Youth Against War and Racism

Reconsider Columbus' Day

2010-10-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

'What Happens if We Stay in Afghanistan': A Response to TIME Magazine

2010-08-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/14-4

by South Asia Solidarity Initiative

The August 9, 2010 issue of TIME magazine featured a striking cover photograph of an 18-year-old Afghan woman, Aisha, who was disfigured by the Taliban last year. The cover title read, "What happens if we leave Afghanistan." While Aisha's story and the stories of many other women like her may depict some part of the reality of women's lives under the Taliban, TIME's conclusion that continuing the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is necessary, is highly misleading and troubling.

Afghan women, like women around the world, have lived under very oppressive conditions for decades. Many women remain indoors, without education or health care, or economic security, have early marriages, and are unprotected from domestic violence. Today, after a decade of the U.S.-led occupation, the lives of Afghan women have become worse, not better: in addition to facing continued oppression under the Taliban and the equally oppressive Northern Alliance, they also live in a war zone.
TIME's statement echoes and resurrects the same justification for the war given during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan: if U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan, any rights gained for Afghan women will be reversed by fundamentalist forces. However, this false logic grossly ignores the history of the U.S. imperialist relationship and presence in the region and its effect on women's rights. During the Soviet occupation in the 1980's, the U.S. armed the anti-Soviet Mujahideen forces, who were at one point led by Osama Bin Laden. In subsequent years the Taliban rose to power, with the Unitd States as its ally. In 2001, when the Bush administration sought to topple the Taliban regime, the United States armed and enlisted the help of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of warlords with its own track record of human rights abuses. Indeed, the United States has consistently chosen the side of fundamentalist allies at the expense of Afghan women, and has always sought its own gains in the region.
In its nine long years, the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan has done nothing to improve the conditions for people in Afghanistan, especially for women. As the classified documents recently leaked by WikiLeaks.org corroborate, the coalition forces have been killing hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the 2009 civilian death toll, close to 2,412 civilian deaths, was the highest of any year since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, and an increase of 24% from 2008. There has been a general increase in violence and civilian deaths because of occupation. A Human Rights Watch Press Alert in 2005, stated that up to 60% of law makers in the lower house of Afghanistan's newly elected parliament are directly or indirectly connected to human rights abuses. By 2009, the U.N. human development index ranked Afghanistan 181 out of 182 countries. The maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan reveals the highest ever documented. Over the past decade, the immensely corrupt, U.S.-backed Afghan regime led by Hamid Karzai has passed and maintained numerous misogynist laws, including the one that put Aisha in jail after she fled from her in-laws.

For the last decade, the occupying forces of the U.S. and its NATO allies have nourished warlords and supported a corrupt government, leading many to join the Taliban and increasing their influence across Afghanistan. Increased civilian deaths, a fundamentalist resurgence, and deadly bombing raids have led to a devastated country and a Taliban stronger than ever before. TIME's claim to "illuminate what is actually happening on the ground" falsely equates the last decade of occupation with progress. The occupation has not and will not bring democracy to Afghanistan, nor will it bring liberation to Afghan women. Instead, it has exacerbated deep-seated corruption in the government, the widespread abuse of women's rights and human rights by fundamentalists, including Karzai's allies, and stymied critical infrastructure development in the country. The question should not be "what happens if we leave Afghanistan," the question should be "what happened when we invaded Afghanistan" and "what happens if we stay in Afghanistan."

The Afghan people are capable of creating their own democratic future. Progressive groups and democratic parties in Afghanistan are fighting to reconstruct the peace and safety of their country, and more often than not, are forced underground for fear of their safety. Despite the repression from the U.S.-backed Karzai government, thousands of brave students and women have come out on to the streets of Kabul to protest the bombings and the continued war. It is from these forces that a larger progressive movement will emerge that could play a role in bringing real democracy to Afghanistan. If the United States continues the occupation, the space for progressive forces becomes increasingly limited.

We must know and remember, that liberation never comes from occupation. We must know and remember, that there will always be resistance to occupation. Occupations, no matter where they take place, from Iraq to Palestine to Turtle Island, are unjust. The American people must come out in support and solidarity with the resilient peoples of Afghanistan and elsewhere who are fighting for their own liberation, and must call for the end of all U.S. wars and occupations.
Signatories:
South Asia Solidarity Initiative
Iraq Veterans Against the War
Derrick O'Keefe co-writer of the autobiography Malalai Joya -- A Woman Among Warlords
Veterans For Peace
Courage to Resist
Anjali Kamat, Producer, Democracy Now!
Robert Jensen, University of Texas, Austin, TX

The South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) is an organization based the United States that is in solidarity with progressive social movements and democratic politics in South Asia. We believe in the shared history and common struggles of South Asia and break from the confines of nation-states to carry forward an alternative vision for South Asia and its peoples.

Report: Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications

2010-08-12T23:51:00.000-07:00

U.S. military aid flowing to Colombia is having a direct, negative effect on the human rights of Colombians. Though the “Leahy Law” prohibits aid to military units that have committed gross violations, the United States continues to support such units in Colombia. Worse, areas where Colombian army units received the largest increases in U.S. assistance reported increased extrajudicial killings on average.

You can read the executive summary below or download the full 51 page report (PDF, 1.4 MB).

The scale of U.S. training and equipping of other nations’ militaries has grown exponentially since 2001, but there are major concerns about the extent to which the U.S. government is implementing the laws and monitoring the impact its military aid is having on human rights. This report by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and U.S. Office on Colombia examines these issues through a detailed case study of U.S.military aid, human rights abuses, and implementation of human rights law in Colombia.

U.S. Military Assistance to the Colombian Army

The experience of US military funding to Colombia shows alarming links between Colombian military units that receive U.S. assistance and civilian killings committed by the army. To prevent similar errors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, relevant Congressional committees and the State Department Office of the Inspector General must thoroughly study the Colombia case and implementation of U.S. law designed to keep security assistance from going to security force units committing gross human rights violations.While researching this report over a period of two years, we drew on a rich set of data about more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the armed forces in Colombia since 2002 and on lists of more than 500 military units assisted by the United States since 2000. FOR found that U.S.officials neglected their duties under the Leahy law, and that many Colombian military units committed even more extrajudicial killings during and after the highest levels of U.S. assistance to those units. Whatever correlation may exist between assistance and reported killings, there are clearly other factors contributing to high levels of killings. Yet, while we could not fix the causes of increased reports of killings after increases in U.S. assistance, our findings highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent correlation.

U.S. Aid and Subsequent Abuses in Colombia (2000-2006)

A number of U.S. laws are designed to protect against the use of U.S. foreign aid to commit human rights abuses. A principal one is the Leahy Amendment, which prohibits assistance to any foreign security force unit if the State Department has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross human rights violations. The country where application of the Leahy law has been the most rigorous — according to the State Department — is Colombia. Yet our analysis strongly suggests that implementation of Leahy Law in Colombia requires suspension of assistance to nearly all Army fixed brigades and many mobile brigades. Most military training in Colombia is funded by the Defense Department.

How should embassy personnel determine whether units should receive assistance where there are high numbers of reported violations for which the responsible unit has not been identified? The data shows that the brigade jurisdiction where a reported violation occurred is a reliable indicator of what unit committed it. Moreover, in Colombia, extrajudicial killings reportedly occurred in nearly all Army brigade jurisdictions, which puts in doubt the legality of assisting any such brigade.

U.S. Aid and Extrajudicial Executions in Colombia

The Leahy Law includes an exception on the prohibition of assistance if “effective measures” (or “necessary steps” for DOD-funded training) are being taken to bring those responsible for a violation to justice. Yet the State Department’s documentation illustrates that only 1.5% of the reported extrajudicial executions have resulted in conviction.

As the data in this report indicate, after November 2008, the number of reported killings of civilians by the Colombian armed forces dropped precipitously, apparently due to an institutional decision to address the practice. The decrease in killings attributed to the armed forces has been accompanied by a steep climb in the number of reported killings by paramilitary successor groups. The implications of reduced reports of civilian killings for continued U.S. assistance under the Leahy Law, however, are minimal, since the law requires not simply an end to the killing, but “effective measures” to bring those responsible to justice before new or continued assistance to the armed forces is lawful.

U.S. Aid and Subsequent Abuses in Colombia (2005-2008)

If U.S. assistance were having a positive effect on the human rights conduct of assisted units, we would expect to see low numbers of reported extrajudicial killings by the army in those areas where aid to the army is concentrated. In order to isolate the relationship between assistance and subsequent executions from other potential factors, we identified the brigade jurisdiction/years when units in the jurisdiction received the largest increases in U.S. assistance. We found that reported extrajudicial killings increased on average in areas after the United States increased assistance to units in those areas. For the 16 largest increases of aid from one year to the next to army units operating in a specific jurisdiction, the number of reported executions in the jurisdiction increased an average of 56% from the two-year period prior to the increase to the two-year period during and after the increased assistance. In other words, when there were significant increases in assistance to units, there were increases in reported killings in the periods following the assistance in the assisted units’ areas of operation.

Human Rights Vetting of the Colombian Army

On the other hand, in years after levels of assistance were most reduced for units operating in a jurisdiction, the number of executions reportedly committed by units operating in the jurisdiction fell, also by an average of 56%. Overall, regions with the biggest increases in military aid generally experience a greater increase or a smaller decrease in the number of extrajudicial executions than do regions with the biggest decreases in military aid. Those jurisdictions where the number of reported killings was the highest after receiving increased assistance all had reported multiple army killings of civilians in the period before the increase.This suggests that a problem that was ignored in deciding to increase assistance to a unit tended to become worse afterward.

There are significant gaps in our knowledge to help us understand and interpret the causes for what we found. Nevertheless, we believe it is important to consider potential explanations and interpretations of our findings, and our report makes preliminary reflections on several hypotheses. We also considered possible explanations for why the Leahy Amendment has been inadequately implemented in Colombia, including insufficient staffing and prioritization, lack of information on reported violations, and differing interpretations of “credible evidence.” Profiles of fourteen brigades and battalions and two Army commanders give more detail to the analysis.

We also reviewed the multi-billion-dollar U.S. military assistance program and human rights violations in Pakistan. It is unclear whether the Frontier Corps and other Pakistani military units trained and equipped by the United States are participating in the country’s extensive human rights violations. However, where there is credible evidence of gross abuses committed by an assisted institution, the Leahy Law requires suspension of aid to the “smallest operational group in the field that has been implicated in the reported violation.” The Frontier Corps is credibly implicated in serious violations. If the State Department cannot determine a smaller unit responsible for these violations, then the Leahy Law requires suspension of assistance to the Frontier Corps itself.

Furthermore, DOD-funded assistance and reimbursements should not be exempt from the Leahy Law human rights vetting requirement. The use of funds to reimburse a foreign government for specific military operations, effectively making that military a proxy for U.S. policy, does not remove the goals of the Leahy Law: to prevent U.S. funds from being used to support militaries committing gross abuses of human rights.

U.S. Aid to and Extrajudicial Executions by Colombian Police

In Colombia, U.S. military assistance continues at a high level. If Colombia represents the most rigorous application of the Leahy Law, what can be expected elsewhere? Moreover, the U.S. record in Colombia is seen as a model for policy in Afghanistan and other countries. Any evaluation of military assistance should not be limited to whether it complies with Leahy Law, since suspension of aid to specific units under Leahy Law does not alter or reduce the overall amount of military assistance. Consideration of military assistance should address the broader context of U.S. human rights goals and obligations.

Because such a large proportion of training and other assistance to Colombia comes under DOD authority, it is especially important that such assistance be transparent, considered by Congress as part of the appropriations cycle, and regularly evaluated for its human rights impacts. We also recommend further study of several phenomena in Colombia that we were not able to examine, including collaboration between paramilitary forces and officers and members of the armed forces, and the relationship between forced displacement, reported extrajudicial killings, and units that received U.S. assistance. Finally, apart from Leahy Law implementation, the increase in reported civilian killings by Army units after they received U.S. assistance raises serious ethical questions about such assistance in Colombia and in other nations where similar conditions of widespread impunity and warfare pertain.

Recommendations

TAKE ACTION: Help implement these recommendations by sending a free fax to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today!

Congress should require the State Department to document the human rights records of units receiving U.S. assistance, and evaluate the human rights impacts of such assistance. The results should be unclassified and posted to the Department’s web site.
The Department of State must fully implement Leahy Law in Colombia. At a minimum, this requires suspending assistance to brigades for which there is credible evidence of extrajudicial executions committed by its members, until and unless those killings are fully investigated and the civilian justice system reaches a judgment. Such evidence exists for all army divisions and nearly all brigades.
Relevant Congressional committees, the National Security Council and the State Department Inspector General should give increased scrutiny of U.S. military assistance in nations where conditions similar to Colombia’s prevail (high levels of security force abuses, high levels of impunity, high or institutional levels of U.S. assistance), including Colombia, until policy-makers provide Congress with a credible explanation for negative human rights impacts and vetting failures in Colombia, and demonstrate concrete changes to ensure these impacts and failures are not replicated.
Because the failure to apply the Leahy Law has led to United States to assist brigades that have committed large numbers of extrajudicial executions, the United States has the responsibility to do everything possible to ensure justice for these cases. U.S. aid to Colombian judicial and oversight agencies should be tied to concrete results in reducing impunity.

FULL REPORT: http://forusa.org/sites/default/files/uploads/militaryaid100729web.pdf

5 Passages from the WikiLeaks "Afghan Diary" That Bring the Bizarre, Tragic Reality of War to Life

2010-08-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on August 7, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147755/

Much has been made of the unfolding scandal surrounding the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war cache. Surprisingly less attention has been paid to the vast amount of material itself -- beyond, that is, what the New York Times and Guardian have deemed important enough to publish. Much of the public, including many people who consider themselves engaged in the war debate, seems (understandably) intimidated by the size of the mega-dump and content to let others explain its significance. This is strange, given that perhaps the loudest message of the leakers is that we should never rely only on officials, embeds, and editors.

Putting to the side the political debates swirling around the leak, the material is rich on its own terms, rich in a way that second-hand round-ups and editorializing syntheses simply cannot capture. The mass of 91,000 raw files is perhaps best read (or heavily skimmed) as a very long work of experimental combat non-fiction, with each chapter a narrative bark of unedited, acronym-packed military speak. Over the course of hours, the sheer redundancy of the material -- a drumbeat of tribal skirmishes, dead civilians, and firefights among Afghan cops, soldiers, and militias -- powerfully conveys with incredible compression the daily grind of chaos and violence that is Afghanistan. The WikiLeaks memos make even the shortest wire dispatch read like an Op-Ed. They are bullets by bullet-point.

Below are five memos that gave this reader pause, each for different reasons. They don't represent the most shocking or important details buried in the cache, but are representative of the tiny rough gems you might find perusing the leaks. They are highly compressed true war stories that will lead different people to different conclusions, including none at all.

#1. The Great Escape

Prisons and prisoners are running motifs in the memos. They are full of reports of AAF's (Anti-Afghan Forces) and ACM's (Anti-Coalition Militias) being overcome, disarmed, flex-cuffed and sent off to the nearest base or holding facility. Some describe interrogations, releases and the occasional jailbreak. This entry relays one such escape with a touch of the cinematic despite itself:

On the night of 28 May between 1500Z and 2400Z Mohammed Wali Jan, a detained suspected ACM (Anti-Coalition Militia) was able to use his blanket as a tool and pull in the roof of his cell. From there he climbed the detention facility wall and escaped. The front gate to the PUC (Prison Under Control) facility was secure and we have been able to retrace his movement over the wall and concertina wire and have identified a recent blood trail heading east. Due to this probable escape route we do not at this time suspect any collaboration from HN (Host Nation) workers or terps (interpreters). Searches are being conducted in the local area.

Zawahiri's Gift of Grammar

There are not many Al Qaeda cameos in the WikiLeaks cache, but among them include this arrest made in January of 2004:

Afghan male found drawing map of kabul military training center (kmtc): an afghan male, jaweed ali, was seen drawing a map of kmtc. Jaweed was apprehended at 1000hrs on 12 jan 04 and taken before the 15th kandak commander who asked that the incident be investigated. A search of jaweeds personal effects resulted in the discovery of an english grammar book dedicated to jaweed by zawahiri in arabic. As the name ubl was also found in the same dedication, it was assumed that the zawahiri was the same one known to be an aq member.

The Curse of UX

Numerous documents detail the deaths of young LN's (Local Nationals). There are reports of kids running into streets and being grinded to death by coalition convoys; of young Afghans getting caught in crossfire; and of children being used as mules and spies. Then there are those who make the mistake of playing with UX (Unexploded Ordinance), scattered throughout the country by all sides. This happened in November of 2009:

Col Shamsul [reports] from Barge Matal, that LN children picked up a UXO and were carrying it through town. It detonated and killed 4 and wounded 3. The WIA injuries are burn and schrapnel wounds to the upper body and arms. Col Shamsul requests MEDEVAC of children to CF hospital to receive treatment. 1302z JCC rpts update for incident in Barge Matal. Of the four KIA rpted 2 were women and 2 were children, and one of the WIA has died of wounds. SUM 2xKIA (Women) 3xKIA (Children) 2xWIA (Children)

"Green on Green"

Dozens of documents report violence between factions within the Afghan national forces. These are listed under "Friendly Fire" in a subsection called "Green-Green" conflict. Usually these reports involve firefights between the ANA (Afghan National Army) and the ANP (Afghan National Police). Others describe explosive scuffles and drawn-out battles between tribal militias, who are often allied with ANA or ANP units.In this case , the green on green "Event" involved a rooftop firefight that cut across a moonlit opium haze:

B Coy 1 RIFLES reported that some ABP (Afghan Border Police) high on drugs were arguing and woke up the TERPS (Interpreters). The ABP were later on the roof talking when 3 x shots were fired in the direction of the terps. 1 x ABP fell from the roof apparently from a GSW (Gunshot Wound). QRF (B Coy 1 RIFLES) was alerted and arrived on the scene to deal with the incident and treat the casualty. The casualty later died from his GSW. OCCD (Operational Command Center - District) will investigate at first light A significant proportion of the ABP in PB (Patrol Base) JUGROOM were high on opium and having a party. An argument between an interpreter and a number of policemen ensued; this developed into a fight between the interpreter and the ABP. The Guard Commander was called, and the PB Commander and Plt Sjt attempted to negotiate with the ABP Commander. The majority of the ABP were on the roof of the interpreters accommodation, and a number of shots were fired. The sentry in Sanger 2 fired one shot in response believing the lives of his PB Commander and Platoon Sjt were in danger. One ABP was wounded with a single GSW to his abdomen. It is not known whether the round lead to the ABP casualty was fired by the UK sentry or was fired from another weapon. After the medical attention the GSW proved fatal and the MIRT was stood down.

The Cave

There aren't many documents dealing with the Coalition's war on drugs. Most that do are organized on a WikiLeaks page titled " Smuggling ." Here are found interdiction reports of everything from massive hashish screens to garbage bags of softball-sized orbs of wet opium. Then there is this evocative memo , describing the Afghanistan equivalent of a dime-bag bust:

ANA (Afghan National Army) were conducting a joint patrol vic WB 546 800. CCA (Carrier Controlled Approach) had seen personnel down loading jingle trucks in caves vic that grid. We set up an RP approximately 300 meters from the suspected jingle truck sight and put a dismounted patrol along the road. We established overwatch over the wadi surrounding the area. While attempting to find another cave to the west, we saw a cave to our south with personnel in it. After coming up short looking for jingle trucks, we decided to look into the cave to the South. A man approached us from the cave and began telling a story about his truck breaking down. ANA and CF (Coalition Forces) were searching the area around the man while we were questioning him. They found an AK-47, two pistols, marijuana, several sticks of explosives, det cord, a large number of D cell batteries, blasting caps, a notebook, a book of pictures and other personal items. I then had the ANA place the men in flex cuffs and sit them down. We brought them to Salerno. Of the four men, one is young, and one is older. The fat man with the lazy eye was very quiet the whole time.

Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, is published by Wiley & Sons.

Blackwater: Can't Stop, Won't Stop

2010-08-06T22:26:00.000-07:00

Published on Friday, August 6, 2010 by Foreign Policy in Focus

Blackwater: Can't Stop, Won't Stop

by Fouad Pervez

Blackwater (rebranded as Xe in an effort to escape the negative publicity associated with their former name), recently received a $100 million contract from the CIA to secure its bases in Afghanistan. The State Department also awarded them $120 million to provide security for new diplomatic buildings, including consulates outside Kabul, giving the firm a total of $220 million in new contracts in Afghanistan . This seems remarkable, given the extremely negative image Blackwater has throughout the world. That people even know about a private security company is a bad sign in itself. Not surprisingly, CIA Director Leon Panetta had to go on the offensive to defend the contracts.

The contracts are certainly problematic. But the real issue is not Blackwater itself, but U.S. military grand strategy.

From a financial aspect, it is not surprising that Blackwater got the contracts. For the CIA contract alone, Blackwater bid a full $26 million below the next lowest bidder, quite significant considering the contract was for $100 million. This low bid was made possible largely by the many huge contracts Blackwater received in Iraq. With close ties to the Bush administration, Blackwater was the 12^th largest contractor in Iraq, even though it was not tasked to build embassies and roads. They pulled in almost $500 million between 2004 and 2006 . They are the State Department’s most frequently used security contractor and get 90 percent of its money from the government, two-thirds of which are no-bid contracts. Thus, Blackwater built a comparative advantage over its rivals during the Bush years. This advantage, which the company still enjoys today, enables Blackwater to bid lower amounts since their profit margins are not as tight as other companies.

Garrisoning the Globe

However, the reason companies like Blackwater, even with their troubling histories, are in demand in the first place has to do with U.S. grand strategy. American foreign policy has become increasingly aggressive over the years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations . It is not just increased aggression, but increased residency — we keep a presence in more places than before. For instance, there are more than 850 U.S. military bases overseas, a number that does not include bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other sensitive locations . An all-volunteer army exacerbates the problem, as there are fewer troops to handle a larger mission. Engaged in two major conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and maintaining bases and troops in over 100 countries translates into serious military overstretch. American foreign policy from the 1940s on, especially toward Western Europe, has been consistently geared toward global hegemony. Instead of passing the buck to Western Europe at critical junctures when it would have been better and cheaper to do so, the United States undermined Western European efforts to gain military independence and autonomy during the Cold Warbecause it was more concerned with global hegemony than the Soviet threat.

The United States seems unwilling to scale back its global military presence. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy no longer explicitly opposes the rise of any real competitor. But thedivergence with the Bush administration approach is somewhat cosmetic . Obama does call for a decrease in direct uses of power and acknowledges that America has no real rival, but does not rule out unilateral action and, more importantly, calls for a maintenance of the level of U.S. military superiority. More troops are necessary to keep up with the mission.

This is where private military contractors like Blackwater become important. These modern-day Hessians provide America a significant amount of needed foot soldiers. They come with other perks as well — they are often beyond the reach of military rules of law, allowing them greater discretion in inflicting disproportionate force to pacify areas. More significantly, increased Blackwater troops mean fewer official U.S. troops. Private military troops now outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan . The advantage of a private military to a political leader is the public cost. Military deaths play a significant role in American foreign policy. The rising troop deaths in Vietnam eventually turned the public against that war. However, if the soldiers are increasingly from private companies, public costs decline. Except for the occasional anomaly, such as the hanging of four Blackwater troops off a bridge in Fallujah , no news headlines announce the deaths of Blackwater soldiers.

But this increased U.S. military presence, so dependent on private contractors, has serious deleterious effects . The more troops, the more resistance. Tellingly, over 700 international relations scholars, who rarely agree on anything, opposed the Iraq War for this very reason : concern about negative ramifications of the U.S. military presence.

Blackwater Despite the Risks

Despite its horrific track record in Iraq, the connection between founder and former CEO Erik Prince and religious extremism , and the accusations that the company defrauded the federal government through phony billing , Blackwater might obtain a $1 billion contract from the U.S. government for work in Afghanistan next year . The comparative economic advantage Blackwater gained during the Bush administration explains why it's positioned to win more contracts. But the lack of change in the overall U.S. mission of global military primacy explains why private military contractors like Blackwater have the impact they have in the first place.

Congress has begun to express some reservations about the contracts. A federal commission established to study wartime contracting slammed State Department officials in a hearing over the $120 million contract they awarded to Blackwater . They were unable to get an answer from officials as to how Blackwater’s history in Iraq figured into the contract. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a strong Blackwater critic, strongly condemned the contract, wondering “why any branch of the government would decide to hire Blackwater, such a repeat offender. We’re talking about murder…a company with a horrible reputation that really jeopardizes our mission in so many different ways.” Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Representative Jim Moran (D-VA) have also been vocal about questioning Blackwater contracts .

However, the real test is whether these contracts are reversed and/or future contracts are given in a much more limited manner or with much greater scrutiny of private military companies. Except for the initial protests from several members of Congress, there has been no new congressional activity on the contracts — no hearings or investigations scheduled.

However, even if Congress does eventually act, it will have addressed only part of the problem. Without either a shift away from maintenance of America’s current global military superiority or from the current U.S. military presence in over 100 countries, there will be a serious problem of military overstretch. By either adopting a more defensive role as an offshore balancer, or significantly scaling back its global military presence, or both, the U.S. military could ameliorate its overstretch problem. Short of that, contractors like Blackwater provide political leaders a convenient “out” from the problem of a draft, which could generate a major public backlash. Because of their economic and political utility, private military contractors like Blackwater will continue getting contracts, regardless of their toxic baggage.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons.

Fouad Pervez is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, where he writes on U.S. foreign policy and security issues in South Asia. He is currently pursuing his PhD in International Relations. He is a writer and policy analyst, and occasionally blogs on There is No Spoon . He can be reached at fouad0 at gmail dot com.

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/06-12

Colombian Mass Grave Of More Than 2000 May Be Civilian Trade Unionists, Not Military Casualties

2010-08-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

Colombia is currently the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, and the U.S. is likely implicated in the murders.

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on August 5, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147728/

If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.

According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.

“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.

The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.

Diverting attention is what outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is all about. While his foreign minister, Luis Alfonso Hoyos, was laying out photos and intelligence claiming that Venezuela was hosting upwards of 1,500 Colombian insurgents, a group of Latin American NGOs were uncovering a vast scheme by Uribe’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS) to sabotage the activities of journalists, judges, NGOs, international organizations and political opponents. Some of these “dirty tricks” included death threats.

Because the U.S.—which has pumped more than $7 billion in military aid to Colombia—supplies the DAS with sophisticated surveillance technology, Washington may end up implicated in the scandal.

The U.S. may also be tarred with the murder of Colombian trade unionists. According to Kelly Nichollas of the U.S. Office on Colombia, testimony at the trial of former DAS director Jorge Noguera indicated that the U.S. trained a special Colombian intelligence unit that tracked trade unionists.

Colombia is currently the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. According to the International Trade Unionist Confederation’s (ITUC) Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights, out of the 101 unionists murdered in 2009, 48 were in Colombia. So far, 20 more Colombian trade unionists have been murdered in 2010. In the case of Hernan Abdiel Ordonez, treasurer of the prison worker’s union, who had complained about corruption, the government refused to provide him security in spite of receiving numerous death threats. He was gunned down by assassins on a motorcycle.

“Colombia was once again the country where standing up for fundamental rights of workers is more likely than anywhere else to mean a death sentence, despite the Colombian government’s public relations campaign,” said ITCU General Secretary Guy Ryder. “The Colombian authorities must take urgent and effective measures to guarantee the physical integrality of Colombian trade unionists.”

Uribe certainly has reason to shift the attention away from Colombia and toward Venezuela. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is pressing its investigation of the “false-positives” murders, and Uribe’s brother has been accused of working with death squads. Santiago Canton, an Argentinean and former head of the rights commission, said “If you put all this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it’s all really consistent over the years.”

And where was the Obama Administration in all this? Firmly supporting Uribe, railing against Venezuela’s suspension of diplomacy with Bogota, and, according to an investigation by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), secretly funneling money to the media operations of Chavez’s right-wing opponents. Right-wingers in Bolivia and Nicaragua are also receiving money.

“Between 2007 and 2009, the State Department’s little known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela through the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF),” says NACLA’s Jeremy Bigwood. In doing this, the State Department violated its own rules requiring that “all publications” receiving money “acknowledge that support.” According to Bigwood, the U.S. waived that requirement for PADF.

Colombia is Washington’s closest ally in the region, so it hardly surprising that Uribe’s right-wing government and Washington’s visceral hatred of Chavez should find common ground. But the attack on Chavez is also a proxy assault on the newly formed, 32-member Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the first regional organization not to include the U.S., Canada, or European countries.

Meeting in Caracas this past July, CELAC selected Chavez and the newly elected conservative president of Chile, Sabastian Pinera, as co-chairs of the forum that will draft statutes for the organization. While it seems like an odd pairing, the U.S. media’s cartoonish characterization of Chavez is not shared widely in Latin America. “Chavez…has shown himself adaptable to making major compromises in order to further Latin American and regional integration,” says Alexander Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

And while Pinera is very conservative, according to Main, “his toned down approach to international relations indicates that he too is prepared to act pragmatically.”

The Caracas meeting called for “political, economic, social and cultural integration” and affirmed the right of “each state to constitute its own political system free of threats, aggressions and unilateral coercive measures.” Tellingly, there was no mention of “free trade” or “open markets,” the so-called “Washington consensus” that characterized U.S. economic doctrine in the region over the past several decades.

As Latin America grows in economic strength and political independence, U.S. policy seems locked into a previous century when it was the major power in the region. Rather than retooling its diplomatic approach to fit the new reality in Latin America, Washington is expanding its military footprint.

It is will soon be operating out of seven military bases in Colombia and has reactivated its 4^th Fleet, both highly unpopular moves in Latin America. Rather than taking the advice of countries in the region to demilitarize its war on drugs, the U.S. recently announced it is deploying 46 warships and 7,000 soldiers to Costa Rica to “interdict” drug traffic and money laundering. From 2000 to 2009, less than 40 percent of U.S. aid to the region went to Latin America’s militaries and police. The Obama Administration has raised that figure to 47 percent.

Washington and Bogota may try to demonize Venezuela, but they are playing to a very small audience, and one that grows smaller—and more irrelevant—by the day.

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

Obama's Neo-Liberal Agenda for Education

2010-08-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

By GILLIAN RUSSOM
WRITING IN March 2008, the editors of a Rethinking Schools book on charter schools held out hope that the end of the Bush administration would mean new possibilities for a progressive education agenda:

This country is on the cusp of a new political dialogue. The conservative stranglehold on political debate is ending, opening up new opportunities for progressives to regain the initiative. How this opening will affect public education in general and charter schools in particular is not yet clear, but it ushers in new possibilities not imaginable a decade ago.1

Two years later, the direction of education policy under the Obama administration is indeed clear. The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has called into question whether our public schools will be funded at even the most basic level required for their functioning. Last year, budget cuts cost 40,000 teacher jobs. This year, 66 percent of school districts across the country have cut more jobs, while 83 percent of districts project cuts for the 2010–2011 academic year.2 Kansas City’s school board has voted to shut down twenty-eight of the city’s sixty-one schools. In California, more than 23,000 teachers received pink slips in March, and students hoping to attend college are facing tuition increases of 20 percent at the California State University and 32 percent at the University of California.These devastating cuts are being applied to a public school system that is already in horrible shape. Many schools are overcrowded and crumbling, lacking essential technology and materials; learning is often dull because teachers are exhausted or focused on preparing for standardized tests; and students rarely get experiences that connect what they are learning to the real world. These abysmal conditions have led to a high school dropout rate of nearly 30 percent nationwide, and more than 50 percent in many major cities.3
Education should be at the center of a national debate on social priorities, led by a president who promised “change.” Instead, the economic crisis is being used by the White House to dramatically accelerate a neoliberal agenda for education, going far beyond what George W. Bush’s administration was able to do with its No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. With Arne Duncan, a political operative with no formal training in the field, as education secretary, the administration has aggressively promoted an education program with three principal elements: using test score data to evaluate teachers, shutting down and “reconstituting” schools deemed to be failing, and expanding privately-run, mostly non-union charter schools. Other elements include the standardization of curriculum and the lengthening of the school day. This agenda is supported by a nearly unified front of the powerful—Wall Street, Democrats and Republicans at all levels, and many non-profit organizations.Obama recently signaled the lengths to which he’s willing to go to implement this agenda. Speaking before an audience of business executives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on March 1, the president supported a Rhode Island school board’s decision to fire all seventy-four teachers and nineteen other school employees at Central Falls High School. “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show sign of improvements then there has got to be a sense of accountability,” he remarked.4 As the only high school in the poorest community in Rhode Island, Central Falls has been chronically underfunded. Yet it seems that the only people being held accountable are the teachers who have dedicated their lives to working with Central Falls students.5

As a Democrat and the country’s first Black president, Obama has much more leeway to implement a conservative agenda than the Bush administration did, under the guise of promoting equity and civil rights. Though Obama may use different language, his education policies are an intensification of the Bush agenda. Yet many teachers’ union leaders who derided NCLB during the Bush era are now supporting Race to the Top (RTTT). American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, after praising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its contributions to the AFT, announced that, “With the exception of vouchers, which drain vital resources from public schools, everything is on the table in terms of reform, as long as it is good for kids and fair to teachers.”6
This situation presents education activists with tremendous challenges, but also an opportunity to build a new movement for public education. It raises the question of our country’s priorities, when teachers are being fired while banks receive bailouts and soldiers are mobilized for Afghanistan. It raises the issue of public versus private control of vital community resources. And it has the potential to connect the labor movement in the form of teachers’ unions with a social movement by communities of color struggling for basic rights.
In order to build this kind of movement, our side must have a comprehensive response to the crisis of public education in the United States. We must be able to explain and organize against the neoliberal agenda, while at the same time putting forward our own vision of how to dramatically improve the quality of education that children receive in the richest country in the world. This article attempts to begin this process.
Education shock doctrine
The Obama administration’s education program is following a neoliberal playbook, using stimulus funding and increased federal monitoring of the education system to coerce states into attacking teachers’ unions and handing over an increasing percentage of schools (and state funding) to privately-run charters.Emerging as the dominant ideology of rampant free-market capitalism in the 1980s (until the Great Recession brought massive state intervention back in play in order to bail out the financial sector), neoliberalism is a set of economic policies that emphasizes the minimization of state intervention in the economy, privatization of sectors of the economy once thought to be the domain of the public sector, deregulation of markets, slashing government spending, and promoting anti-union “flexible” labor policies making it easier for employers to depress wages and fire workers at will. In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein shows how times of crisis have been used as opportunities to push through these neoliberal policies. Klein emphasizes that neoliberal polices involved not only directly selling off public enterprises to private interests, but also governments taking on an increasingly close partnership with the private sector, which acts as a contractor that receives state funds in exchange for providing services.7
Recently, a comprehensive critique of Bush’s (and now Obama’s) education agenda has come from unexpected quarters. Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Bill Clinton. Considered one of the nation’s most serious and credible education scholars, Ravitch was initially an advocate of NCLB, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.8 The book critiques the NCLB mindset, in which schools function as businesses and competition is valued over collaboration. It chronicles how school districts from New York to San Diego are undergoing the “shocks” of heavy-handed market reformers using corporate models to “discipline” their teachers.
Why is the neoliberal model being pursued by such a united front of political and economic elites? Since the Reagan administration issued “A Nation at Risk,” its report on the state of public schooling, government education policy has shifted from an emphasis on equity to strident calls for “excellence.” As part of a backlash against the civil rights movement, the report shifts responsibility for public education’s failures from government to individual schools and teachers.
This approach is especially jarring today, when the Bush and Obama administrations have pumped hundreds of billions in taxpayer money—$70 billion to Goldman Sachs alone—to bail out the banks. And that is not even counting the trillions handed out in low-interest loans—essentially free money—to the banks.“A Nation at Risk” was also motivated by a fear that a poorly educated workforce would make the U.S. economy less competitive. This was echoed in Obama’s first major speech on education. “In 8th grade math, we’ve fallen to 9th place,” he remarked. “Singapore’s middle-schoolers outperform ours three to one… It’s time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.”9
The administration may truly believe that increased standards and testing, closing “failing” schools, and making teachers work harder will bring up the skill levels of American children. Some schools may indeed improve scores as they focus on “test prep” at the expense of critical thinking and meaningful curriculum. But for schools in the most oppressed communities, this agenda is so punitive that it is likely to fail even on the narrow terms of test scores. These children are being prepared for occupations where higher skills are not necessary—or for prison.A major goal of this agenda is to weaken teachers’ unions, by portraying them as bureaucratic, selfish obstacles to quality education. This is part of an overall attack on public-sector unions in this economic crisis. State budget crises are providing the justification to go after public-sector unions in the same way that private-sector unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) were attacked over the past decade. Together, the 1.4 million-member AFT and the 3.2 million-member National Education Association (NEA) represent the biggest single sector of unionized workers in the U.S. today, and therefore a central target of today’s war on labor. The expansion of mostly non-union charter schools provides a powerful weapon.10
Some charter school operators are in it for the easy money—public education is a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But the agenda is much bigger.
While the evidence shows that increasing standards and testing, closing “failing” schools, replacing them with non-union charter schools, and making teachers work harder won’t actually bring up the skill levels of American children overall, that isn’t really the point. Business leaders are excited about education “reform” in general and charter schools in particular because they help to spot talent and recruit the cream of the working class that can be funneled into higher education and employment as technical personnel, frontline managers, and professionals.
That’s why charter schools have the fulsome backing of foundations run by billionaires like Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Los Angeles real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame. In an age of austerity, capital isn’t interested in shouldering the cost of fully funding public education for all. Instead, education is to be divided into distinct tiers, and access to it is to be rationed. Business accounting methods—in this case, test scores—are to be the criteria for making such decisions.Charter schools and “performance pay” for teachers bring the ideology of competition into education, instead of education being a government-guaranteed right for all. Sometimes, pushing free-market ideology is an explicit part of the plan: the original petition by Green Dot charter schools to take over Los Angeles’ Locke High School required that students in history classes “demonstrate a belief in the values of democracy and capitalism.”11
The attack on public education also fits with the goals of local elites in urban areas, who want to restructure their cities in ways that make them more hospitable to business investment (and consequently displace poor communities of color). For example, consider Chicago’s “Renaissance 2010” plan to “reconstitute” failing schools:

The mayor and Civic Committee are operating from a larger blueprint to make Chicago a “world-class city” of global finance and business services, real estate development, and tourism, and education is part of this plan. Quality schools (and attractive housing) are essential to draw high-paid, creative workers for business and finance.12

In order to achieve this ambitious set of goals, control over the school system must be more centralized. In many cities, the move toward charters has been facilitated by imposing mayoral control over school districts.13And the Obama administration’s RTTT program signals the federal government’s desire to increasingly dictate educational policy at a national level.The neoliberal agenda for education can be accelerated now for two reasons—the economic crisis, and a president who is far less likely to face opposition from unions and the left than previous administrations. Arne Duncan is quite open about the fact that he is implementing a “shock doctrine” approach. In an interview on ABC News in January, Duncan said,

