0300GMT

NO WAR FOR OIL?

drummer wanted

from the London Daily Telegraph
QUESTION:
what do you call it?
when a common thief steals $10 from you
and THEN…
offers you $2 back as a “gift”….?

ANSWER:
an Israeli peace gesture

A Navy veteran from Chicago says he was detained and tortured by U.S. forces in Baghdad without being charged.
Twenty-nine-year-old Donald Vance was a private security employee in Baghdad at the time of his arrest.
He has filed a federal lawsuit against former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Donald Vance is a lifelong Chicagoan.
After graduating from Taft High School he joined the Navy. He was discharged in the 90’s.
Two years ago, Vance went to work for a security contractor in Iraq.
The 29-year-old wound up in an American prison.
His experience is spelled out in a lawsuit that is based on the violation of Vance’s constitutional rights.

His Bible is all he had.
Donald Vance kept notes in it while he was detained for three months in Iraq.
The 29-year-old Navy veteran was held at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum security detention site in Baghdad.
To this day, Vance has no idea why the U.S. government imprisoned him and, he says, tortured him from April to July of this year.

“It’s a 9-by-9 cell, built of cinder block, painted white. There is a Turkish toilet hole in the floor, which is, as I’m sure everyone knows, is a hole in the floor,” said Vance.

Vance is back home in Chicago While he has filed a lawsuit against former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vance did not want his face shown on camera.

At the time of his arrest, Vance was working for a security contractor in Iraq.
He wound up as an informant for the FBI, telling them about his company’s alleged illegal activity. When U.S. soldiers raided the company at Vance’s urging Vance and another American citizen became suspects.

“We were blindfolded, shackled, hands tied, and we were put inside Humvees and escorted away,” Vance said.

Vance says for three months he was tortured by the U.S. government and denied any legal representation.

“In the history of this country, American citizens have always been entitled to the rule of law. And what they did to Mr. Vance is to toss the rule of law out the window,” said Arthur Loevy, Vance’s attorney.

Vance was never charged and released in July He remains shocked that the U.S. government can treat anyone like he was treated, let alone an American military veteran.

“Regardless of their nationality or their religion, background — I could believe this was happening to anyone in any place,” said Vance.

Vance is convinced that Donald Rumsfeld knew and signed off on his arrest and imprisonment. A Pentagon spokesperson told the New York Times that Vance and his American co-worker were treated fair and humanely. The pentagon says Vance was being held as a threat. The spokesperson also admitted that the U.S. military did not know Vance was an FBI informant until three weeks after he was arrested.

from ABC7 Chicago

try doing a Google search
use the search terms
cerebral, arteriovenous malformation, neurotoxin
some ‘interesting’ articles come up..
search AGAIN for terms you dont understand..
c..o..n..n..e..c..t…. t..h..e…. d..o..t..s
feels like a Tom Clancy novel huh?

too bad HE doesnt write them anymore……

Already there are killing machines operating by remote control. Soon the machines will be able to kill on their own initiative. A new warfare is on its way

War is about to change, in terrifying ways. America’s next wars, the ones the Pentagon is now planning, will be nothing like the conflicts that have gone before them.

In just a few years, US forces will be able to deal out death, not at the squeeze of a trigger or even the push of a button, but with no human intervention whatsoever. Many fighting soldiers - those GIs in tin hats who are dying two a day in Iraq - will be replaced by machines backed up by surveillance technology so penetrating and pervasive that it is referred to as “military omniscience”. Any Americans involved will be less likely to carry rifles than PlayStation-style consoles and monitors that display simulated streetscapes of the kind familiar to players of Grand Theft Auto - and they may be miles from where the killing takes place.

War will progressively cease to be the foggy, confusing, equalising business it has been for centuries, in which the risks are always high, everyone faces danger and suffers loss, and the few can humble the mighty. Instead, it will become remote, semi-automatic and all-knowing, entailing less and less risk to American lives and taking place largely out of the sight of news cameras. And the danger is close to home: the coming wars will be the “war on terror” by other names, conflicts that know no frontiers. The remote-controlled war coming tomorrow to Khartoum or Mogadishu, in other words, can happen soon afterwards, albeit in moderated form, in London or Lyons.

This is no geeky fantasy. Much of the hardware and software already exists and the race to produce the rest is on such a scale that US officials are calling it the “new Manhattan Project”. Hundreds of research projects are under way at American universities and defence companies, backed by billions of dollars, and Donald Rumsfeld’s department of defence is determined to deliver as soon as possible. The momentum is coming not only from the relentless humiliation of US forces at the hands of some determined insurgents on the streets of Baghdad, but also from a realisation in Washington that this is the shape of things to come. Future wars, they believe, will be fought in the dirty, mazy streets of big cities in the “global south”, and if the US is to prevail it needs radically new strategies and equipment.

