2thirds World

2011-06-07T00:44:00.002-03:00

Haitian Mayor's Office Vows to Destroy All Refugee Camps, Launches Violent Campaign

One of this week's many violent "cleanings" of public spaces. Throughout the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, police and bulldozers smashed earthquake survivors' tent homes and all their possessions. Photo: Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com.

By Beverly Bell

May 27, 2011

On May 23 and 25, police in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince destroyed camps which sheltered people who were otherwise homeless since the earthquake. Police and other municipal workers beat and arrested residents, and physically threatened the lives of a human rights lawyer and an advocate who had come to investigate. The mayor of Delmas announced that this is part of a new campaign to evict internally displaced persons [IDPs] from public spaces.

Those whose lodging was destroyed were amongst the million-plus people who have lived for 16 months under tents, lean-to’s of shredded tarps, or whatever repurposed materials they could scrounge, from blankets to tin. Neither the Haitian government nor the international community has offered any large-scale resettlement options.

Camps Destroyed

On the morning of May 23, two truckloads of police from Delmas, a self-governed district within the metropolitan capital, plus other armed men wearing T-shirts reading “the Delmas mayor’s office in action,” arrived at three camps rimming the intersection of Delmas Road and Airport Road. The security forces and two bulldozers smashed the tents and all the the belongings of an estimated 100 to 200 families, leaving heaps of detritus. Trucks from the mayor’s office hauled away the remains of the survivors’ only possessions.

During the offensive, the Delmas employees arrested three camp residents and beat three community activists who tried to protect the tents, according to eyewitnesses.

On May 25, police turned out at two other IDP camps on Delmas routes 3 and 5 and destroyed tents and belongings there.

Immediately after the destruction, Patrice Florvilus, an attorney with the non-profit group Defenders of the Oppressed, and Reyneld Sanon, an organizer with the right-to-housing coalition Force for Reflection and Action on Housing [FRAKKA] and with the U.S.-based economic justice group Other Worlds, held a press conference on the scene. Delmas police and workers from the district’s garbage collection office came at the two men with shovels, machetes, and knives. Camp residents formed a security cordon and successfully protected Florvilus and Sanon.

Mayoral Offensive to “Clean” Public Spaces

In an interview with the newspaper Le Nouvelliste after the May 23 operation, Mayor Wilson Jeudi of Delmas said, “This is a public place… It can’t remain privatized by a group of people.” In the context of a hyper-concentrated city, much of it still uninhabitable due to rubble from the earthquake, with desperate survivors lodging themselves in virtually any open space, Jeudi offered a new definition of “privatize.” He went on to announce that all public spaces are going to be emptied of residents, leaving them “clean.”

Jeudi called the camps “disorderly” and claimed that many of those in the tents did not actually live there. “They just come to do their commercial activities [thievery and prostitution] and go back to their homes in the evening.”

The mayor said that no compensation would be offered to those ousted from their temporary shelter. “We were all victims of the earthquake,” he added.

Protest over Illegal Evictions Grows

In Washington on May 25, four U.S. representatives expressed alarm at the illegal expulsions. “Facing hostile conditions, including adverse weather, violence, and disease, shelter and work are the priorities for every displaced Haitian and must not be compromised,” said a statement by Representatives Donald M. Payne, Yvette Clark, Fredericka Wilson, and Maxine Waters.

In Haiti, grassroots organizations and camp committees are sponsoring a week of actions to support IDP’s right to permanent housing and to protection from eviction. The coalition will sponsor a sit-in in front of the national parliament today, May 27, to denounce Mayor Jeudi. On May 30, they will hold a press conference, and on May 31 they will file a legal complaint against the expulsions with the Ministry of Justice. On June 1, the group will hold a demonstration to demand rights for those living in temporary shelter.

Two days before the Delmas camp demolitions began, several hundred displaced people rallied against evictions in Camp Caradeux. The event was part of the International Forum on the Crisis of Housing, held May 19 - 21 and attended by hundreds from at least 35 camp committees and 40 grassroots and non-governmental organizations,from throughout the capital region and five other towns. In the first broad-based gathering led by impacted people since last year’s disaster, Haitians stategized with each other and with activists from housing and land rights movements in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. The objective was how to win the guaranteed right to housing.

Sanon, from the forum’s primary convening group FRAKKA, said in the opening address, “The right to housing is a debt that the government has toward the poor for the responsibility it never took on housing that caused so many people to die.” The toll from the earthquake, an estimated 225,000 to 300,000, was in large part this high because so many inferior quality houses collapsed.

The final declaration of the forum read in part, “We ask: [1] for the authorities to stop the violence that is accompanying evictions…; [2] for the authorities to arrest and bring to justice all those engaged in violence against those living in camps; [and 3] for them to take all measures to help people find permanent housing so they can relocate out of camps.”

Marie Hélène René, a participant of the forum who lost her home in the earthquake and now lives in a camp, said, “We’re so vulnerable. We don’t have anything to stop the flooding now [that the rainy season has arrived]. We don’t know what to do. We congratulate all those who are looking for housing, because we’re really desperate.”

Protection from Eviction a Legal Right

Displaced persons are protected by both Haitian and international law. Article 22 of the 1987 Haitian constitution guarantees “decent housing” for everyone. Article 25 of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees every individual a “standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including… housing.” Many sections of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declare protection from displacement, notably for victims of disasters. In a ruling last November, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights directed the Haitian government to stop evicting IDPs unless it provided them safe alternative shelter.

Interviewed by phone on May 26, attorney Florvilus said, “The president [Michel Martelly] who just came to power must take up his historic responsibility. He promised people [in his inaugural address] he would take them out of the tents in the camps in six months. He must now clarify if this was the formula he had in mind for accomplishing that end. Was the mayor the only one behind this attack?”

Florvilus said, “This destruction of people’s property is a violation of the penal code. The government will have to face the nation and the justice system, if not today, then tomorrow.”

Submitted by Beverly Bell on Fri, 07/30/2010 - 08:17

Thousands of internally displaced people live in cramped structures on smog-filled
medians between thickly trafficked highway lanes. Photo: Beverly Bell.

By Beverly Bell

“We’re mobilizing people in the camps and the shantytowns to let them know that getting housing is a right. Our vision is to make the problem of housing a focal point of people’s struggle,” said Reyneld Sanon of the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA by its Creole acronym).

Grassroots groups in Haiti are developing strategies to respond to one of the greatest lingering crises of many after the January 12 earthquake: homelessness for 1.9 million people whose houses crumbled or were too damaged to occupy. FRAKKA represents one initiative, though still fledgling, to unite grassroots groups and residents of internally displaced people’s camps to win their human right to housing. (For another initiative by the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees, see “The Right to Housing in Haiti.”)

Dotting almost every street and open space in Port-au-Prince, and stretching as far as two hours’ drive out of town, are 1,300 formally recognized camps and many more unrecognized ones. Shelter for this nation of refugees occupies even the most unlikely spots, such as median strips on highways and fields near former dumping grounds of dictators’ victims' bodies. At times, camps comprises no more than a few shaky lean-to’s overtaking a sidewalk; at other times, they cover vast terrain and contain tens of thousands of survivors. The shelters are built with whatever people can find, from cardboard boxes to Styrofoam trays, from plastic advertising banners to strips of imitation Arabic rugs. They offer little to no protection from the pounding night rains, thieves, or rapists.

Sanitary conditions are all but nonexistent. Some offer no latrines at all, while others provide putrid port-o-potties. Standard ‘bathroom’ procedure involves plastic buckets which are then emptied in communal spaces. When it is available at all, getting water with which to wash can involve standing in a long line in the tropical sun. Flies, mosquitoes, and other health risks are ubiquitous.

Loune Viaud, the Haiti Operations Coordinator of Partners in Haiti, told me, “Fortunately, we haven’t had any of the epidemics we’ve all been expecting. We’ve had a few cases of diphtheria, which are normally very rare.” She leaned over to knock on the wood of a window sill. When I asked about a spike in post-earthquake HIV rates, she said, “We don’t yet know, but with all the rape and promiscuity in the camps, there’s no way there couldn’t be.”

Violence and physical insecurity are endemic. The State Department renewed a travel advisory after four Americans were killed in Haiti in three months (though almost as many Americans, 3.6, are killed in a typical week in my town of New Orleans,[1] where the population is only about 5% of the island nation’s). Yet the violence primarily impacts those living in camps and on the streets. The cause of the spike in crime can be found in the proximity and vulnerability of victims, since everything the displaced own is in their makeshift shelters, which have no locks or often even walls. Surrounding families in the camps are as many as thousands of strangers. Women’s and girls’ bodies are similarly unprotected and easily accessed, aggravating high preexisting levels of gender-based violence. The spike in crime can also be traced to growing poverty, frustration, and alienation.

One unemployed woman living in a tent in the shantytown of Carrefour told me, “On the street, in the tent, there is no security. Only God.”

In interview after interview I’ve conducted over six months, people have regularly cited the following priorities for their security: a functioning national judicial system, responsive Haitian police, and fulfillment of basic needs. (The responses do not include, notably, greater U.N. ‘security’, as those troops have been involved in many acts of violence against the population. See “United Nations Attacks Refugee Camp, Protests Mount”). But more than anything, they report, they want and need permanent, secure housing.

Two months into hurricane season, no national or international agency appears to have any plan; except for some 28,000 temporary shelters donated by aid agencies – usually just a fancier tent - the only response has been to move Haitians from one tent city to another. A rainstorm on July 12 provided just one indicator of what might happen in the case of a hurricane. Ripping through camp Corail, a bleak desert plain at the foot of a denuded mountain, hundreds of tents were flattened. Corail is one of the few sites where the government and international agencies took any action around internally displaced people, relocating them form their home-made tents elsewhere to commercial tents there.

Here’s another example of emergency preparedness. Amidst current conditions of desperation, tents and other emergency supplies are being withheld and stockpiled for a future humanitarian crisis - at least by international NGOs like Concern International, if not the United Nations itself. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in its Weekly Facts and Messages for June 22, wrote "Contingency planning: Plans for the hurricane season already in place by the international response in Haiti include pre-positioning of emergency supplies.”

Over and over in my conversations with camp residents, they ask, “Do they think we’re animals?”

The question can’t be conclusively answered, but some indicators reveal negligence at best, and high disdain at worst. Food aid has been suspended since the end of March, except for ‘food for work’ programs whose benefits typically flow to friends and family of insiders. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is reported to have called for the closure of some camps. Forcible governmental removal of residents from camps is on the upswing. The U.N. apparently tried to negotiate a three-month moratorium on expulsions with the Haitian government, but the government only held off for three weeks.

Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said on May 10, “We've been trying to incentivize people to return to their homes, particularly if their homes have been adjudicated as safe. But people seek to remain in the temporary communities because, as surprising as that might seem outside of Haiti, life is better for many of them now.”[2]

It’s hard to miss the parallel between Mills’ comment and that of former First Lady Barbara Bush when she visited evacuees from New Orleans in the Houston Astrodome just after Hurricane Katrina. "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this – this is working very well for them."

Mills’ statement is also akin to popular talk among some middle- and upper-class Haitians, and U.N. and NGO employees of ‘false victims.’ ‘False victims’ are those whose lives weren’t fully destroyed by the earthquake and who therefore, apparently, should not be entitled to any benefits. These are people who didn’t lose their own houses but who go hang out at the camps to get whatever aid might be distributed. As I’ve heard it described in an upscale Pétion-ville club and other places far removed from the suffering, these ‘false victims’ are making out like kings from the crisis.

What’s the standard for being a ‘real’ victim? That one lost everything but the clothes on one’s back? That one is a corpse still lying, flattened, in one of many buildings across town that now serves as a mausoleum?

And what would it mean if people’s daily lives were so devastated that they had to go to crowded, muddy, inhumane refugee camps for an upgrade?

Beyond Mills’ and others' insensitivity around the tremendous needs that all destitute people in Haiti face today, she is flat wrong. Most cannot return home for one of at least three reasons. First, the sites that held most of the cement-block houses that were destroyed during the earthquake remain covered in hills of rubble, so much that no tent can be erected there. Hiring a crew to clear and cart away that rubble can cost upwards of US$50, an impossible figure for most. Second, of those houses that are left standing, many are seriously cracked or otherwise damaged. Third, many families who were renters were kicked out by landlords immediately after the earthquake.

“Aren’t we all Haitians? Is any one of us more a person than anyone else?” one former street vendor inquired. She lost her husband, one-room home, all belongings, and the merchandise through which she made her living in the earthquake, and now lives with three children and a niece in a tent made of four sapling trunks and a ripped blue plastic tarp.

“Since January 12, it’s gotten so serious that we have to make this the focus of our work. Even the Haitian Constitution, Article 22, says that the state has an obligation to provide good housing to people,” said Reyneld Sanon, one of the coordinators of the aforementioned housing advocacy group FRAKKA. Formed two months after the earthquake, FRAKKA is a coalition of about thirty groups, including youth, community, workers’ rights, popular education, and children’s right organizations, plus organizations and leadership committees from camps. While the coalition’s size and strength are still humble, it is representative of a new trend to organize around permanent lodging.

“We’ll take advantage of this moment to remind people that in 1985, Mexico had an earthquake. People organized themselves and forced the state to get them housing to live in,” Sanon continued.

“The problem of housing has always been there. If you look at the slums before January 12, those weren’t houses that anyone should have been living in. As the proverb says in Haiti, ‘These houses can fool the sun, but they can’t fool the rain.’ And the problem isn’t just in Port-au-Prince; it’s a national problem. Peasants need houses, too. If you travel around the county, you can see the status of peasants’ housing. You can see that everyone in the country need better housing.

“People know that we have a state that doesn’t work for them. Generally, the state in this country just works for a small sector who are sucking the people dry, that’s in the employ of the bourgeoisie. The people don’t know they have things like the right to free schooling and to health care, and that the state has to give that to them, since they’ve never gotten these things. But they’ve already paid for them with their taxes and even with foreign loans, because it’s the people who are going to pay those back.

“One of the activities we did on May 1 was a training session with about 30 representatives of different organizations. We gave them two documents, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 22 of the Constitution. We went into the camps and did meetings with small groups and one-on-one to talk to them about their rights.

“Then we’re doing consciousness-raising on the necessity for people to unify and fight for housing. This leads us to mobilization, where people can take the streets on a regular basis to get their needs met. Sit-ins, too: we already have a calendar of days to do sit-ins in camps and shantytowns.

A press release by FRAKKA from July 27 recognized that, “The definitive solution to the problem of housing is tied to questions of decentralization, management of the nation, and agrarian reform.” I might add a commitment by the government and international community to meet the needs of all. But in the meantime, the statement reads, “We must mobilize… to demand our rights to get good housing and quality of life.”

Thanks to Mark Schuller, Melinda Miles, and Nicole Phillips.

1 Brendan McCarthy, “Despite drop in crime, New Orleans' murder rate continues to lead nation,” Times-Picayune, June 1, 2009.

2 From Lois Romano, “State Department's Cheryl Mills on rebuilding Haiti,” Washington Post, May 20, 2010, p. A15, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/09/AR201005...

Robert F Kennedy Jr: Shocking Vaccine Cover-Up (video)

2011-04-02T01:42:00.002-03:00

Video: Robert F Kennedy Jr: Shocking Vaccine Cover-Up

Plutonomics

2011-03-10T21:33:00.003-03:00

January 8, 2007, 8:15 AM ET

It’s well known that the rich have an outsized influence on the economy

The nation’s top 1% of households own more than half the nation’s stocks, according to the Federal Reserve. They also control more than $16 trillion in wealth — more than the bottom 90%.

Yet a new body of research from Citigroup suggests that the rich have other, more-surprising impacts on the economy.

Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term “Plutonomy” in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.

In a series of research notes over the past year, Kapur and his team explained that Plutonomies have three basic characteristics.

1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”

2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.

Kapur says that once we understand the Plutonomy, we can solve some of the recent mysteries of the American economy. For instance, some economists have been puzzled (especially last year) about why wild swings in oil prices have had only muted effects on consumer spending.

Kapur’s explanation: the Plutonomy. Since the rich don’t care about higher oil prices, and they dominate spending, higher oil prices don’t matter as much to total consumer spending.

The Plutonomy also could explain larger “imbalances” such as the national debt level. The rich are so comfortably rich, Kapur explains, that they have started spending higher shares of their incomes on luxuries. They borrow much larger amounts than the “average consumer,” so they have an exaggerated impact on the nation’s debt levels and savings rates. Yet because the rich still have plenty of wealth and healthy balance sheets, their borrowing shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

In other words, much of the nation’s lower savings rate is due to borrowing by the rich. So we should worry less about the “over-stretched” average consumer.

Finally, the Plutonomy helps explain why companies that serve the rich are posting some of the strongest growth and profits these days.

“The Plutonomy is here, is going to get stronger, its membership swelling” he wrote in one research note. “Toys for the wealthy have pricing power, and staying power.”

To prove his point, he created a “Plutonomy Basket” of stocks, filled with companies that sell to the rich. The auction house Sotheby’s is on the list, along with fashion houses Bulgari, Burberry and Hermes, hotelier Four Seasons, private-banker Julius Baer and jeweler Tiffany’s. Kapur says the basket has risen an average of 17% a year over the past year, outperforming the MSCI World Index.

Of course, Kapur says there are risks to the Plutonomy, including war, inflation, financial crises, the end of the technological revolution and populist political pressure. Yet he maintains that the “the rich are likely to keep getting even richer, and enjoy an even greater share of the wealth pie over the coming years.”

All of which means that, like it or not, inequality isn’t going away and may become even more pronounced in the coming years. The best way for companies and businesspeople to survive in Plutonomies, Kapur implies, is to disregard the “mass” consumer and focus on the increasingly rich market of the rich.

A tough message — but one worth considering.

Here is the original CitiGroup document:

http://canadianclimateaction.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/citigroup-oct-16-2005-plutonomy-report-part-1.pdf

Top Secret America

2011-02-09T12:28:00.003-03:00

A hidden world, growing beyond control

Washington Post investigation

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counter terrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counter terrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI's rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices "on the order of the pyramids," in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

Construction for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television monitors. "Escort-required" badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. "Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

Chomsky: U.S. Savage Imperialism

2011-02-02T21:29:00.003-03:00

Part three of a Z Media Institute talk, June 2010
February 2011

By Noam Chomsky

In parts one and two of "U.S. Savage Imperialism," Chomsky talks about the U.S. global mission and the Mideast with particular regard to Iran and Israel/Palestine. He closes by speculating on whether, with world pressure, the U.S. might shift its policy and insist on Israel accepting the international consensus on a two-state solution. What follows is a transcript of the first group of questions asked by the students attending Z Media Institute 2010.

Q: Can you talk about Egypt's role in supporting the siege of Gaza and also about the steel wall it's building?

CHOMSKY: You're quite right that Egypt has been complicit in Israel's savage siege of Gaza. Actually, Egypt is more frightened by Hamas than Israel is. Egypt is a brutal dictatorship, strongly supported by President Obama who has said straight out that he's not going to criticize them because Egypt helps us maintain stability in the Middle East. That's why nobody in the Middle East with a brain functioning can take Obama seriously when he talks about human rights.

But Egypt's very worried because if they ever allowed anything remotely like a democratic election, there's a popular force in Egypt which could turn into a majority—namely the Muslim Brotherhood. And the U.S. supports them in that. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt was horrified by their popular victory in Palestine. Egypt also understands U.S./Israeli policy, which is not very obscure. The U.S. and Israel want to throw Gaza, which has been virtually destroyed by the Israelis, into the hands of Egypt. Israel doesn't want it, the U.S. doesn't want it. They can't just kill everybody the way they could in the 19th century because you couldn't get away with it now. So the idea is to keep the population in Gaza barely alive, to abandon any responsibility for them, and to toss them into the hands of Egypt, which doesn't want them. For that reason, and because of the fact that they're ruled by an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood, Egypt has been participating in the siege.

They are, as you said, also building a wall—apparently with U.S. engineering support—to seal off the country totally, partly just to increase the savagery of the siege, but also partly to confound U.S./Israeli policy of attempting to toss Gaza into Egypt's hands, which they don't want.

I've been interested in Israel's motivations for the Gaza attack. Norman Finkelstein has written that it was to restore Israel's deterrence capacity. I wonder if you agree with his thesis and his position that Israel at some point must suffer a military defeat, possibly at the hands of Hezbollah.

I think Finkelstein has a case. Israel was defeated in 2006 and they need to maintain a posture of invincibility after being so terrible harmed. Maybe they thought by smashing up Gaza, they could restore it, but I don't know exactly who they thought they were impressing. To show that an advanced modern army can destroy a totally defenseless population which can't even fire a pistol in response is not a very impressive demonstration of deterrence capacity.

They know that they can stop the rocket attacks, but to do so would mean accepting an agreement with Hamas and providing some legitimacy for the elected government in Palestine. And they don't want to provide any legitimacy. It can't be tolerated. They've got most of the cabinet in prison, in fact. They want to destroy it is an independent force.

What about a military defeat? I was in Lebanon recently and I talked to some of the leading Western Middle East correspondents. Some of them have been based there for decades so they know the region very well. The most knowledgeable of them expect a war. In fact, they think both Israel and Hezbollah want a war. Israel wants a war so it can show it really can destroy Lebanon—it won't be beaten, as it was last time. And if Israel, with U.S. backing, decides to attack Iran, as might happen, they have to destroy Lebanon first because Lebanon has deterrence capacity—namely Hezbollah.

So they may attack and there could be a war and the two of them will destroy each other. It could happen soon.

States don't necessarily act rationally and Israel is becoming extremely irrational, paranoid, and ultra-nationalist. Take the attack on the flotilla. It was a completely irrational act. If they wanted to they could have easily disabled the boats. Attacking a Turkish-flagged ship and killing Turks is about the craziest thing they could do from a strategic point of view. Turkey has been their one close regional ally since 1958.

Attacking your one regional ally for absolutely no reason is a kind of insanity. And they've done it before. Earlier, Israel had purposely humiliated the Turkish ambassador in a manner that I don't think has a precedent in diplomatic history. That's pretty irrational.

