'The Passion' of the Americans

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 27 February 2004

The television airwaves have been filled for the last several days with a lot of back-and-forth about Mel Gibson's new film, 'The Passion of The Christ.' A great deal of debate centers around whether Gibson has fashioned a broadside against Jewish people in the manner of the Medieval anti-Semitic passion plays of old. There are plenty of rabbis arguing with Christian ministers on just about any channel you might choose to watch, so I'm going to leave that question to them for the time being.

My question is much simpler: Why would Mel Gibson make a movie about people in the ancient Middle East and cast it with so many white people? To look at the central actors in this film, you'd think Jesus did his work near Manchester, New Hampshire instead of the Holy Land. The answer to that question lies within the United States, the prime market for this film. There are millions of Christians in America, some 25% of whom would characterize themselves as evangelical. It stands to reason that this film would do very well here, especially given the controversy that has surrounded the content.

The whiteness of the cast, however, speaks to a decidedly un-Christian truth that lies near the heart of this republic. Simply put, nailing a white Jesus Christ to the cross on film will generate a far more emotional response from the American viewing public than the crucifixion of a savior who actually looks like he is from the Middle East.

First, let's dispense with the idea that the white people who were cast to play the most emotive characters - Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene - have anything to do with historical accuracy. In truth, the region where Jesus was born was, and remains, populated by brown-skinned people. The fact of Christ's non-whiteness is borne out in the historical record, and in biblical scripture. Right off the bat, the Book of Matthew describes Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. Egypt is in Africa, and is populated by brown-skinned people. For my money, this would be the last place on earth I would go to hide a white baby from an angry King.

The earliest renditions of Jesus, painted by the first Christians called Essenes in the catacombs of Rome, depict a person with brown skin. During the time of Roman Emperor Justinian II, a gold coin featuring an image of Jesus was minted. This coin, which today can be seen in the British Museum, depicts a man with demonstrably non-white features and tightly curled hair. Finally, there is the Book of Revelations, which bears out the crafting of the Essenes and the Roman coin-makers by describing Jesus as having hair like wool, feet the color of burnt brass, and who resembled jasper and sardine stones. Jasper and sardine stones are both brown, as is burnt brass.

The Jesus most familiar to Americans, the Jesus featured in Gibson's film, looks like the front man for an alternative rock band out of Minnesota. Judas in this film is a shorter version of the same phenomenon. White skin, long straight brown hair, decidedly European features - this is not the Jesus that preached revolution against the Empire long ago. This is the Jesus fashioned by Michelangelo five centuries ago, who used his white cousin as the model for the savior.

The ugly truth which never even occurs to most Americans is that Jesus looked a lot more like an Iraqi, like an Afghani, like a Palestinian, like an Arab, than any of the paintings which grace the walls of American churches from sea to shining sea. This was an uncomfortable fact before September 11. After the attack, it became almost a moral imperative to put as much distance between Americans and people from the Middle East as possible. Now, to suggest that Jesus shared a genealogical heritage and physical similarity to the people sitting in dog cages down in Guantanamo is to dance along the edge of treason.

George W. Bush calls himself Christian. If you believe him, he is on armchair-to-armchair relations with the Almighty, enjoying regular conversations with He Is What He Is on everything from tax policy to invasion plans. Bush serves a unique dual role as both the Commander in Chief and as high priest to the evangelical wing of American Christianity.

When Bush did his little flight-suit strut across the aircraft carrier last May, he proclaimed victory in biblical verse and sent a signal to those Christians who see him as more than a man. Bush, that day, quoted Isaiah's passage from the Servant Songs about captives coming out and slaves being free. This is the same passage, as described in Luke chapter 4, which Jesus used to announce his coming as the Son of God. "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," said Jesus. Bush's use of this incredibly loaded passage speaks as much to his messianic fantasies as it does to his status as Christian-in-Chief.

Yet this is the same man who invades countries without cause and consigns tens of thousands of innocents to explosive, burning death. This is the same man who pushes tax policies that further enrich the wealthy while stripping funds and services from the neediest in this nation. This is the man who speaks the language of vengeance, of fear, of violence. This is the man whose entire moral existence flies in the face of Christ's words from Luke, chapter 12, verse 15: "Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions." Sadly, the skewed moral compass of George W. Bush is shared by too many Americans who would call themselves Christian.

Possibly the most important words ever spoken by Jesus can be found in Matthew, chapter 5, verses 38-45. "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,'" said Christ. "But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

It is these words that condemn both Bush and the hands-off moral attitude of too many American Christians. Certainly, Jesus was no fool. In Luke, chapter 11, verse 21, he said, "When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are in peace." Self-protection, for person and nation, is both moral and intelligent. But vengeance, violence and hatred are not Christian. Mercy, love and generosity are the hallmarks of the teachings of Jesus. If you are to call yourself Christian, you must be for the poor and the weak, and against empire and vengeance. Period.

These simple attributes are all too absent in the American soul and spirit. Gibson's white Jesus is but one example of how far we have strayed. It is a safe bet that, had Gibson chosen a brown-skinned actor to portray Jesus, his film would not find a connection in this country. Millions of Americans try to live by the teachings of Jesus, and do so with success, but find themselves at odds with those who carry the banner of Christianity. This is a travesty.

Too many so-called Christians are blind to history, blind to the actions of our nation, blind to the hypocrisy of our so-called leaders, and the world bleeds because of it. Too many so-called Christians are people who would slaughter the savior to protect their power and position. Were Jesus alive today, he would probably nail himself to the cross to get away from all these people who act like barbarians in His name.

The United States of America had NO justification for invading Iraq or for designating legitimate officers of that sovereign nation's government as criminals to be placed on a tacky, sleazy deck of cards for sale at discount outlets along with the National Enquirer. The entire affair was, is and shall forever remain an illegitimate imperialistic adventure lacking any moral justification whatsoever--one that cannot and will not end well for the would-be conquerors.

D. Grant Haynes

February 15, 2004

See also: http://www.rense.com/general48/mams.htm

A breast is a breast, but 10,000 dead Iraqis is a war crime

February 5, 2004

By D. Grant Haynes

The inanity, the puritanical hypocrisy, the blindness to significant realities, the mass stupidity that characterize--indeed, that are--America are all encapsulated in the brouhaha now raging over the partial exposure of one of performer Janet Jackson's breasts during Super Bowl 2004's halftime extravaganza February 1.

After refusing to lend Super Bowl airing to a MoveOn.org-produced 30-second spot critical of George W. Bush's performance as president, CBS News has crawled, groveled and apologized profusely for more than three days because viewers of the Super Bowl halftime show may have caught a glimpse of one of Jackson's breasts when co-singer Justin Timberlake intentionally pulled her scant outfit down a bit in a planned finale as he sang, "I'm gonna have you naked by the end of this song."

"CBS deeply regrets the incident that occurred during the Super Bowl halftime show. We attended all rehearsals throughout the week and there was no indication that any such thing would happen. The moment did not conform to CBS broadcast standards, and we would like to apologize to anyone who was offended," CBS offered by way of a quick apology.

And there is more insanity.

Secretary of Defense Colin Powell's rotund son, Michael Powell, head of the Federal Communications Commission, promised a federal investigation of the nipple incident, according to AP.

"Federal Communications Commission chief Michael Powell said in a statement, 'Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt.' He promised an investigation... ."

A federal investigation, folks.

And even the National Football League--prime purveyors of violence and animality at all times--had to apologize to America's Christian families, saying the NFL was "extremely disappointed" in Jackson's performance.

All of this feigned outrage from these unlikely hypocrites over a harmless attention-seeking stunt of a few second's duration executed by a mass media icon notorious for such actions.

By way of inexplicable contrast, I read of no outrage being expressed by any of these individuals or groups about CBS's cowardice in pulling the MoveOn.org ad.

Nor did I read of an apology from CBS because they lacked the courage and fairness to run the ad criticizing Bush for his role in destroying the economic viability of one nation and the very infrastructure of two other nations in his three years of miscreant misrule in an office he never won.

Nor have these self-righteous Americans who are so shocked and indignant at the sight of a woman's breast expressed outrage that their tax dollars have been used to murder up to 10,000 Iraqi civilians (See ICH Site) in an immoral war of conquest--a war whose WMD justification has been universally exposed as a bald-faced lie that was peddled repeatedly by Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And there has been no moral outrage from any of the anally retentive fundamentalists of John Ashcroft's stripe who blanch white and faint away at the sight of a human female's breast, (even a sexagenarian bronze one), but who were happy to see their nation launch an unprovoked shock and awe blitzkrieg on Baghdad last March that killed thousands in a few hours.

Where is the moral outrage at this nation's morally reprehensible human rights record in Iraq among these God-fearing Americans who are apparently more offended by a nipple than by piles of dead Iraqi children?

Sadly and deplorably, there is none.

Baring a woman's breast or viewing a woman's breast is not a sin and is hardly a newsworthy event. Ms. Jackson's publicity stunt deserved minimal attention at best, but has received non-stop major coverage for days.

On the other hand, murdering up to 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in a brutal military campaign of imperialistic aggression that continues to lack any justification whatsoever, was and is a crime against humanity that should receive wide and continuing exposure until the perpetrators are brought before an international war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

But there is only silence among the corporate media's talking heads and their pea-brained followers in this matter of genocide in Iraq.

Janet Jackson's right nipple was bared before their very eyes February 1 and they and their wholesome children may have suffered irreparable moral degradation as a result of the exposure. This is the story of significance to them.

The skewed value system of this sick nation of puritanical hypocrites causes me nausea on a daily basis.

"Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths (in the United States) every year... ."

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The above gem, gleaned from the article that follows, is as damning an indictment of the American system of capitalistic greed as is the immoral war of conquest now being waged upon Iraq.

Rather than go halfway around the planet and seek to subjugate for entirely selfish motives a Third World people who have done the United States no harm, the Bush administration should take care of its own at home.

D. Grant Haynes

February 1, 2004

___________________________________

(From WSWS)

Institute of Medicine calls for universal health care in US

By Joanne Laurier

30 January 2004

In the course of his recent State of the Union address, President George W. Bush made clear his unaltered commitment to the existing for-profit health care delivery system in the US that has become increasingly unaffordable for millions of people.

"We will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America's health care the best in the world... A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription," he belligerently declared.

Significantly, a report issued just days before Bush's speech by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) states that a government-sponsored universal health care insurance is the "right prescription"-in fact, the only rational prescription. The January 14 report compiled by the institute, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences--a private organization chartered by Congress--detailed the harrowing consequences of the growing epidemic of uninsured. This is the first time the IOM has recommended that "everyone living in the United States should have health insurance."

"I believe we're reaching the point where the system is unsustainable," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Arthur L. Kellermann of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. Approximately 43.6 million people lacked health insurance at some point in 2002, compared with 39.8 million in 2000. This represents a staggering 17.2 percent of the population under the age of 65 and includes some 8.5 million uninsured children. Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year, according to the report, entitled Insuring America's Health: Principles and Recommendations.

"The lack of health insurance coverage for a substantial number of Americans has been a public policy problem throughout the past century and particularly over the past three decades," states the report in its Executive Summary. "The problem of uninsurance has been growing in urgency...the gap between insured and uninsured people widens and raises questions of equity. This disparity in access to health care violates generally accepted American values of equal consideration and equal opportunity."

Although the United States ranks highest in health care spending as a percentage of GDP (14 percent in 2002) and ranks high in the availability of medical technology, the health of Americans ranks consistently poorly relative to that of residents of other industrialized nations-12th out of 13th in a 2000 comparison. For three indicators-low birth weight; neonatal mortality and infant mortality overall; years of potential life lost--the US came in last even after excluding external causes such as motor vehicle collisions and violence. Also, in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) comparisons of 29 developed countries, the US ranked 25th in male life expectancy and 19th in female life expectancy. Infant mortality rates were the highest among the listed countries.

Of 30 countries in the OECD health data, only Mexico and Turkey have higher uninsured rates than the US!

"Increasingly, the lack of health insurance is understood as a condition for which virtually all Americans are to some extent at risk over the course of their lives...rather than as a fixed characteristic of a well-defined segment of the population. Not all people, however, are equally at risk of being uninsured nor are all spells of uninsurance of equal length," write the authors of the study.

More than 80 percent of uninsured children and adults live in working families, and about the same percentage are US citizens. However, nearly two-thirds of all uninsured persons are members of families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($36,800 for a family of four). While white, non-Hispanic people make up about half of the uninsured, minority group members have a higher risk of going without health insurance. But, states the report, "people may lack coverage regardless of age, education, or state of residence." The study points out that uninsured adults have a 25 percent greater mortality risk than do insured adults and that uninsured children risk abnormal long-term development if they do not receive routine care.

The high costs of health care premiums are the primary reason for uninsurance. For example, without an employer's contribution, a family insurance policy comparable to the average employment-based coverage would cost roughly 25 percent of pretax family income for a family at 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Small employers often receive poorer benefits for premiums compared to larger firms, whose administrative costs for insurance programs are usually 10 percent of premium versus 20 to 25 percent for smaller employers.

In constant 1998 dollars, the cost of employment-based health insurance increased 260 percent between 1977 and 1998, with the employee's share of premiums increasing 350 percent! Median household incomes increased only 17 percent. In 2003, the national average total annual premium for a family policy in an employment-based group exceeded $9,000.

Adolescents are a particularly high risk group for uninsurance. "Their need for some kinds of health care services, such as mental health screening and treatment for drinking and other risky behaviors, increases in their late teenage years, yet 17 percent of adolescents ages 15 to 17 are uninsured, the highest rate of all children. Over one-quarter (27.4 percent) of adolescents ages 10 to 18 in families earning less than the federal poverty standard are uninsured. Forty-four percent of young adults aged 19 to 29 are uninsured at least part of the year. Though generally a healthy population, young adults are particularly vulnerable to injuries, HIV, and pregnancy, but when uninsured their regular access to the health system is disrupted," according to the study.

Another high-risk group is the mentally ill, which is made up of more than 3 million adults with illnesses that can involve psychosis and aberrant behavior. Some 20 percent of these adults who do not reside in institutions lack medical coverage. Between 600,000 and 700,000 persons with severe mental illness are jailed each year.

Lack of insurance can affect access to necessary prescription drugs. The uninsured wait on average four months longer than insured patients to receive newer drug therapies for HIV. Only 43 percent of uninsured children have their prescriptions filled, compared with 61 percent of privately insured and 56 percent of publicly insured children.

Persons who are uninsured for the full year pay 35 percent, on average, of the overall cost of medical services they receive. Medical bills are a factor in nearly half of all bankruptcy filings.

The study estimates that the number of uninsured Americans will rise to more that 48 million in 2009, and, in the event of a recession, the number will reach 61 million. It states: "Over the past 25 years, the growth in the number of uninsured Americans has exceeded the rate of growth in the population under 65 years."

The IOM presented four prototypes for the implementation of universal health care reform from a combination of governmental and private schemes to a federally funded single-payer program. The committee brings out that "single payer models, much like Medicare, are generally considered to have substantially lower administrative costs than private insurance plans, since the need for advertising, underwriting, and much eligibility and billing work disappears."

The IOM report concludes by presenting a scenario that should in a wealthy society be the rule, but is becoming the overwhelming exception: "Imagine what the country would be like if everyone had coverage--people would be financially able to have a health problem checked in a timely manner, to obtain preventative and primary care, and to receive necessary, appropriate and effective health services. Families would have security in knowing that they had some protection against medical bills undermining their financial stability. Key community providers and health care institutions could provide care to those who need it without jeopardizing their financial stability."

This is a tall order for present day America!

As the Bush administration praises the glory of a market-based, private medical system, researchers from the Public Citizen's Health Research Group found that bureaucracy in the health care system accounts for some 30 percent of total US health care spending. Health industry bureaucracy currently consumes at least $399.4 billion annually, while a national health insurance program could save some $286 billion in administrative costs. (For example, in Seattle, Washington, there are at least 755 different insurance plans!)

"Hundreds of billions are squandered each year on health care bureaucracy, more than enough to cover all the uninsured, pay for full drug coverage for seniors, and upgrade coverage for the tens of millions who are underinsured," said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and lead author of the study. "Americans spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as Canadians, who have universal health coverage and live two years longer... Instead of cutting Medicaid and other vital services, officials could expand services by freeing up the $286 billion a year wasted on administrative expenses. In the current economic climate, with unemployment rising, we can ill afford massive waste in health care. Radical surgery to cure our failing health insurance system is sorely needed."

Dr. David Himmelstein, also a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, added: "Republicans are pushing to move seniors into HMOs, whose overhead is three times higher than Medicare's. National health insurance could cover everyone without any increase in costs."

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(What follows was written during the latter years of the Clinton administration, but is, unfortunately, more to the point now than then.)

The real immorality

By D. Grant Haynes

I write of immorality. I write of greed. I write also of a betrayal of the humanitarian and Christian ideals for which this nation is said to stand.

I write of institutionalized selfishness and of the inherent evil embodied in the private health care system of this nation--a system whose practitioners are driven, for the most part, not by the Hippocratic oath, but by aggressive, acquisitive, unbridled capitalism in its most virulent form.

I write also of personal tragedy. Of loss of youth. And of health. And of hope. Of the heightening burdens of the middle years without the benefit of commonly available medical, dental and ocular care.

In so writing, I write not only of my own experiences, but of those of an entire class of Americans--the so-called "working poor" of the nation. We have just enough income to be ineligible for Medicaid or state-administered programs for the indigent, but no medical, dental or ocular insurance coverage and no reserves to pay the mind-boggling fees required of the uninsured for the most basic of services.

Partisan, self-serving, business-oriented conservatives in Congress and elsewhere in the public and private sectors of the nation rail sanctimoniously into the ninth month about President Clinton's peccadillo with an intern--about the shocking immorality of it all--about impeachment being a necessity to restore "integrity" to the office of the presidency.

And this while the selfsame interests quietly sabotage, as they have for the six years of his tenure, all efforts on the part of the president and his administration to launch any meaningful health care reform to relieve beleaguered Americans.

Theirs is the monstrous immorality--to consign millions of individuals to the human junk heap because of their inability to afford private health care insurance or, worse still, the astronomical and wholly prohibitive costs of medical, dental and ocular care nowadays for one without insurance or considerable income.

Medical specialists and health insurance corporate CEO's are amassing obscene fortunes while a significant segment of the American population endures life without the most fundamental of health services--services available without charge to citizens of almost every other Western nation around the globe.

Any unwise sexual liaison in the White House and any attempt to avoid the embarrassment of public disclosure of what was, however ill-advised, essentially a private matter between consenting adults, pales by comparison to the real evils being perpetrated in Washington (and throughout the American medical system) these days.

(From The Nation)

The New American Century

By Arundhati Roy

February 9, 2004

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price.

Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep. Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic value to Empire, or have a "market" of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value--oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal--must do as they're told or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged.

In this new age of empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington found that at least nine out of the thirty members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board were connected to companies that were awarded military contracts for $76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former Secretary of State, was chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest in the case of war in Iraq he said, "I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done,

Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." In April 2003, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again across Latin America, in Africa and in Central and Southeast Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media don't just support the neoliberal project. They are the neoliberal project. This is not a moral position they have chosen to take; it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media work.

Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's all in the editing--what's emphasized and what's ignored. Say, for example, India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian security forces (making the average death toll about 6,000 a year); the fact that in February and March of 2002 more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and 150,000 driven from their homes while the police and administration watched and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the government that oversaw them was re-elected...all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.

Next thing we know, our cities will be leveled by cruise missiles, our villages fenced in with razor wire, US soldiers will patrol our streets, and Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots will, like Saddam Hussein, be in US custody having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined on prime-time TV.

But as long as our "markets" are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton and Arthur Andersen are given a free hand to take over our infrastructure and take away our jobs, our "democratically elected" leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.

Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being non-aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is "natural ally"--India, Israel and the United States are "natural allies"), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.

A government's victims are not only those it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by "development" projects. In the past fifty-five years, big dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million in India. They have no recourse to justice. In the past two years there have been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments--by dams, mines, steel plants and other "development" projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people, including minors, have been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalization, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticizing the court is a crime too, of course. They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism relies for its success on a network of agents--corrupt local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then-Maharashtra government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)

That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys--the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself)--are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO--so who can accuse those organizations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee--so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?

As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancún was crucial for us. Though our governments try to take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancún taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancún we learned the importance of globalizing resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of corporate globalization on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neoliberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in the opposition, when they seize power and become heads of state, are rendered powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also

of the former president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive program of privatization and structural adjustment that has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the opposition into government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats--most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works or, for that matter, how power works. Radical change cannot be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.

At the World Social Forum some of the best minds in the world come together to exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played such a crucial role in the movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement has won some important victories, we must not allow nonviolent resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theater. It is a very precious weapon that must be constantly honed and reimagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.

