By Dennis Kucinich
01/10/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- In November of 2006, after an October upsurge in violence in Iraq, the American people moved decisively to reject Republican rule, principally because of the conduct of the war. Democratic leaders well understand we regained control of the Congress because of the situation in Iraq. However, two months later, the Congress is still searching for a plan around which it can unite to hasten the end of US involvement in Iraq and the return home of 140,000 US troops.
There is a compelling need for a new direction in Iraq, one that recognizes the plight of the people of Iraq, the false and illegal basis of the United States war against Iraq, the realities on the ground which make a military resolution of the conflict unrealistic and the urgent responsibility of the United States, which caused the chaos, to use the process of diplomacy and international law to achieve stability in Iraq, a process which will establish peace and stability in Iraq allow our troops to return home with dignity.
The Administration is preparing to escalate the conflict. They intend to increase troop numbers to unprecedented levels, without establishing an ending date for the so-called troop surge. By definition, this escalation means a continuation of the occupation, more troop and civilian casualties, more anger toward the US, more support for the insurgency, more instability in Iraq and in the region, and prolonged civil war at a time when there is a general agreement in the world community that the solution in Iraq must be political not military. Iraq is now a training ground for insurgents who practice against our troops.
What is needed is a comprehensive political process. And the decision is not President Bush's alone to make.
Congress, as a coequal branch of government has a responsibility to assist in the initiation of this process. Congress, under Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution has the war-making power. Congress appropriates funds for the war. Congress does not dispense with its obligation to the American people simply by opposing a troop surge in Iraq.
There are 140,000 troops remaining in Iraq right now. What about them? When will they come home? Why would we leave those troops in Iraq when we have the money to bring them home? Soon the President will ask for more money for the war. Why would Congress appropriate more money to keep the troops in Iraq through the end of President Bush's term, at a total cost of upwards of two trillion dollars and thousands of more troop casualties, when military experts say there is no military solution? Our soldiers stand for us in the field, we must to stand for them in our legislature by bringing them home.
It is simply not credible to maintain that one opposes the war and yet continues to fund it. This contradiction runs as a deep fault line through our politics, undermining public trust in the political process and in those elected to represent the people. If you oppose the war, then do not vote to fund it.
If you have money which can be used to bring the troops home or to prosecute the war, do not say you want to bring the troops home while you appropriate money in a supplemental to keep them in Iraq fighting a war that cannot be won militarily. This is why the Administration should be notified now that Congress will not approve of the appropriations request of up to $160 billion in the spring for the purposes of continuing the occupation and the war. Continuing to fund the war is not a plan. It would represent the continuation of disaster.
The US sent our troops into Iraq without a clear mission. We created a financial, military and moral dilemma for our nation and now we are talking about the Iraq war as our problem. The Iraqis are forgotten. Their country has been destroyed: 650,000 casualties, [based on the Lancet Report which surveyed casualties from March of 2003 to July of 2006] the shredding of the social fabric of the nation, civil war, lack of access to food, shelter, electricity, clean drinking water and health care because this Administration, with the active participation of the Congress, authorized a war without reason, without conscience, without international law.
The US thinks in terms of solving our own military, strategic, logistical, and political problems. The US can determine how to solve our problems, but the Iraqi people will have problems far into the future. This requires an intensive focus on the processes needed to stabilize Iraq. If you solve the Iraqi problem you solve the US problem. Any comprehensive plan for Iraq must take into account as a primary matter the conditions and the needs of the Iraqi people, while providing our nation with a means of righting grievous wrongs and taking steps to regain US credibility and felicity within the world community.
I am offering such a plan today. This plan responds to the concerns of a majority of Americans. On Tuesday, when Congress resumes its work, I will present this plan to leadership and members as the only viable alternative to the Bush Administration's policy of continued occupation and escalation. Congress must know that it cannot and must not stand by and watch our troops and innocent Iraqi civilians die.
These are the elements of the Kucinich Plan:
1. The US announces it will end the occupation, close military bases and withdraw. The insurgency has been fueled by the occupation and the prospect of a long-term presence as indicated by the building of permanent bases. A US declaration of an intention to withdraw troops and close bases will help dampen the insurgency which has been inspired to resist colonization and fight invaders and those who have supported US policy. Furthermore this will provide an opening where parties within Iraq and in the region can set the stage for negotiations towards peaceful settlement.
2. US announces that it will use existing funds to bring the troops and necessary equipment home. Congress appropriated $70 billion in bridge funds on October 1st for the war. Money from this and other DOD accounts can be used to fund the troops in the field over the next few months, and to pay for the cost of the return of the troops, (which has been estimated at between $5 and $7 billion dollars) while a political settlement is being negotiated and preparations are made for a transition to an international security and peacekeeping force.
3. Order a simultaneous return of all US contractors to the United States and turn over all contracting work to the Iraqi government. The contracting process has been rife with world-class corruption, with contractors stealing from the US Government and cheating the Iraqi people, taking large contracts and giving 5% or so to Iraqi subcontractors.
Reconstruction activities must be reorganized and closely monitored in Iraq by the Iraqi government, with the assistance of the international community. The massive corruption as it relates to US contractors, should be investigated by congressional committees and federal grand juries. The lack of tangible benefits, the lack of accountability for billions of dollars, while millions of Iraqis do not have a means of financial support, nor substantive employment, cries out for justice.
It is noteworthy that after the first Gulf War, Iraqis reestablished electricity within three months, despite sanctions. Four years into the US occupation there is no water, nor reliable electricity in Baghdad, despite massive funding from the US and from the Madrid conference. The greatest mystery involves the activities of private security companies who function as mercenaries. Reports of false flag operations must be investigated by an international tribunal.
4. Convene a regional conference for the purpose of developing a security and stabilization force for Iraq. The focus should be on a process which solves the problems of Iraq. The US has told the international community, "This is our policy and we want you to come and help us implement it." The international community may have an interest in helping Iraq, but has no interest in participating in the implementation of failed US policy.
A shift in US policy away from unilateralism and toward cooperation will provide new opportunities for exploring common concerns about the plight of Iraq. The UN is the appropriate place to convene, through the office of the Secretary General, all countries that have interests, concerns and influence, including the five permanent members of the Security Council and the European community, and all Arab nations.
The end of the US occupation and the closing of military bases are necessary preconditions for such a conference. When the US creates a shift of policy and announces it will focus on the concerns of the people of Iraq, it will provide a powerful incentive for nations to participate.
It is well known that while some nations may see the instability in Iraq as an opportunity, there is also an even-present danger that the civil war in Iraq threatens the stability of nations throughout the region. The impending end of the occupation will provide a breakthrough for the cooperation between the US and the UN and the UN and countries of the region. The regional conference must include Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
5. Prepare an international security and peacekeeping force to move in, replacing US troops who then return home. The UN has an indispensable role to play here, but cannot do it as long as the US is committed to an occupation. The UN is the only international organization with the ability to mobilize and the legitimacy to authorize troops.
The UN is the place to develop the process, to build the political consensus, to craft a political agreement, to prepare the ground for the peacekeeping mission, to implement the basis of an agreement that will end the occupation and begin the transition to international peacekeepers. This process will take at least three months from the time the US announces the intention to end the occupation.
The US will necessarily have to fund a peacekeeping mission, which, by definition will not require as many troops. Fifty percent of the peacekeeping troops must come from nations with large Muslim populations. The international security force, under UN direction, will remain in place until the Iraqi government is capable of handling its own security. The UN can field an international security and peacekeeping mission, but such an initiative will not take shape unless there is a peace to keep, and that will be dependent upon a political process which reaches agreement between all the Iraqi parties. Such an agreement means fewer troops will be needed.
According to UN sources, the UN the peacekeeping mission in the Congo, which is four times larger in area than Iraq, required about twenty thousand troops. Finally the UN does not mobilize quickly because they depend upon governments to supply the troops, and governments are slow. The ambition of the UN is to deploy in less than ninety days. However, without an agreement of parties the UN is not likely to approve a mission to Iraq, because countries will not give them troops.
6. Develop and fund a process of national reconciliation. The process of reconciliation must begin with a national conference, organized with the assistance of the UN and with the participation of parties who can create, participate in and affect the process of reconciliation, defined as an airing of all grievances and the creation of pathways toward open, transparent talks producing truth and resolution of grievances. The Iraqi government has indicated a desire for the process of reconciliation to take place around it, and that those who were opposed to the government should give up and join the government. Reconciliation must not be confused with capitulation, nor with realignments for the purposes of protecting power relationships.
For example, Kurds need to be assured that their own autonomy will be regarded and therefore obviate the need for the Kurds to align with religious Shia for the purposes of self-protection. The problem in Iraq is that every community is living in fear. The Shia, who are the majority fear they will not be allowed to government even though they are a majority. The Kurds are afraid they will lose the autonomy they have gained. The Sunnis think they will continue to be made to pay for the sins of Saddam.
A reconciliation process which brings people together is the only way to overcome their fears and reconcile their differences. It is essential to create a minimum of understanding and mutual confidence between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
But how can a reconciliation process be constructed in Iraq when there is such mistrust: Ethnic cleansing is rampant. The police get their money from the US and their ideas from Tehran. They function as religious militia, fighting for supremacy, while the Interior Ministry collaborates. Two or three million people have been displaced. When someone loses a family member, a loved one, a friend, the first response is likely to be that there is no reconciliation.
It is also difficult to move toward reconciliation when one or several parties engaged in the conflict think they can win outright. The Shia, some of whom are out for revenge, think they can win because they have the defacto support of the US. The end of the US occupation will enhance the opportunity for the Shia to come to an accommodation with the Sunnis. They have the oil, the weapons, and support from Iran. They have little interest in reconciling with those who are seen as Baathists.
The Sunnis think they have experience, as the former army of Saddam, boasting half a million people insurgents. The Sunnis have so much more experience and motivation that as soon as the Americans leave they believe they can defeat the Shia government. Any Sunni revenge impulses can be held in check by international peacekeepers. The only sure path toward reconciliation is through the political process. All factions and all insurgents not with al Queda must be brought together in a relentless process which involves Saudis, Turks and Iranians.
7. Reconstruction and Jobs. Restart the failed reconstruction program in Iraq. Rebuild roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities, houses, and factories with jobs and job training going to local Iraqis.
8. Reparations. The US and Great Britain have a high moral obligation to enable a peace process by beginning a program of significant reparations to the people of Iraq for the loss of lives, physical and emotional injuries, and damage to property. There should be special programs to rescue the tens of thousands of Iraqi orphans from lives of destitution. This is essential to enable reconciliation.
9. Political Sovereignty. Put an end to suspicions that the US invasion and occupation was influenced by a desire to gain control of Iraq's oil assets by A) setting aside initiatives to privatize Iraqi oil interests or other national assets, and B) by abandoning efforts to change Iraqi national law to facilitate privatization.
Any attempt to sell Iraqi oil assets during the US occupation will be a significant stumbling block to peaceful resolution. The current Iraqi constitution gives oil proceeds to the regions and the central government gets nothing. There must be fairness in the distribution of oil resources in Iraq. An Iraqi National Oil Trust should be established to guarantee the oil assets will be used to create a fully functioning infrastructure with financial mechanisms established protect the oil wealth for the use of the people of Iraq.
10. Iraq Economy. Set forth a plan to stabilize Iraq's cost for food and energy, on par to what the prices were before the US invasion and occupation. This would block efforts underway to raise the price of food and energy at a time when most Iraqis do not have the means to meet their own needs.
11. Economic Sovereignty. Work with the world community to restore Iraq's fiscal integrity without structural readjustment measures of the IMF or the World Bank.
12. International Truth and Reconciliation. Establish a policy of truth and reconciliation between the people of the United States and the people of Iraq. In 2002, I led the effort in the House of Representatives challenging the Bush Administration's plans to go to war in Iraq. I organized 125 Democrats to vote against the Iraq war resolution. The analysis I offered at that time stands out in bold relief for its foresight when compared to the assessments of many who today aspire to national leadership. Just as the caution I urged four years ago was well-placed, so the plan I am presenting today is workable, and it responds to the will of the American people, expressed this past November. This is a moment for clarity and foresight. This is a moment to take a new direction in Iraq. One with honor and dignity. One which protects our troops and rescues Iraqi civilians. One which repairs our relationship with Iraqis and with the world.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Another U.S. government theft of Cuban funds frozen in that country
STATEMENT from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs
Another U.S. government theft of Cuban funds frozen in that country
THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs has learned that on November 27 in the United States, Cuban funds were stolen for the fourth time from money illegally frozen in U.S. banks after the triumph of the Revolution, under the so-called “Regulations for the Control of Cuban Assets,” passed on July 8, 1963, establishing, among other steps, the freezing of Cuban assets in the United States as part of the illegal and cruel policy of blockade against Cuba.
This shameless theft was carried out to satisfy legal rulings on spurious lawsuits filed against our country in U.S. courts by U.S. citizens Janet Ray Weininger and Dorothy Anderson McCarthy. These plaintiffs received a total of $72,126,884 from Cuban funds frozen in bank accounts of the National Bank of Cuba and the Cuban Telecommunications Enterprise (EMTELCUBA). In both cases, U.S. federal courts upheld the rulings issued by a Florida state court.
One of the suits against Cuba was filed in the 11th Judicial Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, a Florida state court, by Janet Ray Weininger, the daughter of American pilot Thomas Willard Ray, falsely alleging that he was summarily executed on April 19, 1961 during the mercenary invasion of Playa Girón.
In reality, he was a pilot who an aggressor from the United States, a CIA agent who was shot down during the invasion and whose body remained preserved at the Cuban Institute of Legal Medicine for 18 years because the U.S. government concealed his identity and refused to admit to his U.S. citizenship, in order to not acknowledge its direct responsibility in that failed invasion. Finally, after steps taken by the Ray family and after the U.S. government admitted to the pilot’s identity and citizenship, it was possible to hand over his body to his family in 1979.
In response to the other lawsuit, filed by Dorothy Anderson McCarthy, the abovementioned state court accepted charges of the supposed torture and extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizen Howard F. Anderson without any proof, and when in reality, he was a U.S. citizen who was tried on April 18, 1961 by the Revolutionary Court of Pinar del Río in Case No. 97 of that year for his subversive activities on behalf of the U.S. government and against the Cuban people, and sentenced to the death penalty.
Anderson had been detained by State Security forces on March 26, 1961, a few weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, for being a member of a group of former soldiers at the services of the dictatorship, members of the terrorist groups “Anti-communist Civic Association” (ACA) and “Democratic Revolutionary Front” (FRD), which were preparing armed uprisings, implementing instructions from the CIA. Eight tons of weapons were seized from Anderson’s group, which had buried them on the southern coast of Pinar del Río, and which had been brought to Cuba on February 22, 1961 by a boat with U.S. registration, in a CIA-directed operation. Investigations confirmed that Anderson, who was using the pseudonym “Lee” in Cuba, was the CIA’s liaison with the abovementioned counterrevolutionary organizations in Cuba.
During the processing of the lawsuits against Cuba that have now resulted in another theft of our frozen funds, the U.S. government acted with total complicity with the plaintiffs, arguing that U.S. law permitted the use of those funds to satisfy the rulings favoring the plaintiffs, and therefore that the Treasury Department could not place the slightest obstacle in the way, and even exempted them from obtaining licenses to be able to take possession of the funds.