I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans and this is a tough thing to say but I’m going to be really honest. The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better. And the progress that it made in four years since the hurricane, is unbelievable.14

The “unbelievable” progress Duncan is referring to is the fact that after the hurricane, all New Orleans schools were closed and the teachers fired. Fifty-seven percent of New Orleans schools have now been reopened as non-union charter schools.15 The fact that half of New Orleans children are no longer in the public schools because they were driven from their homes doesn’t seem to bother Duncan.Like a nationwide hurricane, the economic crisis has provided the disaster excuse for pushing drastic changes to education policy nationwide. Speaking in San Francisco in May 2009, Arne Duncan said that California is facing a “moment of opportunity and a moment of crisis...Despite how tough things are financially, it’s often at times of crisis we get the reforms we need.”16 States have been plunged into such deep budget problems that they are rapidly revamping their education policies in hopes of attracting tiny portions of federal stimulus money from RTTT.
Arne Duncan: CEO of School Closings
The strategy of closing or “reconstituting” schools deemed to be failing was pioneered by Arne Duncan in the Renaissance 2010 (Ren 2010) program that he implemented as chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Duncan is a non-educator who was brought into the Obama administration on the basis of Ren 2010’s supposedly stellar record for improving CPS.
Initiated by Mayor Richard Daley and the Commercial Club of Chicago, the goal of Ren 2010 was to close sixty “low-performing” public schools and open one hundred new ones as small schools, charters, or “contract” schools by 2010. To date, at least fifty-one neighborhood schools have been closed or consolidated, and eighty-six new ones opened, the vast majority as charter schools.The closing of neighborhood schools has caused great hardship for students who must relocate, and led to a spike in school violence when students are forced to commute to schools in the territory of rival gangs. The number of students fatally shot on CPS campuses has nearly tripled since 2005.17
Chicago parent Cheryl Johnson spoke at a CPS board meeting about the closure of her child’s school:

Carver High School has been in our community ever since 1974. We should have a right to have our kids go to a school that is in the neighborhood, not to take two buses and to walk to a school that they’ve been fighting in for the last four or five years… Renaissance 2010 is just an avenue for our kids to be killed on a regular basis.18

As Jitu Brown, Rico Gutstein, and Pauline Lipman explained in Rethinking Schools, “For affected communities who have longed for change, Renaissance 2010 has been traumatic, largely ineffective, and destabilizing to communities owed a significant ‘education debt’ (to quote Gloria Ladson-Billings) due to decades of being underserved.”19Renaissance 2010 has not succeeded in improving test scores. When Obama appointed Duncan in December 2008, he said standardized test scores had risen in Chicago’s elementary schools by 29 percentage points during Duncan’s seven years as superintendent. But according to one research group, the real improvement was only about 8 percentage points, trailing behind six other major cities. Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools didn’t improve achievement on tests. Moreover, according to a study by the Commercial Club of Chicago (a sponsor of Ren 2010), under Duncan’s watch, gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards.20
The problems of inner-city schools are a result of poverty, lack of funding and resources, and underpaid teachers. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that shutting these schools down or “reconstituting” them by firing dedicated teachers doesn’t solve these problems. In the UCLA Law Review, Andrew Spitser argued that reconstitution is arbitrary, violates collective bargaining agreements, and has a negative effect on the quality of teachers and instruction.

The loss of legitimacy and morale that would attend the labeling of a large number of schools as failing, and the upheaval caused by reconstitution in so many schools counsel further against reconstitution… school officials need to take care that the methods used to hold schools accountable do not end up punishing the children that the Act is intended to help… reconstitution threatens to do just that.21

Yet as more and more schools fail to reach the ballooning test score expectations of NCLB, we are going to see more students’ educations disrupted with this failed strategy. In addition to the high-profile “turnaround” of Central Falls High School, New York City’s Panel for Educational Policy voted in late January to close some nineteen public schools in mostly working-class Black and Latino communities. A judge has blocked the closings, but the city is appealing the decision. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already closed some ninety-one schools since 2002. And in February, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced its first “reconstitution” of Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles.Why would the government doggedly pursue this strategy that so clearly will not solve the problems of our most-embattled schools? Because it is the logical conclusion of the “accountability” rhetoric at the heart of the neoliberal agenda. If they are going to argue that “bad teachers” must be “held accountable” for a school’s “lack of progress,” then ultimately they must get rid of some teachers to prove that they are serious. The schools that are closed or “reconstituted” are intended to set an example and discipline the rest of us to fall in line.
The Obama-Duncan agenda: A Race to the Bottom
Obama’s first major policy initiative on education was the “Race to the Top” program (RTTT) announced in July 2009. Bringing the spirit of “free-market” competition to the highest levels of government policy, RTTT asks that the fifty states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico compete for a pool of $4.35 billion in stimulus funding for education.On March 15, the administration announced that fifteen states and the District of Columbia had been chosen as finalists for the first round of RTTT money. The handful of winners will share less than half of the total money (about $2 billion). If a state receives the grant, 50 percent of the money must be subgranted to Local Education Agencies (LEAs) including local school districts and charter schools. As we went to press, Duncan had so far chosen only two states to receive RTTT money, Delaware (set to receive $107 million) and Tennessee (set to receive as much as $502 million). According to the Washington Post, “Duncan acknowledged that the small winner’s circle was designed as an incentive for other states to continue revamping their education policies.”22
RTTT’s criteria for awarding grants are carefully calibrated to get states to do two main things: massively expand charter schools and create data systems that allow teachers to be evaluated based on their students’ test scores. In the selection process for RTTT applicants, fifty-eight points are awarded for “improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance,” and forty points for “ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charters and other innovative schools,” while only ten points are allotted for “making education funding a priority.”23
To be eligible for a grant, states must link student test scores to individual teachers and principals for the purposes of evaluation. Applications are judged based on what percentage of a state’s schools may be charters. RTTT guidelines suggest that “reviewers should give States high points if they have no caps or caps of 10 percent or more; medium points if they have caps of 5 to 10 percent; and low points if they have caps of less than 5 percent.”24 Points are also earned for getting teachers and other unions to sign memoranda of understanding agreeing to their “reform” plans.25
The RTTT funds are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the budget shortfalls. Yet the promise of these funds has been used to push through major changes to education policy in dozens of states. For example, if California had been chosen, the state would have gotten at best $700 million in one-time funds, scarcely 1 percent of its education budget. With these paltry funds as justification, the state passed a bill in December mandating punitive “turnarounds” of the bottom 5 percent of the state’s schools and forcing schools to be converted to charters if 50 percent of parents sign a petition.26 Obviously, these policies were pushed not only to be eligible for the grant money but also because they coincide with the goals of politicians—from Republican Governor Schwarzenegger to liberal Democratic state Senator Gloria Romero (who sponsored the new law).27
The sixteen finalists were chosen not because of educational quality, but because they have gone farthest toward implementing neoliberal policies. Finalists Louisiana and Florida schools have consistently earned low rankings, but Florida is a shoo-in for the grant because they already have a “data system” that tracks their students’ test scores from preschool to college. Louisiana was chosen because of its thorough conversion to charter schools and busting of the teachers’ union in New Orleans. Ohio was an early proponent of for-profit charter schools, which had a horrible record in terms of student achievement.28 Rhode Island was no doubt rewarded for its dramatic attack on teachers at Central Falls High School. And six of the sixteen are Southern “right-to-work” states with weak or no unions for teachers. Now Obama has proposed extending the program, as well as expanding it by $3 billion, to fund new “innovations,” especially at charter schools.
Rebranding No Child Left Behind
When Obama took office, his administration signaled a desire to get rid of some of the negative connotations associated with NCLB. As theWashington Post reported,

The Obama administration has made clear that it is putting its own stamp on education reform. That will mean a new name and image for a law that has grown unpopular with many teachers and suburban parents, even though it was enacted with bipartisan support in Congress. “It’s like the new Coke. This is a rebranding effort,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform.29

On March 15, the Obama administration released “A Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the ESEA.”30 Though there may be some “rebranding” going on (Obama doesn’t use the term NCLB), the Blueprint leaves all the basic pillars of Bush’s law untouched. Like NCLB, the Blueprint focuses on “accountability” for teachers and schools based on test scores. The administration claims that the Blueprint changes the focus “from punishing failure to rewarding success,” and schools that are improving will be granted more freedom from federal intervention. But the plan calls for increased intervention for “low-performing schools.” It sets up “school turnaround grants,” which states can only receive if they choose one of four models for their most troubled schools: transformation (replacing the principal, extending the school day, and implementing new governance and “flexibility”); turnaround (replacing the principal and rehiring no more than 50 percent of the school staff); restart (closing the school and reopening it under the management of a charter operator); or closure.Like NCLB, the Blueprint also sets unattainable goals for school improvement, requiring all students to be on track to be “career and college ready” by 2020. As Monty Neill of FairTest explained, “If this reasonable goal is attached to an impossible timeline, it will simply become the new basis for continuing to castigate schools and teachers for not accomplishing what society has failed to provide the resources to accomplish.”31
“Pay for Performance”?
Among progressive teachers, there are some interesting debates taking place about the issue of “differentiated pay.”32 Should we push for extra compensation for teaching in hard-to-staff schools or to attract and retain new teachers? And if we want teachers to have more power and a voice in what happens in schools, should we consider giving extra compensation to those who serve as mentors for their fellow teachers or who take extra time to develop curriculum?
Unfortunately, none of these ideas are what Obama and Duncan mean when they talk about “performance pay” for teachers. The administration is pushing a system to reward—and punish—teachers strictly based on their students’ test scores.In his March 2009 education speech, Obama argued, “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom.” Duncan later clarified what “excellence in teaching” means—improving student test scores. “What you want to do is really identify the best and brightest by a range of metrics, including student achievement,” he told the Associated Press.33
The push toward this kind of “performance pay” will be disastrous for three main reasons. First, because it will tend to punish teachers in the most challenging schools in poorer districts who must battle larger obstacles to improving their students’ learning outcomes. Teachers in less challenging schools and districts with more affluent students will be rewarded. In one county in Florida, where “merit pay” has been most fully implemented, three-fourths of the nearly 5,000 teachers who received merit pay worked at more affluent schools, and only 3 percent worked at low-income schools.34
Second, “merit pay” creates an atmosphere of competition rather than collaboration among teachers. This will severely weaken union solidarity, and is poisonous to the kind of collaboration that is so essential for good teaching. As the creators of the Web site Teachers for CEO Merit Pay explain:

Performance pay structures in education force teachers to compete for a limited pool of merit-pay money, instead of collaborating to provide the best possible education. This creates a disincentive for teachers to share information and teaching techniques. Thus, the main way teachers learn their craft—studying from their colleagues—is effectively discarded. If you think we have turnover problems in teaching now, wait until new teachers have no one to turn to.35

Third, “merit pay” only raises the stakes on the high-stakes testing that has been proven to be both biased and a poor gauge of actual student learning. In its report, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing reviewed a range of research showing that “merit pay” leads to score inflation, narrowing the curriculum to focus solely on math and science, flawed results from for-profit testing companies, and a distortion of the goals of education—and that it may not even raise test scores.36If we want to improve teacher quality, we need to value the teaching profession by raising the bar on teacher pay overall in the United States. A 2007 study found that starting teaching salaries in the U.S. are far below the international norm. Average teacher pay in South Korea is 141 percent of per capita gross domestic product, and just 81 percent in the U.S., which had the lowest teacher pay of the ten countries surveyed. And when teachers are compared to professionals in occupations with comparable levels of education and skills, teachers’ weekly earnings were on average almost 15 percent less.37
Charter schools
According to Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top guidelines, charter schools “offer one of the most promising options for breaking the cycle of educational failure.”38 The evidence shows that while charter schools have been a useful way to eliminate or weaken teachers’ unions, in every other measure, they haven’t proven to be the educational Holy Grail that their promoters have claimed them to be [see accompanying article in this issue].
Responses by teachers’ unionsNational leaders of the AFT and NEA have accepted many of the assumptions of the neoliberal attack. “We finally have an education president,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, following Obama’s first education speech that stressed “performance pay” and charter schools. “We really embrace the fact that he’s talked about both shared responsibility and making sure there is a voice for teachers, something that was totally lacking in the last eight years.”39
In response to the same speech, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said, “President Obama always says he will do it with educators, not to them. That is a wonderful feeling, for the president of the United States to acknowledge and respect the professional knowledge and skills that those educators bring to every job in the school.”40
Both unions initially voiced their support of RTTT. Weingarten said of the program, “The Department of Education worked hard to strike the right balance between what it takes to get system-wide improvement for schools and kids, and how to measure that improvement.”41 And Van Roekel said, “While NEA disagrees with some of the details surrounding the RTTT initiative, this is an unprecedented opportunity to make a lasting impact on student achievement, the teaching profession, and public education.”42
Weingarten has been supporting forms of merit pay and charter schools for years. When she was president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) from 1998 to 2009, the UFT opened two of its own charter schools and partnered with Green Dot to run a third where teachers are under separate contracts from the rest of the UFT. In October 2007, the UFT implemented “performance” bonuses for teachers at schools that improved their test scores.
Now, Weingarten is touting the new contract for New Haven teachers as “a model or a template” for the rest of the country. The contract implements performance bonuses for schools that improve their test scores; gives the school district the right to shut down and reconstitute low-performing schools as charters; and makes it easier for the district to fire teachers after a 120-day “improvement period.” New Haven teachers approved the contract by an overwhelming vote of 842 to 39.According to the Wall Street Journal, the AFT “recently issued a batch of innovation grants to districts that are tying teacher pay to performance,” and the NEA “is taking similar steps to encourage tougher evaluations and to loosen seniority systems, moves that Mr. Duncan called ‘monumental breakthroughs.’”43
The NEA, which had largely refrained from criticizing Obama, did issue a critical statement after the release of the Blueprint:

We were expecting to see a much broader effort to truly transform public education for kids. Instead, the accountability system… still relies on standardized tests to identify winners and losers. We were expecting more funding stability to enable states to meet higher expectations. Instead, the “blueprint” requires states to compete for critical resources, setting up another winners-and-losers scenario. We were expecting school turnaround efforts to be research-based and fully collaborative. Instead, we see too much top-down scapegoating of teachers and not enough collaboration.

Nevertheless, the NEA has not put forward a clear strategy on how to shift education policy.For the AFT, Weingarten has issued a strategy piece entitled, “A New Path Forward.”44 Her proposal for fixing public education contains four elements: 1) a new, more fair, and “expedient” process of teacher evaluation and for dealing with ineffective teachers; 2) a new fair and faster system of due process for teachers accused of misconduct; 3) giving teachers the “tools, time, and trust” to succeed; and 4) creating a trusting partnership between labor and management.
Although the document purports to challenge teacher scapegoating, Weingarten’s first two recommendations accept the logic that individual classroom teachers are what’s standing in the way of quality education. The piece makes no mention of the decimation of school funding nationwide. Most importantly, “A New Path Forward” stresses collaboration with politicians and school districts at a time when we need to be mounting a serious fight against them for funding and democracy.
Why aren’t the national unions taking a more aggressive approach to fight Obama’s anti-union agenda? Obviously, their close ties with Obama and the Democrats are a major factor. Moreover, it has been a long time since teachers’ unions in the U.S. waged any large-scale struggle for our rights, and there is the perception that the Obama agenda has such broad support that it would be impossible to challenge—so if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
In addition, the national unions’ approach is based on an underlying recognition that people are fed up with our public schools. Yet in the absence of our own grassroots, democratic vision of school transformation (that also protects and extends union rights), these union leaders just end up picking and choosing which aspects of the top-down reform agenda to get on board with.Social justice teachers’ unionism
If teachers’ unions and public education are to survive the onslaught of attacks against us, we will need to challenge the assumptions of the “partnership” model and make a fundamental shift toward social justice unionism. Social justice unions see themselves as fighting for the interests of the whole working class, not just their own members. To do this, unions must operate with a class struggle approach, take on all forms of oppression, build alliances with members of the communities in which they work, and have a global outlook.45
We know that teachers’ unions could be the leading force in a social movement for public education. The March 4th Day of Action for Public Education showed the tremendous potential for such a movement. The Day of Action was initiated by college students protesting tuition hikes in California, but eventually all California teachers’ unions got on board, holding leaflettings, school-site actions, and citywide rallies that highlighted the attacks on our public schools. Actions were also held in dozens of cities outside California. Our simple message—that public education and social services must be the top priorities of our society—resonated broadly with the general public. March 4th showed that there is no reason for our unions to be timid right now. Our fight for public education could attract millions to our side.
We will need such a mass movement to sweep away the dominance of “free-market” notions in education policy and return to the emphasis on equity that emerged from the 1960s. To win this fight, we must also win in the battle of ideas. State and federal administrators want us to believe that there are limited funds and that therefore “sacrifices” must be made (always for workers, never for well-paid administrators and executives). Nationally, the states’ total budget gap may be $375 billion for 2010-2011—half of the TARP fund used to bail out the banks. It’s not a question of a lack of funds but of priorities. Billions have been spent to bail out bankers and big businesses and to fund two unpopular wars. California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education. The rich have been under-taxed for decades now.
Such a movement will have to force major changes in how education is funded and run in this country. In California, we will have to overturn a system of state laws that have sapped the funding base from public education: the Proposition 13 cap on property taxes, tax breaks for the wealthy, and a two-thirds rule that makes it nearly impossible for the state legislature to raise taxes. This means that teachers’ unions will have to develop a serious, long-term strategy to build up a power base and push political change.
Grassroots, democratic reform versus top-down, corporate reform
We also need to be deeply involved in putting forward our own vision and concrete plans for transforming our own schools. The left within the teachers’ unions has always fought back against cuts, but for the most part has been hesitant to get involved in reform projects to transform individual schools. We have been clear about what we are against, but much less clear about what we are for.
At the same time, radical education reformers whose focus is creating alternative school models have mostly been working at a distance from the teachers’ unions, which they see as uninterested in questions of school transformation.
If our goal is to build a mass movement for public education, radicals in the teachers’ unions need to reclaim the terrain of education visionaries and combine it with our struggle for school funding and stronger union rights. We need to be part of the small struggles to improve schools in the here and now, because these will help build the community coalitions and power to fight for the massive increase in resources that we need. Of course, meaningful, progressive school reform is unsustainable without adequate funding—and that struggle must continue. But developing a vision for the changes we want to see at each school can bring more teachers, students, and parents into our struggle and lend urgency to the fight for more resources.In other words, we need a dual strategy to confront the dual attack of budget cuts and top-down reform. Progressive teachers in several cities have formed organizations to take on this challenge: The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators in Chicago, the Grassroots Education Movement in New York City, Educators for a Democratic Union in San Francisco, and Progressive Educators for Action in Los Angeles.46
Fighting privatization in Los Angeles
As the Los Angeles Unified School District proceeds with large-scale cuts and layoffs, it has also begun a process that could give away dozens of our schools to privately-run organizations.
Approved by the school board on August 25, 2009, the misnamed “Public School Choice” (PSC) process opened up fifty brand-new schools and 227 “low-performing” schools to bids by “internal and external stakeholders”—including both charter schools and teacher groups. Twelve existing schools and twenty-four brand-new schools were selected as “focus schools” subject to possible takeover for the 2010-2011 school year.
The PSC process for selecting a school operator is completely undemocratic. To submit their own proposal and prevent an outside takeover of their school, teachers and parents who work full time must spend countless hours in the evenings and on the weekends to complete the lengthy application. In contrast, charter schools employ staff members working full time on the process. This year, school proposal teams had just three months to develop, discuss, and write their proposals for major transformations to their schools—a setup to exclude most voices from the conversation. And though school employees and parents can vote on which plan they prefer for their school, the vote is merely “advisory” as the superintendent and school board make the final decision.
It was tempting to abstain from this horribly flawed proposal process altogether. But without teacher and parent proposals, there would have been a far greater risk that the schools would be turned over to charters. And abstaining from the process would have left the question of what kind of changes our schools need completely in the hands of the district and the Charter Management Organizations (CMOs).
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) decided to enter the playing field, and supported teacher groups in submitting proposals for all thirty-six focus schools. This process put teachers into discussions with each other and with parents about what kind of changes we want for our schools. How can we ensure teacher control of curriculum? How can we create more opportunities for teacher collaboration? How can we give parents a genuine voice in school decisions? How can we make students’ learning experiences more rigorous, authentic, and interesting?“[W]e’re trying to show that we can, as teacher-educators, build a school that will benefit our children because we know our children best,” said Josephine Miller, a first-grade teacher at focus school Hillcrest Elementary. “That’s what makes this exciting.”47
UTLA’s Charter Schools Task Force developed a framework of ten social justice principles that guide our efforts toward grassroots, democratic school reform: Access, equity, excellence, personalization, relevance to students’ lives and the real world, public management and local control, public purpose, school and community connection, sustainability and capacity, and commitment to unions and collective action. We think all proposals for school reform should be judged according to these principles, and we used the PSC process to educate parents about why charter schools don’t meet these criteria.
When 87 percent of parents voted to support the teacher-developed PSC proposals in the “advisory votes,” it gave us the best piece of propaganda for our side. The whole PSC process was justified in terms of “letting parents choose”—but parents had clearly chosen to support teacher-developed plans over outside takeovers.
In the end, the school board’s final decision gave twenty-nine of thirty-six schools to the local school plans developed by teachers. Despite a process that was set up to benefit them, charter schools took only four of the twenty-four new schools they bid for, and the two largest CMOs in Los Angeles (Green Dot and Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools) were rejected completely. Three schools went to the Mayor’s Partnership (whose teachers are still in UTLA). None of our schools should have been given away, but the combination of local proposal development and grassroots community outreach helped us save the vast majority of our schools and win people in many Los Angeles communities to opposing charter takeovers.
Many more schools are up for possible takeover next year. As the attacks continue, our challenge is to show how the budget cuts and school takeovers are part of a single, neoliberal agenda for education, and to bring those concerned with budget cuts and those working toward democratic school reform into a large, unified movement.
Conclusion
The neoliberal assault on education has the potential to destroy public schools and teachers’ unions within the next decade. Challenging it will require that we build a movement that is both militant and visionary about the future of public education. To create a broad movement of teachers, parents, and students, we have to consistently tie the issues of reform, resources, and union rights together. A movement for public education has the potential to lead the way and open up a much broader challenge to all the broken promises and conservative policies of the Obama administration: the attacks on all public-sector unions, the budget cuts to all important social services, and the funding of banks, prisons, and war instead of people’s needs.
Ultimately, a movement for public education will have to confront not just the neoliberal agenda, but the overall role of schooling in a capitalist society. If students leave school only to enter an economy where the vast majority of jobs are alienating, unfulfilling, and disempowering, how can we expect to have an education system that prepares them to be creative, critical thinkers?
As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued more than thirty years ago:

What we demand of U.S. schools is perfectly straightforward. We envision an educational system which, in the process of reproducing society, vigorously promotes personal development and social equality. What we have shown is equally straightforward: The major characteristics of the educational system in the United States today flow directly from its role in producing a work force able and willing to staff occupational positions in the capitalist system. We conclude that the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life.48

This is not just a matter of the current wave of education policy, but the structure of our society itself.

Gillian Russom is a high school teacher and union activist in Los Angeles.1 Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson, Stephanie Walters, eds., Keeping the Promise?: The Debate over Charter Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, Ltd., 2008), xii.
2 NBC Nightly News, March 11, 2010.
3 Associated Press, “High school graduation rates plummet below 50 percent in some U.S. cities,” April 1, 2008, www.foxnews.com.
4 Nancy, Krause, “Obama weighs in on CP teacher firings,” www.wpri.com/dpp/news/president-obama-supports-central-falls-teacher-firings.
5 Brian Chidester, “Getting the ax at Central Falls,” Socialist Worker, March 8, 2010, http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/08/axed-at-central-falls.
6 Randi Weingarten, “Spurring union-led innovation: public school entrepreneurs,”Huffington Post, October 8, 2009.
7 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2008).
8 Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
9 “President Obama’s remarks to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce,” March 9, 2009, New York Times, March 10, 2009.
10 Ibid.
11 www.scribd.com/doc/24665283/Green-Dot-Public-sic-Schools-original-Alain-Leroy-Locke-Charter-High-School-petition??autodown=pdf.
12 Jitu Brown, Eric (Rico) Gutstein, and Pauline Lipman, “Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story: myth or reality?” ?Rethinking Schools, Spring 2009.
13 Sarah Knopp, “Charter schools and the attack on public education,” International Socialist Review, November-December 2008.
14 Arne Duncan interview on ABC News “Washington Watch with Roland Martin,” January 29, 2010, http://blogs.abcnews.com/
politicalpunch/2010/01/duncan-katrina-was-the-best-thing-for-new-orleans-schools.html.
15 Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 6, and Leigh Dingerson, “Unlovely: how the market is failing the children of New Orleans,” in Dingerson et al., eds., Keeping the Promise?17-34.
16 Seema Mehta, “U.S. education secretary says California students in peril,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2009.
17 NBC News, “Teen’s beating death puts pressure on officials,” September 28, 2009, www.msnbc.msn.com.
18 Quoted in Melissa Tussing, “Pressure on CPS board to scuttle Renaissance 2010,” Medill Reports Chicago, October 28, 2009, news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=143733&
print=1, and “Report: School closings had little effect on student performance,” Medill Reports Chicago, November 5, 2009, ccsr.uchicago.edu/news_docs/6882report.
19 Brown, Gutstein, and Lipman, “Arne Duncan and the Chicago success story.”
20 Valerie Strauss, “Why Duncan’s record in Chicago is a problem,” Washington Post, December 29, 2009.
21 Andrew Spitser, “School reconstitution under No Child Left Behind: Why school officials should think twice,” UCLA Law Review, June 2007.
22 Nick Anderson and Bill Turque, “Delaware, Tennessee win education awards in first Race to the Top competition,” Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
23 Race to the Top Program, “Executive Summary,” U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., November 2009, www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/executive-summary.pdf.
24 Race to the Top Program, “Guidance and Frequently Asked Questions,” U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., (updated) January 13, 2010, www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/faq.pdf.
25 Ibid.
26 Web site of Senator Gloria Romero, http://dist24.casen.govoffice.com/index.asp.
27 Dan Walters, “Obama’s school grants are side issue in California,” Sacramento Bee, December 8, 2009.
28 Amy Hanauer, “Profits and privatization: The Ohio experience” in Dingerson, et al., eds., Keeping the Promise?
29 Quoted in Maria Glod, “Obama to rebrand ‘No Child Left Behind,’” Washington Post, June 23, 2009.
30 U.S. Department of Education, “A blueprint for reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” March 2010, www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/blueprint.pdf.
31 Monty Neill, “Congress needs a different ESEA blueprint,” National Center for Fair and Open Testing, March 23, 2010, www.fairtest.org/congress-needs-different-esea-blueprint.
32 Barbara Miner, “The debate over differentiated pay: The devil is in the details,”Rethinking Schools Online, Autumn 2009.
33 Quoted in Libby Quaid, “Obama education plan speech: Stricter standards, charter schools, merit pay,” Huffington Post, March 10, 2009.
34 Miner, “The debate over differentiated pay.”
35 www.teachersforceomeritpay.com.
36 The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, “Paying teachers for student test scores damages schools and undermines learning,” November 19, 2009, www.fairtest.org/paying-for-student-test-scores-damages-schools.
37 Miner, “The debate over differentiated pay.”
38 Race to the Top Program, “Guidance and Frequently Asked Questions.”
39 Libby Quaid, “Obama education plan speech: Stricter standards, charter schools, merit pay,” The Huffington Post, March 10, 2009.
40 Ibid.
41 Adrienne Johnstone, “We have to learn how to fight,” Socialist Worker, November 25, 2009.
42 Dennis Van Roekel, “Responding to Race to the Top,” National Education Association video, September 2009, www.nea.org/home/35870.htm.
43 Neil King, Jr., “Obama wins a battle as a teachers’ union shows flexibility,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2009.
44 Randi Weingarten, “A new path forward: Four approaches to ?quality teaching and better schools,” American Federation of Teachers, January 12, 2010, aft.3cdn.net/227d12e668432ca48e_twm6b90k1.pdf.
45 Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 165-186.
46 “Answering the attack on teachers,” Socialist Worker, March 3, 2010, http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/03/answering-attacks-on-teachers.
47 Howard Blume, “Teachers seek control at up-for-bid L.A. Unified Schools,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2010.
48 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (London:Routledge, 1976), 265.

International Socialist Review--

Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'

2010-07-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html

By Patrick Cockburn

The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city raise new questions about battle

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.
Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.
Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".
US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.
In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. "During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city," recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad.
He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."
The survey was carried out by a team of 11 researchers in January and February this year who visited 711 houses in Fallujah. A questionnaire was filled in by householders giving details of cancers, birth outcomes and infant mortality. Hitherto the Iraqi government has been loath to respond to complaints from civilians about damage to their health during military operations.
Researchers were initially regarded with some suspicion by locals, particularly after a Baghdad television station broadcast a report saying a survey was being carried out by terrorists and anybody conducting it or answering questions would be arrested. Those organising the survey subsequently arranged to be accompanied by a person of standing in the community to allay suspicions.
The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout".
Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.
Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.
The US cut back on its use of firepower in Iraq from 2007 because of the anger it provoked among civilians. But at the same time there has been a decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq since 2003. The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004. War damage was only slowly repaired and people from the city were frightened to go to hospitals in Baghdad because of military checkpoints on the road into the capital.

June was worst month for Army suicides, statistics show

2010-07-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

By Mike Mount, CNN Senior Pentagon Producer

Washington (CNN) -- More U.S. soldiers killed themselves last month than in recent Army history, according to Army statistics released Thursday, confounding officials trying to reverse the grim trend.

The statistics show that 32 soldiers killed themselves in June, the highest number in a single month since the Vietnam era. Twenty-one of them were on active duty, while 11 were in the National Guard or Army Reserve in an inactive status.

Seven of those soldiers killed themselves while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Army numbers.

The spike comes after the monthly suicide numbers had dropped following a January high of 28, and Army officials admit they still haven't answered the question of why troops are committing suicide at a record rate.

"There were no trends to any one unit, camp, post or station," said Col. Chris Philbrick, head of the Army's suicide prevention task force. "I have no silver bullet to answer the question why."

He said he could offer only what he has said before: "Continued stress on the force and the opportunities we have been facing in terms of the challenges in the Army continue to cause these events to take place."

Including the June numbers, 145 soldiers have killed themselves this year, more than half of the total number for all of 2009, according to Army statistics.

In 2009, a record-breaking year for suicides in the service, 245 soldiers killed themselves.

In another attempt to put a halt to the trend, the Army released a suicide prevention video, a follow-up to one released last year. The updated video is designed to "hit home" with soldiers and instill the importance of getting help, Philbrick said.

The video, titled "Shoulder to Shoulder: I Will Never Quit," begins with the compelling story of a soldier whose wife said she was divorcing him. The soldier, Spc. Joseph Sanders, says his wife was his whole world.

"I grabbed my rifle, put it under my chin and pulled the trigger," Sanders says.

The gun did not fire, he says, and when he took the rifle apart he discovered that a key part was missing.

His Army buddy then tells viewers he removed the part because Sanders was showing signs that he could kill himself.

Asked why the Army thinks this video will be more effective than the first one, Philbrick said the soldiers will relate to it better.

Watch the video on the Army's Suicide Prevention website

The first video, made up of a mix of actors and real soldiers, "sucked," he said. It was rushed out, and troops did not believe in it. He said some even openly laughed at it.

"This video has all real soldiers with real stories," Philbrick said.

The video is part of a series of efforts to cut the suicide rate. Last year, the Army required all soldiers around the world to stop working and spend a day watching the first video and receiving suicide prevention training.

Philbrick said the alarming June numbers will not bring another Army-wide training day, called a stand-down. He said the new video will be incorporated immediately into the standard suicide prevention training for new troops and the yearly training all soldiers go through.

the Crisis of Capitalism

2010-07-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

March to End the Siege of Gaza!

2010-06-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

FRIDAY JUNE 4TH: March to End the Siege of Gaza, Solidarity with Freedom Flotilla Activists

When: Friday, June 4th at 3:15pm

Where: Leaving from the State Capitol steps in Saint Paul and marching to the Minnesota Trade Office (32 Minnesota Street, St. Paul)

Early Monday morning, The Gaza Freedom Flotilla was raided by Israeli military commandos in international waters who fired live ammunition on the civilian passengers, killing at least 9 people and wounding scores more. The flotilla was a humanitarian aid convoy of 6 ships en route to the Gaza strip carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid, including food, medical supplies, construction materials. On board were more than 600 passengers from over 40 countries including activists, parliamentarians, journalists, and doctors. The flotilla's stated purpose was to break the inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza's borders which has deprived its population of more than 1.5 million of mobility and access to basic needs since 2007. While the violent raid of the Freedom Flotilla in international waters is itself a horrific assault on human life and a repressive act of state violence by Israel, it is but one expression of Israel's ongoing apartheid program in Palestine.

On Tuesday, Minnesotans entered Senator Amy Klobuchar's office to demand a political response to both the killings on the flotilla and the inhumane blockade of Gaza. This Friday, we will go to the MN trade office to demand an end to local economic relations between Minnesota and the State of Israel as part of a larger project of ending all US financial sponsorship of the Israeli war economy. The Minnesota Trade Office facilitates the relationship between Minnesota-based corporations and the State of Israel. In 2008, Minnesota companies made over $10 million on goods exported to Israel. The blockade of Gaza and the occupation of Palestine cannot be sustained without the military and financial support of the United States. This year alone the US will give a total of $2.8 billion to the state of Israel. The US also supports the occupation of Palestine through military aid in the form of technology, training, and weapons. In Minnesota, companies with Israeli contracts directly profit from the systematic violent assault on Palestinian life in the occupied territories.

Join us Friday to show that we will NOT tolerate the murder of activists and the undue persecution of Gazans. March on the Trade Office and demand NO MORE TRADE! TAKE DOWN THE BLOCKADE!

For twitter updates on the march, text "follow DASWO" to 40404 and visit our website at www.daswo.wordpress.com. Email us at daswo.tc@gmail.com.

--Direct Action To Stop War & Occupation (DASWO)

Zine: Confronting Militarism and Military Recruitment In Our Schools

2010-06-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

by: DC Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

note: this was scanned in to be printable. feel free to print as many copies as you want.

Download/View: http://bit.ly/sds-cr-zine

Opening: Thinking about joining the military? Are you willing to leave your family for extended periods of time? Are you ready to kill or die for a cause you don’t believe in? Are you prepared to give up the rights you enjoys as a civilian? Are you willing to fight someone else’s war? If you answered “No” to any of these questions, then the military may not be for you.

thanks to FYRadicalLiterature for the information!

Attention Youth Activists: We’re going to the United States Social Forum 2010!

2010-05-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

It’s going to be one HELL of a Summer ROADTRIP!

From June 22-26^th activists from all over the country will be converging in Detroit, MI for what is sure to be the largest convention of leftist activists in years! We are expecting more than 10,000 people.

According to the website, “the US Social Forum will provide a space to build relationships, learn from each other's experiences, and share analysis of the problems our communities face. It will help develop leadership, vision, and strategy needed to realize another world”.

Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) will be organizing a contingent of youth to leave Minneapolis on June 21^st, attend the forum for five days, and come back to Minneapolis on June 27^th. YAWR will organize transportation, food, and board for all of its contingent members for a fee of $150--$250 per member. If this cost is unaffordable, scholarships are available.

Time will be spent during the forum at workshops, marches, cultural/artistic events during the day and at other times optional recreational activities that include concerts, performances, parties, yoga, and general time to meet people. There will be hundreds of workshops and events to choose from. Some of the workshops are listed here- http://organize.ussf2010.org/workshops

If interested, please fill out an application. Request one and direct any questions to the YAWR email against.war@gmail.com. More specific information will be sent to those interested in the coming weeks.

There will be a meeting on June 14th at 7pm with all of those intending to come to the USSF. That meeting will serve as the deadline to get these applications in.

Israel attacks Gaza Aid fleet

2010-05-31T11:28:00.000-07:00

Israeli forces have attacked a flotilla of aid-carrying ships aiming to break the country's siege on Gaza.

At least 19 people were killed and dozens injured when troops intercepted the convoy of ships dubbed the Freedom Flotilla early on Monday, Israeli radio reported.
The flotilla was attacked in international waters, 65km off the Gaza coast.

Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, confirmed that the attack took place in international waters, saying: "This happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves."

Footage from the flotilla's lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara, showed armed Israeli soldiers boarding the ship and helicopters flying overhead.

Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal, on board the Mavi Marmara, said Israeli troops had used live ammunition during the operation.

The Israeli military said four soldiers had been wounded and claimed troops opened fire after "demonstrators onboard attacked the IDF Naval personnel with live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs".

Free Gaza Movement, the organisers of the flotilla, however, said the troops opened fire as soon as they stormed the convoy.

Our correspondent said that a white surrender flag was raised from the ship and there was no live fire coming from the passengers.

Before losing communication with our correspondent, a voice in Hebrew was clearly heard saying: "Everyone shut up".

Israeli intervention

Earlier, the Israeli navy had contacted the captain of the Mavi Marmara, asking him to identify himself and say where the ship was headed.

Shortly after, two Israeli naval vessels had flanked the flotilla on either side, but at a distance.

They also issued all passengers life jackets and asked them to remain below deck.Organisers of the flotilla carrying 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid then diverted their ships and slowed down to avoid a confrontation during the night.

Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Jerusalem, said the Israeli action was surprising.

"All the images being shown from the activists on board those ships show clearly that they were civilians and peaceful in nature, with medical supplies on board. So it will surprise many in the international community to learn what could have possibly led to this type of confrontation," he said.

Meanwhile, Israeli police have been put on a heightened state of alert across the country to prevent any civil disturbances.

Sheikh Raed Salah,a leading member of the Islamic Movement who was on board the ship, was reported to have been seriously injured. He was being treated in Israel's Tal Hasharon hospital.

In Um Al Faham, the stronghold of the Islamic movement in Israel and the birth place of Salah, preparations for mass demonstrations were under way.

Protests
Condemnation has been quick to pour in after the Israeli action.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, officially declared a three-day state of mourning over Monday's deaths.

Turkey, Spain, Greece, Denmark and Sweden have all summoned the Israeli ambassador's in their respective countries to protest against the deadly assault.

Thousands of Turkish protesters tried to storm the Israeli consulate in Istanbul soon after the news of the operation broke. The protesters shouted "Damn Israel" as police blocked them.

"(The interception on the convoy) is unacceptable ... Israel will have to endure the consequences of this behaviour," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement.

Ismail Haniya, the Hamas leader in Gaza, has also dubbed the Israeli action as "barbaric".
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists, including a Nobel laureate and several European legislators, were with the flotilla, aiming to reach Gaza in defiance of an Israeli embargo.
The convoy came from the UK, Ireland, Algeria, Kuwait, Greece and Turkey, and was comprised of about 700 people from 50 nationalities.

