Knight-Ridder summarizes the damage:

-In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces.

-Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations.

-The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts.

-The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped.

-The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May.

Not only that, it slams the CPA for lack of organization and recordkeeping. The now ex-Coalition Provisional Authority didn't even know how many employees it had. But fear not, Negroponte is on the ground in Iraq preparing the way for the largest US embassy in the world, and it will have a staff equal to the old CPA's Nightline 6/29/04). It is estimated that the US embassy will have a staff of about 3000.

The GAO report also pegs the use of Iraqi funds by the CPA in the rebuilding of Iraq at $21 Billion. Yes, those ARE the same funds that are coming under question as unaccountable, and yes that number does keep going up. If you recall, it went from 2.5 to 11 to 20 and now to 21 billion. Of course, the accounting on how much money there was, and no accountability or tracking of its dispersal, makes it a bit hard to pin down. Even for the GAO.

So is Iraq better off with the US? Well, let's look on the positive side and say, not yet.

I have argued long and hard that the structure of US society is driving us all mad - and ill. I have argued, that we need to drastically change our life styles and pace of life; that we are operating beyond human capacity. I have also opined the use of pharmaceuticals to help us cope with the mess. The Times report makes my case. It interviews a 46 year old woman who has to frequently travel internationally for her job. She was trying to keep herself going on caffeine and it just didn't cut it. Then she discovered modafinil, "a small white pill that revs up the central nervous system without the jitteriness of caffeine or the addiction and euphoria of amphetamines. Particularly damning is her statement:

"Without it my life would not be possible."

Reading through the article, I found that this "small white pill" could keep you awake for hours or even DAYS. Further that it was in demand by truckers, programmers, and college students. I immediately thought about a DARPA project I had read about that was studying how to keep soldiers at maximum alertness for days at a time. It was part of the "war fighter" enhancement studies. Interestingly, much of the research being done for this project focuses around Preventing Sleep Deprivation. Orwellian language strikes again, since they are not trying to "prevent" sleep deprivation, but cause it without the usual mental and organ shutdowns that would occur.

I was also reminded of the arguments in the mid 1980s about the cocaine epidemic among high power business and entertainment folks. It was claimed that part of the draw was it helped them "function" at a higher level. Hmm. So now we have this wonder drug which is sure to be in high demand. I do wonder whether Cephalon has been working on the DARPA project.

The recall of the IRR is yet another sign that the military is stretched very thin. During the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon called up 20,000 IRRs, but that was for short term duty. The current assignments are rumored to be for 18 months. (I heard this in one report, but have not been able to find it in print).

According to CNN, The Pentagon has been screening the IRR list for the past several weeks " in search of qualified people in certain high-priority skill areas like civil affairs." They also note that the Pentagon has been reaching "deep into its resources." The FT article states that the Pentagon has been contacting those in the IRR requesting them to volunteer for assignment, but thus far only about 1,100 volunteered.

A notification was sent to Congress about the recall, which is required by law. Congress called Rumsfeld on the carpet earlier this year for increasing the size of the active military with Congressional approval. There is no indication in either article that Congress has approved the recall (and resulting change in troop strength), just that they were notified.

Articles
6/29/04 CNN, Army to recall former military members

6/30/04 Sevastopulo, Financial Times, Pentagon to recall further 5,600 reservists (FT is a subscription only service so I have made a copy of the article UTJ permanent link)

First, there is the implication that there were rules from the Bush Regime that took "interrogation" beyond the legal bounds. This is clear despite regime claims (and claims by Bush in particular) that such "orders" were never given. We know they were given by Rumsfeld - we have the documentation. But that only applies to the military. The Johnston article, and an article from the AP (CIA Halts Interrogation Tactics), make it clear that there were permission changes for the CIA (civilian side) as well. The permission to use "aggressive" interrogation techniques came from the top.

In the Johnston article states:

Interrogators are uncertain what rules are in effect and are worried that the legal safeguards that they had believed were in place to protect them from internal sanctions or criminal liability may no longer exist, the officials said.

It goes on to state that: "Some intelligence officials involved in the C.I.A.'s interrogation program have told colleagues that they are bitter because their superiors, in the months after the September 2001 attacks, had assured them that aggressive interrogation techniques were necessary and legal."

While one might mince words and say that maybe the CIA was operating on assumption, rather than policy, the Associated Press report is unambiguous. The article starts with the following statement:

The CIA has suspended use of some White House-approved aggressive interrogation tactics employed to extract information from reluctant al-Qaida prisoners, The Washington Post said.

And what did the Post article (CIA Puts Harsh Tactics On Hold - Memo on Methods Of Interrogation Had Wide Review, 6/27/04) say exactly?

The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said.

Had you heard that "administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office."? (wa. Post). In fact, the approval was confirmed by White House Counsel Gonzalez"As far as I'm told, every interrogation technique that has been authorized throughout the government is lawful and does not constitute torture."

Ok, so the lie of "consistent with the Geneva Convention" is out the window. But the "rules" didn't go very far over the line did they? Well, "The "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries." (Wa. Post). Or (from Johnston), "including sleep and food deprivation and procedures in which detainees were led to believe that they might be shot, drowned or hanged." Or from the AP report, "include feigning suffocation, "stress positions," light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making captives think they are being interrogated by another government."

So much for the spin of isolated incidences of "going over the line" by a few "bad apples." Both the CIA and the military, had clear instructions on abuse and torture as interrogation methods.

But there is a deeper lie here that is left out of all three of these reports. You have heard it, I have heard it. We have heard it from experts in interrogation. We have heard it from the lawyers for the soldiers from Abu Ghraib, and from the experts they have brought on. We have even heard it from JAG lawyers seeking outside counsel about the methods changes desired by Rumsfeld. Abuse and torture DO NOT PROVIDE RELIABLE INTELLIGENCE.

So the second lie is that NOT using these "techniques" is "slowing the hunt for information on terrorists" (Johnston). How can stopping techniques that provide unreliable information "slow down the hunt"? The comment leads the reader to assume that such techniques produce consistently valuable and rapid intelligence. If that is the case, why are they still interrogating the prisoners in Guantanamo after two and a half YEARS? This is not to mention that it legitimates the use of abuse and torture of US military, CIA, embassy personnel, or anyone else thought to "know" something.

There is the revelation that there was a specific policy regarding torture and abuse. There is the promotion of the idea that such techniques are necessary, valuable and effective. There is the promotion of the idea that barring torture is somehow hamstringing a critical aspect of the "war on terrorism." That, "promotion" is propaganda as far as I am concerned.

The claim in the Christian Aid report is:

"The US-controlled coalition in Baghdad is handing over power to an Iraqi government without having properly accounted for what it has done with some $20 billion of Iraq's own money, says a new report published by Christian Aid."

The UN gave control of Iraq's oil revenues, and other monies, to the US. I never did figure out why they did that. According to the report, "For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq, it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money."

I guess that we shouldn't be surprised, since the Pentagon hasn't been able to produce a viable audit report for the General Accounting Office (GAO) which consistently shows the DoD with over a TRILLION dollars in untraceable entries.

Nor does the way the money has been dispersed lend itself to tracing:

From U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects "Because of deteriorating security and complex delays in contracts that have slowed the spending of the $18 billion in Congressionally appropriated money, occupation authorities say they decided recently that they had to spend the Iraqi money to build schools, factories and oil fields, and to turn Iraqis away from violence."

"The security needs were just overwhelming," said an occupation official. "Would we rather have been able to save the money and have a nice kitty? Sure. There's always a tension between putting money to work right away and having it available for a tough year next year. This is the way we resolved it."

Iraq's overall domestic budget of roughly $20 billion for 2004, financed mostly by oil revenue, was approved last year by the Program Review Board, a unit of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- the American-led occupation authority in Iraq.

But this spring, Bush administration officials said, it became clear that rising global oil prices were presenting Iraq with a windfall, and a decision had to be made about whether to save that extra money or disburse it in a one-time expenditure that might not be available in the 2005 budget.

Some of the money has gone to American military teams operating since the beginning of the occupation 14 months ago. The teams have become famous in Iraq for the way they have spread across the country, commissioning repairs and paying for them from satchels bulging with $100 bills shipped by plane from a Federal Reserve vault in East Rutherford, N.J. Much of that money came from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

At least $1 billion has been distributed in this fashion -- by some estimates more than $2 billion.

"The military commanders love that program, because it buys them friends," said an administration official, referring to the cash distribution. "

YooHoo! a "windfall!" Of course having unmonitorable access to another nation's treasury always offers the possibility of a "windfall."

Such a big deal was made of the estimated $10 million that Hussein had stashed. Well, the US certainly showed the world what chump change that was. I wonder if the checkbook was among the "papers" given to the interim government, and how much fun they will have trying to balance it.

Collapse

Philip Thorton goes to the heart of the issue with his June 26, 2004 Independent article Hidden costs of pipeline meant to safeguard West's oil supply. There has been a long term plan to get the gas and oil reserves out of Russia and into the global market. Starting in 1996, a consortium evolved, which ultimately became the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. This is a group of massive oil companies (including Unocal, TexacoChevron, and BP) working with state owned energy companies (Russia, Oman, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere).

After the investment of billions of dollars, the pipeline had effectively stalled in between 1998 and 2000. As I noted in the article Power Play?:

The Clinton administration had been working with the Taliban from 1994 forward. Why? Because some companies (particularly UNOCAL and Saudi owned Delta) wanted "to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan." ... "so that the vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the Central Asian and Caspian region could be transported to markets in South Asia, South-East Asia, Far East and the Pacific" ( How America Courted the Taliban). This is supported by Jon Flanders 2001 article. While official relations were purportedly broken off in 1998, relations with the Taliban were maintained through the State Department (Ahmad) and through the Pakistan Military Intelligence ISI by the CIA (Chossudovsky).

According to Jon Flanders (2001), U.S. interest in the pipeline restarted in 2000, but was still not moving forward when Bush was elected. With Bush came Cheney (CEO of Halliburton) and Halliburton had investments in Turkmenistan for "integrated drilling services with an estimated value of $30 million for the total package."

It should not be surprising given the oil interests of the President, his kin, and his appointees, that Bush placed Afghanistan on the top of his action list. In July 2001, Colin Powell gave the Taliban $43 million for "humanitarian aid" (Madsen, 2002).

With billions of dollars already sunk into the investment, and yet another large cache of oil and gas reserves hanging in the balance, George W. Bush was decreed President. Afghanistan, and the pipeline, were clearly at the top of his agenda, and 9/11 provided a public justification to oust the Taliban and take more direct control of the situation. It is a move that obviously paid off. The success was signaled by two releases from the White House: the first on 11/13/2001 Caspian Pipeline Consortium Fact Sheet (full copy below); followed by a congratulatory statement on November 28, 2001 (copy below).

The US Department of Energy provides some interesting information in its Afghanistan Fact Sheet (6/04). First is that Hamid Karzai (former Unocal adviser in Afghanistan and now interim President) heads a "transnational administration." Unfortunately, they do not illuminate what nations are involved. Their historical overview of Afghan energy is interesting in light of US involvement in Afghanistan from the 1980s (under Reagan) onward.

Between the 1960s and mid-1980s, the Soviets had identified more than 15 oil and gas fields in northern Afghanistan. Only three gas fields -- Khwaja Gogerdak, Djarquduk, and Yatimtaq - were developed in the area surrounding Sheberghan, which is located about 120 kilometers west of Mazar-I-Sharif. Afghan natural gas production reached 275 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d) in the mid-1970s. The Djarquduk field was brought online during that period and boosted Afghan natural gas output to a peak of 385 Mmcf/d by 1978. About 100 mmcf/d of this amount was used locally in gas distribution systems in Sheberghan and Mazar-I-Sharif as well as at a 100,000 mt/y urea plant located near Mazar-I-Sharif. One oil field, Angot, was developed in the late 1960s, but aside from production tests, oil production was intermittent, with daily outputs averaging 500 b/d or less.

Northern Afghanistan has proved, probable and possible natural gas reserves of about 5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf). This area, which is a southward extension of the highly prolific, natural gas-prone Amu Darya Basin, has the potential to hold a sizable undiscovered gas resource base, especially in sedimentary layers deeper than what were developed during the Soviet era. Afghanistan's crude oil potential is more modest, with perhaps up to 100 million barrels of medium-gravity recoverable from Angot and other fields that are undeveloped. Afghanistan also may possess relatively small volumes of gas liquids and condensate.

By the 1970s, "Afghanistan supplied 70%-90% of its natural gas output to the Soviet Union's natural gas grid via a link through Uzbekistan." Further, Afghanistan "is estimated to have 73 million tons of coal reserves." Noting the strategic placement of Afghanistan as the preferred route for a pipeline, they then, move into the realm of disinformation by stating (emphases mine):

Given the obstacles to development of a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan, it seems unlikely that such an idea will make any progress in the near future, and no major Western companies have expressed interest in reviving the project. The security situation in Afghanistan remains an obvious problem, while tensions between India and Pakistan make it unlikely that such a pipeline could be extended into India and its large (and growing) gas market. Financial problems in the utility sector in India, which would be the major consumer of the natural gas, also could pose a problem for construction of the TAP line. Finally, the pipeline's $2.5-$3.5 billion estimated cost poses a significant obstacle to its construction.

Numerous sources make clear that the Caspian Pipeline Consortium is alive and well - even battling environmental groups as noted by Thorton. In fact, the CPC just held their annual general meeting on March 27, 2004. There is no indication in that press release that they are on the verge of calling it quits.

The "good war" of Afghanistan based on "getting" Osama bin Laden and eradicating al Qaeda, joins the "good war" of Iraq to "liberate" the Iraqi people from the cruel grips of Saddam Hussein. With the looming transition of power to occur on June 30th, one has to wonder if Iraq will join Afghanistan in having a "transnational administration." One has to ask what a "democracy" looks like under "transnational" governments. In Afghanistan, the top two men are both former Unocal advisers. In Iraq, at least in the short term, the top men are known CIA assets. Does this mean that the US expects more trouble in Iraq than Afghanistan? Is Iraq not yet ready for corporate rule, and therefore must be guided to the process under the invisible expertise of the CIA? Is the escalating violence in Iraq in any way tied to an understanding of these events?

Afghanistan is coming up on its first elections in September- also among increasing violence (Taliban Targeting Would-Be Afghan Voters, Annan calls on NATO to send more troops to Afghanistan as promised). The Afghan elections have been delayed ... and delayed again. It seems that at each critical juncture in Afghanistan, the US has pulled troops and resources into Iraq. One has to ask whether the instability, and the delay of elections, serve a larger purpose - such as not wanting Karzai and crew out of control yet. Will that pattern be replicated in Iraq as the time nears for the interim government to turn over power to an elected Iraqi government? If so, will it be due to ongoing "insurgent" activity in Iraq, or will another "regime change" elsewhere provide the necessary distraction?

Some may think this a bit paranoid, but how much have you heard about the largest "legitimate" economic venture in Afghanistan?

Sources and Resources
Timeline of Competition Between Unocal and Bridas for the Afghanistan Pipeline, World Press Review.

A Timeline of Oil and Violence - Afghanistan, Ring Nebula

Afghan pipeline given go-ahead, BBC, 5/30/02

Afghanistan Fact Sheet US Dept. of Energy, last update 6/04.

Kazakhstan: Major Oil and Natural Gas Projects, Dept. of Energy, July, 2002

European Bank Natural Resources- signed projects (1993-2002)

Afghanistan plans gas pipeline, BBC, 5/13/02

Central Asia pipeline deal signed, McWilliam, BBC, 12/27/02

Afghan pipeline given go-ahead, BBC, 5/30/02.

Power Play?, UTJ, Wolf, 3/23/04 republished from 5/02

The Empire Frame of Mind

Ex-official?s book explores American Taliban, East Valley Tribune, Webb, 6/24/04.

Caspian Pipeline Opens, Washington Times, Pala, 12/03/2001

The Caspian Pipeline Consortium Project, Pipeline & Gas Journal/February 2001/www.undergroundinfo.com.

PBN Case Studies: Caspian Pipleine Consortium

You Can't Call This Pipeline A Pipedream Now, Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, Socor, 3/17/2001. (Discusses Israeli interests in the pipeline)

Speech by Ian MacDonald, General Director of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium International Energy Agency Round Table on Caspian Oil & Gas Scenarios - Florence, 14th April, 2003

CASPIAN PIPELINE CONSORTIUM STUDY RECEIVES KAZAKH GOVERNMENT APPROVAL; RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT APPROVAL ANTICIPATED, ChevronTexaco Press Release 11/02/1998

The CPC was founded in 1992. Equity interest is: Russia, 24 percent; Kazakhstan, 19 percent; Oman, 7 percent; Chevron, 15 percent; LUKARCO, 12.5 percent; Rosneft-Shell, 7.5 percent; Mobil, 7.5 percent; Agip, 2 percent; British Gas, 2 percent; Kazakhstan Pipeline Ventures, 1.75 percent; Oryx, 1.75 percent.

Caspian Pipeline Consortium raises fees for oil transportation, Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections, 4/07/2004

The major shareholders in the consortium include Russia (24 % of the shares), Kazakhstan (19 %) and Oman (7 %). The main private shareholders are Chevron Caspian Pipeline Consortium (15 %) and LUKArco (12.5 %).

Caspian Pipeline Consortium Fact Sheet 11/13/2001

Caspian Pipeline Consortium

While in Russia in October of this year, U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans joined government and business leaders to welcome the announcement that the first tanker loaded with oil from the Caspian Pipeline Consortium departed the port of Novorossiysk. "It tells the world that the United States, Russia, and Central Asian states are cooperating to build prosperity and stability in this part of the world," Evans said.

The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) is a $2.6 billion project consisting of a 935-mile crude oil pipeline that runs from the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Construction on the CPC pipeline began in 1999. It is a key East-West pipeline that will carry oil from the Caspian Sea region to international markets.

The CPC project is the largest, single United States investment in Russia. U.S. companies, including ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, have contributed nearly one-half of the $2.6 billion investment.

Initial capacity of the pipeline will be over 500,000 barrels per day, and is expected to reach to about 1.4 million barrels per day by 2015.

The CPC project advances the Administration's National Energy Policy by diversifying our States energy supply (thereby enhancing our energy security) and by supporting global economic growth. It also highlights the Caspian-region countries' progress towards establishing a transparent and stable environment for international trade and investment.

# # #

President's Statement on Caspian Pipeline Consortium , 11/28/01

Statement by the President

I congratulate Russia, Kazakhstan, and Oman, and their consortium partners, for the commissioning of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC). U.S. firms, notably ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, have played leading roles in this project. These facilities represent the culmination of years of effort. They are examples to the world that the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan are cooperating to build prosperity and stability in this part of the world.

The CPC highlights the important progress by countries in the Caspian region in building a transparent and stable environment for international trade and investment. The CPC project also advances my Administrations National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines that also includes the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Supsa, and Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipelines and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline. These projects will help diversify U.S. energy supply and enhance our energy security, while supporting global economic growth.

# # #

The first thing that was remarkable was the response of the audience to the film. I have never been at a corporate movie theater with a crowd that responded the way the crowd did at Fahrenheit 9-11. Throughout the film people clapped, cheered, laughed, and interjected comments. At the end, some stood clapping in a standing ovation for the film. There was a sense of community in that theater, and it was amazing.

In interviews with Michael Moore I have heard him asked if he is not just "preaching to the choir." While this may be true, it seems to be a very large choir since the film is basically sold out for every showing (hear in Portland) through this weekend. That was and is a hopeful sign.

The second thing that has me deeply troubled is that Moore reveals the use of music in the military effort. Troops are able to plug into the sound system of their tanks and other vehicles to listen to music to pump them up and keep them going as they enter combat. The music then comes through their headphones.

I had already heard about the use of music blasting into detainee areas to upset them and disrupt their sleep. In other words, music used as a source of coercion and torture. But the use by troops was something new for me.

I find this deeply disturbing, and am having a hard time teasing out all the pieces that have me troubled. One thing that stands out is blurring the line of reality. Blowing people up with missiles while hard rock blares in one's ears; shooting people on the street to the background of heavy metal ... it is music perverted. It is using music to distance the soldier from his/her actions. It creates an environment of a movie, or a video game, against the grisly foreground of death and destruction.

This use of music is obviously something that was planned for. The vehicles and communication gear of the troops are set up to acommodate this. It is a military strategy for numbing (or maybe "inspiring") the troops. Certainly the use of music by militaries is not new, but this takes it to a whole new level (in my opinion).