These actions against Cuba are based on the arbitrary and politicized manipulation of the U.S. government designation of our country as a supposed “state sponsor of international terrorism,” as well as a distorted interpretation of U.S. laws themselves.
It is totally unacceptable for the Cuban state to be accused of the commission of supposed acts of terrorism against U.S. citizens. On the contrary, it has been precisely acts of terrorism and armed attacks against Cuba, perpetrated from that country, that have caused thousands of deaths and serious physical and psychological injuries to Cuban citizens, as well as extensive damages and economic harm to our country.
These and other, similar lawsuits filed in U.S. courts lack validity and legitimacy for Cuba, given they are based on totally false and manipulated arguments, constituting legal aberrations that can only be accommodated by and sustained on the irrational and hostile U.S. government policies toward Cuba.
The Cuban state has repeatedly exposed the illegal actions by successive U.S. administrations using Cuban funds illegally frozen in that country. In the past, these funds have been stolen by the decision or consent of several presidents and by the U.S. Congress itself, on the dates of October 2, 1996; February 12, 2001; and April 29, 2005, to “compensate” representatives of the terrorist mafia in Miami, particularly the families of pilots from the counterrevolutionary organization “Brothers to the Rescue” who were shot down on February 24, 1996 for repeatedly violating our airspace.
With the recent attack on Cuban financial assets frozen in U.S. banks, a total of $170,233,536 in funds has been stolen from our country.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses the U.S. government of making yet another unilateral decision to steal Cuban financial assets and therefore flagrantly failing to comply with its obligations to protect and watch over the absolute integrity of those funds, which belong to Cuban institutions.
The Cuban government does not recognize the jurisdiction of U.S. courts to judge the Republic of Cuba. Neither the U.S. government nor the legal agencies of that country have the legitimate right to hand over frozen Cuban funds to terrorist groups or to families of U.S. citizens involved in aggression against our country, thus directly encouraging this type of activity.
The Cuban government condemns these most recent attacks on Cuban funds frozen in the United States, given that they constitute actions in violation of international law and are yet another expression of the criminal U.S. government policy of blockade and hostility against our country.
Cuba will never renounce its right to demand that full responsibility should be taken by the U.S. government for the theft down to the last cent of funds that are legitimately ours.
Havana, January 10, 2007
Foreign Affairs
Another U.S. government theft of Cuban funds frozen in that country
THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs has learned that on November 27 in the United States, Cuban funds were stolen for the fourth time from money illegally frozen in U.S. banks after the triumph of the Revolution, under the so-called “Regulations for the Control of Cuban Assets,” passed on July 8, 1963, establishing, among other steps, the freezing of Cuban assets in the United States as part of the illegal and cruel policy of blockade against Cuba.
This shameless theft was carried out to satisfy legal rulings on spurious lawsuits filed against our country in U.S. courts by U.S. citizens Janet Ray Weininger and Dorothy Anderson McCarthy. These plaintiffs received a total of $72,126,884 from Cuban funds frozen in bank accounts of the National Bank of Cuba and the Cuban Telecommunications Enterprise (EMTELCUBA). In both cases, U.S. federal courts upheld the rulings issued by a Florida state court.
One of the suits against Cuba was filed in the 11th Judicial Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, a Florida state court, by Janet Ray Weininger, the daughter of American pilot Thomas Willard Ray, falsely alleging that he was summarily executed on April 19, 1961 during the mercenary invasion of Playa Girón.
In reality, he was a pilot who an aggressor from the United States, a CIA agent who was shot down during the invasion and whose body remained preserved at the Cuban Institute of Legal Medicine for 18 years because the U.S. government concealed his identity and refused to admit to his U.S. citizenship, in order to not acknowledge its direct responsibility in that failed invasion. Finally, after steps taken by the Ray family and after the U.S. government admitted to the pilot’s identity and citizenship, it was possible to hand over his body to his family in 1979.
In response to the other lawsuit, filed by Dorothy Anderson McCarthy, the abovementioned state court accepted charges of the supposed torture and extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizen Howard F. Anderson without any proof, and when in reality, he was a U.S. citizen who was tried on April 18, 1961 by the Revolutionary Court of Pinar del Río in Case No. 97 of that year for his subversive activities on behalf of the U.S. government and against the Cuban people, and sentenced to the death penalty.
Anderson had been detained by State Security forces on March 26, 1961, a few weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion, for being a member of a group of former soldiers at the services of the dictatorship, members of the terrorist groups “Anti-communist Civic Association” (ACA) and “Democratic Revolutionary Front” (FRD), which were preparing armed uprisings, implementing instructions from the CIA. Eight tons of weapons were seized from Anderson’s group, which had buried them on the southern coast of Pinar del Río, and which had been brought to Cuba on February 22, 1961 by a boat with U.S. registration, in a CIA-directed operation. Investigations confirmed that Anderson, who was using the pseudonym “Lee” in Cuba, was the CIA’s liaison with the abovementioned counterrevolutionary organizations in Cuba.
During the processing of the lawsuits against Cuba that have now resulted in another theft of our frozen funds, the U.S. government acted with total complicity with the plaintiffs, arguing that U.S. law permitted the use of those funds to satisfy the rulings favoring the plaintiffs, and therefore that the Treasury Department could not place the slightest obstacle in the way, and even exempted them from obtaining licenses to be able to take possession of the funds.
These actions against Cuba are based on the arbitrary and politicized manipulation of the U.S. government designation of our country as a supposed “state sponsor of international terrorism,” as well as a distorted interpretation of U.S. laws themselves.
It is totally unacceptable for the Cuban state to be accused of the commission of supposed acts of terrorism against U.S. citizens. On the contrary, it has been precisely acts of terrorism and armed attacks against Cuba, perpetrated from that country, that have caused thousands of deaths and serious physical and psychological injuries to Cuban citizens, as well as extensive damages and economic harm to our country.
These and other, similar lawsuits filed in U.S. courts lack validity and legitimacy for Cuba, given they are based on totally false and manipulated arguments, constituting legal aberrations that can only be accommodated by and sustained on the irrational and hostile U.S. government policies toward Cuba.
The Cuban state has repeatedly exposed the illegal actions by successive U.S. administrations using Cuban funds illegally frozen in that country. In the past, these funds have been stolen by the decision or consent of several presidents and by the U.S. Congress itself, on the dates of October 2, 1996; February 12, 2001; and April 29, 2005, to “compensate” representatives of the terrorist mafia in Miami, particularly the families of pilots from the counterrevolutionary organization “Brothers to the Rescue” who were shot down on February 24, 1996 for repeatedly violating our airspace.
With the recent attack on Cuban financial assets frozen in U.S. banks, a total of $170,233,536 in funds has been stolen from our country.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs accuses the U.S. government of making yet another unilateral decision to steal Cuban financial assets and therefore flagrantly failing to comply with its obligations to protect and watch over the absolute integrity of those funds, which belong to Cuban institutions.
The Cuban government does not recognize the jurisdiction of U.S. courts to judge the Republic of Cuba. Neither the U.S. government nor the legal agencies of that country have the legitimate right to hand over frozen Cuban funds to terrorist groups or to families of U.S. citizens involved in aggression against our country, thus directly encouraging this type of activity.
The Cuban government condemns these most recent attacks on Cuban funds frozen in the United States, given that they constitute actions in violation of international law and are yet another expression of the criminal U.S. government policy of blockade and hostility against our country.
Cuba will never renounce its right to demand that full responsibility should be taken by the U.S. government for the theft down to the last cent of funds that are legitimately ours.
Havana, January 10, 2007
Washington and Its Contempt for the Venezuelan People - The History of Democracy Prevention in Venezuela - Part 2
by Chris Carlson
January 09, 2007
"Long live El Mocho Hernández!" cried Venezuelan dissidents and rebels more than one hundred years ago. The battle cry of a popular movement at the end of the 19th century, "El Mocho" referred to José Manuel Hernández, a wildly popular leader and candidate for president in 1897. But he was a little too popular for Washington's liking.
After years of dictatorship, El Mocho represented a wide array of groups in Venezuela that had grown unhappy with the ruling Caracas elite who centralized power in their hands. He called for free, open elections, free public education, a crackdown on corruption, and decentralization of power among other things. He wanted to give the right to vote to all males over age 18. After years of political exclusion of the masses, they were calling for a more participatory form of democracy. These were hardly radical demands.
But for Washington, closely allied to the elite class in Venezuela, this popular movement was dangerous to their interests. The U.S. minister to Venezuela warned of spreading anti-Americanism among the "unenlightened" classes.(1) The "unenlightened" meant the popular classes, the poor majority of the population. As Washington saw it, only the wealthy, educated people could have control: the stupid majority should be denied any power. If a popular movement could take power, they would certainly transform the elite-dominated system, and the elite would lose their privileges. Washington could lose control.
The conflict going on in Venezuela today with Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution has exactly the same basis. In order to gain any popular representation and participation in the political system, the masses have struggled and fought for centuries against elite domination. The U.S. has been working against them all the way to the present. The Venezuelan masses who support Hugo Chávez today are demanding basically the same thing as those who supported El Mocho Hernández over a century ago; a real democracy with popular participation.
Dating back from the times of colonialism, a small elite class had always controlled and benefited from Venezuela's resources. The vast majority of the population has been neglected and were always excluded. The country was never developed nor modernized, very little industry was created, and the masses had neither job opportunities nor access to education. The economy has always been based on enriching a small minority with the export of primary resources, leaving everyone else out. The trick has been maintaining this undemocratic structure, which means preventing the majority from becoming involved.
Fear of the popular leader El Mocho led the U.S. minister to Venezuela, along with the Venezuelan elite class, to endorse El Mocho's conservative opponent, Ignacio Andrade.(2) According to them, the rural folk and popular masses that supported El Mocho couldn't be taken seriously as they were not "responsible" enough for full political participation. Both U.S. officials and the local elite showed their contempt for democracy when they agreed that the majority of the Venezuelan population should not play a role in politics until they had matured and "acquired the necessary culture." The people were not yet "ready" to participate.(3) When massive fraud stole the victory from El Mocho, Andrade took power even though it was obvious he was not the favorite of the majority. El Mocho Hernández represented the desire for popular participation and would be revered for decades by the excluded masses. However, Washington was relieved; another popular movement had been sidelined, the threat of democracy avoided.
Dictatorship: The Solution to the "Problem" of Democracy
Preferable to Washington was the brutal, iron-fisted dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez who came to power a decade later. Dictatorship was much less risky, mostly because it was allied to elite interests and seldom challenged Washington's hegemony. Gómez ruled for nearly three decades until his death in 1935. During that time he prohibited all political parties and elections. Political opponents were jailed, tortured, and killed. He was very unpopular among the masses, but the Venezuelan elite class and Washington were pleased. The "backwardness" and "racially inferiority" of the Venezuelan masses made a "popular form of government next to impossible."(4)
For the U.S. oil companies, the Gómez regime was extremely friendly. When oil was first discovered in Venezuela in the 1920's he allowed the oil companies to write Venezuela's oil legislation to their liking.(5) For the next two decades they would profit handsomely from Venezuela's oil, and the growth of the oil industry allowed Gómez and the elite class to build their own fortunes.(6)
Other U.S. businesses also benefited, as wealthy Venezuelans imported mostly U.S. manufactured goods. The vast oil incomes created an elite consumer class and U.S. entrepreneurs immediately saw the opportunity to import consumer products for the Venezuelan elite. U.S. corporations opened offices in Caracas.
But after decades of dictatorship throughout the beginning of the 20th century, another popular movement arose in the 1940's with the founding of a new political party, Acción Democrática (AD). After taking power through a coup, political reform was the first item on the agenda. AD declared universal suffrage for all citizens over eighteen, including women. All political parties were legalized, and open elections were finally held. For the first time in history, Venezuelans could all vote and choose their political representatives.(7)
The U.S. saw this popular movement as dangerous. The fact that AD had the support of the poor masses and labor groups meant they might actually make decisions in the interests of the majority. Of course, this is how a democracy is supposed to work, but for the U.S. and the Venezuelan elite, these would be the "wrong" decisions.(8)
A democratic system is the one thing that presents the biggest threat to the interests of the elite class and their Washington allies. Therefore, throughout the history of Venezuela the participation of the masses has always been prevented and carefully avoided. If the popular masses could, in some way, exercise power, they would surely make decisions that would go drastically against elite interests. Most likely they would try to break their dependence on U.S. imports. Most definitely they would raise taxes on U.S. oil companies and use the increased revenues to improve basic services for the masses, like education, health, infrastructure; exactly what Hugo Chávez has done over the last few years.
In 1947, in the country's first ever open presidential elections, AD's candidate Romulo Gallegos won with 73% of the vote. Three of every four Venezuelans had voted for him, and he immediately began to push through a progressive program of reforms.(9) New laws increased taxes on the oil industry's profits, and public education was expanded. AD had raised the minimum wage and began to promote economic diversification. To the U.S. oil companies' dismay, the party came through on its promises to pursue "social justice and better working conditions for the workers."(10)
But Romulo Gallegos, the first ever popularly elected president in Venezuela, only lasted 10 months. He was overthrown by a military coup the same year he took power. A military dictatorship quickly reversed all of AD's progressive reforms and exercised ruthless control over the population for the next 10 years. Gallegos was kicked out of the country. The effective leader of the coup, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, exiled and jailed AD leaders, and repressed all political opposition to him. Political parties and peasant unions were outlawed.(11)
Domestic elites and their allies in Washington concurred that popular democracy was dangerous to their interests. A U.S. Minister in Caracas declared that "the people of Venezuela are not yet ready nor adequately prepared for democracy."(12) A few years later, in 1954, the Eisenhower Administration awarded the ruthless dictator the Legion of Merit decoration for his "special meritorious conduct in the fulfillment of his high functions." (13)
It was indeed "meritorious conduct" when Pérez Jiménez answered by awarding new petroleum concessions to the U.S. companies. For the elite class and Washington, once again, dictatorship was preferable to democracy. Representation and participation of the masses was to be avoided and prevented.
Interestingly, there is a lot that hasn't changed in Venezuela. The popular movement led by Hugo Chávez has been harshly opposed by the elite class and Washington. As with popular movements of the past, the elite has sponsored coup attempts and other actions to remove the widely-supported president from power. Washington has supported their attempts, financing radical opposition groups, and plotting against the government.(14) The mass media, entirely controlled by the elite and linked to U.S. capital, has maintained a constant campaign of attacks against the government, convincing a substantial segment of the population that Hugo Chávez is a horrible dictator.(15)
The conflict is, and has always been, one of class struggle. The elite has always opposed any transformation of the economy, which is based on an unfair system of exploitation. The export of valuable resources finances the import of U.S.-produced goods. But the interests of the popular classes go directly against this system. For the masses to have jobs, education and a good standard of living, the economy must be diversified, and industry must be developed. Income from natural resources must be maximized and used for the benefit of the majority. The dependence on U.S. imports must be reduced.
Ultimately, the benefit of the majority means the dismantling of the undemocratic, elite-based system. For that reason, Washington and the local elite have always feared a popular democracy that serves the common good. From the days of "Viva El Mocho Hernández!" to the days of "Viva Chávez!" popular participation has always been the enemy.
