Afghan Autopsy By Christian Parenti

By Christian Parenti

Editor’s note: America began its so-called war on terror with the intention of driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Five years later, the Taliban is back, Osama bin Laden is still alive, and insurgent fighters cite the U.S. presence in the country as their main wellspring of rage. How did it come to this?

Truthdig contributor Christian Parenti, just back from Afghanistan, reports.



Something significant happened in Kabul on Sept. 8 when a Toyota station wagon packed with explosives rammed two U.S. Humvees at the gates of the American embassy, setting off a massive blast.

The Taliban claimed credit for the bombing, as if to say: We can now strike anywhere. When I interviewed eyewitnesses a few days after the blast, shreds of clothing and a shoe still hung from the branches of a nearby tree. Local shopkeepers described the suicide bomber as “very clean,” “dressed in white” and “wearing eyeliner.” They said he paid $100 for a cigarette just before parking in the spot from which he launched his attack against two American Humvees.

After a month traveling around Afghanistan this autumn, I was forced to a grim conclusion: This project is lost, and nothing very good will likely replace it. The reasons for the international community’s failure here are several. First, there are the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the U.S. role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernizing efforts of its urban middle classes.

The stated goal of this latest occupation has been to create a functioning state where none had existed. Thus, if Afghan institutions fail, so too does the West’s project there.

“You can’t have development without security,” says the waxy NATO spokesman in Kabul, Mark Laity. “And security without development won’t last.” Alas, neither obtains in Afghanistan.

The West, led by the U.S., militarily overmatches its adversaries. But in Afghanistan, that is not the issue. As Bernard Fall said of Vietnam, a war can be militarily unlosable yet politically unwinnable.

Consider again the contours of this crisis: Half of Afghanistan is under effective insurgent control; scores of international troops have been killed this year. Between January and Oct. 8 of this year, there were 78 suicide bombings, killing nearly 200 people. Last year saw only 17 suicide attacks. In the last six months, several previously stable provinces have slipped into chaos. A few dissident British soldiers have accused NATO and U.S. forces of bombing and strafing villages. Despite, or more likely because of this firepower, the situation in key southern provinces like Helmand and Kandahar has deteriorated badly. The British were recently forced to negotiate a withdrawal from one of their southern bases in Masa Qala, essentially surrendering the area to the Taliban.

By late summer, the military crisis in southern Afghanistan was so bad that NATO’s top U.S. commander, Gen. James Jones, was begging for 2,500 extra troops to join the fight in Afghanistan’s deep south. Few extra soldiers were forthcoming. France was asked to move the 2,000 NATO troops under its command in Kabul south but refused, claiming they were needed in the capital.

The resurgent Taliban now control districts just outside Kabul, in Lowgar and Wardak provinces, and are even launching attacks on NATO troops in and around Kabul. In September, Mullah Dadullah, head of the Taliban forces, claimed he had 12,000 fighters, including 500 suicide bombers, and promised escalating violence next spring. Cut those numbers in half or more and the Taliban are still a formidable force.

To find out how the insurgents have crept so close to the capital, a colleague and I head south into Taliban controlled sections of Lorag. As is often the case in guerrilla warfare, the landscape appears normal: The sun shines. The crops, including patches of shaggy green cannabis, survive despite an eighth year of drought. The traffic looks nonthreatening: Toyota Corollas roll past, packed with Afghan families, the women shrouded in blue burqas. So, too, do overloaded “jingle trucks” their sides brightly painted, bumpers trimmed with skirts of dangling tin chains and black tassels in imitation of the pretty elephants that once hauled cargo in these parts. But appearances can be deceptive in Afghanistan.

To appear a bit more like locals, my traveling companion and I are dressed in traditional salwar kameez. My blond colleague, the filmmaker Ian Olds, has his head wrapped in a scarf. At paramilitary police checkpoints, he plays the role of a sleeping sick man. It all seems a bit ridiculous—how could the Taliban really operate this close to the city?

But once we reach our destination—some villages just off the main road—the tension grows palpably thicker. People in Lowgar say that the insurgents have been operating here for about a year. They began with organizers who infiltrated from Pakistan to stir up dissatisfaction and reactivate former fighters.

The guerrillas here got a major boost when the extremist and pathologically ruthless commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar pledged the support of his Hezb-i-Islami, an old mujahedeen party, to Al Qaeda and made peace with the Taliban. A youth from Lowgar explains: “Every family has to give one man to the Taliban.”

The Taliban pay their fighters more that the Afghan military, which only pays $70 a month, but the fighters have local grievances that motivate them as well. A man in Lowgar complains: “There are no jobs, no development. The government is corrupt.”

To the northeast of Kabul, in Kunnar and Nuristan, one finds a different ecology of insurgents: the networks of foreign fighters of Al Qaeda. There, the radio traffic reveals Kandahari Taliban fighters overlapping with Pakistanis and Arabs. Two Afghan journalists who know this scene well describe the Al Qaeda networks along the Pakistani border east of Kabul as supplying expertise and consultative guidance to the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami.

“When I went there, they made me take out the battery and chip from my phone. They brought in an Arab who went over the camera and then disappeared,” said one of these Afghan journalists with Al Qaeda contacts. “The Arab wouldn’t be interviewed. They had Pashtun from Kandahar who had been to Kashmir. They are very smart guys.”

These Al Qaeda networks in the east are small and do not mount large ground offensives like their two allied forces—the southern Taliban and Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. Combat in Kunar and Nuristan is rarely as fierce as it is further south. But Al Qaeda clearly plays an important technical and media role in the overall Afghan jihad.

An intelligence contractor speculated that the Kabul bombings were more likely Al Qaeda types than country bumpkin Kandaharis. “The checkpoints of the national police are all Northern Alliance troops,” he said. “And they harass all Pashtun males. The suicide cells in Kabul are probably more sophisticated types.”

Not all the foreign fighters of the anti-Soviet jihad went home when it was over. Early this year, Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urged followers not to forget the jihad in Afghanistan in their fixation on Iraq. Some of the earliest suicide bombers were said to be Pakistani, (though now most are believed to be Afghans). So there is still a role played by foreign fighters in Afghanistan.

The home-grown Taliban who make up the bulk of the insurgency have a simple cause: They fight to remove foreign troops and impose sharia, Islamic law. When I interviewed a group of fighters in a canyon in Zabul Province in February, the presence of foreign “non-believing” troops was their main grievance. They wanted their watan or homeland under Afghan control.

They talked about U.S. torture and arrests, criticized the government as corrupt and said they wanted a “truly Islamic government.” When pressed on what that was, they ducked any specific description. They claimed that they burned schools only because they opposed the mixing of boys and girls. The fighters were local southern Pashtuns. They laid out a clear critique of President Hamid Karzai and his NATO backers. But their alternative was a rather conservative and underdeveloped ideology, long on fatalism and moralism, short on specifics.

In January, Karzai, looking for a last chance to make peace, offered to negotiate with the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. The Taliban rejected the offer and several months later the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Dadullah, said that only once all Western troops had vacated Afghanistan would his movement parlay with the Karzai administration.
Despite the ample evidence of failure, many U.S. pundits still see Afghanistan as a bright spot in the war On terror. In July, Jamie Rubin wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that the Democrats should turn from Iraq and invest themselves in saving Afghanistan. Peter Bergin visited Afghanistan this fall after a few years’ absence and declared: “What we are seeing in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but it’s better than so-so.”

More, recently the Washington Post’s Jim Hoaglan, invoking the Taliban’s “savagely misogynistic” ways, cited the dubious number of 2 million girls in school in Afghanistan since 2000 to spin the occupation there as “a stunning accomplishment.” But his idea of “winning Afghanistan” has little to do with reality on the ground.

The situation with education in Afghanistan is actually quite abysmal.

On Oct. 2, Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Sadiq Fatman said: “More than 200,000 students are shut out of schools across the country because of school closures due to fear of attacks.”

When CorpWatch looked into the issue of schools constructed by the Louis Berger Group, it found shoddy work and empty buildings. Teachers in Nagahar and elsewhere complained to me of no supplies, late payment of wages, too many students and too few teachers.

The national university is a shambles. “The professors take bribes or just pass you if you are Pashtun or Tajik like them,” says Hasmat, who was studying in Kabul.

“I will be a great butcher,” says Habib, who has studied medicine for six years but calls his Kabul degree worthless.

A professor who is now the Afghan ambassador to Germany says that many female students are dropping out for fear of being abducted while traveling to Kabul University.

Education is only one barometer of failure.

The harsh truth is that the West, led by the U.S., has been defeated in Afghanistan. It is only a matter time - probably three to five more bloody years—before international troops are forced to leave and a new government, or several governments, or a civil war takes hold. The country could likely divide along ethnic lines: a Pashtun south and a Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek north.
Perhaps history doomed this project from the start. For 130 years or more, Kabul has been fighting a losing battle to subjugate the wild Afghan tribes. Sometimes the great powers aid Kabul, sometimes they undermine it by aiding the restive tribes.

Kabul’s struggle to tame rural Afghan society began in earnest with the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman. Victorious over the British but sustained by their grants from 1880 to 1901, Rahman momentarily broke the Pashtun tribes of the south and began to construct a civil service and modern army, starting with a ledger and less than a dozen civil servants. His son, Habibullaha, was weak and under him Kabul’s power waned. Then the grandson, Amanullah, ejected the British in 1919 (and likely had his father assassinated). Once in power, Amanullah launched a reasonably effective modernization plan that emulated Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.

But Amanullah pushed his reforms too far, too fast: Creating girls schools provoked a backlash from the country’s imams and tribal leaders. When his beautiful Syrian wife Soraoiya appeared unveiled in public, the dam broke. The Pashtun lashkars, or tribal armies, went back to war. When Amanullah fled Kabul, a Tajik brigand from the north, named Bacha-i-Saqao ("Son of a Water Carrier") took over to rule and sack the capital for nine months.

Even during the developmentalist golden era of the early Cold War, the Afghan state was weak. From the early 1950s until 1978, Soviet and U.S. aid flowed in to compete at building roads, airports, power stations and irrigation projects. The process was presided over by a strongman, Daud Khan, who served first as prime minister under the king Zahir Shah, then, after a republican coup d’etat in 1973, as president. Daud was a modernizer, but he faced small Islamic insurgencies supported by Pakistan. And though he got some infrastructure built, Daud was never capable of extending Kabul’s writ deep into the countryside.

The Afghan communists of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took over in 1978 with dreams of jump-starting modernization and development in their deeply backward nation of mountain villages, nomads and dirt roads. Instead, they triggered immediate crisis. The communists of the PDPA favored expanding education, gender equality and land reform, but their doctrinal cleavages led to almost immediate internecine warfare within the party. In 1967, the PDPA had split into two groups—the Khalq and Parcham—but there was violent rivalry even within the Khalq faction.

The new government succeeded in alienating Afghanistan’s largely autonomous tribal leaders. Scattered rebellions soon erupted. By April, 1979, whole units of the Afghan army were defecting to the rebels. As early as March 30, 1979, Robert Gates, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, attended a meeting at which Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe asked whether there was “value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, [and] sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”

As former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, explained in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.S. began aiding the tribalist and Islamic uprisings as early as July 1979. By early autumn, the Afghan army had collapsed and the USSR, fearing that Islamic rebellion in Afghanistan would quickly spread to its Central Asian republics, invaded on Dec. 24, 1979.

Soviet Special Forces, or Spetnaz, commandos killed one communist leader, Hafizullah Amin, who had earlier killed Nur Mohammed Taraki, and replaced Amin with the more agreeable Babrak Karmal. For the next eight years, the Soviet Union bled into the Hindu Kush mountains, sending in war material and fresh troops only to bring out zinc caskets and heroin-addicted vets. As the war progressed, the Red Army’s tactics devolved: mines were dropped indiscriminately from planes and civilian populations bombed.

