Monsters and Evil

How An Old Bush Can Ruin Lunch or How You Can Exercise Your Conscience!

2010-01-11T05:07:00.000-08:00

How would your respond? Calling murderers what they are is appropriate!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhznZ-d5h7Y

January 6, 2010 - As if a restaurant's shrine to a mass murderer and featured menu items in the name of the diabolical traitor to America weren't enough, George Bush Sr. himself arrived when I was eating lunch with friends. Although I'm aware of many of his countless crimes against humanity, my mind went blank when it came to speaking out. It's a wonderful thought for me to imagine these killers being scolded each and every time they appear in public.

Debt Collectors Face Lawsuit After Florida Man's Death

2009-12-30T13:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Debt-Collectors-Face-Lawsu-by-Roger-Shuler-091230-422.html

December 30, 2009
Debt Collectors Face Lawsuit After Florida Man's Death
By Roger Shuler

Cross Posted at Legal Schnauzer

A woman in Tampa, Florida, is suing debt collectors for contributing to her husband's heart-related death.

Dianne McLeod is suing Green Tree Servicing for the wrongful death of her husband, Stanley, who died in 2005 after a series of heart problems.

Mrs. McLeod says debt collectors repeatedly violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and the resulting stress led to her husband's death.

The McLeod story hit quite a nerve here at Legal Schnauzer. My wife and I have been subject to blatant unlawful actions from debt collectors. This has caused enormous stress, but so far, our health seems to be holding up. But what if that changes. What if Mrs. Schnauzer has a stroke? What if I have a heart attack?

And what about the abuse we've taken from corrupt members of the Alabama State Bar over the past eight or nine years? I know we enjoyed generally good health when our legal nightmare started in 2000 and 2001. What are the cumulative health effects of being repeatedly cheated in court? If a researcher wanted to examine that question, we could be guinea pigs A and B.

I've already told Mrs. Schnauzer, "If I keel over someday soon, here are the people you need to sue for every penny they are worth." And I wasn't joking.

I'm also not joking about the deleterious effects unethical debt collectors can have on your life. We've already written that Mrs. Schnauzer thinks she was recently cheated out of her job at Infinity Property & Casualty Corporation because of a lawsuit we've filed against two debt-collection outfits--NCO and the Birmingham law firm of Ingram & Associates. In fact, she testified to that effect under oath in a recent deposition.

Mrs. Schnauzer wasn't just blowing off steam. We've uncovered evidence that Lloyd Gray & Whitehead, a Birmingham firm defending NCO, has substantial ties to Infinity Property & Casualty. We've also discovered that at least one very close associate of Alabama Governor Bob Riley--a target of frequent critical coverage here at Legal Schnauzer--resides on Infinity's Board of Directors. (Much more on all of this coming soon.)

Finally, new evidence indicates that even my unlawful termination, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), might have been driven, at least partially, by Ingram & Associates' and NCO's efforts to collect a debt we allegedly owed to American Express. (Much more on that coming, too.)

As for Dianne McLeod, does she have a legitimate lawsuit? Time will tell. But our Legal Schnauzer team hopes she brings Green Tree Servicing to its ugly knees.

Just how bad are some debt collectors? Consider this from a CNN article about the McLeod case:

Billy Howard is an attorney who runs the Consumer Protection Division for Morgan & Morgan. Howard represents McLeod and has about 500 similar cases against companies who use what he called "Tony Soprano tactics," a reference to the fictional organized crime leader who was the central character in the HBO drama "The Sopranos."

"I think it's frightening because these companies go after people and they utilize tactics people just don't know are illegal," Howard said.

"Scare tactics work. They've worked for years. That's how the mafia made so much money. That's how these mafia-like tactics result in so much money. People are scared," he said.

Howard says one of his other clients had this message waiting on the answering machine:

"You're a piece of s---. That's why you turned your phone off. Mother f-----. But that's OK.

"You haven't heard the last of me. But if it takes me a year or takes me two, believe me, I will find you. You better move. But if you move, you better move to California, 'cause I do travel. And I like traveling. Goodbye."

And then there was this one:

"When I see you. I'm gonna f--- you up. I want my money, and I want it now. I hate people who lie to me and abuse my company. ... If you bring my money back, you don't have to worry about me, just disregard my message."

We have not received those kinds of physical threats. But in some ways, we were treated even worse than this. There's little doubt that Mrs. Schnauzer was cheated out of her job because we chose to fight back against corrupt debt collectors. Now, we are seeing more and more signs that I might have lost my job largely because of debt collectors, too.

How low will debt collectors go? They seem to have a bottomless pit of sleazy tactics. We will be following the Dianne McLeod case. And we soon will be going into detail about what we've experienced from the classy crowd at NCO and Ingram & Associates.

The Devil's Decade

2009-12-28T16:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Well-That-Sure-Sucked-Go-by-David-Michael-Gree-091226-315.html

December 26, 2009
Well, That Sure Sucked: Good Riddance To The Devil's Decade
By David Michael Green

As I understand it, certain pundits are struggling with finding an appropriate name for the decade now mercifully coming to an end.

What's the problem, I wonder? Are their word processor dictionaries redacted of all four-letter words? I mean, I could think of a few dandies, right of the top of my head.

Short of the 1860s or 1930s, this was perhaps the most disastrous decade in American history, and it deserves a good goddamed label to celebrate that fine achievement.

More on that below. Meanwhile, whatever the appropriate term, it's important to keep things in perspective. I think the most crucial notion to understand about our time and perhaps the only way to make sense of it is to see it as the point where the process of imperial decline shifted into third gear. That explains a lot. I like to think that even Americans wouldn't be capable of the sick stupidity we've witnessed over these harrowing years without the effects of rapid altitude decline and the loss of cabin pressure that the ship of state has been experiencing during this era.

Perhaps I'm too generous toward a people who don't deserve a lot of that sentiment, either because of their diminished intelligence, generosity, compassion, sophistication or all of the above. I imagine that would be the feeling on the streets of, say, Fallujah, where the attitude might well be confined to a lovely blend of schadenfreude and indifference, were it not for the fact that the paroxysms of the flailing elephant send so many fruit stands flying as the mortally wounded beast goes careening down the main street of the global village, toward inevitable defeat in its struggle with unforgiving gravity.

America probably must come down to earth again, its abortive "century' of world dominance having anyhow been artificially fabricated from a toxic combination of circumstance and theft right from the beginning. I can even say that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it is, of course, all relative to what replaces Pax Americana. Anyone who assumes that it can only get better on the international front isn't thinking real clearly or real historically. Indeed, in all fairness, the US may well have run the most benign and least imperial empire in history though not for lack of trying by the likes of, say, Paul Wolfowitz or John Bolton.

Thus it may well be that the next big thing is even less pretty. Watching the Chinese government in action at home, where they are unfettered, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in what a Pax Sinica would bring once they are also unfettered abroad. If the same cats who brought us Tiananmen Square and Tibet are next gonna be seeking planetary domination, for once in my life I may actually come to appreciate the value of nuclear weapons...

But I digress. As I was saying before those proverbially inscrutable Asian aspiring hegemons so rudely interrupted me, the fall of American global dominance was only ever a matter of time in the coming. What is most lamentable, however, is the way in which we've handled that transition, and most especially, the degree to which we've exacerbated it. In short, it didn't have to be like this. If the post-war French and the British represent two rather caricatured but nevertheless illuminative models of how to grapple with the end of empire, we have unfortunately elected to adopt the violent and undignified Gaulist approach. We even went with a actual full-scale replication of the draining Vietnam experience. At this rate, we'll be invading Algeria next. Heck, maybe that's just what Bush meant to do, but he pushed the wrong button, mixing up, as he was wont to do, those Islamic countries whose names start with the letter "A' (watch out Albania!).

Probably we'll just settle for repeating the French experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of actually attacking Algeria. What seems more assured is that we will replicate the catastrophic domestic meltdowns France experienced in 1958 and 1968, as the lunacies of reactionary politics and the realities of tectonic change met on the French battlefield, and the state nearly took on the role of the slaughtered innocent civilian bystander, or what the military nowadays likes to call collateral damage.

If that happens, few will bear more responsibility than Barack Obama, who in less than a year's time has managed to revive a comatose Republican Party that like Jimi Hendrix, was dying from asphyxiation of its own vomit whilst simultaneously flushing away the good will that he and his own party enjoyed down into the overflowing sewers of failed American presidencies. Miraculously, he even managed to do all of this without any serious "mistake', epic blunder, or fresh crisis on his watch. About the lamest positive act Obama did all year was the decidedly inartful and astonishingly unnecessary comment he made about the Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Department. If all you're counting is the proactive mistakes made, Obama had fewer in a year than many presidents do in a typical week.

On the other hand, if you include blown opportunities into the mix, perhaps only Herbert Hoover can equal this president's record. If you look at what he didn't do, in short, it's hard to imagine a more prolific record of non-achievement. Does he know this? Sometimes especially when I watched his Afghanistan speech about getting in so that we could turn right around and get back out I wondered if it could be possible that he has taken it as his task to quietly and heroically direct the managed decline of the American empire, even at the cost of his own presidency.

That, of course, is pretty hard to imagine, but more to the point it is really unnecessary to do it this way, anyhow. We can be a lot better than that, even if decline is inevitable. (And it may not be, at least in an absolute sense. Relative decline cannot be escaped, however, if for no other reasons than that China has other plans. As does India, Europe and Latin America.) A forward-thinking set of politics could really advance the nation and its economy in a hugely positive way, if only the accretionary shackles of predatory rentier pretend-capitalism could be busted off, freeing American society to realize its potential.

To choose but the most proximate example, we could have had real healthcare reform, I believe, if Obama had fought for it like George W. Bush or Lyndon Johnson fought for their respective legislative agendas. To see what I mean, think of Bush hawking the manifestly idiotic idea of invading Iraq. When he first began his marketing campaign for the war, most Americans wanted no more part of that imperial folly than they were hankering for a good dose of the clap. But Bush and his people were as relentless as they were ubiquitous, and in a few months time they turned public opinion, managing to get about two-thirds of the country lined up behind their plans for a most excellent adventure in Mesopotamia. Obama, on the other hand, is possessed of rhetorical skills that drive someone like W who couldn't have conjugated his way (in English!) out of tenth grade, even after his grandpa paid for the new school gymnasium nearly apoplectic just thinking about them. And yet the bloodless current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can't be bothered to work up either a passion or a sweat to sell his policy wares. Or is it that he just realizes, as so many progressives now have, that what he's selling just isn't worth getting excited about?

These two presidencies really do illustrate all too nicely the pathos that is twenty-first century America. Consider their respective situations, and what each did with those circumstances. Bush came into office after marketing himself as a moderate, after one of the most contentious election meltdowns in American history, with a Congress almost exactly evenly divided (and the Senate soon to fall into the hands of the Democrats), with no particular crisis going on short of a mild recession, and with really no mandate of any sort, apart from hopefully not acting as ill-suited and unprepared for the job as he seemed to be during the campaign (no worries there, though Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell would be keeping him on the right path remember?). So what does he do under these circumstances? He adopts a radical regressive agenda. He polarizes the country. He lets loose a marketing campaign of epic intensity, he hammers Congress, he aggrandizes to himself probably more unilateral power than any president in history. And he gets virtually everything he wants. If you can hold your nose long enough to get past the results of his policies, it's quite an amazing story of boldness and presidential success, made all the more remarkable because of how astonishingly bad his ideas were for the country, and how transparent that fact was even at the time. This guy was selling melted poisonous ice-cubes to Eskimos in wintertime, and he not only made the sale, he got them to want the purchase.

Obama, on the other hand, is dealt almost the opposite hand when he comes to office. He is elected in a clear and compelling victory. He gets a Congress with his party controlling both houses by lopsided 60-40 margins. He receives a clear mandate for change, and he is backed by a stunning outpouring of goodwill, both at home and abroad. He's got crises that everyone agrees need some serious tending to. In short, you could hardly come up with a better set of circumstances for presidential success if you sat down and created them yourself. So what does he do with this gift? Again, the opposite of Bush. He demands nothing. He fights for nothing. He negotiates with everyone, including those who have zero intention of voting for a bill that he is nevertheless allowing them to dilute, and those (generally the same folks) explicitly trying to ruin his presidency.

And what does he have to show for it? More looting of the public fisc by the already fantastically wealthy. Policies that would be heartily applauded by the far right if enacted by Bush and a Republican Congress. But, since they aren't, he is hated by those same people anyhow. And, as an extra added bonus, he's managed to alienate millions of progressives and young first-time enthusiasts in the political system who rallied to his cause thinking it was their cause in 2008. This is an astonishing act of cynicism for the history books, and one which will come back to haunt both Obama and his party in a huge way. For which I, personally, am delighted.

However, Obama's abuse of real people who really care about their country, and who for precisely that reason rolled up their sleeves and worked their butts off to get him into the White House, will also have grave repercussions for what's left of the republic and those consequences I do happen to care about. There is huge anger out there, huge antipathy to politics as usual, and huge reluctance to get fooled again. The situation is ripe, the moment pregnant. My guess is the next stop is some form of radical demagoguery (can you say "Palin"?), perhaps followed by a complete abandonment altogether of the two-century-plus American experiment in democracy, when the demagoguery tanks even worse than Obama. Yep, the guy who just won the Nobel Prize could be the guy who unravels democracy in America. Of course, he's had a tremendous amount of help, so we can't give him all the blame. But more and more he looks to me like James Buchanan, the man widely considered the worst president in American history. And why? Because the fifteenth president continued practicing politics as usual as crisis for the republic loomed large. As a result of trying to please everyone, Buchanan pleased no one, lost popularity, had a one-term presidency, split the Democratic Party, and stood by as the country plunged toward civil war. Why does that sound a bit too frighteningly familiar to anyone besides me?

America has been "blessed' in the twenty-first century with two presidents who are fine exemplars of their parties. One stood for the absolute worst tendencies in American politics, but knew his convictions and would take no prisoners fighting to win at all costs (especially somebody else's costs). The other seems to have no ideational tendencies of particular note whatsoever, and would certainly not be so rude as to break decorum in any way, even for purposes of advocating for something that might actually improve the condition of the country. I mean, what would people think?

Seeing this talented African-American president benefit so much from the struggles of prior generations of progressives, and from the massive outpouring of goodwill from those who need deliverance and wanted to believe his rhetoric of hope only for him to win election and then muster the full weight of the oligarchy-sponsored American government to stand on their throats, choking off the life of the country and the planet well, that's a fitting end to this particular sorry decade.

It began, equally fittingly, with the Enron debacle, which demonstrated emphatically the nature of a society that has come to worship above all else a greed so rapacious that alleged people could even contemplate tripping electrical system blackouts for an entire region of the country, just to make an extra buck. So what did we do about that? How about institutionalize it as a full-blown system of governance, and choose for president a guy who was up to his faux cowboy belt-buckle in the Enronics of Kenny Boy Lay, one of his biggest contributors?

Well, of course, "choose' isn't quite the right term, is it? Shortly thereafter came Bush vs. Gore, when the United States Supreme Court jettisoned any and every pretense of dispassionate apolitical jurisprudence in favor of a judicial-led regressive coup so blatant that it actually issued an order halting the counting of the votes. You know your democracy is toast when masses don't assemble in the streets over that one. Iranians do. We, on the other hand, just wanted it all to be over.

The new president, as stripped of a mandate as he was of a conscience, immediately proceeded to begin dismantling wholesale the bipartisan foreign and domestic pillars of the post-war Pax Americana system, many of which had even survived the Reagan years. Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty? Gone. International Criminal Court? Gutted. Kyoto? Abandoned. Transatlantic alliance? That was "Old Europe'. Massive tax cut for the already fantastically wealthy, leaving gaping revenue gaps in its place? You betcha. Let's not forget. This was already a radical presidency on September 10, 2001.

Then, of course, the next day came. As the events of that day came into focus, my first thought was for the poor people in those buildings. But I must confess that my second thought was that having this occur on the Bush administration's watch could only mean much ugliness around the corner. I felt a bit guilty for thinking about politics at the time, but I must say in retrospect: Check. Got that one right.

There is much evidence to suggest that the politically correct conspiracy theory about 9/11 that is, the conventional story has both some gaping holes and some holy lies in it. But even if we leave aside the horrifying implications of that thought, the idea that a president who was minimally criminally negligent on terrorism policy could benefit so much for so long from this tragedy is yet another reminder of how bad the decade was.

Then came Afghanistan, which shortly thereafter became one of the myriad casualties of Iraq. There are no words for this. There is no meaningful difference in law, morality, politics, culture or civilization between Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. The only divergence between the two acts of pure aggression is that when the hegemon does it, there's no one around to block or punish the crime. Although I must say, in the longer term, the gods of karma have gotten better on that score notwithstanding the fact that Bush and Cheney and the rest of the cowardly crew who ordered up this outrage have so far escaped more or less untouched.

History will also record this as the decade when the evidence for global warming became so compelling that even George Bush endorsed it. And then we did nothing. If this country was a drunkard spouse who was bringing a hailstorm of destruction down on the family, you'd toss the creep out on the street and get a divorce. We haven't. And, really, when you think about it why should we? There are plenty of other planets out there to choose from once we wreck this one, aren't there?

Of course there are myriad further tales of woe to be told. After all, this was the decade in which the thirty year assault of radical regressivism came to full fruition, and was there for people to observe in all its glory. The damages have been incalculable, and I haven't even gotten to Sarah Palin yet.

If there was one bright spot, it was the seeming recognition by the American public that this full glory of regressive politics was a fairly horrifying prospect to behold, once stripped by a sufficient dose of reality immersion to reveal the truth behind the marketing slogans. Americans seemed to finally come to their senses just a bit, and decide that the thirteenth century was best left in the history books, after all.

But then along came Barack Obama to provide the fitting end to it all. Crushing any sense of possible recovery or redemption (and even his own presidency) on the altar of perpetual obedience to corporate predation, he has now made the decade complete in every way. Not only has he abandoned any meaningful solutions for the multiple crises he inherited, he has absolved by silence the folks who produced those very catastrophes. No, strike that. He has more than absolved them, he has revivified them.

If there is any bright spot in the whole affair, it is that conditions are fertile for potentially big change in this country. But, then, this is America, a place where a corporate milquetoast like Harry Reid defines the supposed left, and is considered some sort of Bolshevik revolutionary. Or worse, I should say that it is an increasingly desperate, collapsing empire America, where the chances that such big change could be really ugly are lots higher than not. Really, pushed off its fat ass toward one political pole or another, do you see this country careening more toward twenty-first century Sweden, or 18th century Prussia? And when you look at the actors and energies out there working hard to move the nation in one direction or the other, just who seems to have the horses today? (Hint: The Tea Partyers are not progressives in this particular tableau. Perhaps in Germany circa 1933, but not in the America of 2009.)

So let's just hunker down for the new year, hope for the best, and call this one "The Devil's Decade", eh? Chalk it up to the red guy with the tail and pitchfork. Maybe we'll do better next time, but so far in the twenty-first century the score stands at: Satan, one; Humanity, zero.

Of course, I don't really believe in the Devil. Or in angels, or saints or miracles, or any of the other human-made dramatis personae and sundry religious claptrap that get us into so much trouble.

No, I don't really think there is a dude running around out there who is the Devil.

Whole countries, on the other hand...?

Well, now. That's another matter entirely.