Only fragments of this story have so far appeared in the mainstream media, but enough information is available on the internet, from the comments of those in charge and in the specialist press to leave no room for doubt about how sweeping it is, how dangerous and how imminent.

Military omniscience is the starting point. Three months ago Tony Tether, director of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s research arm, described to a US Senate committee the frustration felt by officers in Iraq after a mortar-bomb attack. A camera in a drone, or unmanned aircraft, spotted the attackers fleeing and helped direct US helicopters to the scene to destroy their car - but not before some of those inside had got out. “We had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car,” he said, “because we simply didn’t have enough coverage available.” So some of the insurgents escaped. Tether drew this moral: “We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers or IEDs [improvised explosive devices] . . . This is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but, just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data.”

DARPA has a host of projects working to meet those needs, often in surprising ways. One, called Combat Zones That See, aims to scatter across cities thousands of tiny CCTV cameras, each equipped with wireless communication software that will make it possible to link their data and track the movements of every vehicle on the streets. The cameras themselves will not be that different from those found in modern mobile phones.

Seeing through concrete

Already in existence are sensors the size of matchboxes which respond to heat, light, movement or sound; and a variety of programmes, including one called Smart Dust, are working on further miniaturising these and improving their ability to work as networks. A dozen US university teams are also developing micro-aircraft, weighing a few grams each, that imitate birds and insects and could carry sensor equipment into specific buildings or rooms.

DARPA’s VisiBuilding programme, meanwhile, is making “X-ray eye” sensors that can see through concrete, locating people and weapons inside buildings. And Human ID at a Distance is working on software that can identify individual people from scans of their faces, their manner of walking or even their smell, and then track them anywhere they go.

(RFID chips in YOUR new national ID card will make this a snap)

Closely related to this drive are projects involving compu-ter simulations of urban landscapes and entire cities, which will provide backdrops essential for using the data gathered by cameras and sensors. The biggest is Urban Resolve, a simulated war against a full-scale insurgency in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in the year 2015.

Digitised cities

Eight square miles of Jakarta have been digitised and simulated in three dimensions. That will not surprise computer gamers, but Urban Resolve goes much further: the detail extends to the interiors of 1.6 million buildings and even the cellars and sewers beneath, and it also includes no fewer than 109,000 moving vehicles and people. Even the daily rhythms of the city have been simulated. The roads, says one commentator, “are quiet at night, but during weekday rush hours they become clogged with traffic. People go to work, take lunch breaks and visit restaurants, banks and churches.”

Digitise any target city and integrate this with the flow of data from many thousands of sensors and cameras, stationary and mobile, and you have something far more powerful than the regular snapshots today’s satellites can deliver. You have continuous coverage, around corners and through walls. You would never, for example, lose those mortar bombers who got out of their car and ran away.

All this brings omniscience within reach. The US web-based magazine DefenseWatch, which monitors developments in strategy and hardware, recently imagined the near-future scenario of an operation in the developing world in which a cloud of minute, networked sensors is scattered like dust over a target city using powerful fans. Directed by the sensors, unmanned drones patrol the city, building up a visual and audio picture of every street and building. “Every hostile person has been identified and located,” continues the scenario. “From this point on, nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical centre.”

Another DARPA project, Integrated Sensor is Structure, is working on the apex of such a system: huge, unmanned communications and surveillance airships that will loiter above target areas at an altitude of 70,000 feet - far above most airline traffic - providing continuous and detailed coverage over a whole city for a year or more.

From these platforms, all the information could be fed down in real time to soldiers and commanders carrying the hand-held computers being developed by the Northrop Grumman Corporation with DARPA funding. The real aim, however, is not to expose flesh-and-blood Americans on the ground, but where possible to use robots. That way there will be no “body bag problem”; and in any case machines are better equipped than human beings to process and make use of the vast quantities of data involved.

In one sense, robots are not new: already, armed drones such as Predator, “piloted” by CIA operators from screens in Florida, have been responsible for at least 80 assassination raids in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan (killing many civilians as well). Defence contractors have also developed ground-based vehicles capable of carrying cameras and weapons into the battlefield.

But this is only the start. What will make the next generation different is that they are being designed so that they can choose, all on their own, the targets they will attack. Operating in the air and on the ground, they are being equipped with Automated Target Recognition software capable not only of comparing signals received from new-generation sensors with databases of targets, but also of “deciding” to fire guns or launch missiles automatically once there is a good “fit”. Automated killing of this kind hasn’t been approved by anyone yet, but it is certainly being planned. John Tirpak, editor of Air Force Magazine in the US, expects initially that humans will retain the last word, but he predicts that once robots “establish a track record of reliability in finding the right targets and employing weapons properly”, the “machines will be trusted to do even that”.