The U.S. effort in this conflict was also massive, described by Fred Halliday as “the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA.”

From 1979 to 1992, America channeled a minimally estimated $3 billion to the various mujahedeen factions fighting the Russians and then the Najibullah regime. The Saudi dynasty sent an equal amount, while additional aid flowed from China, Iran, assorted Islamic charities, drug-running operations, privatized CIA funding sources (such as the collapsed Bank of Commerce and Credit International) and various Arab millionaires (such as Osama bin Laden).

Most of the arms were Soviet hand-me-downs purchased from the increasingly Western-oriented Egypt. Running the pipeline of arms, training, money, information and drugs in and out of Afghanistan was the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Described as a state within a state, the ISI almost doubled in size during the war and became the most religiously politicized apparatus of the Pakistani government.

Throughout the Reagan years, U.S. funding for the mujahedeen steadily increased. Facilitated by innocuously named lobbying groups like the Afghan American Educational Fund, above-board appropriations for the largely secret campaign reached $250 million annually by 1985. Much more issued from the CIA’s black budget. Fully a third of U.S. monies went to the religious zealot and Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Now this feverishly anti-American warlord has joined forces with the Taliban.

Among the many volunteers who joined the jihad was the young Osama bin Laden. Another was his now close comrade, the Egyptian surgeon-turned-terrorist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Charged with conspiracy in the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri was arrested, tortured and, upon release, fled to Afghanistan. Known as “Afghan Arabs,” these foreign fighters also included Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Indonesians and Malaysians.

By the time the Afghan communists were vanquished and the mujahedeen were victorious, Afghanistan was devastated. In place of a state, it had seven competing guerrillas parties. Civil war and banditry consumed the next decade and from this emerged the Taliban—a messianic, largely illiterate, vigilante force that sought to impose Muslim law and order upon Afghanistan’s anarchic state of war.
For the U.S. to have succeeded after ousting the Taliban would have taken Herculean effort, single-minded dedication, enormous sums of money, a deft cultural and historical expertise, wise political balancing between rival Afghan factions and ethnic groups and a careful vetting of Afghan allies.

Instead, the American-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was marked by carelessness, parsimonious budgeting and a deep cultural ignorance rooted in a sense of technology-based omnipotence.

Central to the Afghan failure was the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq—the land of oil, cornerstone of Arab nationalism, strategic linchpin to a globally crucial region. In the Bush imperial scheme, Afghanistan served as a stepping-stone to Iraq and a political prop with which to sell and justify the more nebulous war on terror. As a project in and of itself, Afghanistan was always a sloppily handled sideshow.

Consider again the salient facts: Well before 9/11, the Bush team’s earliest cabinet meetings touched on regime change in Iraq. Days after 9/11, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested that the U.S. skip an invasion of Afghanistan and proceed directly to Iraq. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, complained that there were no good targets in Afghanistan. But the Afghan invasion had to happen for U.S. foreign policy to have any credibility. As it happened, the Afghan war was an advertisement for Rumsfeld’s goal of “military transformation” and his theory of light, fast warfare.

Once the Afghan occupation began, the political process was rushed. Warlords were allowed to take over the government. The loya jirga, the constitution, the presidential elections, and the parliamentary elections were all rushed processes, designed to meet U.S. political deadlines. This was the quickest way to create the short-term appearance of stability and success and thus was the quickest way to Iraq. But this process created a hopelessly dysfunctional, intensely corrupt Afghan government, and that foreordained Western failure. After all, who would stand up as the West stood down?

The international community’s military spending in Afghanistan has outpaced development spending by 10 to 1. This is a core mistake in a war that is fundamentally political. Despite the disproportionate military spending, the U.S. deployed only 9,000 troops to hunt Osama bin Laden during the first two years. The ratio of support troops to combat soldiers in the U.S. military is such that a force of 9,000 translates into little more than 800 or 900 soldiers actually in the field at any one time.

On the economic front, things were even worse. The Bush administration actually forgot to request any money for Afghan reconstruction in its initial 2002 budget. The final budget did allot $300 million to development, but for a population of 28 million people with such a devastated infrastructure, that was hardly a start.

Another key mistake in forming the Afghan state was the U.S. agreement to “pay the army.” Unlike Iraq—which had a real army but which Paul Bremmer foolishly fired—Afghanistan had only warlord militias. Once the U.S. agreed to maintain these armed bodies, graft ran wild: the number of alleged troops controlled by each Northern Alliance “commander” accelerated rapidly.

“Suddenly [former Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim] Fahim was claiming that he had 20,000 and then, no, it was 50,000, or 70,000, or whatever number you could come up with,” said a British intelligence contractor. “That became an awful lot of $30 a month per man going into somebody’s pocket. And you can be damned sure the boys with the [AK-47s] weren’t getting much of it.”

Ridiculous shakedown schemes like that set the tone and soon the Afghan government had 32 huge dysfunctional ministries—all-subsisting on foreign aid. In fact, these ministries are so dysfunctional that despite all the graft and theft and leakage of funds, many ministries actually have 30 percent of their funds unspent. In other words, the chaos at the ministries is so deep they can’t even steal their full allotment of aid money.

But why blame the Afghans? After all, they take their cues from their overlords. The Defense Department has admitted that it cannot keep track of the billions of dollars it has spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Government Accountability Office concluded that the U.S. seemed to have little idea of how many contractors were in the two countries or what they were doing.”

Corruption is only part of the issue—the warped political theater of the Bush administration misshaped what development did happen.

“Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad screwed it up,” says Mary Louise Vitelli, a U.S. consultant to the Ministry of Mines and Industry (one of the five Afghan government ministries that control power generation). “Instead of rebuilding Kabul’s three hydro plants, he wanted 500 girls schools, because that looks good. So now Kabul is still without power.” Also, Kabul’s power stations were Soviet built, so their repair would have mostly likely meant contracting Russian firms— not something Team Bush likes to do.

True, Coca-Cola has opened a bottling plant in Kabul and the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development has erected a largely unused five-star hotel in the capital. But in more important ways, Afghanistan’s reconstruction is stalled out. The result has been joblessness, hunger and growing political rage that is now being harnessed by an array of Islamic guerrillas.

The connective tissue for all the Afghan guerrilla groups is Pakistan, its radical Islamist parties and its intelligence services. While the insurgents are fueled by internal dynamics, they also receive external stimulus from across the border. One reason Pakistan aids the Afghan insurgents is that Political Islam - a view of Islam as a revolutionary political vehicle and sharia as a solution to social problems - has considerable traction in Pakistan. In 2002, a coalition of six Islamist parties, the Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), became the second-largest group in Pakistan’s Parliament. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency is heavy with Islamist fellow travelers who have long-standing personal and political links to the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami and Al Qaeda. Since June, Pakistan has had a de facto truce with pro-Taliban tribal forces on the Pakistan side of the border.

A formal truce was signed on Sept. 5, which allowed Afghan insurgents to continue using Pakistan as a base. A month later, U.S. military spokesman Col. John Paradis announced that insurgent attacks had tripled in eastern Afghanistan along its border with Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency.

Pakistan continues to destabilize Afghanistan for several reasons: part of the issue is ethnic politics. In 1893, Afghanistan agreed to a frontier with British India called the Durand Line, after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, who forced it upon Abdur Rahman, the so-called “Iron Emir” of Afghanistan. The Durand Line’s main political impact has been to divide “Pashtunistan,” leaving what is now a population of 28 million Pashtun speakers dispersed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns make up 40 percent of the population and have ruled the country ever since its creation in 1749. In Pakistan, Pashtuns are a large and poor minority. The last thing Pakistan wants is for the Pashtun minority within its borders to link up with or become the tools of a strong neighboring Afghanistan ruled by Pashtuns.

The other factor in Pakistani thinking about Afghanistan is India. As long as massive India threatens Pakistan, Pakistan wants Afghanistan to remain pliable so as to provide “strategic depth” or fallback room in case of a major land war with India.

Pakistan’s support for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar dates back to 1975 when the ISI supported the young radical against the nationalist government of Daud Khan. With the Communist coup in 1978 and Soviet invasion of 1979, Pakistan’s support for Hekmatyar and other Afghan guerrillas increased: CIA and Saudi money was managed by the Pakistani ISI. After the mujahedeen finally took Kabul in 1992, the country went into meltdown after four years of chaos and warfare. Pakistan backed the Taliban, who managed to subdue most of Afghanistan by 1996.

With the attacks of 9/11, discussion of Pakistan-Taliban relations turned on how Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf would soon be forced to ditch his Pashtun clients so as to serve the new U.S. agenda. Such a change of course would gain the general many concessions, but it would undermine the perpetual structural agenda of keeping Afghanistan weak.

So after 9/11, Musharraf played two seemingly contradictory roles: one as America’s indispensable ally, the local broker in the war on terror. The other was the traditional role of destabilizing and dominating Afghanistan.

In the face of this gathering storm, the West is getting increasingly aggressive about opium poppy eradication— trying to douse the fires of insurrection.

For several years, the U.S. occupiers had the sanity to ignore opium, but in 2003, Republican Congressman Henry Hyde sent a letter to Donald Rumsfeld, expressing his “growing concerns about Afghanistan and the impact of illicit drugs on the fight against global terrorism.” The next year, Rumsfeld called the drug problem in Afghanistan “too serious to be ignored.” Opium is now seen as the linchpin to the counterinsurgency: kill the poppies and you kill the rebels.

Finally, in 2005, there was some success in poppy eradication - a reported 21 percent drop in production - but that coincided with (and possibly caused) an upsurge in guerrilla activity.

This year, production bounced back to a record high of 6,100 tons of opium and U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for more robust eradication. Some officials even want to start aerial spraying. Among them is the freelance drug warrior retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who told the AP: “We know exactly where these fields are. They’re absolutely vulnerable to eradication. And it is immeasurably more effective to do it with an airplane.” He calls the war on opium a matter of national security
“I’ve been telling the Pentagon, if you don’t take on drug production, you’re going to get run out of Afghanistan,” he said.

Leveler heads— including many in the NATO forces—readily admit that nothing could be more destabilizing. Even the NATO spokesman Mark Laity, a Brit, privately disparaged U.S. domestic pressure for robust anti-drug policy in Afghanistan as a “short-sighted, moralistic policy nostrum” that he wished U.S. voters would stop supporting.

Opium cultivation and trafficking makes up more than half the Afghan economy --amounting to $3 billion annually, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Poppy cultivation employs an estimated 2.9 million people and Afghanistan now supplies 92 percent of the world’s heroin.

What that means in practical terms is that many key players in the Afghan government are heavily involved in drug trafficking—including Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, an influential leader of the Popalzai clan of the Kandahari Pashtun.

One motive behind stepped-up eradication has been to consolidate power in Kabul. The private intelligence firm Stratfor correctly noted that “the poppy eradication plan’s main objective is to begin eliminating the smaller, more easily managed and often more reckless warlords in the area. Little-known provincial players will be the first warlords targeted by the government.”

More often than not, eradication does the opposite: It becomes another chance for local officials to demand bribes from poor farmers or for local warlords to stand up successfully against Kabul. According to some farmers I have interviewed, eradication when thwarted (as it usually is) strengthens local commanders—as threatened farmers turn to the gunmen for help.

“We are facing a lot of problems. Only security has improved,” say Ghulam Hazrat, a teacher and farmer in the Derazi village of the Kuma district. Farmers in Kuma are among the few who have been forced to seriously scale back their poppy cultivation. “We have no paper or books in the school. The road is bad. There is no clinic.” He says there are only four teachers for 350 students in this group of villages. And the teachers have not been paid for three months.