Israel returns to Assassinations Policy

2009-12-28T05:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.middleastpost.com/1583/israel-returns-assassinations-policy/#utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+middleastpost1+(Middle+East+Post)

Israel returns to Assassinations Policy
Ziad Khalil Abu Zayyad
Middle East Post
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:09 EST

Six Palestinians were killed in two separate incidents by the Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank. Three of the Palestinians were assassinated in Israel returns to Assassinations Policy 122 320×240 one of the palestinian victims Nablus at the West Bank. According to Israeli sources, Ghasan Abu Sharkh, Raed Sarkaji and Anan Suboh took part in the last attack which resulted in killing an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

The Israeli troops entered Nablus while being directed by the Israeli Intelligence Service "Shabak" in order to assassinate the three Palestinians who are known as leaders of Fatah movement in the Palestinian territories. Israel considered this operation a success since it came only 48 hours after the attack on the Israeli's car in the West Bank. The Palestinian authority considered this operation another act made by the Israeli government in order to destroy the peace process and the efforts made by the United States and the international community in order to renew the negotiations.

In another incident Israel killed three Palestinians in Gaza who were trying to infiltrate through Erez Checkpoint into the Israeli territories. According to Aljazeera correspondent the three Palestinians were Bedwins searching for metal and building material in order to get it back for recycling and use in Gaza.

The Israeli operation in the West Bank is considered a serious development in the area since it may bring more reactions from the Palestinian side and end in a new round of violence between the two sides. Although the Palestinian security forces are applying everything which was asked from them in matters of security, Israel continues to take law in its hands and even implements public executions claiming that this is a legal punishment for those who were involved in terrorist attacks against Israelis.

In Israel's operation in the West Bank anti tank rockets and heavy weapons were used to target buildings full of civilians. The Israeli forces stormed into Anan Suboh's house and stayed inside it for several hours before executing him which leaves more questions about the real Israeli intentions for this operation. The mission was not to arrest the Palestinian activists but instead to investigate with them and immediately execute them no matter what. Ghasan Abu Sharkh did not show any kind of resistance and despite this he was shot at his head immediately. Raed Sarkajy's wife was injured while she was sleeping beside him on their bed. The Israeli forces attacked the room and shot both of them although there wasn't any kind of resistance from inside the house.

The whole operation sends one message which Israel wants the Palestinians to understand clearly: Israel is ready to execute anyone without a court or a respect for the Palestinian authority's presence at the West Bank. The Israeli assassinations were criticized by several International organizations for its ruthless and illegality. Israel is not only violating the security arrangements and attacking civilian areas but it also starts such operations with a target of killing those who are considered suspects ignoring the part of court of law and justice.

The Israeli army and Intelligence may consider this operation a successful one since it proves that Israel is holding the West Bank as it wants. However, the result of such operations will prove that the Israeli policy will only bring failure and more reactions which may return the area into a new circle of violence.

These six Palestinians were killed in the day when the Palestinians remember the 1600 victims who died in Israel's war on Gaza. Since the war and until today Israel continues to depend on its security plans in dealing with its conflict with the Palestinians. The only result which they are bringing on the Israeli people is more anger and hatred within the Palestinians who are suffering until today.

Wife, brothers describe Israeli assassinations

2009-12-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=249765

Wife, brothers describe Israeli assassinations
(updated) 27/12/2009

Nablus - Ma'an - Family members of three slain Fatah members gave testimony of the last moments of their loved ones' lives on Saturday, hours after the men were assassinated by Israeli forces in their own homes in Nablus.

Raed Sarakji, 38

Now a widow, Tahani Ja’ara is 32 years old and seven months pregnant. "We were sleeping in our bedroom, not bigger than six square meters, when Israeli soldiers began yelling 'get out, get out.' I thought I was dreaming. When I heard the Israeli soldiers and their police dogs outside the room, that was when I realized it was real."

Tahani said her husband told soldiers he would get out of the house, so they started shooting through the door and the windows. “He fell between my hands bleeding. I started crying 'they killed him, they killed him.' Then soldiers broke the door and got in. He was already dead, but they continued to riddle his body with bullets to make sure he was killed."

Three months before his death, Sarakji opened a used tools shop in the Old City of Nablus. He had just been released from Israeli prison in January 2009 after spending seven years in jail. He was trying to restart his life, according to Tahani.

According to a statement from the Israeli military, Sarkaji was involved in the manufacture of explosives and the establishment of an explosives-manufacturing laboratory in Nablus.

Ghassan Abu Sharkh, 39

Ghassan's 16-year-old brother Diyaa Abu Sharkh saw him shot dead Saturday morning. “Everything happened very quickly… when we opened the door and saw the soldiers, two masked collaborators pointed to my brother Ghassan who was walking down the stairs. Before I knew it he was being shot. I couldn’t really make sense of what was going on at all. Then an Israeli officer asked me whether the dead man was Ghassan, and I said yes. 'Good, then ask everybody to leave the house,' the officer said."

“I was stading close to Ghassan when they killed him. They could have detained him very easily. He passed to join my brother Nayif who was killed by Israeli forces a few years ago [2004].”

Ghassan Abu Sharkh was a car electrician and owned a small workshop. He left behind a wife, three sons, and a daughter.

The Israeli military's statement included no specific allegations against Ghassan, only his late brother.

Anan Subih, 33

Farid Subih is 45; his brother Anan was killed Saturday morning in the Ras Al-Ain neighborhood of Nablus. “At 3am, dozens of Israeli troops surrounded our four-story building. They blew open the the main gate then started shooting randomly and throwing grenades in all directions. Anan was inside, and he asked everybody to leave the building to avoid being hurt.”

He continued, “We headed to the nearby house of the Al-‘Amoudi family. Then soldiers entered the house with police dogs, and they started throwing more grenades, and a fire erupted in the warehouse full of plastic chairs and sponge material.

“My brother was not armed, but we could see soldiers continue to ransack the house. For three hours, we didn’t know what was going on. After the soldiers left, we found Anan dead … bullets tore all his body and bones. They could have detained him, and he died believing he had been granted amnesty by Israeli forces. He left behind a widow, two sons, and five daughters,” added Farid.

According to the Israeli military, Annan was killed after an exchange of fire and was "found in a hiding place along with weapons and ammunition."

Anan had been affiliated with Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigades years before, but he was completely pardoned in an amnesty deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Uganda's oil, and gay death penalty, may rival Saudi Arabia's Special

2009-12-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

This how the devil gets his blood to drink while spreading that blood on everyone's hands through the oil. This indirectly corrupts our Souls unless we recognize these Great Murders and spiritually Resist them!

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/284407#tab=comments&sc=0&contribute=&local=

Uganda's oil, and gay death penalty, may rival Saudi Arabia's Special
Posted Dec 24, 2009 by ■ Ann Garrison

Oil reserves as large as Saudi Arabia's may soon embolden Ugandan officials who've been threatening to punish homosexuals with death, just as independently oil wealthy Saudi Arabia does.

Oil reserves as large as Saudi Arabia's may soon embolden Ugandan officials who've been threatening to punish homosexuals with death, just as independently oil wealthy Saudi Arabia does.

In mid-December the U.S. State Department assured Americans outraged by Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009, a.k.a. Hang the Gays bill, that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had promised to veto it, if his Parliament passes it in January 2010. However, on 12.22.2009, Uganda's leading newspaper, the Daily Monitor, reported that the government is still undecided, and will remain opposed to homosexuality, no matter how great the international pressure.

And, a little known bill as draconian as the Anti-Homosexuality Act has also been proposed----the ill-named HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill, which would criminalize HIV transmission, create mandatory testing and disclosure laws, and, according to Human Rights Watch, violate international law.

Homosexuality is already a crime in Uganda; the penalty is 14 years to life in prison. The Anti-Homosexuality Act would add seven "aggravated homosexuality" offenses, including gay sex while being HIV positive, gay sex with a disabled person, and serial homosexual convictions, all punishable by death. It would also add a long list of related offenses, like "aiding and abetting homosexuality" and "failure to disclose the offense," meaning failure to report gay sex or related offenses within 24 hours. And thus, it would create a politically convenient excuse to incarcerate most anyone, before Uganda's July 2011 elections or thereafter.

Investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet reported that the U.S. fundamentalist elitist group known as "The Family" backed the bill both ideologically and financially, as culture wars born in the U.S.A. took the world stage.

After publishing "Globalizing the Culture Wars," Public Research Associates launched a campaign to demand that famously gay intolerant Pastor Rick Warren speak out against the Anti-Homosexuality Act, in Uganda, where he has so much influence, as a pastor, and, as a major player in PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Rick Warren twisted George Bush's arm, to propose PEPFAR, which Congress then funded at roughly $15 billion, from 2003 to 2008, then roughly $48 billion from 2008 to 2013. Both Uganda and Rwanda are among PEPFAR's 15 "focus countries"---U.S. allies receiving the most PEPFAR funds, often with little oversight.

Rick Warren finally did speak out against the bill, as did President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs Chair Russ Feingold, D-WI, and even Senators Grassley and Ensign, both of whom are members of "The Family." But, how much leverage will they, and all the other foreign nations and organizations who've spoken out against the bill continue to have?

"If Museveni wants the bill to pass, it will pass." ---Charles Langwa Bbaale

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986.

"If Museveni wants the bill to pass, it will pass," says Charles Langwa Bbaale, president of the Ugandan Ecological Party, affiliated with the Global Greens, and with the 2011 Coalition parties planning to field candidates in Uganda's July 2011 election. "But 50 percent of his budget comes from foreign donors, and he has to have those donations to keep employing all the people who keep him in power because he employs them, so he has to listen to the donors and they may pressure him to veto the bill."

"And, even if it doesn't pass, or only part of it passes," Bbaale adds, "it will have done what it's supposed to do if it distracts from other issues like poverty and hunger, and the lack of democracy."

Enormous oil wealth will soon strengthen Museveni's hand, already infamous for thirteen or more security organizations, answerable only to him, which persecute, abduct, disappear, torture, and execute opponents, and, harass media.

In December 2007, Africa surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports and, in January 2009, Heritage Oil announced what could be the largest onshore oil discovery in Sub Saharan Africa, in the Albertine Basin surrounding Lake Albert, which forms a part of the Uganda/Congo border.

Oil is already causing new disputes and skirmishes, on this border which has seen near constant conflict since 1996. Reserves are thus far reported to be on the Ugandan side, though the European colonists who created the border never drew it clearly.
On 06.02.2009, Edris Kisambira, quoted Ms. Sally Kornfeld, a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy, in East Africa Business Week:

"You are blessed with amazing reservoirs. Your reservoirs are incredible. I am amazed by what I have seen, you might rival Saudi Arabia,' Kornfeld told a visiting delegation from Uganda in Washington DC."

University of Lumumbashi Professor Joseph Yav Katshung wrote, instead, of "The Curse of Oil in the Great Lakes of Africa," in the Pambazuka News, 10.03.2007, though he also argued for using resources as “tools for reconciliation and reconstruction."
How much of Uganda's oil wealth remains in Uganda, how it's distributed, the environmental costs, and, the outcome of further disputes between Uganda and D.R. Congo, will depend in part on whether or not Yoweri Museveni can hold onto the near absolute power he's held since 1986, with force and patronage.

And, on whether popular Ugandan opposition parties are able to mount a serious challenge in 2011 elections, against all odds; they'll first have to succeed at electoral reform.

Opposition parties were finally able to register, in 2005, after 19 years of rule by Museveni and his National Resistance Movement.

The use and abuse of Uganda's oil will also depend, of course, on the competition, collaboration, and, covert intervention, of world powers and oil companies now maneuvering to secure as much of Uganda's oil, and oil wealth, as possible. World powers including not only the UK, the US and their allies, but also of course, China, and, as recently reported, Italy and Libya.

Oil and human rights

Senator Russ Feingold issued a press release stating that the Anti-Homosexuality Act's passage would "hurt the close working relationship between our two countries, especially in the fight against HIV/AIDS," but, if Senator Feingold were serious about gay rights, human rights overall, and HIV, he'd be pushing to end the U.S.A.'s "close working relationship" with Yoweri Museveni, and citing Museveni's long list of human rights crimes, as recounted by London human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, in the Black Star News, 12.18.2009, with links to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports. Milton Allimadi reported, in the Black Star News, 08.11.2009, that Museveni's crimes include even the targeted use of rape, including male rape, and thus, HIV, in Northern Uganda and Eastern Congo.

Even as Senator Feingold issued his perfunctory press release objecting to Uganda's anti-gay death penalty, he was, pushing the LRA Disarmament Act of 2009, Senate Bill 1067----which will further arm and fund Yoweri Museveni, so long as he remains a U.S. ally in good standing. It will also make way for more U.S. weaponry and military "advisors," and, further militarize the Eastern Uganda/Northeastern Congo border, where big oil finds have already heightened longstanding conflict.

And, Yoweri Museveni may soon control so much oil that he can hang all the gay people, and whomever else, he wants, as freely as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and otherwise carry on his epic career as all around tyrant and human rights criminal.

Anyone hoping for a better outcome might ask how to encourage a free and fair election in Uganda, in July 2011, in accordance with the Human Rights Watch report, Preparing for the Polls.

Top pathologist says doctors also involved in organ stealing

2009-12-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

http://uruknet.info/index.php?p=m61270&hd=&size=1&l=e

Top pathologist says doctors also involved in organ stealing
Israeli video confirms theft of Palestinian organs
Al Arabiya
DUBAI (Al Arabiya) - December 20, 2009

An Israeli video confirmed accusations that Tel Aviv was illegally stealing organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and justified the practice in the name of scientific research, press reports said Sunday.

The news of the harvesting of Palestinian organs was first published by a Swedish newspaper, which an outraged Israel denied, but according to the video corneas, hearts, bones and skin from the back were harvested from the bodies of dead Palestinians without authorization or permission from their families, the Palestinian Maan News Agency reported.

The 57-minute video was filmed by Yehuda Hiss, the director and chief pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, and explains how he authorized organ theft, gave instructions to doctors to do so and said he would sometimes snatch the organs himself.

"The process started in the early 1980s and lasted till the end of 2000," Hiss, who heads the only place in Israel authorized to conduct autopsies in cases of unnatural death in Israel and the occupied territories, said in the video.

"We would not remove the entire eye," Hiss said. "We would just remove the cornea then close the eye back."

Hiss explained how he has also removed skin from the back of dead Palestinians and said the families of the dead never discovered the theft since they did not turn the body before burying it.

The skin was then said to have been given to soldiers who suffer from burns and in 1986 a skin bank was established in Israel.

Slap on the wrist

Bones, especially long ones, and parts of the heart were also regularly stolen.

"We donated the organs we took to hospitals," Hiss explained. "I specifically gave them to Tel Hashomer hospital because all the doctors there were my friends. I took no money in return, but four years later they gave us a microscope. We also gave organs to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and they gave us an inter-body scan to film the contents of the corpse."

Israeli law prohibits taking organs from corpses without obtaining permission from the family of the deceased, which Hiss said he specifically instructed doctors not to do.

"We did it for the sake of research and medical progress," said Hiss, who admitted to having removed organs from 125 bodies without permission or authorization.

News of organ thefts led to the suspension of Hiss as director of the institute in 2005 but Israel’s top attorney decided not to press charges and Hiss ended up just being reprimanded and going back to his position at the institute.

The Israeli Ministry of Health responded to the tape by saying that everything was done in accordance with the law while hospitals that were named argued that the topic is old news and there is no point bringing it up again now.

(Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)

Stop American Evil, President Obama!

2009-12-17T11:18:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Stop-American-Evil-Presid-by-Thomas-Farrell-091215-742.html

December 17, 2009
Stop American Evil, President Obama!
By Thomas Farrell

Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) December 15, 2009 Stop American evil, President Obama. It is evil (i.e., the opposite of good) for you to build up the armed forces of the United States in the unjust war in Afghanistan. In the Cold War, we had one evil empire (the United States) pitted against another evil empire (the Soviet Union). But since the end of the Cold War, we have had only one remaining evil empire the United States. And now instead of working to extricate the United States from the two unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, you plan to escalate the evil war in Afghanistan. Shame on you! You are an evil man!

I hope I've gotten your attention, President Obama, and illustrated for you just how easy it is to turn the term "evil" against you, because by definition evil is the opposite of good. Whenever I think you are up to no good, I can label you and your efforts "evil." So can others. You're not the only glib preacher-man in the country. As a result, I propose that you and I and others stop using the term "evil" in our public discourse about the unjust wars that the United States is carrying on in Afghanistan and Iraq

After all, Aristotle centuries ago noted that we tend to act under the impression that we are doing good. You evidently think you are doing good. But I think you are up to no good. Put differently, Aristotle's point is that we tend not to act under the impression that we are undertaking to do evil. Of course we may be mistaken about what is good to do in any given set of circumstances. As a result, there is usually room for some disagreement about what is good to do in any given set of circumstances.

How many Americans have explicitly claimed that they were for "evil"? By definition, evil is what people agree to be against. Even the Americans who plotted to assassinate President John F. Kennedy no doubt thought they were doing good by assassinating someone they thought was a traitor to the Cold War cause -- as he understandably was, as James W. Douglass shows in his excellent book "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" (2008).

So according to Aristotle's way of thinking, everybody tacitly agrees in principle to do good and avoid evil. But there is usually room for some debate about what might be good to do in a certain set of circumstances.

Should you choose to lead us by your own example in our public discourse and stop using the term "evil" to frame your claims in the future, then you will be able to claim that you have stopped using the term and that your opponents should do so as well. However, if you persist in using the term "evil," then by your own example you will be inviting your opponents to use the term against you and your efforts.

As you may know, in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, God was imagined to be the only force in the cosmos strong enough to bring an end to evil in the world as we know it. They even imagined that God would intervene and bring an end to the evil in the world as we know it. They imagined that God's intervention would be the end of the world as we know it known for short as the end-time, or the eschaton. Some of them earnestly hoped for the end-time to come soon. But only God knows when the end-time will come.

In the meantime, I take the point of the apocalyptic tradition of thought to be that only God can decisively and finally bring an end to the evil in the world as we know it, not Americans.

As you know, many Americans today have been eagerly reading novels about the end-time. When we start fantasizing about the end-time and the glories of God's final intervention, we run the risk of mistakenly thinking that we can cue God about when to start the end-time. We might think, "OK, God, we will start the war against the evil of Islamist terrorism, and you finish off the evil of Islamist terrorism."

See how that might work? In light of the millions of Americans today who have read those novels about the end-time, I would urge you to stop referring to alleged "evil" in the world because those Americans are already overly impressed with the evil in the world they do not need you to help them imagine further evil in the world.

Instead of talking further about evil in the world, I would urge you to publicize the Muslim custom of stoning the devil. In my estimate, this is a great custom. We Americans should adopt this custom, but without making the pilgrimage to Mecca. I take the point of the custom to be that we imagine the devil to be the source of evil in our lives. As a result, we act out our disapproval of evil in the world by stoning the devil.

In the novel "1984" George Orwell had the people of the fictional Oceania punctuate their days with the custom known as the two-minute hate exercise. In spirit, the two-minute hate period resembles the Muslim custom of stoning the devil. There is something to be said about pumping ourselves to denounce something vigorously. It can help us keep the adrenalin flowing.

But when we fancy ourselves as being pitted against evil, we can also fancy ourselves as being good to an unwarranted degree. In addition, we may be blind to our own shortcomings and limitations. That's the danger of imagining ourselves as pitted against evil.

