Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

By Paul Craig Roberts

“On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs.”
- Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: “I am a Zionist.” Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel’s opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history’s great killers, disputed the facts: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

Golda Meir’s apology for Israel’s great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na’im Ateek’s description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as “visitors in their own city.”

On December 10, 2007, MK Ephraim Sneh boasted in the Jerusalem Post that Israel had achieved “a true Zionist victory” over the UN partition plan “which sought to establish two nations in the land of Israel.” The partition plan had assigned Israel 56 percent of Palestine, leaving the inhabitants with only 44 percent. But Israel had altered this over time. Sneh proudly declared: “When we complete the permanent agreement, we will hold 78 percent of the land while the Palestinians will control 22 percent.”

Sneb could have added that the 22 percent is essentially a collection of unconnected ghettos cut off from one another and from roads, water, medical care, and jobs.

Rev. Are documents that the abuse of Palestinians’ human rights is official Israeli policy. Killings, torture, and beatings are routine. On May 17, 1990, the Washington Post reported that Save the Children “documented indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting of children at home or just outside the house playing in the street, who were sitting in the classroom or going to the store for groceries.”

On January 19, 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister, announced the policy of “punitive beating” of Palestinians. The Israelis described the purpose of punitive beating: “Our task is to recreate a barrier and once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the area.”

According to Save the Children, beatings of children and women are common. Rev. Are, citing the report in the Washington Post, writes: “Save the Children concluded that one-third of beaten children were under ten years old, and one-fifth under the age of five. Nearly a third of the children beaten suffered broken bones.”

On February 8, 1988, Newsweek magazine quoted an Israeli soldier: “We got orders to knock on every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy clubs. This was no private initiative, these were orders from our company commander…. After one soldier finished beating a detainee, another soldier called him ‘you Nazi,’ and the first man shot back: ‘You bleeding heart.’ When one soldier tried to stop another from beating an Arab for no reason, a fist fight broke out.”

These were the old days before conscience was eliminated from the ranks of the Israeli military.

In the London Sunday Times, June 19, 1977, Ralph Schoenman, executive director of the Bertrand Russell Foundation, wrote: “Israeli interrogators routinely ill-treat and torture Arab prisoners. Prisoners are hooded or blindfolded and are hung by their wrists for long periods. Most are struck in the genitals or in other ways sexually abused. Most are sexually assaulted. Others are administered electric shock.”

Amnesty International concluded that “there is no country in the world in which the use of official and sustained torture is as well established and documented as in the case of Israel.”

Even the pro-Israeli Washington Post reported: “Upon arrest, a detainee undergoes a period of starvation, deprivation of sleep by organized methods and prolonged periods during which the prisoner is made to stand with his hands cuffed and raised, a filthy sack covering the head. Prisoners are dragged on the ground, beaten with objects, kicked, stripped and placed under ice-cold showers.”

Sounds like Abu Gharib. There are news reports that Israeli torture experts participated in the torture of the detainees assembled by the American military as part of the Bush Regime’s propaganda onslaught to convince Americans that Iraq was overflowing with al-Qaeda terrorists. On July 23, 2008, Antiwar.com posted an Iraqi news report that the Iraqi government had released a total of 109,087 Iraqis that the Americans had “detained.” Obviously, these “terrorist detainees” had been used for the needs of Bush Regime propaganda. No one will ever know how many of them were abused by Israeli torturers imported by the CIA.

Rev. Are’s book makes sensible suggestions for resolving the conflict that Israel began. However, the problem is that Israeli governments believe only in force. The policy of the Israeli government has always been to beat, kill, and brutalize Palestinians into submission and flight. Anyone who doubts this can read the book of Israel’s finest historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).

Americans are a gullible and naive people. They have been complicit for 60 years in crimes that in Arnold Toynbee’s words “are comparable in quality” to the crimes of Nazi Germany. As Toynbee was writing decades ago, the accumulated Israeli crimes might now be comparable also in quantity.

The US routinely vetoes United Nations condemnations of Israel for its brutal crimes against the Palestinians. Insouciant American taxpayers have been bled for a half century to provide the Israelis with superior military weapons with which Israelis assault their neighbors, all the while convincing America – essentially a captive nation – that Israel is the victim.

John F. Mahoney wrote: “Thomas Are reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: an active pastor who comes to the unsettling realization that he and his people have been fed a terrible lie that is killing and torturing thousands of innocent men, women and children. Not without ample research and prayer does such a pastor, in turn, risk unsettling his congregation. The Reverend Are has done his homework and, I suspect, has prayed often and long during the writing of this courageous book.”