Planners believe, moreover, that robot warriors have a doomsday power. Gordon Johnson, a team leader on Project Alpha, which is developing robots for the US army, predicts that, if the robot’s gun can return fire automatically and instantly to within a metre of a location from which its sensors have detected a gunshot, it will always kill the person who has fired. “Anyone who would shoot at our forces would die,” says Johnson. “Before he can drop that weapon and run, he’s probably already dead. Well now, these cowards in Baghdad would have to pay with blood and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The costs of poker went up significantly. The enemy, are they going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I’m guessing not.”

Again, this may sound like the plot of a B-movie, but the US military press, not a body of people given to frivolity, has been writing about it for some time. DefenseWatch, for example, also featured robots in that future war scenario involving sensors dispersed by fans. Once a complete picture of the target city is built up, the scenario predicted, “unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to selected targets to take them out, one by one”.

The silver bullet

It is shocking, but will it happen? The project has its critics, even in the Pentagon, where many doubt that technology can deliver such a “silver bullet”. But the doubters are not in the ascendant, and it would be folly, against the background of the Iraq disaster and the hyper-militarised stance of the Bush administration, to write it off as a computer gamer’s daydream.

One reason Washington finds it so attractive is that it fits closely with the ideologies of permanent war that underpin the “war on terror”. What better in that war than an army of robot warriors, permanently cruising those parts of the globe deemed to be “supporting terrorism”? And what a boon if they destroy “targets” all on their own, with not a single US soldier at risk. Even more seductively, this could all take place out of sight of the capricious western media.

These technologies further blur the line between war and entertainment. Already, games featuring urban warfare in digitised Arab cities are everyday suburban entertainment - some are produced by the US forces themselves, while a firm called Kuma Reality offers games refreshed weekly to allow players to simulate participation in fighting in Iraq almost as it is happening in the real world.

Creepy as this is, it can be worse: those involved in real warfare may have difficulty remembering they are not playing games. “At the end of the work day,” one Florida-based Predator operator reflected to USA Today in 2003, “you walk back into the rest of life in America.” Will such people always remember that their “work day”, lived among like-minded colleagues in front of screens, involves real death on the far side of the world? As if to strengthen the link with entertainment, one emerging military robot, the Dragon Runner, comes with a gamer’s control panel. Greg Heines, who runs the project, confesses: “We modelled the controller after the Play Station 2 because that’s what these 18-, 19-year-old marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives.”

The US aspiration to be able to kill without human involvement and with minimum risk raises some dreadful questions. Who will decide what data can be relied on to identify a “target”? Who will be accountable when there is an atrocity? And what does this say about western perceptions of the worth and rights of the people whose cities are no more than killing fields, and who themselves are mere “targets” to be detected, tracked and even killed by machines?

Finally, the whole process feeds alarmingly into the “homeland security” drive in the cities of the global north. The same companies and universities are supplying ideas to both, and the surveillance, tracking and targeting technologies involved are closely related. What we are seeing is a militarisation of urban life in both north and south that helps perpetuate the biggest and most dangerous myth of all, which is that technical and military solutions can somehow magic away resistance to George W Bush’s geopolitical project.

will YOU comply?

recommended read: Orson Scott Card’s new novel EMPIRE..

Why are Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests include deniers of the genocide?

Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state.

A handful of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran’s controversial conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews - not because they deny the Holocaust but because they object to using it as justification for the existence of Israel.

With their distinctive hats, beards and side locks, these men may, to the untrained eye, look like any other Orthodox believers in Jerusalem or New York. But the Jews who went to Tehran are different.

Some of them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a group which views Zionism - the movement to establish a Jewish national home or state in what was Palestine - as a “poison” threatening “true Jews”.

A representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed “that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved”.

In its place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be “a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries”.

Neturei Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish religion.

The book of Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews argue that the Holocaust was “divine will”

But how does Neturei Karta and other Orthodox Jews such as Austria-based Rabbi Moishe Ayre Friedman justify attending such a controversial conference?

Rabbi Friedman told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme that he was not in Tehran to debate whether the Holocaust happened or not, but to look at its lessons.

He says the Holocaust was being used to legitimise the suffering of other peoples and he wanted to break what he called a taboo on discussing it.

The main thing, he argued, was not Jewish suffering in the past but the use of the Holocaust as a “tool of commercial, military and media power”.

In what many other Jews would consider the height of naivety, he commended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for wanting “a secured future for innocent Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere”.

The conference was just the latest anti-Israeli event sponsored by Iran

In his speech to the conference, Neturei Karta’s Rabbi Cohen said there was no doubt about the Holocaust and it would be “a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the

crime in any way”.

However, he also argued that the genocide had been divine will. “The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say ‘Never Again’.

“They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy.”

Neturei Karta have been condemned by other Orthodox Jews as an extreme fringe movement while the Tehran conference has been denounced by the Israeli parliament.