Now, as the Muslims know, the devil somehow keeps managing to survive being stoned. As a result, there is no end to the evil in the world. The devil is a wily devil. So it looks like there will be no end to evil until the end-time, and only God knows when that will be. I wouldn't get my hopes up about it coming very soon.

In the meantime, I'd prefer to see my fellow Americans adopt the custom of stoning the devil instead of reading novels fantasizing about the end-time. I am really wary of people who are fantasizing about the end-time and longing for it to come. I'd prefer to see them actively engage in activities to improve themselves in this life and wait for death to lead them into the afterlife, instead of fantasizing about the afterlife coming soon because of the end-time coming soon.

However, if we Americans were somehow to stop imagining ourselves as pitted against evil, then how might we conceptually frame our opposition to something? In accord with Aristotle's way of thinking, we might try to put ourselves in the shoes of our opponents and try to imagine their view of the world and how they can imagine whatever they consider to be good.

For example, we might try to imagine how the Ayatollah Khomeini could consider the United States as the Great Satan. As you may know, this is not exactly hard to understand. At an earlier time, the United States intervened significantly and substantially in Iran. As a result of that covert intervention, the government of the Shah of Iran was set up in Iran, and the United States then overtly supported the Shah's government. But the Ayatollah Khomeini led the revolution that overthrew the Shah's government. So from the Ayatollah Khomeini's point of view, the United States is the Great Satan because of the intervention in Iran.

But has the interventionist spirit of the American government stopped? No, it hasn't. Witness the present wars in which the United States is involved in Afghanistan and Iraq. Might these other American-led interventions in Muslim countries lead other Muslims to follow the Ayatollah Khomeini's example and refer to the United States as the Great Satan? In addition, might these other American-led interventions in Muslim countries prompt other Muslims to organize armed resistance against the United States?

These two wars were initiated because of what you referred to in your Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as humanitarian reasons. Saddam Hussein in Iraq had done things that violated our American sense of proper humanitarian behavior, and so had the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Let us be clear here about these two American-led interventions. The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were not carried out by Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, nor by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Had either of these two governments carried out these attacks, these attacks would have been acts of war. In accord with the principle of self-defense, the United States would have been justified to go to war against any country that had carried out an act of war against it. This is the basic principle of the just war theory.

But no country carried out an act of war against the United States in these attacks. These attacks were organized and carried out by the non-governmental group known as al Qaeda, whose leaders is Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia.

Now, because the United States has carried out a number of interventions covertly through the CIA (e.g., in Iran), we might wonder if Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda carried out the attacks on the United States covertly in behalf of Saudi Arabia or some other country. As we might expect, no country has yet stepped forward and claimed to have covertly supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Nor has anybody in the United States yet presented convincing evidence that any country covertly supported Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

However, as you know, some Americans have advanced the view that the CIA may have orchestrated the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Various scenarios have been advanced regarding possible CIA involvement.

But I don't find the arguments about possible CIA involvement in these attacks convincing. Americans don't have a monopoly on the kind of trickster manipulative thinking that the CIA is famous for. It strikes me that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda represent a non-governmental response to the American-government-sponsored CIA, but not a CIA-infiltrated-and-manipulated organization.

In any event, the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have been carried out for supposed humanitarian reasons, and you endorse carrying out wars for humanitarian reasons, President Obama, provided that you happen to agree with the alleged humanitarian reasons. I know that you did not agree with President George W. Bush's reasons for going to war against Iraq. But you evidently agreed with going to war against Afghanistan.

But you have not yet articulated any limit principle for wars carried out for humanitarian reasons. In your wars for humanitarian reasons, what is the principle, if any, for calling an end to the war? In "1984" Orwell envisioned continuous war as the future state of things to come. There appears to be no end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By what principle, if any, will the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ever come to an end?

Another principle of just war theory is proportionality. The most famous articulation of the principle of proportionality is found in the book of Exodus 21:23-25: "But where injury ensues, you are to give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, bruise for bruise, wound for wound" (REB).

Because you are a lawyer, you may recognize that the biblical version of the principle of proportionality is the basic principle of retributive justice. Retributive justice demands a penalty for breaking each law. But the penalty is supposed to be proportionate to the crime committed by breaking the law in question.

As an intellectual exercise, let us consider the principle of proportionality in connection with the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, were not an act of war because by definition only a country can carry out an act of war. So the attacks were crimes. The actual perpetrators of the attacks were killed in the attacks. Consequently, there can be no retributive justice brought against them.

But presumably the perpetrators had help in planning and carrying out the attacks.

In accord with the principle of proportionality, shouldn't the Americans get to kill as many people as were killed on September 11, 2001? Innocent civilians were killed in these attacks. So shouldn't the Americans get to kill innocent civilians in the effort to capture criminals in al Qaeda, or kill them in the process of trying to capture them?

After all, al Qaeda operatives killed innocent American civilians, so shouldn't the Americans get to kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq in the effort to capture criminals al Qaeda so that they can be brought to justice for the crimes of September 11, 2001, that they helped perpetrate? I myself would not answer this question in the affirmative because the Americans should be pursuing criminals in al Qaeda, not acting as though they were conducting a war on no-combatant civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But this brings me back to the two presumably humanitarian wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How many people in Afghanistan and how many people in Iraq have died thus far in these two American-led wars? How many of the dead were supposed al Qaeda criminals? And how many of the dead were not al Qaeda criminals but so-called collateral damage? And why have the American-led forces in these two wars been allowed to bring about the deaths of so many people as collateral damage? What is being gained by killing so many people as collateral damage in these two American-led wars?

If we were to try to apply the principle of proportionality to these two wars, what exactly are all the deaths attributed to collateral damage in Afghanistan and Iraq thus far supposed to be in proportion to? From what I can gather, the number of deaths attributed to collateral damage far exceeds the numbers of deaths in the attacks on September 11, 2001.

For humanitarian reasons, President Obama, you should stop the deaths inflicted by the American-led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Can Obama Face the 'Unspeakable'?

2009-12-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

I don't believe evil is unspeakable. I believe it can accurately be described and named but people don't want to face the Truth of this Underworld.

http://www.truthout.org/topstories/1214097

Can Obama Face the 'Unspeakable'?
Monday 14 December 2009
by: Lisa Pease | Consortium News

Obama, like President John F. Kennedy, has had his first encounters with the permanent warfare establishment, and so far, has been persuaded by their arguments. This book could open his eyes – and ours – to the possibility of another path.

In this eloquent, remarkable book, longtime peace activist and theologian Jim Douglass uses Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic monk, to elevate the study of Kennedy’s presidency to a spiritual as well as physical battle with the warmongers of his time.

In 1962, as Douglass records in his preface, Merton wrote a friend the following eerily prescient analysis:

“I have little confidence in Kennedy. I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much the Time and Life mentality ….

“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

Merton coined the term “the Unspeakable” to describe the forces of evil that seemed to defy description, that took from the planet first Kennedy, then Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and which tragically escalated the war in Vietnam.

Merton warned that “Those who are at present too eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.”

The Unspeakable represents not only willful evil but the void of an agenda for good, an amorality that, like a black hole, destroys all that would escape from it.

Douglass defines the Cold War version of the Unspeakable as “the void in our government’s covert-action doctrine of ‘plausible deniability,’” that sanctioned assassinations and coups to protect American business interests in the name of defeating communism.

Douglass traces Kennedy’s confrontation with the Unspeakable and his efforts to escape that trajectory. Kennedy came to understand that peace through war would never bring us true peace, but only a “Pax Americana,” which would foster resentment among the conquered, sowing the seeds of future conflicts, a fear that has proven true over and over in the years following his death.

Mea Culpa

Douglass opens with a sort of mea culpa, noting that by failing to see the connection between Kennedy’s assassination and his own personal fight against nuclear weapons, he “contributed to a national climate of denial.”

Douglass explains that the cover-ups of the assassinations of the Sixties was enabled in large part by denial, and not just by the government, but by those of us who never clamored for the truth about what happened.

Douglass reminds us that “The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that has become foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of ‘plausible deniability.’”

Douglass quotes Gandhi on the principle of satyagraha, how truth is the most powerful force on earth, and how, as Gandhi said, “truth is God.” If you want to see God, you must first be able to look truth in the face.

Douglass frames Kennedy’s assassination as rooted in our Cold War past. Our collective failure to demand accountability for the crimes done in our name came back to haunt us in the most visceral of ways on Nov. 22, 1963, when the President was shot dead in the street in front of us.

With astonishing moral clarity and elegant prose, Douglass lays out Kennedy’s multiple battles with the military, industrial and intelligence establishments, which are not really separate entities, but deeply interdependent on each other.

The well-documented (and footnoted and indexed) book opens with a succinct chronology of major events during Kennedy’s administration. Seeing all the events laid out simply, end-to-end, makes the book’s conclusions all the more powerful.

The answer to the question implied in the book’s subtitle of “Why he was killed and why it matters” seems self-evident when you strip away all the false history and distractions that have been injected into the record to muddy the waters and look simply, finally, at what happened.

Douglass takes us back to what may well be the source of John Kennedy’s courage – the sinking of his PT boat and his heartbreakingly difficult but ultimately successful efforts to rescue his comrades. Kennedy faced his own death several times during that first long night, and told his fellow crewmembers when he got back to shore that he’d never prayed so much in his life.

Even after he was safe, Kennedy plunged back into the ocean a second time in an attempt to signal another boat. Kennedy’s utter selflessness was not some liberal fantasy; it was an actuality, for his PT crew.

JFK’s Suffering

As Robert Kennedy wrote later, at least half of John Kennedy’s life he suffered some form of pain. He had scarlet fever as a child, and suffered from back trouble most of his life. He was beset with illnesses, often at the most inconvenient times.

But he never complained, and few realized what he dealt with. Perhaps these experiences shaped John Kennedy’s own sense of compassion for others.
And perhaps these experiences, in which death seemed always nearby, gave him the courage to do what few others would attempt, as the Cold War nearly exploded into a hot one during the Cuban missile crisis.

Kennedy’s first confrontation with the Unspeakable came during his first 100 days in office with the Bay of Pigs operation he inherited as a going concern from the Eisenhower Administration. The CIA convinced Kennedy that the operation would be successful, and that no American troops would be needed (Kennedy’s prerequisite for launching the operation).

The Cuban exiles were trained and ready and well supplied, he was told. Kennedy approved the plan, and the plan was a disaster.

In the Bay of Pigs account, Douglass referenced something I had never read before – coffee-stained notes from Allen Dulles leftover from an unpublished draft of an article, discovered by Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. In the notes, Dulles acknowledges the plan had no chance of success, but that he and others in the CIA drew Kennedy into the plan on the assumption that when it failed, Kennedy would send in the military to finish the job.

Dulles and the CIA had vastly underestimated Kennedy’s capacity to absorb defeat rather than to escalate a situation.

Douglass also cites an NPR report by Daniel Schorr to support this notion. Schorr attended a special conference on the Bay of Pigs in 2001, and reported on NPR additional details supporting this thesis, concluding that, “In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.”

The CIA even had a plan to circumvent Kennedy if Kennedy had not agreed to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Under the plan, Kennedy would be maneuvered into rubber-stamping it through the careful stage-managing of his ignorance.

But the one thing the CIA could not do was order the military’s direct intervention. For that, they needed the President. And that is where Kennedy won his first battle with the Unspeakable. He refused to choose more death and destruction over defeat.

Kennedy would demonstrate this capacity two more times – during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in his refusal to escalate troop levels in Vietnam.

Backchannels

Douglass outlines in perhaps the greatest detail yet the various backchannels President Kennedy used to open avenues of communication with both the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Castro was more distrustful of Kennedy than Khrushchev was at first, but Khrushchev told Castro that Kennedy could be trusted.

Indeed, Castro became so enamored of Kennedy that he was visibly distressed at the news of Kennedy’s assassination. He felt they had just started to make progress, and was concerned about his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and queried a contact about Johnson’s relationship with the CIA. (Castro knew how the system worked perhaps even more acutely than Kennedy did, having been at the receiving end of its actions for so long.)

Douglass is not uncritical of Kennedy, and points out his notable failing for even half-heartedly supporting the coup that led to the assassination of Diem in Vietnam.

But Douglass adroitly sidesteps sideshow issues that make up too much of the Kennedy literature of late, and focuses on Kennedy’s most important policy decisions, and how they show Kennedy’s changing and continually evolving mindset.

It was that evolution that threatened the ruling class who perhaps had assumed at first that they had elected one of their own to the White House. Kennedy was, after all, rich and privileged, and with that combination usually came the typically pro-business-above-all-else mindset.

But Kennedy was not one of them, as Douglass makes clear through the context of Kennedy’s actions in office. He was operating with a more spiritual understanding of our place in the world. And Merton proved right. That evolution put a target on his back.

Douglass’s book is a wondrous mixture of biography, history and conspiracy realities. Douglass seamlessly mixes new information about long acknowledged events with well-documented discoveries about the CIA’s covert relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald in a narrative that is tragic, compelling, and works on the reader with a quiet moral force, relentlessly asking us to face the truth about these events.

We, too, face the Unspeakable, each and every day. What can we do better? Douglass quotes Gandhi saying “truth is God,” and suggests that only by confronting the truth about our past can we be liberated from the Unspeakable.

The only fault I would find with the book, and it’s a really small one, is some reliance near the end on a couple of first-person accounts for which there are no additional corroborating records. The events may be true accounts, and if they were true, it makes sense there would be no corroborating records.

But the author provides no caveat, and given how well-documented the rest of the book is, those episodes stick out for their thinness. Still, these events are not central to the book’s thesis, and if proven false, they in no way detract from the rest of the nourishing narrative.

As someone who has researched the Kennedy assassination for over 17 years, and who has read many books on the case, I can finally say, for the first time, this is the single best book ever written on why Kennedy was killed, who did it, and why it still matters.

It’s only fair to note that Douglass quoted from my own writings on the subject liberally. But before you assume that affected my objectivity, so have many others whose books I could not in good conscience recommend. Douglass maintains an unerring focus on the truth of what happened that is all too rare in books on the assassination.

If you’re only going to read one book on President Kennedy’s assassination, let Douglass, like Charon, ferry you through that murky realm. If enough people read and talk about this book honestly, a sea change in our foreign policy will become not just possible, but inevitable.

The truth really could still set us free, if we are brave enough to confront it.

If chimpanzees could talk, what would they say?

2009-12-16T10:30:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/If-chimpanzees-could-talk-by-PETA-091215-260.html

December 16, 2009
If chimpanzees could talk, what would they say?
By PETA

According to a recent study published in the journal Nature, scientists have discovered that a gene called FOXP2, which is believed to be responsible for the evolution of speech in humans, behaves differently in humans than it does in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. The gene produces a protein in humans that differs by just two amino acids from chimpanzees' FOXP2 protein. Think about itif not for those two amino acids, chimpanzees might be able to talk. If they could speak, what would they say?

Actually, we already know what they would say, thanks to the work of people such as Roger Fouts, a professor at Central Washington University who is famous for teaching chimpanzees American Sign Language (ASL). Fouts' most famous pupil is Washoe, who was the first nonhuman animal to learn ASL and who, in turn, taught it to her adopted son, Loulis. Washoe spontaneously combined words to describe her experiences and desires, using expressions such as "you me hide" and "listen dog." She also invented names for her possessions, referring to her doll, for instance, as "Baby Mine." She was even known to fib and tell jokes.

Perhaps Fouts' second most famous pupil is Booee, a chimpanzee who was taught ASL while he was "on loan" to Fouts. More than a decade laterafter Booee had been reclaimed and sent to a laboratory where he was subjected to hepatitis experimentsthe TV show 20/20 approached Fouts about reuniting with Booee on camera. Although worried by the prospect of upsetting Booee, Fouts agreed in the hope that the reunion, which would be watched by millions of people, could potentially help Booee and other chimpanzees in laboratories.

I will never forget the footage of Roger entering the laboratory and signing, "Hi, Booee. You remember?" Booee, who had been sitting despondently in his small cage a moment earlier, jumped up and down in excitement, signing his name, "Booee, Booee, Booee," over and over again. "Yes, you Booee," Roger signed back. Remembering that Fouts always carried treats, Booee asked for them, even using an old nickname that he had invented for Rogera flick of his ear with his finger. He and Fouts spent the next several minutes playing games of "chase" and "tickle" like they used to do all those years ago.

As Fouts had hoped, viewers were touched by the joyful reunion, and they were heartbroken when they watched Booee move dejectedly to the back of his cage when the time came to say goodbye. Because of the subsequent outcry, Booee was sent to a sanctuary months later, where he still lives.

Unfortunately, more than 1,000 other chimpanzees remain caged, lonely and miserable in laboratories, despite overwhelming evidence that they are highly intelligent, sensitive animals. They are injected with drugs, infected with diseases that they would never normally contract and subjected to traumatic psychological experiments. When they're not strapped to a table, they languish in cagesoften in windowless roomsthat bear no resemblance to their natural forest and jungle homes. Their spirits are broken from years of needles, scalpels, toxins, pain, solitude, fear and the overwhelming nothingness of waking up, day after day, in a cold metal box.

The U.K., Japan, Austria, New Zealand and the Netherlands have prohibited the use of great apes for invasive research and testing. The U.S. is the only country in the world that continues large-scale use of chimpanzees in experiments. That may change if The Great Ape Protection Acta bill that would phase out the use of chimpanzees in invasive research and retire federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuariesever becomes law.

If chimpanzees could talk, they would almost certainly say, "Let me out," as one of Booee's fellow inmates signed. Yes, it's time to let them out. They are not test tubes with fur. They have thoughts, feelings and desires. It's time to let them be chimpanzees.

Kathy Guillermo is the vice president of laboratory investigations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; http://www.StopAnimalTests.com.

The Anthropogenic Climate Swindle: Do You Really Want a World Dictatorship?

2009-12-10T16:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12709

THE ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE SWINDLE: DO YOU REALLY WANT A WORLD DICTATORSHIP?
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of The Schiller Institute and chairwoman of the German party Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, BüSo.

December 9, 2009 (LPAC)— The audacity with which a clique of climate-scientists, a majority of the media, and a range of governments are trying to uphold the fairy tale of anthropogenic climate change, even though the recently published e-mails from East Anglia University have totally confirmed the suspicion of innumerable serious scientists that there is no evidence for global warming, is unprecedented.

The reason for this is obvious: The monetarist system of globalization today is in most dimensions more bankrupt than the communist system was in 1989. The British Empire is especially desperate, the crisis in Dubai and other upcoming state bankruptcies make clear that a second wave of insolvencies threatens to pull the whole dilapidated thing into collapse—and this time the financial oligarchy does not assume that the taxpayers in all countries are ready to compensate for their gambling debts, which have been accumulated anew in grand style.

Attempt to Get World Dictatorship

So, what then is happening in Copenhagen? It is nothing less than an effort to establish a world dictatorship, in which the gambling casino will be funded in a new way, and, moreover, the goal of the long-desired population reduction can be covered up with an environmentalist cloak. Listen to what Lord Monckton had to say in Berlin on December 4:

"The Copenhagen Treaty says that it is going to establish a world government. This has been an ambition of certain bureaucrats, certain political groupings, fascists, freemasons, marxists, for hundreds of years. All these different groups all at once or one after another wanted to achieve world domination. Previously it was thought it might happen by force, by military force. Now they found a way of doing it by what one might call a bureaucratic coup d'etat in the name of saving the planet which doesn't need to be saved. There is no threat to the climate. They have decided that they can persuade even the free nations of the West to give up their democracy, give up their freedom, and transfer all ultimate economic as well as environmental power to an unelected world government.