____________________
(1) Ewell, Judith. Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia ©1996, pg. 97
(2) Ewell, pg. 95
(3) Ewell, pg. 92, 109
(4) Ewell, pg. 123
(5) Ewell, pg. 134
(6) Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, And Modernity in Venezuela. The University of Chicago Press ©1997, pg. 82
(7) Coronil, pg. 132
(8) Ewell, pg. 155
(9) Coronil, Pg. 139
(10) Country Studies US/Area Handbook Series, Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, U.S. Department of the Army, ©2005, The Transition to Democratic Rule, http://countrystudies.us/venezuela/6.htm
(11) Country Studies US, The Transition to Democratic Rule, http://countrystudies.us/venezuela/6.htm
(12) Ewell, pg. 159
(13) Ewell, pg. 160
(14) Gott, Richard. Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Verso ©2005, pg. 224
(15) Gott, pg. 246
________________________________
Chris Carlson is a North American student and activist living in Venezuela. See his personal blog at: www.gringoinvenezuela.com
January 09, 2007
"Long live El Mocho Hernández!" cried Venezuelan dissidents and rebels more than one hundred years ago. The battle cry of a popular movement at the end of the 19th century, "El Mocho" referred to José Manuel Hernández, a wildly popular leader and candidate for president in 1897. But he was a little too popular for Washington's liking.
After years of dictatorship, El Mocho represented a wide array of groups in Venezuela that had grown unhappy with the ruling Caracas elite who centralized power in their hands. He called for free, open elections, free public education, a crackdown on corruption, and decentralization of power among other things. He wanted to give the right to vote to all males over age 18. After years of political exclusion of the masses, they were calling for a more participatory form of democracy. These were hardly radical demands.
But for Washington, closely allied to the elite class in Venezuela, this popular movement was dangerous to their interests. The U.S. minister to Venezuela warned of spreading anti-Americanism among the "unenlightened" classes.(1) The "unenlightened" meant the popular classes, the poor majority of the population. As Washington saw it, only the wealthy, educated people could have control: the stupid majority should be denied any power. If a popular movement could take power, they would certainly transform the elite-dominated system, and the elite would lose their privileges. Washington could lose control.
The conflict going on in Venezuela today with Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution has exactly the same basis. In order to gain any popular representation and participation in the political system, the masses have struggled and fought for centuries against elite domination. The U.S. has been working against them all the way to the present. The Venezuelan masses who support Hugo Chávez today are demanding basically the same thing as those who supported El Mocho Hernández over a century ago; a real democracy with popular participation.
Dating back from the times of colonialism, a small elite class had always controlled and benefited from Venezuela's resources. The vast majority of the population has been neglected and were always excluded. The country was never developed nor modernized, very little industry was created, and the masses had neither job opportunities nor access to education. The economy has always been based on enriching a small minority with the export of primary resources, leaving everyone else out. The trick has been maintaining this undemocratic structure, which means preventing the majority from becoming involved.
Fear of the popular leader El Mocho led the U.S. minister to Venezuela, along with the Venezuelan elite class, to endorse El Mocho's conservative opponent, Ignacio Andrade.(2) According to them, the rural folk and popular masses that supported El Mocho couldn't be taken seriously as they were not "responsible" enough for full political participation. Both U.S. officials and the local elite showed their contempt for democracy when they agreed that the majority of the Venezuelan population should not play a role in politics until they had matured and "acquired the necessary culture." The people were not yet "ready" to participate.(3)
Dictatorship: The Solution to the "Problem" of Democracy
Preferable to Washington was the brutal, iron-fisted dictator, Juan Vicente Gómez who came to power a decade later. Dictatorship was much less risky, mostly because it was allied to elite interests and seldom challenged Washington's hegemony. Gómez ruled for nearly three decades until his death in 1935. During that time he prohibited all political parties and elections. Political opponents were jailed, tortured, and killed. He was very unpopular among the masses, but the Venezuelan elite class and Washington were pleased. The "backwardness" and "racially inferiority" of the Venezuelan masses made a "popular form of government next to impossible."(4)
For the U.S. oil companies, the Gómez regime was extremely friendly. When oil was first discovered in Venezuela in the 1920's he allowed the oil companies to write Venezuela's oil legislation to their liking.(5) For the next two decades they would profit handsomely from Venezuela's oil, and the growth of the oil industry allowed Gómez and the elite class to build their own fortunes.(6)
Other U.S. businesses also benefited, as wealthy Venezuelans imported mostly U.S. manufactured goods. The vast oil incomes created an elite consumer class and U.S. entrepreneurs immediately saw the opportunity to import consumer products for the Venezuelan elite. U.S. corporations opened offices in Caracas.
But after decades of dictatorship throughout the beginning of the 20th century, another popular movement arose in the 1940's with the founding of a new political party, Acción Democrática (AD). After taking power through a coup, political reform was the first item on the agenda. AD declared universal suffrage for all citizens over eighteen, including women. All political parties were legalized, and open elections were finally held. For the first time in history, Venezuelans could all vote and choose their political representatives.(7)
The U.S. saw this popular movement as dangerous. The fact that AD had the support of the poor masses and labor groups meant they might actually make decisions in the interests of the majority. Of course, this is how a democracy is supposed to work, but for the U.S. and the Venezuelan elite, these would be the "wrong" decisions.(8)
A democratic system is the one thing that presents the biggest threat to the interests of the elite class and their Washington allies. Therefore, throughout the history of Venezuela the participation of the masses has always been prevented and carefully avoided. If the popular masses could, in some way, exercise power, they would surely make decisions that would go drastically against elite interests. Most likely they would try to break their dependence on U.S. imports. Most definitely they would raise taxes on U.S. oil companies and use the increased revenues to improve basic services for the masses, like education, health, infrastructure; exactly what Hugo Chávez has done over the last few years.
In 1947, in the country's first ever open presidential elections, AD's candidate Romulo Gallegos won with 73% of the vote. Three of every four Venezuelans had voted for him, and he immediately began to push through a progressive program of reforms.(9) New laws increased taxes on the oil industry's profits, and public education was expanded. AD had raised the minimum wage and began to promote economic diversification.
But Romulo Gallegos, the first ever popularly elected president in Venezuela, only lasted 10 months. He was overthrown by a military coup the same year he took power. A military dictatorship quickly reversed all of AD's progressive reforms and exercised ruthless control over the population for the next 10 years. Gallegos was kicked out of the country. The effective leader of the coup, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, exiled and jailed AD leaders, and repressed all political opposition to him. Political parties and peasant unions were outlawed.(11)
Domestic elites and their allies in Washington concurred that popular democracy was dangerous to their interests. A U.S. Minister in Caracas declared that "the people of Venezuela are not yet ready nor adequately prepared for democracy."(12) A few years later, in 1954, the Eisenhower Administration awarded the ruthless dictator the Legion of Merit decoration for his "special meritorious conduct in the fulfillment of his high functions." (13)
It was indeed "meritorious conduct" when Pérez Jiménez answered by awarding new petroleum concessions to the U.S. companies. For the elite class and Washington, once again, dictatorship was preferable to democracy. Representation and participation of the masses was to be avoided and prevented.
Interestingly, there is a lot that hasn't changed in Venezuela. The popular movement led by Hugo Chávez has been harshly opposed by the elite class and Washington. As with popular movements of the past, the elite has sponsored coup attempts and other actions to remove the widely-supported president from power. Washington has supported their attempts, financing radical opposition groups, and plotting against the government.(14) The mass media, entirely controlled by the elite and linked to U.S. capital, has maintained a constant campaign of attacks against the government, convincing a substantial segment of the population that Hugo Chávez is a horrible dictator.(15)
The conflict is, and has always been, one of class struggle. The elite has always opposed any transformation of the economy, which is based on an unfair system of exploitation. The export of valuable resources finances the import of U.S.-produced goods. But the interests of the popular classes go directly against this system. For the masses to have jobs, education and a good standard of living, the economy must be diversified, and industry must be developed. Income from natural resources must be maximized and used for the benefit of the majority. The dependence on U.S. imports must be reduced.
Ultimately, the benefit of the majority means the dismantling of the undemocratic, elite-based system. For that reason, Washington and the local elite have always feared a popular democracy that serves the common good. From the days of "Viva El Mocho Hernández!" to the days of "Viva Chávez!" popular participation has always been the enemy.
____________________
(1) Ewell, Judith. Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire. The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia ©1996, pg. 97
(2) Ewell, pg. 95
(3) Ewell, pg. 92, 109
(4) Ewell, pg. 123
(5) Ewell, pg. 134
(6) Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, And Modernity in Venezuela. The University of Chicago Press ©1997, pg. 82
(7) Coronil, pg. 132
(8) Ewell, pg. 155
(9) Coronil, Pg. 139
(10) Country Studies US/Area Handbook Series, Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, U.S. Department of the Army, ©2005, The Transition to Democratic Rule, http://countrystudies.us/venezuela/6.htm
(11) Country Studies US, The Transition to Democratic Rule, http://countrystudies.us/venezuela/6.htm
(12) Ewell, pg. 159
(13) Ewell, pg. 160
(14) Gott, Richard. Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Verso ©2005, pg. 224
(15) Gott, pg. 246
________________________________
Chris Carlson is a North American student and activist living in Venezuela. See his personal blog at: www.gringoinvenezuela.com
One of the "Good Guys", a true "American Hero" - Philip Agee, the ex-CIA spy who stayed out in the cold
After blowing the whistle on the dirty tactics of his CIA bosses in the 70s, Philip Agee was forced into exile. Thirty years on he has found a safe haven, but, he tells Duncan Campbell, the fight goes on
Duncan Campbell
Wednesday January 10, 2007
Guardian
Thirty years ago, Philip Agee, then a 41-year-old former CIA officer living in Cambridge, was told that he was to be deported from Britain as a threat to the security of the state. After a high-profile but unsuccessful attempt to fight the order, he and his young family left Britain for ever. But what happened to the man denounced as a traitor by George Bush Sr, threatened with death by his former colleagues and portrayed as a communist stooge by the British government?
A small fish restaurant off the Winterhude marketplace in Hamburg, on a grey afternoon, seems as good a place as any to meet a former CIA man who has spent much of his life looking over his shoulder. He is 71 now, grey-haired and a little battered around the face from recent surgery on a tumour, but still recognisable as the intense and clean-cut agent who took on the CIA all those years ago. It was his book, Inside the Company, published in 1975, that first revealed in detail many of the dirty tricks that his colleagues had been involved in across the world. Agee, a former philosphy and law student from a comfortable Florida family, had been in the CIA for more than a decade, working mainly in Latin America, before making his momentous decision to quit and tell.
"It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America," he says. "Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador - they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government. That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries."
His intent to destabilise the organisation by revealing the identities of CIA agents infuriated his former employers. In Britain, he worked with publications such as Time Out, which in those days had a lengthy news section, to list the names of the agents, leading to many of them being sent back to Washington, their cover blown. The US government was livid.
Agee had made it clear he was going to settle in Cambridge with his partner, Angela, a leftwing Brazilian who had been jailed and tortured in her own country, and his two young sons by his estranged wife, and carry on exposing the CIA. But before he could unpack his bags, he was facing expulsion. He believes the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, urged the prime minister at the time, Jim Callaghan, to act because of a belief that Agee had disrupted the Jamaican elections in favour of leftwinger Michael Manley by exposing CIA activities there.
The home secretary, Merlyn Rees, issued the deportation order, informing colleagues - falsely and maliciously, according to Agee - that Agee was behind the deaths of two British agents. "Rees lied," he says. On the same day, a young American journalist, Mark Hosenball, who had just left Time Out where he had co-authored an exposé of GCHQ in Cheltenham, was also told to leave. The two became a cause celebre.
There were no safe havens for Agee. France refused to allow him to stay. The Netherlands, which had initially granted him admission, changed its mind, and he had no desire to risk a return to the US and probable prosecution and jail. Events in his personal life took over. His relationship with Angela, already strained by the pressures of deportation and his own frequent absences campaigning, ended. He met and fell in love with a ballet dancer called Giselle Roberge. At her suggestion, they married, which gave him the right to stay in Germany.
Agee currently splits his life between Hamburg and Havana. His US passport was revoked in 1979, but he was given a Grenadian one after helping that country's radical government. Then the Nicaraguans, under the Sandinista government, gave him one, which he was able to use until 1990 when his past caught up with him once more. "When Violetta Chamorro [a centrist candidate] was elected president," he explains, "she was desperate to have the Bush administration release the hundreds of millions of dollars they had promised in aid for relief and reconstruction. In order to release the aid, Bush made a series of demands and the revocation of my passport was one of them."
Since 1990, he has had a German passport. He did apply to get his US one back and duly visited the American interests section in Havana. "It was a spooky experience. The head of the section invited me to lunch - he was extremely friendly - but there was no way I would have lunch, much less a conversation about Cuba, with him. I did tell him I thought the US was getting a black eye over Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly over the torture." His bid to get the passport back was unsuccessful. "They wanted to have all the details of the Americans I was dealing with in the travel business [Agee started a company in the 90s to brings visitors to Cuba]. They expected me to rat on all the Americans who come to the country illegally. And I wasn't about to do that."
Looking back over the 30 years since he made his decision to step out into the cold, Agee says: "There was a price to pay. It disrupted the education of my children [Phil and Chris, teenagers then], and I don't think it was a happy period for them. It also cost me all my money. Everything I made from the book, I had to spend. But it made me a stronger person in many ways, and it ensured I would never lose interest or go back in the other direction politically. The more they did these dirty things, the more they made me realise what I was doing was important."
Under the US Freedom of Information Act, Agee has been able to see the scope of the operation mounted against him by an unforgiving CIA. "They admitted to having 18,000 pages on me. I figured out there were 120 pages a day for seven or eight years. That can only be things like telephone transcripts and letter intercepts. Some person from the Pentagon was talking about me and saying they had two or three people working on me full time. I thought it was so foolish, such a waste of money, because I don't do anything that's not public. I don't pay much attention to them any more, but now and then something will come up."
What comes up most often is the name of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens who was assassinated in 1975. Although Welch was named not by Agee but in other publications, Agee has often been blamed for his death. "George Bush's father came in as CIA director in the month after the assassination and he intensified the campaign, spreading the lie that I was the cause of the assassination. His wife, Barbara, published her memoirs and she repeated the same lie, and this time I sued and won, in the sense that she was required to send me a letter in which she apologised and recognised what she wrote about me was false. They've tried to make this story stick for years. I never know what government hand or neocon hand is behind the allegations, and I don't pay too much attention, but I know I haven't been forgotten."
Agee may not be on the run any more - he has been back to the US many times without being arrested and was allowed back into Britain under the Major government - but life is lived at least at a trot. He has just arrived from Spain, where he has addressed a rally in support of the Miami Five, the Cubans jailed for up to 25 years on espionage charges for infiltrating anti-Castro groups in Florida. Soon he will return from Hamburg to his other home, Havana, and his travel business. Initially, his customers came from the US, but Americans are forbidden by law from visiting Cuba and can be fined heavily if caught, so his clients now come mainly from Europe.