“With no poppy, lots of people have had to leave to find work. The government promised each farmer $350 not to plant poppy. But the money was stolen. Only some farmers got $150. Maybe we will plant this year. If we don’t plant, we will suffer and when people suffer, people fight.”

Eradicate the opium poppy - half the economy - and Afghanistan’s 28 million people could plunge back into all-out civil war, with the country eventually disintegrating into two or three pieces: the Pashtun south becoming a de facto extension of heavily Pashtun Pakistan, and the more ethnically diverse north and west around Herat being pulled into the orbits of the more developed economies of Central Asia and Iran.

One of the key elements in the poppy eradication strategy is judicial reform. To see how the courts work, I asked to see a trial. I was put off for a week. But then, after pressing hard, the provincial court in Kabul relented.

It was a murder trial. The accused stood impassively as the agreements were delivered rather haphazardly. It all seemed a bit odd. Then a death sentence was delivered and the defendant walked out of court.

What?

It turned out the whole thing was staged for my benefit. The court faked a trial (rather sloppily) so as to keep me away from the real sham of justice as it is actually practiced in Afghanistan. “They can’t show us real trials because they are so bad,” says my interpreter.

The hopelessness of an American victory in Afghanistan seems to be sinking in among some politicians. Senate leader Bill Frist recently called for negotiations with the Taliban, though he was forced to later back off his statement. So, too, has British Deputy Foreign Secretary Kim Howell suggested talks with the enemy. Meanwhile, the top NATO commander on the ground, Lt. Gen. David Richards of the UK, has warned that if the international forces and Kabul government cannot improve the economic and security environment within the next six months, most Afghans in the south will likely switch to active support of the Taliban. For a career military man, that sort of warning is quite an admission.

In the meantime, NATO’s growing desperation has driven it to use ever more aerial bombardment and strafing. This serves merely to lose the battle for Afghan “hearts and minds.”

NATO’s aggressive military operations are creating an intensified solidarity among Pashtuns, which means greater support for the Taliban. Now the fight has entered Kabul, the rising violence even lapping at the gates of the U.S. embassy compound.

Overall, the situation remains stalemated. But here is a prediction: The West will eventually tire of the expense, casualties and futility of it all. Then, after face-saving negotiations, the West will once again quit Afghanistan.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
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1,245 Secret CIA Flights Revealed by European Parliament

The CIA flew 1,245 secret flights into European airspace, according to a European Parliament draft report obtained by ABC News.

The report is the result of a year-long investigation into secret CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights and prisons in Europe.

No European country has officially acknowledged being part of the program.

But citing records from an informal meeting of European and NATO foreign ministers last December that included Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Parliament's draft report concludes "member states had knowledge of the programme of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons."

The report said the recently fired head of Italian intelligence, General Nicolo Pollari, "concealed the truth" when he appeared before the Parliament's investigating committee and stated "that Italian agents played no part in any CIA kidnapping."

The report detailed the involvement of many European countries in what it called the CIA's "illegal" program.

It listed the number of CIA flights, or stopovers, it found in a number of countries.

Italy: 46 stopovers.

United Kingdom: 170 stopovers.

Germany: 336 stopovers.

Spain: 68 stopovers.

Portugal: 91 stopovers.

Ireland: 147 stopovers.

Greece: 64 stopovers

Cyprus: 57 stopovers.

Romania: 21 stopovers.

Poland: 11 stopovers.

Betting on the Venezuelan Election: One Limousine for Chavez, Two Cows for Rosales Written by Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr

Across Venezuela ,"Atrevete!", the presidential campaign slogan of Manuel Rosales, blares from nearly every media available. Rosales is Venezuela's main opposition candidate to standing democratic-socialist president Hugo Chavez. Roughly, "Atrevete!" translates along the lines of "Be bold and daring!"

Ironically, the Rosales' ¨Atrevete!¨ slogan provided Chavez supporter Jhonny Conteras inspiration for an unusual dare, a bet on the elections.

Conteras placed a classified advertisement in "La Frontera," the local newspaper of Merida, Venzuela. It reads: Atrevete. Do you firmly believe that you are going to win? I bet my luxury car against your goods, in a notarized agreement. I'm going with Chavez.

Conteras is a middle-age local business man and self-described "natural Chavista." He owns two posadas in Merida, a medium-sized university town situated in the Andes Mountains. He proudly owns a mint condition black Ford Lincoln Limousine. The fact that he owns a luxury car imported from Miami separates him from the stereotype of Chavistas as underemployed and poor.

Sunday Dec. 3 marks Election Day and nearly everyone has already chosen sides. Many local opinion polls show Rosales and Chavez neck and neck, but Conteras states that these surveys are manipulations.

¨If they want to manipulate, that's fine with me. I don't cheat," said Conteras. "My classified ad is straightforward, no lies. It's not saying anything provocative. If someone firmly believes they will win, what are they afraid of?"

Conteras has no fear of losing his Limo. He plans on splitting the proceeds of his winnings between his retirement fund and his children.

On Nov. 26 he finalized his bet, having chosen between the dozen or so serious contenders.

"I was offered 2 cows to bet against my luxury car, but I decided to go with a pro-Rosales neighbor," said Conteras.

The neighbor, Marcos Ribas, has gambled nearly $12,000 USD on Rosales’s electoral success. This bet stands forth in Venezuela’s economic context where the average yearly income per capita is $6,400 according to the latest CIA World book facts.

Since placing the classified ad on Nov. 15, Conteras has received hundreds of replies, text messages and phone calls. Today, in between the text messages on his cell phone to ¨pick up milk on the way home, dear¨ are mini representations of the political polarization in Venezuela.

Half the messages are support for Chavez.

One reads: "Asi es mi compatriota esos sinvergüenzas no volverán con Dios la virgen y Chavez hasta q la muerte nos separe su devota Rosa." ("That’s it my compatriot! Those shameless folks won’t return to power. God, the Virgin Mary, and Chavez, until death we part. Your Devoted, Rosa.")

The other half are death threats and insults. Among the messages suitable for publication, "Te interesa gane el loco alguna teta tienes hijo de puta ." ("If you want the loco to win, you must getting paid off, you son of a bitch.")

Because of the threats, Conteras has hired 24-hour armed guards. The guards also are pro-Chavez.

Conteras explained why he supports Chavez.

"In Venezuela, the opposition controls the state, without caring for our state. For example, in the past under their leadership, the International Monetary Fund gave funds to Venezuela. Then, we became a country in debt without real production. PDVSA, our basic industry, was in danger. Everything was bad," said Conteras. "This is what I don't want to happen again with Rosales. The opposition continues heading in the same direction, and the transnational companies and interests continue to poison us."

He remains firm that Chavez will win elections on Sunday.

Rebecca Trotzky Sirr is a 2006/07 Fulbright Scholar in Venezuela, a 3rd year medical student at the University of Minnesota, and a single mom to a smarty pants second grader, Zev. Rebecca believes that revolution is medicine. Zev believes that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but the tooth fairy definitely does. Both are willing to bet 2 cows that Chavez will win the elections on Sunday. Contact Rebecca at revolution.is.medicine(at)gmail.co

The Fall of The Green Zone - Bury my heart in the Green Zone By Pepe Escobar

By Pepe Escobar

"We are in dire need of Iran's help in establishing security and stability in Iraq."- Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, November 27, in Tehran

11/28/06 "Asia Times" -- --- As dozens of people a day (sometimes a couple of hundred a day), every single day, Sunni and Shi'ite alike, continue to be beheaded, tortured, blown up, shot, kidnapped, struck by mortars and even doused in gasoline and set on fire in a non-stop gruesome ritual, every big player seems to be laying down a desperate game to "save" Iraq. This includes the ongoing summit between Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and his Iranian counterpart Mahmud Ahmadinejad in Iran and this week's meeting between President George W Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Jordan.

But they all have forgotten to consider the guerrilla point of view; as far as the Sunni Arab resistance is concerned, any summit is guilty of legitimizing the "puppet" Iraqi government.

The Talabani-Ahmadinejad meeting was supposed to have included Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Syria had to walk a careful diplomatic tightrope to evade Iran's invitation without alienating a close ally and at the same time send a signal to Washington it is willing to talk with no preconditions. James Baker's and Lee Hamilton's Iraq Study Group (ISG), after all, will propose a chaos-defying summit between Iraq and all its close neighbors.

Non-stop White House and Pentagon accusations swirl around: Syria facilitates the flow of jihadis into Iraq through their deserted, 1,200-kilometer border. This simply does not make sense (in fact the exodus is the other way around: every day up to 2,000 Iraqis flee to Syria, and more than 1,000 to Jordan, according to the United Nations). Syria may have a Ba'athist regime, but the power elite is configured by Alawites - who follow a branch of Shi'ism completely different from Iran's duodecimals (who believe in 12 imams). The utmost fear of the Assad regime is exactly Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda kind, so Damascus would not be aiding them.

Kurdish warlord-turned-politician Talabani may have been US-protected during the days of Saddam Hussein, but quite a few players in the White House and Pentagon axis will have their reasons to regard the summit in Tehran as a pure "axis of evil". As for the helpless Maliki, there's not much for Bush to lecture him about; his days in power may be numbered. According to various and persistent reports, including from Western and Arab networks, a coup d'etat may be in the works in Baghdad: the US in the Green Zone may have enlisted four of Saddam's Sunni Arab generals with the mission of toppling the Shi'ite-majority Maliki government to install a regime of "national salvation". It would then restructure the Shi'ite-dominated ministries of Defense and Interior and finish off Shi'ite militias such as the Badr Organization of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.

Call it the return of the Ba'athists - minus Saddam. Even before rumors of a coup began circulation, one could see the so-called diplomatic strategists of Baker's ISG coming up with the idea of trying to co-opt the resistance into entering a coalition government.

But that does not mean the plan will work. The US might invest in an Asian-style face-saving operation spun by heavy public relations by getting involved in direct negotiations with the Sunni Arab resistance. But only a Saddam-style dictator is capable of assuring a strong, stable central government in Baghdad in charge of security for everyone, with no discrimination. That would mean alienating the Shi'ite religious parties and their paramilitary factions to the limit.

The return of the Ba'athists fits into a "stay the course" pattern. And it also somehow fits into the Pentagon's "go big" (more troops) and "go long" (many years) strategies - which would take at least up to 2015 before Iraqization of the security forces is complete. In the end, these "strategies" amount to little more than a catchphrase - a muddled "go big but short while transitioning to go long".

A web of myth continues to be spun by much of the world's press, according to which Iran, as an overpowering entity, uses the US occupation to crush the Sunni Arab resistance while manipulating Shi'ite militias. This is a two-pronged fallacy. The Pentagon's finest in Iraq are not crushing anything - on the contrary. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has all but installed an Islamic emirate in al-Anbar province, while the Mehdi Army reigns in Kufa, south of Baghdad, and in Sadr City in Baghdad itself.

The 10,000-strong Badr Organization - affiliated with SCIRI - may have been trained by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, but it does not take any orders from Tehran. As for Muqtada's 7,000-strong Mehdi Army, it is split into at least three different factions (two of them don't even respond to Muqtada anymore). But all of them are opposed to Iranian interference.

The Maliki government is, for all purposes, already dead. Maliki, the No 2 of the Islamist Da'wa Party, controls only 25 representatives in the 275-member parliament. He depends on the SCIRI - which has the majority - and the Sadrists. So obviously Maliki cannot order any kind of crackdown either on the Badr or the Mehdi Army factions. According to the Islamic Party - which has the majority of parliamentarians under the Sunni Concord Front - the police and the army are totally infiltrated by Shi'ite militias. The Sadrists for their part denounce the US "return of the Ba'athists" strategy - and defend the Mehdi Army as patriots who protect Shi'ites from the takfiris (Sunni radicals).