"When Sir Maurice Strong first created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the UN, he created it not as a scientific body, but as a political entity. He said at the time that he hoped that this would become the nucleus of a world government. The whole idea of world government, according to people like Sir Maurice Strong, is not to trust the people. What they will talk of is that there has been market failure in that the policies and freedom and successes of the free market and of capitalism have led to the poisoning of the planet with CO2, and therefore we need to take democracy away, so that the institutions of democracy, which include the stock markets and companies which flourish best under freedom, all of those will in future be under the thumb of a tyranny. It won't seem brutal initially, but it will be extensive. It will stifle freedom in exactly the way that we have already begun to see with the European Union, where there is a European parliament, but it cannot propose legislation. If it decides something, it can be overruled by the commissars. If it wishes to amend legislation, only the commissars, who are unelected, can give it permission. So Europe already has a kind of regional model of what will become a world government with far greater powers even than the EU over the individual nations of the world. It will be a sad day for freedom and democracy if that treaty proceeds at Copenhagen in only a few days' time.

Climate-Gate Makes them Desperate

"The Climate-gate Affair, the revelation that all the leading scientific institutions and leading scientists around the world have been bending, inventing, fabricating, contriving, altering, hiding and destroying scientific data, will, if anything, put even more pressure on the world leaders who want a dictatorial world government, to act in haste and push it through before too many people find out about Climate-gate. At the moment the mainstream news media have indulged in what might be almost called a conspiracy of silence, not to admit these emails exist, and if they have to admit they exist, as the BBC did one month after receiving them, (but only after other people had mentioned it first), the BBC and most of the news media have still not said what is in these emails. So, the world political leaders who want to create a world government will try, and try really hard, extra hard as a result of Climate-gate, to push it through before it's too late. Once people find out what you and I know, they will not want any kind of world government, because they would realize the climate is not at risk; that's always been a fabrication, and those who are using that fabrication to close our liberties down, must not be allowed to get away with it.

"They have certainly destroyed data that had been validly requested under the British FOIA. That is a criminal offense, for which I think the professor in charge of it, and possibly one or two other officials there, including the FOIA-official at the University of East Anglia, will be prosecuted, and they will be heavily fined. I can't see how they can get out of it, given the very clear content of their emails, one of which is Professor Jones writing to his colleagues all over the world, saying 'Please, destroy your data, because otherwise we will have to give it to these people.' That is an outrage, and he must not be allowed to get away with it. I hope that he will be prosecuted, convicted, and fined."

"I think that Prof. Rahmsdorf will be there, I imagine Prof. Schellnuber will be there. I have heard Prof Rahmsdorf's lecture, and I have noticed in his slides that he never used a peer-reviewed source. He always used a website called realclimate.org; and what is that website? It is the website of this poisonous network of dishonest scientists to which Rahmsdorf and Schellnuber belongs; to which Jones belongs, Hansen and Schmidt of NASA belongs; Tom Karl, who runs the national climatic data center in the United States—all of these people, Kevin Trenberth, who raped the landmark paper in 1997 on the Earth's Radiation budget—all of these people are connected by these Emails. We have always suspected they were connected, and of course we have never been able to prove it, but now we can. ... I described how at various stages in the previous evolution of the climate scare people had bent, distorted and invented the data, used corrupt mathematical procedures, used incorrect science, deliberately pushed things only in one direction, a false direction towards greater alarm than there should be. There is nothing wrong with the climate, we are having virtually no effect on it, but they wanted to tell another story, for financial reasons because they all got rich on this, ...."

The fact that the majority of German industry adopted environmentalist technology long ago, and obviously intends to remain "market-leaders" in this area which is based on totally false scientific assumptions, changes nothing about the blindness of their members. Listen to what (to offer an exact description) Fred Singer had to say at the same conference in Berlin:

"The final word I have is for those of you who are concerned about Germany and the economy of Germany. I have here something which was put out by the BDI. They accept every bit of nonsense from the IPCC? How is it possible that people who are educated, maybe even have engineering degrees, can go along with this kind of nonsense? They think that perhaps they will benefit from it. They will not! Everybody will lose, everyone here will lose, and it is a shame that these things can happen. I read the names of some of the people: Keitel, Löscher, and Schulz.

The Population Will Lose

"First of all, it is clear that we have no climate problem, and certainly no climate problem that can be tackled by human efforts. The question is: why all this excitement? What is going on? And if you look into it closely, we can see that it is a question of money and power. I'm not into this business, but it is useful for those of you who are in the press or in the media to find out who benefits from all of this and who loses. Well, I can tell you who loses: the population as a whole.

"Now, what is the great disappointment to us from outside of Germany is to see what has happened here in this country when the government changed. We had expected and hoped for a change similar to what has happened, let's say, in Australia in the last week, when they turned down Cap and Trade, the Emissions Trading System, decisively. We would think the same thing will happen in the United States. Here we find that the Black-Green [CDU-FDP] is following steps that are no different from Red-Green [SPD-Green]; in fact, it's worse. A 40% cut by 2020? That is ridiculous! It doesn't make sense."

This monstrous dumbing down of the population must stop. There is only one reasonable theme to be discussed in Copenhagen, namely, how the greatest systemic crisis in the history of mankind can be overcome, how the poverty which cries to heaven, in which more than half of mankind lives, can be overcome.

The only practicable concept for doing that, has been proposed by Lyndon LaRouche, with his Four Power Alliance for a new credit system.

"This Is Ugly; This Is Evil; This Is Unforgivable"

2009-12-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.larouchepac.com/node/12688

"This Is Ugly; This Is Evil; This Is Unforgivable"

December 8, 2009 (LPAC)-- The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, gave a press conference on Monday to announce—as expected—that the EPA had "found" that carbon dioxide, CO2, "threatens the public health and welfare of current and future generations," and therefore has to be regulated and drastically reduced. The so-called reasons she adduced—global warming, rising sea levels, entire species dying right and left—are almost identical to the lies publicized around the globe on Monday, in a common editorial published in 56 newspapers in 45 countries, on the occasion of the opening of the Copenhagen Climate Control Summit.

That piece of lying, fascist crap, drafted principally by the London Guardian editorial board, shrieks that the Copenhagen conference will be "fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation," and that failure to act would mean that "climate change will ravage our planet.... Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea."

Responding to the EPA insanity, the Copenhagen developments, and the broader British imperial policy of green Malthusian genocide, Lyndon LaRouche today stated:

"We should say this is pure evil—pure evil. They are lying; they either don't know what they're talking about, or they are lying, one of the two. This means mass murder. If it's implemented, it means mass murder of Americans, among others. And therefore it cannot be Constitutional, because you are depriving people of their rights. You are depriving them of due process.

"What's going to happen," LaRouche continued, "is you're going to create a crisis under which you are going to have a revolt by the people of nations. You are in danger of creating a situation in which you will get a dictatorship of those who revolted, who secured power, by revolting against this crap. And their passions will be so strong, that you can't resist it.

"This is ugly; this is evil. This is unforgivable," LaRouche said of these policies.

LaRouche noted that the British Empire is pushing these policies as the entire global financial system is going down on its own steam, faster than people wish to admit. The crash has already happened, he emphasized, and its effects are going to occur anyway, however people may choose to delude themselves. But the timeframe that reality is imposing is that action is needed now: failure to act poses the key, existential threat humanity is facing now.

The LaRouche movement is delivering that message directly at the Copenhagen Summit, among other places. A team of LaRouche organizers handed out thousands of leaflets to conference participants, media, and others, which prompted one high-level African delegate to tell us on the way out that the leaflet "was amazing and probably true," and that everyone was talking about it inside the conference.

The leaflet, a slightly modified version of Helga Zepp-LaRouche's statement on Copenhagen, with the headline "Global Warming Hoax Spells Genocide—Adopt the LaRouche Plan for Development!" states at the outset:

"We must face the ugly truth. The catastrophe that threatens mankind is not climate change, or carbon, or any one of a number of phony 'environmental' issues; it is the breakdown of the world's imperial monetarist system, imperilling the lives of billions. The real threat is that those shaping this Climate Conference, starting with the British Monarchy itself, have an agenda of reducing population worldwide, by setting up a form of global governance to reduce consumption and production. This genocidal agenda must be rejected, in favor of the LaRouche Plan for reversing the economic crisis, which is on the table of major world governments right now."

Killer Coca Cola Corporation

2009-11-25T15:45:00.001-08:00

Below are some of the many reasons I won't drink coke! Haven't for many years! They're a Killer Korporation!!!

November 24, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Activists Target 'World of Coca-Cola'
by Matthew Cardinale

ATLANTA, Georgia - Activists from the U.S. and Colombia are targeting the World of Coca-Cola museum, located near its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, accusing the company of "union busting", paying its workers "poverty wages", and engaging in environmentally destructive practices.

www.killercoke.org "We're an unofficial coalition with the India Resource Center, focusing on Coca-Cola overusing waters in drought areas. We're supporting Corporate Accountability International, that have been trying to stop the use of bottled water over tap water," Lew Friedman, of Killer Coke, told IPS.

"We're working on behalf of Sinaltrainal, the food workers in Colombia. They had eight union leaders murdered. We've been augmenting their legal suit," Friedman said.

"There's plenty of evidence that shows the plant managers were very cozy with the paramilitaries," he added.

Sinaltrainal v. Coca-Cola was filed in 2001 by the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of the Colombian trade union Sinaltrainal, several of its members, and the estate of Isidro Gil, one of its officers who was murdered.

Coca-Cola bottlers "contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders", the lawsuit states.

In addition, Killer Coke claims that many of the Colombian paramilitary troops were trained at the controversial formerly-named School of the Americas, now called the U.S. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Economic Cooperation, in Fort Benning, Georgia.

In 2003, the U.S. District Court removed Coca-Cola as a defendant in the case because the murders took place in Colombia, not in the U.S. However, two Coca-Cola bottlers remained as defendants in the case. In 2006, the judge dismissed the remaining claims.

When IPS asked Coca-Cola about Killer Coke's demonstration in Atlanta last week, the company replied in an email statement that it "was based on an uninformed and inaccurate portrayal of The Coca-Cola Company and independent Coca-Cola bottlers in Colombia and based on allegations that are over ten years old".

"The unfounded allegations have been reviewed over the years by multiple courts in Colombia and most recently in the United States, as well as by the International Labor Organization, and outside law firms - all concluding that the Coca-Cola bottler employees in Colombia enjoy extensive, normal relations with multiple unions and are provided with safe working conditions there," Coca-Cola said.

While much of Killer Coke's focus seemed to be on the Colombian trade union issue, activists said other issues involved the alleged use of child labour in other countries and questions about the healthiness of Coca-Cola products in general.

"There are issues of health, the use of high fructose corn syrup," Friedman said.

As part of their campaign, Killer Coke has been successful at getting over U.S. 50 colleges and universities to stop selling Coke, and at getting the Service Employee Industrial Union (SEIU) and teachers' unions to stop carrying Coke in their offices.

Killer Coke decided to target Coca-Cola headquarters on its own turf, in Atlanta, in part by driving a mobile billboard around town that read, "Don't Drink Killer Coke Zero: Zero Ethics, Zero Justice, Zero Health." This is a pun on one of the company's products, Coke Zero, which is a near-zero calorie beverage.

"The World of Coke is basically one large advertisement for Coca-Cola. It's the centre of Coca-Cola, it's a mile away from their headquarters, it's basically their public image that's there," said Ian Hoffmann, a young activist from Minnesota. "We've got people coming forward and saying it's an anti-union company. Coca-Cola usually says 'we're an Atlanta-based company. What happens in Colombia is out of our control, and more importantly, not our responsibility', even though they [the bottling plants] are bottling Coca-Cola products and helping the company with huge profits," Hoffmann said.

"We want some accountability. From my end, I'd like them to acknowledge what's going on there, explaining to us why after the union leader gets shot dead, that the next day no one signs a new contract with Sinaltrainal. How do they stand by that? How do you defend that?" Hoffmann said.

"If these are people that are working, bottling Coca-Cola products, how is it okay for this company to stand by and not take some kind of action?" Hoffmann said. "How could this be happening at Coca-Cola with management turning a blind eye?"

Hoffmann acknowledged it is difficult going up against a multinational corporation like Coca-Cola. "It's usually difficult because of the brand name. They have forced their way into every American fridge. The money they spend to get their name out and marketing to children. It's a Coke culture, you know, starting out with those ads with Santa Claus."

At a protest last week, activists chanted slogans and played a recording of a contemporary folk song called, "Coke is the Drink of the Death Squads".

They came from all over the U.S., including states like Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota, as well as Washington, DC. Groups like Witness for Peace and School of the Americas Watch were also represented.

Martha Giraldo, 31, of Colombia, charged Coca-Cola's bottling plants with "using temp [temporary] workers on contracts three months or less long, and they don't pay a just wage, exterminating labour leaders, violating our Constitutional right to be unionised. In Colombia, we're in a human rights crisis."

Giraldo and another speaker spoke to the mostly English-speaking audience through a translator.

"People are marginalised in large cities of our country. We're all suffering a humanitarian crisis. It's not true what [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton says when she says in Colombia we're safe and live in peace. It's only for some, large landowners and the paramilitary; the rest are marginalised for denouncing it. We are being accused of being guerrilla supporters," Giraldo said.

"In Colombia there are four million internally displaced people, who've been driven off their land because of terror campaigns of the paramilitary," Giraldo said. "In addition to fumigating coca crops and food crops and water sources we use to drink, approximately 30,000 people disappeared in Colombia. We don't know where they are. It's been years since they disappeared."

"We're here in front of one of the symbols of capitalism. This company represents one of the perverse ways of accumulating capital. We're here to demonstrate on behalf of our dead brothers," said Gerardo Caja Marca in a speech at the rally.

"They systematically violate human rights in Colombia. All workers have the right and obligation to defend their rights. Simply exercising those rights has cost the lives of workers in Colombia," Caja Marca said.

"Lastly we came here to demand justice. These are the men of war. These are the ones who put seven US military bases in Colombia. These are the ones who create paramilitaries. We accuse Coca-Cola of financing assassins. We want truth and reparations," Caja Marca said.

Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan Revealed

2009-11-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

And this company is doing all their evil deeds in the name of Christ!

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan Revealed
By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation
November 24, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144153/

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services." The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.
His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."

"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."

Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"

Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The Nation.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."
In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."

Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.

In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"
In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."

"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."

Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan

For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."

Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."

The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large gated community established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."

Torture Memo Author Sets Up Defense Fund to Fight Possible Impeachment

2009-11-21T11:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=101653

November 19, 2009 7:32 AM
Torture Memo Author Sets Up Defense Fund to Fight Possible Impeachment
Michael Isikoff

The federal judge who helped draft Justice Department memos on torture has set up a legal defense fund to pay the costs of defending against possible disciplinary or impeachment proceedings. Jay Bybee, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Las Vegas, quietly set up the fund last July following widespread news reports that he and a former deputy, John Yoo, were the focus of a long-running investigation by the Justice Department's internal ethics unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), over their role in crafting the memos.

But there were no public references to the fund until this, week when Declassified noticed that a link to the fund had popped up on the Web site of Keep America Safe, an advocacy group set up last month by Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, that is highly critical of President Obama's national-security policies. The fund is listed as one of Keep America Safe's "causes we support."

The defense fund may be about to become extremely useful for Bybee, who anticipates legal expenses "well in excess of $500,000" as a result of the Justice investigation, according to a letter from the U.S. Judicial Conference ethics committee posted on the fund's Web site. Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday that, after a nearly year-long delay and numerous internal reviews, the OPR report into the torture memos was finally slated to be released at the end of this month.

As NEWSWEEK reported last February, the initial draft of the report, completed during the waning days of the Bush administration, concluded that Bybee (at the time assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel) and Yoo may have violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they drafted a controversial Aug. 1, 2002, memo on torture.

But then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey rejected the draft report and directed that copies of its findings be sent for comment to the targets (including Bybee, Yoo, and Steve Bradbury, who had by then become assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel). Since then, the report has been redrafted and, after a further round of comments, is now being reviewed for final release by David Margolis, a veteran career prosecutor at the Justice Department.

The initial 2002 memo, signed by Bybee but believed to have been principally drafted by Yoo, concluded that during wartime, President Bush as commander in chief could unilaterally disregard a federal law banning torture in the prosecution of the war on terror. It also concluded that harsh interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA did not constitute torture unless they resulted in the "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." That conclusion opened the door for the CIA to use a wide array of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that were approved in a separate memo by Bybee and Yoo on the same day.

Since then, there have been calls for Bybee's impeachment from some liberal advocacy groups and law professors. "He's the only person holding an office that could be the target" of impeachment, said Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group that has campaigned for "accountability" over the use of torture techniques during the Bush era.

But legal sources familiar with the OPR report (who asked not to be identified discussing it because the process is ongoing) say it is believed to have undergone numerous revisions since the original draft and that it is far from clear what its final conclusions will be. Maureen Mahoney, Bybee's lawyer, declined to comment on the specifics of the report but said, "If DOJ follows settled rules of law, it cannot possibly conclude that Judge Bybee's conduct was unethical."

Bybee, who served in the Justice Department under both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was President George W. Bush's first nominee to be assistant attorney general in charge of OLC, the office that effectively serves as legal adviser for the entire federal government. He was then nominated by Bush to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and confirmed in March 2003—well before the existence of the torture memos or the CIA's use of waterboarding had become publicly known.

The letter sent to Bybee in May by the chair of the U.S. Judicial Conference's Committee on Codes of Conduct gave approval for the judge to set up the fund based on a set of facts he had presented. Those include the OPR inquiry, and the possibility that the Justice Department might launch investigations into torture and that "some members of Congress have indicated impeachment may be considered."

The letter, from Judge M. Margaret McKeown, approves the creation of a defense fund in which "others may solicit contributions," provided it adheres to rules that the committee has laid down for other judicial funds in the past, namely that the list of contributors be "blind" so that Bybee never learns their identities, and it not include lawyers who have cases before the judge.

James Spears, a Washington lawyer who is one of three trustees of the fund, declined to comment on how much the fund has raised. But the former Justice Department colleague of Bybee's did say, "We're confident that he'll be vindicated."

France Finds Monsanto Guilty of Lying

2009-11-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/21/France-Finds-Monsanto-Guilty-of-Lying.aspx

France Finds Monsanto Guilty of Lying
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
November 21 2009

France's highest court has ruled that U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto had not told the truth about the safety of its best-selling weed-killer, Roundup. The court confirmed an earlier judgment that Monsanto had falsely advertised its herbicide as "biodegradable" and claimed it "left the soil clean." Roundup is the world's best-selling herbicide.
French environmental groups had brought the case in 2001 on the basis that glyphosate, Roundup's main ingredient, is classed as "dangerous for the environment" by the European Union.

In the latest ruling, France's Supreme Court upheld two earlier convictions against Monsanto by the Lyon criminal court in 2007, and the Lyon court of appeal in 2008, the AFP news agency reports.

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics, including ruthless legal battles against small farmers, is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

BLACKWATER: STOP ACTING SURPRISED

2009-11-17T09:25:00.000-08:00

You didn't think Eric Prince (CEO of Blackwater, now XE) was a 'good' man because he professes to be a Christian, do you? He's a MASS MURDERER!!!

