An Interview With the Economic Hit Man

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Truth exists, falsehood has to be invented.(image : operation iraqi freedom)

Saturday, February 18, 2006
An Interview With the Economic Hit Man

An Interview With the Economic Hit Man

“We Have Created the World’s First Truly Global Empire”. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we’ve created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it’s been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to someone on the inside who decided to speak out, and he is John Perkins, has written the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He came into our studios to talk about his former work, going into various countries to try to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations, what he called the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he was an economic hit man. I began by asking him to explain this term.

JOHN PERKINS: We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it’s been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we’ve created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it’s been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what’s going on at the World Trade Organization, and also, in fact, with the transit strike here in New York, is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we move further, your experience with it? Explain the vantage point you come from. What does it mean to be an economic hit man?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, what we’ve done — we use many techniques, but probably the most common is that we’ll go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, and we’ll arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks, things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they’re huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won’t get education, health, and other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq.” And in that way, we’ve managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we’ve done this.

AMY GOODMAN: And you worked for?

JOHN PERKINS: I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the one that’s in the news so much today because of spying on people, and I was tested by them, recruited by them —

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean you were recruited by them?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, while I was a senior in business school at Boston University, they came to me and suggested that I take their test. I had connections through my wife with people in the agency, and they put me through a series of tests, personality tests, lie detector, several days, and concluded that I would make a good economic hit man, and they also discovered a number of weaknesses in my character, which they could use then to hook me into the business, and then I ended up working for a private corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn’t you work for the N.S.A.?

JOHN PERKINS: Because these days it’s not done that way. Nobody wants to be able to connect the dots. So the N.S.A., the C.I.A., these types of organizations often recruit economic hit men and the jackals, the assassins, the 007 types, but they will recruit us, maybe train us, and then turn us over to a private corporation, so that you really can’t make the connection, so that if I were caught at what I was doing in one of these countries, it would not reflect on our government; it would only reflect on the corporation that I worked for.

AMY GOODMAN: And who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: I worked for a company called Charles T. Main, a big consulting firm out of Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: And your job?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I started off as economist, became chief economist, and my job really - I had a staff of several dozen people. My job was to get them, and for me to convince these countries to accept these very large loans, to get the banks to make the loans, to set up the deal so that the money went to big U.S. corporations. The country was left holding a huge debt, and then I would go in or one of my people would go in and say, “Look, you know, you owe us all this money. You can’t pay your debts. Give us that pound of flesh.”

The other thing we do, Amy, and what’s going on right now in Latin America is that as soon as one of these anti-American presidents is elected, such as Evo Morales, who you mentioned, in Bolivia, one of us goes in and says, “Hey, congratulations, Mr. President. Now that you’re president, I just want to tell you that I can make you very, very rich, you and your family. We have several hundred million dollars in this pocket if you play the game our way. If you decide not to, over in this pocket, I’ve got a gun with a bullet with your name on it, in case you decide to keep your campaign promises and throw us out.”

AMY GOODMAN: Well, explain actually how that plays out, because it’s not really in this pocket and that.

JOHN PERKINS: No, it’s - what I’m saying is that, you know, I can make sure that this man makes a great deal of money, he and his family, through contracts, through various quasi-legal means, and I can also - if he doesn’t accept this, you know, the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to Jaime Roldos in Ecuador and Omar Torrijos in Panama and Allende in Chile, and we tried to do it to Chavez in Venezuela and are still trying - that we will send in the people to try to overthrow him, as, in fact, we recently did with the President of Ecuador, or if we don’t overthrow him, we’ll assassinate him. And these people all know the history. They know that this has happened many, many, many times in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened to Torrijos, for example, in Panama, and what did you have to do with it?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, this was back in the ‘70s, and Torrijos was making a lot of world headlines, because he was demanding that the Panama Canal be turned back over to Panamanians. I was sent down to Panama to bring him around, to convince him that he needed to play the game our way. And he invited me to a little bungalow outside of Panama City, and he said, “Look, you know, I know the game, and if I play it your way, I’ll become very rich, but that’s not important to me. What is important is that I help my poor people.” Now, Torrijos wasn’t an angel, but he was very committed to his poor people. So he said, “You can either play the game my way, or you can leave this country.”

And I talked to my bosses, and we all decided I should stay. Maybe I could bring him around. In the meantime, we could make some money, and so I stayed. But I knew the whole world was watching Torrijos because of this Panama Canal issue and that if he didn’t come around, the jackals would be likely to come in. [inaudible] A man like Torrijos [inaudible] not only would we lose Panama, but he would set an example that others might follow. So I was very concerned. I liked Torrijos, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring him around was not just because it was my job, but because I wanted to see him survive, and because he didn’t come around, sure enough, he was assassinated.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

JOHN PERKINS: Fiery airplane crash, and afterwards, there was no question that - he had been handed a tape recorder as he got on the plane that had a bomb in it.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you know this?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I know the people that did the investigation afterwards, and this is pretty well-documented in many places also, but I, personally, was aware of what went on, and, of course, you know, our official line here was that, of course, that wasn’t what happened. The plane simply blew up and hit a mountain. But there was no question, and in fact we were expecting this to happen.

Three months before this, another president, Jaime Roldos of Ecuador, who I also was involved in trying to bring around, he very strongly opposed our oil companies. Not “oppose,” isn’t the right word. What he said is, “Oil from Ecuador has to serve the interest of the Ecuadorian people. Therefore, the oil companies are going to have to pay a lot greater share to the Ecuadorian people or we’re going to nationalize them.” And he’d run on a very, very strong anti-American campaign, and we knew that if he didn’t change his ways, that something would happen to him. We were in his office making the same promises. You know, here we’ve got a couple of million dollars for you. Here we’ve got a bullet for you, basically. It’s done a lot more subtly than that, but that’s the short version. And three months before Torrijos, his airplane also exploded.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the investigation reveal in that case?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, if you’re talking about F.B.I. investigations, it revealed that there was an airplane that exploded in both cases. If you’re talking about local investigations and investigations that were done by many international journalists, there were explosives on those planes, both of them. And, you know, it’s relatively easy to get to assassinate one of these presidents who has a security force that’s well armed, that surrounds him all the time, and in the case of both Roldos and Torrijos, those security forces had been trained primarily at the School of the Americas, a U.S. training camp for South American armies. It’s well known that when -

AMY GOODMAN: Which used to be in Panama, actually?

JOHN PERKINS: Used to be in Panama, right, and it’s well known that people that are trained this way stay pretty loyal to their trainers. And they didn’t make a lot of money, and so if one of their trainers went back and said, “Hey, would you mind handing this tape recorder to Jaime Roldos?” And the security guy may very well know that there’s a bomb in it, and I’m going to pay you several hundred thousand dollars or maybe in this case it’s only $100,000, because these guys were not very well paid, or, “simply look the other way while we plant something on the plane.”

