Iraq War Crimes

President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

dlindorff — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:22:53 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

Let’s just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000
tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it
in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive
dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic
in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the
effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets
because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and
concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons
were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they
have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon
hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those
military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge
(this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at
government-directed control of information. In America, some of the
most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media—supposedly
a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted
uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as
Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American
military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just
recently, stories have appeared both on Britain’s SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper,
reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant
cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf,
Baghdad and Samara—all urban areas where there were major assaults by
US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons
were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a
staggering 15 times normal—an increase of 1400%! While the article
doesn’t mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in
Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of
birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late
2004, they do say those doctors cite “radiation and chemicals” which
were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn’t tell CBS News or CNN not to report
this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least
generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington
Post and say, “Don’t report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or
on the possible connection to US weaponry” (Though the government did
ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National
Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and
managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story
about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the
2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations
themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of
no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized
either by the government or by other media organizations for being
unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is
that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone
in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and
journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese
people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian
dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the
state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are
being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them.
Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up
subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how
to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also
developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting
called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, “back-alley news.” This
system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As
telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing
transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet,
which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known
as China’s “Great Firewall”—effectively all of China is like a vast
corporate “intranet” which blocks access to outside websites—still
allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor,
particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of
addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes,
of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important
news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay,
manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship
apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the
Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and
they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is
blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored,
filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we
boast of our “free press,” and our open society, and indeed, as a
journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn’t
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won’t appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don’t even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care—either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland—and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world—or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as “number one.”

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn’t get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization’s history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier “heroes” are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don’t insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pentagon Dirty Bombers: Depleted Uranium in the USA

dlindorff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:27:12 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow
and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit
to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch
of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains
of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield
Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is
a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing
of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a
pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that
any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many
as 2000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa
alone.

But that’s only a small part of the story.

The Army is actually seeking a master permit from the NRC to cover
all the sites where it has fired DU weapons, including penetrator
shells that, unlike the M101, are designed to hit targets and burn on
impact, turning the DU in the warhead into a fine dust of uranium oxide.

Depleted-uranium tipped M101 "spotting round" for Davy Crockett mortar

Uranium particles, whether pure uranium or in an oxidized form, are
alpha emitters, and can be highly carcinogenic and mutagenic if
ingested or inhaled, since they can lodge in one part of the body—the
kidney or lung or gonad, for example—and then irradiate surrounding
cells with large, destructive alpha particles (actually helium atoms),
until some gene is compromised and a cell become malignant.

Among the sites identified by the NRC as being contaminated with DU are:

Ft. Hood, TX
Ft. Benning, GA
Ft. Campbell, KY
Ft. Knox, KY
Ft. Lewis, WA
Ft. Riley, KS
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD
Ft. Dix, NJ
Makua Military Reservation, HI

Other locations identified as having DU weapons contamination are:

China Lake Air Warfare Center, CA
Eglin AFB, Florida,
Nellis AFB, NV
Davis-Monthan AFB
Kirkland AFB, NM
White Sands Missile Range, NM
Ethan Allen Firing Range, VT
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

An application for a 99-year permit to test DU weapons at the NM
Inst. Of Mining and Technology claimed that that site’s test area was
“so contaminated with DU…as to preclude any other use”!

DU weapons have also been used by the Navy at Vieques Island off Puerto Rico (the Navy claimed it was a “mistake.”

The Pentagon continues a long history of claiming that DU is not
dangerous, although this official stance is belied by the warnings it
has given to its troops (though not to civilians in battle zones), to
stay well clear of tanks and other equipment destroyed by US tanks,
which used DU weapons as the ordnance of choice in both the Gulf War
and the current Iraq War. During both wars, DU ammunition was used by
Army and Marine tanks, by the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the A-10 ground
support jet, the Marine Harrier jet, and specially equipped F16 fighter
jets. The Navy also switched from DU ammunition to tungsten ammunition
in its Phalanx anti-missile ship defense system because of health and
environmental concerns with the DU ammo.

The Pentagon denies that it uses depleted uranium in bombs, missiles
and cruise missile warheads, but military personnel have reported their
use in all three delivery systems, and reports exist of DU
bunker-buster bombs, DU-tipped penetrator warheads on Tomahawk cruise
missiles and on some air-to-ground missiles.