It was wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will slip off the bestseller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose interest. Or so he hopes.

This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to agree on something. That something does not need to be an overarching preordained ideology into which we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.

If all of us are indeed against imperialism and against the project of neoliberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of antiwar activists have retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.

Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the US Army's capture of Saddam Hussein, and therefore in retrospect justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq, is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an

in-house quarrel. They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.

So if we are against imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the US occupation and that we believe the United States must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?

How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old killer Baathists, are they Islamic fundamentalists?)

We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.

Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the US occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the US government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to Iraq to clean up after them.

I suggest we choose by some means two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.

The Project for the New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.

For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.

Now we finally have a justification for murdering 16,000 human beings in Iraq. The exercise has helped produce abler soldiers and fostered the "warrior ethos". They are stark, raving mad, folks. Our countrymen have lost all sense of morality. We are killing helpless men, women and children in backward Middle Eastern countries that possess no air forces and no way to defend themselves at all and we are doing it partially, at least, to improve the "fighting spirit" of Americans in the service. They truly have gone mad. Bush's speech has emboldened the lunatics.

Where did we go wrong?

By D. Grant Haynes

December 28, 2003

Receipt of an especially offensive bit of spam a couple of days before Christmas seemed to have set the tone for my entire holiday.

"Saddam Captured!!" the graphic screamed in wild yellow display type.

Saddam Hussein's recent demeaning mug shot--the one with the unkempt beard, the bruised face, and disheveled appearance--was prominently displayed with "dead or alive" telescopic sight cross hairs superimposed.

"Get the world's most wanted cards before they sell out for good!" the huckster screamed at me as I attempted to open and discard the trashy email I had not sought.

Credentials alleging the semi-official status of the product were proffered too.

"Cards sold by 140+ media outlets."

"Sold to United States military worldwide."

And finally, "Exclusive licensed cards", whatever that means.

What I had on my hands was a successor to the "most wanted" deck which has been sold in discount stores as a point of sale impulse item, along with the candy bars and the Enquirer, since the Iraq invasion began.

Saddam Hussein was the Ace of Spades in the original deck.

Now the Ace of Spades--numero uno--is behind bars and being tortured, no doubt, and this has prompted entrepreneurs--ever ready to make a buck--to offer a revised deck in this morally upright nation.

The new deck was being forced onto spam victims within three days of Hussein's alleged "capture" by American forces--an event we now know was as fictionalized as was Jessica Lynch's one girl Alamo-like last stand.

Never mind the messy details--the fact that Kurdish soldiers actually captured Saddam Hussein days or weeks earlier and brokered a deal with the Americans before handing him over in a drugged stupor.

Our boys can still play poker on their Bradleys with the new deck that is in as poor taste as a velvet Elvis in a Texas truck stop.

And they can still swagger and talk about "gittin'" Saddam, even if they didn't actually "git" him after all.

One of them can even brag of "slugging" the 66-year-old Saddam after the former dictator had been handcuffed. A Bronze Star for bravery must surely be in order for this boy.

How low will my nation sink and how long will its couch potato population feed blindly on endless demonizations of other men, other nations and other religions, while looking the other way and excusing the continuing cruelty, brutality, deception and lies that characterize the occupation of Iraq?

The tacky, sleazy "Saddam Captured!!" deck now being hawked to American civilians and apparently distributed to U.S. soldiers is indicative of the malaise of the soul in America that causes this writer to no longer feel at home or at peace in the nation of his birth.

America is in a tailspin and I do not see her pulling out of it anytime soon.

Greed, avarice, brutality, racism, religious bigotry and a callous indifference to other nations, cultures, and peoples--indeed, to the entire planet and all other beings on it, in fact,--are running out of control today in America as they have been since George W, Bush slithered into the White House and the office of a presidency he never won.

Dishonesty begets dishonesty.

Evil begets evil.

And the media whores continue to spread the gospel.

I am happy to be in the latter segment of this human life journey because there is little apparent good left in America anymore and certainly no bright future for anyone to anticipate.

Even the wealthy few who have engorged themselves on Bush tax breaks need air to breathe and water to drink and these very essentials of life itself--on the hill as well as in the barrio--are being squandered and poisoned by aberrant Washington neocons now.

There will be no winners in the longer perspective. Investment portfolios won't buy health or peace when there's no air left to breathe or anywhere left to run because the entire human race despises us.

America has in less than half a decade become the most hated and feared nation on earth--the one considered to be the greatest threat to the survival of the human species. That's quite an achievement for one aberrant non-elected administration in three years, but they've done it.

I feel remorse for my children and for all the other young people of my nation who must keep the faith and rear families and attempt as best they can to fulfill the American dream at a time when the American dream as I knew it in my youth is seemingly dead--defeated by a coterie of sour old Republican businessmen who have hijacked a nation for their own selfish and greedy political ends.

I ask myself where "we" went wrong to find ourselves bequeathing to our children and their children men of the caliber of George W. Bush and John Ashcroft when we had Kennedys and Humphreys and McGoverns and even Carters to work with in our time.

These leaders of our salad days were, relatively speaking, each educated, intelligent, compassionate, socially conscious and, to a greater or lesser degree, visionaries--men in a class apart from the brutish knaves running Washington today.

How did we squander our national treasure and allow it to fall into such shabby hands?

Where did we fail?

I am very disquieted as the third year of the Bush presidency ends.

I see no light on the horizon beyond the dark night of the soul my nation now endures.

Bravado, tough guy rhetoric, glorified violence characterize Samarra story

By D. Grant Haynes

December 18, 2003

"They've made a mistake to attack U.S. forces," Sassaman said. "No one knows the town better than we do. We're gonna clean this place."

In a chest-beating bravado-laced Associated Press news story of December 17 headlined. "U.S. Hunts for Militants North of Baghdad" readers were treated to a more honest than usual glimpse into the true nature of the present brutal occupation of Iraq and also to the depth of the disregard on the part of American personnel there for the sanctity of Iraqi neighborhoods, homes, properties and citizens.

The reporter, Aleksandar Vasovic, as well as 4th Infantry Division Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman and an unnamed enlisted soldier, swaggered through the piece with "tough guy" talk and flippant, violence-laced descriptions of an operation carried out in the middle of the night of December 17 in Samarra, Iraq.

"Using sledgehammers, crowbars, explosives and armored vehicles, U.S. forces smashed down the gates of homes and the doors of workshops and junkyards Wednesday to attack the Iraqi resistance that has persisted despite the capture of Saddam Hussein," Vasovic explained without embarrassment or apology.

Apparently emboldened and heady still from the orgiastic exultation that had followed the capture and public humiliation of Saddam Hussein December 13, American military spokespersons and the censors that could have edited an embedded reporter's dispatch, allowed the military's disregard for the dignity of Iraqis--even of women and children in the middle of the night--to ooze bloodily through in the hate-mongering paragraphs that followed.

"Loud blasts mixed with the sound of women and children screaming inside the houses. An explosion at the gate of one compound shattered windows, cutting a 1-year-old baby with glass," Vasovic wrote in his word portrait.

Suggesting a tone of sarcastic sadism and unlimited violence to come that should chill the blood of any decent American--one that would do justice to Attila the Hun--Sassaman swaggered as John Wayne rehearsing lines on the set of a B grade serial western.

"Samarra has been a little bit of a thorn in our side," said Col. Nate Sassaman. "It hasn't come along as quickly as other cities in the rebuilding of Iraq. This operation is designed to bring them up to speed."

"They've made a mistake to attack U.S. forces," Sassaman said. "No one knows the town better than we do. We're gonna clean this place," he offered a bit farther along in the story.

Gonna clean the place, huh, Sassaman?

Gonna kick some Arab ass, huh, Sassaman?

This because Samarra's residents dared to fight with limited and improvised weaponry the unprovoked and cowardly invasion and occupation of their small nation by the most powerful military machine on the planet earth--an invasion that has no more legitimacy than did Hitler's blitzkrieg on Poland in September 1939.

How dare mere Iraqis attempt to or even think to resist your indomitable boys in their Bradleys and Apaches--Christian warriors commissioned by George W. Bush and Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin to "clean up" Iraq and probably the rest of the non-Zionist Middle East too, truth be known.

How dare they!

Iraqis are "evil doers" all--evil doers down to the 1-year-old with the glass cut and the women screaming in the middle of the night as their men were snatched from the marriage bed.

Evil doers deserve no mercy.

Find a live oak and hang 'um high.

Put Saddam on the sorrel and let him dance first.

Everything exists in simplistic black and white tones of good vs. evil in the world of George W. Bush, Sassaman and Boykin.

When the enlisted men at Samarra had their turn to talk, one flippantly allowed as how locksmithing would be a booming business the next day, so many doors of private dwellings had they blown open or knocked down with American machines.

There was no humanity--no regret--no reflection--in his tone.

"Locksmiths will make a lot of money these days," said a U.S. soldier, laughing as he sat atop a Bradley," Vasovic recorded.

This is what it comes down to in Iraq now, my American compatriots.

A brutal band of bullies in the night breaking down doors and terrorizing Iraqis in their homes and beds.

They're winning few hearts and minds with such tactics. Nor do they care. They are occupiers there to build military bases, instill fear, pump oil, and stay.

They're not liberators sent to repair, heal and leave.

The present ill-advised, illegal and immoral American occupation of Iraq is building a reservoir of hatred for Americans and the West in the Middle East that will outlive us all.

It is the gravest foreign policy blunder of the United States since Vietnam at least--perhaps in the 227-year history of the nation.

Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein's capture, as his sons' and grandson's murder last summer, will not end the insurgency of Iraqi freedom fighters against colonial domination of their nation by the United States of America.

Nor does his capture lend one whit of legitimacy to the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis by the American military machine since the unwarranted invasion of their nation in March 2003.

Let us never forget that Saddam had NO weapons of mass destruction and NO connection whatsoever with events of September 11, 2001 and was NO threat to the United States of America.

Also, let us never permit anyone to forget that George W. Bush remains a monumental liar who peddled endless falsehoods to a frightened American public to justify a unilateral colonial invasion of Iraq that was not about saving the world from Saddam Hussein but, rather, about oil and strategic political and military hegemony. Nothing more.

The United States supports at this time innumerable tin horn dictators of Saddam Hussein's stripe and will continue to do so as long as those dictators serve the political goals of this, the most hypocritical, vicious and scheming nation in the family of man.

Saddam's capture will represent a public relations bonanza for George W. Bush in his reelection bid and will occupy the minds of naive and dumbed down American couch potatoes for a time as Fox News fans the flames of Islamaphobia with the story.

But the dying in Iraq will continue unabated and the unilateral and preemptive occupation of Iraq--a war crime in itself bereft of any moral justification--will not succeed in the longer view of history.

By way of closing, I am compelled to note that I do not personally hate Saddam Hussein. I feel compassion for the man and believe that he should be treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

D. Grant Haynes

December 14, 2003

Were today's swaggering war hawks chicken hawks during Cold War Era?

D. Grant Haynes

September 15, 2002

One is forced to wonder where the current flock of posturing American war hawks who are so intent upon invading Iraq were back in the days of the Cold War when a belligerent Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missile warheads aimed at American cities and a land army considerably larger than ours.

Why didn't American forces launch an invasion of the Soviet Union similar to the one now being planned against Iraq?

After all, the Soviets were definitely a threat to our security. And they certainly had plenty of nuclear and biological weapons--a thousand times more than Saddam Hussein could ever amass.

I believe the answer is fairly simple. The Soviets were capable of offering resistance and would have returned fire on a massive intercontinental scale.

Our generals and politicians determined discretion to be the better part of valor at that time and accepted the so-called "balance of terror" that characterized the Cold War Era.

By way of contrast, Iraq is a small, primitive, sparsely populated Third World nation with limited military potential, no offensive capability beyond the Middle East, and, lest we forget, vast petroleum reserves.

Iraq can be pummeled indefinitely from 30,000 feet and will be incapable of mounting resistance or posing a serious threat to the lives of American flight crews involved in what will be called a "war" by the Bush administration and America's corporate media whores.

There will be no war--only death from six miles up to thousands of Iraqi men, women and children who have done me no harm and against whom I harbor no ill will.

The Bush administration's strong-arm tactics with the United Nations Security Council to secure a consensus for an assault against the sovereign nation of Iraq on the basis of alleged but still undisclosed "evidence" that Iraq has biological weapons and is seeking to develop a nuclear capability would be laughable were it not so serious in its implications.

The United States of America has no moral right or imperative to arbitrarily and selectively "punish" smaller and poorer nations on a whim--because leaders of the targeted nations are less than honorable men--or because said leaders "might" be thinking about how atomic bombs work or "might" have biological agents.

Iraq poses no direct threat to the United States and most of the Middle Eastern nations against whom she could mount a threat are more than capable of defending themselves.

There is no moral justification whatsoever for Americans to slaughter thousands--perhaps hundreds of thousands--of Iraqis to force an internal regime change and installation of a puppet government consisting of "yes" men for the Bush administration--a government whose titular leader will be, as in Afghanistan, so unpopular that he must be continuously protected from his own people by the American military.

But that's apparently what is about to occur.

Congress is being given a four-week window to rubber stamp the administration's mad plan for Iraq's destruction without so much as a break for members to directly consult their constituents back home. White House legal advisers have already said Bush doesn't have to secure congressional approval before beginning the blitz in any case.

Bush has said America will go into Iraq alone if the United Nations Security Council doesn't lend unconditional support to his plans for a forced regime change there and one can assume that he will. Who's to prevent it? He's the commander-in-chief of the dominant military power among the nations of men at this unhappy juncture in human history and he can do as he damned well pleases.

Get out your beer nuts and Budweiser, mindless American couch potatoes. This one's gonna' have you standin' up and cheerin' like it's Super Bowl weekend. You'll get a better adrenalin rush than you did with First Blood, Terminator 2, and Tom Clancy's Arab-baiting The Sum of All Fears, combined.

You and your overbearing children will learn to hate all Middle Easterners and you'll come to enjoy seeing Saddam Hussein's soldiers incinerated from on high by Christian warriors--Armageddon-like.

You will not be encouraged to think of Iraqis as human beings with mothers and fathers and wives and children who love them. Rather, you'll be desensitized and will see them only as moving targets to be zapped by the deft joy stick finger with which you play your violence-prone computer games.

Sock! Bang! Pow! Boom! There goes another one!

The only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi!

Damned! That must have been a thermobaric bomb! I'll wager that suffocated those Islamic sons-of-bitches!

Dan Rather and Peter Jennings will spend weeks solemnly narrating pyrotechnic feeds from a dying Baghdad as global capitalism wages another brave war against men and women in donkey carts and adobe huts.

I want no part of the economically and politically motivated high tech slaughter likely being planned by the Bush administration for Iraq in the upcoming media spectacular, "Persian Gulf War, Part II".

Excesses of blind patriotism annoying, dangerous

By D. Grant Haynes

November 17, 2001

Dear Post-911 Flag-Waving Fellow Americans:

After reading your newspapers--after listening to your corporate media's propagandistic version of the so-called "War Against Terrorism" now under way in Afghanistan--after seeing your flag-decked SUV's with the Pisces emblems on the one side and National Rifle Association stickers on the other--after enduring this national adrenalin rush daily for the past two months--I have concluded that you are, by and large, a shallow, callous, insular, naively manipulable and infinitely self-righteous lot.

You are dangerously intoxicated at this time with a virulent strain of myopic ethnocentrism approaching Third Reich fanaticism--one that is most unattractive to the quiet minority here who can't in good conscience join your sloganeered, bumper-stickered, anthem-singing, flag-flapping, Arab-hating hysteria.

You are riding the crest of a wave of blind arrogance, egocentric hedonism and aggressive nationalism that cannot last--one that will inevitably lead to a cataclysmic fall in time.

I do not know how these things will evolve. I am no prophet or seer. But of this I am reasonably certain. You will be--you must be--humbled. Karmic laws are inexorable, inescapable and universal. America is ripe for a humbling as the 21st Century begins.

I do not wish this to be the case. I live here, as have my forebears for at least six generations. I have children and grandchildren who will suffer when the collapse occurs. But I see this national adjustment as inevitable.

You as a people are not better than--you do not deserve more of everything than--any other group on the planet.

You do not possess an inherent right to abuse--to show utter disregard for--other human cultures and groups, as well as every other species with which you share this tiny blue orb.

You do not possess an inherent right to destroy the very Earth that has nurtured you with your outsized contribution to global pollution--one that will bring catastrophic climate changes and sea level alterations within the present century.

You are not so very special and unique as you may imagine, flag-waving Americans. Deity has not singled you out for preferential treatment and predestined dominance. You are merely the current bully on the block--an ephemeral thing at best. Bullies come and go.

In the longer view of history, you will go the way of other civilizations that became overly extended, overly aggressive, overly confident, overly materialistic, and overtly abusive toward all that did not embrace unflinchingly their narrowly defined interests and values.

I have thought often during recent days of Thomas Jefferson's remark regarding the institution of slavery--a gathering storm in his time.

He said, "...I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Indeed, I tremble today for my country because I know my fellows are on a course that cannot end well.

Beware of an opportunistic politician with the sudden onset of a grand diversionary 'vision'

January 15, 2004

By D. Grant Haynes

Concerning Bush's newly discovered "vision" of America's future in space, George W. Bush has less vision about the future utilization of space--about mankind's eventual and inevitable reach for the stars--than does the fly that buzzes about my head today.

Bush is a small-minded and cynical opportunist of limited intellect and vision who happens to be in the White House (illegitimately) at a point in the 40-plus-year ongoing space program when Spirit Rover--a particular Mars exploration mission planned well before his tenure in Washington-- has proven to be uncommonly successful as Mars missions go.

Being the crass political opportunist he is, Bush (or, rather, his handlers and speech writers) have suddenly discovered a lofty "vision" of his that sees Americans going back to the moon between 2015 and 2020 and to the planet Mars thereafter.

Should America and the human race be unfortunate enough to see Bush retain the presidency later this year, any influence he may have on the future of the American space program will be as baneful as his influence on all else has been.

Bush and his neocon megalomaniacs would immediately seek to militarize space for the selfish nationalistic advantage of their nation. It is inevitable. That is their mind set in all things. They will be as mean, self-centered, greedy and brutish in space as they are domestically, in the Middle East, and everywhere else their influence has been exerted.

Before heading for the final frontier, the Bush cabal would do well to (a) find an exit strategy from the deepening Iraq quagmire and (b) set straight a faltering domestic economy that reels under a $500 billion deficit born of excessive tax breaks for the wealthy and the present unnecessary, unlawful and immoral war on Iraq.

Bush's "space vision" is pure election year balderdash timed to deflect media and public attention from 15 Democratic primaries and caucuses to be held in the next 30 days.

And, as might be expected, endlessly groveling corporate media whores are dutifully publishing and republishing Bush's manufactured hoopla about his vision of America's future role in space with perfectly straight faces as they relegate news from Iraq and the Democratic primary campaigns to positions of secondary importance.

Your hard lessons are only beginning, naive Americans

A year after the midterm elections of November 2002 you, naive Americans, are beginning to learn the hard lessons a few of us foresaw.

You now have on your collective hands in Iraq a disaster of major proportions--one you could have helped avert by failing to give the Bush agenda so rousing an approval.

And on the domestic front the aberrant Bush administration is busily dismantling Medicare, Social Security and environmental protection laws as quickly as cowardly and compliant congressmen from both sides of the aisle can vote the changes.

You could also have prevented these cascading calamities--disasters that will haunt you, your children, and your grandchildren for generations to come.

But you would not.

You approved of Republicans and of their agenda and voted more of them into office in November 2002.

Your collective stupidity provided George W. Bush with encouragement to foster the mayhem he is now visiting upon the nation and the world.

We who fought this disaster with all our power to the last hour will NEVER forgive you for what you have done to our nation.

Personally, I simply want out--out of America and out of your disgusting presences.

D. Grant Haynes

December 9, 2003

You made your beds hard Americans: Now, lie in them without any whining

By D. Grant Haynes

November 5, 2002

Americans, you have indicated by your actions in the midterm elections of November 5, 2002, that you deserve the government that was foisted upon you in a questionable manner two years ago.

There will be no further sympathy or compassion for you in this quarter--only for the present and future victims of your new reckless imperialism and insane drive toward economic and military domination of the planet.

The cowering Third World masses now in the cross hairs of your high tech killing machinery deserve sympathy, compassion and deliverance, but you, collectively, deserve no consideration.

You had the opportunity today to reverse the determined direction taken by the Bush cabal in the past two years. You could have voted enough Republicans out of office to blunt their arrogance and sober their aggressive intent.

But you did not.

Rather, with your votes you gave them a green light--carte blanche approval--for the war, conquest, colonization and genocide agenda for Iraq lying in readiness on the Pentagon's war room tables even now.

So be it.