That’s an easy thing to do, and incidentally, we also tried to do that to Saddam Hussein. When he didn’t come around, the economic hit men tried to bring him around. We tried to assassinate him. But that was an interesting point, because he had pretty loyal security forces, and in addition he had a lot of look-alike doubles, and what you don’t want to be is a bodyguard to a look-alike double and you think it’s the president and you accept a lot of money to assassinate him and you assassinate the look-alike, because if you do that, afterwards your life and your family’s isn’t worth very much, so we were unable to get through to Saddam Hussein, and that’s why we sent the military in.

AMY GOODMAN: Although Saddam Hussein was in the pocket of the U.S. for many, many years.

JOHN PERKINS: He was and - but we wanted that final deal, similar to the one we’d struck with Saudi Arabia. We wanted to get Saddam Hussein to really tie in to our system, and he refused to do that. He accepted our fighter jets and our tanks and our chemical plants that he used to produce chemical weapons that we knew were being used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He accepted all that, but he wouldn’t quite tie into our system in such a big way that he would bring in the huge development organizations to rebuild his country, as the Saudis did, in a Western image. And that’s what we were trying to convince him to do and also to guarantee that he would always trade oil for U.S. dollars, instead of Euros, and that he would keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us. He would not go along with those things. If he had, he would still be president, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: As a consultant, you did work in Saudi Arabia, John Perkins?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, in fact I put — I was one of the ones responsible for putting together the main deal there in the early ‘70s. As you may recall, Amy, OPEC decided that they were going to clamp down on us, shut off our oil supplies. They didn’t like our policies towards Israel, and so in the early ‘70s, the supply of oil was cut way back in this country. We had long lines of cars at the gas stations, and we were afraid we were going to go to another depression like the one that started in 1929, so the Treasury Department came to me and some other economic hit men and said, “Look, this is unacceptable.” And I give all the details of this in the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, but the short version is, they said, “Make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” and we knew that the key to stopping this sort of thing was Saudi Arabia, because it controlled more oil than anyone else and the Royal House of Saud was corruptible.

So again, the short version is we put together a deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send almost all of the money it made from selling oil all over the world back to the U.S., invest it in U.S. government securities, the interest from those securities was used by the Treasury Department to hire U.S. companies to rebuild Saudi Arabia, power plants, desalinization plants, in fact, entire cities from the desert, and in the process, to westernize Saudi Arabia, to make it more like us. And the other part of the deal was the House of Saud agreed to keep the price of oil within limits acceptable to us, and we agreed to keep the House of Saud in power, and that deal still holds. It’s been holding for a long time. There’s a lot of blowback right now that’s occurring around it, but from our standpoint as economic hit men, it was an extremely successful deal, and it’s the one we tried to replicate with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Break.

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. I asked him if he was the first person to coin the term “economic hit man.”

JOHN PERKINS: I think I may have been the first to use it in print, but we used it back in the ‘70s. We called ourselves — and it was sort of a tongue-in-cheek term. Officially, I was chief economist, but we used that sort of tongue-in-cheek, because it described was we did. Since the book came out on hardback - yes, and there’s a new epilogue in the paperback, which covers a lot of the new material — a lot of people have stepped out of the shadows and approached me and talked to me, high people in governments and other economic hit men and jackals and wanted to share their story. A lot of them want to do it anonymously, which is a little tricky for a writer these days, as you know, but it’s been fascinating to me how many have stepped out.

I also have seen, Amy, I think, a tremendous change in attitude around the world. We’re seeing people really rebelling and saying, you know, we understand what’s going on. And to be honest with you, I attribute a great deal of that to your show and other shows like it. You’re reaching people. The internet, for example, is working wonders. And there’s a lot of books, there’s a lot of movies like Syriana and Hotel Rwanda and Good Night, and Good Luck and so on and so forth. So, the information is getting out. And I think once Americans understand what we’re doing in the world and how much hatred this is generating, we will demand change. And I think history has proven that when we demand change in any area, eventually — it takes a little time — but we do get it. So I’m very hopeful.

AMY GOODMAN: And these people who have come forward, are they active today?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes, very much so. One of them - you know, there was a president elected, the President of Ecuador, Gutierrez, a few years ago and he ran on a very, very strong anti-U.S. ticket. And he said that if he was elected, he would make sure that the people of Ecuador get the fair proceeds from Ecuadorian oil. As soon as he was elected, he was visited by an economic hit man, whom I know personally, and read the Riot Act, told the things we mentioned earlier, you know, “I’ve got money for you or a bullet.”

Within a month, he came to Washington. There was a famous picture shown all over Ecuador of him sitting, holding hands with George Bush. And very soon after that, he went against everything in his campaign promises. He cut sweet deals with the oil companies. He went back on the indigenous peoples, whose lands in the Amazon area he had promised to protect. And the Ecuadorian people went wild. They took to the streets. They protested and demonstrated and eventually threw him out of power.

So this particular one backfired. But what — the economic hit man did his job right. Gutierrez came around, and then the Ecuadorian people understood what was going on. I have good friends in Ecuador who called me shortly after that and said, “You know, when we elect someone democratically to do something and he doesn’t do it, democracy requires that we throw him out. Why don’t you the same thing in your country?”

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, what about Evo Morales? You talk about Gutierrez.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Bolivia. In fact, at one time, I was offered the job as president of Bolivian Power Company, which is the second most important job in Bolivia, actually, behind the President. And Bolivia has this - and it was an American-owned company, incidentally. Bolivia has this long record of giving into the I.M.F. and the World Bank, privatizing their resources, like their power company and their water company. And the people of Bolivia were fed up with this. They had been exploited and exploited and exploited. And so Evo Morales ran on this ticket that said, “I’m not going to put up with this anymore.” And, of course, he’s getting a bad name in the U.S., because we want to portray him as a cocaine-raising farmer who’s all in favor of Castro and socialism and communism and cocaine. The fact is he did raise coca. He was a coca farmer. Coca’s a very legitimate product in Bolivia that is not just used for cocaine. It’s used for many other things.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, for example, high altitude sickness. Coca tea is perfectly legal in this country, too, and it’s very effective against high altitude sickness, and derivatives of coca are used for many medicines. They’re very effective. But the reason he was elected had nothing to do with any of that. It simply has to do with the extreme frustration and anger of the Bolivian people, of how they’ve been exploited and how the I.M.F. and the World Bank have insisted that they turn their resources over to foreign corporations. And also, you know, part of the World Trade Organization policies is that we insist that countries like Bolivia not subsidize their local industries and products, but that they accept our subsidies of them, and that they not erect any barriers against our goods coming in there, but they accept the barriers that we erect against their goods. And people around the world, Amy, are getting fed up with this. 300 million Latin Americans — South Americans out of 360 million, over 80% have voted for these types of candidates.