I can't help but think to various other example that have come to light, such as the whole "White Power" music genre aimed at young people, or the allegations that Marilyn Manson's music drove the kids at Columbine High School to their rampage, or the article in the 6/26 Guardian - Chilling Call to Murder as Music Attacks Gays.

Music touches us. It moves us. It connects us. It is a form of expression. It is very twisted for it to move us to kill; to distance us from the reality of our actions.

In a stunning move of blatant disregard for the transparency of government, the Supremes issued their decision on Thursday about Cheney's energy panel. You guessed it, Court Won't Make Cheney Energy Papers Public (FindLaw, 6/24/04). The Administration had argued in Cheney's defense that Cheney should not have to reveal who was on his energy task force, nor what their suggestions had been. The reasoning was that "advice" to the President and Vice President should be confidential so advisors feel unencumbered to give "advice." The court concurred, and sent the case back to the appellate court. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy wrote:

""Special considerations applicable to the president and the vice president suggest that the courts should be sensitive to requests by the government,"."

What this means for the citizenry, is that the Supreme Court has supported the Bush regime's right to shield their activities behind a curtain of executive privilege.

Doing its best to nibble at the freedom of speech and shutting out voices from around the globe, a policy change occurred (very quietly) at the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. The policy imposes conditions and penalties on publishers and editors.

"publishers and others who edit manuscripts from nations under U.S. trade embargoes -- including, at the moment, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba -- may face criminal penalties, including fines of up to $500,000 and 10 years in prison, unless they are working under special licenses from the government." (Hands Off, Kraft, Hartford Advocate, 3/11/04)

The argument runs that while publishing per se is not illegal, that editing and adding things such as illustration, make materials more salable. Therefore, it counts as an "economic service" to an embargoed country. Doing business in violation of embargoes is a Cheney specialty. While serving as the CEO of Halliburton, Cheney crafted a continuing flow of business with Iraq (in excess of $24 million in contracts), Iran, Libya (Cheney Made Millions Off Oil Deals with Hussein, Lee, TruthOut, 11/13/2000; Documenting the Halliburton / Cheney Crimes and Controversies, Part II, Limburg, Independent Media TV, 2/14/04). The policy change particularly impacts international organizations and journals such as the American Chemical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The policy is seen as shutting down the free flow of ideas and information.

Closer to home, Bush who has allegedly been getting erratic recently been recently (Capitol Hill Blue, 6/17/04), has launched a war on mental health. Excuse me, a war to protect mental health. Bush is issuing a wide ranging mental health initiative in July. (We may need it after the handover of control to the new Iraqi government.) True to double-speak form, the policy initiative comes from the findings of Bush's "New Freedom Commission on Mental Health" which he started in April of 2004. Since "freedom is one of those double entendre words for Bush, one piece of the plan aims to screen the entire population for mental illness,

"The president's commission found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children. According to the commission, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviours and emotional disorders." Schools, wrote the commission, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools."

while the other part ties in big pharma to treating those of us diagnosed. (Yes, another perk for pharmaceutical companies who are still wetting their pants over the Medicare prescription drug plan).

"The commission also recommended "Linkage [of screening] with treatment and supports" including "state-of-the-art treatments" using "specific medications for specific conditions." The commission commended the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes.""

The visions of "thought police" dance in my head, with a populace drugged into zombie compliance. What if the "screening" shows you have an "undiagnosed" mental condition? The initiative plans to "link specific medication" to "specific illnesses." What if you choose to not be "treated?" Could you then be seen as a danger to your community and be forced to submit to treatment? Seem far fetched? Then you should be keeping your eye on the The Model State Health Emergency Powers Act, which allows for the forced treatment of individuals under certain national conditions. The Act is being used as a policy base for state by state legislation. (see the following sites: The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act: An Assault on Civil Liberties in the Name of Homeland Security; Emergency Powers Legislation from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.)

Notes
The "New Freedom" initiative is related to the legislation discussed in UTJ on 6/19/04 - Our Rights in Jeapordy. To read the full article from the British Medical Journal - Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness, Lenzer, BMJ, 6/19/04)

The Bush Administration, which just finished backing down from how successful their "war on terrorism" had been in reducing terrorist activity, will now have to back down from the wonderful economic recovery. Apparently, the growth was much slower than thought. Production was down to 3.9 from the initial estimate of 4.4, inflation doubled over last quarter, and consumption was down. Take that and spin it.

In what might be a Bush Administration movie called "Desperately Seeking the bin Laden - Hussein Connection," Americans in Iraq have found the smoking gun. According to the NYT article, Iraqi intelligence agents met with bin Laden in the Sudan in the mid 1990s with joint interests in undermining the Saudi government. Iraq agreed to support al Qaeda by broadcasting the sermons of an anti-House of Saud cleric. Yes sermons. This is pointed to as a "propaganda" connection. We all know that the Saudi ruling family is above reproach and loved by the people. We might take this "discovery" with a grain of salt as it was provided by none other than the Iraqi National Congress - aka Ahmad Chalabi (or Chalabi the Liar, who was thrown into doubt and disfavor recently by the US). Of course, if the US is going to put forward that kind of supporting link with bin Laden they better start shredding documents about US support for that organization as well. After all, the US trained and armed the al Qaeda in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets (as US proxies). In fact, we brought some of them to the US to train.

Yesterday, a voter registration group known as "America Coming Together" was accused of hiring felons to do door-to-door voter registrations. The "scoop" was an attempt by the Republican National Committee to attack what they see as a Democrat sponsored anti-Bush group. ACT did nothing to try and hide the fact that some ex-cons were working as canvassers, and argued that they deserve a second chance, but will initiate background checks. For once, the RNC and Bush seem to not be on the same page because Bush (trying to project a kinder image) had said earlier in Cincinnati that ex-cons deserve a second chance. He also urged supports at the campaign fundraiser to join the army of compassion - now there's an oxymoron for you.

End of sound bite.

Sources

6/25/04 O'Farrell, BBC, Celibacy and the city

6/25/04 Reuters, Economy Grew More Slowly in 1st Quarter Than First Thought

6/25/04 Shanker, NYT, Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says

6/25/04 Hunter, CNS, Liberal Group Defends Sending Ex-Cons Door to Door

6/22/04 Horstman, The Cincinnati Post, Bush collects $2.5M in campaign visit here

The interim government has stated that they plan on instituting martial law when they take power because of the level of violence. BUT the Iraq ministers told only US can impose martial law (Bellacio, 6/24/04). Huh? How can the US say that the sovereign government of Iraq can't impose martial law?

"The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq's interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.

Senior American officials say Iraq's authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.

But they say the recent United Nations Security Council resolution 1546 sanctions the use by foreign forces in Iraq of "all necessary measures" to provide security.

A senior coalition official in Baghdad said: "Under the UN resolution, the multinational force will have the power to take all actions traditionally associated with martial law." He said they had raised their legal objections with Iyad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister. "

One might wonder what the interim government is going to use for funds. If you've followed the news, the profits from the sale of Iraqi oil have been going into a protected fund so the new government will have a treasury. But someone has got the key to the bank, and it's not the Iraqi's. On June 21, 2004, the NY times had a piece U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects. Wow! thought I. That is a chunk of change. But in typical fashion, it is an under estimate by several factors. According to the UN, the US has spent over $11 billion from the oil revenues. How much money is in that bank anyway?

So this is what sovereignty looks like from the US perspective. The government can't tell the US to leave. They can't determine how to address their own security. They can't have custody of Saddam Hussein. And the US has the keys to the treasury. Yep. Sounds like sovereignty to me.

1 - The sleeping political spirit of Europe

Three major experiences marked the XXth century: Mussolinian Fascism, Hitlerian Nazism and Soviet Marxism. All three preceded the seraphic forms which the American imperialism was going to take, with its "idealities"' horns of plenty, with the Messianic conditioning of opinion in the name of the myth of a redemptive freedom, with the simplification of a field of vision conceptualized by promising abstractions, with the promotion of a " Good " and an " Evil " mythified on the model of Manichean orthodoxies of salvation and damnation. But these age-old matrix of the black and white of the Sacred found their most simplistic theological pace in the mythical edenism from which American imperialism has made its religious ornament.

Just when a psychobiological knowledge on the three monotheisms' draw of swords is taking its first steps in anthropology, the European political reason remains trivial after a millennium of a simple administrative practice of the States. How the art of governing wouldn't seam rebel to the development of an anthropology of the American imperialism that would clarify the relations between religious American unconscious and the hyper-industrialization of modern democracies, and to the development of an anthropology that would highlight the theological bases of empire's political unconscious? There must be a second reading of the history of the brain of civilizations, there must be a reflexion nourished by an in-depth knowledge of the evolution of our osseous cranium, there must be a psychoanalysis of the bio-oneiric life of a species whose unconscious mental leaves to worlds divided between their Eden and their hell.

The historians of XXIst century will mention that in 2004, a great part of the European leading class was so late in the radiographic knowledge of our species' two-phase brain that It was extremely refrained from understanding how United States had become a schizoid empire, thus messianically expanding through the five continent, and refrained from understanding that the irrepressible ambitions of this nation dichotomized by its "salvation" theology had to be observed to the light of the laws which govern the growth and which order the failure of the empires self-mythified by their religious seraphism. But moreover, it was becoming urgent to become aware of the fate that governs the modern wars for the control of the new energy resources in this time, the supply oil had become the key of the domination of the world. To capture the black gold reserves, the empire needed a strategy of abduction, which was in great contrast with the myth of the American empire's religious predestination. The planet's brain had become the hostage of a theopolitic of the soteriological democracy annunciations.

In truth, Nazism and Marxism had already presented resolutely redemptive and bloody forms of politics. But the first ideologies connecting to an oneiric future of politics, therefore to a dream of salvation on the whole earth, had only delayed the armed landing of the evangelist American dream, which had remained artificially under pressure and whose victory of 1945 was going to release the eschatologic surge. Why the European elites of the beginning of the third millennium still entirely ignored the religious nature of the "liberators" empires and their vocation to seize the world? It is that they did not have at all the keys of a critical anthropology which would have enabled them to decipher the biblical bases of political America. The problem was with the leading classes of the time lacking of historical knowledge. For a long time the most informed men of CLIO had tried to arm their memory with the elementary reference marks provided by chronology.

One remains confused by reading, in 1986, under Jean Favier's pen, member of the Institute and general director of France Archives, an explanatory text illustrating the scholar lack of information of " cultivated general public " to who was addressed the remarkable Chronique de l'humanité published by Larousse:

"The American victory in the war against Spain in 1898 made out of the United States, regional power, a world wide imperialist power which appropriated a vast insular area in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The old Spanish possessions - Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines - were placed under American protectorate. Central America, "back-yard of the USA" and Far East became the usual theatres of the American imperialist politics. Maritime power on the Atlantic and the Pacific, the USA could guarantee their possessions only by two distinct fleets. A colossal policy of getting maritime equipment, started by President Theodore Roosevelt, made it possible for the United States to become in 1907 the second naval power of the world, behind United Kingdom, whereas it occupied only the fifth row three years earlier. In the centre of the strategic conditions of the American imperialism, the Panama Canal, link between the two oceans, only means to efficiently guarantee the colonial empire, President Roosevelt proclaimed the United States right to intervene directly in the interior affairs of the Central America countries to guarantee their safety, when the American political or economic interests required it." (p.937)

This overview of the situation courageously appeared "commited" at the time. How was it possible that scolarised France had not learned these facts during primary school?

2 - Europe of an Andersen's tale

More than one century had passed since the war of 1898. A sixty years long reign on Europe of the allegiance occupied by American garrisons found sovereign, therefore set up in enclaves of a foreign State's territory on our European ground, is a reign that only begins to have us see that since 1945, the planet's history is that of the expansion of an American empire whose fall of the Berlin Wall did not stop the move and of which September 11, 2001 only accelerated the pace. This phenomenon is similar only to the immense backwardness and delay that the Hellenic world and its pedagogues had showed to discover the rise of Rome and to explain it to the school boys. But who could have imagined that a blindness considered to be extraordinary by the historians of ancient world would happen again millenniums later, and this only because no one was teaching to rising generation that politics is the language of history? How come the American presence all around Mediterranean sea appeared granted and accepted, and that Europe was asking for a modest share of this imperium?

When the United States announced that they were going to settle in Baghdad the most gigantic of their embassies and that it would count three thousand people; when everyone was seeing the American empire building in Iraq military bases intended to accomodate a hundred and twenty thousand men with residence; when Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, expected that there would

" not be any change in our military deployment between June 30 and July 1st, unless that we will be over there on the invitation of an Iraqi sovereign government, which will ask us to remain until the killers, as those who did the atrocities of Falloujah, are put out of state of harm " ( Le Monde diplomatique, May 2004),

how come the whole world was transported in a reversed tale of Andersen, in which the king wasn't naked in the middle of his "chamberlains chamarrés", but armed to the teeth? How come the aureola of democracies which was floating over the king's head emitted such powerful rays that the king's heart was metamorphosed in a church of the humans right to the eyes of the whole universe?

Such an apostolic mystery could only be explained under the light of an anthropology of holiness to the height, if possible, of the spectrography of Andersen. In these distant times, Noam Chomsky was evoking " the autism of the empire ". But the descent in the depths of an autism crowned by the divine grace was requiring not only searches in the kingdom of the mystical unconscious of our species, but a psychoanalysis of the theology that was exceeding the means of investigation that were those of psychobiological genius of the great Danish.

To try to understand Andersen's tale, a comparative lighting of Marxist edenism and that of America will make it possible to go down in the first anthropological mysteries of modern empires and to exert us to progress a little in the speleology of the oneiric life of simiohuman history. Then a genealogy of the politico-religious unconscious of the monotheisms will make us witness the conclusion of an alliance of sacred orthodoxies with democratic totalitarianism.

3 - Compared psychophysiology of the Soviet ex-empire and the American empire

One remembers how the expansion of the Soviet empire rested on the rise of the world wide proletariat to the rank of redeemer of mankind. The modern messianism was singing an hymn to the planetary victory of justice over the injustice of capitalism. The promise of salvation on earth had profited from the guarantee of a foreteller and of an infallible intercessor of the working class deliverance on an international scale. The new vehicle for the Writings of Freedom was called the " historical process ". This mean of transport of the happy and blessed towards a tangible paradise was introducing a new type of scission of the simiohuman brain between the religious dream and reality.

The panoply of the cerebral dichotomies already indexed in the nomenclatures of schizoid theologies of the time was arming from now on with dialectical thoughts and a genealogy of " concrete truth " on all inhabited ground. When the armies of the " Warsaw Pact " were seizing a nation - Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary - they were installing there governments won over to the new Vatican and supposed to express the will of the sovereign people: this is why these countries were called people's democracies, in opposition to middle-class democracies. Marxism had carried the 1789 liberation principles to their soteriological achievement in Russia, where they had found their Episcopal see. The Western States legitimated these wars known as " liberating". They were considered as based on a mystic of bliss from here bellow which Christianity had relegated in the beyond after only a century of setbacks on earth. Nobody was easily fooled by the disguises in international law of a tyranny validated by a semi-religious finalism.

In front of this eschatology in conformity with sacrilizing mentalities of orthodoxe Russia, the American empire had been able to consolidate its democratic soteriology and had been able to extend according to the to despotism which had capitalist Europe shaking. But following the collapse of the Marxist edenism, the United States naturally took care not to withdraw their troops from the Old Continent - on the contrary, they reinforced the guardianship supervision which they were exerting since 1945 by the means of NATO and they perennialized in times of peace the mission that this military organization had achieved at the hours of the cold war. Controlled Europe was agreeing to it. Under these conditions, it is decisive to reach the anthropological analysis, therefore biopsychic of the parareligious weapons which will make it possible to the American empire to relay the Marxist dream; because theologies of the two empires were meeting in a common paradisiacal dream and a dream rooted in the origins of Judaism and Christianity because messianisms all are founded on the myth of an escape out of the prison world described as " temporal ", the prison world of " Egypt of the rites " whose Exodus episode had concretized the original symbolic system under Moïse's commandment. The examination of the differences in method and of the parallelisms that we can notice in the two empires of the Eden will make it possible to specify the schizoid structure of the oneiric brain that these two messianisms are sharing.

4 - Two edenisms

The evangelism and angelism belonging to the democratic type of Edenic universal dream suffer from two handicaps whose impact was discovered by Marxism only with lateness. The first handicap results from how " humans right " and "freedom " are ideal by definition, therefore abstract by nature, which generates a sacred veneration capable of protecting them from the examination of the degree of application to real history of their seraphic universality. For this reason, they appear of a more theological use, therefore more oneiric than Marxist edenism, which was dreaming of putting a very large proletariat in immediate and direct possession of its rights and its powers on earth. But these prerogatives of salvation were remaining attached to the needs and the wishes of labour status, therefore related to an ignorance and an inculture which left in advance the proletariat in the incapacity of never exerting efficiently indeed, and of its own authority, the responsibilities of a leading class. Also the proletarian elites went through the party's school charged of teaching them the catechesis of a new ecclesiocracy.

This pedagogy was so well copied on those of the seminars, that collective dignities and prestige the labour class claimed for itself were fatally leading labour class, like all churches, to devaluating the individual capacities to the profit of a powerful collective ego. A cerebral dichotomy of this kind necessarily led to the destruction of talent and genius, therefore to the ruin of the bases of civilization. On the other hand, this final catastrophe was profiling in the term of more than half a century. Meanwhile, Marxist edenism could use as wiched the support of "croisés" (crusaders) of masses' salvation, crusaders whose compact and blind regiments were receiving the parareligious support of legions of apostolic intellectuals coming from the middle-class. The American empire, on the other hand, was based on a more verbal edenism, therefore looking more vaporous, but founded on a complete individualism, therefore on the intense valorization of particular merits. A messianism based on what is qualitative constitutes a political handicap and advantages of what war on Iraq was going to show the difficult division.

The Marxists masses did not have the eyes to observe the Soviet empire in action. Neather them saw the Kremlin putting hands on the resources of the nations it occupied, neither the faithful ones of the XVIth century saw the Church piling a treasure of war by the sale, at own desks, of entry bonds to the paradise. On the other hand, the edenism of the American empire presented until cynicism and to everybody's eye the spectacle of its industrial and commercial ambitions, because by rehabilitating the spirit of lucre in the posterity of Calvinism, the good capitalist conscience insulted a worship of poverty bound not only to Christianity since the origins, but also with Buddhism. Moreover, the source of asceticism is in the Stoicians' philosophy.

While the proletarian dream was nourishing from ignorance and the simplicity of spirit of the candidates to a future Eden, the American edenism could only be openly propagated by the joint force of weapons and industry. The military victory was accumulating ruins and piling up dead bodies at only purpose of filling the order books of the big American companies. As to the nations appealed to grow rich at the sides of the warrior of businesses and appealed to profit from gigantic and profitable market from the rebuilding at high price of the losers' pulverized dwellings, their avid complicity was also associating them to the hard verdict to what the religious edenisms are necessarily tributary here below: success on the ground. The cerebral dichotomies whose apparatus of the Sacred is that of political Utopia are subjected to expected verdicts of the court of victory and defeat of weapons.

The Marxist edenism had used a crusade of the poor and had encountered a universalization of stupidity, the American edenism was helding up the standard of the lucre cloathed in political euphoria. But the anthropological difference between the two dream and salvation empires is even more instructive if one compares the systems of repressions which they generated.

5 - Compared analysis of the concentration systems
The Stalinist goulags were supposed to purify the world of its capitalist profit plague. They were working on the lustral model of conversion and redemption of the sinner. The labour camps were at the same time punitive and purifiers. The new catechism was managed with roughness. It was leading the sinner to an Eden at the same time far away and about to land from one moment to another. When the fanaticism of proletarian salvation had seized the Marxist myth, it had accumulated the pieces of corpses of Pol Pot. In front of such titanic setbacks, democratic holiness believed to have won their case all the more that the recalcitrance of Karl Marx's victims to conquer freedom, equality and fraternity to the price of the extinction of capitalist profit appeared inveterate. How come that under conditions looking that favourable, the invasion of the American democratic edenism caused a revulsion more immediate and more violent than that which had taken away the tyranny of a Soviet leading class as infidels to its own orthodoxy as the Roman clergy toward the Gospels?

Initially, the prophets of the New World could not believe their eyes concerning how the stubborn impiety of the Iraqi people made Iraqis take arms against the New World's holy idealities. And yet, the new religion of redemption and of salvation was self confident, devilishly jaunty, full of sufficiency and forfantery. Wasn't its natural lightness the legitimated product of its innate innocence? But it was too much convinced of the inferiority of the different people remained on earth and located at a so great distance from the paradise of the new chosen ones. The mocking and laughing pace of that new religion's promises were not forgiven.