It’s a good bet that all US munitions containing DU have been widely tested at various US military bases and testing grounds.

The bottom line is that at the same time that US government is
continuing to warn about the danger of terrorists acquiring the
materials to make a “dirty” bomb that could spread radioactive material
in the US, the US military has for years been doing exactly that, and
continues to do so, with no intention to clean up its messes, many of
which are allowing depleted uranium to percolate into ground water or
flow down streams to more populated areas.

Of course, it could have been worse. The M101 mortar that litters
Pohakuloa was actually designed as a range-finder for the Davy Crocket
mortar, which back in the late 1950s and the 1960s was designed to
allow infantry troops to fire a small “tactical” nuclear mortar shell
at targets just five miles distant. Some 700 of these “little nukes”,
that had a power of “just” several kilotons or less, were made and
actually made their way into the arsenals of troops in Europe and
elsewhere during the Cold War. Fortunately there are no reports of any
of them having been fired off at any of the military’s firing ranges.

Then again, the Pentagon doesn’t exactly have a sterling record
about telling the truth where nuclear weapons and DU weapons are
concerned.

Nor is the NRC to be relied on to protect the American public. As an
administrative judge wrote in a ruling on a case involving DU
contamination at Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana, the NRC exhibited
a “more than casual attitude with regard to decommissioning of sites on
which radioactive materials remain as a potential threat to public
health and safety and to the environment.”

In another case, involving cleanup of the ShieldAlloy Metallurgical
Corp.’s site in Newfield, NJ, where DU weapons were made, a judge said,
“at the very least, the (NRC) staff has countenanced…a situation that
will leave the citizens in the area surrounding the activity site in
doubt for close to two decades regarding what measures will ultimately
be taken for their protection.”
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Outrageous Thought of the Day: Nuclear Hypocrisy

dlindorff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:47:22 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and
Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and
radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that
gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff
that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough
as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and
burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of
Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily
contaminated by DU ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of
Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has
fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also
launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs
at it.

While I don't have direct knowledge, I'd say it's a safe bet that
there are a number of sites on the Mainland US where DU munitions have
also been widely used--maybe White Sands Proving Ground the Marine
training area near Joshua Tree National Monument in Southern
California, or other such training and testing areas.

The simple truth is that our own government, besides committing an
ongoing atrocity in the Middle East, is also poisoning our own country
with uranium oxide.

Our Nobel Peace Prize president should take note. President John F.
Kennedy reportedly moved to halt open air testing of nuclear weapons
after looking at the rain falling outside the window of the Oval Office
and asking a science advisor whether it was delivering nuclear fallout
to his front lawn (he was told that it was). Maybe President Obama
should consider that the rain today is delivering uranium dust to his
wife's and daughters' garden in the back yard of the White House. At
least he should take a look at pictures of the horribly deformed babies
being born to mothers in Iraq (and of the lucky babies that are
stillborn), thanks to the radioactive warfare that the US military has
been employing against both that country and Afghanistan--his
"necessary" war.

There is another irony here too. The US is expressing concern about
Iran enriching uranium, and possibly creating a nuclear bomb, which in
the unlikely event that it were ever used, might spread some
radioactivity around parts of the Middle east, yet it is the US which
already has spread 2000 or more tons of uranium dust all over Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 18 years--far more than any small Iranian bomb could release.

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is
"The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Depleted Uranium Weapons: The Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:08:18 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only
to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions
in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power
plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’
spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope
U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found
in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. Once simply a
nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose
of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number
of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times
heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added
property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an
ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense
concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through
the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside
(which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of
Iraqi tanks hit by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30
mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog
ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan
(as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks
and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker
buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its
warhead. DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns
up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise
missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly
feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which
carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is
used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment.
This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these
vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops
in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers,
etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched
vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried
in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear
materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait,
polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the
1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year
with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international health officials have
been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years
ago by the Christian Science Monitor
described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in
Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with
radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has
exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are
just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested.
Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly
poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in
the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of
deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons
were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US
Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has
received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found
a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects
have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq,
where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack
on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal
Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006,
stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies
born, 24% of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet,
fully 75% of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to
August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births
were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one
deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and
many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating
the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially
in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will
come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war
crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and
other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic
effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US
military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who
were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange,
the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously
denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims
by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to
do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a
cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban
on all depleted uranium weapons.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
work is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

