Commentary

NEW address

2005-02-09T02:38:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Research DRM talk

2005-02-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

[Interview given at M$'s research campus]

Cory Doctorow
June 17, 2004

Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and
DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright
stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a
kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave
me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a
standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three
weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going
to Microsoft to talk about DRM.

I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That
means I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of
making my living from writing since I was 12 years old.
Admittedly, my IP-based biz isn't as big as yours, but I
guarantee you that it's every bit as important to me as yours is
to you.

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:

1. That DRM systems don't work

2. That DRM systems are bad for society

3. That DRM systems are bad for business

4. That DRM systems are bad for artists

5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital
into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like
Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms
to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the
future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and
this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to
soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's
compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of
that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save
all our asses.

Let's dive into it.

--

1. DRM systems don't work

This bit breaks down into two parts:

1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory

2. Applying that to DRM

Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping
secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an
attacker (actually, there can be more attackers, senders and
recipients, but let's keep this simple). We usually call these
people Alice, Bob and Carol.

Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic
War. You need to send messages back and forth to your generals,
and you'd prefer that the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can
rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts your message is
probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your empire
on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable
messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured --
but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts
skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him.

So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where
every character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They
used to do this with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when
anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A would become N,
B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 more,
so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda.

Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your
algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red.

So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about
keeping the existence of your messengers and their payloads
secret. Get that? You're Augustus and you need to send a message
to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm reliably informed means
"cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his hands on it.
You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the
empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the
garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one
knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies everywhere, in
the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts
an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the
message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked.
So the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a
secret. The ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and
the more secrets you've got, the less secure you are, especially
if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets aren't really
all that secret any longer.

Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and
Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news
for crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere
with a receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave
fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the other
hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which
means that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the
message a secret. Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he
can assume Churchill overhears it.

Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky
primitive mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers
are machines for rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both
sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the most
cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented
text so that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of
the message isn't a secret anymore, but the cipher is.

But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of
Adolf's Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of
intelligence. I mean, this was good news for Churchill and us,
but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the day, it's bad news
for anyone who wants to keep a secret.

Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even
if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is
intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret.
Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I
think of as Schneier's Law: "any person can invent a security
system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."
This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering
if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart
people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break
it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living
in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher
ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your
messages, snickering at you.

Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key
crypto it becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their
keys secret from Carol, even if they've never met. So long as
Alice and Bob can keep their keys secret, they can assume that
Carol won't gain access to their cleartext messages, even though
she has access to the cipher and the ciphertext. Conveniently
enough, the keys are the shortest and simplest of the secrets,
too: hence even easier to keep away from Carol. Hooray for Bob
and Alice.

Now, let's apply this to DRM.

In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and
Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD.
She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say,
Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm
called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS
un-scrambler.

Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is
well-known. The ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr.
So what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're
golden.

But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the
Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if
he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his
DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a
drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker --
with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.

Hilarity ensues.

DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid.
It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not
because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day,
all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their
attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point,
the secret isn't a secret anymore.

--

2. DRM systems are bad for society

Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM
doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average
individuals! It's like a speedbump!"

Put your hand down.

This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social.
They're both bad for society, though.

Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to
break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or
Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the
cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted.

Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can
solve this problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board
and goop it all up with epoxy."

Put your hand down.

Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper.

Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet
paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM
will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys.

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user
honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that
their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not
organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out
millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof
against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof
against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down
the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the
end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the
most unsophisticated and least capable among us.

Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM.
She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about
electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room
and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought
home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial
investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of
everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the
DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could
make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled
her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on
the VCR and waited.

Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at
this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who
was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that
she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right
order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that
everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone
in her or his family: wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek
friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative?

I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user.
She's not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not
making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's
not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it
in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something *honest* -- moving
it from one format to another. She's home taping.

Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision
embedded -- by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical
blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this
fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a
gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know
that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid,
mind you -- just naive.

The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts
what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about
Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids,
she'll download it from the net and burn it for them.

In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers
and big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous
policy called anticircumvention.

Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an
access control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to
break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that
lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One
court even held it illegal to tell someone where she can find
out how to make that tool.

Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security
system so clever that he can't see its flaws. The only way to
find the flaws in security is to disclose the system's workings
and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any
cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that
kind of feedback. That's something that a Princeton engineering
prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a
paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure
Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the
recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his
ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of
client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut
and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so lucky.

Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian
programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the
failings in Adobe's e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam
for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the
Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket
warning to its researchers to stay away from American
conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of
country where certain equations are illegal.

Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to
exclude competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware
is a "copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for
interfacing with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics --
think of the hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the
performance settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming
that their printer cartridges contain copyrighted works --
software that trips an "I am empty" flag when the toner runs out,
and have sued a competitor who made a remanufactured cartridge
that reset the flag. Even garage-door opener companies have
gotten in on the act, claiming that their receivers' firmware are
copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door
openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures?

Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" --
copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad
news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and
their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to
the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit
anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the
blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say
over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If I
buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's
my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a whacky kind of
pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements
and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible
*property* -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing
through property law for centuries.

But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting
copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without
accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest
in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are
an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I
know of that says that an author should be able to control where
you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can
buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from
Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy
books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may
have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who
sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it,
I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers
call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as
"Capitalism."

The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called
DVD-CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for
anyone who gets a key from them. Among these is something called
region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it'll have a flag set
that says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to America and
your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted
regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not
allowed to play your disc.

Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to
do this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors
the right to control display, performance, duplication,
derivative works, and so forth, we didn't leave out "geography"
by accident. That was on-purpose.

So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because
it'd be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented
a business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up.
The DVD is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you
break the region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul
of anticircumvention.

That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norweigan teenager who
wanted to watch French DVDs on his Norweigan DVD player. He and
some pals wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do
so. He's a wanted man here in America; in Norway the studios put
the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of *unlawfully
trespassing upon a computer system.* When his defense asked,
"Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His
own."

His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated
by the weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his
DVD: DRM only works if your record player becomes the property of
whomever's records you're playing.

--

3. DRM systems are bad for biz

This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people
who make record-players should be able to spec whose records you
can listen to, and that people who make records should have a
veto over the design of record-players.

We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just
the reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into
a parallel or serial interface, which were never envisioned by
their inventors. Our strong economy and rapid innovation are
byproducts of the ability of anyone to make anything that plugs
into anything else: from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps
onto the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of
your car's dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that
anyone can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds.

The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to
plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack.
They claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but
really it was about propping up this little penny-ante racket
that AT&T had in charging you a rental fee for your phone until
you'd paid for it a thousand times over.

When that ban was struck down, it created the market for
third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to
answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets -- billions
of dollars of economic activity that had been supressed by the
closed interface. Note that AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries
of this: they *also* got into the business of making phone-kit.

DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware
interfaces. Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog,
where he wrote an essay about the best way to protect your
investment in the digital music you buy. Should you buy Apple
iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM music? Scoble argued that
Microsoft's music was a sounder investment, because Microsoft
would have more downstream licensees for its proprietary format
and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of devices to choose
from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your virtual
records on.

What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases
on the basis of which recording company will allow the greatest
diversity of record-players to play its discs! That's like
telling someone to buy the Betamax instead of the Edison
Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is a crank about licensing his
patents; all the while ignoring the world's relentless march to
the more open VHS format.

It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the
records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much
innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players?
They've gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and
amazing new markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR?
There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first
HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 100 movies, and they're
charging *$27,000* for this thing. We're talking about a few thousand
dollars' worth of components -- all that other cost is the cost of
anticompetition.

--

4. DRM systems are bad for artists

But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the
ink-stained scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We
poor slobs of the creative class are everyone's favorite
poster-children here: the RIAA and MPAA hold us up and say,
"Won't someone please think of the children?" File-sharers say,
"Yeah, we're thinking about the artists, but the labels are The
Man, who cares what happens to you?"

To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand
how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently
technological, since the things it addresses -- copying,
transmitting, and so on -- are inherently technological.

The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It
was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in
America was getting a talented pianist to come into your living
room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The music
industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers.

The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes
printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape,
which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands --
the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the
publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!

Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa
showed up in Congress to say that:

These talking machines are going to ruin the
artistic development of music in this
country. When I was a boy...in front of every
house in the summer evenings, you would find
young people together singing the songs of
the day or old songs. Today you hear these
infernal machines going night and day. We
will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal
chord will be eliminated by a process of
evolution, as was the tail of man when he
came from the ape.

The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for
us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it
and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment
in America.

But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution
sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful
arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they'd
do less composing if they weren't paid for it, so Congress needed
a fix. Here's what they came up with: anyone who paid a music
publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll
of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn't say
no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue
about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel.

This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker
sings "With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee
to the Beatles' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates
the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into
letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know.

That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times
more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a
thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more
people.

This story repeats itself throughout the technological century,
every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary
blanket license -- the music companies got together and asked for
a consent decree so that they could offer all their music
for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable
operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them
and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize
this practice rather than screw around with their constituents'
TVs.

Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a
copyright -- that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought
out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the
experience of watching a movie in your living room would look
like: they'd licensed out their programming for use on a machine
called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that
were read-only. Proto-DRM.

The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good
odds. Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is
defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against
infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms
the work into something new, like a collage; whether it uses all
or some of the work; whether the work is artistic or mainly
factual; and whether the use undercuts the creator's
business-model.

The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or
duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a
non-transformative use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way
that directly undercut the Discovision licensing stream.

Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry,
told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film
industry "as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."

But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it
determined that any device capable of a substantial
non-infringing use was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this
Boston Strangler business: if your business model can't survive
the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get
another business-model or go broke."

Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had,
as the Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and
they made more art that paid more artists and reached a wider
audience.

There's one thing that every new art business-model had in
common: it embraced the medium it lived in.

This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't
succeed on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable:
they were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that made
the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for
a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful
organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and
bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all
survival strategies.

Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled
pianist: but they *scaled better*. Radio lacked the social
elements of live performance, but more people could build a
crystal set and get it aimed correctly than could pack into even
the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s don't come with liner notes,
they aren't sold to you by a hipper-than-thou record store clerk
who can help you make your choice, bad rips and truncated files
abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second copy of "Hey Jude" from
the original Napster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting the CD. I don't
know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like
the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy suit
shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but
Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put
ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs,
with liner notes and so forth -- that's a liability: it's a piece
of my monthly storage-locker costs.

Here are the two most important things to know about computers
and the Internet:

1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits

2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
another very cheaply and quickly

Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers
will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press
is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at
speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get
junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the
basis for a free society.

And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record
execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that
Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s
with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll
listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's
bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book
looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is
to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like
the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to
sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will
really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the
actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that what
the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read
aloud from your personal Word of God.

New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only
better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at
the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the
old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite,
high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks
are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for
free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb
it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing
list.

The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of
thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the
bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on
the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at
epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without
technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor,
who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII
and HTML and PDF.

The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted
ebooks, they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes
the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when
you're selling copies by the ten, that's not even a business,
it's a hobby.

Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and
more words off of more and more screens every day through most of
your professional careers. It's zero-sum: you've also been
reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the
dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to
his secretary is info-roadkill.

Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for
every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys
until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their
hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index
fingers.

Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap
printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a
full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine,
perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of
paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you
generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done.
I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my
music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the
car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em?

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed
copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a
utilitarian one. There's nothing *moral* about paying a composer
tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *immoral*
about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off
your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that
people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs
are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling
carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies
and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The
existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old
production, reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be
weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives
us more art with a wider reach: that's what tech is *for*.

Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out
of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the
copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology
collide, it's copyright that changes.

Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM
nominally props up -- didn't come down off the mountain on two
stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the
technical reality created by the inventors of the previous
generation. To abandon invention now robs tomorrow's artists of
the new businesses and new reach and new audiences that the
Internet and the PC can give them.

--

5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could
play Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea.
The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie
rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers
-- made billions for Sony and its cohort.

That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS
format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to
make up for it.

But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company
and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and
Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3
player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of
making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips,
low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like
Real and OpenMG. They spent good money engineering "features"
into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving
their music back and forth between their devices. Customers
stayed away in droves.

Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The
market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs --
the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back
before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC
companies like Apple.

That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market
demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn,
I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in
order that I may do less with my music." Presented with an
alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship.

The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip
their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced
smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also
fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their
PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to
another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the
spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they
discovered that after they restored their music that they could
no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different
machine, and locked them out of their own music.

There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your
customers want you to make expensive modifications to your
products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And
there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving
than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic
technology failures.

I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten
months, and because I always order the new models the day they're
announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I
hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early
on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth
of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines
was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the
shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000
miles away in Toronto.

If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would
have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for
Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music
Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so
much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and
re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I
would have been fine.

As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control
spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own
music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a
time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.

I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *leading edge* case. If Apple
succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time
until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and
bought enough music to end up where I am.

You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me
play everybody's records. Right now, the closest I can come to
that is an open source app called VLC, but it's clunky and buggy
and it didn't come pre-installed on my computer.

Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that
Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it,
they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could
hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them
and made the product they thought their customers wanted.

I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft
customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and
I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft
has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for
decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet
widescale digital infringement.

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and
serve copies of documents without their authors' consent,
something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because
companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared
lawmakers to prosecute.

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so
decisively that most people never even realized that there was a
fight.

Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest,
toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to
anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can
take them with your arm behind your back.

In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he
talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers'
desires. It's because people like you and me spent the 80s and
the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories about impossible
DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money
every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward?
That feature costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour.
The mute button will cost you a quarter.

When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone
companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just
writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that
phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad
for the cellphone economy, because it'll put the extortionate
ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that
just because you bought the CD doesn't mean that you should
expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player,
and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to
expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about
alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning?
Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?

The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now,
at least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell
them, someone else will.

The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous.
There's a company out there charging *$27,000* for a DVD
jukebox -- go and eat their lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do
it: he's off at the D conference telling studio execs not to
release hi-def movies until they're sure no one will make a
hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC.

Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much
interested in what you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection
Discussion Group meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered
out, the studios' position was, "We'll take anyone's DRM except
Microsoft's and Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast wonks
about the European version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the
Digital Video Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's
different in Europe: mostly they're worried that some American
company like Microsoft will get their claws into European
television."

American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics
companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the
VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don't want
to let you guys get between them and their customers.

Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the
record player that can play everyone's records.

Because if you don't do it, someone else will.

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Coming Back Home - To New York

2005-02-03T03:01:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
February 03, 2005
By Andre Vltchek

New York can be admired or despised, loved or hated, but anyone who at least once visited this city can't remain indifferent towards it. For some, it is the cultural capital of the world, the most cosmopolitan city on earth, for others a monster growing to the skies, obnoxious center of global economic power, place of decadence and indescribable richness; very symbol of the Empire. Or it can be all above combined, and more.

For many years, New York City was my home. In abstract way it still is, although I had chosen not to live there for many years. New York is where I became an internationalist, it's where I managed to shed my racial prejudices imported from Central Europe; where I discovered that the world is round, consisting of hundreds of fascinating cultures, traditions and approaches to life.

New York is where I spent countless hours browsing through progressive bookstores of East Village, where I learned all I had to know about jazz in Harlem's Baby Grand, where I used to take advantage of six dollars standing room at the very back of the Metropolitan Opera House. My New York was that of great and cheap Indian eateries, of art and revival cinemas, of avant-garde theatres.

But above all, my New York consisted of friends: people from all imaginable corners of the globe. Many of them were Jewish progressive writers and classical musicians - natives and émigrés - while others were Latin Americans, Europeans, Asians and South Africans. All of them to certain extend insane or at least eccentric.

I left several times but I always came back. And then, few years ago, I left for good, beginning to spin around the world, searching for important stories, writing articles and books, making films about the pitiful state of the world.

Living and working in some of the most desperate parts of the planet, I soon discovered that New York was not seen everywhere just as a vibrant cultural and art capital of the world. Quite far from it! It was one of the symbols of the Empire, of neo-colonial arrangement of the world, of economic might and terror.

I watched in disbelief September 11th events on the television screen in my apartment in Hanoi. While Vietnamese friends and colleagues were offering their deep condolences, home made rockets and firecrackers of celebration were flying towards the night sky from almost all surrounding villages. New York was hit, it was damaged and injured. I realized that for many Vietnamese, the city was a symbol of their past suffering, of terrible and genocidal war; of death. It was not the capital of the country which destroyed their homes and killed their families - but for some reason it was the most powerful symbol representing it.

I disagreed, I felt like arguing that by American standards New York was in fact unique, inhabited my so many progressive men and women, by countless minorities, by the millions of poor families hardly making their ends meet. It was in vain: New York the symbol, New York of might, the victorious New York - all this was already sold by the rubbish films and novels to the people all over the world. And it backfired.

Time passed, new wars erupted and unjustifiable invasions took place. I refused to go back. I couldn't imagine living in a country which was directly or indirectly devastating large parts of the world. I developed almost physical allergy to the present administrations (federal and that of the city itself), to neo-conservative fundamentalist ideology, to intellectual submissiveness of main-stream media and publishing world.

I missed New York; I missed things which I used to take for granted but which now appeared like tremendous luxury. I missed seeing people of every race and nationality; I missed cultural and culinary diversity. I missed the feeling that just about everything great that this world ever created is available in one relatively small area. I missed activism and desire of many New Yorkers to participate in changing the world.

Then suddenly time came when I had to return. My film about Suharto's atrocities was opening in Manhattan. I had two book projects I had to take care of. And some networking had to be done for my future work in Southeast Asia.

I couldn't sleep on the 18 hours non-stop flight from Singapore to Newark, NJ. I was thinking about what's waiting for me after landing. I was going back to the city which I knew intimately. But I was also going back to New York - the city seen by many as the center of unjust economic order which was destroying large parts of impoverished world. Were New Yorkers victims or victimizers, or both?

Singapore Airlines landed at Newark Airport, NJ, surrounded by depressing factories and warehouses. Half an hour later I was being driven towards Manhattan by African American cabbie, who was indulging in endless outpour of insults towards the present administration. He compared George to several domestic animals and I made myself cozy and comfortable at the backseat, enjoying this colorful monologue more than the ride itself. What he said made sense. I had nothing to add.

Holland Tunnel was clogged with traffic and we took side streets through several dilapidated towns, in order to reach Lincoln Tunnel. It was the same mess as before; not much changed.

The very first evening I was dragged to a party thrown by my friend - well known concert pianist. Grand Steinway piano was taking half of his living room; it was covered by a thick cloth and had been used (for lack of space) as provisory table for snacks and booze. His girlfriend cooked delicious dishes in something loosely resembling small size walk-in closet.

Money seemed to be on everybody's mind. There were well-justified fears of losing mortgages, medical insurances, rent controlled apartment leases. In the meantime I was told that 75 thousand dollars a year before taxes is now a minimum income that could sustain one single person in Manhattan. I was wondering how many New Yorkers were averaging this sum of money.

Next day I was taken to a new left-wing cable television station operated from dilapidated downtown loft, run with almost no money but with tremendous determination. Dissent was still alive but stripped of cash. Most of the downtown progressive and "subversive" bookstores in East Village closed down, unable to pay exuberant rents. Main-stream booksellers quickly filled the gap.

Manhattan used to be a precise barometer of American social problems. Beggars and homeless people were proportionally represented everywhere, living on the same streets as those with seven digit incomes. That was a brutal honesty of New York - nobody could escape reality, everybody was forced to take note of the social inequalities and desperation. Now there was a dramatic decrease in number of beggars on the posh Manhattan streets. I saw almost no poor people in exclusive neighborhoods. They were pushed away; swept off like dirt, like garbage. New York was turning into a segregated town.

How many of those who had to leave the town because of skyrocketing real estate prices, how many of those who were "removed" from the streets felt like victorious members of the Empire?

After visiting "Ground Zero", I took the Uptown E-Train. First thing I saw was a man lying on the floor. His glasses, his instant camera and other belongings were scattered all around him, his wrist was encircled by a plastic batch from a hospital.

I found a train conductor, insisting that he immediately calls for medical help which he did, after some hesitation. Train was stuck for fifteen minutes. Then police arrived. They poked into an old man with their clubs: "Hey, buddy! Get up, buddy!" One minute later, three firefighters entered the car. Their presence was truly Kafkaesque. Eventually, a man got up and stumbled out of the car. Paramedics never arrived.

Was this man responsible for the plundering of natural resources of the third world?

While some parts of Manhattan were shining with new neon lights, exposing elaborate make-up, overpriced eateries (which replaced local Chinese restaurants and Greek diners) and posh chain stores, large parts of the city were as dilapidated as before, consisting of low income neighborhoods and desperate ghettos hardly visible in other of "developed" countries.

Great majority of New Yorkers didn't resemble arrogant victors or self-assured and omnipotent Empire. Most of them look preoccupied and tired. They didn't appear like people who were living extravagant, wasteful and lavish lifestyle supported by child-labor in Philippines or exploited and underpaid Mexican workers on the border. Some, of course, were, but they were minority like everywhere else.

Empire's increasing grip on the rest of the world didn't make New Yorkers carefree and frivolous; it obviously didn't give them any extra security. Money from all over the world was flowing through the city's banks and stock exchanges, but offered almost no benefits to the great majority of the city's inhabitants.

Brutal empires of the past were conquering, destroying and exploiting neighboring countries, as well as far-away nations. Large part of the loot was inevitably grabbed by the rulers, but the rest was usually distributed among the common folk. In this respect, American Empire is unique. Loot stays in the limited number of pockets. Majority of American people pay for the conquests and foreign expeditions with their taxes, while receiving very little or nothing in return. New countries are being conquered, new markets forced to "open" to our business and geopolitical interests. But at home, public services are being cut and the standard of living is decreasing for decades.

It's always good to return home, even if the home is not a structure, even if it's not defined be some set of walls. Home can't be always unlocked by a key; it can be a state of mind; an abstract entity. But my home was becoming more and more divided. Some parts of it were crumbling, others were increasingly lacking identity. Some people there went hungry, some were ruling the world. There were victims and victimizers, martyrs and executioners.

In some ways, New York is a victim of the Empire. In much broader sense, even the Empire itself - the American Empire - is subservient to much larger empire, one constructed on greed and business interest world wide. This doesn't justify anything (definitely not invasions and other military actions performed by the armed forces of this nation), but it explains a lot.

Although it is rarely pronounced, majority of American people have exactly the same enemies as the poor people in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Their lives are being influenced by the same forces, controlled by the same rulers.

The night before leaving, standing near the Ground Zero late at night, I felt endlessly sad. This place was an overwhelming symbol of misunderstanding. Innocent men and women who died on September 11th were already buried. Few years after the attack, new high-rise structure will dominate New York skyline again. Thousands of lives were lost, but the system that is plundering the world continues to exist, intact.

Those who are forming the system, those who rule the world don't sit in one particular building; they don't live in one particular city. They are scattered all over the world. The only way to resist their dictatorship is for majority of the people on this planet to agree on new rules for the different, better world; and to stick to these rules, refusing to participate in existing immoral concepts.

I believe that such scenario is possible and inevitable. If it would be achieved, cosmopolitan, multi-racial and multi-cultural New York could and should play important role in forming the new world.

http://www.zmag.org

The third way's dirtiest secret

2005-02-03T02:51:00.000-08:00

Ministers have tried to cover up their dependence on forced labour

Felicity Lawrence
Thursday February 3, 2005
Guardian

A year ago this Saturday, 23 Chinese cocklepickers died at Morecambe Bay. A major new report that uncovers the scale of forced labour in Britain and makes recommendations on curbing this new form of slavery might be thought a fitting memorial to those who died. Instead, the government has tried to block its publication until after the election, as our front-page story reveals.

Interviews with migrants record the violence, threats, debt-bondage, dangerous conditions and enforced long hours to which they are exposed. They also lead to the inescapable conclusion that the deregulated economy has created the conditions for this exploitation to flourish under Labour.

The report* was commissioned at the beginning of last year by the International Labour Organisation - the UN body that works with government, unions and industry - and the TUC, and was completed last summer by academics at Oxford and Sussex universities. Yet it is only now seeing the light of day. It will finally be published this week by the TUC, but minus its ILO and Department for Work and Pensions backers. What is a Labour government that champions social justice so frightened of? And why has it taken the unions so long to defy its efforts at censorship?

The original title of the report was Free Market and Forced Labour. For it looks not just at the extent to which coercive employment takes place - and the answer is far more than anyone has acknowledged - but also at the nature of economic demand that drives migration and forced labour. And herein lies the real horror.

It is not just the sex industry that traffics and exploits migrants, but our key sectors - food and agriculture, contract cleaning, hotels and catering, construction and care homes. Moreover, the state uses migrants' forced labour in many cases - when it outsources local authority care to the private sector, when it uses agencies to recruit NHS nurses who end up living on £5 a week, when it uses contract cleaners provided by the cheapest bidder for its offices, or when subcontracted migrant labour is used on private finance initiative construction.

The UK has Europe's most flexible labour force; it lives in fear and squalor, is paid a pittance and is bussed round the country to work in the shadows of the night shift.

If exploitation of migrant labour turns out to be at the core of our competitiveness, as this report suggests, then tackling the problem requires Labour to address the structure of big business and its regulation - to rethink the philosophies inherited from the Tories that advocate subcontracting, outsourcing, competitive tendering, low piece rates, short-term contracts, workforce mobility and a light touch on red tape. But that undermines New Labour's whole narrative - the third way in which economic growth, based on global competitiveness, can be combined with tackling poverty and inequality.

The lives of migrant workers described in this report make a mockery of the government's programme of social justice. Social justice for our own population turns out to depend on the importation of an underclass of foreigners to create our wealth. We compete with countries that have no labour rights by importing their conditions.