And then, one badly could understand an holiness which allowed amused women to be photographed at the sides of the defeated left naked like worms and attached by the neck to a leash for dogs. These trainers angels and specialized angels in the exercise of virtues of democracy were illustrating another weakness of American edenism. I already emphasized that, from its side, the expansion of Marxist empire had progressed on the kreeping model and without resorting to massive and prolonged carnages, because it had been ensured by armies of workers elated by a mystic of deliverance. The capitalist yoke had been broken, was it said, by the inaugural Revolution of 1917, then by the bloody weapons of Utopia and the lawsuits in heresy.

On the otherhand, Washington's edenism was dressing up as wild beasts in a circus of Good. By holding up the streamers of democracy's idealities on the scale of the whole earth, the White House was inaugurating the seraphic era of despotism. As a result, the American military conquests needed to get a planetary holly cloathing, which could be only if other angelic nations were also coming to occupy, by use of weapons, the conquered territories to the benefit of the empire of Good. The show of this gigantic conversion of force into virtue had gone as far as caricature. One had seen microscopic States sending about fifty soldiers, so much it was important to conquer in catastrophe the symbol of justice and right which their physical presence would be supposed to embody. The universality of the ethics engraved on the blazon of apostolic democracies was turning over against its apostles. Chrism (Saint chrème) of which one had coated bombs and guns was flaking off. Marxism, on the other hand, was feeling sufficiently legitimated by the Gospels of saint Marx not to have to call the armies of capitalist sin and stain in reinforcement of freedom and the sovereignty of the people.

Also the revelation through televisual image diffused on the five continents, of the maltreatment and tortures by American army at Guantanamo, then in Iraq, had ruined in only one blow and definitively the theology of the American Eden, while the Marxist Eden had been able to flourish before the advent of a civilization left to the ubiquity of its own theatre. The empire's evangelism was telling, from now on, the adventures of universal conscience to the way of a comic strip with multiple episodes.

Initially, Washington had tried to keep the sinners in an unhappy, but accidental adventure: it was only a question of "brebis galeuses" - the English language calls them "black sheep" -, as was saying the White House, whose exemplary and fast punishment was going to be enough to purify the Eden, at a moment stained by an extraordinary contest of circumstances. But soon a tight report of more than fifty pages of a General engaged on the ground had confirmed that it was indeed of an institutionalization of torture systematically and expressly authorized by the highest authorities of the army and by the American State. How come the myth of freedom on which the New World's democracy was resting since Abraham Lincoln, had produced a concentration system that some had succeeded in hiding during a few months, but that appeared to everyone as natural as the Russian goulags?

For scientific anthropology, the capital range of this discovery results from how the sacred origin of torture was so spectacularly confirmed that it became impossible not to connect it to the Manicheist origin of all the monotheists religions, something that I did not stop emphasizing since September 11, 2001 on this site. Now, how to look further into our analyses of the cerebral dichotomy mankind suffers from at the present stage of its evolution?

6 - The Christian concentration camp

The first theological model of Gulag of Nazi concentration camps, and of the torture rooms imagined by the democratic empire isn't anything else than the hell of Christians and Moslems, of which one knows that the eternal atrocities are thoroughly described by Dante and that they appear among the pearls of the Sacred to arrange among the treasures of world literature. In front of such anthropological obviousnesses, for how long will the traditional social sciences be able to take advantage of the status of a science based on a voluntary blindness which was believed exclusively reserved to theological thought? Isn't it time to analyze how a proper "scientific " blindness can meet the alliance of a common "angelism" with " experimental knowledge ", with politics, and with the Sacred?

How to proclaim rational a knowledge of the escaped prisoners of animal world that would remain timourously silent over the pathetic articulation between oneiric worlds and real worlds, an articulation of which our brain seems stamped from birth? The time has come to give a look at holy synergies between dreamed cruelties of the Sacred and the cruelties put into practice by political schemer, or we will have to give up any anthropology whose rationality would be to the scale of this spectacle. One calls "scientific" an objectivity able to clarify the subjectivity of illusory problems whose blindness manages to adorne.

Then it appears that the "angelism" of human conscience is at the base of all theologies which claim to be of the divine election of the " right persons ", and it appears that if the Nazi, Marxist and American concentration camps share a theology of torture precisely founded on the proclamation of the innocence of the torturers, then this model of devotion answers point by point to the theatre production of Christian paradise and hell. Therefore the chosen ones on earth are proclaimed the champions of piety and justice. Their seraphism is so innate that they do not have a look for the damned they watch slowly cooking in their underground oven. As the sovereign of the universe of these savages isn't other than the wild creator of the world, who raised the devil to the rank of guardian and general administrator of his gigantic Gulag, scientific anthropology led to the psychobiological spectrography of the three single gods. As a result, the scientific study of simiohuman theology enters the field of historical and political documentation on cerebral and moral evolution of mankind; and the history of psychophysiology of idols becomes the key to a real scientific anthropological knowledge of human.

Because as long as a religion is believed true, and as long as it is therefore sincerely practised by tens of million of faithful ones, there, hell plays a central part, coming from the only fact that the strategy of punishement is the heart of politics, so it is the capacity of sky and of leading classes to join in order to discipline mankind. The brutality of tortures thus is the thermometer of the gravity of danger to be fought: the infinite cruelty of " God " is declared proportional to the need of which its " holy justice " is supposed to be forced to fight the plague of sin. The Messianic wars of democracies being considered to express the will and the concerns of their sky of values, the compared observation of the means of tortures of Nazism, Marxism and the American empire appears to be the privileged instrument of the anthropological weighing of the simiohuman political brain.

Naturally, when the political weakening of religions makes them seraphic, their irresponsibility turns them unsuitable to the anthropological weighing of the species. This is why the Christian theology of tortures is heuristic only from the first century to the twentieth; but the Roman theology of hell has not changed a iota, so that the documentation of anthropological science is not helped of anything by the apparent irenicism of catechesis since Vatican II.

7 - A psychoanalysis of american torture

A science of mankind based on critical observation of the brain of the civilizations of liberation and salvation requires a compared psychoanalysis of the three monotheists theologies and of their history, as well as the examination of their ideological tracings and transfers. Thus the schizoid brain of Marxist type rested on the execration of the empire of evil that was embodied to its eyes by capitalism of XIXth and of XXth centuries. On its side, the religious brain of American type gives birth to a theological empire being collateral and rooted in immemorial time : the Evil and the Good refer to the myth of innocence of the First Couple. Also GW Bush declared that nothing appeared more enigmatic to him than the hostility of the external world towards the United States; and he claimed to the face of the world: " Us who are so good!"

American torture appears so well connected to the biblical innocence of the inhabitants of Eden, that it presents itself under the features of the most common piety. A sacrilege anthropology by definition, because scientific, is thus held to explain the genealogy of the duplicated life of the brain of humanity since this strange species escaped from the animal world. I can only propose some political and historical tracks of a research on the universality of simiohuman's unconscious which controls this existential bipolarity.

One knows that in Occident the torturer was condemned to hide with all his family just as a pest, because of the theological bancality of the divino-human justice, which condemned murder, but legitimated death penalty and infernal tortures. As for America, it tries to escape from this dichotomy of its religious unconscious by making cherubinic its politicy of purification of the universe. One will notice, in this spirit, that American soldiers guilty of tortures in Iraq are seraphes and that they kindly accept to be photographed at the sides of their victims, undoubtedly in order to enrich their album of patriotic memories. Democratic senator Mr. Patrick Leahy, former president of the commission of judiciary affairs, sees there the proof that they are covered by the line authority. But this authority covers them because of the religious unconscious that controls American politics. Without an anthropological knowledge of this unconscious, historical science is blind, so much the characteristic of the white teeth Eden is precisely to metamorphose the humiliations inflicted to the prisoners in expressions of faith in the empire of the Good, which involves the need for promoting bliss on earth. The purification of the world by torture belongs to piety.

8 - A recall to history

To understand it, it is necessary for us to return one moment to the imperial explosion of 1898 evoked above by Jean Favier. At this date, the Secretary of State Elihu Root wrote that the American soldier is

" different from other soldiers of all the other States of the world since the world started. He is the vanguard of freedom and justice, of law and order, peace and happiness. "

The perfect achievement of the wills of God on earth had made it possible to America to spread its kindness and its blessings in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Mexico and among the indigenous populations of the Pacific. The " national nobility of soul" had left the limbs to land in real history. The American democratic messianism is a reproduction or a dubbing of the myth of incarnation - it comes down from the sky of divine justice.

The nation expressly designated by the divinity to achieve its projects in this world conforms to the prophesied mission as soon as the XVIIth century by calvinists, who were already seeing America as the " redeemer of nations ". For this reason, it is predestined to build a " city of paradise " that all nations will have to imitate. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson added:

"I believe that God put in us a prophetic vision of freedom (...) I nourished the hope that we were selected, and that in an eminent way, in order to show to the other people of the world how they must walk on the path of freedom."

The defeat of Nazis and the fall of Communism were going to confirm the national conviction which will express Francis Fukuyama in The End of History (La fin de l'histoire): after eight thousand years of social development, humanity discovered that democratic and liberal capitalism finally carried out the final synthesis that universal History was waiting for impatiently between " moral goals and fundamental national interests " of America. Also Duncan Hunter, member of the Chamber of the representatives can write:

" America is the strength of good. Our troops changed the world and build a future for the Iraqi people. "

As for Tom Delay, the leader of the majority in the Chamber, he does not fear to add:

" The operation Iraqi Freedom, whatever the cracks it showed, is an absolute good. "

9 - Return to the anthropological psychoanalysis of the Sacred

Which is the degree of religious culpability of the tortured ones that will rise from this mental universe? Paradoxically, these damned ones will be given a floating theological status, because the redemptive good conscience from which the torturers take profit, and that makes the torturers safe from the contamination by the evil which abounds in the outside world, (this redemptive good conscience) reduces the weight of the damnation pronounced by angels' justice, a damnation that weighs heavily on the shoulders of the heretics, but without crushing them completely. It is known that Calvin is a theological son of Saint Augustin and that the bishop of Hippone is the first theorist of the fate of the sin of which are excruciated for all eternity miserables that the unsoundable mystery of the creator's arbitrary did not predestine to salvation.

But the author of the Confessions is also the theologist of grace: the infinite freedom and power of the creator can save in extremis the worst infidels. This is why American torture is held in suspension somewhere between eternal flames and Eden thus, so to speak, in the " average area of the air ", according to Descartes: one will not burst the eyes of the prisoners, one will not tear off their nails, but they will be starved, dehydrated, sodomized, they will be left to gibes, exposed nacked to the threat of aggressive dogs, because principal torture, to the eyes of a theology of predestination to salvation or to damnation is the torture of moral humiliation in front of God.

The tortured ones are guilty in advance because the creator collectively judged them to be from their birth strangers to the blessings the kingdom of Good could bring to them and of which they are condemned to refuse the benefits. But from this theology of "self-innocenting", also results that Americans are sincerely astounded to find themselves rejected and hated by the rest of the world. Quite simply, they cannot get over that they find themselves the victims of a so great injustice, when they " are so good ", them who bring to a lower civilization the religious treasures of democracy and its Gospel of Freedom. Not one moment these idolatrous of their sky doubt of the legitimacy of the war that led them straight in these oil-bearing places, since God is their guide and that He took them by the hand to have them discover the country of Canaan. It is thus without batting an eyelid that the idolatrous of the absolute condemn the resistant ones to their occupation and that they qualify them " terrorists " and "killers" obstinately rebellious to the deliverance which the sky of democracy brings to them totally free of charge.

Also we saw all the American political community, John Kerry ahead, declaring itself "outraged" by the decapitation of an American industrialist as retaliation to tortures undergone in the American prisons by tens of thousands of Iraqis. The empire's good conscience was so well reinforced that the future White House candidate could affirm:

" Now, there is no doubt that we must continue ".

However, this last adventure is understandable too only in the light of a radiography of the theological unconscious of the nation: to the "self-innocenting" of the elected officials is opposed the absolute evil, that of ancient scriptures, which obeyed to the law of retaliation. Calvinist sweetening of the principle "eye for eye, tooth for tooth " is seen as the world advent of holiness on earth; but angelized repression leads to refined and proliferating forms of cruelty - and initially to interminable methods of torture, therefore adapted in advance to the incurable character of the sin to fight! The unanimity and the instantaneity of the American political community's reaction in front of a murder committed at the school of "old law ", well shows the psychological knot of imperial theology: the main thing is to legitimate in front of God the war of conquest and the occupation. Naturally Kerry isn't dupe : he knows that the theological mask is used to sanctify the final Americanization of the Mediterranean region. But the need to reinforce the religious cover of the Empire's expansion around the Mare Nostrum is not less a revolution ; more over, what will become political Europe if it condemns the empire for ethical reasons without seeing the essential, which is not theological: it is a question of being opposed to territorial expansion of an empire, and it is for this purpose that an anthropology able to decipher unconscious theologies is an essential intellectual weapon.

10 - America and theology of anguish

As seen, the existential psychoanalysis of theologies is a key of history and of politics. But at the same moment, the American messianism is corroded from the inside by the cruel obviousness that the ruin of Marxist heresy and of its deadly immorality neither sanctified the globalization of trade, nor legitimated the gigantic profits of the great international companies. How will be endorsed thickest armour of political innocence? How will one remain happy and hopping in the universe of a blinded Eden of "Good"? How will one attend the spectacle of a civilization which is horrified by the hell of a capitalist profit whose brutality replaces the Stalinian hell? The theological drama of America, inaugurated with the rout of Vietnam, lands in the third millennium.

Then the other face of Calvin's theology appears, that of doubt and anguish: the believer is never sure to be chosen. Which final proof does he have of it? Nothing else than the abundance of tangible properties the divinity kindly accepts to generously give him. This is why, at the beginning, Genevois calvinists are at the same time ascetics and rich bankers. The American defeat in Iraq will be a terrifying theological traumatism, because it will be the public proof of the disavowal of the nation of the chosen ones by the divinity. Naturally, all this will be happening in the non-explored depths, therefore carcinogenic of the religious unconscious of the nation. But how to explain that Saint Augustin's God made thirty two nations accomplices of a torturer? We wish a lot of pleasure to the future theologists of the American God. Modern anthropology only raises the true question, the only question having a scientific status : why the escaped ones of zoology use their advance of 1,5% on chimpanzee's psychogenetic capital to go up in the holly sky in so many ways?

Does a humanity torn between its animal impulses and the failure of its jumps towards pseudo angelica worlds testify of an incurable brutality? To learn it, isn't the rational knowledge the new pedagogue of hope? An anthropology based on the psychophysiologic observation of theologies and attentive to the diversity of their schizoid representations of the world appeals as well to the spectrography of religious beliefs according to times and places as to the weighing of the bipolar mental structure which orders them all.

May 14, 2004
Translated by Marilyse Devoyault ,06/21/2004

John Kerry is a leading figure in this enlightened effort to close off opportunity to ambitious Third World countries. Were the same principles somehow to be applied to the products of American corporations, there wouldn't be any merchandise left on the country's shelves. Most domestic shipping would close down because American merchant ships are virtually all flagged in foreign ports to excuse them from taxes and regulations. Hollywood would close since most of its films are shot anywhere but Hollywood. As the Internet becomes a truly international method for exchanging information and commerce, instead of one dominated by Americans who because of their wealth were first in with a large population of computers, you will unquestionably see politicians like Kerry seeking to limit it, too.

It is a globalized world, and that is not a slogan. Since Elizabethan times at least a remarkable economic process has been underway, changing society and its institutions throughout the advanced world. The scale of economic production and its associated trade has grown from craftsmen in the homes of tiny villages to specialized factories in growing cities; then to regional firms and to great national corporations and retail chains. Now these changes move inexorably to world-scale, bringing with them the benefits of economic growth to regions of the world long frozen in poverty and ancient custom. So long as this change is fairly administered by a parallel growth in international treaties, laws, and organizations, it will gradually and peacefully bring the same benefits to dark corners of the world that it brought to dark corners of America.

Narrow-minded American legislators bore considerable responsibility for the sustained nature of the Great Depression with the foolish Smoots-Hawley bill unilaterally limiting trade. Unenlightened American trade restrictions against the ambitions of Japan as it entered the modern era helped push that country eventually to attacking the United States. With globalization an important part of the world's economic landscape through this century, comparably selfish efforts by American legislators can produce comparably destructive results.

The call-center legislation will affect a number of countries, especially India, a country using its relatively high proportion of educated people and sizeable pool of English speakers as comparative advantages in new businesses like global call centers. Indian companies have adopted the practice of training their employees to speak with an American accent. Employees also typically adopt simple American names rather than spend several minutes of each call trying to explain names like Chandrascar or Gojsumal.

Under the legislation, those calling from outside the United States will not only have to identify themselves accurately but to offer the person being called an opportunity to transfer to an American call center. This is particularly interesting coming, as it does, in a country where felons are often the people handling your business on the telephone and whose legislators generously tolerate a huge home-grown population of con artists and chiselers. One can just imagine some of the calls that will hum across the planet under the legislation.

____________________________

In a call center in Bangalore, India, an attractive young man speaks into his headset. Above him in his tiny cube is a framed copy of his degree in engineering, opportunities in a developing country like India fully to use your education being very limited. He speaks American-style English with a reasonably good accent, having been trained in it.

"Hello, Mrs. Jones, I am calling you about an important new opportunity."

"Whatcha sayin'?"

"I'm calling about a new opportunity…"

"Could a swore ya said ya was callin' 'bout some damn community. I ain't interested in no communities, that's fur sure."

"That's fine, Mrs. Jones, in a minute I'll be glad to explain about the opportunity. First, though, I have to inform you, in keeping with new legislation in America, that I'm calling from Bangalore, India…"

"Huh? Ya callin' 'bout bingo in Indiana?"

"Sorry, Mrs. Jones, no, that's Bangalore, B-A-N-G-A-L-O-R-E, in India."

"Never heard of it."

"That's okay, Mrs. Jones, as I was saying, in keeping with new legislation in America, my name is Yogesh…"

"I ain't got time ta be guessin' no names."

"Yo-gesh, Mrs. Jones, Yogesh Vajpayee is my name, Mrs. Jones."

"Hold on there. What the hell kinda name is that? You ain't no 'merican are ya?"

"That's right, Mrs. Jones, I'm calling from India, and I am obliged to ask you if you would prefer that I transfer this call to an American call center?"

"Well, a course, why'd ya think I wanna be talkin' to some guy with a weird name like yours callin' from some damn place I never hearda?"

"Okay, Mrs. Jones, I am now transferring you. This may take a few minutes. So you hang on. Very nice speaking with you."

Mrs. Jones waits, holding the phone, muttering about foreigners.

In a large, dingy room of a privately-run Texas medium-security prison, one of dozens of prisoners working for a subcontractor of the company running the prison, a man with a long purplish scar on one side of his face and cigarette dangling between chubby, yellowed fingers, receives the call and grunts into his headset. On the computer screen in front of him, Mrs. Jones credit rating comes up along with her address and other personal information.

"That Mrs. Jones? The name's Jake."

"God, it's nice hearin' a real 'merican."

"Yeah, I know jus' what ya mean there, Mrs. Jones. T'aint much fun tryin' ta figure out what some monkey from Iraq is yakkin' 'bout."

Jake takes a long drag on his cigarette, smiles at a grotesquely-pornographic photograph taped to his keyboard, and scratches his shaved head.

"I'm callin' ya for Jerry Franklin."

"Jerry Franklin? Why God bless, what a fine Christian man!"

Jake takes another big drag on his cigarette and scratches the crotch of his orange prison jump suit, war-on-terror surplus the private prison contractor obtained from the Pentagon.

"Sure 'nuff is. Well, M'am, they all got somethin' for ya"

"Somethin' fur me?"

"Yup. Jerry's askin' folks like you if they got themselves focused on Eternity?"

"Oh, you jus' tell Jerry, I sure am."

"Yes'am. Jerry figures good Christian folk got special needs."

"Well, I s'pose they do."

"Jerry's thinkin' what with the End a comin'…"

"Oh, he's right 'bout that, ya can sure tell when yer gettin' foreigners botherin' ya at home an' all."

"Well, he jus' thought maybe ya was interested in some in-surance. Ya know, ta leave somethin' fur those lef' behind after the Battle of Armageddon an' the Rapture an' all."

"In-surance? I ain't interested in no damn in-surance."