THE WAR NERD / AUGUST 11, 2009
BLACKWATER: STOP ACTING SURPRISED
By Gary Brecher

One thing you notice more and more the longer you hang around this sleazy world is the way mainstream types can’t admit to the obvious. They always have to act shocked. So it’s like, “Bond Mogul Convicted of Fraud”-oh, the shock! Like they didn’t know, like everybody over the age of nine doesn’t know, that insider trading is the whole point of the market. So much lying. Makes me sick.

And if you say you weren’t surprised, you’re the bad guy. You’re “cynical.” I love that word, “cynical.” Why not call the guy who discovered germs “cynical”? That’s a nasty theory if I ever heard one: armies of little monsters too small to see, just waiting to turn your mucus membranes into their orgy pools. It’s true, sure, but gosh it’s so darn “cynical”! Let’s pretend it isn’t true.

No, see-nobody calls germs cynical because they don’t want to die of typhoid or diptheria or all the other stuff that people stopped getting once they faced up to the cynical facts like grownups for once in their wuss-ass lives. But just ask them to face up to anything that real where big animals like people are concerned and eeeek! They’ll scream like a cartoon elephant in a tutu at a mouse.

So take Blackwater. It’s shock’n'horror time because a couple of ex-mercs blew the whistle on Erik Prince’s Onward Christian Steroid Casualties operation in Iraq.

Yup, from shock’n'awe to shock’n'horror in only goin’-on-seven short years: that’s how fast normal healthy people can face facts. Give’em enough time, like at least until the statute of limitations runs out, which just happens to be seven years, and they’ll face facts like anything. A decent interval, that’s what they love.

The Blackwater defectors have filed a sworn deposition in federal court that Blackwater zapped Iraqis at random, aimed to kill Muslims anywhere and any time they could, paid little Baghdadi girls a dollar a head, so to speak, for sexual services and just generally behaved like cartoon baddies. David Axe at Wired.com’s half-assed Inspector-gadget military blog “Danger Room” yukked it up with a headline calling Erik Prince a “super-villain” and called the defectors’ story “a fantastic litany of crimes, almost too fantastic to be believed.”

This is crap, of course. There’s nothing unbelievable or even unusual about what these Blackwater mercs did in Iraq. It’s what mercs always do, wherever they go. The only way you can be surprised about what happened is if you’ve been lying to yourself for your whole life.

Number one, and this will be bad news to all the computer dweebs at Wired: insurgency and counterinsurgency war is made with people. Not gadgets. So it comes down to the quality of the people you put in the field.

While we’re letting that sink in, and believe me it’s a real bummer for these Popular Mechanix war fans so it’ll take a while to sink in-while we wait, we’ll go on to bad news item #2: We hate the Iraqis. We didn’t go there to save them or help them or paint their thumbs purple, we went there to punish them, hurt them, fuck them up. This is one of the biggest and dumbest lies around, this “saving Private Iraqi” crap. Before the war people were a little more honest: we’re going to blast the fuckers, make them pay. “Pay for what?” wasn’t very clear but then who was asking? Nobody cared. Just make them pay.

Then they turned out to be unarmed, WMD-wise, and we were stuck like a Bakersfield cop standing over a dead cholo. What do you do, plant a .38 on him? Not in Iraq, not after you stupidly invited every damn news crew in the world on a ride-along in your big barrio-patrol adventure. So suddenly it was, “Uh…we shot this guy to, um, save a buncha other people, yeah, that’s it, because we love his cousins and his neighbors!”

So officially we love Iraqis, but the people saying that didn’t volunteer for Blackwater. You know why? Because everybody, and I mean everybody, in America knows that the “I heart Iraq” thing is a total lie and always has been.

The guys who volunteered for Blackwater didn’t go there to build peace-corps girls’ schools, they went to get rich in a free-fire, no-rules video game. And those men are still volunteering, by the way, you can go to their site and sign up at one of their regional HQ right now:

Here’s what I mean by people never ever looking at the obvious facts: go to an internet café if you can still find one and look over the shoulder of every male in the place (which is usually everybody except one weird girl in the corner). You’ll find every one of those guys is playing a first-person shooter game or something like World of Warcraft–you know, Eric Cartman and his friends vs. Dragons or Wizards or some crap.

That’s what’s going on in the heads of every male of military age. Now most of the guys in that internet place are nice Asian boys with moms who’d skin them alive if they volunteered for Blackwater–can’t blame them either. If I was Asian I wouldn’t feel all that safe on a Blackwater training compound, I’d make my will and wait for an “accidental” frangible round in the back of the head from some redneck training buddy. So they won’t actually go to Iraq to get head from little slave girls and shoot civilians for fun.

But they’ll think about it. It’s the world most male human beings, if you wanna call us human, inhabit by preference. In our free time, online, that is. We don’t actually live like that because our parents told us, you have to do your homework and get a job eventually. We don’t want to; we want the world on that screen, killing and raping. It’s just not practical as a career.

Except around 2003 it was practical, for a whole lot of guys from places you wouldn’t want to live: Tennessee, Alabama, North Georgia, Oklahoma. Guys who’d never had a choice worth making, or only had a choice of WalMart or the Service, no money with no benefits vs. no money with at least VA for life. Suddenly these guys were making $700 per day–yes, that’s right, per day–to do what every boy at that internet café is doing: strutting around in armor shooting people.

And the people they were hired to shoot were already officially designated targets: Iraqis, ragheads, whatever. I’m not even gonna focus on the hate-speech crap, because (and damn, I get so tired of having to repeat this, but I know you bastards will avoid reality if I give you half a chance)—because, I repeat, hate speech is normal. The human norm. The only way you can think hate speech is weird or criminal is if you don’t know anything about history and never ever even listen to the people around you. I guarantee, even if you live in San Francisco–Hell, especially if you live there–you’ll find most of the talk you hear is hate speech, because that’s how people talk and always have and always will. In SF maybe the hate speech is aimed at rednecks, fat white losers like, uh, me, but it’s the same hate speech. That’s how one bunch of primates keeps itself together: by hating on another buncha primates in the next tree.

It’s that simple. The reason the SF haters don’t go volunteer for Blackwater is (a) they can make more money without risking their necks; and (b) they wouldn’t get to kill fat rednecks like me, so it wouldn’t be any fun for them. I promise you, if Blackwater got a contract to “protect” someplace like Enid, Oklahoma from “Christian Extremists” you’d get half of SF volunteering and they wouldn’t even ask what the pay rate was. It’s who we are, it’s what we do. I wouldn’t blame’em. Imagine the fun it’d be for some Noe Valley yuppie, driving down those Okie alleys with your barrel playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe, catch an okie by the frontal lobe, or just making up games, “Lessee, I’m gonna shoot the next one I see with buck teeth…or a cowboy hat…no, maybe the next four-door pickup, I hate those things, shoot the next redneck driving a crew cab….”

And then you go home, take your steroids for the day to stay nice’n'pumped’n'pissed off, and wander over to the canteen where they’ve got some nice orphan Okie girls, around ten or maybe twelve years old, and while you’re getting head off them for a dollar you’ve got the extra zip of knowing you’re the all-conquerin’ bastard that offed their parents at the traffic light last week an’ orphaned them, so you got them into their present line of employment.

That’s how Genghis Khan felt, folks. He was just honest enough to say so. It’s been a while since anybody was that honest, and it never did take hold on this side of the ocean. We’re liars, mealymouthed gospel-puking liars from the get-go, but once it gets dark–and it got nice’n'dark in Iraq for a while there–once it gets dark, we act just like every other stinking male ape who ever got handed a gun.

So just stop lying and acting surprised. That’s all I ask. Just stop lying for once. Reminds me of that old NWA line, oughta be the national motto: “Bitch, stop lyin’.” You ain’t surprised at what these Blackwater apes did, you’d do it yourself if you didn’t have better job ops stateside, and if you ever even looked around you or just remembered what you felt like when you were nineteen you’d know there’s nothing “almost unbelievable” about any of it.

Of course they did all that shit. What did you think? More and more I think most moral, normal people spend most of their energy NOT thinking about anything–history, stats, money, or even remembering what they were like when they were still alive. They spend about a gigawatt per hour NOT thinking about stuff, and anything left over goes to some crap peaceable-kingdom fantasy.

You see that even in the nature documentaries. I’ve noticed there’s always some supposedly clean kind of ape, you know? When I was a kid they thought chimps were the nice ape. Then somebody filmed chimps hunting down monkeys and eating them alive, tearing off KFC arms and legs still hot. So much for the nice chimps. Then it was the pygmy chimp, the bonobo…except some other party-pooper just filmed these nice little feminist chimps doing the same thing, just with smaller monkeys. Whoops! Where’s the nice ape?

And who ever said there was one?

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to brecher@exiledonline.com.

NYT: Blackwater Bribed Iraqi Government Officials

2009-11-13T09:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.truthout.org/topstories/111209sg03

NYT: Blackwater Bribed Iraqi Government Officials
Sari Gelzer | Truthout
Thursday 12 November 2009

In September 2007, Blackwater Worldwide security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. The New York Times is reporting that following the massacre Blackwater Worldwide executives bribed Iraqi officials with secret payments of about $1 million in an attempt to maintain the company's endangered ability to operate in the country.

The deadly shooting marked a turning point in the Iraqi government's growing concern over the reckless actions of the security firm and led to their refusal to allow them to continue operating in the country. Despite the Iraqi government's refusal to give Blackwater a license to operate, a downsized group of the company's guards continue to to work in Iraq to this day.

Following the New York Times report, Iraq's Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani told CNN that commanders are investigating the allegations of bribery.

Jeremy Scahill, writing for the Guardian, believes that amongst all the allegations against Blackwater, this could be the one that results in the most serious blow to the company. Given that the bribes occurred while FBI agents were in Baghdad conducting a criminal investigation of the shooting, the Blackwater executives could face charges of obstruction of justice, said Scahill.

Currently, a federal grand jury in North Carolina is conducting a lengthy investigation of the company. In addition to obstruction of justice, The New York Times reports that Blackwater executives could also face charges of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials.

In the Guardian, Scahill said: "The new report, if true, could help explain why Blackwater has survived so long in Iraq. It could also be a window into what may become the most serious legal issue facing Prince and other executives."

Rack 'em and Screw 'em, Boys!

2009-11-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Rack-em-and-Screw-em-Bo-by-Sheila-Samples-091101-922.html

November 1, 2009
Rack 'em and Screw 'em, Boys!
By Sheila Samples

Is there anything scarier than the New York Times' Halloween treat entitled, "Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails"?

Pardon my Palinese, but -- You betcha! You damnbetcha!

For starters, the "conditions" the Times mentions only briefly are, in reality, depraved, corrupt, immoral, inhumane torture. According to the Times...

"F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw'. . ."
What is more frightening -- that the C.I.A. got its jollies by torturing, even murdering human beings in its secret sodomy frat-houses -- or that the F.B.I. took one look, fled the scene and remained silent for years?

Perhaps it's the two-page memo President George Bush had circulated seven months earlier wherein he determined -- under his authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive of the United States --

"...none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world because, among other reasons, al Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party to Geneva." (emphasis added)
[...]

"...I determine that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva. I note that, because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al Qaeda, al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war."

Bush then added piously that our values as a nation that we shared with many nations (?) required us to treat humanely even those not qualified as humans nor entitled to such treatment. So -- wink, wink -- rack 'em and screw 'em, boys!

According to the Times, the documents were released as a result of several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch. Makes you wonder if this nation's mainstream media, both print and electronic, has no access -- nor interest -- in freedom of information, doesn't it?

The Times did provide links (see below) to the released documents -- 953 pages it knew most of us would never read. To offset that, the Times assigned two of its top investigative reporters -- Scott Shane and Charlie Savage -- to get the critical information out.

These guys hopped right on it and, after yawning through the assignment, their bland 306-word "news" article was published on page A28.

I don't know about you, but even for Halloween -- that's scary!

Links to released documents via New York Times
A.C.L.U. vs. C.I.A. (SDNY) (pdf) (13 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (DDC2) (pdf) (441 pages)
Judicial Watch vs. C.I.A. (DDC) (pdf) (34 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (SDNY) (pdf) (98 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (DDC2) (pdf) (61 pages)
A.C.L.U. vs. D.O.D. (pdf) (141 pages)
Feinman vs. C.I.A. (DDC) (pdf) (163 pages)
Judicial Watch vs. D.O.J. (DDC) (pdf) (2 pages)

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production

2009-11-02T09:48:00.003-08:00

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE59S4DL20091029?sp=true

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production
Olesya Dmitracova
Reuters
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:26 EDT

London - Leading banks have funded arms manufacturers, whose products include cluster bombs, to the tune of $5 billion in the past two years, despite an international accord to ban such weapons, a study said Thursday.

The report by Profundo consultancy and several NGOs said the banks loaned money to companies whose products include cluster bombs or their components.

It did not say the funds went directly to make cluster bombs. The manufacturers could use the money for any of their production lines.

The top five loan providers were Bank of America, Citigroup , JP Morgan, Barclays and Goldman Sachs, the study said.

The researchers used publicly available information, such as that supplied by stock exchanges and financial databases, to produce their study.

According to the research, the banks have provided financing for diversified manufacturer Textron, aerospace and defense group Alliant Techsystems and defense contractor Lockheed Martin , all based in the United States.

Barclays said in a statement it provided financial services to arms makers within a specific policy framework, taking into account the likely use of the equipment.

"Our policy ... explicitly prohibits financing trade in landmines, cluster bombs or any equipment designed to be used as an instrument of torture," Barclays said.

Asked to clarify, a Barclays' spokeswoman declined further comment.

Bank of America and JP Morgan declined to comment while Citigroup and Goldman Sachs also had no immediate reaction.

Cluster bombs, which open in mid-air and scatter a multitude of bomblets over a wide area, have killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians, campaigners say.

Nations agreed to outlaw cluster bombs in May 2008. The resulting convention will come into force when 30 countries have ratified it -- 23 have already done so.

Neither the United States nor Britain, where the top five loan providers are based, have yet ratified the treaty.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions includes a ban on assisting anyone to make the bombs.

"We feel very strongly that assistance in production means investment. If you invest in a company, you're considered to assist the production of these (bombs)," Roos Boer, one of the report's authors, said at the launch of the study.

The report said: "Financial institutions should develop policies that exclude all financial links with companies involved in producing cluster munitions."

It added: "Policies should not be narrowed to refusing project financing for cluster munitions."

The report also called on governments to draw up clear legislation to prohibit investment in cluster bombs and to provide guidelines for financial institutions.

Report slams bank links to clusterbomb production

2009-11-02T09:48:00.001-08:00

VIRTUE AND EVIL; EMPATHY AND SELFISHNESS

2009-10-25T09:36:00.001-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/VIRTUE-AND-EVIL-EMPATHY-A-by-Professor-Emeritus-091021-80.html

October 25, 2009
VIRTUE AND EVIL; EMPATHY AND SELFISHNESS
By Professor Emeritus Peter Bagnolo

The Fiction Of Socialism

For those who say that the Catholic Popes were always against “Socialism,” as did a thing called The Vortex, let me, a Catholic, tell you why the popes were always against “Socialism,” because they did not want to loose the patronage of the very wealthy nobility and merchant class, the class against which St. Francis of Assisi rebelled, including his own wealthy merchant father. Because they did not want a government entity to replace them or compete with them for the use of what they call charity, but which men with minds unhampered by a twisted mind/logic call, justice.

However, in reality the whole system of churches existing on the church society, parish, bishoprics, their entire religion, and all religions exist on the contributions and charity of their citizens, their society, their members, and that is Socialism. It is what humans are, social animals.

Sorry, folks, but those who call a societal sharing through taxes and charity, Socialism, ignore the base word Social, as in society-in which the word society itself identifies what we know, that God created us as a social species, not as stand alone solitary beings. Socializing is Socialism! Isn't that what we are doing when we ALL chip in to pay for: schools, police and firemen, libraries, parks, road building and maintenance, the US army, air force, navy, marines, coast guard, national guard, water purification, aid to industries (Corporate tax breaks and corporate “Grants” all by itself totals about $3 trillion each year and more if you count the fabled No-Bid Contracts so popular in the Bush administration and that is more all by itself than a Public HealthCare system, which we should develop within Medicare. We should have the same Healthcare system as our Senators enjoy). No bid means a company is a “Uniquely Qualified Contractor” of which in America, there is no such thing, is that what they mean by Socialism?

Ready, now? Good because I have news, The Good News, from above, and listen closely cardinals, Bishops, priests and "popes?" Jesus WAS a Socialist! No, you say? Then learn how to read and write the archaic languages for yourselves (Archaic Aramaic, Archaic Hebrew, Archaic Coptic, Archaic Latin, Archaic Greek and do your own Biblical translations. In fact, every word that streamed forth from the mouths of God, Jesus and the prophets was what the less educated call, Socialism.

The Criminalization Of Avarice/Greed!
Ages ago all merchants who made their own goods were men and women with the best work always at heart and mind. There are still a handful of people, artists, actors, musicians, writers, architects, furniture makers, seamstresses, farmers, livestock ranchers, etc, who made their wealth by the sweat of their brows and the creativity of their minds, always hard at work trying to do the best possible work, without cheating anyone. Now people make and sell garbage of which our grandparents would be ashamed. The greatness of their workmanship made their reputations, profits were secondary to artisans.

Modern business people seem mostly only interested in the bottom line and cheat everyone, including their own souls. Because of the great population, which needs service, we cannot make everything by hand any longer. However, large corporations and some smaller ones, now knowingly make toxic products that kill, maim and make invalids of some of their customers and then try to avoid paying the piper for their crimes and for the lives they have destroyed.

More and more morons with TV and cable shows lie to our people shouting like the fascists and Nazi's did in Germany in the 1930's-1940's, having sized up Americans as stupid and gullible. They are trying to make believe that Socialism is a kind of evil, while those who say so enjoy the benefits of that “Socialism” in their contracts, as do our senators with their incredible health care coverage.

What is evil is fascism and racism and that is what is strangling the Republican Party. What is recently strangling the Democratic Party is Wannabe-ism. They want dynastic wealth also and they figured like Eddie Murphy did in film, THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN, that politics is the pathway to their goal. They are all headed to Hell, with no way back.

I say we need a New Democracy, the one where justice is Godly, and wealth is Evil. It was the Evangelist Luke quoting Jesus who revived the Hebrew Prophets feelings about the one thing ONLY among the Seven Deadly Evils, Avarice/Greed, which has not been criminalized and should be criminalized. With that in mind America should take a cue from the Northern Europeans. There, Executives of corporations are limited in Compensation Packages. After WW II CEO's made 25 times the average Compensation Packages of their employees. Now they make from 550-1100 times that figure, but only of their USA employees, not those overseas they pay 15 to 25 cents an hour and NO benefits.

The public needs to know that any salary a CEO or any executive takes including bonuses, above a moderate figure is criminal, it is money stolen from their investors, which are all of those who own stock in their company directly or indirectly. Every bank, every, pension fund, every penny of interest you make is being filched and raped by Executive Compensation Packages. I have sat in boards of directors and almost everyone on such boards was part of the national horror. All were CEO's or CEO's in waiting and they ALL want higher salaries, and they all wanted more money than they and an army of generations of their heirs could ever spend-in short, they wanted royalty based on material wealth because they know they can never attain royalty based upon goodness and the grace of God, because they are condemned by their acts.