There is ammunition for both the anti-immigration far right and pro-regulation old left here, and small wonder Labour would rather postpone the discussion until after an election. The unions have been alarmed about the scale of forced labour for some time as the realisation grows that unless they protect migrants, their own members' conditions cannot be protected. The intense talks between union leaders and ministers to thrash out Labour policy commitments before the election included a discussion of "superexploitation" among migrants. (The word exploitation is no longer thought adequate to describe what is going on.) Reportedly there were even suggestions that a crusade to protect our twilight migrant workforce might restore the government's moral authority lost in Iraq. But unions and ministers alike are afraid to rock the boat on migration for fear of losing votes. So a deal has been done to wait.

But super-exploitation cannot wait. Talk to residents in the agricultural town of Boston, Lincolnshire, where some 50% of the vote in the borough elections was for Ukip or the BNP, and they will tell you that the reason they are drawn to the far right is that no one else is talking about what they see, the violence and crime that organise migrants.

Conspiracies of silence always play into the hands of the far right. If the government really wants a new moral authority, it should come clean on forced labour and its causes now.

*Forced Labour and Migration to the UK, by Bridget Anderson and Ben Rogaly;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1404545,00.html

Cuban leader Castro calls Bush 'deranged'

2005-02-03T02:02:00.000-08:00

Associated Press
February 2, 2005
Vanessa Arrington

HAVANA (AP)--Cuban leader Fidel Castro said Tuesday that President George W. Bush appears "deranged," and that Cubans would much rather live in the Caribbean island's
"heaven" than try and survive in Bush's corrupt, capitalist "hell."

Castro also expressed little enthusiasm for renewed diplomatic ties between Cuba and the European Union, indicating displeasure that a decision to lift sanctions on Cuba was temporary.

In comments aired live on state-run television, Castro told thousands of teachers attending an international pedagogy conference in Havana that he closely watched Bush's inauguration speech Jan. 20 and saw "the face of a deranged person."

"If only it were just the face," he said, to roars of applause by educators in the audience hailing from 52 countries around the world.

Castro, wearing his olive green military uniform, criticized Bush's government, linking it to corruption and torture. He then defended Cuba 's socialist system, which Bush's administration has openly said should be replaced with a democratic, free-market one.

"This country is heaven, in the spiritual sense of the word," he said. "And I say (to Bush), we prefer to die in heaven than survive in hell."

Castro, 78, stood up for much of his five-hour speech. After he broke his right arm and shattered his left kneecap in an accidental fall in October, the Cuban leader was in a wheelchair before he started standing up and walking again
in December.

E.U. foreign ministers announced this week they would lift a ban on high-level governmental visits and stop inviting Cuban dissidents to embassy gatherings in Havana. The 25-nation bloc had imposed the sanctions after Castro's government cracked down on government opponents in March 2003.

The E.U.'s new policy, which demands the release of all imprisoned dissidents, is up for review in July.

"They are treating us ... as if we were condemned to a death sentence," using these months to "observe how I behave," Castro said.

Cuba "doesn't need the United States, it doesn't need Europe," he added. "What a wonderful thing to be able to say, that (Cuba ) doesn't need any assistance - it's
learned to live without it."

Conversely, Castro flowered praise on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, defending the character and ambitions of his close friend and ally. Castro said he laughs every day when he hears "the idiocies" said about Chavez.

The Cuban leader also underlined Cuba's successes in education, where the government has focused many of its resources since the 1959 revolution thrust Castro into power.

"Cuba is doing more for education than UNESCO," he said, referring to the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/aplatin_story.asp?category=1102&slug=Cuba%20Castro

Young people being sold 'a way of life' by the media

2005-02-03T01:06:00.000-08:00

Times of Malta
Ariadne Massa
Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Politicians and the Church have come under fire from young people who believe the two are "major exponents of the old ways of doing things" who fail to take their needs and interests into account.

This emerged from research carried out by Joe Grixti, who examined how young Maltese consumers are influenced by broadcasting and assessed the impact of global and local media on the young people's culture.

The qualitative study was the subject of a public seminar held yesterday evening by the Broadcasting Authority at Robert Samut Hall, in Floriana.

The findings have been compiled in a book-length report entitled Broadcasting And The Young Adult Consumer: Local And Global Media Influences On Maltese Youth Culture, which the authority will be publishing in the near future.

Dr Grixti, a senior lecturer at Massey University in New Zealand, based his findings on data from a series of focus-group interviews with 195 young men and women aged between 14 and 25.

Many interviewees expressed impatience with the "old way of doing things", insisting that greater openness to new ideas, especially to those from technologically advanced cultures, was essential to Malta's further development.

The study also showed that commercial media were not just selling brands of products to young people but a complete way of life.

The majority of young people studied were very much aware of the fact that they were living in a consumption-driven environment and it appeared they had internalised the values which underscored Western consumer cultures.

The young people actually saw today's youth as "never happy" and "always wanting more" and even recognised that the wanting was more important than the having.

The majority believe their parents were happier at their age and that their lives were less hectic and stressful, even though they had fewer comforts and technologies. However, they could not imagine living without these comforts and new technologies.

Several young people found the idea of saving amusing and stressed that many were in the habit of living beyond their means. Several attributed the fact that more young couples were choosing to live together, as opposed to tying the knot, to the high cost of living and low wages, which made it harder to save for the responsibilities of starting a family.

Media images of "beautiful people" were also leading to insecurity or unrealistic expectations, as well as self-punishing behaviour among many young people.

The impact of these images was greater on women than on men, even though the latter were taking a greater interest in fashion and self-grooming.

Repetitive media projections of what was presented as desirable images of what is "normal", "healthy" and "attractive" were also creating a situation where those with disabilities were being seen as "the other".

The study went on to confirm the international trend of alcohol and tobacco advertisers who were specifically targeting young people. Both habits were often associated with being a cool, fun-loving adult.

Young people's attitudes to sex and sexual behaviour has also appeared to have changed dramatically, with the changes marked by ongoing conflicts, contradictions and double standards.

The more liberal attitude was perceived to be directly related to the ways in which sex was portrayed in the media, especially in films, programmes and publications from overseas.

Interviewees described more liberal attitudes to sexual relations as a positive sign of progress and essential if Malta was "to catch up with the rest of the world".

However, others believed this laxity could lead to confusion and stress and many felt they were under a lot of pressure to conform to norms and expectations on appearance and sexual behaviour.

Dr Grixti said in his report that Maltese youth culture was not so much being replaced by global mass culture as mutating by interacting with it.

Young people associated being forward-looking, modern and technologically advanced to being in tune with what they saw on the foreign media, specifically from Western Europe, Britain and the US.

Being old-fashioned and backward tended to be linked with an inability to move beyond the obviously indigenous and traditional such as locally produced goods, Maltese-language television programmes - especially soap operas and political debates - and advertisements.

Despite this, strong family values and family support systems were deemed to be the greatest asset of being Maltese, not least because they believed it facilitated better character formation.

However, others saw these characteristics as shackles which were holding young people back from embracing a more "liberated future".

The report ended by pointing out that since today's young people lived in such media saturated environments it was imperative that they were better equipped to understand the language of the media.

Those who had been to schools with active media education programmes were consistently more critical and reflective about what they saw in films or television.

On the other hand, those who had not had a similar education tended to depend more on common sense responses, which could be easily manipulated by professional image-mongers.

"We need to give young people the tools to be able to understand how the media, which saturates their everyday life, are constructed; how they work; what are the forces behind those particular media; what are the forces behind those particular products and what are the intentions of those people who are projecting them," Dr Grixti said in a recorded speech from his office in New Zealand. Dr Grixti ended by pointing out that young Maltese people were at a crossroads in a modern world.

"They're a wonderful young people, full of energy, full of life, and full of enthusiasm. They are trying to make a lot of sense from the messages which very often are quite contradictory - the old and the new.

"They want to embrace the new but very often don't want to give up the security of the old. And that is quite unique in the way it happens in Malta but not unique in terms of the fact that it does happen in other countries as well."

http://www.timesofmalta.com/core/article.php?id=176654

The Left Loses College Kids

2005-02-02T01:53:00.000-08:00

LA Times
By Brian C. Anderson
January 28, 2005

Brian C. Anderson is the author of "South Park Conservatives," to be published by Regnery in March, and senior editor of City Journal, where a longer version of this article appeared.

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no.

Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest … affirmative action.

For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Latinos could buy one for a lot less. The principle, the protesters observed, was the same one governing university admission practices: treating people differently based on race.

The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of the American college scene, they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. But the left's long dominion over the university — the last place on Earth that the left's power would break up, conservatives believed — is showing its first signs of weakening.

The change isn't coming from the faculty lounges and administrative offices but from self- organizing right-of-center students themselves. Never has the right flourished among college kids as it does today. The number of College Republicans, for instance, has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats' 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members).

Other conservative organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard's has more than 100 students blasting away) to impudent anti-PC newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools everywhere — even at Berkeley, crucible of the '60s student left.

The bustle reflects a general rightward shift in college students' views. In 1995, reports UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, 66% of freshmen wanted the wealthy to pay higher taxes. Today, only 50% do. Support for abortion stood at two-thirds of students in the early '90s; now it's just over half. A late-2003 Harvard Institute of Politics study found that college students had moved to the right of the overall population, with 31% identifying themselves as Republicans, 27% as Democrats and the rest independent or unaffiliated.

One reason that conservative ideas are taking on greater allure for students is that the authorities say they're verboten. Currently, faculty Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 7 to 1 (in humanities and the social sciences), according to Daniel Klein of Santa Clara University and Charlotta Stern, a Swedish sociologist.

"There's a natural and healthy tendency among students to question the piety of their teachers," notes Alan Kors, a University of Pennsylvania history professor.

Katherine Ernst, a recent NYU grad, confirms the point. Ernst already leaned right when she arrived on campus. But the left-wing propagandizing of her professors made her conservatism rock-solid.

"One professor, right after Sept. 11, gave a terrorist-sympathy speech that went, you know: 'Oil, oil, oil, they're poor, we take advantage of them, it's really complicated, blah, blah, blah,' " Ernst says acidly. "How could anybody exposed to this kind of stuff not become a raging right-winger?"

The leftism that so angers these students includes the "hey ho, Western civ has got to go" theories that inform college courses from coast to coast. A student, conservative or otherwise, who doesn't buy into the West-is-the-worst line can "have an awful time of it," Harvard junior Jordan Hyldenn says.

Some conservative students keep their real views to themselves and parrot the "correct" line, fearing that otherwise they'll get a low grade. One earnest Princeton freshman, for instance, had to write a paper on same-sex marriage, which he opposes, for a constitutional law course taught by a pro-gay-marriage professor. "I radically altered my position to make it more in line with what my professor's beliefs are," he says.

An American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey finds that half of all students — not just conservatives — at the top 50 colleges say profs frequently inject their political views into courses, and almost one-third think they have to agree with those views to get a good grade.

Several national organizations are trying to fight the left-wing bias on campus. Perhaps most significant is Students for Academic Freedom, founded in 2003 by David Horowitz and already boasting 130 campus chapters. Its key initiative is a campaign for an "Academic Bill of Rights," which enjoins universities not to deny tenure or fail to hire teachers solely because of their conservative politics, and to ensure that teachers keep their classes from becoming left-wing propaganda sessions. Legislation enacting variations of the bill is on the move in 19 states.

Conservatives still have a long, long way to go. The professorate remains a solidly left-wing body, more likely to assign Barbara Ehrenreich than Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault than Michael Oakeshott, and nothing is going to change that soon.

Nevertheless, the left's iron hold on academe is beginning to loosen. Anyone who cares about the education of our children — and the future political discourse of our country — can only cheer.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-anderson28jan28,0,5967567.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

India on the Edge of Survival

2005-02-01T06:31:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky
31 January, 2005

[T]he dramatic rise in suicides in Andhra Pradesh, which have become a huge scandal....are particularly striking because they are so close to the jewels of the Indian economy, the high tech IT centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which evoke paroxysms of awe from the worshippers of neoliberalism.

The suicides are the other face of the same principles. The state has redirected resources from the rural population—the vast majority—to the sectors of privilege. That means cutting back on irrigation, rural credit, etc., while also driving poor farmers to agroexport: cotton for example. A slight problem then arises. Poor farmers are on the edge of survival, and commodities fluctuate radically in price. One bad year for cotton and the family is driven to usurious money-lenders, who they can’t pay back, so it escalates, and soon the farmer is driven to suicide in despair. The Indian agricultural economist Utsa Patnaik recently drew a comparison to the period right after the American civil war, which led to reduction of cotton exports to Britain and induced Indian peasants to produce cotton for the British rulers. After the civil war, cotton production resumed in the US, the market crashed, and the farmers couldn’t pay the money lenders. The reaction then was a peasant revolt, attacking the money lenders and destroying their records. Now it is suicide. She writes that under British colonial rule farmers were more militant and optimistic than under the neoliberal regime, a different and suffocating form of subordination. That’s only a small piece of the picture. Those who sing odes to the progress of India under neoliberal reforms rarely tell us that over half the population doesn’t even know they have taken place, and that maybe close to 90% of the population are in the black or informal economy, outside the range of government statistics, and barely surviving. Over half of women and children have anemia, probable brain damage. That is sometimes called a “pocket” that has been left behind by “globalization” within a country that is benefiting from it. A rather big pocket. It continues, in the real world.

...The problem is quite a different one, in both cases: preventing the disaster. Anemia and malnutrition can be prevented. The Tsunami could not have been, but the disaster that followed could have been alleviated, not just by warning systems (the US military base in Diego Garcia apparently knew right away) but also by saving the coastline from destruction—say, not destroying mangrove forests, which protect it, for tourist hotels.

http://blog.zmag.org/index.php/weblog/entry/india_on_the_edge_of_survival/

Haiti Solidarity

2005-01-28T03:38:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
January 28, 2005
By Yves Engler

"Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint L'Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want liberty and equality to reign in San Domingo."

January 1 was the 201st birthday of the first nation of free people in the Americas. Its citizens are descendents of the only successful slave rebellion in human history.

The country is of course Haiti, which in its 201st year finds itself occupied, not just by International Monetary Fund or World Bank policymakers, but by well-armed foreign soldiers. Some in the international community want to deepen and extend this occupation. They call it making Haiti a UN protectorate.

All this, it should be noted, follows last February's foreign-orchestrated overthrow of Haiti's constitutional order: the elected president and hundreds of elected mayors, council members and senators throughout the country were forced from office. The poor - especially those associated with ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas party - have been the primary victims of the recent upheaval. Food prices have skyrocketed, thousands of government workers fired, and thousands more jailed or killed.

The Canadian government, through the Ottawa initiative and soldiers sent to "secure" the airport the night Aristide was forced out of the country, has played no small role in orchestrating Haiti's recent social/humanitarian disaster. Fortunately, however, our country is not preordained to play a destructive role in Haiti, even if we have an under-acknowledged colonial legacy.

On a recent trip to Haiti I found that many people were perplexed by Canada's current policy towards their country. Those I talked to generally had positive things to say about Canada's role after the 1994 restoration of Aristide. Some people asked if Canada's Haiti policy changed because Paul Martin took power. Others pointed out that it might be Ottawa trying to curry favour with Washington after not (officially) joining the Iraq debacle. (One person thought it might have something to do with Canada never having its own colonies: Haiti is just the right size, he said.) Whatever our government's motives, the Haitians I talked to all said Canada is currently playing a destructive role in their country.

Ten months of Canadian-backed terror against the poor of the hemisphere's poorest country is enough. It's time to change our government's anti-democratic and elite-friendly policies in Haiti. Haiti solidarity activism, which has been slow to take off, should become the Canadian left's top foreign policy concern.

Why Haiti more than other conflicts?

Canada also has a significant presence in Afghanistan but the domestic situation there is substantially more complex. The occupation in Afghanistan is not so clearly anti-poor or anti-democratic. The constitutional order Canada helped overthrow in Haiti represented the poor majority and it is the poor who currently face the brunt of the repression.

Opposition to Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine is critical but U.S. opinion/action is of overwhelming importance to change. Successful Canadian solidarity work could (and should) move Canada towards the position of the rest of the world: condemning Israeli policy at the UN, which would certainly be of some help to Palestinians. But without the U.S. halting its vast sums of military aid and continuous UN vetoes it's unlikely that the Canadian left could accomplish a great deal more.

Iraq is clearly a larger humanitarian catastrophe than Haiti but again we have little control over Iraq's destiny. In Haiti, on the other hand, Canada is acting aggressively to legitimize the murderous installed regime by giving cash, through Paul Martin's recent visit and by playing host to the recent Montreal conference with some of the Haitian Diaspora. Canada is also in charge of the entire 1600-member UN police force. The UN police are coordinating with the Haitian police - increasingly reconstituted with former military officers - that are responsible for a large number of the political assassinations.

In our age of "war on terror" the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine obviously take on an even greater political significance than the immense suffering of those countries' inhabitants. The conflicts contribute to racism against Arabs and Muslims in Canada, for example (all those anti-Arab rants in the Asper-owned papers.).

In the same way, the overthrow of Haiti's elected government and the recent deterioration of living conditions is intertwined with deep seeded racism. Mainstream reporting about Haiti has a significant undercurrent of "look at those poor blacks unable to govern themselves." The discussion about turning Haiti into a UN protectorate is just the extension of this racist idea. (Iraq is stable enough for elections but Haiti isn't?).

More fundamentally it's not a coincidence that the campaign to de-stabilize the country gained momentum as Haiti prepared to celebrate 200-years of independence. The world's powers have never taken kindly to Haitian independence; not when slaves defeated the English, Spanish and French empires between 1791 and 1804 nor when the Lavalas government broke ties between Haiti's police and the U.S. in 1999. (This came four years after the Army, created by the U.S. during its occupation of 1915-1934, was disbanded.)

Haiti's anti-colonial, pro-black and anti-oppression symbolism is an integral part of its history. The slave-holding nations, hoping to crush its example, refused to recognize its independence. For 60 years the U.S. refused recognition and the colony of Canada, with slaves in Montreal until 1834, wasn't a great deal kinder.

The right, especially the active white supremacist elements in the Republican Party, have used Haiti to advance their racist world view. But the left, aside from a few black Pan-Africanists, has done little to combat the right's racism toward Haiti and has mostly forgotten any connection with Haiti's inspiring example of human liberation.

How many of us have read about Toussaint L'Ouverture? Or the slaves who liberated themselves, their island and provided support for Latin American independence? Our children should learn about Haiti's shining example of fighting human oppression, not just about how that country is very poor.

If we want to move forward with our struggle for liberation we need to be grounded in our successes. All the more so when right-wing forces use Haiti's successful slave rebellion to humiliate and destroy its people today.

Haiti's social movements, I was told by people there, have enough strength to once again overcome the country's small elite and create a more just system. But foreign powers are interfering and supporting Haiti's elite, moving the balance of powers in the elite's favour. That is why our solidarity is of utmost importance.

For those interested in organizing or taking part in demonstrations (planned for Saturday February 26th) in Canada or throughout the world commemorating the one year anniversary of the overthrow of Haiti's constitutional order get in touch with Anthony at afenton@riseup.net For those interested in bringing Haitian speakers to Canada or the northeast of the US get in touch with yves at (514) 807 - 9037 or yvesengler@hotmail.com Anyone planning on attending the World social form who might be interested in outreaching with our Brazilian, Argentinean and Chilean comrades please get in touch with yves.

Churning of the Ocean: The Tsunami and the Third World

2005-01-27T01:45:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
January 26, 2005
By Vijay Prashad

The January 17, 2005 issue of the European edition of Time and of the International edition of Newsweek had the same photograph. It showed a burly US naval officer from the USS Abraham Lincoln holding a badly injured child in the Indonesian port city of Banda Aceh. The pathos on the face of the officer is not propaganda, nor is the grief and fear on the face of the gravely affected child staged. The tragedy is real, as is the immense human effort of reconstruction and healing.

What is almost offensive is the tenor of the media coverage in the US, and of its main periodicals. In the aftermath of the death of the quarter million and the devastation in the lives of the survivors, the emphasis of this media has been on the role of the US government and of US nationals in the clean up. The cover picture in these flagship magazines, as well as the tenor of the coverage within the US, displays a classic colonial device: to show the white nations as the protector, and the darker nations as the helpless lot thankful for the temperament and technology of the overlords.
The photo-shoot is everything: Senator Bill Frist during a photo opportunity on his disaster tour in Sri Lanka asked his aides to "Get some devastation in the back."

The autonomous effort of people along the Indian Ocean rim and of their sacrifice has not graced our press. Terri Gross of Fresh Air (1/19/05) noted that the US government's aid package of $350 million is larger than that of Saudi Arabia, which is all very well. Bear in mind that the US contribution is only 0.003% of our GDP. But why is the US always the main story, even when the devastation is in Asia, and even when the main effort of recovery will be made by Asians and not by the few US marine and medics who are in the area?

I was in Chennai last week, one of the worst hit parts of India. During a visit to the offices of the largest newspaper in the city, and in Southern India, The Hindu, I learnt of the open hearts of ordinary people toward those so tragically affected. The newspaper had started a fund drive, and within a few weeks had collected over Rs. 10 crore, which is Rs. 100 million or else $2.25 million. The amount is not large in itself, but consider this:
most of the money has come in from individual donations or else from schoolteachers, bank clerks and other salaried employees as well as hourly workers in factories and shops who have donated a day's salary. Those who can least afford to put money in the can have been the most enthusiastic.

In Kolkata, even street beggars decided to donate a day's earnings toward the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, whose coffers will swell to around $100 million. The Communist members of parliament pledged a month of their salaries. Political parties from across the spectrum held drives to raise money and to send people for relief work. All this money is going toward state and extra-state agencies who are in the thick of reconstruction. More Indians died in the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 (30,000), and yet the Indian population has easily raised more in two weeks for this tragedy than they did in twelve months after the 2001 quake.

Talking to Indians of all political denominations and from different social locations, it became clear that the money came in for two reasons. First, we remain baffled by the scale of the disaster in the region, not just in the nation. Conversations on the lack of an effective early warning did not detract from our awe at Nature's power over human endeavors. Attempts to connect the scale of the devastation to global warming and other such human disasters will need to be studied, although some of this ecological analysis seemed politically opportunistic. Clearly the attrition of mangrove forests along part of the coastline, and other such issues affected the scale of the death, but we don't know that it produced the shift in the tectonic plates.

Money poured in because it was the very least one could do in the face of what is without mercy.

Second, when the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that his government would not require foreign aid, and when the Indian media reported on the efforts of the Indian navy and others in the region (including in Sri Lanka and the Maldives), it showed that one had to do one's part in the region and not rely upon any external uncles for help. Singh's words stirred up an almost anachronistic Third World anti-colonial nationalism, even as Singh himself leads a government otherwise prone toward concessions to the world's bankers. Before the US government pledged $2.6 million to Sri Lanka in the days after the Tsunami, the Indian government already offered $26 million.

The ethos that motivates this effort comes from regionalism, from the fifty-year tradition of Third World solidarity, as well as from the two-decade attempt by the Indian state to be the major power in the neighborhood. These complex motivations drive the agenda. What is remarkable is not what motivates the government, but how the demonstration of sovereignty provokes this large-scale voluntary contribution toward reconstruction not just within the nation, but also within the region. Our reporters miss such an effort perhaps because it is so alien to US nationalism.

Time carried a sidebar story that questioned the mechanism of relief delivery ("How Much Will Really Go to the Victims?"). Despite our best good intentions, the article argues, "Donor countries do not want their aid to overwhelm a country's bureaucracy or feed corruption, so in the name of accountability, they give very carefully." The idea of "donor nations" comes from institutions like the Paris Club (created in 1956 to coordinate the relationship of advanced capitalist states and "Third World debt") and the G-7 (formed in 1975 to coordinate macroeconomic policy among the advanced capitalist states).

These institutions promote the view that they "give" and the darker nations "take." The Third World is the "recipient" of First World largess, which entirely covers up the sacrifice and effort of two thirds of the world's people. Those who live outside the G-7 too demonstrate their capability to be donors, even if they make demands upon the imperial powers to redress historical theft, to compensate for a lack of technical and capital resources.

To invoke corruption is a necessity, because any relief effort is suffused with mendacity and greed. However, corruption in the Third World should not be an excuse not to provide monies for reconstruction. Within Indian society, for instance, corruption is both endemic and condemned. It is a political issue that inflames discussion and organization countries such as India welcomed the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003). Neither corruption nor bureaucratic unaccountability stops global corporations and G-7 nations from doing business with the darker nations.

Corruption is a problem, but the work that the discourse of corruption does is almost as insidious as the ailment itself. To harp on about corruption allows the media to paper over the fundamental lack of generosity of our governments, but also to occlude a much greater problem that the national liberation and Third World bourgeois state has been cannibalized, that it cannot provide many basic services, and that it has few resources to command for social development.

For days in much of South and South-East Asia, the state did not act. This had little to do with corruption or bureaucratic unaccountability alone, but it had lots to do with the fact that under IMF direction and with the enthusiasm of the domestic elite, the state's capacity to provide services had been slashed. The shell of the state, now increasingly privatized, had to rely upon the immense sacrifice of its officials, of organized political outfits and of ordinary citizens to conduct the normal operations of modern relief.

The military in much of the region took the lead because of all state institutions it has been least cannibalized a sad commentary on modern civilization. On January 12, the Paris Club declared that it would suspend collection of debt payments from Tsunami affected countries "until the World Bank and the IMF have made a full assessment of their reconstruction and financing needs." This was by far the most important gesture from the G-7, greater than all the money that its independent nations pledged. What it recognized is that the debt service payments are so vast that they cripple the ability of the darker nations to conduct social development, and relief. That recognition needs to be built upon.