It's Congress: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands After Hearings

dlindorff — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:06:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible
volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an
awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and
stifling laughs. A few of us couldn’t contain ourselves and actually
burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We
couldn’t resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a
prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy
lumber out. Instead, a shrivled little old man left the booth, nodded
silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to
produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max
Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of
allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six—three
conservative Democrats and three Republicans—and several weeks more of
discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that
essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather
smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed
buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health
insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

If the stench of corruption from the legal bribes of the insurance
industry lobby were not so vile and pervasive, we would all be rolling
in the aisles at the tiny fart produced by all that straining and
pushing on the part of Sen. Baucus (D-Montana) and his Finance Committee
colleagues.

Of course, it’s not over yet. Once both houses of Congress have
voted to approve the bills that have emerged from committee in House
and Senate, there will be another session on the pot—this time in a
secret conference committee, where members of the leadership of both
houses will negotiate to come up with a single bill to send back to
their respective houses for an up-or-down vote.

It can be safely predicted that the final legislation will resemble
much more the Senate version than the House version, because Senate
Democrats long ago surrendered control of that body to the minority
Republicans by accepting the so-called Rule of 60, whereby any
Republican can simply threaten to filibuster a piece of legislation and
the Democrats will immediately take it back and hack off any offending
piece of it to ensure that either all Democrats will vote for it, or
that one or two allegedly sane Republicans will join the majority of
Democrats, thus making a filibuster impossible.

Not once since at least 2006, when Democrats took over the Senate,
has the Senate Democratic leadership demanded that all Democrats in
that body support a bill or face retaliation, in the form of lost
committee assignments or sabotage of a bill important to local
constituents—the kind of thing that Republicans have done with their
members for years.

Indeed, Democrats seem to like the imaginary Rule of 60, as it
gives them a ready excuse to never have to actually do anything
progressive, as demanded by their electoral base.

And so, whether it’s health care reform, financial industry
regulation and reform, climate change legislation, civil liberties,
investigations into torture and war crimes, or ending the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, Congress has come to resemble a French railway station
lavatory, with committees grunting away in the stalls behind closed
doors, while a little old lady in the corner collects change from the
visitors who regularly come in to take a piss and monitor the
proceedings.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Is America a Sick Country or What?

dlindorff — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:19:32 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

You see, here's the thing. When you hear about the sick, twisted
things that America's torturers have been doing, courtesy of President
George W. Bush and Vice President Darth Cheney, you have to remember
that the US military and the CIA were not really all that reliable when
it came to picking up the real terrorists. In fact, their batting
average was pretty lousy.

According to even the Pentagon's own reckoning, for example,
probably 85% of the captives being held at Guantanamo over the past
eight years were not terrorists at all, and a fair number--probably the
majority--weren't even fighting anyone when they were captured. I'm
sure that the averages at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or at the
secret prison in Iraq are no better. The military was offering bounties
in Iraq and Afghanistan for alleged terrorists, you see, and probably
still is, but in both of those lawless, tribal countries, many people
have used the offer to settle old feuds, turning in people they wanted
to punish or dispose of, and many others just turned in random people
to get the reward money.

Remember this when you hear about torture tactics that we are
learning were used by our side--things that make waterboarding sound
like a walk in the park. We're now getting confirmation of things that
we journalists were hearing rumors of earlier: faked executions using
blanks, faked executions in neighboring rooms, followed by threats of
the same to a person who had just heard the screams and a shot in the
cell next to him, threats with an electric drill, and now perhaps the
worst yet--the threat to kill a captive's children. And of course there
is the already disclosed case of a captive who had his genitals cut
with a razor, and generous use of tasers in places on the body designed
to cause maximum pain. That, and of course there are a lot raped
captives (including young boys), and a lot of bodies yet to be dug up
of captives who were simply killed during torture.

We've got a litany of horror and abuse here that sounds like the
worst kind of stories that used to come out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
or the Argentine Junta or Idi Amin's Uganda. About the only thing
missing is word that the military and CIA torturers were eating their
victims, or feeding them their own genitals, but who knows? Maybe we'll
get there yet. It's hard at this point to rule anything out.