You have made your beds hard as a society by your choices today. Now, lie in them and don't whine at the pain surely to follow--a revived draft, body bags and flag-draped caskets at Arlington, and the continuing decline of an America that was robust, healthy, at peace, possessed of a budget surplus, and respected throughout the world two short years ago.

It is all gone now because of your collective stupidity and folly.

____________________________________________________________

Every nation has the government it deserves."

Joseph de Maistre

American combat deaths in Middle East during period of Nov. 1-28, 2003

___________________________________________

You will note that several of the deaths in the table below are described as resulting from "non-hostile" gunshot wounds. Does this imply suicide?

The media doesn't give much play to combat deaths when something more "important" grabs the headlines--something like George W. Bush's surprise 2.5 hour pre-election photo op visit to Baghdad on Thanksgiving Day, for instance.

A listing of combat deaths within specified time periods can be accessed by going to the following Department of Defense site and clicking on a miniscule and easily overlooked link titled "Casualty Reports" at the bottom of the site well below the news about how well things are going.

http://www.centcom.mil/

"Republicans seem to think there is an inspiring quality in giving more money to the top one percent. When I read this, I am reminded of the 'Horse and Sparrow' theory of economics--that if you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows."

James K. Galbraith

Bush solution to economic woes is to widen gap between wealthy, others

By D. Grant Haynes

January 2003

The January 6 Associated Press headline read, "Dow Jumps 130 on Anticipation of Tax Cut".

George W. Bush was preparing to give the wealthy of this nation their second undeserved bonus package in as many years.

The first had come in 2001 shortly after he was appointed to the Oval Office he never won.

That 2001 tax package--one allegedly designed to "stimulate" an economy that needed no stimulation until the disaster that is the Bush administration came to town--had seen refund checks in the mail to American tax payers within weeks of its passage by Congress.

As in most else supply-sider Bush and his economic advisers have done to "stimulate" the economy, the 2001 tax package was weighted heavily in favor of the wealthy on the basis of the so-called "trickle down" theory of economics.

The trickle down idea is, of course, that if you put more money into the pockets of excessively prosperous investment capitalists at the top of the heap--those who live off their dividends and the labors of others--they will, in turn, make more investment capital available to open more shops, expand more enterprises, and hire more drudges at the bottom of the heap, thereby stimulating the economy.

The hapless drudges--the have-nots--will, it is assumed, be ever so grateful for their penurious minimum wage salaries and will dutifully spend as much of each week's wages as possible at the local discount store on whatever shoddy icons of emptiness Madison Avenue has invented for them to "need" during a particular season or at a given time.

Billy Bob will go home to his trailer, pop a top, and listen to a CD on his gimmicky new toy that was assembled by sweatshop labor in some distant land, while the wily investor prepares to reinvest the derived profit from his previous investment round (oh yes, there must be profit, else there would be no investment) in another scheme to snag Billy Bob's extra $75 next month or season.

Those who have nothing will continue to have nothing and those who have the most will gain ever more with each round of investment.

Everybody will be happy and the economy will hum.

Something like that, anyway.

The trickle down theory of economics apparently doesn't work as well in the real world as on paper in the president's rarefied world of excess and privilege.

Bush's bear market was not rejuvenated by his 2001 tax giveaway and the Dow has continued to play footsie with 8000 for the better part of his two years in office.

When investors are cautious, as well they should be with Bush at the helm, they apparently sit on their savings or invest conservatively in other areas that have a less direct effect on the economy.

Aside from the unworkability of trickle down economics, there is also a fundamental moral flaw in the concept.

It is, in this writer's opinion, reprehensible that Billy Bob and his family should be expected to always be satisfied with the crumbs from the table of capitalistic excesses that is the lifestyle of the top ten percent, economically, when a fairer and more equitable distribution of the wealth of the nation would see everyone with more than enough on which to live comfortably.

The dog-eat-dog world of laissez-faire capitalism is inherently harsh, cruel, self-centered, uncaring and inhumane. No altruism here.

All of which is probably academic at this point in time, though perhaps not always.

Back to Bush's 2001 tax package.

Under the 2001 stimulus package, the poorest 20 percent of American taxpayers could expect to see their taxes cut by an average of $47 a year for the next 10 years.

By contrast, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans were awarded tax cuts averaging $7,300 a year over the next decade.

And the super-rich--the top one percent of Americans in terms of annual income--could look forward to an average of $54,480 a year in income tax reductions as the 2001 tax package was signed into law.

This unwarranted windfall from Bush to American capitalism's crème de crème would amount to 45 percent of the entire $364 billion revenue loss the Treasury Department anticipated in the 2001 tax giveaway, according to calculations circulated at that time.

But that's history now.

Bush's 2001 tax cut became law.

The super-rich bought another SUV with their $54,480 tax saving.

The very prosperous probably spent their $7,300 tax saving on a few new and trendy adult toys to enhance their largely hedonistic and inane lifestyles.

And those of us at the bottom of the heap--the ones with the old cars that leak fluids and won't start on cold mornings--the ones of us with no health insurance, limited dental and ocular care, and a grocery list plagued by a preponderance of canned goods--we bought a week's supply of staples with our $47 tax saving.

Having succeeded in the first months of his presidency to shamelessly tilt the tax tables to favor the wealthy at the expense of a budget surplus inherited from Bill Clinton and to the detriment of the rest of us, one might have assumed Bush would leave well enough alone for a time--at least for the remainder of his first term.

There was his "war on terrorism"-- an adventure that will absorb hundreds of billions of dollars for decades, we are told.

And there had been the one-two-three punches of 911, the collapse of MCI WorldCom and the collapse of Enron, two corporations whose wheeler-dealer accountants finally ran out of new lies and new sets of books to cook.

Each of these body blows to a previously prosperous and reasonably positive America had left gaping tears in the social, financial, and psychological fabrics of the nation.

Unprecedented unemployment and devaluation of millions of 401K retirement nest eggs followed as Wall Street slid from a Dow Jones average that seldom closed under 10,000 during the last year of President Clinton's administration to one that rarely topped 8,500 after 18 months of Bush policies.

Indeed, there were multiple reasons to support the assumption the president would not push Congress for further tax breaks for the wealthy in a country that had already conducted a costly military assault on Afghanistan and was preparing a much costlier and, arguably, less justified one on Iraq in the wake still of 911.

More frivolous tax giveaways for the St. Moritz set were out of the question for the foreseeable future.

Right?

No, wrong.

I believe many of us failed to fully grasp the true nature and grave implications of the Bush coup d'tat of 2000 until January 6 of this year when our appointed president unveiled a revised and drastically more ambitious tax relief plan to supersede the 2001 version.

The latest tax giveaway scheme--one that will cost roughly $670 billion rather than the previous $364 billion--is allegedly aimed at jump starting the still flagging Bush economy--an economy for which Alan Greenspan has run out of prime rate cuts and AP business desk toadies out of ingenious new spins.

This time, the sop to wealth is more brazen and less measured.

The president has asked Congress to abolish all stock dividend taxes. The move, if accepted by Congress, will almost double the cost to the nation of Bush's tax relief schemes for America's millionaires.

Critics of the dividend tax slash were quickly accused by Bush of engaging in the rhetoric of "class warfare".

You can bet your sweet, gilded Cadillac Escalate key fob we're talking about class warfare, Mr. President.

You have declared economic war on the lower and middle classes in America and on democracy itself with your unwise, strong arm tactics to redistribute wealth upwardly at the expense of our lives, our health and our general well being.

Your brazen policies to favor the wealthy will exacerbate class antagonisms and the likelihood of eventual class warfare. The choice was yours, not ours.

Bush is now also asking that his tax reduction stimulus package adopted in 2001 be speeded up to give more away faster--again, to those least in need, as social welfare programs, environmental protection plans and a plethora of other compassionate initiatives of the Clinton years fall by the wayside.

There is no reason to expect any opposition to Bush's 2003 tax package from a Congress wholly controlled by Republicans and otherwise populated by cowardly Democrats who would not stand up to Bush even before they deservedly lost a majority in the disastrous mid-term election. The package will pass with minor changes at best.

The watchdog organization, Citizens for Tax Justice, commented recently on the president's latest and most bold attempt to establish a plutocracy of wealth in America.

"The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers--those who make over $356,000 a year--will get almost 50 percent of the benefit of eliminating the tax on dividends and 45 percent of the money from accelerating the rate cuts. The 80 percent of the households making less than $73,000 a year would get less than 10 percent of the new tax breaks."

Let's face it folks, the United States of America has undergone a revolution in which money, power and privilege have ousted representative democracy.

The president was appointed by five conservative Supreme Court justices against the will of the majority of voting Americans in 2000.

His administration is disassembling Bill of Rights freedoms honored since Thomas Jefferson and company penned them more than 225 years ago.

And his administration is diligently organizing a police state with the right (thanks to a spineless Congress) to invade the privacy of any private communication link or any dwelling place at will.

The America we have known is no more.

As Democratic advocate and commentator James Carville said following the mid-term election in November, "the American people just don't have any idea as to what's coming."

Indeed.

The junta now entrenching itself in Washington is erecting barricades to any pendulum swing back to the nominal and workable center of American politics in the foreseeable future.

They aren't planning on losing an election soon and they won't if chicanery and voter fraud such as we saw in Florida two years ago can prevent the occurrence.

Considering the speed with which they have consolidated power, and the very magnitude of the changes they have wrought in long-accepted constitutional guarantees, who would venture to guess how far the Bush administration will go in 2004 to insure a victory, should there be widespread dissent and popular opposition?

The Bush cabal--all millionaires from the outset--are going for broke--for the jackpot--for their prosperity and their six-figured constituency's hegemony over the nation and the world.

To hell with the rest of us in America, and to hell with any Third World people whose natural resources this colossal and malignant octopus of a consuming and destroying imperialistic nation covets.

The rules have changed and we are all fair game now.

We as a nation are headed--or more accurately, are being dragged, kicking and screaming in many cases, perhaps--in a direction and to a place vast numbers of us do not wish to go.

But go we must for the time being. They are in control of both houses of Congress and the lunacy has only just begun.

Times will become hard for the poor and for those on moderate and fixed incomes in the next years.

Unemployment continues to rise and major economic indicators--consumer confidence, retail sales, and others--continue to fall or flat line, despite rate cut after rate cut from the Federal Reserve and sop after sop to the wealthy.

Nothing is turning the economy or the nation around as Bush continues to give more and more to his constituency at the expense of the rest of us.

Trickle down is not working. Too little is trickling down.

The spiral into the abyss may take some years, but it has begun in earnest and is gaining momentum.

This is a cruel but apparently necessary process--one that must precede the drastic changes that are needed in America.

When the experiences of loss of income, loss of health care (for those fortunate enough to have had any), loss of property, loss of dignity and loss of hope become unbearable for enough people--when tens of millions of low and middle income Americans have meager rations, nowhere to live, and nothing to lose--a solution will be waiting in the wings.

The greed hounds of Wall Street and a thousand sequestered corporate board rooms are forcing the silent, suffering majority in America into a corner from which there will be no choice eventually but to come out fighting.

A thoroughgoing egalitarian socialist revolution is needed in America--a revolution in which parasitic capitalists who have become so greedy, aggressive, arrogant and overbearing of late lose their privileged places at the human table that should be the American experience.

But the time is not right just yet. Conditions must get worse--much worse--first.

This, because Americans have been conditioned and traumatized by their capitalistic masters into an unthinking, uncritical knee-jerk reaction to the very term "socialism". They aren't ready quite yet to waken from this imposed lethargy.

But waken they must sooner or later if they are ever to throw off the chains now being forged in Washington by an aberration of an administration bent on establishing a predatory military plutocracy that accords ever more privilege and financial advantage to the wealthy few at home while threatening the very survival of the human race abroad with reckless, unprovoked and unjustified imperialistic adventures.

Americans must take back their ship of state eventually and build a more equitable one from the ground up. The present structure has foundered on the shoals of greed, arrogance of power and undeserved wealth, as well as on cultural and ethnic elitism. She is listing badly.

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market."

Manifesto of the Communist Party

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

When they get through torturing, tormenting, humiliating and killing Saddam Hussein, they should consider bringing before an international war crimes tribunal the commander-in-chief of American forces in Afghanistan when the following gross human rights violations occurred.

D. Grant Haynes

December 15, 2003

(Listen to Democracy Now's first U.S. airing of "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death" at the following audio link.)

Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death

Afghan officials confirm U.S. role in massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners

By Stefan Steinberg

WSWS

17 March 2003

On March 6, the German television programme Panorama presented fresh evidence implicating US troops in the massacre of Taliban prisoners during the 2001 war in Afghanistan. Shown on the ARD channel, the programme presented footage, including interviews with two Afghan government ministers who confirmed the presence of American troops during the transportation and killing of surrendered Taliban prisoners.

A documentary film made by Scottish director Jamie Doran--shown in an uncompleted form to members of the European Parliament and other selected audiences in Europe last June--presented the first public charges of American involvement in war crimes in Afghanistan.

Doran's film documents events following the November 21, 2001 fall of Konduz, the Taliban's last stronghold in northern Afghanistan. The film presents a series of witnesses who testify that American military forces participated in the armed assault and killing of several hundred Taliban prisoners in the Qala-i-Janghi fortress. Witnesses also allege that, following the events at Qala-i-Janghi, the American army command, together with troops of the Northern Alliance, were complicit in the killing and disposal of a further 3,000 prisoners, out of a total of 8,000 who surrendered after the battle of Konduz.

Hundreds of prisoners died of suffocation in the course of transportation in closed containers to the prison of Shibarghan. The transport finally ended in a stretch of desert known as Dasht-i-Leili, near Mazar-i-Sharif, where dead bodies were unloaded and several hundred prisoners who were still alive were shot to death.

The US State Department has consistently denied any American involvement in the massacre of prisoners in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif by forces loyal to the commander of the Northern Alliance, General Rashid Dostum. Dostum was the closest ally of American forces in November 2001 when fighting in Afghanistan reached its peak.

Following the showing of the rough cut of Doran's film the Pentagon issued a June 13, 2002 statement denying US complicity in the torture and murder of POWs. The US State Department followed suit with a formal denial one day later.

In December of last year, Doran's completed film "Massacre in Afghanistan-Did the Americans Look On?" was shown to German audiences. The film has already been shown in Britain and Italy and has been bought for showing in a total of 11 other countries. The American media has blocked virtually all coverage of the film and its allegations. The film was recently released, however, on video-titled Afghan Massacre-Convoy of Death, available from Doran's production company at www.acftv.net.

Prior to the German broadcast, a State Department spokesman, Larry Schwartz, declared: "It is a mystery to us why a respected television channel is showing a documentary in which the facts are completely wrong and which unfairly depicts the US mission in Afghanistan." Following the December transmission, State Department officials once again denied any involvement by US troops in the killing of Taliban prisoners.

Now the allegations raised in Doran's film have been confirmed for the first time by Afghan government officials. German reporters accompanied a small team representing the German parliamentary committee for Human Rights to Afghanistan on a trip to investigate the background to the events in Mazar-i-Sharif. In the course of their research, the reporters were able to briefly interview Rashid Dostum, who now occupies the post of joint Deputy Defence Minister of Afghanistan.

In the interview, Dostum acknowledged that the killing of prisoners had taken place. He was not prepared to be drawn out, however, on the role played by US troops in these killings. Dostum shares the deputy post at the Afghan Defence Ministry with another general, Atig ullah Barialei, who was much more forthright and conceded that American troops were in attendance at this massacre.

Barialei stated in an interview with Panorama reporters at the Defence Ministry that, in his opinion, what had taken place in the desert was a war crime, and he confirmed that "at all the incidents which took place, American troops were present."

Barialei's charge was confirmed by Afghanistan's Interior Minister Taj Muhammed Wardak. Wardak acknowledged that unarmed prisoners had been killed in an operation that he called an "accident". Wardak went on to acknowledge that US troops were present during both the transportation and killing of the prisoners. Shortly after his interview with Panorama, Wardak resigned his post as interior minister for reasons that remain unclear.

In a comment for the Panorama programme, Christa Nickels, representing the German parliamentary committee for Human Rights, stated that she was convinced beyond any doubt that a massacre of prisoners had taken place. The prisoners had previously been disarmed, and their killing was in blatant violation of international law. She added that the statements made by Afghan government officials served to reinforce allegations that American Special Forces troops were present during the killings.

The United Nations had agreed to organise a fullscale investigation of the events at Mazar-i-Sharif this spring, but according to a representative of Physicians for Human Rights interviewed in the Panorama documentary, there is little chance of such a probe ever taking place. No agreement has been reached with the government of Afghanistan for the protection of those who would do the investigating, and the UN is displaying little willingness to ensure on its own that suitable protection be made available.

Since Doran's film was completed, two of the eyewitnesses who testified on camera to seeing US soldiers at the scene of the killings have themselves been murdered. Other witnesses and co-workers of the filmmaker have received death threats.

The Panorama documentary ends with recent footage of the desert where the massacre took place. There are indications of digging suggesting that an attempt is underway to destroy the evidence of a war crime. The film's narrator warns that a forthcoming war in Iraq, with all its new attendant horrors, could serve to finally distract all attention from the involvement of US forces in the war crimes carried out at Mazar-i-Sharif.

Bush: a portrait of sadism and ignorance

By Bill Vann

WSWS

18 December 2003

Media reports on the nationally televised interview with George W. Bush broadcast by ABC News Tuesday night focused on the American president's call for the execution of Saddam Hussein. "Zap rat Saddam, sez Prez," was the way the New York Daily News summed up the contents of Bush's remarks.

The general portrayal was one of a tough-talking leader moved by feelings of personal outrage to demand that the former Iraqi president pay the "ultimate penalty" for his crimes.

Those who actually sat through the interview and who know Bush's record, however, may not be so impressed. When he was governor of Texas, the "ultimate penalty" was altogether routine. He presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in US history, and once allowed that he spent an average of just 15 minutes reviewing cases before giving the order to put human beings-including the mentally ill-to death.

After becoming president, he has resumed the use of the federal death penalty for the first time in the US since 1963, ordering the execution of a Persian Gulf War veteran on the very eve of launching the invasion of Iraq last March.

For Bush, imposing the death penalty is less a matter of moral outrage than vicarious thrill. His personal sadism and the "kick" he gets from exercising this ultimate power was revealed most noxiously in his public mimicking of the plea for clemency by a condemned Texas woman, Karla Faye Tucker, before ordering her state murder.

"This is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice. But that will be decided not by the president of the United States but by the citizens of Iraq in one form or another," said Bush, who defensively added, "You don't want a kangaroo court."

But that is precisely what Washington is preparing. The "citizens of Iraq" will decide nothing. They are subjects of a US military occupation, without an elected government and without even the prospect of a vote for years to come. The US will create the instrument that will render Hussein's verdict based on the time-honored American principle of "give him a fair trial and hang him."

The Bush administration has no intention of allowing any court that is not under its unrestricted control to bring Hussein to trial. Having revoked a previous treaty committing US support for the International Criminal Court, it is determined not to legitimize any such body. It justifiably fears that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks and others could some day be brought before such a tribunal on war crimes charges stemming from the war of aggression against Iraq and the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens.

While international courts have ruled out the death penalty as a barbaric punishment, with an Iraqi puppet court, the US can put Saddam Hussein speedily to death while claiming that it is merely doing the will of the Iraqi people.

The other advantage of such a procedure is that dead men tell no tales. Hussein can be denied the one defense he would inevitably make before an international court: that the greatest crimes of which he stands accused-the Iran-Iraq war, the gassing of the Kurds and suppression of the Shiites-were carried out with either the direct support or tacit approval of US administrations in Washington.

Whether Bush himself even grasps these political issues behind the US handling of Hussein is unclear. The image that came across in what was an exceedingly rare extended interview was that of a politically ignorant and vindictive individual.

His interviewer was Diane Sawyer, a virtual state institution, whose "journalistic" credentials are rooted in her having served as a flack in the Nixon White House and then having followed the disgraced president to San Clemente to help him write his memoirs. But even the gentle probing of such a trusted ally seemed to be an ordeal for Bush.

His peculiar facial expressions and nervous body language suggested an inner fear that each and every question would press against the outer limits of his scant knowledge, driving him to seek refuge in the few stock phrases that he has picked up from his speechwriters and political handlers.

Thus, when Sawyer opened up a line of inquiry concerning the failure of the US military to turn up any trace of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the pretext for launching the administration's predatory war, Bush became badly flustered.

Sawyer asked about his administration's claims that the Iraqi regime was close to producing nuclear arms and had hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons. Bush responded, "Look, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous person, and there's no doubt we had a body of evidence proving that, and there is no doubt that the president must act, after 9/11, to make America a more secure country."

When Sawyer tried to pursue the question, Bush replied childishly, "Well, you can keep asking the question and my answer's gonna be the same. Saddam was a danger and the world is better off cause we got rid of him." The former White House aide moved accommodatingly to a different subject.