Would it be possible for someone in the CIA today to do what Agee did? "I think it would be much harder," he says. "I can think of plenty of people in the CIA who would be horrified by what the CIA has been doing in terms of the torture of suspected terrorists, but a person who tried to do what I did would face kidnapping and possibly being put on ice in a secret prison for many years to come."
Although the cases of Agee and Hosenball were inextricably linked, the two men have not met since their expulsions. Hosenball has had a successful journalistic career, first with the Sunday Times and now with Newsweek, a publication that has, coincidentally, always been hostile to Agee. "Newsweek is not about to be favourable to me or even neutral," says Agee. "It has been on my case from the very beginning."
If the CIA were hoping that age would mellow Agee, they were wrong. I had last seen him nearly 30 years ago at his farewell party in London as he said his reluctant goodbyes to what had become a large and vocal defence campaign. He wept on the ferry that took him away from Britain as he contemplated what the future might hold for him and his family, and you wondered how he would survive. But he remains as committed as ever, and busy working on another book, this time about the CIA's activitives in Venezuela over the years. "I never stopped what I started in London," he says, "and I don't expect to stop till I'm dead".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Hugo Chavez Announces Nationalizations, Constitutional Reform for Socialism in Venezuela
By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com
Caracas, January 8, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— During the swearing-in ceremony of his new cabinet, Venezuela’s President Chavez announced a series of dramatic new measures for moving ahead in establishing 21st century socialism in Venezuela. Among these new measures are the convocation of a new constitutional assembly and the re-nationalization of key industries.
In his speech Chavez characterized the preceding years of his presidency, 1999-2006, as a “phase of transition,” which ends now, and that “we are now entering a new era, the National Simon Bolivar Project of 2007-2021.” This project would head towards “Bolivarian Socialism, which requires greater levels of effort and engagement, clarity and efficiency, and revolutionary quality,” said Chavez. The year 2021 is significant for Chavez because it is the 200th anniversary of Venezuelan independence.
This new project, which Chavez promised to outline in greater detail during his own swearing-in on Wednesday, for his second full presidential term, consists of five “motors”: an “enabling” law, constitutional reform, popular education, reconfiguration of state power, and explosion of communal power.
1. Enabling law (ley habilitante), which Chavez referred to as the “mother law” of the project. This law would allow Chavez, over the period of one year, to pass laws on specified issues as decrees. This type of law has been given to Venezuelan presidents on several occasions before, such as during the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Perez (1974-1979) and early in Chavez’s presidency, following the passage of the 1999 constitution, to bring the country’s laws up to date to the new constitution.
Chavez said that part of this enabling law would be the nationalization of key industries that had been privatized under previous governments, such as the telecommunications company CANTV and the electricity companies. “All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized,” said Chavez.
CANTV’s shares dropped by 14.2% following the announcement, until the New York Stock Exchange halted trading of CANTV shares. The former state company was privatized in 1991.
Also, his government would push for changing the minority stake the state oil company has in four Orinoco Oil Belt projects into a majority stake. The four Orinoco joint ventures are with the U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Conoco, and Chevron, France’s Total, Britain’s BP, and Norway’s Statoil. Together these produce 600,000 barrels of oil per day, about 18% of Venezuela’s total production. This move follows an earlier move to create joint ventures out of foreign companies’ operations in marginal oil fields.
Chavez also suggested that other revolutionary laws would be passed per decree as part of this enabling law. The text of the enabling law is nearly ready and would soon be presented to the National Assembly.
2. Constitutional reform is the second motor for the new phase of the Bolivarian Revolution. Chavez did not say what kinds of changes he envisioned, other than to say that this would require a “constituent power” [constitutional assembly]. Just as eight years ago we convoked [this power], I invoke and convoke the constituent power, the popular [grassroots] power, the true combustible so that these motors that I am talking about can bring us to a better future.”
One constitutional change Chavez did mention today would be to abolish the independence of the Central Bank, saying that such independence is a tool of neo-liberalism. Another change that Chavez has mentioned in the past is the possibility of getting rid of the two-term limit for presidential terms.
3. The third “motor” is the launch of a new drive for “Bolivarian popular education,” which would, “deepen the new values and demolish the old values of individualism, capitalism, of egotism,” said Chavez.
4. “A new geometry of power for the national map,” said Chavez is the fourth “motor,” which he admitted sounded rather abstract. Chavez explained that what he was referring to was the need to reorganize political power in Venezuela, so that the marginalized poorer areas, such as Apure state, would be more included. Also, he said that a law that his supporters had passed, the law of municipal councils, was not working and needed to be reformed.
5. Explosion of communal power, said Chavez, is the most powerful motor of this next phase. According to Chavez, this refers to giving more power to the recently created communal councils of 200 to 400 families, which would eventually eclipse the existing power structures, so as to create a “communal state.” What is needed, said Chavez, is to “dismantle the bourgeois state” because all states “were born to prevent revolutions.” Instead, the old state would have to be turned into a “revolutionary state.”
OAS General Secretary is an “Idiot” (Pendejo) for Interfering in Venezuela
Defending his decision not to renew the broadcast concession of the oppositional TV station RCTV, Chavez attacked OAS General Secretary Miguel Insulza, who had urged Chavez to reconsider the decision. RCTV’s broadcast concession is to expire in late May and Chavez announced last week that he would not renew it because RCTV has been acting irresponsibly because of its support of the 2002 coup attempt and of the oil industry shutdown.
According to the AP, Insulza issued a statement last week in reaction to Chavez’s announcement, in which he stated, “The closing of a mass communications outlet is a rare step in the history of our hemisphere and has no precedent in the recent decades of democracy,” Insulza also warned of the "political repercussions" that the action could bring.
He went on to say that any move that forces RCTV to close “gives the appearance of a form of censorship against freedom of expression and at the same time serves as a warning against other news organizations, leading them to limit their actions at the risk of facing the same fate.”
Chavez reacted very angrily to Insulza today, saying that Insulza is an “idiot” (pendejo) and called for his resignation. A General Secretary “who reaches this level must, out of dignity, leave his office,” said Chavez, adding, “Unless someone wants to once again convert the OAS into what Fidel Castro once called … the ministry of the colonies.”
Venezuela would denounce Insulza in the next OAS meetings because of “interference and lack of respect.” “We are not afraid, you are quite wrong,” said Chavez, addressing Insulza.
Venezuela has received widespread international criticism for the plan not to renew the RCTV concession, but Chavez has said that he does not care about such reactions and that his decision was irreversible and completely within the scope of Venezuelan law, which gives the executive discretionary power over the renewal of broadcast licenses. Venezuela’s communications minister Willian Lara has suggested that RCTV does not need to close once its license runs out because it sells programs throughout the continent and it could also opt offer its programming on cable.
See also: Chavez Swears-In New Cabinet for “Venezuelan Path to Socialism”
Caracas, January 8, 2007 (venezuelanalysis.com)— During the swearing-in ceremony of his new cabinet, Venezuela’s President Chavez announced a series of dramatic new measures for moving ahead in establishing 21st century socialism in Venezuela. Among these new measures are the convocation of a new constitutional assembly and the re-nationalization of key industries.
In his speech Chavez characterized the preceding years of his presidency, 1999-2006, as a “phase of transition,” which ends now, and that “we are now entering a new era, the National Simon Bolivar Project of 2007-2021.” This project would head towards “Bolivarian Socialism, which requires greater levels of effort and engagement, clarity and efficiency, and revolutionary quality,” said Chavez. The year 2021 is significant for Chavez because it is the 200th anniversary of Venezuelan independence.
This new project, which Chavez promised to outline in greater detail during his own swearing-in on Wednesday, for his second full presidential term, consists of five “motors”: an “enabling” law, constitutional reform, popular education, reconfiguration of state power, and explosion of communal power.
1. Enabling law (ley habilitante), which Chavez referred to as the “mother law” of the project. This law would allow Chavez, over the period of one year, to pass laws on specified issues as decrees. This type of law has been given to Venezuelan presidents on several occasions before, such as during the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Perez (1974-1979) and early in Chavez’s presidency, following the passage of the 1999 constitution, to bring the country’s laws up to date to the new constitution.
Chavez said that part of this enabling law would be the nationalization of key industries that had been privatized under previous governments, such as the telecommunications company CANTV and the electricity companies. “All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized,” said Chavez.
CANTV’s shares dropped by 14.2% following the announcement, until the New York Stock Exchange halted trading of CANTV shares. The former state company was privatized in 1991.
Also, his government would push for changing the minority stake the state oil company has in four Orinoco Oil Belt projects into a majority stake. The four Orinoco joint ventures are with the U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Conoco, and Chevron, France’s Total, Britain’s BP, and Norway’s Statoil. Together these produce 600,000 barrels of oil per day, about 18% of Venezuela’s total production. This move follows an earlier move to create joint ventures out of foreign companies’ operations in marginal oil fields.
Chavez also suggested that other revolutionary laws would be passed per decree as part of this enabling law. The text of the enabling law is nearly ready and would soon be presented to the National Assembly.
2. Constitutional reform is the second motor for the new phase of the Bolivarian Revolution. Chavez did not say what kinds of changes he envisioned, other than to say that this would require a “constituent power” [constitutional assembly]. Just as eight years ago we convoked [this power], I invoke and convoke the constituent power, the popular [grassroots] power, the true combustible so that these motors that I am talking about can bring us to a better future.”
One constitutional change Chavez did mention today would be to abolish the independence of the Central Bank, saying that such independence is a tool of neo-liberalism. Another change that Chavez has mentioned in the past is the possibility of getting rid of the two-term limit for presidential terms.
3. The third “motor” is the launch of a new drive for “Bolivarian popular education,” which would, “deepen the new values and demolish the old values of individualism, capitalism, of egotism,” said Chavez.
4. “A new geometry of power for the national map,” said Chavez is the fourth “motor,” which he admitted sounded rather abstract. Chavez explained that what he was referring to was the need to reorganize political power in Venezuela, so that the marginalized poorer areas, such as Apure state, would be more included. Also, he said that a law that his supporters had passed, the law of municipal councils, was not working and needed to be reformed.
5. Explosion of communal power, said Chavez, is the most powerful motor of this next phase. According to Chavez, this refers to giving more power to the recently created communal councils of 200 to 400 families, which would eventually eclipse the existing power structures, so as to create a “communal state.” What is needed, said Chavez, is to “dismantle the bourgeois state” because all states “were born to prevent revolutions.” Instead, the old state would have to be turned into a “revolutionary state.”
OAS General Secretary is an “Idiot” (Pendejo) for Interfering in Venezuela
Defending his decision not to renew the broadcast concession of the oppositional TV station RCTV, Chavez attacked OAS General Secretary Miguel Insulza, who had urged Chavez to reconsider the decision. RCTV’s broadcast concession is to expire in late May and Chavez announced last week that he would not renew it because RCTV has been acting irresponsibly because of its support of the 2002 coup attempt and of the oil industry shutdown.
According to the AP, Insulza issued a statement last week in reaction to Chavez’s announcement, in which he stated, “The closing of a mass communications outlet is a rare step in the history of our hemisphere and has no precedent in the recent decades of democracy,” Insulza also warned of the "political repercussions" that the action could bring.
He went on to say that any move that forces RCTV to close “gives the appearance of a form of censorship against freedom of expression and at the same time serves as a warning against other news organizations, leading them to limit their actions at the risk of facing the same fate.”
Chavez reacted very angrily to Insulza today, saying that Insulza is an “idiot” (pendejo) and called for his resignation. A General Secretary “who reaches this level must, out of dignity, leave his office,” said Chavez, adding, “Unless someone wants to once again convert the OAS into what Fidel Castro once called … the ministry of the colonies.”
Venezuela would denounce Insulza in the next OAS meetings because of “interference and lack of respect.” “We are not afraid, you are quite wrong,” said Chavez, addressing Insulza.
Venezuela has received widespread international criticism for the plan not to renew the RCTV concession, but Chavez has said that he does not care about such reactions and that his decision was irreversible and completely within the scope of Venezuelan law, which gives the executive discretionary power over the renewal of broadcast licenses. Venezuela’s communications minister Willian Lara has suggested that RCTV does not need to close once its license runs out because it sells programs throughout the continent and it could also opt offer its programming on cable.
See also: Chavez Swears-In New Cabinet for “Venezuelan Path to Socialism”
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Over 100,000 Pentagon paid mercenaries in Iraq, the forgotten "Surge"
By Barry Lando
What is striking about the current debate in Washington - whether to "surge" troops to Iraq and increase the size of the U.S. Army - is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: The number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000, but more like 240,000.
What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries - known these days as "private contractors." After the U.S. Army itself, they are easily the second-largest military force in the country. Yet no one seems sure of how many there are since they answer to no single authority. Indeed, the U.S. Central Command has only recently started taking a census of these battlefield civilians in an attempt to get a handle on the issue...
The private contractors are Americans, South Africans, Brits, Iraqis and a hodgepodge of other nationalities. Many of them are veterans of the U.S. or other armed forces and intelligence services, who are now deployed in Iraq (and Afghanistan and other countries) to perform duties normally carried out by the U.S. Army, but at salaries two or three times greater than those of American soldiers.
They work as interrogators and interpreters in American prisons; body guards for top U.S. and Iraqi officials; trainers for the Iraqi army and police; and engi-neers constructing huge new U.S. bases. They are often on the front lines. In fact, 650 of them have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion
Their salaries, are, in the end, paid directly by the U.S. government - or tacked on as huge additional "security charges" to the bills of private American or other contractors. Yet the Central Command still doesn't have a complete list of who they are or what they are up to. The final figure could be much higher than 100,000.
The U.S. Congress, under Republican control until now, knows even less.
Yet these private contractors man their own helicopters and Humvees and look and act just like American troops.
"It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the military commander to en-sure contractor compliance," William L. Nash, a retired general, told the Washington Post. "If you're trying to win hearts and minds and the contractor is driving 90 miles per hour through the streets and running over kids, that's not helping the image of the American army. The Iraqis aren't going to distinguish between a contractor and a soldier."
But who, in the end, do these contractors answer to? The U.S. Central Command? Their company boss? Or the official they've been assigned to protect?
A recent case in point: The former Iraqi minister of electricity, who had been imprisoned on corruption charges, managed to escape in broad daylight in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Iraqi officials claim he was spirited away by con-tractors from a private security detail that had been hired when he was minis-ter.
Which raises another question. Who has jurisdiction over these private contrac-tors if they run afoul of the law in Iraq? Also, are they supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions? Or George W. Bush's conventions?
For instance, according to The New York Times, although 20 civilian contractors working in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq - including Abu Ghraib - have been charged with mistreating prisoners, none has ever been successfully prosecuted.
Another point, which brings us back to the discussion about increasing Ameri-can troop levels in Iraq: It would seem that the Pentagon could outsource a "surge" by a simple accounting sleight of hand, quietly contracting for another 10,000 or 20,000 mercenaries to do the job, and the Congress and press would be none the wiser.
Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." He also blogs at Barrylando.com.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lando/46429/
What is striking about the current debate in Washington - whether to "surge" troops to Iraq and increase the size of the U.S. Army - is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: The number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000, but more like 240,000.
What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries - known these days as "private contractors." After the U.S. Army itself, they are easily the second-largest military force in the country. Yet no one seems sure of how many there are since they answer to no single authority. Indeed, the U.S. Central Command has only recently started taking a census of these battlefield civilians in an attempt to get a handle on the issue...