The Boards/CEO's simply raise each others salaries, in a mutual agreement which the Law, many years ago, aiming at knocking over the Mafia, called Conspiracy and “Racketeering” and jailed so many over that issue. Well, we now need to overthrow all such corporate Racketeers in America and we can begin right now with a new view of CEOs. The average CEO IQ, is thirty to 70 points lower than that of the average: Scientist, College Professor, Class Action Lawyer, Physician, Engineer, architect, Physician, Historian, Author, artist, Composer, mathematician, Anthropologist, and inventor, etc. in America. We even had a president whose IQ was lower than the average Frog. It takes several things to be a success in life, Grace, a kind of humility, empathy for those less blessed, and a willing ness to help them. It also takes intellect and wisdom, and a few other virtues, some have one of those, some have several, and some have none of those virtues and gifts.

To become CEO It takes no specific talent, just a lifetime of ass kissing, and that is all. Many of us have turned down the path of ass kissing and made our own way in the world. It is very rare indeed, for anyone to go up the corporate ladder without being a non-whistle-blower, a yes-man/woman, a criminal or an ass-kissing weasel. I even saw them in academia-there they were throwing away so much for so little.

Recall please, Timothy 6:10: For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

And the words of Jesus, at Luke 18:1-25: For it is easier for a camel to pass through the Eye of The Needle*, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

*(I capitalized Eye of The Needle, here because Jesus here was speaking hyperbolically, figuratively, and realistically, by referring to a place. The Eye of The Needle was said to have been a narrow pass in the rocks through which even a camel could not squeeze without great effort.)

Yachtsmen And The Olympics
I am ever so happy that Chicago's mayor, who sounds more like a fascist every day than GW Bush did, was unable to clog the great city with the Olympics and drive it further into debt. He blew taxes even higher by hosting silly things like, "Venetian Night?” Did you know that the city pays for "Venetian Night?" I have been to a couple of them with a friend who belongs to Lake Michigan Lakeshore, yacht club. There we sat on the deck of the yacht club eating chilled shrimp and lobster and crab, caviar, Roasted prime rib/Lobster Newberg, Clams on the half-shell, and the best Champagne on the planet and a host of other dainties and expensive, exotic, goodies in a huge buffet followed by a boring stream of Yachts of the very rich, most of which, at least those yacht owners I met, were legalized criminals and just regular illegal crooks/Corporate Criminals, all of which could afford to pay for "Venetian Night" themselves. What is there to pay for anyway? A few fireworks and the fuel to run the boats by a group of morons who are fat on too much money stolen from citizens?

Remove Corruption; Make Lobbying A Capital Crime!
However, so used are the Corporate Criminals, to robbing us to pay for their waste ,that I think the reason Obama doesn't want to go after Bush for his crimes, is that ALL of them have robbed us of trillions. This is the most comforting reason for my faith, knowing that these sonsofbitches will rot in Hell and why I think the legalization of dueling followed by implementation of the *Scaramouch approach is best. Otherwise, most people would prefer a rerun of the Original Revolution. Recall that The Bard Of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson said we should revolt every 20 years, or suffer, what we now suffer. In that task Americans have failed to obey that Founding Father. He foresaw what FDR did and later what Eisenhower did, in his Military Industrial Complex warning. Roosevelt was given to know that when the majority of the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a small minority, so does the power to bribe and that has always been the case and is today. When/if one segment of the population of any nation amasses dynastic wealth and power, that nation takes the final step to degradation and destruction of itself.

Remove Bribes and you remove corruption, by making lobbying a Capital Crime.

Imagine that, a citizen led, political and commercial revolution to throw out the downstate Illinois criminals, (of which I believe the former governor to be among the most moderately guilty), and the Chicago Criminals and arrest every politician in America, withdraw the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, confiscate the wealth and holdings in real estate from everyone who was any part of the Boom and crash. Banish the war criminals, the peace criminals, and everyone for which we pay the toll except the poorest, nationalize healthcare (which should be one word as I show it) exile all political families, nationalize the Drug companies, hospitals and physicians, paying them as we pay professors, nationalize oil, electricity and all fuel sources and nationalize water, (we will see a new Dust Bowl soon, viva la Faulkner, and that is no prophecy that is common sense,) ask the western and north western states, like Montana, all of whose mountain water supplies are 35%-61% less packed snow, which become drinking water).

Unemployment

Further I recommend dismantling the major Farm/chemical companies, make pesticides illegal to be sold over the counter, making advertising of prescription drugs illegal a federal offense with minimum sentences which rivaling those convicted of violent crimes.

People are safer smoking Marijuana and drinking booze, than breathing pesticide fumes from their lawns and gardens. Pesticides/herbicides are far more harmful that the Drugs Made By the Legalized Addictive Drug Dealers and their Pimps and Pushers, the physicians of America, at least many of them.

We need to forbid a foreign war unless there is a national referendum, instead we should declare war on Nazi/Skinheads/the KKK and all racists. We should Criminalize Greed/Avarice, forbid land speculation and banish all the developers who were a part and parcel of this Depression, yes, Virginia there IS a DEPRESSION! The MSM says we have about 10.7% out of work against 25% in the Depression from 1929 to 1939?

Well they did not have Unemployment Compensation (UEC) back then and now they are counting only those who are still on the roles of unemployment. Counting everyone else out of work, who are no longer in the queue of UEC temporary headcount, we have 27.5% which eclipses the Great Depression of the 1930's following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 (and that is without counting the underemployed who lost their jobs and then took jobs out of their expertise that pay less than one half to 15% of their previous jobs).

The MSM has not been very cooperative with truth since the 1960's and probably, unless tax subsidies support independent news organizations, never will be unless corporations are not allowed to own any of the news on any and all media.

Evil Among Us

2009-10-10T05:50:00.001-07:00

http://www.areawidenews.com/blogs/1215/entry/30111/

Evil Among Us
Bret Burquest
Area Wide News
Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:34 EDT

© Unknown
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Recently, I acquired a computer virus that reduced my system into a useless pile of junk. After four days in the shop, I had to start all over once again, restoring what I could and reconstructing some of the things I lost.

It makes one wonder what sort of sadistic creep would do such a thing to a complete stranger.

Some people believe that the struggle between good and evil is nothing more than a struggle between knowledge and ignorance, and that good will always prevail because everyone is basically decent and all it takes to overcome the wickedness within them is to somehow educate them about the wrongness of their ways.

While we assume everyone has a conscience restraining them from evil, studies by Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., reveal that about four percent of the population has a sociopathic personality disorder.

In other words, one out of every 25 people is a psychopath -- a person with no sense of concern for the well-being of others and no feelings of remorse, regardless of what sort of harmful or immoral action they undertake.

A psychopath is able to lie, steal, cheat and kill with no feelings of sorrow or regret. Sometimes their only motive is the thrill of inflicting pain. This gives the psychopath a competitive advantage over a normal person.

The high incidence of psychopath dysfunction has a profound disturbing effect on the rest of human society.

Violent psychopaths (batterers, animal abusers, child predators, rapists, murderers, serial killers, etc.) are easy to identify. Prisons are overpopulated with them. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the BTK Killer, the Green River Killer, the Boston Strangler, etc. were all serial killers who had no personal moral qualms about their actions.

However, there are also many psychopaths who are outwardly acceptable, intelligent and skillful at blending into ordinary society. These are the dangerous ones who are able to deceive and negatively influence others.

Political Ponerology, a term introduced by psychologist Andrew M Lobaczewski, Ph.D., is the science of the nature of evil for political purposes. This occurs when socially accepted psychopaths attain political leverage.

The only difference between an ordinary psychopath (a violent, impulsive bully with no conscience) and a socially accepted psychopath is social status, intellect, ambition and being in the right place at the right time.

Basically, successful (socially accepted) psychopathic individuals move into positions of power (in politics, business, military, etc.) and link up with others of similar ilk to form cohesive internal structures that have the ability to take over entire movements. They often rise to the top through cunning, deception and ruthlessness.

Psychopathic leaders spin their version of the truth (especially when they control the media) while distorting reality. Eager to please, people tend to be blindly loyal to their leaders and go along with the crowd. This leads to a "my country right or wrong" attitude where decent people perpetuate the evil of their psychopathic masters.

Hitler and the Nazis were a prime example of Political Ponerology. They introduced a scientific methodology (psychological propaganda) in Germany to rally the populace into a mass hypnotic frenzy of hate. France and England watched in horror as the Nazis marched across Europe -- hesitating too long, then making concessions with Germany. The subsequent agreements with Hitler (a psychopath) were worthless, costing millions of lives.

Stalin (a psychopath) killed millions, Saddam Hussein (a psychopath) killed hundreds of thousands, etc.

Clearly, negotiating with a psychopath legitimizes the psychopath and furthers his stronghold over his people.

Appeasement doesn't work on a person without a conscience. All the energy spent by naive peace protestors is for naught. You can love your enemy all you want but if your enemy is incapable of love he will destroy you.

An appeaser is one who feeds a wild beast hoping it will eat him last.

The world is a cruel, violent place. Studies have determined the origin of evil is genetic. A small percentage of people are born without a conscience (psychopathic) and have a predisposition to commit evil acts on others.

This notion is difficult to accept. Ordinary people prefer to believe everyone on this planet would act as they would act. But ordinary people must contend with pure evil somewhere on this planet every day. It won't go away.

Evil people dwell among us. They enjoy inflicting pain on the rest of the world and are incapable of change.

Some of them rise to the top and gain control. It's our duty to recognize them and deal with them properly.

Life is simple. You just need to think for yourself, be kind to others, bathe regularly and oppose evil.

_

Quote for the Day -- "How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." Adolph Hitler

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human

2009-10-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23390256-now-scientists-create-a-sheep-thats-15-human.do;jsessionid=B4F0A0387731387757AD95C446E09750

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human
Last updated at 10:22am on 25.03.07

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.
The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor's bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep's foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

At present 7,168 patients are waiting for an organ transplant in Britain alone, and two thirds of them are expected to die before an organ becomes available.

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras.

But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.

Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV."

Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."

Campaign asks for international treaty to limit war robots

2009-10-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17887-campaign-asks-for-international-treaty-to-limit-war-robots.html

Campaign asks for international treaty to limit war robots

15:41 30 September 2009 by Nic Fleming

Robots are synonymous with modern warfare, but what are the ethical implications? (Image: Ethan Miller/Getty)
A robotics expert, a physicist, a bioethicist and a philosopher have founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) to campaign for limits on robotic military hardware.

Roboticist Noel Sharkey at the University of Sheffield, UK, and his colleagues set up ICRAC after a two-day meeting in Sheffield earlier this month. Sharkey has spoken before of ethical concerns about military systems that make their own decisions.

"Robot weapons are likely to change the character of warfare," Sharkey told New Scientist. "We seem to be rushing headlong into the development of autonomous weapons systems without any real concern for the long-term impact on civilian populations."

Preventative measures

In its opening declaration the committee called for a military robots to be banned from space and said no robotic systems should carry nuclear weapons.

The other founding members of ICRAC are physicist Jürgen Altmann of Dortmund University of Technology, Germany; Robert Sparrow of the Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, near Melbourne, Australia; and philosopher Peter Asaro of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

The committee will recruit more people to monitor the development of autonomous weapons and to campaign for the preventative arms control – like the regulations that govern nuclear and biological weapons – to be applied to robots.

Robot proliferation

The US air force's remote-controlled aircraft – MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers – are playing an ever-growing role in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And thousands of ground-based robots have been used to help western forces carry out surveillance in dangerous areas of these countries and to locate and disarm bombs worldwide.

Among the most advanced military robots are Talons – small tractor-mounted units with chemical, temperature and radiation sensors that can also carry grenade launchers, machine guns and 50-calibre rifles.

Close to 50 countries either already have or are working to obtain robotic military systems, says Sharkey. So far these are all controlled remotely by pilots or other operators.

Man in the loop

ICRAC fears the principle of keeping a "man in the loop" will be eroded, so that the next generation of robot soldiers will be trusted with life-or-death decisions. Indeed, research into just such scenarios is taking place with US military funding.

The committee is also worried that countries will be more likely to go to war if their casualties will be robots rather than human soldiers. They have also raised the danger of autonomous systems starting and escalating conflicts automatically.

They are drawing up a report on their concerns to present to the European parliament and plan to invite researchers, politicians and representatives of the military to a conference in Germany next summer.

Good in parts

However, robot soldiers have their place, says Michael Codner, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence think tank in London.

"If you are using them to clear mines and there is no one at risk, it makes absolute sense to use them.

"If one reaches the stage of artificial intelligence where robots become unpredictable because they are making their own minds up, it will be difficult to retain responsibility in the user," he concedes. "But that is an issue that will be some way in the future. There is time for ethics and law to cope with this eventually."

Robotics engineer Ron Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, has argued that machines could perform more ethically than humans in some battlefield situations if they had ethical rules and biases incorporated into their control software.

Infinitely Defining Evil

2009-09-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.hyperthot.com/11110_bk.htm

Infinitely Defining Evil

Now we have left the scale of the human with its finite levels of belief. We may want to look back to the chapter where we considered the idea of infinite goodness. When infinite goodness touches our thought, it seems like there is no such thing as evil. Any sense of the negative becomes simply a sense of its nothingness. When we have worked these things out, evil as an abstraction will have lost its fearful mental aspect, and we will not be afraid to handle it analytically, up close. We have been preparing ourselves to address an infinite idea of evil. In talking here about evil, I hope you will pardon me for not belaboring its ugly aspects. There will be time for that. In working out this problem in theory, the most ethereal sense of evil is the best level at which to defuse it. Evil as an infinite abstraction is more tractable than as a concrete confrontation. If we are good at dealing with evil seeds, perhaps we can minimize the extent to which we will have to deal with evil fruits.

As a prelude to getting serious about defining evil, let us review definitions of evil implicit in the points of view we have discussed so far. At the totally material level of human belief, no one is interested in the concept of evil. With no justification for ascribing mystical significance to untoward events, we define evils loosely as things against human survival or well-being. Any rational vehemence on the subject of evil would only refer to its appearance as phenomena without considering spiritual dimensions.

When a mystical concept of evil is introduced, evil is interpreted to be the result of capricious or malevolent forces or angry gods. Undisciplined spiritism can fall into believing that mysterious powers of darkness are lurking about causing all sorts of mischief. Since this doesn't make any sense, we deem it to be a pre-rational level of belief and move on.

The first level where things can start to make sense to the rational thinker is introduced by the concepts of monotheism and law. Evil is seen as punishment for wrong doing and for contrast to good, so life doesn't get too boring. At this first level of human belief, good and evil are inherent in the creator and also in man; they are certainly inherent in this theory.

At the second level, evil is not believed to be created or ordained by the creator but by an adversary internal to the creation and allowed by a creator unwilling or unable to prevent it. The creator has not provided ground rules to reliably eliminate evil. Evil is embodied in a personal devil, and good is embodied in a benevolent personal deity.

At the third level, evil is not seen to be created or allowed by the creator, but is viewed as a mortal error. The origin of this error is addressed by saying the error is unreal and, therefore, has no origin. Reluctantly, this false belief is said to have begun as a false supposing. Evil is believed to be a mesmeric mental influence from which humans can gradually demonstrate their freedom. The creator is seen as a divine principle having no association with evil, and man's true selfhood is seen to be spiritual.

At the fourth level, the human explanation for evil is that it is spiritually mental empty space. The creator is entirely spiritual and good, and has no opposition, real or imagined. This is a state of human belief the only error of which is limitation. The explanation for this view is that our awareness of sublime spiritual creation began little and is continuing to dawn.

Reaching for the spiritual idea in level three can lead us to reach for the infinite idea in level four. None of these views of good and evil are without flaws. The fourth level of belief may present the lesser of evils, but it sacrifices the idea of infinity to its logic. And that is not good.

In each of these cases, there is a symmetry of sorts. Good and evil are logical opposites. As thought progresses, however, good and evil are increasingly less balanced in the scales of our beliefs. As our sense of good evolves toward its allness, our sense of evil diminishes in progressively more abstract phases of its nothingness. As our sense of spiritual good becomes more tangible, our sense of evil becomes more ethereal, until it becomes a pure abstraction, a term for that which is essentially nothing at all.

When spiritual progress has readied us to cross from one level of human belief to the next, the crossing is often stalled by our trepidation. Every significant step we complete is welcomed by a sense of relief as there emerges both a brighter world and an accompanying lessening of superstitious fears. Until we are ready to move ahead, however, each next step will seem too hard to comprehend, too impersonal or abstract in its appeal, too expansive or hopeful in its possibilities, and somehow irreconcilable with our sense of things.

Given the option to define evil once and for all, we might want to do better than these flawed choices. None of these choices, not even the ones giving us quite a lot of freedom from fear, will give us reliable practical relief from a sense of evil as something or even as nothing.

* * *

It is useful to recognize that what we believe may be different from what we think and from the way we may be trying to think. I may look around me and see my perceptions of sense evidence characterized by level four beliefs, but I will try to spend time and effort thinking in better ways than that. I know that thinking beyond the level where I am believing provides the impetus for grasping new potentials and for bringing more radical transformations. Reaching out beyond my beliefs provides the vital inspiration that nourishes the rest of the process.

Thinking at the level where we are believing can involve interpreting and re-interpreting what we see. It can help us put our sense evidence into the best light. Affirmative thinking to recast and unlimit our sense of things can help clear out discordant beliefs and open up our thoughts to wider prospects for good.

The peculiar challenge when we have beliefs at level four is that no humanly dimensioned positive or spiritual thoughts will contrast significantly with our beliefs. When we are in a level four belief about things, we need to reach outside the human dimension altogether to find thoughts that are ahead of our beliefs. That is one reason we are addressing the subject of infinite ideas.

As one practices spiritually principled thinking about oneself, about one's fellows, and about the universe, one's sense of the reality of spiritual goodness becomes more palpable and one's sense of evil diminishes. Our analysis of evil evolves from chance to indifference to caprice to punishment to adversary to error to nothingness, with each belief of evil presenting a less formidable mental aspect than the last. But why evil at all? Is there anything good about evil at any level? Do we want to vanquish even the word evil and never think of it again?

How could we define evil infinitely and have it be less than the level four belief of it where it is a sense of nothing, simply a sense of spiritually mental empty space? Since you read the first sentence of this book, you may have guessed what we are going to do with infinite evil. What are we going to do with an infinite empty place? After all this trouble, do we simply want to make it go away?

Let us be practical. Let us come up with a definition of evil that we will be delighted with, one that will have significant value. What definition of evil could help us with conception of the infinite idea? Since the word is here, is there a definition of evil that we could feel good about having forever?

The reason we asked the question about evil in the first place was to help us resolve our sense of the negative. We were able to think about pure infinite goodness in a way that created a concept of reality that almost seemed totally complete and sublime. But it did not fit with our world of observation. It was unable to address a sense of discord or limitation. If thinking about the infinite aspects of good gives us the greatest sense of goodness, what might we conclude from thinking about evil as infinite, once we have concluded that it is nothing at all? What would that mean, and how would that fit into our scheme of things?