AMY GOODMAN: Not to be ethnocentric about it, but America is a tremendous power, especially military power. It has been diverted now to dealing with Iraq. President Bush declaring war on Iraq, not exactly officially declaring it, but engaging in it. Do you think that that has something to do with what is happening in Latin America, not to take power away from the people and what they are doing there?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, certainly, I think that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela might not have survived his presidency. His presidency might not have survived had we not been in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were so diverted. We — the economic hit men tried to overthrow him, you know, a few years ago and were successful for about 48 hours. But then he had control over the oil company, and he was very, very popular. So he got back into office. At that point, had we not been involved in Iraq, I strongly suspect that we would have done something much more aggressive, as we’ve done so many other times. When the economic hit men fail, we take more drastic steps. Because we were so involved in Iraq, we didn’t do that.

This gave great support to all of the other movements in Latin America. And these other candidates, people like Evo Morales, really looked to Hugo Chavez as an example of someone who’s had the staying power. He’s been able to stay there, despite the fact that the administration has spoken so strongly against him and is so angry.

The other side of the coin is that Brazil is a world power. It’s one of the largest economies in the world, and it produces a tremendous number of military weapons that are used worldwide. And Lula, of Brazil, he’s backed off a bit. And there’s an interesting story that I know behind that.

AMY GOODMAN: What?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I’ll get into that. But he’s backed off a bit. But he still - he’s made alliances with Chavez, with Kirchner of Argentina, with Morales of Bolivia. They’ve all agreed that if the United States does anything drastic, they’ll stand together and oppose us. So there is this coalition that’s happening. It’s quite loose. But nonetheless, there’s a tremendous amount of support there.

AMY GOODMAN: Lula, what do you know?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was one of the speakers at the World Social Forum in Brazil in last February, and a man asked to meet with me who was a very high advisor to Lula. And he said, “You know, what you say in your book is all very true, but you just — that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He said, “You know, from the time I was a very young man, I was quite radical. And it was interesting to me, as I was going through university, how much sex, drugs, booze were available to me in the parties that I was invited to, and so on. And now that I’m in this position of power, I discover that somebody was taking pictures of all those things, that there’s a record of this.”

And he says, “You don’t realize how all-pervasive your Secret Services are. It’s recruiting, in their own way, young people, even those that are extreme socialists and communists. Your people befriend us from very early ages and get a lot of information on us. So when we become high up in the government, they basically -” And I said, “They blackmail you?” And he said, “Well, you could use the word ‘blackmail,’ but I think I would prefer that’s ‘modern U.S. diplomacy.’”

And I asked him, I said, “Well, is Lula a part of this?” And he obviously didn’t really want to answer this question. He hesitated, and he said, “Let me just say that nobody gets to power in Brazil these days without being very willing to make compromises to your corporations and your government.” He said, “I think Lula’s a very, very good man, but he also has to deal with reality. And certainly, he’s been watched all of his life, and I’m sure he’s had the same temptations I did.”

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s also engulfed in a major corruption scandal, which, for many of his long-time supporters, Brazilians and outside, are raising a lot of questions.

JOHN PERKINS: And I think the fact that the scandal has come out and has been blown into such proportions is an indication that someone is sending Lula a very strong message. Incidentally, the jackal - I’ll call him - that was working with Gutierrez of Ecuador said to me, “You know, this isn’t limited to other countries. This happens in your country, too. Don’t you think that the assassination of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and others like that, and the many senators that have died in airplane crashes and other things, has sent a strong message to your politicians? And don’t you think that -”

AMY GOODMAN: Who said this to you?

JOHN PERKINS: The same economic hit man/jackal who visited Gutierrez and read him the Riot Act.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you care to share his name?

JOHN PERKINS: No. I’ll let him do that at some point, if he feels it’s appropriate. Right now, he doesn’t feel it’s appropriate. He’s still in the business. And so, many of these people are still very — even the ones that have retired are getting pensions, and they’ve got loyalties, some of them. So, they’ll talk to me on the side and say, “I want you to put this in your book, but I’m not ready to talk.” A couple of them I am working with to write a book, and my literary agent is working with them. So hopefully some of them will come clean. But it’s a slow process in making that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: And these people you know, who you call economic hit men, who are the first to move in to these men who gain power, where does — what do you know about Evo Morales now? He’s just been elected President?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I have no doubt that he has been visited by at least one of these men, who’s known him beforehand. These are not strangers that walk in. They’ve been hanging around Bolivia for a while, as I did. And so, once the President is elected, they walk into his office and shake his hands and say, “Congratulations, Mr. President. You won. We launched a strong campaign against you, but now you’ve won. And now, I want to tell you the facts of life and make you —”

AMY GOODMAN: And you know someone who has talked to him in this way?

JOHN PERKINS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was — according to you, what was President Morales’s response?

JOHN PERKINS: Morales was very diplomatic about the whole thing, but absolutely stood firm and said, “You know, my people have elected me for a reason, and I intend to honor that.” This is what his initial response was. But what I will say is we can’t imagine the pressure now that’s being exerted on a man like Morales, as is true with all these other presidents. They know what’s happened before their time. And they - you know, the pressure will be put on them tighter and tighter and tighter.

And imagine being in that position. Imagine being an integritous person and really wanting to help your country, being elected with a majority - Morales got 54% of the vote, which is unheard of in Bolivia; he was up against many opponents — and then, wanting to implement the policy, and somebody walks into your office and reminds you of what happened to all these other presidents.

And perhaps the most scary one was Noriega, who did not get assassinated. He wasn’t a martyr. Instead, he had to stand by and watch several thousand innocent Panamanian civilians bombed, slaughtered, burned to death. And then he was dragged off to a U.S. prison, where he has been pretty much in solitary confinement every since. Imagine thinking that might happen to you.

And so, Evo Morales, the story has just begun for him. I sympathize with him very deeply. And I think from our standpoint, Amy, as American citizens — and I look at myself as an extremely loyal American citizen. I believe in the principles of this country, which I think that in the past few decades, increasingly, we’ve put them way in the back burner. But as good Americans, we need to insist that our government and our corporations honor democracy.

Source : The ICH

Note : For audio, please click at the source above.

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 4:28 PM | 0 comments

Friday, February 17, 2006
The New Abu Ghraib Abuse Evidence

Abu Ghraib leaked report reveals full extent of abuse

· 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse
· 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse
· 660 images of adult pornography
· 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees
· 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts

by Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

The Guardian. Friday February 17, 2006. Nearly two years after the first pictures of naked and humiliated Iraqi detainees emerged from Abu Ghraib prison, the full extent of the abuse became known for the first time yesterday with a leaked report from the US army’s internal investigation into the scandal.

The catalogue of abuse, which was obtained by the online American magazine Salon, could not have arrived at a worse time for the Bush administration, coinciding with yesterday’s United Nations report on abuse of detainees at Guantánamo, the release of a video showing British troops beating up Iraqi youths, and lingering anger in the Muslim world over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

Bush administration officials had already been fending off a new wave of anger about the torture of detainees - following the airing of graphic images from Abu Ghraib on Australian television - when Salon posted a story on its website yesterday saying it had obtained what appears to be the fullest photographic record to date of the abuse.