The private contractors are Americans, South Africans, Brits, Iraqis and a hodgepodge of other nationalities. Many of them are veterans of the U.S. or other armed forces and intelligence services, who are now deployed in Iraq (and Afghanistan and other countries) to perform duties normally carried out by the U.S. Army, but at salaries two or three times greater than those of American soldiers.
They work as interrogators and interpreters in American prisons; body guards for top U.S. and Iraqi officials; trainers for the Iraqi army and police; and engi-neers constructing huge new U.S. bases. They are often on the front lines. In fact, 650 of them have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion
Their salaries, are, in the end, paid directly by the U.S. government - or tacked on as huge additional "security charges" to the bills of private American or other contractors. Yet the Central Command still doesn't have a complete list of who they are or what they are up to. The final figure could be much higher than 100,000.
The U.S. Congress, under Republican control until now, knows even less.
Yet these private contractors man their own helicopters and Humvees and look and act just like American troops.
"It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the military commander to en-sure contractor compliance," William L. Nash, a retired general, told the Washington Post. "If you're trying to win hearts and minds and the contractor is driving 90 miles per hour through the streets and running over kids, that's not helping the image of the American army. The Iraqis aren't going to distinguish between a contractor and a soldier."
But who, in the end, do these contractors answer to? The U.S. Central Command? Their company boss? Or the official they've been assigned to protect?
A recent case in point: The former Iraqi minister of electricity, who had been imprisoned on corruption charges, managed to escape in broad daylight in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Iraqi officials claim he was spirited away by con-tractors from a private security detail that had been hired when he was minis-ter.
Which raises another question. Who has jurisdiction over these private contrac-tors if they run afoul of the law in Iraq? Also, are they supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions? Or George W. Bush's conventions?
For instance, according to The New York Times, although 20 civilian contractors working in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq - including Abu Ghraib - have been charged with mistreating prisoners, none has ever been successfully prosecuted.
Another point, which brings us back to the discussion about increasing Ameri-can troop levels in Iraq: It would seem that the Pentagon could outsource a "surge" by a simple accounting sleight of hand, quietly contracting for another 10,000 or 20,000 mercenaries to do the job, and the Congress and press would be none the wiser.
Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." He also blogs at Barrylando.com.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/lando/46429/
Monday, January 08, 2007
Indeed there is Apartheid in Israel
A new order issued by the GOC Central command bans the conveyance of Palestinians in Israeli vehicles. Such a blatant violation of the right to travel joins the long list of humans rights violations carried out by Israel in the [Occupied] Territories.
By Shulamit Aloni
01/05/06 "Ynet " --- - Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.
The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.
If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night – all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.
On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order – this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”
Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved ‘for Jews only’, on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal”.
Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either
Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger. Of course none of this applies to those whose labour serves the settlers. They and their employers will naturally receive the required permits so they can continue to serve the lords of the land, the settlers.
Did man of peace President Carter truly err in concluding that Israel is creating Apartheid? Did he exaggerate? Don’t the US Jewish community leaders recognise the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 7 March 1966, to which Israel is a signatory? Are the US Jews who launched the loud and abusive campaign against Carter for supposedly maligning Israel’s character and its democratic and humanist nature unfamiliar with the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 30 November 1973? Apartheid is defined therein as an international crime that among other things includes using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups, thus depriving people of their human rights. Isn’t freedom of travel one of these rights?
In the past, the US Jewish community leaders were quite familiar with the meaning of those conventions. For some reason, however, they are convinced that Israel is allowed to contravene them. It’s OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children, deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It’s permissible to rob people of their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo. From now on, Israelis and International humanitarian organisations’ volunteers are prohibited from assisting a woman in labour by taking her to the hospital. [Israeli human rights group] Yesh Din volunteers cannot take a robbed and beaten-up Palestinian to the police station to lodge a complaint. (Police stations are located at the heart of the settlements.) Is there anyone who believes that this is not Apartheid?
Jimmy Carter does not need me to defend his reputation that has been sullied by Israelophile community officials. The trouble is that their love of Israel distorts their judgment and blinds them from seeing what’s in front of them. Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and extensive.
We do limit ourselves to denying the [Palestinian] people human rights. We not only rob of them of their freedom, land and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million civilians. Let them “sit in the darkness” and “starve”.
Employees cannot be paid their wages because Israel is holding 500 million shekels that belong to the Palestinians. And after all that we remain “pure as the driven snow”. There are no moral blemishes on our actions. There is no racial separation. There is no Apartheid. It’s an invention of the enemies of Israel. Hooray for our brothers and sisters in the US! Your devotion is very much appreciated. You have truly removed a nasty stain from us. Now there can be an extra spring in our step as we confidently abuse the Palestinian population, using the “most moral army in the world”.
Shulamit Aloni, the Israeli Prize laureate who once served as Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin, is from Yediot Acharonot, Israel’s largest circulating newspaper, which appeared in the Hebrew Ynet but not in the English-language Ynetnews.
Tranlated by Sol Salbe, an Australian editor, whose comments are in square brackets.
Hebrew original: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3346283,00.html Yediot Acharonot, Israel’s largest circulating newspaper.
By Shulamit Aloni
01/05/06 "Ynet " --- - Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.
The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.
If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night – all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.
On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order – this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”
Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved ‘for Jews only’, on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal”.
Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either
Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger. Of course none of this applies to those whose labour serves the settlers. They and their employers will naturally receive the required permits so they can continue to serve the lords of the land, the settlers.
Did man of peace President Carter truly err in concluding that Israel is creating Apartheid? Did he exaggerate? Don’t the US Jewish community leaders recognise the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 7 March 1966, to which Israel is a signatory? Are the US Jews who launched the loud and abusive campaign against Carter for supposedly maligning Israel’s character and its democratic and humanist nature unfamiliar with the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 30 November 1973? Apartheid is defined therein as an international crime that among other things includes using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups, thus depriving people of their human rights. Isn’t freedom of travel one of these rights?
In the past, the US Jewish community leaders were quite familiar with the meaning of those conventions. For some reason, however, they are convinced that Israel is allowed to contravene them. It’s OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children, deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It’s permissible to rob people of their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo. From now on, Israelis and International humanitarian organisations’ volunteers are prohibited from assisting a woman in labour by taking her to the hospital. [Israeli human rights group] Yesh Din volunteers cannot take a robbed and beaten-up Palestinian to the police station to lodge a complaint. (Police stations are located at the heart of the settlements.) Is there anyone who believes that this is not Apartheid?
Jimmy Carter does not need me to defend his reputation that has been sullied by Israelophile community officials. The trouble is that their love of Israel distorts their judgment and blinds them from seeing what’s in front of them. Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and extensive.
We do limit ourselves to denying the [Palestinian] people human rights. We not only rob of them of their freedom, land and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million civilians. Let them “sit in the darkness” and “starve”.
Employees cannot be paid their wages because Israel is holding 500 million shekels that belong to the Palestinians. And after all that we remain “pure as the driven snow”. There are no moral blemishes on our actions. There is no racial separation. There is no Apartheid. It’s an invention of the enemies of Israel. Hooray for our brothers and sisters in the US! Your devotion is very much appreciated. You have truly removed a nasty stain from us. Now there can be an extra spring in our step as we confidently abuse the Palestinian population, using the “most moral army in the world”.
Shulamit Aloni, the Israeli Prize laureate who once served as Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin, is from Yediot Acharonot, Israel’s largest circulating newspaper, which appeared in the Hebrew Ynet but not in the English-language Ynetnews.
Tranlated by Sol Salbe, an Australian editor, whose comments are in square brackets.
Hebrew original: http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3346283,00.html Yediot Acharonot, Israel’s largest circulating newspaper.
18 Secret Armies Of The CIA
1. UKRAINIAN PARTISANS
From 1945 to 1952, the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukrainian partisan units which had originally been organised by the Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally, in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.
2. CHINESE BRIGADE IN BURMA
After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000-man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.
3. GUATEMALAN REBEL ARMY
After Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz legalised that country's Communist party and expropriated 400,000 acres of United Fruit banana plantations, the CIA decided to overthrow his government. Guatemalan rebels were trained in Honduras and backed up with a CIA air contingent of bombers and fighter planes. This army invaded Guatemala in 1954, promptly toppling Arbenz's regime.
4. SUMATRAN REBELS
In an attempt to overthrow Indonesian president Sukarno in 1958, the CIA sent paramilitary experts and radio operators to the island of Sumartra to organize a revolt. With CIA air support, the rebel army attacked but was quickly defeated. The American government denied involvement even after a CIA B-26 was shot down and its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, was captured.
5. KHAMBA HORSEMEN
After the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the CIA began recruiting Khamba horsemen - fierce warriors who supported Tibet's religious leader, the Dalai Lama - as they escaped into India in 1959. These Khambas were trained in modern warfare at Camp Hale, high in the Rocky Mountains near Leadville, Colorado. Transported back to Tibet by the CIA-operated Air America, the Khambas organized an army numbering at its peak some 14,000. By the mid-1960s the Khambas had been abandoned by the CIA but they fought on alone into 1970.
6. BAY OF PIGS INVASION FORCE
In 1960, CIA operatives recruited 1,500 Cuban refugees living in Miami and staged a surprise attack on Fidel Castro's Cuba. Trained at a base in Guatemala, this small army - complete with an air force consisting of B-26 bombers - landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961. The ill-conceived, poorly planned operation ended in disaster, since all but 150 men of the force were either killed or captured within three days.
7. L'ARMÉE CLANDESTINE
In 1962, CIA agents recruited Meo tribesmen living in the mountains of Laos to fight as guerrillas against Communist Pathet Lao forces. Called l'Armée Clandestine, this unit - paid, trained and supplied by the CIA - grew into a 30,000-man force. By 1975, the Meos - who had numbered a quarter million in 1962 - had been reduced to 10,000 refugees fleeing into Thailand.
8. NUNG MERCENARIES
A Chinese hill people living in Vietnam, the Nungs were hired and organised by the CIA as a mercenary force, during the Vietnam War. Fearsome and brutal fighters, the Nungs were employed throughout Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Numgs proved costly since they refused to fight unless constantly supplied with beer and prostitutes.
9. PERUVIAN REGIMENT
Unable to quell guerrilla forces in its eastern Amazonian provinces, Peru called on the US for help in the mid-1960s. The CIA responded by establishing a fortified camp in the area and hiring local Peruvians who were trained by Green Beret personnel on loan from the US Army. After crushing the guerillas, the elite unit was disbanded because of fears it might stage a coup against the government.
10. CONGO MERCENARY FORCE
In 1964 during the Congolese Civil War, the CIA established an army in the Congo to back pro-Western leaders Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. The CIA imported European mercenaries and Cuban pilots - exiles from Cuba - to pilot the CIA air force, composed of transports and B-26 bombers.
11. THE CAMBODIAN COUP
For over 15 years, the CIA had tried various unsuccessful means of deposing Cambodia's left-leaning Prince Norodom Sihanouk, including assassination attempts. However, in March, 1970, a CIA-backed coup finally did the job. Funded by US tax dollars, armed with US weapons, and trained by American Green Berets, anti-Sihanouk forces called Kampuchea Khmer Krom (KKK) overran the capital of Phnom Penh and took control of the government. With the blessing of the CIA and the Nixon administration, control of Cambodia was placed in the hands of Lon Nol, who would later distinguish himself by dispatching soldiers to butcher tens of thousands of civilians.
12. KURD REBELS
During the early 1970s the CIA moved into eastern Iraq to organize and supply the Kurds of that area, who were rebelling against the pro-Soviet Iraqi government. The real purpose behind this action was to help the shah of Iran settle a border dispute with Iraq favourably. After an Iranian-Iraq settlement was reached, the CIA withdrew its support from the Kurds, who were then crushed by the Iraqi Army.
13. ANGOLA MERCENARY FORCE
In 1975, after years of bloody fighting and civil unrest in Angola, Portugal resolved to relinquish its hold on the last of its African colonies. The transition was to take place on November 11, with control of the country going to whichever political faction controlled the capital city of Luanda on that date. In the months preceding the change, three groups vied for power: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). By July 1975, the Marxist MPLA had ousted the moderate FNLA and UNITA from Luanda, so the CIA decided to intervene covertly. Over $30 million was spent on the Angolan operation, the bulk of the money going to buy arms and pay French and South African mercenaries, who aided the FNLA and UNITA in their fight. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, US officials categorically denied any involvement in the Angolan conflict. In the end, it was a fruitless military adventure, for the MPLA assumed power and controls Angola to this day.
14. AFGHAN MUJAHEEDIN
Covert support for the groups fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was stepped up during the administration of Ronald Reagan. The operation succeeded in its initial goal, as the Soviets were forced to begin withdrawing their forces in 1987. Unfortunately, once the Soviets left, the US essentially ignored Afghanistan as it collapsed into a five-year civil war followed by the rise of the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban. The Taliban provided a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
15. SALVADORAN DEATH SQUADS
As far back as 1964, the CIA helped form ORDEN and ANSESAL, two paramilitary intelligence networks that developed into the Salvadoran death squads. The CIA trained ORDEN leaders in the use of automatic weapons and surveillance techniques, and placed several leaders on the CIA payroll. The CIA also provided detailed intelligence on Salvadoran individuals later murdered by the death squads. During the civil war in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, the death squads were responsible for 40,000 killings. Even after a public outcry forced President Reagan to denounce the death squads in 1984, CIA support continued.
16. NICARAGUAN CONTRAS
On November 23, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a top secret National Security Directive authorising the CIA to spend $19 million to recruit and support the Contras, opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinista government. In supporting the Contras, the CIA carried out several acts of sabotage without the Congressional intelligence committees giving consent - or even being informed beforehand. In response, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, prohibiting the CIA from providing aid to the Contras. Attempts to find alternate sources of funds led to the Iran-Contra scandal. It may also have led the CIA and the Contras to become actively involved in drug smuggling. In 1988, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations concluded that individuals in the Contra movement engaged in drug trafficking; that known drug traffickers provided assistance to the Contras; and that 'there are some serious questions as to whether or not US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua'.
17. HAITIAN COUPS
In 1988, the CIA attempted to intervene in Haiti's elections with a 'covert action program' to undermine the campaign of the eventual winner, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Three years later, Aristide was overthrown in a bloody coup that killed more than 4,000 civilians. Many of the leaders of the coup had been on the CIA payroll since the mid-1980s. For example, Emmanuel 'Toto' Constant, the head of FRAPH, a brutal gang of thugs known for murder, torture, and beatings, admitted to being a paid agent of the CIA. Similarly, the CIA-created Haitian National Intelligence Service (NIS), supposedly created to combat drugs, functioned during the coup as a 'political intimidation and assassination squad.' In 1994, an American force of 20,000 was sent to Haiti to allow Aristide to return. Ironically, even after this, the CIA continued working with FRAPH and the NIS. In 2004, Aristide was overthrown once again, with Aristide claiming that US forces had kidnapped him.