Despite the cannibalization of the state form and the endemic corruption and bureaucratic unaccountability, people still turn over their money to the state for reconstruction. The horizon of the state as the dispenser of justice lives on as a legacy of Third World anti-colonial nationalism. If the state has withered, the belief in the state has not altogether gone. And indeed, how would it go.

What are the alternatives: private capital, which is motivated by its profits alone, and which is also unaccountable and also corrupt (viz. Enron)? Non-governmental organizations, whose scale is so miniscule that despite whatever good work they do, they cannot provide the sort of services (insurance, naval assistance) provided by the state or global corporations? The only institution that seems viable is the national state, and this is perhaps the reason why individual Indians, for example, raised money and turned them toward the state for rehabilitation.

Short of a month after the Tsunami, the US military decided to pull out of the effort. At a dramatic press conference on January 19, US Pacific Command's chief Admiral Thomas Fargo announced that the US military "will start right now transferring functions to the appropriate host nations and international organizations." Transferring? As if the US had been the dominant power in this effort. The soldier on the cover of Time and Newsweek will deploy, if Seymour Hersh is right, somewhere near Iran, keener to create tragedy than to mollify it. The darker nations, meanwhile, will persist in recovery long after the television cameras and print journalists have gone on to the next misfortune.

Vijay Prashad has just finished writing Darker Nations: the Rise and Fall of the Third World which will be published later this year by the New Press.

Jim Crow returns to the voting booth

2005-01-26T02:57:00.000-08:00

Does America have apartheid vote-counting system?

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Wednesday, January 26, 2005

by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast

The inaugural confetti has been swept away and with it, the last quarrel over who really won the presidential election.

But there is still unfinished business that can't be swept away. After taking his oath, the president called for a "concerted effort to promote democracy." The president should begin with the United States.

More than 133,000 votes remain uncounted in Ohio, more than George W. Bush's supposed margin of victory. In New Mexico, the uncounted vote totals at least three times the president's plurality -- and so on in other states.

The challenge to the vote count is over, but the matter of how the United States counts votes, or fails to count them, remains.

The ballots left uncounted, and that will never be counted, are so-called spoiled or rejected ballots -- votes cast by citizens, but never tallied. This is the dark little secret of U.S. democracy: Nationwide, in our presidential elections, about 2 million votes are cast and never counted, most spoiled because they cannot be read by the tallying machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Cleveland State University Professor Mark Salling analyzed ballots thrown into Ohio's electoral garbage can. Salling found that, "overwhelmingly," the voided votes come from African American precincts.

This racial bend in vote spoilage is not unique to Ohio. A U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation concluded that, of nearly 180,000 votes discarded in Florida in the 2000 election as unreadable, a shocking 54 percent were cast by black voters, though they make up only a tenth of the electorate. In Florida, an African American is 900 percent more likely to have his or her vote invalidated than a white voter. In New Mexico, a Hispanic voter is 500 percent more likely than a white voter to have her or his ballot lost to spoilage.

Unfortunately, Florida and New Mexico are typical. Nationwide data gathered by Harvard Law School Civil Rights Project indicate that, of the 2 million ballots spoiled in a typical presidential election, about half are cast by minority voters.

The problem is that some officials are quite happy with the outcome of elections in which minority votes just don't count. They count on the "no-count."

Before last November's election, the American Civil Liberties Union sued five states for continuing to use punch-card machines, those notorious generators of "hanging" chads and "pregnant" chads that disproportionately disenfranchise black voters.

Four of those states settled with the ACLU by adopting simple fixes to protect voters. One state, notably, refused: Ohio, which forced 75 percent of its voters to use punch-card machines. In minority and low-income areas, these old machines on average spoil an unacceptable 8 percent of the votes cast on them. In high-income white districts, spoilage is typically 1 percent.

In Ohio, the decision to keep the vote-destroying machines in place in African American districts was made by the state's Republican attorney general, Jim Petro, and its secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell, not incidentally, co-chaired the Bush-Cheney re-election committee. The election in Ohio was fundamentally flawed, a fact compounded by the widespread use of electronic voting machines susceptible to manipulation and hacking.

This election saw an explosion in a new category of uncounted, ballots: rejected provisional ballots. In Ohio alone, more than 35,000 of these votes were never tallied. Once again, the provisional ballots were cast overwhelmingly in African American precincts.

Why so many? In November, for the first time since the era of the Night Riders, one major political party launched a program of mass challenges of voters on Election Day. Paid Republican operatives, working from lists prepared by the party, fingered tens of thousands of voters in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, questioning their right to a ballot.

One of these secret "caging lists" was obtained by BBC Television from inside Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. Every one of the voters on those sheets resided in African American neighborhoods, excepting a few in precincts of elderly Jewish voters.

These lists helped Republican poll workers challenge voters on the basis of an alleged change of address. An analysis of one roster showed that several of those facing challenge were African American soldiers whose address changed because they were shipped overseas.

Challenged voters were shunted to "provisional ballots," which, in Ohio and elsewhere, were not counted on the flimsiest of technicalities.

Who won the presidential race? Given the millions of ballots spoiled and provisional ballots rejected, the unfolding mystery of the exit polls and widespread use of electronic voting machines, we will never know whether John Kerry or George W. Bush received the most votes in Ohio and other swing states

But we can name the election's big winner: Jim Crow.

Last Thursday, the president said, "Our country must abandon all the habits of racism."

From benign neglect of the voting machinery to malign intent in challenging minority voters en masse, the United States is turning that ill habit into an electoral strategy.

In 1965, Congress gave us the Voting Rights Act, promising all people the right to cast a vote. It is now time to making counting that vote a right, not just casting it, before Jim Crow rides again in the next election.

---

Rev. Jackson is founder of Rainbow Coalition/ People United to Save Humanity (Operation PUSH). Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, investigated the election for BBC Television.

http://www.gregpalast.com/

What Could Go Wrong in 2005?

2005-01-25T06:36:00.000-08:00

What Could Go Wrong in 2005?
By Marshall Auerback

In his 1849 novel, Les Guepes, Alphonse Karr penned the classic line: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." In the case of the United States in 2005, however, the opposite might be true: The more things stay the same, the more they are likely to change…for the worse. In that regard, compiling a list of potential threats to the U.S. this year has a strangely déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling. After all, such a list would represent nothing more than a longstanding catalogue of economic policy-making run amok. Virtually the same list could have been drawn up in 2004, or 2003, or previous years.

Such threats would include: a persistent and increasing resort to debt-financed growth and a concomitant, growing imbalance in the trade deficit, leading the U.S. ever further into financial dependency and so leaving it dangerously indebted to rival nations, which could (at least theoretically) pull the plug at any time. This, in turn, is occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly problematic, Vietnam-style quagmire in Iraq, against imperial overstretch, and against a related ongoing crisis in energy prices, itself spurring an ever more frantic competition for energy security, which will surely intensify existing global and regional rivalries.

Just as a haystack soaked in kerosene will appear relatively benign until somebody strikes a match; so too, although America's longstanding economic problems have not yet led to financial Armageddon, this in no way invalidates the threat ultimately posed. For economy watchers in 2005, the key, of course, is to imagine which event (or combination of them) might represent the match that could set this "haystack" alight -- if there is indeed one "event" which has the capability of precipitating the bursting of a historically unprecedented credit bubble.

The odd thing about credit bubbles is that they have no determined resolution, nor is there anything about such a dynamic that specifies the path by which it will be reversed; nor is there some specific level of financial excess guaranteed to eventually put an end to it. The beginning of that end could potentially be set off at any level at any time. Nevertheless, it is possible to sketch out several scenarios which could conceivably, in the eleven months left to 2005, trigger such a reversal or even something approaching economic collapse.

Debt: A Policy on Steroids

The Achilles heel of the American economy is certainly debt. It is generally assumed that increases in credit stimulate consumer demand. In the short run that is true, but the long run is another matter altogether. When debt levels are as high as those the U.S. is carrying today, further increases in debt created by credit expansion can come to act as a burden on demand. Signs of this are already in the air -- or rather in what has been, by historic standards, only feeble economic growth in the U.S. economy over George Bush's first term in office.

Think of the present mountain of national debt as the policy equivalent of steroids. It has so far managed to create a reasonably flattering picture of economic prosperity, much as steroid use in baseball has flattered the batting averages of some of game's stars over the past decade. But unlike major league baseball, forced to act by scandal and Senate threats, America's monetary and financial officials still refuse to implement policies designed to curb the growth of a steroidal debt burden. If anything, addiction has set in and policy has increasingly appeared designed to encourage ever larger doses of indebtedness. Each bailout or promise of a government safety net has only led to more of the same: the Penn Central crisis; the Chrysler and Lockheed bailouts; the rescue of much of the savings and loan as well as commercial banking system in the early 1990's; the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management; and the persistent reluctance of U.S. officials to regulate the country's increasingly speculative financial system, which has led not only to fiascos like Enron -- the 21st century poster child for what ails the US economy -- but speaks to the dangers of excessive debt, corrupt financial practices, highly dubious accounting, and endless conflicts of interest.

The result of this reluctance to confront the consequences of America's credit excesses -- a federal government debt level that is now at $7.5 trillion. Of this, $1 trillion is ancient history; the other $6.5 trillion has built up over the past three decades; the last $2 trillion in the past eight years; and the last $1 trillion in the past two years alone. According to the economist Andre Gunder Frank, "All Uncle Sam's debt, including private household consumer credit-card, mortgage etc. debt of about $10 trillion, plus corporate and financial, with options, derivatives and the like, and state and local government debt comes to an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle Sam's GDP [gross domestic product]." This rising level of indebtedness will become a huge deflationary weight on economic activity if debt growth should seriously slow – which is the economic equivalent of a Catch-22.

The "Blanche Dubois" Economy

The situation of the American economy becomes yet more precarious when you consider that the country's major creditors are foreigners. Today, the U.S. economy is being kept afloat by enormous levels of foreign lending, which allow American consumers to continue to buy more imports, which only increase the already bloated trade deficits. In essence, this could be characterized in Streetcar Named Desire terms as a "Blanche Dubois economy," heavily dependent as it is on "the kindness of strangers" in order to sustain its prosperity. This is also a distinctly lopsided arrangement that would end, probably with a bang, if those foreign creditors -- major trading partners like Japan, China, and Europe -- simply decided, for whatever reasons, to substantially reduce the lending.

China, Japan, and other major foreign creditors are believed willing to sustain the status quo because their own industrial output and employment levels are thought to be worth more to them than risking the implosion of their most important consumer market, but that, of course, assumes levels of rationality not necessarily found in any global system in a moment of crisis. All you have to do is imagine the first hints of things economic spinning out of control and it's easy enough to imagine as well that China or Japan, facing their own internal economic challenges, might indeed give them primacy over sustaining the American consumer. If, for example, a banking crisis developed in China (which has its own "bubble" worries), Beijing might well feel it had no choice but to begin selling off parts of its U.S. bond holdings in order to use the capital at home to stabilize its financial system or assuage political unrest among its unemployed masses. Then think for a moment: global house of cards.

Already China has given indications of its long-term intentions on this matter: Roughly 50% of China's growth in foreign exchange since 2001 has been placed into dollars. Last year, however, while China saw its reserves grow by $112 billion, the dollar portion of that was only 25% or $25 billion, according to the always well-informed Montreal-based financial consultancy firm, Bank Credit Analyst.

Beijing has already made it clear that it will spread its reserves and put less emphasis on the dollar. As one of America's largest foreign creditors, China naturally has the upper hand today, like any banker who can call in a loan when he sees the borrower hopelessly mired in IOUs. If such foreign capital increasingly moves elsewhere and easy credit disappears for consumers, U.S. interest rates could rise sharply. As a result, many Americans would likely experience a major decline in their living standards -- a gradual grinding-down process that could continue for years, as has occurred in Japan since the collapse of its credit bubble in the early 1990s.

Even if China, Japan, and other East Asian nations continue to accommodate American financial profligacy, a major economic "adjustment" in the U.S. could still be triggered simply by the sheer financial exhaustion of its overextended consumers. After all, the country already has a recession-sized fiscal deficit and zero household savings. That's a combination that's never been seen before. In the early 1980's, when the federal deficit was this size, the household savings rate was 9%. This base of savings enabled the government to finance its vast deficits for a time through a huge one-time fall in net savings, the scale of which was historically unprecedented and not repeatable today in a savings-less America.

At the Edge: Imperial Overstretch

A restoration of national savings is fundamentally incompatible with continued economic growth, all other things being equal. And the United States can ill-afford even lagging economic growth, given the magnitude of its burgeoning – and expensive – overseas military commitments, especially in an Iraq that is beginning to look like Vietnam redux.

President Bush likes to compare his combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strategies with President Reagan's blend of tax cuts, military assertiveness, and massive borrowing in the 1980s. His economic advisers, especially Vice President Dick ("deficits don't matter") Cheney, appear to believe that the present huge trade and fiscal deficits will prove no more disruptive in the next decade than they were in the Reagan years.

But if we turn to the Vietnam parallel, we find a less comforting historical precedent: the decision, first by President Johnson and then by President Nixon, to finance that unpopular conflict through borrowing and inflation, rather than higher taxes. The ultimate result of their cumulative Vietnam decisions was not just a military humiliation but also a series of economic crises that first caught up with the country in the late 1960s and continued periodically until 1982.

In a sense, the dollar's continuing fall last year (especially against the euro) in spite of significant interventions by central banks in the global foreign exchange markets, reflects a similar loss of respect for U.S. policy-making – and especially for the linking of the dollar and the Pentagon through an endless series of foreign adventures. In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it needs and invests instead in military "security" will eventually find itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself, which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as "imperial overstretch":

"[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously."

That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion Gross Domestic Product and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush Administration is reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps 10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible for that hollowing out.

Oil: The Dividing Line of the New Cold War

And then there is the problem of crude which, despite predictions from ever optimistic financial analysts has once again begun to approach $50 a barrel. The one thing Mr Bush has never mentioned in relation to his Iraq war policy is oil, but back in 2001 former Secretary of State James Baker presciently wrote an essay in a Council on Foreign Relations study of world energy problems that oil could never lurk far from the forefront of American policy considerations:

"Strong economic growth across the globe and new global demands for more energy, have meant the end of sustained surplus capacity in hydrocarbon fuels and the beginning of capacity limitations. In fact, the world is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity, raising the chances of an oil supply crisis with more substantial consequences than seen in three decades. These choices will affect other US policy objectives: US policy toward the Middle East; US policy toward the former Soviet Union and China; the fight against international terrorism."

The CFR report made another salient point clear: "Oil price spikes since the 1940s have always been followed by recession." In its current debt-riddled condition, further such price spikes could bring on something more than a garden-variety economic downturn for the U.S., especially if some of the major oil-producing nations, such as Russia, follow through on recent threats to denominate their petroleum exports in euros, rather than dollars, which would substantially raise America's energy bill, given the current weakness of the dollar.

The most recent spike in the price of oil was not simply a reflection of rising political uncertainty and conflict in the Middle East. There are other reasons to expect higher energy price levels over the next two to three decades – the most notable among them being strong demand from emerging economies, especially those of China and India.

The parallel drives for energy security on the part of the United States and China hold the seeds of future conflict as well. Yukon Huang, a senior advisor at the World Bank, recently noted that China's heavy reliance on oil imports (as well as problems with environmental degradation, including serious water shortages) poses a significant threat to the country's economic development even over the near-term, the next three to five years.

China's already vigorous response to this challenge is likely to bring it increasingly up against the United States. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for instance, returned from a Christmas trip to China where he apparently sold America's historic Venezuelan oil supplies to the Chinese together with future prospecting rights. Even Canada (in the words of President Bush, "our most important neighbors to the north") is negotiating to sell up to one-third of its oil reserves to China. CNOOC, China's third largest oil and gas group, is actually considering a bid of more than $13 billion for its American rival, Unocal. The real significance of the deal (which, given the size, could not have been contemplated in the absence of Chinese state support) is that it illustrates the emerging competition between China and the U.S. for global influence -- and resources.

The drive for resources is occurring in a world where alliances are shifting among major oil-producing and consuming nations. A kind of post-Cold War global lineup against perceived American hegemony seems to be in the earliest stages of formation, possibly including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia and Venezuela. Russian President Putin's riposte to an American strategy of building up its military presence in some of the former SSRs of the old Soviet Union has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, organize large-scale joint war games with the Chinese military, and work towards the goal of opening up the shortest, cheapest, and potentially most lucrative new oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian Sea area to Iran. In the meantime, the European Union is now negotiating to drop its ban on arms shipments to China (much to the publicly expressed chagrin of the Pentagon). Russia has also offered a stake in its recently nationalized Yukos, (a leading, pro-Western Russian oil company forced into bankruptcy by the Putin government) to China.

In a one-superpower world, this is pretty brazen behavior by all concerned, but it is symptomatic of a growing perception of the United States as a declining, overstretched giant, albeit one with the capacity to strike out lethally if wounded. American military and economic dominance may still be the central fact of world affairs, but the limits of this primacy are becoming ever more evident -- something reflected in the dollar's precipitous descent on foreign exchange markets. It all makes for a very challenging backdrop to the rest of 2005. Keep an eye out. Perhaps this will indeed be the year when longstanding problems for the United States finally do boil over, but don't expect Washington to accept the dispersal of its economic and military power lightly.

Marshall Auerback is an international strategist with David W. Tice & Associates, LLC, a USVI-based money management firm. He is also a contributor to the Japan Policy Research Institute.

http://www.prudentbear.com/

A case for Chechnya

2005-01-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.

New Left Review 30,
November-December 2004
Tony Wood

What happened was what always happens when a state possessing great military strength enters into relations with primitive, small peoples living their independent lives. Either on the pretext of self-defence, even though any attacks are always provoked by the offences of the strong neighbour, or on the pretext of bringing civilization to a wild people, even though this wild people lives incomparably better and more peacefully than its civilizers . . . the servants of large military states commit all sorts of villainy against small nations, insisting that it is impossible to deal with them in any other way.

Leo Tolstoy, 1902 draft of Hadji Murat

In the decade and a half since the end of the Cold War, the map of Eastern Europe has been comprehensively redrawn. More than a dozen new countries have appeared as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav wars of succession, an arc of newly sovereign states stretching from Estonia to Azerbaijan. The majority of them have, at the prompting of the us, been incorporated into Euro-Atlantic defence structures, and several were ushered into the eu earlier this year; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now form the outer perimeter of the Single Market, while Georgia and Ukraine have advanced their cases for nato membership. The continent has been transformed.

Chechnya provides a stark contrast to these trajectories. Here, as in the Baltic states, a national independence movement emerged during perestroika, and a broad national consensus for secession was democratically ratified in late 1991. Earlier the same year the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania overwhelmingly voted for separation from the ussr; the results of the referenda were quickly approved by the ussr’s Supreme Soviet and the three new nations, with populations of 1.6 million, 2.7 million and 3.7 million respectively, were admitted to the un within a matter of weeks. But Chechnya—at 15,000 square kilometres, slightly smaller than Wales, and with a population of around a million—has, since 1991, suffered two full-scale assaults by the world’s fifth-largest military force, and is now entering the sixth year of a vicious occupation designed to reduce the populace to starvation and submission. While citizens of the Baltic states are now able to cross Europe’s borders freely, Chechens must endure Russian checkpoints and zachistki—‘clean-up’ operations, ostensibly for checking identity papers—which routinely result in the torture, ransom, disappearance or summary execution of those arrested, as well as the pillaging and further impoverishment of those who remain. The devastation is unthinkable, the brutality endless and unchecked, while the casualties remain largely uncounted.

Discussions of the Russo-Chechen conflict have rarely focused on this staggering divergence of fortunes, often preferring the state-sponsored obfuscations of the ‘war on terror’, or else characterizing it as the all but inevitable product of a long-running historical antagonism. The legacy of Chechen resistance to Russian colonization—from the first confrontations with Cossack settlers in the sixteenth century to the southward expansion of the Tsarist Empire in the nineteenth century, and well into the Soviet period—has undoubtedly played a role in galvanizing the movement for secession. A strong impetus would also have come from the experience of deportation and exile suffered by several North Caucasian peoples in 1944. The immediate roots of the present war, meanwhile, can be found in the Kremlin’s cynical plan to hoist Putin into power, and to reverse the defeats suffered in 1994–96.

But underpinning Chechen resistance, past and present, has been a consistent struggle for self-determination. The Chechens’ demands are comparatively modest—full sovereignty, retaining economic and social ties with Russia—and have a sound constitutional basis. The response, however, has been staggeringly disproportionate, with Russian forces unleashing attacks of a ferocity unmatched in these lands since the Second World War. In the West, on the rare occasions that attention is devoted to Chechnya there has been almost total unanimity that Chechen independence is not to be countenanced, for the good of Russian democracy and its nascent capitalism. What follows is an attempt to demonstrate the weakness in fact, and shamefulness in principle, of the arguments used to deny the fundamental right of the Chechen people to govern themselves.

Frontier revolts

The Chechens are one of an intricate patchwork of peoples covering the North Caucasus. [1] ‘Chechen’ is in fact a Russian designation, after a village where a battle was fought between Cossack settlers and the local people in 1732; the Chechens—mythically descended, ‘like sparks from steel’, from the hero Turpalo-Nokhchuo—refer to themselves as ‘Nokhchii’, and are closely related to the neighbouring Ingush, with whom they share many customs. The two peoples, whose languages are mutually intelligible, are jointly known as the Vainakh. They have been present in the area for over 6,000 years, their livelihood predominantly provided by livestock, subsistence farming and the surrounding forests. As with mountain peoples elsewhere, Chechen society lacked feudal structures, being composed instead of groupings of clans living in formal equality—‘free and equal like wolves’, as the Chechen saying has it. This essentially democratic, acephalous form of social organization distinguished the Chechens from many other Caucasian peoples, such as the Kabardins or Avars, and was to have far-reaching implications: firstly because it meant that there was no native elite whom the Tsars could co-opt; and secondly because the Chechens were in a sense already ideally organized for guerrilla warfare.

The tradition of resistance to outside rule in Chechnya is striking in its depth and consistency. It has been stronger here than elsewhere due to a combination of factors: pre-existing social relations, cultural patterns, concrete historical experience and environmental conditions. Topography and demographics have been crucial: Chechnya’s thickly forested mountains provided better cover for resistance than was available in, say, Ingushetia; moreover, as the most numerous of the North Caucasian peoples, the Chechens provided the majority of footsoldiers for rebellions against Russian rule. Their record of struggle sets them apart from their neighbours, among whom both admiration and resentment of Chechens are common. It was above all the disparity between Chechen and Ingush experiences of and attitudes to Russian rule—the Ingush largely abstained from the rebellions of 1840–59 and 1920—that lay behind Ingushetia’s decision to separate from Chechnya in a 1991 referendum.

Resistance has been bolstered and perpetuated by Chechen culture in which, as elsewhere in the Caucasus, honour—both martial and familial—and hospitality are prominent. Memory plays a central role, not only in its oral traditions—notably the epic songs, illi—but also in the customary duty to remember seven generations of ancestors. History is no dispassionate record of events; it is the basis of Chechen identity itself. [2] Religion, too, has been an important element: Islam penetrated the East Caucasus in the 17th and 18th centuries, melding with local animist traditions. The Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood, with its aversion to hierarchy and creed of resistance, held strong appeal for Chechens, and it was under Sufi leadership—uniting dozens of disparate Caucasian peoples behind the banner of Islamic solidarity—that the most effective resistance to Russian colonial domination was to be mobilized in the 19th century. [3]

Russia’s southward expansion began with the conquest of the khanate of Astrakhan by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, and the first contacts between Chechens and Russians date from this time. But shifts in geopolitical fortunes and priorities meant that Russian imperial interest in the Caucasus revived only in the late 18th century—provoking the 1785–91 uprising of Sheikh Mansur, whose armies inflicted a heavy defeat on Catherine the Great. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Tsars began to colonize the region in earnest, constructing lines of forts along the Terek and Sunzha rivers, which laterally bisect Chechnya. Russia’s colonial policy was similar to that adopted by other European powers in their dealings with tribal peoples; in the Caucasus it was personified by General Aleksei Yermolov, who from 1816 attempted to subdue Chechnya, where resistance was stiffest, by means of punitive raids on mountain villages, collective punishment, razing of houses and crops, deforestation, forced mass deportation, and settlement of Cossacks on lands vacated by Chechens. Not only did this approach dispossess and enrage an entire population, it also had longer-term sociological consequences. In his eagerness to drive the Chechens out of the agricultural lowlands and into the mountains where they would eventually starve, Yermolov blocked the formation of feudal and landowning structures in Chechen society, thus cementing the very clan-based order that had made resistance so effective. [4]

The Chechens initially responded to Yermolov’s brutality with armed raids on Russian positions. But by the late 1830s resistance had coalesced around Imam Shamil, an Avar from Dagestan who advocated Islamic discipline in order to defend local ways—including the adat or customary laws—against the invader. Between 1840–59 Tsarist repression escalated into full-scale war against Shamil’s proto-state. [5] The armies of Alexander ii eventually won through sheer military might, but the persistent trouble on his empire’s southern flank evidently persuaded the Tsar, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, to press on with the task his father had entrusted to Paskievich, Yermolov’s successor, in 1829—the ‘extermination of the recalcitrant’. Forced deportations of the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus began in 1856 and continued until 1864; a total of 600,000, including 100,000 Chechens, were sent to the Ottoman Empire, where tens of thousands perished from starvation and disease. The Cherkess have never recovered demographically; most of the Chechens who survived, however, eventually returned, though many remained to form significant diaspora communities in present-day Turkey and Jordan.