You may remember that throughout this book we have left some issues untreated. In an early chapter, we considered conception and elimination, that making things better consists of having more of what we want and less of what we do not want. We tried to put aside the question of what we did not want by saying we would not plant bad seeds and would start with clean soil and would not let the wind blow anything into our garden. We said we would not plant seeds we did not want. We deferred talking about mental weeding and getting rid of unwanted seeds latent in the soil, by saying we would not have them. Where can we find virgin soil so clean that we will never have to weed it?

Later on, we talked about types of spiritual action, looking only at the types of action in line with goodness. We talked about exercising obedience, belief, understanding, and knowledge to make good things happen for us. Since we had no interest in making bad things happen, we did not address opposite mental action. Perhaps we need to find ways to deal with negative action. What do we do with accident, abandonment, malice, disobedience, doubt, misconception, and delay?

Then, we used words to create a spiritual thought model, but we did not reconcile that spiritual model closely to our world of observation. We could have simply called that mental world our reality. We relied on the discipline of our logic to define an idea of pure infinite goodness for which no opposite was defined. Having done that, we then returned to our world to apply the standard of goodness to the question of evil's origin. Until now our discussion has deferred serious consideration of a definition for evil, except to say what it, according to our evolving spiritual logic, is not or cannot be. We have proceeded to a level of human belief where all that is left of evil is pure limitation.

* * *

For good to prevail, evil must be dealt with in whatever form it appears. In the wholly material view, evil is simply a random event. The subject of evil is dealt with humanly and does not come up as a spiritual issue. In the next frame of mind, we are indifferent to evil, until our theory transitions to another. While involved in human mysticism, we might attempt religious practice to combat evil, but it is too confusing to be effectual. Let us group these three pre-rational theories as level zero. At the first rational level, evil is avoided through obedience and dealt with through law. At the second level, evil is overcome as faith and love triumph over doubts and fears. At the third level, belief in evil is dispelled through understanding the supremacy of Spirit. At the fourth level, evil is seen as spiritually mental empty space, made insensible by our expression of the idea of infinite goodness.

Where does this progression go? Is there an end to it? Is there anything to be done with evil to antidote it once and for all? Are we ready to do that? One thing is clear, ignoring evil is not the answer. Dealing with evil, abstaining from it, overcoming it, understanding its nothingness, and displacing it, is part of the process by which room is made for higher conceptions of good.

Although the idea of pure infinite spiritual goodness can define the substance and content of good, more than a finite sense of evil needs to be cleared out to enable the infinite idea to appear. With the words of infinite goodness, we have the good seeds we need. Now our need is for better soil.

Let us start with a fresh piece of paper and see if we can define infinite evil to make it serve a purpose. Have we outgrown our need for punishment, adversary, illusion, and human limitation? What is our real need? Is there any such thing as a necessary evil? If knowledge of evil is knowledge of empty space, maybe it is just an empty space to receive the essence of good, to make it room.

When our thinking is based on the principle of pure infinite goodness, our jurisdiction is uncontested within that realm. Might we ever need jurisdiction over mental space not subject to infinite goodness? Could there be other jurisdictions in the infinite? We have used spiritually principled thinking to try to conceive ideas of pure goodness. Is it possible that we could use some negative seed, some upside-down thought model, to render certain undesirable words inconceivable? Is there a thought we can hold affirmatively whose effect will be to make some specific things not happen? Would this be a form of negative knowing?

Consider a situation where you are about to enter a dark unfamiliar room. You ask, "What is in the room?" You are told, "The room has a carpet on the floor, a sofa and two chairs, a lamp, a table, and a large bookshelf filled with books." Is that information enough for you to know it is safe to enter the room? Do you know if the floor is strong enough to hold your weight? Do you know whether there are any snakes slithering about on the floor? No, but you presume it is safe. Unless, of course, someone already asked you about the snakes.

Consider a situation where you are staying the night alone in a cabin in the woods. You have no telephone, and the nearest road is three miles away. Just as you are about to go to sleep and have blown out your candle, you hear a rustling sound outside. What goes through your mind? Could the sound be caused by the wind, or a bear, or a prowler? What are you likely to assume? Is it good? Can your sense of goodness displace your fears?

In these last two situations, you know certain affirmative facts, but these facts themselves say nothing about the possibility of untoward events. In considering these situations, however, you may have a sense of uncertainty about them. Are you certain these situations are safe? What do you really know? These two situations are intended to suggest a mental region that may exist between what one knows and what one knows nothing of, a middle ground where the mind is left to wander, to assume, to suppose, and possibly to be afraid.

In situations where we are not at risk, where there are no potentials for loss or concerns for safety, we can usually tolerate a fairly high degree of uncertainty in our lives. There are plenty of times when we might be content to be uncertain. As might be expected, however, when issues of safety arise, our tolerance for uncertainty becomes less and less. We might wish to have two locks on the door and have one of them be really big. When the stakes are very high and the issues of life and death are present, our willingness to take unnecessary chances is rightfully diminished.

When the human mind does not know something, and feels uncomfortable not knowing, it sometimes tries to create a sense of knowing through the process of supposing. Someone who has supposed something has entered into a state of belief that may bear no relation to the facts. As was stated earlier about belief, likewise with supposing, there is nothing in the nature of one's ability to hold a supposition that bears on whether it is true. Sometimes we suppose just to quiet our fears. Other times supposing makes our fears worse.

Let us consider what the special nature of infinite ideas can offer to such issues. To human belief, there are things that are clearly good, things that are clearly bad, and sometimes gray areas in between. Religionists and others may differ on what the gray areas are. We sort through gray elements, and depending on our level of perspective we sometimes resolve gray issues to one side or the other. The infinite idea resolves gray areas and reconciles black and white. The infinite idea does not need a human belief or interpretation to tell it where to put thoughts; it puts them where they belong, and it puts them there to best effect, naturally. How does it do this?

From the viewpoint of infinity, one can translate good and evil events into those that are possible and inevitable and those that are impossible and inconceivable. These distinctions constitute primal order in the infinite realm. When you experience this in practice, you will appreciate the easy precision with which life at this level is ordered.

At the level of infinity, one realizes the truth of the common, if pessimistic, wisdom that if something can go wrong, it will. If something is possible at the level of infinity, it becomes an infinite possibility - it becomes a virtual certainty. The corollary, which obtains at the level of infinity, and from time to time elsewhere, is that if something cannot go wrong, it won't. If something is unlikely at the level of infinity, it is then infinitely unlikely - this thing is not going to happen. Because infinity tends to take things to their extremes, it takes all thoughts and shows their true colors.

Stepping off from a level four view of evil, if evil is spiritually mental empty space, an infinite idea of evil is infinitely empty. If evil is nothing, an infinite idea of it is infinite nothingness. Because of this aspect of the infinite idea, an unusual level of certainty accompanies an infinite apprehension of evil. In a sense, it is a negative certainty. It is a certainty about what is not. Infinite uncertainty becomes a kind of certainty. It becomes a kind of knowing. Infinite identity naturally resolves good and evil, real and unreal, into their essence as something and nothing. Working with any given word, we do not even need to know which it is going to be. Infinite identity conceives of such opposites as present and ever available or as forever absent, inconceivable, and unthinkable.

Another special attribute of the infinite idea is the degree to which it embraces experience. There are many abstract or spiritual ideas we can ponder that might allow us to remain remotely contemplative about them, but not the infinite idea. The infinite idea embraces all that is real, and it also embraces infinite abstractions whose unreality has been resolved into nothingness. The infinite idea does not have anything real or imagined conceivably outside of itself. One identifying with the infinite idea may be led into experiences confirming that evil is not only unreal at a spiritual level, but can be experienced as nothing more than empty space on the human scene. The experiential validation of evil as empty space confirms the supremacy of spiritual goodness and makes room for new conception.

Were it widely rumored that the moon was made of green cheese, some would swear it was a fact. Some might have doubts; others might have misgivings; some might have hope, while others had faith. Some might have real confidence, conviction, scientific understanding, or even absolute certainty. All such states of mind are not to be compared to knowledge gained from experience. We would not use words like conviction, faith, understanding, or certainty to describe the point of view of one who had been to the moon and returned. If we were the ones to have traveled to the moon, found it to be green cheese, nibbled on some of it, brought some back to earth, and used it to make salad dressing, we would not need to assert that we were certain.

Having been there, our viewpoint would not need to be supported by a conscious or affirmative mental position on the subject. We would simply have knowledge. While others might be afraid to entertain a doubt on the subject, for fear of losing their beliefs, any who had been there would not feel so threatened.

* * *

Let us follow another line of thought by addressing the nature of truth insofar as truth defines what is true and what is not. A witness asked to give testimony in a court of law is sometimes asked if they will "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Have you ever wondered why they do not simply ask the witness to tell the truth or not to lie? The reason for asking such a complicated question to get a straight answer has to do with what it takes to know the whole truth.

At the level of infinity, it could be said that the truth is one idea. However, that one idea has implicit in it three parts: there is the truth about what is, the truth about what is not, and the recognition that these two parts constitute the whole of truth. Because of what it takes to really know the truth, one cannot really know the truth without knowing what is true, what is not, and that these two fit together forming one whole truth.

In the illustration presenting the unfamiliar room, we had no way of knowing whether the room was filled with snakes. Truths were stated about the contents of the room, but we did not know if those constituted the whole truth. If we had asked whether there were any slithery things in the room, the truthful answer might have kept us from wading ankle deep into snakes.

This is not to suggest that we should ask a thousand questions about what is, what is not, and if anything has been omitted. In normal human living we are content to have a reasonable level of uncertainty. As spiritual thinkers, however, our true knowing conveys a sense of legitimate reality that is directly linked to our beliefs. The spiritual truths that we are able to truly know unveil the reality of spiritual goodness at hand. In dealing with good and evil, we can know infinite good, but how can we infinitely un-know evil?

In the human dimension, negative knowing is very different from not knowing. If there was a bear outside your cabin at night, perhaps you would rather not know about it until you saw its tracks in the morning. But not knowing about the bear is profoundly different from knowing that there is no bear.

We are not addressing things about which we would like to be humanly ignorant, but things we would like to know, about which we may have some uncertainty. If you know what is, if you know everything that is true about spiritual reality, cannot someone always come up to you and ask, "Is there anything else?" Could something possibly go wrong? Are you sure it is really safe? Will it ever happen again?

Were we to imagine an allegorical serpent who asks a lot of tricky questions, would the truth about spiritual goodness silence such a serpent? Understanding the truth about spiritual goodness might enable us to answer this serpent, but we might have to keep answering its pesky questions over and over and over. We may be able to attain a high level of certainty about goodness, but what do we know about evil? What is our level of expertise regarding the most subtle of serpents? Can they get to us? When knowledge of the infinite idea answers a questioning serpent, that question is never heard from again.

Knowledge of the infinite idea is all-inclusive of what is and all-exclusive of what is not. Knowledge of infinite good's allness and of infinite evil's nothingness constitutes one whole idea. The one who has knowledge of the infinite idea does not feel a twinge of uncertainty when asked to consider, "But what if...?" What is it about having knowledge of the infinite idea that makes us like the space travelers with all the cheese?

* * *

If an infinite uncertainty is not going to happen, if infinite doubt is total disbelief, if infinite risk is total failure, perhaps a use for such concepts can be found in the spiritually mental realm. We may want to be certain that evil will not happen, but until now we have only defined certainty for good things happening. To deal with evil, perhaps we need to have some negative certainty - we need to know what is not. Where can we find negative certainty in the mind of pure goodness?

Conventional wisdom says that it is hard to prove a negative. Perhaps we cannot be negatively certain, but only infinitely uncertain. Maybe, like having two locks on the door, we can have infinite certainty of good and infinite uncertainty of evil, both at the same time, flip sides of the same coin. Is uncertainty the symmetrical opposite of certainty and somehow to be associated with evil? Could it be that part of the antidote for evil is to have an infinite idea about it? When we are infinitely uncertain about evil, perhaps we are home free. If this is valid, the abstraction of infinite evil could be extremely useful, perhaps by being infinitely useless. It would be nice to have an infinite set of words for all the things that should never sensibly be.

We have talked about how an event that is infinitely uncertain will not happen. Carrying this idea a little further, infinite weakness is so puny as to be totally powerless. Infinite lack defines all the things we will never have. Infinite delay defines nothing ever happening. Infinite void defines a place absolutely clean of everything.

An infinite idea of evil can bring out the opposite of any human sense of it as something. This can be found with every word we could ever associate with evil. Each human step toward the realization of evil's nothingness brings palpable relief. When finally seen to be nothing, the words we might associate with evil can be elevated to an infinite idea the consequences of which must be entirely good.

While the most elevated human belief of evil, even as apparent spiritually mental empty space, does not conflict with all sorts of human suffering, the infinite idea of evil makes the idea of sensible evil totally inconceivable. It becomes nonsense. For this reason, the specific infinite idea of good and evil can antidote any adverse human sense of evil.

We have discussed the idea that infinite spiritual goodness defines the nature of everything that is real. We also know that the whole truth must include not only the truth of what is, but the truth of what is not. This latter aspect of truth is what is meant by the infinite idea of evil. The infinite idea of evil is inconceivable.

The idea that evil is the absence of good has been around for centuries. Working with the idea of evil as the absence of good and making that infinite, brings out interesting practical possibilities. If evil is a word whose essence is that it is ultimately inconceivable, the infinite idea of evil defines precisely and exactly that which is not.

At level three, where we first defined evil as unreal error, we were just at the beginning of understanding it. We declared evil to be nothing, but even then we did not fully comprehend what that meant. When we said it was unreal, we didn't mean some fancy infinite abstraction, but just that we had spiritual grounds for banishing its manifestations from consciousness. Now we learn that infinite evil is like a list of all the words that can be known to be inconceivable in the light of infinite spiritual thinking and being.

Perhaps when we have knowledge of the infinite idea, evil becomes a category for all the things that can never happen to us. If we have knowledge of infinite evil, perhaps we have knowledge that evil is something rightly experienced only in its absence. Then like returned lunar space travelers with green cheese on our breath, with knowledge of the infinite idea, we can go beyond belief, beyond understanding, having been there.

What may appear as scary evils on the human scene can be increasingly overcome as we embody the infinite ideas that antidote them and translate our sense of the negative into the infinite words that make it inconceivable. Now we are ready to stop wondering why providential intervention has not delivered us from evil. Perhaps it already has. Maybe the principle for evil's vanquishment is at our disposal, and we just have to work it out. If having to work it out is the bad news, the good news is that infinite truth is retroactive, which says that when we finally get things together, we will realize they have always been that way.

The one who has knowledge of infinite evil finds sensible evil to be inconceivable. A finite conception of evil, as by the human mind, is not a true conception but a misconception. Now let all our misconceptions be infinite. As we let spiritual conception displace human supposition, our ability to humanly misconceive fades away. Then we can no longer conceive of evil as a reality or misconceive of it in any sensible way.

Evil's ultimate antidote lies in infinite creativity, which renders, at once, the forever conceivability of good and the inconceivability of evil. If you can conceive of good, you can have it sensibly - it will make sense. To have knowledge of evil at the highest level of apprehension, its being inconceivable, makes it also insensible.

Words of infinite good and infinite evil would almost suggest an infinite writer of nonfiction and fiction. Its nonfiction is of things that are knowable, of goodness, love, life, and happiness. Its fiction is of opposite words. Because these things are fiction, they are all the things that become inconceivable to us as we reflect the infinite idea.

What evil may be to our senses often has little to do with its essential nature. Spiritual understanding of goodness dissolves beliefs of evil as obtrusive discord. Knowledge of the infinite idea of good and evil vanquishes the last observable remnants of evil, at their essence, as pure limitation.

Having made so little of human beliefs of evil, it is prudent to say something about the compounded phases of nothingness we might see as evils on the human scene. As a safety precaution, one would not want to encounter evil at any level of belief where it is regarded as something, but only at a level that knows it is nothing. Even though the idea of sensible evil is invalid, a belief in its validity could make it seem real to our mentality, and we would rather not have to deal with it at that level. If we see evil having a mental aspect as something, we should address it based on how it looks to us.

The basic office of evil is to define that which is not. For this reason, evil wants to pretend it is not there; it wants to hide, and when uncovered it wants to disappear. Because true knowing must comprehend both what is and what is not, any aspect of evil needs to be recognized by its particular name before that specific phase of it can completely disappear. Only in this way can we have a knowledgeable inventory of all the things that can never be.

It is fine for evil to appear to thought as an abstract empty space with a name. And it is fine for us to have knowledge of it by experiencing its oneness with the infinite idea of good. But if evil appears to us as accident, indifference, malice, vengeful justice, evil personality, mortal belief, or fatal limitation, it is unwise to lend our thought to it, to consent to it, to conceive of it, or to reproduce it. Sentient evil will eventually disappear from consciousness, and we do not want to be identifying with it in any finite way when it goes. In addition to simply disappearing, a more genteel way of saying that evil destroys itself, disappearing evil often brings out things that are aesthetically unpleasant, so they can disappear too.

When one is at a level of human belief where evil appears as something that is nothing, rather than as something that is something, one should be especially alert not to be humanly careless. There are no rewards in this life for being dumb. As an infinite idea, evil is an inconceivable abstraction. Entertaining a human belief in evil as something or even as nothing could lead one to accept evil's appearance on the human scene, which is all that is required to open the way for unfortunate manifestations.

* * *

Let us consider ourselves at a picnic luncheon looking for the salt. We are told there is a salt shaker with salt in it. What do we really know about this? Assuming that the statement about the presence of salt is truthful, we know there is salt. Based on that statement alone, we do not know how much salt, and we have no information about whether there is anything else in the shaker. We know that by being salt, the substance in question is not pepper. But to have the whole truth about what is in the shaker, we need to know more. We would really need to know more about this salt shaker were we to have our lives depend on it.

The mind that knows only what is, is open to suggestions from the remainder. Before we shake this salt on our cosmic mashed potatoes, we may want to know, not only what is in the shaker, but what is not. It might be salt mixed with rat poison for all we know. This might seem to be a silly distinction, and in most cases it is. But if our universe is to become the image of our knowing, we will certainly want to know what is real and what is to be excluded from sensible existence. Using the four levels of human belief and a level beyond the human, let us consider different observations about the salt shaker. Please pardon the strained analogy.

At level one, we look in the salt shaker and see salt and rat poison. We want to have the rat poison there, for some reason - to get rid of rats, perhaps. Because we want it there, it makes sense that the one who filled the shaker put in both salt and rat poison. We need to pick our way carefully among the specks. We cannot help wondering which ones were intended for us. No wonder we feel guilty.

At level two, we look in the salt shaker and see salt and rat poison. We know the one who put salt in the shaker did not put in the rat poison. Someone else did that. You can finish the rest of that story.

At level three, we look in the salt shaker and see salt and rat poison, but knowing that no one would have put rat poison in the shaker, we conclude that our observation must be in error. It is only our false belief that says it is there. Realizing this, we look again and, yes, our illusion of rat poison has disappeared. All we see is salt. However, at this point we have lost our appetites.

At level four, we see clearly that the salt shaker is half full of salt, nothing else. This would not be a problem ordinarily, but today we are at the end of a very long line. We are afraid that by the time we get to the front of the line the salt will be all gone.

As infinite thinkers, we see the salt shaker completely full of lovely white salt. In this case, we may even feel like we washed the salt shaker and filled it ourselves. The idea of rat poison is, to us, inconceivable. Having heard a rumor of rat poison, however, we are amused and comforted by the idea that all that salt fits in a perfectly empty shaker.