What has become of the US? We started out the victims
of an attack in 2001, with the whole world rallying to our side, and
within a matter of weeks, our government, acting in our name, had
secretly embarked on a wholly unnecessary and totally criminal descent
into the barbarity of Middle Ages.

And now? The new administration has claimed to have put a stop to
the atrocities, but it remains adamant that it is not going to root out
the evil that was already done to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.

President Barack Obama says he does not want to look back at any
crimes that were committed. He wants to go "forward." This is not the
voice of justice, though. This is the voice of political gutlessness
and of big power exceptionalism. The same America that demands the
prosecution of war criminals in little countries like Cambodia or
Serbia or Sudan, considers itself exempt from criminal liability for
its own crimes.

Attorney General Eric Holder says he may be ready to appoint a
prosecutor to investigate cases where CIA or private contract torturers
"overstepped" the rules set by the White House and Justice Department,
but he has said he will not allow the investigation to go beyond that
to pursue the people who enabled those acts of torture--people like
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who personally instructed
torturers in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" in one case, or
Assistant Attorney Generals John Yoo and Jay Baybee (now a federal
judge), who ruled that anything short of the destruction of bodily
organs or of a pain level equivalent to death was okay. Nor will he
allow any investigation to look at acts of torture that were
authorized, like waterboarding, if they had the sanction of the
Bush/Cheney White House.

This position taken by the new administration should sicken us all.
Worse, it should be broadly condemned, because if the descent into
barbarity which occurred with the highest White House sanction is not
investigated thoroughly, and punished fully, there is no way we can say
it will not happen again. In fact, it's safe to say that it will happen again,
the next time another charlatan gets into office and uses fear to blind
the American people to all that is right and decent, and to the
importance of maintaining the rule of law.

I know there are terrible things happening right now which demand
our attention and action--an escalating, endless war in Afghanistan
that increasingly resembles Vietnam in 1966 or 1967, a presidential
cave-on on health care reform, a sell-out on real action against
climate change, and on and on--but this particular crime--the crime of
failing to act to punish violations of the Geneva Conventions on
treatment of prisoners of war, which is being committed today by the
Obama administration--is so obscene, so directly in our faces, and is
such a stain on the whole nation, that it demands action.

We will probably never know how many innocent lives have been
destroyed by America's eight years of officially sanctioned torture,
but we can at least see to it that the people who sanctioned it, and
not just those who engaged in it (and that goes right up through the
chain of command to the Commander in Chief and to the real power behind
the throne, Dick Cheney), are put in the dock like the criminals at
Nuremberg, to face the charge of war crimes. and crimes against
humanity.

As the citizens of what we call a democracy, we can demand nothing less.
__________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadeelphia-area journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Clinton and Obama: The Worst and Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

dlindorff — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:20:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Bill Clinton was the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party
and to progressives since that racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency and dragged the US into the utterly pointless and incredibly
bloody First World War.

Clinton, by posing as a progressive, confused and undermined, and
ultimately betrayed the liberal/progressive wing of the party,
shattering what was left of the New Deal coalition and leaving the
American left adrift and riven by the conflict between those who
thought the Democratic Party was the only viable vehicle for
progressive reform and those who thought it was hopelessly in the grip
of corporate interests.

Barack Obama offers the hope of bringing that era of debilitating confusion to an end.

Not because he is the Great Black Hope of progressives, but because
he has taken the concept of selling out to corporate interests and
compromising with Republicans to such remarkable heights that
progressives hopefully can no longer be confused about the
irretrievably corrupted nature of the Democratic Party.

On virtually every issue of importance, President Obama has sided with corporate interests and the wealthy.

On the issue of war and peace, he has sided with the
military-industrial complex, with a policy of permanent occupation of
Iraq and endless war in Afghanistan, as well as continued funding of
the country’s colossal armory of death, from strategic missiles and
submarines to aircraft-carrier-group armadas to high-tech fighter
squadrons and space weaponry.

On civil liberties, he has sided with the police state, supporting
continuation of the Bush/Cheney administration’s insidious National
Security Agency spying program, defended military spying within the US,
and refused to prosecute obvious abuses by the prior administration.

On torture, the Obama administration is continuing the imprisonment
and torture of captives in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world
at Bagram Air Base and, probably, at other secret sites, and instead of
closing Guantanamo as promised, is looking into transferring that
hellhole of torture and abuse to one or several sites in the mainland
US.