In one extraordinary exchange, Sawyer asked Bush about his statement that his sole source of news is briefings prepared by his staff. "I get my news from people who don't editorialize," he said. "They give me the actual news, and it makes it easier to digest on a daily basis, the facts."

Asked by Sawyer whether he did this because he found it "harder to read constant criticism," Bush responded: "Why even put up with it when you can get the facts elsewhere? I'm a lucky man, I've got ... all kinds of people in my administration who are charged with different responsibilities, and they come in and say this is what's happening, this isn't what's happening."

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the US president's political backwardness and personal indifference to the world outside the White House. His disdain for reading newspapers reflects a lack of any ability or even interest in developing a political orientation based upon a study of competing interests and conflicting policies as they are reflected through the press.

Making such analyses is a key task of any serious politician, but Bush is not such a figure.

His subjectivism and limited intellectual capacity make him easy to manipulate. His subordinates and advisers feed him the "facts" that favor the policies they seek, and Bush, with his unconcern about political debate in the wider world, is not even in a position to grasp the aims of antagonistic forces within his own administration and staff.

Given such an individual as the titular chief executive, it is not hard to understand the colossal blunders the administration has made in its war in Iraq, policies that continue to cost the lives of both Iraqi civilians and young American soldiers on a daily basis.

Within US ruling circles, the fact that Bush is grossly unqualified for the position that he holds is well known. For the gang of corporate criminals that dominate his cabinet and serve as his principal political base, his lack of any knowledge or intelligence make him a malleable instrument for the pursuit of their profit interests.

Most thinking and compassionate members of the human race abhor George W. Bush--all that he stands for and all that he has done since his theft of the Presidency of the United States of America.

He has made Americans the most hated people on the earth and for that some of us will never forgive him.

D.G.H.

________________________________________________________________

Vatican raps U.S. over humiliating Saddam images

VATICAN CITY, December 16 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) -- The president of the Vatican Justice and Peace Commission lambasted Tuesday, December 16, U.S. occupation authority in Iraq for showing humiliating pictures of ousted president Saddam Hussein.

"I personally felt sorry to see this broken man treated like a cow as they checked his teeth," said Cardinal Renato Martino as he presented Pope John Paul II's message for the World Day of Peace, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"We should have been spared these images," he said, in reference to a video clip played by the U.S. army Sunday, December 14, showing a disheveled and bearded Saddam being poked and prodded during medical checks.

The American military announced Saddam was captured a day earlier during a military operation near his hometown of Tikrit a day earlier.

"In seeing this man in his such tragic circumstances, I felt pity and I hope that others felt it too," said the 71-year-old cardinal, who served for years as head of the Vatican's diplomatic mission to the U.N.

In clear criticism of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Martino said it would be "illusory" to think Saddam's capture would "repair all the drama and damage caused by a conflict that remains a defeat for humanity."

During the Iraq invasion, U.S. senior officials, topped by President George Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld criticized the Iraqis and Arab news channels for showing U.S. war prisoners on TV, calling it a war crime and threatening to hold Iraqi officials accountable.

Martino also hoped Saddam's trial would "contribute to the pacification and democratization of Iraq," asserting it must be conducted in "an appropriate place."

The issue has sparked a controversy with some saying he should stand an Iraqi trial under Arab-International supervision to guarantee a fair trail.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clarke expressed readiness Sunday, December 14, to act as defense lawyer for Saddam.

Law Of Force

In another development, Pope Paul criticized the U.S. unilateral invasion of Iraq without a mandate from the United Nations.

"International law must ensure that the law of the more powerful does not prevail," said the pontiff, appealing for the replacement of "the material force of arms with moral force of law."

In reference to the so-called war on terror, the pope said governments must avoid the "temptation to appeal to the law of force rather than to the force of law."

"Democratic governments know well that the use of force against terrorists cannot justify a renunciation of the principles of the rule of law," he said.

The pontiff also underlined that the "fight against terrorism cannot be limited solely to repressive and punitive operations."

The use of force had to be "accompanied by a courageous and lucid analysis of the reasons behind terrorist attacks," he said.

"The scourge of terrorism has become more virulent in recent years and has produced brutal massacres which have in turn put even greater obstacles in the way of dialogue and negotiation, increasing tensions and aggravating problems, especially in the Middle East," Pope Paul averred.

He underlined the necessity of "eliminating the underlying causes of situations of injustice which frequently drive people to more desperate and violent acts."

What's in a face?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time in 18 months today, December 11. The jubilation, greed and avarice evident in the above trader's face upon that closing bell say a great deal about what is wrong in America and in the Middle East today.

This trader doesn't give a damn about displaced Palestinians that have lived for more than 50 years in filthy refugee camps because Zionists have appropriated their ancestral lands.

Nor does he care that Americans and Iraqis died today while he and his clients were making money on Wall Street.

His grandsons are in all likelihood going to law school, medical school, or dental school and don't have to die in Iraq or Afghanistan, as do Iraqis, Afghans, and the children of the working poor of America.

This greedy old New Yorker is unconcerned about the plight of others. He made money today and money is his god so he is happy.

There are too many such as he in too many positions of power and influence in the United States of America.

The Medicare fraud and the decay of American democracy

By David Walsh

WSWS

9 December 2003

George W. Bush signed the Medicare reform bill amid great fanfare at a ceremony December 8 in Washington D.C.

According to the Los Angeles Times, "The ceremony was something of a holiday season party for the legislation's Republican supporters and leading figures in the health care industry."

The passage of this bill and its signing into law represent a devastating exposure of the state of American "democracy" in 2003.

The new bill, passed by Congress last month, marks a significant step toward privatizing and ultimately dismantling Medicare.

It places prescription drug coverage for senior citizens entirely in the hands of private insurance companies and health care plans, forbids the government from negotiating drug prices, blocks the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada, and subsidizes private health plans and insurers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

The long-term aim of Bush and the Republicans is to bankrupt Medicare, end all government regulation and control over the drug, insurance and health care industries, and create a two-tier health care system: a privately-owned and operated system for the wealthy elite and upper-middle-class, and a bargain-basement system for the rest of the population.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich admitted in 1995 that the right wing's intention was to let Medicare "wither on the vine." The Bush administration, with the support of the AARP (formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons) and the complicity of the Democratic Party, has begun the process of its destruction.

The most striking feature about this far-reaching measure, which will negatively impact tens of millions of people for generations to come, is the absence of any serious public debate, discussion or input. The overwhelming majority of the American population has no idea of what is in the bill. Many members of Congress had only a vague notion of the bill's contents when they voted on it.

USA Today noted December 8: "Health care experts and economists are scouring the bill's 680 pages, plus hundreds of pages of addendums, to try to understand the far-reaching changes and how new private-insurance options will work for seniors accustomed to Medicare's uniform benefit structure."

In the words of Thomas Jefferson: "The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate." From this standpoint, the Medicare bill is an object lesson in the putrefaction of democracy in the US.

The Bush administration and the media concealed the reality of the bill from the public. Only when its passage was a foregone conclusion did the media begin to consider its provisions and hint at its impact on poor and working-class elderly people.

Not until Monday, when Bush signed the bill into law, did major media outlets report some of its most regressive provisions-including large financial penalties for retirees who fail to sign up immediately for the "voluntary" drug program, and a ban on so-called "Medigap" insurance policies that millions of seniors presently rely on to cover out-of-pocket drug costs. (Such costs will remain under the new bill, which for most retirees will only cover between 40 percent and 60 percent of prescription drug expenses).

The Medicare bill, crafted by and for the drug, health care and insurance companies, was essentially enacted behind the backs of the American people who overwhelmingly support the Medicare program and oppose the privatization schemes at the heart of the new measure.

The Democrats, the supposed party of opposition, collaborated in this charade. They were incapable of organizing any significant resistance or exposure of its provisions. A number of leading Senate Democrats came out openly in support of the measure. At the signing ceremony, Bush singled out the support of Democratic senators Max Baucus of Montana and John Breaux of Louisiana. (The latter has received $65,000 in campaign contributions from pharmaceutical firms since the 1996 election cycle.)

In no country in Western Europe, and in precious few in other parts of the world, could such a far-ranging measure have been enacted with so little public discussion and debate. There would have been round-table discussions, television debates and public hearings. In the US, there was no such thing.

The level of corruption, bribery and criminality involved in pushing through this windfall for big business was remarkable, even by American standards. Public Citizen, the non-profit group founded by Ralph Nader, pointed out in a June 2003 report that "the drug industry hired 675 different lobbyists from 138 firms in 2002--nearly seven lobbyists for each US senator, according to federal lobbying disclosure records. The industry spent a record $91.4 million on lobbying activities in 2002, an 11.6 percent increase from 2001."

The report further noted: "Drug industry lobbying ranks include 26 former members of Congress. All told, 342 lobbyists (51 percent of those employed by the industry) have 'revolving door' connections between K Street [the location of corporate and legal lobbying firms] and the federal government.

"The Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents more than 100 brand-name prescription drug companies, shelled out $14.3 million last year, a 26 percent increase from 2001 and nearly double what the group spent in 2000. PhRMA hired 112 lobbyists in 2002, 30 more than the year before. ...

"Since Public Citizen began tracking the drug industry's lobbying activities in 1997, the industry has spent nearly $478 million lobbying the federal government. In that same period, the top 25 pharmaceutical companies and trade groups gave $48.6 million to federal campaigns. Well over $100 million more went to paying for issue ads, hiring academics, funding nonprofits and other activities to promote the industry's agenda in Washington. All told, the drug industry has spent nearly $650 million on political influence since 1997."

CBSNEWS.com reports: "Many of the group's [PhRMA's] members also spent millions on lobbying in the first half of this year, including Eli Lilly and Co. ($2.9 million), Bristol-Myers Squibb ($2.6 million), Johnson & Johnson ($2.2 million), Hoffmann-La Roche ($2 million) and Pfizer ($1.8 million).

"Overall, the industry has already spent more than $29 million in lobbying this year, more than any other industry, according to Political Money Line, a nonpartisan Washington web site. The industry enjoyed about $150 billion in US sales last year."

The pharmaceutical and health products industries have also made generous campaign contributions. The Center for Responsive Politics notes that between 1992 and 2002 these industries tripled their political contributions, from $8 million to $27 million per election cycle. The Republicans received 54 percent of this cash in 1992 and 76 percent in 2002.

George W. Bush received the most money from the pharmaceuticals and health products industry, with more than $466,000 in 1999-2000. The industry donated $10.6 million in "soft money" to Republican candidates during the 2000 election cycle, twice the amount given to the Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee and a doctor, has received $258,000 from pharmaceutical firms.

The Bush administration has close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Bush's father, the former president, was a director of Eli Lilly, as was Mitch Daniels, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld headed Searle, now Pharmacia, from 1977 to 1985. During the 2000 election it was revealed that Gail Wilensky, Bush's senior health care adviser, held $10.5 million in shares and stock options in health care companies.

Top officials from drug maker Merck and PhRMA sat on advisory committees shaping the administration's health care policies, including its virulent opposition to regulating prescription medicine prices.

One of the more brazen examples of conflict of interest involves Thomas Scully, the federal official who runs Medicare and "was intimately involved" (New York Times, December 3) in drafting the legislation to overhaul the program. During the time he was engaged in this effort, Scully was also "the object of a bidding war among five firms hoping to hire him to advise clients affected by the measure."

The Times goes on: "Mr. Scully has made no secret of the fact that he has been looking for jobs outside the government for more than six months-even as he spent hundreds of hours in closed sessions with House and Senate negotiators working out countless details of the legislation, which makes the biggest changes in Medicare since creation of the program in 1965."

The five firms are Alston & Bird, a law firm that represents the National Association for Home Care and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, among other clients; Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a law firm that represents the Disease Management Association of America, which made large gains from the new Medicare law, as well as the American Association for Homecare and the Federation of American Hospitals; Ropes & Gray, a Boston law firm that represents PhRMA, along with major drug makers including Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Novartis and Pfizer; Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a private equity investment firm which has invested in many health care firms; and Texas Pacifica Group, a private investment partnership that helped rescue Oxford Health Plans from financial difficulty while Scully was on Oxford's board.

Scully, who served as a White House budget official in the first Bush administration, defended his actions and said he saw no reason to recuse himself from work on the Medicare legislation.

The Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress allegedly resorted to bribery and, when that failed, threats to force recalcitrant Republican House members to support the Medicare "reform." Columnist Robert Novak in the November 27 Chicago Sun-Times reported on the experience of Michigan Republican Congressman Nick Smith, an opponent of the Medicare bill, during the last-minute maneuvers surrounding the close House vote on the measure. Smith, Novak wrote, "had never experienced anything like it." Novak continued: "House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.

"Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat."

Smith acknowledged the truth of the story, writing in a column November 23, "Bribes and special deals were offered to convince members to vote yes." Subsequently, he retracted the claim about bribes being offered, suggesting only that Republican leaders threatened to oppose his son's candidacy.

The entire repugnant episode surrounding the passage of the Medicare bill underscores the increasingly hollow character of American democracy. The rights, living standards and social conditions of the vast majority of the population are under ferocious attack by a ruling elite that shows no restraint. They cannot be defended within the framework of two right-wing parties that defend the interests of a financial oligarchy. The political lesson of this and similar experiences is the need to build a mass socialist party of the working class.

Universal national health care only answer

The United States of America should offer full cradle to grave health care coverage for all of its citizens. Period.

Any nation with enough money to go halfway around the planet and spend more than $400 billion to kill tens of thousands of people in the Third World for no morally justifiable reason should at least take care of its own at home.

Yes, we need "socialized medicine" and we need it now.

Bush's steps toward privatization of Medicare are in keeping with his administration's entire domestic agenda and should come as no surprise.

As with his tax cuts that were weighted to benefit his constituency of wealth and influence, this so-called Medicare reform bill will benefit a crust of excessively wealthy societal leeches to the detriment of the masses.

Physicians, pharmaceutical companies and medical insurance conglomerates--those that would lose their privileged places under a governmentally administered national health care system--will become richer still under the Bush Medicare plan.

And the poor will have to continue to skimp and save and scrounge each month to try to find a way to pay exorbitant medical and drug bills, lest they face collection agency action.

Business as usual for the selfish greed hounds now in the saddle in Washington.

It's a rotten system and one that will only get worse as long as Republicans occupy the White House and control both houses of Congress.

We as a nation are in one hell of a mess, folks.

D. Grant Haynes

November 25, 2003

Would all the adulterers in the Southern Command please rise

Concerning the following Fox News story, Captain Yousef Yee was charged with the serious offense of spying at Guantanamo Bay, but since there is apparently nothing of substance in this with which he can be destroyed, hypocritical Bush administration operatives are reduced to a smear campaign involving allegations of adultery and pornography to besmirch the reputation of this American Army officer who dared to profess Islam.

Shades of Monicagate.

Low down, hypocritical Republicans never change their colors. They are the same assholes today that they were in 1997 when attempting to destroy Bill Clinton on sexually-related charges amounting to nothing that was anyone's business or had any bearing on national security or his performance as president.

I would guess that the Uniform Military Code of Justice's adultery standard is the most selectively enforced statute in that cumbersome tome.

It is common knowledge that military men experiencing long separations from their wives and families often commit "adultery". Camp followers have been around as long as there have been men and armies.

What percentage of American military personnel committing adultery are being prosecuted?

I'd like to see all of the hypocrites involved in the present persecution of this Muslim chaplain be forced to reveal every sordid detail of their own adulteries and porn excursions.

Were this the case, there would be few accusers left to torment Captain Yee.

I despise hypocrites and America is the most hypocrite-ridden society on earth today.

D. Grant Haynes

November 26, 2003

________________________________________________________________

(From Fox News)

Yousef Yee charged with adultery

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - The U.S. military on Tuesday charged a Muslim chaplain accused of taking classified material from the U.S. prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with adultery and storing pornography on a government computer.

The new charges include making a false statement, storing pornography on a government computer and having sexual relations outside marriage, which violates military law...

The adultery allegedly occurred with an unspecified woman at Guantanamo and in Orlando, Fla., between July and September 2003, and the pornography was on his government-issued computer at the base in eastern Cuba, Duany told The Associated Press.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice classifies adultery as a punishable offense, U.S. Southern Command said... .

Why don't they call the entire debacle 'Operation Lie, Cheat and Kill for Oil' and cease absurd name games?

By D. Grant Haynes

November 18, 2003

Have you noticed that American military operations in Iraq must always come with a sophomoric label possessed of the ring of a video arcade cyber war game?

One is forced to ponder where and how the slogans are derived and to what end.

Under the umbrella of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", which began March 19 with a cowardly "shock and awe" missile blitz of Baghdad that indiscriminately snuffed out thousands of innocent lives, the abortive invasion and occupation of Iraq now sees a new "operation" launched weekly--sometimes daily--as the Iraqi resistance movement gains momentum and sophistication.

We had "Operation Peninsular Strike", "Operation Desert Scorpion", and "Operation Desert Sidewinder" in June.

Scorpions and sidewinders are poisonous creatures indigenous to North America. I suppose the point to be made was obvious in those cases.

Deadly North Americans had come to Iraq to poison the soil, air and water with depleted uranium dust and to kill the natives with the most sophisticated arsenal of weapons of death on the planet.

In July came "Operation Ivy Serpent".

The serpent imagery isn't difficult. Serpents are associated with biblical evil in the minds of moronic, hypocritical fundamentalists, and we know that George and his legions of such crusaders are bent on eliminating "evil doers" everywhere.

Muslims worship "idols" according to none less than Bush's deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin, so they definitely deserve to be eliminated as "evil doers" in the minds of Bush and his minions.

Also, a few serpents like the North American desert sidewinder are poisonous and can inflict great harm and pain.

Take your pick on that one.

But from whence the ivy?

Bush boasts of being a "C minus student" at his Ivy League alma mater, Yale University. Perhaps that's where the ivy comes in.

Or maybe the administration seeks to conjure the imagery of poison ivy, another dangerous North American species that can make life miserable.

Any sloganeered label to momentarily foster the bravado--rev up psychologically--the tattooed working class American kids that have to kill and be killed in these operations will apparently do.

In any case, and whatever the reasoning of the toadies that sit around somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon or CENTCOM playing with upcoming operation labels, there seems to have been a hiatus in the operations name game during the late summer and early fall.

Bremer and company were basking in the false assumption they had walked into Iraq without a further fight to set up a model capitalistic Western society that would put Bechtel and Halliburton into the empire racket early on.

But vast numbers of Iraqis had another idea.

Now that the Iraqi opposition to the aggressive Anglo-American occupation has bagged a few helicopters and otherwise achieved an average attrition rate of several GI's a day, we've had a resurgence of ominously labeled and highly hyped military operations.

And we're into the ivy thing again for reasons known only to the Pentagon and Franklin Graham's god probably.

During November "Task Force Iron Horse" has brought us "Operation Ivy Cyclone", "Operation Iron Hammer" and "Operation Ivy Cyclone II"--all in a matter of 10 days.

Cyclones are violent windstorms that destroy everything in their path and iron hammers can be utilized to beat the brains out of a man or a beast. The imagery makes sense. The occupier's intent is perfectly clear and they do it daily with 500 pound bombs.

But the ivy remains a mystery still.

Whatever the case and however the slogans are derived, the operations name game, like the war itself, is absurd and sick in its inception and prosecution.

No doubt more "operations" with more comic book simplistic labels will be trumpeted as the fortunes of the occupiers continue to decline and their methods of "democratization" in Iraq become ever more brutal and repressive.

Do these childish labels reflect the mentality of the American men and women being asked to daily risk their lives, as well as take innocent Iraqi lives, in this unwinnable war of occupation?

Unfortunately, probably so in many cases in the all-volunteer army with which America would feign to dominate the world.

But surely not with all American military personnel. There is an officer corps and there are educated individuals there. Don't they snicker? Or do they accept this manipulation of the enlisted cannon fodder over which they preside as standard operating procedure?

How long will military families, as well as the American public in general, be kept on the rah-rah bandwagon of false patriotism through meaningless labels that disguise a war of aggression against a small and defenseless Middle Eastern nation with the second largest oil reserve on earth--one that had done Americans no harm when this all began--one that had NO connection with 911?

How many aluminum coffins must come back to Dover Air Force Base in the darkness of the night before Americans waken to the reality of what BushCo. has done to their nation and to thousands of their loved ones (there are over 9,000 American casualties now), as well as to tens of thousands of Iraqis, for nothing more noble than hegemony and oil?

How long must this idiocy continue?

Call it "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and dress up each killing expedition with some absurd new label to capture the imagination of the young, the naive, the impressionable and the stupid. Do it until the cows come home and the Anglo-American war on Iraq will still be a filthy, brutal latter day episode of colonial aggression with no moral justification whatsoever.

Iraq was not involved in 911.

Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqis did not attack the United States of America.

George W. Bush was wrong in preemptively attacking Iraq against the will of the United Nations and most of the people of the world.