There's a loud click, and Jake's left with a hum on the line, but it only lasts a second or two, as another call is transferred from Bangalore.

It is important to note that Bush's 2/07/02 order on treatment of prisoners was based on (at least) the following documents:

Status of Taliban and Al Qaida, Dated:19 January 2002

Status of Taliban and Al Qaida message from Chairman, Joint Chief of Staff to Unified Commands and Services, Dated: 21 January 2002

However, the Bush order references both Department of Justice and Department of Defense input in determining the status of both detainees and "enemy non-combatants" as outside the protections of the Geneva Convention. Therefore the DoJ memo that was released (8/01/02 DoJ Memo to the President's Counsel on Standards of Conduct for Interrogation) came after the order above. This means that there was 1) requests before that time on torturing detainees, and 2) that for some reason (such as wanting to extend the policy or approve even more aggressive techniques) they requested even more counsel from the DoJ. But let's deal with the documents that have been released.

Of critical importance in Bush's order is item 5 which states:

"5. I hereby reaffirm the order previously issued by the secretary of defense to the United States Armed Forces requiring that the detainees be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."

The importance of this becomes clear when interpreting the Working Group Report of 1/15/03 (DoD Document 8). On second paragraph of page five of the pdf file (page 3 of the actual report), the 2/17/02 order is interpreted by the DoJ's General Counsel (whom I believe is William J. Haynes, II from the DoD Document 5), as approving "aggressive" "counter-resistance" techniques:

"Due to the unique nature of the war on terrorism in which the enemy covertly attacks innocent civilian populations without warning, and further due to the critical nature of the information believed to be known by certain of the Al-Qaida and Taliban detainees regarding future terrorist attacks, it may be appropriate for the appropriate approval authority to authorize as military necessity the interrogation of such unlawful combatants in a manner beyond that which may be applied to a prisoner of war who is subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions"

Notable in Haynes report is that :

Page 72 "As the Commander in Chief authority is vested in the President, we recommend that any exercise of authority by DOD personnel be confirmed in writing through Presidential directive or other document."

The report is essentially accepted by Rumsfeld as a policy basis in his memo of 4/16/03 (DoD Document 9 which is to the Commander of US Southern Command (which I believe is Guantanamo)). In summation of that directive, Rumsfeld states: If interrogators wish to go beyond these measures "... you should provide me, via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee."

Questions
1) What was the Presidential directive and Pentagon policy prior to January of 2002?

2) According to the information in the memos, and the aggressive interrogations which have occurred, where are all of the written approvals, and what were the basis for those approvals? Since Rumsfeld made this "policy," he had to know what was going on.

3) What changes occurred to the policy after April 16 2003? It is clear that the policy moved beyond Guantanamo because (according to the Taguba Report) Mjr. General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib. It is also clear at this time from various reports, leaks, and human rights agencies reports, that "aggressive measures" were approved in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In fact, the according to Haynes' Working Group Report, he felt that the suggestions were legitimate in all areas outside US territory and sovereign holdings.

4) What was the Bush Directive after the Pentagon policy change. The only information we have is from before that (2/17/02). Haynes' working group report specifically requests a directive from the President in writing. The reasons are concerns regarding possible prosecution that might arise both domestically and internationally.

5) Bush is continuing to use the same language from item 5 of his order in press statements today. Given that it is clear how that is being interpreted, one can only assume that the President has indeed signed off on the use of torture. One must also assume that he has issued a later directive which expanded the use of torture beyond Guantanamo.

6) Haynes notes in his report:

Page 71 "Should the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques than have been traditionally used by U.S. forces become public, it is likely to be exaggerated or distorted in the U.S. and international media accounts, and may produce an adverse effect on support for the war on terrorism."

It seems clear, that the administration did NOT want any of this becoming public. They are still attempting to localize the problem to a "few bad apples" even though it is clear that knowledge of the "abuse" was approved at least to Rumsfeld. So the question is, How can they be trying soldiers for abuse when the responsibility clearly lies above them? The pivotal question is, were they following a policy? That policy is starting to emerge, but is far from clear at this point.

Conclusion
What the documents point to, is that 1) it is the policy to this administration to utilize interrogation ("counter resistance") techniques that are outside of the Geneva Convention and the Torture Conventions, outside US law, and strongly counter to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Unless, a number of units had "gone rogue," there should be documentation on every individual who was held and interrogated under Category II or beyond techniques (this was clearly requested by Rumsfeld). If there is not documentation, was there another policy change that changed who had to know and approve? In other words, we could assume that the policy became "anything goes."

Rumsfeld, and Myers were both "in the loop," and information was being presented to the President as well. This means that knowledge of what the actual policy was (and is), and approval of it, came from the highest levels. Denial of knowledge, or arguing that "we don't approve torture" are outright lies. Therefore, they have lied to the people of the U.S., to the Congress, and they have refused to provide documents Congressional oversight committees. I believe that the last two at least are illegal if not impeachable.

Notes on the Documents
Document 3:  Memo for Commander Joint Task Force 170, Dated: 11 October 2002   <> DoD Doc 3

Page 3
Category I techniques are for interrogation in a comfortable environment with the offering of "rewards" ("cookies or cigarettes).

Category II techniques allow yelling at the prisoner; deception; multiple interrogators; claiming that the interrogator is a civilian from a foreign nation. With permission of GIC, interrogators can us "stress positions" for a maximum of four hours; use falsified documents or reports; place in isolation for up to 30 days with approval, and extended beyond 30 days with the approval of the Commanding General.

Page 4
Interrogation may take place somewhere besides the interrogation booth. Light and sound sensory deprivation; hooded during transportation and questioning; 20 hour interrogations; removal of all comfort items; feeding only MREs (meals ready to eat); stripping the prisoner; forced grooming; "use of detainee's phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress"

Category III techniques
Requires request through the Director of JIG (?)and approval of Commanding General with legal review.

"Any of these techniques that require more than light grabbing, poking, or pushing, will be administered only by individuals specifically trained in their safe application."

Threats of death or severe pain to detainee or his family.
exposure ot cold weather or water
use of wet towels to "induce the misperception of suffocation"
use of "mild" physical contact (note unless more significant pain is approved)

Several pages of legal analysis are included with the conclusion that the techniques authorized for interrogations are legal (page 10). More extreme techniques are considered legal "so long as there is an important governmental objective."

Document 4:  SOUTHCOM's endorsement of the CJTF-170's request, Dated: 25 October 2002   <> DoD Doc 4

James T Hill, General US Army, approves Category I and II techniques, but has reservations about Category III techniques

Document 5:  Secretary of Defense memorandum ref: approving counter resistance techniques, Dated: 02 December 2002   <> DoD Doc 5 12/2/02

William J Haynes, General Counsel, ran the suggested interrogation strategies past Deputy Doug Feith and General Myers. He claims that there are no issues with Category I and II techniques, but that except for standing for a maximum of 4 hours Category III techniques are a matter of policy.

Rumsfeld writes on the bottom of the memo "Howard, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

Document 6:  Secretary of Defense memorandum for Commander, SOUTHCOM ref: Counter Resistance Techniques Dated: 15 Jan 2003   <> DoD Doc 6

From Rumsfeld tasking the General Counsel to establish aworking group to determine legality and impacts of various interrogation methods. (1/15/03)

Document 7:  Memorandum for the Department of Defense General Counsel Ref: Detain interrogations Dated:15 Jan 2003    <> DoD Doc 7 1/15/03
RUmsfeld suspends approval of anything beyond Category I techniques until the working group reports.

Document 8:  Working Group Report on detainee operations Dated:04 April 2003   <>
DoD Doc 8

The actual report is dated 4/03/03

page 5 "Many of the techniques of the second and third type have been requested by USSOUTHCOM and USCENTCOM."

page 5 Seems to read the President's policy as using techniques that violate the Geneva Convention (paragraph 2)

The bulk of the report details various aspects of international and US law, and then discusses how defense might be made against any charges.

Conclusions - page 69
- Detainees are not covered by the Geneva Convention ans therefore are beyond the definition of POW

- US law doesn't apply if detainees are not US citizens or are held outside the territory of the US

Page 71 "Should the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques than have been traditionally used by U.S. forces become public, it is likely to be exaggerated or distorted in the U.S. and international media accounts, and may produce an adverse effect on support for the war on terrorism."

Page 72 "As the Comander in Chief authority is vested in the President, we recommend that any exercise of authority by DOD personnel be confirmed in writing through Presidential directive or other document."

Document 9:  Memo for Commander, SOUTHCOM: Counter Resistance Technique in the War on Terrorism Dated:16 Apr 2003  <> DoD Doc 9 4/16/03

Rumsfeld approved techniques "A-X set out at tab A" of his response. He also requires that use of techniques "B,I, O or X" he must be notified in advance.

"B" Incentive/Removal of Incentive. Concern is over religious items.

"I" Pride and Ego Down - cautions about degrading detainees

"O" Mutt and Jeff could run into Geneva Convention issues

"X" Isolation - going beyond international agreements

If interrogators wish to go beyond these measures "... you should provide me, via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee."

It appears that Israelis 'using Kurds to build power base' (Guardian, 6/21/04). Israel has hundreds of agents in northern Iraq (Ha'aretz, 6/20). Both of these reports are in part based on the "Old Uncoverer" Seymour Hersh whose latest expose is in the 6/28/04 New Yorker - PLAN B. Israel is operating supporting the Kurds because they feel threatened by Iran, and believe that the security situation in Iraq is crumbling.

"Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel's clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports." (Hersh)

Of course, the Israeli activity is making Turkey nervous because they fear that the pressure will mount to make Kurdistan and independent state. The existence of that state on the border of Turkey is seen as a major security threat.

It does not help the situation that the Kurds see yet another potential betrayal by the US in the new Iraq. The Kurds are a minority, and are concerned that they will be left out, or left powerless under a new Iraqi government. Hersh predicts that "A (Kurdish) declaration of independence would trigger a Turkish response--and possibly a war--and also derail what has been an important alliance for Israel. Turkey and Israel have become strong diplomatic and economic partners in the past decade."

Israel is apparently training some Kurds in advanced commando tactics (does this sound familiar?), which only increases the concern of Turkey. The US is not unaware of the Israeli activities, but may be looking the other way because the see it as applying more pressure on Iran which is accused of having a well developed nuclear program.

Meanwhile, there are the "insurgents" (opposers of US occupation) inside Iraq, who are posing no end of problems for the US. This has been a losing battle that has included curfews, sieges, and active combat. THe biggest headline in this regard lately has been the missile attack on Faluja which killed (an estimated) 22 people. The attack was yet another failed response as it killed only civilians (VOA, 6/20/04). This "error" has once again increased the anger against the US and is seen as posing a threat to the handover of power to Iraq (Independent, 6/20/04).

But over the last couple of months, the US has been running a dual campaign. On one hand fighting with "insurgents," and on the other, using if you can't beat 'em join 'em approach. So we have active fighting at the same time the US is recruiting them - THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: SECURITY; Failing to Disband Militias, U.S. Moves to Accept Them (Filkins, NYT, 5/28/04). The carrot for those who cooperate is ban them from participation in the new government. However, that plan may be eroding as well Sadr is invited to participate in the national conference (ABC, 6/21/04) to discuss the shape of the new Iraqi government.

Meanwhile, the interim government has decides to outlaw the militias (Wa. Post, 6/8/04) and possibly declare martial law (NYT, 6/21/04) - at least for those militias who haven't joined the Iraqi security forces.

But now there is more unaccounted money flowing through US hands. The US has siphoned off about $2.5 Billion from Iraq oil profits to pay for "security." According to the 6/21/04 article by Steve Weisman of the NY Times, U.S. Is Quietly Spending $2.5 Billion From Iraqi Oil Revenues to Pay for Iraqi Projects, the slowness of reconstruction money just doesn't match a satchel of money in hand. Other satchels are being filled with dollars confiscated by the US during the 1991 Iraq war (an estimated $1 - $2 billion disbursed thus far):

"The teams have become famous in Iraq for the way they have spread across the country, commissioning repairs and paying for them from satchels bulging with $100 bills shipped by plane from a Federal Reserve vault in East Rutherford, N.J. Much of that money came from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States during the Persian Gulf war in 1991."

Aside: Didn't we "freeze" assets after 9/11, and also Hussein's assets after the invasion? Are these legal confisgations?

This use of Iraqi oil dollars and seized assets should be ringing alarm bells. The money being "spread around" is virtually unaccounted for. The whole purpose of using it is (apparently) to avoid the red tape (oversight) of the use of the $18 Billion coming from the US tax payers for reconstruction. In other words, this money is virtually untraceable. Now there is a business opportunity for you. Billions of dollars with no accountability. Maybe the US has found a new money source for its covert operations. Of course, one has to ask the question of whether this money is only going to activities in Iraq, or if it is also being funneled elsewhere.

Weisman notes that there are questions about the US using the oil revenue in this way as it is supposed to be there for the new Iraq government and the people of Iraq. Draining the bank of the new government doesn't seem to be a current concern for the US. Please keep this little tidbit in mind if the US gets asked for an emergency appropriation for the Iraqi government.

So there we have the Iraq strategy - buy them, bribe them, kill them and find unaccountable money to spend. Look the other way as Israel creates and army among the Kurds (as the US did in Afghanistan and is in the process of doing with hiring militias in Iraq). Build the problems of tomorrow today. That is the US strategy in Iraq, and make a profit for some throughout the whole process.

The bombings, kidnappings and killings have gone up. Worse still, CNN’s Paula Zahn is fading, and might need another “offending” zipper promo to disprove her ex-boss confident prediction that “a dead raccoon could get higher ratings.”

We like a drama where Nielson’s and newscasters’ figures are more captivating than a couple of dead things - soldiers, raccoons or otherwise. It can’t be news we are watching. Certain things are unraveling fast, as tantalizing as a zip being drawn down.

While the show goes on, the killings have increased.

Just two days back US national Paul Johnson was beheaded in Saudi Arabia.

Islamist websites, as usual, showed gruesome pictures of the murder scene. Johnson’s head was “placed on his back as he lay in a pool of blood.” (AFP, June 18).

The militants made sure there was a visible a “pool of blood” this time, unlike that suspicious video of Nick Berg, made more dubious after observations were made of the full-length screening by those who could stomach the entire footage.

Predictably, there were cries of “barbarism.” “They're trying to get us to retreat from the world. America will not retreat,” declared President George W. Bush.

We need the US army there. Can’t you see what happens when you give some space to those terrorists? Unlike Bush, Wall Street held its sangfroid. There was no panic that day even as expat workers in Saudi Arabia look badly exposed. When these professionals do leave “sooner or later you're going to be able to count the effect in actual barrels, and that's the scary part,” said Jan Stuart of New York brokerage FIMAT USA. (AP, June 15)

To give Bush plenty of credit, the militants were dim enough to call themselves the Fallujah Brigade of Al Qaeda, and here is your direct link between “Saddam Hussein” and “Al Qaeda.”

“Bin Laden” is seldom used in these linkages.

Credit too should be heaped on the Saudi security forces for their lightning liquidation of the alleged mastermind Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, hours, just hours after the deed was done. They couldn’t do anything in the days, months or years prior to this, when Al-Moqrin was plying his terrorist trade. The man had posted stuff on the net too many times and how was he tracked? Why the militants ingeniously dumped Johnson’s body from a car that had a giveaway license plate in view of a witness who tipped off the Saudi authorities for a bloody denouement (AP, June 18). At the time of writing, Saudi forces are still searching for his “body”, presumably the other part. (AP, June 20).

Johnson was an engineer for Lockheed Martin, and reportedly worked on the Apache helicopter systems. He would have been a prized catch for some valuable technical information and there are people willing to pay a ransom for this. Rescue attempts and the level of urgency can differ in such situations.

The victim reportedly liked Saudi Arabia. Nick Berg was well liked by the Arabs as well at a time when the US authorities got him detained him for some odd reason. Let’s see how Johnson’s story is spun.

Let us not forget Nick Berg, shall we? It’s not possible to keep track of all the killings perpetrated in the past four years alone.

Do not also forget Nick Berg when barbarism makes blasé headlines each day and when you are struggling with money and life’s cares in the months ahead. You may have good reason to worry over that.

The BBC reports that our planet’s oil reserves – may not be as comfortable as we led to assume.

Pipelines in Iraq, which has the second largest reserves of oil, have been hit and exports have come to a standstill. Recent attacks against the oil lifeline may have repercussions well beyond June 30. Pipelines take time to be fixed, and further attacks are bound to unnerve our markets. Someone has to maintain security there. The supply situation is critical according to David Thurtell, from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “There's no fat left…There's no room for error, accident or more attacks.” (Globe and Mail, June 17)

“If something happens in Saudi Arabia, that's the $100 (per barrel) oil. And that might be just for starters,” says Adam Sieminski of Deutsche Bank in London. (AP, June 17).

If there is not enough oil around, the United States has aggrandized its powers incalculably. Bloodstained boots are now treading atop the largest swath of our planet’s reserves.

One should check again the true state of US and Israeli strategic oil reserves. Master warmongers prepare their campaigns well, right up to the goof ups of their undertrained soldiers who operate within underfunded units. Battling soldiers can create enough pandemonium for us to beg stability and peace at any cost. Who is going to challenge them?

The only nation, which has the military firepower and sufficient fuel, is Russia. President Vladimir Putin has just vowed to prevent the collapse of Yukos, an oil giant once headed by the hated Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Ain’t that a nightmare scenario? “Destroy Magog, annihilate Gog,” might be an apt rehash of the Bible belt’s “Kill a Commie for Christ!” The Gipper is dead but those echoes may resound louder in days to come. Leaders come and die, but the Iron Lady’s handbag - if you loved Frederick Forsyth’s The Fist of God - will remain, reminding us of our unfinished divine crusades.

George, he must not get away with this.1

Millennial and apocalyptic hints can refresh many who are clueless over George W. Bush’s monastic services at Yale’s Skull and Bones “tomb”. If he was into booze, drugs or whatever frat boys usually did, fine, but that’s not what you associate with skulls, bones and tombs do you? More like Megiddo, Belial, rivers of blood and that fanged guy from Transylvania. Was the young Bush just an apprentice pirate set to rip off the world? Professing Christians should visit Yale and investigate. His rival John Kerry was a fellow brother, and has some claims of being descended from Judah. This gets a little frightening for some, and fits well into prominent belief-systems, twisted no doubt by the old Gipper’s and Dubya’s lies. They are still getting lots of help from televangelists, who flushed with tithes and offerings, won’t remind their flock that no one can claim David’s mantle; it was taken long back.

In the face of evil, Gandalf showed more courage when he declared, “there is only one Lord of the Rings.”

Anyone who wants to be tendentious will no doubt be gratified by this report: Out of the blue, Putin claims that Russian secret services had warned of an imminent “terrorist attack”, post Sept 11 from Saddam’s Iraq. This came as shock as Putin was vehemently opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Can we see a corridor blasted through the Caucasus one day, with war machines fueled by Yukos oil? There are Chechen terrorists there, you know, supported by our (ex-)CIA darling Osama bin Laden.

The statement by Putin’s, a former KGB agent, is now seen as an election boost for Bush. Still want to “Kill a Commie for Christ?” The Russians will not/or cannot pump extra oil for the world as business reports indicate.

There is more deceit.

The US is trying to justify this war retrospectively by trumpeting its capture of Saddam Hussein, another one associated with tombs, skulls, and bones. The White House is concerned about his trial and for very good reasons. It would be convenient if Saddam is silenced soon and permanently, one way or the other.

He can’t get away with it George.

According to the official version, Bush and co are worried about the trial’s security guarantees. Here is what the USA Today has to say:

“But Saddam can face justice only as long as he's held under the kind of impenetrable security the U.S. has established at a secret location in Iraq. Iraqis can't yet provide that… Refusing to give up custody of Saddam to Iraqis carries a different risk. It can signal that the ‘full sovereignty’ they've been promised on June 30 is a bogus pledge.” (USA Today, June 17)

Fears could be put to rest if Saddam is sent to the International Criminal Court. Let the UN worry about Saddam. It is harder to mount an insurrection out of The Hague and the man can tell us his side of the story as well. This won’t happen with Kofi Annan in charge. He did nothing to prevent the war. He couldn’t question those fabricated claims at the UN Security Council. His son, Kojo Annan, allegedly made tons of money from the Iraqi Oil for Food program. The Security Council, dominated by the US, conveniently overlooked these shady accounts and contracts, while the US and Britain kept pummeling Iraq with bombs and WMD allegations. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them children, are now reduced to bones inside makeshift, sandy tombs, qualifying Kojo to be another member of the select club.