They claim there's an existential threat from Iran, but according to the U.S. strategic analysis, the threat is that Iran doesn't obey orders and is a deterrent to Israel's efforts at regional dominance. But if the Israelis fool themselves into thinking Iran is an existential threat, the outcome of that you can't even think of.

It's not that Iran is that rational either. There's a possible conflict brewing in the region, which is really frightening to think about. As you may know, Iran has announced that it intends to send ships to break the Gaza blockade. If that happened, all bets are off. Israel could go berserk. It's a powerful state with hundreds of nuclear weapons. They could decide to destroy the region and destroy themselves in the process. Who knows. It's scary.

Israel has a doctrine that goes back to the 1950s. They sometimes call it the Samson Complex, named after the most respected and honored suicide bomber in the world. Samson was a famous hero who killed a lot of Philistines. As the story goes, Delilah cut off his hair and he lost his strength and the Philistines captured and blinded him. But his hair grew back and he regained his strength. He was in the temple surrounded by thousands of Philistines when he pulled down the temple walls and killed himself and more Philistines in his death than in his lifetime.

The Samson Complex means if the world presses Israel too far, they will go crazy and bring down the temple walls. Of course, they'll be killed too. This attitude is part of the national psyche and it's expanding now.

And it's not a joke. It could happen.

Talk about Netanyahu's attempt to crush left dissidents.

It's not just Netanyahu. It's blamed on him, but it is the national mood, which is shifting very far to the ultra-nationalist right. Take a look at the polls. The national mood is paranoid. Part of it is the feeling that Israel has to crush any attempt to question the legitimacy and magnificence of what they are doing. This change in the country in the last few years is dramatic.

When the international community asks for an independent investigation, who are these investigators and do they have any legitimacy at all?

Most of what's going on doesn't get reported. But a couple of days ago, there was an important meeting of what we call the international community—which means the United States and anybody who happens to agree with us.

Maybe the whole world disagrees, but then they're against the international community. I'm not joking. Take the idea that the international community is calling on Iran to stop enriching uranium. You read that everywhere.

Exactly who is this international community? It's not the non-aligned countries, which are most of the world. They vigorously support Iran's right to enrich uranium, so they can't be part of the international community.

A couple of years ago the majority of Americans agreed with them. So the majority of Americans also aren't part of the international community because the international community is Washington and whoever happens to be going along with it.

It was pretty striking what happened in the last couple of weeks about this. Turkey and Brazil made a deal with Iran, which was pretty similar to what the U.S. had proposed. They would arrange for uranium to be enriched outside of Iran and then return it to them for medical purposes. It turns out that Obama had written a letter to Lula, the president of Brazil at the time, advocating a similar deal, probably because Obama believed that Iran would never agree and then he'd be able to refer to the letter and say, well, we tried and they wouldn't do it. But Iran did agree and the U.S. instantly reacted by ramming through a UN Security Council resolution, which is so weak that China and Russia agreed to it instantly. If you read the terms of the resolution—which was passed and praised here—if you look at the small print, it does almost nothing. Its only effect is to transfer to China even greater control over Iran's resources. So China's happy with it.

Russia's happy with it because it permits them to sell all the arms they want to Iran. But the U.S. had to ram the resolution through to make the world know who's boss. Not Brazil and Turkey. Turkey is the most important regional power, with a long border with Iran. So they're not allowed to be boss. Brazil is the most important, most respected country in the South, so they can't be boss. In fact, if you read the New York Times, the headlines say that there's a "spot on Lula's legacy" for standing up to the U.S. Today there's a report quoting some high level official saying, we've got to do something to make sure Turkey stays in line.

That's kind of like the Mafia. You have to make sure nobody interferes with your right to control everything. So the U.S. rams through an almost meaningless UN resolution to block a Turkish/Brazilian initiative which could have made some progress.

The relevant part of the international community is actually the Asian security system, CICA—I think. It includes most of the Asian states—China, India, Iran, Israel, and so on. They had a security meeting and decided strongly to call for an international investigation into Israel's attack on the flotilla. The rules of the organization, however, require consensus. Of course, Israel didn't agree so the vote was 22-1, or something close to that. Therefore, the group made a separate declaration calling for an international investigation.

Obama immediately blocked that Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation and the Asian security organization was blocked out of the media. So it didn't happen, except that it did happen.

International relations theory doesn't amount to much. There are some principles. Probably one of the most important is the Mafia principle. The Godfather does not accept disobedience. A small storekeeper somewhere who doesn't pay protection money can't get away with it. Maybe you don't even need the money, but if one storekeeper gets away with it, somebody else will get the idea and pretty soon the system erodes. So you don't just send in your goons to get the money, you send them to beat them to a pulp so everybody gets the idea.

That's how international affairs works. Sometimes it's called the domino theory or some other thing. But you look at case after case and it constantly works like that.

Does it mean anything that Turkey is in NATO and Israel attacked a Turkish ship in International waters?

There's some debate about technically how the ship was flagged, but if it was a Turkish flagged ship, as was claimed, that means it's Turkish territory. Under maritime law, a ship in waters is part of the territory of the country that flags it. There is a NATO treaty that requires NATO powers to go to the assistance of any NATO country under attack. So, if treaties meant anything, which, of course, they don't, the NATO countries, led by the United States, should have immediately gone to the support of the Turkish ship. If an Iranian ship had attacked a NATO vessel, probably Iran would have been blown off the face of the earth.

You mentioned this boss who says what can happen and what can't as a model of the way nation states work. Other times don't you have to look at economic classes instead? How does that work?

That's an interesting question and Iran is a very interesting case. There are a couple of principles of international affairs and all of them are missing from international relations theory. As I mentioned, one of these is the Mafia principle: another traces back to Adam Smith. We're supposed to worship Adam Smith, but we're not supposed to read him. That's much too dangerous. He's nowhere near the crazed capitalist lunatic that's constructed in ideology. He's a pretty sensible guy. Smith pointed out that in England—I'm quoting him

—"the principle architects of policy are the merchants and manufacturers," the people who own the economy. And they make sure that "their own interests are most peculiarly attended to" no matter how "grievous" to the people of England, let alone others who were subjected to, what he called, "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

Sometimes these principles conflict and those cases are important for the study of policy formation. With Iran, for example, the major economic forces would be pretty happy to have the U.S. normalize relations with Iran.

The U.S. energy corporations are not delighted that China is picking up all the goodies. But state policy requires that we give Iran's resources to China over the objections of U.S. energy corporations, which usually have a crucial impact on policy making.

That's the conflict between two doctrines: the Mafia doctrine and the Adam Smith doctrine. In this case, the Mafia doctrine wins. It's striking—if you look over the history, you find that the very same individuals will make different decisions depending on whether they are running a corporation or running the government. The same people who are making the decisions about Iran—let's give the resources to China—if they were still running their energy corporations, they'd make the opposite decision. They now have an institutional role in state policy, which is different from the role of the CEO of a corporation. The CEOs of corporations have an institutional role as well—to maximize profits. It's a legal requirement and if they don't do it, they're out and someone else comes in who will do it. The role of the same individual in, for example, the state department or the Pentagon is to consider the long-term consequences of policy choices that sometimes conflict with the parochial interests of a particular sector of the economy. So what you get is a conflict and, in Iran's case, the Mafia principle wins. The same individuals who might have run oil companies, now must decide that for the long-term goal of controlling the Middle East, it's necessary to take positions which, in fact, harm the energy corporations.

Iran is not the only case. U.S. policy toward Cuba is quite interesting to study for understanding
international relations theory. For 50 years, ever since Cuban independence, the U.S. has been attacking and punishing the people of Cuba. And we know exactly why. The documents are all out. You have to punish the people of Cuba—this is Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so on—because Cuba isn't following orders. They are carrying out what the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called "successful defiance" of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine, which said the U.S. runs the hemisphere.

Meanwhile, for decades the large majority of the U.S. population has been in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba. The rest of the world is totally opposed to U.S. policy towards Cuba. Just take a look at the UN Assembly votes every year. It's the World v. the United States—and the Marshall Islands or something. That's not unusual. What's striking in this case is that major sections of American business are also opposed. That includes energy, pharmaceutical, and agricultural corporations. They all want to normalize relation with Cuba. Following the Adam Smith principle, you'd expect them to determine policy, but it's overridden by the Mafia principle .

If you really want to study international affairs, those are the cases you should look at. Just as, if you want to understand U.S. Cold War policy, you should look at what happened in 1990. But those are exactly the topics that are off the agenda. You don't study them in graduate school, there's no academic literature about them, there's no commentary about them. They're just too revealing.

Incidentally, it's not the first time in the case of Iran. In 1953, when the U.S. and Britain overthrew the parliamentary regime and installed the Shah, the U.S. government wanted U.S. oil companies to take 40 percent of the British concession. It was part of the long-term U.S. policy of edging the British out of the Middle East and taking over and turning them into a junior partner. The oil companies didn't want to do it for short-term reasons. It turned out that there was an oil glut at the time and if they took over the Iranian concession, they would have to reduce their liftings in Saudia Arabia, which was much more important for them.

But they were compelled by the government to take it. They were even threatened with anti-trust penalties, so they followed orders. In this case, long-term concerns about the control of oil overrode the specific parochial interest of the architects of policy.

I should mention that during the Second World War there was a kind of mini-war going on between Britain and the U.S. over control of Middle East oil, mainly in Saudi Arabia. It was understood by the 1930s that it was the real prize, the jewel in the crown. Britain wanted to keep it and the U.S. wanted to take it away. So there was a battle going on—we have the documents—and, of course, the U.S. won. Britain was in dire straits at the time, so the U.S. took over Saudi Arabia.

At the end of the war, the British understood that their role as the international hegemon was essentially over and the foreign office recognized that they would have to be what they called "junior" partners of the U.S. They had no illusions about what the U.S. was up to: they said, the U.S. is taking over the world under the pretext of benevolence, but they're just after power and we have no choice, except to be junior partners.

The U.S. treats them with total contempt and Britain just takes it. The most striking case was during the 1962 missile crisis. U.S. leaders—the Kennedys—were making decisions which they understood could lead to the destruction of England and all of Europe. They were pushing things to the point where there might be a Russian retaliation and they weren't telling the British about it. In fact, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, didn't know what was going on, but tried desperately to find out. At one point, one of Kennedy's senior advisers—probably Dean Acheson—defined what he called the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Britain, which he said means that "Britain is our lieutenant—the fashionable word is 'partner'."

Of course, Britain has a choice. They could be part of the Eurozone, but they prefer to be a junior partner and think of themselves as independent actors in world affairs. Of course, Europe, too, has choices and these have been a serious concern for U.S. policy since 1950. U.S. planners understood that there would be industrial recovery in Europe in the early post-war period. Once they do, they're a power on the scale of the United States with a large economy, a larger educated population, with a lot of advantages. They could become an independent force in world affairs—what is called a third force. That's a big danger. You can't run the world if there's a big independent force. A lot of efforts were meant to prevent that. One of them is NATO. Part of the goal of NATO was to ensure that Europe would remain a vassal under U.S. control.

What happened in 1990 is striking in this respect. If anybody believed the propaganda of the preceding 50 years, then as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, you'd expect NATA to be disbanded. The propaganda about NATO, at the time, was that it was there to protect us from the Russian hordes. Okay, no more Russian hordes, let's disband NATO. Is that what happened? No. NATO expanded in quite an interesting way. Gorbachev made an incredible concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO. If you think about it, that's pretty astonishing. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia a couple of times in the last century. Now Gorbachev was agreeing to let unified Germany join a hostile military alliance. Why did he do it? Because there was a quid pro quo. He made an agreement with the Bush (senior) administration that NATO would not expand "one inch to the East." It would not include East Germany and obviously nothing beyond it. Well, Gorbachev was naive.

Bush was careful never to put the agreement on paper—we have a detailed scholarly record of this. Gorbachev made the stupid error of thinking he could make a gentleman's agreement with the U.S. Well, that's pretty stupid. The U.S. hadn't the slightest intention of living up to the agreement. And it didn't. So, of course, NATO expanded to the east and, under Clinton, right up to the Russian border—and even further.

NATO's official role now is to control the global energy system, the sea lanes, and pipelines. There was a conference in Washington recently led by former Secretary of State Albright, which outlined a global mission for NATO. The idea is that NATO should become a U.S.-run global intervention force. There's a conflict about this. The Europeans aren't all that happy about spending the money and the U.S. is charging them with being too non-violent and so on.

What happened with NATO is a dramatic illustration of the fact that all the propaganda of the Cold War was complete lies. NATO doesn't disappear when the Russian hordes are gone, it expands to make sure that Europe doesn't carry out that dangerous option of becoming an independent third force in world affairs.

Z

Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and author of dozens of books and articles, mainly

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives

Congo Resource Wars and Rwanda

2011-01-18T20:30:00.000-03:00

Following the Mineral Trail: Congo Resource Wars and Rwanda

Thursday, 18 February 2010 12:23 John Lasker

The Rwandan government and its military have largely been suspected by a UN Panel of Experts, human rights organizations and independent journalists, of financially supporting a number of violent militias that have destabilized the eastern Congo region to illegally traffic millions-of-dollars worth of minerals such as coltan, gold, and cassiterite. These minerals are then brought from neighboring Congo into Rwanda for eventual sale on the international market.

In 2000, Rwanda, an African ally of Washington, produced 83 tons of coltan from its own mines but found a way to export a total of 603 tons that year, as discovered by Danish journalist Bjorn Willum, after he requested the figures from the National Bank of Rwanda. Willum also found the Rwandan army, which at the time was receiving funding and training from the US military, made $250 million that year by selling stolen Congolese minerals, most likely purchased from their shadow militias.

Roughly ten years later, a UN Panel of Expert's report titled The 2009 Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo states that the illegal traffic of Congolese minerals still flows into Rwanda mostly from these violent militias that continue to profit greatly, presumably passing earnings onto their Rwandan backers. The report also implicated a number of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers of indirectly financing the resource war as their buyers simply waited in Rwanda for the minerals to make their way across the border.

What's more, this is not the first UN Panel of Expert's report on the exploitation of Congolese resources; similar findings were also publicized in 2001 and 2003. While a consensus can not be reached among government agencies and human rights groups, the International Rescue Committee believes the resource war which started in the mid-1990s has taken the lives of 4 to 5 million people, most of whom are Congolese.

Given the implication of such violence and illegal trade, one would expect US embassy officials in Rwanda to have an opinion on the subject. Sasha Lezhnev is the director of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, a nonprofit that aids former child soldiers. Of late, he's spent time in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2008 Lezhner spoke to the outgoing US ambassador to Rwanda about the resource conflicts in the region.

"I asked the ambassador," says Lezhnev, "'What are your feelings about Rwanda's influence in the eastern Congo?'" The ambassador immediately responded: "I don't know what you're talking about."

Lezhnev was shocked at what he believes is simply the former ambassador's ignorance of Rwanda's influence. "We have to open our eyes to what's going on," he says.

Yet after years of apparent indifference to the eastern Congo resource wars, it appears the US is finally starting to take measures to help end the conflict; the U.S. Senate is pushing forward the Congo Conflict Minerals Act of 2009. The bill calls for, among other things, a system of oversight to keep watch on all US-based industries that utilize Congolese coltan, cassiterite, wolframite and gold, and make sure the minerals were not extracted from conflict mines controlled by illegal armed groups.

However, the bill makes no mention of the Paul Kagame regime, which has led Rwanda since the genocide of 1994, or his administration's influence in eastern Congo. Kagame has said any strategic maneuvers on Rwanda's part in the eastern Congo, which also includes the deployment of regular Rwandan troops, is so to keep the pressure on those groups that took part in the 1994 massacre.

But according to Professor Yaa-Lengi, who runs the New York-based Coalition for Peace, Justice and Democracy in the Congo, millions of Congolese - a number corroborated by several American-based human-rights organizations interviewed for this article - believe Kagame's claims are a ruse, a smoke-screen to loot Congolese minerals. He says it is part of an elaborate plan that many Congolese believe was initiated by the US; and thus Rwanda is an American proxy with a mission to keep Congolese minerals moving cheaply to Western-based mining companies.

Yaa-Lengi says these theories, deemed far-fetched by many experts, don't end there. "Bill Clinton was behind the (1994) genocide," he stated. "Millions of Congolese believe this."

Lezhnev and representatives of other human rights groups working in the eastern Congo scoff at Yaa-Lengi and the charges he levels against the Clinton administration. But they agree the Congolese have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the US and their regional interests.

For instance, David Sullivan of the Enough Project says during the Bush administration, the White House had a public relations official working in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. When Bush's term ended in 2008, he says the official quickly took a job with the mining company Freeport-McMoRan and its operations in the country, which mainly extracts copper and cobalt.

"There are some really dangerous arguments about this [Rwanda's interests in the Congo]," says Sullivan. "There are a lot of conspiracy theories. And many people overstate the influence of the US in Rwanda and the region."

Fueling those conspiracy theories in part is President Kagame, who gained power immediately following the 1994 genocide. Kagame went through a U.S. military training program on American soil during the years leading up to the massacre. There's also historical evidence that points to how important Congolese minerals are to the US; the US military acquired uranium from a mine in the DRC town of Skinkolobwe to build the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. The U.S. continues to maintain strong ties with Rwanda: US assistance to the country "has increased four-fold over the past four years," according to the US State Department.

Lezhnev says, "We have a lot of leverage with Kagame and we have to use that." Meaning that the US needs to pressure the Rwandan government into ending its destabilizing role in the eastern Congo.

Yet what specific influences the US ultimately has over Rwanda remains a mystery. One element that contradicts the conspiracy theories offered by Yaa-Lengi, however, is the new Senate bill. Sullivan says it could end the resource war in eastern Congo. But he acknowledges the bill is no panacea.

"We would like to see a provision in the bill that makes [all metal brokers who sell minerals acquired from the eastern Congo] disclose the minerals exact origin, the exact mine it came from," he says. "If they say they are getting the minerals from Malawi, then they have to have an independent verification saying so." When selling their minerals onto the international market, metal traders have faked records saying the minerals were actually from countries other than the Congo.

Essentially, what Sullivan and the Enough Project are calling for is an independent auditing effort based in the eastern Congo. This could be expensive, but if established, could lead to new successes in the fight against the looting. For example, say a metal broker is caught selling minerals from a mine that is a source of conflict and controlled by a violent militia - a reality for many eastern Congolese mines. In this case "[the metal broker] will lose access to international markets," says Sullivan.

Some experts on the eastern Congo say the bill is flawed and if passed, won't have the muscle to end the resource war.

"Given the many links in the supply chain [of eastern Congo minerals], any of them can simply claim they don't know where the minerals are coming from and it is currently difficult to prove them wrong," says David Barouski, a student from the University of Wisconsin, who has documented first-hand the resource war in the eastern Congo. "The U.S. claims it wants to help implement ways to certify this chain, but how are they going to do it for every mine in a conflict zone? Certification at the mines would require agents to go on site, but with such poor infrastructure it would be years before this is feasible and there would need to be peace to rebuild the infrastructure."

Besides the U.S., the Congolese people don't trust the UN either, says Yaa-Lengi. Throwing fuel on their UN speculation, he says, is the 2009 UN Panel of Experts' report on the eastern Congo, The Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At first the report was leaked, angering members of the Security Council. Then its official release was delayed.

"The UN delayed publishing it because it points a finger back to the UN and the Security Council," says Yaa-Lengi. "This is because they are allowing the Congolese to die and be raped. The UN knows it, but they are allowing it. All members of the Security Council are benefiting from the resources of the Congo. The UN does only what the Security Council wants and by that we mean what the super powers want."

The U.N. Security Council is comprised of the U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia and China as permanent members and two other rotating member nations. Companies in every one of these nations, claims Yaa-Lengi, have benefitted in some way from the cheap minerals taken from eastern Congo, one of poorest nations on the planet. But according to the African Business Magazine, the DRC currently has an estimated total mineral wealth of $24 trillion, equivalent to the GDP of Europe and the US combined.

Sullivan of the Enough Project agrees the Congolese are suspect of the UN, as they are of the US. Yet, he says to "keep in mind the [UN] Panel of Experts is independent of the Security Council." For the most part, this UN Panel of Experts is made up of regional experts of the eastern Congo, its culture, government and society, he says, adding "The new report has pretty much been ignored by the Security Council."

Indeed, past UN Panel of Experts' reports on the eastern Congo, published in 2001 and 2003, were also mostly ignored by members of the Security Council. Even though the UN Panel of Experts had evidence piled high implicating scores of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers of buying looted minerals from conflict mines of the eastern Congo.

Take, for example, the story of Robert Raun, a former metal broker who worked just across the eastern Congolese border in Rwanda. He was the beneficiary of a strange response on the part of the UN in 2004, a response that sends mixed messages about the West and their intentions for the eastern Congo resource war.

Raun and his mining company, Trinitech of Cleveland, Ohio, which processed and traded coltan, had been implicated in the UN's 2001 report, The Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This report essentially accused Trinitech and over 100 other Western-based mining companies of looting minerals from the eastern Congo. The minerals included coltan, a black metal ore that is needed to meet the West's insatiable thirst for personal technology. It is a key ingredient in the manufacture of cell phones, lap tops and video-game consoles. (Also see Inside Africa's PlayStation War in Toward Freedom.)

When Raun stepped onto the 20th floor of the Secretariat Tower of the United Nations in 2004 to respond to their charges, the "power of accusation" from the UN, he says, had already ruined Trinitech. The UN also accused Raun of aligning with "elite networks" of Rwandan government officials and high-ranking military officers. The elite networks were apparently forcing Congolese children and captives to mine for coltan.

"The allegations we were using child labor was a fabrication," insists Raun, a devout Christian. "[But] accusation is a powerful thing. It ruined us. Nobody wants to buy from the company that's wearing the Scarlet Letter. We're just a shell of what we used to be. But we're standing, by the power of God, we're standing."