Bush's policies have bred terrorists--not eliminated them.

American soldiers should not be in Iraq in the first place and those there should be brought home as soon as possible, regardless of how much crow Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have to consume.

(Editor's Note: November 30, 3003 --We have another one, folks. Task Force "All American" is on the loose in Iraq now. God, that's such a brilliant one! "You have to be a football hero..." and all of that bullshit, you know.)

(Editor's Note II: December 23, 2003 -- Since the last update here, Iraqis have been dying at the hands of American soldiers in operations "Santa Claws" and "Iron Justice", among others. Of one thing we may all be certain; there is no "justice" involved in anything being done in Iraq by Americans at this time.)

A fitting commentary on the debauched state of America and overindulged, materialistic Americans.

Did anyone ever see an obese Afghani in a dusty and windblown refugee camp?

Probably not many.

Kick ass patriots in SUVs let the poor do the dying

ave you noticed that those still doggedly making the most ostentatious shows of patriotism usually drive $50,000-$75,000 vehicles, live in upper middle class neighborhoods, and have sons and grandsons in colleges and graduate schools?

On the other hand, the enlisted men dying in Iraq are predominantly children of the working class--often boys of ethnic in origin who joined the armed forces because they had no prospect of employment or money for higher education after high school.

It's a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, as in most of capitalism's meddling adventures abroad.

What is needed is a thoroughgoing egalitarian revolution that will see some equalization of the yawning chasm of growing inequities now characterizing Bush's America.

D. Grant Haynes

November 7, 2003

Advantage?

No, the U.S. does not have the advantage in Iraq because the U.S. is morally bankrupt in its policy there.

Right will prevail in Iraq in the end and the U.S. will withdraw from that beleaguered nation.

This, because excessive firepower and killing machinery alone are not stronger than God, good, the final arbiter in the affairs of men and nations.

No Supreme Being, whatever the nature of one's conceptualization thereof, will bless the dark, selfish, greedy, deceitful and brutal nation America has become under George W. Bush.

Failure in Iraq is inevitable.

_________________________________________________

"Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God." -- Gandhi

Greetings...

From Democracy Now! news briefs of November 5, 2003...

Pentagon recruits volunteers to fill draft boards

The Pentagon has quietly begun recruiting volunteers to serve on community draft boards in case a military draft is resumed.

There are approximately 2,000 draft boards across the country but the boards have been largely left dormant for the past 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War.

The Pentagon recently posted a message on the "Defend America" website seeking new volunteers.

__________________________________________________________

Should George W. Bush win a second term as president, and should Congress continue its spineless subservience to the Bush cabal, there is no doubt in this writer's mind that a military draft will be reinstituted early on in his second administration.

After all, no sucker nations have been found to provide cannon fodder in Iraq and Afghanistan and, clearly, much more will be needed for decades, according to the architects of America's new war on "terrism".

Perpetual war for perpetual peace, as one author has put it recently.

Children learning even now to hate Arabs through a new generation of shocking Arab-baiting computer games available on the Internet will receive their calls to the service of international capitalism before their first kisses in some cases.

And all too many will go obediently to their deaths in the deserts of the Middle East to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel and a hundred other slimeball multinational corporations already gearing up for the "reconstruction" of that which their aberrant champions in Washington are destroying for nothing more noble than oil and hegemony.

D. Grant Haynes

November 5, 2003

Bob Keeler: Beware attempts to revive military draft

By Bob Keeler

Newsday

Monday 22 December 2003

It has been 30 years since the last time an American entered the armed forces through the not-so-tender mercies of the draft, on June 30, 1973. The next time could be just around the corner, if President George W. Bush is re-elected.

No, no, no, a thousand times no, say the White House, the Pentagon and Congress. They insist they have no plans for a draft. In any case, take this to the bank: It will not happen before Nov. 2, 2004. Still, the rumors refuse to die, and it was the Pentagon itself that started the buzz.

Last month, on its anti-terrorism Web site, the Pentagon posted a plea for volunteers to serve on the draft boards and appeals boards that will decide whether men (current draft law does not affect women) can get deferments or exemptions. The law created the boards as an insurance policy, in case of an emergency need for more troops.

The Selective Service System--the civilian agency that registers men when they turn 18 for a possible future draft--had nothing to do with this announcement. But it did get a lot of applications for draft board membership as a result. (Hint: Opponents of war are also eligible to sit on these boards.) When the appeal created a flurry of stories, the Pentagon quickly took it off the Web.

At the time, an organization vitally interested in the draft, the Center on Conscience and War, got a flood of anxious e-mails and calls. The center's executive director, J. E. McNeil, did not see the incident as evidence of movement toward the draft. But in recent weeks, she has heard of rumblings, from the Republican side of the aisle in Congress, about a draft after the election.

In a perfect world, the Pentagon would reject a draft. It likes its soldiers willing and malleable, not angry and cynical. But the current situation is far from perfect. Despite the capture of

Saddam Hussein, young Americans are likely to keep dying in Iraq. Reserve and National Guard troops have been deployed far longer than they expected. This may soon start to erode enlistment and re-enlistment rates. At the same time, Bush's reckless preventive-war strategy could commit further troops to battles in other countries.

If Bush's policy keeps demanding more and more troops, and the supply of volunteers dwindles, it only takes a simple act of Congress to start the draft. That would be a profoundly bad idea.

As one of 230,991 draftees in 1965, I have some interest in this. When Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) proposed this year to create a fairer, more comprehensive draft, including women, it got me thinking about the issue again. If there were a draft, I felt, a lot of young people and their parents might have had second thoughts about cheering Bush's invasion of Iraq. Then I had a second thought of my own: Naaaah!

"There are usually two reasons for a draft," McNeil said. "One is people who believe that having a draft will keep us out of war. The reality is that the draft has never kept us out of war."

The second argument, which seems central to Rangel's thinking, is that a draft would make the military more equitable. It would pull in people from all strata of society, rather than just those who volunteer because they need a job or could not otherwise afford college.

Some even argue, against the evidence of history, that a draft would conscript the children of members of Congress. "During Vietnam, not one single member of Congress had a child who was drafted," McNeil said. "The reality is that the middle class and the upper middle class always have more options than the lower class in the face of the draft."

As the law now stands, once Congress activates the draft, it would be somewhat tighter and fairer than in the early Vietnam era, with fewer exemptions. Selective Service would leap into action, using a lottery to start by drafting 20-year-olds. But unless they make the draft age 55, to conscript war-loving lawmakers, "fair draft" is an oxymoron, like "smart bomb" or "friendly fire."

As divided as this country is now, a new draft would only exacerbate the division. And it would give this war-without-end presidency an endless source of warm bodies to pursue its cowboy foreign policy. Who knows what "October surprise" invasion Bush may have in store to boost his re-election chances in 2004?

Then the next step might be a "February surprise" draft in 2005.

Those wishing to know the truth about the "partial birth abortion" procedure Christian fundamentalists and right wing Republicans have been running off at their hypocritical mouths about for a decade or so are invited to visit the following WSWS link.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/oct2003/abor-o24_prn.shtml

This writer was certain that much was being left unexplained (like why such a procedure is necessary in rare cases) in the lurid accounts circulated by opponents of so-called partial birth abortions.

The WSWS has taken courage in hand and provided the medical explanation.

Bravo to them in this service to truth and reportorial integrity.

D. Grant Haynes

October 31, 2003

The Pentagon's Pope

The Guardian

Monday 27 October 2003

The troubles besetting Donald Rumsfeld, who is still the US secretary of defence, continue to grow. The blundering Pentagon chief was in hot water again last week over a series of church and prayer breakfast speeches made by his deputy under-secretary for intelligence, Lieutenant-General William Boykin. Among other things, Gen Boykin, an evangelical Christian, said that the US "war on terror" was a "spiritual battle" between a Christian nation and Satan and that God picked George Bush to be president.

Talking about a Muslim militant in Somalia who had claimed Allah's protection, Gen Boykin said he knew that would not work because "I knew my god was bigger than his. I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol." In the ensuing furore, Mr Rumsfeld declined to repudiate Gen Boykin's remarks, let alone sack him. Mr Bush, tackled on the issue by irate Muslim clerics in Bali, was obliged to state that the US was not fighting a war against Islam and that Gen Boykin's views did not reflect his administration's policy. Embarrassing the president in front of foreigners is considered a cardinal sin in Washington. Mr Rumsfeld may yet repent it at leisure.

Troubles rarely arrive singly. The Pentagon was sent to battle stations again after being accused of ignoring a pre-war state department study of Iraq. The study warned that US troops would not be seen as liberators, that serious security problems would ensue and that Iraq's reconstruction needs were being underestimated. Many of the study's predictions have turned out to be only too accurate, unlike the overly optimistic pre-war analysis peddled by Mr

Rumsfeld. But he would brook no opposition then, as now. The experienced army chief, Gen Eric Shinseki, was ridiculed for claiming that too few troops were being sent to Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld sacked another dissident, army secretary Thomas White, who has since effectively accused him and his officials of misleading the nation about Iraq and failing to get a grip there. He has minimised the concerns of serving US soldiers and reservists. Little wonder a nervous White House has moved to curb Mr Rumsfeld's powers.

A newly leaked Rumsfeld memo suggests the beleaguered defence secretary may be finally coming round to the notion of his own fallibility. He now admits Iraq will be a "long, hard slog" and wonders whether the "war on terror" is being lost. He now suspects, belatedly, that a long-term, non-military strategy is lacking. And he asks his top advisers to suggest what he should do.

Given his record of blunders, the answer is obvious.

White House bans news coverage of coffins returning from Iraq

WSWS

By Bill Vann

23 October 2003

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the Bush administration has ordered the Pentagon to prevent any news coverage of the bodies of US troops being sent home from Iraq. The blackout on casualties is part of the attempt by the White House to recast the nightmare in Iraq as a "good news" story.

"Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of US soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped coffins," wrote the Post's White House reporter Dana Milbank. "To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases."

In the post-Vietnam War era, the return of the remains of US military personnel killed overseas was generally treated as a solemn state occasion. The trauma over Vietnam and the deaths of more than 58,000 soldiers had forced a break with the policy that prevailed during that war, in which the phrase "sent home in a body bag" summed up the indifference exhibited by the US government toward the troops in the field.

Thus, President Jimmy Carter attended memorial ceremonies held at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the site of the military's largest mortuary, when bodies were brought back from the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran. Reagan pinned medals on the coffins of US Marines killed in El Salvador and attended memorials for the 241 Marines who died in the Beirut barracks bombing. George Bush the elder paid similar homage to soldiers killed in Panama and Lebanon, while elaborate ceremonies were staged to greet returning caskets at Dover, Andrews Air Force Base, Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany and elsewhere.

The military command and the US government have never doubted the impact of these images. Army General Henry Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented in 1999 that any US foreign military intervention would have to pass the "Dover test," meaning the public's reaction to photographs and news footage of caskets coming off of military transport planes.

The present administration has decided that it will simply not take this test. Instead, it chides the news media for focusing on the killing and maiming of US military personnel in attacks by resistance forces-presently averaging 25 a day-not to mention the killing and wounding of Iraqi civilians. Instead, it insists that the print and broadcast news trumpet supposed accomplishments, like the issuing of a new US-designed currency.

For the most part, the big business media has complied, keeping its coverage of soldiers' deaths to a minimum and not dwelling on funerals or the suffering of the families left behind.

While using aircraft carriers and massed ranks of soldiers and sailors as backdrops for his photo opportunities, Bush has treated the US soldiers in Iraq with contempt. There has never been an occupant of the White House so obviously indifferent to the deaths of American servicemen and women in combat as George W. Bush. With the Iraq death toll for US troops approaching 350, Bush has yet to attend a single funeral or memorial service.

Having acted on its own propaganda claims that the Iraqi people would greet the US occupiers as "liberators," the administration failed to properly deploy or equip US forces for what has become an ever more hostile environment. At the same time, US servicemen and women have been subjected to abysmal living conditions, in large part because support services were contracted out to politically connected private firms that failed to deliver once it became clear that Iraq remained a war zone.

The treatment of soldiers who have been wounded or injured in Iraq is scandalous. Those released from military hospitals, in many cases disabled for life, have found to their shock and anger that they were billed for their hospital meals.

At Fort Stewart, Georgia, where Bush staged one of his post-invasion appearances, using returning troops as a prop, approximately 600 wounded and injured reservists are being denied prompt medical care and housed under disgraceful conditions in World War II-era cinderblock barracks that lack running water or air-conditioning. Wounded soldiers are forced to walk 30 yards-in many cases on crutches-to a bug-infested communal latrine. They are obliged to buy their own toilet paper.

After several of the reservists revealed these conditions to the media, some 400 of the wounded men and women were lined up in formation Tuesday morning to be reprimanded by senior officers, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported Wednesday. "They said we'd be doing more cleaning up, more work, and to keep our mouths shut," Sgt. Dennis Stewart, a Terre Haute, Indiana firefighter told the newspaper.

Who are these soldiers for whom the president and his administration demonstrate such disregard? Overwhelmingly, they are drawn from the working class, in many cases joining the military because they needed a job or money for their education.

Specialist Simeon Hunte, 23, of Orange, New Jersey was shot to death October 1 while on patrol in Al Khadra. He is survived by his wife, a one-and-a-half year old daughter and a newborn son he never saw. "Hunte attended Montclair State University but did not graduate. He joined the Army to get the financial assistance to reach his goal," according to a press account of his death.

Analaura Esparza-Gutierrez, 21, was born in Monterrey, Mexico, immigrated to the US as a child of seven and was preparing to apply for US citizenship. An Army private, she was killed October 1 when a military convoy in which she was riding was hit by an explosive device and rocket-propelled grenades. She had attended Houston Community College in Texas, but joined the Army so that her parents would not have to sacrifice to pay her tuition. "She was always more worried about us than she was about herself," her father said.

Sgt. David Travis Friedrich, 26, of Naugatuck, Connecticut was killed in a mortar attack on a US base near Baghdad September 20. His mother said he had enlisted in the reserves to help pay for his graduate courses at the University of New Haven. He also held a full-time job in a factory before he was called up for active duty.

Ryan Carlock, 25, of Colchester, Illinois, was killed in combat north of Baghdad on September 9. He joined the Army three years ago to earn a living to support his wife and two children and to get job training. "He was trying to figure out his next move, stay in or go to college," his stepfather said.

A common thread runs through the biographies of the great majority of those who have lost their lives in the war and occupation in Iraq, one of struggle and sacrifice in the face of a shrinking job market and spiraling college tuition fees. The gulf between them and the US president is so vast as to defy comparison. Bush's admission and graduation from Yale University, like his avoidance of military service and the succession of well-paid sinecures that preceded his installation as president, were guaranteed by his family's wealth and fame.

For Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as for Halliburton, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips, the lives of these young people are eminently expendable, a small down payment in blood on what they hope will be a windfall in profits resulting from the seizure of Iraq's oil reserves and the looting of the US treasury by means of vastly inflated "reconstruction" contracts.

For American working people, the deaths of these young men and women is a terrible tragedy and waste. These soldiers, like the American people as a whole, were dragged into an illegal war based on lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and Baghdad-terrorist connections that were invented to cover up the Bush administration's predatory objectives. They have been kept in Iraq nearly seven months after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime under conditions of rising popular hostility to what is plainly an exercise in US colonialism.

The Bush administration is notoriously given to the belief that image is all that matters and that it can carry out any criminal policy so long as it can drape it in the flag and count on a pliant media to conceal the truth. While it may be able to stop the cameras from filming the caskets unloaded at Dover air base, the bodies are still coming home from Iraq for burial in towns and cities from New York to California.

As it becomes clear to ever broader sections of the population that these deaths were unnecessary and the result of what can only be described as a criminal enterprise, the demand will inevitably grow for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and a settling of accounts with those responsible for the needless killing of both Iraqis and Americans.

See the following link for a fascinating series of articles on the origins of "Christian Zionism", the mad eschatologically-shored theology that sees conservative Christians in the United States supporting the cruel excesses of Israeli Zionists in the Middle East. Popular fiction writers Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins are two vocal and influential proponents of this idiocy.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4959.htm

Americans who supported the unwarranted "Shock and Awe" bombardment and occupation of Iraq, as well as those who participated in it, will not find absolution or peace in their present lifetimes. Ali and tens of thousands of other maimed and dead Iraqis will haunt them for remainder of their pampered yet miserable lives of American luxury.

_______________________________________________________________

Ali's anger at U.S. pilot lingers

October 13, 2003

Iraqi orphan Ali Abbas says he hoped the US pilot who bombed his family would be made to suffer as he had.

The 13-year-old has been fitted with artificial arms in a London hospital after being severely burned in a missile attack on Baghdad early in the conflict.

Ali said he still had vivid memories of the night of the strike that killed his parents and 13 other relatives. He said: "I keep asking myself: 'Why are they bombing Iraqi people? What have we done to them?. I hoped that the pilot who hit our house would be burned as I am burned and my family were burned."

The youngster said he had mixed feelings about the British following his ordeal.

"When I was in the hospital they sent me letters, but they still helped the Americans," he told ITV1's Ali Abbas - Child of Hope, A Tonight Special to be screened this evening.

He recalled huddling with his family during the bombing, and later being stopped by the police as he was taken to hospital.

"They asked questions like: 'Where are you going? Where are you heading? Who is this?' Then I looked at my arms and I saw them gone. They said: 'It is a hopeless case, it's hopeless'."

Images of Ali lying in a filthy cot in a Baghdad hospital, close to death, shocked the world. The teenager, who is now looked after by his uncle, was airlifted to a hospital in Kuwait for treatment.

He was later brought to Britain where he has been fitted with two artificial arms at Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton, south-west London, a world-renowned centre for working with amputees.

He now has a cosmetic prosthetic on his left side and a state-of-the-art artificial limb on the right with an electrode touching the muscle on his stump to open and close his hand. Ali had a Manchester United tattoo specially put on the new right arm.

He now faces months of occupational therapy and, while he is growing, the limbs will need to be replaced at intervals. He plans to return to his country at some point, where he hopes to go to school and enjoy some "proper Iraqi cooking".

From Democracy Now! Radio, read a transcript or listen to the audio of a speech given by author and Middle East expert Tariq Ali October 14, 2003 in New York City. Ali, author of Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq, contends that America's occupation of Iraq is doomed to failure.

Tariq Ali

Listen to Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky each discuss the Bush administration's so-called war on terrorism at the following Pacifica Radio Democracy Now! audio links...

Roy -- May 13, 2003

Chomsky -- June 2, 2003

All Americans should be forced to open the following link and look at the file, notwithstanding that doing so may ruin a football weekend, a mindless and escapist movie, or some other bit of inane frivolity.

HELLO. It is time to WAKEN, Americans.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3450.htm

Tough talk from a guy who used family influence to avoid Vietnam; one who plays golf in Crawford, Texas, while the children of poor Americans die in Iraq...

He's right--we've been hoodwinked all our lives, folks...

__________________________________________

Rogues have no right to self-defense

By Edward Herman

August 15, 2003: (ZNet) The view that U.S. targets have no right to defend themselves from a U.S. threat or actual attack goes back a long way. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the United States was regularly intervening in its backyard to discipline the unruly natives, those who objected and fought against the Marines were always designated "bandits," even when the resistance "was organized, using flags and uniforms" (M. M. Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo).

The Vietnamese, in the 1950s and 1960s, resisting a U.S.-imposed puppet ruler and then a direct U.S. invasion, were always terrorists or aggressors in their own country in the U.S. official (and hence media) view, and as Leslie Gelb explained in defending the classification of Vietnam as an "outlaw," they "harmed Americans" who had come to subdue them (NYT, April 15, 1993).

Gelb, then Foreign Editor of the New York Times (and former State Department and Pentagon official), had internalized the imperial premise of a U.S. right to attack and dominate anywhere and for any reason, and the corollary idea that resistance to such actions is criminal.

One of the grotesqueries in U.S. imperialist history has been the regular U.S. practice of threatening some tiny backyard target, preventing its access to weapons from the United States or U.S. allies, and then pointing to the target's acquisition of arms from the Soviet bloc as proof of (1) their aggressive intentions and (2) their links to the larger menace of Soviet aggression.

This was a notable feature of the U.S. direct and proxy attacks on Guatemala in the early 1950s, Cuba from 1959 onward, and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In the case of Nicaragua, U.S. official claims of Soviet MIG fighters on their way to Nicaragua in November 1984--eventually acknowledged to have been straightforward Reagan administration disinformation--caused panic in the media and among leading Democrats, just as a shipment of small arms from Czechoslovakia to Guatemala had done in 1954. These countries had no right to try to defend themselves against ongoing U.S. efforts to overthrow their governments by violence.