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian and pastor who was executed for his active participation in the German Resistance against Nazism.

Professor Benjamin M. Weir, San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote: “This book will make the reader squirm. It asks you to lend your voice in behalf of the voiceless.”

Americans who can no longer think for themselves and who are terrified of disapproval by their peer group are incapable of lending their voices to anyone except those who control the world of propaganda in which they live.

The ignorance and unconcern of Americans is a great frustration to my friends in the Israeli peace movement. Without outside support those Israelis who believe in good will are deprived, by America’s support for their government’s policy of violence, of any peaceful resolution of a conflict began in 1947 by Israeli aggression against unsuspecting Palestinian villages.

Rev. Are wrote his book with the hope that the pen is mightier than the sword and that facts can crowd out propaganda and create a framework for a just resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his concluding chapter, “What Christians Can Do,” Rev. Are writes: “We cannot allow others to dictate our thinking on any subject, especially on anything as important as Christian faithfulness, which is tested by an attitude towards seeking justice for the oppressed. It’s a Christian’s duty to know.”

Duty, of course, has costs. Rev. Are writes: “Speak up for the Palestinians and you will make enemies. Yet, as Christians, we must be willing to raise issues that until now we have chosen to dodge.”

More than a decade later, President Jimmy Carter, a true friend of Israel, tried again to awaken Americans’ moral conscience with his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter was instantly demonized by the Israel Lobby.

Sixty years of efforts by good and humane people to hold Israel accountable have so far failed, but they are more important today than ever before. Israel has its captive American nation on the verge of attacking Iran, the consequences of which could be catastrophic for all concerned. The alleged purpose of the attack is to eliminate nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons. The real reason is to eliminate all support for Hamas and Hezbollah so that Israel can seize the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon. The Bush regime is eager to do Israel’s bidding, and the media and evangelical “Christian” churches have been preparing the American people for the event.

It is paradoxical that Israel is demonstrating that veracity lies not in the Christian belief in good will but in Lenin’s doctrine that violence is the effective force in history and that the evangelical Christian Zionist churches agree.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review.

Tags: Christianity, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Zionism
Posted in History, Opinion, Saswat | No Comments »

Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power

Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.

WASHINGTON — The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA’s working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi’s and Conyers’ offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses — and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

“If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration’s attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don’t know,” says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

“You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don’t know [the extent of] what laws have been violated.”

The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government’s extensive use of military assets — including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes — for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.

Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA’s use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government’s extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists” to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, “our cities would be ablaze.” A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government’s “inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect.”

“It’s not just the ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program,’” agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration’s misleading name for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. “We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we’re always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture.”

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration’s alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores — without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as “an emergency internal security database system” designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA’s use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.

The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program — former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel — testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that “involved computer searches through massive electronic databases” containing “records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans.”

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton’s company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors’ Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. “It operates just like Google,” Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software — and its outstanding ability to search other databases — to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS involved something “so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem,” Hamilton told me. He added, “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core.” Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw’s behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.

Hamilton says James B. Comey’s congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft’s dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. “It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans,” he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government’s use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, “he turned white as a sheet.”

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans’ lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU’s Steinhardt, it would be “pretty frightening stuff.”

The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw’s PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret “backdoor” access to the electronic flow of money around the world.

In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey — who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela — the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.

From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan’s National Security Council, called “Follow the Money,” that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was “the principal software element” used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.

According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. “That was the beginning of the whole process,” he said.

After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror — and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain’s lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants’ due process rights.

According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity’s financial activity. “The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element” in intelligence, he explained. “If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity.” (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.)

The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA’s job much easier. “The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic,” he said. “Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you’re looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say ‘forget it.’” Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there’s a “whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That’s something for the lawyers to figure out.”

Bailey’s information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance using “an ad-hoc collection of so-called ‘black programs’ whose existence is undisclosed.” Some of these programs began “years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach.” Among them, the article said, are a joint NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back “about 15 years” to 1993. That’s not quite right, Bailey clarified: “It started in the early ’80s, at least 10 years before.”

Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified “Continuity of Government” program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.

In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the “highly sensitive and classified” nature of FEMA’s domestic security operations.

In September 2001, according to “The Rise of the Vulcans,” a 2004 book on Bush’s war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to “undisclosed locations” to maintain government functions. It was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency program: The Justice Department’s legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, were based on “fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government.”