But Israel had said it would not allow the flotilla to reach the Gaza Strip and vowed to stop the six ships from reaching the coastal Palestinian territory.

The flotilla had set sail from a port in Cyprus on Sunday and aimed to reach Gaza by Monday morning.

Israel said the boats were embarking on "an act of provocation" against the Israeli military, rather than providing aid, and that it had issued warrants to prohibit their entrance to Gaza.
It asserted that the flotilla would be breaking international law by landing in Gaza, a claim the organisers rejected.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201053133047995359.html

Thousands protest Arizona's immigration law

2010-05-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

Under a broiling desert sun, tens of thousands of protesters on Saturday slowly marched five miles to the state Capitol to rally against Arizona's controversial new immigration law.

There was no official crowd estimate, but the march was by far the biggest demonstration since Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law on April 23. The law makes it a state crime to lack immigration papers and requires police to determine the status of people they stop and suspect are in the country illegally.

The law's backers, who held their own rally at a suburban stadium Saturday evening, contend that the measure is necessary to protect against violence seeping across the border from Mexico. "Why not make the country like it's supposed to be? Borders define us," said Don Baggett, who came to the rally from a Houston suburb.

Critics including President Obama, whose Justice Department is expected to challenge the law in court, say the measure invites racial profiling.

Several groups have sued to stop the law from going into effect as scheduled July 29. It is widely popular in Arizona and has attracted majority support in several national polls.

State Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard, a Democrat who opposed the law and is running for governor, announced Friday that he would defend the state against federal litigation. But Brewer, his likely Republican opponent, said Friday night that she didn't trust Goddard and would select private attorneys to handle the case.

Saturday was dominated by the voices against the law, and the march shut down much of this city's center.

Demonstrators came from as far as Rhode Island and Louisiana. They streamed down the broad boulevards in a several-blocks-long procession of white shirts, American flags and umbrellas to protect against the sun and temperatures in the high 90s. Dennis DuVall, 68, drove down from Prescott, Ariz., 100 miles north.

"It's my civic duty," said DuVall, a retired bus driver. "It shows commitment. People are willing to come out and walk five miles in 100 degrees. It's important."

The diverse crowd included a number of families like the Baezes, who drove from San Diego on Friday night. Juan and Guadalupe Baez, their six children ranging in age from 2 to 18 and Guadalupe's mother all wore matching white T-shirts that Juan, a 43-year-old trucker, had designed. On the back were the words, "We are hard workers, not criminals! We believe in USA justice. Arizona's SB 1070 is not justice."

"It's good to come here to help people," said Baez, who emigrated from Mexico illegally 24 years ago but was legalized in the amnesty signed by former President Reagan in 1986. He is now a U.S. citizen.

Passage of the Arizona law shocked him. "I thought the government is more noble, more fair here," he said.

Another family pushed a toddler who held a hand-lettered placard that said, "Mommy, why is my skin color a crime?" Several banners targeted President Obama, with whom many Latino activists express disappointment for failing to push immigration reform. "Obama ¿Donde Esta la Reforma?" asked one.

Another banner, carried by a group of students, declared, "CSU Bakersfield: We Are Arizona."

Hours later, several thousand supporters of the law filled most of a ballpark in Tempe where the Angels play during spring training. A series of talk radio hosts revved up the crowd while a musician played "Hit the Road Jack," and "tea party" groups signed up new members. One member of a Texas tea party, a legal immigrant from Colombia, spoke in Spanish of her support for the law.

"It's difficult for me to understand why you Americans have to pay for so many people who are not citizens," said Victoria Dennis of Dallas, as her husband, Philip, translated to wild applause. "This has got to stop, not only here in Arizona, but in America."

One in Three Killed By Drones in Pakistan Is a Civilian

2010-05-28T13:13:00.000-07:00

New (and Old) Members YAWR Meeting (FREE PIZZA)

2010-05-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

Youth Against War & Racism Meeting
--- Join us to prepare a summer of youth activism ---
--- Pizza and drinks provided! ---

Monday (Memorial Day), May 31st
5:00pm - 6:30pm

Mayday Bookstore, 301 Cedar Ave, Minneapolis (West Bank)

After a period of internal re-organization, Youth Against War & Racism is back in action, and we're inviting you to join us for a summer of organizing an activism. Our immediate focus is mobilizing for a local youth delegation to join with thousands at the U.S. Social Forum at the end of June (email back if you want to come!).

YAWR already has a long track record of organizing against military recruitment in the schools, including our continued campaign of anti-war tabling which brought us into all but two Minneapolis high schools this past Spring semester. But while maintaining a strong youth antiwar presence, YAWR is planning to branch out even further this summer, potentially taking up budget cuts to education, immigrant rights, LGBT rights, and more. We have several exciting campaign ideas, but we want your input before firmly deciding on our next steps. Join us Monday to help set the direction of youth activism in the Twin Cities in 2010 and beyond.

Here is the Agenda for the Monday YAWR Meeting

1. Introductions/pizza
2. What is YAWR? (What we stand for, what we have done)
3. Next Steps?
4. U.S. Social Forum
     What is the Social Forum
     What YAWR wants to do and logistics
     Why you should go

See you there!

NO JOKE: CIA Had Plan to Portray Saddam Hussein as Pedophile

2010-05-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

(May 25) -- The CIA had a bag of dirty tricks ready for Saddam Hussein in preparation of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq that included making him look like a pedophile. It also had something similar planned for Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post blog Spy Talk, citing former CIA officials, said one devious tactic involved creating a video showing the Iraqi strongman purportedly having sex with a teenage boy.

"It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera," one ex-CIA official told Spy Talk's Jeff Stein. "Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session."

Courtesy INA / Getty Images

The CIA had plans to create videos making it look like then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a pedophile.

The ex-CIA officials said the idea was then to "flood Iraq with the videos."

The CIA also had a plan to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin, and use a Saddam Hussein lookalike to announce he was resigning and handing over the reigns to his elder and erratic son, Uday, Spy Talk reported.

"I'm sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday," the impostor Hussein would tell the Iraqi people.

For bin Laden, Spy Talk reported, the agency actually took things one step further and used actors to make a video of the al-Qaida leader and others sitting around a campfire drinking liquor and bragging about their conquests with boys.

The blog reported that the CIA's Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, but in the end none ever took off because of internal disagreements over the dirty tricks, plus the CIA "didn't have enough money and expertise to carry" them out.

A U.S. Official said in a statement today to AOL News: " We can't confirm these accounts, but if these ideas were put forward at any time they clearly didn't go very far."

Some strong opposition came from James Pavitt, the now-ex-head of the CIA's Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner.

One of the ex-CIA sources told Spy Talk that the ideas were ridiculous and came from people who had spent time in Latin America and East Asia and didn't understand Middle Eastern culture.

"Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East -- nobody cares," one former CIA official told Spy Talk. "Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos."

Hussein was eventually captured in late 2003 and was hanged Dec. 30, 2006. His sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a shoot out with troops in Iraq in July 2003.

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/cia-had-plan-to-pose-saddam-hussein-osama-bin-laden-as-pedophiles/19490666

Arizona to Obama: We need Predator drones!

2010-05-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

The governor specifically asked for OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, used by the military for reconnaissance, noting that Arizona currently has only four of them "available for border missions."

"These helicopters are extremely valuable assets in supporting law enforcement efforts on the ground," she wrote. "The number available, though, is inadequate to provide the kind of support needed on the Arizona border."

The governor said that a fleet of eight to 10 Kiowa helicopters "would enable us to double our border coverage to 2,000 hours per year. To be effective, these additional aircraft must be equipped for day and night operations."

Her letter included a map showing the state-by-state allocation of Kiowa helicopters, as well as newer Lakota helicopters.

The governor also requested "wider deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) along our nation's southern border." UAVs are flying, remote-controlled robot drones that are widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are several different military models that fall under that description, including the Hunter, Predator, Reaper and Global Hawk, but the governor didn't request a particular type.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Unbowed by a raft of boycotts over her immigration policy, Arizona Gov. Janice Brewer has requested helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles from the White House to patrol the border region with Mexico.

Brewer, in a letter to President Obama, asked that the National Guard reallocate reconnaissance helicopters and robotic surveillance craft to the "border states" from other parts of the country."I am aware of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and it seems UAV operations would be ideal for border security and counter-drug missions," said the governor.

Her letter was dated May 20, the day that Mexican President Felipe Calderon met with Obama at the White House, condemned Arizona's new immigration law before Congress and later attended a state dinner

The new law, which goes into effect in July, requires police to "determine the immigration status" of anyone under "reasonable suspicion" of being an illegal alien. The most significant detail in this law is that it shifts this responsibility -- normally accorded to federal immigration authorities - to state police.

The governor, who signed the bill into law on April 23, maintains she is trying to pick up the slack for the federal government in cracking down on illegal immigration, including drug and human trafficking, along the border.

Obama Set To Send 1,200 Troops To US-Mexico Border

2010-05-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

by Erica Werner and Jacques Billeaud

WASHINGTON — Under pressure to take action, President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered 1,200 National Guard troops to boost security along the U.S.-Mexico border, pre-empting Republican efforts to force a congressional vote to send the troops.

Obama will also request $500 million for border protection and law enforcement activities, according to lawmakers and administration officials.

The president's action comes as chances for comprehensive immigration reform, Obama's long-stated goal, look increasingly dim in this election year. Obama has been all but compelled to do something since Arizona's passage of a tough illegal-immigration law thrust the border problem into the public spotlight.

Indeed, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer credited her signing of the controversial new law for compelling Obama to act. Signing the law, Brewer said in a statement, "clearly ignited the talk of action in Washington for the people of Arizona and other border states."

The National Guard troops will work on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support, analysis and training, and support efforts to block drug trafficking. They will temporarily supplement Border Patrol agents until Customs and Border Protection can recruit and train additional officers and agents to serve on the border, according to a letter Tuesday from top administration security officials to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich.

In 2006, President George W. Bush sent thousands of troops to the border to perform support duties that tie up immigration agents. But that program has since ended, and politicians in border states have called for troops to be sent to curb human and drug smuggling and to deal with Mexico's drug violence that has been spilling over into the United States.

The White House released the letter signed by national security adviser James Jones and White House counterterror chief John Brennan not long after Obama met at the Capitol with Republican senators who pressed him on immigration issues, including the question of sending troops to the border.

Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl have been urging such a move, and Republicans planned to try to require it as an amendment to a pending war spending bill.

In a speech Tuesday on the Senate floor, McCain said the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border has "greatly deteriorated." He called for 6,000 National Guard troops to be sent, and he asked for $250 million more to pay for them.

"I appreciate the additional 1,200 being sent ... as well as an additional $500 million, but it's simply not enough," McCain said.

McCain's amendment would direct the defense secretary to deploy the National Guard troops. The letter from Jones and Brennan took scathing aim at that approach.

"It represents an unwarranted interference with the commander in chief's responsibilities to direct the employment of our armed forces," Jones and Brennan wrote.

Democrats were considering countering McCain's amendment with a proposal of their own after disclosure of the administration plans. The White House wasn't expected to formally send its spending request to Capitol Hill until after the Memorial Day recess, said Kenneth Baer, spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

A military official said Tuesday that details were still being worked out on the troops' orders and destinations, adding that the timing of their deployment was not yet clear. Also undetermined was which units from which states would deploy.

The Defense Department, which has been jousting with the Homeland Security Department for the better part of a year over the possible deployment, had previously expressed concerns that the troops not be used for law enforcement duties. Pentagon officials are worried about perceptions that the U.S. was militarizing the border.

The administration's plans appear to use Guard troops only in a supporting role, according to the military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details were still being worked out. Some of the troops will be armed, but others will not.

Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords said the situation on the ground now is different from when Bush deployed the Guard. Arrests have fallen in the Arizona sector and there've been record drug seizures.

She said the border is more violent and law enforcement is outgunned. She and other lawmakers want the troops to be armed – they were not in the previous deployment.

She said the U.S. needs to "spend what it takes" to secure its border with Mexico.

The Mexican Embassy said Tuesday it hoped the National Guard troops would be used to fight drug cartels and not enforce immigration laws. Mexico has traditionally objected to the use of military forces to control undocumented migration, saying such measures would criminalize migrants and open the way for potential abuse.

Cecilia Munoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, told a group of Spanish-language reporters Tuesday that the National Guard troops would not deal directly with migrants.

More than 20,000 Border Patrol agents are deployed now, mostly along the nation's southern border.

___

Billeaud reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Suzanne Gamboa, Lolita C. Baldor and Luis Alonso in Washington and Paul Davenport in Phoenix contributed to this report.
Get HuffPost Politics On Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz! Subscribe to the new HuffPost Hill newsletter! Know something we don't? E-mail us at huffpolitics@huffingtonpost.com

U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Military Acts in Mideast Region

2010-05-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

by mark mazzetti

WASHINGTON — The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.

The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.

In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.

General Petraeus’s order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.

But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen — which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation — or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.

The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.

Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.

The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country’s nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.

“The Defense Department can’t be caught flat-footed,” said one Pentagon official with knowledge of General Petraeus’s order.

The directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed Sept. 30, may also have helped lay a foundation for the surge of American military activity in Yemen that began three months later.

Special Operations troops began working with Yemen’s military to try to dismantle Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s terror network based in Yemen. The Pentagon has also carried out missile strikes from Navy ships into suspected militant hideouts and plans to spend more than $155 million equipping Yemeni troops with armored vehicles, helicopters and small arms.

Officials said that many top commanders, General Petraeus among them, have advocated an expansive interpretation of the military’s role around the world, arguing that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.

The order, which an official said was drafted in close coordination with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command, calls for clandestine activities that “cannot or will not be accomplished” by conventional military operations or “interagency activities,” a reference to American spy agencies.

While the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have often been at odds over expansion of clandestine military activity, most recently over intelligence gathering by Pentagon contractors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there does not appear to have been a significant dispute over the September order.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to confirm the existence of General Petraeus’s order, but said that the spy agency and the Pentagon had a “close relationship” and generally coordinate operations in the field.

“There’s more than enough work to go around,” said the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. “The real key is coordination. That typically works well, and if problems arise, they get settled.”

During the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed clandestine military operations, arguing that Special Operations troops could be as effective as traditional spies, if not more so.

Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress, although Pentagon officials have said that any significant ventures are cleared through the National Security Council. Special Operations troops have already been sent into a number of countries to carry out reconnaissance missions, including operations to gather intelligence about airstrips and bridges.

Some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.

A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.

In contrast, General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

The Occupation of U.S. Public Schools: Kids as Cannon Fodder and Consumers

2010-05-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

by Mary Beaudoin, Women Against Military Madness

In November of 2009, ninety retired U.S. military leaders, including former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, two former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and six other four-star generals and admirals, announced their plans to cultivate another demographic to fight future imperial wars—pre-schoolers. According to Rear Admiral Barnett, “Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent on what’s going on in pre-kindergarten today.”

Major press throughout the country printed the story, echoing the concern that so many 17-24 year olds are unfit for military service today and that in the future it could mean “a limited pool (of potential recruits) will hold back our military readiness and erode our national security in the long run.

Although it may be surprising that they are targeting tots, it’s probably not surprising that high-ranking retired military men have an interest in raising cannon fodder for the future and passing on the lethal legacy associated with their careers. But what may come as a surprise is that they are already well on their way with the aid of the Obama administration and U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as congress, in pursuing an aggressive agenda, spearheaded by the Pentagon and corporate business interests, to alter the entire U.S. public education system.

To this end, Mission Readiness promoted the Early Learning Challenge Fund. It was included in the Zero-to-Five Initiative (that’s “zero to five” years of age) of President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Request. Congress was lobbied for support state-by-state and the House of Representatives passed the initiative in the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act last September; it currently awaits passage in the Senate. The money is not for actual program. The strategy is to shift who has control of public education beginning with children in the tender years and continuing through high school.

The Early Learning Challenge Fund is only one of a number of grant programs designed to “reform” the nation’s education system by militarizing and privatizing it. The so-called “education reform” movement was initiated by practitioners of a new form of private giving called “venture philanthropy,” which regards public schools as free-market terrain in which to exercise its own ideologies and agendas, away from the purview of public accountability and without cumbersome educator, local community, and school board input (the “reform” movement pushes for giving city mayors, rather than school boards, oversight for schools—although it will involve itself in school board campaigns when it isn’t possible).

Kenneth Saltman, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Foundations in Education at DePaul University, stated: “Within this corporatized view of educational leadership found in venture philanthropy, military leadership is celebrated for its alleged link with corporate management—a focus on discipline, order and enforcement of mandates through a hierarchy at every level of public schooling.” (Kenneth J. Saltman and David Gabbard, Education as Enforcement: the Militarization and Corporatization of Schools, New York: Routledge 2003.) Saltman calls the militarization of public schools with its focus on urban and predominantly African-American and Latino student bodies, “a ‘profoundly racialized phenomenon’” in that “these students are framed as suffering primarily from a lack of discipline which the military and corporation can supply.”

Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad, who made a fortune through residential home building, and the insurance and financial products corporations SunAmerica and AIG, is regarded as the foremost practitioner of venture philanthropy in education reform. He created the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems to carry out its agendas—placing corporate executives and military officers who are not educators—in charge of public school administrations, and indoctrinating administers who are already in the school system into its methods nationwide. By 2010, graduates from the Broad Superintendents Academy held 68 superintendent positions and 88 senior school district executive positions across the country. Last year, 43 percent of all large urban school districts that conducted external searches for new superintendents filled their positions with graduates of the academy.

It isn’t any wonder then that the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which operates these programs on school reform, sees things moving in the direction it desires. Its 2009/2010 report states: “The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. Secretary of Education marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.”

Military infiltration and control of public schools figure prominently in this scenario. Of the 14 members of the Broad Superintendent Class of 2010, (They keep their current jobs and attend “class” training for ten months at specific times throughout the year.) four are high-ranking military: the former Chief of Operations, NATO Afghan Operations; the Director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis for the United States Military Academy; the Commanding General of the United States Army Human Resources Command; and the Director of the Human Performance Resource Center for the United States Army. The class of 2009 included the Commanding General of 10th Mountain Division and Joint Task Force of 25,000 U.S. military in Afghanistan.

The education “reform” movement has so permeated our national culture that it now forms the framework of discussions about education—often in glowing terms. Both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Minneapolis’s Star Tribune referred to the selection of the new St. Paul School Superintendent for training at what they call the “prestigious” Broad Supervisor’s Academy. Although the new superintendent is an educator qualified for other reasons, the Pioneer Press called her experience at the Broad school “something the School Board could hardly overlook when they were choosing candidates.”

Several top officials in New York City’s Department of Education were trained at the Broad program but a chemistry teacher complains, “My district can’t provide working heat, light, or running water for my under-equipped lab, but we pay hundreds of thousands to the consulting businesses he (Eli Broad) promotes.” She goes on to state: “The real drive behind his manipulations is the marketing plan for the useless ‘services’ and products provided (at public expense) for his for-profit entrepreneurial ‘partners.’ Edubusiness entrepreneurs hide under a layer of fake nonprofits set by ‘philanthropists’ like Broad and Gates.” (Gotham Schools at http://gothamschools.org)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is another of the most prominent venture philanthropy foundations, providing seed money for education. A Portland, Oregon parent is one of many who expresses concern in a blog about what is happening to public schools—in this case, public pre-school. He complains that “my four year old can now color a rooster on the computer. Great skills for the future! It would be much cheaper to color a rooster with crayons on paper, but that wouldn’t benefit the tech companies pocketbook…” Horatio Guernica (pen name of a West Coast writer) stated in As It Ought to Be: Public Education July 2009 that current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a former board member of the Eli Broad Foundation, and the education reformers he represents “are frothing at the mouth to privatize one of our last remaining public assets, public schools…”

According to reports in Detroit News from October 2009 through January 2010, in the Detroit Public School District controversy swirls around extremely lucrative contracts for consultants, possible conflicts of interest with record-breaking deals for web-based teaching products and student achievement measurement. Detroit Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is a graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s School and embroiled in a lawsuit with the school board over who has control of academics.