The killings continue, and so does the abuse. In Baghdad, I am told, one frequently hears of Sandniggers and Dune Coons, though dead coons are sent back silently in boxes draped with Stars and Spangles. The luckier ones battle over news ratings.

From the other side comes infidels, najis and yes, killings.

Car bombers just killed 41 people in Iraq, mainly potential army recruits, and wounded 150. The Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem al-Shalan was furious. “We will cut off the hands of those people, we will slit their throats if it is necessary to do so…For those people who want to join the new Iraqi army, we will protect them and we will find them a safe location so they can submit their applications.” (AP, June 17)

Major oil installations are the safest locations; they rank above pipelines, civilian quarters, and US army posts. Have you heard of any rockets slamming into the heart of an oil installation? ”

One of the cars used in that bombing was an SUV packed with artillery shells. Many Americans can’t afford to buy or maintain them anymore. Someone must have thought the approaching bombers were VIPs and, unless you are a GI, you wouldn’t dare mess with them in Iraq, with or without Saddam. Al-Shalan’s remarks throw a clue.

The culprit happens to be that Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who we were led to believe had wielded that knife with such skill, balance and force on Nick Berg, despite being endowed with a missing leg.

He is masterminding “simpler, more frequent car bombings meant to upend the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi regime.” (AP, June 17) The new Iraqi leaders, in their newfound freedom are ready, and want to reinstate Saddam’s “exceptional” old laws to ease this transfer of sovereignty (AFP, June 18). Freedom has arrived.

Zarqawi has succeeded in prolonging the presence of US troops, bringing back draconian laws and actualizing the most dangerous oil monopoly in history. He works for Al Qaeda.

There are hunting him down, and after him, another will take his turn. It takes our attention away from Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahari. Have you heard of ex-Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar lately?

We are coaxed to see things differently.

The US is regarded as “Occupiers” by 92 per cent of Iraqis (USA Today, June 16) while more Iraqis prefer Saddam to the rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to lead the country. (Reuters, June 17). If Saddam is more popular, it’s better to ease up on Al-Sadr, at least for the time being. There is now a tacit truce.

American citizens view this madness differently. The latest Pew research poll shows that they are “more upbeat about events in Iraq”, giving the president a lead over his ultimate Democrat challenger John Kerry, the only candidate around who can help Bush win the election for the first time. The “terror” trick is working; if there were post 9/11 attacks on home soil that means the US did fine in invading Iraq, right?

“Terror” is a magic word. Uttered too many times and one would believe that Saddam ordered 9/11 even when the “official commission declares the absence of any link.” Enter Al Qaeda’s Zarqawi and the Fallujah Brigade; Exit Rumsfeld who wanted to strike Iraq “five hours” after the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.2 No smoking gun needed; just the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet deduction. Rumsfeld’s thoughts matched the speed his president’s jet was notching “five hours” after those hits. As one academic cynically told me: “Life would be boring without Rumsfeld. Leave the man alone…”

Months of investigations by US intelligence systems were sexed up to confirm the Defense Secretary’s suspicions that fateful day. Investigators now admit there were “glaring intelligence failures.” Experts still can’t figure out who or what was being said in those “three secretly taped conversation” that Colin Powell confidently “played to the UN Security Council in Feb 2003.” This formed one part of the WMD evidence.

Two MI6-recruited spies in Iraq provided others. Their “alarming reports of Saddam Hussein’s WMD were rushed to the White House shortly before the invasion though they were never interviewed by the CIA.”

This enthusiasm was also evident during the hunt for David Kelley, when he was interviewed, cross-interviewed and grilled by Tony Blair’s henchmen. Operation Mason, which caught up with Kelley, was built on packs of lies. Among other things, there is a noticeable drop in the quality of British journalism since 9/11.

When you have unimpeachable proof from paid sources, back them up with photos from high altitude spy satellites, the ones that can read your number plates as clearly as those witnesses in Saudi Arabia recently. After the war on Iraq was planned, it’s lenses popped out upon sensing Scud missile stores in Iraq. When the UN team was rushed there, they tuned out to be “half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq.” That was Saddam’s brilliant maskirovka. The UN team printed “Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team” on 20 gray T-shirts to mark its success. (LA Times, June 17)

Ballistic chickens remind you of someone on 9/11, don’t they? The military jets couldn’t outperform him that day. They couldn’t be scrambled fast enough after the first crash due to poor communications. (AP, June 17) Those kamikaze Boeings traveled much faster.

They all happened in a crucial time frame by coincidence, and statistically, any mathematician will tell you this is quite a feat, even without factoring in the combined failure of at least four intelligence agencies. America’s declared $US40 billion budget for its intelligence systems proved no help in recruiting a single mole who could burrow close enough into Hussein's inner circle.

The two Georges - Tenet and Bush – are sticking to their guns over the WMD, something casually described as being used for “bureaucratic reasons” by Wolfowitz only 13 months earlier. You’d expect more from Tenet. As for Bush, you won’t notice any difference if he ever gets Alzheimer’s.

More blood will be spilt. The Senate voted overwhelmingly two days back to add 20,000 troops to an Army overstretched by the war in Iraq and other “commitments around the world.” The operative words are “other commitments around the world.” The 4 percent increase in the size of the army amounts to $1.7 billion (per year presumably). Army Chief of Staff Gen Peter J. Schoomaker counters it “costs the Army $3.6 billion a year to keep 10,000 soldiers trained and equipped.” (AP, June 17)

An underfunded and undertrained army means canon fodder. Dead soldiers translate to livewire propaganda in the midst of homeland “terror”. There will no Vietnam War syndrome with terror on your doorsteps.

For those who support the war in Iraq, here is what the same report said: “On another amendment, Senate Republicans defeated a proposal by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., to roll back some of President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to help pay for the Iraq war.” (AP, June 17)

It had the full backing of ex-POW John McCain, the Republican once sought by John Kerry as his running mate.

Who is paying for this war? Families of dead soldiers? Check the Fortune 500 list of the wealthiest Americans and find the names of billionaires who had a son or daughter killed by an enemy bullet in Iraq. The only wealthy person I can think of was Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire. Many eulogized him. How is John Ashcroft’s son, Andy, serving in Iraq when soldiers are having their tours of duty extended?

There will be no shortage of soldiers. New data indicates a rise in unemployment rates for Blacks and Hispanics. (USA Today, June 17).

Along with oil uncertainties, the surge in producer prices has again stoked inflation anxieties. May’s producer price index (PPI) jumped to 0.8 per cent. If inflation picks up quickly, so will the Fed’s interest rates, faster than Alan Greenspan’s promise of a “measured pace.” That’s real trouble for Bush and Co.

OPEC is lobbying outsiders such as Mexico to boost production. Spare production capacity is limited and the tolerance level for future supply disruptions is approaching zero. The militants know this very well and they know how to create a “butterfly effect” right up to Beijing.

China, the world’s second largest oil importer, has just 20 days of reserve oil compared to Japan’s six months.

Yet the Anglo-American alliance, dependent on Saudi oil, and profiting from arms sales, continue to abet Riyadh’s criminality, to the extent that the Bush administration “blacked out 28 pages of a Congressional report that documented Saudi government ties with the 9/11 hijackers.” (Guardian, June 14, 2004).

Things are heating up on other fronts as well. Shell Chairman Ron Oxburgh recently told the Guardian that he “was very worried for the planet.”

There is bad news from a 3,000m (about 10,000ft) ice core from Antarctica, which reveals the Earth's climate history. “Carbon dioxide levels are the highest” level for the last “440,000 years.”

You don’t need a 3km slab of ice to sound the alarm. Kuala Lumpur has been cooking unusually for the past one year and I doubt my brand new air conditioner will last 440 days.

Oxburgh’s is subtly trying to blame India and China. These two countries have a large stock of untapped coal, and without oil, they will overtake the USA as the globe’s no 1 pollutants.

They are now at the mercy of others. Where are the star Luddites who yelped at those dam projects in India? It’s one thing to write arty smut from the comfort of one’s cooled home, powered by a diesel generator if necessary; yet another when you are having surgery during a prolonged power outage. During my time there, I knew many Indian students, who lucubrated often in candlelight before exams. They understand national vulnerabilities.

If there is no oil, coal will be used and the shift will not be easy.

Oxburgh forgot to mention the oil industry’s preparedness for this day. Every successful corporation - and these are huge empires – makes profits from predicting, or creating future trends. They rely on very precise data to hedge. Alternative fuel could be already here. Before that, war machines will devour our oil. You can’t replace an F16’s engine overnight, as they need optimum performance, unless that too has panned out as well.

We are going to sweat for a while. ‘Tis time I got another air conditioner!

June 20, 2004

Kuala Lumpur

Copyright@ 2004 Mathew Maavak

Reference:

1) In Forsyth’s novel, Margaret Thatcher thus displayed her steely resolve to George Bush Sr, who, was left wondering which was more intimidating - her handbag or a Saddam Hussein who had just invaded Kuwait. (Quoted from memory. Exact page number to be furnished later).

2) Jim Lobe, Iraq: Credibility at Breaking Point, (Asia Times, June 18)

Founder, Panoptic World
Tracking Trends in Our Evolving Society
www.maavak.net

There is an expectation that seas could rise anywhere from 40 inches to 40 feet (Wired). A 40 inch rise would push water inland about 300 feet, "pushing high-water marks 300 feet inland and flooding Florida, Bangladesh and even most of Manhattan." The 40 inch estimate is if the ice sheets don't melt. However, they are melting and that pushes the ocean rise to 40 feet. That rise would push the ocean 3600 feet inland. I don't know what that would cover, but my guess is that it would drown most islands, most of Japan, and everything on the east coast of the US up to the Catskills (just a guess).

To add trouble to the already strapped south Asia region, The U.N. Warns Aral Sea in Asia Could Dry Up (Newsday, 6/18/04). The Aral Sea is one of the largest inland water masses, and it has shrunk to half its normal size. And New York, will be hit multiply by this disaster - rising ocean as mentioned above, and health impacts (Earth Institute News):

"In the future we can look forward to more and longer air quality alerts, more heat stress, and illness or deaths related to these, according to project director Joyce Rosenthal of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School. �Some neighborhoods will suffer more, especially poorer neighborhoods with less greenery and more asphalt, which can create a heat island effect.� The study looked at climate and health projections through 2050."

NOTE: The study referenced in this quote is the Metropolitan East Coast Assessment, which is part of the US Global Change Research Group

Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an Urgent action call on US climate (BBC, 6/15/04). We are still the largest global contributor to global warming (both through our energy use and global consumption). China and India are gaining rapidly through accelerated development. However, I don't think we are going to get into a long global warming period. I believe that the climate will tip into an ice age first (see Environmental collapse - sooner not later (Wolf, 2/04/04).

So the issue is how to address the disaster that is looming over us. I would agree with the PEW Research Report -Coping with Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the U.S.. There are two major areas to address - mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is changing what we are doing to slow down (and perhaps reverse) the damage. Adaptation includes preparing for the change in a variety of ways. Certainly one of those is getting the global population off the coast lines, relocating critical infrastructure and industry, developing technologies to address climatic extremes, etc.

Sequestration, mentioned earlier, is one of the mitigation strategies being pushed. It essentially means capturing global warming gases (somehow) and putting them someplace out of the atmosphere (underground or under the ocean). This may work on the short term, but I can't help but feel it is fraught with problems. Let's take the example of pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ocean floor.

One of the things that carbon dioxide does on the surface is to make the earth "breathe deeper" (McKibben, A Special Moment in History). This means that it forces increased plant growth. I would assume that it might do the same thing on the ocean floor. Or if that is an anaerobic environment, it might kill off what is there. Either way, it seems likely that it is not going to stay put. One scenario for it getting out (or getting up) is through violent storm activity. In a 6/18/04 report from the Independent/UK - An ocean in bloom: Storms breathe life into the Atlantic - Connor states that the recent hurricanes have caused a dramatic growth in the amount of phytoplankton. The massive storms stir up the sea floor, releasing minerals. One thing we are relatively sure of at this time is that global warming is going to dramatically disrupt the weather patterns, and increase both the number and severity of massive storms. Therefore, it seems highly possible that global warming gases "sequestered" on the ocean floor are unlikely to stay there.

Underground sequestration doesn't seem a much better option to me. Wouldn't such gases eventually just "percolate" up?

The good and bad news is that we are likely to run out of oil. Good news (possibly) because its demise will dramatically reduce the global warming emissions (unless we replace it with some other hydrocarbon). The bad news is that we have built industrial society and the global economy on petroleum. At this point, without oil many will die and societies will fall. The estimates of when peak oil production will start a rapid decline has been moved up considerably from 2030 to 2007 (Are we ready for when the oil runs out?, Leggett, Guardian, 6/19/04).

Folks we just lost TWENTY-THREE YEARS of preparation time. No big deal since we are refusing to prepare anyway. 2007 is less than 3 years away. While Leggett is optimistic that we can replace oil consumption with "renewable" sources, I don't share that optimism. Most "renewable" sources at this time require massive amounts of (oil-based) energy to create. Just replacing oil as fuel for transportation is a massive undertaking.

Let's look at replacing automotive fuel. First, it would take the equivalent of billions of gallons of gasoline a DAY for the US alone. Second, we have a fuel delivery infrastructure that was created (largely) at tax payer expense. That delivery system doesn't exist for say hydrogen. Battery charging and replacement also draws on energy resources and we are not equipped for a mass jump to that either. But there is a bigger issue here in relationship to transportation. The transportation of cargo. We live in an interdependent global economy that is totally dependent on massive cargo shipments. Huge tankers and cargo carriers using the energy it takes to run NY City for a day, are not only going strong, but the fleet is being expanded. Are we going to shift them to hydrogen in 3 to 5 years?

It seems clear to me that we need to be expending our time and money on preparing for what is coming at us like an avalanche. Instead, the developing world is spending more on defense (Verma, OneWorld South Asia, 6/17/04). In 2003, global defense spending went over $1 TRILLION. Of course it is being well spent (not), as we can see in the genocide in the Sudan (Darfur) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is estimated that 17 million people are going to starve to death this year alone, and AIDS is a growing curse decimating populations, and leaving millions of orphans. The next pandemic is waiting to break, SARS or super bugs or ebola or avian flu. The money is not going to address these critical issues either. Instead, we spend money on defense and expanding the reach of an (oil driven) global economy that is causing even greater inequality ( Global Shifts Raising Issues of Income Equality, Boston Globe, 6/20/04).

It is clear we are going in the wrong direction; that we are squandering precious resources, lives and TIME. The powers that be have no interest (apparently) in doing anything but continuing to make things worse. That means it is up to us folks.

Sequestration Articles/Info
Ocean Carbon Sequestration Abstracts Office of Science - DoE.

Climate Change Scenarios Compel Studies of Ocean Carbon Sequestration, Paul Preuss, Berkley Lab

Global Warming - Impacts & Strategies
Costs of Warming on the Rise, Leahy, Wired, 6/19/04.

Coping with Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the U.S. PEW Research Center

Implementing Climate and Global Change Research: A Review of the Final U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan (2004), Committee to Review the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan, National Research Council

In many ways, McCain is what Colin Powell used to be. He is seen as a man of principle, and he is seen as a hero. As a candidate, he has a reputation that complements Bush's obvious weaknesses. He has fought for campaign finance reform. He is staunchly anti-torture. And he has taken a highly visible stand on the environment. He (and Liberman) introduced the Climate Stewardship Act). On Earth, the quarterly magazine of the Natrual Resources Defense Council, did their spring feature story on him with - Meet Captain Climate.

McCain's stance on global warming would be in direct contrast to Bush's abysmal record and outright denial, but that would be a benefit.

McCain offers the same benefits to Bush that he would have offered to Kerry - appeal to independents and undecided Republicans. McCain brings with him a boatload of political weight. I am really surprised that no one has asked him if he has been approached by the Bush team. (But I guess that wouldn't be politic.)

The question I have is, would McCain accept the VP tap from Bush? My sinking feeling is that he would.

Inside the US the data collection accelerates with new means being found everyday. Efforts to get criminals while they are in short pants are underway by employing mental health screening of "troublemakers" in the nation's schools. It is extending internationally as the US pushes for "biometric" passports and visas on all visitors entering the US. There has been talk of national identity cards in the US, Canada, and Britain.

Each of these little tidbits goes into a database and the databases get connected. For example, there has been talk of linking the US and UK biometric visa databases. I wrote about this recently in Generating "data" and a Hole to Put it in (6/05/04).

There are several bills wending their way through Congress to implement school based screening of children.

HR 3063 Children's Mental Health Screening and Prevention Act of 2003, asks for a demonstration projects in schools to screen for mental illness and crime prevention.

S 2459 Community Security Act , was introduced 5/20/04 by Rockefeller of West Virginia. Section 4 amends the "Safe Schools through Mental Health Program" by extending it to homeland security. While the bill addresses responding to disasters and terrorist attacks, it also reaches more broadly to prevent "terrorism." Under Sec 4131 it states:
" `(C) provide mental health services to elementary and secondary school students who face, or have faced, disciplinary action, including students who have been suspended or expelled from school ."

"Prevention" and "screening of children is also part of H. R. 811 - SMARTS Health Act.

While on one hand it sounds great that the feds are noticing that the health needs of children (including mental health needs) are being taken more seriously, it is worrisome to have that legislation tied to preventing terrorism by screening "disruptive" children. Further, that grant monies are being earmarked to research these screening systems.

Obviously, we should be concerned about school violence, but linking violence and crime under the rubric of terrorism is alarming. We now have teachers as "terrorists;" drug offenders as "terrorists;" environmentalists as "terrorists;" protesters as "terrorists." Do we really want to categorize children who get in trouble at school as "pre-terrorists?"

But back to the population in a databank...

The school screening discussed above will be placed into databases. There is no protection I found in any of the above legislation that such information would be protected, nor sealed as is usually the case for minors. There are no protections that parents and guardians could refuse to have their children "screened." Add about 60 million school children to the "data bank."

The Bush regime has recently been stressing that the "war on terrorism" could stretch over generations. Perhaps they are planning for that by sorting out the "troublemakers" early in their lives.

I am sure that the issues of biometric national identity cards will be coming around again. Looking at the visa situation, all visitors will be recorded and tracked. The databases in the various countries will be linked to share data. What the US is building in terms of domestic systems is expanding on a global basis.

I keep hearing in the back of my mind something a police officer once shared with me. He said that there are two types of civilians - perpetrators and potential perpetrators. The cops are the only "safe" ones. It is an "us against the world" mentality, but I see it playing out with the ever broadening links to terrorism and who is a terrorist. There is the US "security" establishments, and there is the rest of the world - terrorists or pre-terrorists all - and all of us neatly tracked through computer systems no matter where in the world (or off it) we may be.

To track legislation or look at legislation in this article, try the Thomas Legislative Guide

Here is the process I suggest:

1. Read the Pheiffer article.

2. Think about the issues and problems.

3. I will set up an entry solely for your comments and thoughts which will be dated 7/15/04. This is so it will stay at the top of Uncommon Thought.

4. Offer discussion and thoughts through the comments option on Uncommon Thought to the entry I post.

5. I, and perhaps others should you choose to volunteer, will write up our collaborative response and submit it.

The deadline for submissions is July 30th. That is why I proposed the 7/15/04 deadline for your comments on Uncommon Thought. It give me (or us) the time to actually put together our collective submission.

If you wish, we can have a community discussion of the article first.

Are you willing to participate? Do you want a discussion fo the article first? Please indicate your thoughts and preferences through the comments to this entry.

One might ask what in the world one might do with an invisibility cloak (or capability)? I'm sure the Pentagon has a few ideas, and the criminal mind can come up with profitable uses as well. However, Tachi sees virtually limitless possibilities. For example, for the parking challenged, the bumber of one's cars could be fitted with the cloak. Then you could see exactly where the other bumbers were. Of course, that might make the front of your own vehicle invisible, or the bumbers of other people might be invisible, which might have the opposite effect. It might be popular with children playing hide and seek as well.

Mackie, Guardian, 6/13/04, Japanese boffins spawn almost invisible man

BBC, 6/14/04 Inventor plans 'invisible walls'

Andrew Greeley asks in his June 11, 2004 article, Is U.S. like Germany of the '30s?. He points to the humiliation of the German people and their anger at their leaders as key to the rise to power of Hitler. He argues that Hitler was a strong leader who appealed to the "dark side" of Germans.

Greeley's article does not do justice, in my opinion to the comparisons to be made. It also doesn't address the scope of the deception being played out in front of our eyes.