It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush’s national security team, Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington’s role was disclosed in “The Dark Side,” a book published this month about the Bush administration’s war on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls Addington “the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program,” and reports that he was the key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a prime witness for a broader investigation.

Getting a full picture on Bush’s intelligence programs, however, will almost certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was asked for Pelosi’s views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. “The question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?” the participant in the meeting recalled.

That question was answered in the seven-page memo. “The rise of the ’surveillance state’ driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration,” the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush’s programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.

The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.

So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both Feingold and Leahy’s offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence inquiry.)

The Democrats’ reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in congressional complicity with the Bush administration’s intelligence policies. Many of the war on terror programs, including the NSA’s warrantless surveillance and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” were cleared with key congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others.

The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn’t have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless wiretapping. Opponents of Bush’s policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.

The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is running as a champion of Bush’s national security policies and would be unlikely to embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. (Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s spokesman on national security, declined to comment.)

Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama’s spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)

But even that may be a lofty hope. “It may be the last thing a new president would want to do,” said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, “some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened.”

Tags: 9/11, Bush, Domestic, Privacy, Salon, Spying, Terrorism
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Backlash Against Feminism

A critical look at modern day (or, should we say, postmodern) indifference towards feminism and the fruits of liberation realized through relentless struggles by women activists…
(- RD)

Now, the backlash

The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women’s bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don’t want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing … an all-out assault on feminism. But why? And what’s to be done about it, asks Kira Cochrane

Anyone who has ever called themselves a feminist – even with a laugh in their voice and a toss of their hair – knows that the word is a red rag to misogynists, and that in the face of this, you have to find ways to bolster yourself. Deep-held conviction helps, as does the camaraderie of brilliant, politicised women. There’s the self-respect that comes with recognising that not having a penis is no actual impediment, and, finally, crucially, there’s the element of results: the sense that the culture is chugging forward.

There has always been resistance to feminism – the backlash that Susan Faludi chronicled in her 1991 book of the same name. But there is also the satisfaction of arguments won, rights enshrined, respect ensured, the sense that the central feminist project – the fight for women to be treated as human beings, no more, no less – is inching along. In fact, reading a recent piece by US feminist writer, Katha Pollitt, headlined Backlash Spectacular and charting the ways in which North American culture is regressing on women’s rights, I felt smug. Thank God that’s not happening here, I thought, sinking into my seat and reaching for another chocolate.

Of course, if you’re feeling smug, you’ve got it wrong. In the weeks after Pollitt’s article, I found myself tripping over signs, left and right, that not only does the feminist movement still have far to go, but that arguments we thought were long-won have been re-opened, rights we thought were settled are suddenly under threat. These signs came in a whole variety of forms, some ridiculous, some devastating.

On the ridiculous side, for instance, came a survey by Marketing magazine of the nation’s most-loved and least-loved celebrities. The respondents’ top five most loved were men: Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. Of the five most hated, the top four were women: Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona, with Simon Cowell coming in at number five. On some level, reacting to this at all seemed stupid, and yet …

Another small sign came in the response to a post on the British feminist website the F Word. The average number of comments on any post on the site is around 10, but after one of the site’s bloggers asked whether readers had experienced street harassment, hundreds of responses poured in. “Of course,” wrote one woman, “I can’t go out without being honked at, and people have asked me to ’suck their cock’ when I was just walking down the street.” “Yup,” wrote another, “got threatened with rape on my way home just under a fortnight ago – when I responded angrily the creeps followed me down the road.”

Then there are all the signs about attitudes to women and work. Flicking through the newspapers one day, I came across an interview with Theo Paphitis, who appears on the TV show, Dragon’s Den, as well as on the country’s Rich List each year; he is easily one of the UK’s most prominent business people. “All this feminist stuff,” he said, “are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?” Paphitis went on to note that women “get themselves bloody pregnant and … they always argue that they’ll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal”. On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks “it’s a bit soppy”.

And, sadly, Paphitis isn’t alone in his unreconstructed views. In interviews earlier this year, Alan Sugar, Amstrad founder, Apprentice star and government business adviser, repeatedly challenged a law instituted more than three decades ago. This law was one of the big wins of the 1970s feminist movement, making it illegal for women to be asked at interview whether they plan to have children, on the grounds that it is clearly discriminatory: a chance for employers to weed out any woman who wants to combine a family with work. “You’re not allowed to ask, so it’s easy,” said Sugar, “just don’t employ them.”