Nevertheless, on that day in New York City in 2004, the UN would surprisingly drop its charges against Trinitech. Indeed, at that time, the UN was giving a lot of Western-based mining companies and metal brokers working in eastern Congo a pass. Out of the 100 or so mining companies accused of looting minerals, the UN dropped the charges against each one, infuriating mining watchdog efforts such as MiningWatch Canada.

Raun only answers to the child labor charges, however. When asked who Trinitech was buying its coltan from, and whether it came from conflict-ridden mines in the eastern Congo, he responds, "No comment".

John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio.

Cancun climate agreement and Bolivia's dissent

2011-01-04T19:12:00.002-03:00

Cancun climate agreement stripped bare by Bolivia's dissent

By Nick Buxton

December 16, 2010 -- Transnational Institute -- In the famous Hans Christian Anderson fable, "The Emperor's New Clothes", a weaver famously plays on an emperor's arrogance and persuades him to wear a non-existent suit with the argument that it is only invisible to the "hopelessly stupid".The moment of truth comes, as we can all remember, when a child in an otherwise silent crowd yells out, “But he is not wearing any clothes!” What we don't always recall is that the naked Emperor suspects the child may be telling the truth, but carries on marching proudly and unclothed regardless.

The story is a rather apt parallel for the Cancun climate agreements that were signed last week. Only one dissenting country, Bolivia, dared to voice its dissent with the agreement. Yet its voice was silenced by the gavel of the chair and by the standing ovations of 191 countries. They, like the naked emperor, must know that the deal is naked and without substance, yet they march on proudly regardless.

Cancun sets us on dangerous path to runaway climate change

Bolivia's indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any "clothes" was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The troubling reality, as he pointed out, is that the agreement merely confirms the completely inadequate voluntary pledges of reductions of 13-16% by 2020 made since Copenhagen's climate talks in 2009. Analysts at Climate Action Tracker have revealed that these paltry offers are nowhere near enough to keep temperature increases even within the contested goal of 2 degrees Celcius. Instead they would lead to increases in temperature of between 3 and 4 degrees C, a level considered by scientists as highly dangerous for the vast majority of the planet. Solon said, “I cannot in all in consciousness sign such as a document as millions of people will die as a result.”

To a stony silence from fellow country negotiators, Solon also pointed out a whole range of critical flaws in the agreement from its complete lack of specifics on key issues of finance to its systematic exclusion of voices from developing countries.

Why the Cancun text is a backward step
• Document effectively kills of the only binding agreement, Kyoto Protocol, in favour of a completely inadequate bottom-up voluntary approach.
• Increases loopholes and flexibilities that allow developed countries to avoid action, via an expansion of offsets and continued existence of "surplus allowances" of carbon after 2012 by countries like Ukraine and Russia which effectively cancel out any other reductions.
• Finance commitments weakened: commitment to “provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries have been diluted to talking more vaguely about “mobilising [resources] jointly”, with expectation that this will mainly be provided by carbon markets.
• The World Bank is made trustee of the new Green Climate Fund, which has been strongly opposed by many civil society groups due to the undemocratic makeup of the World Bank and its poor environmental record.
• No discussion of intellectual property rights, repeatedly raised by many countries, as current rules obstruct transfer of key climate-related technologies to developing countries.
• Constant assumption in favour of market mechanisms to resolve climate change even though this perspective is not shared by a number of countries, particularly in Latin America.
• Green light given for the controversial REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) program, which often ends up perversely rewarding those responsible for deforestation, while dispossessing indigenous and forest dwellers of their land.
• Systematic exclusion of proposals that came from the historic World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change including proposals for a Climate Justice Tribunal, full recognition of Indigenous rights, and rights for nature.

As a press statement from Bolivia put it: “Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.”

Solon concluded that in substance the Cancun text was little more than a rehashed version of the Copenhagen Accord, that had been widely condemned the year before. Patricia Espinosa, chair of the talks, refused to open up any points of her draft text for negotiation and cheered on by other delegates made the legally dubious ruling that Bolivia's opposition did not block consensus. The Cancun agreements were "approved" to great celebration from the international community.

Cancun mood-music sways opinion

It became clear soon after the plenary ended that what seemed like roars of support for the Cancun text were more cries of relief or desperation. After the debacle in Copenhagen and following a probably deliberate policy by major powers who spoke constantly of "low expectations", the mere existence of an agreement seemed enough. As Chris Huhne, Britain's climate secretary put it, “This is way better than what we were expecting only a few weeks ago.”

The mood seemed to infect the larger non-governmental organisations who were gathered in Cancun. Greenpeace, whicht had labelled the almost identical Copenhagen Accord last year a “crime scene”, said that Cancun had put “hope over fear and put the building blocks back in place for a global deal to combat climate change”. Oxfam echoed, saying that “negotiators have resuscitated the UN talks and put them on a road to recovery.”

In the aftermath of Cancun, the main defence of the text has been based on appeals to realism. As Tom Athanasiou of Eco Equity puts it in his analysis on the accord: “The reason that so many people are celebrating the Agreements is because they believe that, setting aside the details, they capture the only agreement that was possible.”

Many environmentalists argue that at least with this accord and a reinvigorated belief in the UN, we live to fight another day. Meanwhile they warn that a collapse of negotiations in Cancun would perhaps have forever destroyed the UN process and even the possibility of any future binding agreement on climate change. Nearly all use one of the favourite mantras of the negotiations, saying that critics should “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.

Realism of science, or realism of the powerful?

However this argument supposes two things: first, that progress, even if small, was made at Cancun and second, that it is better to have some kind of agreement than none at all. This reasoning along with both the financial offers, cajoling and bullying of the major powers – which was revealed most dramatically in Wikileaks cables – is no doubt what drove most government negotiators to sign the Cancun texts. Yet both suppositions are highly questionable.

First, in terms of analysing progress, aside from the many other critiques of the texts, there is strong evidence that the Cancun agreements take us backwards rather than forwards. One of the key characteristics of the otherwise wholly insufficient Kyoto Protocol is that it had legally binding targets based in theory on the science. As we come up to the first deadline of 2012, 17 countries will almost certainly breach their commitments to reduce emissions by 2020 by 5% compared to 1990. Some countries like Canada, Australia, Turkey and Spain have instead vastly increased emissions. However the fact that they signed legally binding targets does open up the possibilities of legal challenges and a more effective incentive in future for countries to abide by their commitments.

By contrast, the Cancun agreement effectively kills off the Kyoto Protocol and replaces it with a pledge system of voluntary commitments. Not only does this lead to countries only offering what they plan to do anyway, ignoring what science demands; there is absolutely no possibility of legal penalties if a country fails to fulfil its commitments. It is an ineffective and highly dangerous way of tackling one of the biggest crises humanity has faced.

Will good be the enemy of the necessary?

The second questionable supposition is that any agreement is better than no agreement. This may be true for some international discussions on less critical issues, but is it for discussing a climate crisis where urgent and radical action is the only way to avert runaway climate change? As even supporters of the Cancun agreement note, the text has mainly punted off most difficult decisions to the next meeting of the UNFCC in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011. It already seems likely that we will see a repeat of the hype built up around Copenhagen and the equal likelihood of either a fudge or a failure – particularly if delegates can seem so easily sated by a few symbolic gestures such as the ones in Cancun.

Meanwhile the window of opportunity to act is closing. One report by the London School of Economics suggested that greenhouse gas emissions will have to peak by 2015 to have even a 50% probability of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees C – the demand made by over 100 developing nations. The Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change similarly identified 2015 as a time when emissions will have to peak to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at levels of 350 to 400 parts per million.

Yet in the face of this, the best the world community can come up with is an agreement to continue negotiating? And we are happy to call that a success? [As a side note, it can only be seen as deeply cynical that industrialised countries in Cancun agreed on 2015 as the date to review whether the global target should be 1.5 degrees C rather than 2 degrees C given that any action after that will almost certainly be too late.]

The truth is that Cancun revealed a shocking failure by the world's nations – and particularly those most responsible for causing climate change – to find a collective and effective response to a crisis that will affect the most vulnerable. A report by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, in December 2010 noted that already 350,000 people die from natural disasters related to climate change and that this figure is likely to rise to 1 million people every year if we don't radically change course.

Bolivia was not an obstacle to progress, it was rather the only country daring enough to tell the truth. Rather than less Bolivias, we need more willing to stand up and say that the agreement was "naked" and unacceptable. Perhaps if more countries – especially major emerging economies like India and Brazil – had said they would not accept an illusory deal, it could have shocked the world into moving beyond cautious approaches and acting radically for humanity and the planet.

Only mass mobilisation can shift power balance

The needed shift in thinking and action, though, will only happen if we mobilise and on a scale that has never been done before. Bolivia's bravery came to a large degree from the mandate it received at the World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change, and the support it felt from people on the streets just a few blocks from the Cancun negotiating halls. Thousands of Indigenous people, smallholder farmers and grassroots activists marched on the streets were unequivocal in condemning the Cancun agreements and in supporting Bolivia.

They already see the costs of climate change and were not prepared to be bought off with a deal that did nothing to safeguard their future. They were backed by climate justice networks worldwide. Yet the isolation of Bolivia in the conference plenary shows that this movement faces a huge challenge in the coming year to scale up. As Bill McKibben, founder of the global campaign 350.org, argues we need to “build a movement strong enough to take on the most profitable and powerful enterprise that the human civilization has ever seen—the fossil fuel industry” and we need to do it urgently before it is too late.

[Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working on media, publications and online communications for the Transnational Institute. He has been based in California since September 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years, working as writer/web editor atFundación Solón, a Bolivian organisation working on issues of trade, water, culture and historical memory. He is a long-term activist on global justice and peace issues. In the late 1990s he was communications manager at Jubilee 2000, part of the global movement that put unjust international debt on the global political agenda. His publications include: "Networking for debt cancellation”, in Advocacy, activism and the Internet (Lyceum books, 2001); “Civil society and debt cancellation”, in Civil society and human rights (Routledge, 2004) and “Politics of debt”, in Dignity and Defiance: Bolivia’s challenge to globalisation (University of California Press/Merlin Press UK, January 2009). This article first appeared at the Transnational Institute website and is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewalunder a Creative Commons licence.]

Wikileaks, Washington on Haiti

2010-12-29T19:41:00.002-03:00

Wikileaks Show Why Washington Won’t Allow Democracy in Haiti

By Mark Weisbrot

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited (UK) on December 17, 2010. original.

The polarization of the debate around Wikileaks is pretty simple, really. Of all the governments in the world, the United States government is the greatest threat to world peace and security today. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the facts with a modicum of objectivity. The Iraq war has claimed hundreds of thousands, and most likely more than a million lives. It was completely unnecessary and unjustifiable, and based on lies. Now, Washington is moving toward a military confrontation with Iran.

As Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, pointed out in an interview recently, in the preparation for a war with Iran, we are at about the level of 1998 in the build-up to the Iraq war.

On this basis, even ignoring the tremendous harm that Washington causes to developing countries in such areas as economic development (through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization), or climate change, it is clear that any information which sheds light on U.S. "diplomacy" is more than useful. It has the potential to help save millions of human lives.

You either get this or you don’t. Brazil’s president Lula da Silva, who earned Washington’s displeasure last May when he tried to help defuse the confrontation with Iran, gets it. That’s why he defended and declared his "solidarity" with embattled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, even though the leaked cables were not pleasant reading for his own government.

One area of U.S. foreign policy that the Wikileaks cables help illuminate, which the major media has predictably ignored, is the occupation of Haiti. In 2004 the country’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time, through an effort led by the United States government. Officials of the constitutional government were jailed and thousands of its supporters were killed.

The Haitian coup, besides being a repeat of Aristide’s overthrow in 1991, was also very similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 – which also had Washington’s fingerprints all over it. Some of the same people in Washington were even involved in both efforts. But the Venezuelan coup failed – partly because Latin American governments immediately and forcefully declared that they would not recognize the coup government.

In the case of Haiti, Washington had learned from its mistakes in the Venezuelan coup and had gathered support for an illegitimate government in advance. A UN resolution was passed just days after the coup, and UN forces, headed by Brazil, were sent to the country. The mission is still headed by Brazil, and has troops from a number of other Latin American governments that are left of center, including Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. They are also joined by Chile, Peru and Guatemala from Latin America.

Would these governments have sent troops to occupy Venezuela if that coup had succeeded? Clearly they would not have considered such a move, yet the occupation of Haiti is no more justifiable. South America’s progressive governments have strongly challenged U.S. foreign policy in the region and the world, with some of them regularly using words like imperialism and empire as synonyms for Washington. They have built new institutions such as UNASUR to prevent these kinds of abuses from the north. Bolivia expelled the U.S. ambassador in September of 2008 for interfering in its own internal affairs.

Is it because Haitians are poor and black that their most fundamental human and democratic rights can be trampled upon?

The participation of these governments in the occupation of Haiti is a serious political contradiction for them, and it is getting worse. The Wikileaks cables illustrate how important the control of Haiti is to the United States.

A long memo from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince to the U.S. Secretary of State answers detailed questions about Haitian president Rene Preval’s political, personal, and family life, including such vital national security questions as "How many drinks can Preval consume before he shows signs of inebriation?" It also expresses one of Washington’s main concerns:

"his reflexive nationalism, and his disinterest in managing bilateral relations in a broad diplomatic sense, will lead to periodic frictions as we move forward our bilateral agenda. Case in point, we believe that in terms of foreign policy, Preval is most interested in gaining increased assistance from any available resource. He is likely to be tempted to frame his relationship with Venezuela and Chavez-allies in the hemisphere in a way that he hopes will create a competitive atmosphere as far as who can provide the most to Haiti."

This is why they got rid of Aristide – who was much to the left of Preval — and won’t let him back in the country. This is why Washington funded the recent "elections" that excluded Haiti’s largest political party, the equivalent of shutting out the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. And this is why MINUSTAH is still occupying the country, more than six years after the coup, without any apparent mission other than replacing the hated Haitian army – which Aristide abolished – as a repressive force.

People who do not understand U.S. foreign policy think that control over Haiti does not matter to Washington, because it is so poor and has no strategic minerals or resources. But that is not how Washington operates, as the Wikileaks cables repeatedly illustrate. For the State Department and its allies, it is all a ruthless chess game, and the pawns matter. Left governments will be removed or prevented from taking power where it is possible to do so; and the poorest countries – like Honduras last year – present the most opportune targets. A democratically elected government in Haiti, due to its history and the consciousness of the population, will inevitably be a left government – and one that will not line up with Washington’s foreign policy priorities for the region. Hence, democracy is not allowed.

Thousands of Haitians have been protesting the sham elections, as well as MINUSTAH’s role in causing the cholera epidemic, which has already taken more than 2,300 lives and can be expected to kill thousands more in the coming months and years. Judging from the rapid spread of the disease, there may have been gross criminal negligence on the part of MINUSTAH – i.e. large-scale dumping of fecal waste into the Artibonite river. This is another huge reason for them to leave Haiti.

This is a mission that costs over $500 million a year, when the UN can’t even raise a third of that to fight the epidemic that the mission caused, or to provide clean water for Haitians. And now the UN is asking for an increase to over $850 million for MINUSTAH.

It is high time that the progressive governments of Latin America quit this occupation, which goes against their own principles and deeply held beliefs, and is against the will of the Haitian people.

also

OAS Removes its Special Representative in Haiti for Telling It Like It Is About UN Peacekeeping Mission

Posted on December 30, 2010 by magbana

OAS Removes Special Representative in Haiti from Post

ST. DOMINGO – The Organization of American States removed its special representative in Haiti, Ricardo Seitenfus, from his post, a diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

The move came after the publication in a Swiss newspaper of remarks attributed to the diplomat in which he questioned the role of the U.N. Stabilization Mission for Haiti, or Minustah, which has been in the country since 2004, and the policy of the international community toward the Caribbean nation.

Seitenfus said in the interview published Dec. 20 that the U.N. had “imposed” the presence of its troops in Haiti despite the fact that the country was not involved in a civil war.

“Haiti is not an international threat. We’re not in a situation of civil war. Haiti is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan. However, the (U.N.) Security Council, given the lack of any alternative, has imposed the blue helmets since 2004, after the exit of the president (Jean-Bertrand Aristide),” the OAS diplomat told Switzerland’s Le Temps.

The Brazilian diplomat, who had been scheduled to leave the post anyway in the coming months, also said in the interview that Haiti “is on the international stage mainly due to its great proximity to the United States. Haiti has been the object of negative attention on the part of the international system. For the U.N., this is about freezing power and transforming the Haitians into prisoners on their own island,” namely Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

“The Haitians committed the unacceptable in 1804 (the year of their independence): a crime of lese majesty for an anxious world. The West (was) then a colonial, slave-holding and racist world that based its wealth on the exploitation of conquered lands. So, the Haitian revolutionary model made the great powers afraid,” Seitenfus said.

The OAS official also analyzed the role of non-governmental organizations in Haiti, in particular after the Jan. 12 earthquake, and he said that “the cooperative (organizations) that arrived after the quake are not very old; they came to Haiti without any experience … (and) after the earthquake, the professional quality fell a great deal. There exists a maleficent or perverse relationship between the NGOs’ strength and the Haitian state’s weakness.”

Seitenfus, in addition to his responsibilities with the OAS, was that organization’s delegate to the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, or IHRC.

Wiki-Leaks on Shell

2010-12-27T18:01:00.001-03:00

Wiki-Leaks on Shell Oil Company: The Vampires Sucking the Blood of Nigerians

Shell Oil Company: The Vampires Sucking the Blood of Nigerians

The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians’ every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The company’s top executive in Nigeria told US diplomats that Shell had seconded employees to every relevant department and so knew “everything that was being done in those ministries”. She boasted that the Nigerian government had “forgotten” about the extent of Shell’s infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.

The cache of secret dispatches from Washington’s embassies in Africa also revealed that the Anglo-Dutch oil firm swapped intelligence with the US, in one case providing US diplomats with the names of Nigerian politicians it suspected of supporting militant activity, and requesting information from the US on whether the militants had acquired anti-aircraft missiles.

Neo-Colonialist Blood Suckers:

Cables from Nigeria show how Ann Pickard, then Shell’s vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa, sought to share intelligence with the US government on militant activity and business competition in the contested Niger Delta – and how, with some prescience, she seemed reluctant to open up because of a suspicion the US government was “leaky”.

But that did not prevent Pickard disclosing the company’s reach into the Nigerian government when she met US ambassador Robin Renee Sanders, as recorded in a confidential memo from the US embassy in Abuja on 20 October 2009.

At the meeting, Pickard related how the company had obtained a letter showing that the Nigerian government had invited bids for oil concessions from China. She said the minister of state for petroleum resources, Odein Ajumogobia, had denied the letter had been sent but Shell knew similar correspondence had taken place with China and Russia.

The ambassador reported: “She said the GON [government of Nigeria] had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.”

Nigeria is Africa’s leading oil producer and the eighth biggest exporter in the world, accounting for 8% of US oil imports. Although a recent UN report largely exonerated the company, critics accuse Shell, the biggest operator in the delta, and other companies, of causing widespread pollution and environmental damage in the region. Militant groups engaged in hostage-taking and sabotage have proliferated.

The WikiLeaks disclosure was today seized on by campaigners as evidence of Shell’s vice-like grip on the country’s oil wealth. “Shell and the government of Nigeria are two sides of the same coin,” said Celestine AkpoBari, of Social Action Nigeria. “Shell is everywhere. They have an eye and an ear in every ministry of Nigeria. They have people on the payroll in every community, which is why they get away with everything. They are more powerful than the Nigerian government.”

The criticism was echoed by Ben Amunwa of the London-based oil watchdog Platform. “Shell claims to have nothing to do with Nigerian politics,” he said. “In reality, Shell works deep inside the system, and has long exploited political channels in Nigeria to its own advantage.”

Nigeria tonight strenuously denied the claim. Levi Ajuonoma, a spokesman for the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, said: “Shell does not control the government of Nigeria and has never controlled the government of Nigeria. This cable is the mere interpretation of one individual. It is absolutely untrue, an absolute falsehood and utterly misleading. It is an attempt to demean the government and we will not stand for that. I don’t think anybody will lose sleep over it.”

Another cable released today, from the US consulate in Lagos and dated 19 September 2008, claims that Pickard told US diplomats that two named regional politicians were behind unrest in the Rivers state. She also asked if the American diplomats had any intelligence on shipments of surface to air missiles (SAMs) to militants in the Niger Delta.

“She claimed Shell has ‘intelligence’ that one to three SAMs may have been shipped to Nigerian militant groups, although she seemed somewhat sceptical of that information and wondered if such sensitive systems would last long in the harsh environment of the Niger Delta,” the cable said.

Pickard also said Shell had learned from the British government details of Russian energy company Gazprom’s ambitions to enter the Nigerian market. In June last year, Gazprom signed a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) deal with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations.

Shell put a request to the US consulate for potentially sensitive intelligence about Gazprom, a possible rival, which she said had secured a promise from the Nigerian government of access to 17trn cubic feet of natural gas – roughly a tenth of Nigeria’s entire reserves. “Pickard said that amount of gas was only available if the GON were to take concessions currently assigned to other oil companies and give them to Gazprom. She assumed Shell would be the GON’s prime target.” Pickard alleged that a conversation with a Nigerian government minister had been secretly recorded by the Russians. Shortly after the meeting in the minister’s office she received a verbatim transcript of the meeting “from Russia”, according to the memo.

The cable concludes with the observation that the oil executive had tended to be guarded in discussion with US officials. “Pickard has repeatedly told us she does not like to talk to USG [US government] officials because the USG is ‘leaky’.” She may be concerned that … bad news about Shell’s Nigerian operations will leak out.”

Shell declined to comment on the allegations, saying: “You are seeking our views on a leaked cable allegedly containing information about a private conversation involving a Shell representative, but have declined to share this cable or to permit us sufficient time to obtain information from the person you say took part in the conversation on the part of Shell. In view of this, we cannot comment on the alleged contents of the cable, including the correctness or incorrectness of any statements you say it contains.”