Throughout the country, much evidence points to a coup d’etat of public schools. The Pentagon absorbs a monstrous amount of taxpayers’ money. Sanctions are put in place—struggling schools are unable to get the resources they need, with the most vulnerable paying the heaviest price and often forced to close. Hence, the school district is “softened up.” Using the corporate media, a propaganda campaign is conducted to convince the public that schools (especially urban ones) are failing and that educators and the local community are inadequate to handle the problem—though privatized charter school enterprises and the military can, making use of public money but without public accountability.

U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan held the title “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools and presided over the most militarized school district in the United States. Andy Kroll reported in Mother Jones, August 30, 2009, that “nearly 10,500” of Chicago’s “sixth through twelfth graders participate in some kind of military program on campus. Today, Chicago has six military high schools run by a branch of the armed services. Six smaller military academies share buildings within existing high schools.”

Chicago teacher Betsy Schnitizer wrote that Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education “union-busting, school-privatizing, school-militarizing Arne Duncan” is an indication of “the corporate and military friendly agenda of Barack Obama.” (“Obama’s Privatizing Agenda for Education?” January 26, 2009). Like many others, she describes a situation in which teachers are fired and replaced with young, non-union teachers; a small handful of elite, token schools are rewarded and those in most need are “characterized as failures” and cut adrift—some turned over to direct military control.

The National School Board’s daily web blog, BoardBuzz, reported on January 28, 2010, hearing from the Department of Education that there will be resources to “improve underperforming schools and a big push for prekindergarten” among other things, but said, “What concerns BoardBuzz is the discussion of a shift from discretionary funds to competitive grants…”

To make schools and educators compete for grants is not a sustainable model and sets up a scenario to divide them into winners and losers—reflecting the competitive philosophy of free-market capitalism and victor versus vanquished tactic of the military—one that from all accounts is moving ahead all over the country, from one end to the other.

The Washington Post, January 29, 2010, reported U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan saying, “this is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.” In its out-of-touch ignorance and callousness, the remark recalls Barbara Bush’s comment about how the suffering people of New Orleans were better off in the Super Dome than they had been before the levees broke. More importantly, it is the trademark of disaster capitalism as described by economist Naomi Klein, in which privatization moves in to profit when a geographic region finds itself in vulnerable circumstances.

Educators, teachers’ unions, school boards, parents, grandparents, communities, civic watchdogs, counter-recruitment activists and anyone concerned about children, militarization and privatization will need to be vigilant, vocal and active in the days ahead to prevent more of the public school system from being dismantled and put in the hands of oligarchs and the military forces who have strategically targeted public schools and children to exploit as consumers and cannon fodder. Recent successful efforts in Los Angeles can inspire them. This February educators, parents, students and the teachers’ union mounted a vigorous grassroots campaign to take back schools from outside reformers. As a result, the Los Angeles School Board voted against charter take-overs and turned 22 out of 30 challenged schools over to teacher control.

Defying Police Threats, Students Walk Out Against the Republican National Convention

2010-05-10T22:31:00.000-07:00

by Ty Moore

Despite police attempts to intimidate students from participating, hundreds of Twin Cities youth walked out of high schools on Thursday, September 4^th, to protest the war on the final Republican National Convention. Over 400 joined an energetic rally and march from the State Capitol, featuring a theatrical mock trial of giant puppet caricatures of Dick Cheney and other "War Criminals" who run Washington.

"While the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul roll out the red carpet for the convention, we say no to business as usual while the people responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqis, Afghans, and U.S. soldiers come to our city to plot their next steps," said Desarae Walker, a sophomore at the University of Minnesota and an activist with Youth Against War & Racism and Socialist Alternative. "We are tired of paying for a war with no end in sight."

The walkout also received substantial media coverage, including on TV news, in both local and national outlets (several links are included at the end of this article).

Most organizers of the event had anticipated a substantially higher turnout, but this was cut across by thinly veiled threats by police of violence against students who walked out - threats echoed by school officials. With the student strike called for just the third day of classes, there was little time for organizers to counter this fear campaign.

Police intimidation
St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington told the press, "The one untoward event that we are hoping that most well-thought out students in the city will not take part in is ... a call for students to walk out of school today. We think that's a bad idea on almost every possible basis. The place for students today is to stay in school" (Pioneer Press, 9/4/08).

The police told St. Paul and Minneapolis school district officials that the streets of downtown St. Paul would not be safe for students participating in the student strike. This message was clearly conveyed to students and many parents, in some cases through automated phone calls to students' homes warning of the alleged dangers and potential extra disciplinary action from the schools themselves
However, with walkout organizers publicly projecting a peaceful and permitted march, the only threat to students' safety was from the heavily armed police themselves! As promised by organizers, the walkout rally and march was a spirited, family -friendly event that proceeded without any confrontations with police. Hundreds of students peacefully left school in an act of collective civil disobedience, many participating in their first ever protest, demanding an end to the war in Iraq, and end to military recruiters in their schools, and money for education, not war.

Police Chief Harrington deceitfully told the media that students should skip the walkout since "there will be opportunities [Thursday] evening" to protest. Yet that evening, over 1000 people gathered at the State Capitol for a rally and march to the Xcel, where McCain was to give his acceptance speech. However, the police refused to grant organizers a permit to march after 5pm, effectively turning the streets around the Xcel into a "No protest zone" in the hours before McCain's speech (rendering the First Amendment null and void on Thursday night).

Of those who turned out to the evening protest, nearly 400 were arrested after cops blocked them from crossing bridges to get anywhere near the convention site. About 20 members of the media, including 2 Associated Press reporters, were caught in this indiscriminate police round-up! This was the culmination of a week of police repression against mostly peaceful protests, which created an extremely anxious climate in the city – difficult conditions under which to mobilize fresh layers of youth into action.

Counter-Recruitment Campaign Grows
While the turnout on the September 4^th student strike was smaller than past walkouts organized by Youth Against War & Racism, which have brought up to 2000 youth out, the local campaign YAWR has led against military recruitment in schools is stronger than ever.

Earlier this year, YAWR successfully pushed the Minneapolis school board to pass a resolution substantially restricting military recruiters' access to schools, and opening the door to a more institutional presence for the counter-recruitment movement in schools. This fall, YAWR intends to build on this success and expand our presence and base in Minneapolis high schools.

Just as important, over the last year the core activist base of YAWR has continued to expand. This in part came out of a highly successful activist training camp YAWR organized in August in partnership with the Ruckus Society, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Socialist Alternative, and Headwaters Foundation for Justice. Out of this camp, and in the run-up to the RNC, a whole new group of youth leaders developed, solidified as a team, and politically educated each other. In many respects, this will likely prove the most important lasting success of YAWR's student strike, because it lays the foundation for future youth movements to develop and flourish in the Twin Cities and beyond.
Further, a walkout by 400 students on the third day of school in the face of a hostile climate of police repression shows there is a substantial base of serious youth activists. Our key task now is to build off this success to organize more youth to take action to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and counter the presence of military recruiters in our schools.

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30317436@N08/page2/
"Students Skip School to Stage Peaceful Protest", Star Tribune:
http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/conventions/27867639.html
Video and news story on the student strike from KSAX: http://ksax.com/article/stories/S567267.shtml?cat=10230
Minnesota Public Radio report on Day 4 RNC protests, including the walkout:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/09/04/rnc_day4/?refid=0
Video from Democracy Now! (3 minutes in):
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/9/5
"Police Urge Students to Stay in School During the RNC":
http://www.wkbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=8952217

Money for Domestic Programs (AND MOMS) NOT FOR WAR!

2010-05-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

They're Not Illegal, They're Heroes: Why Immigrants Are Right to Chase the American Dream

2010-05-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

We need to stop calling undocumented immigrants in the United States “illegal”. A more appropriate term is: New American Heroes.

Why are undocumented immigrants heroes?

Millions of Americans, immigrants and citizens, work incredibly hard every single day in ridiculously low paying jobs that are the life-blood of our economy but are barely life-sustaining in return. I think every person who gets up at the crack of dawn or in the middle of the night to work one or two or even three jobs so they can pay the rent and put food on the table are heroes. But as hard as it is for every low-wage worker in the United States (and increasingly, middle class folks too) undocumented immigrants face additional, greater obstacles. These undocumented immigrants are heroes, too.

I certainly don’t have what it would take to survive if I was forced to flee my home country because of economic or political insecurity, travel thousands of miles in sometimes life-threatening conditions, move to somewhere where I probably don’t know anyone and don’t speak the language, and do the most thankless and backbreaking jobs like picking vegetables in the 100 degree sun or washing pots in a restaurant — all to help my family survive. I think that is heroic.

But whether we’re talking about undocumented immigrants in low-wage jobs or middle class immigrants who overstayed their visas, as a nation we have always believed that the pursuit of the American dream is heroic. Given that the rest of the world has long paid the price for sustaining the American dream (in terms of natural resources, cheap labor, wars, etc.), it’s only fair that immigrants should in turn hope to share in that dream. Through our cultural dominance of the globe, we repeatedly hold up the American dream as an ideal to which everyone should aspire — and, we tell the world, one in which everyone is included. It’s only fair that others should want in.

Some argue that all makes sense but still, why can’t all immigrants just take the legal path to the American dream? Because, increasingly, there isn’t one. Two very important facts have changed in the last decade that significantly impact the immigration equation.

First, in 1994, NAFTA was passed. Now, true, Mexico signed it — but it was largely under the coercion of big international business interests. The result was the devastation of Mexico’s economy by larger corporations in the US that flooded their market with cheaper products. A lot of that was corn, which we subsidize with our tax dollars here — and that artificially cheap corn imported into Mexico drastically undercut local farmers. Folks who had been surviving for generations as farmers and local business people are now seriously struggling.

Second, two years later, the United States passed a harsh immigration reform law that, ostensibly, made it much harder for immigrants already here (and with proper papers) to get citizenship AND made it harder for migrants from certain countries — especially Mexico and Central America — to come here in the first place.

So you pass United States policy that intentionally smothers small farmers and shopkeepers, etc., in Mexico AND THEN you change immigration policy so that these now-much-more-desperate immigrants can’t come to the US.

Why is it our corn can cross the border to “compete” in Mexico’s economy but Mexicans can’t cross the border to compete here?

In this context, the word “illegal” in the immigration debate is not only divisive but misnomer. If anything, the United States’ political acts should be deemed “illegal”, not the acts of well-meaning immigrants left with no other choice. Moreover, throughout history, we have celebrated those who disobey unjust laws in the name of justice. Undocumented immigrants today are carrying the torch of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Sojourner Truth — great leaders who understood that sometimes we must all answer to higher laws, to a higher belief in freedom and equality for all. In the great tradition of the American Revolution, resisting unjust laws — even if doing so is technically illegal — is an act of heroism.

On May 1, 2010, hundreds of thousands of heroes marched in cities and towns across the United States demanding a workable path to citizenship that will move our entire nation forward together. Just as it would be unthinkable for President Obama and Congress to ignore the demands of military war heroes, we cannot ignore the dire situation facing these heroes of economic wars our country has wrought. Just as undocumented immigrants recognize higher good than broken immigration laws, the President and Congress must find higher guidance than what is considered politically safe.

The word hero comes from Greek meaning to protect or defend. Undocumented immigrants are protecting and defending something much more important than borders (which big business erased long ago). Undocumented immigrants are defending the very definition of America, one that has always promised opportunity for all newcomers and, with any hope, always will.

Sally Kohn, Chief Agitation Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, is a community organizer, writer and political commentator. You can read more about her work at:http://movementvision.org

“Hey Dad, Why do we save Billionaires, but not Teachers?”

2010-05-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

This week thousands of New Jersey public school students walked out of class to protest draconian school budget cuts. “Save my teacher,” their signs read. In a state that is home to a bevy of high finance billionaires, with the highest per capita income in the nation, teachers are being sacked left and right. In our town half the student body protested outside the high school. Perhaps the protesters should turn their eyes towards the twenty-five top hedge fund honchos who took in $25 billion in 2009. Their “earnings” alone could fund 658,000 entry level teachers.
It’s ironic that the battlefield in this war over resources is public education. Because the public remains entirely uneducated about the connection between those billionaires and school budget cuts. We are clueless about what the Wall Street billionaires do to earn their riches and whether it’s of any value. We might be able to understand “weapons of mass destruction,” but financial weapons of mass destruction are way beyond us.
The new earning reports are good, we read. The giant financial institutions are back to making billions through “trading.” So are these bankers grown-up versions of kids trading baseball cards–or are they robber barons? Are they enriching our society or siphoning off its wealth? Maybe the marching students of New Jersey could ask Governor Christie to explain.

Here’s what we do know for sure. Our modern financial honchos are very different from the robber barons of old. Everybody knew that Rockefeller meant oil, Ford meant cars and Carnegie meant steel.
Yes, today, we know that Gates and Jobs mean computers. But who the hell is David Tepper, and what does he produce with his Appaloosa hedge fund? He must have done something pretty impressive to earn $4 billion (not million) in 2009, the worst financial year since the Great Depression, with 29 million Americans unemployed or forced into part-time work. Then again, how much would he have “earned” had we not provided more than $8 trillion in bailout funds, loans and guarantees to the collapsed financial sector?
Mr. Tepper lives in New Jersey where the governor has gone to war with the teachers, hoping to break the union and balance the budget on the backs of our students. But Governor Christie’s enthusiasm for a balanced budget only goes so far: He’s resolutely opposed to reinstituting the “millionaires’ tax” -even though the state’s fiscal crisis is a direct consequence of what millionaires and billionaires did on Wall Street.
Mr. Tepper’s personal income for 2009 would have covered the salaries of 62 percent of public school teachers–who reach 855,600 students. (Mean salary $57,645 )
But let’s not lay it all on Tepper’s shoulders. Andrew J. Hall once worked for the financial basket case called Citigroup. When it became clear that his $100 million bonus was embarrassment for the bailed out bank, his own financial group was sold to Occidental Petroleum. He’s an oil trader.
Can some well-educated New Jersey public school student please explain: What’s an oil trader? We say it’s all about gambling – me included. But does that mean that when he wins someone else loses? Can he make bets where no one loses? Or does the house lose? Are we the house and lose by paying more for gas? Or, is Mr. Hall really a shining green knight who is helping to reduce global warming by driving up the price of oil? We don’t know enough to even ask.
And unfortunately we also don’t know enough to ask the most important question of all: Do these financial barons create economic value or are they just siphoning off wealth from other parts of the economy? Is their work productive or are they just blowing air into the next financial bubble that will explode in our faces?
Because we don’t know, we also can’t discuss how our system assigns economic value to what each of us does. Something is really screwed up when we award billions to Wall Street elites for doing things we don’t comprehend, even as we lay off teachers by the thousands.
It’s the invisible hand of the free market, we’re told. Invisible is right. We can’t see, feel, touch or even fathom the outlines of our current financial system. If we were able to shine a bright light on the financial machinations happening right now on Wall Street, we might find that our financial free markets are not all that free. We might find that a few large financial institutions have a stranglehold over many financial markets and are sucking all the money out of them. We might find a massive array of government subsidies in the form of asset guarantees and cheap borrowing facilities. We might discover that like the robber barons of old with their all-powerful “trusts,” the largest financial institutions have invented new forms of monopoly power and political influence.
How much does President Obama himself know about what our modern-day barons really do? You’ve got to wonder when he calls Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein “savvy businessmen” and says he doesn’t “begrudge” them their “success and wealth.” As the Goldman Sachs scandal unfolds from civil to criminal charges, the President may be finding out more than he wanted to know about just what the JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs execs have been up to.
The President is not alone in accepting the equation that wealth = success = deserving of our admiration. Without much reflection many of us assume that because the rich are successful, their work must have great value. But since we don’t really know what they do, their financial haul may not in fact reflect any real contribution to our society. Ask Tony Soprano.
As we stumble around in a fog of confusion about the financial industry, more and more of our economy is being eaten up by it. Financial profits and bonuses are soaring again. The share of all corporate profits that come from finance jumped from about 7 percent in 1948 to nearly 35 percent just before the recent crash. And they are rising back up to those levels right now. (You want to see some scary pictures? Check out the financial graphs at Tradersnarrative.com.)
We were once told by gurus like Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan that this brave new financial world was the key to a bright future. The great new service sector was supposed to replace our old, polluting industrial jobs with clean, high-paying jobs in finance. American investors would be the bankers of the world. We did it better and smarter than everyone else.
But is ripping off consumers with hidden credit card fees a worthwhile activity? How about placing layers of fantasy finance bets on subprime mortgages? Is buying and selling millions of credit default swaps on Greek bonds that you don’t own a constructive activity? Would the world really suffer if we did some heavy financial industry trust-busting? We need to know more, much more.
So how do we find out? Our journalists and commentators have to dig deeper. We can’t be cowed by the enormous wealth these “successful” financiers have amassed, even if some of them are progressive philanthropists.
It’s good for America to see its bankers parade before congressional committees and offer spirited defenses of the indefensible. The more the American people can hear banking tycoons trying to justify their existence, the angrier they’ll become. But the investigations have to go deeper. Yes, Goldman Sachs seems to have pulled off a slimy scam by building securities they knew would tank and helping a hedge fund billionaire bet against them. But it’s what they do every day that really matters. We need to ask: How are your activities helping to build a better America? How are you helping to put our people to work? Do you know? Do you care?
And then we have to decide: Should we reinstitute Eisenhower-era taxes on the super-rich? Should we tax the hell out of financial gambling? Should we cut financial institutions down to size? Should we value teachers more than we value hedge fund billionaires?
Maybe the marching students already know the answers.
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

May Day Protest v. GOP State Convention

2010-05-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Arizona Legalizes Racial Profiling

2010-04-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that Arizona's new immigration legislation - requiring law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers - demeans us all by effectively legalizing racial profiling...

The conservative “states” rights” mantra sweeping our country has led to one of the most egregious wrongs in recent U.S. history. New legislation in Arizona requires law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers. What constitutes “reasonable suspicionâ? When asked what an undocumented person looks like, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law last week, said, “I don't know what an undocumented person looks like.” The bill does not prohibit police from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to stop. It is unlikely that officers will detain Irish or German immigrants to check their documents. This law unconstitutionally criminalizes “walking while brown” in Arizona.

Former Arizona attorney general Grant Woods explained to Brewer that SB 1070 would vest too much discretion in the state police and lead to racial profiling and expensive legal fees for the state. But the governor evidently succumbed to racist pressure as she faces a reelection campaign. Woods said, â[Brewer] really felt that the majority of Arizonans fall on the side of, “Let's solve the problem and not worry about the Constitution.â” The polls Brewer apparently relied on, however, employed questionable methodology and were conducted before heavy media coverage of the controversial legislation. No Democrats and all but one Republican Arizona legislator voted for SB 1070.

Undocumented immigrants in Arizona now face six months in jail and a $500 fine for the first offense — misdemeanor trespass — and an additional $1,000 fine for the second offense, which becomes a felony.

By establishing a separate state crime for anyone who violates federal immigration law, the new Arizona law contravenes the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which grants the federal government exclusive power to regulate U.S. borders.