A survey showed that 68% of employers agree with Sugar, and it was at this point, admits Katherine Rake, director of equality campaign, the Fawcett Society, that she seriously began to worry that a major backlash was underway – suddenly she found herself having to speak up for rights that are so long-established they had seemed entirely beyond debate. More cause for concern arrived in a particularly unlikely and depressing figure: former feminist icon, Rosie Boycott, one of the founders of the ground-breaking 70s magazine, Spare Rib. Writing in the Sunday Times, Boycott, who now runs a smallholding, said that “my pigs certainly aren’t going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business. Little wonder, then, that plenty of angry voices were last week demanding that women should get back to the kitchen”.

If women aren’t wanted in the workplace – and the fact that we’re still paid 17% less than men for full-time work, 36% less for part-time work, is a sign in itself – then at least our right to be safe from violence is recognised and protected, right? Far from it. Just as the attitudes of business leaders seem to be regressing at speed, the number of women being killed by a current or former partner has remained constant at two a week, and the rape conviction rate has been diminishing to the point of near-invisibility.

I was reminded of this last fact when the Washington Post, a newspaper that rarely picks up on British feminist issues (the US frankly having enough issues of its own) ran a long article about this disgrace in our justice system. The piece pointed out that the rape conviction rate in Britain has plummeted from 33% in the 70s to just 5.7% today, and that the 14,000 rapes reported each year are thought to be the tip of the iceberg – Solicitor General, Vera Baird, suggested that only 10%-20% of all cases are brought to the attention of the authorities. The article quoted a barrister called Kerim Fuad, who has represented many men accused of rape, and who admitted that he had been surprised by some “not guilty” verdicts – including those in which the plaintiff had sustained internal injuries. It alluded to an Amnesty International poll, conducted in 2005, which found that 26% of respondents thought that a woman was totally or partially responsible for being raped if she was wearing revealing clothing, and 30% thought she was totally or partially responsible if she was drunk.

How does the wider culture respond to this? Does it do everything it can to make sure that rapists are punished, that women are granted justice, that the balance is redressed? It does not. In the years in which the rape conviction rate has stood at a point so insultingly low that it represents a backlash in and of itself, the papers have often focused, not on the victims, not on the rapists, but instead on running multiple articles about women who have apparently lied about being raped. The number of women who take false complaints to the police is thought to stand at 3% of the total, as it does with other crimes, but the media focus has casually, simply, successfully, helped ingrain in the public imagination that, when it comes to rape, women lie – a notion that, naturally, has a rather serious effect when it comes to trial by jury.

If rapists aren’t going to be punished, then there must at least be good support services in place for women who have been raped. Well, no. The women’s movement of the 70s and early 80s fought for provision for rape victims, a network of Rape Crisis centres, and, by 1984, there were 68 of these essential services across England and Wales. Today, with rapes at an unprecedented high (the tally of recorded rapes rose by 247% between 1991 and 2004), the number of Rape Crisis centres has almost halved – there are now only 38. This massive shortfall in services is less surprising when you consider that three of the most important women’s charities in the UK – Refuge, Women’s Aid and Eaves Housing for Women – all of which support female victims of violence, have a combined income considerably lower than that of The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that supports ageing donkeys.

As the number of Rape Crisis centres plummets, the number of lapdancing clubs has proliferated, bolstered by a 2003 change in licensing laws, which bracketed them with coffee shops and karaoke bars. Since this legislative change came into effect, the number of lapdancing clubs has doubled. In the small city of Brighton and Hove, for instance, six clubs opened in quick succession and across the country they are now opening at a rate of almost one each week. The government has recently pledged to tackle this issue, by reclassifying lapdancing clubs as “sex encounter” establishments, and while that’s great, it doesn’t change what we’ve learned in the meantime – the fact that there is clearly a massive demand for these clubs, that venues which involve women’s bodies being marketed to men are patently a brilliant business proposition. This isn’t surprising when you consider that the sex industry is more casually accepted than ever: one in 10 men now admit to having visited a prostitute, stag party visits to brothels are seen as par for the course, and the consumption of internet pornography has gone far beyond the point of familiarity.

The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women’s bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we’ve seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women’s bodies are pored over – a pound gained provoking headlines that they’re fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they’re too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they’ve failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye – which could just be a stray lash. What is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control. In the eyes of these magazines, a healthy body mass index could be considered seriously plump. A woman deemed too fat in one magazine could, on the basis of exactly the same picture, be deemed too thin by another magazine. The constant message is that women’s bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there’s then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There’s something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.