Health care reform has become a sad joke, with the emerging
“reform” bill looking for all the world like the Rube Goldberg creation
of the Clinton era that properly went down in flames. Instead of taking
on the insurance industry, the hospital companies and the
pharmaceutical industry and other parts of the profit-making
medical-industrial complex, Obama cut deals with all of them behind
closed doors, assuring that their profits would be left untouched, and
that they could essentially write their own “reform” bill through the
offices of bought-and-paid members of Congress like Senator Max Baucus.
Obama and his congressional allies carefully kept any discussion of the
single-payer idea—essentially Medicare for all, and the approach that
even Obama himself admits would be cheaper and more universal—out of
sight and off the table.

Climate change action, too, has been sold out, with Obama adopting
the approach favored by the energy industry—“cap and trade.” That
concept is a gold mine for Wall Street trading firms, which will be
doing trades next in pollution credits instead of subprime mortgages,
and for energy companies which will get free credits to sell, courtesy
of the taxpayer. And because it’s a system so easy to game, it will do
nothing or next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Finally, there’s economy and banking reform. Here Obama didn’t even
make a pretense of taking a progressive approach. There is a stimulus
program, but half of it was in the form of tax cuts—token for the poor
and middle class and significant for the rich and for businesses, and
half in the form of federal grants, often for unneeded projects like
roads and road repair which go to some of the higher paid members of
the working class, leaving the poor and the ununionized with no job
help. Meanwhile, bankers were the recipients of trillions of dollars in
bailout assistance, while nothing was done to break up the huge
mega-bank holding companies that brought on the financial and economic
crisis in the first place. Instead of picking economic advisers and
bank regulators from the many talented system critics like Nobelists
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Obama picked veterans of the
Bush/Cheney administration, and Wall Street shills like Larry Summers
and Timothy Geithner.

Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not
because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his
background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience
living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead
him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped
too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out
for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the
right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.

I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist
through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was
wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor
movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has
to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of
their key issues.

But here is the silver lining: The sell-out this time is so much
more blatant, and so much more serious, than it was with Clinton, and
for all the talk about Obama’s ability to string words together, he is
so much less of a charismatic figure than the gregarious Bill Clinton,
that he is unlikely to hang on to the ardent support that propelled him
to his victory last November. The disappointment and sense of betrayal
among progressives this time is palpable, especially because, while
Clinton, by 1994, had the excuse that he was working with a Republican,
or partially Republican Congress, Obama has solid control of both
houses, but refuses to use it. If, as I expect, the recession continues
to deepen, with more and more people losing jobs and homes, if, as I
predict, health care continues to be unaffordable and inaccessible, if,
as I know will happen, evidence of deadly climate change continues to
pile up, and if, as I am equally certain, Iraq explodes and the war in
Afghanistan continue to worsen, the left is going to see Obama and the
Democrats in Congress as the failures and corrupt frauds they are, and
will abandon them.

That leaves the question of what to do, and where those frustrated progressives will turn.

I don’t claim to have the answer to that. Clearly the labor movement
needs to recognize that hitching its fortunes to the Democratic Party
has been and will continue to be a dismal failure. It needs to pull all
its political money back and only support those who are 100% allies in
the struggle for the rights of workers. No money for the party as a
whole. It should also go back to the pioneering work of people like the
late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil and Chemical and Atomic Workers Union,
who before his death was tirelessly working to establish an American
labor party.

Other third parties on the left need to drop their individual
agendas and work towards unity, especially with the labor movement, in
order to create a broad-based left party that doesn’t have litmus tests
for inclusion—just broad principles like steeply progressive taxation,
an end to NAFTA and the WTO, democratization of the Federal Reserve
Bank, national health care, a wholesale slashing of the military
budget, by perhaps two-thirds or more, free education through four
years of college for all, and a crisis plan to attack climate change.