The Maliki government won't go down quietly, though, if judged by its current diplomatic frenzy. The US for its part will accomplish absolutely nothing by trying to take down Muqtada and the Mehdi Army, or even the Badr Organization. If the Pentagon somehow decided to go on an all-out offensive, it would be very easy for SCIRI/Badr - or for Mehdi Army commandos - completely to cut off the US supply route from Kuwait to Baghdad.

What the Shi'ite Islamic parties in power and Tehran agree on is a crucial point: the Sunni Arab resistance must be vanquished. But Muqtada's position is more nuanced: as a true Iraqi nationalist, he does not rule out agreements with Sunni Arabs with the supreme objective of kicking the occupiers out. Meanwhile, the US military will keep being caught in a deadly trap - between the sprawling, underground Sunni Arab resistance and the Shi'ite militias' non-stop rampage.

The fall of the Green Zone

Everyone is guilty in the ongoing Iraq tragedy. The US-trained new Iraqi army is infiltrated by militias, by death squads and even by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The SCIRI, Da'wa and the Kurds are only worried about their own interests, not the interests of Iraq as a nation. And the US - always hiding under the dubious mantra of "Iraqi democracy" - totally evades its responsibility in provoking the appalling chaos in the first place.

Militia hell will remain impervious to any summit. Shi'ite clerical leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani may call for restraint. But Sistani does not control the Shi'ite proletarian masses anymore, Muqtada does. The Americans - attacked at least 180 times a day, every day - will keep "controlling" only one piece of real estate in the whole of Mesopotamia (although an extremely valuable one): the Green Zone.

The ISG may recommend more summits and more covert contacts with the Sunni Arab resistance. Ahmadinejad, Talabani and Assad may even meet again. But Baghdad sources close to the resistance in the Sunni belt have told Asia Times Online of another coup in the making - and that goes way beyond the removal of the Maliki government.

Secular former Ba'athists and Saddam's fighters congregated in the Army of Mohammed - the paramilitary wing of the Awda Party - are already in control of the Syrian border (and not Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda kind).

The next big step for the Sunni Arab resistance - according to sheikhs of the powerful Shammar Sunni tribe - would be to take out the Badr Organization, holed up in the Ministry of the Interior, and the two most murderous factions of the Mehdi Army. That would mean an Iraqi nationalist purge of the hated "Iranians". And that implies an all-out attack on the Green Zone.

The return of the Ba'athists and the fall of the Green Zone: now that's a prime-time double bill to knock 'em dead.

"My Pet Goat" Library, Kennedy (CIA) Assassination(s) and George H.W. & George W. Bush

November 28, 2006 -- George W. Bush Library and associated "think tank" to be located in Dallas. The contest to host the George W. Bush Presidential Library and an associated think tank is down to Baylor, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Dallas. The final decision is expected by December or January. The library's fund is already drawing large million dollar donations from the Bush family's wealthy cronies.

The choice of Dallas to house the Bush II Library provides a stark reminder of the impact the Bush family has had on U.S. history over the past 45 years, Dallas is also the home of the infamous Texas School Book Depository (TBSD). The founder of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, David Harold Byrd, owned the TSBD when it was used as one of the snipers nests for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The Louisiana Civil Air Patrol (LCAP) figures prominently in the hit on Kennedy. The LCAP alumni include David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, James R. Bath (George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard pal and fellow AWOL truant as well as Bin Laden family agent), Charles Rogers, Barry Seal and John Liggett.

A WMR reader who is also a JFK assassination expert maintains that Rogers was one of the three tramps in Dallas' Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. The researcher also claims that CIA operative Chauncey Holt (also one of the three tramps) confirmed that Rogers was one of the tramps.

George W. Bush Presidential Library to be in Dallas -- however, the fitting legacy to Bush Family crimes is the Texas School Book Depository.

Seal was a notorious CIA drug runner who was gunned down with George H. W. Bush's telephone number in the trunk of his car (George deMohrenshildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's Dallas handler upon Oswald's return from the USSR, also had George H. W. Bush's home address and phone number in his personal address book just before his suicide and 1978 Congressional testimony on his knowledge of the JFK assassination). Liggett was a Dallas mortician who was considered the best in face and head reconstruction, and was utilized to alter the true appearance of JFK after the assassination.

And the Bush connections with a Kennedy assassination do not end with November 22, 1963 in Dallas. A recent Guardian report places CIA agent David Morales -- who was posted as the Operations Chief at the CIA's JM/WAVE station and was involved in the CIA's ZF/RIFLE plot to kill Fidel Castro -- at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5th, 1968. The same Morales that was part of Operation 40 and was in the TSBD according to witnesses in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The Guardian quotes Morales as saying in 1973, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." Veteran US State Department diplomat Wayne Smith, the former chief US liaison officer in Havana, said Morales told him at a Buenos Aires cocktail party in 1975 that "Kennedy [Bobby] got what was coming to him." Smith said that Morales "hated the Kennedys, blaming their lack of air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961."

Morales was part of the CIA's Operation 40, the program that engineered the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Morales' colleagues included Luis Posada Carriles (who carried out the terrorist bombing of the Barbados-Trinidad-Havana Cubana Flight 455 off the coast of Barbados in 1976) and Orlando Bosch (involved in the 1976 car bombing of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague on Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of Washington's Embassy Row in 1976). Both terrorist acts were signed off and approved by then-CIA Director George H. W. Bush. Another Operation 40 principal was former CIA Director and Florida Representative Porter Goss.

Morales died of a heart attack in 1978, just a few week before testifying before the House Committee on Assassinations.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas will serve as a perception management center that will work in tandem with the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University to hype the "good deeds" of America's most hideous and atrocious family.

La Patria venció a la antipatria - Rafael Correa Delgado es el Presidente Electo del Ecuador

por Altercom*

El pueblo eligió a Correa con el 57% de los votos. A las 17h00 en todo el Ecuador se cerraron las urnas. Inmediatamente se inició el conteo de los votos. Tres grandes encuestadoras: Cedatos/Gallup, Market y RTS/Teleamazonas, además de los canales de TV que apoyaron abiertamente a Noboa, realizaron sondeos a ’boca de urna’ y anunciaron que: Rafael Correa Delgado es le nuevo presidente del Ecuador. Los resultados que provienen del conteo real de votos, transmitidos por los medios radiales y televisivos, liquidan cualquier sospecha generada en la Bananera Noboa o en el Banco del Litoral. El Ecuador decidió cambiar de rumbo para el siglo XXI.

27 de noviembre de 2006

El nuevo Vicepresidente de la República es LENIN MORENO, amazónico, discapacitado que hizo la campaña en su silla de ruedas, muy apreciado por amplios sectores marginados de la vida nacional.

EL PUEBLO VOTÓ POR CORREA Y SU PROPUESTA

El pueblo entregó el 57% de sus votos por el candidato de Alianza PAIS y de distintas organizaciones populares y políticas que se sumaron a su candidatura, por la CONSTITUYENTE ORIGINARIA, por la SALIDA DE TROPAS EXTRANJERAS de Manta y la NO INTERVENCIÓN EN EL PLAN COLOMBIA de EEUU-Uribe, por la NO FIRMA DEL TLC CON EEUU, por EL FIN DEL ÉXODO y la REUNIFICACIÓN DE LA FAMILIA ECUATORIANA, por la REDISTRIBUCIÓN DEL EXCEDENTE PETROLERO, por el CRÉDITO PARA REPOTENCIAR LA AGRICULTURA Y LA INDUSTRIA, por MEJORES INGRESOS FAMILIARES, por la INTEGRACIÓN LATINOAMERICANA, por JUSTICIA, DIGNIDAD Y SOBERANÍA NACIONAL.



En estos momentos en Quito, frente a la sede de Alianza PAIS, se celebra la victoria a lo grande. Miles de quiteñas y quiteños copan la avenida de Los Shirys en la capital ecuatoriana. Lo mismo ocurre en Guayaquil, Cuenca, Riobamba, Portoviejo, Lago Agrio, Puyo, Loja, Esmeraldas. Cabe indicar que en pueblos más pequeños, la población se ha convocado en los parques principales para celebrar lo que se considera ya "el inicio verdadero del Ecuador al siglo XXI", como nos manifestó una ciudadana en Alangasí, una población cercana a Quito.

DECLARACIONES DEL PRESIDENTE ELECTO

Correa anunció el "FIN DE LA NOCHE NEOLIBERAL" , en su discurso de victoria, y agradeció "a Dios y al Pueblo Ecuatoriano" .

"Asumimos esta victoria con profunda gratitud a las millones de personas que anónimamente, con plata y persona, contribuyeron a la victoria".

"ESTE ES EL TRIUNFO DE UN PUEBLO Y DE QUIENES DERROTARON A LOS MILLONES DE DÓLARES" , añadió.

"Nuestra lucha no ha sido para lanzar un hombre a la presidencia, sino para ver esa Patria: ALTIVA Y SOBERANA, con justicia, sin niños trabajando o muriendo de hambre..."

"La gran mayoría quiere ASAMBLEA NACIONAL CONSTITUYENTE."

"Estudiaremos el reingreso a la OPEP y el fortalecimiento de los Bloques Latinoamericanos."

"Obedeciendo a la política internacional del Ecuador NO DECLARAREMOS TERRORISTAS A LAS FARC, pues eso sería involucrarnos en el Plan Colombia. Dialogaré con el presidente Uribe porque es parte del contexto latinoamericano."

"El gobierno de Rafael Correa y Lenin Moreno será el GOBIERNO DE LOS MIGRANTES."

"Transformar a la Patria no es tarea de un hombre, sino de todo un pueblo."

Rafael Correa gana la presidencia de Ecuador doblando en votos al candidato de derechas

Rafael Correa gana la presidencia de Ecuador doblando en votos al candidato de derechas Alvaro Noboa
Agencias

El candidato izquierdista Rafael Correa será previsiblemente el nuevo presidente de Ecuador. Tanto las encuestas a pie de urna como los primeros resultados oficiales le dan como vencedor de la segunda vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales celebradas ayer, en las que disputaba el puesto al conservador Álvaro Noboa. Con un 34% de los votos escrutados, Correa dobla en votos a su rival -66,3% para Correa y 33,6% para Noboa- y ya ha anunciado su victoria y declarado que asume el "triunfo" con "serenidad, esperanza y gratitud".

En un tono conciliador y sin pose triunfalista, Correa ha declarado, tras autoproclamarse vencedor, que hoy es un día "histórico para la patria. No hay vencedores ni vencidos en cuanto a ciudadanos, sino que ha triunfado un proyecto ciudadano". Según él, recibe la victoria con serenidad porque entiende que "tanta ilusión, alegría y esperanza de todo el pueblo no es por dos ciudadanos sino por ese afán de cambio, por creer que una patria nueva y mejor para todos y todas es posible". Para Correa, su virtual triunfo es una demostración de que, "después de muchos años de tinieblas políticas, económicas y sociales excluyentes, no nos han robado la esperanza".

En su primera comparecencia, además de anunciar la composición del que será su Gobierno, Correa ha reiterado que no suscribirá el Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC) con Estados Unidos, que no involucrará a su país en el Plan Colombia -el plan de lucha contra el narcotráfico y la guerrilla financiado por Washington- y que renegociará la deuda exterior de Ecuador.