Rebellion flared up in Chechnya and Dagestan in 1877–78, this time mobilized primarily by Qadiri Sufi brotherhoods, and was once again brutally suppressed. A relatively quiescent period followed, in which the Chechens remained on the socio-economic margins, and subject to still more severe land hunger than Russian peasants—by 1912, Chechens and Ingush owned less than half as much land per person as Terek Cossacks. [6] The discovery of oil near Grozny in the 1880s brought with it rapid industrial and urban growth, but what meagre benefits this provided went above all to Russian migrant workers; indeed, Grozny remained a strongly Russian city well into the 1970s. As the Empire sought dependable local cadres, however, a small minority of Chechens began to receive a Russian education. It was from among these men, influenced by the ideas of the narodniki and later the Social-Democrats, that a local intelligentsia began to emerge in the late 19th century; initially focused on recording the folklore and traditions of their people in scholarly works, by the first decade of the 20th century they had moved to writing critical articles on the current conjuncture. [7] Several such figures were involved in the creation of an independent North Caucasian Mountain Republic in 1918, while others fought alongside the Reds during the Civil War as the best means of securing local autonomy. (Among them was Aslanbek Sheripov, whose brother Mairbek was to lead an uprising against Stalin in 1940.) Nevertheless, by the end of the Tsarist era, there was as yet no distinct Chechen nationalism; aspirations to sovereignty were instead couched in pan-Caucasian terms.

Revolution to deportation

The leading role played by Cossacks in the White Army, which moved into the North Caucasus in 1919, galvanized opposition in Chechnya. Mobilized by Sufi brotherhoods in the countryside and by radicals such as Sheripov in Grozny—which survived a 100-day White onslaught in 1918—the resistance engaged fully a third of Denikin’s forces at a crucial moment in the Civil War. [8] After the White withdrawal in 1920, however, the Red Army initially replicated the pattern of punitive raids, and resistance continued. By 1921 Stalin was forced to pledge full autonomy for the rechristened Soviet Mountain Republic, accept local Islamic laws and return lands granted to the Cossacks. Within a year the Soviets had reneged on these promises, sending in army detachments to forcibly disarm the Chechens in the highlands; further pacification measures were required into the summer of 1925, including artillery and aerial bombardment of mountain villages.

Yet although many Chechens saw Soviet rule as Russian domination refurbished, others were better disposed to the Communist order, seeing it as Chechnya’s path to modernity. Much of this ambiguity persists to this day, since the Soviet system provided professional opportunities and social infrastructure that the patriarchal order had never offered. In the field of culture, Chechen writers turned away from the Arabic poetic traditions of preceding centuries towards realist fiction in the manner of Gorky; it was the playwright and novelist Khalid Oshaev who devised the Latin transcription for Chechen in 1925—anticipating Atatürk by three years. [9] By the late 30s, however, modernization had become unambiguously synonymous with Russification. This was expressed on a symbolic level with an enforced shift to Cyrillic script, and in a literal sense with adjustments to administrative boundaries designed to dilute the weights of the titular nationalities of the newly formed Caucasian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics, merging distinct groups and adding to them areas with predominantly Russian populations. [10]

As elsewhere in the ussr, the onset of collectivization in Chechnya in the autumn of 1929 marked the beginning of a qualitatively different phase of Soviet history. In response to arbitrary arrests and confiscations of livestock, armed resistance began once more: archives were burnt and dozens of gpu agents assassinated, prompting the despatch of the Red Army to Checheno-Ingushetia that December. It suffered heavy losses, and the Kremlin line was softened until 1931, when the gpu arrested 35,000 Chechens and Ingush for ‘anti-Soviet’ activity. The following year saw the beginning of a crackdown on the local intelligentsia, though the 3,000 arrests of 1932 were outdone by the 14,000—3 per cent of the population—that took place during the ezhovshchina of 1937; guerrilla activity continued in Chechnya’s mountainous south, however, until 1938. An indirect indication of the toll taken by arrests and repression can be seen in the fact that, between the Soviet censuses of 1937 and 1939, Checheno-Ingushetia suffered a population loss of 35,000. [11]

But the depredations of the gpu pale into insignificance beside the genocidal deportations of 1944. If the former were tragically generalized across the ussr, the latter were chillingly focused. The pretext given by the Soviet authorities was that several North Caucasian peoples and the Crimean Tatars had collaborated en masse with the Nazi occupying forces. Chechen émigré circles—including the grandson of Shamil—had briefly made contact with the German authorities. But in Chechnya itself, opportunities for working with the enemy were limited: having taken Rostov, Stavropol, Krasnodar and Mozdok by late August 1942, the Wehrmacht ground to a halt before reaching Grozny; the only town in Checheno-Ingushetia over which they managed to establish control before their retreat began in late 1942 was Malgobek, which had a predominantly Russian population. [12] In Chechnya as elsewhere, the handfuls of collaborators were overwhelmingly outweighed by the number of Caucasians and Tatars volunteering for service in the Red Army—17,413 Chechens alone—or fighting with partisan bands behind German lines.

The real motivation undoubtedly lies instead in the obstinate refusal of the majority of Chechens, above all, to bow to Soviet authority. It was this that underpinned the nationalist insurrection led by Hassan Israilov and Mairbek Sheripov, which began in 1940—when Hitler and Stalin were officially allies—and which had, by 1942, gained control of several mountain regions and formed a provisional government. [13] Rather than being deployed against Hitler’s armies, the Soviet air force pounded the mountain auls in a bid to crush the North Caucasian National Committee.

The plan for the deportation was drawn up in October 1943, codenamed ‘Operation Lentil’—the first two syllables of the Russian word chechevitsa pointing a phonetic finger at the principal targets. On 23 February 1944, in a process personally supervised by Beria, 478,000 Chechens and Ingush were crammed into Studebaker trucks and then sent, along with 50,000 Balkars, to Central Asia in airless freight trains; Kalmyks and Karachais suffered a similar fate. Food was scarce, disease rife, and many simply died of exposure. nkvd files give an official death rate of 23.7 per cent in the trains, a total of 144,704 people. Estimates for indirect population loss among Chechens alone range from 170,000 to 200,000. [14]

Return from exile

Although the Israilov rebellion had provided a brief glimpse of a modern Chechen nationalism, the latter was largely forged by the experience of deportation and exile. The brutal specificity of Soviet nationalities policy and the sense of a shared, bitter destiny aided the formation of a Chechen national consciousness. The Sufi brotherhoods played a key role in exile, too, since their underground activities perpetuated a specifically Chechen religious tradition. Though Islam was to re-emerge during perestroika, there is little doubt that in Chechnya, religion served as ‘spiritual clothing for [a] national struggle’. [15]

In exile, the surviving Chechens and Ingush faced strict restrictions on residence and were mostly able to work only as manual labour. With de-Stalinization in the late 1950s they began to stream back to the re-established Chechen-Ingush assr. But even after their return, they were heavily discriminated against, and largely excluded from skilled employment—a marginalization that only consolidated the national identification that had begun to develop in exile. In the late Soviet period, Checheno-Ingushetia’s economy was divided into two spheres. The largely urban Russians—24 per cent of the republic’s total 1989 population of 1.2 million—dominated the oil and machine sectors, health, education and social services. The predominantly rural Chechens and Ingush—the former far more numerous than the latter, composing 64 per cent of the assr’s population—worked in agriculture, construction and also crime. Given the higher population growth rate of Chechens and Ingush relative to Russians, by 1989 these imbalances had resulted in an estimated surplus labour force of over 100,000, while a quarter of ethnic Chechens were now living outside Checheno-Ingushetia, having left in search of employment. Like the rest of the North Caucasus, moreover, Checheno-Ingushetia had markedly lower wages and poorer social provision than the rest of Soviet Russia: the average wage in 1985 was 83 per cent of the rsfsr average, dropping to 75 in 1991; infant mortality was 23 per 1000 in 1987, compared to an rsfsr mean of 14 per 1000. In 1989, only 5 per cent of the population of Checheno-Ingushetia had higher education, while 16 per cent had no education at all. [16]

The brunt of this economic apartheid was, of course, borne by the rural population—according to the 1989 census, 59 per cent in Checheno-Ingushetia, compared to 27 per cent in the rsfsr as a whole—and it was above all from the poor south of the republic that the independence movement drew its numerical support. By the end of the Soviet era, Chechnya’s small intelligentsia—largely the product of the Communist system—was also pressing for, at the very least, a revision of the terms of Chechnya’s ussr membership. Indeed, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the leaders of the nationalist movement came not from the political elite, but from local artistic and intellectual circles—the poet Zelimkhan Yandarbiev and the actor Akhmed Zakaev, for instance—although some, such as Dzhokhar Dudaev and Aslan Maskhadov, were drawn from the Red Army, one of relatively few Soviet institutions open to Chechen talents. Financial support, meanwhile, came from local bosses such as Yaragi Mamadaev or the Moscow-based diaspora—much more numerous and prosperous than overseas Chechen communities, which have had little influence on present conditions in their ancestral land.

A crucial factor in 1990–91 was the fact that, unlike the vast majority of Russia’s titular ethnic republics, Chechnya possessed no native nomenklatura which could seamlessly retain power. The reasons for this are the same as those underpinning the emergence of Chechen nationalism itself. The gpu had picked off pre-Revolutionary leaders and intellectuals; but it was above all the deportation and subsequent discrimination that had ‘prevented the Chechens from forming a consolidated, self-confident Soviet elite that could have peacefully resolved the situation when the Soviet Union started to fall apart’. [17]

Declaration of independence

As in the Baltic States, the origins of the Chechen national movement lie in informal associations established during perestroika, such as the scholarly society Kavkaz, Bart (‘Unity’)—which in 1990 became the Vainakh Democratic Party—and the Popular Front of Checheno-Ingushetia. The latter was closely connected to the local Party and kgb, and initially limited itself to organizing protests on environmental issues, such as a planned chemical plant in Gudermes, or on the defence of Chechen culture (the Ingush were largely sidelined). But the notion of full sovereignty became increasingly central to discussions during 1990, and more radical forces gained the upper hand. On 26 April, Gorbachev promulgated a law giving all Russian assrs ‘the full plenitude of state power on their territory’, and making them full subjects of the ussr, with the constitutional right to secede from the Union. On a visit to Kazan in August 1990 while campaigning for the rsfsr presidency, meanwhile, Yeltsin famously told Russia’s ethnic republics to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can stomach’. The First Chechen National Congress, held in November 1990 with the full approval of the local cp, took up these invitations by declaring the sovereignty of the Chechen Republic of Nokhchi-cho, but also resolved that the new state would remain part of the ussr.

At this stage, the chief differences among Checheno-Ingushetia’s political forces concerned the composition of a new national leadership, the form of relations with Moscow and the role of Islam. All the main factions of the Chechen National Congress—the Communists; a secular group drawn from the Soviet intelligentsia and the Popular Front; radical Chechen nationalists, such as the Vainakh Democratic Party, many of whose members favoured some form of Islamic state—advocated full sovereignty ‘at a minimum’. [18] It was only in 1991, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, that this consensus was broken, as the local Party clung to power while the nationalist opposition gathered force. The key actors here were the Vainakh Democratic Party, led by Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, and the Executive Committee of the Chechen National Congress, which was from March 1991 headed by Dzhokhar Dudaev.

For the previous five years, Dudaev had commanded a long-range bomber division in Tartu, and was strongly influenced by the rising fortunes of the Estonian independence movement. He had left Estonia just as a referendum there returned a strong majority in favour of secession—an event which doubtless encouraged him to embolden his stance: Estonia’s population of 1.6 million was, after all, little larger than Checheno-Ingushetia’s, and the latter had a smaller Russian minority than either Estonia or Latvia. Dudaev’s arrival in Chechnya brought a radicalization of the Executive Committee, which soon created an armed National Guard and by the summer of 1991 was openly calling for the dissolution of the Chechen-Ingush Supreme Soviet, claiming legitimate authority now rested with the National Congress.

The decisive blow to the local Party’s authority came with the August putsch against Gorbachev. While Chechnya’s cp officials avoided taking a decisive stance, Dudaev’s Executive Committee staged rallies and called a general strike in defence of Yeltsin. A classic revolutionary situation of dual power ensued, until the seizure of the Supreme Soviet on 6 September by the National Guard and the paramilitaries of Bislan Gantemirov’s Islamic Path Party. [19] With hundreds of people streaming into Grozny from the Chechen countryside in support of Dudaev, the nationalists took control of more government buildings during September. The Executive Committee’s response to Yeltsin’s proposal of a Provisional Council to replace the Supreme Soviet, a compromise more palatable to the local cp, was to form an interim government and schedule elections for 27 October. Dudaev won a landslide victory, and declared independence on his inauguration on 1 November. [20] At the end of the same month, the Ingush voted formally to separate from Chechnya, and remain part of Russia as an assr.

Dudaev’s declaration of independence was the latest in a series that had begun in Lithuania in March 1990. Armenia followed in August, Georgia in April 1991, and 20–31 August 1991 saw similar declarations from Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan; Tajikistan followed suit in September, Turkmenistan in October and Kazakhstan in December. The contrast between the fate of these states and Chechnya is striking. On 6 September, for example, the Kremlin recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and on 17 September the three nations were given seats in the un; Ukraine and Belarus were already members, but the rest of the former Soviet republics were admitted on 2 March 1992 (except Georgia, which had to wait until July for lack of a government). On 2 November 1991, meanwhile, the rsfsr Supreme Soviet declared the elections Dudaev had just won to have been unlawful. Then, on the night of 8–9 November, Russian special forces flew in to Khankala airbase near Grozny in a bid to remove Dudaev from power. But the coup attempt was foiled by a combination of armed Chechen opposition and obstruction from Gorbachev, still nominally commander of the Soviet military, and unwilling to repeat the bloodshed that had taken place in Lithuania that January. Russian troops left Chechnya in humiliation, and for the next three years, the country gained de facto independence.

Chechnya’s secession was in line with ussr law, and the margin of Dudaev’s electoral victory indicated the depth of popular support for full sovereignty. Moreover, for all the doubts they subsequently raised as to its legitimacy, the Russian authorities on several occasions accepted Chechen independence de jure. On 14 March 1992, after negotiations on a range of legal, economic and security issues, Chechen and Russian representatives signed protocols explicitly referring to the ‘political independence and state sovereignty of the Chechen Republic’, a formula that was endorsed in further documents signed on 28 May and 25 September of that year. [21]

Dudaev in power

Dudaev’s Chechnya has been portrayed as a lawless land, blighted by crime, corruption and political and economic instability, with the blame placed squarely on its uniformed leader. Comparison with other former Soviet republics yields a more balanced assessment. In the years immediately following 1991, economic disaster overtook all post-Soviet states. Perhaps the most comparable to Chechnya are the republics of Transcaucasia, which saw abrupt shrinkages of gdp—35 per cent in Azerbaijan in 1991–92 and 23 per cent in 1992–93; 40 and 32 per cent respectively in Georgia, 52 and 15 in Armenia—as well as a marked decrease in industrial production: the 1992 figures for Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are 44, 48 and 24 per cent respectively. In Chechnya, industrial production dropped by 30 per cent in 1992 and by 61 per cent in 1993—principally due to the emigration in the early 1990s of the predominantly Russian specialists in the oil industry, the republic’s main source of revenue. [22] Though the Dudaev government was undoubtedly inexperienced in economic affairs, Chechnya’s woes were clearly part of a wider catastrophic trend.

If Chechnya’s contested political scene stands in marked contrast to the nomenklatura dictatorships of Central Asia or Azerbaijan, it more closely resembles the turbulent landscape of post-Soviet Georgia, where president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was toppled by military coup in 1992 and assassinated in 1993. Political opposition to Dudaev came initially from former Party officials and pro-Moscow Chechens in the lowlands, but was soon augmented by business elites dissatisfied with the slump in economic fortunes after 1991 (and by the Dudaev government’s unwillingness to privatize with the same gusto as the federal centre). As it did in Georgia, Yeltsin’s government proceeded to finance and arm opposition groups, which made several attempts to assassinate Dudaev.

Dudaev responded to these pressures with populist gestures to the poorer, more traditional south—such as the 1994 renaming of Chechnya as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, after a highland region—and, increasingly as of 1993, by a strengthening of presidential rule. Dudaev’s dissolution of parliament in April 1993 tarnishes his democratic credentials—though he did not go so far as to shell his elected opponents into submission, as Yeltsin did in October of the same year. It should also be recalled that, unlike Aleksandr Rutskoi and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the leaders of the rebellion against Yeltsin, the Chechen opposition was actively being funded by an aggressive foreign power, with the aim of revoking Chechen sovereignty altogether. Moreover, several of the pro-Moscow districts claiming to be victims of Dudaev’s dictatorship unilaterally declared their secession from Chechnya in June 1993, with no democratic mandate whatsoever. It was this constitutional disorder, which Russia had itself created, that served as the pretext for invasion in 1994.

Much has been written about the prevalence of crime under Dudaev. [23] Chechens had become prominent in the shadow economy in the late Soviet period, largely due to their exclusion from legitimate sectors. But in Chechnya as elsewhere, the surge in criminal activities after 1991 is intimately bound up with the post-Soviet economic collapse. Against a background of catastrophic de-industrialization and skyrocketing inflation, crime became ‘a matter of simple survival’. Highly profitable rackets sprang up around the Baku–Novorossiisk pipeline, which then ran across the heart of Chechnya, and Grozny airport became a kind of special free trade zone for drugs and contraband. Two remarks are in order here: firstly, these activities would not have been possible without the complicity of the Russian authorities controlling Chechen airspace and manning the border; and secondly, these larcenous de facto privatizations were simply small-scale versions of the orgy of theft then taking place in Russia itself. The Chechens were very much the ‘junior partners in a wave of corruption and criminality emanating from the Russian capital’. [24]

Yeltsin’s Vietnam

The Russian authorities had clearly been contemplating military intervention in Chechnya long before 1994: Rutskoi had advocated it in October 1991, and military stand-offs had taken place on Chechnya’s borders twice in 1992. The immediate trigger for war, however, was the failure of yet another special forces coup attempt in Chechnya on 26 November 1994, which has been described as ‘Yeltsin’s equivalent of the Bay of Pigs’. [25] Russian forces entered Chechnya on 11 December, and throughout that month Grozny came under a bombardment described as more intense than that in Sarajevo or Beirut. With the New Year came a full-scale ground assault, with the Russians taking Grozny in March amid heavy casualties, almost totally destroying the city’s centre. The pattern of massively disproportionate force was repeated elsewhere—most brutally with the massacre of at least two hundred villagers in Samashki on 6–8 April 1995—but the Russian advance slowed in the spring of 1995, as the occupying army increasingly sought local truces rather than engaging Chechen formations. Shamil Basaev’s May 1995 raid on Budennovsk, and the ensuing negotiations, provided a vital breathing space for the Chechen resistance, which was now able to filter back behind Russian lines in sufficient numbers to seize key towns—holding Gudermes for several days in December 1995.

From the outset, there had been a striking degree of opposition to the war not only among the Russian public, where a small but persistent anti-war movement took root, but within the army itself. As early as 13 December 1994, a tank column had refused to fire on a group of women blocking the road into Chechnya. The high number of Russian casualties contributed to low morale, and the notion of withdrawal from Chechnya became increasingly popular. In the spring of 1996, with electoral disaster looming and the Chechen resistance making bold, large-scale attacks, Yeltsin put forward a tokenistic peace initiative, but then ordered the assassination of Dudaev, carried out by Russian rocket attack on 22 April 1996. Yandarbiev took over as acting president. Thereafter, the Russians alternately proposed ceasefires and renewed their offensive, most notably after Yeltsin had scraped home in the June elections—a victory due in no small part to the massive political and monetary support of the West, orchestrated primarily by the Clinton administration. [26]

The decisive spur for negotiations came after a Chechen offensive on Grozny, Gudermes and Argun—launched to coincide with Yeltsin’s inauguration on 9 August—had driven the Russians back to their positions of December 1994. On 31 August General Aleksandr Lebed and Chechen Chief of Staff Aslan Maskhadov signed the Khasavyurt accords, which recognized Chechnya as a subject of international law but postponed a final decision on its status until the end of 2001. The first Russo-Chechen war was a humiliating defeat for the Russians and, despite their victory, a cataclysm for the Chechens. Conservative estimates give 7,500 Russian military casualties, 4,000 Chechen combatants and no less than 35,000 civilians—a minimum total of 46,500; others have cited figures in the range 80,000 to 100,000. [27]

Imaginary dominos

The principal argument advanced in defence of Yeltsin’s assault on Chechnya was that Chechen independence would unleash a chain of separatist wars in the rest of Russia—an internal version of the Cold War trope of a ‘domino effect’. It rests on precarious foundations. As Robert Wade has recently written in the Financial Times, the likelihood of secession increases ‘the more that three conditions are met: location on a non-Russia border; population with non-Russian majority; a plausible export revenue base’. To take the second of these, demography: of the rsfsr’s 31 titular ethnic republics, in 1991 only 4 had an absolute majority of the titular groups—North Ossetia, Tuva, Checheno-Ingushetia and Chuvashia—while 3 had a simple majority: Tatarstan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia. Russians formed the majority of the population in the rest. Economically, all but two of the seven republics listed above were heavily dependent on the federal budget; only Tatarstan, a major manufacturing centre which produced 25 per cent of the country’s oil, and Checheno-Ingushetia, which produced 90 per cent of Russia’s kerosene, were net contributors. [28] Only these two republics refused to sign federal treaties with Russia in 1992; but in Tatarstan the main issue was the distribution of revenues between a central nomenklatura and a peripheral one, and a deal was eventually reached early in 1994. Only in Chechnya did a democratic movement for secession emerge, and only there did the cause of independence gather significant mass support.

What of Russia’s strategic objections? Chechnya sits near the centre of the isthmus separating the Black Sea and the Caspian, and the Russian authorities frequently raised the spectre of an independent Chechnya galvanizing the other Caucasian peoples to form a single state that would choke Russian supply lines and threaten vital geopolitical interests. But after an initial surge in solidarity in the early 1990s, interest in a pan-Caucasian state rapidly waned—especially so in the wake of the Ingush–North Ossetian war of 1992—and by 1994 the Chechens were entirely isolated. Still more damaging to such arguments is the Russians’ strategic hypocrisy: furious at the prospect of Chechen secession, they to this day arm and encourage irredentism in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Indeed, many of the Chechen field commanders who would fight the Russians in 1994–96—among them Shamil Basaev—were trained by the gru, Russian military intelligence, for deployment in Abkhazia in 1992–93.

Once the motives of restoring order, preventing Russia’s disintegration and protecting its strategic interests are removed, how then are we to explain the decision to invade in late 1994? A key individual role was played by the nationalities minister Sergei Shakhrai, fresh from wrapping up the treaty with Tatarstan, and long personally ill-disposed towards Dudaev. In broader terms, John Dunlop has pointed to the ‘outbreak of a virulent form of Russian neo-imperialism’, which sought to re-establish Russia’s dominance over its periphery. After its defeat in Afghanistan and the us victory in the Gulf, the Russian military was also eager to re-assert itself. But the principal impetus was supplied by the Yeltsin regime’s urgent need for a ‘small victorious war’ to consolidate its endlessly corrupt and increasingly unpopular rule. [29] The same desperate need to hold on to the levers of power, and the associated profit-streams, undoubtedly persuaded Yeltsin’s clique of the wisdom of concluding a truce at Khasavyurt two years later, after Chechen forces had brought the Russian army to a standstill.

Out of the rubble

The Chechen state that emerged from the rubble in 1996 was confronted with tasks that would have been daunting even with a unified domestic political scene and vast quantities of international aid. A prime factor in its subsequent misfortunes lay in the very document that had secured peace: the postponement of a decision on Chechnya’s status until 2001 by the Khasavyurt accords. The Russians worked assiduously to ensure that the Chechen government remained trapped in a juridical limbo, unable to secure international recognition or seek redress against the former occupiers. Only Afghanistan and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus were willing to accord Chechen envoys full diplomatic status. To this day, official Islamic solidarity has been non-existent: ‘not a single Arab country ever recognized Chechen independence, and their rulers consistently voiced support of Russia’s territorial integrity’. Little better was to be expected from the West, where in 1995 Clinton compared Yeltsin’s anti-separatist stance to that of Abraham Lincoln, and was to hail the liberation of Grozny in 2000. [30]

Economic life in Chechnya was at a low ebb. Much of the country’s infrastructure and industry had been pulverized by Russian bombardment, while the reconstruction funds allocated by Moscow were routinely embezzled before reaching their destination—in 1997 Yeltsin professed amazement that of $130m sent to the Chechen National Bank, only $20m ever arrived. Out of 44 industrial concerns operating in 1994, only 17 were running in 1999; production in the latter year stood at 5–8 per cent of the pre-war level. In 1998, unemployment stood at 80 per cent, while it was estimated that legitimate sources of income could only reach a third of the way to the poverty threshold. In these circumstances, barter, woodcutting and metal salvaging became important means of subsistence. But it was above all crime that flourished, most notably kidnapping and small-scale pirate oil-processing operations—in 1999 there were an estimated 800 mini-refineries run by armed factions siphoning off oil from pipelines. Grozny’s arms market, too, did a roaring trade—as, more surprisingly, did markets in general, which were full of cheap goods and agricultural products. Social provision, however, had collapsed: education was almost non-existent, and access to health services minimal; infant mortality was estimated to stand at an incredible 100 per 1000. [31]

External silence and profound social and economic dislocations combined with internal turbulence to choke off any prospect of a viable political project. The presidential elections held in Chechnya in January 1997—described by the osce as ‘exemplary and free’—were won by Aslan Maskhadov, a former Soviet artillery general and Dudaev’s minister of defence, who received 59.3 per cent of the votes; his nearest rivals were Basaev, with 23.5 per cent, and Yandarbiev, with 10.1 per cent. [32] The results—far more evenly distributed than those in Georgia’s 1995 elections, or the farcically one-sided contests in Kazakhstan in 1994 or Azerbaijan in 1998—register the country’s principal political faultlines, which divided Maskhadov’s project for an independent secular Chechnya from the uncompromising stance of some of his field commanders, who in several cases advocated a pan-Caucasian Islamic state as the sole guarantee of Chechen independence.