It said the material, gathered by the army’s criminal investigation division, included 1,325 photographs and 93 video clips of suspected abuse of detainees, 546 photographs of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, as well as 660 images of adult pornography, and 29 pictures of US troops engaged in simulated sex acts. Based on date stamps, all were recorded between October 18 and December 30 2003, the same timeframe as the original scandal.

The website published 18 pictures from the prison. Aside from the ritualised images of humiliation - naked Iraqi men kneeling or lying on the ground alone or in a heap or wearing women’s underwear on their heads - they also reveal the apparent normality of those bizarre scenes within Abu Ghraib. One of the pictures shows an army sergeant standing calmly to fill out paperwork on a wall. Behind him is a hooded, naked detainee. Another photograph shows Staff Sergeant Ivan Chip Frederick - who was tried for his role in the abuse scandal - trimming his fingernails beside an Iraqi who is standing on a box wearing a hood and electrical wires.

There are also images of physical violence: a blood-streaked cell, and a picture of the battered face of a corpse packed in ice. "The DVD also includes photographs of guards threatening Iraqi prisoners with dogs, homemade videotapes depicting hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate, and a video showing a mentally disturbed prisoner smashing his head against a door. Oddly, the material also includes numerous photographs of slaughtered animals and mundane images of soldiers travelling around Iraq," Salon said.

The magazine said it thought the material included all of the pictures that originally surfaced when the abuse became known in April 2004, as well as the pictures aired on Australian television. Human rights organisations have been fighting for months for the army to release a full record of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Salon said it received the material from a member of the military who had spent time at the jail and was familiar with the investigation.

The first official response from Washington as well as Baghdad was concerned as much with the impact these new pictures of abuse could have in the Middle East at a time when anger against the west is high. A Pentagon spokesman said the release of additional images of abuse "could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world".

Iraq’s prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, while condemning the abuse at Abu Ghraib, noted that US soldiers had already been punished for it.

Mr Jaafari’s government was also on the defensive about torture yesterday after the first direct evidence emerged that death squads had operated from within the interior ministry.

The US general in charge of training the Iraqi police, Major General Joseph Peterson, told the Chicago Tribune that the death squads that had been arresting and killing Sunnis had been operating from within the police force although they wore commando uniforms. "We have found one of the death squads," Gen Peterson told the paper. "They are a part of the police force of Iraq."

In another development, ABC television on Wednesday night aired audio tapes of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet meetings during the mid-1990s, including a segment in which he says he warned Washington of a terror attack. "Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans," Saddam is heard saying, adding that he "told the British as well". However, he adds: "This story is coming, but not from Iraq."

Source : The Guardian

Most Essential Readings : ’If This Isn’t Evil’ and ’The Strappado Rendition’ both by Anwaar Hussain

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 8:34 AM | 0 comments

Thursday, February 16, 2006
Nuking the Economy

Nuking the Economy

Forget Iran, Americans Should be Hysterical About This

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

02/13/06 "Counterpunch" — — Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics re-benchmarked the payroll jobs data back to 2000. Thanks to Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, I have the adjusted data from January 2001 through January 2006. If you are worried about terrorists, you don’t know what worry is.

Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That’s one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration.

Over the past five years the US economy experienced a net job loss in goods producing activities. The entire job growth was in service-providing activities—primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.

US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super-economy that is “the envy of the world.” Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce. The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees. The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%. Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43%. Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%. Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.

The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized “new economy” never appeared. The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%. Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs. Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%. Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs. Today there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.

In five years the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them over-qualified.

Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. The low measured rate of unemployment does not include discouraged workers. Labor arbitrage has made the unemployment rate less and less a meaningful indicator. In the past unemployment resulted mainly from turnover in the labor force and recession. Recoveries pulled people back into jobs.

Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off. Today the unemployment is permanent as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones.

Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.

Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.

They were wrong.

At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for “free market economists” who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefitting Americans. Where is the benefit when employment in US export industries and import-competitive industries is shrinking? After decades of struggle to regain credibility, free market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.

No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year’s legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau’s March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7,9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)

The economics profession has failed America. It touts a meaningless number while joblessness soars. Lazy journalists at the New York Times simply rewrite the Bush administration’s press releases.

On February 10 the Commerce Department released a record US trade deficit in goods and services for 2005—$726 billion. The US deficit in Advanced Technology Products reached a new high. Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the US highly dependent on foreign provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the US economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade.

Polls indicate that the Bush administration is succeeding in whipping up fear and hysteria about Iran. The secretary of defense is promising Americans decades-long war. Is death in battle Bush’s solution to the job depression? Will Asians finance a decades-long war for a bankrupt country?

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Source : The ICH

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 7:37 AM | 2 comments

Monday, February 13, 2006
State of the Earth

State of the Earth

by Anwaar Hussain

In 1 AD, we humans were estimated to be around 300,000,000. In 1850, we first passed the 1 billion mark. We were 3.9 billion on January 1 of 1970 and today we number 6.9 billion. Our plunder of mother earth and our mutual murder has increased by a direct proportion to the increase in our numbers over the eons.

War talk is on the wind once again. The feverish frenzy to kill each other is soon going to overtake us. Man will exult in the blood of man in the mad race for the left over resources in the innards of the earth.

It is time for a State of the Earth report.

While the twenty-first century has already taken a gory start, it was the last century that stands out as the most horrific and brutal testimony to our blood-lust. We killed three times more people in wars in this one century alone than in all the previous five centuries. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945 there have been over 250 major wars in which we put to death more than 23 million of our brethren, made homeless tens of millions and injured and bereaved countless millions. 3 out of 4 fatalities of these wars have been our women and children. 50 million of our fellow beings have been forced to flee their homes because of our conflicts since the 1990s alone.

To our children, especially, we have been exceptionally vicious in these conflicts. We killed more of them than soldiers in these wars. In the past decade alone, we snuffed the lives of around 2 million of our children in armed conflicts and injured three times as many. Even more heart-rending is the fact that we are using 300,000 of our children as soldiers in current armed conflicts in more than 30 countries around the world, with some as young as 10 years of age or even younger.

We have been killing ourselves in a variety of ways. The use of land mine, for example, has been just one of our methods. By one estimate, we have planted between 60 and 70 million landmines in the ground in at least 70 countries maiming or killing approximately 26,000 civilians every year, including 8,000 to 10,000 of our children.

Next, small arms have been the weapons of our choice in 46 out of 49 major conflicts since 1990 enabling us to slaughter four million of our species, about 90 per cent of which were civilians—80 per cent being women and children again. We now have more than 500 million small arms and light weapons in circulation around the world - one for about every 12 of us.

Not content with the rate of killing, we devised weapons of mass destruction during the last century. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now a tale of the yore. With a typical modern 150-kiloton hydrogen bomb, we can now cause somewhere between 736,000 and 8,660,000 deaths, depending on the population density of our target city.

We took such liking to this weapon that we today have on planet earth, the only home known to our species, approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads with some 5,000 of these on hair-trigger alert ready to be launched on a few minutes notice. Such was our fondness for these weapons that just one country, the United States, alone has spent almost $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs since 1940.