The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism by Howard Zinn

by Howard Zinn
November 26, 2006
Democracy Now

Madison is a very special place. I always have a special feeling when I come here. I have a feeling I am in a different country. And I'm glad, you know. Some people get disgusted of the American policy, and they go to live in some other country. No. Go to Madison.
So, now I'm supposed to say something. I am glad you're there, whoever you are, and this light is shining in my eyes to wake me up.

Well, do you get the feeling sometime that you're living in an occupied country? Very often that's a feeling I get when I wake up in the morning. I think, "I'm living in an occupied country. A small group of aliens have taken over the country and are trying to do with it what they will, you know, and really are." I mean, they are alien to me. I mean, those people who are coming across the border from Mexico, they are not alien to me, you see. You know, Muslims who come to this country to live, they are not alien to me, you see. These demonstrations, these wonderful demonstrations that we have seen very recently on behalf of immigrant rights, say, and you've seen those signs saying, you know, "No human being is alien." And I think that's true. Except for the people in Washington, you see.

They've taken over the country. They've taken over the policy. They've driven us into two disastrous wars, disastrous for our country and even more disastrous for people in the Middle East. And they have sucked up the wealth of this country and given it to the rich, and given it to the multinationals, given it to Halliburton, given it to the makers of weapons. They're ruining the environment. And they're holding on to 10,000 nuclear weapons, while they want us to worry about the fact that Iran may, in ten years, get one nuclear weapon. You see, really, how mad can you be?

And the question is, how has this been allowed to happen? How have they gotten away with it? They're not following the will of the people. I mean, they manufactured a will of the people for a very short time right after the war started, as governments are able to do right after the beginning of an armed conflict, in order to able to create an atmosphere of war hysteria. And so for a short time, they captivated the minds of the American people. That's not true anymore. The American people have begun to understand what is going on and have turned against the policies in Washington, but of course they are still there. They are still in power. The question is, you know, how did they get away with that?

So, in trying to answer the question, I looked a little at the history of Nazi Germany. No, it's not that we are Nazi Germany, but you can learn lessons from everybody and from anybody's history. In this case, I was interested in the ideas of Hermann Göring, who, you may know, was second in command to Hitler, head of the Luftwaffe. And at the end of World War II, when the Nazi leaders were put on trial in Nuremberg, Hermann Göring was in prison along with other of the leaders of the Nazi regime. And he was visited in prison by a psychologist who was given the job of interviewing the defendants at Nuremberg.

And this psychologist took notes and, in fact, a couple of years after the war, wrote a book called Nuremberg Diary, in which he recorded -- put his notes in that book, and he recorded his conversation with Hermann Göring. And he asked Göring, how come that Hitler, the Nazis were able to get the German people to go along with such absurd and ruinous policies of war and aggression?" And I happen to have those notes with me. We always say, "We happen to have these things just, you know, by chance."

And Göring said, "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war? But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in any country."

I was interested in that last line: "It works the same way in any country." I mean, here, these are the Nazis. That's the fascist regime. We are a democracy. But it works the same way in any country, whatever you call yourself. Whether you call yourself a totalitarian state or you call yourself a democracy, it works the same way, and that is, the leaders of the country are able to cajole or coerce and entice the people into war by scaring them, telling them they're in danger, and threatening them and coercing them, that if they don't go along, they will be considered unpatriotic. And this is what really happened in this country right after 9/11. And this is happened right after Bush raised the specter of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and got for a while the American people to go along with this.

But the question is, how did they get away with it? What about the press? What about the media? Isn't it the job of the press, isn't it the job of the media, isn't it the job of journalism to expose what governments do? Don't journalists learn from I.F. Stone, who said, "Just remember two words," he said to young people who were studying journalism, he said, "Just remember two words: governments lie"? Well, but the media have not picked up on that. The media have gone along, and they embraced the idea of weapons of mass destruction. You remember when Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations just before the onset of the Iraq war and laid out to the UN this litany of weaponry that Iraq possessed, according to him, and gave great details in how many canisters of this and how many tons of this, and so on and so forth. And the next day, the press was just aglow with praise. They didn't do their job of questioning. They didn't do their job of asking, "Where? What is your evidence? Where did you get this intelligence? Who did you talk to? What are your sources?"

Isn't this what you learn as a freshman in college? "Hey, what are your sources? Where are your footnotes?" No, no. They were just -- the Washington Post said, "It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the New York Times , you know, it was just beside themselves with admiration for Colin Powell. Of course, it all turned out to be untrue, all turned out to be lies. But the press did not do its job, and as a result, the American people, watching television, reading the newspapers, had no alternative source of information, no alternative opinion, no alternative critical analysis of what was going on.

And the question is, why still did the people believe what they read in the press, and why did they believe what they saw on television? And I would argue that it has something to do with a loss of history, has something to do with, well, what Studs Terkel called "national amnesia," either the forgetting of history or the learning of bad history, the learning of the kind of history that you do get, of Columbus was a hero, and Teddy Roosevelt is a hero, and Andrew Jackson is a hero, and all these guys who were presidents and generals and industrialists, and so on. They are the great -- they are the people who made America great, and America has always done good things in the world. And we have had our little problems, of course -- like slavery, for instance, you know -- but we overcome them, you know, and, you know. No, not that kind of history.

If the American people really knew history, if they learned history, if the educational institutions did their job, if the press did its job in giving people historical perspective, then a people would understand. When the President gets up before the microphone, says we must go to war for this or for that, for liberty or for democracy, or because we're in danger, and so on, if people had some history behind them, they would know how many times presidents have announced to the nation, we must go to war for this reason or that reason. They would know that President Polk said, "Oh, we must go to war against Mexico, because, well, there was an incident that took place on the border there, and our honor demands that we go to war."

They would know, if they knew some history, how President McKinley took the nation into war against Spain and Cuba, saying, "Oh, we're going in to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control." And in fact, there was a little bit of truth to that: we did go in, we fought against Spain, we got Spain out of Cuba, we liberated them from Spain, but not from ourselves. And so, Spain was out, and United Fruit was in, and then the American banks and the American corporations were in.

And if people knew their history, they would know, you know, that President McKinley said, when -- as the American army was already in the Philippines and the American navy was already in the Philippines, and Theodore Roosevelt, one of our great presidential heroes, was lusting for war, then people would know that McKinley, who did not know where the Philippines were, but very often now presidents need to be briefed and told where something is. You know, George Bush, "This is Iraq is," you know. Lyndon Johnson, "This is where the Gulf of Tonkin is." You know, they need it.

And president -- they would know, if they knew history, that President McKinley said, "We're going into the Philippines to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos." And if they knew their history, if the history books spent some time on the war in the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century, instead of, as history books do -- they spend a lot of time on the Spanish-American War, which just lasted three months -- they spend virtually no time on the war on the Philippines, a bloody war which lasted, oh, seven years, and which involved massacres and the extermination of populations. That history doesn't appear. You know, we had civilized and Christianized the Filipinos and established our control.

They would know, if they heard the President say, "We are going to bring democracy to the Middle East," they would know how many times we brought democracy to other countries that we invaded. They would know if we brought democracy to Chile, when we overthrew a democratically elected government in Chile in 1973. They would know how we brought democracy to Guatemala when we overthrew, again, a democratically elected -- oh, we love democratic elections, we love free elections, except when they go the wrong way. And then we send either our army in or the CIA in or secret agents in to overthrow the government.

If people knew that history, they would never for a moment believe President Bush, when he says, oh, we're going into Iraq, you know, because of this reason and that reason and liberty and democracy, and they're a threat, you know. I mean, it takes -- yeah, it takes some historical understanding to be skeptical of the things that authorities tell you.

When you know history, you know that governments lie, as I.F. Stone said. Governments lie all the time. Well, not just the American government. It's just in the nature of governments. Well, they have to lie. I mean, governments in general do not represent the people of the societies that they govern. And since they don't represent the people and since they act against the interest of the people, the only way they can hold power is if they lie to the people. If they told people the truth, they wouldn't last very long. So history can help in understanding deception and being skeptical and not rushing to embrace whatever the government tells you.

And if you know some history, you would understand something which is even more basic, perhaps, than the question of lying about this war or lying about this invasion, lying about this intervention, something more basic, if you knew some history: you would understand a sort of fundamental fact about society, and including our society, that the interests of the government and the interests of the people are not the same.

It's very important to know this, because the culture tries very hard to persuade us that we all have a common interest. If they use the language "national interest" -- there's no national interest. There's their interest and our interest. National security -- now, whose security? National defense, whose defense? All these words and phrases are used to try to encircle us all into a nice big bond, so that we will assume that the people who are the leaders of our country have our interests at heart. Very important to understand: no, they do not have our interests at heart.

You will hear a young fellow who is going off to Iraq. I remember hearing the same thing when a young fellow went off to Vietnam. And a reporter goes up to the young fellow and says, "You know, young man, you're going off, and what are your thoughts and why are you doing this?" And the young man says, "I'm doing this for my country." No, he's not doing it for his country. And now, she's not doing it for her country. The people who go off to war are not doing fighting for their country. No, they're not doing their country any good. They're not doing their families any good. They're certainly not doing the people over there any good. But they're not doing it for their country. They're doing it for their government. They're doing it for Bush. That would be a more accurate thing to say: "I'm going off to fight for George Bush. I'm going off to fight for Cheney. I'm going off to fight for Rumsfeld. I'm going off to fight for Halliburton." Yeah, that would be telling the truth.

And, in fact, you know, to know the history of this country is to know that we have had conflict of interest in this country from the very beginning between the people in authority and the ordinary people. We were not one big happy family that fought the American Revolution against England. I remember, you know, in school, that's how it seemed, you know: they're the patriots, and there's all of us, working, fighting together at Valley Forge and Bunker Hill, and so on, against the Redcoats and the British, and so on. It wasn't that way at all. It wasn't a united country.

Washington had to send generals down south to use violence against young people to force them into military service. Soldiers in the revolutionary army mutinied against Washington, against officers, because there was class conflict in the army, just as there had been class conflict all through the colonies before the Revolutionary War. Well, anybody who knows the military, anybody who's been in the military, knows that the military is a class society. There are the privates, and there are the officers. And in the Revolutionary War, the privates were not getting shoes, and they were not getting clothes and not getting food, and they were not getting paid. And the officers were living high in resplendence. And so, they mutinied, thousands of them.

I don't remember ever learning about that when I studied history in school, because the myth comes down: oh, we're all one big happy family. You mean, including the black slaves? You mean, including the Native Americans, whose land we were taking from them, mile by mile by mile by mile? We're all one big happy family? The women, who were left out of all of this, were -- no, very important to understand that fundamental fact: those people who run the country and we, our interests are not the same.

So, yes, history is useful for that, for understanding -- understanding that we are a nation like other nations, for understanding that we are not, as again we are taught from early on, we are the greatest, we are number one, we are the best. And what -- it's called American exceptionalism in the social sciences. The United States is an exception to the rule of nations. That is, the general rule of nations is they're pretty bad. But the United States, our country, we are good. We do good in the world.

Not long ago, I was on a radio program, interviewed by -- this was sort of a regular commercial station. I like to be interviewed on regular commercial stations, where the guy really doesn't know who he's invited, you see. And he says, "Professor Zinn, don't you think America has, in general, been a force for good in the world?" "No, no, no." Why not ask me, "Do you think the British Empire was a force for good in Africa, or the Belgians were a force for good in the Congo, or the French were a force for good in Indochina? You think the United States was a force for good when they sent the Marines into Central America again and again and" -- no.

But there's this notion of, you know, we are different. We are the great -- I mean, sure, there are very great things about America, but that's not what we did to other countries, not what we did to black people, not what we did to Native Americans, not what we did to working people in this country who suffered twelve-hour days until they organized and rebelled and rose up. No, we have to be honest with ourselves.