The confrontation between secularists and Islamists was to prove fatal to Maskhadov, who as of 1998 was increasingly defied by powerful players such as Basaev, Yandarbiev and Salman Raduev. Maskhadov made misguided attempts to undercut his adversaries’ support—such as the 1999 introduction of elements of sharia law, in contravention of Chechnya’s 1992 constitution—and on several occasions entered into armed conflict with forces loyal to former field commanders such as Raduev and Arbi Baraev, in a bid to free hostages taken as part of the kidnapping business that flourished in Chechnya from 1996–99. [33] Maskhadov’s opponents, meanwhile, repeatedly stepped up criminal activities at moments designed to undermine negotiations with the Russians—most notably with the kidnap and killing of the Russian Interior Ministry envoy Gennadii Shpigun in March 1999.

Many Western commentators have seen the failures of Maskhadov’s regime as grounds for including Chechnya in the ever-expanding category of ‘failed states’ undeserving of sovereignty, and which it would be better to place under the custodianship of more civilized great powers. [34] This argument should be rejected as decisively in Chechnya as elsewhere. Few states would have been able to establish a peaceful, prosperous society in three years given the physical ruin, economic collapse and countless political and social fractures wrought by two years of war with a vastly more powerful neighbour. Isolation and the war’s shattering after-effects to a great extent shaped the character and fortunes of independent Chechnya, as to a lesser extent did its essentially anarchic social traditions. But it should be stressed that the prime cause of Chechnya’s woes from 1996–99 was the utter devastation wreaked upon it by the Russian military in the preceding years.

Uses of Islamism

Much has been written about the role of Islam in Chechnya—the Russian military claiming the country is awash with Arab mercenaries, and that it forms part of an incipient ‘Wahhabite crescent’ threatening to engulf Russia’s entire southern flank. Since 9.11, the West has largely colluded with such fantasies by identifying Russia as its ally against an ‘Islamic threat’ emanating from Central Asia. But the character and composition of Islamic radicalism in the North Caucasus have largely been misunderstood. What is commonly referred to as ‘Wahhabism’ is, more accurately, Salafism, and has indigenous roots in the struggle between orthodox forms of Islam and local syncretistic traditions. The Sufism that took root in Chechnya in the late 18th century accommodated veneration of Chechen holy figures and shrines, and played a vital underground role in cementing Chechen national identity during exile. The 1980s saw a religious revival and, for the first time in Chechnya since 1944, the construction of mosques; but it was only during the war of 1994–96 that Islam emerged here as a political phenomenon, a tool for mobilizing and providing discipline in the resistance to Russian occupation. More austere Salafite interpretations gained ground simply due to the prestige and armed strength of field commanders such as Basaev and Raduev—who may have embraced Sunni orthodoxy in a bid to secure financial support from the Gulf—and after the war because of economic hardship and the impasse reached by the secular independence project. [35]

The escalating Islamization of Chechnya, meanwhile—Yandarbiev signed into law a new criminal code based on Sudan’s, and later he and Basaev called for the abolition of the presidency in favour of an imamate—should be seen as part of an internal political battle over the nature of the Chechen state. Elsewhere in the North Caucasus, the targets and social bases of radical Islam are different, born of economic misery and frustration with the political closure effected by immovable elites. Levels of funding from abroad for Islamists have been greatly exaggerated—as have the numbers of volunteers, which experts even now put at no more than 1–2 per cent of pro-independence forces. For all the claims of international Islamic involvement in Chechnya, the cause in which resistance has been mobilized there remains that of national independence. In a less guarded moment, Putin himself implicitly admitted as much, revealingly comparing the campaign launched in Chechnya ‘to the security service operation in the Baltics and Western Ukraine . . . aimed at eradicating anti-Soviet resistance lasting from 1944 to the mid-1950s’. [36] His continual insistence on the Islamic dimension serves only to underline the base opportunism of his ‘anti-terrorist operation’—a colonial war repackaged for domestic and international consumption.

Putin’s war

According to the Russian analysts Dmitri Trenin and Aleksei Malashenko, preparations for war in Chechnya were ‘well under way’ as early as 1998. [37] The pretext this time was provided by Basaev’s August 1999 incursion into Dagestan, which marked an attempt to expand the influence of Islamists who had already established micro-imamates there, and ultimately to unite Chechnya with Dagestan and form an independent Islamic state. [38] Although Basaev was quickly expelled from Dagestan, a series of explosions in apartment buildings in Buinaksk, Volgodonsk and Moscow in late August and September—fsb collusion has repeatedly, and plausibly, been alleged—prepared domestic opinion for the ‘counter-terrorist operation’ that began at the end of September.

Vladimir Putin’s rule has unarguably marked a transition from the oligarchic capitalism of Yeltsin to a more authoritarian mode—he has, notably, installed dozens of former kgb personnel in key positions throughout government, and brought the powerful plutocrats of the 90s to heel or else driven them into exile. But it is the war in Chechnya—launched within a month of his appointment as prime minister—that has been his principal means of consolidating power, paving the way for his smooth ascent to the presidency in March 2000, and ensuring a staggering degree of compliance from political elites and intelligentsia alike.

Putin’s war on Chechnya has been characterized from the outset by a far more relentless use of force than that of his predecessor, not only in terms of troops and ordnance but also cruelty to civilians from an army bent on revenge, and increasingly composed of kontraktniki, professional soldiers often recruited from Russia’s prisons. On 1 October, Russian forces—100,000-strong this time, compared to the 24,000 Yeltsin had initially deployed—entered Chechnya after several weeks of massive aerial bombardment had virtually levelled the remnants of Grozny. After securing the lowlands north of the Terek in the autumn of 1999, they rolled southward and, in February 2000, took Grozny, suffering heavy casualties in the process. Chechen government troops retreated to the mountains, where they were pounded by Russian artillery and air-strikes.

Putin strolled to victory in the March election—Blair rushed to Moscow to be the first world leader to congratulate him—and in June appointed Akhmad Kadyrov as puppet ruler. But for all the talk of ‘normalization’, as Putin passed responsibility for Chechnya from the army to the fsb and then to the Interior Ministry (mvd), Chechen resistance forces remained able to infiltrate Russian lines. The massed troops of the Russian Defence Ministry, mvd, fsb and special forces (omon) controlled the plains by day, but Chechen forces began to conduct guerrilla operations by night, picking off convoys or patrols before melting into the forest. Since then, the conflict has remained one between ‘an elephant and a whale, each invincible in its own medium’. [39]

With Russian casualties rising—the official figure for 2002–03 was 4,749, the highest in one year since 1999, and the monthly average for 2004 is currently higher than American losses in Iraq—Putin has since 2001 adopted a strategy of ‘Chechenization’. [40] This has meant troop reductions—around 60,000 Russian soldiers now face an active resistance estimated at a maximum of 5,000—and the delegation of many combat operations to militias under the control of Kadyrov’s puppet government. [41] Kadyrov was shoehorned into the presidency of Chechnya in a rigged election in October 2003—in which 20,000 of the occupying troops were eligible to vote—but his assassination on 9 May 2004 required yet more fraudulent elections this autumn, won by Kadyrov clan loyalist Alu Alkhanov. The change of personnel will do little to alter the character of the quisling regime. Under the command of Kadyrov’s son Ramzan, the kadyrovtsy have become infamous for their brutality, and have tortured and killed their countrymen no less assiduously than the occupiers themselves. Kadyrov’s administration, while professedly setting about the reconstruction of Chechnya, remained a corrupt clique—Putin’s human rights envoy to Chechnya admitted that no more than 10 per cent of the $500m allocated to Chechnya in 2001 had been spent, and in 2002, fsb director Nikolai Patrushev admitted that $22m had been ‘misused’ that year. [42]

There can be no greater indictment of Putin’s rule than the present condition of Chechnya. Grozny’s population has been reduced to around 200,000—half its size in 1989—who now eke out an existence amid the moonscape of bomb craters and ruins their city has become. According to unhcr figures, some 160,000 displaced Chechens remained within the warzone by 2002, while another 160,000 were living in refugee camps in Ingushetia. The latter figure has declined somewhat since—a Médecins Sans Frontières report of August 2004 estimated that around 50,000 Chechen refugees remained in Ingushetia—thanks to the Kremlin’s policy of closing down camps and prohibiting the construction of housing for refugees there. Those forced back to Chechnya live on the brink of starvation, moving from one bombed-out cellar to another, avoiding the routine terror of zachistki and the checkpoints manned by hooded soldiers, where women have to pay bribes of $10 to avoid their daughters being raped, and men aged 15–65 are taken away to ‘filtration camps’ or simply made to disappear. The Russian human rights organization Memorial, which covers only a third of Chechnya, reported that between January 2002 and August 2004, some 1,254 people were abducted by federal forces, of whom 757 are still missing. [43]

The military stalemate has produced a chilling degeneration among the occupying forces. Sheltered by an official policy of impunity—many officers, for instance, have been permitted to have several different identities, ostensibly to protect them from ‘revenge attacks’ by Chechens—Russian troops have engaged in an orgy of theft and arbitrary cruelty. Each of the ministries operating in Chechnya runs its own fiefdom, with corresponding rackets and sales of arms, often to the Chechen resistance fighters themselves. There are dozens of reported instances of soldiers returning the bodies of civilian casualties only for a fee—which is higher for a corpse than a living person, because of the importance in Chechen traditions of burial on clan lands. The violence has not been limited to Chechen civilians: an estimated half of Russian casualties have come in non-combat situations, mostly due to systematic bullying of demoralized teenage recruits—largely those without parents rich enough to buy exemption from service. Those returning to Russia from service in Chechnya often bring with them the vicious habits learned there. [44] In that sense, the ugly symptoms of Russia’s aggression towards Chechnya have metastasized into a cancer that threatens to consume Russian public and private life.

The Russian media had played a key role in conveying something of the horrors of the 1994–96 war; this time, the authorities have not made the mistake of allowing them freedom to operate, and have closed down or replaced the editorial teams of the two most critical sources of news, ntv and tv6. [45] A striking contrast between the current war and the previous one has been the manner in which Russian official discourse has permeated journalistic commentary, to the point where ‘terrorist’ and ‘Chechen’ have become virtually synonymous. This has had poisonous social repercussions: generalized antipathy to ‘persons of Caucasian extraction’ has often flared up into outright xenophobia, resulting in both official and spontaneous public persecution not only of Chechens but also of several other peoples from the region. [46] It is this widespread public hostility to the Chechen cause, together with the more general political atomization and apathy of contemporary Russia, that largely explain the absence of a cogent movement against the war. There have recently been some stirrings on this front: on 23 October, human-rights organizations staged a demonstration on Moscow’s Pushkin Square that drew up to 2,000 participants, and on 6–7 November the Soldiers’ Mothers’ Committees held the founding congress for a new political party. But dissent has thus far focused largely on the war’s brutality rather than its political roots. Even on the left, the question of Chechen independence has at times all but vanished. [47]

Regional repercussions

The horrors of Beslan, where on 3 September this year at least 350 people died after Russian troops stormed a school in which hostages were being held by an Islamist group loyal to Shamil Basaev, form part of a logic of escalating violence engendered by the Russian occupation. While resistance has predominantly taken the form of guerrilla actions inside Chechnya against Russian troops and pro-Moscow Chechens, the current war has seen the increasing resort to violence outside Chechnya’s borders—including the previously unused tactic of suicide bombings. Such methods are, of course, above all an expression of utter desperation, perpetrated by people with nothing to lose but their lives; it has been suggested that the high incidence of female suicide bombers may be connected with widespread rape by Russian troops, though this aspect of the war is still less reported than the rest. [48]

Since the suicide bombings of government and military targets in Mozdok, Gudermes, Znamenskoe and elsewhere, as well as attacks in public spaces in Moscow, Russian officialdom has spoken of a ‘Palestinization’ of the Chechen resistance. The largely unmentioned obverse, or rather, precursor of this has been an ‘Israelization’ of Russian strategy. The mass of checkpoints designed to prevent the population from moving freely; the killing of unarmed civilians; the impunity enjoyed by the occupying forces; the deliberate economic immiseration and overall humiliation visited on the inhabitants of the occupied territory—all these features are common to the West Bank and Chechnya today. In February of this year, Russia resorted once again to targeted assassination, killing former president Yandarbiev in Qatar with a car-bomb—an operation to which it was rumoured that Israeli secret services had lent their expertise.

As Israel has done in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon, the Russians have conducted raids on the refugee camps in Ingushetia, seeing them as breeding grounds and hiding places for resistance fighters. These repeated incursions have served only to enrage both the refugees and the local population, between whom Russian soldiers have proved unable or unwilling to distinguish. It is worth noting that the raids on government offices in Nazran in June this year were conducted primarily by Ingush, and that there were almost as many Ingush among the Beslan hostage takers as Chechens. Though the Russian authorities now speak with alarm of a possible ‘regionalization’ of the conflict, it is an expansion and escalation entirely of their own making.

There are plenty of socio-economic grounds for discontent at Russian rule in the North Caucasus. The region remains one of the country’s poorest, with the lowest wages and official unemployment rates several times higher than the national average—29 per cent in Dagestan and 35 in Ingushetia, compared to 9 per cent nationwide. [49] Characteristically, Putin has opted to deal with the possibility of political challenges from the disenfranchised by coercive means, first by ensuring the election of loyal fsb cadres such as Murat Ziazikov—lowered into place in Ingushetia after Putin engineered the exit of the popular Ruslan Aushev—and now by ending the election of regional governors altogether in favour of handpicked appointees. This is, of course, part of a much wider re-centralization of authority under Putin; but once again, Chechnya has had a formative influence on the new Russian political elite’s strategy and composition. Of the seven presidential plenipotentiaries appointed in 2000, two were former commanders in the Chechen war, and several more veterans have become regional governors or taken up other official roles. [50] More than an expedient assault on a weakened enemy, the war in Chechnya has been an important source of cadres for Putin’s neo-authoritarian project.

Under Western eyes

What has been the international response to the ongoing assault on Chechen statehood? As the Chechen foreign ministry official Roman Khalilov dryly notes, ‘the international community’s record of timely, painless recognition of secession is extremely poor’. [51] Here Chechnya has been a casualty of the basest Realpolitik. Western governments gave the nod to Yeltsin’s war as a regrettable side-effect of a presidency that had at all costs to be prolonged, if capitalism was to be successful in Russia. Putin has benefited from a similarly craven consensus. Yet for all the column inches expended on the harm done to Russia’s fragile democracy by the imprisonment of yukos chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it is in Chechnya that the face of Putin’s regime is truly revealed, and it is above all by its sponsorship of wanton brutality there that it should be judged.

The few early criticisms of Putin’s campaign from such bodies as the osce and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe were soon toned down, and dismissed by European governments as counter-productive amid attempts to welcome Putin to the European fold. In September 2001, while state-sanctioned murders were being committed with impunity in Chechnya, Putin received a standing ovation in the Bundestag; in the summer of 2002, Chirac endorsed the Russian view of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’, and he and Schroeder reiterated their support at Sochi in August 2004. Collective eu efforts have been limited to humanitarian aid for the refugee camps in Ingushetia. [52]

Despite repeated approaches from Maskhadov’s envoys, the un has, for its part, refused to meet with Chechnya’s legitimately elected leaders—though Kofi Annan was quick to express his grief at the assassination of the puppet Kadyrov earlier this year. On a visit to Moscow in 2002, Annan even praised Putin’s efforts at conflict resolution—doubtless appreciative of the latter’s prior backing for his bid to secure a second term as Secretary General. Questions about Russia’s actions in Chechnya have routinely been sidestepped at meetings of the un’s Human Rights Committee.Nor has support been forthcoming from elsewhere. Arab governments have emphasized their support for Russia’s territorial integrity, while in 1999 the Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi insisted the Russo-Chechen war was strictly an internal affair. China has seen in Yeltsin’s and now Putin’s suppression of Chechen aspirations for independence a useful precedent for its own dealings with Tibet and Xinjiang. [53]

Official reaction in the us, of course, has been conditioned by the needs of the ‘war on terror’. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, Putin wasted no time in linking Chechnya to the wider battle against Islamic extremism, and gave the us permission to plant forward bases across Central Asia, its former sphere of influence, as a quid pro quo for Washington’s approval for war in Chechnya. The Bush administration has responded with the requisite silence—though this is a marked change of tack for many of the neo-cons, whose hostility to Russia has meant support for Chechen independence from unlikely quarters. Members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya include Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Decter and James Woolsey. Outside official circles, right-wingers such as Richard Pipes have also argued the Chechens’ case, pointing out that authoritarianism is in Russians’ dna and that Putin would do well to learn the lessons de Gaulle drew from Algeria. [54]

Liberals, by contrast, have been divided between those who accept the devastation visited on Chechnya as a regrettable bump in Russia’s difficult road to a stable democracy, and those who actively endorse Putin’s war. Despite the constitutional propriety of the Chechens’ demands, there is almost universal agreement on the unacceptability of Chechen independence. ‘The first requirement is the exclusion of formal independence as a subject for negotiation’, concludes Jonathan Steele, on the grounds that Putin will simply not accept secession. [55] Anatol Lieven describes Russia’s right to wage war on Chechnya as ‘incontestable’, at the same time urging ‘more nuanced’ assessments of Russian war crimes. More recently, he has insisted that the West take a tougher line with Maskhadov, pressing him not only to break with the ‘terrorists’ but to fight them ‘alongside Russian forces’. [56] Blair’s fulsome support for Putin, meanwhile, only underscores the hypocritical selectivity of his ‘humanitarian interventionism’.

An anti-colonial struggle

Putin’s decision in September 2004 to place a bounty on the heads of both Basaev and Maskhadov signals his intent: no political settlement with pro-independence forces will be contemplated, no future for Chechnya envisaged other than a series of Kremlin-installed puppets disbursing favours to those whose loyalty can be bought or whose needs have overruled their principles. The Russians, echoing the Israeli tactic of claiming ‘there is no partner for peace’, have worked hard to close off potential dialogue; Maskhadov’s repeated offers of negotiations and proposals for peace—the latest involving un protectorate status for Chechnya as an interim stage on the road to independence—have fallen on deaf ears.

The military solution Russia has sought over the last decade is, however, unlikely to materialize. In 1994–96 Chechnya won a remarkable victory against an adversary that massively outmanned and outgunned it, and though the sheer weight of the force currently deployed against it makes large-scale successes such as the 1996 re-taking of Grozny seem unlikely, the very brutality of the Russian occupation will succeed only in generating resistance. This in turn means that perhaps the most striking feature of the post-Soviet political landscape will remain in place: the determining role played by this tiny nation in the fortunes of its incomparably larger neighbour. The Chechens have defeated the Russian army, crippled the Yeltsin presidency, provided the springboard for Putin’s ascent to power, and now present the principal threat to Russia’s stability. The frictionless extension of his term to 2008 notwithstanding, a constant stream of casualties from Chechnya may in the end prove as costly to Putin as it was to Yeltsin.

The scale of destruction wrought in Chechnya in the course of the last decade, the scores of thousands of deaths, the continuing savagery of the occupation, all form a standing rebuke to the complacency of Western governments and citizens alike. But the most shameful aspect of both Russian and Western reactions to Chechnya—a mixture of eager complicity and mute acquiescence—is the consistent refusal to countenance the Chechens’ legitimate aspirations to independence. We should have no truck with such evasions. The Chechens are engaged in an anti-colonial struggle comparable to those waged by Europe’s other colonies in Africa or Asia in the last century. They have never accepted foreign dominion—‘no legitimate Chechen authority has ever signed any formal treaty accepting Russian or Soviet authority’—and have repeatedly given democratic approval to the idea of sovereign statehood. [57] The starting point for any discussion should be the fact that they are as entitled to their independence as any other nation.

http://www.newleftreview.com/NLR26401.shtml

Unusual Suspects

2005-01-25T02:23:00.000-08:00

What happened to the women held at Abu Ghraib? The government isn’t talking. But some of the women are.

The American Prospect
By Tara McKelvey
Issue Date: 02.04.05

On the morning of September 24, 2003 -- ﬁve weeks after the suicide bombing of a United Nations compound in Baghdad killed 23 people, including top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, signaling an intensiﬁed phase of Iraqi insurgency -- a group of American soldiers burst into Selwa’s villa near the banks of the Tigris River in Samarra, Iraq. Samarra, at the time, was under siege; after the team burst in, one of the soldiers pointed his riﬂe at Selwa (she asked me to use a pseudonym), a 55-year-old wife and mother, and her daughters and grandchildren began screaming. She, and everyone in the villa, was terriﬁed -- and with good reason. The soldiers had raided their house exactly four months earlier, and she remembered vividly what had happened that night.

On May 24, 2003, three weeks after George W. Bush had declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over, the soldiers stormed across the villa’s marble ﬂoors, riﬂed through family photographs, and searched inside a French cabinet. They conﬁscated the family’s life savings -- $315,000 in U.S. dollars and $12,000 in Iraqi dinar -- and then seized Selwa’s husband, Saddan, who had been trained as a mechanic and, under Saddam Hussein, had risen through the Ministry of Commerce ranks until he became a director. Ever since his arrest, Selwa had lived in fear that the soldiers would come back to interrogate her or search the house again. But she never suspected they’d take her away, too. “My daughter started shouting and screaming, ‘Why are you taking my mother? You took my father!’” Selwa remembers.

On a recent December evening, 14 months after she was arrested, she sits in a room in Le Royal Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Warm and outgoing, she quickly puts me at ease. Wearing a stylish black jacket and dripping with gold and jewels, she looks like the kind of woman you might see in a specialty food store on New York’s Upper West Side, bustling around the place and ﬁlling her basket with spicy sausages and boxes of tea. She has creamy skin and hazel eyes, and she appears rested despite the fact that, two days earlier, she had embarked on a risky journey through war-torn Iraq to meet me in Amman. She tried to come to Jordan directly, but she found the Jordanian border closed in the wake of a recent explosion. So she drove to the Syrian border, which was also closed, and spent the night. The next day, she made it here.

“The soldiers put me in a Hummer and took me to a police station,” she continues, recalling the events of September 2003. “An American and an Egyptian translator interrogated me. They asked, ‘Do you know any insurgents?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Where did you get your money?’ I said, ‘We have chicken and sheep farms and property.’ They said, ‘You have something to hide. You are giving money to the resistance. Tell us the truth.’”

Several days later, she was taken in “ﬂexicuffs,” or plastic handcuffs, to a detention facility in Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, where approximately 700 male Iraqi prisoners were living in desert tents. After she arrived, she says, soldiers and guards forced her and other prisoners to crouch on the ground with their arms above their heads in 100-degree weather: “They told us, ‘You are cowards. You are Saddam’s children. You are ﬁghting against the Americans.’ If we complained, they said, ‘Shut up. Put your face against the wall.’”

The next day, a stocky American ofﬁcer in boots and a T-shirt told Selwa she was responsible for the disposal of waste. As a former detainee told Human Rights First senior associate Ken Hurwitz during an interview last August, this is a ritual that serves purposes both utilitarian and penal: Human waste is dumped in metal containers, mixed with lighter ﬂuid, and set on ﬁre. Detainees are forced to stir the mixture to speed its dissipation. It’s a wretched job, done in shifts by young men and boys, and the stench is overwhelming.

That afternoon, the American ofﬁcer lit a mixture of human feces and urine in a metal container and gave Selwa a heavy club to stir it. She recalls, “The ﬁre from the pot felt very strong on my face.” She leans forward and sweeps her hands through the air to show how she stirred the excrement. “I became very tired,” she says. “I told the sergeant I couldn’t do it.”

“There was another man close to us. The sergeant came up to me and whispered in my ear, ‘If you don’t, I will tell one of the soldiers to fuck you.’”

She looks down at the ﬂoor.

“It is a shame on them,” says Riva Khoshaba, a 28-year-old Assyrian American lawyer who was born in Iraq. She is sitting across the table in the Amman hotel and looking sympathetically at Selwa. “Not on you.”

Selwa closes her eyes and nods her head, trying to show that she is listening. But it’s almost as though she is sitting at a table far away and can hear Khoshaba’s words but can’t make out their meaning. Selwa nods again and sinks back into her chair.

“I said, ‘I will go on.’ I stirred for two hours,” Selwa says. “Then I fainted.”

For Selwa, it was only the beginning of a nightmarish journey. In early October of 2003, she was strip-searched and given an ID bracelet and a prisoner number. She had arrived at Abu Ghraib.

* * *

In the barrels of newsprint that have been devoted to Abu Ghraib since 60 Minutes II released the now-infamous photos on April 28, 2004, one aspect of the story has received scant attention in the American media: the detention of women. The liberation of women in Iraq and (especially) Afghanistan has been, at times, a major talking point for Bush administration ofﬁcials as they have touted the successes of their war on terrorism in the Middle East. Yet in Iraq, the beneﬁts of a free society have eluded at least part of the female population.

Forty-two women have been held at Abu Ghraib, according to a U.S. Department of Defense statement provided at the request of a U.S. senator and forwarded to me, though none are interned there now. (Many of the women were released in May, shortly after the scandal broke, and the last woman was let go in July.) Overall, 90 women have been held in various detention facilities in Iraq since August 2003, says Barry Johnson, a public-affairs ofﬁcer for detainee operations for the Multi-National Force, the ofﬁcial name of the U.S.–led forces in Iraq, speaking on a cell phone from Baghdad. Two “high-value” female detainees are now being held, he says. More women may be in captivity, he adds, explaining that “units can capture and keep them up to 14 days.” In addition, approximately 60 children, or “juveniles,” are being held.