That intense scrutiny of women’s bodies is one trend in pop culture. Another related one is the current obsession with women as mothers, a trend being played out all over our cinema screens – in films including Juno, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Happy Endings, Waitress and Smart People. It’s also being played out in the gossip magazines. In the past few years we have seen Jennifer Lopez paid a reported $6m (£3m) for exclusive pictures of her with her twin babies; Angelina Jolie is expected to clear $10m if she agrees to pose with the twins she will give birth to later this year.

In fact, the obsession is such that one magazine editor has said that “it’s at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos”. We’ve seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years – as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is “this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?”

Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women’s worth is directly tied to childbearing, the constant images of mothers are a siren call for women to get back into the home, and yet we’re also seeing more and more blame put on mothers. Women whose children are murdered or abducted are increasingly blamed for not having looked after their offspring well enough, for not having been on constant watch; those who work with the victims of child sexual abuse say that this is true in those cases too – there is often more blame put on the mother of a child who has been abused, than whoever actually abused them. And on a more day-to-day basis, it seems that it’s impossible for women to live up to social standards of motherhood. Mothers who go out to work are seen as neglectful, those who stay at home are seen as dullards. Today’s mothers are regularly defined as too overbearing – when they’re not being reviled as too lax.

The other big gossip-magazine trend is for women to be depicted as “mad”. Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive media obsession with women who are considered to be out of control – Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and, to a lesser extent, Paris Hilton – and it’s hard to avoid the sense that people want to watch these women’s story arcs reach the same conclusion as that of their predecessor, the former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, who died of an overdose last year. Of course, at one point there was also a massive interest in Pete Doherty’s behaviour, but it’s notable that this was when he was going out with Kate Moss, and his transgressions therefore reflected on her. Once they had broken up, that interest quickly waned.

These pop cultural trends have been around for a few years, but one longstanding issue that renewed itself very recently was the backlash against abortion rights. This crept up on me suddenly in late Spring – I knew that a Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries, was campaigning to bring the abortion time limit down from 24 weeks to 20 weeks, but until a few days before the Commons vote on this issue, I had no idea that amendments had been tabled to bring the time limit down to 12 weeks, 14 weeks, 16 weeks, 18 weeks, 22 weeks. And while the outcome of that vote was a retention of the time limit, that was only because of the Labour majority in the House of Commons. Eighteen shadow cabinet ministers voted to reduce the limit to 22 weeks; David Cameron voted to reduce it to 20 weeks. A survey of prospective Conservative MPs found that only 9% would vote in favour of the current time limit – 86% want a lower limit.

With figures like this, there seems no doubt that it could be very difficult to retain current abortion rights if the Conservatives come to power, as many now consider inevitable. And this is especially true since analysis of parliamentary candidates shows that the already appallingly low rate of women in government – they make up just under 20% of MPs – may well fall given a Tory influx at the next election, and certainly won’t rise.

“My big concern,” says Rake, “is making sure that we create a feminist debate that sustains us through however many terms of Tory government we’re going to have”. And there are plenty of other signs that we’re going to need such a debate – in fact, the backlash is intensely bound up with the current rightward shift in politics. Since taking office as Mayor of London, for instance, one of Boris Johnson’s first acts has been to axe the role of women’s adviser; an insider was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying that Johnson saw the role as a “throwback to the Eighties GLC”.

Thankfully, there are signs that the feminist debate is growing – in fact, many of those I spoke to believe that this is exactly why the backlash is so strong at the moment. Before the abortion vote took place in the Commons, for instance, a large group of women gathered outside Parliament, and formed a rowdy protest against this potential assault on our rights. Rake says that membership of Fawcett has shot up recently, because “as the progressive space closes down at a national level, it just opens up somewhere else … I do think that there’s a general unease about the culture – we’ve been campaigning on the lapdancing issue, and we’ve had a lot of people saying, ‘Thank God someone’s finally saying something about the fact that I have to walk past a lapdancing club just to get home every night’. I think that there’s that general concern about backslip on cultural issues, and then just a concern that, while on other issues we’re moving vaguely in the right direction, the progress is incredibly slow. That’s led to a kind of militancy that’s re-arising now, in all sorts of quarters.”