This is a very hard thing to do: be honest about ourselves. I mean, but, you know, you're brought up and you say, "I pledge allegiance," you know, etc., etc., "liberty and justice for all," "God bless America." Why us? Why does God blessing us? I mean, why is He singling us out for blessing? You know. Why not, "God bless everybody"? If indeed, you know -- but, you know, we're brought up -- if we were brought up to understand our history, we would know, no, we're like other nations, only more so, because we are bigger and have more guns and more bombs, and therefore are capable of more violence. We can do what other empires were not able to do to such an extent. You know, we are rich. Well, not all of us. Some of us are, you see? But, no, we have to be honest.

Don't people join Alcoholics Anonymous so that they can stand up and be honest about themselves? Maybe we ought to have an organization called Imperialists Anonymous, you know, and have the leaders of the country get up there on national television and say, "Well, it's time, you know -- time to tell the truth." It would be -- I don't expect it to happen, but it would be refreshing.

And then, if we knew this history, we would understand how often fear has been used as a way of getting people to act against their own interests to work up hysteria and to get people to do terrible things to other people, because they've been made afraid. Wasn't it fear and hysteria that motivated lynch mobs in the South? Wasn't there created fear of black people, hysteria about black people, that led white people to do some of the most atrocious things that have been done in our history? And isn't it today -- isn't it fear, fear of Muslims, not just terrorists, in general? Of course, fear of terrorists, especially fear of Muslims, you see? A very ugly kind of sentiment to inculcate on the American people, and creating a kind of hysteria, which then enables them to control the population and enable them to send us into war after war and to threaten, you know, still another war.

And if we knew some history, we would know about the hysteria that accompanied the Cold War, the hysteria about communism. It's not that communism didn't exist, just as terrorism does exist, yes. It's not that communism -- communism existed, and there was a Soviet Union, and it was repressive to its own people, and it did control Eastern Europe, but there was an enormous exaggeration of the Soviet threat to the point where -- oh, it's not just that they're in Eastern Europe. It's, they're going to invade Western Europe.

By the way, no evidence of that. CIA analysts who were specialists in the Soviet Union in recent years came forth and said there was never any evidence that the Soviet Union were going to invade Western Europe. But against that, NATO was created. Against that, the United States built up an enormous nuclear arsenal.

The Soviets were always behind the United States. They built up the Soviets as a threat, but after all, who had the atom bomb first? And who had more atom bombs than anybody? And who was the only country that actually dropped atomic bombs on ordinary people in two cities in Japan? And so, we who use the atomic bomb, we who accumulate the atomic bomb, we create a hysteria about countries that are desperately trying to catch up. Of course, Iran will never catch up, and North Korea will never catch up. The Soviet Union tried to catch up. But in creating this monster threat, we took trillions of dollars of the wealth of this country and expended it on military budgets.

And the hysteria about communism reached the point where -- and I'm not just talking about school kids hiding under their desks, you know, because the Soviets were going to drop an atomic bomb. There was no evidence the Soviets were going to drop an atomic bomb. By the way, there is evidence that the joint chiefs of staff, the people high up in the American government, at various, various times proposed preventive war, dropping nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union. But we created a threat so ominous, so omnipresent, that kids were, yeah, hiding under their desks, and also so that anything that happened anywhere in the world that was not to the liking of the United States became part of the world communist threat.

And so, to deal with that, we could go into any country in Latin America that we wanted. And because it was a communist threat, we would send an army over to Vietnam, and several million people would die, because Vietnam became the symbol of the communist threat in the world. When you think about how absurd it was to worry that Vietnam, already divided into a communist north and anti-communist south, to worry that, oh, now half of this tiny country is going to become communist, and just to the north a billion people had turned to communism. And there's something a little bizarre.

But, you know, bizarre thinking is possible when you create fear and hysteria. And we're facing, of course, that situation today with this whole business of terrorism. And if you added up all the times in speeches of George Bush and his Cabinet and all the times they used the word "terrorism" and "terror," it's a mantra they have created to frighten the American people.

I think it's wearing off. You know, when you -- I think there's beginning to be some recognition, and that accounts for the fact that public opinion has turned against the war. People no longer believe that we're fighting in Iraq in order to get rid of terrorism, you know, because the evidence has become so overwhelming that even the mainstream media has reported it -- you know, the National Intelligence Estimate. And this is the government's own intelligence agencies saying that the war in Iraq has caused a growth of terrorist groups, has increased militancy and radicalism among Islamic groups in the Middle East.

But terrorism has supplanted communism as an attempt to get people to do things against their own interests, to do things that will send their own young people to war, to do things that will cause the depletion of the country's wealth for the purposes of war and for the enrichment of the super-rich. It doesn't take much thought about terrorism to realize that when somebody talks about a war on terrorism, they're dealing with a contradiction in terms. How can you make war on terrorism, if war itself is terrorism? Because -- so you respond to terrorism with terrorism, and you multiply the terrorism in the world.

And, of course, the terrorism that governments are capable of by going to war is on a far, far greater scale than the terrorism of al-Qaeda or this group or that group or another group. Governments are terrorists on an enormously large scale. The United States has been engaging in terrorism against Afghanistan, against Iraq, and now they're threatening to extend their terrorism to other places in the Middle East.

And some history of the use of fear and hysteria and some history of the Cold War and of the anti-communist hysteria would be very useful in alerting people to what we are going through today. I mean, with Iran, for instance, it's shameful, and the media have played such a part in this, of the Iran nuclear weapon. They want a nuclear weapon. They don't say they have a nuclear weapon. They want a nuclear weapon. So do I. Yeah, it's easy to want a nuclear weapon. And small countries that face enormous military powers and who cannot possibly match the military power of these enormous countries, they are following what was the strategy of the United States: the United States said, "We must have a deterrent." How many times have you heard, when you ask, "Why do we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?" "We must have a deterrent." Well, they want a deterrent: one nuclear weapon. You know.

Not that situation with Iraq. I mean, you know, Condoleezza Rice: "a mushroom cloud." We were the only ones who created mushroom clouds, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iraq was in no position to create a mushroom cloud. All the experts on the Middle East and atomic weapons said, you know, Iraq was five-ten years away from developing a nuclear weapon, but we were creating, you know, hysteria about nuclear weapons.

Now we're doing the same thing with Iran. And the International Atomic Energy group of the UN flatly contradicts a congressional report which talks about the danger of Iran's nuclear weapons, and the international group, which has conducted many, many inspections in Iran, says, well, you know, you need to -- and they give the American people a kind of half-education. That is, they say, they use the phrase, "They're enriching uranium." Well, that scares me. You know, they're enriching uranium. I don't really know what it means, you see, but it's scary. And then you read the report of the International Atomic Energy group, and you see, well, yes, they are. They've enriched uranium to the point of 3.5%. In order to have one nuclear weapon, they have to enrich it to 90%. They're very, very far from even developing one nuclear weapon, but the phrase "enriched uranium" is, you know, repeated again and again, you know.

And so, yes, we need some historical understanding, yeah, just remembering back to Iraq, just remembering back to the hysteria around Vietnam. My god, a communist might take over South Vietnam! And then what? Just a short hop to San Francisco. No, some of you may remember that when Reagan was supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, he was saying, "You know, you see where Nicaragua is? It wouldn't take much for them to get to Texas." I wondered about that, you see? And then I wondered, why would the Nicaraguans want to get to Texas? And this is no slur on Texas, but -- and once they got to Texas, what would they do? Take a United Airlines flight to Washington. What would they -- but really, it's very important to know some of that history to see how hysteria absolutely cripples consciousness about what is going on.

I would suggest something else. I'm getting worried about how much time I have taken. Well, actually, I'm not getting worried about how much time I've taken. I don't care. I'm looking at my watch to pretend that I care. And since I don't know when I started, I can't figure out how long I've been talking.

But at some point the war in Iraq will come to an end. At some point, the United States will do in Iraq what it did in Vietnam, after saying, "We will never leave. We will never leave. We will win. We will stay the course. We will not cut and run." At some point, the United States is going to have to cut and run from Iraq, you see. And they're going to do it because the sentiment is going to grow and grow and grow in this country and because more and more GIs are going to come back from Iraq and say, "We're not going back again," and because they're going to have more and more trouble supplying the armed forces in Iraq, and because the parents of young people are going to say more and more, "We are not going to allow our young people to go to war for Bechtel, you know, and Halliburton. We're not going to do that." So at some point, yes, at some point we are going to do what they say we mustn't do: cut and run.

We don't have to cut and run. Cut and walk. Cut and swim. Cut, but get out, as fast as you can, because we're not doing any good there. We're not helping the situation. We're not bringing peace. We're not bringing a democracy. We're not bringing stability. We're bringing violence and chaos. We're provoking all of that, and people are dying every day. When a Democratic leader says, "Well, I think we ought to withdraw by May 14th, 2000-and-whatever." You know, yeah, every day from now until then more people will die, and more people will lose arms or legs or become blinded. And so, that is intolerable. And so, we have to do everything we can.

And in the case of Vietnam, at a certain point the government realized it could not carry on the war. The GIs were coming back from Vietnam and turning against the war. They couldn't bring people to join the ROTC. Too many people were running to Canada. Too many people were not signing up for the draft. Finally, it had to do away with the draft. They were losing the support of the population. They were losing support of the military. And at a certain point, no.

And something like that is going to happen. And the sooner we help it happen, of course, the better. The more we go into the high schools -- you know, there's a very practical thing, very practical thing that everybody can do, and that is, go to their local high schools and make sure that all the parents and all the kids in high schools understand that they don't have to give their information to the military recruiters, you see, as, you know. And more and more have teams of people who will counter the propaganda of the military recruiters.

You know, they are having trouble. They're getting desperate about recruiting for the military, going to all sorts of lengths and, or course, they're concentrating -- they send their military recruiters into the poorest schools, because they know that the working class kids are the most vulnerable, the most needy, the ones who, you know -- they need an education, they need a skill, and so. And so, they're trying to prey on the working class. Eugene Debs said -- if you don't mind my quoting Eugene Debs -- but Eugene Debs said in a speech during World War I, which landed him in jail, "The master class has always started the wars. The working class has always fought the wars." And, of course, that has been true all the way. So we will at some point get out of Iraq.

But I want to suggest one thing: we have to think beyond Iraq and even beyond Iran. We don't want to have to struggle against this war and then against that war and then against the next war. We don't want to have an endless succession of antiwar movements. It gets tiring. And we need to think and talk and educate about the abolition of war itself, you see.

I was talking to my barber the other day, because we always discuss world politics. And he's totally politically unpredictable, as most barbers are, you see. He said, "Howard," he said, "you know, you and I disagree on many things, but on one thing we agree: war solves nothing." And I thought, "Yeah." It's not hard for people to grasp that.

And there again, history is useful. We've had a history of war after war after war after war. What have they solved? What have they done? Even World War II, the "good war," the war in which I volunteered, the war in which I dropped bombs, the war after which, you know, I received a letter from General Marshall, general of generals, a letter addressed personally to me, and to 16 million others, in which he said, "We've won the war. It will be a new world." Well, of course, it wasn't a new world. It hasn't been a new world. War after war after war.

There are certain -- I came out of that war, the war in which I had volunteered, the war in which I was an enthusiastic bombardier, I came out of that war with certain ideas, which just developed gradually at the end of the war, ideas about war. One, that war corrupts everybody who engages in it. War poisons everybody who engages in it. You start off as the good guys, as we did in World War II. They're the bad guys. They're the fascists. What could be worse? So, they're the bad guys, we're the good guys. And as the war goes on, the good guys begin behaving like the bad guys. You can trace this back to the Peloponnesian War. You can trace it back to the good guy, the Athenians, and the bad guys, the Spartans. And after a while, the Athenians become ruthless and cruel, like the Spartans.