SB 1070 creates a cause of action for any person to sue a city, town or county if he or she feels the police are not stopping enough undocumented immigrants. Even if a municipality is innocent, it will still be forced to rack up exorbitant legal fees to defend itself against frivolous lawsuits.

The bill also makes it a misdemeanor to attempt to hire or pick up day laborers to work at a different location if the driver impedes the normal flow of traffic, albeit briefly. How many New York taxi drivers impede the flow of traffic when they pick up fares? The law also criminalizes the solicitation of work by an undocumented immigrant in a public place, who gestures or nods to a would-be employer passing by. This part of the legislation is also unconstitutional as courts have held that the solicitation of work is protected speech under the First Amendment.

The new law effectively compels Arizona police to make immigration enforcement their top priority. Indeed several law enforcement groups oppose SB 1070. The Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, an organization of police officials who favor federal immigration reform, condemned the law, saying it would probably result in racial profiling and threaten public safety because undocumented people would hesitate to come forward and report crimes or cooperate with police for fear of being deported. The Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police also criticized the legislation, saying it will “negatively affect the ability of law enforcement agencies across the state to fulfill their many responsibilities in a timely manner;” the group believes the immigration issue is best addressed at the federal level.

Many civil rights and faith-based organizations also oppose SB 1070.
The Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF) called the law “tantamount to a declaration of secession.” The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders Legal Defense Fund - which represents 30,000 evangelical churches nationwide - as well as MALDEF, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are preparing federal lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of SB 1070.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles called the ability of officials to demand documents akin to “Nazism.” Former Arizona Senate majority leader Alfredo Gutierrez said, “This is the most oppressive piece of legislation since the Japanese internment camp act” during World War II. Representative Raul M. Grijalva (Dem.-AZ) called for a convention boycott of Arizona. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) complied. AILA is moving its fall 2010 conference, scheduled for Arizona, to another state.

Even though SB 1070 will not take effect for at least 90 days, undocumented immigrants in Arizona are terrorized by the new law. A man in Mesa, Arizona looked around nervously as he stood on a street corner waiting for work. “We shop in their stores, we clean their yards, but they want us out and the police will be on us,” Eric Ramirez told the New York Times.

Ironically, expelling unauthorized immigrants from Arizona would be costly. The Perryman Group calculated that Arizona would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs if all undocumented people were removed from the state.

âThis bill does nothing to address human smuggling, the drug cartels, the arms smuggling,” according to Democratic Senator Rebecca Rios.

âAnd, yes, I believe it will create somewhat of a police state,” she added. “Police in Arizona already treat migrants worse than animals,” said Francisco Loureiro, an immigration activist who runs a shelter in Nogales, Mexico. “There is already a hunt for migrants, and now it will be open season under the cover of a law.â

SB 1070 is the latest, albeit one of the worst, racist attacks on undocumented immigrants. The federal program called 287(g) allows certain state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in federal immigration enforcement activities. But a report released earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found a lack of oversight and training without adequate safeguards against racial profiling.

We can expect SB 1070 to be replicated around the country as the ugly wave of immigrant-bashing continues. Lawmakers from four other states have sought advice from Michael Hethmon, general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, who helped draft the Arizona law.

âSB 1070 is tearing our state into two,” said Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, who called the bill “bitter, small-minded and full of hate.â

He thinks “it humiliates us in the eyes of America and threatens our economic recovery.” More than 50,000 people signed petitions opposing SB 1070 and 2,500 students from high schools across Phoenix walked out of school and marched to the state Capitol to protest the bill before it passed. On Sunday, about 3,500 people gathered at the Capitol, chanting, “Yes we can,” “We have rights,” and “We are human.â

President Obama criticized SB 1070 as “misguided,” saying it will “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.” He called on Congress to enact federal immigration reform.

But Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the Coalition of Human Rights in Tucson, told Democracy Now! that there have been more deportations under the Obama administration than in any other administration. “This administration continues to follow the flawed concept that migration is somehow a law enforcement or national security issue,” she noted.

âAnd it is not. It is an economic, social, political phenomenon.” She mentioned that NAFTA has displaced millions of workers in Mexico who flood into the United States.

Instead of expressing gratitude for the back-breaking work migrant laborers contribute to our society, there is an increasingly virulent strain of racism that targets non-citizens. Republican lawmakers are joining together to oppose federal immigration reform, opting instead for a “states rights” approach where each state is free to enact its own racist law.

Let us join the voices of compassion and oppose the mean-spirited actions that aim to scapegoat immigrants. Laws like SB 1070 demean us all.

Colombia's Deadly "Democracy"

2010-04-26T17:48:00.000-07:00

More Than 150,000 May Have Been Killed

By DANIEL KOVALIK

In his book, Colombia: the Genocidal Democracy, Father Javier Girardo, a Jesuit priest and long-time human rights activist in Colombia, estimated that, between 1988 and 1995, more than 60,000 Colombians lost their lives to the internal conflict in Colombia – most of them at the hands of the state, either in the form of the official Colombian military or the paramilitary forces supported by the state.

As for the Colombian state’s support for the paramilitaries, also known as “death squads,” that is well-known. Thus, as the U.S. State Department has concluded in its annual human rights reports, the paramilitaries have received active support from the Colombian government and from the Colombian military which has provided the paramilitaries with weapons, ammunition, logistical support and even with soldiers. Given that the U.S. has aided the Colombian military with over $7 billion in military assistance since 2000, all the while knowing the military’s close collaboration with the murderous paramilitaries, the U.S. itself is complicit in the paramilitaries’ crimes.

The extent of the Colombian state’s connections with the paramilitaries continues to be exposed, with former paramilitary leaders revealing the heights of the government support for their activities. Within the past days, for example, former paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso confirmed that the current Colombian Vice-President, Francisco Santos, and the Defense Minister, Juan Manual Santos, had close ties with the paramilitary forces. Juan Manual Santos is expected to be the next President of Colombia.

Up till recently, the prevailing estimate of civilians killed specifically by the paramilitaries has been around 30,000. Father Girardo, citing new estimates by Colombia’s own Prosecutor General, has now shattered those original estimates, announcing that the Prosecutor General is currently investigating 150,000 extrajudicial killings by the paramilitary groups – killings which took place between the late 1980’s and the current time. Even the prior, more conservative estimates would have made Colombia the worst human rights abuser in South America in recent times, having victimized more than Argentina’s fascist junta and Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship.

The new estimates place Colombia in a category all of its own as the worst human rights abuser in the Western Hemisphere. And, in terms of peoples internally displaced as a result of the conflict in Colombia – over 4 million – Colombia ranks only second in the world to the Sudan. And, not too surprisingly given the U.S.’s usual support for the worst human rights abusers, the Washington Post reported in an article by Juan Forero on April 19, 2010, that Colombia is “Washington’s closest ally on the continent.”

In this same Washington Post article, Forero relates that, even as the U.S. has provided Colombia with massive amounts of assistance – most of it military, of course – Colombia has continued to slip deeper and deeper into poverty, with 43% of its population now living in poverty and 23% living in “extreme poverty.” As the Washington Post explained, Colombia is “the only major country in Latin America in which the gap between the rich and poor has increased in recent years, according to a report by the UN Economic Commission on Latin America.”

Of course, as Father Girardo noted in The Genocidal Democracy – a book which is sadly out of print – this is all according to Washington’s plan to make Colombia a compliant country open to unchecked exploitation by U.S. companies with an endless well of hunger for Colombia’s vast reserves of oil, coal, fruits, flowers and precious metals and gems, as well as for a desperate workforce willing to accept barely-subsistent wages.

With President Obama continuing to solidify the U.S.’s relationship with Colombia through a new deal which will give the U.S. access to 7 military bases, and through a Free Trade Agreement which Obama is now pushing, despite his campaign pledges to oppose it, this deadly game plan continues unabated. Only massive resistance in this country can end such destructive foreign policies.

* * *

As this article was going to publication, we learned that Javier Girardo, and his human rights group, Justicia y Paz, have received death threats in retaliation for the above-mentioned revelations about the paramilitaries. Please take a moment to write a note of concern for the life of Father Javier to Hillary Clinton (Fax 202 647-2283) and President Alvaro Uribe at the Colombian Embassy in D.C. (Fax 202 232-8643).

Daniel Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer working in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Yes, We Could... Get Out! Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

2010-04-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.
Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.

It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.
It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.
It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.
Vietnam and Afghanistan
Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.
And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).
The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.
It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously -- including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.
Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end.
And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country.
We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.
A Brief History of American Withdrawal
Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw -- not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.
And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.
Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.
A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (anda local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base," he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run" charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.
In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Timesreports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”)
If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassybuilt along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.
In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1.875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country.
Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone warthey are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool”of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”
Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.
Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.

The Guantanamo Deception

2010-04-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

Wilkerson Discloses Hundreds of Innocents Jailed

By BILL QUIGLEY

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, provided shocking new testimony from inside the Bush Administration that hundreds of the men jailed at Guantanamo were innocent, the top people in the Bush Administration knew full well they were innocent, and that information was kept from the public.

Wilkerson said President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld “indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons” and many in the administration knew it. The wrongfully held prisoners were not released because of political maneuverings aimed in part to cover up the mistakes of the administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years, signed a sworn declaration for an Oregon federal court case stating that he found out in August 2002 that the US knew that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were not enemy combatants. Wilkerson also discussed this in a revealing and critical article on Guantanamo for the Washington Note.

How did Colonel Wilkerson first learn about the innocents in Guantanamo? In August 2002, Wilkerson, who had been working closely with Colin Powell for years, was appointed Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State. In that position, Wilkerson started attending daily classified briefings involving 50 or more senior State Department officials where Guantanamo was often discussed.

It soon became clear to him and other State Department personnel “that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all.”

How was it possible that hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent? Wilkerson said it all started at the beginning, mostly because U.S. forces did not capture most of the people who were sent to Guantanamo. The people who ended up in Guantanamo, said Wilkerson, were mostly turned over to the US by Afghan warlords and others who received bounties of up to $5000 per head for each person they turned in. The majority of the 742 detainees “had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention.”

Military officers told Wilkerson that “many detainees were turned over for the wrong reasons, particularly for bounties and other incentives.” The U.S. knew “that the likelihood was high that some of the Guantanamo detainees had been turned in to U.S. forces in order to settle local scores, for tribal reasons, or just as a method of making money.”

As a consequence, said Wilkerson “there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

Wilkerson wrote that the American people have no idea of the “utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the initial stages…Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”

Why was there utter incompetence in the battlefield vetting? “This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to ‘just get the bastards to the interrogators.’”

As a result, Wilkerson’s statement continues, “there was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan.”

In addition, the statement points out “a separate but related problem was that often absolutely no evidence relating to the detainee was turned over, so there was no real method of knowing why the prisoner had been detained in the first place.”

“The initial group of 742 detainees had not been detained under the processes I was used to as a military officer,” Wilkerson said. “It was becoming more and more clear that many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military. If there was any evidence, the chain of protecting it had been completely ignored.”

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this early on and knew “of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released,” wrote Wilkerson.

So why did the Bush Administration not release the men from prison once it was discovered that they were not guilty? Why continue to keep innocent men in prison?

“To have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers,” wrote Wilkerson.

“They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released,” according to Wilkerson. “I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.”

The refusal to let the detainees go, even those who were likely innocent, was based on several political factors. If the US released them to another country and that country found them innocent, it would make the US look bad, said Wilkerson. “Another concern was that the detention efforts at Guantanamo would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were. Such results were not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at the Department of Defense.”

At the Department of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld, “just refused to let detainees go” said Wilkerson.

“Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney,” according to Wilkerson, “whose position could be summed up as ‘the end justifies the means’, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

President Bush was involved in all of the decisions about the men in Guantanamo according to reports from Secretary Powell to Wilkerson. “My own view,” said Wilkerson “is that it was easy for Vice President Cheney to run circles around President Bush bureaucratically because Cheney had the network within the government to do so. Moreover, by exploiting what Secretary Powell called the President’s ‘cowboy instincts,’ Vice President Cheney could more often than not gain the President’s acquiescence.”

Despite the widespread knowledge inside the Bush administration that the US continued to indefinitely detain the innocent at Guantanamo, for years the US government continued to publicly say the opposite – that people at Guantanamo were terrorists.

After these disclosures from deep within the Bush Administration, the newest issue now before the people of the U.S. is not just whether the Bush Administration was wrong about Guantanamo but whether it was also consistently deceitful in holding hundreds of innocent men in prison to cover up their own mistakes.

Why is Colonel Wilkerson disclosing this now? He provided a sworn statement to assist the International Human Rights Clinic at Willamette University College of Law in Oregon and the Federal Public Defender who are suing US officials for the wrongful detention and torture of Adel Hassan Hamad. Hamad was a humanitarian aid worker from Sudan working in Pakistan when he was kidnapped from his apartment, tortured and shipped to Guantanamo where he was held for five years before being released.

At the end of his nine page sworn statement, Wilkerson explains his personal reasons for disclosing this damning information. “I have made a personal choice to come forward and discuss the abuses that occurred because knowledge that I served an Administration that tortured and abused those it detained at the facilities at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere and indefinitely detained the innocent for political reasons has marked a low point in my professional career and I wish to make the record clear on what occurred. I am also extremely concerned that the Armed Forces of the United States, where I spent 31 years of my professional life, were deeply involved in these tragic mistakes.”

Wilkerson concluded his article on Guantanamo by issuing a challenge. “When – and if – the truths about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will be revealed in the way they should be, or Congress will step up and shoulder some of the blame, or the new Obama administration will have the courage to follow through substantially on its campaign promises with respect to GITMO, torture and the like, remains indeed to be seen.”

The U.S. rightly criticizes Iran and China for wrongfully imprisoning people. So what are we as a nation going to do now that an insider from the Bush Administration has courageously revealed the truth and the cover up about U.S. politicians wrongfully imprisoning hundreds and not releasing them even when they knew they were innocent? Our response will tell much about our national commitment to justice for all.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be contacted atquigley77@gmail.com

Soldiers in "WikiLeaks" Unit Apologize for Violence + VIDEO

2010-04-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The WikiLeaks "Collateral Murder" video shook an apathetic and misled public awake with images of civilian killing in the chaotic streets of Baghdad in July 2007. US forces wounded two small children and killed over a dozen people including members of the media. Two soldiers from the company involved in the shooting incident have written a letter of reconciliation and apology to the people affected by the incident, which is published below. -Matt Renner.

An Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People: From Current and Former Members of the US Military

Peace be with you,

To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the "Collateral Murder" Wikileaks video:

We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.

We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.

There is no bringing back all that was lost. What we seek is to learn from our mistakes and do everything we can to tell others of our experiences and how the people of the United States need to realize what we have done and are doing to you and the people of your country. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused.

We have been speaking to whoever will listen, telling them that what was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region.

We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.

More and more Americans are taking responsibility for what was done in our name. Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.

Our government may ignore you, concerned more with its public image. It has also ignored many veterans who have returned physically injured or mentally troubled by what they saw and did in your country. But the time is long overdue that we say that the values of our nation's leaders no longer represent us. Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won't lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation's importance pales in comparison to our common humanity.

We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members, as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad, to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves from the destructive policies of our nation's leaders, and to extend our hands to you.

With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused.

Solemnly and Sincerely,
Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Memo To America: Stop Murdering My People

2010-04-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

Amid increasing civilian deaths and resurgent warlordism, Afghan women's leader Malalai Joya writes that Hamid Karzai and the U.S. are losing credibility in Afghanistan day by day.

Almost every day, the NATO occupation of our country continues to kill innocent people. Each time, it seems, military officials try to claim that only insurgents are killed, or they completely deny and cover up their crimes. The work of a few courageous journalists is the only thing that brings some of these atrocities to light.

For instance, it was only after the reporting of Jerome Starkey of the Times of London that officials admitted to the brutal Feb. 12 murder of two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and several young men in a night raid at a home where a family was celebrating the birth of a child.

We can no longer bear the killing of our pregnant mothers, the killing of our teenagers and young children, the killing of so many Afghan men and women. We can no longer bear these “accidents” and these “apologies” for the deaths of the innocent.

Night raids, air raid “mistakes,” firing on civilian buses and cars at checkpoints—the occupation finds many ways of killing the people of Afghanistan. The excuses and lies for these deaths are like salt in our wounds, and it is no wonder that protests against the U.S. military are growing. The Afghan people have had enough.

In recent weeks, there has been much talk about Hamid Karzai’s threats to join the Taliban and about his supposed differences with the American government. But for Afghans, Karzai long ago lost all credibility. The joke among our people is that Karzai doesn’t do or say anything without consulting the White House first. No amount of nationalistic rhetoric or demagoguery on his part will change this perception.

Everyone in Afghanistan knows that Karzai was placed into power with the backing of the United States and its allies, and to this day he relies on their support. His regime would not last a day without it. And Afghans know too well the reality of his corrupt government: It has delivered nothing to the country’s poor other than sorrow and destitution, while filling the pockets of drug traffickers, warlords, and its own corrupt officials.

Afghanistan has had puppet leaders before, rulers who served only the interests of foreign occupiers, whether British or Soviet. But Karzai may be the most hated puppet in our history; he has empowered some of the most brutal internal enemies of ordinary Afghans, warlords of the Northern Alliance like Sayyaf, Dr. Abdullah, Rabbani, Mohaqiq, Ismael Kahn, Dostum and many others. Even his two vice presidents, Fahim Qasim and Karim Khalili, are notorious fundamentalist warlords. The president’s brother in Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is another thug in power whose links to the drug trade and the CIA have been widely reported.

Karzai made headlines by threatening to “join the Taliban,” but the reality is that for more than eight years he has had no problem working with fundamentalists who are the ideological brothers of the anti-women Taliban. In fact, Karzai himself used to support the Taliban when he was a minor tribal leader in Kandahar in the 1990s, and for years he has been negotiating to bring Taliban leaders into his puppet regime. Some of them are already serving in his regime, and the U.S. government has been encouraging these negotiations by creating the false categories of "moderate" and "extremist" Taliban.

He has also been reaching out to that most brutal warlord and criminal, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a mujahideen leader known for killing civilians and currently designated a terrorist by the U.S. government. Karzai recently appointed Abdul Hadi Arghandewal, an infamous leader of Hekmatyar’s party, as his minister in charge of the economy. These negotiations and flexible alliances by Karzai and the U.S. government are nothing new. For three decades, the U.S. has backed these criminals: Hekmatyar, al Qaeda and other fundamentalists in the 1980s, the Taliban in the 1990s, and now Karzai and his warlord allies.

Progressive-minded Afghans want to break out of this circle of warlordism once and for all. It is ironic that Karzai talks about the possibility that a “national resistance” could develop in Afghanistan. He should know that the prime target of such a movement will be his own regime and its foreign supporters.

Our people are deeply fed up. They have organized many anti-U.S. protests in the past months and if the occupation continues, the resistance will only grow. More than eight years of occupation have made life bleak, and we are tired of being pawns in the U.S. and NATO’s game for control of Central Asia.

We salute the anti-war movements in the NATO countries. Here, we will struggle to our last breath to stop this war that is tearing apart our beloved Afghanistan.

Malalai Joya, now 31, was the youngest member of the Afghan parliament, elected in 2005. In 2007 she was suspended from parliament because of her consistent criticism of the warlords and other human-rights abusers in the Karzai regime. Joya has survived five assassination attempts to date, and has written her life story in the book A Woman Among Warlords (with Derrick O’Keefe, Scribner, 2009). She writes from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Ninety-Four Percent of Kandaharis Want Peace Talks, Not War

2010-04-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Apr 18 (IPS) - An opinion survey of Afghanistan's Kandahar province funded by the U.S. Army has revealed that 94 percent of respondents support negotiating with the Taliban over military confrontation with the insurgent group and 85 percent regard the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers".The survey, conducted by a private U.S. contractor last December, covered Kandahar City and other districts in the province into which Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is planning to introduce more troops in the biggest operation of the entire war. Those districts include Arghandab, Zhari, rural Kandahar and Panjwayi.