There is a pervasive belief in the U.S. that what happened in Nazi Germany could never happen here. The belief goes beyond the Holocaust, to the transformation of a democracy into a fascist state; to the transformation of protection of individual freedoms into a police state with massive surveillance. Yet it is happening, and the people submit. Even as voices rise, most still feel that much of the actions of the last three years were necessary.

There are striking similarities between George W. Bush and Adolph Hitler. They both belong to secret death societies - Hitler to the Thule Society and Bush to the Skull and Bones. ( Tid Bit: Prescott Bush made a fortune doing business with the Nazi Regime - links below} Both brought their brotherhood and their vision to their leadership in their respective nations (Bush currently has five "Bonesmen" in his administration). Both were "messianics." Both saw their role as a calling to power to lead their nations to global domination. Both thought no cost was too great in this quest. Both acted on the belief that evil means were justified in the pursuit of the greater vision. Both promoted a good/evil dichotomy to their citizens. But these similarities aside, there are other similarities between Hitler's Germany and Bush's United States.

At a basic level, Greely is right in that upon the rise to power of these two men, their respective nations were looking for a change. In the US, the tilt for two decades has been towards a corporate government model. (I remember during the early 1980s there was some talk of running Lee Iaccoca - CEO of Chrysler - for President of the United States). Certainly, George Bush and his administration have reflected that desire. There was a desire for "morality" after the spectacle of the Clinton sex scandals. George sold himself well in this regard as well.

However, the fascist transformation of the United States has been long in the making - see Fascism USA, UTJ 5/22/04. We have been moving towards this for over twenty years. GW is just taking us over the cliff, and he is doing it by promoting and enforcing a perverted patriotism, and promulgating a campaign of fear. This too is similar to Hitler's rise to power. He didn't just spring full blown on the German scene.

Now to the present and the undermining of a nation.

There has been an ongoing erosion of the line between various branches of government. Under the auspices of the "war on drugs," there has been an increasing blurring of the line between the military and the police. This legal line is blurring to invisibility in the aftermath of 9/11. In the 6/21/04 Newsweek article Intelligence: The Pentagon--Spying in America? by Michael Isikioff, we learn that the Senate Intelligence Committee has eliminated the restriction that the Department of Defense no longer has to comply with the Privacy Act (the CIA is also exempt from this restriction). What is frightening here is that both the CIA and the military are only tasked to operate outside the Untied States, that is until the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, and the merging of departments and agencies under the Homeland Security Act, and the various intelligence reorganization policies. Now both of the non-domestic tasked agencies can (and do) operate inside the US.

An examination of recent legislation coming out of the Senate Intelligence Committee is instructive. Both domestic intelligence authorizations and Department of Defense authorizations are in the same bills. Joint reports, programs, and transfer of personnel are common. There are provisions in other legislation being proposed that should also raise alarm.

S.1047 - Department of Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by Senate)
Section 1037 allows the use of "unmanned aerial vehicles for support of Homeland Security missions. That is the "predator drones being used in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The bill allows them to operate over population centers inside the US.

S.1050 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 (Placed on Calendar in Senate)
Sections 3131 and 3132 authorize restarting the nuclear weapon development program and underground testing of nuclear weapons.

Public Law 108-177 - Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 from S.1025 Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 . Exempts the Department of Defense from the constraints of the Freedom of Information Act (Section 503, item 5 D).

All of the above is new legislation that erodes the boundaries that protect the population from the overbearing power of our government. They join a slew of other legislation: the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and all of its siblings, the Homeland Security Act, numerous anti-privacy and anti-rights infringements. All of these in the name of "security," and argued as "necessary in the war on terrorism." Wasn't it Ben Franklin who said something to the effect, "That he who gives up liberty for security gets neither"?

But it is largely a hidden and misrepresented erosion of democracy that faces us. It is an erosion that largely is not marketed with the face of the dominant race in the United States, and when it is (such as has happened recently) it is the face of the convert to Islam, or the Environmental Terrorist, or the Political Activist. Anti-patriots all according to the new rhetoric. These are the faces of the "terrorists" in our midst. The unknown element able to hide in "our" neighborhood and strike us without warning. Interestingly not on the list (given the recent Nichols trial) is that of the White Supremacist, or the armed militia groups. So we add the "TIPS" program to the mix, for average citizens to turn in their neighbors, people on the street, or people acting "strangely" to the FBI for investigation.

Likewise the Germans (or rather those selected as loyal Germans) had their fears quieted by the Hitler propaganda machine. They blindly and unwittingly gave up their democracy to fascism because those "rules and punishments" applied to someone else - the Jew, the Gypsy, the immoral, the homosexual, the anti-Reich resister .... not to them. Those extreme government actions were for "their" protection and for a greater Germany. It is more than hauntingly familiar - it is playing out day by day in front of our eyes.

So why does this tactic of framing the leader as a father and protector of the "real" national values work? It works because it plays upon the racism and ethnocentrism embedded in the culture. This is particularly true in the US which styled itself for so long as the true white democracy - reserving rights of citizenship and social participation for "whites." This creates (still) a sense of entitlement and protection. The tactics of fear work within this rubric of entitlement and protection because whites are being protected from "them." Included in them are those "traitors" who challenge the system and who challenge the entitlements (the perpetual enemy within). The dreams of grandeur work because the embeddedness of entitlement, purity, morality and "rightness" embedded in the nationalism it creates leads naturally to a belief in national entitlement and right within the world. The world is rightly "ours" and all that is in it is "ours."

It worked in Germany. It has, and is, working in the United States. We see similar processes at work in the policies of Israel, and in the anti-immigrant movements and far-right shifts in parts of Europe. The US is not totally unique in any of this. What is unique is that we have the military power to take by force externally, and the perceived justification and technology of controlling by force internally.

Those of us who are alarmed are told "Don't worry. If you have nothing to hide, then the protections of law are not needed." If "they" are a threat, then "take them out." How inconvenient that 'our' oil (or other desired resource) is under someone else's land.

Can it happen here? It is happening here.

Update there is a new Senate Bill that aloows syping by the Pentagon - S. 2386, Sec. 502.

Secret Society Links
Three World WarsThe Real Adolf Hitler

IAE THE SKULL AND BONES SOCIETY

C e p h a s M i n i s t r y / L i b r a r y THE THULE SOCIETY & NWO

Kris Millegan, Parascope, The Order of Skull and Bones

Steven Bonta, The New American, The Power Elite & George W. 7/17/2000

The Bush's and the Nazis
The Third Reich.

Wasserman and Fitrakis, Rense.com, Sen Byrd, Media Begin To Cover Bush-Hitler Connection

Article showing Skull and Bones members, E. R. Harriman,
and Prescott S. Bush(The President's Grandfather.) tied to Hitler's funding and Banking. The Bush-Nazi Connection The Zanesville Signal, Zanesville, Oh Thursday, July 31, 1941

They sell everything in America. I recall the many patriotic displays of flags, buttons, and sweats in parking lots, supermarkets, and doughnut shops - all for sale, day and night, right after 9/11. Many claimed to be at reduced prices or even offered at two-for-one in especially touching displays of national feeling.

I recognize that Kerry needs all the advertising and marketing he can get. Every niche counts for one of the most uninspiring candidates in memory, although competition for the distinction of "most uninspiring" is tight in America. The nation's political system seems capable only of advancing con men, bumblers, and paste-board cutouts anymore, although, occasionally, as in the case of the late Great Communicator, a single man combines all three identities. A network of powerful interests much like rivers and tributaries running together to form one roaring cataract sweeps away any candidate in a major party who might actually stand for something other than the imperial ethos.

God knows Kerry never has never represented much of substance. Efforts to sell him are likely wasted. Ask any professional marketer whether he or she thinks Bud Lite, even with the best marketing effort, can outsell Bud. If there's a better description of John Kerry than "Bush Lite," it eludes me.

Kerry, the boring, monotone moose of American politics, has hung up his set of Senate-fundraising cummerbunds - or at least restricted photographers access to the galas when he still hitches them up - in favor of casual plaid shirts. Well, he isn't completely consistent about the plaid shirts: it's a matter of which group he's addressing whether he wants to suggest being a regular guy or society swell. When he does wear the plaid - always immaculately pressed to make sure no one mistakes him for someone who actually works for a living - there is more than a passing nod to millionaire, perpetual candidate, Lamar Alexander, who made a hobby of running for the Republican nomination sporting custom-made red lumberjack shirts.

People in struggling or oppressed lands who dream of being able to vote freely will be distressed to learn that America squanders her national elections on such costumed silliness, but it really cannot be otherwise when candidates have almost nothing to say.

Kerry's casual shirts are probably custom-made, too, with enough of them in each of his wardrobes to provide a fresh change three times a day. After all, Kerry is a very wealthy man, coming from a privileged background and having married the fabulously-rich heiress to the Heinz Pickle and Canned Spaghetti fortune (no, she has no connection to the company, now part of a monstrous agglomerate, she just sits on mountains of cash it generated). You can see where Kerry's sympathy and understanding for the little guy might come from.

There are precedents. George Washington inherited wealth and also married a very wealthy lady, Martha Custis, probably the richest widow in the colonies. Washington was famous for his warm qualities, too. The icy, piercing stare given to anyone for so much as touching his sleeve unbidden was legendary. His private characterization of early militiamen in Massachusetts, the men who genuinely had risked everything to start the revolt against Britain that he and other aristocrats then took over, was along the lines of filthy rabble.

Now, Kerry is not built of quite the same stern stuff as the Father of His Country. Washington would never have worn a plaid shirt, but a lot has changed since his day when maybe the wealthiest one-percent of Americans could vote. Now, most Americans can vote, so you can't be standoffish and you must expose yourself to the mob if you want to become President. The wealthiest one-percent now are limited strictly to determining with their campaign contributions which candidates the rabble sees on its ballots.

But Washington did sometimes coyly draw his silk frock coat over his cummerbund for touching moments when he spoke to people who weren't fellow aristocrats: he was skilled at acts like removing his glasses as his eyes went misty addressing the men, whose poor promises for pay he would in some cases later buy up at severe discount. You wouldn't recognize his capacity for empathy with ordinary men, though, from the monstrous bill he submitted to Congress after the Revolution for everything you can imagine including the wagon trains of wine he consumed at table while the rabble often did without a decent meal.

It's true that wealthy people sometimes make inspired leaders - F.D.R. comes to mind as does the greatest prince in Europe's history, Elizabeth I - but such people give strong signs of their remarkable talents long before they've reached Kerry's age. You don't hide your light until the near approach of senility. More often than not, you get Bushes or Rockefellers from the likes of Kerry, people with no more motivation for serving than capping their family's list of achievements with the nation's highest office.

Kerry rarely speaks of working people or the poor, rather he speaks of "the middle class," feel-good language adopted by contemporary politicians to cover just about everyone in the country down to McDonald's employees with more than one-month's service. You are not supposed to speak of class differences in America. Everyone there is middle-class, unless extremely wealthy like Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney or Mr. Rumsfeld, something not to be mentioned, or so poor as not to be worth mentioning. Economically-marginal Americans like to be called "middle class," just as they like to brag about their kids "going to college," even when the kids are working towards a degree in playground supervision or fast-food management in one of America's countless sleazy, for-profit diploma mills.

Mr. Kerry, of course, didn't attend a diploma mill. Only the best for him, the Yale of George and Daddy Bush. Incidentally, Bush's graduating Yale is often advanced as an argument for his actual intelligence being higher than the public's perception. But those old schools just love accepting the sons and daughters of rich patrons, and they manage to graduate them virtually always. You don't build fat institutional endowments by flunking guys like Georgie Bush. Even Oxford and Cambridge in England follow the practice, accepting and graduating some of the most mediocre members of the Royal Family.

America's love affair with everyone's being middle class nicely serves the establishment's belligerent foreign policy. It just doesn't count for much when you kill peasants somewhere on the periphery of the empire, it's a bit like stepping on ants while doing your gardening, and Kerry knows, firsthand, about killing peasants. He and his merry band of men buzzed up and down the rivers of Vietnam in a boat shooting people too poor and ignorant to understand the great blessings of liberty being offered them.

That experience may equip Kerry to handle the revolt of Iraqi peasants against American occupation. After all, in Vietnam they didn't bother with stripping prisoners naked and smearing excrement on them. That was a war for real men. They took prisoners up in helicopters and threw them out from several thousand feet if they didn't give the right response, and frequently even when they did give the right response. It just made for one less gook (the affectionate nickname American troops bestowed on the locals). When America's good old boys tired of such vicious games, they just napalmed whole villages instead of bothering to find out what should or should not be attacked. That's how you build a "body count" of about three million.

Kerry's statements on foreign policy indicate, as they are intended to do, that he is ready and willing to kill and maim for whatever are America's interests of the moment abroad. Of course, he doesn't say just those words, but what he does say carries those implications. Never mind any emphasis on diplomacy, international institutions, or cooperation - that's all sissy stuff. On the issue of Israel's bloody occupation of the Palestinians, a dreary, deadening reality at the heart of much of America's current trouble in the world, Kerry sounds even more fanatical than Bush.

Of course, the one comforting thought about an idiotic slogan like "These colors don't run," is that it is so plainly false. The colors ran like a cheap dye in Vietnam and Cambodia, leaving a trail of death, disillusionment, and broken promises. And the colors ran again in Somolia where an arrogant people busied themselves more with trying to shoot-up the bad guys than they did with feeding desperate people.

A stark summary of what actually has occurred over the last few years highlights the slogan's goonish nature. The only attack on America was by nineteen fanatics with virtually no weapons who all died. It is positively inspiring that Old Glory, imperial symbol of the world's mightiest country, didn't run on such a challenging field of battle. Old Glory also withstood the heroic assault and occupation of two pathetically-poor countries whose combined capacity for defense was roughly comparable to the state of Missouri.

How could you lose with cruise missiles, stealth bombers, high-tech fragmentation bombs, the poison of depleted uranium, plus all the money and means imaginable to bribe officials and reward disloyalty? It was indeed a shining achievement, and if you recall John Kerry's voice standing against any of it, you heard something the world missed.

The examples are countless of headstrong people like Americans learning hard lessons only by banging their heads into walls. A second dose of Bush's truly destructive leadership will likely do more for America's ailments than taking a placebo like John Kerry.

In a long and sourced article, COUP D'ETAT (6/08/04), Michael Ruppert argues that the overthrow of Bush is part of a covert CIA action, in retaliation for the insults to the agency and for the outing of Valerie Plame.

The vindictive outing of Plame may be even bigger news than the corporate press have led us to believe. According to Ruppert, it seems likely that Plame was not just an undercover agent, but an NOC (Non-Official Cover). These are established proprietary companies that operate over years and decades, insinuating themselves in business and political affairs. Plame was part of the NOC Brewster, Jennings & Associates. This is an energy (oil) related company tied into ARAMCO - the Saudi owned Arabian American Oil Company. Brewster Jennings had founded Mobil Oil which was a prnciple founder of ARAMCO. Therefore, when the Bush regime decided to strike back at Joe Wilson through his wife Valerie Plame, they took out Brewster Jennings & Associates at the same time. A major loss on both counts, especially given world events.

Is the CIA after the Bush cabal? I don't know, bur Ruppert makes a convincing argument. Certainly, they have a lot of experience in the techniques of undermining and overthrowing governments. One has to wonder if Bush Sr. has spoken to his son about what he's doing, and what may be afoot. Afterall, He was the head of the CIA for a while and is certainly aware of how these things operate. He would be in a better position than most to know about a major NOC. Perhaps that is why Bush doesn't consult his father - such reality would intrude in the Shrub's land of make believe and only hearing what he wants to hear.

The Ruppert article leaves me with a burning question - who is being positioned to assume the leadership of the country? In my understanding of the previous coups with CIA involvement, not only is the existing government brought down, but a new one is put in its place.

If you take the time to read through (or even scan) the Pentagon report, it is clear that every pertinent international and domestic law banning torture is argued around. Likewise, the legal opinion from the Department of Justice legitimates use of torture (Wa. Post, 6/08/04) in 2002.

Aside: There is a great review of "State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism" by Tracy Mclellan discussing the history of terrorism and torture by the US

Attacks are now zeroing in from different sides to get the truth out. On the public front, we have the Center for Constitutional Rights filing suit against the private contractors involved in the torture at Abu Ghraib. Ron Daniels of CCR was interviewed by David Brancaccio on the 6/11/04 edition of NOW. In the interview, Daniels raises the lager issue of the power of the executive branch:

The second piece is related to the first "Economic Pressure." It looks at the economic impact of the ongoing high cost of oil. Peter Beutel (President of Cameron Hanover) believes that we will see "inflationary creep followed by a fed reaction folowed I am almost certain by a recession."

The final clip relates to the new attack on environmentalists as "terrorists." The clip is called "A Question of Civil Rights." Artist Arthur Robbins was "fingered" by a woman as hanging an illegal art work at the NY Met. At 11:00 at night, Detectives from the NY Anti-terrorism Task Force showed up to interrogate. He captured the interrogation on videotape.

I see Ron Reagan's statement as a reflection of the deep concerns that are coming from conservatives about the neo-conservative leadership now in power. Certainly among those concerns is the clear evangelical (and perhaps apocalyptic) christianity that is constantly brought to the fore. For all that Bush has styled himself as carrying forward the "Reagan Revolution," he has carried it in a very different direction than I think even Reagan envisioned.

Thanks to Ron Reagan Jr. for making such a clear statement.

I must say that watching the final funeral services gave me an appreciation for Ronald Reagan the man. I am happy that is so because I had a deep dislike for Reagan the President.

Below is the full text of Ronald Reagan Jr.'s remarks:
Available from the Associated Press

Text of remarks by Ron Reagan Jr. at Friday's burial service for former President Reagan, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks Inc.:

RON REAGAN JR.: He is home now. He is free. In his final letter to the American people, Dad wrote, "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life." This evening, he has arrived.

History will record his worth as a leader. We here have long since measured his worth as a man. Honest, compassionate, graceful, brave. He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet.

He used to say, "A gentleman always does the kind thing." And he was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. A gentle man.

Big as he was, he never tried to make anyone feel small. Powerful as he became, he never took advantage of those who were weaker. Strength, he believed, was never more admirable than when it was applied with restraint. Shopkeeper, doorman, king or queen, it made no difference, Dad treated everyone with the same unfailing courtesy. Acknowledging the innate dignity in us all.

The idea that all people are created equal was more than mere words on a page, it was how he lived his life. And he lived a good, long life. The kind of life good men lead. But I guess I'm just telling you things you already know.

Here's something you may not know, a little Ronald Reagan trivia for you, his entire life, Dad had an inordinate fondness for earlobes. Even as a boy, back in Dixon, Ill., hanging out on a street corner with his friends, they knew that if they were standing next to Dutch, sooner or later, he was going to reach over and grab hold of their lobe, give it a workout there. Sitting on his lap watching TV as a kid, same story. He would have hold of my ear lobe. I'm surprised I have any lobes left after all of that.

And you didn't have to be a kid to enjoy that sort of treatment. Serving in the Screen Actors Guild with his great friend William Holden, the actor, best man at his wedding, Bill got used to it. They would be there at the meetings, and Dad would have hold of his earlobe. There they'd be, some tense labor negotiation, two big Hollywood movie stars, hand in earlobe.

He was, as you know, a famously optimistic man. Sometimes such optimism leads you to see the world as you wish it were as opposed to how it really is. At a certain point in his presidency, Dad decided he was going to revive the thumbs-up gesture. So he went all over the country, of course, giving everybody the thumbs up.

Doria (Ron Reagan Jr.'s wife) and I found ourselves in the presidential limousine one day returning from some big event. My mother was there and Dad was, of course, thumbs-upping the crowd along the way, and suddenly, looming in the window on his side of the car, was this snarling face. This fellow was reviving an entirely different hand gesture. And hoisted an entirely different digit in our direction. Dad saw this and without missing a beat turned to us and said, "You see? I think it's catching on."

Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.

Humble as he was, he never would have assumed a free pass to heaven. But in his heart of hearts, I suspect he felt he would be welcome there. And so he is home. He is free.

Those of us who knew him well will have no trouble imagining his paradise. Golden fields will spread beneath a blue dome of a western sky. Live oaks will shadow the rolling hillsides. And someplace, flowing from years long past, a river will wind toward the sea. Across those fields, he will ride a gray mare he calls Nancy D. They will sail over jumps he has built with his own hands. He will, at the river, carry him over the shining stones. He will rest in the shade of the trees.

Our cares are no longer his. We meet him now only in memory. But we will join him soon enough. All of us. When we are home. When we are free.