By Chris Floyd

    I. Genetic Modification

    Like the two entwining strands of the double helix, law and power form the genetic structure of government. Law is nothing but empty verbiage without power to back it up, enforce it, embody it. And power without law is nothing but a mad ape, baring its teeth, thumping its chest, raping and beating where it pleases, taking what it wants: a bestial thing, born in the muddy swamp of our lowest, blindest, rawest biochemical impulses. Disconnect these strands and things fall apart, as Yeats says; the center literally cannot hold, and the blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon the world.

    We have seen the proof of this in our time. When law - understood here as agreed-upon principles of justice and commonweal - is treated as a filthy rag or a “quaint” relic or a cynical sham by those in power, the result is an ever-growing suppuration of greed, lies, brutality and violence. Its starkest form is evident in Iraq, where a lawless invasion based on deceit has created a hell beyond imagining, and beyond control. At home, unfettered power has stripped Americans of their essential liberties and human rights, which are now no longer unalienable and inviolable but are instead the gift of the “unitary executive,” to bestow - or withhold - as he sees fit.

    For those who hoped that November’s elections might bring some essential alteration in our degraded estate, some repair of the broken strands, recent events have been dispiriting indeed. Two in particular stand out as exemplary of the ugly reality behind the bright rhetoric of “change” and “moderation” now twinkling in the Beltway air. Although apparently unrelated, they are in fact part of the same malignant process that has been devouring the structure - and substance - of the Republic for years.

    One strand of this revealing juxtaposition involves the release of a video showing the nightmarish treatment meted out to Jose Padilla - an American citizen seized on American soil and subjected to torture under indefinite detention without charges or trial, and who was subsequently revealed by the Bush administration itself to have engaged in no conspiracy or act of hostility toward the United States. Now his mind has been broken by years of brutal “interrogation methods,” complete isolation and bizarre sensory-deprivation techniques, leaving him incapable of aiding his defense in his trial for the much-reduced - and, according to most legal experts, highly shaky - charges of trying to aid Islamist groups in Chechnya and elsewhere.

    The other strand centers on the Senate confirmation of Robert Gates as defense secretary, in which one of the most compromised candidates ever nominated for a major Cabinet post was ushered into power with loving care by a Democratic faction supposedly dedicated to “vigilant oversight” and “asking tough questions” after their triumph at the polls last month.

    Taken together, these events represent a kind of photographic negative of the double helix of a healthful state: instead of law and power, we see tyranny and weakness, linked in a destructive downward spiral that shows no sign of ending.

    II. A Bulwark Breached

    To understand more fully the nature of the atrocity inflicted on Jose Padilla - and the whole penumbra of constitutional and moral issues raised by Bush’s liberty-gutting “unitary executive” dictatorship - we must go back precisely 140 years, to December 1866, when the Supreme Court rendered its formal opinion in the case Ex Parte Milligan. It was a decisive ruling against a government that had far overreached its powers, stripping away essential liberties in the name of national security. The justice who authored the unanimous majority opinion was a Republican, an old friend and political crony of the president who had appointed him. Even so, his ruling struck hard at the abuses set in train by his patron. He stood upon the law, he stood upon the Constitution, even in the aftermath of a shattering blow that had killed more than 600,000 Americans and almost destroyed the nation itself.

    This is what the Court decided: “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence.”

    The author was Justice David Davis, an Illinois lawyer appointed by Abraham Lincoln after helping run the campaign that gave his old colleague the presidency in the fateful 1860 election. (Davis was also, by a strange quirk of history, the second cousin of George W. Bush’s great-grandfather.) By the time the Court issued its ruling, Lincoln was dead, but the after-effects of his ever-expanding suspension of civil liberties during wartime were still roiling through the courts, and through America’s fractured society. The Milligan ruling was, in the words of legal scholar John P. Frank, “one of the truly great documents of the American Constitution,” a “bulwark” for civil liberties, expansive and exacting in the constitutional protections it spelled out.

    The ruling acknowledged that there are times when the writ of habeas corpus may have to be suspended, in an area where hostilities are directly taking place - but even this power, they noted, was highly circumscribed and specifically delegated to Congress, not the president. Lincoln exceeded this authority on numerous occasions, increasing the scope of his powers until the entire Union was essentially under martial law, and anyone arbitrarily deemed guilty of never-defined “disloyal practices” could be arrested or silenced - in the latter case by having their newspaper shut down, for instance. (Lincoln would sometimes - but not always - seek ex post facto Congressional authorization for these acts.) Some parts of the Union that the Lincoln administration thought particularly disloyal were officially put under martial law - like southern Indiana, where anti-war agitator Lambdin Milligan and four others were accused of a plot to free Confederate prisoners, and were summarily tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal.