18. VENEZUELAN COUP ATTEMPT
On April 11, 2002, Venezuelan military leaders attempted to overthrow the country's democratically-elected left-wing president, Hugo Chavez. The coup collapsed after two days as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and as units of the military joined with the protestors. The administration of George W. Bush was the only democracy in the Western Hemisphere not to condemn the coup attempt. According to intelligence analyst Wayne Madsen, the CIA had actively organised the coup: 'The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel, headed by a lieutenant colonel on loan from the US Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help organise the coup against Chavez.
From 1945 to 1952, the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukrainian partisan units which had originally been organised by the Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally, in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.
2. CHINESE BRIGADE IN BURMA
After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000-man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.
3. GUATEMALAN REBEL ARMY
After Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz legalised that country's Communist party and expropriated 400,000 acres of United Fruit banana plantations, the CIA decided to overthrow his government. Guatemalan rebels were trained in Honduras and backed up with a CIA air contingent of bombers and fighter planes. This army invaded Guatemala in 1954, promptly toppling Arbenz's regime.
4. SUMATRAN REBELS
In an attempt to overthrow Indonesian president Sukarno in 1958, the CIA sent paramilitary experts and radio operators to the island of Sumartra to organize a revolt. With CIA air support, the rebel army attacked but was quickly defeated. The American government denied involvement even after a CIA B-26 was shot down and its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, was captured.
5. KHAMBA HORSEMEN
After the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the CIA began recruiting Khamba horsemen - fierce warriors who supported Tibet's religious leader, the Dalai Lama - as they escaped into India in 1959. These Khambas were trained in modern warfare at Camp Hale, high in the Rocky Mountains near Leadville, Colorado. Transported back to Tibet by the CIA-operated Air America, the Khambas organized an army numbering at its peak some 14,000. By the mid-1960s the Khambas had been abandoned by the CIA but they fought on alone into 1970.
6. BAY OF PIGS INVASION FORCE
In 1960, CIA operatives recruited 1,500 Cuban refugees living in Miami and staged a surprise attack on Fidel Castro's Cuba. Trained at a base in Guatemala, this small army - complete with an air force consisting of B-26 bombers - landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961. The ill-conceived, poorly planned operation ended in disaster, since all but 150 men of the force were either killed or captured within three days.
7. L'ARMÉE CLANDESTINE
In 1962, CIA agents recruited Meo tribesmen living in the mountains of Laos to fight as guerrillas against Communist Pathet Lao forces. Called l'Armée Clandestine, this unit - paid, trained and supplied by the CIA - grew into a 30,000-man force. By 1975, the Meos - who had numbered a quarter million in 1962 - had been reduced to 10,000 refugees fleeing into Thailand.
8. NUNG MERCENARIES
A Chinese hill people living in Vietnam, the Nungs were hired and organised by the CIA as a mercenary force, during the Vietnam War. Fearsome and brutal fighters, the Nungs were employed throughout Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Numgs proved costly since they refused to fight unless constantly supplied with beer and prostitutes.
9. PERUVIAN REGIMENT
Unable to quell guerrilla forces in its eastern Amazonian provinces, Peru called on the US for help in the mid-1960s. The CIA responded by establishing a fortified camp in the area and hiring local Peruvians who were trained by Green Beret personnel on loan from the US Army. After crushing the guerillas, the elite unit was disbanded because of fears it might stage a coup against the government.
10. CONGO MERCENARY FORCE
In 1964 during the Congolese Civil War, the CIA established an army in the Congo to back pro-Western leaders Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. The CIA imported European mercenaries and Cuban pilots - exiles from Cuba - to pilot the CIA air force, composed of transports and B-26 bombers.
11. THE CAMBODIAN COUP
For over 15 years, the CIA had tried various unsuccessful means of deposing Cambodia's left-leaning Prince Norodom Sihanouk, including assassination attempts. However, in March, 1970, a CIA-backed coup finally did the job. Funded by US tax dollars, armed with US weapons, and trained by American Green Berets, anti-Sihanouk forces called Kampuchea Khmer Krom (KKK) overran the capital of Phnom Penh and took control of the government. With the blessing of the CIA and the Nixon administration, control of Cambodia was placed in the hands of Lon Nol, who would later distinguish himself by dispatching soldiers to butcher tens of thousands of civilians.
12. KURD REBELS
During the early 1970s the CIA moved into eastern Iraq to organize and supply the Kurds of that area, who were rebelling against the pro-Soviet Iraqi government. The real purpose behind this action was to help the shah of Iran settle a border dispute with Iraq favourably. After an Iranian-Iraq settlement was reached, the CIA withdrew its support from the Kurds, who were then crushed by the Iraqi Army.
13. ANGOLA MERCENARY FORCE
In 1975, after years of bloody fighting and civil unrest in Angola, Portugal resolved to relinquish its hold on the last of its African colonies. The transition was to take place on November 11, with control of the country going to whichever political faction controlled the capital city of Luanda on that date. In the months preceding the change, three groups vied for power: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). By July 1975, the Marxist MPLA had ousted the moderate FNLA and UNITA from Luanda, so the CIA decided to intervene covertly. Over $30 million was spent on the Angolan operation, the bulk of the money going to buy arms and pay French and South African mercenaries, who aided the FNLA and UNITA in their fight. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, US officials categorically denied any involvement in the Angolan conflict. In the end, it was a fruitless military adventure, for the MPLA assumed power and controls Angola to this day.
14. AFGHAN MUJAHEEDIN
Covert support for the groups fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was stepped up during the administration of Ronald Reagan. The operation succeeded in its initial goal, as the Soviets were forced to begin withdrawing their forces in 1987. Unfortunately, once the Soviets left, the US essentially ignored Afghanistan as it collapsed into a five-year civil war followed by the rise of the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban. The Taliban provided a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
15. SALVADORAN DEATH SQUADS
As far back as 1964, the CIA helped form ORDEN and ANSESAL, two paramilitary intelligence networks that developed into the Salvadoran death squads. The CIA trained ORDEN leaders in the use of automatic weapons and surveillance techniques, and placed several leaders on the CIA payroll. The CIA also provided detailed intelligence on Salvadoran individuals later murdered by the death squads. During the civil war in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, the death squads were responsible for 40,000 killings. Even after a public outcry forced President Reagan to denounce the death squads in 1984, CIA support continued.
16. NICARAGUAN CONTRAS
On November 23, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a top secret National Security Directive authorising the CIA to spend $19 million to recruit and support the Contras, opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinista government. In supporting the Contras, the CIA carried out several acts of sabotage without the Congressional intelligence committees giving consent - or even being informed beforehand. In response, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, prohibiting the CIA from providing aid to the Contras. Attempts to find alternate sources of funds led to the Iran-Contra scandal. It may also have led the CIA and the Contras to become actively involved in drug smuggling. In 1988, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations concluded that individuals in the Contra movement engaged in drug trafficking; that known drug traffickers provided assistance to the Contras; and that 'there are some serious questions as to whether or not US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua'.
17. HAITIAN COUPS
In 1988, the CIA attempted to intervene in Haiti's elections with a 'covert action program' to undermine the campaign of the eventual winner, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Three years later, Aristide was overthrown in a bloody coup that killed more than 4,000 civilians. Many of the leaders of the coup had been on the CIA payroll since the mid-1980s. For example, Emmanuel 'Toto' Constant, the head of FRAPH, a brutal gang of thugs known for murder, torture, and beatings, admitted to being a paid agent of the CIA. Similarly, the CIA-created Haitian National Intelligence Service (NIS), supposedly created to combat drugs, functioned during the coup as a 'political intimidation and assassination squad.' In 1994, an American force of 20,000 was sent to Haiti to allow Aristide to return. Ironically, even after this, the CIA continued working with FRAPH and the NIS. In 2004, Aristide was overthrown once again, with Aristide claiming that US forces had kidnapped him.
18. VENEZUELAN COUP ATTEMPT
On April 11, 2002, Venezuelan military leaders attempted to overthrow the country's democratically-elected left-wing president, Hugo Chavez. The coup collapsed after two days as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and as units of the military joined with the protestors. The administration of George W. Bush was the only democracy in the Western Hemisphere not to condemn the coup attempt. According to intelligence analyst Wayne Madsen, the CIA had actively organised the coup: 'The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel, headed by a lieutenant colonel on loan from the US Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help organise the coup against Chavez.
South America: Toward an Alternative Future by Noam Chomsky
Last month a coincidence of birth and death signaled a transition for South America and indeed for the world.
The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died even as leaders of South American nations concluded a two-day summit meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, hosted by President Evo Morales, at which the participants and the agenda represented the antithesis of Pinochet and his era.
In the Cochabamba Declaration, the presidents and envoys of 12 countries agreed to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union.
The declaration marks another stage toward regional integration in South America, 500 years after the European conquests. The subcontinent, from Venezuela to Argentina, may yet present an example to the world on how to create an alternative future from a legacy of empire and terror.
The United States has long dominated the region by two major methods: violence and economic strangulation. Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.
Previous attempts at independence have been crushed, partly because of a lack of regional cooperation. Without it, threats can be handled one by one. (Central America, unfortunately, has yet to shake the fear and destruction left over from decades of U.S.-backed terror, especially during the 1980s.)
To the United States, the real enemy has always been independent nationalism, particularly when it threatens to become a "contagious example," to borrow Henry Kissinger's characterization of democratic socialism in Chile.
On Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet's forces attacked the Chilean presidential palace. Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, died in the palace, apparently by his own hand, because he was unwilling to surrender to the assault that demolished Latin America's oldest, most vibrant democracy and established a regime of torture and repression.
The official death toll for the coup is 3,200; the actual toll is commonly estimated at double that figure. An official inquiry 30 years after the coup found evidence of approximately 30,000 cases of torture during the Pinochet regime. Among the leaders at Cochabamba was the Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet. Like Allende, she is a socialist and a physician. She also is a former exile and political prisoner. Her father was a general who died in prison after being tortured.
At Cochabamba, Morales and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela celebrated a new joint venture, a gas separation project in Bolivia. Such cooperation strengthens the region's role as a major player in global energy.
Venezuela is already the only Latin American member of OPEC, with by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East. Chávez envisions Petroamerica, an integrated energy system of the kind that China is trying to initiate in Asia.
The new Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, proposed a land-and-river trade link from the Brazilian Amazon rain forest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast — a South American equivalent of the Panama Canal.
Other promising developments include Telesur, a new pan-Latin American TV channel based in Venezuela and an effort to break the Western media monopoly.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called on fellow leaders to overcome historical differences and unite the continent, however difficult the task.
Integration is a prerequisite for genuine independence. The colonial history — Spain, Britain, other European powers, the United States — not only divided countries from one another but also left a sharp internal division within the countries, between a wealthy small elite and a mass of impoverished people.
The main economic controls in recent years have come from the International Monetary Fund, which is virtually a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. But Argentina, Brazil and now Bolivia have moved to free themselves of IMF strictures.
Because of the new developments in South America, the United States has been forced to adjust policy. The governments that now have U.S. support — like Brazil under Lula — might well have been overthrown in the past, as was President João Goulart of Brazil in a U.S.-backed coup in 1964.
To maintain Washington's party line, though, it's necessary to finesse some of the facts. For example, when Lula was re- elected in October, one of his first acts was to fly to Caracas to support Chávez's electoral campaign. Also, Lula dedicated a Brazilian project in Venezuela, a bridge over the Orinoco River, and discussed other joint ventures.
The tempo is picking up. Also last month, Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, continued the dialogue on South American unity at its semiannual meeting in Brazil, where Lula inaugurated the Mercosur Parliament — another promising sign of deliverance from the demons of the past.
Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent book is "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy."
The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died even as leaders of South American nations concluded a two-day summit meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, hosted by President Evo Morales, at which the participants and the agenda represented the antithesis of Pinochet and his era.
In the Cochabamba Declaration, the presidents and envoys of 12 countries agreed to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union.
The declaration marks another stage toward regional integration in South America, 500 years after the European conquests. The subcontinent, from Venezuela to Argentina, may yet present an example to the world on how to create an alternative future from a legacy of empire and terror.
The United States has long dominated the region by two major methods: violence and economic strangulation. Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.
Previous attempts at independence have been crushed, partly because of a lack of regional cooperation. Without it, threats can be handled one by one. (Central America, unfortunately, has yet to shake the fear and destruction left over from decades of U.S.-backed terror, especially during the 1980s.)
To the United States, the real enemy has always been independent nationalism, particularly when it threatens to become a "contagious example," to borrow Henry Kissinger's characterization of democratic socialism in Chile.
On Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet's forces attacked the Chilean presidential palace. Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, died in the palace, apparently by his own hand, because he was unwilling to surrender to the assault that demolished Latin America's oldest, most vibrant democracy and established a regime of torture and repression.
The official death toll for the coup is 3,200; the actual toll is commonly estimated at double that figure. An official inquiry 30 years after the coup found evidence of approximately 30,000 cases of torture during the Pinochet regime. Among the leaders at Cochabamba was the Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet. Like Allende, she is a socialist and a physician. She also is a former exile and political prisoner. Her father was a general who died in prison after being tortured.
At Cochabamba, Morales and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela celebrated a new joint venture, a gas separation project in Bolivia. Such cooperation strengthens the region's role as a major player in global energy.
Venezuela is already the only Latin American member of OPEC, with by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East. Chávez envisions Petroamerica, an integrated energy system of the kind that China is trying to initiate in Asia.
The new Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, proposed a land-and-river trade link from the Brazilian Amazon rain forest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast — a South American equivalent of the Panama Canal.
Other promising developments include Telesur, a new pan-Latin American TV channel based in Venezuela and an effort to break the Western media monopoly.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called on fellow leaders to overcome historical differences and unite the continent, however difficult the task.
Integration is a prerequisite for genuine independence. The colonial history — Spain, Britain, other European powers, the United States — not only divided countries from one another but also left a sharp internal division within the countries, between a wealthy small elite and a mass of impoverished people.
The main economic controls in recent years have come from the International Monetary Fund, which is virtually a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. But Argentina, Brazil and now Bolivia have moved to free themselves of IMF strictures.
Because of the new developments in South America, the United States has been forced to adjust policy. The governments that now have U.S. support — like Brazil under Lula — might well have been overthrown in the past, as was President João Goulart of Brazil in a U.S.-backed coup in 1964.
To maintain Washington's party line, though, it's necessary to finesse some of the facts. For example, when Lula was re- elected in October, one of his first acts was to fly to Caracas to support Chávez's electoral campaign. Also, Lula dedicated a Brazilian project in Venezuela, a bridge over the Orinoco River, and discussed other joint ventures.
The tempo is picking up. Also last month, Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, continued the dialogue on South American unity at its semiannual meeting in Brazil, where Lula inaugurated the Mercosur Parliament — another promising sign of deliverance from the demons of the past.
Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent book is "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy."
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project
January 8, 2007
NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.
“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.
The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.
Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.
Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
When this document was first uncovered in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."
When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride approached the CIA in 1988, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.
It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.
"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good."
In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a minor yet significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”
This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.
Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.
Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.
George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.
The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”
The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.
Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]
Russ Baker, founder of the Real News Project, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, Real News editorial board member, are at work on a book about George W. Bush and the Bush clan, due out later this year. They may be reached at: russ [at] realnews.org.
Copyright © 2006, Russ Baker/Real News Project, All Rights Reserved
By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen | The Real News Project
January 8, 2007
NEW YORK--Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.