She points to the revival of the Reclaim the Night marches, and the recent Million Women Rise march. “I do think that there’s a sense that people are beginning to get active, because they’re also all waking up to the fact that a lot of the rights that we’ve taken for granted, can’t be. I think that that activism and recognition is a cause for optimism.”

Professor Liz Kelly, chair of the End Violence Against Women campaign agrees that we’re in a time of resistance, but also sees a positive side to the situation: “I think that you always get the greatest resistance when you’re actually doing something,” she says. “I think it signals that there’s a slightly stronger sense of feminist organisation and voice than there was 10 years ago. The irony, of course, is that you only get resistance if there’s something to be resisted.”

A friend of mine, a long-time feminist activist, notes that “there’s always been a backlash, ever since day one of women’s existence – long before it’s ever been documented. So the concept of backlash is always alive, it’s just that there are times when you think that we are really sinking into a cesspit. What I would say, though, is that, for all the resistance, I don’t think we ever take two steps back. I think we only ever take steps forward, but those steps can be smaller and harder, like wading through treacle, or sometimes you can have a little sprint, a spurt, and think, ‘That’s fantastic, we’ve won that little battle.’

“What a backlash does is that it curtails us, but we never take those two steps back, and that’s what I think can send the conservatives – and I mean that with a small ‘c’ – and the rightwingers, and the upholders of the traditional family, absolutely wild, because whatever they throw at us, so what? What do they think we’re going to do? Go back to how we were before? Go back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich? We might be wading through treacle at the moment,” she says, “but the fact is that they won’t actually win”.

Tags: Backlash, Susan Faludi, Women
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Karzai blames West for Afghan violence

NEW DELHI, India – International forces in Afghanistan have mismanaged the fight against the Taliban, leading to a rise in violence, and now risk losing people’s goodwill, President Hamid Karzai told an Indian news channel.

Karzai has often criticised the Western conduct of the war in Afghanistan, saying civilian casualties must stop.

In turn, the president, who wants to stand for re-election next year, is often criticised at home for being overly influenced by the United States and Britain.

In an interview to be aired on Indian television on Monday, he said foreign troops had failed to go after “the sanctuaries of the terrorists” which Afghan officials say exist over the border in Pakistan.

Karzai did not directly mention Pakistan but the Afghan government has said that the West should have done more to crack down on Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan.

“It was a serious neglect of that, in spite of our warning,” he told CNBC TV 18, adding that other former members of the Taliban who had given up arms were unfairly hunted down within Afghan territory.

“Some of the Taliban who have laid down their arms, who are living in the Afghan villages peacefully, who have accepted Afghanistan’s new order, they were chased, they were hunted for no reason, and they were forced to flee the country.”

Ousted from power in 2001 by U.S.-led and Afghan forces, the Taliban has vowed to topple the Afghan government and drive out the foreign troops who back it.

Some 13,000 people, including more than 380 foreign troops and 81 Canadian soldiers, have been killed in violence since 2006.

“The international community came to Afghanistan in the name of fighting terrorism and that fight has to be real and effective,” Karzai said.

“There is no way we can win this war against terrorism unless and until Afghanistan is . . . detached from the other interests or views that some of our partners have in this region.”

On the one hand the Taliban have shown a desire for political dialogue but on the other stepped up attacks, including a high-profile strike at a state parade attended by Karzai and Western diplomats in April.

Karzai also said violence had risen because not enough attention was paid in time to the training of a new Afghan army and police force.

There are 2,500 Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan as part of a NATO-led international force.

The Afghan president said he did not accept charges in the Western media of corruption, ineptitude and paranoia in his government.

“I don’t even recognise it,” he said.

Reuters

Tags: Afghanistan, Cold War, War
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Ireland sees growing opposition to European constitution

The June 12 vote on the Lisbon Treaty now seems less certain, as opposition groups, some businessmen and farmers raise concerns about sovereignty.
By Kim Murphy

NENAGH, IRELAND — The “Yes on the EU” bus rolled into town blaring a foot-stomping “Galway Girl” from its megaphone one afternoon last week, but what it got was a whole lot of no.

An Irishman has always been a hard sell, and never more so than when issues of sovereignty are at stake.

“People died for your freedom,” declares one of the signs that have popped up in this agricultural town as Ireland prepares to vote June 12 on the European Union’s new constitution. “Don’t throw it away.”

Farmer Ida McLoughlin isn’t sold on the other posters plastered around town: “Vote yes for jobs, the economy and Ireland’s future.”