    It was this case that the Court - five members of which were Lincoln appointees - overturned in such a decided fashion. The ruling is plain: constitutional protections not only apply “equally in war and peace” but also - in a dramatic extension of this legal shield - to “all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.” No emergency - not even open civil war - warrants their suspension. Even in wartime, the president’s powers, though expanded, are still restrained: “he is controlled by law, and has his appropriate sphere of duty, which is to execute, not to make, the laws.”

    All of this - and much more of the ruling besides - is directly applicable to the transparently illicit and unconstitutional regime set up by the Bush administration to prosecute its self-declared “War on Terror.” Indefinite detention, torture, military tribunals, the arbitrary creation of novel legal categories such as “unlawful enemy combatant,” warrantless surveillance, extrajudicial killings, kidnapping and rendition of uncharged captives, secret prisons - in short, the entire apparatus whose machinations led to the destruction of Jose Padilla’s mind - is completely without basis in law, as the US Supreme Court ruled 140 years ago.

    In fact, the current Court drew heavily on Milligan in another case involving an American citizen imprisoned in the “War on Terror” (after being captured on the battlefield, unlike Padilla, who was grabbed while walking through the Chicago airport): Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld. It was this 2004 ruling that sent the Bush administration back to Congress for rubberstamp approval of a bill that turned out to be not a limitation of the presidential dictatorship, but its vast expansion, including the permanent loss of habeas corpus rights even by Terror War captives who had not engaged in hostilities against the United States. (Indeed, as administration officials have explicitly stated, these strictures could also apply to people who had unwittingly aided an accused terrorist organization in some fashion.) Many legal experts agree that the deliberately vague language of this new bill - the now-infamous “Military Commissions Act” - includes American citizens among those who can be arbitrarily designated as “unlawful enemy combatants” and held forever without charge or trial at the pleasure of the “unitary executive.”

    The MCA was regarded by many as the final guttering-out of the Republic’s ancient flame. It wholeheartedly accepted the principle of the “unitary executive” and Bush’s claim of “inherent powers” which allow him to disregard any part of any law that he doesn’t like - despite the fact that such ghostly powers do not exist in the Constitution, as the Milligan ruling clearly stated. By codifying the principle of presidential dictatorship into “law” - now understood merely as the ratification of the executive’s arbitrary decisions - the MCA transformed the fundamental nature of the American state. As noted above, all liberties are now at the mercy of the executive. The abuses of power that this principle has led to are already enormous; the potential for further abuses under this new-style state is virtually without limit.

    But suddenly, in the Republic’s darkest hour, came a ray of light: against all odds - and a vast GOP vote-fixing operation that shaved off at least three or four million likely Democratic votes, as Greg Palast has documented - the American people ousted Bush’s willing executioners of liberty from their stranglehold on Congress. Hopes long quelled by years of unanswered outrages sprang back to life: Surely now will come a day of reckoning. Now will come a restoration. Now the great double helix of law and power will be stitched back together again.

    But will it?

    III. The Party of Surrender

    The hope of a return to at least a semblance of constitutional government rests on the Democrats’ newly-acquired majority. It is perhaps a mark of how very desperate the nation’s condition has become that this particular group of national Democratic leaders could actually inspire hopes for substantial change. Their record over the past five years has been one of accommodation, cowardice, confusion and weakness. No issue - with the possible exception of Social Security privatization - was worth a concerted fight, a filibuster, or even tough questioning: not even a war of aggression launched while UN inspectors were in the process of determining the veracity of the casus belli. The president wanted his war no matter what; they gave him a blank check for it - and they keep on cashing it.

    From the Patriot Act to the “Authorization to Use Military Force” against Iraq - which has become the Bush administration’s repeatedly invoked “Enabling Act” to “justify” its authoritarian dictates - the Congressional Democrats (aside from a handful of honorable exceptions) have offered, at best, only token, tepid opposition to Bush’s relentless encroachments and blood-soaked follies. Indeed, many of them have often been enthusiastic partners in the excesses. Very few have dissented from the underlying principles of Bush’s policies (war, war profiteering, “full-spectrum dominance” of world affairs, corporate hegemony of American society, the diminution of liberty, etc.); they have only taken issue with tactical questions of how these polices have been pursued. They could not even summon up the guts to filibuster the MCA, to go down fighting for the Republic with every tool at their disposal.

    And yet still it is hoped that the strong support of the American people in the November elections will somehow transform this gaggle of timorous geese into bold champions of liberty when they assume the mantle of majorityship in January. Well, it may be so; stranger things have happened in the world. But if their recent performance during the Gates confirmation process is any indication, essentially nothing will change at all: the horror in Iraq will rage on and on, and there will be no legal reckoning for the perpetrators of unjust war, barbarous practices and the unlawful exercise of arbitrary rule.