Some women and children are picked up because they’re a “security threat,” Johnson says. And some women are detained because they’re the sisters, wives, or girlfriends of suspected insurgents -- that is, because the military thinks these women might provide information on the insurgency. But this practice, like the instances of torture exposed last year, violates the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that no one can “be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” In one such incident, a 28-year-old mother of three, including the 6-month-old baby she was nursing, was captured on May 9, 2004. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained a memo in which a former Defense Intelligence Agency ofﬁcer described her detainment as a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The treatment of civilian women by American forces is a charged issue for Iraqis -- and especially for those who oppose the American presence. The terrorists who kidnapped CARE International Director Margaret Hassan, for example, demanded the release of women held by U.S. and coalition forces. Hassan is now believed to be dead. Women and children have been reluctant to speak to American journalists, which is one reason their internment has received little attention in the U.S. media. Recently, though, some have begun to step forward.

* * *

Let people know what happened to us,” says Victoria, a 54-year-old former bank director, on the phone from her home in the al-Dora section of Baghdad. She and Selwa, and about a dozen other women, were held together in close quarters at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities. During my trip to Amman in early December 2004, and in later telephone conversations, I spoke with four of these women. I also spoke with six men who were held at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere and had witnessed, overheard, or claimed they knew about instances of women being abused.

Seven of the people I interviewed are plaintiffs in a pair of class-action lawsuits brought by a group of American attorneys, including Khoshaba, working with the left-leaning, New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, against two private companies, the San Diego–based Titan Corporation, which hired translators who worked at Abu Ghraib, and the Virginia-based CACI International Inc., which provided interrogators. Three of the people I interviewed are not part of the lawsuits. (The suits seek redress for all detainees, not just women.)

Relying on the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 and the Racketeer Inﬂuenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970, the suits, one aimed at each company, seek damages on behalf of detainees. The Alien Tort Claims Act has been used by human-rights groups seeking to hold U.S. corporations accountable for activity in countries with lax judicial systems. The RICO claim is novel -- the suits’ detractors would use a less charitable adjective -- and asserts that the abuses allegedly committed by employees constitute a pattern of racketeering activity. In February or March, a California federal court judge will decide whether or not he will hear the case. The contractors were, of course, “under the operational control and direction of the U.S. military,” according to a July 29 statement by CACI (pronounced “khaki”). A classiﬁed report by U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church on interrogation techniques has reportedly been completed and is supposed to be released in the next few weeks.

Titan’s vice president of corporate communications, Ralph “Wil” Williams, told me he would not speak publicly about the lawsuit, as did CACI International’s lead counsel, Steptoe & Johnson partner J. William Koegel Jr. In the past, Williams has said, “We believe the lawsuit to be frivolous, and we will defend ourselves against it vigorously.” And last July 27, the day the suit against CACI was ﬁled in federal court in Washington, the company issued a statement reading, “CACI rejects and denies the allegations of the suit as being a malicious and farcical recitation of false statements and intentional distortions.” According to the statement, “Neither the company nor any of its employees has been charged with any wrongdoing or illegal acts relating to any work in Iraq.”

Susan L. Burke, a partner in the Philadelphia law ﬁrm Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads and one of the lead lawyers in the case, says she ﬁrst heard about prisoner abuse on December 26, 2002, in a Washington Post article. “There was a quote from an ofﬁcial who said, ‘If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,’” says Burke, a blond, 42-year-old Catholic University of America law-school graduate, as she sits in a bar at Le Royal Hotel. “I thought, ‘This is my country. I can’t let this pass.’”

* * *

A door to the balcony outside the hotel room is open a few inches, and, as dusk falls, you can hear the sound of prayers being chanted at mosques around the city. Selwa, leaning back in her chair, says she met Saddan, her husband-to-be, when she was a teenager. He was 34. She wasn’t exactly thrilled: “I thought he was too old,” she says. But, eventually, he won her heart. “He used to sing for me and recite poems he had memorized,” she says. She quotes from Bedouin verse: “Your sweat is like pearls that sparkle.”

In the late 1990s, Saddan received an award from Saddam Hussein for a water-management system he’d devised. He had his picture taken with the then-dictator. But, Selwa insists, her husband wasn’t close to Hussein. “He worked for the government, and we supported [the regime]. But my husband was not important at all,” she says.

Frank “Greg” Ford, 50, a former California National Guard sergeant who was in Samarra from April through June 2003 and is now a corrections ofﬁcer at Folsom State Prison in Represa, California, remembers Selwa’s husband differently.

“He was considered Saddam Hussein’s right-hand man,” says Ford, who served in the military for 30 years and has worked as a Coast Guard medical corpsman. “I saw photos of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.” Ford says an “in-house” source -- as well as an Iraqi who had known the family for decades -- told them about Saddan.

Speaking on background, a military ofﬁcial says Saddan “was listed as a Baath Party member.” And Selwa, says the ofﬁcial, “was believed to be involved with ﬁnancing and organizing insurgent activities.”

Selwa says she believes that a tenant in a property she and her husband owned “snitched on us.” “We have a saying in Samarra, she says. “Everything is forgiven except if you have money.”

Ford led the raid on their villa. He says that he knew Selwa didn’t have any useful information; his informants had told him that Saddan was the prize. That’s why Ford took her husband to the police station that night. Yet Ford was appalled by the brutal way the American soldiers treated Saddan. He told them to back off.

“My team leader started beating on this old man,” Ford says. “They’d ask him questions, and every time they got a wrong answer -- pow! -- they’d hit him again. He was about to [have a] stroke.” (Ford, who sees himself as a whistle-blower, claims soldiers abused other prisoners at the police station, too; his company commander says Ford was suffering from “combat stress,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Ford’s “allegations are under investigation by the [Army’s criminal-investigation unit],” says Lieutenant Colonel Doug Hart, public-affairs chief with the California National Guard.)

“[Saddan] was extremely high-value -- a reservoir of information. I said he was not to be harmed in any way,” says Ford. “But I had a bad feeling about it.”

I tell Ford that Saddan was killed in a mortar attack on April 6, 2004, at Abu Ghraib. “Christ,” he says. “I knew they would screw it up.” I also tell him that Selwa was taken to Abu Ghraib, and he is shocked. “I never told them to take her,” he says. “She didn’t know anything.”

When Selwa talks about Abu Ghraib and the detention facilities, her voice is soft.

“Whenever I remember, it’s like a ﬁre goes out,” she says. “Once I saw the guards hit a woman, probably 30 years old. They put her in an open area and said, ‘Come out so you can see her.’ They pulled her by the hair and poured ice water on her. She was screaming and shouting and crying as they poured water into her mouth. They left her there all night. There was another girl; the soldiers said she wasn’t honest with them. They said she gave them wrong information. When I saw her, she had electric burns all over her body.”

Selwa says she and a group of women lived in a wing of the prison that was separate from the male unit. Like the other women, she had a small room with a toilet and access to a sink. “There were a lot of maggots,” she says. She explains how she would wash her slip and her robe and then put the damp clothes on and let them dry as she was wearing them.

I ask her if she was sexually assaulted.

“No,” she says. “They respected me.” She pushes her chair away from the table.

Asked if she was ever forced to take her clothes off, she leans back and pulls her jacket over her chest and covers part of her face with her hand. She looks downward and bites her thumb. Her eyes are half-closed, and her shoulders are slumped.

“I don’t remember,” she says. She folds her arms across her chest and her eyes ﬁll with tears. She stares at the ground. A few minutes later, she excuses herself and leaves the room.

* * *

Another woman held in Abu Ghraib was Mithal, a 55-year-old supervisor at an electrical company. Arrested on February 26, 2004, she was taken to Al-Sijood Palace, in Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” and asked about her neighbor, a retired government worker. “I think they were confusing him with some big, important person,” she says.

“When they didn’t get the answer they wanted, they would put the hood on my head and yank it and make me run across a yard,” she says. “I was barefoot, and the yard was ﬁlled with sharp stones. The American soldier said if I didn’t cooperate, they’d put me in prison for 30 years. He said if I were his mother, he would kill me. This lasted for eight hours. Then they put me in a wooden room and sat me on a chair. They said bad words -- hurtful words. They covered me in blankets, one after another until I couldn’t breathe. Eight blankets. I pounded my feet against the ﬂoor because I was suffocating.

“After that, they took me to [a detention center near Baghdad International Airport]. There, I heard a young woman crying out from her cell, telling an American soldier to leave her alone. She said, ‘I am a Muslim woman.’ Her voice was high-pitched and shaky. Her husband, who was in a cell down the hall, called out, ‘She is my wife. She has nothing to do with this.’ He hit the bars of his cell with his ﬁsts until he fainted. The Americans poured water over his face and made him wake up. When her screams became louder, the soldiers played music over the speakers. Finally, they took her to another room. I couldn’t hear anything more.”

Afterward, Mithal says, she was taken to Abu Ghraib. “They stripped me and searched me,” she remembers. “Then they gave me blankets and put me in solitary conﬁnement in a room 2 meters by 1 and a half meters. There was no light in the room. I was there for three months.”

* * *

The third woman I interviewed is Khadeja Yassen, a 51-year-old former school principal. She is the sister of former Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan al-Jizrawi. A high-ranking ofﬁcial of the Hussein government, he was the “Ten of Diamonds” in the Pentagon’s “most-wanted” playing cards. She was arrested at home on August 11, 2003, and interrogated about her brother’s whereabouts. She was held at various detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, for ﬁve months, until she was released on January 11, 2004.

“After I got there,” she told me, “they took me to a room with a dog. It was a huge black dog, and it barked so loudly. It was on a leash, and it was standing two meters from me. I was terriﬁed -- I felt as if I would go mad. My legs buckled, and I collapsed. An American soldier -- a woman -- was standing behind me, and she held me up. I was kept in the room for two or three minutes, and then I was taken to another place for the interrogation. They asked me about my brother. I said, ‘I don’t know where he is.’ They said, ‘You have seen the dog. Now tell us the truth.’”

I ask her if they touched her during the interrogation.

“I won’t answer this question,” she says. “I promised them I would not say anything about this.”

* * *

Were Iraqi women raped or sexually assaulted by Americans at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities? None of the women I interviewed would talk about it. “You’re asking this question in a culture that kills you for being raped,” explains Khoshaba, referring to so-called honor killings, in which women are slain for behaving “dishonorably,” which can mean they’ve had the bad luck to be sexually assaulted.

There are no reliable statistics on honor killings in Iraq. But Yanar Mohamed, 43, president of the Baghdad-based group Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, has opened shelters in Baghdad and Tikrit for women who are afraid of family members. About 10 women, including a 24-year-old former soldier, Liqwa, who claims an American soldier raped her, have stayed in the shelters.

Under such circumstances, rape is difﬁcult to prove. Yet reports of sexual abuse and exploitation have crept into government documents. On October 7, 2003, American soldiers held a female detainee’s hands behind her back, forced her to her knees, “kissed [her] on the mouth,” and removed her blouse, according to a Commander’s Report of Disciplinary or Administrative Action. Major General Antonio Taguba reported on the “videotaping and photographing [of] naked male and female detainees” in his May 2004 report on detainee abuse. In their August 25, 2004, report examining the role of military intelligence, Major General George R. Fay and Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones describe “Incident No. 38,” in which “a criminal detainee housed in the Hard Site was shown lifting her shirt with both her breasts exposed. There is no evidence to conﬁrm if [this was] consensual or coerced; however in either case sexual exploitation of a person in U.S. custody constitutes abuse.”

And an image shown to members of Congress on May 12, 2004, seems to depict a female detainee exposing her breasts, apparently against her will, according to a high-level Senate staffer. “She just looked like she’d died inside,” the staffer says.

Rape has become a potent symbol in Iraq, and propaganda about sexual assault has been used to foment anti-American sentiment and recruit new members for the resistance. But for some, rape has more than a symbolic meaning. A 35-year-old woman named Sundus (she asked that I use only her ﬁrst name) was hired by Burke’s legal team last summer to meet with former detainees and ﬁnd out about their experiences. A graduate of Iraq’s Al-Mamoun University College, where she studied English poetry and Shakespeare, she works to promote civil society in Iraq and is involved in election monitoring. “She’s among the new generation who’s trying to build Iraq through [nongovernmental organizations] and civil society,” says Salah Aziz, president of the Tallahassee, Florida-based organization American Society for Kurds, who met Sundus in Iraq last summer when she attended his National Endowment for Democracy–funded workshop on NGOs. “She’s a strong lady.” Between August and December 2004, Sundus says, she interviewed 54 former detainees.

“I think many women who were held at Abu Ghraib were raped by Americans,” says Sundus. She wears a lilac hajib, which she ﬁddles with during interviews. She has received death threats because she works with Americans, and she says one Iraqi man told her that if she spoke negatively about the resistance, “‘We will put you in the back seat of the car like Margaret Hassan.’”

Sundus explains how Selwa and Selwa’s sister came to her ofﬁce last August. Selwa said she wanted to speak about her detention privately. Her sister left the room. Then Selwa sat down with Sundus. “They did everything bad to me, and may God take them all to hell,” Selwa told her. “She began to weep bitterly,” recalls Sundus. “She didn’t tell the truth to her family.”

Male detainees, too, have described the abuse of women. A 42-year-old car broker, Saleh, who was held at Abu Ghraib from October to December of 2003, spoke with Huntington Woods, Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, a member of Burke’s legal team, in March 2004. “He said he saw a woman being raped: ‘She was on all fours in a hallway outside my cell, and a soldier was raping her. She was looking at me, and I couldn’t do anything to help her. Her eyes looked dead,’” says Akeel.

Mahal, a 70-year-old tribal sheik who wears a charcoal tunic and has a gray-speckled mustache, told me he met a female detainee on May 4, 2004, the day they were both released from Abu Ghraib, on a bus ride home. “She sat two rows away from me,” he says. “She was wearing a hajib, and her face was completely dried up. It looked as though she hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time. ‘I’ve seen terrible things,’ she said. ‘We went through hell.’ She was crying and saying women had been tortured and raped.”

Nabil is a 37-year-old human-rights lawyer married to Selwa’s oldest daughter. He is a tall man with a high forehead, and he is dressed in a white shirt, cufﬂinks, a wool vest, and wire-rimmed glasses. (He asked me not to use his real name “so I can sleep soundly at night.”) He was arrested on September 28, 2003, and held at various detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, until May 28, 2004. A military ofﬁcial conﬁrms that Nabil was released from Abu Ghraib on that date.

“In November or December, I really can’t remember, I was in a room and could hear sounds coming from outside,” he says, drinking tea in an Amman hotel room. “The windows were broken, and they were covered with wooden panels. Sometimes I could hear screams and shouts. Women were calling for mercy. There were also children between the ages of 10 and 12. The children became hysterical. I was told the women were tortured in front of their children. One day, a sheik came back from a medical clinic where he’d been treated. He was in tears. ‘What happened?’ we asked. He told us he had seen a young girl, 15 years old, with internal bleeding. She had been raped over and over again by the soldiers, and she could no longer talk. He is a deeply religious man. But that night, he shouted at Allah. ‘How is it possible that you are there and these things are happening?!’ he said.”

A former diplomat who attended the UN General Assembly in New York in December 2001 (“I had an administrative job,” he says), Nabil says he was forced to hear the cries of women during his own interrogations. “I feel this was part of the psychological warfare on me,” he says. “They told me, ‘You are a diplomat. You once visited countries as a VIP and had diplomatic immunity. This means nothing to us. And we will prove it to you. Everything you have heard about the concepts of democracy, liberty, religious tolerance, and human rights -- you can throw them away,’” he says. He grabs a handful of air and pretends to toss something over his shoulder. “They said, ‘We are above the law. We have no limits. They call us the special ops. No one has power over us -- not even President Bush. If someone dies during interrogation, that is normal.’”

Nabil sits on a luggage rack in the hotel room and describes how soldiers kicked him, beat him, stepped on his ﬁngers, and doused him with ice water. His spine, he says, is now “crooked and twisted.” He lifts up a neatly pressed pant leg to show a red hole in his knee where an electrical wire had been inserted.

Today, he says, he still feels ashamed -- and tells no one -- that his mother-in-law was detained. “The ﬁrst thing that will come to their minds is that she was sexually assaulted,” he says. “As a man, I feel I should have defended her till my death.”

* * *

Many experts would say that such interrogations violate the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, a senior U.S. military ofﬁcial told reporters in a background brieﬁng on May 14, 2004, that the interrogations have reaped beneﬁts. “We have gotten some great information on additional terrorist threats in Iraq, on radical Sunni Islamists working with former regime elements and how that working relationship takes place,” he said. “And we’ve also gotten some key information on terrorists.” But Anthony H. Cordesman, author of a December 2004 Center for Strategic for International Studies paper, “The Developing Iraqi Insurgency,” says it hasn’t been enough. The military has stumbled in its efforts to gather even basic facts about the insurgency, Cordesman says, explaining that it has “failed to honestly assess the facts on the ground in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam.” According to information provided in a February 2004 International Committee of the Red Cross report, 70 percent to 90 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib had little or no intelligence value.

In some cases, the interrogators may have been asking the wrong questions. Victoria, the former bank director who was seized on August 11, 2003, says, “They asked me if I knew where the weapons of mass destruction are.” Like many of the former detainees I spoke with, she says someone -- an employee at her bank, she believes -- tipped off the U.S. forces about her.

“There was always pressure to get information, and some [U.S.] agents didn’t have much patience,” says David DeBatto, a 50-year-old former Army National Guard counterintelligence agent who was in Iraq from March through October of 2003. He is now a guest commentator on National Public Radio, FOX News, and MSNBC. “As soon as they got information,” he says, “they thought it was good. They wouldn’t verify it. Maybe they even embellished it a little.”

After I returned from Jordan last December, I received an e-mail from Tony Miller, a U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) public-affairs specialist, in response to my questions about prisoner abuse. “CID is looking into the allegations of detainee abuses,” he wrote. “[But] we will not get into numbers and types of investigations.” When I ask Multi-National Force spokesman Barry Johnson about the sexual abuse of women at Abu Ghraib, he says, “There are no allegations of rape by any female detainees.”

I mention the stories I’ve heard and ask whether or not military investigators have tried to contact the women who have been released. “Well, we don’t really have a mechanism for reaching out and ﬁnding former detainees,” he says. “If we have allegations and they’re brought to us, we would open the case.”

I point out that it’s hard for them to talk about this.

“Certainly, there is a stigmatism in this culture when a female is detained or put in prison,” he says. “It has been an education for us to understand this. And when I know there is someone who is talking to people like you, I try to remind you that there are people at the [Iraqi] Ministry of Human Rights -- there are females there -- and they deal with detainees on a daily basis.”

What kinds of things have you heard from them? I ask.

“Well, frankly, I just don’t think there have been too many former detainees who have gone to them,” he says.

A high-level Senate staffer says the Department of Defense has “stonewalled” senators when they’ve asked about the sexual abuse of women at Abu Ghraib. “Most, if not all, of the female detainees have never been questioned about whether or not they were sexually assaulted or raped at Abu Ghraib,” she writes in an e-mail. “Therefore, as the [Defense Department] spins it, no allegations ‘surfaced’ so no corrective measures are needed.”

* * *

Are these former detainees exaggerating their abuse? Are they remembering things wrong? Worst, are they lying? They have a reason to hate Americans. Further, there might be ﬁnancial rewards for those who are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. As I was introduced to various “torture victims,” as members of their legal team describe them, and at other times during my trip to Jordan and since, I’ve wondered if I was being duped.

“How do you know they’re not lying?” I ask Sundus in an airy café as Alanis Morissette plays over the loudspeakers. At a nearby table, a tribal sheik eats pistachios and spits shells into a saucer. “When I sit in front of you, you don’t know if I’m telling the truth,” Sundus says. “But when you look into my eyes, you ﬁnd out. Of course, sometimes you get confused. It’s natural. But when you depend upon your feeling, you can tell.”

On my fourth day in Amman, I hired Ranya Kadri, a reporter and “ﬁxer” who works for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, to translate my interview with Selwa. Kadri, a kickboxing aﬁcionado, has a reputation for being tough with customs ofﬁcials, nosy hotel butlers, and journalists (“John Burns is afraid of me,” she told me, speaking of The New York Times correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for reporting on the Taliban).

Before the interview, she pulls me aside. “Are you sure she’s not trying to trick you?” she asks. “I’ve seen it happen before. They use fake death certiﬁcates and everything.” I sit with Kadri across a table from Selwa. After speaking for nearly two hours, Selwa steps out of the meeting room for a break. Kadri turns to me and says, “I believe her. She says she likes Saddam Hussein and things she knows she shouldn’t. She’s the real thing.”

Perhaps, eventually, an American court will decide. The more I thought about the lawsuit, the more it became apparent to me that a legal effort like this can serve as a magnet for people who might have hidden agendas. The members of the legal team have ventured into a treacherous environment: an occupied country at war with itself, where hatred of America runs deep and where the level of intrigue makes Casablanca look like a middle-school debating society. Burke et al. have had to assemble their team of investigators and their evidence as quickly as they could, amid danger and chaos, and without long expertise in the area. The pressure on them is not so unlike the pressure that was on the military contractors to generate quick and unambiguous results. It’s a possibility that in this sprawling coalition of trial lawyers, activists, and victims thousands of miles away, some uncomfortable truths could be revealed -- for example, that some of the women I spoke with actually might have known things that would have been of value to the U.S. military. And it’s a possibility that some of the actors in this drama, whether they’re working in Baghdad or in the United States, nurture visions of a future Iraq -- fundamentalist, or perhaps re-Baathiﬁed -- that would be repugnant to any liberal sense of justice and the rule of law.

But as long as the government fails to act on evidence that private contractors may have committed torture -- or, indeed, fails to come clean on how the policy that condoned torture was devised in the ﬁrst place -- the private lawsuit, however ﬂawed, may be the best legal recourse. A Democratic staffer on a Senate committee studying the issue says, “We don’t usually question tactics. But part of me thinks maybe we should. One of the big problems in Iraq was how we conducted the war. They were just nabbing everybody and then sending them to Abu Ghraib. It’s not surprising you have these results.” Human Rights First’s Hurwitz says, “We think the proliferation of reports -- from Taguba, Fay and Jones, and others -- has actually clouded the issue. Each of the authors has a tiny mandate. In the end, you don’t see the truth, which is how cruel and pointless the treatment of detainees has been.”

* * *

It’s a Saturday afternoon in Washington, and I’m on the phone with Mithal, who was held at Abu Ghraib. As Mithal says, she never had anything against Americans before they arrived. Now she does.

Her voice sounds scratchy, and I’m almost out of minutes on my prepaid calling card. I ask if there’s anything else she wants to tell me. “I am an Iraqi woman, and I refuse to allow an American or anyone else to occupy my land,” she says. “They told us they are going to give us liberty, and we have found something totally different.”

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=9044
Tara McKelvey is a Prospect senior editor.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Tara McKelvey, "Unusual Suspects", The American Prospect Online, Jan 14, 2005.

We Should Never Forget Burma

2005-01-24T06:57:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
January 24, 2005
By John Pilger

I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me, which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is now complete, in the tenth year of her detention. The last time I got through, I asked her what was happening outside her house. "Oh, the road is blocked and there are soldiers all over the street... for my own security, of course!"

She thanked me for the books I had sent her, hand-carried through the underground that now struggles to maintain contact. "It has been a joy to read widely again," she said. I had sent her a collection of her favourite T S Eliot, as well as Jonathan Coe's political novel, What a Carve Up!, whose gentle irony must have seemed strange in jackbooted Rangoon. She told me she relished biographies of those who had also suffered through isolation: Mandela, Sakharov. Little has reached her since then, and it is not known if she still has her old Grundig shortwave radio. The regime has now removed her personal security guards from her compound beside Inya Lake. Having tortured and killed her closest allies, they must believe that, if the world looks the other way, they can do the same to her.

"For the media, Burma is seldom fashionable," she told me. "But the important thing to remember about a struggle like ours is that it endures, whether or not the spotlight is on, and it can't be turned back." For one so alone, these are salutary words; I recommend them to those who lose heart when their participation in one demonstration fails to stop an invasion.

Fortunately, Aung San Suu Kyi and the democracy movement she leads are supported by a tenacious solidarity network throughout the world; and I am indebted to John Jackson and Yvette Mahon of the Burma Campaign UK for never letting us forget that, if the often debased cry of democracy means anything, its true test is Burma. In the current issue of Metta, the campaign's journal, Desmond Tutu reminds us that Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 per cent of the parliamentary seats in Burma's 1990 election, the signal for a military junta to hunt, imprison, torture and murder the victors, and enslave much of the nation. "Suu Kyi and the people of Burma," writes Tutu, "have not called for a military coalition to invade their country. They have simply asked for the maximum diplomatic and economic pressure against Burma's brutal dictators."

As the public's response to the tsunami and the invasion of Iraq has shown, the fastest-growing division in the world is between people and those in power claiming to act morally in their name. Burma exemplifies this. Take the European Union's disgusting policy. Clearly with an eye to its vast Asian market, the EU, promoter of "human rights" when the price is right, has shamelessly appeased the Burmese junta. Consider what happens in Burma today. Rape is used as a weapon of the state against ethnic woman and children. Forced labour is widespread, described by the UN's International Labour Organisation as a "crime against humanity".