“Since the EU, all you see are 4×4s going down the street and big buildings going up. The thatched cottages are gone,” McLoughlin said. “You have all these Johnny-come-lately people who were poor and got rich, and they’re dreadful people. We’ve lost our Irish values.”

Adoption of the so-called Lisbon Treaty requires ratification by all 27 member states of the EU, which could take a much more prominent role on the world stage under the streamlined diplomacy and beefed-up military readiness the document envisions.

Fourteen nations have ratified the agreement through their parliaments, and the remainder are expected to do so by the end of the year. Only Ireland’s constitution requires a referendum — and that could make or break the long-awaited constitution.

The Irish government, most business leaders and political parties of nearly every stripe have come out overwhelmingly in favor of the Lisbon Treaty, pointing out how Ireland’s membership in the EU over the last 35 years has helped transform the Emerald Isle of 4.1 million people from an impoverished backwater dependent on Britain to one of Europe’s most robust economies.

But a newly vigorous opposition composed of farmers, a few wealthy businessmen with vague connections to the U.S. defense establishment and the leftist Irish republican party, Sinn Fein, have gained quickly in recent polls, and the outcome is suddenly no longer a sure thing.

It is not clear what happens if Ireland says no — except that the union would surely be plunged, as it was when France and the Netherlands voted down an earlier EU constitution in 2005, into uncertainty and more tedious negotiations on what EU leaders say is a badly needed framework for decision-making among its suddenly more numerous member states.

“It would put us in the very tortured position of going back to the drawing board,” said Marc Coleman, a Dublin-based economic analyst.

The treaty signed in Lisbon in December would help Europe project itself more forcefully on the international stage by creating a European Council president and foreign affairs representative while outlining a framework for EU troop deployments in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

The treaty would broaden and establish a legal basis for the EU’s lawmaking powers in some areas while making them subject much more directly to national parliaments and citizens initiatives. It would set out voting weights between large and small countries, improve cross-border cooperation in areas such as crime fighting and climate change and streamline the European Commission to a manageable decision-making body of 18.

Under the treaty, member nations still would retain their historic veto power in crucial areas such as defense, foreign policy, taxation and social security, but not on issues like immigration and energy policy.

Voters in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland worry that the nation would be forced to expand abortion rights (no), forfeit its long tradition of military neutrality (no) or give up the holy grail of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle, Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate (probably not, though some in Europe would like to try).

Treaty opponents say the government is too smoothly dismissing what may be legitimate fears and is too quick to warn that Ireland would incur the wrath of the rest of Europe if it voted no.

“People always say Ireland is in very good standing at the European level. But why wouldn’t we be? We haven’t invaded one of the partner countries, we haven’t partitioned them. But we’re also a small member state, and in the power structure that is the EU, small states have to be very careful in how they protect their status and institutions,” said Mary Lou McDonald, a member of the European Parliament with Sinn Fein.

Here in County Tipperary, the “Yes on the EU” bus was stopping in front of village cafes and bakeries; young activists from the majority Fianna Fail party trailed out in yellow T-shirts. They smiled and passed out leaflets touting EU membership as a bonanza for Ireland — the country received 58 billion euros in European funds for agriculture, infrastructure and other programs from 1973 to 2003. Its exports to other EU states increased from 45 billion euros in 1997 to 87 billion in 2006.

Maire Hoctor, a Fianna Fail lawmaker and a minister of state from Nenagh, strolled the sidewalks, stopping for hugs, handshakes and an occasional tongue-lashing. She was joined by party colleague Jim Casey, mayor of North Tipperary.

“They’re not going to give us anything. They’re going to take it away, for sure,” said Bernie O’Brien, an elderly woman who resisted their overtures.

“I remember when we had nothing in this county: We had a one-way ticket to Britain, and that was our lot,” Hoctor told her.

Much of the opposition in rural Ireland involves an issue that has nothing to do with the EU treaty at all: agriculture proposals submitted last month to the World Trade Organization by the European trade commissioner, who is Britain’s former envoy to the British province of Northern Ireland.

Irish farmers say the trade proposals could put 50,000 cattle farmers in Ireland out of business by easing importation of Brazilian and Argentine beef and driving down prices. The Irish Farmers Assn. says it will urge its members to vote “no” on the EU treaty if Ireland doesn’t exercise its EU veto to block the trade proposals.

“It’s just going to decimate farms,” McLoughlin told Hoctor. “Sure, we’ve gotten subsidies from the EU. We got the check in the post, like everyone else. We were bought. We were humiliated. My husband has been told what to grow, when to grow it.”