See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying

Monsanto’s fall from grace

2010-10-21T02:44:00.000-03:00

What Monsanto’s fall from grace reveals about the GMO seed industry

by Tom Philpott

12 Oct 2010 3:39 PM

I got caught up in a cyclone of travel, meetings, and speechifying the last two weeks, so I'm a bit behind on the latest news in the food world. But I did take note of Andrew Pollack's Oct. 4 New York Times story on the recent plight of genetically modified (GM) seed giant Monsanto, long-time Wall Street darling and bête noire of the sustainable food movement.

Pollack summed up Monsanto's woes like this:

As recently as late December, Monsantowas named "company of the year" by Forbes magazine. Last week, the company earned a different accolade from Jim Cramer, the television stock market commentator. "This may be the worst stock of 2010," he proclaimed.

On Tuesday, Forbes publicly lamented its decision to deem Monsanto "company of the year." The headline was cutting: "Forbes was wrong about Monsanto. Really wrong." How did Monsanto go from Wall Street hero to Wall Street doormat?

According to The Times' Pollack, Monsanto's troubles are two-fold: 1) the patent on Roundup, Monsanto's market-dominating herbicide, has run out, exposing the company to competition from cheap Chinese imports; and 2) its target audience -- large-scale commodity farmers in the south and Midwest -- are turning against its core offerings in genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton seed traits.

I agree with Pollack's diagnosis, but I want to add a third and even more fundamental problem to the mix: Monsanto's once-celebrated product pipeline is looking empty. As I'll show below, its current whiz-bang seeds offer just tarted-up versions of the same old traits it has been peddling for more than a decade: herbicide tolerance and pest resistance. Meanwhile, judging from the company's recent report on its latest quarterly earnings, the "blockbuster" traits it has been promising for years -- drought resistance and nitrogen-use efficiency -- don't seem to be coming along very well.

Why do I say that? In my days as a reporter covering the stock market, I read a lot of company financial reports. When a high-tech company like Monsanto disappointed Wall Street analysts with its financial performance, it would strain to draw attention to "next-generation" products that promised huge future returns to investors. But in its report on its disappointing quarter last week, Monsanto did no such thing. It gave zero details about next-generation seeds, and instead focused on its "revamped pricing approach." Translated, that means that after years of constantly jacking up prices, the company is being forced to slash them to keep farmers interested. The loss of pricing clout is devastating for a high-tech company like Monsanto.

What gives? Why is the company that once ruled the Big Ag universe like Darth Vader now whimpering like a mouse?

Stuck in the mud

As Pollack delicately puts it, Monsanto "has been buffeted by setbacks this year." The most famous one is the rise of Roundup-resistant "superweeds," first in the south and then in the Corn Belt, that has forced thousands of farmers to reconsider the merits of Monsanto's flagship Roundup Ready crop varieties.

Monsanto's response has been to roll out its much-ballyhooed SmartStax corn seed, "stacked" with a mind-boggling eight foreign genes. Colluding with its arch-rival Dow AgroSciences -- whatever happened to antitrust, again? -- Monsanto loaded the new wonder-seed with multiple varieties of the toxic gene from Bt, a naturally occurring bacteria that had been used as a pesticide for years before Monsanto came along. Each of the Bt varieties in SmartStax targets a specific insect. To address the problem of Roundup-resistant "superweeds," the SmartStax seed combines Monsanto's Roundup Ready trait with Dow's trait for resistance to its own proprietary herbicide, Liberty. Now corn farmers can douse their fields freely with not one but two broad-spectrum herbicides!

In a press release heralding the advent of SmartStax when it was still in development back in 2007, a Monsanto exec expressed the company's hopes and dreams for the new product:

"By bringing together the two companies that have developed and commercialized the trait technologies widely used in agriculture today, we can provide farmers an 'all-in-one' answer to demands for comprehensive yield protection from weed and insect threats," said Carl Casale, executive vice president of strategy and operations for Monsanto. "Farmers will have more product choices to optimize performance and protection, and that translates into a higher-yielding opportunity and a new growth proposition for their businesses and ours."

But as I say above, SmartStax is just a mashup of various forms of the only two traits Monsanto has ever brought to market: herbicide tolerance and Bt toxicity.

And unfortunately for Monsanto and its once fat-and-happy shareholders, SmartStax corn is starting to look, well, not so smart. According to The Times' Pollack, early data from this year's corn harvest suggest that SmartStax is "providing yields no higher than the company's less expensive corn, which contains only three foreign genes." As a result, the company is having to slash prices on both SmartStax and its new soybean seed, cleverly called Roundup Ready 2 Yield. Oops.

The evident failure of SmartStax to deliver yield gains may be the straw that crushes Monsanto's long-time claim that its products offer farmers dramatically higher yields than do conventional seeds. In a 2009 paper called "Failure to Yield," Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, showed that since their public debut in 1996, GM traits have actually provided, at best, marginal yield gains -- and in fact in some cases have caused yields to decrease.

So why is Monsanto merely rearranging and stacking up last year's traits, and not rolling out new ones?

Tough row to hoe

Here's what I think, from years of listening to industry critics like Gurian-Sherman and the Center for Food Safety's Andrew Kimbrell: It is one thing to splice a particular trait like herbicide or pesticide resistance into the corn genome. You isolate the gene in an organism like Bt that kills insects, splice it into the corn genome, and watch it express itself.

But transforming a crop's way of taking up water and fertilizer -- the goal of engineering crops that can withstand drought and use nitrogen more efficiently -- is infinitely more complex. These intricate processes developed through millions of years of evolution. They don't involve a single gene, but rather groups of genes interacting in ways that are little understood. And as the Union of Concerned Scientists' Gurian-Sherman told me in an interview, in the process of achieving a complex trait like drought resistance, breeders often generate unintended traits, such as susceptibility to disease. These are known as "pleiotropic effects" -- simply the idea that changing one aspect of a thing can create multiple, unpredictable effects. Pleiotropy is the scourge of GMO breeders looking to create the next generation of miracle transgenic seeds.

In his 2009 paper No Sure Fix [PDF], Gurian-Sherman shows that attempts to create nitrogen-efficient GM seeds that actually work well in the field have so far failed -- and that conventional breeders have actually managed to generate significant gains in nitrogen-use efficiency in the field without resorting to transgenic methods.

In his Times piece, Andrew Pollack reports that Monsanto "hopes" to introduce another complex trait, drought-tolerance in corn, sometime in 2012. My experience as a business reporter tells me that if Monsanto execs were confident in their ability to do so, they would have trumpeted it in their dismal recent quarterly report.

From my perspective, what we're seeing is signs that GMO technology is much cruder and less effective than its champions have let on. After decades of hype and billions of dollars worth of research, much of it publicly funded, the industry has managed to market exactly two traits. More devastating still, it has failed on its own terms: it has not delivered the promised dazzling yield gains.

As Monsanto execs scramble to win back their mojo with Wall Street investors -- the lot that brought us the dot-com and housing busts in the past decade alone -- the rest of us would do well to remember that the surest path to a bountiful future lies in supporting biodiversity, not in narrowing it away by handing the globe's seed heritage to a few bumbling companies.

Tom Philpott is Grist’s senior food and agriculture writer.

La Via Campesina denounces Gates Foundation

2010-10-08T21:11:00.003-03:00

MONDAY, 13 SEPTEMBER 2010 13:38

Glendive, Montana. La Via Campesina (www.viacampesina.org), a global peasant movement representing small farmers, landless workers, fisherfolk, rural women, youth and indigenous peoples, with 150 member organizations from 70 countries on five continents, has denounced the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s recent acquisition of Monsanto Company shares. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was founded in 1994 by Microsoft founder William H. Gates, and today exerts a hegemonic influence on global agricultural development policy. The Foundation channels hundreds of millions of dollars into projects that encourage peasants and farmers to use Monsanto’s genetically-engineered (GE) seed and agrochemicals. In August the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the $33.5 billion asset trust endowment that funds the Foundation’s philanthropic projects (and to which Bill & Melinda are trustees) disclosed that it purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto shares for just over $23 million.(1)

According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

Since 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation, an ardent promoter of GE crops for the world’s poor, to implement the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which is opening up the continent to GE seed and chemicals sold by Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. The Foundation has given $456 million to AGRA, and in 2006 hired Robert Horsch, a Monsanto executive for 25 years, to work on the project. In Kenya about 70 percent of AGRA grantees work directly with Monsanto (2) , nearly 80 percent of Gates' funding in the country involves biotech, and over $100 million in grants has been made to Kenyan organizations connected to Monsanto. In 2008, some 30 percent of the Foundation's agricultural development funds went to promoting or developing GE seed varieties (3).

In April the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and finance ministers from the US, Canada, Spain and South Korea pledged $880 million to create the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), managed by the World Bank to “tackle world hunger and poverty.”(4) In June GAFSP announced that it gave $35 million to Haiti to increase smallholder farmers’ access to “agricultural inputs, technology, and supply chains.”(5) In May Monsanto announced that it donated 475 tons of seed to Haiti, which is being distributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The administrator of USAID is Rajiv Shah, who worked at the Gates Foundation before being appointed by the Obama administration in 2009.

According to Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Haitian Peasant Movement of Papaye and Caribbean coordinator of La Via Campesina, “It is really shocking for the peasant organizations and social movements in Haiti to learn about the decision of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to buy Monsanto shares while it is giving money for agricultural projects in Haiti that promote the company’s seed and agrochemicals. The peasant organizations in Haiti want to denounce this policy which is against the interests of 80 percent of the Haitian population, and is against peasant agriculture—the base of Haiti’s food production. ”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also funds the US government’s Feed the Future initiative, administered by the State Department. At a July 20 congressional subcommittee hearing on Feed the Future, executive vice president for Monsanto Gerald Steiner testified that “Feed the Future is exciting not least because it recognizes both the business imperatives by which Monsanto and other companies must operate… We want to do good in the world, while we also do well for our shareholders.” Steiner mentioned Monsanto’s project to develop drought resistant maize for Africa, also funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.(6)

According to Hoff, “Foundations, however well meaning, should not be setting food and agricultural policies for any nation of peoples. Democracy demands the informed participation of civil society to determine what is in the best interest of each nation's population. ‘Doing well for our shareholders’ seems an ulterior motive for meddling in the health and welfare of the planet and all its inhabitants in order to make a profit.”

Perhaps not by coincidence, in July Monsanto’s chief executive officer and president Hugh Grant purchased $2 million of company shares, and vice president and chief financial officer Carl M. Casale bought $1.6 million of shares. “Grant and Casale have pocketed nice sums from selling Monsanto shares over the years.”(7) Purchase of Monsanto shares by Gates, Grant and Casale could have been in anticipation of last week’s news that researchers published the genome for wheat, the staple grain for one-third of the world's population. “For Monsanto, a quality wheat genome map could potentially help in our efforts to bring better wheat varieties to farmers," said Monsanto. (8) In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $26.8 million to Cornell University to research wheat, and in May awarded $1.6 million to researchers at Washington State University to develop drought-resistant GE wheat varieties.(9)

The Gates Foundation continues to push Monsanto’s products on the poor, despite mounting evidence of the ecological, economic and physical dangers of producing and consuming GE crops and agrochemicals. In June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monsanto Co. vs. Geertson Seed Farms, its first case about a GE crop. The Court recognized that genetic contamination of non-GE crops from transgene flow of DNA from GE crops, which occurs through the spread of pollen by wind and bees, is harmful and onerous to the environment and farmers. According to the web site of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, “AGRA and its partners have released more than 100 new varieties of improved seed across the [African] continent.”(10)

La Via Campesina maintains that the best way to ensure healthy food, adapt to climate change, conserve soils, water and forests, and revitalize rural economies is with policies that promote food sovereignty and small-scale, agroecological farming systems—the foundation of which is native seed varieties. The United Nations estimates that 75 percent of the world’s plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers have abandoned native seed for genetically-uniform varieties offered by corporations such as Monsanto. Genetic homogeneity increases farmers’ vulnerability to sudden changes in climate and the appearance of new pests and diseases, while seed agrobiodiversity—with native seed adapted to different microclimates, altitudes and soils—is fundamental for adapting to climate change. Saving and replanting native seed increases agrobiodiversity and strengthens crops’ genetic plasticity (their capacity to adapt rapidly over generations to changing growing conditions).

According to Henry Saragih, general coordinator of La Via Campesina in Jakarta, "La Via Campesina condemns this missappropriation of humanitarian aid for commercial ends and the privatization of food policies".

What has the Gates Foundation done for global health?

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673609608850/fulltext?rss=yes

Mis-financing global healthcare

http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/Devi%20Revised_paper_final.pdf

(1)http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1166559/000104746910007567/a2199827z13f-hr.txt

(2) Community Alliance for Global Justice. “Gates Foundation invests in Monsanto.” Press release August 25 2010. http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org/2010/08/for-immediate-release-gates-foundation-invests-in-monsanto/

(3) Holt-Giménez, Eric. “Monsanto in Gates’ clothing? The emporor’s new GMOs.” Huffington Post. August 26 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/monsanto-in-gates-clothin_b_696182.html

(4) Kellerhals Jr., Merle David. “Finance ministers announce $880 million for Global Food Security.” April 22 2010. http://www.america.gov/st/develop-english/2010/April/20100422155518dmslahrellek0.9501917.html

(5) Feed the Future. “An Improved Approach to Agriculture and Food Security: Haiti” June 25 2010.

(6) Monsanto Company. “Jerry Steiner speaks to congress about the Feed the Future Initiative.” July 20 2010. http://monsanto.mediaroom.com/steiner_feed_the_future_initiative_072010

(7) Gottfried, Miriam. “Top Monsanto execs load up on shares.” Barron’s. July 15 2010.

(8) Gillam, Carey. “Wheat groups welcome genetic news; say more needed.” Reuters. August 27 2010. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN277047520100827

(9) Weaver, Matthew. “Gates awards $1.6 million for dwarf wheat research.” Checkbiotech.org. July 25 2010.http://greenbio.checkbiotech.org/news/gates_awards_16m_dwarf_wheat_research

(10) http://www.gatesfoundation.org/press-releases/Pages/global-trust-fund-for-poor-farmers-100422.aspx

UN Security Council Regime of Tribunals and Sanctions

2010-09-30T19:57:00.000-03:00

The UN Security Council Regime of Tribunals and Sanctions: A Smokescreen for Military Seizure of Regions and Resources

by Niloufer Bhagwat

Global Research, August 18, 2010
- 2010-08-17

The government of Israel orchestrated after ‘Operation Cast Lead’ the brutal military attack and bombing of Gaza with prohibited weaponry, the pre-meditated racist killings of Turkish citizens and a US citizen of Turkish origin on the Mavi Marmara. Confused about the next move contemplated by the Freedom Flotilla for Gaza and disconcerted at the dialogues between different political formations in Lebanon, the government and the opposition, including the Hezbollah-led ‘National Resistance’, instructed Lt.General Gabi Ashkenazi to position a ‘cat among the pigeons’, by informing the Knesset Foreign Relations Committee on 8th July 2010 that “with lots of wishes and a little bit of information the situation in Lebanon will deteriorate following the issuance of an indictment by the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon over the assassination of former Prime Minister martyr Rafiq Hariri”.

General Ashkenazi’s official statement before the Israeli Parliament, even before any indictment was officially issued, that the Hariri Tribunal would implicate members of the Hezbollah and destabilize Lebanon to the advantage of Israel, by sowing internal discord between different religious denominations, indicated insider knowledge of the functioning and objectives of the Hariri Tribunal for reasons now disclosed by Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah, the Secretary General of the Hezbollah, at his press conference held on August 9th. The aforesaid facts publicly expose the design for the geopolitical and strategic use of the Hariri Tribunal and its investigative machinery for subverting justice. An earlier investigation by the Chief Investigator, Detlev Mehlis of Germany, had successively pointed its needle of suspicion first at Syria and thereafter at four Lebanese Senior Police Officials falsely implicated, jailed for four years, released after being found innocent, as false witnesses were encouraged by the investigators and never proceeded against. In recent weeks it was hinted that members of the Hezbollah were to be indicted by the Tribunal, which coincided with the preparations of the US–Israeli axis to unleash a nuclear war in the region, even as an economic and financial collapse looms over the United States which will adversely impact Zionism and Zionist controlled Banks and financial institutions, among others, even in Europe.

The government of Lebanon alarmed at the disclosures supported by evidence at the 9th of August 2010 by the Secretary General of the Hezbollah, revealing that the government of Israel had actually stalked the late Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s convoy with MK Spy Drones and through intelligence agents on the ground and the earlier revelations on Israeli infiltration of the State Telecom Company,with documentation produced at the press conference of the footage of Israeli drone transmissions[1], has now officially sought an investigation of the complicity of the Israeli government into the assassination, an angle which was never investigated by the Hariri Tribunal, despite the fact that the government of Israel had the most to gain from assassinations in Lebanon of leaders of different political formations, as a powder keg for religious and sectarian strife, to destabilize Lebanon to pursue its strategic aims of further colonization and restructuring of the entire region, in collaboration with the United States and its allies.

It is not surprising that the Security Council-appointed Hariri Tribunal continues the murky traditions of all hitherto Security Council-appointed special international tribunals, including for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, among others. They were uncovered by leading jurists and Defense Counsel for what they really are: geopolitical instruments to camouflage dark deeds in various regions, committed by the Anglo–American-Israeli governments axis with the acquiescence of other permanent members of the Security Council, in collaboration with governments who are their military proxies. They carried out military aggression, merciless bombings of the civilian population, sectarian killings by more than one group to fracture existing societies and regime change and pre-planned assassinations to replace governments. They also pillaged hydrocarbons and minerals, among other financial and economic objectives, including the lethal trade in drugs for money laundering into Banks and financial institutions of the coalition of the willing. Further acts include stationing military troops to re-colonize countries, a joint enterprise of major banking, financial and corporate entities of more than one country recently facing a financial denouement in their own heartlands, bailed out by massive subsidies from the public exchequer at the cost of citizens everywhere.

In this context, Professor Michael Mandel, an eminent Professor of Law, Co-Chair of Lawyers Against the War (Canada) described appropriately what happened in Rwanda:

“…It was another case of Western greed (again mostly US) and IMF-imposed austerity throwing a match into an ancient and highly volatile inter-communal conflict left over from colonial times.”

In a recent memorandum dated 25th July 2010[2] addressed to the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda and to the Security Council and Secretary General of the United Nations, detainees who are accused persons before the Rwandan Tribunal invited urgent attention to the fact that Defense Counsel were being terrorized by the government of Rwanda, headed by President Paul Kagame. It is well known that President Kagame’s special relations with the United States and the UK protected members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by President Kagame, from being indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This Memorandum refers to threats, arbitrary arrests and assassinations of Defense Counsels, including the recent assassination of Professor Jwani Timothy Mwaikissa one of the Defense Counsel before the ICTR from Tanzania. It was accompanied by thefts of his documents, the deaths of other Defense Counsel in suspicious circumstances and the illegal arrest and detention of lead ICTR Counsel Professor Peter Erlinder by the government of Rwanda for alleged “genocide denial”. This was carried out under a statute enacted specially for that purpose to deter the truth from emerging about the role of the Rwandan government’s Patriotic Front in the genocide, in violation of the impunity conferred on Professor Erlinder from prosecution, as Defense Counsel before the ICTR. Professor Erlinder was granted bail only on medical grounds, after Bar Associations and Jurists and Heads of Law Schools all over the world protested. Several Defense lawyers have earned the wrath of the regime and of the Permanent Members of the Security Council who are prime movers of the ICTR,in view of their carefully researched facts, exposing that collective killings amounting to genocide was resorted to by both a section of the Hutus and Tutsis, following the entry into Rwanda of the military forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front of then General Kagame (now President of Rwanda), former head of the military intelligence in the Ugandan government of President Museveni, supported by the military forces of Uganda and that the genocide was triggered by the assassination of the head of the previous government of President Habariyama, in circumstances indicating conspiracy with powers external to the region. Articles written by Professor Erlinder based on his work before the ICTR exposing the role of the governments of Rwanda and Uganda in the pillaging of the mineral resources of the Congo, as the avant guard for some members of the Security Council and their allies, devouring resources in colonial style, leaving 5 million dead in the region, incensed those involved in the pillage of the Congo.

The US-UK governments and the government of Rwanda closely monitor the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, move for the removal of inconvenient prosecutors and the harassment and elimination of Defense Counsel. The former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Carla Del Ponte has written her own account, exposing her removal, when the Chief Prosecutor attempted to investigate charges against the Rwandan Patriotic Front government headed by President Kagame, for the collective killings of Hutus, she was replaced.[3]

The Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia were similarly influenced. When NATO commenced the bombing of Yugoslavia with the civilian population and the entire infrastructure was deliberately targeted, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, hand-picked for the assignment by the same culprits of the Security Council, was served with a complaint by the entire faculty of Belgrade University that Solana be indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in violation of all norms of International Law, as NATO was responsible for civilian deaths. This was followed by a several complaints against NATO bombings from all over the world including from Canada, demanding that the Chief Prosecutor charge NATO leaders with war crimes, the only steps taken by the Chief Prosecutor against the merciless bombing of Belgrade was to state that:

“…I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct the campaign in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with International Humanitarian Law.”[4]

This illegal position was taken by the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY, despite the fact that the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War of 1928 signed by the USA, France and 13 other States including Germany and Great Britain which was ratified by 62 nations; the Nuremberg Principles and the UN Charter have declared that the use of war is illegal for the solution of international controversies or as an instrument of national policy.