The premise of the right to attack at imperial discretion implies that international law does not apply to the imperial center, but only to others, and of course the United States has taken this for granted for many decades. For the New York Times, "Providence decreed" that we should take over Puerto Rico (1898); for Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. adherence to the Monroe Doctrine "may force the United States, however reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power" (1904); and for William Howard Taft, the entire hemisphere "will be ours...by virtue of our superiority of race" (1912). Modesty has never been a characteristic of U.S. leaders.

The assumption of a right to use force anywhere and unilaterally was prominent in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but even before the Bush-2 era actions involving Iraq, U.S. officials never allowed international law to interfere with policy.

For example, in the Reagan years the International Court finding that the United States had engaged in "unlawful acts" and owed Nicaragua reparations was simply ignored, and the administration vetoed a Security Council resolution calling upon all countries to abide by international law! During Bush-1's tenure the United States not only vetoed a Security Council condemnation of the U.S. invasion of Panama, it maneuvered the UN into sanctioning a war against Iraq by fending off all negotiating efforts, and conducted that war in violation of numerous international prohibitions (e.g., cluster bombs, fuel air explosives, depleted uranium, burying large numbers of Iraqi soldiers in bulldozed sand, and deliberately destroying Iraq's water supply facilities).

Clinton carried on this great tradition, in the case of Iraq aggressively implementing the sanctions policy of deliberate deprivation of medicines and means of repairing the water system destroyed in 1991, with enormous civilian casualties, in clear violation of international law as regards the treatment of civilian populations. The "no-fly zones" in Iraq were not authorized by any UN resolution and the destruction and scores of civilian deaths resulting from U.S.-British air attacks on Iraq during the dozen years before the 2003 invasion were therefore criminal acts.

As with the Vietnamese daring to shoot at U.S. soldiers invading their country, so Iraqi missiles aimed at U.S. and British aircraft prior to the March 18-19, 2003 invasion represent unjustified "attacks" that "demonstrate Iraq's contempt for UN resolutions" according to Donald Rumsfeld (BBC, "Iraq intensifies 'attacks,' says US," Sept. 30, 2002). Iraq, like all other U.S. targets, has never had any right of self-defense.

The United States also takes upon itself the right to name rogues, as it has long done terrorist organizations and terror states. Naturally, as super-rogue, it does not name itself, despite its unsurpassed rogue credentials (see Richard DuBoff's updated listing of 27 recent U.S. rogue acts, which do not even include attacks on other countries, in "Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Biggest Rogue of All," ZNet Commentary, Aug. 9, 2003; also the longer and more far-reaching accounts in William Blum, Rogue State and Noam Chomsky, Rogue States).

It also excludes its allies and clients, just as it denies them terror-state status, no matter how excellent their qualifications. It is easy to see why the super-rogue has decided that it will oppose, possibly by force, any other country developing the capacity to challenge its military hegemony: this permits the super-rogue to behave like a rogue itself while self-righteously naming (and attacking) targets (i.e., alleged "rogues") of choice.

Super-rogue behavior has been dramatically evident in the Iraq sanctions, invasion and occupation. Super-rogue was able to impose punitive sanctions on Iraq that involved treating 23 million civilians as hostages to the demand for regime change for twelve years, in the process killing over a million of those civilians.

This was done with the cooperation of Kofi Annan and the UN, and with no outcry or protest from the "international community," media or "cruise missile left." Super-rogue was then able to invade and occupy Iraq in blatant violation of the UN Charter, after having made fools of the inspectors and UN, and he did this without the slightest penalty from the same "international community" that had punished Vietnam severely for invading Cambodia and overthrowing Pol Pot, an invasion that took place only after repeated attacks on Vietnam by Pol Pot's forces. Iraq of course had not attacked the United States or Britain and had no capability of doing so. In short, UN sanctions have nothing to do with principles; they only follow demands and/or approval of the principal (super-rogue).

It is now generally acknowledged, even by some U.S. officials, that the attack on Iraq was based on serial lies concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat that they posed to U.S. and British national security. It is also evident that the U.S. attack on Iraq once again involved the use of anti-civilian weapons (cluster bombs, depleted uranium), deliberate attacks on many sites where civilians were likely to be killed, and over 5,000 civilian deaths.

It is also evident that the U.S. government has violated the obligation of an occupying army to provide security and assure basic services to the civilian population of the occupied territory; that it came in prepared only to protect the oil ministry and oil resources; and that it has given highest priority to hunting for Saddam Hussein rather than assuring even minimal services to the victimized population.

But despite the illegality-plus-lie basis of the conquest, and the gross mishandling and illegalities of the occupation, and the obvious intent to rule Iraq directly or via proxies, the international community has not called for punishing the killers of over 5,000 civilians (plus innumerable other crimes) and forcing the aggressors-murderers out. Three thousand dead U.S. citizens on 9/11 was unbearable in the United States and aroused the deepest sympathy and understanding on the part of the "international community," for whom it justified a vengeance assault on Afghanistan and declaration of a global "war on terror."

But 5,000+ Iraqi civilians killed on the basis of lies is quite bearable, and the New Hitler will not even be deprived of the fruits of his conquest, let alone be subjected to sanctions. He is merely urged to farm out some of the management responsibilities to the UN and to move more rapidly to that democratic state that he belatedly claimed to be his objective in regime change in Iraq. But there are no threats or penalties for misbehavior, which is why super-rogue finds it so satisfying to be super-rogue and promises to use force to assure preservation of his super-rogue status.

And super-rogue can continue to set the agenda on "threats" for the UN and international community. The world's people may, despite control of the global media by friends of super-rogue, believe that super-rogue himself, with his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his continuing military buildup and drumbeat of threats to use force unilaterally, his open-ended "war on terror" being carried out in cooperation with junior-partner rogues like Sharon, constitutes far and away the world's greatest threat to peace, security, and even survival.

But super-rogue says that North Korea's and Iran's quest for nuclear weapons is a very very serious problem that amounts to "crises," and news reports tell of well-developed U.S. plans to attack these rogues and put a stop to their nefarious behavior. The Western media and even the liberals swallow this, agreeing that these are crises and major threats, with the debate over whether we can solve this problem by negotiations (the liberals) or must go in and "take out" the threatening weapons and/or regimes.

One pathetic liberal gambit has been to criticize the Bush cabal's focus on Iraq, which doesn't have a bomb, while neglecting the fearsome threat that North Korea in the meantime might be acquiring a nuclear weapon.

This inflates the threat of North Korea's possible possession of a nuclear weapon, which it could not use without committing national suicide. It ignores the fact that North Korea and Iran are compelled to seek such weapons because the United States openly threatens to use such weapons against them.

It ignores the fact that Israel has been allowed--even helped--to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal without penalty, and is permitted by super-rogue and the international community to do so, while countries threatened by Israel's weaponry cannot do the same without constituting a "threat." It ignores the fact that the super-rogue is the only country that has used nuclear weapons and now threatens their further use even more openly.

In short, the real threats today are not to be found in actions of North Korea or Iran, but rather in the U.S. rejection of the Non-Proliferation Treaty promise to refrain from the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states; its threat to use these and its other weapons in "preemptive" (in reality, preventive) actions against targets of choice; its self-exemption from international law; and its double standard support for Israel's freedom to acquire nuclear weapons while such efforts by Israel's opponents are intolerable.

The response of the UN and international community to these real threats has been in the same pattern as their treatment of the U.S. plan to attack Iraq. That is, instead of opposing the U.S. threats and plans of aggression against its targets, the UN and international community accept the U.S. premises that its targets pose the threat. And just as they rushed to accommodate the super-rogue with intensified inspections to deal with that monstrous threat of Iraq's WMD, they now rush to persuade North Korea and Iran to be reasonable, accept international inspections, and give up any desire they might have to acquire nuclear arms.

Once again those threatened by the super-rogue are not granted the right to defend themselves, not only by super-rogue but by the UN and "international community." But this failure to contest super-rogue's actions and policies encourages him to continue on his deadly path, and it will hardly deter his prospective victims from seeking to protect themselves.

(From World Socialist Web Site)

Release of Hussein son's photos: Washington exposes own barbarism

By Barry Grey

25 July 2003

The world was subjected to a gruesome and barbaric spectacle on Thursday when the Bush administration released photographs of the mutilated corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, ambushed and killed by American forces on July 22.

The American cable news networks wasted no time in displaying blowups of the bloody heads and torsos of the dead men and beaming the images into homes across the US and around the world. US government spokesmen and media commentators could barely conceal their glee at the sight of the shattered bodies, and their satisfaction over inflicting the pictures on a global audience.

Nothing the World Socialist Web Site could say would be a more devastating indictment of the degenerates who wield power in the US and their media accomplices than their own self-exposure. The overwhelming majority of people around the world, and especially in the US, will feel only revulsion and shame at this exhibition of sadism.

Whatever one thinks of the deposed Iraqi ruler and his sons-who were undoubtedly guilty of reprehensible crimes-the actions of the Bush administration in slaughtering Uday and Qusay Hussein and then gloating over their dead bodies demonstrate that the US ruling elite has nothing to learn from its enemies when it comes to savagery and contempt for human life.

Bush administration notables such as Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, justified the release of the photos as a supposed boon to the Iraqi people. The aim, they said, was to convince the Iraqis that Saddam's sons and right-hand men were well and truly dead. This, they claimed, would reassure the people that the Baathist regime was finished and would not return.

Not only that. It would, said Bremer, encourage ordinary Iraqis to come forward with information about the whereabouts of other Baathists (above all, although Bremer did not name him, the still-at-large Saddam Hussein) and demoralize those who are waging a guerrilla war against the American occupiers. Rumsfeld claimed at a joint press conference with Bremer that the showing of the photographs would save the lives of American troops.

Speaking in Philadelphia, Bush exulted, "Now, more than ever, the Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and is not coming back." The previous day, Bush stood alongside Bremer, Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers and boasted that the killing of Hussein's sons meant the US military was "on the offensive" in Iraq" against a "few remaining holdouts" of the Baathist regime.

To the extent that Bush and company truly believe such claims, they reveal the degree to which they are suffering from political dementia and self-delusion. The display of American arrogance and contempt for human sensibilities-let alone deeply felt cultural feelings about the desecration of the dead-will only fuel the hatred of the Arab masses for the invaders and their quislings within Iraq. Indeed, even as the photos were being broadcast, news reports were circulating about the death of three more American soldiers in Iraq.

Despite all of the "winning the hearts and minds" blather, it was impossible to conceal a more ruthless motive behind the release of the photos-namely, to intimidate and terrorize the Iraqi people and show in the most graphic manner possible who is "boss" in the new Iraq.

There are indications that the pressure to release the photos came primarily from the White House and the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, headed by Rumsfeld, not the military. On Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commanding Army officer in Iraq, told reporters the military was reluctant to release the grisly images. He was doubtless concerned about the ramifications of issuing the photos for the safety of American soldiers on the ground.

But that evening, Rumsfeld told reporters, "There will be pictures released," and on Thursday he claimed responsibility for the decision to release them. Significantly, the photographs were issued by Bremer, an appointee of the White House, not by the Army.

Militarism and criminality

The fact that those who wield power in Washington are blind to the mass revulsion that will arise in response to the showing of these photos highlights the insular and degenerate character of the American ruling elite. These traits are concentrated in the man who sits atop the government.

The political calculations of Bush and his associates, such as his chief adviser Karl Rove, are of the most crude and backward sort. It is no exaggeration to say they reflect a criminal mentality.

Bush's inner circle was intimately involved in the decision to massacre the Hussein sons and release the photos of their corpses. They believed that such a "success" would reverse the unfavorable political momentum of recent weeks, which have seen a mushrooming controversy over administration lies, mounting US casualties in Iraq, and a failing economy-the combined effect of which has been reflected in plummeting poll numbers for Bush.

The New York Times reflected the thinking in the White House in a July 24 article headlined, "Deaths of Hussein's Sons Allow Change of Subject." The author wrote: "With the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons on Tuesday in Iraq, a bad political month for President Bush got palpably better." The author went on to write that "privately, advisers to the White House said the development marked an important turn of fortune..." He quoted a top Republican adviser as saying, "But the death of the Hussein brothers has a tactical political meaning because it changes the subject from the 16 words in the State of the Union."

Role of the media

It will come as no surprise to those-the vast majority-who retain a sense of humanity and have not lost their political bearings that the American media played a particularly despicable role in these events. On Thursday morning, Jerry Nachman, the editor-in-chief of MSNBC, the cable news network jointly controlled by NBC and Microsoft, indulged in commentary with overtly racist overtones while photos of the shattered corpses played across the TV screen.

Nachman justified the showing of the photos on the grounds that the US was obliged to tailor its tactics to the mentality of the Arab people, who, he declared, routinely witnessed public executions and had come to expect public beheadings. He was seconded by the pundit of the moment, Con Coughlin, author of a book entitled Saddam: King of Terror. Coughlin opined that the display of the photos would "win respect for the Americans" in the Arab world.

On CNN, moderator Wolf Blitzer opened up the telephone lines for comments from the public, and was taken aback when the first caller denounced the broadcast of the photos as a moral abomination, and reminded him that among those killed in the American assault on Tuesday was the 14-year-old son of Qusay Hussein, Mustapha. "Why don't you show his photo too?" she demanded.

It should be recalled that during the US invasion, the Bush administration publicly denounced the Arabic network Al-Jazeerah for displaying photos of American soldiers killed and taken captive by Iraqi forces, calling it a flagrant violation of international law. The White House demanded that US media outlets refuse to broadcast or publish the photos, and the major media meekly complied.

The contrast to the media's current role in emblazoning the photos of the dead Hussein brothers at the behest of the government only underscores its corruption and subservience to political reaction and the Bush White House.

(From the World Socialist Web Site)

Friedman: We did it 'because we could'

New York Times covers up for lies on Iraq war

By Bill Vann

6 June 2003

In the face of a mounting international scandal over US and British falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction, advanced to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's chief foreign affairs columnist, has leapt into the breach to assure the paper's readers that whether Bush and Blair lied about WMDs is beside the point.

His June 4 column in the Times is a demonstration of the cynicism of the media-including its erstwhile "liberal" representatives-and its contempt for democratic principles.

Friedman declares that the failure to discover Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is not "the real story we should be concerned with." The question of WMDs was, he says, "the wrong issue before the war, and it is the wrong issue now."

The Times columnist argues that there is no point getting upset about the US president launching a war under false pretenses. This is a minor technicality. "Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason."

Curiously, one often raised reason is absent from Friedman's list--namely, Iraq's oil wealth. This is a glaring omission, coming as it does in the wake of statements from top administration officials who planned the war acknowledging that Iraq's possession of the world's second-largest oil reserves was the decisive factor in the decision to go to war.

Explaining why Washington invaded Iraq-where no weapons of mass destruction were found-while opting for a diplomatic approach to North Korea, which has openly touted its nuclear weapons program, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told delegates to a security summit in Singapore last weekend: "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

In an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz tacitly acknowledged that the charge of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons was a pretext. "For reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction," the Pentagon's number-two man said.

Friedman's omission is all the more curious-and damning-since he himself published a column in the New York Times last January 5 bearing the headline "A War for Oil?" in which he declared he had "no problem" with a war waged to gain control of Iraq's petroleum reserves.

In his latest column, Friedman writes, "The real reason for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough." Washington could have picked any Arab country, he argues. "Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could..."

Friedman is unabashed in his thuggery. His answer is worthy of any thief asked to explain why he mugged an elderly woman. Iraq was an irresistible target because the 1991 Persian Gulf War, followed by a decade of United Nations sanctions, continuous US-British bombing in the "no-fly zones," and the work of United Nations weapons inspectors had left the country virtually defenseless. And there was that small matter Friedman chooses to ignore: Iraqi oil.

Friedman is a fan of brutality and force, a taste he acquired while covering the bloody exploits of Ariel Sharon and the fascist Falange during the Lebanese civil war two decades ago. If the toll in human lives exacted in Afghanistan was not enough to balance the scales for September 11, why not slaughter thousands, if not tens of thousands more in Iraq?

The point, he suggests, is to terrorize the entire Arab and Islamic world, subjugating it to the requirements of Washington and Israel.

Having dispensed with the "real reason," he moves on to the "right" and "moral" ones. The "right reason" for the war, he claims, is "the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime." Such a regime, Friedman suggests, would represent an antidote to a supposed terrorist threat by serving as a "model" for "angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states."

"Partnering"--a term that generally describes two companies setting up a joint enterprise--is a strange word to use for what could better be described as plunder. One could as easily speak of Hitler's Germany "partnering" with the Poles to create Lebensraum in the east.

The contours of Friedman's "progressive Arab regime" that is supposed to serve as a "model" for all of the Arab "failed states" have already begun to emerge. Its principal foundation is the sweeping privatization of Iraq's state sector, beginning with its oil fields. Accompanying these measures, the US viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, has already announced more than half a million layoffs of Iraqi state workers.

Washington has made it clear that it will impose a "free market" economic model on Iraq-the same model that has produced a string of "failed states" from Latin America to Africa-regardless of what its people desire. This model will assure that the current mass unemployment and desperate poverty remain permanent. Politically, the regime will be a militarized puppet of the US.

The notion that such a state will inspire hope among "angry, humiliated young Arabs" is a measure of the appalling ignorance that merges seamlessly with Friedman's arrogance and bloodlust.

Finally, there is the "moral reason" for the war-the fact that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein repressed its own people. Never mind that the CIA helped bring the Baathists to power and provided them with lists of socialists and nationalists who became their first victims.

"Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any WMDs to justify the war for me," says the Times columnist.

The unearthing of human remains in Iraq was, according to Friedman, the irrefutable answer to anyone's questioning the morality of the war. That the bulk of these unearthed victims were Shiites, massacred with the tacit approval of the US government when they rebelled in the wake of the first Persian Gulf War, does not enter into Friedman's moral calculations.

Moreover, the unearthing of similar remains in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Argentina--all victims of dictatorships installed by the CIA and the Pentagon--apparently escaped his notice. Had he seen the skulls and skeletons at those sites would it have caused a comparable epiphany, convincing him of the immorality of US imperialist interventions?

Friedman proudly declares that whether or not any WMDs are found or even existed is for him a matter of indifference. The "genocidal evil" that he perceived in the mass graves uncovered after the war was sufficient justification. "But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq," he tells his readers. "Mr. Bush took the country into his war."

Friedman was never fighting his "own war in Iraq," not even in his own head. His job involved not fighting, but lying. After luncheon consultations with the war's Pentagon plotters, he crafted lying bits of sophistry to justify an illegal act of aggression. His specialty was to cloak a filthy and predatory enterprise in "progressive" and "moral" trappings.

The "Bush team," Friedman tells his readers, opted, "for PR reasons," not to disclose its "real reason" for war, not to mention its supposed "right" and "moral" motives.

Friedman, it should be pointed out, acknowledged during the buildup to the Iraq war that there existed no popular support for attacking the Middle Eastern country. In a column published February 5, he commented that he was "struck by an incredible contrast...between the audacity of what they [the Bush administration] intend to do in Iraq-a audacity that, I must say, has an appeal for me-and the incredibly narrow base of support that exists in America today for this audacious project."

An avowed advocate of war, Friedman found himself compelled to admit that in public appearances around the country, "there was not a single audience I spoke to where I felt there was a majority in favor of war in Iraq."

Faced with the same dilemma, the administration bombarded the public with phony propaganda about "weapons of mass destruction." It sought to terrorize the American people into supporting a war. It claimed repeatedly that Saddam Hussein's regime had a huge stockpile of nerve gas, biological weapons and possibly even atomic bombs, and was preparing to hand them over to the same band of terrorists that leveled the World Trade Center.

That this is no big deal for the leading foreign affairs columnist at the New York Times is itself a testimony to the degeneration of the media and the disappearance of any significant base of support for democratic rights within the ruling elite, including its supposedly liberal wing.

One only has to recall the furor unleashed by the Times, the Washington Post and others over Richard Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia, not to mention his lying over what his administration tried to dismiss as a "second-rate burglary" at the Watergate complex some three decades ago.

Now, confronted with overwhelming evidence that a US administration launched an unprovoked war against a country that posed no threat to the American people based on lies and fabrications whose like has not been seen since the days of Adolf Hitler, the response is to invent "moral" alibis.

Implicit in this attempted whitewash is the idea that the American people have no right to know why the government sends its soldiers to kill and die in another country, much less to exercise any influence on the decision to go to war.

This is not a new idea. Herman Goering, the number-two man in Hitler's Third Reich, described the same concept quite well in an interview conducted in his Nuremberg jail cell: "Naturally, the common people don't want war, neither in Russia nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship...All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Will this insanity ever bottom out?

The flagrancy of the illegality of the occupation and attempted subjugation of Iraq becomes more obvious and more odious each day.

In a civilized world and under the loosest interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, a large and powerful nation cannot simply overrun a small and defenseless one, kill tens of thousands of its citizens and soldiers, allow its museums of antiquity to be sacked, categorize its legitimate government officials as "wanted", and then declare the sole political party of the defeated nation to be outlawed, thereby rendering 15,000-30,000 former civil servants who alone possess the expertise to help put their shattered society back together ineligible to do so.