If the ever fractious US left, and the somnolent labor movement,
cannot come together as one, there is little hope of political change
in America. At that point the alternative would be an increasing
militancy over these critical issues, outside of the electoral
arena—something that has to happen anyhow, regardless of whether a real
third party force can be put together. We know that simply organizing
occasional polite marches in Washington, or in key cities, accomplishes
nothing. We have learned that email campaigns to deluge members of
Congress with canned opinions don’t work. What has worked, and will
always work, is massive campaigns of civil disobedience, tent cities in
Washington, organized disruption of war preparations, and door-to-door
organizing. The corrupt hacks who inhabit the halls of Congress and the
White House will not do the right thing just because it is the right
thing, or because we ask them nicely. They may, if we make them fear
that they will actually lose our votes in the next election. For the
most part, incumbent Democrats know that the people who peacefully
march down Connecticut Avenue are still likely to vote for them come
the next election. They’re not going to be so sure about people who are
being hit by tear gas and water cannons and who are being hauled off en
masse to jail at protests.

We may need to start sending that stronger message.
___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net www.thiscantbehappening.net

Saving Private Bergdahl

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:49:47 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for
23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the US soldier in Afghanistan who was
captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who
must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to
happen to him.

But I’m willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now,
that the US had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture
and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in
Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called
War on Terror.

I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be
suckered into joining the US military and was then dispatched to fight
and kill people in some far-off land where the US had no reason to be
in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know
that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in
respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the
treatment of captives.

The sad truth, however, is that neither the Bush/Cheney
administration, which simply tossed out the Geneva Conventions in 2001
and said its provisions, despite being signed into law by the US, did
not apply to the war in Afghanistan, which was the first assault in
what they conceived as a borderless and endless War on Terror, nor the
Obama administration, which has refused to grant full Geneva Convention
rights to the captives it holds in places like Afghanistan’s Bagram Air
Base, or at Guantanamo Bay, or to prosecute those who tortured and
ordered torture in the prior administration, has followed the law...

For the rest of this article, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

On Torture and War, Obama Sounds Increasingly, and Disturbingly, Like Bush

dlindorff — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:46:31 -0400

by Dave Lindorff

In reversing himself and declaring that the US government will not release further photos in its possession of torture being practiced on captives held by the US military and the CIA, President Obama is sounding increasingly like the Bush/Cheney administration before him.

It may well be that, as Obama says, release of those photos could lead to anger in the Islamic world and perhaps to recruitment gains among groups like Al Qaeda that are attacking American troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but this is only true because at the same time, the Obama administration is opposing taking any legal action against the people who authorized and promoted that torture.

If the Obama administration were to open a full-scale legal investigation into torture, with an independent prosecutor assigned to go after anyone who violated the Geneva Conventions and the US Criminal Code outlawing torture and the authorization, condoning or covering-up of torture, quite the opposite would happen: people in the Islamic world would see that this nation was coming to terms with those who abused the law.

As things stand, we have a only few people at the very bottom of the chain of command who are doing jail time or suffering administrative punishments for committing acts of torture and abuse which they believed had been ordered and authorized by leaders in the military, the Secretary of Defense's office, and the White House, but not one of those in authority who set the torture of captives in motion has been called to justice. Obama has endorsed that situation by again referring to the torture as just the actions of "a few people."

It was hardly that, however, and he knows it. Torture was a major part of the Bush/Cheney so-called "War" on Terror, and was being conducted on an industrial scale, with White House lawyers providing legal cover, the Secretary of Defense sending memos urging every more aggressive techniques, and government doctors and psychologists working assiduously to make them more "effective."

The illogic of Obama's position on these photos is stunning. Since we know the photos exist, the refusal to make them public can only feed a sense that they must be worse than the horrific photos of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison which were already released. Nobody is going to assume that the photos in the White House's possession are less offensive than what has already been discovered and made public--for why would the administration be worried about that?

The truth is always better than a cover-up, and what we now have the president advocating is a cover-up of American torture.

But that's only part of the president's slide into Cheneyism. We have the president now calling for the possible indefinite detention of terror suspects--an idea that only insures that there will always be an incentive for recruiting more terrorists (to avenge those in captivity)--and that makes a joke of our own Constitution, which guarantees everyone--not just citizens--the right to a trial, the right to a presumption of innocence, and protection from "cruel and unusual punishment," which indefinite detention certainly is.

The war in Afghanistan, which now must be called Obama's War, thanks to his policy of escalation, is also becoming Cheneyesque, with the firing of Gen. David McKiernan, and his replacement as head of the Afghanistan War by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Gen. McChrystal hails from the Special Forces, and played a role in the torture that was integral to the US war and occupation in Iraq. Far from being put in charge of operations in Afghanistan, where public backing for the US military is virtually non-existent at this point, McChrystal should be facing investigation and possible prosecution here at home for his role in torture of captives.