And we did that in World War II. We, after Hitler committed his atrocities, we committed our atrocities. You know, our killing of 600,000 civilians in Japan, our killing of probably an equal number of civilians in Germany. These, they weren't Hitler, they weren't Tojo. They weren't -- no, they were just ordinary people, like we are ordinary people living in a country that is a marauding country, and they were living in countries that were marauding countries, and they were caught up in whatever it was and afraid to speak up. And I don't know, I came to the conclusion, yes, war poisons everybody.

And war -- this is an important thing to keep in mind -- that when you go to war against a tyrant -- and this was one of the claims: "Oh, we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein," which was, of course, nonsense. They didn't -- did our government care that Saddam Hussein tyrannized his own people? We helped him tyrannize his people. We helped him gas the Kurds. We helped him accumulate weapons of mass destruction, really.

And the people you kill in a war are the victims of the tyrant. The people we killed in Germany were the victims of Hitler. The people we killed in Japan were the victims of the Japan Imperial Army, you know. And the people who die in wars are more and more and more people who are not in the military. You may know this about the different ratio of civilian-to-military deaths in war, how in World War I, ten military dead for one civilian dead; in World War II, it was 50-50, half military, half civilian; in Vietnam, it was 70% civilian and 30% military; and in the wars since then, it's 80% and 85% civilian.

I became friends a few years ago with an Italian war surgeon named Gino Strada. He spent ten years, fifteen years doing surgery on war victims all over the world. And he wrote a book about it, Green Parrots: Diary of a War Surgeon. He said in all the patients that he operated on in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere, 85% of them were civilians, one-third of them, children. If you understand, and if people understand, and if you spread the word of this understanding, that whatever is told to you about war and how we must go to war, and whatever the threat is or whatever the goal is -- a democracy or liberty -- it will always be a war against children. They're the ones who will die in large numbers.

So, war -- well, Einstein said this after World War I. He said, "War cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished." War has to be abolished, you know. And it's -- I know it's a long shot. I understand that, but you have to -- when something's a long shot, but it has to be done, you have to start doing it. Just as the ending of slavery in this country in the 1830s was a really long shot, but people stuck at it, and it took 30 years, but slavery was done away with. And we can see this again and again. So, we have a job to do. We have lots of things to do.

One of the things we can learn from history is that history is not only a history of things inflicted on us by the powers that be. History is also a history of resistance. It's a history of people who endure tyranny for decades, but who ultimately rise up and overthrow the dictator. We've seen this in country after country, surprise after surprise. Rulers who seem to have total control, they suddenly wake up one day, and there are a million people in the streets, and they pack up and leave. This has happened in the Philippines, in Yemen, all over, in Nepal. Million people in the streets, and then the ruler has to get out of the way. So, this is what we're aiming for in this country.

Everything we do is important. Every little thing we do, every picket line we walk on, every letter we write, every act of civil disobedience we engage in, any recruiter that we talk to, any parent that we talk to, any GI that we talk to, any young person that we talk to, anything we do in class, outside of class, everything we do in the direction of a different world is important, even though at the moment they seem futile, because that's how change comes about. Change comes about when millions of people do little things, which at certain points in history come together, and then something good and something important happens.

Thank you.

A Fraud Worse than Enron: The case of United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega

Tomgram: Elizabeth de la Vega, Bringing Bush to Court

Keep in mind, I've run Tomdispatch.com for only a few years, but I've been a book editor in mainstream publishing for over 30 years. Sometime last spring, I was on the phone with former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega talking about books she might someday write, when she suddenly said to me, "You know what I'd like to do?" When I asked what, she replied, "What I've done all my life."

"What's that," I wondered innocently enough.

"I'd like to draft an indictment of President Bush and his senior aides, and present the case for prewar intelligence fraud to a grand jury, just as if it were an actual case of mine, using the evidence we already have in the public record. That's the book I'd like to do."

With those three decades of publishing experience, I never doubted that this was an idea whose time should come -- and now it has. De la Vega has drawn up that indictment -- a "hypothetical" one, she hastens to add -- convened that grand jury, and held seven days of testimony. Yes, it's a grand jury directly out of her fertile brain and the federal agents who testify are fictional, but all the facts are true. She understands the case against the Bush administration down to the last detail; and she's produced, to my mind, the book of the post-election, investigative season: United States v. George W. Bush et al.

It's a Tomdispatch.com book project, produced in conjunction with Seven Stories Press, a superb independent publisher, and officially published on December 1st. I think it's simply sensational. It makes a "slam dunk" case for the way we were defrauded into war; despite the grim subject matter, it's a beautifully designed little book, a pleasure to hold in your hand; and, because de la Vega is a natural as a writer, it's also thoroughly enjoyable reading. With genuine pride, I'll be turning the Tomdispatch.com website over to excerpts from the book this week, beginning with the posting of De la Vega's introduction on the Enronization of American foreign policy today. The actual "indictment" will be posted on Wednesday; the first day of grand jury testimony on Thursday.

I assure you, this is must-read event; no less important, this is a must-buy book that must be given over the holiday season to friends, relatives, those who politically disagree with you, and even perhaps sent to Congressional representatives. Please get the investigative ball rolling by purchasing the book at Amazon.com or, if you want to give all involved a few extra cents, directly at the Seven Stories website.

Today, United States v. George W. Bush et al remains in the realm of fiction, but tomorrow, if you lend a hand… who knows? Tom


A Fraud Worse than Enron

By Elizabeth de la Vega

Elizabeth de la Vega, appearing on behalf of the United States. That is a phrase I've uttered hundreds of times in twenty years as a federal prosecutor. I retired two years ago. So, obviously, I do not now speak for any U.S. Attorney's Office, nor do I represent the federal government. This should be apparent from the fact that I am proposing a hypothetical indictment of the President and his senior advisers -- not a smart move for any federal employee who wishes to remain employed. Lest anyone miss the import of this paragraph, let me emphasize that it is a DISCLAIMER: I am writing as a private citizen.

Obviously, as a private citizen, I cannot simply draft and file an indictment. Nor can I convene a grand jury. Instead, in the following pages I intend to present a hypothetical indictment to a hypothetical grand jury. The defendants are President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war--in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States. And all of you are invited to join the grand jury.

We will meet for seven days. On day one, I'll present the indictment in the morning and in the afternoon I will explain the applicable law. On days two through seven, we'll have witness testimony, presented in transcript form, with exhibits.

As is the practice in most grand jury presentations, the evidence will be presented in summary form, by federal agents -- except that these agents are hypothetical. (Any relationship to actual federal agents, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.)

On day seven, when the testimony is complete, I'll leave the room to allow the grand jury to vote.

If the indictment and grand jury are hypothetical, the evidence is not. I've prepared for this case, just as I would have done for any other case in my years as a prosecutor, by reviewing all of the available relevant information. In this case, such information consists of witness accounts, the defendants' speeches, public remarks, White House press briefings, interviews, congressional testimony, official documents, all public intelligence reports, and various summaries of intelligence, such as in the reports of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the 9/11 Commission. I've discarded any evidence, however compelling, that is uncorroborated.

Then, using a sophisticated system of documents piled on every surface in my dining room, I've organized and analyzed the reliable information chronologically, by topic, and by defendant. I've compared what the President and his advisers have said publicly to what they knew and said behind the scenes. Finally, I've presented the case through testimony that will, I hope, make sense and keep everybody awake.

After analyzing this evidence in light of the applicable law, I've determined that we already have more than enough information to allow a reasonable person to conclude that the President conducted a wide-ranging effort to deceive the American people and Congress into supporting a war against Iraq. In other words, in legal terms, there is probable cause to believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell violated Title 18, United States Code, Section 371, which prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States. Probable cause is the standard of proof required for a grand jury to return an indictment. Consequently, we have more than sufficient evidence to warrant indictment of the President and his advisers.

Do I expect someone to promptly indict the President and his aides? No. I am aware of the political impediments and constitutional issues relating to the indictment of a sitting president. Do those impediments make this merely an empty exercise? Absolutely not.

I believe this presentation adds a singular perspective to the debate about the President's use of prewar intelligence: that of an experienced federal prosecutor. Certainly, scholars and experts such as Barbara Olshansky, David Lindorff, Michael Ratner, John Dean, and Elizabeth Holtzman have written brilliantly about the legal grounds for impeachment that arise from the President's misrepresentations about the grounds for an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. But for most Americans, the debate about White House officials' responsibility for false preinvasion statements remains fixed on, and polarized around, the wrong question: Did the President and his team lie about the grounds for war? For many, the suggestion that the President lied is heresy, more shocking than a Baptist minister announcing during vespers that he's a cross-dresser. For many others -- indeed, now the majority of Americans -- that the President lied to get his war is a given, although no less shocking.

So my goals are threefold. First, I want to explain that under the law that governs charges of conspiracy to defraud, the legal question is not whether the President lied. The question is not whether the President subjectively believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The legal question that must be answered is far more comprehensive: Did the President and his team defraud the country? After swearing to uphold the law of the land, did our highest government officials employ the universal techniques of fraudsters -- deliberate concealment, misrepresentations, false pretenses, half-truths -- to deceive Congress and the American people?

My second goal is to supplement the scholarly analyses already written, by moving beyond exposition, beyond theory, to the inside of the courtroom, or more precisely, the grand jury room. By presenting the President's conspiracy to defraud just as a prosecutor would present any fraud conspiracy, I hope to enable readers to consider the case in an uncharged atmosphere, applying criminal law to the evidence that they believe has been proved to the standard of probable cause, just as grand jurors would in any other case.

Why is it important to do this? Because whether the President and his senior officials conspired to defraud the United States about the grounds for war is, at least on one level, a legal question, but, without a shift in political will, there will never be any reasoned consideration of it as such. The President will not be held accountable for misrepresenting the prewar intelligence unless and until Congress conducts hearings similar to the Watergate hearings. As yet, however, we seem painfully incapable of reaching that point. We are like inept tennis partners, collectively letting the ball slip by in the no-man's-land between the service line and the baseline, or in this case, between the legal and the political.

Perhaps more important, however, is that, although the evidence of wrongdoing is overwhelming, the facts are so complicated -- far more so than those that prompted the Watergate hearings--that it's impossible to have a productive debate about them in the political sphere. Indeed, modern-day spin has vanquished substance so thoroughly that even the most well-grounded charge of deliberate deception is often considered more despicable than the deception itself.

One forum where that's not true is the courtroom. The court system is far from perfect, but there we at least expect that people will not substitute personal attacks for argument. We expect a reasoned exploration of fact versus fiction, honest mistake versus deliberate fraud. We also expect, and the law requires, that people hear all the evidence before deciding, thereby avoiding the rapid volley of sound bites that so regularly masquerades for debate on television. Hence, this hypothetical grand jury presentation: it is a vehicle to deliver a message.

My third goal is to send the message home -- to whomever will listen. And this is it:

The President has committed fraud.

It is a crime in the legal, not merely the colloquial, sense.

It is far worse than Enron.

It is not a victimless crime.

We cannot shrug our shoulders and walk away.