A nation simply cannot do these things in a world ruled by law--in a world in which any shred of justice remains.

Yet, the Bush administration IS doing these things in Iraq and each morning brings a more outlandish headline, while those that could make a difference--the Germans, the French, the Russians--fall into line behind this brazen thuggery on a continental scale, or remain very quiet for fear of reprisals--economic or otherwise--should they cry out against this ever-growing fester on the face of humanity.

I may be one lone voice and my opinion may be less important than a sparrow fart in Fargo, but I will speak out without fear of consequence.

Though a fait accompli of sorts now, the war on Iraq was and is wholly wrong, wholly unjustified, and wholly immoral.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Tens of thousands of men, women and children have been killed.

Chaos reigns in the streets of Baghdad with the entire infrastructure of law enforcement, sanitation, and utility services in shambles.

Cholera is becoming epidemic.

Iraqi oil is already being appropriated by the occupiers.

Iraq's museums and libraries of antiquity, as well as hospitals and colleges and universities, have been ransacked as American military forces looked on.

Iraq is in complete chaos and at the point of dissolution while moronic Americans buy tasteless decks of playing cards at discount chains with images on them of the last people who kept any order in Iraq. These men and women are now "wanted" , according to the Bush administration and the money-grubbing printers of the tacky and gimmicky cards.

Insanity prevails and my fellow countrymen are allowing and encouraging it by their overwhelming approval of continuing and unprecedented lawless actions on the part of their government.

Is there no one with the intestinal fortitude to say, "enough is enough--I don't approve--we don't approve"?

D. Grant Haynes

May 16, 2003

(From The Observer of Great Britain)

Troops 'vandalise' ancient city of Ur

By Ed Vulliamy

May 18, 2003

The Observer

One of the greatest wonders of civilisation, and probably the world's most ancient structure - the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq - has been vandalised by American soldiers and airmen, according to aid workers in the area.

They claim that US forces have spray-painted the remains with graffiti and stolen kiln-baked bricks made millennia ago. As a result, the US military has put the archaeological treasure, which dates back 6,000 years, off-limits to its own troops. Any violations will be punishable in military courts.

Land immediately adjacent to Ur has been chosen by the Pentagon for a sprawling airfield and military base. Access is highly selective, screened and subject to military escorts, which - even if agreed - need to be arranged days or weeks in advance and carefully skirt the areas of reported damage.

There has been no official response to the allegations of vandalism - reported to The

Observer by aid workers and one concerned US officer.

Ur is believed by many to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. It was the religious seat of the civilisation of Sumer at the dawn of the line of dynasties which ruled Mesopotamia starting about 4000 BC. Long before the rise of the Egyptian, Greek or was here that the wheel was invented and the first mathematical system developed. Here, the first poetry was written, notably the epic Gilganesh, a classic of ancient literature.

The most prominent monument is the best preserved ziggurat - stepped pyramid - in the Arab world, initially built by the Sumerians around 4000 BC and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BC.

The Pentagon has elected to build its massive and potentially permanent base right alongside the site, so that the view from the peak of the ziggurat - more or less unchanged for 6,000 years - will be radically altered.

Each hour, long convoys of trucks heave gravel and building materials through checkpoints and the barbed wire perimeter extends daily.

There are reports that walls have been damaged by spray-painted graffiti, mostly patriotic or other slogans, and regimental mottos. One graffiti reads: 'SEMPER FE' - Always Faithful - the motto of the Marines, who stormed through this region on their way to Baghdad, and form a contingent at the base.

Other reports by groups who cannot be named for fear of losing access to medical patients being treated on the base say there has been widespread stealing of clay bricks baked to build and restore the structures at Ur.

The Army Public Affairs office at Ur refused to speak to The Observer.

And the following derives from the government of a group of right-wing zealots who have been crowing and strutting about the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms for decades! I guess only Americans have that right, huh. There are two sets of rules in this world now. One for American good ol' boys and another for the rest of humanity.

_______________________________________________

US military tells Iraqis to turn in all guns or face arrest

05/15/03: Baghdad, Iraq-AP -- The U-S military is now telling Iraqis they cannot own or sell guns. Any Iraqi who does faces arrest, according to a new radio spot running in the country.

Lieutenant General David McKiernan, who is commanding U-S forces on the ground, says a new set of laws in Iraq are aimed at rebuilding law and order.

One problem U-S forces have is the tens of thousands of weapons Saddam Hussein's government gave out in its final days in power. Many ended up in the hands of looters or criminals.

McKiernan has issued a statement saying coalition forces will hunt down those people -- whom he calls a threat to everyone in Iraq. He is urging any Iraqi who owns a firearm to turn it in to coalition forces.

(Editor's note: This plan didn't go too well, apparently. There are a few guns left in Iraqi hands in Fallujah and other Iraqi cities in April 2004. D.G.H. 4/16/04)

Shhh...don't waken the children to reality

By D. Grant Haynes

May 2002

I viewed Hollywood's adaptation of Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County" recently. I had seen the film initially some years ago and regarded it as much ado about nothing for the most part at that time.

But I was struck in this new viewing more than before by the universality of Francesca Johnson's dilemma. Perhaps maturation and recent life experiences have generated a heightened understanding and awareness on my part.

Robert Kinkaid possessed a few of the qualities that have both inspired and dogged me during my middle years.

He was a rootless writer and photographer, as well as a keen and cynical observer of the human condition. Kinkaid had been far and done much. He had seen and experienced multiple facets of life and love and possessed limitless anecdotal knowledge of the world. He offered much to Francesca in terms of sensitivity, understanding, appreciation of beauty and companionship that she would never find on an Iowa farm.

But Kinkaid lacked Middle America's major indicators of success and worthiness--roots sunk deeply in one geographic location, a home and real estate, and most importantly, a traditional Cleaver family mind set.

Francesca reluctantly opted for the Cleavers, choosing security and safety over fascination, inspiration and love. She lived out her years with a boring Iowa pig farmer, remaining a lonely and empty woman with nothing but tattered memories of her brief encounter with Kinkaid.

Had I been writing the screenplay, I would have had her fling open that truck door and dash through the rain storm to head west with Robert Kinkaid.

For better or worse, that's the impulsive sort of decision that has governed my life more often than not.

But such actions and those who take them do not comfort the psyche of Middle America's puritanical heartland.

Though they know better from their own experiences and those of others, the majority of Americans--middle class protestant ones especially--prefer to keep their heads safely in the sand about life and the human condition, pretending still in a little house on the prairie dream world that probably never was--one that most certainly doesn't exist now.

All is well in this delusional world of make believe--one that's filled with Little League games, soccer moms, church suppers and PTO meetings. Marriage and family are still the rocks of civilization and the ostriches are "saved" and bound for Heaven. Their president, George W. Bush, is a worthy man with a commission from their God to root out homosexuality, abortion and Islam.

In my opinion, such as they dwell in the outer limits of utter darkness, living and dying without a clue about the past, the present, or the future. They're not living--they're merely existing in a state of perpetual denial, awaiting the flat line and the rude awakening that will likely follow.

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is termed resignation is confirmed desperation."

Francesca Johnson completed her life journey in this condition of quiet desperation. I think that's a damned shame. I wanted more for her. I wanted her to go with Robert Kinkaid and seek a few years of happiness and joy while they each hade time and opportunity.

America's love affair with guns, violence must end

By D. Grant Haynes

First there were the two students that were killed and the nine that were wounded by a fellow student at a Pearl, Mississippi high school in October 1997.

Then only two months later--in December 1997--three were killed and five were wounded at a Paducah, Kentucky high school.

And we all remember the horror of the Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings three months after Paducah when, in March 1998, two children, ages 11 and 13, opened fire from the woods, killing four students and a teacher and wounding 10 others before they were stopped.

A month later--in April 1998--a 14-year-old boy in Edinboro, Pennsylvania shot and killed a science teacher at a school dance.

And less than a month after the Pennsylvania shooting--in May 1998--America was rocked twice in three terrible days when news came of similar killings by teenagers at Fayetteville, Tennessee and Springfield, Oregon high schools. The toll in those May 19 and May 21 killing sprees was five dead and 20 wounded.

The insanity of free-wheeling murder by gun-toting students with real or imagined beefs against the system or individuals at American schools did not end in 1998, unfortunately.

The nation and the world are, even now, reeling in shock and disbelief in the aftermath of the recent massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

In that April 20 shooting rampage 13 people died and 22 others were injured or maimed by two disaffected students who later turned their portable arsenal that included assault rifles, sawed-off shotguns and handguns on themselves.

The talking heads on television and elsewhere are busy discussing all that is wrong in American society that could cause kids with one of the highest standards of living in the world to be so unhappy that they elect to take their own and others' lives rather than stick around and grow up.

They cite erosion of the traditional family unit and a loss of a sense of identity--of ties to family, church and home--as sources of the rage the kids are expressing with their assault rifles.

And the print media wags, many of whom are fence-straddlers plagued by a paucity of spine in the face of the conservative business interests in their communities, are busy writing hand-wringing statements attacking equally "safe" targets.

They wax eloquent about a need to return to "old fashioned values." They cite the culpability of the electronic media for glorifying excessive violence in movies and video games merely to sell more tickets and tapes and 30-second prime time advertising spots.

Much of what all of these Monday morning quarterbacks offer is probably true, but none of it addresses the most patently obvious message in the series of tragic shootings at American schools during the last 18 months.

By and large, the commentators tiptoe past the obvious with limited comment, lest the traditional power structure in their little domains and in this WASPish society in general become offended.

There are far too many guns in America.

Guns of all sizes, shapes, calibers and intended purposes are too readily available and play too important a role in the work, play, thinking, attitudes and personal lives of too many Americans of all ages.

Had the disenchanted youths who have done all the killing on school campuses recently not had access to handguns, deer rifles, sawed-off shotguns and even military assault rifles in their homes and communities, they could not have murdered others as they did. And many innocent people would be alive today who aren't.

America's love affair with guns and violence as a way to solve problems--with the frontier mystique that is a holdover from a past that no longer exists--must end.

The National Rifle Association's unhealthy influence in Congress and in conservative circles of business and industry must come to an end too. The NRA is an anachronism at the close of the 20th Century and, like their current spokesman, Charlton Heston, the organization should retire from the scene.

There will never be a cessation of the killings at America's schools--or a turnaround in a death-by-gunshot incidence rate in the United States that is greater than that of any other civilized nation--until the American home with a cabinet full of hunting rifles, shotguns and handguns becomes the exception rather than the rule.

No amount of baloney about our "constitutional right to keep and bear arms" should be allowed to eclipse or thwart what all Americans of common sense and good conscience must know in their hearts in the wake of the Columbine High massacre.

Some of the guns have to go.

(Written in April 1998 shortly after the school yard killings in Jonesboro, Arkansas of March 24, 1998.)

Don't blame the children

By D. Grant Haynes

Services had not been set for the five victims of the recent senseless violence at an Arkansas middle school when the tattered and, under the circumstances of the moment seemingly obscene, litany of the far right about gun control was heard once more in our land.

"Guns don't kill--people kill", these stalwart, self-appointed defenders of America were telling us even as we began to try to understand how and why two pre-adolescent children, ages 11 and 13, could or would set an ambush and murder with high-powered deer rifles four of their fellow classmates and a young teacher. It had happened at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on March 24.

And then there were the inelegant locals--a mayor, a sheriff, and assorted others--all thrust into a limelight they never anticipated and were ill-equipped to handle well. Their biggest concern--the overriding question being discussed by these "law and order" folks--revolved around how long the two allegedly murderous middle school suspects could be kept locked away from decent people.

What troubled the local commentators most was an Arkansas law that would see the boys released from juvenile detention at age 18, even if convicted in juvenile court. Many wished there was a way to try them as adults so they could be incarcerated for life--or perhaps sentenced to death.

No one was talking about the complicity of the adults and institutions in the world of these children that have been responsible for forging them into the insensitive and violence-prone little animals they and thousands like them have become in America lately.

The adult world fashioned these children into what they are and punishment for their heinous crime should be directed at the real perpetrators--not at the small boys.

Perpetrators like the grandfather from whose home three deadly hunting rifles and seven handguns were allegedly taken in preparation for the killing spree.

Perpetrators like the hawkers of violence as a simple and readily available solution to every problem in this society--from the makers of movies whose only theme is mindless mayhem and conscienceless carnage to the video game manufacturers who have constructed a virtual reality world for impressionable young minds--an electronic battlefield where death is as quick and clean and painless as clicking the mouse. SOCK! BANG! POW!--the opponent is electronically vanquished and there is no consequence.

Perpetrators like the lobbyists for the National Rifle Association whose inordinate influence in Washington prevents politically sensitive lawmakers from passing meaningful legislation to restrict the sale and ownership of death-dealing weapons of all kinds--the only common sense solution to the national tragedy of a firearm-related death rate among American children that is 12 times higher than that of any other industrialized nation on earth.

And finally, there are the legions of well-meaning but unenlightened American men who glorify killing as sport, teaching their sons that the right of passage into manhood includes "getting their first buck". They too are far from blameless in the dilemma we now face.

Rather than heap scorn and heightened punishment scenarios on the two fresh-faced school boys who pulled the triggers in Arkansas, the real culprits--the individuals and institutions that enshrine guns and violence and the bloodthirsty customs and outgrown rituals surrounding them as "sport"--should be manacled.

And the avaricious purveyors of the excessive entertainment industry violence that desensitizes impressionable children about the sanctity of life should be led away with them.

These long-overdue changes would be a just and fitting memorial to the five innocent people who gave their lives in a hail of hunting rifle fire on that Arkansas school ground March 24.

(Written in March 1998 at the time of the California primary election campaign that saw Republican Congressman Frank Riggs attacking Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, his anticipated election opponent in the fall general election, over her pro-environment stand on the Headwaters Forest controversy in Humboldt County, California. Riggs later withdrew from the primary and Barbara Boxer defeated her Republican opponent in the November election, of course.)

Headwaters deal a disgrace

By D. Grant Haynes

In a recent press release, 1st District Republican Congressman Frank Riggs of Napa chided Senator Barbara Boxer, his Democrat opponent in the upcoming U.S. Senate election, for not enthusiastically joining him and Senator Diane Feinstein (D) in the so-called "Headwaters" deal, details of which had been disclosed the prior day.

Riggs sought to characterize the tentative arrangement between the federal and state governments and the Pacific Lumber/Maxxam Corporation as a stunning victory for everyone--as pro-environment and pro-jobs--as an example of nonpartisan consensus politics at its best.

Riggs asked rhetorically and tauntingly in the release that fairly reeked of election year partisanship,

"But where's (was) Barbara Boxer ?". (At the time he and Senator Feinstein were putting their stamps of approval on the Headwaters deal, he meant.)

Maybe environmentally sensitive Senator Boxer was in her office weeping while the deal was being struck. Well she might have been. And well might all enlightened Americans have been.

The proposal, which is all but a fait accompli, but on which final action will not be taken until March 1999, would see 60,000 acres of old growth and virgin Humboldt County redwoods environmentalists have fought for a decade to save pared down to a mere 15,500 acres, only 7,500 acres of which would be protected in perpetuity as a public park. Some of the rest will be subject to minor logging immediately and all of the rest will be subject to logging after a 50-year moratorium expires under terms of the agreement.

The arrangement being proposed is no victory for the environment. It's a shortsighted sellout to a powerful and influential timber corporation that wants to continue cutting redwoods that were shading a sun-dappled forest floor when Balboa discovered the Pacific.

When one considers that human greed and shortsighted, rapacious logging over the past 150 years have already destroyed more than 96 percent of the unbroken canopy of Pacific Coast redwoods that once stretched from the present Oregon Coast to the Big Sur, what species of madness could justify sacrifice of three fourths of the pitifully small four percent remaining?

The hour is already late for the human race. The warning flags are flying. The ozone layer is depleted and carbon dioxide levels are steadily rising as planet-sustaining forest habitats continue to be destroyed precipitously. We as a species are apparently nearing the end of our tenure on this planet because of the very sort of greed and exploitation of the natural world embodied in the Headwaters deal.

But even at this eleventh hour for us all as a species, and in what is, arguably, the most progressive and environmentally conscious state in the most progressive and environmentally conscious nation on Earth, some politicians are willing still to strike deals with ruthless industrialists like Pacific Lumber/Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz of Texas who wants to cut a few thousand more acres of old growth redwoods in his time for no reason more noble than corporate profit.

And what use will they make of the lumber from those magnificent forest giants that have weathered 2,000 years of earthquakes and fires and climatic vagaries to still thrust their 300-plus-foot deity-affirming spires into the heavens? Will they produce some paneling to adorn an egotistical man's castle during his ephemeral span, perhaps?

How could any enlightened human justify cutting even one more of the few remaining ancient redwoods? It should never happen. Not for jobs. Not for corporate profit taking. Not for any conceivable reason.

Congressman Riggs, your involvement in the Headwaters deal is nothing to beat your chest about.

It's a disgrace.

Ashcroft should have read Jefferson

By D. Grant Haynes

I've long been weary of seeing Thomas Jefferson's brilliant prose in the Declaration of Independence appropriated by Bible-punching fundamentalist preachers as proof that the Founding Fathers wanted Jesus rammed down everybody's throat in the new nation they risked their lives to found in 1776.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," Jefferson had penned.

Elsewhere in the hallowed document Jefferson referred to the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God"-- a clear allusion to Jefferson's Deism or nature-centered conception of deity.

In another paragraph in which the signers sought to further justify their bold intentions, reference was made to the "Supreme Judge" of the world as the final arbiter of the actions of men.

Finally, in the last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson and the 12 other brave men about to affix their signatures to a document that would become their death warrants if the revolution failed, made reference to their "reliance on the protection of Divine Providence."

From the slender thread of usage of the terms, "Creator", "Nature's God", "Divine Providence" and "Supreme Judge"-- never "Jehovah" or the "Christian God" or the "Son of God" or "Jesus"-- Ashcroft and 10,000 other protestant preachers have since elected to conclude that their brand of militant, emotional, unreasoning, Pentecostal religious fervor was authorized by the Founding Fathers.

Nothing could be further from the case.

Jefferson, like many other American Revolutionary patriots (Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Crisis, for example), was a child of the Age of Reason, not of brush arbor frontier evangelism. Jefferson was a brilliant writer, philosopher, thinker and inventor whose musings transcended those of frontier preachers considerably.

Jefferson was, in fact, a Deist and his philosophy was more closely attuned to the Unitarianism of his day than to conventional protestantism. He was a friend and champion of English scientist and Unitarian pastor Joseph Priestley who had emigrated to America after persecution for his refusal to accept the concept of the Trinity and other trappings of the Church of England. The two thinkers exchanged correspondence for many years.

Concerning Jefferson's conception of the role of Jesus in human history, Jefferson biographer and researcher Martin A Larson, wrote in a 1977 work,The Essence of Jefferson, "...it is certain that he (Jefferson) regarded Jesus simply as a great ethical teacher and that he rejected all doctrines which attributed to him a supernatural birth, a divine mission, miraculous powers, a resurrection from the grave, or any expectation of a Second Coming. In short, his general position was nearly that of a modern Unitarian or perhaps a Humanist. In fact, in one letter he declared that he hoped the entire American nation would one day become Unitarian."

In a 1787 letter to a student contemplating religious study Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfold fear."

So where do Ashcroft and the rest of them get off appropriating Thomas Jefferson for their own purposes?

Interpolating from his writings, Jefferson would probably disapprove of Ashcroft's theology. And I'm almost certain he'd abhor George W. Bush's aberrant "faith-based" initiative proposal.

Jefferson biographer Larson wrote, "In every way and at all times, Jefferson's watchword ... was the unlimited freedom of the human mind. And let us note that when he said he had sworn on the altar of God eternal enmity against every form of tyranny over the mind of man, the declaration was directed, not at the English government or the hated financiers, but toward two Protestant denominations which were attempting to drive from educational institutions those who would not subscribe to their dogmas."

Above all else Mr. Jefferson of Monticello wanted the federal government to maintain an impenetrable chasm of separation from sectarian organizations, however successful or unsuccessful, popular or unpopular, politically correct or incorrect, sensible or foolish, a given denomination might appear to be.

I wish that George W. Bush was as wise.

Will failure to exhibit sufficient 'love of country' become actionable offense in John Ashcroft's revised America?

By D. Grant Haynes

Attorney General John Ashcroft was quoted by the Associated Press following John Walker Lindh's Feb. 5 federal grand jury indictment as saying, "Americans who love their country do not dedicate themselves to killing Americans"...

That's a reasonable enough statement on the surface, though I am not aware of a federal law requiring an American to "love his country". I suspect we all love our country in varying degrees and in varying ways according to our life experiences in our country.