According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an “oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush.” The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963.
“Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil,” the memo reads. In fact, early Zapata corporate filings do not seem to reflect Devine's role in the company, suggesting that it may have been covert. Yet other documents do show Thomas Devine on the board of an affiliated Bush company, Zapata Offshore, in January, 1965, more than a year after he had resumed work for the spy agency.
It was while Devine was in his new CIA capacity as a commercial cover officer that he accompanied Bush to Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967, remaining in the country with the newly elected congressman from Texas until January 11, 1968. Whatever information the duo was seeking, they left just in the nick of time. Only three weeks after the two men departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies launched the Tet offensive with seventy thousand troops pre-positioned in more than 100 cities and towns.
While the elder Bush was in Vietnam with Devine, George W. Bush was making contact with representatives of the Texas Air National Guard, using his father's connections to join up with an elite, Houston-based Guard unit - thus avoiding overseas combat service in a war that the Bushes strongly supported.
The new revelation about George H.W. Bush's CIA friend and fellow Zapata Offshore board member will surely fuel further speculation that Bush himself had his own associations with the agency.
Indeed, Zapata's annual reports portray a bewildering range of global activities, in the Mideast, Asia and the Caribbean (including off Cuba) that seem outsized for the company's modest bottom line. In his autobiography, Bush declares that “I'd come to the CIA with some general knowledge of how it operated' and that his 'overseas contacts as a businessman' justified President Nixon's appointing him as UN ambassador, a decision that at the time was highly controversial.
Previously disclosed FBI files include a memo from bureau director J. Edgar Hoover, noting that his organization had given a briefing to two men in the intelligence community on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The memo refers to one as “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” and the other as “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
When this document was first uncovered in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president and seeking the presidency, insisted through a spokesman that he was not the man mentioned in the memo: "I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late '63. I don't have any idea of what he's talking about." The spokesman added, "Must be another George Bush."
When Nation magazine contributor Joseph McBride approached the CIA in 1988, it initially invoked a policy of neither confirming nor denying anyone's involvement with the agency. But it soon took the unusual step of asserting that the correct individual was a George William Bush, a one-time Virginia staffer whom the agency claimed it could no longer locate. But that George Bush, discovered in his office in the Social Security Administration by McBride, noted that he was a low-ranked coast and landing-beach analyst and that he most certainly never received such an FBI briefing.
It was perhaps to help lay to rest the larger matter of the elder Bush's past associations that the former president went out of his way during his recent eulogy for President Ford to sing the praises of the Warren Commission Report as the final authority on those days.
"After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And a conspiracy theorist can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford's word was always good."
In fact, Ford's role on the Warren Commission is seen by many experts as a decisive factor in his rise to the top. As a Commission member, Ford altered its report in a minor yet significant way. As the Associated Press reported in 1997, “Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission's key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas. The effect of Ford's change was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.”
This modification played a seminal role in ending talk of a larger conspiracy to kill the president. Knowledge of Ford's alteration has encouraged theorists to scrutinize the constellation of other figures who might have had a motivation to cover up the affair.
Meanwhile, there is much more to learn about George H. W. Bush's friend, Thomas Devine. The newly surfaced memos explain that Devine, from 1963 on, had authority from the agency to operate under commercial cover as part of an agency project code-named WUBRINY.
Devine at that time was employed with the Wall Street boutique Train, Cabot and Associates, described in the memos as an “investment banking firm which houses and manages the [CIA] proprietary corporation WUSALINE.” These nautical names - 'Saline' and 'Briny' - or, for the Bay of Pigs invasion 'Wave' - are CIA cryptonyms for the programs and companies involved.
George H.W. Bush's own ties are amplified in the 1975 CIA memo, dated November 29, which makes it clear that he had knowledge of CIA operations prior to being named the new director of the CIA in the fall of that year.
The 1975 memo notes that, through his relationship with Devine, “Mr George Bush [the CIA director-designate] has prior knowledge of the now terminated project WUBRINY/LPDICTUM which was involved in proprietary commercial operations in Europe.”
The Bush documents, part of a batch of 300,000 records the CIA provided to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were publicly released in 1998 as the result of a lawsuit, donated to a foundation, scanned into a database - and only just noticed by an independent researcher.
Click the following to view original supporting documents: [1] [2] [3]
Russ Baker, founder of the Real News Project, and Jonathan Z. Larsen, Real News editorial board member, are at work on a book about George W. Bush and the Bush clan, due out later this year. They may be reached at: russ [at] realnews.org.
Copyright © 2006, Russ Baker/Real News Project, All Rights Reserved
America's new U.N. Ambassador's Oily and Slimy Past
by Phyllis Bennis
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her most recent book is Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power .
The transfer of current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad from his job as the Great Wizard of Iraq’s embattled Emerald City in Baghdad’s Green Zone, to the quieter but no less complicated halls of the United Nations, may have several rationales.
One reason may be a belated Bush administration recognition that Khalilzad’s favored strategy of demanding that Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government “reach out” to Iraq’s angry Sunni community has failed to quell the violence. (It is unlikely, however, that anyone in the administration acknowledges that no strategy will work as long as the U.S. occupation continues.) Another may be based on an overdue recognition that sending a Sunni Afghan-born envoy who speaks several regional languages means little, when that diplomat still represents policies of war and occupation across the region.
But sending Khalilzad to the United Nations clearly indicates that the White House, however ideologically committed to unilateralism and the unbridled assertion of military power, still need the U.N. Zalmay Khalilzad’s history—with U.S. policies in Central Asia, Afghanistan, oil, the Bush family—goes back many years, and he remains a key defender of those policies. He served in key Cold War positions in both the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations, mostly having to do with the 1980s anti-Soviet contra war in Afghanistan as well as the Iran-Iraq War of the same period. In both cases he distinguished himself by backing regimes that would only later be identified as part of the so-called axis of evil: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It was in Afghanistan that he made the biggest splash. He had been an early supporter of the Taliban during the brutal internecine fighting that accompanied the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. And he remained in touch with the fundamentalist forces after they trounced opposing warlords and took power in Kabul in 1996. By 1997, according to the Washington Post:
…at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay Khalilzad was chatting pleasantly over dinner with leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime about their shared enthusiasm for a proposed multibillion-dollar pipeline deal.
Khalilzad, a hardcore neoconservative protégé of Dick Cheney and member of the Project for a New American Century, was working as a risk assessor for Unocal oil company, which was then debating the viability of a natural gas pipeline project in Afghanistan. The Taliban had no official diplomatic relations with the U.S., but Unocal flew Taliban ministers to Texas and flew their own corporate officials to Afghanistan for negotiations. No one in Texas and few in Washington had anything to say then about the Taliban’s treatment of women, its imposition of harsh medieval laws mandating punishments of amputation and death by stoning, its destruction of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage or its denial of health care and education.
As the respected World Press Review pointed out, the “United States was slow to condemn the Taliban in the mid-1990s because the Taliban seemed to favor U.S. oil company Unocal to build two pipelines across Afghanistan.”
That included Zalmay Khalilzad. Writing on October 7, 1996, just as the Taliban was sweeping to victory in Afghanistan’s civil war and five years to the day before his future boss George W. Bush would launch a massive war against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Khalilzad said:
the Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction... It is time for the United States to re-engage [the Taliban].
So after September 11, when the Bush administration was determined to go to war against Afghanistan, concern remained about how to protect U.S. economic—read: oil—interests in the area. In 1998 Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney had told oil executives that “the current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region.” So it was no surprise that the oilmen and oilwomen of the Bush administration would continue their efforts to protect U.S. access to current and future oil and gas in the region, even as they launched a war against the country they had so recently hoped would become a giant oil transit hub for U.S. oil companies drilling there. As the Bush administration began casting around for the right person to protect those interests, Afghan national, oil expert and recent Taliban-backer Zalmay Khalilzad, by then on staff of the National Security Council and a special adviser to the president on Afghan policy, fit the bill admirably.
Two years earlier, even before 9/11, Khalilzad himself had urged the Bush administration to create “a military stalemate” in war-torn Afghanistan. Drafted as part of a major set of proposals for a new U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Khalilzad went on to call on Bush to
appoint a high-level envoy for Afghanistan who can coordinate overall U.S. policy. The envoy must have sufficient stature and access to ensure that he or she is taken seriously in foreign capitals and by local militias. Equally important, the special envoy must be able to shape Afghanistan policy within U.S. bureaucracies.
Two years later, on December 31, 2001, Khalilzad’s appointment as special envoy to the new Afghan regime was announced. The White House announcement did not mention his history with Unocal. Nor did it repeat Dick Cheney’s words about the importance of oil in the Central Asia/Caspian region. The Amarillo Globe-News, reporting on Cheney’s 1998 speech, said the “potential for this region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf, though, does not concern Cheney... ‘You’ve got to go where the oil is,’ he said . ‘I don’t worry about it a lot.’”
That Bush administration tendency not to worry showed up in Khalilzad as well. Three months into the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who also happened to be a former colleague of Khalilzad at Unocal, told the press he had not asked the United States for a bombing halt. Khalilzad, noting in Kabul at the same time that the U.S. bombing was causing civilian Afghan casualties, said blithely :
“you have to weigh the risks of ending the conflict prematurely with the costs of continuing it. I have no doubt, on balance, that we will continue until we achieve our goals… We do not target civilians, but civilians unfortunately do get affected, even killed,” Khalilzad went on. “War is a very imperfect business.”
It was a good lesson Khalilzad remembered when he moved on to his next war, in Iraq.
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Her most recent book is Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power .
The transfer of current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad from his job as the Great Wizard of Iraq’s embattled Emerald City in Baghdad’s Green Zone, to the quieter but no less complicated halls of the United Nations, may have several rationales.
One reason may be a belated Bush administration recognition that Khalilzad’s favored strategy of demanding that Iraq’s Shi’a-dominated government “reach out” to Iraq’s angry Sunni community has failed to quell the violence. (It is unlikely, however, that anyone in the administration acknowledges that no strategy will work as long as the U.S. occupation continues.) Another may be based on an overdue recognition that sending a Sunni Afghan-born envoy who speaks several regional languages means little, when that diplomat still represents policies of war and occupation across the region.
But sending Khalilzad to the United Nations clearly indicates that the White House, however ideologically committed to unilateralism and the unbridled assertion of military power, still need the U.N. Zalmay Khalilzad’s history—with U.S. policies in Central Asia, Afghanistan, oil, the Bush family—goes back many years, and he remains a key defender of those policies. He served in key Cold War positions in both the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations, mostly having to do with the 1980s anti-Soviet contra war in Afghanistan as well as the Iran-Iraq War of the same period. In both cases he distinguished himself by backing regimes that would only later be identified as part of the so-called axis of evil: Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It was in Afghanistan that he made the biggest splash. He had been an early supporter of the Taliban during the brutal internecine fighting that accompanied the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. And he remained in touch with the fundamentalist forces after they trounced opposing warlords and took power in Kabul in 1996. By 1997, according to the Washington Post:
…at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay Khalilzad was chatting pleasantly over dinner with leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime about their shared enthusiasm for a proposed multibillion-dollar pipeline deal.
Khalilzad, a hardcore neoconservative protégé of Dick Cheney and member of the Project for a New American Century, was working as a risk assessor for Unocal oil company, which was then debating the viability of a natural gas pipeline project in Afghanistan. The Taliban had no official diplomatic relations with the U.S., but Unocal flew Taliban ministers to Texas and flew their own corporate officials to Afghanistan for negotiations. No one in Texas and few in Washington had anything to say then about the Taliban’s treatment of women, its imposition of harsh medieval laws mandating punishments of amputation and death by stoning, its destruction of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage or its denial of health care and education.
As the respected World Press Review pointed out, the “United States was slow to condemn the Taliban in the mid-1990s because the Taliban seemed to favor U.S. oil company Unocal to build two pipelines across Afghanistan.”
That included Zalmay Khalilzad. Writing on October 7, 1996, just as the Taliban was sweeping to victory in Afghanistan’s civil war and five years to the day before his future boss George W. Bush would launch a massive war against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Khalilzad said:
the Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction... It is time for the United States to re-engage [the Taliban].
So after September 11, when the Bush administration was determined to go to war against Afghanistan, concern remained about how to protect U.S. economic—read: oil—interests in the area. In 1998 Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney had told oil executives that “the current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region.” So it was no surprise that the oilmen and oilwomen of the Bush administration would continue their efforts to protect U.S. access to current and future oil and gas in the region, even as they launched a war against the country they had so recently hoped would become a giant oil transit hub for U.S. oil companies drilling there. As the Bush administration began casting around for the right person to protect those interests, Afghan national, oil expert and recent Taliban-backer Zalmay Khalilzad, by then on staff of the National Security Council and a special adviser to the president on Afghan policy, fit the bill admirably.
Two years earlier, even before 9/11, Khalilzad himself had urged the Bush administration to create “a military stalemate” in war-torn Afghanistan. Drafted as part of a major set of proposals for a new U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Khalilzad went on to call on Bush to
appoint a high-level envoy for Afghanistan who can coordinate overall U.S. policy. The envoy must have sufficient stature and access to ensure that he or she is taken seriously in foreign capitals and by local militias. Equally important, the special envoy must be able to shape Afghanistan policy within U.S. bureaucracies.
Two years later, on December 31, 2001, Khalilzad’s appointment as special envoy to the new Afghan regime was announced. The White House announcement did not mention his history with Unocal. Nor did it repeat Dick Cheney’s words about the importance of oil in the Central Asia/Caspian region. The Amarillo Globe-News, reporting on Cheney’s 1998 speech, said the “potential for this region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf, though, does not concern Cheney... ‘You’ve got to go where the oil is,’ he said . ‘I don’t worry about it a lot.’”
That Bush administration tendency not to worry showed up in Khalilzad as well. Three months into the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who also happened to be a former colleague of Khalilzad at Unocal, told the press he had not asked the United States for a bombing halt. Khalilzad, noting in Kabul at the same time that the U.S. bombing was causing civilian Afghan casualties, said blithely :
“you have to weigh the risks of ending the conflict prematurely with the costs of continuing it. I have no doubt, on balance, that we will continue until we achieve our goals… We do not target civilians, but civilians unfortunately do get affected, even killed,” Khalilzad went on. “War is a very imperfect business.”
It was a good lesson Khalilzad remembered when he moved on to his next war, in Iraq.
Soldiers and Imperial Presidents By Charles Sullivan
Soldiers and Imperial Presidents
By Charles Sullivan
01/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The vast majority of those who serve in the United States military probably do so with the best of intentions and with honor. The belief that they are defending their country from foreign attackers and doing their patriotic duty as citizens is persistently reinforced. Military service is one of America’s sacred cows; it is something that is rarely questioned and is surrounded by an invisible aura of nobility. No one, especially those who serve, wants to think of their time in the military as anything less than honorable and worthy of glorification.
But the trouble with sacred cows is that they tend to preclude critical examination and often escape the scrutiny of rational thinking and moral judgments. The premise of honorary military service thus goes virtually unchallenged, and often becomes the essence of dogma. But it seems to me that anyone contemplating a military career, especially since it may require killing other human beings and broad scale environmental destruction, should do so with open eyes and clear senses. They need to know who they are serving and whose interests they are protecting.