Why? Because We Are All Kitty Genovese's Neighbors

As an Assistant U. S. Attorney in Minneapolis, a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force in San Jose, and Chief of the San Jose Branch U.S. Attorney's Office, I prosecuted all manner of criminal cases. There were bank embezzlements, government frauds, violent takeover robberies, piloting a commercial passenger flight while under the influence--the pilot had had twenty rum and (diet) Cokes and four hours' sleep before takeoff--and investment frauds, to name a few. Most were interesting; some downright loopy. One hapless fellow, for example, stole a truck filled with frozen turkeys and drove it across state lines to Wisconsin, thereby landing himself in federal prison rather than in county jail. For good measure, the following week -- before he'd been apprehended for the frozen-turkey heist -- he stole a truck filled with packaged frozen broccoli and drove it to Iowa.

Unquestionably, though, the most compelling cases were those that involved victims -- of violent crimes, robberies, or fraud. So I was not surprised to hear the lead Enron prosecutor's comment after the jury convicted former Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling: "What inspired me," John Hueston said, "was just that, that I had spoken to so many employees, so many victims who lost their savings, people who pleaded with me and the other prosecutors to see justice done."

Thanks to Hueston and his team, the victims of the Enron fraud -- a $68 billion dollar crime that left 20,000 people without jobs, pensions, and life's savings -- have obtained some measure of justice. They will never be made whole, but at least the CEOs who orchestrated the fraud have been held accountable. In the case of the largest corporate fraud ever prosecuted in the United States, the system has worked, albeit imperfectly.

Thus far, however, in the case of the vastly broader and more devastating Iraq war fraud orchestrated by the CEO of the United States and his management team, the system has failed. And we are all victims of this fraud. George W. Bush exploited the vulnerability of an entire populace reeling from the September 11, 2001, attacks to manipulate them into supporting a war based on false pretenses. If the financial cost of the President's fraud is astronomical -- $340 billion in direct war costs alone as of August 2006 -- the human cost is incalculable, and far more profound: over 2,500 American soldiers killed and 19,000 wounded; possibly many more than 50,000 Iraqis killed; untold numbers of grieving Iraqi and American family members; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis homeless; and a million soldiers who have been sent to this war and will never be the same.

While we are all victims of the President's crime, we are also all bystanders. The crime is ongoing, happening right before our eyes, and we are all onlookers; we are all, in a sense, Kitty Genovese's neighbors.

As Malcolm Gladwell recounts in his book The Tipping Point, Kitty Genovese was viciously assaulted, stabbed three times, and finally killed, on the way to her Queens, New York, home one night in 1964. Thirty-eight neighbors heard or watched her ordeal, but no one called the police until the attack was essentially over. The murder was universally seen as a horrifying example of modern-day indifference to the plight of others. But, Gladwell explains, psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley conducted experiments that led to a far different explanation: "When people are in a group . . . responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem . . . is not really a problem." Ironically, then, it was not that no one called to help Kitty Genovese "despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it's that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream."

For over a year now, polls have shown that the majority of Americans believe President Bush deliberately misrepresented prewar intelligence. Executive branch officials who deliberately mislead Congress and the public intending to influence congressional action have committed a federal crime. That means that roughly 100 million Americans believe Bush has committed a crime, yet most, like Kitty Genovese's neighbors, are just passive bystanders--although not, I believe, due to indifference.

Indeed, many of us are just watching it happen because we feel powerless to stop it. Hundreds of thousands of people have, in effect, called 911, but not even Democrats in Congress have been willing to answer the phone. It is not that they don't have enough information; it is, our Democratic representatives say, because it is not good political strategy.

The proposition that it is not good political strategy to insist that government officials obey the law is highly debatable. More important, strategizing in the face of an ongoing crime is wrong. Ask any legislator whether he would strategize about possible political fallout before intervening to stop a crime that was occurring in front of his eyes and the response would be, "Of course not." But that is exactly what's happening right now.

So, consider this my 911 call. I'm calling on Democrats and Republicans to do the right thing. And I'm calling on everyone else to do whatever you can to convince Congress to do the right thing. I am not talking about bringing people to justice in the vengeful sense that President Bush employs. I am talking about effecting justice. I am talking, finally, about holding our highest government officials accountable for a complex and calculated program of false pretense, misleading statements, and material omissions -- a criminal betrayal of trust that is strikingly similar to, yet far worse than, the fraud committed by Enron's top officials.

Enron: Misleading Statements and Material Omissions

In July of 2002, President Bush stood before a snappy blue-and-white banner marked "Corporate Responsibility" and announced that he was opposed to fraud. With the enactment of the new Corporate Corruption Act, the President declared, there would "not be a different ethical standard for corporate America than the standard that applies to everyone else. The honesty you expect in your small businesses, or in your workplace . . . will be expected and enforced in every corporate suite in this country." CEOs would now have to personally vouch for the truth of their public statements.

Bush's speech announcing a higher standard for CEOs was itself misleading. Hearing it, one might easily conclude that if the President hadn't pushed for this new law, corporate officers would be legally entitled to lie, cheat, and steal. Not true, of course. The new law, also called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, did not suddenly, for the first time in United States history, require corporate officials to be truthful, forthright, and fair with the public. Such obligations have been inherent in criminal fraud and other statutes for years.

Indeed, the Enron prosecution did not involve the Sarbanes-Oxley Act at all. The main charge was conspiracy to defraud: that is, conspiring to deceive investors by manipulating financial data, making false and misleading statements, and deliberately omitting important facts, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.

Manipulation of data, false and misleading statements, and material omissions -- sound familiar?

At trial, former Enron CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling claimed they were not responsible for the deception because they had no idea what their underlings were doing. As the jury was instructed, however, anyone who makes representations intending that the public will rely on them, has an affirmative obligation to make sure that they are true and accurate. Representations made with reckless indifference to their truth are as false as outright lies.

After four months of complex testimony, the jury reached a simple conclusion: Lay and Skilling were responsible for what went on their company. As school principal Freddie Delgado put it: "I can't say that I don't know what my teachers were doing in the classroom. I am still responsible if a child gets lost."

In other words, the Enron jurors concluded that, legally, the desks of CEOs Lay and Skilling were the final repositories of the proverbial buck. Those jurors were average Americans -- office workers, educators, engineers, a nurse -- and they knew, even without the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that CEOs should be held to the same standards of honesty and accountability that they would apply to themselves in their own lives. Faced with evidence that Lay and Skilling had repeatedly made public statements that were seriously undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by information and warnings they had received behind the scenes, the jury refused to allow them to avoid responsibility by blaming their subordinates.

Iraq: Misleading Statements and Material Omissions

The techniques of deception used by George W. Bush and his aides are identical to those used by Lay and Skilling. In his July 2002 speech announcing the signing of the Corporate Corruption Bill, the President said, "The only fair risks are [those] based on honest information." The President and his top advisers were acutely aware of the solemn risks posed by an invasion of Iraq, but instead of debating those risks honestly, they developed slogans, including the familiar "risks of inaction are greater than the risks of action" that simultaneously usurped and deflected counterarguments while providing no information whatsoever, honest or otherwise.

Such propaganda, cynical and craven as it is, might not qualify as criminal fraud, but the propaganda alone was insufficient to convince Congress and the American people to invest in the plan for war. To remedy this deficiency and close the deal, the President and his top aides made hundreds of representations, both general and specific, that were carefully crafted to manipulate public opinion. As we now know, many of those assertions were false and misleading. More important, we also now know that President Bush and his advisers had notice and direct knowledge that their representations were seriously undermined and in some key instances, disproved by information that was available to them. Consistently, the President and his aides knowingly conveyed false impressions, concealed important information, made deliberate misrepresentations, and professed certainty about facts that were speculative at best. Such is the definition of criminal fraud -- whether committed by the President of the United States or the CEO of a major corporation.

The only difference between the fraud committed by the Enron officers and the fraud committed by the President is that the latter was far more comprehensive and far more calculated. Even as President Bush stood center stage endorsing honesty that July four years ago, he and his company were setting the stage for another show. If the "only fair risks" speech was a perky Frank Capra clip, the White House's next production would be twenty-first-century H.G. Wells.

As of July 30, 2002, Bush had directed the creation of the White House Iraq Group, a public-relations operation whose sole purpose was to market the war. This team, collectively called WHIG, was co-chaired by the President's closest aides and long-term political consultants, Senior Adviser Karl Rove -- whom Bush has described as "the architect" of his 2004 reelection campaign--and former Counselor to the President Karen Hughes.

By July 30, 2002, the White House Iraq Group had already begun fabricating an ominous scenario that blurred together the September 11 tragedy, mushroom clouds rising over American cities, and terrorists releasing strains of smallpox, interspersed with the shadowy face of a mad Iraqi dictator spring-loaded to attack the United States. They were collecting props--anthrax vials and undated photos showing centrifuge components and unidentifiable buildings where something ominous might be happening, but we can't afford to wait to find out. They were writing the script: power phrases like "Grave and gathering danger" and "We can't afford to let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud," designed less to inform than to inflame. And, finally, Rove, Hughes, and company were scheduling appearances for the President's War Council members that would begin just a month later, in early September 2002.

It was to be a bravura performance by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and many supporting cast members. The production was so well done, in fact, that, like the radio audience terrified into hysteria by the infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast of 1938, most of us were fooled. Admittedly, we resisted buying the duct tape and plastic sheeting; we may not have wrapped our heads in wet towels to ward off Martian gas like the 1938 radio audience. What happened, however, was much worse: because of Bush's fiction, we agreed to bomb people 8,000 miles away whose only "crime" was that they were oppressed by a violent and cruel dictator.

Undoubtedly, Americans were panicked by H. G. Wells's radio play in part because they were exhausted and nervous in those tough Depression years. But Orson Welles' breathless report of a Martian invasion was never intended to cause panic, nor was it ultimately harmful.

The President's elaborate production was, and still remains, an entirely different story. It was a deliberate effort to create a permanent state of fear in America. And to say it was harmful is like saying that it hurts to get hit by a Mack truck.

Federal sentencing guidelines recognize that one who defrauds a vulnerable victim, such as a salesman who falsely represents the curative benefits of an elixir to a cancer patient, has committed an even more serious crime than one who defrauds a person who is not so "particularly susceptible." The President knew that Americans were "particularly susceptible" in 2002. We were exhausted, and justifiably terrified, not only because of September 11 but also because of the anthrax murders and the random Washington, DC, sniper killings that coincided with the Bush-Cheney administration's push for war.

President Bush and his White House Iraq Group did not merely exploit this fear; they magnified it. Worse yet, the President was the very person upon whom the public relied to protect it from danger and, one would hope, from omnipresent fear itself. Having used the authority of the Oval Office to make people more afraid, having created an even darker backdrop of fear, our highest officials exploited that reliance and the trust they enjoyed by virtue of their positions to sell something they knew the American public would not otherwise have bought. It was as if the cancer victim's trusted personal physician had convinced him that his disease was more advanced than it really was, and then used the same fraudulently heightened fear to manipulate him into buying a bogus cure-all.

In the language of criminal law, the President and his senior advisers have abused a position of trust to defraud the most vulnerable of victims. How would such a case be presented for prosecution? I invite you into the grand jury room to observe:

Ladies and Gentlemen, tomorrow begins our presentation in the case of United States v. George W. Bush et al. Please remember that you must decide the case based solely on the evidence that's presented and the applicable law, without regard to prejudice or sympathy. In other words, your politics, and any personal feelings you have toward the defendants -- positive or negative -- should have no bearing on your deliberations.

I will begin by passing out the indictment, so don't forget your reading glasses . . .

[Coming Wednesday: Part 2 of United States v. George W. Bush at Tomdispatch.com -- the indictment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell.]

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch. This is the introduction to her new book, United States v. George W. Bush et al. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.

Excerpted from United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega, published December 1, 2006 by Seven Stories Press and Tomdispatch.com.

Copyright 2006 Elizabeth de la Vega