It has never made sense to initiate a war in Afghanistan in order to go after a band of criminal terrorists hidiing out in the mountains. Bush and Cheney turned what should have been a focused hunt for Al Qaeda terrorists into a war on the Taliban government and ultimately the people of Afghanistan. Obama has continued that error, and now blithely hyphenates the terms Al Qaeda and Taliban in defining the "enemy" of American forces in that country.

Such a war can never be won, and can only lead to tragedy, not just for the people of Afghanistan, for whom it is already that, but for American troops and ultimately for America itself.

It is a war that never should have been fought, and which now should be ended as rapidly as possible.

Obama at this point, by covering up for official torture, and by signing on to and expanding the war in Afghanistan, is dooming his presidency, further staining the reputation of the United States, and ultimately furthering the decline of the country that was set in motion by his predecessors.

____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

1, 2, 3 What Are We Fighting For? The War Crimes Song-and-Dance Routine

dlindorff — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:41:52 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over--and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

In Iraq, we took a city of 300,000, Fallujah, and effectively leveled it. Anyone who died there was presumed to be an insurgent, though the truth was, the Marines encircling the city before the onslaught only allowed fleeing women, girls and male children who were under the age 12 to flee, sending older boys and men seeking to get out back into the city to meet their fate.

Just this week, the brave Marines in Iraq blew away a 12-year-old boy after someone tossed a grenade their way. Local people said the grenade had been tossed by an older man standing near the boy, who fled. The unlucky boy, who was just a kid who sold gum for a living, had not done anything, local people said.

Now it’s Afghanistan, where upwards of 120 people, including babies and small children, were slaughtered during a battle in a remote part of the country in the latest example of mass deaths at the hands of American forces. Local people say that several villages in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province of were intensely bombarded by US planes, causing most if not all of the deaths. The US response to the initial charges of a mass slaughter of civilians was to blame the deaths on the Taliban. When it became clear that the victims had died of burns and shrapnel, not from bullets, the US came out with a new explanation: The Taliban had tossed grenades at the locals. But reporters at the scene reported seeing huge craters and leveled buildings—not what you get from hand grenades. Then came reports of unusually deep and localized burns—the type caused by white phosphorus—a weapon that the US has used widely in Iraq--including in densely populated Fallujah—and in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon immediately said it did not use white phosphorus bombs in the battle in question, and suggested instead that perhaps the Taliban had used phosphorus grenades. This again was an absurd argument. The purpose of phosphorus weapons, primarily, is to light up a battlefield, but Taliban fighters don’t want lit up battlefields. They prefer operating the dark. It is the US that wants to light up targets.

Besides, there are those craters to explain.

So the next dance step was to say that the Taliban had caused the deaths, because during their retreat they had fled to the town, miles from the scene of the battle that led to the calling in of air support by US advisers to embattled government forces, and in so doing, had brought the attack upon the villagers.

Well, assuming that is true, there is still the problem that under the Geneva Conventions, it is a war crime to attack an enemy where the risk of harming large numbers of civilians is too great. The extreme example would the bombing of a school full of children on the grounds that a few enemy soldiers were hiding in the school (something that the Israeli military did in Gaza during the recent invasion, causing the deaths of dozens of children). But bombing a town full of people in order to hit a few retreating enemy fighters is equally criminal—a point that the Pentagon, and the compliant US media, are ignoring.

Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan—for it is indeed his war now—is turning into the same kind of bloody imperial slaughter that Iraq was earlier under President Bush. The stated objective—eliminating Al Qaeda—has been lost. The enemy of all this fighting isn’t Al Qaeda at all; it is the indigenous Taliban—the former governing power in Afghanistan until the US invasion in 2001, and a political organization that never was an enemy of the US.

Whatever one might think of the religious fanatics and misogynists who go under the name Taliban, they are not seeking to overthrow the West. They are simply seeking to return to power in Afghanistan, one of the poorest, remotest, and economically and politically least important countries in the world.

And to defeat that movement, if that can even be done, the US is going to have to kill Afghani civilians by the truckload, as it has been doing.

And then there has to be the inevitable dancing around to hide the criminality of what the US is doing.

The blame-the-victim dance goes on.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net