While the global military expenditure has crossed US $ 1000 billion in 2004, almost half the world’s people subsists on less than $2 a day with about 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 per day. Today, there are still 125 million of our children who never attend school. Another 150 million children of primary age start school, but drop out before they can read or write. One in four of us adults in the developing world - 872 million people - is illiterate, and the numbers are growing.

Further, we have shackled the poorest of the poorest amongst us in a ruthless stranglehold of debt burden. It is considered to be the biggest single barrier to development in the Third World, the most powerful tool that some of us in the western nations use to keep whole countries in bondage. It is estimated that the Third World pays the developed North nine times more in debt repayments than they receive in aid. Africa alone spends four times more on repaying its debts than it spends on health care. Every child that is born in the developing world is strapped with a debt of 400 dollars to the richest nations from the moment of his birth.

The pursuit of wealth at any cost has made our world topsy-turvy. The assets of the 200 richest people in 1998 were reported to be more than the total annual income of 41% of the world’s people. Just three families - Bill Gates, the Sultan of Brunei and the Walton family - are estimated to have a combined wealth of around $150 billion. Their value equals the annual income of 600 million people living in the world’s poorest countries.

The richest 20% of the world population now receives 150 times the income of the poorest 20%. The bottom line for poverty and incomes is that the share of the poorest 20% of the world’s people in global income now stands at a miserable 1.1%. It continues to shrink. And the ratio of the income of the top 20% to that of the poorest 20% rose from 30 to 1 in 1960, to 61 to 1 in 1991 - and to a startling new high of 78 to 1 in 1994. The income gap between the richest fifth of the world’s people and the poorest fifth, measured by average national income per head, increased from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1997.

As a result of this viciously unequal distribution of wealth, 826 million people remained undernourished in 1996-98. Hunger continues to afflict an estimated 793 million people around the world, including 31 million in the U.S. Every day, 24,000 people die from hunger and other preventable causes. Nearly 160 million children are malnourished worldwide. Almost 800 million people-about one-sixth of the population of the world’s developing nations-are malnourished. 200 million of them are our children.

880 million of us around the world lack access to basic healthcare, and 1.3 billion lack access to safe drinking water. 17 million people die each year from curable diseases, including diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis. 5 million of these people die due to water contamination. Each day in the developing world, 30,500 children die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea, acute respiratory infections or malaria. Malnutrition is associated with over half of those deaths.

We have not been exactly idle on our environment front too.

We have chopped down half of our forests that originally covered 46% of our planet’s lands with only one-fifth now remaining pristine and undisturbed. In Latin America, for example, forests are being lost at most alarming rates. The rate of forest loss in Mexico alone is estimated at 600,000 to 2.5 million acres per year. The lush forests that blanketed half of Panama at mid-century, covered only about 10% of the country by the year 2000. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are now at risk of extinction.

Species have been disappearing at 50-100 times the natural rate, and this is predicted to rise radically. In the next 20 to 50 years, we will drive to extinction between 10 and 20 percent of all other species on planet earth. If we persist in our ways, an estimated 34,000 plant and 5,200 animal species - including one in eight of the world’s bird species - face total disappearance.

Almost a quarter of the world’s mammal species will face extinction within 30 years. 60% of the world’s coral reefs, which contain up to one-fourth of all marine species, could be lost in the next 20-40 years. Sixty percent of our world’s important fish stocks are threatened from over-fishing. More than 20 percent of the world’s known 10,000 freshwater fish species have become extinct, been threatened, or endangered in recent decades.

The severe rape of our environment has resulted in desertification and land degradation that threatens nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe. Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and one billion people are at risk. Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years, resulting in several adverse effects on the environment and human society, including widespread species loss, ecosystem damage, flooding of populated human settlements, and increased natural disasters.

The above data is almost 10 years old. No rocket science is involved in calculating the prevailing situation.

This century, we are already in the midst of a bleeding war. In the twilight of gloom, one can clearly see the gathering storms of yet another war on the rapidly darkening horizons. Just as in the showers of blood, only the blood suckers thrive, there are some of us who want a perpetual war to perpetuate themselves. One can clearly hear the ominous rustling on the winds. Ironically, as the vampires are rising from the dead, the keepers of the silver bullets have gone to into a deep slumber.

Mark Twain was on the mark when he said;

“Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’.”

So this, then, is the state of the earth.

Copyrights Anwaar Hussain

Essential Reading : ’Who Shall Inherit the Earth?’ also by Anwaar Hussain

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 7:46 PM | 4 comments

US Draws up Plans for Attack on Iran

US Draws up Plans for Attack on Iran

British think tank warns strike against N-sites could kill thousands

LONDON: US military strategists are drawing up plans for an attack on Iran as a last resort to stop the Islamic republic from developing nuclear weapons, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in London reported.

In a front-page dispatch from Washington, it said Central Command and Strategic Command planners were "identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation".

The planners are reporting to the office of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a view to having a military option if diplomatic efforts fail to put the brakes on Iran’s suspected quest for nuclear weaponry. "This is more than just the standard military contingency assessment," the Sunday Telegraph quoted a senior Pentagon adviser as saying. "This has taken on much greater urgency in recent months."

Meanwhile, a British think tank predicted in a report being published on Monday (today) any US air assault on Iranian nuclear and military facilities would likely kill thousands of people, spark a long-lasting war and push Iran to accelerate its atomic programme.

The Oxford Research Group, which specialises in arms control and non-proliferation issues, said military action against Iran, "either by the United States or Israel, is not an option that should be considered under any circumstances."

The Bush administration has refused to rule out the use of force if Iran does not comply with international diplomatic efforts to curb its contentious nuclear programme. Iran says it is seeking only to generate electricity, but the United States alleges that the country aims to build nuclear weapons.

The report by Prof Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford said a US attack would likely consist of simultaneous air strikes on more than 20 key nuclear and military facilities, designed to disable Iran’s nuclear and air-defence capabilities.

Such strikes would probably kill several thousands people, including troops, nuclear program staff and "many hundreds" of civilians. The report said a military attack would spur Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, accelerate its nuclear programmes and step up support to insurgents in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and would fuel anti-American sentiment around the world.

Escalating military confrontation would draw in other states in the region, it warned, making "a protracted and highly unstable conflict virtually certain". "A state of war stretching over years would be in prospect," the group warned.

The report said an attack by Israeli forces, while on a smaller scale than a US strike, would also have negative consequences. "Alternative ways must be found of defusing current tensions and avoiding an exceptionally dangerous confrontation, however difficult it might be," said the group’s director, John Sloboda.

Source : The Jang

Most Essential Reading : ’A Letter to Neocons’ by Anwaar Hussain

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 5:14 AM | 0 comments

Saturday, February 11, 2006
The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon

The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon

By John Pilger

Friday 10 February 2006. Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy’s ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response." you sense he means it. Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It’s important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations." Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran’s neighbor, scandalously reneged on Britain’s most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.

However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair’s Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament ..." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands’s book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.

Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991. Iran offers no "nuclear threat." There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognize the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.

Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America’s and Britain’s anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran’s case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion." Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran’s obligations under the NPT.

Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.

For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.

At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don’t know if they’re developing them, but if they’re not developing them, they’re crazy."

It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.

Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America’s military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.

That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran’s nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world’s fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world’s central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.

While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran’s oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut’s Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military’s oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labor MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all."

But what of Iran’s promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars," as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.

Courtesy : TruthOut

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 6:25 PM | 0 comments

Friday, February 10, 2006
Life in the USA

Life in the USA

By James Rothenberg

The political system has not been corrupted. It is working effectively, like always. The backbone is the patronage system. Politicians have wonderful memories. They know who they owe. Prostitution is a profession, allegorically the oldest one. Politics is a business. At one time it was popular to think that if someone rich enough were to get elected, he (at that time it would surely be a he) would be immune, but who can owe as much as the rich?

We could try term limits, a single term. In and out. Make room for the next bright face. What do politicians do during the summer? They give college commencement speeches til hoarse, all the same speech... “You are our country’s future leaders”. Meanwhile 50 years pass, the college kid is gray and that politician still has his ass on his seat. A single term would not fundamentally change the patronage system, but it would devalue it. You’re not worth as much.

Also sensible would be a switch to runoff elections, or at least instant runoff elections. But as the snide commandant in Stalag 17 told the feisty boys in Barracks 4, “Curtains vud do vunders for this barracks. You veel not get them!” Democrats and Republicans staunchly unite in opposition to such extreme measures. Why take poison unless you are trying to commit suicide?

There were no intelligence failures concerning Iraq. The invasion was not a mistake. Neither was the torture. Instead, bright, rational people acted in the best tradition of U.S. foreign policy since the birth of our great nation, the redskins being the first foreigners. Try telling Americans that their country uses violent force without moral compunction in wresting from weaker countries just what it wants from them and the air will suddenly get chillier around you. However, there is a record. Like Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

It would take more than a cell block of arrests from the president on down to make America the Beautiful’s dress pretty enough to party again, but who will arrest the arrestors? For the future we could require political office holders to speak their own words, that is, write their own speeches. That shouldn’t be too much to ask of a leader.

Americans are well trained in how to think. It occurs so naturally from birth that we are unaware of the training. The basic idea is that your country knows better than you do. The most thoroughly educated Americans treat it as undying dogma that our country is always and everywhere a force for good in the world. Those who have been deprived of formal education rely more on their nose, an organ of exceptional trustworthiness.

The primary writer of the Constitution, James Madison, stressed that the government must be set up in such a way so as “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”, such protection of the rich becoming axiomatic. Good Americans seem very comfortable with the great wealth and income divide in their country. Another founding father, first Chief Justice John Jay, felt that those who owned the country should run it. Good Americans are comfortable with that also.

In election year 2000, Al Gore claimed that the greatest beneficiaries of Bush’s proposed tax cuts would be the richest 1% of Americans, but sufficient voters, ever mindful of longstanding tradition, protected that minority.

We are not a nation of laws, despite the priestly incantations. There are plenty of people who are above and beyond the law. We say we are a nation of laws but for that statement to have the intended, hallowed effect it has to mean more than hauling some vagrant off the street. It has to mean that the punishments meted out to the weak and poor will in identical measure be meted out to the rich and powerful. We could try, Stengel-like, to look it up, but for that the record is meager.

Declaring war is a popular tactic. Thanks to modern technology we have a handy measure of its permeability throughout our culture. Googling the term “war on hunger” yields some 21,900 references. The “war on poverty” yields 646,000 references, and the “war on drugs” yields 4,310,000. Then there is the “war on terror” with 25,100,000.

We are supposed to accept the sincerity of these wars with all the seriousness that the naming is intended to imply. Looking to actual practice the war on hunger more closely resembles a war on the hungry, the war on poverty a war on poor people, and the war on drugs a war on the people who use them. Now comes the punch line, only it isn’t funny. The war on terror more closely resembles a war to terrorize (intimidate) we the people.

First, if we wanted to reduce terror, we could stop harboring terrorists, stop supporting them, stop paying them, and stop doing it ourselves. There are a couple of reasons why Americans are slow in coming to this conclusion. One is that we only acknowledge the terrorism of others, never our own. Ours is always precautionary action or legitimate self-defense. The second reason is ironclad; the State Department confines its definition of terrorism to that which is carried out by “subnational groups or clandestine agents”, so acts carried out by the United States of America are conveniently exempt.

Countries, even countries with armies so mighty they encircle the globe, cannot commit terrorism, by official decree. They do it unofficially. But they can do a lot more. They can plan and initiate a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” as adjudged at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. One of those other war crimes is Art. 6 (c) Crimes against Humanity, meaning civilians, meaning terrorism.

Americans learn early on about the unmatched freedoms we enjoy. What is all the fanfare about if these freedoms are only granted on a tentative basis? What does it mean to be free from surveillance when the government finds no pressing reason to surveil, but subject to surveillance when the government claims the need? Or to have the right to dissent when it does not greatly worry the government, only to have dissent stifled when it poses serious problems? These freedoms that our leaders boast about to succeeding generations are surely more than fair-weather freedoms. That would be bad enough but it goes one step deeper. Freedom is expressly for the bad weather, or it never really was.

The “war on terror” is our national slogan. It went into the shop for a nomenclature change last year, but emerged intact. For awhile we didn’t want to seem too warlike. Better to stress promotion of freedom and democracy, freshen up the old image. But the war on terror says it all, and it is oh so useful. The other day the man with the worst job in America, Scott McClellan, landed a blow for freedom with his retort to a questioner, “Are we a nation at war?” Of course there is an answer besides the dutiful yes but to voice it may affect your ability to continue roaming without a straitjacket.

The President must have the war because the war makes it possible to do all the things he could never do if there wasn’t a war. Ask his cover, Attorney General Gonzales, who informs the Judiciary Committee that there is no such thing as a bad inherent power. One of the senators asked Gonzales a very improper question. “How will we know when the war is over?” Gonzales could only smile at the suggestion that between these two learned men there could be any general disagreement about the usefulness of war to a country intent on dominating the world with military force.

War is not inevitable but there is something innate in our species that prepares us to march to the beat of the drum. Our primitive herd instinct makes us vulnerable to exploitation. When everybody is taught precisely the same thing, it no longer matters what is taught. The result is always orthodoxy. The military teaches a valuable strategy. After being captured, the best time to escape is as soon as you can. Of course you have to realize you are a captive.

A million men frozen at attention waiting for the signal of another to act as one. Is this not true ugliness? Ugliness is not deformity but its opposite; it is any multitude of people in constant agreement.

War as a tool of control relies on the glorification of battle and death. Humans are the only of earth’s creatures that cherish life. This is because they know it will end. This is why they invented god. But what is the historical record of the god concept? Is it used more effectively to save or take life? We could look it up.