It came to me like a punch in the stomach that these two were too close together to not have an association. I thought that I would take a few moments to look them up, and Merriam Webster's says:

em·pire Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Old French empire, empirie, from Latin imperium absolute authority, empire, from imperare 1 a (1) : a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority; especially : one having an emperor as chief of state (2) : the territory of such a political unit b : something resembling a political empire; especially : an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control 2 : imperial sovereignty, rule, or dominion

and for empirical:

em·pir·i·cal
Variant(s): also em·pir·ic /-ik/ Function: adjective
1 : originating in or based on observation or experience
2 : relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory
3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment
4 : of or relating to empiricism

and just for good measure,

im·pe·ri·ous Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin imperiosus, from imperium
1 a : befitting or characteristic of one of eminent rank or attainments : COMMANDING, DOMINANT b : marked by arrogant assurance : DOMINEERING
2 : intensely compelling : URGENT
synonym see MASTERFUL

There is the hegemony (another one of my favorite words) of an empire - such as the United States - who by force of arms and economy dominates those it views as competitors or resources. But the true hegemony is the simultaneous spread of a rule of mind as well as a rule of force. Or to put it another way, the imposition of a cultural world view and order, backed up by the restructuring of the physical, social, and economic domains within the construct of that world view.

Empirical data is similar in a variety of ways. There is the assumption that fact exists outside of interpretation or context (just as "the market" has an empirical existence). Empirical data is by definition atheoretical, but almost any sociologist or philosopher would question the hubris of such a sweeping assumption. The impirical nature of empirical data is that data, and observation, and reality exist in the same aspect to ANY observer. The observer, may then take those observations an apply a theoretical (or cultural or personal) framework to derive an understanding (or meaning) from the observed.

But this is rarely what happens in daily life. In the hegemonic cultural perspective of the US dominant society, data exists of its own and means the same thing to all. Statements such as "Just give me the facts;" or "The facts speak for themselves;" are ubiquitous.

But "facts" mean little outside of context (or theory or interpretation). In fact, facts can mean almost anything, and data can prove almost anything. For example, if I say there has been a 300% increase in the birth of mutated flies, the immediate assumption is that there may be something big going on. While that may be true, if the previous data showed that there were ten mutated flies, and the most recent observations show that there are 300 of them, it might change the way we understand the empirical data.

The imposition of empirical data is an ordinary feature of the social sciences. Empirical data supports or does not support hypotheses derived from theories. Empirical data test the explanatory strength of theory. In the "real world" facts and theory are interwoven indistinguishably. In the "real world" theory drives observation and what is deemed to be observable, and theory drives what we look at.

So to bring these two back together, we have empire or the domination of one nation over other nations and people. This inevitably means the cultural domination as well as the remolding of societies to fit (or support) those of the empire. On the other hand, we have the imposition of empirical data (and the independent existence thereof) as proof of an assertion. Empires (including the US) is habitually renaming and redefining the world (and the language). So called "empirical data" occurs within this field of construction. If one's interpretation of the "facts" does not fit the empire's interpretation then you are wrong, or you are "spinning" the data, or you are unpatriotic (or anti-American or a terrorist).

The imperiousness of both empire and empirical data is clear to "scientists" who operate under the auspices of one and the demand for the other. But everyone runs into this problem when they engage in dialogue (or argument) with the "true believers" (and I don't mean this in a religious sense). No fact is fact unless it fits within the construct they hold.

Bush and company exemplify this in the extreme. For them, the only thing that exists is their reality. They are being bothered by the horseflies of "misinterpretation" of the "facts" by those who don't share that particular construct.

But our President knows how to make a deal as he negotiates with the G8 and negotiated with the UN Security Council. In the G8 deal, the US has agreed to support some debt relief for 41 high debt nations in exchange for G8 relief of much of Iraq's outstanding pre-invasion debt, and support in the rebuilding of Iraq.

Likewise with the UN Security Council, the US had to give Iraq more sovereignty than it wanted, to get UN support in Iraq. In reading the draft agreement, current issues and policies raise questions.

For example, the resolution states it is "Reaffirming also the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own natural resources.." And then multiple times throughout the document states they will set up a pluralistic democracy that protects human rights. So, they can determine their own political future as long as it meets the vision outlined in the draft. The previous quote also raises questions about exactly what resources Iraq will get to control. When the US took over, they privatized oil and water supplies, along with electric production and distribution.

The resolution also states that the interim government will not make any binding decisions that last beyond its planned tenure, but the new government and the US decreed that Iraqi militias were outlawed and that Sadr and his top aides could not fill a political office for at least three years. That sounds like it exceeds the period to the planned December elections to me.

And what about those militias? The US is recruiting militias as security forces. Is it only those who refuse to join up with the US occupation forces that are "outlawed?"

But ... the agreement has some major problems , and the Kurds are threatening to back out of the deal.

I'm not sure what has been clarified with the UN resolution, nor with the surety of the wheeling and dealing at the G8. What does seem certain is that there is not likely to be a smoothe transition July 1 nor in December, and that Iraq's sovereignty may be much more limited than it is being advertised.

An aside ... There are those who are saying that there is no such thing as partial sovereignty. Therefore, Iraq is either sovereign or it is not. While that may be true, there are numerous examples of partial sovereignty and the US is quite familiar with them. That is what the recognized tribes in the US have been dealing with for ages.

Articles & Sources
Friendship, His Way - Bush Sets the Terms in Forming Relationships With World Leaders Wa. Post, 6/08/04 Kessler

Relieve the burden Leader, Guardian, 6/08/04

Bush backs UK plan for debt relief Ellitott et al, Guardian, 6/08/04

Decree Outlaws Iraqi Militias In Effort to Bolster Security
Shiite Cleric, Aides Barred From Public Office for 3 Years Cody, Wa. Post, 6/08/04

Agreement 'reached' on Iraq draft BBC 6/08/04

UN Security Council 6/07/04 - Romania, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and United States of America: draft resolution

You might think the men who resigned, Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Parvitt, should have been fired long ago. Never mind the nonexistent weapons in Iraq or phony invoices for uranium, the Agency's failure around the events leading to 9/11 was stunning, but the intelligence business is one of the few where job performance is almost unconnected with keeping your job.

There are many examples, but the incredibly bizarre career of James Angleton, CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence during the 1960s and into the 1970s, is perhaps the most striking. The activities of Angleton, a man certainly suffering from paranoid delusions, came close to destroying the Agency in the 1960s, but his career didn't end until William Colby became Director and forced Angleton to resign in 1974. Even then, he was kept on as a consultant, in the typical generosity of an organization with unlimited funds and afraid of revelations by an extremely angry, sick old man.

The disconnect between performance and job in Big Intelligence exists for many reasons, but four key ones are the fear of discrediting or embarrassing the Agency at a time of difficulty, the organizational difficulty of holding particular individuals responsible for bad intelligence, the chummy, old-boy atmosphere that invariably pervades such a vast and privileged bureaucracy, and unavoidably-political nature of all work by Big Intelligence.

These points have been demonstrated many times. The CIA does not appear to have paid a price for its monstrous failings before and after President Kennedy's assassination (which included no anticipation of an event intimately related to its activities in Cuba and, afterward, acts like Angleton's destroying important evidence), nor does it appear to have paid for decades of wildly-inaccurate assessments of the Soviet Union's capacities. Since raw intelligence from many sources is digested and filtered through an elaborate bureaucracy, the second point is virtually axiomatic for Big Intelligence. Kim Philby's amazing career with Britain's SIS may be the greatest-ever example of the third point.

John Kerry's reaction to the resignations provides a perfect example of the political trash dumped time and again at the Agency's doorstep, "We must reshape our intelligence community for the 21st century and create a new position of 'director of national intelligence' with real control of all intelligence personnel and budget." What do you do with a cheap, gas-bag slogan like that?

I guess Kerry missed the fact that his suggestion closely fits the job description given the Director when President Truman created the CIA half a century ago. Kerry also seems unaware that the CIA has been reshaped and adjusted time after time in its brief history - after the nightmare revelations of the Church Committee, after James Angleton's reign of terror in counterintelligence, and after Reagan's election - to little meaningful or lasting effect. It remains the world's largest bureaucracy for the production of costly flops.

The ancient Greeks gave us many timeless legends and warnings, but the myth of Cassandra, who received both the gift of telling the truth and the curse of not being believed, fixes for all time a fundamental relationship in human affairs.

Governments always feel an irresistible impulse to obtain intelligence. You might call it the God Impulse, wanting to know everything that's going to affect you, yet governments are condemned by their nature not to want to hear truth on many subjects. That applies just as much to democracies as dictatorships. Government policies are shaped by attitudes, preconceptions, and wishes. When these confront disagreeable facts, the preconceptions generally prevail.

There is also an inherent conflict between the idea of an agency charged with providing facts and the needs of a government which more often than not involve actively hiding or manipulating facts for political goals.

But Big Intelligence is not exactly comparable to Cassandra. It has not been blessed with always knowing the truth, so that after spending frightful amounts of money, it often works feverishly to hide its ignorance and protect its image of godlike knowledge. The cloak of secrecy is used to protect Big Intelligence from embarrassment as much as it is used to protect genuine information.

Big Intelligence shares the same preconceptions as the politicians it serves. After all, its leaders are appointed from a pool of people friendly to a government's intentions. You do not get people like Ralph Nader appointed to high posts in the CIA. No, you get people like Daddy Bush, always.

If you want a whiff of the unavoidably bureaucratic and political nature of Big Intelligence, go find some of the op-ed pieces written by Robert M. Gates who served as Director from 1991 to 1993. The good old New York Times often published his puff pieces. Gates was a career CIA bureaucrat, I believe the only one ever given the top job. His pieces, bromides expressed in oily institutional prose, are not worth reading except for the sense they convey of a decades-long career of throbbingly-dull, inconclusive reports.

Later, John M. Deutch, an extraordinarily arrogant, plodding academic served as Director. He should have faced trial for taking top-grade secret material home and storing it on a personal computer later shown to have accessed many pornographic Internet sites. Some national security.

On the other end of the scale of Directors, there was a violence-prone thug like William Casey, 1981 to 1987, a throwback to the days of "Wild" Bill Donavon who ran the OSS, World War II forerunner of the CIA. Casey was a good chum of the late Great Communicator and relished the dirty-tricks part of Big Intelligence. He utterly failed in the CIA's great tasks, from understanding revolutionary developments then occurring in the Soviet Union to knowing enough about the Middle East to prevent Reagan's disastrous, embarrassing landing and blowing-up of Marines in Lebanon.

Intelligence agencies do succeed at certain kinds of tasks, but they are not necessarily tasks sensible people want done in a free society. The KGB was very effective at keeping the population of Soviet Union watched and intimidated. The FBI in the United States was pretty effective at the same task. Many members of the American government, in both legislative and executive branches, for decades lived in dread of revelations from the special files Director Hoover kept on them. As a part of its defensive arsenal against Hoover, officials at the CIA - the Agency and the FBI fought like wild dogs over every scrap of bone - are reported to have kept salacious items like a Peeping Tom photograph of Mr. Hoover having oral sex with his assistant Clyde Tolson.

The CIA has at times been successful at overthrowing, or contributing to the overthrow of, governments America doesn't like, even when they were elected, although it often fails here, too, the most notable example being its years of costly, stupid effort to overthrow Castro. The Agency also pays selected politicians, leaders, and parties all over the world both to assist them and compromise them should it become necessary later to apply pressure. The new Prime Minister of Iraq's so-called independent government is one of these CIA creatures.

Many of the CIA's most costly operations appear successful when viewed superficially. Its operation in Afghanistan during the 1980s, where it spent billions to help drive out the Soviets, is a good example. Eventually, the Soviets left and were embarrassed by their failure, but if you examine the operation over a longer time-horizon, you see that it was in fact a catastrophic failure.

The truth is, so long as the Soviets held sway in Afghanistan, no one had to worry about terror or instability from the region. The CIA's "success" gave birth to those very things. With no strategic foresight, the CIA was not greatly concerned about such matters - instead, it was concerned with staging a set of gigantic, deadly frat-boy pranks to embarrass and damage the Soviets. The horrible excesses of the Taleban (the British spelling for those ready to e-mail a correction) owe much to the CIA's "success." The Soviets, for all their flaws, always promoted secular government and practices such as women being educated as professionals, and they did this in Afghanistan. Their efforts were swept away by the terrible governments the CIA's "success" gave the country.

Not only was the Soviet Union already beginning to unravel during those years - again, momentous developments of which the CIA as an institution remained ignorant - but the training, money, arms, and incitement the CIA contributed to Afghan rebels virtually created the groups associated with 9/11. The CIA's practice of bringing shadowy characters back and forth by the hundreds to the United States on visas American embassies were forced to issue without examination unquestionably helps explain how nineteen suicide-bombers entered the country on legitimate visas. The shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles the CIA supplied wild mountain men to shoot down Soviet helicopters found their way later to various places for attacks on civilian airliners. How's that for a return on your tax dollar?

Most Americans have little idea how much money is wasted on Big Intelligence. The budgets are, of course, top secret, but, before 9/11, it was a common estimate that the CIA went through $30 billion a year. Of course, the U.S. also maintains an even more-secret, technical outfit called the NSA, various branches of military intelligence (pardon the oxymoron), intelligence sections in the State Department, the FBI (now spreading its tentacles around the globe with offices being established abroad - oh, wouldn't J. Edgar be happy! He and Clyde might have done weekends in London or Paris), and other lesser-known agencies. After 9/11, we can be sure that the dinner plates of all these agencies were so heaped with extra ladles of gravy, they slopped trails on their way back to the table.

For what America wastes on Big Intelligence, every beat-up classroom in the nation could be re-equipped or replaced over a few years. Were that ever to happen, the world might be blessed by a generation of Americans whose international behavior displayed a notable increase in genuine, effective intelligence.

It started with the pushing and passage of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act which abridged or abolished constitutional and civil protections for both citizens and non-citizens. It followed with plans to avoid international law regarding prisoners, and deals to protect US military and officials from war crimes and human rights violations charges.

In the June 7, 2004 SF Chronicle, there is an on article John Yoo's influence in framing the legality of skirting international law in relationship to prisoners from conflicts. Yoo was one of of the Administration's top legal experts and produced the argument put in place by the Administration that prisoners held at Guantanamo are not legally prisoners of war. Therefore they are not protected under the Geneva Conventions. As the article notes:

Bush's decision one month later to suspend the conventions at Guantanamo was intended to give interrogators greater freedom to use tough methods with suspects. U.S. officials argued that granting normal prisoner-of-war status would allow detainees to retain information on possible future terrorist attacks against the United States.

Likewise in the 6/7 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin writes that the President bound by the laws prohibiting the use of torture. The article is written based upon the release of a classified draft which states:

The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

So here we have it. We are courts martialing low rank individuals while "investigations" are showing that the policy was torture and abuse - not just at Abu Ghraib, but for anyone swept up in the "war on terrorism."

There are glaring examples (despite protestations to the reverse) that abuse and torture is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure). In an incident that has drawn remarkably little comment, Specialist Sean Baker (stationed at Guantanamo) was beaten so severely in a secret training sequence that he is suffering long term - if not permanent - neurological damage (Kristoff, 6/05/04). Specialist Baker was to pose as a prisoner and refuse to come out from under his bed. MPs (not knowing Baker's identity) were sent in to bring him out. He was manhandled and his head repeatedly smashed into the floor of the cell. Baker, gave the code word which should have stopped the exercise, but it was either not heard, not known, or disregarded. The beating stopped when the soldiers realized that Baker was wearing fatigues under his orange jump suit. ["Hey man, sorry."]

Personnel from Guantanamo were sent to Abu Ghraib to implement Guantanamo procedures. Major General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to take over interrogations in Abu Ghraib, and has been reassigned now to be in charge of the entire facility.

Given the information and actions that are all too well known at this point, it is clear that we are looking at an "anything goes" POLICY that initiated in the White House and has set the rules for the entire "war on terrorism." The Administration cleared the way and approved the abuses and violations carte blanche. There is no pattern to discover. There is no further "evidence" and "investigation" needed into the climate and responsibility inside Abu Ghraib. The investigation needs to be how this policy was implemented within the military, intelligence, and criminal justice systems.

Bush may well have been "shocked and sickened" by the pictures out of Iraq. He may well believe that this doesn't reflect "American values." But by what ever gods there are, he is certainly responsible for the policy he put in place that sanctioned everything that has happened - including torture and murder at Abu Ghraib.

This is certainly not the only horror story of the black market in human organs. In China (and I'm sure elsewhere), poor people sell their organs (a kidney, an eye, etc.) for a pittance in order to feed their families. Now in Afghanistan we have this travesty of humanity.

One can understand the desperation on the part of starving people to sacrifice parts of themselves. It is more difficult to understand how little one must think of others to kill them and take those organs. What is driving this?

Well, the desire to live longer with the economic resources to back it up would be the short answer. We are creating a world where apparently people feel OK about living on the suffering (and lives) of others. We see that in broad scale with a global economy provides cheap goods steeped in the blood and misery of others, and the indiscriminant destruction of the environment. It feels a bit different though when a society is structured towards that end, and an individual paying for the death of another so they can have a kidney. At root, it isn't so different. They are driven by, and justified by the same forces and beliefs. Some people are worth more than others. Those worth more have a right to take what they want.

In the US, the majority is happy to turn a blind eye to the death and destruction it takes to live the way we do. When the issue comes up, those who benefit most are happy to tell us that it is someone else's fault. "We pay so little because we don't want to upset the economy over there." "A dollar goes a lot farther in X than it does in the US, so you can't compare." "Children are traditionally used as labor in X and we are being culturally sensitive in not challenging their customs."

On the other hand, there is a clear understanding that US interests in the Middle East are about oil. We have known for decades that energy (oil) dependence held the US hostage. So what happens? Oil consumption goes up. The SUV becomes the most popular vehicle on the road. A few thousand people die in Iraq, a few tens of thousands have their lives degraded and shortened, but the oil flows. It is so much easier to accept the line that we are "freeing" the Iraqi people, then what is actually happening.

All comfortable lies for a society.

But what kind of lies can the patient in Pakistan tell themselves as they receive a kidney from a murdered child? Perhaps that the child "died for a good cause." Or that they (the child) probably would have died in a few years anyway (from the social and economic conditions in Afghanistan)." Or maybe "They gave up their life so I can continue to be successful." Maybe those are comfortable lies as well.

Perhaps, what makes humans truly different from other species is the ability to deceive ourselves with comfortable lies. Other species tell the truth, they live the truth. Self (and other) deception is not in their makeup. What a trait to drive humanity to the top of the food chain - not opposable thumbs, not speech, and not bigger brains, but the ability to lie to ourselves and others.

While people may (foolishly) argue over human impact on the environment, there is no doubt that we have created these bugs. We have created them through the widespread use of antibiotics, and more recently antibacterial products. The public has largely been blamed for the creation because patients "demand" unnecessary prescriptions of antibiotics. Certainly the over use of antibiotics is a part of the problem. However, it is top on the list because the wide use of antibiotics on the food supply is being kept behind curtain one.

Yes, agricultural practices are directly linked to antibiotic resistance. It is unknown how much of the antibiotic use in the US is tied to agriculture, but it is at least 50%. Some estimates are over 70%. Antibiotics are also liberally used on crops under the theory that it enhances their growth. But a new culprit is now linked - GM crops. In fact, if you do a search on antibiotics food supply it is difficult to get past the GM links.

Why would antibiotic resistance be linked to genetically modified crops? Because the telling marker of a transgenic "success" is antibiotic resistant markers. So with all the problems that many of us have with GM crops and animals, here is another one.

But humans are implicated in yet another way in the antibiotic resistant microbe evolution - the use of antibacterial products. The original cases of MRSA came out of the hospitals. This was not surprising, because of the heavy use of antibacterial cleaning supplies in hospitals. A resistance to such products began to appear, and stronger antibacterials were created which created stronger variations of the "bugs." But antibacterials have found widespread usage outside the hospital environment - in our homes and work areas. We have antibacterial soaps, scrubs and cleaning products. Not to mention antibacterial air (treatments.) The use of these products are certainly implicated in both creating superbugs and decreasing natural resistance to them. Antibacterial soaps may be particularly suspect in that they are used directly on the skin and kill healthy as well as dangerous bacteria. In doing so, they allow the proliferation of resistant staph bacteria which can possibly "colonize" the individual.