The junta holds more that 1,350 political prisoners, many of whom are routinely tortured. Up to a million people have been forced from their land. Half the national budget is spent on a brutal, peacock military whose only enemy is its own people, while next to nothing is spent on health; one in ten Burmese babies die in infancy. And the true leader, elected in a landslide, is incarcerated, rising at four o'clock every morning to meditate on such an epic injustice.

Meanwhile, the EU shores up the regime by increasing imports, worth around 4bn dollars between 1998 and 2002. Last October, the fifth summit of the 39-state Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) was held in Hanoi and attended by representatives of the junta for the first time. Instead of announcing a boycott, the Europeans turned up and said nothing. Rather, France's president, Jacques Chirac, said he hoped stronger sanctions would not be necessary because they "will hurt the poorest people". For "poorest people" read Total Oil Company, part-owned by the French government, the largest foreign investor in Burma, where the oil companies' infrastructure of roads and railway access have long been the subject of allegations of forced labour. Total's euros allow the junta to re-equip its state of fear.

"None of the EU officials I have met," says John Jackson, "denies that foreign investment and military spending in Burma are closely linked. In the week the regime received its first payment for gas due to be piped to Thailand from a gas field operated by Total Oil, it made a 130m dollar down-payment on ten MiG-29 jet fighters."

Jackson points to the farce of present EU sanctions. After as many as 100 of Suu Kyi's supporters were publicly beaten to death by soldiers in 2003, the EU extended its visa ban to the junta and Germany froze no less than 86 euros of German-based Burmese assets. In contrast, and through direct action, the international campaign has chalked up major disinvestments, such as Premier Oil, Heineken, PepsiCo, British Home Stores. The current "dirty list" of investors includes the oil companies Total and Unocal, Rolls-Royce, Lloyd's of London and so-called prestige travel companies such as Bales, Road to Mandalay and Orient Express. The bestselling Lonely Planet guidebook is a fixture on the list. Lonely Planet has long made a fool of itself by claiming, in the words of one of its writers, that Burma is "better off" today, and that although the junta is "abominable", "political imprisonment, torture" and "involuntary civilian service to the state" are not new and "have been around for centuries".

Tell that to the people of Pagan, the ancient capital, which used to have a population of 4,000. Given a few weeks to leave, their homes were bulldozed and they were marched at gunpoint to a waterless stubble that is a dustbowl in the summer, and runs with mud in the winter. Their dispossession was to make way for foreign tourists. "I shall welcome tourists and investors," said Aung San Suu Kyi, "when we are free." There is an abundance of evidence that foreign tourism has benefited the regime, not the Burmese people, and that much of the tourist infrastructure was built with "involuntary civilian service" - an idiotic euphemism for bonded or outright slave labour.

Filming secretly in Burma nine years ago, I came upon what might have been a tableau from Dickensian England. Near the town of Tavoy, in the south, gangs of people were building a railway viaduct, guarded by soldiers. These were slave labourers, and many were children. I watched one small girl in a long blue dress struggle to wield a hoe taller than herself, falling back exhausted, in pain, holding her shoulder. "How old are you?" I asked her. "Eleven," came the reply.

Just as we should not forget the people of Fallujah and Najaf and Baghdad, and Ramallah and Gaza, so we should not forget this little girl, and her people, and their leader, who ask for the most basic rights and deserve our support.

The Burma Action Campaign website is www.burmacampaign.org.uk
E-mail: info@burmacampaign.org.uk or phone (44) 20 7324 4710

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

The way out of Iraq: Decentralizing the Iraqi Government

2005-01-24T03:50:00.000-08:00

Oakland, CA.--With elections in Iraq only days away, U.S. military officials admit the insurgent attacks will continue unabated on election day and beyond, and many predict the aftermath will lead to even more factional unrest and perhaps civil war. Is it possible to have a democracy in war-torn Iraq?

"Iraq's fractious population cannot be made into a U.S.-style liberal federated republic," says Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California. "A better long-term solution is a partition or an economic confederation of states, which allows Iraqis
to segment their multitude of ethnic, religious and tribal factions but integrate economically," Eland concludes in a new policy report, The Way Out of Iraq: Decentralizing The Iraqi Government (The Independent Institute).

In this fragmented developing country with little prior experience in genuine democracy, a social fabric torn by three recent wars and more than a decade of the most grinding economic isolation in world history, almost any policy option has its drawbacks, admits Eland, a national security expert. But the plan with the best chance of success would include a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal, replaced by a temporary multinational force, and the creation of a constitutional convention that included representatives from all tribes, geographic areas and ethnic and religious groups.

"The strategic necessity for the U.S. to have a unified, democratic federation in Iraq is vastly overblown," writes Eland. "True Iraqi self-determination would probably yield a decentralized government-for example, a partition or
a loose economic confederation, which allows for local security but features a simple common market and currency and has agreements on oil revenue sharing," he said. "These alternatives have the best chance of reducing the violence and putting Iraqis on the road to peace, stability and prosperity."

"Iraq, like Czechoslovakia, is an artificial state, created by the British from the Ottoman Empire after World War I," points out Eland. "With no national identity or tradition of political pluralism, Iraq's provinces contained three different ethnic/religious groups subdivided by tribal loyalties. Similar to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Iraq's ethnic and religious factions were held together by brute force and authoritarian rule. Those multi-ethnic religious societies broke up when the autocrat was removed.

Czechoslovakia and most of the former USSR broke up peacefully, but Yugoslavia had a bloody civil war. An Iraqi federation is doomed to fail because many of its groups-most of them with armed militias-would be suspicious that a strong Iraqi central government would eventually fall under the control of a rival group," says Eland. "Iraq will eventually break up under a federated system. The question is whether it will be peaceably or through a bloody civil war. True Iraqi self-determination, which would probably lead to a controlled decentralization of power, would eliminate the incentive of these groups to fight for control of the central government.

THE WAY OUT OF IRAQ: Decentralizing The Iraqi Government
http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=16

30 Books, Not One Review - Chomsky and Academic History

2005-01-20T01:37:00.000-08:00

By JOHN H. SUMMERS

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

-- Karl Marx Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Noam Chomsky has written more than 30 books over the last three decades. Yet neither the Journal of American History, nor the American Historical Review, nor Reviews in American History has reviewed them. If the journals had overlooked one or two of Chomsky's books, then the omissions might not rise to the status of a problem, and could be attributed to a combination of reasons each of them incidental to Chomsky himself. If the journals had in fact devoted attention to him, but the preponderance of the attention had been hostile, then they might stand accused of harboring a bias. This is the most respectable way to disagree about such matters. But the journals have not done enough to deserve the accusation. They have not reviewed a single one of his books. Chomsky is one of most widely read political intellectuals in the world. Academic history pretends he does not exist.

Why is this so?

A moment's reflection rules out the easiest explanations. No formal policy could have held up against multiple changes in the editorships of the journals. Even a tacit conspiracy is unthinkable given the upheavals of the last three decades. The journals have absorbed, presented, and guided an explosion of historical writing on dozens of subjects. How skillfully they have done so is open to debate. But their formal commitment to intellectual pluralism has remained intact. As the editor of the Journal of American History wrote in 2004, "Through our book reviews, we aim to serve as the journal of record for American history."

Could it be that Chomsky does not figure in the record because he writes about topics of little interest to historians? His books contain arresting arguments about the history of the Cold War, genocide, terrorism, democracy, international affairs, nationalism, social policy, public opinion, health care, and militarism, and this merely begins the list. In addressing these subjects he ranges across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, paying special attention to the emergence of the United States. Two of his major themes, namely, the "rise of the West" in the context of comparative "global history," are also major areas of interest for professional historians, never more so than today.

Could it be that Chomsky is left out because he does not qualify as a professional historian? The journals have reviewed such nonhistorians as Robert Bellah, Randall Collins, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Garry Wills, and John Updike because the books in question show a strong historical component, or contain implications for historiography. (Would it be cheap to add that Chomsky obeys a stricter method than some professional historians have obeyed lately? He presents evidence with an extensive record of citation, and keeps the rhetorical content of his writings extremely low.)

Could it be that Chomsky is left out because he does not divorce his politics from his history? Academic historians regularly use their skills as instruments of political abuse and intimidation, as Sean Wilentz did in his testimony before Congress a few years ago, or as David Landes did in a letter to the New York Times in 2000, in which he wrote, "If Mr. Nader thinks people will forget that he has been willing to bring grave harm to his country, he is in for a big surprise."

If this sort of thing suggested acceptable grounds for exclusion from the community of scholars, few historians would have learned to honor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. Not only is Schlesinger manifestly a liberal historian. He has put his skills at the direct service of a great political power. A profession that made the divorce of politics and history a condition of entry would have packed away Schlesinger, Landes, and Wilentz in disgrace a long time ago. Professional history does not (and should not) do anything of the kind. The same point holds with only slightly less force in the case of Henry Kissinger. Reviews in American History, having passed up all opportunities to review Chomsky's books, described Kissinger's Diplomacy (1994) as "a masterful, brilliant, and provocative account of world politics and American foreign policy from Cardinal Richelieu to the end of the Cold War." The review did not take up the question of Kissinger's war crimes.

Schlesinger's liberalism mirrors the dominant ideology in history writing. But to stop here would be to dump the whole question into the realm of biases. It would be to employ a loose sociology of knowledge to argue that the journals serve some ideologies to the exclusion of other ideologies. The trouble with this reasoning is that the journals in fact have become open to ideas that claim to have surpassed liberalism: postcolonalism, poststructuralism, and so on. More to the point, they have not been shy in throwing open their pages to Marxism. To speak "objectively," Eric Hobsbawm remains a member of one of the most murderous political parties of the twentieth century, and his books are vigorously discussed. Why Schlesinger and Hobsbawm, but not Chomsky?

I suspect that the answer lies less with Chomsky's arguments, and still less with his professional status, than with his intentions. The history of liberalism and Marxism in the academy has been the history of a science of concepts. The main responsibility of the liberal or Marxist intellectual, accordingly, has been to discover new material, which often involves correcting and recorrecting biases in past scholarship, a sort of intellectual forensics. The science of concepts not only parallels the development of institutions; it requires their continual enlargement and aggrandizement. All this should be obvious from the plain fact that liberal and Marxist historians have conquered institutional power and prestige across the country, and have effected a virtual monopoly on serious intellectual discussion.

Contrast this with Chomsky's anarchist interpretation of responsibility. "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies." Strictly speaking, the difference is not mutually exclusive. Yet one cannot read Chomksy's books easily conclude that truth is something to be surrounded by a gang of concepts, or driven into the corners of institutions and "think tanks" (a phrase which ought to discredit itself in the presence of an mind awake.) He does not say, with the post-liberal thinkers, that academic intellectuals need a whole new vocabulary to understand reality. He does not think of historical writing as a pathway to power, tenure, faculty club dinners, fund-raising, or anything else of this sort. He does not leave a clear idea of power in view, in part because his anarchism teaches him to view social status as a form of domination.

This explanation might be crude, but it can explain how the current generation of professional historians, many of them beginning in the restless mood of the 1960s and 1970s, have fitted themselves so effortlessly into the hierarchical arrangements of academic life. They have liberalized it to include once-marginalized social groups, but have done nothing to reverse the repression of labor power. The difference between a free professional and a university employee ought to be as wide as possible. Today the difference has been erased, and the history's professional societies have left it undefended. The historians now preside over a structure of domination far greater in its scope and power than at any time in the past.

The question of power also explains why even history journals dedicated explicitly to radical analysis have ignored Chomsky. The Radical History Review has reviewed exactly one of his books, which it called "absurd." Whatever else the RHR has achieved since its founding in the 1970s, it represents the triumph of the career radical, the academic historian who is not merely unpunished for radical statements, but actively rewarded with money, prestige, book contacts for "radical readers," and so on. It is damnably difficult nowadays to tell the difference between a young business executive and a "radical historian."

Whatever the reason, the consequences of the exclusion have been terrible, for both parties. The isolation forces Chomsky to meet tests of personality nobody else is asked to meet. Everything from the tone of his writings to the recesses of his biography come up for harsh review. His critic finds a factual error and meets it with a cry of "aha!" If no factual errors are at hand, the critic cries "too simple," and instead of engaging in research and discussion that might give the argument more nuance or variety, the critic stops reading altogether. Such are the excuses available to the self-satisfied. Accreditation, not argument, likewise dominates the reaction of the followers. They become attracted to Chomsky because of his isolation, and impute to him quasi-magical qualities. (A glance at his published interviews will indicate how frequently he attempts to discourage his cult-like following.)

The journals, by excluding one of the most influential voices in contemporary political discussion, disqualify themselves as serious forums. More than this, they betray a selective commitment to intellectual freedom. For one of the lessons we have learned from those post-liberal ideas is that censorship involves subtle relationships between culture and social processes. Silence can be produced and sustained as easily as argument.

The profession's recovery of principle is not the only reason for putting a halt to its exclusion of Chomsky. Most of the reviews and articles in the journals are mind-numbingly boring. They lack vital connections to pressing human responsibilities. They meet the demand for "relevance" without posing the question, relevant to what? It is the great misfortune of liberal and Marxist historians to be writing in the age of conservative ascendency. For decades they have managed the ideological interests of parties close to power, only to discover, belatedly, that their metaphysics of progress have betrayed them. So they grind down their concepts into finer and finer points. But in forsaking the fields of "intelligence" for the technologies of "reason," they produce an effluvia of permanent surrender. Probably so many young people find Chomsky bracing and invigorating because so much else in our culture is passionless and purposeless.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me repeat. The point is not that Chomsky is free of faults, or that he is correct in his use of fact and interpretation, or that my explanations are correct. The burden here is rather light. It is merely to show that he deserves to be included in the pages the leading journals in history. Perhaps one big forum on "Chomsky and the History of American Foreign Policy" would reestablish good faith. Who could not fail to learn something from a debate between Chomsky and John Lewis Gaddis? Perhaps a book review would be a good start.

http://www.counterpunch.org/summers01082005.html

Quest for decent wages

2005-01-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
King's Dream Included Decent Wages January 19, 2005
By Holly Sklar

Did you know that raising the minimum wage was a demand of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a Dream" speech?

King, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and other leaders of the 1963 March on Washington demanded "a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living."

They didn't dream that four decades later, the value of the minimum wage would go down as the cost of housing, food, health care and other necessities went up.

They didn't dream that four decades later, 36 million Americans would be below the official poverty line -- far below a decent standard of living.

They didn't dream that four decades later, the black poverty rate would still be triple that of whites.

At the time of the march in 1963, the minimum wage was $7.80 an hour, adjusting for inflation in 2004 dollars. Today's minimum wage is far lower -- just $5.15 an hour.

In "Where Do We Go From Here?" King wrote, "There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer."

The minimum wage reached its peak value in 1968, the year King was assassinated.

Today's $5.15 minimum wage is 41 percent less than 1968's inflation-adjusted minimum wage of $8.78.

Full-time, year-round minimum wage workers made $18,262 in 1968, adjusting for inflation. Today's full-time minimum wage workers make just $10,712 a year.

The minimum wage sets the wage floor. As the floor sinks, millions of workers find themselves with wages above the minimum, but not above the poverty level.

Business Week observed last year in a cover story on the working poor, "Today more than 28 million people, about a quarter of the workforce between the ages of 18 and 64, earn less than $9.04 an hour, which translates into a full-time salary of $18,800 a year -- the income that marks the federal poverty line for a family of four."

One out of three black workers earns less than $9.04 an hour -- barely above the value of the minimum wage of 1968.

Certainly, King didn't dream that four decades after the March on Washington, the U.S. Conference of Mayors would find in its annual "Hunger and Homelessness Survey" that 17 percent of the homeless were employed, as were 34 percent of adults requesting emergency food assistance.

The last minimum wage increases in 1996-97 were followed by rising incomes and falling poverty and unemployment nationwide. We need another boost to the minimum wage, and the economy.

Most Americans believe a job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it. Most Americans want to raise the minimum wage significantly.

Yet Congress has had seven pay raises since 1997, when the minimum increased to $5.15, while approving none for minimum wage workers. This month, congressional pay rose to $162,100 -- way up from $133,600 in 1997. That cumulative $28,500 congressional pay hike is more than the total earnings of two minimum wage workers.

At the time of the 1963 March on Washington, members of congress earned nine times the pay of minimum wage workers. Now, they earn 15 times as much. To reverse that growing gap, Congress should tie their pay raises to raises in the minimum wage.

Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a leader of the March on Washington, has said if King were alive, "he would be in the forefront of reminding the government that its first concern should be the basic needs of its citizens -- not just black Americans but all Americans -- for food, shelter, health care, education, jobs, livable incomes and the opportunity to realize their full potential."

A. Philip Randolph introduced King before the "I have a Dream" speech as "the moral leader of America."

Congress and the White House should stop taking a holiday from King's dream and enact "a national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living."

Holly Sklar is co-author of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us" (www.raisethefloor.org). She can be reached at hsklar@aol.com.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign

2005-01-18T03:11:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign January 18, 2005
By Stephen Bezruchka

We all know about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's. civil rights work and his famous I have a dream speech delivered in Washington in 1963 because of the power of the media to shape what we think. I want to discuss what the mainstream media doesn't cover on Dr. King, his thinking and action in the last few years of his life.

Consider what Reverend King was working on at the time he was assassinated in Memphis in April 4 1968. The United States of America, was at that time committing atrocities in Vietnam similar to those we are doing in Iraq today. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out a year before his death in his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York. He called the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The Enron's Bechtel's and Haliburton's of that era were not pleased by his efforts. Public opposition could end the free-flowing profits they had enjoyed. Time magazine called his speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Dr. King saw that economic segregation was not limited to skin color. The people going off to fight in Vietnam were poor people, whether they were poor blacks or whites. Those of greater means found ways of avoiding service. The administration had declared a war on poverty, but like our never ending war on terrorism, it eventually became a war on the poor. To King our invasion of Vietnam was a war against the poor. He felt Congress demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness." Sound familiar? To Martin Luther King Jr. the increasing gap between rich and poor at that time was the key battle. He formulated the Poor People's Campaign to culminate in an encampment of 500,000 of the nation's poorest and most alienated citizens who were to erect a tent city near the Washington Memorial in DC in the spring of 1968. They would then lobby their elected officials for legislation to oppose the war on the poor and draft an economic bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

How would the rich and powerful react when faced with the possibility of 500,000 people camping in DC to protest the social and economic injustices that so many Americans were exposed to then? King, a man recognized around the world, and honored with a Nobel Prize now was turning his attention toward poverty. If he were unknown, he could be deemed a terrorist threat to national security and quietly banished to Guantanamo.

With half a million poor people camped on the Mall in DC, the other millions of poor people would act in solidarity, all around the country and the world. To restrain them, the rulers would have to mobilize a large army, but that would be difficult as most troops were over in Vietnam. Other tactics were necessary.

Before the Poor People's Campaign in the spring of 1968 King supported a Memphis sanitation worker's strike on March 18, and called for a general work stoppage there. He tried to lead a peaceful march on the 28 that was disrupted and rescheduled for April 5. On April 3, Dr. King checked into the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he was assassinated on the balcony the next day. James Earl Ray entered a plea of guilty and was never tried, but sentenced to the state penitentiary where he died in 1998.

Martin Luther King Jr., tried to expose truth, not by speaking truth to power, power doesn't listen, but by speaking truth about power. A man of his capabilities and stature could be successful in carrying out the Poor People's Campaign and getting half a million poor people camped on the mall which would be a big threat to the rich and powerful. So the US government used violence on America's greatest prophet of non-violence. A civil trial took place in December 1999 in Memphis where King was murdered, and a jury of six whites and six blacks found that the US government conspired to murder Martin Luther King Jr. Most of you are unaware of that trial.

If you go to the King Center website, under news and information, you will find the transcripts of the month long trial together with the verdict. More details are in a book AN ACT OF STATE: The execution of Martin Luther King by William F. Pepper, King's attorney. Where was Time Magazine, Reader's Digest and the Washington Post? Why didn't the media cover this story with glaring headlines? Our commercial media are safely outfoxed, embedded in the henhouse so we can not expect to be fed news that might threatened their interests. But I urge you to check out the facts about this unknown aspect of King's death.

In Martin Luther King's day, there were only a handful of countries healthier than the US, but now there are over 25. We in the US, the richest and most powerful country in world history are less healthy than people in the other rich countries and a few poor ones . The feds give the reasons for our poor health as being because of the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Exactly the issues Martin Luther King Jr. drew attention to in the last years of his life. He used the peaceful means of public demonstrations he knew best. King said: "Of all the inequalities, inequalities in health are the most inhumane of all."

Today a black man in Harlem has a shorter life than a man in Bangladesh, a black man in DC lives less long than a man in Ghana. The disparities in health in the US and in the world have increased, with so-called progress since King's time.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's life we see that he thought for himself, he observed, discussed, and acted upon his convictions. He worked peacefully, recognizing the power of mobilizing large numbers of people to press for their interests. These strategies are really the only ones available to those of us who are not the rich and powerful few. Peaceful protest by large numbers of knowledgeable people are incredibly effective.

In evidence-based medicine parlance, they are Class I interventions. Today resurrecting King's Poor People's Campaign can serve our citizens well. The need is ever greater . Today we have many more homeless in our face perhaps ten to fifteen million or more than in Reverend King's time. We have the highest child poverty of any rich country, and shameful outcomes on so many indicators of human welfare. Yet we have half of the world's billionaires, 281. The rich and powerful will not give up their wealth and power without a mass movement to compel them to do so. I urge you to carry out the unfinished work of this great American.

Martin Luther King Jr. was able to recognize the critical issues impacting not just African Americans but all of us. He had effective ways of drawing attention to these problems. He paid the ultimate price for this efforts. King can inspire us to follow in his footsteps to continue the Poor People's Campaign and to push for an economic bill of rights. Remember his words: "True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Stephen Bezruchka teaches in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Washington. For details on the trail go to: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/WFPonMLK.html For details on the health status of the United States in comparison to other countries, go to the Population Health Forum's website: http://depts.washington.edu/eqhlth/

Self-censorship run amok for fears of "big brother" FCC fines

2005-01-18T02:36:00.000-08:00

IP List Post:

Dave,

This is getting far past ridiculous. A tiny group of right-wing
wackos filing complaints is causing the FCC to act even crazier
than its usual incarnation, setting loose a cascade of bizarre
self-censorship actions that make about as much sense as TSA
airport security operations.

As noted in:
[http://dazarticles.blogspot.com/2005/01/fcc-fears-force-fox-to-pixelate.html]

the Fox network -- not known for timidity in low-brow programming --
has now protectively "blurred" the posterior of a *cartoon character*,
for fear, they say, of FCC reprisal. This same cartoon
apparently ran without problems five years ago. Meanwhile, PBS is
editing out glimpses of nudity from other programming, demonstrating
all too well how far they've descended into the "take no chances"
mundane status quo. Even non-nudity scenes -- anything relating
to the human body or sexuality that can generate a complaint from anyone,
now appear to be at risk.

Of course, scenes of contestants eating rats in reality... oops, I
mean "unscripted" programs are still A-OK.

The FCC and broadcasters expect consumers to shell out the big bucks
for broadcast digital/HDTV receivers so that Congress can get their
precious analog spectrum back. But who in their right mind would
spend that kind of money for the sort of highly-filtered/censored
broadcast dreck that is rapidly making the "vast TV wasteland" of
yesteryear look like the golden age of television?

Lauren Weinstein

America's Compassion in Iraq Is Self-Destructive

2005-01-17T05:41:00.000-08:00

[beggars belief]

Wednesday, January 12, 2005
By: Elan Journo and Yaron Brook

Fighting a compassionate war is immoral; it is costing the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and emboldening our enemies throughout the Islamic world.

The horrific suicide bombing in December of a U.S. mess tent near Mosul and the assassination on Jan. 10 of the deputy chief of Baghdad police--the second Iraqi official murdered in five days--are further indications that the war in Iraq is worsening. Things are going badly not because, as some claim, the United States is arrogant and lacking in humility--but because it is self-effacing and compassionate.

The Bush Administration's war in Iraq embraces compassion instead of the rational goal of victory. Such an immoral approach to war wantonly sacrifices the lives of soldiers and emboldens our enemies throughout the Middle East to mount further attacks against us.

Regardless of whether the Iraqi dictatorship should have been our initial target in the war against totalitarian Islam, when in the nation's defense a President sends troops to war, morally he must resolve to soundly defeat the enemy while safeguarding our forces and citizens. But America's attention has been diverted to rebuilding Iraqi hospitals, schools, roads and sewers, and on currying favor with the locals (some U.S. soldiers were even ordered to grow moustaches in token of their respect for Iraqi culture, others are now given cultural sensitivity courses before arriving in Iraq). Since the war began, Islamic militants and Saddam loyalists have carried out random abductions, devastating ambushes, and catastrophic bombings throughout the country. That attacks on U.S. forces (including those engaged in reconstruction efforts) have gone unpunished has emboldened the enemy.

Early and stark evidence of the enemy's growing audacity came in March 2004 with the grisly murder and mutilation of four American contractors. Following the attack, U.S. forces entered the city of Fallujah vowing to capture the murderers and punish the town that supports them. But such resolve was supplanted by compassion.

In the midst of the fighting the United States called a unilateral ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid in and to enable the other side to collect and bury its dead. The so-called truce benefited only the enemy. The Iraqis, as one soldier told the Associated Press, were "absolutely taking advantage" of the situation, regrouping and mounting sporadic attacks: as another soldier aptly noted, "It is hard to have a cease-fire when they maneuver against us, they fire at us." As the siege wore on, the goal of capturing the murderers quietly faded--and the enemy's confidence swelled.

Neither the later offensive on Fallujah in November nor any of the subsequent incursions have quelled the insurgents: witness the unending string of car bombings and (road-side) ambushes. Why?