There is no escaping the fact that the U.S. is an imperialist nation conceived in genocide and racism that has continued through the ages, and worsened with the rise of modern technology and weaponry. With the advent of smart bombs came stupid and immoral leaders. Our litany of crimes against earth and humanity are concealed under layers of moral language, but the actual deeds belie the intent behind what is being done in our name. Ignorance, however, does not absolve anyone from culpability.
Anyone considering military service should deliberate upon the promises proffered by recruiters with extreme skepticism. Recruiters are trained to exalt war as the highest expression of patriotism and love of country; when, in fact, it is often the most debasing expression of our humanity that makes a shallow mockery of real service to god and country. The war resister and the conscientious objector may be the true patriot.
I will make no effort to conceal my contempt for military recruiters who prey upon unsuspecting and inexperienced youth, especially the poor and economically disadvantaged. No parent should expose their children to these predators. Recruiters are the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, and they should be accorded no more respect than them, or the corporate con men who sell us goods that are detrimental to our health. These people are not concerned about the welfare of our children or the country; they are the representatives of imperialism, empire, and Plutocracy; and they are in search of cannon fodder.
Marketing militarism and war to society at large is no different than selling potato chips laced with trans-fats or carcinogenic chemicals, without regard to public health and its attendant social costs. It is all about managing public perception and providing widening profit margins to the corporations that are running the government. To hell with the public welfare and moral pronouncements, the plantation owner demands blood sacrifices as a show of loyalty and gratitude.
Thus it is not surprising that military sacrament is couched in the language of service to country, patriotism, and other noble causes that are as divorced from reality as the President is removed from sanity. The hypocrisy of righteous language contrasted to the actual deed is readily apparent to anyone who knows history. It is propaganda in the purest and most lethal form.
No doubt, the millions of men and women working in the armed forces today do so in the belief that they are heroically serving their country, as well as the cause of freedom and democracy. But in fact, they are serving the ruling clique, the Illuminati, and a few thousand wealthy investors, which represent less than 0.02% of the population. There must be no confusion that the financial interests of Halliburton, Bechtel, and the Bush dynasty are not the interests of America’s citizens, especially those in the armed forces.
There is nothing noble or moral about invading defenseless sovereign nations and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent human beings. There is no morally justifiable way of making occupation and the outright theft of natural capital, such as oil, respectable or gallant. Genocide and theft are crimes against humanity, regardless how the corporate advertisers and public relations firms couch them; and the military is complicit in the commission of those crimes, whether they are ignorant of their role in them or not.
Consider, for example, the role the military has traditionally played in carrying out the plans of one imperial president after another. We have troops permanently stationed in 135 nations protecting America’s corporate interests from democracy. Stifling democracy is quite different from nurturing it. Either most of our presidents are pathological liars or they do not know the difference between nurturing and destroying. America’s record of imperialism speaks for itself; and it is something that, when critically examined, is not easily mistaken for anything other than what it is.
Similarly, the bogus war on terror is a contradiction in terms, as historian Howard Zinn has so aptly pointed out. War is terrorism. Terrorism begets terrorism, and nothing but terrorism. War does not, and cannot ever lead to peace.
Aided by the CIA and death squads trained at the School of the America’s at Fort Benning, Georgia, the U.S. has crushed one fledgling democracy after another and replaced them with brutally oppressive right wing dictatorships friendly to American corporations and financial investors. Let us recall that Saddam Hussein was our man in Iraq until he converted from the dollar to the euro. From Iran to Chile there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cases that could be cited. For a more detailed analysis of these incursions, I refer readers to William Blum’s provocative book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War Two.
Let us assume that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is a fairly typical example of imperial policies that have been in vogue for well over a century. Like previous military actions, the invasion of Iraq was based upon a litany of lies set forth by the president and his cabinet, and carried forth in the corporate media. Iraq did not pose a threat to America or to the interests of the American people, and both the President and the commercial media knew it. Their intent was to deceive and to garner support for unconscionable acts of aggression and terror that are not in the people’s interest.
Thus our armed forces are in Iraq under false pretenses that have nothing to do with spreading democracy or liberating oppressed people from tyranny. They are there for reasons that are as nefarious as they are treasonous. More than anyone, the men and women in the armed forces need to know why they are in Iraq and what is expected of them by the commander in chief.
The Plutocratic interests in Iraq may be summarized as the use of technologically advanced military forces and high tech weaponry that provide incalculable wealth to a privileged few. In this context, soldiers are nothing more than a means to and end; a Machiavellian way of socializing costs and privatizing profits—the ultimate in corporate welfare. Well over $50 billion in profits have been hauled out of Iraq by 150 U.S. corporations, including the privatization of lucrative Iraqi oil. The profits and the death toll continue to rise simultaneously.
To date, some 700,000 Iraqi people have died in the war and occupation, and the violence is rapidly escalating. Most of the dead are civilians, many of them women and children. Over 3,000 American soldiers have died on the basis of lies and thousands more are permanently maimed and traumatized—all to enhance the bottom line of America’s wealthiest and most privileged elite.
It is not well publicized in the western mainstream media that fourteen permanent military bases are under construction in Iraq. The occupation is growing deep tap roots that are drawing the life, and the oil, out of the region, and consuming it in a firestorm of self-perpetuating violence.
President Bush and his kind, always eager to exploit a photo opportunity, frequently pay homage to the troops stationed around the world and in return garner their respect and admiration, neither of which is deserved. Placing soldiers in peril when there is no threat to America or to national security is an expression of utter contempt for them; it is a treasonous offense worthy of the most severe punishment short of execution.
Aside from photo ops, Bush and his wealthy brethren do not associate with enlisted men, whose petty lives transpire far below the lofty socio-economic status the elite were born into. Enlisted men and women are permitted to wipe the cow dung from the president’s cowboy boots, but they are not allowed to wear them or travel in the same social circles as their owner.
The parasites that are running the country produce nothing, and have no more loyalty to the American people or to the Constitution than Frito-Lay or Halliburton. Their only allegiance is to accruing ever more wealth and power to themselves by all possible means, including war. You see, America is also an occupied country.
Neither the Iraqi nor American people’s interest is served by the military industrial complex. War is never in the interest of those who are fooled into fighting them. War benefits those who instigate them and reap their financial reward from the safety of posh offices and marbled halls. War is the century’s old tradition of peasants doing the bidding of kings and queens. That is whose interest is being served by our soldiers.
The truth is that soldiering is a particularly virulent manifestation of America’s unending class war; the continued exploitation of the working class by the ruling elite—the rich preying upon the poor. Now the President and his accomplices in Congress intend to send even more soldiers to Iraq, further escalating the violence, and acting contrary to public sentiment. The lives of these men and women mean nothing to the emperor and his minions. They are only so much excrement to be wiped from their boots; the sacrificial lambs of empire crawling beneath their ignoble gaze.
Despite my severe criticism, it is not my intention to disparage either soldiers or military service. However, these men and women are being duped and exploited, and someone has to tell them what they are killing and dying for. It will remain for each individual to weigh the evidence and decide whether it is right or wrong, courageous or foolish.
Sources:
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, Regan Books, 2006
Information Clearinghouse, www.informationclearinghouse.info
Killing Hope, William Blum, Common Courage Press, 1995
Charles Sullivan is a photographer, free-lance writer and social activist residing in West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com.
By Charles Sullivan
01/03/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The vast majority of those who serve in the United States military probably do so with the best of intentions and with honor. The belief that they are defending their country from foreign attackers and doing their patriotic duty as citizens is persistently reinforced. Military service is one of America’s sacred cows; it is something that is rarely questioned and is surrounded by an invisible aura of nobility. No one, especially those who serve, wants to think of their time in the military as anything less than honorable and worthy of glorification.
But the trouble with sacred cows is that they tend to preclude critical examination and often escape the scrutiny of rational thinking and moral judgments. The premise of honorary military service thus goes virtually unchallenged, and often becomes the essence of dogma. But it seems to me that anyone contemplating a military career, especially since it may require killing other human beings and broad scale environmental destruction, should do so with open eyes and clear senses. They need to know who they are serving and whose interests they are protecting.
There is no escaping the fact that the U.S. is an imperialist nation conceived in genocide and racism that has continued through the ages, and worsened with the rise of modern technology and weaponry. With the advent of smart bombs came stupid and immoral leaders. Our litany of crimes against earth and humanity are concealed under layers of moral language, but the actual deeds belie the intent behind what is being done in our name. Ignorance, however, does not absolve anyone from culpability.
Anyone considering military service should deliberate upon the promises proffered by recruiters with extreme skepticism. Recruiters are trained to exalt war as the highest expression of patriotism and love of country; when, in fact, it is often the most debasing expression of our humanity that makes a shallow mockery of real service to god and country. The war resister and the conscientious objector may be the true patriot.
I will make no effort to conceal my contempt for military recruiters who prey upon unsuspecting and inexperienced youth, especially the poor and economically disadvantaged. No parent should expose their children to these predators. Recruiters are the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, and they should be accorded no more respect than them, or the corporate con men who sell us goods that are detrimental to our health. These people are not concerned about the welfare of our children or the country; they are the representatives of imperialism, empire, and Plutocracy; and they are in search of cannon fodder.
Marketing militarism and war to society at large is no different than selling potato chips laced with trans-fats or carcinogenic chemicals, without regard to public health and its attendant social costs. It is all about managing public perception and providing widening profit margins to the corporations that are running the government. To hell with the public welfare and moral pronouncements, the plantation owner demands blood sacrifices as a show of loyalty and gratitude.
Thus it is not surprising that military sacrament is couched in the language of service to country, patriotism, and other noble causes that are as divorced from reality as the President is removed from sanity. The hypocrisy of righteous language contrasted to the actual deed is readily apparent to anyone who knows history. It is propaganda in the purest and most lethal form.
No doubt, the millions of men and women working in the armed forces today do so in the belief that they are heroically serving their country, as well as the cause of freedom and democracy. But in fact, they are serving the ruling clique, the Illuminati, and a few thousand wealthy investors, which represent less than 0.02% of the population. There must be no confusion that the financial interests of Halliburton, Bechtel, and the Bush dynasty are not the interests of America’s citizens, especially those in the armed forces.
There is nothing noble or moral about invading defenseless sovereign nations and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent human beings. There is no morally justifiable way of making occupation and the outright theft of natural capital, such as oil, respectable or gallant. Genocide and theft are crimes against humanity, regardless how the corporate advertisers and public relations firms couch them; and the military is complicit in the commission of those crimes, whether they are ignorant of their role in them or not.
Consider, for example, the role the military has traditionally played in carrying out the plans of one imperial president after another. We have troops permanently stationed in 135 nations protecting America’s corporate interests from democracy. Stifling democracy is quite different from nurturing it. Either most of our presidents are pathological liars or they do not know the difference between nurturing and destroying. America’s record of imperialism speaks for itself; and it is something that, when critically examined, is not easily mistaken for anything other than what it is.
Similarly, the bogus war on terror is a contradiction in terms, as historian Howard Zinn has so aptly pointed out. War is terrorism. Terrorism begets terrorism, and nothing but terrorism. War does not, and cannot ever lead to peace.
Aided by the CIA and death squads trained at the School of the America’s at Fort Benning, Georgia, the U.S. has crushed one fledgling democracy after another and replaced them with brutally oppressive right wing dictatorships friendly to American corporations and financial investors. Let us recall that Saddam Hussein was our man in Iraq until he converted from the dollar to the euro. From Iran to Chile there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cases that could be cited. For a more detailed analysis of these incursions, I refer readers to William Blum’s provocative book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War Two.
Let us assume that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is a fairly typical example of imperial policies that have been in vogue for well over a century. Like previous military actions, the invasion of Iraq was based upon a litany of lies set forth by the president and his cabinet, and carried forth in the corporate media. Iraq did not pose a threat to America or to the interests of the American people, and both the President and the commercial media knew it. Their intent was to deceive and to garner support for unconscionable acts of aggression and terror that are not in the people’s interest.
Thus our armed forces are in Iraq under false pretenses that have nothing to do with spreading democracy or liberating oppressed people from tyranny. They are there for reasons that are as nefarious as they are treasonous. More than anyone, the men and women in the armed forces need to know why they are in Iraq and what is expected of them by the commander in chief.
The Plutocratic interests in Iraq may be summarized as the use of technologically advanced military forces and high tech weaponry that provide incalculable wealth to a privileged few. In this context, soldiers are nothing more than a means to and end; a Machiavellian way of socializing costs and privatizing profits—the ultimate in corporate welfare. Well over $50 billion in profits have been hauled out of Iraq by 150 U.S. corporations, including the privatization of lucrative Iraqi oil. The profits and the death toll continue to rise simultaneously.
To date, some 700,000 Iraqi people have died in the war and occupation, and the violence is rapidly escalating. Most of the dead are civilians, many of them women and children. Over 3,000 American soldiers have died on the basis of lies and thousands more are permanently maimed and traumatized—all to enhance the bottom line of America’s wealthiest and most privileged elite.
It is not well publicized in the western mainstream media that fourteen permanent military bases are under construction in Iraq. The occupation is growing deep tap roots that are drawing the life, and the oil, out of the region, and consuming it in a firestorm of self-perpetuating violence.
President Bush and his kind, always eager to exploit a photo opportunity, frequently pay homage to the troops stationed around the world and in return garner their respect and admiration, neither of which is deserved. Placing soldiers in peril when there is no threat to America or to national security is an expression of utter contempt for them; it is a treasonous offense worthy of the most severe punishment short of execution.
Aside from photo ops, Bush and his wealthy brethren do not associate with enlisted men, whose petty lives transpire far below the lofty socio-economic status the elite were born into. Enlisted men and women are permitted to wipe the cow dung from the president’s cowboy boots, but they are not allowed to wear them or travel in the same social circles as their owner.
The parasites that are running the country produce nothing, and have no more loyalty to the American people or to the Constitution than Frito-Lay or Halliburton. Their only allegiance is to accruing ever more wealth and power to themselves by all possible means, including war. You see, America is also an occupied country.
Neither the Iraqi nor American people’s interest is served by the military industrial complex. War is never in the interest of those who are fooled into fighting them. War benefits those who instigate them and reap their financial reward from the safety of posh offices and marbled halls. War is the century’s old tradition of peasants doing the bidding of kings and queens. That is whose interest is being served by our soldiers.
The truth is that soldiering is a particularly virulent manifestation of America’s unending class war; the continued exploitation of the working class by the ruling elite—the rich preying upon the poor. Now the President and his accomplices in Congress intend to send even more soldiers to Iraq, further escalating the violence, and acting contrary to public sentiment. The lives of these men and women mean nothing to the emperor and his minions. They are only so much excrement to be wiped from their boots; the sacrificial lambs of empire crawling beneath their ignoble gaze.
Despite my severe criticism, it is not my intention to disparage either soldiers or military service. However, these men and women are being duped and exploited, and someone has to tell them what they are killing and dying for. It will remain for each individual to weigh the evidence and decide whether it is right or wrong, courageous or foolish.
Sources:
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time, Regan Books, 2006
Information Clearinghouse, www.informationclearinghouse.info
Killing Hope, William Blum, Common Courage Press, 1995
Charles Sullivan is a photographer, free-lance writer and social activist residing in West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com.
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