    Gates had been raked over hot coals during his last confirmation, as CIA director in 1991: four months of hearings, with hundreds of witnesses, thousands of documents and four days on the grill for Gates himself, as the New York Times notes. Much of the probe centered on Gates’s role in the Iran-Contra affair. (”Affair” being the somewhat light-hearted word for an operation that involved shipping arms illegally to the “Islamofascist” mullahs of Iran, running a terrorist war against Nicaragua, waging “psy-ops” war on the American people and systematically lying to Congress.) And even more details of Gates’s murky past in the shadowlands of covert ops and backroom deals have come to light in subsequent years, as the indefatigable Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com reports. These include:

Highly credible allegations of Gates’s role in the secret funneling of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, at the behest of the Reagan-Bush administration;

Highly credible allegations of his role in the “October Surprise” plot of 1980, which saw top Reagan-Bush campaign officials (and most likely Bush I himself) negotiating with Iranian leaders to keep the American hostages in Tehran held captive until after the election (an act of high treason, by the way);

His blatant skewing of intelligence data to serve partisan political purposes, in particular helping the Reagan-Bush team craft baseless, fearmongering scare stories about the “Soviet menace”;

His bellicose, hair-trigger plans for bombing Nicaragua and launching an all-out invasion of Libya, which alarmed even his hardcore, hard-Right mentors like Bill Casey.

    Matters worth a question or two, you might think, before giving a man control over the most gargantuan military machine in the history of the world, along with its ever-expanding intelligence tentacles (both at home and abroad) and hydra-headed covert operations. Yet none of these uncomfortable topics were broached during the perfunctory, one-day hearing on Gates’s acquisition of the Pentagon. Even old Democratic lions like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd purred like kittens as the chubby-cheeked Beltway operator offered up a few well-scripted “moderate” noises. Instead of an exercise in serious oversight, the hearing was a “day of compliments and warm chuckles,” as the NYT described it.

    But the past wasn’t the only thing being avoided by the ever-polite “opposition” party; they gave Gates a pass on the present as well. As Parry astutely notes, the Democrats failed “to nail down the nominee’s precise thinking on any aspect of the war strategy or even to secure a guarantee that the Pentagon would turn over documents for future oversight hearings. Among many gaps in the questioning, the Democrats didn’t press Gates on whether he shared the neo-conservative vision of violently remaking the Middle East, whether he endorsed the Military Commissions Act’s elimination of habeas corpus rights to fair trials, whether he supports warrantless eavesdropping by the Pentagon’s National Security Agency, whether he agrees with Bush’s claim of “plenary” - or unlimited - powers as a commander in chief who can override laws and the US Constitution.”

    And so Gates, a long-time Bush Family factotum - in fact, even more of a compliant “Family” member than the ever-prickly Donald Rumsfeld - is in like Flynn. Not a single Democrat voted against him. They have clearly begun this “new era” as they mean to go on. They have already surrendered the biggest weapon in their arsenal that might induce genuine change in the Bush administration’s disastrous policies and force the White House to cooperate with Congressional investigations: the threat of impeachment for the many high crimes and misdemeanors that Bush and Dick Cheney could very plausibly be charged with. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has firmly ruled out any moves toward such actual accountability.

    What’s more, the Democrats have also surrendered the most effective tool for bringing the murderous, illicit war in Iraq to an end: the power of the purse, which an earlier Congress used to cut off funds for the Vietnam War. Today’s Democratic leaders swiftly rejected the call by Congressman Dennis Kucinich for similar action. In fact, the newly-selected House Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, echoes warhawk Senator John McCain in calling for even more troops and more money to be thrown into the Iraqi fire.

    Yes, there will be cosmetic changes when the Democrats take the reins. There will be more investigations - largely toothless, with the White House stonewalling and running out the clock, although a few low-hanging “bad apples” might be picked off here and there. There will be symbolic gestures, such as the recently introduced bill to rescind the MCA - a piece of pure political theater that has no chance of becoming law: the Democratic majority will be too small to override the inevitable veto. In fact, the entire “progressive agenda” - which anxious moderates fret will be “threatened” if the Democrats actually try to carry out their public mandate of holding the administration responsible for its actions - will be hobbled in any case by Bush’s ironclad veto, no matter how many warm chuckles the Dems share with administration minions. Spineless in opposition, the Democrats have already disarmed themselves before taking a share of power - and so power will remain in the lawless hands of the “unitary executive.”

    Where then is the end of the downward spiral, the “widening gyre” as law and power spin farther and farther apart? And what rough beast, sprung from this new genetic code of tyranny and weakness, is even now slouching toward Bethlehem - or Babylon - to be born?