Casey said the issue shouldn’t be used to block a treaty that will be good for Ireland.

“We’ve always negotiated good deals for the farmers in Ireland in Europe, and I’m convinced that will continue,” he said. “The EU has provided well for farmers. Since we entered Europe, everything has gotten much, much better.”

The other main source of opposition has come from a group called Libertas, fronted by two wealthy businessmen who have had extensive contracts with the U.S. military. This has caused some in the Irish media to speculate that the group is advancing the agenda of U.S. conservatives, some of whom worry that a stronger, united Europe would undermine U.S. interests on the continent.

But Ulick McEvaddy, a former military intelligence officer whose company has contracts for aerial refueling with the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps and who is one of Libertas’ biggest supporters, said he was worried about threats to Ireland’s independence.

“We’re handing over direct responsibility and huge issues of sovereignty to the Brussels parliament,” McEvaddy said. “If they believe in this great experiment, put it to all the people of Europe.”

Even in County Tipperary, some are willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

“Europe hasn’t let us down yet,” said Mick Connell, a member of the local council in Templemore, not far from Nenagh. “That should be good enough.”

From the Los Angeles Times

Tags: Europe, Ireland, Lisbon, Sovereignty
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Cuba Supports Press Freedom

By Peter Phillips

Carlos Bastidas was only 23 years of age when he was assassinated by Fulgencio Batista’s secret police after having visited Fidel Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos’ brother, told about how a river of changed flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother’s efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.

The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. World Press Freedom day was proclaimed by the UN in 1993 to honor journalists who have lost their lives reporting the news, and to defend media freedom worldwide.

During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba.

I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over 90 municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province.

During the course of several hours in each station I was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose. This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests.

Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 resulting in the deaths of seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people and several hotel bombings in the 1990s one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.

In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.

Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is bias and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one organic country in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctor from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43% increase in GDP over the past three years.

Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly, discussed bias in the US media, “how often do you see Gore Vidal interviewed on the US media?” he asked. Vidal has recently said that the US is in its ‘worst phase in history.’ “Perhaps Cuba uses corporate news to excess,” he said, “Cuban journalists need to link more to independent news sources in the US.” Alarcon went on to say that Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, but that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.

As the Cuban socialist system improves, the US does everything it can to artificially force cold-war conditions by funding terrorist attacks, maintaining an economic boycott, launching a new anti-terrorism Caribbean naval fleet, and increasingly limiting US citizen travel to Cuba. It is time to reverse this cold-war isolationist position, honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system and build a positive working relationship between journalists in support of media democracy in both our countries.

Media Channel, 2008
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology and Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media research organization. He traveled to Cuba as an invited guest of the Journalist Union of Cuba May 10 to 15, 2008.

Tags: Cold War, Cuba, Journalism, Press Freedom
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Desmond Tutu condemns Gaza blockade

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu has called Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip an “abomination.” (CLICK HERE for video)

He strongly condemned what he called international “silence and complicity” on the blockade, which he compared to the actions of Burma’s leaders.

Speaking at the end of a two day mission to the area, the former archbishop said the humanitarian situation there could not be justified.

Earlier, 60 Palestinians were detained in an Israeli raid on northern Gaza.

Residents in the Beit Hanoun area were summoned to a local square by Israeli troops with loudhailers before dozens were taken away, witnesses said.

‘International complicity’

Mr Tutu was in Gaza on a United Nations fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinians by Israeli shellfire in November 2006.
The former archbishop of Cape Town said the international community’s “silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all”.

Mr Tutu said conflicts were resolved through talking to enemies not friends.

He said his meeting with the deposed prime minister, Ismail Haniya, was an opportunity to tell the Hamas leader the firing of rockets into Israel was also a violation of human rights.

During his two-day visit, Mr Tutu met relatives of 19 civilians killed in the Israeli shelling of two houses in Beit Hanoun and is due to report his findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

He condemned the incident as a “massacre”.

Israel says the Beit Hanoun deaths in November 2006 were a mistake during action to target areas used by Palestinian militants.

The Israeli military confirmed its pre-dawn incursion into Gaza on Thursday and said about 60 “wanted Palestinians” were being interrogated.

Armoured military bulldozers destroyed farmland during the incursion, witnesses told AFP news agency.

Israeli forces launch frequent attacks into Gaza which they say are aimed at combating Palestinian militants who fire rockets into Israel.

Further comments on this article on Canadian Dimension

Tags: Israel, Middle East, Tutu
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