One might contribute a broadening ancillary phrase to the dialog by noting that "humanitarians who love their fellow men and respect all life do not dedicate themselves to developing ever more sophisticated and efficient means of exterminating others in callous disregard of the sanctity of all life."

Be that as it may be and returning to the matter at hand, Ashcroft's amorphous catch-all, say nothing phrase, "love their country", could be expanded in dangerous ways by a fascist state bent on stifling criticism and opposition.

Some "love of country" possibilities we may soon hear come readily to mind...

Americans who love their country don't criticize its leaders or their policies in times of war. (Remember that the war on terrorism is expected to last for decades.)

Americans who love their country volunteer for military service.

Americans who love their country protect 2nd Amendment freedoms by joining the National Rifle Association.

Americans who love their country protect the free enterprise system and the American way of life by voting Republican.

Americans who love their country buy flags, bumper stickers, window decals and lawn signs in the patriotic section between the plastic flowers and the rotting bananas at their local discount center and display them prominently.

Is it possible we are only a step away from lockstep conformity and intimidation in the United States in which failure to exhibit outward and visible manifestations of "love of country" -- i.e., lapel pins, flags, bumper stickers, and other pseudo-patriotic plasticized paraphernalia--becomes an actionable offense--a litmus test, passage of which protects us from federal, state and local profiling, harassment and prosecution?

After the "love of country" fascist curtailment of liberty and free speech in the name of patriotism has been accomplished by the Bush administration, will the next prerequisite to remain in favor with Ashcroft be a public profession of "love for Jesus"? We know his Savior is always on his mind.

Who would be surprised at anything now, considering the vast curtailments in civil liberties already adopted by Congress without discussion in the post-911 hysteria of these troubling times?

I love much about my country, but I don't love the direction it has taken since being hijacked in December 2000 by George W. Bush with the help of the infamous felonious five Supreme Court justices that facilitated the coup. Nothing has gone well nationally or internationally since that ill-fated subversion of the democratic process.

A personal commentary

It's not that McVeigh was right in what he did, but that the executioner was equally as wrong in what he did

By D. Grant Haynes

June 11, 2001

Timothy McVeigh, 33, was executed by lethal injection this morning at 7 a.m. CDT as he lay strapped onto a death chamber gurney at a maximum security federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

McVeigh's execution came six years after he allegedly master-minded a plot to bomb the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. That act led to the deaths of 168 individuals.

If capital punishment is a legitimate, viable and morally acceptable solution to criminal activity, few individuals have been more deserving of the death penalty than McVeigh.

But I do not believe capital punishment--the planned and premeditated murder by the state of an individual as retribution for wrongs committed against society by that individual--is a legitimate, viable and morally acceptable solution to criminal activity.

The logic of an execution--that a second wrong deed meted out by society to the criminal for what that person did wrong will balance the ledger and produce equity--is illogical. Two wrongs do not constitute a right.

Capital punishment administered by the state is a reaffirmation that violence and death are a logical and justifiable way to solve a problem. They are not.

McVeigh's criminal act was unspeakably terrible and should not be minimized. But his murder this morning by the federal government was equally reprehensible.

Premeditated destruction of a life--whether by lethal injection, electrocution, hanging, firing squad or a bomb such as McVeigh is said to have used in Oklahoma City--is always wrong.

There are simply too many unfathomable moral issues involved that are beyond the purview of man's present wisdom, knowledge and understanding for the state to assume the heady posture of being the arbiter of life and death.

In the first place, the perceived culpability of the one being executed is almost always linked to a greater or lesser degree to transitory human concepts that typically are built on the quick sands of religious zealotry, myopic nationalism, racism and the darkest elements of hatred and revenge.

From a universal or cosmic perspective, if not a 21st Century nationalistic American one, Timothy McVeigh was (and is) no more guilty of murder than crew members of the Enola Gay who incinerated 140,000 men, women and children in a microsecond on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima, Japan.

From that broader perspective, McVeigh is no more guilty of murder than the nameless and numberless crews of high-flying B-52's that bombed North Vietnamese hamlets and all their cringing inhabitants into cratered oblivion during the Vietnam War--a war we now know had no purpose, solved no problems, and was a mistake from the outset.

McVeigh was a decorated Gulf War hero who probably learned to use explosives to kill at the direction of the U.S. military in preparation for his role in the extermination of thousands of Iraqi soldiers during "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf's little Mideast turkey shoot a decade ago.

He was commended with a Bronze Star for killing in Iraq in a national statement to Saddam Hussein, but he was executed for killing in Oklahoma City in a personal statement to his own government.

My objective is not to defend McVeigh's terrible act in Oklahoma City, but only to point out that one man's villain is another man's hero in human life. It's always a matter of perspective--nothing more.

In any case, Timothy McVeigh is okay today.

He drifted harmlessly and painlessly out of Terre Haute's grim death chamber and to another reality and energy system even as his executioners, their unheroic deed accomplished, unstrapped his lifeless body from the gurney under the cold gaze of closed circuit television.

The television system had enabled family members of his victims to watch the unseemly spectacle--allegedly to achieve "healing and closure". I suspect, however, that some who viewed this morning's macabre event in Terre Haute are more disturbed than healed by what they saw.

Well they should be.

Watching a man die will lend no healing to anyone and any vengeful observer of this morning's execution who now professes healing as a result of watching McVeigh die is in as much need of rehabilitation as is McVeigh.

Timothy McVeigh has many lessons to learn and taskmasters wiser than earth plane judges and prison yard executioners will oversee his progress. But he still possesses boundless opportunities to correct his mistakes and retrace his errant footsteps, as do we all.

Timothy McVeigh is not in fundamentalism's imagined "hell" today, as much as some of the most unenlightened members of the American public hope and affirm in their ignorant chortles.

He is in the same locale they too--indeed, all of us--will be in during early stages of the transition from the earth life plane to another energy system when we "die".

McVeigh's impending life review will be a stern one and future lessons he'll have to learn may differ from those some of the rest of us will encounter, but only by degree.

The process will be essentially the same for us all.

Sinners and saints--beggars and CEO's--even executioners who spent their lives here premeditatedly murdering men strapped to gurneys or electric chairs--will continue to grow and learn and change and evolve until the dross is separated from the gold and a more perfect man is realized.

(Written in February 1998 at the time of the execution of Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, but of renewed interest now in light of George W. Bush's selection as president.)

Karla Faye leaves death row

By D. Grant Haynes

On February 3, 1998 at around 6:30 p.m. in Texas 38-year-old convicted murderess Karla Faye Tucker went quietly--almost serenely, observers said--to her death in Huntsville at the state's maximum security prison.

Karla Faye had been convicted 14 years earlier for her role in a brutal 1983 Houston double murder. She had never protested her innocence through the years of appeals that eventually ran out after going all the way to the Supreme Court. She admitted participation in the crime.

The basis of her legal plea that her life be spared, and of the humanitarian pleas of an impressive array of champions ranging all the way to Pope John Paul II, was that she had undergone a Christian conversion and was not the same woman she had been 15 years before when, high on drugs and at the culmination of a childhood of neglect and abuse, she and a now-dead partner killed two people.

And there was abundant evidence she had indeed had a monstrous childhood of neglect and abuse.

There was also convincing evidence she had been genuinely transformed by her Christian conversion and that she probably would spend the rest of her life, whether in prison or out, appealing to others not to make the mistakes she had made.

After all, her champions said, was this not the central theme of Christianity--that goodness and love and Christly compassion can overcome evil--that forgiveness can be obtained and that redemption of a sinner is possible? It was a convincing argument--especially in a state like Texas--so replete with conservative Christian congregations that pay lip service to these notions every Sunday.

But in the end, conservative Texans would have no part of it. Karla Faye's last chance to live slipped away when Texas Governor George W. Bush elected not to intervene during the final hours prior to the lethal injection.

Karla Faye Tucker is gone. (One can hope to a pleasanter realm than Texas' drear death row cell block where she spent so much of her adult life.) But the philosophical, moral and religious issues raised by her highly publicized case are not gone and will not go away soon.

The case has brought the whole ugly specter of capital punishment before the public gaze in a way few other executions have in recent years. I believe the Tucker case will be pivotal and that Americans will move to an eventual revulsion at the prospect of capital punishment as a solution to societal problems.

There was a time when this writer would have championed capital punishment. But I am no longer there. My changed consciousness will no longer allow me to be comfortable with capital punishment.

Now, I know I would not want to be the one--indeed, I could not be the one--to pull the switch--or begin the drip of the lethal drugs into a Karla Faye Tucker's arm. Could you? If your answer is, like mine, a resounding "no", then we're each guilty of hypocrisy for condoning--not speaking out against--a societal solution we cannot accept personally--one we've outgrown in our individual journeys. We're letting the archetypal hangman with the black hood from our violent past as a species perform a ritual that is no longer ours.

In my opinion, to premeditatedly take the life of another creature--another repository of the divine spark--whether for food or for fur or in retribution for their own wrongdoing in the case of a human is morally reprehensible.

On a purely pragmatic level, and concerning human justice, an overwhelming case can be made against capital punishment. Like the gross imperfections in the present system--one that has seen people executed who were later proven to have been innocent of the crime for which they gave their lives.

One in which the money, prestige, glamour and potential for societal disruption if convicted sees a man like O.J. Simpson go free, while an unimportant little Texas white trash nobody like Karla Faye Tucker has to mount the gurney and keep her appointment with death.

No, our justice system is too imperfect--too flawed--too unequal in application--too sensitive to political whims at times--for us, collectively, to take on the heady task of deciding who should live and who should die and how and when such justice should be administered. I doubt we have earned the right. I want no part of it.

We as a nation and as a species should not be in the death business--not for the Karla Faye Tuckers of the human race or for any of the millions of other sentient creatures over whom we arrogantly imagine ourselves to have fleeting dominion. A solution must be found to our blood lust as a species.

What a difference a year can make

By D. Grant Haynes

September 1999

Back East the President and Mrs. Clinton stroll the streets of Skaneateles, New York, hand-in-hand, looking for a post-presidential home.

Meanwhile, down South...

Former Republican House Majority leader Newt Gingrich dodges reporters' questions in Georgia about the recently-released details of a divorce settlement with his second wife--one in which the name of a former female aide figures prominently.

And over in Arkansas Senator Tim Hutchinson, an ordained minister who once pastored a congregation in Northwest Arkansas, stiffly refers reporters to a previously-released statement about his now-finalized divorce with his wife of decades, Donna Hutchinson. There too, the role of a certain other woman has been whispered.

And a flurry of new-old aphorisms--universally applicable rules of human conduct--come to the minds of many of us.

How about the biblical injunction, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"?

Or, "For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known"?

More to the point perhaps, "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye...."

Or, in the vernacular, "What goes around comes around."

Folks, there has to be a degree of poetic justice in all of this.

Do you recall what this nation and its president were enduring a year ago in the impeachment proceeding?

Do you remember how then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich of Georgia, along with Senator Hutchinson's brother, Asa, Republican Congressman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and a dozen other self-righteous young Republican lions persecuted our president week after week after wearying week as the summer drifted into fall?

They crucified Bill Clinton endlessly, delivering countless impassioned prosecutorial pleas on the floor of the House and then the Senate about the President's alleged lack of moral leadership--about his forfeiture of the right to lead the nation again because of his admitted adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The President had slipped. He had made a foolish mistake of an extremely embarrassing and personal nature with a woman young enough to be his daughter and his Republican persecutors would not let it go.

They sought blood. They were unrelenting, showing no mercy and no good taste even in forcing every lurid detail to be published, hashed and rehashed.

They were just plain mean-spirited in their frenzy to get the President while he was against the ropes, as it were.

We who supported President Clinton throughout the impeachment ordeal saw the pain and strain in his haggard face at that dark hour in his career and we prayed that he be given the strength to endure and to survive his trial by fire.

He was given the strength and he did endure and he did survive.

President Clinton has since exonerated himself to a large degree, demonstrating again his remarkable capacity for bouncing back.

He showed world class leadership with his steel and determination to do the right thing in the Kosovo crisis. Even his most partisan critics have found little to fault in his performance as leader of the predominant NATO nation in the Kosovo outcome.

President and Mrs. Clinton are okay. Whatever their differences and problems, they've worked them out and are purchasing a home in New York State as a base for the First Lady's likely political career there.

And where are some of the President's meanest former critics now--the Hutchinsons and Gingriches who preached sanctimoniously during the summer of 1998 about morality and family values and of the President's great moral flaws?

They're squirming before the cameras and recorders in their own little personal hells created by their hypocrisy. They're trying to explain why they, like Bill Clinton, are human and have flaws.

Meanwhile, Hillary and Bill stroll the shady, leaf-strewn fall streets of Skaneateles--their well-wishers--the wise people of Middle America who never had any stomach for the impeachment circus anyway--thronging them in adoration.

Indeed, what a difference a year can make.

(Written in the fall of 1998)

GOP sought a Monicagate for years

By D. Grant Haynes

Before it was Monica and "perjury" it was Chinagate. And before Chinagate it was filegate. And before filegate it was travelgate. And before Chinagate, filegate and travelgate, there was Whitewater.

The same mean-spirited coterie of sore-losing hypocritical conservatives have been out to get Bill Clinton since the day he won the presidency. Their minions at the grass roots level are the ones who drove around with "Don't Blame Me--I Voted For Bush" bumper stickers on their vehicles for years after the 1992 election.

These individuals and the ideological groupings they represent have hated the President from the outset--not because of his personal standards of conduct (theirs are probably no better, and they could care less anyway)--but because he initiated programs and supported initiatives that would see them lose a few of their cherished advantages in American society. He represented the changes they did not want to see occur.

He wanted health care reform to establish minimal care levels for all Americans at the expense of some of the profits of physicians' groups and the drug and insurance companies whose CEO's are amassing fortunes while millions have no medical services available at all. He and his lovely wife proposed a reform package and those with a vested interest in the status quo did not want the Clinton health care reform to succeed.

They mocked Hillary Clinton for her efforts with various stupid jokes and bumper stickers that disparaged the First Lady as usurping her husband's role.

President Clinton and his able vice-president, Al Gore of Tennessee, wanted environmental legislation that would save redwood trees and endangered species at the expense of selfish and rapacious lumber giants like Pacific Lumber/Maxxam Corporation in Northern California.

Those interests hated him and his "green" legislation from the outset because they wanted to continue cutting the few remaining groves of ancient redwoods in the name of jobs, progress, and corporate profit.

And, again, there were no perjury charges and there was no Monica Lewinsky in the picture at that time, but those who opposed everything our handsome, successful Democratic president was seeking to accomplish still opposed him for purely selfish and partisan reasons.

Now, in this hour of great political peril for the President, the amoral sharks who opposed him all along anyway and on general principles, smell blood in the water and are joining hypocritically with a rag-tag coalition of moral majority preachers, beer-guzzling rednecks, and cowardly politicians from both sides of the aisle in Congress (politics does indeed make strange bed fellows) to call for Clinton's destruction.

They cloak themselves in the flag, the Constitution and the Bible as they speak gravely about the "rule of law" and "moral authority" and "doing what is right". When did any of them adhere to such lofty moral dictums in the marketplace or in their own personal affairs? Not often.

Bill Clinton--this president of the people--has fought for the people and against the vested business interests most often represented by the Republican Party in this nation throughout his six years in the White House.

Seemingly, what anguished his enemies most was that he did it so well! Despite the unrelenting opposition of congressional Republicans on much that he tried to do, he had unparalleled success in balancing the budget and in establishing a climate of prosperity in America that none could fault. Crime rates started down. The stock market started up. But the enemies of the President never gave up in their relentless search for a chink in his armor.

When his opponents could establish nothing of substance with which to crucify him after years of delving into Whitewater and travelgate and Chinagate and God only knows how many other probes that never saw the light of day, they turned to his one area of known weakness--his Achilles' heel, as it were--women and his tendency toward extramarital dalliance.

They spent four years and $45 million trying to trip him up about the details of something that never should have been any of their or our business in the first place.

After all the time, money and energy diverted to the Starr investigation, all Starr and the Republicans have or ever had is a charge of perjury about the details of an adulterous affair that should never have been the subject of an investigation in any case.

That's one heck of a flimsy reason for deposing a president. But that's all we taxpayers have to show for the $45 million used in Starr's diligent undertaking into salacious voyeurism and what followed in the House of Representatives and is now moving to the Senate.

Sadly, however, in the course of Starr's absurd Independent Counsel inquisition show we as a nation have lost face internationally. Not because of the president's unsavory liaison with Lewinsky, but rather because in almost every other society on earth sex is seen as a natural function of human beings--not as the "filthy, dirty, evil, sweaty and sinful little thing" of Jerry Falwell's dreary and repressed world.

Europeans and others cannot understand the puritanical preoccupation here with the essential "naughtiness" of sex. Many there have not a clue how President Clinton--a remarkably successful leader of the most powerful nation on earth--could face the possibility of impeachment and all the disruption that would bring to the entire world because of a sexual indiscretion. Europeans, who are accustomed to seeing their heads of state involved in such activities without penalty or serious notice, are incredulous that Americans are so caught up in this essentially unimportant matter.

President Clinton made some serious errors of judgment, but he has acknowledged this and apologized to the nation and other affected parties. Beyond that, the matter should have been dropped and he should have been allowed to resume what he does so very well--be presidential and lead this nation.

The present course--an insane impeachment trial in the Senate of a man who has committed no high crimes and no misdemeanors worthy of consideration as impeachable offenses and who enjoys the approbation and approval of more than 70 percent of Americans in their wisdom and common sense--will go nowhere.

But it will distract the President and the nation from the important business at hand--health care reform, social security reform, minimum wage adjustment, and other causes that would make life easier for ordinary Americans while cutting the profit margins of the selfish asses who control the GOP and who have wanted Bill Clinton destroyed for six years.

(From the October 8, 2001, edition of the London Guardian)

The West's arrogant assumption of its superiority dangerous as any other form of fundamentalism

by Madeleine Bunting

The bombs have hit Kabul. Smoke rises above the city and there are reports that an Afghan power plant, one of only two in the country, has been hit.

Meanwhile the special forces are on standby, and the necessary allies have been cajoled, bullied and bribed into position.

That is not all that was carefully prepared ahead of yesterday's launch of the attacks.

Crucially for a modern war, public opinion formers at home have been prepared and marshaled into line with a striking degree of unanimity. The voices of dissent can barely be heard over the chorus of approval and self-righteous enthusiasm.

It's the latter that is so jarring, and it's a sign of how quickly the logic of war distorts and manipulates our understanding. War propaganda requires moral clarity - what else can justify the suffering and brutality? - so the conflict is now being cast as a battle between good and evil. Both Bin Laden and the Taliban are being demonized into absurd Bond-style villains, while halos are hung over our heads by throwing the moral net wide: we are not just fighting to protect ourselves out of narrow self-interest, but for a new moral order in which the Afghans will be the first beneficiaries.

The extent to which this is all being uncritically accepted is astonishing. Few gave a damn about the suffering of women under the Taliban on September 10 - now we are supposedly fighting a war for them. Even fewer knew (let alone cared) that Afghanistan was suffering from famine. Now the west is promising to solve the humanitarian crisis that it has hugely exacerbated in the last three weeks with its threat of military action.

What is incredible is not just the belief that you can end terrorism by taking on the Taliban, but that doing so can be elevated into a grand moral purpose - rather than it incubating a host of evils from Chechnya to Pakistan.

Is this gullibility? Naivete? Wishful thinking? There may be elements of these, but what is also lurking here is the outline of a form of western fundamentalism.

It believes in historical progress and regards the west as its most advanced manifestation. And it insists that the only way for other countries to match its achievement is to adopt its political, economic and cultural values. It is tolerant towards other cultures only to the extent that they reflect its own values - so it is frequently fiercely intolerant of religious belief and has no qualms about expressing its contempt and prejudice.

At its worst, western fundamentalism echoes the characteristics it finds so repulsive in its enemy, Bin Laden: first, a sense of unquestioned superiority; second, an assertion of the universal applicability of its values; and third, a lack of will to understand what is profoundly different from itself... .

The Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,

He fights with missiles and with spears.

He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,

Been a soldier for a thousand years.

 

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,

A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.

And he knows he shouldn't kill,

And he knows he always will,

Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

 

And he's fighting for Canada,

He's fighting for France,

He's fighting for the USA,

And he's fighting for the Russians,

And he's fighting for Japan,

And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

 

And he's fighting for Democracy,

He's fighting for the Reds,

He says it's for the peace of all.

He's the one who must decide,

Who's to live and who's to die,

And he never sees the writing on the wall.

 

But without him,

How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?

Without him Caesar would have stood alone,

He's the one who gives his body

As a weapon of the war,

And without him all this killing can't go on.

 

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,

His orders come from far away no more,

They come from here and there and you and me,

And brothers can't you see,

This is not the way we put the end to war.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

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