---

    Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored award in 2003. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the “Empire Burlesque” political blog.

keywords: outgoing, black, woman, democrat

On Monday, gathering in a conference room in Washington D.C., Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (Bravest Woman in Politics) and her advisors worked on a draft copy of the articles of impeachment against President Bush.
At the heart of the charges contained in McKinney’s articles of impeachment, is the allegation that President Bush has not upheld the oath of presidential office and is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Article I states that President Bush has failed to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. Specifically cited in this article is the charge that Bush has manipulated intelligence and lied to justify war: “George Walker Bush … in preparing the invasion of Iraq, did withhold intelligence from the Congress, by refusing to provide Congress with the full intelligence picture that he was being given, by redacting information … and actively manipulating the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs by pressuring the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.”
This manipulation of intelligence was done, the charge continues, “with the intent to misinform the people and their representatives in Congress in order to gain their support for invading Iraq, denying both the people and their representatives in Congress the right to make an informed choice.”

Article II, “Abuse of office and of executive privilege,” states that President Bush has disregarded his oath of office by “obstructing and hindering the work of Congressional investigative bodies and by seeking to expand the scope of the powers of his office.” The President has “failed to take responsibility for, investigate or discipline those responsible for an ongoing pattern of negligence, incompetence and malfeasance to the detriment of the American people.”
This article continues by indicting Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in their actions to manipulate or “fix” intelligence and mislead the public about Iraq’s weapons programs. Ultimately, this article calls not only for Bush’s impeachment and removal from office but also asks the same actions to be taken against Cheney and Rice.

Article III states that President Bush has failed to “ensure the laws are faithfully executed” and that he has “violated the letter and spirit of laws and rules of criminal procedure used by civilian and military courts, and has violated or ignored regulatory codes and practices that carry out the law.”
Specifically, McKinney cites illegal domestic spying as a result of failing to obtain warrants thereby subverting congress and the judiciary in the process: “… by circumventing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts established by Congress, whose express purpose is to check such abuses of executive power, provoking the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to file a complaint and another judge to resign in protest, the said program having been subsequently ruled illegal; he has also concealed the existence of this unlawful program of spying on American citizens from the people and all but a few of their representatives in Congress, even resorting to outright public deceit.”

The article continues by citing public statements Bush has made that were blatantly contradictory to his policy and actions regarding domestic spying.
While the staff was editing the document, one advisor told me, “As we sat down and worked on this, a pattern became very clear … a pattern to specifically undermine the constitution and establish a unitary presidency.”
The charges addressed in McKinney’s resolution are nothing revelatory or new. Rather, they are issues which have been in the public eye for quite some time and have increasingly been covered in the media over the last year.
Despite winning the congressional majority, the Democrats have yet to put forth a plan to investigate what have become somewhat ubiquitous allegations.
Speaker-elect, Representative Pelosi, dismissed any possibility of impeachment, saying it is “off the table” and that it is “a waste of time … making them lameducks is good enough for me.” Although, in the November election, 60% of the voters in her own district cast ballots in favor of Proposition J, a measure calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

In 2005 Representative John Conyers sponsored a resolution, HR 365, to create a special committee to investigate allegations against the Bush Administration – a move that would likely lead to the discovery of impeachable offenses. This resolution was passed to the House Committee on Rules and was never brought up for a vote.
At that time it was widely believed that if the Democrats took control of congress, Conyers would reintroduce the resolution as would have subpoena power if selected as leader of the House Judiciary Committee.
A few days after the Democrats won control Conyers echoed Pelosi’s statement saying, “I am in total agreement with her on this issue … impeachment is off the table.” Last week a spokesperson from Conyers office said that the resolution would not be reintroduced and that the Representative had no intention to pursue the matter.
Will other members of congress support the action Congresswoman McKinney has brought forth?
At the table in what could be considered her impeachment “war room” the question is brought up a number of times.
Mike, an advisor to McKinney, mentions, “Conyers was supposed to have investigations. They were chomping at the bit 6 months ago to do subpoenas.”
McKinney quietly replies, “Now they say they aren’t even going to issue subpoenas.”
Looking up from her papers she takes a deep breath, “I’m going in alone on this one because now it is all about them playing majority politics.”
This is McKinney’s last week as a member of congress and this act, to impeach the president, is the final resolution she will enter into the Congressional record.
For those who know anything about Cynthia McKinney it may come as no surprise that she would file this resolution as her parting gift to Congress.
McKinney is no stranger to being attacked by the media and has been isolated from her own party.

From her inquiries into election fraud in 2000 to her calls for a transparent and thorough investigation into 9-11, not to mention the widely covered run-in she had with the Capitol Hill Police, the congresswoman is aware that this resolution will likely be ignored and that she will be ruthlessly attacked upon its filing.
“What do you think they are going to do to me this time?” she asks her staff. Everyone uncomfortably shifts in their seats and after no answer comes McKinney explains, “We have to do this because this is simply the right thing to do. The American people do want to hold this man and his office accountable for the crimes they have committed and if no member of congress is willing to do it, than I will.”