Source : The ICH

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 6:30 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, February 09, 2006
Illegal and Inept

Illegal and Inept

By BOB HERBERT

While testifying about the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked to explain how the program had been damaged by the disclosure of its existence in the press.

Senator Joseph Biden suggested that Al Qaeda operatives have most likely been aware for some time that the government is trying to intercept their phone calls.

Mr. Gonzales agreed. "You would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance," he said. "But if they’re not reminded about it all the time in newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget."

Senator Biden managed to laugh. Probably to keep from crying. This was the attorney general of the United States speaking, yet another straight man for an administration that has raised governing to new heights of witlessness. Watching the Bush administration in action would be hilarious, if its ineptitude and brutally misguided policies didn’t end so often in needless suffering and sorrow.

The public should be aware of two important points about the president’s domestic spying program: it’s illegal, and it’s not catching terrorists.

If the program were legal, there is no chance so many Republicans would be upset about it. While questioning Mr. Gonzales at Monday’s Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, assailed both of the rationales used by the administration to justify the program.

Referring to the administration’s repeated insistence that the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda gave the president the power to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Senator Graham said:

"I’ll be the first to say, when I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche."

Senator Graham then addressed the argument that the president has the inherent power under the Constitution to authorize the warrantless wiretapping. Such a view, said Senator Graham, would undermine the principle of checks and balances. "Taken to its logical conclusion," he said, "it concerns me that it could basically neuter the Congress and weaken the courts."

Moments later, he added, "And when the nation’s at war, I would argue, Mr. Attorney General, you need checks and balances more than ever."

Other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who expressed skepticism or voiced serious doubts about the program included Mike DeWine and Sam Brownback, and the chairman, Arlen Specter. "You think you’re right," Senator Specter told Mr. Gonzales. "But there are a lot of people who think you’re wrong."

Apart from the legal issues, it’s increasingly clear that the president’s program is contributing little if anything to the effort to protect Americans from Qaeda-type terrorism.

Senator Biden asked Mr. Gonzales whether the program had achieved any results. Mr. Gonzales said it had helped identify "would-be terrorists here in the United States."

"Have we arrested those people?" asked Mr. Biden. "Have we arrested the people we’ve identified as terrorists in the United States?"

The attorney general’s reply left people shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. "When we can use our law enforcement tools to go after the bad guys," he said, "we do that."

Senator Biden tried to push the issue, but Mr. Gonzales would not elaborate. Mr. Biden finally said: "Well, I hope we arrested them - if you identified them. I mean, it kind of worries me because you all talk about how you identify these people, and I’ve not heard anything about anybody being arrested."

A clue to Mr. Gonzales’s reluctance to discuss the achievements of the president’s domestic spying program could be found on the front page of The Washington Post on Sunday. A long article about the program began as follows:

"Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use."

To laugh or to cry - that is the question as we contemplate three more years of this theater of the absurd known as the Bush administration.

Source : The NYT

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 10:49 PM | 0 comments

An Excerpt From George Orwell’s 1984

An Excerpt From George Orwell’s 1984

The Ministry of Truth-Minitrue, in Newspeak-was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forcedlabour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

Source & Courtesy : netcharles.com

Admin’s Note : From now on, Fountainhead would occasionally be running a series of chosen excerpts from George Orwell’s work. Not only would we be paying tribute to that great seer, we too may start to see.

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 8:43 AM | 3 comments

Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Denmark Cartoons

The Denmark Cartoons

by Anwaar Hussain

The derogatory cartoons that have the Islamic world in throes of violent protests were first published in September 2005 by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. They were later republished in Austria in January, and then at the beginning of February in a number of European newspapers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

There have since been angry and sometimes violent protests across the Islamic world, Britain and France. At least six deaths have been reported thus far. A hornets’ nest has been stirred with the end of the rapidly escalating crisis nowhere in sight.

Has it all happened innocuously and accidentally or is it a deliberate attempt towards an ulterior motive?

To answer this question let us go back in time to May 2005.

Only four months before the crisis, between May 5 to May 8, 2005, a group of powerful men from today’s finance, industry and politics huddled together in the warm and cozy rooms of the 5-star Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Überfahrt in Rottach-Egern, Germany. Outside the hotel, private and state guards patrolled with automatic weapons and sniffer dogs. The gray Bavarian skies rained on.

This secretive cabal of powerful men otherwise goes by the name of Bilderberg Group (a simple Google query will throw up thousands of results). The Bilderberg Group is the only private international organization that Time magazine rated 10 for secrecy on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most secret).

So what do the defamatory cartoons have to do with the Bilderbergs? Let us first have a look at the names of just some of the attendees of the May 2005 conference. These were;

Josef Ackermann, Chairman, Group Executive Committee. Deutsche Bank AG, Germany

Joaquin Almunia Amann, Commissioner, European Commission

José M. Durno Barroso, President, European Commission, Portugal

Franco Bernabe, Vice Chairman, Rothschild Europe, Italy

Martin S. Feldstein, President and CEO, National Bureau of Economic Research, U.S.A.

William C. Ford, Jr., Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company, U.S.A.

Timothy F. Geithner, President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, U.S.A

Donald E. Graham, Chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company, U.S.A.

Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations, U.S.A.

Jaap Hoop de Scheffer, Secretary General, NATO, Netherlands

Allan B. Hubbard, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Director of the National Economic Council, U.S.A.

John M. Keane, President, GSI, LLC; General, US Army, Retired, U.S.A.

Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc., U.S.A.

Neelie Kroes, Commissioner, European Commission

Michael A.Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute, U.S.A.

William J. Luti, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern & South Asian Affairs, U.S.A.

Jessica T. Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, U.S.A.

Kenneth B. Mehlman, Chairman, Republican National Committee, U.S.A.

Elena Nemirovskaya, Founder and Director, Moscow School of Political Studies, Russia

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands

Andrzej Olechowski, Leader Civic Platform, Poland

Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief, Time Inc., U.S.A.

Richard N. Perle, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, U.S.A.

Friedbert Pflüger, Member of Parliament, CDU/CSU Fraktion, Germany

H.R.H. Prince Philippe, Belgium

Rato y Figaredo, Rodrigo de, Managing Director, IMF

David Rockefeller, Member, JP Morgan International Council, U.S.A.

Judith Rodin, President, The Rockefeller Foundation, U.S.A.

Dennis B. Ross, Director, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, U.S.A.

H.M. the Queen of Spain

Peter D. Sutherland, Chairman, Goldman Sachs International;

Jean-Claude Trichet, Governor, European Central Bank

James D. Wolfensohn, President, The World Bank, U.S.A.

Paul Wolfowitz, President designate, The World Bank, U.S.A.

And of course there were the usual prime ministers and U.S. government officials. Also present were the movers and shakers of the Western media including media heads from almost all the countries whose press chose to publish the insulting cartoons. The names of Messers Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, however, must ring some bells. (Click here for the complete list)

Also on the list of attendees was one Anders Eldrep from Denmark. Anders Eldrep (sometimes spelled as Eldrup) happens to be married to one Merete Eldrep. This lady is the managing director of company JP/Politikens Hus (JP for Jyllands-Posten) that published the slanderous anti-Islamic cartoons in Denmark.