In contrast a few weeks later, after the intensive bombing campaigns by NATO commenced, on 22nd May President Milosevic among other four top officials were indicted and all except one crime in the indictment,were alleged to have occurred on dates after the bombing started and President Milosevic was handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia by his government, when an economic boycott was imposed on Serbia. To perpetuate the myth of a one-sided alleged ethnic cleansing by the Serbs, as Yugoslavia had to be balkanized to seize its economic space in the financial interests of Western Corporations and Banks, despite the fact that there was evidence that UN troops were positioned at the relevant places where Bosnians among others had been killed and did nothing to prevent it. The earlier ethnic cleansing of the Serbs by the Croats and others in Krajina, among many other places including in Kosovo, where the Kosovo Liberation Army of criminals pillaged, killed and drove out 100,000 Serbs and 100,000-150,000 Romas has never been the subject matter of any serious indictment against leaders of the Republics, who were used by NATO as an instrument of the balkanization of former Yugoslavia. The Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY had been handpicked and closely monitored by the US, UK and other NATO powers, with Russia and China then frozen into inaction by deals struck with those Permanent members from the NATO dominating decision making in the Security Council, even though thousands of lives could have been saved and later hundreds of thousands in Iraq during the 13 year regime of sanctions imposed by the Security Council, including the half a million children who died, with the total toll from sanctions on Iraq between 12 May 1996 to 22 May 2003 estimated at 1.5 million, that is even before the military aggression of the US-UK led coalition of the willing in 2003. As a consequence monstrous sacrilege of justice and collective killings have been permitted by the Security Council on defenseless civilian populations, in absolute violation of its role to ensure security to the people of the world.

These are only very few examples of how countries have been devastated and destroyed, exposing without a shadow of doubt that the security system of the United Nations, with the Security Council as the pivot, no longer protects member states of the United Nations. It is controlled on behalf of the dominant financial and commercial oligarchy astride the world acting through the Permanent Members, incorporating other governments into their strategy in different regions to wage war or acquiesce to the waging of war for a quid pro quo, as a “continuation of policy by other means”. Military power has been used to enforce a military and economic order to seize resources, national budgets and to control trade in vital commodities, including hydrocarbon resources, to provide immediate liquidity to US, UK and NATO Banks and Financial institutions or those of its alliance partners, including arrangements with other Permanent members and with members of the G8 countries and others, including Banks and Corporations under Zionist control, to establish a so called “International Security Assistance Force” as in Afghanistan of almost 50 countries and earlier the coalition of the “willing” for Iraq and Yugoslavia. It is in this context, that the case studies on behemoth corporations including financial institutions taking decisions for war through their governments, have to be understood by those who claim to be serious members of the Anti–War movement.

Dr. Frederic F. Clairmont, writing on “British Petroleum: The Unfinished Crisis and Plunder of Anglo-American Imperialism” perceptively observes:

“The Anglo–Persian Oil Company’s ascendancy owed nothing to free play of markets idealized by myth makers of economic liberalism but to the marriage of big capital and thrust of imperial financial power for the enhanced control of world markets. As with earlier conquests and brutal territorial annexation of Cecil Rhodes… it signalized the marriage of Big Capital and the Imperial Political Military Complex.”[5]

The case of British Petroleum is only a case study of one company, which is present through military forces of its government in those hydrocarbon regions of the world presently occupied.

When Tribunals cannot be appointed by the Security Council or when regime change and the forced restructuring of governments is difficult in view of internal cohesion, sanctions are resorted to by the US led Security Council, to weaken countries before imposing the “killing fields” of war on an already weakened and demoralized population, as happened in Iraq. The sanctions imposed on Iran by the permanent members of the Security Council, all heavily armed “Nuclear Weapons States” with nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the entire world, in order to implement so called Chapter VII procedures in the face of the alleged threat to peace by Iran (as in the earlier onslaught on Iraq with the fictional weapons of mass destruction theory advanced) conclusively establishes that there is presently no international security system protecting countries who are member states of the United Nations. It also shows that the Security Council and its Permanent Members are initiating or acquiescing in a brutal ‘Military Order’, for the seizure of markets and resources imposed on one country after another, evidenced by successive occupations of former Yugoslavia, followed by Afghanistan still ongoing and Iraq. This comes among many other brutal military interventions in the Congo, in Haiti in the Horn of Africa, in Lebanon, in Gaza and in Palestine, apart from other countries and regions where covert intervention or open warfare is being waged.

Scientific opinion has recently become more vocal, claiming that Bunker Busters and small nukes (micro–nukes), with depleted uranium weaponry termed as the “Trojan Horse” of nuclear weapons[6], have been used in Afghanistan, Iraq and former Yugoslavia among other regions. The infamy of what was visited on Iraq, though it was known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, has been confirmed by a Commission constituted by the Netherlands Parliament [7]. The Davids Committee, with a former Chief Justice of the Netherlands Supreme Court as the President of the Committee of jurists, historians and diplomats among its members, opined that the Iraq war was illegal in international law and there were commercial reasons for the UK influencing the decision of the government of the Netherlands to join the alliance for aggression against Iraq. These commercial reasons in the report clearly point to the interests of the Oil majors among other UK companies.

To further understand the diverse commercial and trade interests behind these wars, it is necessary to refer to the 100 orders of Paul Bremer, derogatively referred to as the US Pro-Consul for Iraq. These 100 orders constitute another case study of “war as policy by other means”, the military seizure of the resources of Iraq and the corporate interests involved. One of these illegal orders which have no sanctity under International Law as it is imposed by an occupying power which is not authorized to alter or pillage the economy of countries occupied, prohibited Iraqi farmers from using their seeds, mandating that hereinafter the Iraqi farmers were to buy their seeds from the US or Australian agribusiness companies. The 100 orders of Paul Bremer reveal the reasons for sanctions on Iraq followed by the brutal war, just as the increase in the cultivation of opium and the manufacture of heroin and its sale for laundering into Banks and Financial Institutions, with the drug trade providing the third largest returns among international commodities, is evidence of one of the major objectives of the occupation of Afghanistan. And this occupation is still ongoing, whatever the camouflages of the internecine international alliances and their interests in Afghanistan.

To date, billions have disappeared from the account of the ‘Iraqi Oil for Food Fund’ and the national treasury of Iraq, not accounted for by the Permanent members of the Security Council or the alliance for the occupation of Iraq, as these sums were to be seized and never to be accounted for. Billions were quickly swallowed up by those on whose behalf the war was waged. Some of the “Best and Brightest Companies” and Security Agencies of the United States and UK (among other companies of the US-led military alliance) were awarded one contract after another, including to advise municipalities in Iraq, the cradle of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Whereas the UN Security Council was quick to appoint an investigating committee for those who had allegedly violated the sanctions on Iraq and were allegedly favoured by special contracts from the Saddam Hussein government, in what was alleged to be an attempt to defeat sanctions. There is significantly no Security Council-appointed Commission to investigate and recover the ‘Oil for Food’ funds of Iraq and the money siphoned off from the national treasury of Iraq. Significantly, the Bush government passed a special Executive order that Courts in the United States would have no jurisdiction in respect of disputes related to agreements and contracts in respect of Iraqi Oil.

Even apart from the fact that after the ‘Tehran Declaration’ by Brazil and Turkey, with Iran agreeing to exchange 1,200 Kg of its 3.5 % enriched uranium with Turkey in exchange for 20% uranium to be used in its Medical Research Reactor, there is no case whatsoever for imposition of sanctions on Iran. Even apart from the Tehran declaration there is prima facie no case for sanctions and the Resolution of the Security Council imposing a fourth round of sanctions is a blatant violation of the UN Charter with all earlier Resolutions imposing sanctions against Iran similarly tainted. Chapter VII of the UN Charter can only be resorted to if there is in existence “any threat to the peace or breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. However, the only threat to peace, breach of the peace or acts of aggression to-day in the region, is from the United States and Israel supported by NATO and by other Permanent Members of the Security Council and some of the G8, horse trading their veto powers or votes in the Security Council.

Even prima facie, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty calls for the reduction of the nuclear weapons arsenal of the nuclear weapon powers, with the objective of complete and not selective nuclear disarmament. A Security Council which has not imposed sanctions on Nuclear Weapon States with formidable nuclear weapons arsenal and on Israel, despite the whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu exposing in 1986 that Israel was a clandestine nuclear weapons State, can hardly claim that the imposition of sanctions through the Security Council and separately by the US, the European Union and Japan taking unilateral measures is justified, when the evidence against Iran continues to be fictitious and hypothetical. Beyond this, it is outrageous to focus on countries with limited nuclear know-how and weaponry that is purely defensive in nature and with limited delivery systems, such as that of North Korea (excluding the Nuclear Weapons Club, which is the main threat to peace from any sanctions or any action by the international community). These powers admittedly and openly have weaponry to destroy the world several times over, and with the scientific evidence to which the international community is now privy, we know that the government of the United States has used small nukes in the form of Bunker Busters and Depleted Uranium weaponry in Iraq and Afghanistan and earlier in Yugoslavia, with the acquiescence of the “coalition of the willing” which includes NATO. It has also used conventional weapons and drawn up a military plan for the pre-emptive use of small nukes and followed it up with the declaration that the USA will use them if necessary against Iran and North Korea, among other governments found violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any such violation is, of course, to be interpreted by the United States.

The recent resolution introduced by one-third of the members of the Republican party in the House of Representatives is ominous, as it categorically asserts that the United States will support Israel’s right to militarily attack Iran. This resolution, along with acts of aggression which have taken place, the use of ‘Bunker Busters’ and DU weaponry and threats to use nuclear weapons, openly flouts the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles which emerged from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. They were termed as “Victor’s Justice” by the eminent Indian Judge on the Tribunal for the Far East, Justice Radha Gobind Pal, in a dissenting judgment given in the aftermath of the Second World War. Significantly no one was indicted for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States of America, the first country to have used nuclear weapons and which has in the last decade formulated a doctrine for the first use and joint use of nuclear with conventional weapons with others like France following. And this without a murmur of protest by the so-called international community in the Security Council or General Assembly despite the Advisory Opinion of the ICJ on the illegality of the use of nuclear weapons being prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.[8]

Recalling the tragic day the atomic bomb was used on Nagasaki at the recent Nagasaki Peace Declaration[9] on 9th August 2010, the Mayor of Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, criticized the nuclear weapons states for their “lack of sincere commitment to nuclear disarmament”. Despite the statement’s characteristic understatement, this focus on the major nuclear weapons states and even on the secret nuclear pact of the earlier governments of Japan must be widely welcomed and deserves international focus. It is a correct and open moral and legal indictment of Nuclear Weapons States imposing selective sanctions on Iran and earlier on Iraq and North Korea by the Mayor of Nagasaki, a city which was mercilessly bombed. The government of Japan, on the other hand, has fallen in line with the Permanent Members of the Security Council and the G8 and ignored the voices of the people of Japan, declaring that Japan will also impose separate sanctions on Iran. It will be following the USA and the European Union, in addition to the sanctions imposed by the Security Council. And this despite the fact that Japan supported and welcomed the ‘Tehran Declaration’, influenced in all probability by interlocking corporate and financial interests and the continuing presence of US bases in Japan 65 years after the Second World War

In the face of another cataclysmic threat of war with nuclear weapons, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has withered away for some special consideration, trade related, financial or political, and its two powerful members are not to be heard. It is possibly influenced by ‘Oligarchs’ in Russia with interlocking interests and Zionist links. In the case of China, it may be influenced by banks and companies with similar interlocking interests with Western corporations and oil majors who have targeted Iran and probably influenced by those who use China as a cheap labour platform for export markets among other countries. In this context it is necessary to reflect on what an outstanding political theorist of the 20th Century wrote “…let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the peaceful division of these parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of ‘internationally united finance capital’”.[10]

It is significant that the non-aligned group of nations has collectively supported Iran’s access to nuclear energy. India is among one of the major countries to finally stand up against cooperating with the regime of sanctions on Iran, as the regime of sanctions is antagonistic to the interests of Indian companies trading with Iran and the energy security of the people of India, with the government’s priority in that order. This will result in renewed pressures on India, already destabilized by the fraudulent “War on Terror” which had become a part of its official discourse to camouflage economic and financial policy dictated by Transnational Companies. These include multinational companies from India, which has distorted Indian democracy and its constitutional goal of equitable economic growth and balanced development.

It is in the context of this ‘Military Order’ imposed by the US-led NATO alliance in several regions of the world, acquiesced to by Russia, China and Japan and other G8 countries, that the whole objective and purpose of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has to be understood, amongst other disarmament measures imposed by the Security Council selectively. A military order imposing colonial regimes by companies and governments for the seizure of whole continents and colonial control of resources by military mean was historically possible only because of military superiority and fostering of internal divisions in the society sought to be colonized. More recently by encouraging fractious infighting between neighbouring states, such as the Iraq–Iran war.

Iran is not the first country to be targeted in quick succession, nor will it be the last. Increasingly events indicate that some governments and their ruling elites may not be in a position to stand up and be counted. This reflects the harsh facts that those governments which are not equitable to their own citizens and allow the seizure of savings, resources or land within their own countries of working people, cannot always be relied upon internationally to protect international security based on a just world order and equitable terms of trade. Yet all strategies to militarily seize regions, including sanctions and blockades, have to be defeated and exposed. Militaries and military alliances which are the instruments of aggression have to be disrupted and defeated and the dominant economic and political order in the world today controlling international finance, trade and manufacture in the interests of a few financial centres and behemoth banks and corporations, pauperizing many societies, including people from within the country in which these entities are based, has to be overturned in the interest of civilization itself. It is these same entities are destroying the fragile of ecosystem of our entire planet with impunity ravaging the environment on a colossal scale. These large financial and corporate entities are controlling their governments, have bankrupted their own and other societies and have a history of using the imperial and colonial system and with superiority of weaponry. They must be refrained from seizing the resources of whole countries by war or sectarian strife, including the resources of people in their own societies. To trust them would be an exercise in extreme naiveté, if not outright collaboration.

Notes

1. Press Conference held at Beirut of the Secretary General of the Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah, 9th August 2010.

2. Memorandum of detainees of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda addressed to the ICTR, to the Security Council, to the Secretary General of the United Nations, 25th July 2010.

3. Carlo Del Ponte and Sudetic, ‘ Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity ‘( The Other Press NY,2009)

4. Michael Mandel ‘ How America Gets Away With Murder ‘,2004 Pluto Press.

5. Dr. Frederic F. Clairmont,’ British Petroleum : The Unfinished Crisis and Plunder of Anglo-American Imperialism’,9.8.2010 Globalresearch.ca.

6. Leuren Moret, Depleted Uranium : The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War, presentation in proceedings before the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan, at Tokyo, a civil society initiative of Jurists and Law Professors of Japan 2003.

7. Davids Committee on the Iraq War, constituted by the Netherlands Parliament, Report submitted to Parliament on 12th January 2010.

8. International Court of Justice,’ The Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons’ Advisory Opinion of 8 July,1996, I.C.J. Reports 226.

9. Tomihisa Taue, Mayor of Nagasaki, Nagasaki Peace Declaration, 9th August 2010.

10. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,’ Imperialism, the Highest stage of Capitalism’, 1917, Zizn i.ZnaniyePublishers, Petrograd, Russia.

A Millionaire is a Larger Strain on Resources than Hundreds of Peasant Families

2010-08-06T15:26:00.004-03:00

October 04, 2009 By George Monbiot Source: Alternet

It's time we had the guts to name the problem. It isn't population; it's consumption. It's not sex; it's money. It's not the poor; it's the rich.It's no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which they can't be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational." But it's Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world's population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world's population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together. Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm.

The paper's author, David Satterthwaite, points out that the old formula taught to all students of development -- that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I=PAT) -- is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I=CAT: consumers times affluence times technology. Many of the world's people use so little that they wouldn't figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children.

While there's a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there's a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I've been taking a look at a few superyachts, as I'll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they're accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet's RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn't going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 l/hr. But the raft that's really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3400 l/hr when travelling at 60 knots. That's nearly one litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre.Of course to make a real splash I'll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jet skis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I'll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we're burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined "Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation." It revealed that "some of America's leading billionaires have met secretly" to decide which good cause they should support. "A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat." The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it's the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it's impossible to satirise.James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven't been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich.

The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons, except among wealthier populations.

The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century, probably at around 10 billion. Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing.

But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don't consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock's words, "hiding from the truth." It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich.

So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where's Class War when you need it?It's time we had the guts to name the problem. It's not sex; it's money. It's not the poor; it's the rich.

Deadly Dudus Raid

2010-05-28T11:46:00.000-03:00

Jamaica Gleaner Online

A band of soldiers blocking access to the East Kirkland Heights death house as residents look on. - Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer

Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter

THE TRAIL of blood that has marked attempts to arrest accused drug baron Christopher 'Dudus' Coke lengthened yesterday with yet another civilian casualty as the security forces came up empty-handed after a fierce firefight in an upscale St Andrew community.

The civilian was identified as 63-year-old Keith Clarke, the brother of former People's National Party government minister Claude Clarke and the brother-in-law of Children's Advocate Mary Clarke.

The Clarke family said last night that they were "horrified and shocked by the dangerous, unprofessional and outrageous conduct of the security forces ... who forcibly invaded his home and killed him in front of his wife and daughter".

They have demanded a "complete, full and thorough investigation" into the matter.

Acting Deputy Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds, who heads the operation, said the operation was part of an islandwide effort to apprehend Coke.

According to Hinds, in addition to Clarke, four Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) soldiers were left nursing gunshot wounds during the confrontation between the soldiers and gunmen.

Speaking at a press conference at the Hilton Kingston hotel in New Kingston yesterday afternoon, Hinds said one firearm was recovered in the operation.

Gleaner sources later reported that, acting on information, a massive JDF team went to premises in East Kirkland Heights reportedly owned by one of Coke's key business associates.

With helicopter support, the soldiers stormed the upscale premises and were fired on.

The loud explosions rocked the usually quiet suburban community, causing residents, many metres away, to duck for cover.

According to the residents, shortly after 2 a.m., their night's rest was disturbed by the sound of a low-flying helicopter.

The residents said this was quickly followed by loud explosions and bright lights across the sky.

"Then a just pure (many) gunshots, for about 20 to 30 minutes, and me hear nuff heavy-duty weapons a fire," one resident, who requested anonymity, told The Gleaner.

She said that after a lull, when the only sound heard was of raindrops on the roof, the gunfire resumed.

"There was another barrage and then there was sporadic shooting for the next two hours," the resident said.

She said the gunfire appeared to be coming from different directions and sounded as those firing were moving.

It is not clear how the shooting moved from the initial premises to two neighbouring properties or how Clarke was killed.

"The matter is now the subject of an investigation by the Bureau of Special Investigations and I am constrained to say nothing more at this time," Hinds said.

The security forces have been trying to apprehend Coke since Monday when he ignored an appeal to turn himself in.

Coke, the reported head of the Shower Posse which has tentacular links in Jamaica, the United States, Britain, Canada and Caribbean, is wanted by American authorities to answer gun and drug charges.

The hunt for Coke started in Tivoli Gardens before moving to Coke's home in Plantation Heights, St Andrew, and another residence in Greater Portmore, St Catherine.

It has already led to the death of at least 73 civilians, including some believed to have engaged the security forces in gun battles in Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town earlier this week.

Meanwhile, the Police High Command issued an appeal yesterday evening for 13 men it describes as gang members or leaders to turn themselves in.

'Dudus' Coke heads the list, followed by his brother Laighton Coke, popularly called 'Livity'.

The police also want reputed Arnett Garden gang leader George Phang to surrender himself.

This is the second time in three days that the police are issuing an appeal for wanted men to turn themselves in. Following the first appeal, 12 men turned themselves in.

WANTED

KINGSTON WESTERN

Tivoli Gardens - Christopher Coke, otherwise called Dudus

Laighton Coke, otherwise called Livity

Arnett Gardens - Gang George Phang

KINGSTON CENTRAL

Central Kingston - Donovan Ainsworth, otherwise called Pepsi

Tel-Aviv - Delano Walker, otherwise called Fidel

P.O.W. Crew - Anthony Harding, otherwise called Prince Pow

KINGSTON EASTERN

Top Road - Earl Brown, otherwise called Chun

Bryden Street - Jermaine Layne, otherwise called Cutter

Top Jacques Road - Everton Douglas, otherwise called Fuba

Bottom Jacques Road - Troy Ricketts, otherwise called Ockra

Goodwich Lane - Michael Ewan, otherwise called Mikey One Two

Burgher Gully - Michael Murray, otherwise called Bizzy

Hypolite Road - Andrew Salmon, otherwise called Alcapone

arthur.hall@gleanerjm.com

Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation

2010-05-19T01:11:00.003-03:00

America's richest people meet to discuss ways of tackling a 'disastrous' environmental, social and industrial threat

May 24, 2009

From The Sunday Times

John Harlow, Los Angeles

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

These members, along with Gates, have given away more than £45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.

They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at “security briefings”.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion,” Gates said then.

Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than £2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving” and they intended to “continue the dialogue” over the next few months.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.

more info here : http://uscl.info/edoc/doc.php?doc_id=57&action=inline

Zimbabwe: Zuma Blasts Sanctions’ Extension

2010-04-26T14:02:00.003-03:00

The HeraldFebruary 23, 2010

THE continuation of the illegal economic sanctions against Zimbabwe undermines the Global Political Agreement signed by the country’s three main political parties, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has said.

In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, President Zuma blasted the European Union and critics of South Africa’s stance on Zimbabwe.

The EU last week extended its illegal sanctions regime on Zimbabwe for another year alleging “lack of progress in the implementation of the GPA”.The inclusive Government, formed after the September 15, 2008 agreement, celebrated its first anniversary a few days before the EU’s decision.

President Zuma challenged his critics to come out in the open on what they had done to help Zimbabwe.“Criticisms made against South Africa are not fair. Those who have criticised South Africa have done absolutely nothing.

“They have not produced even a single document. South Africa deliberately took a decision to engage Zimba-bweans even before Sadc moved in.

“That engagement helped the country produce a clause that helped the country in the last election and led Sadc to say South Africa must continue.

“It is South Africa (that) negotiated the agreement that led to the unity Government in Zimbabwe. All the critics cannot produce a report of what they have done.

“It’s unfair. We are still working harder to nurse the situation so that it is resolved,” he said.
President Zuma added: “We want to create a conducive environment so that they (Zimbabweans) can have elections to choose their own government but the continuation of sanctions is undermining the agreement.

“We need to reach a point where they will go to elections without a fight. We need to put a platform for them to move forward. President Zuma described the Zimbabwean situation as complex.