It is questionable as to how effective this move could be in gaining support because of her reputation as a firebrand congresswoman and because, ultimately, she is on her way out of office.

The Congresswoman and her staff realize this but hope that by filing the articles of impeachment it will, at the very least, open up a discussion on whether or not President Bush and key members of his administration have committed impeachable offenses and whether our officials should be held to account.
“My duty as a member of Congress is merely to uphold and preserve the constitution and to represent the will of my constituency.

Ultimately, it isn’t up to me or any other member of congress – it is up to the American people to decide.”

subtext: dont rock the boat

from our UK correspondant

NASA, the US space agency, has given the first details of its plans to set up a permanent human settlement on the moon by 2024, as the first part of a scheme for manned exploration of Mars and beyond in the solar system.

The project, first outlined by President George Bush almost three years ago in a speech outlining America’s space ambitions, would return a man to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972. That stay lasted just three days.

Under the new programme, beginning in 2020, astronauts would make stays of a week. These would be gradually lengthened, so that within four years the base would be permanently manned, with astronauts living on the base for six-month stretches.

The chosen site will be at or near one of the moon’s poles, probably the south pole, because of the long periods of sunlight those regions enjoy.

That would permit solar power generation, and the production of electricity, in keeping with NASA’s aim of “living off the land”. The south pole has a special attraction: the suspected nearby presence of key elements, most notably helium-3, a lighter form of the gas that can be used for nuclear power. There have also been some signs that deep craters could contain ice, which would provide water and fuel.

The moon base, said Scott Horowitz, NASA’s director of lunar exploration, “will be a central theme in our plan for going back to the moon, in preparation to go to Mars and beyond”. He added that agency scientists knew less about the lunar poles than they did about Mars, although the moon was only 250,000 miles from Earth.

The rockets and landing capsules - the Ares I and Orion programmes - which will ferry astronauts back and forth will be exclusively American, NASA said. But the agency wants to bring in other countries, including Britain, India, Russia and China, as well as the European Space Agency. The key question, unanswered by NASA officials this week, is how much the base might cost. Unofficial estimates put the price tag at around $100bn (£50.8bn), compared with NASA’s present annual budget of $18bn.

But costs will be spread over two decades, and the agency hopes to offset part of the bill by attracting private sector investment. The total cost of sending a man to Mars will be far higher however, at least $600bn (£304bn).

The US also appears determined to avoid the problems that have plagued the still uncompleted international space station, by bringing other countries into the process at an early stage. Contacts with key partners have already been made, and a conference is scheduled for early 2007.

NASA claims the end of the Shuttle programme in 2010, and the winding-down of the space station, mean that the lunar base can be funded within existing budget ceilings. But critics dispute that, arguing that less high-profile but highly valuable scientific programmes will have to be scaled back, if the agency is to avoid going cap in hand to Congress for extra money.

The programme appears to have broad support on Capitol Hill, even with Democrats in charge from next month. The hope is that the public interest in space will be rekindled by the prospect of men actually living on the moon.

courtesy of covert correspondent

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.

Mr Halim was one of four teachers killed in rapid succession by the Islamists at Ghazni, a strategic point on the routes from Kabul to the south and east which has become the scene of fierce clashes between the Taliban and US and Afghan forces.

The day we arrived, an Afghan policemen and eight insurgents died during an ambush in an outlying village. Rockets were found, primed to be fired into Ghazni City during a visit by the American ambassador a few days previously.

But, as in the rest of Afghanistan, it is the civilians who are bearing the brunt of this conflict. At the village of Qara Bagh, the family of Mr Halim are distraught and terrified. His cousin, Ahmed Gul, shook his head: “They killed him like an animal. No, no. We do not kill animals like that, it would be haram. They took away a father and a husband, they had no pity. We are all very worried. Please go now, you see those men standing over there? They are watching. It is dangerous for you, and for us.”

Fatima Mushtaq, the director of education at Ghazni, has had repeated death threats, the notorious “night letters”. Her gender, as well as her refusal to send girls home from school, has made her a particular source of hatred for Islamist zealots.

“I think they killed him that way to frighten us, otherwise why make a man suffer so much? Mohammed Halim and his family were good friends of ours and we are very, very upset by what has happened. He came to me when the threats first began and asked what he should do. I told him to move somewhere safe. I think he was trying to arrange that when they came and took him,” she said.

The threats against Ms Mushtaq also extend to her husband, Sayyid Abdul, and their eight children. “When the first letters arrived, I tried to hide them from my husband,” she said. “But then he found the next few. He said we must stand together. We talked, and we decided that we must tell the children. So that they can be prepared, but it is not a good way for them to grow up.”

Ms Mushtaq is familiar with the ways of the Taliban. During their rule she and her sister ran secret schools for girls at their home. The Taliban beat them for teaching the girls algebra.