Four manths later, the cartoons appeared.

Neither Anders Eldrep is an ordinary Tom, Dick or Harry nor his wife exactly a babe in woods not to have understood the repercussions of their actions.

Merete Eldrep, the wife, is a former Head of Secretariat at the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs and Deputy Director of the Danish Energy Authority.

And Anders Elderp, her illustrious husband, is the current Chairman of Denmark’s Oil and Natural Gas Company DONG and has been Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Danish Finance up to the year 2001. He also has attended the last FIVE Bilderberg meetings thus far. Interestingly, a previous editor-in-chief of ’Politiken’, another of JP/Politikens Hus’s newspapers, namely Toger Seidenfaden, too was a long-time Bilderberger.

Now a little more about the Bilderberg Group.

In a rare interview given to BBC, Etienne Davignon, 73, the chairman of the Bilderberg Group and a former Belgian diplomat and European Commissioner, dismissed claims that the Bilderberg Group is part of a global conspiracy to rule the world by a self-selected elite of movers and shakers. His dismissal is as natural as publicly admitting the cabal’s sinister agenda would have been unnatural. Please read the interview to form up your own opinion. In my judgment the sole aim of the group is implementing a Euro-American, some say Anglo-American, blueprint of a New World Order for the express benefit of these elites.

The Bilderberg discussions are structured on the principle of reaching accord rather than through ceremonial resolutions and voting. Such is the power and status of the active members that if an agreement for action is arrived at, the resulting decision is expected to be implemented in the West as a whole.

In the post 9/11 geo-political milieu particularly, the group’s aim has been to buttress the foreign policies of the governments of the United States and Great Britain or, more simply, to help execute the precise formula sold internationally by the Bush/Blair combo. This new world order, with the group’s unflinching support, is being shoved down the collective throat of the world citizenry under the guise of “global war on terrorism”, and of establishing “democracy”, “peace”, and “freedom” in the world.

Just three quotes from the lamb talk of these Anglo-American leaders make clear enough readings of their intentions;

"Out of these troubled times [Iraq/Kuwait conflict], our fifth objective — a new world order can emerge: a new era...We’re now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." September 11, 1990 - Iraq Speech by President George H. W. Bush

"Our mission is clear: to rid the world of evil" - Pres. George W. Bush, post-Sept. 11, 2001

"Out of the shadow of this evil [9/11], should emerge lasting good... This is a moment to seize...let us re-order this world around us." - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Oct. 2, 2001 (BBC)

My questions then;

Was this whole anti-Islamic cartoon exercise actually nothing more than an innocent attempt at promoting the much cherished cause of freedom of expression on sensitive topics---anti-Semitism being disallowed, by word or action, by law in most of the western world?

Or, given the ominous times we are in, the Muslims are deliberately being provoked, exploiting their emotionality, into presenting themselves in one seething, throbbing mass of foaming-at-the-mouths herd of rabid cavemen image for their eventual annihilation? No one, after all, cries over the mushroom clouds blotting the horizons over beastlands.

Or is the scribe being overly alarmist?

You decide.

Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain

posted by Anwaar Hussain at 7:12 PM | 29 comments

Monday, February 06, 2006
Time to Scrap the NPT

Time to Scrap the NPT

by Mike Whitney

There’s only one country that has ever used nuclear weapons.

There’s only one country that has used nuclear weapons on civilian population centers.

There’s only one country that has ever threatened to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear countries.

There’s only one country that has over 10,000 nuclear weapons many of which are on hair-trigger alert for enemies real or imagined.

There’s only one country that has developed a regime of low-yield, bunker-busting, "usable" nuclear weapons; stating that they could be legitimately used, not to deter aggression or to stave off an imminent threat, but simply to eliminate the "suspicion" of weapons programs.

There’s only one country that justifies unprovoked aggression (preemption) in its National Security doctrine; allowing it to attack any potential rival to its global dominance.

There’s only one country that currently occupies a Muslim nation of 25 million inhabitants without any proof of an imminent threat, weapons-systems, or territorial aggression.

The purpose of the NPT (Nonproliferation Treaty) is to reduce or eliminate the development of nuclear weapons. If it is to have any relevance at all it must be directed at nations that not only have weapons, but demonstrate a flagrant disregard for the international laws condemning their use. The IAEA should focus its attention on those states that have a clear record of territorial aggression, military intervention, or who consistently violate United Nations resolutions.

In its present form the IAEA and the NPT are utterly meaningless. Rather than leading the world towards nuclear disarmament, the agency and the treaty have simply ignored the misbehavior of the more powerful nations and humiliated the non-nuclear states with spurious accusations and threatening rhetoric.

The NPT was never intended to be a bludgeon for battering the weaker nations; nor was it set up as a de-facto apartheid system whereby the superpower and its allies can lord above the non nuclear states coercing them to act according to their diktats. It was designed to curb the development of the world’s most lethal weapons; eventually consigning them to the ash-heap.

The political maneuvering surrounding Iran’s "alleged" nuclear weapons-programs demonstrates the irrelevance and hypocrisy of the current system. As yet, there is no concrete evidence that Iran is in non-compliance with the terms of the treaty. That hasn’t deterred the Bush administration from intimidating its allies and adversaries alike to assist them in dragging Iran before the Security Council. At the same time, the United States is occupying the country next door to Iran and, after having killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis and destroyed vast swaths of the countryside, has still never provided any coherent justification for the initial invasion. The international community has simply looked away in fear.

This alone should illustrate the ineffectiveness of the institutions that are designed to keep the peace.

If the ruling body at the IAEA is to have any relevance, it must direct its attention to the real threats of nuclear proliferation posed by those nations that consider nuclear weapons a privilege that should be limited to a certain group of elite states. If the IAEA cannot perform its duties in a neutral manner that respects the rights of all nations equally, it should disband and abolish the NPT without delay.

If the IAEA is uncertain about the real threats to regional peace, they should take note of the many recent polls which invariably list the same belligerent nations as the leading offenders. It is these countries that should be scrutinized most carefully.

It is not the purview of the IAEA to keep the weaker nations out of the nuclear club. That simply enables the stronger states to bully their enemies with threats of using their WMD. In fact, it’s plain to see that the current disparity in military power has created a perilous imbalance between nations which is rapidly spreading war throughout the world.

One only has to look at Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo to see the glaring failures of the unipolar model; where the military prowess of one country is so great it is emboldened to resolve its differences through conflagration. The NPT was not created to facilitate the imperial ambitions of the superpower, but to protect the innocent from the increasing likelihood of nuclear holocaust.

If the NPT cannot decrease the threat of nuclear war from conspicuously hostile nations, it should be abandoned altogether.

Courtesy and Copyright © Mike Whitney

Source : UrukNet

Most Essential Reading : "Of Nuclear Giants and Ethical Infants" by Anwaar Hussain