“People don’t seem to be looking at Zimbabwe in totality. They wanted us to shout on top of our
voices. That would have undermined negotiations.”
President Zuma’s remarks come shortly after President Mugabe said issues being discussed by the negotiators did not threaten the survival of the inclusive Government. In his traditional birthday interview, President Mugabe last week said the EU’s decision to extend sanctions was aimed at undermining unity between Zimbabweans.
He urged Zimbabweans to ignore the embargo and work on using the country’s natural resources for the benefit of the nation.

Diplomats accredited to Zimbabwe have also come out strongly against the sanctions, urging the West to respect Zimbabwe’s sovereignty. Speaking at a workshop held by the Centre for Peace Initiatives in Africa last week, the diplomats described the extension of sanctions as uncalled for and said the West should stop interfering in Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs.

Haiti Post-Earthquake

2010-04-15T22:28:00.000-03:00

March 11, 2010

By Noam Chomsky
and Keane Bhatt

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis “The Tragedy of Haiti” from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance. This was first published in ¡Reclama! magazine.

Keane Bhatt: Recently you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.

Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance...the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that’s what it’s good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.

KB: If this militarization of relief was not intentionally extreme but rather just a default response of the US, is it just serendipity that there is a massive troop presence available to manage the rapidly mounting popular protests post-earthquake? Surprisingly large, politicized group comprised of survivors has already mobilized around demanding Aristide’s return, French reparations instead of charity, and so on.

NC: So far, at least, I don’t know of any employment of the troops to subdue protests. It might come, but I suspect a more urgent concern is the impending disaster of the rainy season, terrible to contemplate.

KB: Regarding relief work, aside from Partners in Health, Al Jazeera noted that the Cuban medical team was the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and constitutes the largest contingent of medical workers in Haiti, something that preceded the earthquake. If their performance in Pakistan [earthquake of 2005] is any indicator, they will probably be the last to leave. Cuba seems to have an exemplary, decades-long conduct in foreign assistance.

NC: Well, the Cubans were already there before the earthquake. They had a couple hundred doctors there. And yes, they sent doctors very quickly; they had medical facilities there very quickly. Venezuela also sent aid quite quickly; Venezuela was also the first country and the only country at any scale to cancel totally the debt. There was considerable debt to Venezuela because of PetroCaribe, and it’s rather striking that Venezuela and Cuba were not invited to the donors’ meeting in Montreal.

Actually the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, went out of his way to thank three countries: the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela for their rapid provision of aid. What Al Jazeera said about Pakistan is quite correct. In that terrible earthquake a couple of years ago, the Cubans were really the only ones who went into the very difficult areas high up in the mountains where it’s very hard to live. They’re the ones who stayed after everyone else left. And none of that gets reported in the United States. But the fact of the matter is, whatever you think about Cuba, its internationalism is pretty dramatic. And the people who’ve been working in Haiti for years have been awestruck by Cuban medical aid as they were in Pakistan, in fact. That’s an old story. I mean, the Cuban contribution to the liberation of Africa is just overwhelming. And you can find that in scholarship, but the public doesn’t know anything about it.

KB: On that point, you’ve talked about how “states are not moral agents. They act in their own interests. And that means the interests of powerful forces within them.” How does the history of exemplary humanitarian work as Cuban state policy relate to that thought?

NC: Well, I think it’s just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you’ve mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola—much of the Cuban population comes from Angola. But South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent—it was a psychic shock—white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. Well that gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds. Now, it didn’t end the wars. The South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique continued until the late 1980s, with strong US support. And it was no joke. According to the UN estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it’s just an astonishing story but barely known—one out of a million people has ever heard of it.

KB: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that?

NC: Well they’re talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they’re embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I’m not sure how it’s playing out. As far as the IMF is concerned—the IMF is basically an offshoot of the US Treasury Department—they’ve talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt.

KB: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The DR has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add?

NC: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any—barely any refugees—even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there’s marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first US reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn’t be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that’s atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it’s right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians.

Furthermore there’s a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn’t much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of—it goes back to the French colonial system—but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.

KB: You’re talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s?

NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.

KB: Racism.

NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along.

When Clinton restored Aristide—Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story...he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well—well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history—it’s only a tiny piece of it—the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.

KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?

NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time—1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that.

KB: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls (made by some of his more militant supporters) for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup?

NC: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter.

KB: On February 17th, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide’s return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing?

NC: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide—they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him—they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.

KB: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example?

NC: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn’t let him in. And there’s good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather. It’s too dangerous. We can pretend it’s otherwise, but that’s the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious US pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It’s a dangerous, violent superpower. I don’t have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don’t have to tell you about it—that’s the way it works.

KB: Using, as you’ve said, the historical US legacy in the DR, can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the DR, and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under US aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain…

NC: I know. And providing a base for them.

KB: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you’ve actually worked to dismantle and destabilize?

NC: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it’s also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don’t do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France’s richest colony and a source of a lot of France’s wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of?

A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them…

KB: Twenty-one billion dollars…

NC: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It’s not surprising.

KB: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration.

NC: Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision—that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy?

NC: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.

KB: You’ve talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American ‘Bad Left’ and ‘Good Left,’ omitting Brazil's important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn’t Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the ‘Good Left’? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup (US, France, Canada). What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times (Zelaya of Honduras)?

NC: Good questions. I haven't seen anything useful on Brazil's decisions on these matters.

KB: Any comments on the US media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s ‘pact with the devil,’ David Brooks’ ‘progress-resistant culture,’ pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in the New York Times.

NC: It's been mainly awful, but I haven't kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should—with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France.

KB: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they’ve exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d’etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process.

NC: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.

And that applies right now. Take the aid that’s coming in. There is aid coming in—we have to show we’re nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.

Brief Chronology of Events in Haiti

adapted from Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment

courtesy Peter Hallward

August 14, 1791 A slave uprising begins in northern Saint-Domingue

Februrary 4, 1794 Abolition of French colonial slavery

January 1, 1804 Saint-Domingue is renamed Haiti, and declares itself independent of France

1825 France recognizes Haitian independence for the payment of 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million as compensation for lost property)

1915-34 The United States (under Woodrow Wilson) invades and occupies Haiti

September 22, 1957 Francois Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) becomes president

April 21, 1971 Francois Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude (‘Baby Doc’)

February 7, 1986 ‘Baby Doc’ is pushed out of Haiti by a popular uprising; General Henry Namphy takes power

December 16, 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected with 67% of the vote; his prime minister is Rene Preval

September 30, 1991 General Raoul Cedras overthrows Aristide, who goes into exile; over the next few years several thousands of Aristide’s supporters are killed

Summer 1993 The paramilitary death squad FRAPH is formed, led by Toto Constant and Jodel Chamblain

September 19, 1994 US soldiers occupy Haiti for the second time; Aristide returns from exile

Early 1995 Aristide disbands Haiti’s armed forces

Mid-1995 Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas wins legislative elections

December 17, 1995 Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote

Late 1996 Formation of Fanmi Lavalas in opposition to ex-Lavalas faction

May 21, 2000 Fanmi Lavalas wins landlide victories at all levels of government; opponents form a US-backed coalition called the Convergence Democratique

November 26, 2000 Aristide is re-elected with 92% of the vote

July 28, 2001 First of many commando raids on police stations and other government facilities by ex-soliers based in the Dominican Republic, led by Guy Philippe

December 17, 2001 Ex-soldiers attack the presidential palace, provoking popular reprisals against the offices of parties belonging to Convergence Democratique

April 2003 Aristide asks France to repay the money it extorted from Haiti

January 1, 2004 Haiti celebrates bicentenary of independence from France

February 5, 2004 Full-scale insurgency begins, Chamblain overruns Cap Haitien

February 29, 2004 Aristide is forced onto a US jet and flown to the Central African Republic

March 2004 US troops occupy Haiti for a third time, interim government is formed with Gerard Latortue as P.M., the Lancet estimates thousands killed by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitaries

A Disturbing Look at the Dairy Industry

2010-01-29T22:32:00.001-03:00

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan

January 26, 2010

Most dairy enthusiasts would be horrified to know the conditions cows endure and how closely dairies are tied to veal operations and the rest of the meat industry.

The bucolic scene of Holsteins grazing on a grassy hill that adorns milk cartons and cheese wrappers is nothing more than fantasy these days. While the meat industry has come under intensive scrutiny (and with good reason) for the massive factory farm system of raising cattle in confinement, animals in the dairy industry are arguably worse off.

Eating milk, cheese, sour cream, ice cream, and other dairy yumminess is impossible to do with a clear conscience -- and I'm not referring to the fat or cholesterol. Calves born into the industrial grip of today's dairy industry have a road ahead of them that is short, but not merciful. Dairy cows are subject to brutal conditions before being sent to slaughter for beef and male calves are worth next to nothing in the dairy business. Some are simply left to die after birth. Many are slaughtered for low-grade "bob veal" a few days after they are born and will end up as cheap hot dogs or dog food.

While a small number of dairies are bucking the industrial trend, the vast majority of dairy products we eat come from factories that are nothing short of horrific in many cases.

Where Milk Comes From

We've become so far removed from the source of our food that many Americans are oblivious to where most of what they eat is actually coming from, dairy included. Yes, milk comes from cows. And how do cows get milk? Like other female mammals, they produce milk to feed their offspring. In the business of raising cows to produce as much milk as possible, which is the goal of most of the U.S. dairy industry, cows are kept in perpetual states of lactation and impregnation.

"One of the things people don't think about is the effort it takes a cow to produce milk," said Marlene Halverson who has worked on farm animal welfare issues for years. "The amount of energy and the physiological capacity to produce the kinds of yields that industrial dairy farming is demanding of cows today is huge." The average dairy cow on industrial farms produces roughly 20,000 pounds of milk a year -- 10 times more than she'd normally produce to feed a calf.

Professor John Webster, author of The Welfare of Dairy Cattle, wrote, "The amount of work done by the cow in peak lactation is immense ...To achieve a comparably high work rate a human would have to jog for about six hours a day, every day."

Sounds exhausting. And that's just the beginning. In between milkings, Halverson says, a high-producing dairy cow's udder will fill up with 6.5 gallons of milk. That makes walking with a cow's normal gait next to impossible because of the swollen size of the udder, greatly increasing the chances of lameness.

Of course, cows haven't always produced so much milk. As Nicolette Hahn Niman accounts in her book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, early in our country's history, cows weren't even milked year round, but only in the months where there was good enough grass. "Like cured meats, butter and cheese were methods of preserving milk during the seasons of plenty for the cold months to come," she accounts.

And cows used to serve multiple purposes -- milk, meat, and labor. But increasingly cows were bred for single traits, such as milk production. After World War II, industrialization of our food system ramped up with the availability of cheap energy, pesticides, fertilizers, and mechanization. By 2005, Niman writes, cows' yields were increased by seven fold in a century's time -- mainly through manipulations of breeding and diet and the additions of antibiotics and hormones.

But the largest surge in so-called productivity came decades after WWII. "It was the 1970s when the dairy industry really started ramping up milk production in Holstein cattle," said Halverson. "Cattle before the 1970s were healthy, normal dairy cows, they didn't have issues with lameness, mastitis (a painful udder infection), and reproductive problems in huge amounts." All that selective breeding and milk demand has made the Holstein a much more fragile animal.

Under healthy conditions, it's not uncommon for a dairy cow to live between nine and 20 years while being productive in the herd, said Halverson. While many cows can even live to 25 years, today's dairy cows don’t even come close to that. "They are living two or three years and being culled," she said. The next stop from there is to live out the remaining days alongside beef cattle awaiting slaughter at a feedlot.

Life on the 'Farm'

The vast majority of dairy cows in the U.S., around 75 percent, will never graze in pasture and most won't spend any time outside. And most cows that are outside aren't nibbling on greener pastures, but are instead confined in barren dirt lots, a report by Farm Sanctuary details. This will sound familiar if you know anything about beef cattle raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

Like feedlot beef cattle, dairy cows aren't fed the diet nature intended for them and are instead pumped full of animal by-products and grains, which leads to metabolic disease (and more horrific things like Mad Cow). "Unlike omnivorous chickens and pigs, all cattle are naturally designed to live entirely from slowly and methodically foraging vegetation," wrote Niman in Righteous Porkchop. "Bovines in the wild spend most of their waking hours in a state of ambulant grazing, walking an average of 2.5 miles a day, all the while taking 50 to 80 bites of forage per minute. Life in a confinement dairy promised a cow an environment and a diet that violated her very evolution."

Dairies vary across the country, explains Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary. In the Midwest and Northeast cows may spend some time outside in warmer months and then are kept tethered by the neck in "tie stalls" in the winter. In the Southwest and California, two booming dairy areas, cows are kept in "dry lots," that most closely resemble CAFO feedlots "where the cows are packed by the thousands in a series of barren, feces laden pens," said Baur. And then there are "freestall" dairies that are essentially giant, crowded warehouses, which are no fun either.

( "Graziers" -- farmers who are returning their animals to pasture -- are the exception. More on this below.)

If cows aren't done in by an unhealthy diet, horrible living conditions (which for some include walking and sleeping on concrete), overproduction of milk, lameness, mastitis (the number one reason for culling cows), then they are also forced to endure having their tails docked without -- a painful process that renders them defenseless against biting flies. And then there is the agony of having their newborns taken from them directly after birth. This has been detailed in reports of the noises mothers make when their calves are removed and stories of cows breaking free of operations and traveling miles to other farms to find their calves.

And for the calves, life is no picnic. Female calves will be kept for milking to replace other cows in the herd. And for male calves, it’s bleak. If they aren’t left to die or sent to slaughter within days, then it’s off to a veal operation, which are "virtually synonymous with animal cruelty," as Paul Shapiro Senior Director, End Factory Farming Campaign of the Humane Society said, and slaughtered around 4-5 months. And the rest are either raised for beef on the farm where they are born or sold to another beef operation and slaughtered around 13-14 months. In fact, "the veal industry was literally born out of the dairy industry," said Baur. "It was developed to take advantage of the unwanted male calves born to dairy cows."

And there are many. "In one recent year, about 4.5 million male calves were born in U.S. dairies," wrote Niman. "Of those, 42 percent were immediately sent to slaughter; over half went to confinement veal operations; the remainder to feedlots."

Halverson, who worked with 14 animal welfare scientists to design a set of high welfare husbandry criteria for a program her sister Diane created at the the Animal Welfare Institute, said they often recommend euthanasia on the farm for male calves. "It is the most humane way if the farmer or someone he or she knows isn't going to raise the calf -- it seems like a terrible waste, but when farms send their male calves to an auction house they may only get $10-15, if the calf sells at all -- it's not worth it in terms of the suffering of the animal."

The much-maligned veal industry, infamous for housing calves in tiny crates, has seen a small shift. Some farmers are engaging in "specialty veal" operations that have much more humane conditions for animals, sometimes even allowing them to remain on pasture with their mothers or in or to live in groups in large pens or hoop houses with other calves -- but these are few.

Usually the stories are much worse.

"We recently did an investigation at a bob veal plant in Vermont, it was certified organic, very small plant," said Shapiro. "Despite this, the abuse that we documented on camera was absolutely horrendous: skinning of animals alive, live animals on piles of dead animals outside, calves being beaten, being shocked with electric prods over and over, being dragged, kicked, all in front of a USDA inspector no less. When we released the results of the investigation the footage was so damning that the USDA shut the plant down -- it's been shut down for more than 3 months and a criminal investigation is still pending."

How Did Things Get So Bad?

The story of dairy's downhill slide is familiar throughout the food world. "There has been a real drive to get cheaper and cheaper food and that is one factor that led to factory farming, not only in the dairy industry but throughout all of agribusiness. We think of food as being cheap but in reality there are a lot of external factors that we don't really pay for when we go the supermarket," said Shapiro. "Those are increased animal suffering, increased environmental degradation, and increased food safety risks."

One of the drivers for that has been consolidation of the dairy industry. Farm Sanctuary reports that the total number of U.S. dairies has dropped 55 percent since 1991, but for operations where the herd size is over 100, it has increased by 94 percent. Megadairies with thousands of cows are now replacing smaller, family farms. In California there are now dairies with over 10,000 cows and the state's San Joaquin Valley is home to 2.5 million dairy cows, Niman reports.

But it's not just the size of operations that is problematic, it's the capitalization -- the money that is needed to sustain an industrial-style operation. A capital-intensive dairy system is 'inelastic.' "The farmer can no loner respond to changing market conditions by increasing or decreasing herd size or milk output," Niman wrote. "Instead, (just as we've seen with poultry and pig contract growing), farmers that have opted into the industrialized system are now servants to massive debt."

This means farmers end up subjecting their animals to the harshest conditions in efforts to produce more and more milk. A perfect example is the use of Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) growth hormone, pushed by Monsanto, in efforts to increase yields. The results instead have been catastrophic for the health of cows, which is of course not good for business either. The industrial system has also given birth to the huge prevalence of the udder infection mastitis, which accounts for $2 billion in annual losses, Niman writes.

This style of raising animals has taken its toll on the environment as well, from air to water pollution, as well as contributing heavily to emissions of methane gas caused by cattle not eating their natural diet. One dairy in northern Minnesota has been described by the State Department of Health as a public health hazard, Halverson said. On days when winds bring the pollution from the dairy's manure pits to their residences, the neighbors have been advised by the Department to leave their homes and stay with relatives or in hotels in town. The industry's grip on state agencies has prevented this facility from being closed down -- instead it has received extensions from the pollution control board.

Too Much of a Bad Thing, Not Enough of a Good Thing

The irony of all this increased production is that it's unnecessary. Many people can argue for health reasons that we don't need dairy products to begin with, but as Niman writes, the industry has actually saturated itself. In 1986 the government actually paid dairy farmers to slaughter 10 percent of the U.S. herd.

"Responding to the ongoing dairy excess, the federal government has long purchased cheese, butter,and nonfat dry milk under a dairy price support program," Niman explained. "The products are stored and, to the extent possible, funneled into domestic and foreign feeding programs, including school lunches. What can't be poured into some type of program is put into storage. At times the dried milk surplus has been extreme. 'In 2002, storage costs alone for the powder peaked at $2.3 million a month,' said Michael Yost, associate administrator of the USDA's Farm Service Agency."

And while we have too much of a bad thing, we're lacking in the alternatives.

A small number of dairy farmers are returning their animals to the pasture system of using rotational grazing, allowing their animals outdoor pasture access as much of the year as possible and supplementing their diets in winter with hay, grain and silage. Halverson says many of these farms are moving away from selective breeding and are now cross-breeding Holsteins with more robust Normande and Jersey cattle. "They are not demanding as much milk from their cows. They get lower yields," she said. "But their costs are also lower because they are not so highly capitalized as dairy factories, needing lots of labor and paying enormous vet bills."

It's a choice that's also better for the environment and it results in a healthier product, to boot. It's also many steps up when it comes to the treatment of animals (although, of course, the cows in any operation don't make it out alive and male calves still have bleak prospects).

So, where to find these "graziers," as they're known?

The best bet is to check for local dairies where you live, find out if their animals are pasture raised, and then go see for yourself. Online resources like the Eat Well Guide and LocalHarvest.org are helpful in locating good dairies or stores that sell their products. And there are labels (some good and others misleading) to help make sense of what you're really getting.

There are also larger businesses, like Organic Valley, that have taken steps to improve the welfare of their animals. "Our dairy animals have the best life of any dairy animals in this country, that's for certain," said Wendy Fulwider, the company's animal husbandry specialist. "We do have pasture requirements, so they do get to spend a lot of time outdoors and they get excellent pasture to eat. They get exercise and sunshine and have the most nutritious milk. They are incredibly healthy."

The company is a cooperative of 1,350 farms and has a minimal requirement of 120 days on pasture per year, they follow the organic standards and don't use hormones like rBST. "Our cows live longer than conventional cows, they are healthier, they're not spending their entire life on concrete and they are eating minimal amounts, if any grain. It's not uncommon to have a 10- or 12-year-old dairy cow on our farms," said Fulwider.

Halverson agrees that the easiest way to feel better about the dairy you're getting is to look for the organic label. "But I realize there is controversy over organic dairies, especially in California where certain dairies have been accused of raising their cattle on feedlots essentially," she said.

Gene Baur paints a harsher picture. "The vast majority of dairy is from industrial type operations. Even Horizon, which is an organic-type farm is basically a factory farm," he said. "What they have done and what other large agribusinesses have done, is work to lower the standards for what is organic and so even Horizon I would call a factory farm."

Both Dean Foods' Horizon and Aurora Farms have come under attack from groups claiming they violate organic standards because of their animals' lack of access to pasture.

Niman sees hope for the future in graziers, which are better for the environment, animals and health.

Still, the safest best would be to skip the dairy altogether. "People should be thinking more about their food choices and eating in a way that is consistent with their own values and their own interests," said Baur. "I believe for most people that will mean not eating animal products because the way these animals are treated is brutal and all their lives end in a violent way, which is bad for the animals and for people. If people ate in a way consistent with their own values they wouldn't be supporting that system. Also people should eat in a way consistent with their own interests and eat in a way that is healthy, that does not lead to heart disease and cancer -- that also means not eating animal food but choosing plant food."

No matter what people's eating choices, there is always room for improvement. "There are a variety of ways to improve animal welfare each time you sit down to eat. For example, the alternatives to dairy that are out there are more plentiful and better than there have been. Now, any supermarket you go to is going to have a wide variety of soy and rice milks and other alternatives," said Shapiro. "At the same time there are dairy producers who don't engage in many of the practices that we talked about.

"So, whether they are interested in reducing or eliminating consumption of dairy or looking for higher standards of animal welfare dairy products, I think all of those are good options for consumers. It's not to say that anyone is going to be totally cruelty-free in our diets, even the strictest vegans, it is to say that each one of us can move in a better direction when it comes to our food choices and making them more ethical no matter where we are on that spectrum."

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

2010-01-29T00:54:00.003-03:00

by Chris Hedges

Corporate forces have carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed, is the outrage of those who prefer a choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion.