Afghan interviewers conducted the survey only in areas which were not under Taliban control.

The decisive rejection of the use of foreign troops against the Taliban by the population in Kandahar casts further doubt on the fundamental premise of the Kandahar campaign, scheduled to begin in June, that the population and tribal elders in those districts would welcome a U.S.-NATO troop presence to expel the Taliban.

That assumption was dealt a serious blow at a meeting on Apr. 4 at which tribal elders from all over Kandahar told President Hamid Karzai they were not happy with the planned military operation.

An unclassified report on the opinion survey was published in March by Glevum Associates, a Washington-based "strategic communications" company under contract for the Human Terrain Systems programme in Afghanistan. A link to the report was first provided by the website Danger Room which reported the survey Apr. 16.

Ninety-one percent of the respondents supported the convening of a "Loya Jirga", or "grand assembly" of leaders as a way of ending the conflict, with 54 percent "strongly" supporting it, and 37 percent "somewhat" supporting it. That figure appears to reflect support for President Karzai's proposal for a "peace Jirga" in which the Taliban would be invited to participate.

The degree to which the population in the districts where McChrystal plans to send troops rejects military confrontation and believes in a peaceful negotiated settlement is suggested by a revealing vignette recounted by Time magazine's Joe Klein in the Apr. 15 issue.

Klein accompanied U.S. Army Captain Jeremiah Ellis when he visited a 17-year-old boy in Zhari district whose house Ellis wanted to use an observation post. When Ellis asked the boy how he thought the war would end, he answered, "Whenever you guys get out from here, things will get better. The elders will sit down with the Taliban, and the Taliban will lay down their arms."

The Kandahar offensive seems likely to dramatise the contrast between the U.S. insistence on a military approach to the Taliban control of large parts of southern Afghanistan and the overwhelming preference of the Pashtun population for initiating peace negotiations with the Taliban as Karzai has proposed.

Ironically, highlighting that contradiction in the coming months could encourage President Barack Obama to support Karzai's effort to begin negotiations with the Taliban now rather than waiting until mid-2011, as the U.S. military has been advocating since last December.

Obama told a meeting of his "war cabinet" last month that it might be time to start negotiations with the Taliban, but Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have opposed any move toward negotiations until Gen. McChrystal is able to demonstrate clear success in weakening the Taliban.

The Taliban ruling council has taken advantage of the recent evidence of contradictions between Pashtuns in Kandahar and the U.S. military over the Kandahar offensive by signaling in an interview with The Sunday Times of London that Taliban leader Mullah Omar is prepared to engage in "sincere and honest" talks.

In a meeting in an unidentified Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan reported Sunday, two Taliban officials told the newspaper that Omar's aims were now limited to the return of sharia (Islamic law), the expulsion of foreigners and the restoration of security. It was the first major signal of interest in negotiations since the arrest of Mullah Omar's second in command, Mullah Baradar, in late January.

The report of the Glevum survey revealed that more people in Kandahar regard checkpoints maintained by the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) and ANA and ANP vehicles as the biggest threat to their security while traveling than identified either Taliban roadside bombs or Taliban checkpoints as the main threat.

Fifty-eight percent of the respondents in the survey said the biggest threat to their security while traveling were the ANA and ANP checkpoints on the road, and 56 percent said ANA/ANP vehicles were the biggest threat. Only 44 percent identified roadside bombs as the biggest threat – the same percentage of respondents who regard convoys of the International Security Assistance Force – the NATO command under Gen. McChrystal – as the primary threat to their security.

Only 37 percent of the respondents regarded Taliban checkpoints as the main threat to their security.

In Kandahar City, the main target of the coming U.S. military offensive in Kandahar, the gap between perceptions of threats to travel security from government forces and from the Taliban is even wider.

Sixty-five percent of the respondents in Kandahar City said they regard ANA/ANP checkpoints as the main threat to their security, whereas roadside bombs are the main problem for 42 percent of the respondents.

The survey supports the U.S. military's suspicion that the transgressions of local officials of the Afghan government, who are linked mainly to President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar province council and the main warlord in the province, have pushed the population into the arms of the Taliban.

An overwhelming 84 percent of the respondents agreed that corruption is the main cause of the conflict, and two-thirds agreed that government corruption "makes us look elsewhere". That language used in the questionnaire was obviously intended to allow respondents to hint that they were supporting the Taliban insurgents in response to the corruption, without saying so explicitly.

More than half the respondents (53 percent) endorsed the statement that the Taliban are "incorruptible".

"Corruption" is a term that is often understood to include not only demands for payments for services and passage through checkpoints but violence by police against innocent civilians.

The form of government corruption that has been exploited most successfully by the Taliban in Kandahar is the threat to destroy opium crops if the farmers do not pay a large bribe. The survey did not ask any questions about opium growing and Afghan attitudes toward the government and the Taliban, although that was one of the key questions that Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the head of intelligence for Gen. McChrystal, had sought clarification of.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Obama’s “Remainees” Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?

2010-04-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

By Karen J. Greenberg
On his first day in office, President Barack Obama promised that he would close the Bush-era prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” and “no later than one year from the date of this order.” The announcement was met with relief, even joy, by those, like me, who had opposed the very existence of Guantanamo on the grounds that it represented a legal black hole where the distinction between guilt and innocence had been obliterated, respect for the rule of law was mocked, and the rights of prisoners were dismissed out of hand. We should have known better.

By now, it’s painfully obvious that the rejoicing, like the president’s can-do optimism, was wildly premature. To the dismay of many, that year milestone passed, barely noticed, months ago. As yet there is no sign that the notorious eight-year-old detention facility is close to a shut down. Worse yet, there is evidence that, when it finally is closed, it will be replaced by twoGuantanamos -- one in Illinois and the other in Afghanistan. With that, this president will have committed himself in a new way to the previous president’s “long war” and the illegal principles on which it floundered, especially the idea of “preventive detention.”

Guantanamo in Illinois
For those who have been following events at Guantanamo for years, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. We knew just how difficult it would be to walk the system backwards toward extinction, as did many of the former lawyer-critics of Guantanamo who joined the Obama administration. The fact is: once a distorted system has been set in stone, the only way to correct it is to end the distortion that started it: indefinite detention.
As of today, here’s the Guantanamo situation and its obdurate math. One hundred eighty-three detainees remain incarcerated there. Perhaps we should call them “remainees.” According to the estimates of the Guantanamo Detainee Review Task Force set up by Attorney General Eric Holder, about half of them will be released sooner or later and returned to their homelands or handed over to other “host” countries. They will then join approximately 600 former Guantanamo inmates released from custody since 2002. Another thirty-five or so remainees will be put on trial, according to reports on the task force’s recommendations and, assumedly, convicted in either civilian courts or by military commissions. For the remaining 50 or so -- those for whom evidence convincing enough for trial and conviction is absent, but who are nonetheless deemed by the president to constitute a threat to the nation -- the legal future is dim, even if the threat assessment which keeps them behind bars has nothing to do with normal American legalities.
Some of these long-term remainees may, in fact, have been jihadists at the time they were rounded up. Given the years of incarceration and the conditions they experienced, many more of the remainees may have been radicalized in Guantanamo itself, and might now seek to harm the U.S. or its citizens. In addition, half of them originally came from Yemen, a country unstable enough that, on return, some might indeed be recruited by forces intent on doing the U.S. harm. Although, in defiance of the warnings of its right-wing critics, the Obama administration did return six remainees to Yemen at the end of 2009, the Christmas Day bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab only ratcheted up concerns about possible radicalization and training there. There have been no further transfers to Yemen since then.
So what is an administration that has made a firm promise and encountered an obstacle-laden, politically charged reality to do? If you take seriously the plans that this administration has been floating, the answer is simple: close down Guantanamo by putting in play two other Guantanamos (lacking the poisonous name) -- one on American soil and one in Afghanistan, one future-oriented and sure to prove problematic, the other reeking of past disasters.
At some future date, the Obama administration has announced plans to move those Guantanamo detainees who are neither tried nor released to the still-to-be-refurbished Thomson Correctional Facility in Thomson, Illinois -- “Gitmo North,” as it’s been dubbed by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Plans to relocate at least some detainees to a prison in the U.S. surfaced last summer. The idea has since encountered Congressional resistance on the grounds of safety and security, heightened by outsized American fears that such prisoners have Lex Luthor-like powers and that al-Qaeda has the capability to attack any non-military prison holding them. The administration, however, is still pursuing the Thomson plan.
McConnell and other Republicans may be using the “Gitmo” label to stoke American fears of terrorism on our soil, but they are not wrong in another sense. A jail holding uncharged and untried remainees for the foreseeable future -- or even a remainee who has been tried and acquitted -- will indeed be “Gitmo,” whatever it’s official name and whatever happens to the prison in Cuba. In July 2009, in fact, the strikingly un-American idea of a presidentially imposed post-acquittal detention was first suggested by Jeh Johnson, the current General Counsel for the Department of Defense, as one possible fate for a dangerous detainee whom a deluded jury (or a jury deprived of torture-induced confessions) might free. In this scenario, such a remainee, like those never brought to trial, would potentially remain under lock and key until the end of hostilities in the “long war,” itself imagined as at least a generational affair.
Guantanamo in Afghanistan
In other words, what’s being proposed is the moving of a (renamed) Guantanamo, body and soul, to the United States. That’s already a dismal prospect, but hardly the end of the line when it comes to post-Guantanamo thinking for this administration. In fact, a new idea has emerged recently. Last month, according to the Los Angeles Times, the White House hinted that the administration was contemplating using the already existing prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan as yet another replacement for Guantanamo -- apparently for housing future prisoners in what is no longer officially termed the Global War on Terror.
Were this to happen, it would be a squaring of the circle, a strange return to the origins of it all. Bagram was, notoriously enough, the place where, in 2001-2002, many of the prisoners who ended up at Guantanamo were first held (and often badly mistreated). Perhaps my mind has simply taken a cynical turn, but I can’t help wondering whether the administration might someday simply dump some of the Guantanamo remainees there as well. Then, we would be grimly back where George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began. The “advantage” of Bagram, of course, is simple enough: prisoners on an American military base in distant Afghanistan might not be subject to the same levels of scrutiny or legal “meddling” (as the supporters of the Guantanamo process like to term it) as in Cuba or the United States -- all those habeas challenges and challenges to military commissions that have, in eight years, convicted only three detainees (only one of whom still remains in custody), and all those human rights concerns.
There are indications that, in considering the re-use of Bagram as a parking lot for “the worst of the worst,” Obama administration officials remain remarkably blind to the history they are threatening to repeat. Evidently they don’t grasp the obvious parallels between Guantanamo and Bagram. Nevertheless, the language they are wielding has begun to sound eerily familiar. Last month, for instance, a senior Pentagon official wasquoted saying that the idea of reinvigorating Bagram as a holding facility for such prisoners might not be the ideal solution, but was the “least bad” choice. How similar that sounds to the words former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld applied to Guantanamo Bay when he announced its opening in 2002. It was, he acknowledged almost apologetically, the “least worst place.”
If a two-prison solution were to go into effect, that would mean President Obama had fully accepted the Bush administration’s notion of a generational global battlefield against terror. After all, that’s what underlay Gitmo from the beginning and that’s what would underlie a rejuvenated Bagram as well. In theory, there could be a workable solution lurking somewhere in all this murky planning, if it were undergirded with actual legal definitions; if, in the case of Thomson, the Illinois facility-to-be, the prisoners placed there were first charged, tried, and convicted; and if, in the case of Bagram, anyone placed there was declared a prisoner of war, or given some legally recognized status according to the laws of war or the Geneva Conventions. But as of now, it looks like both facilities will instead offer an endorsement of so-called preventive detention.
The administration’s disingenuousness on this point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the system of indefinite detention that lay at its core and that continues to defy the rule of law as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. military law, and the international conventions that this country has signed onto.
Closing Guantanamo does not simply mean emptying the prison cells at that naval base and throwing away the keys. It means ending the policy that has become synonymous with Guantanamo -- of incarcerating individuals without the need to prove their guilt, and without a clear and recognizable process for determining the grounds for their detention.
Faced with opposition in Congress and in public sentiment generally, the Obama administration increasingly seems focused on ending not the conceptual nightmare we call Guantanamo, but the irritating problem that Guantanamo represents. Unfortunately, as this administration will learn to its regret, there is no closing Guantanamo if preventive detention continues.
In reality, a two-Guantanamo policy is likely to prove an unwieldy disaster and will hardly lead the country out of the quagmire of incarceration that the Bush administration mired us in. In the end, that quagmire is not legal (though the legal issues it raises are fundamental), nor political (though it may look that way from Capitol Hill): it’s psychological. And there is only one way to escape from it: end once and for all the notion of preventive detention by placing firm and unbending confidence in our military, our intelligence agencies, and our system of justice to identify enemies, prosecute those whom they can, and abide by the laws of war for prisoners of war.
Perhaps it’s also time for us to accept life in a world of imperfect security. It may sound harsh, but not nearly as soul-defeating as the idea that not one, but two Guantanamos, will define the American future.
Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, among other works. To listen tothe latest TomCast audio interview in which Greenberg discusses the quagmire of U.S. detention practices, click here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.

Afghans 'abused at secret prison'

2010-04-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

By Hilary Andersson

BBC News, Bagram

Afghan prisoners are being abused in a "secret jail" at Bagram airbase, according to nine witnesses whose stories the BBC has documented.
The abuses are all said to have taken place since US President Barack Obama was elected, promising to end torture.
The US military has denied the existence of a secret detention site and promised to look into allegations.
Bagram was the site of a controversial jail holding hundreds of inmates, who have now been moved to another complex.

The old prison was notorious for allegations of prisoner torture and abuse.
But witnesses told the BBC in interviews or written testimony that abuses continue in a hidden facility.
Sleep deprivation
"They call it the Black Hole," said Sher Agha who spent six days in the facility last autumn.
"When they released us they told us we should not tell our stories to outsiders because that will harm us."

BAGRAM AIRBASE
“ I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise ”
Mirwais, former detainee

Sher Agha and others we interviewed complained their cells were very cold.
"When I wanted to sleep and started shivering with cold I started reciting the holy Koran," he said.
But sleep, according to the prisoners interviewed, is deliberately prevented in this detention site.
"I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise," said Mirwais, who said he was held in the secret jail for 24 days.
"There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they'd come in and disturb you," he added.
The prisoners, who were interviewed separately, all told very similar stories. Most of them said they had been beaten by American soldiers at the point of arrest before being taken to the prison.
Mirwais had half a row of teeth missing, which he said was from being struck with the butt of a gun by an American soldier.
No-one said they were visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross during their detention at the site, and they all said that their families did not know where they were.
In the small concrete cells, the prisoners said, a light was on all the time. They said they could not tell if it was night or day and described this as very disturbing.
Mirwais said he was made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.
The ex-prisoners said they were imprisoned at the secret jail before being taken to the main detention centre at the Bagram airbase, a new complex called The Detention Facility in Parwan.
Bagram's prisoners were moved to the Parwan complex from the old notorious Bagram prison site on the airbase earlier this year.
In 2002, two prisoners were killed in the Bagram prison while in US custody after being suspended from the ceilings of their cells and brutally beaten.
New jail
The BBC was allowed into the new Bagram prison for an hour.
This was one of the first opportunities any outsider has had to set eyes on Bagram's interned prisoners since a jail was first established at Bagram soon after 9/11.
In the new jail, prisoners were being moved around in wheelchairs with goggles and headphones on.

The goggles were blacked out, and the purpose of the headphones was to block out all sound. Each prisoner was handcuffed and had their legs shackled.
Prisoners are kept in 56 cells, which the prisoners refer to as "cages". The front of the cells are made of mesh, the ceiling is clear, and the other three walls are solid.
Guards can see down into the cells above.
The BBC was told by the military to wear protective eye glasses whilst walking past the mesh cells as prisoners sometimes throw excrement or semen at the guards.
Prisoner accounts we logged painted a much better picture of the Parwan Detention Facility.
The US military itself has admitted that about 80% of those at Bagram are probably not hardened terrorists. It is the process of giving every detainee an internal military trial of sorts, called a Detainee Review Board.
The prisoners are represented by soldiers who are not lawyers.
"To this date, no prisoner has ever seen a lawyer in Bagram", said Tina Foster, who represents several of Bagram's prisoners in cases she has filed in on their behalf in the US. Guantanamo Bay's prisoners are able to see their lawyers.
About 100 prisoners have been released through this process, but due to an increased intake, the number of prisoners at Parwan is now 800, up from about 650 in September 2009.
The BBC put the allegations of ongoing abuses as a secret site on the airbase to the US military at Bagram. The military categorically denied the existence of a secret detention site.
"I've never heard of it. This is the only detention facility in Afghanistan" said Vice Admiral Robert Harward who is in charge of the Detention Facility in Parwan.
The US military promised to investigate any allegations of abuse.

Youth Against War and Racism

Reconsider Columbus' Day

'What Happens if We Stay in Afghanistan': A Response to TIME Magazine

Report: Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications

Recommendations

5 Passages from the WikiLeaks "Afghan Diary" That Bring the Bizarre, Tragic Reality of War to Life

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNetPosted on August 7, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/147755/

Blackwater: Can't Stop, Won't Stop

Garrisoning the Globe

Blackwater Despite the Risks

Colombian Mass Grave Of More Than 2000 May Be Civilian Trade Unionists, Not Military Casualties

Colombia is currently the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, and the U.S. is likely implicated in the murders.

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in FocusPosted on August 5, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/147728/

Obama's Neo-Liberal Agenda for Education

Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'

June was worst month for Army suicides, statistics show

the Crisis of Capitalism

March to End the Siege of Gaza!

Zine: Confronting Militarism and Military Recruitment In Our Schools

Attention Youth Activists: We’re going to the United States Social Forum 2010!

Israel attacks Gaza Aid fleet

Thousands protest Arizona's immigration law

One in Three Killed By Drones in Pakistan Is a Civilian

New (and Old) Members YAWR Meeting (FREE PIZZA)

NO JOKE: CIA Had Plan to Portray Saddam Hussein as Pedophile

Arizona to Obama: We need Predator drones!

Obama Set To Send 1,200 Troops To US-Mexico Border

U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Military Acts in Mideast Region

The Occupation of U.S. Public Schools: Kids as Cannon Fodder and Consumers

Defying Police Threats, Students Walk Out Against the Republican National Convention

Money for Domestic Programs (AND MOMS) NOT FOR WAR!

They're Not Illegal, They're Heroes: Why Immigrants Are Right to Chase the American Dream

“Hey Dad, Why do we save Billionaires, but not Teachers?”

May Day Protest v. GOP State Convention

Arizona Legalizes Racial Profiling

Colombia's Deadly "Democracy"

More Than 150,000 May Have Been Killed

Yes, We Could... Get Out! Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

The Guantanamo Deception

Wilkerson Discloses Hundreds of Innocents Jailed

Soldiers in "WikiLeaks" Unit Apologize for Violence + VIDEO

Memo To America: Stop Murdering My People

Ninety-Four Percent of Kandaharis Want Peace Talks, Not War

Obama’s “Remainees” Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?

Afghans 'abused at secret prison'

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet
Posted on August 7, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147755/

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus
Posted on August 5, 2010, Printed on August 12, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147728/