In my opinion, the overuse of antibacterials - particularly by individuals plays upon a socialized fear of "germs." Children are socialized from early on about "germs" - invisible monsters who will "get" you. Parents are cautioned about clean environments and keeping their children safe. The marketing world tells us all that "The only good bug is a dead bug." And in my opinion, this war on germs (and bugs) is directly tied to a socialized idea that "Cleanliness is next to godliness." Advertisers just extend the idea.

So there you have it. WE are creating the superbugs that are likely to explode upon the world. No ifs, and, or buts about it. The evidence is clear. The evidence is unequivocal. But, we are still allowing the advertising and sale of antibacterial products. We are still putting massive amounts of antibiotics into the food supply (though there are efforts to decrease this). Doctors have made prescriptions for antibiotics more restrictive. We are still allowing GM crops and products to be developed and released in the environment (in fact we are loosening regulations, and strong arming for global use). They are trying to develop a new family of antibiotics restricted from agricultural use. So weighing all of this, we are probably speeding up the mutation of these bugs rather than slowing them down.

For More Information
CDC MRSA Fact Sheet

CDC VISA/VRSA Fact Sheet

FDA Antibiotic Resistance Fact Sheet

The Problem of Antibiotic Resistance

WHO - Overcoming Antimicrobial Resistance

CDC - Antibacterial Household Products: Cause for Concern

NPR Special Report: How Safe is the Food Supply?

Antimicrobial Use in Food Animals (Microbe World)

Genetic engineering causing increased antibiotic resistance.

The Use of Antibiotic Resistance Markers to Develop Biotech Crops

The use of antibiotic resistance markers in the development of transgenic crops has raised concerns about whether transgenic crops will transfer their antibiotic resistance genes to soil micro-organisms, thus causing a general increase in the level of antibiotic resistance in the environment.

According to a newly released GAO report - Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses (May 2004), there are 199 current datamining efforts on the books with 131 that are already in use (Government data-mining lives on, Cnet, 6/01/04).

One such massive datamining project was awarded to Accenture (see UTJ article Accenture. Doesn't That Name Sound Familiar?) who received a $10 Billion contract for border security. This contract is supposed to extend to all land-based entries into the US. Accenture is using twenty-nine subcontractors and they include AT&T, KBR, and Dell Computer (Cnet article).

So there is copious amounts of data being gathered. The Colorado facility will hold hold the equivalent of 10 terabytes of data every day (NSA's new Colorado data warehouse: a Library of Congress per day, UnderReported, 6/03/04). I do have to question the completeness of the GAO Reports listing of data mining programs as it totally misses both the renowned CAPPS II system and MATRIX. The CAPPS program for tracking airline passengers is not even mentioned. The MATRIX system is discussed, but not included in their listing of projects. Their description of MATRIX is:

One example of a large-scale development effort launched in the wake of the September 11 attacks is the Multistate Anti-terrorism Information Exchange System, known as MATRIX. MATRIX, currently used in five states, (Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) provides the capability to store, analyze, and exchange sensitive terrorism-related and other criminal intelligence data among agencies within a state, among states, and between state and federal agencies. Information in MATRIX databases includes criminal history records, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, incarceration records, and digitized photographs. Public awareness of MATRIX and of similar large-scale data mining or data mining-like projects has led to concerns about the government's use of data mining to conduct a mass "dataveillance" - a surveillance of large groups of people -to sift through vast amounts of personally identifying data to find individuals who might fit a terrorist profile.

There are certainly some drawbacks to living in the information age. With the amount of data being collected by various government agencies, one must wonder how big the Colorado facility is, and at the computer equipment necessary to even store such data - much less access it. My mind boggles, but it would seem that at least one supercomputer would be required (and probably more than one in fairly short order). It wasn't mentioned whether supercomputers were on the NSA's shopping list. As a researcher, I have to wonder how anyone would ever make sense of that amount of data. As a researcher, I also know that with that many bits and pieces of people's lives virtually any scenario can be made plausible.

I have include a selective listing of programs from the GAO report below. All descriptions are direct quotes.

From the Defense Intelligence Agency:
Insight Smart Discovery: Will be a data mining knowledge discovery tool to work against unstructured text. Will categorize nouns (names, locations, events) and present information in images. (planned)

Verity K2 Enterprise: Mines data from the intelligence community and Internet searches to identify foreign terrorists or U.S. citizens connected to foreign terrorism activities. (operating)

PATHFINDER: Is a data mining tool developed for analysts that provides the ability to analyze government and private sector databases rapidly. It can compare and search multiple large databases quickly. (operating)

Autonomy: Is a large search engine tool that is used to search hundreds of thousands of word documents. Is used for the organization and knowledge discovery of intelligence. (operating)

Airforce
Integrated Space Warfare Center (SWC) Information System:Will be an internal database containing information on all development/execution activities within the SWC. Will be used by all management and analyst personnel to track and align the center's activities to warfighter needs, report on execution status, financial status, schedule status, and performance measurements. (planned)

Genomic and Proteomic Results Analysis: Analyzes National Institutes of Health's genetic data. (operational)

Computer Network Defense System: Evaluates network activities to create rules for intrusion detection system signature sets. ((operating)

Modus Operandi Database: Is an investigative tool used to identify and track trends in criminal behavior. It links characteristics of crimes and provides details on crime scenes and other crime factors. (operating)

Department of Education
Citizenship of PLUS Loan Borrowers' National Student Loan Data Systems: Looks for issues regarding citizenship among its PLUS loan borrowers. Flags records based on selected criteria and requests additional information from schools. (operating)

Foreign Schools Initiatives National Student Loan Data System/Central Processing: Is a proactive investigation effort that looks at whether financial aid was granted individuals attending foreign institutions during periods of nonenrollment. (operating)

Title IV Applicant - Death Database Match: Compares Department of Education data with the Social Security Administration's death database to detect fraud or criminal activity. (operating)

OIG Project Strikeback: Compares Department of Education and Federal Bureau of Investigation data for anomalies. Also verifies personal identifiers. (operating)

CheckFree Software/Purchase Card Program: Takes monthly billing information from the Bank of America to create reports on purchases, purchase quantity, and frequency of purchases. Data are mined for instances of fraud or abuse. (operating and links to private sector data)

Grant Administration and Payment System: Assists in managing grant activities and aids in detecting instances of fraud or abuse in grant activities. (operating and links to private sector data)

Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Projects: Tumbleweed/ Snowball: Is part of an OIG investigation to determine potential fraud of financial aid grants primarily in New Hampshire. (operational)

DoE
Counterintelligence Automated Investigative Management System (CI-AIMS): Is an investigative management system used by Department of Energy (DOE) field sites to track investigative cases on individuals or countries that threaten DOE assets. Information stored in this database is also used to support federal and state law enforcement agencies in support of national security. (operational)

Autonomy: Will be used to mine a myriad intelligence-related databases within the intelligence community to uncover criminal or terrorist activities relating to DOE assets. (planned)

Counterintelligence Analytical Research Data System (CARDS): Is used to log briefings and debriefings given to DOE employees who travel to foreign countries or interact with foreign visitors to DOE facilities. Data are mined to identify potential threats to DOE assets. (operational)

Center for Disease Control
BioSense: Enhances the nation's capability to rapidly detect bioterrorism events. (operational)

Border and Transportaion Security Directorate
Incident Data Mart: Will look through incident logs for patterns of events. An incident is an event involving a law enforcement or government agency for which a log was created (e.g., traffic ticket, drug arrest, or firearm possession). The system may look at crimes in a particular geographic location, particular types of arrests, or any type of unusual activity. (planned - uses private sector data)

Case Management Data Mart: Assists in managing law enforcement cases, including Customs cases. Reviews case loads, status, and relationships among cases. (operational and uses private data)

Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate
Analyst Notebook I2: Correlates events and people to specific information (operational and uses private data)

Automatic Message Handling System (Verity): Automatically takes messages from external agencies and routes them to appropriate recipients - detecting terrorist activity (planned)

Secret Service
Criminal Investigation Division Data Mining: Mines data in suspicious activity reports received from banks to find commonalities in data to assist in strategically allocating resources. (operational)

DoJ
Drug/Financial Fusion Center: Will contain data from, and be used by, Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force agencies. The system will permit the collection and cross case analysis of all drug and related financial investigative data. (planned and uses private data)

DEA
Statistical Management Analysis and Reporting Tool System (SMARTS) /SPSS:Is a query analysis and reporting tool that pulls data from many systems. It allows for statistical analyses of drug cases Drug Enforcement Administration's statistical reporting. (operational)

TOLLS: Is a database of telephone calls from court ordered and approved wiretaps and Title III investigations. Information such as telephone numbers, time and date of calls, and call duration is captured. Data are mined for patterns to give leads in investigations of drug trafficking. (operational)

FBI
Secure Collaborative Operational Prototype Environment/ Investigative Data Warehouse:Allows the FBI to search multiple data sources through one interface to uncover terrorist and criminal activities and relationships. Data sources are a combination of structured and unstructured text. (operational)

Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force Activity: Supports the Foreign Terrorist
Tracking Task Force that seeks to prevent foreign terrorists from gaining access to the United States. Data from the Department of Homeland Security, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, and public data sources are put into a data mart and mined to determine unlawful entry and to support deportations and prosecutions. (operational)

FBI Intelligence Community Data Marts: Is intended to take a subset of approved data from a data warehouse and make it available to the intelligence community.(planned)

State Department
Citibank's Ad Hoc Reporting System: Enables purchase card managers to track trends related to the usage of credit cards by employees in purchasing supplies
and services for official use. Purchase card program is worldwide, and spending patterns and purchases are monitored for potential misuse or fraud. (operational and uses private data)

IRS
Reveal: Will be used to detect financial criminal activity such as tax evasion. (planned and uses private data)

This had made the headlines, and even a special focus on "Nightline." Women military personnel are being raped by their comrades and the military doesn't follow up. In fact, many are afraid that reporting the incident will harm their service and advancement opportunities. Even when reported, the women are generally told to stay with their units. They are forced to remain part of the "team" where one of their team mates has violated them. When resolution does come, it generally means the reassignment of the female service person who was the victim - not the rapist.

It is put about that the armed services really needs to come to grips with this problem. They need to work on their policies and protocols. They need to do more training and supervision. My guess is that the problem is much deeper than this. Why do I think this? The following blurb from Army Times, Sex slaves and the U.S. military:

"At a time when the U.S. State Department and the United Nations labor to combat the international trafficking in women, the U.S. military supports a flourishing trade in sex slaves in South Korea.

Hundreds of trafficked women, mostly from former Soviet bloc countries and the Philippines, are forced by local bar owners to work as prostitutes in bars that cater to American servicemen. The women are typically lured to Korea with promises of high-paying jobs but end up being held against their will and coerced into working as prostitutes in circumstances that both the State Department and the United Nations condemn as a form of sexual slavery.

The U.S. military leadership in Korea says it is powerless to put a stop to the practice, which they claim is the responsibility of the Korean police. But the top Korean police expert on prostitution said it is unlikely Korean police will do anything to halt the trafficking because of widespread police corruption.

While U.S. troops continue to be the sex-slave racket's best customers, U.S. commanders turn a blind eye. And there's no end in sight. "

The rest of the article is for subscribers only - which I am not.

I think that the last paragraph of the blurb tells it all - "US commanders turn a blind eye." So is that what is called "lack of supervision?" When commanders know things are happening, but give implicit approval by ignoring what is going on, is that "lack of supervision?" Does the lack of training refer to commanders or troops? If the problem is endemic and clearly points to the denigration of women (in the military or not) is that a "training" issue, or is it a policy issue? At the very least it is a military "culture" issue which is not addressed by "policy," or at least the "policy" is not enforced.

Meanwhile, women serving our country are fair game the the military "turns a blind eye" to sexual slavery.

Yes comrades, it obviously pays to engage in illegal business practices, fleece the country, and make products that don't work. On 7/15/03 Accenture admitted it "might" have violated the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with its Middle East operations (NYT, 7/15). It is also close partners with one of our favorite corporate charities - Halliburton. Given that Accenture is such a good coporate citizen, I certainly think they deserve another $10 BILLION contract (not).

The Daily Misleader also has a nice blurb on this today - Bush Gives Contract to Tax Traitor/Campaign Donor.

The study, led by a Harvard Medical School researcher, found evidence of mental problems in 26.4 % of people in the United States, versus, for example, 8.2% of people in Italy. The researchers were concerned with matters such as lack of access to treatment and under-treatment, but for those concerned about a safe and decent world, I think the salient finding is simply America's high percentage. The world is being led by a nation where more than one-quarter of the people have genuine mental problems.

The finding is strangely both comforting and disturbing.

It is comforting because it helps explain why Americans continue supporting a man proven wrong every time he opens his mouth, a man who has de-stabilized parts of the world in the name of creating stability, a man claiming sound business principles who has pitched the United States into deficit free-fall, and a man who arouses suspicion and fear throughout the world.

The study is comforting, too, because it helps explain an opposition candidate like John Kerry. How can liberals generate excitement over this stale, fly-buzzed doughnut of a candidate? I suppose the same way they get excited every time Bush's polls dip by something little more than statistical noise. Perhaps the same way a man like Michael Moore - who makes gobs of money playing to the suspicions and prejudices of the paranoid segment of America's great political market - could so eagerly embrace a crypto-Nazi like General Wesley Clark as "his candidate"?

The finding is comforting in explaining all those Americans shocked and appalled over The New York Times' recent apology for its drum-beating, pre-invasion coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons. Here is a newspaper that, more often than not, comes down on the wrong side of human rights, always protects Establishment interests, always ignores abuses until they can no longer be ignored, and yet it somehow retains a reputation in America as guardian of treasured values and as the nation's newspaper of record.

Well, the "record" part is easily explained, since The Times often takes one position before an event and another after, adjusting its emphasis according to shifts in public opinion or facts discovered by someone else. With that kind of coverage, you surely do qualify as some kind of paper of record.

But nothing could be a bigger nonsense than The Times' reputation as guardian of values in a free society. Just ask Wen Ho Lee, or Richard Jewell, or the woman who accused a Kennedy of rape, or all the people who died unnecessarily at the Bay of Pigs. Go back and examine The Times at key points in the communist witch hunts or at the outbreak of the Korean War. Go back and examine its views and emphasis when President Johnson offered his Hitler-like lies about the Gulf of Tonkin. Go back and see how often The Times has done any real investigative journalism - when it mattered, not in retrospect - about subjects as vital as the FBI's huge abuse of power during the 1960s or the shameful backgrounds of many of the country's leading politicians. Just examine the statements of the paper's signature columnist, Thomas Friedman, who sounds like Henry Ford condemned to bizarre re-incarnation as one the Jews he so hated.

But the finding also is quite disturbing. America, for many years to come, will dominate world affairs. The world will continue to be treated as though it were the backyard sandbox of the Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Liebermans, Kerrys, Albrights and other privileged, selfish, and not particularly well-informed American Establishment figures.

I explain American insanity by a gene pool fouled with the heavy early migration of Puritans, mentally disturbed fanatics if we accept the rather detailed historical record in Europe, plus the immense stresses of a society run along strict principles of Social Darwinism. An almost unqualified admiration for greed now dominates American culture. Yes, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" involved self-interest, but go back and read that thoughtful and compassionate philosopher and compare what he says to the chimpanzee screams we hear from America.

As to the stresses in American society, I refer not only to the struggle of individuals to survive there, but to the fact that the whole story of America has been one of unremitting aggression. It is the story of "a pounding fist," as Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy described himself.

Had America somehow come to be in Europe, its story would most closely parallel that of Germany and its long, belligerent effort to dominate the continent. It is only because so much of America's aggression has been against what seemed lightly settled places - the Ohio Valley, the Great Plains, Canada, Mexico, and Hawaii - that people think any differently about it. Other places were not so lightly settled, and opposition in places like the Philippines was crushed with great bloodshed.

My criticism of the United States is not concerned with how it wishes to order its own society, but about how its activities spill over into the rest of the world. Its actions in the world too often resemble those of an ugly drunk pushing his way into your living room and puking all over the carpet.

Iraq provides a textbook example. The net effect of the invasion of Iraq is a badly de-stabilized country, now full of people who resent Americans for their brutality and arrogance, where once there were undoubtedly many who dreamily admired America at a distance. Saudi Arabia also has been de-stabilized, as many warned Bush that it would be before he set his crusaders marching. Many old friends and allies, like France or Canada, have been stupidly abused for offering sound advice and declining to join the march to hell. Tony Blair's pathetic rag of a government hangs by threads after working against the clear wishes of the British people, and Blair has found the voice he thought he had earned in the councils of war arrogantly dismissed by Bush and his fanatics. Israel's state-terror in the West Bank and Gaza, cheerily accepted by Bush (and Kerry), has risen to nightmarish levels, and if you think that has no connection with all the hatred for America in the world, you are either foolish or qualify as part of the more than one-quarter of Americans who need professional help.

Oil prices are high and unstable, as are American deficits. International security arrangements, those things so loved by police-mentalities but which have never been known to stop real bad guys, are becoming stupidly cumbersome and heavy-handed. Yet America still supports Bush, no matter what its small tribe of liberals chooses to believe. Knowing America's record on small tribes, I suppose it's healthy self-interest to pretend enthusiasm for tiny dips in Bush's polls and for an alternative as insipid and meaningless as John Kerry.

While I am glad for the confirmation of my hypothesis, I can't help feeling, as with so many studies, this one does little more than confirm the painfully obvious.

I have heard here and there on late night news shows that the recent series of attacks may rock the House of Saud, and even collapse the Saudi economy. The fall of the royal family is sure to have dramatic effects on the Bush family which is so closely linked to them. It could also have dramatic effects on the US as the major global oil consumer. First through the influence of the Saudi's in OPEC, and there willingness to pump more oil for the US. If the ongoing attacks significantly decrease the Saudi output, or dramatically increase the cost, the US economy may be in for a long uphill pull.

With both of these threats, how might the Bush neo-cons react? Would they go so far as to intervene militarily to support the Royal Family? Would the public buy it? I am afraid that many would if gas goes high enough, and the cost increases associated with that (food and goods), then the public might indeed support such a move. It would be an even worse mistake than invading Iraq in terms of fanning the flames of anger at the US. I am sure that intervention would be sold as being in the US "national interest."

I hate to think that the US public could be manipulated into another impossible resource war to the benefit of those who are already over the moon with the spoils of the "war on terrorism," but I'm in a grim emough mood to think they might.

I do hope that my cynicism is getting the better of me. I'd like to hear you thoughts on this. All of you are braod readers with good analytic skills. What are your thoughts?

But this is the age of technology you know, so why do ID cards at all? Why not do injectable bio-chips (UTJ, 12/30/03) instead? All of our pertinent data could be placed on the chip at birth, with a remote upgrade function to add info (medical, employment, credit, drivers license, legal violations, etc) to it as we age. Heck we could even include a remote tracking device so that if someone gets lost or kidnapped we could find them any place on the planet. Then all we would have to do is put discrete chip readers around, or give them to those who "need" them which could be just about anyone.

Why carry yet another card - this one with "bio-metric" information - when we could get rid of all cards and just have THE CHIP. Very efficient don't you think? No more credit cards, social security cards, insurance cards, visas, drivers licenses. Go to a cashless society and you wouldn't even need a billfold. Imagine that - the billfold a quaint antique.

Given the technology today (and emerging) you could even add more capabilities and connections. How about a bio-monitor that could alert emergency personnel to your health status. It could even double as an unauthorized substance monitor. Then if you wanted to drive and your chip said you had ingested an unauthorized substance, it could keep your car from starting (much less cumbersome than an onboard breathilizer). If someone was suspected of committing a crime, you could stop them in their tracks with the addition of an internal electric shock. Oh the possibilities are endless.

Of course, all of this information (including the information for a national ID card) will be available to at least two major, integrated, databases - the private corporation that gets the contract, and the US govenrment. The Department of Homeland Security already is developing its own data mining program (UTJ, 1/07/04), and there are data mining programs for those in subsidized housing, and networking police jurisdictions across the country (MATRIX). How cumbersome to have all these massive and extensive programs. It will ultimately be proposed that the Pentagon's on hold project (Total Information Awareness) will be raised as an efficient solution. This is a prediction.

Oh yeah ... privacy? My guess is that will be a word that drops from the english language, or that the meaning will transform - you know like the idea of "freedom" has nothing to do with voice or movement or personal choice, just with the "freedom" to be controlled by monopoly capitalism - the "freedom" to buy.

So a National ID card seems to be an idea whose time has come. I am sure that it will make us all much more secure (meaning that the powers that be can more easily "secure" us individually - i.e. track us and lock us up). But never fear, we have a public that seems to not be bothered by this type of intrusion. Afterall, if you don't have anything to hide then you have nothing to worry about.