Thousands of Americans died, even after receiving H1N1 vaccine shots

2010-01-18T16:46:00.004-03:00

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor (NaturalNews)

The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I'm about to reveal here.It all started with the CDC's recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates.

According to the CDC:
• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a "success" even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines.
• 55 million people "became ill" from swine flu infections.
• 246,000 Americans were hospitalized due to swine flu infections.
• 11,160 Americans died from the swine flu.

Based on these statistics, the CDC is now desperately urging people to get vaccinated because they claim the pandemic might come back and vaccines are the best defense.But here's the part you're NOT being told.The CDC statistics lie by omission. They do not reveal the single most important piece of information about H1N1 vaccines: How many of the people who died from the swine flu had already been vaccinated?
Many who died had already been vaccinatedThe CDC is intentionally not tracking how many of the dead were previously vaccinated. They want you (and mainstream media journalists) to mistakenly believe that ZERO deaths occurred in those who were vaccinated. But this is blatantly false. Being vaccinated against H1N1 swine flu offers absolutely no reduction in mortality from swine flu infections.And that means roughly 20% of the 11,160 Americans who died from the swine flu were probably already vaccinated against swine flu. That comes to around 2,200 deaths in people who were vaccinated!

How do I know that swine flu vaccines don't reduce infection mortality? Because I've looked through all the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials that have ever been conducted on H1N1 vaccines. It didn't take me very long, because the number of such clinical trials is ZERO.That's right: There is not a single shred of evidence in existence today that scientifically supports the myth that H1N1 vaccines reduce mortality from H1N1 infections. The best evidence I can find on vaccines that target seasonal flu indicates a maximum mortality reduction effect of somewhere around 1% of those who are vaccinated. The other 99% have the same mortality rate as people who were not vaccinated.

So let's give the recent H1N1 vaccines the benefit of the doubt and let's imagine that they work just as well as other flu vaccines. That means they would reduce the mortality rate by 1%. So out of the 2,200 deaths that took place in 2009 in people who were already vaccinated, the vaccine potentially may have saved 22 people.
61 million injections add up to bad public health policySo let's see: 61 million people are injected with a potentially dangerous vaccine, and the actual number "saved" from the pandemic is conceivably just 22. Meanwhile, the number of people harmed by the vaccine is almost certainly much, much higher than 22. These vaccines contain nervous system disruptors and inflammatory chemicals that can cause serious health problems.

Some of those problems won't be evident for years to come... future Alzheimer's victims? .Injecting 61 million people with a chemical that threatens the nervous system in order to avoid 22 deaths -- and that's the best case! -- is an idiotic public health stance. America would have been better off doing nothing rather than hyping up a pandemic in order to sell more vaccines to people who don't need them.Better yet, what the USA could have done that would have been more effective is handing out bottles of Vitamin D to 61 million people. At no more cost than the vaccines, the bottles of vitamin D supplements would have saved thousands of lives and offered tremendously importantly additional benefits such as preventing cancer and depression, too.

The one question the CDC does not want you to ask
Through its release of misleading statistics, the CDC wants everyone to believe that all of the people who died from H1N1 never received the H1N1 vaccine. That's the implied mythology behind the release of their statistics. And yet they never come right out and say it, do they? They never say, "None of these deaths occurred in patients who had been vaccinated against H1N1."
They can't say that because it's simply not true. It would be a lie. And if that lie were exposed, people might begin to ask questions like, "Well gee, if some of the people who were killed by the swine flu were already vaccinated against swine flu, then doesn't that mean the vaccine doesn't protect us from dying?"
That's the number one question that the CDC absolutely, positively does not want people to start asking.So they just gloss over the point and imply that vaccines offer absolute protection against H1N1 infections. But even the CDC's own scientists know that's complete bunk. Outright quackery. No vaccine is 100% effective. In fact, when it comes to influenza, no vaccine is even 10% effective at reducing mortality. There's not even a vaccine that's 5% effective. And there's never been a single shred of credible scientific information that says a flu vaccine is even 1% effective.So how effective are these vaccines, really? There are a couple thousand vaccinated dead people whose own deaths help answer that question: They're not nearly as effective as you've been led to believe.They may not be effective at all.

Crunching the numbers: Why vaccines just don't add upThink about this: 80% of Americans refused to get vaccinated against swine flu. That's roughly 240 million people.Most of those 240 million people were probably exposed to the H1N1 virus at some point over the last six months because the virus was so widespread.How many of those 240 million people were actually killed by H1N1? Given the CDC's claimed total of deaths at 11,160, if you take 80% of that (because that's the percentage who refused to be vaccinated), you arrive at 8,928. So roughly 8,900 people died out of 240 million. That's a death rate among the un-vaccinated population of .0000372With a death rate of .0000372, the swine flu killed roughly 1 out of every 26,700 people who were NOT vaccinated.

So even if you skipped the vaccine, you had a 26,699 out of 26,700 chance of surviving.Those are pretty good odds. Ridiculously good. You have a 700% greater chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, by the way.What it all means is that NOT getting vaccinated against the swine flu is actually a very reasonable, intelligent strategy for protecting your health. Mathematically, it is the smarter play.Because, remember: Some of the dead victims of H1N1 got vaccinated. In fact, I personally challenge the CDC to release statistics detailing what percentage of the dead people had previously received such vaccines.

There is no doubt that many of those who died from H1N1 were previously vaccinated. The CDC just doesn't want you to know how many (and they hope you'll assume it's zero).
Where are all the real journalists?I find it especially fascinating that the simple question of "How many of the dead were previously vaccinated?" has never been asked in print by a single journalist in any mainstream newspaper or media outline across the country. Not the NY Times, not WashingtonPost.com, not the WSJ, LA Times or USA Today. The MSM today, in other words, is often quite pathetic. Far from the independent media mindset that used to break big stories like Watergate, today's mainstream media is little more than a mouthpiece for the corporatocracy that runs our nation. The MSM serves the financial interests of the corporations, just as the CDC and WHO do. That's why they're all spouting the same propaganda with their distorted stories about H1N1 swine flu.

Nations scrap orders for GSK swine flu jab
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/nations-scrap-orders-for-gsk-swine-flu-jab-1869653.html

Influenza A: "They Organized the Psychosis"Wednesday 06 January 2010
by: Jean-Emmanuel Ducoin L'Humanité

President of the Council of Europe's Health Commission, German Wolfgang Wodarg, alleges serious irregularities in the production, officials approvals and distribution of the influenza A vaccine.

Scandals of State(s)
And what if financial waste were to become a scandal of state ... and of many states? By dint of retracing the trail of the anti-influenza A shots, the debate over public policies during a pandemic is being utterly transformed into a vast denunciation of the collusion between laboratories and governments. We hardly doubt that, secretly, while laying low in the shadows, lobbyists did whatever necessary to convince decision makers to buy their vaccinations in massive quantities. Did these servants of the great trusts direct, and in consequence, manipulate the conditions of purchase? The troubling facts that we are publishing [see below] contain that which should arouse our most intense scrutiny. Our questions, moreover, are now shared ... and not by just anybody! The Council of Europe's Health Commission, no less, has, in fact, just voted for an official investigation to evaluate the influence of pharmaceutical groups on governments' and even the World Health Organization's choices ...Also See: Bruno Odent Influenza A: They

Organized a Psychosis
France is on the front line. And for good reason. Since she's been in office, [French Minster of Health] Mrs. Bachelot and the members of her office, frequently accused of collusion with business circles, have rarely been short of any zeal in rolling out the red carpet for the medicine men listed on the stock exchange. Favoring "complete-vaccination," a variant of Sarkozyist "complete-security," France consequently purchased - without any transparency - far more doses of vaccine than did comparable countries. Moreover, since the summer, the government has been lying to us: the official cost, 869 million euros, is nothing but the tip of the iceberg, to which must be added the purchase of masks, publicity costs and also the exorbitant amount of expenses contributed by local governments, hospitals etc.: probably over 2 billion euros in all! Even the independence of the Groupe d'expertise et d'information sur la grippe [Group for Flu Appraisal and Information] (Geig), an official body of the Ministry of Health, arouses indignation: it is 100 percent financed by five laboratories ...Ninety-four million doses for five million people who chose to be vaccinated: cherchez the blooper! After having conducted the matter like a Napoleonic battle, the government beats a retreat to the point of negotiating (on what conditions?) the cancellation of half the order for vaccines ... At the hour of reckoning, a wind of panic blows through the Palace. For who will have benefited from this collective hysteria? The laboratories, obviously: spending 870 millions euros on four of them was no longer a precautionary principle, but a veritable financing plan!

The main beneficiaries? GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis et Sanofi-Aventis: over a billion euros of additional revenues in the fourth quarter for the GSK, between 350 and 500 millions for the two others ... Not only did the organized psychosis fill their coffers, but governments, transformed into super-sales-reps, are taking responsibility for assuring their products' resale! In a global market estimated at 600 billion dollars (it has doubled in ten years), everyone will have understood that for the laboratories the stakes resemble a trade war in which anything is allowed.

The "Ottawa Initiative on Haiti"

2009-12-19T03:48:00.003-03:00

By Jean Saint-Vil

April 20, 2009

globalresearch.ca

On Sussex Drive in Ottawa, just a few steps away from the enormous US embassy, stands the Peacekeeping Monument. The structure titled "Reconciliation" was erected to honour the more than 125,000 Canadians who have served in United Nations peacekeeping forces since 1947. The current article documents one particular instance –the February 2004 intervention in Haiti - where the historical record conflicts with the "good peacekeeper" narrative communicated by the Canadian government, reiterated by the corporate media, and represented by "Reconciliation."

Seeing themselves as a generous people, most Canadians also consider that their noble ideals are reflected in the foreign policy of their government. The importance of nurturing this positive image both at home and abroad is well ingrained in the national psyche and, every now and again, surveys are conducted to confirm its resilience.[1]

Walter Dorn, Associate Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, writes that:

For Canadians, peacekeeping is about trying to protect people in mortal danger... about self-sacrifice as well as world service. These notions of courage and service resonate with the public, and politicians across the political spectrum have readily adopted the peacekeeping cause... Canadian support for its peacekeeping role has been so strong for so long that it has become a part of the national identity.[2]

Canada's intervention in Haiti is represented and legitimized in such terms. On the very first line of the section of its website devoted to Haiti, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) boasts how "Canada has committed to allocate $555 million over five years (2006-2011) to reconstruction and development efforts in Haiti." Such "special consideration" is given to Haiti because "[t]he Government of Canada is committed to helping the people of Haiti improve their living conditions."[3] Unequivocally endorsing the government's line as reiterated by its Ambassador to Haiti, Claude Boucher, Maclean's Magazine answers its own question in an April 2008 feature article: "it's easy to forget that what Boucher says is true. Haiti is a less dangerous, more hopeful place than it has been for years, and this is the case, in part, because of the United Nations mission there and Canada's involvement in it."[4]

The Ottawa Initiative

In contrast to Maclean's pronouncement, a growing number of international critics insist that what is happening in Haiti is instead an odious imperialist crime in which Canada is shamefully complicit.[5] These skeptics argue that in January, 2003 the Canadian government organized a meeting to plan the illegal and violent overthrow of the democratically-elected government of the small Caribbean nation for political, ideological and economic reasons.[6] The meeting, called the "Ottawa Initiative on Haiti," was held at the government's Meech Lake conference centre in Gatineau, Québec, on January 31 and February 1, 2003, one year before the February 29, 2004 coup d'état.

The extraordinary decisions taken at this gathering of non-Haitians were first leaked to the general public in Michel Vastel's March 2003 article, published in French-language magazine l'Actualité. Under the prophetic title "Haiti put under U.N. Tutelage?," Vastel described how, in the name of a new Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, parliamentarians of former colonial powers invited to Meech Lake by Minister Denis Paradis, decided that Haiti's democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had to be overthrown, a Kosovo-like trusteeship of Haiti implemented before January 1, 2004 while the US- subservient Haitian Army, the Forces armées d'Haiti (FAdH), would be reinstated alongside a new police force. The UN trusteeship project itself first surfaced in 2002 as mere rumor (or trial balloon?) in the neighboring Dominican Republic's press.

While Canadian soldiers stood guard over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, the president of Haiti and his wife were put on an airplane by US officials before dawn on February 29, 2004. According to world-renowned African-American author and activist Randall Robinson, who interviewed several eye-witnesses, the aircraft was not a commercial plane. No members of the Aristide government and no media were at the airport as Mr. and Mrs. Aristide were effectively abducted and taken to the Central African Republic against their will, following a refueling stop in the Caribbean island of Antigua.

In its December 10, 2004 report titled "An Economic Governance Reform Operation," the World Bank bluntly declared that (thanks to the coup), "The transition period and the Transitional Government provide a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms with the involvement of civil society stakeholders that may be hard for a future government to undo."[7] Within the same post-coup period, said transitional government adopted a budget plan baptised "interim cooperation framework" (ICF) which outlined extensive privatization measures, accompanied by massive layoffs of public sector employees. This was done without the benefit of any legal sanction from a Haitian parliament. De facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, who was hand-picked by the U.S. to implement the ICF, promptly began the distribution of $29 million dollars to remobilized soldiers and paramilitaries whom the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had recruited and trained for the coup over the previous years in neighboring Dominican Republic and whom Latortue dubbed "freedom fighters". The announcement of special pay to Latortue's "freedom fighters" was made within days of a December 6, 2004 announcement of new "aid to Haiti" by the Canadian government.[8]

As of September 2008, most of the objectives attributed to the Ottawa Initiative have come to fruition. Haiti's democratically–elected government has been overthrown, the country has been put under UN tutelage, new armed forces have been formed, and former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is still in exile. As for Canada's promised "improvement to living conditions", such improvements can easily be demonstrated for the over 9000 foreign troops (police and military) whose salaries have in many instances doubled during their tour with the UN force in Haiti (MINUSTAH). However, as far as the overwhelming majority of Haitians are concerned, there are no reasons to rejoice. In the past five years, they have been subjected to an unprecedented wave of kidnappings, rapes and murders, among other forms of urban violence. The Haitian state has been further weakened and destabilized. The trauma and social divisions of the Haitian people have been greatly exacerbated as a consequence of the coup. Understandably, many charge that the R2P doctrine has proven to be "a nightmarish and violent neo-imperialist experiment gone terribly mad" conducted on Haitians in blatant contravention of international law.[9]

At the time of the first leak of the Ottawa Initiative meeting to the public, Canadians of Haitian origin warned Prime Minister Jean Chrétien not to engage in such "a foolish adventure in neocolonialism."[10] But these warnings were to no avail. After several changes in government in Ottawa, there is no indication of any change in policy. On the contrary, Canadian officials are steadfastly implementing the same ill-fated policy while disingenuously diverting blame for failure onto its victims. Does it not speak volumes that in Haiti, as in foreign-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, kidnappings and the "brain drain" are two phenomena that have markedly intensified with the arrival of the foreign troops?[11]

Four shaky pillars

The post-coup regime in UN-occupied Haiti rests on four unstable pillars: money, weapons, class solidarity and racism.

Money: Those who call the shots in Haiti today are those who control the bank accounts. Contrast, for example, the $600 million budget of the UN force with that of the Republic of Haiti. The latter grew from $300 million in 2004-05 to $850 million in 2005-06 to 1.8 billion in 2006-07 and finally to $2 billion in 2008-09, with the caveat that above 60% of the budget is dependent on foreign sources and their associated conditions. President Préval's pleas for MINUSTAH tanks to be replaced by construction equipment remain as futile as they are incessant.[12] The "grants" allocated to Haiti at never-ending donors' conferences are largely directed towards the donor's own selected non-governmental organizations.

In response to last year's food riots, Préval vowed in a speech delivered in Creole that he would no longer subsidize foreign rice imports but would instead stimulate the production and consumption of Haitian rice. This statement was retracted in a matter of hours, and Préval announced instead that he was in fact using the country's meager resources to subsidize imported (American) rice to reduce the retail price by 16 percent.[13] The balance of power being what it is in these complex relationships, Haiti is expected to accept without a whimper the poisoned gifts "donated" by her generous benefactors in the name of "peace" or "humanitarian aid." I recall how in 1997, when confronted with the poor quality of a foreign "expert's" report submitted to the Minister, a junior Canadian NGO staff person, who was supposedly working in support of Haiti's Ministry of Environment, arrogantly interjected that "beggars cannot be choosers."

Weapons: MINUSTAH, comprised of some reputedly ruthless forces of repression including those of Brazil, China, Jordan and the U.S. has no rival on the ground in terms of sheer fire power. MINUSTAH's marching orders are especially clear following the "suicide" of its former military leader, Brazilian General Bacellar, who was found dead on January 7, 2006, following a night of heated exchange with members of Haiti's business elite who were openly critical of him for being too "soft" with "slum gangs", "bandits" or "chimères." MINUSTAH serves the role of place holder for the defunct Haitian army (FAdH), the traditional tool by which Haiti's elites and their foreign allies have kept the "black masses" under control. "In the context of a country with an estimated 210,000 firearms (the vast majority of which remain securely in the hands of its ruling families and businesses)", writes Peter Hallward, "it may be that a ‘chimère' arsenal of around 250 handguns never posed a very worrying threat."[14] The dramatic increase of weapons entering Haiti by way of Florida immediately after the 2004 coup suggests that the powers in place aren't willing to take any chances.

Class solidarity: By caricaturing the base of support for the toppled Lavalas government as a violent underclass of "chimères" (monsters), mainstream media inside and outside of Haiti helped the coup forces to gather much sympathy. The attack on Lavalas was systematic, but the casualties of the coup went far beyond a single political party. Today, there remains not a single political party in Haiti which is independent of the foreign forces. Préval himself declares that he does not belong to a political party.[15] The Lespwa platform under which he was elected is already in shambles. Hallward provides an in-depth analysis of 20 years of efforts deployed by the US and its allies to destroy Haiti's emerging popular democracy. The devastating impact of the assassinations in the 1990s of key figures of the progressive bourgeoisie linked to Lavalas, such as the Izmery brothers, attorney Guy Malary, agronomist and journalist Jean Dominique, are key to understand the class struggle still unfolding in Haiti. The web of connections between the Port-au-Prince-based ambassadors, NGO directors, food importers and sweatshop owners, all of whom live in the same neighborhoods, send their kids to the same schools and have developed an acute sense of (Apartheid-like) community is an important element that remains to be thoroughly researched, documented and analyzed. Meanwhile, mainstream media continues to propagate the stereotypes which sustain this mentality of a "besieged class" that must be protected from "savage others."[16]

In order to meet the class-based "responsibility to protect" they have assumed in post-Aristide Haiti, Canada, the US, the UN and the Préval Government are steadfastly enforcing undemocratic and illegal practices such as the maintenance in African exile of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the exclusion of his Fanmi Lavalas party from the Senatorial elections of April 19, 2009[17]. Clearly, rather than contribute to inter-Haitian reconciliation, social appeasement or political stability, such practices further exacerbate political tensions among a people that has heroically struggled for peace but have consistently been denied the benefit of genuine international brotherhood.

Racism: The lingering influence of white supremacist ideology in world affairs is seldom referred to in mainstream publications about Haiti. Yet, it is a key pillar of the Ottawa Initiative and the R2P doctrine on which it was predicated. Indeed, the racial features of the conflict brewing in Haiti are quite visible.

At the international level, the anti-coup and pro-Haitian sovereignty positions adopted by members of the US Congressional Black Caucus, the nations of the Caribbean and Africa, have consistently stood in sharp contrast to those in the US White House, Canada and Europe.

In Haiti, the black majority stands in opposition to a foreign-backed minority represented by the likes of white American sweatshop owner André Apaid, his brother-in-law and unsuccessful presidential candidate Charles Baker, American Rudolph Boulos, his brother Reginald Boulos, Hans Tippenhauer, (uncle and nephew of the same name), Jacques Bernard, etc.[18]

The similarities abound with the 1915 US occupation of Haiti which resulted in the imposition of a string of light-skinned, U.S.-subservient, dictators ruling Haiti: Sudre Dartiguenave, Louis Borno, Elie Lesco, Louis Eugene Roy and Stenio Vincent. As in 1915-1934, members of Haiti's black majority resisting the humiliating occupation of their land today are deemed to be a horde of "bandits" who endanger "private property." Back in the 20th century the private property being protected by Yankee troops was mostly American. Today, MINUSTAH's ‘responsibility to protect' also extends to important Canadian investments such as Gildan Active Wear's sweatshops and Ste-Geneviève Resources' gold exploration concessions.[19]

In a research paper titled Defining Canada's role in Haiti, Canadian Armed Forces Major J.M. Saint-Yves writes that:

"While the solutions may sound colonial in nature it is clear that the endemic corruption of Haitian society will prevent the establishment of a sound economic solution to Haiti's problems under Haitian control. Rather, foreign investment under foreign control is required to establish a new Haitian economy based on industries that will directly benefit the rural Haitian population".[20]

As we will see in further detail, the "foreign control" Saint-Yves is calling for is already in place. But, it appears that the results of such racist and imperialist take-over have thus far proven to be the kind of ugly orphan that no one wants to officially claim as their own.

Documenting Canada's Role

From the early hours of the coup, Haitian-American activist and attorney Marguerite Laurent has been a powerful and relentless voice denouncing the overthrow of the Aristide government and in documenting its consequences for thousands of people worldwide. "If justice, and not power, prevailed in international affairs," writes Laurent, "the coup d'état corporatocracy in Haiti, that is, the governments (US/France/Canada), international banks and rich multinational corporations, and their Haitian minions who funded the overthrow of Haiti's elected government, would be paying reparations to the people of Haiti who lost and continue to lose loved ones, property, and limbs."[21]

Ten days after the coup, Stockwell Day, then-foreign affairs critic for the Conservative opposition, declared in Parliament that "... we have an elected leader Aristide. We may not have wanted to vote for him... But the (Canadian) government makes a decision that there should be a regime change. It is a serious question that we need to address. That decision was based on what criteria?"[22]

At first, the Liberal government attempted to cast doubt on whether the infamous coup-plotting meeting of January 31, 2003 ever took place. Records of a March 19, 2003 Senate hearing titled "Meeting on Regime Change in Haiti" include Senator Consiglio Di Nino inquiring about a "secret initiative referred to as the "Ottawa Initiative on Haiti" that is being led by the Secretary of State for La Francophonie." The Senator asked: "Can the leader of the government in the Senate tell us if this meeting actually took place?" to which Liberal Senator Sharon Carstairs answered: "I cannot honestly say whether this meeting took place. I have no information whatsoever on such a meeting."[23]

Since this exchange in the House of Commons, successive governments – Liberal and Conservative alike – have steadfastly pursued the agenda developed under "The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti", the minutes of which have yet to be made available as requested by New Democratic Party MP Svend Robinson. Vancouver-based Journalist Anthony Fenton, who eventually obtained a severely edited set of documents concerning the meeting and its aftermath under Access to Information, wrote to the author as follows:

It remains a reasonable question to ask why these full, uncensored minutes haven't been tabled in the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs. Since the coup, the same committee has heard Haiti-specific testimony on at least thirteen separate occasions. Between May and June of 2006, the Committee heard from over thirty 'witnesses,' in the course of conducting their 'Study on Haiti.' This resulted in the December 2006 tabling of the ‘Report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Canada's International Policy Put to the Test in Haiti.'

Fenton notes that, of course, no reference to a coup or Ottawa Initiative is to be found in the Report or the Government's response.

In "Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority," written with colleague Yves Engler, Fenton documents various aspects of Canada's involvement in the 2004 coup d'état.[24] Of particular note is the role CIDA played in both the destabilization campaign that prepared the way for the coup and the PR campaign which followed. In Damming the Flood, a book published by UK-based Canadian author Peter Hallward, Canada is deemed to have executed "its client functions in rare and exemplary fashion" in the eyes of the US, the ultimate leader of the multinational coup. "Canada's foreign minister Pierre Pettigrew reportedly met with leading figures in the anti-Aristide opposition and insurgency shortly before the February coup and, as we have seen," Hallward continues, "CIDA provided significant financial assistance to pro-coup pressure groups like the National Coalition for Haitian Rights-Haiti (NCHR-Haiti) and SOFA."[25]

Upon analysis, the case of CIDA's funding to NCHR-Haiti is particularly disturbing in that it provides direct evidence of collusion between the highest level of Canadian government and a pro-coup NGO of much disrepute in the eyes of Haitians and international observers alike. NCHR-Haiti is said to have caused great harm to the cause of peace and justice in Haiti. Chiefly among NCHR-Haiti's damages, critics often point to the wrongful jailing of Haiti's Prime Minister Yvon Neptune for over two years on trumped-up charges that were – through the CIDA/NCHR-Haiti connection - essentially financed by Canadian tax-payers. NCHR-Haiti has been so discredited on account of the Yvon Neptune wrongful imprisonment scandal that its US-based parent organization demanded that it change its name, which has since been modified to Réseau national de défense des droits humains (RNDDH).

In his well-researched article "Faking Genocide," Kevin Skerrett writes that:

Within days of the coup, accusations of Prime Minister Neptune's responsibility for a major massacre, a "genocide" of 50 people, were published by a human rights organization called the National Coalition for Haitian Rights-Haiti (NCHR-Haiti)...The particular episode of violence and political killings for which Neptune was being blamed took place in the city of St. Marc on February 11 2004, during the three-week "death squad rebellion" that began February 5 in Gonaives and was then spreading through the north of Haiti. The attacks launched through this "rebellion" culminated in the coup of February 29.[26]

Documents obtained in 2007 through Anthony Fenton's Access to Information Request (CIDA A-2005-00039) reveal that, in the name of the victims of coup violence, NCHR-Haiti submitted a $100,000 project to CIDA on Friday March 5, 2004. By Monday March 8, Mr. Yves Petillon, Chief of Canadian Cooperation at the Embassy in Haiti, received a recommendation from his staff to approve the funding and on Thursday, March 11 (within less than 5 working days from the original submission), Mr. Pétillon signed and approved the 10 page grant request. As someone with over 17 years of experience in the federal grant funding world, the author can attest that this is an unusually rapid response time.

In their March 5 funding proposal, the applicants wrote: "Just as NCHR aided and assisted victims of the Lavalas regime, the organization has the obligation to do the same for Lavalas supporters now coming under attack." Yet, the same document confirms NCHR's deliberate decision to limit the dates covered by the victims' fund to February 9 through 29, 2004. Thus, they purposely exclude the victims of anti-Lavalas violence which peaked as the death squad "rebellion" hit Gonaives in the first days of February and in the days following Aristide's removal on February 29, 2004. In addition, NCHR openly refused to enter the Bel Air neighborhood to investigate widespread reports of killings of unarmed Lavalas supporters by foreign occupiers in early March 2004.[27]

Two days after the coup, in an interview given to journalists Kevin Pina and Andrea Nicastro, Prime Minister Yvon Neptune declared: "The resignation of the President is not constitutional because he did that under duress and threat. The chief of the Supreme Court was brought here into my office by representatives of the international community. I was not invited or present when he was sworn in".[28]

In sharp contrast to the CIDA-funded reports produced by NCHR-Haiti, the above statement goes a long way to explain the true motivations behind the illegal incarceration and torment suffered by Haiti's constitutional Prime Minister during the post-coup period when "Haitian" justice and prison systems effectively fell under Canadian control. While Mr. Neptune was being punished in jail for his refusal to condone the coup, Paul Martin went to Haiti in November 2004. This was the first ever official visit of a Canadian Prime Minister to Haiti. During his visit, Martin, who dubs himself a proud champion of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, was quoted by Agence France Press as saying that "there are no political prisoners in Haiti."[29]

Haiti's Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, was eventually freed under René Préval's presidency. His release occurred after all risk was effectively cleared that dozens of illegally incarcerated top leaders of Fanmi Lavalas would register and win the foreign controlled elections of 2006.

Months after his return to Canada, Prime Minister Martin was publicly denounced by activist Yves Engler with the infamous heckle "Martin lies, Haitians die" for his shameful behavior in Haiti. During another episode of colourful protest, Engler decorated then Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew's hands in the red of Haitian blood. For his efforts, Engler ended up spending several days in jail.[30]

What is becoming clearer is the hugely embarrassing contradiction between the multi-million dollar contributions which the Canadian government boasts having made to help fix the Haitian police and justice systems and the fact that said systems are deemed by several independent studies to be in much worse shape several years after the coup. The suggestion that this "failure" is solely that of Haitians also falls flat in the face of scrutiny. Consider the bold statements made by Chief Superintendent David Beer, Director General of International Policing at the RCMP at the April 3, 2008 meeting of The Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development:

"Mr. Chair, I think the committee might be interested to know that although our numbers are down to a certain degree in the total number of almost 1,900 serving police officers, in the mission Canada continues to have very key roles. Indeed, Canada holds the position of deputy commissioner of operations, senior mentor and advisor, and senior mentoring unit for the police for the city of Port-au-Prince. We are in charge of the Bureau de la lutte contre le trafic des stupéfiants, the counter-narcotics unit. We're also in charge of the anti-kidnapping unit. We also contribute to border management, the academy, and la formation de la police nationale. Also, we're involved in a financial integrity and assets management project within the Haitian National Police. Finally, Mr. Chair, the vetting and registration of the HNP is also a responsibility of a Canadian police officer". [31]

The conspicuous exchange of funds between CIDA and NCHR-Haiti which financed Mr. Neptune's ordeal may never make the front pages of Maclean's Magazine or the Globe and Mail. Generally speaking, Canadians meet with great surprise and disbelief the recurring corruption scandals involving their political elite. One of the cases currently in front of the courts involves former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney who is accused of having accepted bribes in cash, while in office, from German arms dealer Karlheinz Shreiber. Many are shocked by the case. However, that the Mulroney-Shreiber deal in question allegedly involved the purchase of weapons destined to "peacekeeping" has attracted no special attention. If anything, it seems, Brian Mulroney stands to benefit from the "peacekeeping" connection that he volunteered about his dealings with the infamous arms dealer.

Peace Be Unto Them . . . With Tanks and Bullets

In fact, bloody foreign interventions dubbed ‘peacekeeping' enjoy such a positive aura in Canada that para-governmental bodies such as FOCAL are openly calling for Canada to engage ever deeper in the imperialist adventure that is The Ottawa Initiative.

It is this aura which inspires military figures such as Major Michael D. Ward to write that "strong commitment to the sovereignty [and] independence ... of Haiti is a crucial barrier to the international engagement required to rebuild and reform the Haitian state."[32]

Such crude and condescending statements explain why the North-South Institute cautioned, as early as October 2005, that "The Canadian government's justification for the 2004 intervention in Haiti, without open debate from an R2P perspective, has damaged the R2P campaign, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean."[33] The CIDA-funded think tank proceeds to lament how ‘peacebuilding' in Haiti has been compromised by de facto collaboration with paramilitary leaders responsible for past human rights violations.

In the very document produced by the R2P Commission, it was boldly highlighted how governments engaged in such interventions must prove themselves to be very agile at spinning and controlling information. "The key to mobilizing international support," it states, "is to mobilize domestic support, or at least neutralize domestic opposition." Further, it highlights the crucial role that government-funded entities (wrongly referred to as ‘non-governmental agencies' - NGOs) have to play in this regard: "NGOs have a crucial and ever increasing role, in turn, in contributing information, arguments and energy to influencing the decision-making process, addressing themselves both directly to policy makers and indirectly to those who, in turn, influence them."[34]

It thus falls to heavily-funded NGOs to ensure that racism is seen as humanism and imperialism as peacekeeping – no matter the native body count. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the eyes of people of African-descent worldwide, Canada's "good" image has suffered a considerable blow as a result of the 2004 coup and its aftermath.

Commenting on the food riots that rocked Haiti in April 2008, veteran journalist John Maxwell, wrote in the Jamaica Observer:

"Today, and especially for the last few weeks, the starving people in Haiti have been trying to get the world to listen to their anguish and misery...Mr Bush and Mr Colin Powell and a mixed gaggle of French and Canadian politicians had decided that freedom and independence were too good for the black people of Haiti. Lest you think I am being racist, there is abundant evidence that the conspiracy against Haiti was inspired by racial hatred and prejudice...I have gone into this before and I will not return to it today . . . Suffice it to say that the US, Canada and France, acting on behalf of the so-called 'civilised world', decided on the basis of lies that, as in the case of Iraq, a free and independent people had no business being free and independent when their freedom and independence was seen to threaten the economic interest of the richest people in Haiti and, by extension, the wealthiest countries in the world".[35]

Conclusion

According to Walter Dorn, there exist two groups of advocates of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. "The idealist or internationalist school often clashes with the realpolitik school, whose members are usually called realists (although not necessarily realistic)," says the military professor. "Canadian realists hold that Canada's contributions do not arise from the purity of our souls or national benevolence, but because of basic national interest." Dorn tells us that, for the realists, "Canada's large contributions to the UN's successive missions in Haiti are also explained in part by a desire to assist the US in the continental backyard."

Speaking about his own ‘civilized world's responsibility to protect ‘others' in early 2003, then-Minister for la Francophonie Denis Paradis was quoted by journalist Michel Vastel as follows: "I do not want to end up like Roméo Dallaire..." "Time is running out because, it is estimated that Haiti's population could reach 20 million in 2009," observed Vastel, before proceeding to quote Minister Paradis describing Haiti's 99 percent African population as "a time bomb which must be stopped immediately! "[36]

It is frightening for a historically-conscious person, especially one of African descent, to observe how the logic of Rudyard Kipling's ‘White man's burden' emanates so easily from the minds of high-ranking Canadian officials and intellectuals, and then is translated into foreign policy that is implemented with brute force. As Sherene Razack writes in Black Threats, White Knights, "Peacekeeping today is a kind of war, a race war waged by those who constitute themselves as civilized, modern and democratic against those who are constituted as savage, tribal and immoral."[37]

A report issued by the International Commission argues that "there is much direct reciprocal benefit to be gained in an interdependent, globalized world where nobody can solve all their own problems: my country's assistance for you today in solving your neighbourhood refugee and terrorism problem, might reasonably lead you to be more willing to help solve my environmental or drugs problem tomorrow."[38] One is indeed well advised to ask the crucial question: What are they talking about as far as R2P is concerned? This so-called responsibility is to protect who from what? Are soldiers being mobilized to protect vulnerable populations from massive human rights horrors or to protect the interests of world elites from threats such as Haiti's perceived black "time bomb", or Europe from the advances of the wretched of the earth arriving by way of Morroco and Spain?

While seeking the answer to that pivotal question, I am mindful of the shocking statement made by the Assistant Secretary General of the OAS, in front of myself as well as several other witnesses at Haiti's Hotel Montana, on December 31, 2003: "The real problem with Haiti" said Luigi Enaudi, "is that the ‘International Community' is so screwed up & divided that they are actually letting Haitians run Haiti." Less than two months after Einaudi uttered these words, US Marines entered the residence of Haiti's president, while Canadian RCMP soldiers secured the airport to facilitate the coup and occupation of Haiti. Since that fateful night, Haitians are no longer running Haiti and the bloodbath the foreign invaders claim to have intervened to avoid has reached unprecedented proportions, with full involvement of the UN forces engaged in what can only be defined as class and race warfare. Meanwhile, the world still awaits a serious report on the circumstances surrounding the death of U.N. Commander Urano Teixeira Da Matta Bacellar, at Hotel Montana, on January 7, 2006.

Luigi Einaudi

"there is a limit to how much we can constantly say no to the political masters in Washington. All we had was Afghanistan to wave. On every other file we were offside. Eventually we came onside on Haiti, so we got another arrow in our quiver."

Bill Graham, Former Canadian Foreign Minister in January 2007 interview cited in Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (Toronto, ON: Viking Canada, 2007), pp. 126-27

What Should Canadian Policy Towards Haiti be? - beyond figurehead politics... making a real paradigm shift!

Contrary to the IMF style of "aid", the Cuba-Venezuela model is, in essence, what activists for peace with justice have been advocating for several years. Unfortunately, successive Canadian governments have chosen to ignore this message and, instead, have multiplied workshops, conferences, meetings (usually, with little or no Haitian participation) to coordinate even more "aid" to Haiti. This is done in blatant disregard of the evidence that Haiti has, for far too long, been "aided to death" by its self-appointed foreign friends.

The appalling poverty found in Haiti is no recent phenomenon due to "bad governance," as is often posited by apologists for the violent conquest of this continent. The endemic vulnerability of the African and First Nations populations of the Americas stems from 500 years of inhumane colonial and neo-colonial policies. A strategy consisting in piling up money and weapons, while patching up a brick school, a dispensary and a few prisons in return for shameless waving of countless Canadian flags, is no solution at all.

Commenting the current world hunger crisis, Jeffrey Sachs suggested that the long-term solution involves putting brakes on the U.S. ethanol industry, creating a $5-billon fund for agriculture, and financing better research and development for crop technologies in the developing world.[39] Laudable goals, indeed! However, judging from the Haitian experience, governments of enriched societies who built their wealth on racial slavery, theft of indigenous land and shameful trickery of the world financial system, can hardly be counted upon to make such a radical 180 degree conversion. It will necessitate a mass mobilization of peoples worldwide to force these urgently needed changes. Reversing the situation requires us all to force the enriched states to adopt new policies and approaches, rather than rehashing the same old racist practices, masked or not, with clever and cynical humanitarian rhetoric. Their challenge is to first stop doing harm, and then repair the damage already done. Our challenge is to consistently practice genuine people-to-people solidarity.

NOTES

1 "World Sees Canada as Tolerant, Generous Nation," Angus Reid Global Monitor : Polls & Research (November 12, 2006).

2 Walter Dorn, "Canadian Peacekeeping: Proud Tradition, Strong Future?" Canadian Foreign Policy, Vol. 12, No. 2, (Fall 2005) Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) website [www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/acdicida.nsf/EN/JUD-12912349-NLX]

3 Michael Petrou, "Haiti: Are we helping?," Mclean's (April 7, 2008)

4 See Marguerite Laurent, "It's Neither Hope nor Progress when the International Community is Running Haiti," Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, [www.margueritelaurent.com] and

5 Aaron Lakoff, "The Politics of Brutality in Haiti: Canada, the UN and "collateral damage," Dominion Paper (January 21, 2006).

6 Anthony Fenton and Dru Oja Jay, "Declassifying Canada in Haiti" Global Research [www.globalresearch.ca]; and Canada Haiti Action Network website [www.canadahaitiaction.ca]

7 Report No. 30882-HT, "Program Document of TheInternational Development Association to the Executive Directors for an Economic Governance Reform Operation", World Bank, (December 10, 2004)

8 DeWayne Wickham, "Payoffs to Haiti's renegade soldiers won't buy peace," USA Today (January 3, 2005)

9 Jean Saint-Vil, "Please Fix Canada's Policy Towards Haiti," Letter to Minister Peter McKay, (May 29, 2008) [www.archivex-ht.com]

10 Jean Saint-Vil. "New Canadian Premier Gets Sound Advice on Haiti," Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, (February 6, 2006) [www.windowsonhaiti.com]

11 Five LDCs -- Haiti, Cape Verde, Samoa, Gambia and Somalia -- have lost more than half their university-educated professionals in recent years because these professionals have moved to industrialized countries in search of better working and living conditions. UNCTAD, "Least Developed Countries Report 2007: Knowledge, Technological Learning and Innovation for Development" [www.unctad.org] (July 19, 2007)

12 President René Préval's Inaugural Speech, Haiti, (May 14, 2006) [www.margueritelaurent.com]

13 The New York Times appears to have been better connected to the real powers running the show in Haiti. Because of its precipitous attribution of the price reduction measure to Mr. Préval, the Times issued a correction note dated April 10, 2008, in which one reads "A picture caption last Thursday about rioting in Haiti over high food prices misstated President Rene Préval's position on the issue. He urged Haitians to become agriculturally self-sufficient; he did not say he would urge Haiti's congress to cut taxes on imported food." See "Haiti's President Tries to Halt Crisis Over Food," New York Times (April 10, 2008).

14 Cited in Robert Muggah, "Securing Haiti's Transition," Small Arms Survey Occasional Paper no. 14 (October 2005)

15 In interview with Haitian President René Préval, March 2006, Ottawa.

16 "An Inside Look at Haiti's Business Elite, An Interview with Patrick James," Multinational Monitor (January/February 1995)

17 HAITI: Fanmi Lavalas Banned, Voter Apprehension Widespread, By Jeb Sprague, IPS (april 17, 2009)

18 Jean Saint-Vil, "Haiti's 'Ambassador' to Canada" Znet (June 9, 2005) [www.zmag.com]

19 Reed Lindsay, "Haiti's future glitters with gold," Toronto Star (July 21, 2007)

20 Maj. J.M. Saint-Yves, "Defining Canada's Role in Haiti", (Toronto: Canadian Forces College Master of Defence Studies Research Project, 2006), [http://wps.cfc.forces.gc.ca]

21 Marguerite Laurent, "Debt Breeds Dependency Equals Foreign & Corporate Domination" [www.margueritelaurent.com], (January 4, 2005)

22 Hansard,House of Commons, 37th Parliament, 3rd Session (March 10, 2004)

23 Hansard, Debates of the Senate, 2nd Session, 37th Parliament,  (March 19, 2003)

24 "Using NGOs to Destroy Democracy and the Canadian Military Connection," excerpt from: Canada in Haiti Waging War on the Poor Majority by Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton. Fernwood Publishing, 2005

25 Peter Hallward, "Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment", Verso Books, 2007

26 Kevin Skerrett, "Faking Genocide: Canada's Role in the Persecution of Yvon Neptune," Znet (June 23, 2005) [www.zmag.org]

27 Tom Reeves, "Haiti's Disappeared," Znet [www.Zmag.org] (May 5, 2004)

28 Kevin Pina and Andrea Nicastro, "Interview with Prime Minister Yvon Neptune," Haiti Action (March 2, 2004) [www.haitiaction.net]

29 "Canada in Haiti for long run, says PM," Caribbean Net News (November 19, 2004)

30 Marcella Adey and Jean Saint-Vil, "Human Rights worker arrested for heckling Prime Minister Paul Martin" globalresearch.ca (December 4, 2005)

31 Hansard, 39th Parliament, 2nd Session, Number 021 "Evidence" Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, (April 3, 2008)

32 Major Michael T. Ward, "The Case for International Trusteeship in Haiti" Canadian Forces Journal, vol. 7, no. 3 (Autumn 2006)

33 Stephen Baranyi, "What kind of peace is possible in the post-9/11 era?" North-South Institute , (October 2005)

34 ICISS (IBID)

35 John Maxwell, "Is Starvation Contagious?" Jamaica Observer (April 13, 2008)

36 Michel Vastel, "Haiti mise en tutelle par l'ONU?" L'Actualité, (March 15, 2003)

37 Sherene H. Razack, "Black Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeing, and the New Imperialism", University of Toronto Press, (2004)

38 ICISS, "Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty" (page 71), [www.iciss.ca] (December 2001)

39 Sinclair Stewart, "Facing a food crisis, optimist finds hope in the dismal science," The Globe and Mail (Wednesday April 30, 2008)

President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush

2009-12-15T02:03:00.001-03:00

By Ralph Lopez (DailyKos)

"You have the power to hold your leaders accountable." - President Obama, Ghana, July 14, 2009

(Ralph Lopez) -- While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.

As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forcesstruck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn't work, and that it didn't prevent any attacks. And it gets worse. Bush's own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn't prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."

Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.

It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:

"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."

And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:

the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."

What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":

Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis...Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.

This attitude seemed to change after Obama's speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:

"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."

To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I'd been waterboarded 82 times I'd be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos,"wrote in the New York Times:

"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence...This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."

Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president's agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:

[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...

President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.

Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal)bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:

"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.

It's almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier's families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."

A compilation in November2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:

-- Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

-- Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

-- Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.

-- Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.

-- German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.

-- Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.

-- Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.

-- Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.

-- IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.

-- One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."