Because in Fallujah and throughout this war the military (under orders from Washington) has been purposely treading lightly. Soldiers have strict orders to avoid the risk of killing civilians--many of whom aid or are themselves militants--even at the cost of imperiling their own lives. Mosques, which have served as hideouts for terrorists, are kept off the list of allowed targets. Military operations have been timed to avoid alienating Muslim pilgrims on holy days.

There is no shortage of aggressors lusting for American blood, and they grow bolder with each display of American compassion.

Consider the shameful tenderness shown toward the Islamic cleric Moktadr al-Sadr, who aspires to be the dictator of an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. An admirer of the 9/11 hijackers, Sadr has amassed an armed militia of 10,000 men (right under the noses of our military), and demanded that Coalition forces leave Iraq. On the run for the murder of another cleric, he took refuge with his militia in the holy city of Najaf, which has been surrounded by U.S. troops. Rather than attacking, however, the United States agreed to negotiate. It is as absurd to negotiate with and trust the word of a villain such as Sadr as it would have been to negotiate with Nazis bent on wiping out Allied forces in World War II. It is shockingly dangerous that the United States allowed a mediator from Iran--part of the "Axis of Evil" and Sadr's ideological ally--to assist in the negotiations.

In the end Sadr was allowed to walk away along with his armed militia; his agreement to disarm them has--predictably--gone unfulfilled.

For the enemies of America, Iraq is like a laboratory where they are testing our mettle, with mounting ferocity. The negotiations with Sadr; the half-hearted raids on Fallujah; our timid response to daily insurrections throughout Iraq; America's outrageously deferential treatment of its enemies--all of these instances of moral weakness reinforce the view of bin Laden and his ilk that America will appease those who seek its destruction.

If we continue to confess doubts about our moral right to defend ourselves, it will only be a matter of time before Islamic militants bring suicide-bombings and mass murder (again) to the streets of the United States.

Though Washington may be blinded by the longing to buy the love of Iraqis, our servicemen know all too well that (as one put it): "When you go to fight, it's time to shoot--not to make friends with people." In its might and courage our military is unequaled; it is the moral responsibility of Washington to issue battle plans that will properly "shock and awe" the enemy. Eschewing self-interest in the name of compassion is immoral. The result is self-destruction.

Dr. Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. Elan Journo is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr012=hy1ojdv0h3.app5a&page=NewsArticle&id=10775&news_iv_ctrl=1021

Conspiracy Theorists

2005-01-17T05:36:00.000-08:00

by Jolly Roger
slicingthroats@yahoo.com
January 8, 2005

Everyone has heard, and has probably used the term "conspiracy theorist," and the fact of the term being in common use, also indicates that we generally agree on what it means. I saw a movie by that name, and the title character was a raving lunatic who kept his food in thermoses with combination locks to reduce his chances of being poisoned by imaginary enemies.

Regardless of how the stupid movie turned out, what's important here is the common perception people have of someone to whom that label is applied, and just as important, is who it is that applies the label. The common perception is that someone who is labeled a "conspiracy theorist" is suffering from some type of psychological disorder, and that label is usually applied to people by our government, and our news media. The next thing to consider, is that the label is applied to anyone who questions our government's version of events in any matter. Doesn't it logically follow that the media are teaching us to assume that anyone who questions the government is insane? When that label is applied to a person, doesn't it become easy to dismiss everything they say without even hearing it? How convenient for them.

I think the label first became widely used to slander people who questioned the details surrounding the JFK assassination, and forty years later, there aren't too many thinking people who still believe the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" explanation. That explanation is doubted by everyone who has taken the time to look into the details, and believed only by people who refuse to.

Which is "theory" and which is fact? In the absence of a full confession, this can only be decided by a preponderance of evidence, and it would be silly to come to a conclusion on any matter without looking at all the evidence available. This is only common sense, just as it is safe to assume some degree of guilt or complicity on the part of anyone who lies about an event, or tries to hide, plant, or destroy any type of evidence.

Conspiracy theories arise from evidence. After the government releases an explanation of a particular event, a conspiracy theory is only born because evidence exists to disprove their explanation, or at least call it into question. There's nothing insane about it, unless you define sanity as believing whatever the government tells you. In light of the fact that our government lies to us regularly, I would define believing everything they tell you as utter stupidity.

In July of 1996, flight 800 exploded over Long Island. Shortly after their terrorist explanation failed scrutiny, our government then explained the event by claiming that a faulty electrical system caused a spark that ignited a fuel tank, and the people who doubted this explanation were quickly labeled "conspiracy theorists." More than a hundred witnesses saw a missile travel from the ground up to the plane just prior to its explosion, but rather than being treated as eyewitnesses to an event, they were labeled "conspiracy theorists," which label allowed all subsequent investigation to ignore the strongest evidence in the matter.

Our "investigative" news agencies decided to accept and disseminate the official story, and they helped us forget the U.S. naval station nearby, the fact that missiles were regularly test fired there, and naturally, they paid no heed to more than a hundred "conspiracy theorists" who saw the plane get blown out of the sky by a missile. I believe that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down flight 800, and that's my belief because it's the most sensible explanation that can be drawn from the available evidence. I'm not theorizing about conspiracies, but there are conflicting explanations of the event, and if the Navy did accidentally blow a passenger plane out of the sky, who would have a motive to lie about it? The U.S. government, or a hundred witnesses?

Then of course, there were the "crazy conspiracy theories" arising from the bombing of the Alfred Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. In that matter, audio tapes and witnesses agree that there were two explosions, the first of which occurred inside the building between eight and ten seconds before the truck bomb exploded. Explosive experts agree that Timothy McVeigh's fertilizer bomb could not have destroyed the building, and the FBI's counter terrorism chief, and members of BATF lied about their whereabouts during and prior to the catastrophe. The evening news decided not to tell you any of this, and they will label anyone who tries to a "paranoid conspiracy theorist." In light of the evidence, we would be complete fools if a conspiracy theory didn't exist.

There were no conspiracy theories arising from the explosion of flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and there were no conspiracy theories arising from the work of the uni-bomber, so the newly invented psycho-babble that tries to explain the malady of conspiracy theorists, also needs to explain why millions of conspiracy theorists all decided not to theorize about those events. There is no psychological malady. There was simply no evidence to indicate a conspiracy.

The real question is not why people theorize about conspiracies, but why people choose to believe the government's version of events when it's obvious that they're lying. One reason is that most people never see the evidence because our "news" industry hides it, and another reason is that the same news industry will quickly associate anyone who questions the government with the people who see Elvis, Bigfoot, and UFO's.

But sadly, I think the main reason people choose to believe the government's version of events despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is because it's easier, and safer. If you ignore most of the evidence, and accept as plausible whatever ridiculous explanation the T.V. provides, your life remains simple, and you get to sit on your ass and watch more T.V. If on the other hand, you pluck your head from that same ass and realize you've been lied to, as a citizen in a democratic society, you're instantly burdened with being responsible for doing something about it. Every citizen of the United States has a civic duty to participate in their government, and keep themselves informed of its actions, or government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" isn't possible. You were warned that "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, " but you chose to ignore your government, and believe whatever they told you, and because of this, Americans have lost their freedom. Although presidents and senators are public servants, unlike the dog catcher and mailman, they wield a lot of power over people's lives, and that's why they have to be watched, and scrutinized.

Statistical analysts from UCLA and Rutgers University believe that John Kerry won the 2004 presidential election by an estimated 1.3 million votes, and despite the fact that these learned scholars are probably the most qualified people alive to forward such an opinion, our news madia dismisses this as "conspiracy theory." George W. Bush lost the 2000 election, and he lost the 2004 election, but he's occupying the White House, shredding our constitution, and stealing our wealth and freedom in a "war on terror" that's as fraudulent as his presidency because many Americans are too stupid to see it, too lazy to do anything about it, or both.

I'm sorry if I sound angry, but the fact of the matter is that I am angry. While you were staring into the television like an idiot, our freedom, wealth, and constitutional protections have been stolen from us, and because you're stupid enough to believe the manure being shoveled by our government, you've allowed them to commit bigger and more heinous crimes. Because you were too lazy to research their nonsensical economic policies, and see them for the scams that they are, we'll all soon be living in poverty. And because you're so lazy, apathetic, and easily lied to, millions have died for the profits of a few. I have every right to be angry, and only a fool wouldn't be.

Only a small portion of my anger is reserved for the government of the United States, because they only did what can be expected of any government. They grabbed money, power and control where it was easy to do so. Most of my anger is directed toward my fellow American citizens, because they allowed it to happen by believing whatever they're told, and not doing what's expected of them. Patriotism in America does not mean waving the flag in blind loyalty to the government. As an American citizen, you have a civic duty to question your government, and hold them accountable for their actions, not use the flag as a blindfold. The American people have been duped once again, and it doesn't seem like it's a difficult thing to accomplish.

America's latest "conspiracy nuts" are better known as the 9-11 truth movement.

The news media are doing their usual job of slandering them with their usual childish name calling, but for more than three years, they have refused to show you the documented fact, scientific data, expert testimony, photographic evidence, or the credible eyewitness accounts that prove U.S. government complicity in the events of September, 11, 2001. If this were just a "crazy conspiracy theory," I don't think people in our government would have worked so hard to destroy, hide, and lie about the evidence. The White House tried to derail every investigation into the matter. If we had an honest government, we wouldn't have conspiracy theories. We would have honest investigations, and fair trials, but these things are disappearing from America.

There are disturbing facts regarding the events of September 11 that every American needs to be aware of , but naturally, none of it will be on T.V. I've met a lot of people in the 9-11 truth movement, and I can assure you that none of them are crazy, paranoid, or even "conspiracy theorists." One generalization I can make about them is that they all seem to be very intelligent. Maybe the smartest thing you could do would be to start listening to them. The Arabs don't "hate your freedom." The White House hates your freedom, because it's the only thing that stands between them, and unlimited power. - Jolly Roger

"Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom" - Thomas Jefferson

Anything written by "Jolly Roger" is the property of the American Resistance Movement, and the author hereby grants permission to anyone who so desires to post, print, copy, or distribute this letter as they see fit, and in fact, the author encourages you to do so

911truth.org 911review.org 911review.com physics911.org wtc7.net

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050115062752457

Caracas: Meeting In Defense Of Humanity

2005-01-17T01:36:00.000-08:00

ZNet Commentary
Caracas: Meeting In Defense Of Humanity January 17, 2005
By Jane Franklin

Faced with the fact that the White House in Washington plans to rule the world, Venezuela and Cuba have formed an alliance of resistance to U.S. empire--an alliance that is already creating forces aimed at changing the world for the better. After Hugo Chavez was elected president in 1998, the country was renamed the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, for the Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar. President Chavez is working hard to unite Latin American and Caribbean nations in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) to counter the Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement that Washington is trying to impose.

One result of the rapidly-expanding collaboration between Venezuela and Cuba was born last January when a group of Cuban and Venezuelan writers decided to organize a World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity. Cubans and Venezuelans went to work, assisted by people from other countries, including the United States. The Venezuelan Minister of Culture sent out invitations, and the project came to fruition on December 1 when about 300 people from dozens of countries arrived in Caracas for a five-day meeting with many Venezuelans. I was fortunate to be one of those invited from the United States to this remarkable event.

The World Meeting opened in an auditorium that seats 5,000 people. It was packed, and President Hugo Chavez was greeted by cheers, chants, and clapping when he entered, greeting and hugging and kissing dozens of us as he proceeded slowly toward the stage. Forget the image of "thug" or "clown" that the U.S. media present; Hugo Chavez is an articulate, charismatic, witty intellectual with a crucial ability to project plans that are both concrete and visionary.

With the basic premise that the best defense is a good offense, he advised us to go on the offensive. In this and two other speeches at the World Meeting, he described Venezuela's efforts to reduce the poverty level, now 80% of the population of 25 million people. The main weapon in that battle is a new institution--called missions or misiones, established to provide free health care, education, cultural activities, sports facilities, and other services for people all over the country.

For one day of the World Meeting participants visited some of these missions. Some of us flew by plane into the Interior. I was in a group that went by bus to the nearby state of Vargas, where we visited two types of mission, a Barrio Adentro medical mission and a Ribas educational mission, both located in poor neighborhoods.

The Barrio Adentro missions were launched in April of 2003 when 58 Cuban doctors arrived to help establish the first Barrio Adentro (inside the neighborhood). The concept is similar to Cuba's family doctor clinics. But these doctors found patients who had never had a medical exam, some with medical problems that, untreated, would be a death sentence.

Now there are more than 13,000 Cuban doctors at Barrio Adentros located all over the country, treating 17 million Venezuelans. The doctors and other Cuban medical personnel with whom we me are obviously closely integrated with their neighborhoods in a way that leads to community involvement and therefore knowledge about the basic issues of medical care and society. The respect for each other and the pride in their achievements was obvious.

Now 250 Venezuelan medical students have graduated from medical school in Cuba and are returning to their neighborhoods to practice medicine. A thousand more are in training in Cuba and the Chavez government plans to build a new medical school within a new university in Caracas with the goal of medical care for the poor rather than only for the wealthy.

The Ribas mission that we visited is also part of a nationwide structure, this one for education. I was reminded of President Chavez's remark that now three generations study together: Grandmothers who could not read and could not teach their children to read are now helping their grandchildren learn to read. Within the next several years, Venezuela plans to build education centers called University Towns in all 344 municipalities of the country.

This medical and educational care are major achievements of the alliance between Cuba and Venezuela in which a barter arrangement provides Cuba with oil and Venezuela with doctors and teachers. Imagine if we could achieve this kind of exchange internationally.

This goal of international cooperation was and is the subject of the World Meeting. Each participant spent two and a half days of intense work at one of ten roundtable discussions to reach united positions as part of an appeal to people around the world.

Each roundtable provided simultaneous translation into French, English, and Spanish, and we met for long hours. The "Caracas Appeal" can be found online at caracas2004.info. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel read this Appeal on the closing day. Our first task, it states, will be to create a "network of networks" to link our various actions in an international movement for the defense of humanity.

The Appeal points out that while financial resources are wasted in the military industrial complex, a silent genocide takes place every day in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The Appeal expresses our gratitude to the government, the people and the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for their commitment to the future of this international movement. The Appeal concludes, "At this hour of great danger, we reaffirm the conviction that another world is not only possible, but necessary.

We reaffirm our commitment and make an open call to join the struggle for that world with more solidarity, more unity and more determination."

The Coming Wars - Seymour M. Hersh

2005-01-17T01:21:00.001-08:00

What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
New Yorker
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong—whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.

Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

For more than a year, France, Germany, Britain, and other countries in the European Union have seen preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon as a race against time—and against the Bush Administration. They have been negotiating with the Iranian leadership to give up its nuclear-weapons ambitions in exchange for economic aid and trade benefits. Iran has agreed to temporarily halt its enrichment programs, which generate fuel for nuclear power plants but also could produce weapons-grade fissile material. (Iran claims that such facilities are legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or N.P.T., to which it is a signator, and that it has no intention of building a bomb.) But the goal of the current round of talks, which began in December in Brussels, is to persuade Tehran to go further, and dismantle its machinery. Iran insists, in return, that it needs to see some concrete benefits from the Europeans—oil-production technology, heavy-industrial equipment, and perhaps even permission to purchase a fleet of Airbuses. (Iran has been denied access to technology and many goods owing to sanctions.)

The Europeans have been urging the Bush Administration to join in these negotiations. The Administration has refused to do so. The civilian leadership in the Pentagon has argued that no diplomatic progress on the Iranian nuclear threat will take place unless there is a credible threat of military action. “The neocons say negotiations are a bad deal,” a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) told me. “And the only thing the Iranians understand is pressure. And that they also need to be whacked.”

The core problem is that Iran has successfully hidden the extent of its nuclear program, and its progress. Many Western intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, believe that Iran is at least three to five years away from a capability to independently produce nuclear warheads—although its work on a missile-delivery system is far more advanced. Iran is also widely believed by Western intelligence agencies and the I.A.E.A. to have serious technical problems with its weapons system, most notably in the production of the hexafluoride gas needed to fabricate nuclear warheads.

A retired senior C.I.A. official, one of many who left the agency recently, told me that he was familiar with the assessments, and confirmed that Iran is known to be having major difficulties in its weapons work. He also acknowledged that the agency’s timetable for a nuclear Iran matches the European estimates—assuming that Iran gets no outside help. “The big wild card for us is that you don’t know who is capable of filling in the missing parts for them,” the recently retired official said. “North Korea? Pakistan? We don’t know what parts are missing.”

One Western diplomat told me that the Europeans believed they were in what he called a “lose-lose position” as long as the United States refuses to get involved. “France, Germany, and the U.K. cannot succeed alone, and everybody knows it,” the diplomat said. “If the U.S. stays outside, we don’t have enough leverage, and our effort will collapse.” The alternative would be to go to the Security Council, but any resolution imposing sanctions would likely be vetoed by China or Russia, and then “the United Nations will be blamed and the Americans will say, ‘The only solution is to bomb.’”

A European Ambassador noted that President Bush is scheduled to visit Europe in February, and that there has been public talk from the White House about improving the President’s relationship with America’s E.U. allies. In that context, the Ambassador told me, “I’m puzzled by the fact that the United States is not helping us in our program. How can Washington maintain its stance without seriously taking into account the weapons issue?”

The Israeli government is, not surprisingly, skeptical of the European approach. Silvan Shalom, the Foreign Minister, said in an interview last week in Jerusalem,with another New Yorker journalist, “I don’t like what’s happening. We were encouraged at first when the Europeans got involved. For a long time, they thought it was just Israel’s problem. But then they saw that the [Iranian] missiles themselves were longer range and could reach all of Europe, and they became very concerned. Their attitude has been to use the carrot and the stick—but all we see so far is the carrot.” He added, “If they can’t comply, Israel cannot live with Iran having a nuclear bomb.”

In a recent essay, Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (and a supporter of the Administration), articulated the view that force, or the threat of it, was a vital bargaining tool with Iran. Clawson wrote that if Europe wanted coöperation with the Bush Administration it “would do well to remind Iran that the military option remains on the table.” He added that the argument that the European negotiations hinged on Washington looked like “a preëmptive excuse for the likely breakdown of the E.U.-Iranian talks.” In a subsequent conversation with me, Clawson suggested that, if some kind of military action was inevitable, “it would be much more in Israel’s interest—and Washington’s—to take covert action. The style of this Administration is to use overwhelming force—‘shock and awe.’ But we get only one bite of the apple.”

There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”

Chubin added that Iran could also renounce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. “It’s better to have them cheating within the system,” he said. “Otherwise, as victims, Iran will walk away from the treaty and inspections while the rest of the world watches the N.P.T. unravel before their eyes.”

The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Some of the missions involve extraordinary coöperation. For example, the former high-level intelligence official told me that an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts. (In 2003, the I.A.E.A. disclosed that Iran had been secretly receiving nuclear technology from Pakistan for more than a decade, and had withheld that information from inspectors.) The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.

Getting such evidence is a pressing concern for the Bush Administration. The former high-level intelligence official told me, “They don’t want to make any W.M.D. intelligence mistakes, as in Iraq. The Republicans can’t have two of those. There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” The official added that the government of Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani President, has won a high price for its coöperation—American assurance that Pakistan will not have to hand over A. Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, to the I.A.E.A. or to any other international authorities for questioning. For two decades, Khan has been linked to a vast consortium of nuclear-black-market activities. Last year, Musharraf professed to be shocked when Khan, in the face of overwhelming evidence, “confessed” to his activities. A few days later, Musharraf pardoned him, and so far he has refused to allow the I.A.E.A. or American intelligence to interview him. Khan is now said to be living under house arrest in a villa in Islamabad. “It’s a deal—a trade-off,” the former high-level intelligence official explained. “‘Tell us what you know about Iran and we will let your A. Q. Khan guys go.’ It’s the neoconservatives’ version of short-term gain at long-term cost. They want to prove that Bush is the anti-terrorism guy who can handle Iran and the nuclear threat, against the long-term goal of eliminating the black market for nuclear proliferation.”

The agreement comes at a time when Musharraf, according to a former high-level Pakistani diplomat, has authorized the expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons arsenal. “Pakistan still needs parts and supplies, and needs to buy them in the clandestine market,” the former diplomat said. “The U.S. has done nothing to stop it.”

There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)

“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.

The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the “axis of evil,” is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. “We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,” the President said at a news conference late last year. “Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.”

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. “We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.”

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”

Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of an undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (socom), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to socom in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment. Then, last fall, Rumsfeld’s ability to deploy the commandos expanded. According to a Pentagon consultant, an Execute Order on the Global War on Terrorism (referred to throughout the government as gwot) was issued at Rumsfeld’s direction. The order specifically authorized the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets, the consultant said. It included a target list that cited Al Qaeda network members, Al Qaeda senior leadership, and other high-value targets. The consultant said that the order had been cleared throughout the national-security bureaucracy in Washington.

In late November, 2004, the Times reported that Bush had set up an interagency group to study whether it “would best serve the nation” to give the Pentagon complete control over the C.I.A.’s own élite paramilitary unit, which has operated covertly in trouble spots around the world for decades. The panel’s conclusions, due in February, are foregone, in the view of many former C.I.A. officers. “It seems like it’s going to happen,” Howard Hart, who was chief of the C.I.A.’s Paramilitary Operations Division before retiring in 1991, told me.

There was other evidence of Pentagon encroachment. Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)

Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings.

Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. Relevant members of the House and Senate intelligence committees have been briefed on the Defense Department’s expanded role in covert affairs, a Pentagon adviser assured me, but he did not know how extensive the briefings had been.

“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”

The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”

In his conversation with me, Smith emphasized that he was unaware of the military’s current plans for expanding covert action. But he said, “Congress has always worried that the Pentagon is going to get us involved in some military misadventure that nobody knows about.”

Under Rumsfeld’s new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon’s current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

One of the rationales for such tactics was spelled out in a series of articles by John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, and a consultant on terrorism for the rand corporation. “It takes a network to fight a network,” Arquilla wrote in a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists. These “pseudo gangs,” as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.

“If a confused young man from Marin County can join up with Al Qaeda,” Arquilla wrote, referring to John Walker Lindh, the twenty-year-old Californian who was seized in Afghanistan, “think what professional operatives might do.”

A few pilot covert operations were conducted last year, one Pentagon adviser told me, and a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda. But at the end of the year there was no agreement within the Defense Department about the rules of engagement. “The issue is approval for the final authority,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Who gets to say ‘Get this’ or ‘Do this’?”

A retired four-star general said, “The basic concept has always been solid, but how do you insure that the people doing it operate within the concept of the law? This is pushing the edge of the envelope.” The general added, “It’s the oversight. And you’re not going to get Warner”—John Warner, of Virginia, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—“and those guys to exercise oversight. This whole thing goes to the Fourth Deck.” He was referring to the floor in the Pentagon where Rumsfeld and Cambone have their offices.

“It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,” the first Pentagon adviser told me. “It’s a global free-fire zone.”

The Pentagon has tried to work around the limits on covert activities before. In the early nineteen-eighties, a covert Army unit was set up and authorized to operate overseas with minimal oversight. The results were disastrous. The Special Operations program was initially known as Intelligence Support Activity, or I.S.A., and was administered from a base near Washington (as was, later, Gray Fox). It was established soon after the failed rescue, in April, 1980, of the American hostages in Iran, who were being held by revolutionary students after the Islamic overthrow of the Shah’s regime. At first, the unit was kept secret from many of the senior generals and civilian leaders in the Pentagon, as well as from many members of Congress. It was eventually deployed in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government, in Nicaragua. It was heavily committed to supporting the Contras. By the mid-eighties, however, the I.S.A.’s operations had been curtailed, and several of its senior officers were courtmartialled following a series of financial scandals, some involving arms deals. The affair was known as “the Yellow Fruit scandal,” after the code name given to one of the I.S.A.’s cover organizations—and in many ways the group’s procedures laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal.

Despite the controversy surrounding Yellow Fruit, the I.S.A. was kept intact as an undercover unit by the Army. “But we put so many restrictions on it,” the second Pentagon adviser said. “In I.S.A., if you wanted to travel fifty miles you had to get a special order. And there were certain areas, such as Lebanon, where they could not go.” The adviser acknowledged that the current operations are similar to those two decades earlier, with similar risks—and, as he saw it, similar reasons for taking the risks. “What drove them then, in terms of Yellow Fruit, was that they had no intelligence on Iran,” the adviser told me. “They had no knowledge of Tehran and no people on the ground who could prepare the battle space.”

Rumsfeld’s decision to revive this approach stemmed, once again, from a failure of intelligence in the Middle East, the adviser said. The Administration believed that the C.I.A. was unable, or unwilling, to provide the military with the information it needed to effectively challenge stateless terrorism. “One of the big challenges was that we didn’t have Humint”—human intelligence—“collection capabilities in areas where terrorists existed,” the adviser told me. “Because the C.I.A. claimed to have such a hold on Humint, the way to get around them, rather than take them on, was to claim that the agency didn’t do Humint to support Special Forces operations overseas. The C.I.A. fought it.” Referring to Rumsfeld’s new authority for covert operations, the first Pentagon adviser told me, “It’s not empowering military intelligence. It’s emasculating the C.I.A.”

A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.”

There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray.

The White House solidified its control over intelligence last month, when it forced last-minute changes in the intelligence-reform bill. The legislation, based substantially on recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, originally gave broad powers, including authority over intelligence spending, to a new national-intelligence director. (The Pentagon controls roughly eighty per cent of the intelligence budget.) A reform bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-2. Before the House voted, however, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld balked. The White House publicly supported the legislation, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused to bring a House version of the bill to the floor for a vote—ostensibly in defiance of the President, though it was widely understood in Congress that Hastert had been delegated to stall the bill. After intense White House and Pentagon lobbying, the legislation was rewritten. The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.”

“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.

“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact