China and Algeria managed to water-down the draft removing references to sanctions before voting in favor.

This amendment may sound hopeful but actually means little as the resolution was unanimously passed under Chapter Seven, meaning it is liable to being militarily enforced.

So once again, we have a Mid-East country on the US regime-change list with a Damoclesian sword hanging over its head, should it shrink from prostrating itself before the New World Order by handing over top regime figures for what is referred to nowadays as "justice".

In this case, the suspects are the Syrian President's own brother and brother-in-law having been fingered by a Syrian deserter and embezzler who recently telephoned his elder brother from Paris with the words: "I've become a millionaire", or so reports the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Further, the "Mehlis report" is drenched with bias from start to finish, acknowledging the help investigators received from Lebanon and other countries with no mention of Syria.

Moreover, in its "Executive Summary" it terms the assassination of Hariri as "terrorist" but later goes on to suggest "fraud, corruption and money-laundering could have been motives for individuals to participate in the operation". In this case, his death would not fall under the category of terrorism but criminality.

Indeed, during the UN's recent 60th anniversary summit, delegates failed to agree on a definition of 'terrorism' so if the UN doesn't recognize the meaning of that word, what is it doing coloring a heavyweight UN report?

But let's not be too pedantic. Whether or not the higher echelons of the Syrian government were involved in the killing of the former Lebanese Prime Minister is a useful red herring in the great scheme of things.

Since when has the UN been involved with investigating the demise of individuals, even ones as beloved as Hariri?

If that was ever its mandate, why didn't it dispatch its minions to search out the killers of JFK, Salvadore Allende, Anwar Sadat or look into the mysterious deaths of Gamal Abdul Nasser and Yasser Arafat?

Why didn't the UN delve into who poisoned Viktor Yushchenko? The answer is simple. Doing so would not be politically expedient as the investigation of Hariri's death so transparently is.

It's clear that Hariri's assassination is being trumped up as a proverbial smoking gun and a handy emotive one at that - in the 'out to get Syria' game, indicating that the White House is scraping the barrel for a regime-change pretext.

Let's face it. Syria's president Bashar Al-Assad is no Saddam Hussein. He hasn't been "gassing his own people" and neither has he invaded his neighbor (he was invited in to Lebanon by the Lebanese government to quell a civil war), nor has he begun a series of pre-emptive wars.

In fact, in the run-up to the Iraq war when Syria held a temporary seat on the UNSC, Al-Assad and his British-born wife were given the red carpet treatment by both Downing Street and Queen Elizabeth.

Unlike Saddam, a rough and ready rifle-wielding bandito-type, Bashar Al-Assad is a soft-spoken eye-doctor unwillingly thrust into power when his popular brother Basil died due to a road accident. And unlike Saddam, Bashar has attempted to implement a series of political, social and economic reforms against opposition from his father's old guard.

This is a cultured man with whom the West should be dialoguing not demonizing. So where did Al-Assad go wrong and when did he become a marked man?

His greatest 'mistake' was being one of the few Arab leaders to speak out against the invasion of Iraq and give public support to Palestinian militant groups deemed 'terrorist' by the U.S.

His dressing down of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair during the latter's visit to Damascus in front of the cameras was the start of a slippery slope. From then, he could do no right in spite of the fact the vast majority of world nations were of like mind, including France, Germany and Russia.

Since, Syria has been accused of harboring terrorists and allowing insurgents and weapons to freely cross its borders into Iraq.

In answer to these charges, it closed down the Damascus offices of Hamas and other groups and appealed for US assistance in sealing its long porous borders. It also asked Britain to supply it with night-vision goggles so as to police the border, which Britain agreed to do before reneging on its promise.

When Western nations occupying Iraq began playing the tom-toms against Syria's having over-stayed its welcome in Lebanon, Al-Assad responded by withdrawing Syrian troops and dismantling its intelligence apparatus there. A UN report signed off on Syria's exit.

So here was a country which does not have weapons of mass destruction, was not threatening or occupying its neighbors, had cooperated with Bush's war on terror and which has long been asking to return to the peace table with Israel offering peace in exchange for occupied Syrian territory including the strategically important Golan Heights. Ah! Here we may be onto something.

A return to "Clean Break", whose authors are all current or former members of the Bush administration and include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz as well as David and Meyrav Wurmser, may give us a clue.

Given a hearty stamp of approval by Dick Cheney and Daniel Pipes, the document calls for the overthrow of both the Syrian and Iranian regimes in order to secure Israel as the dominant regional power, along with an end to the 'land for peace' policy.

In light of the sheer ruthlessness of the above in pursuing their Straussian goals, as evidenced by the recent CIA leak case, and their need for a cassus belli to go after Syria, one must take their crocodile tears over Hariri's death with a huge shovel of salt.

Lastly, I would like to leave you with some questions which deserve mulling over.

Why would the Syrian government on the brink of quitting Lebanon and in the knowledge that it was being squeezed by the White House and Downing Street itching for a fight murder a Lebanese out-of-power politician and with such dramatic fanfare entailing the use of elaborate planning and sophisticated equipment?

The Mehlis report states both the Lebanese and Syrian secret services were tapping Hariri's phone lines and knew his every movement in advance. That said, wouldn't a single sniper's bullet have done the job even more efficiently than a bomb? And, more importantly, fewer individuals would have been involved and the evidentiary paper trail insignificant.

Even if the Syrian regime was dumb enough to kill Hariri in the way that it is alleged, there is a far bigger picture at play, which unfortunately many Lebanese are unable to see.

This myopia is because many Lebanese are rightfully angry over Syria's extended stay in their country and emotionally traumatized at the passing of a true Lebanese patriot credited for returning parts of Beirut to their pre-war magnificence.

Nevertheless, the Lebanese must realize that any attack on Syria is ultimately an attack on them and with Hizbollah vowing to stand shoulder to shoulder with Damascus yet another Lebanese internal conflagration could be triggered.

Revenge may be sweet but the Lebanese should remember it is not only fleeting it also has a nasty habit of boomeranging.

In this case, the way forward for everyone concerned should be a process of forgiveness and reconciliation.

I can only hope that Lebanon won't allow itself to be used as a pawn in a foreign power play destined to benefit Israeli expansionism and neo-con hegemonic ambitions. And, even more importantly, I would urge world leaders to look up the meaning of 'integrity' before locating their missing cajones.



Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer and columnist on Mid-East affairs based in Cairo. She can be contacted at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Gorilla Radio for Monday, October 31, 2005


Does Canada want Amparo Torres dead? Nchamah Miller of the Committee to Support Amparo Torres’ Rights.

Taking to the streets with the Western Canada Wilderness Committee's Write and Rally rally.

And, Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria this week.


Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.

You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com



This Week on Gorilla Radio

Lost amid the headlines of America’s crusades in Central Asia, one of the longest running civil wars in the world grinds on. The situation in Colombia is grim. For over forty years, a desperate armed resistance has struggled against an oligarchic government and its ruthless policies. Typically, the struggle has created refugees fleeing factional violence and government-sponsored death squads.

Amparo Torres, declared a refugee by both the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and Canadian immigration when she arrived in 1996 suddenly finds herself accused of association with a “terrorist” organization, and so eligible, under Canada’s new “terrorism” laws, for “repatriation” to her native Colombia.

Nchamah Miller is a political science Ph D candidate at York University and is the chair of the Committee to Support Amparo Torres’ Rights. Nchamah Miller and seeing justice done in the first half.

And; Last week, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee launched its ‘Write and Rally for Vancouver Island’ campaign, an effort to pressure the provincial government to protect more than the meagre 13% of wild habitat levels they are currently proposing.

In the second half, “live” from the weekend’s Write and Rally rally.


And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that’s good to do in and around Victoria this week.

But first, Nchamah Miller and Canada, taking back refuge from the storm.


Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.

You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com


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Chavez Set to Face Bush

PEJ News - C. L. Cook - In his weekly address to the Venezuelan people, President Hugo Chavez says he's anticipating debating George W. Bush at the forthcoming Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina later this week.

www.pej.org

Chavez Set to Face Bush
C. L. Cook

PEJ News
October 30, 2005


Chavez told his television and radio audience he expects Bush will focus on reviving the largely moribund Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, a massive trade deal Chavez says is "doomed to failure," adding:

"The debate in Mar del Plata will be beautiful. I imagine it will be, because the gentleman Bush is going to keep making his point."

The FTAA has been a focal point of American trade delegations for both the Bush and Clinton administrations, but the failure of expanded "free trade zones" to improve the quality of life for Latin America's largely impoverished populations has turned public opinion against the deal, and initiated a continent-wide political move to the left.

Chavez left no room for doubt as to where he stands on the deal, saying:

"The FTAA is dead. It will have to be buried. The people of this continent will bury it, and another model of integration will emerge... in the streets, there is a Latin American fervor. We'll see each other there to defend our model."

Chavez maintains, the so-called elimination of trade "barriers" inordinately favours the wealthy and trans-global corporations, while doing little to better conditions for the poor. His "Bolivarian Alternative," named for the 19th century liberator, Simon Bolivar, is based on more "socialistic" principles, the tenets of which hold that a broader distribution of wealth will bring prosperity to all.

Over the last year, Chavez has used Venezuela's considerable oil reserves to bolster Cuba and other Caribbean nations, selling oil under special terms, and using the currency boon garnered from record world oil prices to solidify his standing with his neighbours by providing low-interest loans, accepting payments in barter, and employing other development assistance.

Delineating his reform programme from the FTAA's goals, Chavez said:

"Our mission is socialist because it puts social aspects first, Capitalists put capital first."

As with other high-level trade missions, the Summit of the Americas meetings will be shadowed by a "Peoples Summit," where indigenous, trade union, and social justice groups from around the world will convene.


Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News. He also hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. You can check out the GR Blog here.


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