Observations about the salt shaker and its contents represent the different steps of our evolving beliefs. The contents of the salt shaker is like the contents of consciousness. Our individual levels of belief determine how we will be likely to perceive issues and approach solutions. It is only as infinite thinkers that we become aware of the value of starting with an empty shaker. Reaching for identity beyond human dimensions nurtures our knowledge of infinite fullness in infinite emptiness, and this brings the ultimate comforts

Interpreter of Organized Evil

2009-09-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

http://articles.latimes.com/2001/oct/12/news/cl-56208?pg=0

Interpreter of Organized Evil
By PAUL LIEBERMAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
October 12, 2001

NEW YORK — "When I'm very much in demand," Robert Jay Lifton said, "you know that the world is in trouble."

It was a joke, of course, but not a joke, for he was standing before an audience of fellow psychiatrists and other therapists who had sought him out as the logical person, indeed, to help them understand what they were now living through.

"He has spent most of his life trying to fathom the unfathomable," explained Dr. Michael Singer, director of the NYU Psychoanalytic Institute, introducing the 75-year-old Lifton as the man to launch its lecture series Terror and Aftermath: Perspectives on the World Trade Center Tragedy.

Most everyone there knew the details of Lifton's long interest in atrocities and their survivors: how as a young psychiatrist, in the 1950s, he studied Chinese "Thought Reform," brainwashing to produce a "psychology of totalism." He went on to study survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and Vietnam veterans, and Nazi doctors, and then the Japanese terrorist cult of Aum Shinrikyo, which in 1995 released deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system with the apocalyptic goal of "destroying the world to save it."

Now the New York therapists were hoping he could explain, "How could this have happened again?" And they were asking not as observers, Singer said, but "now unfortunately, as victims ourselves."

The group gathered Tuesday night in the auditorium of NYU medical Center, virtually next door to Bellevue Hospital and its chilling "Wall of Prayers," with the faces of hundreds of people first listed as merely "missing" from the twin towers. Many had been trying to help families of such people, or others who escaped. They were coping, as well, with the new fears of their old patients--and of their own families.

Lifton would, in the course of the evening, offer them insights on the apocalyptic dimension of Osama bin Laden's movement, and the death anxiety that he sees as he surveys the country, a view into the minds of both perpetrators and targets.

Decades ago, Lipton became part of a group that believed psychological insights could help them better understand historical figures and events. Their leader was Erik Erikson, the Danish painter-turned-analyst who wrote about the stages of life and helped popularize the concept of identity. Erikson also produced books on Martin Luther and Gandhi suggesting how their individual conflicts helped them come up with new ways of thinking, or acting, for millions of others.

While such "psychohistory" could become reductionist in lesser hands, or even invite parody--Did Hitler become Hitler because he had only one testicle?--Erikson spawned such followers as Robert Coles, with his studies of "Children in Crisis," and Lifton, who was interested in psychological makeup of entire groups.

Teaching at institutions such as Yale and Harvard, the "Wellfleet Group" would meet to hash out their theories at Lifton's home on Cape Cod. "We have a long tradition of reflecting on dreadful events," he says, "in a utopian setting."

It was there, as well, that he wrote much of his 1999 book on the Japanese cult that killed 11 people in its subway attack, injured several thousand more, and had even bigger plans: to make tons of nerve gas and use crop-dusting helicopters to release it in the major cities of Japan, and perhaps the U.S., setting off world war. In "Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism," Lifton warned that the events in Japan might signal worse to come.

"Its members can claim the distinction of being the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world," he wrote. "The next group of disciples to try might not be quite as small as Aum, or as inept, or as encumbered by its own madness."

That book did not sell well, however--and Lifton was not delighted with some reviews. It was almost as if he had cried out into a void.

Then came Sept. 11. "I had to go to New York one way or another."

There were a couple of reasons he had to go. One was that he had written mostly about history. Even his interviews with the Japanese cult members were after the fact, their leader already in prison. What was happening in New York wasn't history--it was ongoing, and far from finished.

The second reason: He was a New Yorker himself. Lifton grew up in Brooklyn and attended one of the city's huge high schools, Erasmus Hall, before attending Cornell and New York Medical College. But any New York insularity had ended with his service as an Air Force psychiatrist, stationed in Korea and Japan.

"I really discovered the world from that," says Lifton, who sometimes made a joke of it after he became a leading protester of the Vietnam War, suggesting in 1974 that the Nobel Prize be awarded to those who resisted serving. He also combined his humor and political views in doodled cartoons, creating conversations between two stick-figure birds, one young, small and naive, the other older, larger and pompous.

Though Lifton first came to public attention while teaching at Harvard, then Yale, from 1956 to 1967, for the past 15 years he had been back in New York, teaching at the City University's graduate center and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he headed a Center on Violence and Human Survival.

This summer, however, he sold his apartment on Central Park West and bought a home in Cambridge, Mass., where he will return to Harvard as a senior fellow in the Kennedy School and psychiatry chairman at the medical school.

In New York the media kept calling him, needing a quote or talking head on terrorism, violence or the plight of survivors. But Lifton also wanted to visit ground zero and, he hoped, start speaking to the people whose lives were upended.

He also knew he'd be asked to share what he'd learned over 50 years--and Tuesday's talk was his first chance to do that in any formal setting, though he quickly cautioned his audience "what I say is really preliminary." He was still trying to figure it out too.

He went through each of his studies, often not needing to elaborate on its relevance to ongoing events.

The "thought reform" practiced by the Communist Chinese was an illustration of how individuals could be taken over by a cause, pulled into an "all-or-nothing commitment, a polarization of good and evil." His theories in this area were an extension of Erikson's observations of how adolescents, in particular, were prone to fanaticism. Finding it hard to form an identity, they opted for one that was rigid, with no fluidity, handed them by a strong leader. That was Lifton's "psychology of totalism."

His subsequent studies showed how such a phenomenon could serve the causes of violence--not always committed by strangers.

From Vietnam veterans, especially antiwar veterans, he observed "destroying to save

From the Nazi doctors, he "came upon the idea of 'killing to heal,"' the notion that certain people have to be killed in order to heal the dominant group [This is part of the secret human sacrifice phenomena].

In the Japanese cult, he saw both apocalyptic motivation and desire to take "ownership of death." The group also engaged in "altruistic murder, in which members felt they bestowed benefits

Lifton worries that Americans do not understand this apocalyptic dimension of such destructive movements--and that of Osama bin Laden, whom he sees operating on two levels: with easily graspable political grievances, such as about America's support of Israel or its presence in Saudi Arabia; yet also speaking of cleansing the world of the Great Satan, America, and of Muslims who do not fit in his ideal.

"He talks about those who are defiled, who are nonbelievers."

"I think people misunderstand Bin Laden when they leave out that dimension, which is amorphous, and without boundaries."

He noted that Americans may be skeptical of such pious pronunciations when they learn that the hijackers went to strip clubs or malls. "I'm not certain, but it sounds to me like a form of what I call 'Doubling,"' he said, "the formation of a functionally second self, so it is true that some of them could drink and make merry and go bowling, and do things that ordinary Americans did . . . so removed from the suicidal martyr's mission . . . It's the kind of double life that spies can often live."

In understanding the impact on Americans, he turns to the survivors of Hiroshima. Though the devastation there was far greater, "we heard people [in New York] describe the feeling that it seemed like a nuclear attack, like a nuclear bomb had gone off. It struck him that the term used, "ground zero," was "a nuclear weapons term."

"In my experience, survivors immediately experience a sense of anxiety, or a death-haunted image [stemming from] the death immersion or the death encounter

He's been made aware of such fears in a personal way. His two children both have shared their fears for the future of their own young daughters.

So he is worried, first about them, and the knowledge that this fear is a real one, given "the realistic possibly of further terrorism." But he fears the American response, too. For while "survivor anger is understandable, quite human," he does not believe that anger should drive policy. Though speculating that it will be impossible to ever satisfy the apocalyptic groups, he still hopes for some "minimally violent means of achieving some form of justice

While agreeing that "we should do everything we can to bring the perpetrators to justice," he cautions that such groups can spur a response that accepts their "totalistic" vision of the struggle--as with the initial naming of the American counter-effort as "Operation Infinite Justice."

When it was time for questions, the shrinks asked briefly about helping patients in therapy. But mostly they spoke like any Americans, passionately debating the politics of the moment.

One questioner wanted to point out the legitimate complaints about America that might have spurred the attack. "Is the U.S. taking more than its share of the world?" he asked.

"A man like Bin Laden can have very real grievances as well as an apocalyptic vision," Lifton responded. "If you dropped a cruise missile [on him], you wouldn't stop Islamic terrorism."

Another question: After half a century of studying such phenomena, what about the past month took him by surprise?

"I insisted in [the 1999] book that this could exist here," Lifton said. "Nevertheless, I was shocked. I wasn't free from this invulnerability

"We're all in the middle of something that we can't fully grasp or evaluate. We're unable to extricate ourselves sufficiently to take much distance from it. I have been trying to connect it with other extreme events I've studied. But having said that, we realize we're not free of this. It contains us, it threatens us. And we're all making inner decisions about what we do with it. I'm thinking constantly about it--and making notes."

He and a colleague at the Center on Human Violence, Charles B. Strozier, have already begun the $130,000 research project to interview in depth, and over time, people who directly observed the unfolding drama.

Lifton predicted he would be back in New York a lot.

There's one thing he hasn't had time for.

"I haven't done a single cartoon since Sept. 11," he said.

Torture in the Middle Ages, Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments, and the Power of Authority Over Conscience

2009-09-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/Articles/Art/oldspeak-evil_repost2.asp

Organized Evil
Torture in the Middle Ages, Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments, and the Power of Authority Over Conscience

By David McNair

Editor’s note: Organized Evil first appeared in Oldspeak in February 2003. It was originally intended to be a meditation on the history of torture and the nature of human cruelty inspired by an exhibition of torture instruments from the Middle-Ages and the industrial era. The exhibit, entitled Inquisition: Torture and Intolerance, was on display at the San Diego Museum of Man at the time. In addition, early reports about questionable interrogation techniques being used by the U.S. government on terror suspects had begun to surface (See: Washington Post article "U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations"). Considering the current prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, we felt that Organized Evil had become even more relevant now than when it first appeared.

Head Crusher, Venetian, 1500-1700. Still used as an interogation device in the world today.

In the early 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment on human obedience at Yale University. Volunteer subjects were asked to participate in a "memory study" and told that it was concerned with "the effects of punishment on learning." Each volunteer, referred to as a "teacher," was introduced to an "experimenter," who would oversee the experiment, and a "learner," who was strapped into a kind of electric chair while the volunteer sat behind a panel of switches and voltage meters, one of which was marked "Danger: severe shock." The learners were actors, and whenever the experimenter commanded the teacher to administer an electric shock, increasing the voltage level based on the frequency of wrong answers, the actors pretended to suffer. Although many of the teachers were clearly disturbed by the effects of the experiment, they continued to obey the experimenter. In fact, 26 out of the 40 teachers administered the shocks up to the maximum level, even after the actors had feigned losing consciousness. In further experiments, in which Milgram used a wide variety of subjects with different economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds, the results were the same. A majority of people continued to obey authority despite their misgivings. Among the aberrations in this experiment, a few are quite interesting. Of course, there were those few who resisted authority, and whose actions we would hope would be our own, including a man who had experienced the German occupation in the Netherlands during World War II and who finally refused the experimenter, saying, "I came here of my own free will. I thought I could help in a research project. But if I have to hurt somebody to do that—I can’t continue." But most of the aberrations were disturbing. One teacher, clearly troubled by what he was doing, said to the controller after the learner appeared to pass out, "Sir, I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you should look in on him." Another man, described as highly intelligent and sophisticated, could not control his laughter each time he administered a shock. A year later, in a questionnaire, he said, "What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e., the adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e., don't hurt someone who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, 'You can call yourself Eichmann,' I hope I deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values I encounter."

The "Iron Maiden" of Nuremberg, 15th Century.

In 1983, an exhibition of torture instruments from the Middle-Ages and the industrial era opened in Florence, Italy. The exhibit, called "Inquisition," was one of the first attempts to display these horrible instruments of human torture, and presented an appalling and profoundly disturbing story of human cruelty throughout the ages. The exhibit became internationally famous almost overnight, and by the time it closed in Barcelona, Spain, in 1986, the gruesome images of these devices were familiar to millions around the world. In addition, the exhibit has been revived and is currently on display at the San Diego Museum of Man, entitled Inquisition: Torture and Intolerance. "While its contents are horrifying, the exhibit offers an important indictment against torture and tyranny," says Museum Director Douglas Sharon. "And its overall purpose is to convey a powerful message against any kind of inhuman treatment." The exhibit is supported by such important organizations as Amnesty International and the Mexican Academy of Human Rights. You can also visit the permanent exhibit online at the Historical Torture Museum.

"But one of the real surprises of Milgram’s experiments is that it does not point toward a sadistic desire to control others, like you might think, but rather toward an inability to resist authority."

The exhibit has also been preserved in a bilingually published book called Inquisition, from which the images that accompany this article were taken. The photographs of these devices, along with antique engravings of the spectacles of their use, present a profound moral and spiritual dilemma to those of us who like to believe that love and faith and gentleness are stronger than hatred and evil and death. In trying to understand why people did this to one another, and continue to do so, we are faced with some uncomfortable truths about human nature. As Milgram’s experiments reveal, people have a capacity to distance themselves from the sufferings of others, as well as a darker capacity to justify such cruelty or even delight in it, so long as it is sanctioned by some legitimate authority, not a direct result of our actions, or seems to serve a higher purpose.

Milgram’s experiment came as a shock to many so-called enlightened people, who considered torture unjustifiable and a crime against humanity—those who considered, for example, the Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jews unthinkable. In fact, before Milgram conducted his famous experiments, he asked psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, graduate students, and faculty in the behavioral sciences to predict the outcomes. "With remarkable similarity," Milgram writes in The Perils of Obedience, an article about his experiments that appeared in a 1974 issue of Harper’s Magazine, "…they predicted that virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. These predictions were unequivocally wrong."

Amsterdam, about 1700. The burning of witches and heretics during the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions.

In contemplating the torture devices in Inquisition, or in contemplating the continued existence of torture in the world today, in which Amnesty International says it has "received reports of torture and ill-treatment inflicted by state agents in over 150 countries since 1997," and in which the United States has begun to sanction the torture of terror suspects to obtain information (See Washington Post article "U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations"), it is hard not to return to Milgram’s experiments and the realization that the roots of torture and man’s inhumanity to man are buried deep in the human psyche. (Of course, and I digress, in contemplating the devices in Inquisition, it is impossible not to give Freud the nod here and ignore the sexual nature of torture with its obvious links to sado-masochism and the pursuit of pleasure through pain. But the more you really think about what torture is, and how it has been used through the ages and in the present, a fascination with its sexual appropriation seems to diminish, reduced to a childish farce indulged in by societies that are distanced from any state-sponsored torture.) But one of the real surprises of Milgram’s experiments is that it does not point toward a sadistic desire to control others, like you might think, but rather toward an inability to resist authority. One of the fundamental lessons of Milgram’s study, he writes, was that:

"…ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

People choose not to resist authority in interesting ways as well. Milgram cites one teacher, described as a rough-hewn 37-year-old welder, who performed his task with the loyalty of a soldier, at one point actually forcing a learner’s hand down on the electrode when the actor pretended to recoil from the shock treatments. Other teachers found it easier to administer shocks when they were ordering someone else to physically switch the levers. Many of the teachers were clearly uncomfortable with what they were doing, protesting and fully convinced of the wrongness of their actions, but still unable to "make an open break with authority." Some of these people even began to delude themselves into thinking, as Milgram puts it, that they were "on the side of the angels" by switching the levers gently in the hope of lessoning the suffering of the learner—anything but outright defiance of authority.

"Looking at the antique engravings and illustrations in Inquisition, you notice an almost serene detachment in the faces of the torturers and those witnessing the torture, as if their tortured fellow human beings were merely slabs of meat being sawed, poked, flayed, burned, and spiked."

Now imagine if the consequences of defying authority (no one in Milgram’s experiments were threatened with punishment if they refused to administer the shocks) were being tortured, killed, or having your loved ones harmed. The terrible power that the threat of torture possesses, particularly when it’s randomly and frequently administered, is undeniable. It is what Geroge Orwell’s creation, O’Brien, the state torturer in the novel 1984, calls "a boot stomping on a human face forever."– i.e. the total control and power of state authority over the individual. Given this reality, it’s not hard to imagine how the centuries of torture presented in Inquisition could have persisted. While it’s true that certain political and church leaders, and particularly the administrators of the torture, may have actually enjoyed being the boot stomping on the face of humanity, the large majority of people were simply terrified into submission and compliance.

In the introduction to Brian Innes’ book, The History of Torture, the author tells the story of Paul Teitgen, a hero of the French Resistance who had been tortured by the Germans at Dachau, and later became the Secretary-General in the Algerian government. A communist supporter of the nationalist revolution had been captured planting a bomb in a gasworks factory under Teitgen’s watch and was believed to know where a second bomb was planted. The Chief of Police tried to persuade Teitgen to let him use all the means necessary in interrogating the man, but Teitgen refused, later saying:

"I refused to have him tortured. I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did go off. Thank god I was right. Because if you once get into the business of torture, you’re lost…Understand, fear is the basis of it all. All our so-called civilization is covered with a veneer. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear. The French—even the Germans—are not torturers by nature. But when you see the throats of your friends slit, the veneer vanishes."

Fear. That’s the primary feeling you get leafing through the horrible images in Inquisition. The terrible fear of having to imagine it being done to you or someone you know, and the terrible knowledge that human kindness and love can be provisional, vulnerable to the brutal ideologies, theologies, laws, and social conventions that people often live under, vulnerable to a desire for self-preservation, and ultimately corrupted when people put too much faith in their rulers or religious leaders.

"As Milgram’s experiments reveal, people have a capacity to distance themselves from the sufferings of others, as well as a darker capacity to justify such cruelty or even delight in it, so long as it is sanction by some legitimate authority, not a direct result of our actions, or seems to serve a higher purpose. "

In the end, Milgram cites Nazi war criminal Eichmann and the army of bureaucrats who operated the German concentration camps in World War II as models of "socially organized evil in modern society," reminding us that Eichmann himself was more of a paper pusher than a sadistic monster, and that he was sickened when he toured the concentration camps. And all down the line of command there were simple ways for individuals to avoid considering themselves directly responsibility for their actions. Here, Milgram blames this kind of evil on a form of society in which people perform very specialized jobs, feel like mere cogs in a wheel, and are therefore disconnected from the larger meaning of their actions. "Thus," Milgram writes, "There is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act."

The Interogation Chair, 17th Century.

But, of course, this "fragmentation" is nothing new. Looking at the antique engravings and illustrations in Inquisition, you notice an almost serene detachment in the faces of the torturers and those witnessing the torture, as if their tortured fellow human beings were merely slabs of meat being sawed, poked, flayed, burned, and spiked. People stand idly, looking somewhat bored, while someone hangs naked from a poll getting his flesh ripped. A studious looking man takes notes while a woman receives water torture. Three men play cards while a man hangs from the ceiling by one arm with heavy weights tied to his ankles. One man seems to smirk while he helps saw a man in half. Remove the torture victims from these engravings and illustrations and you’re left with portraits of everyday life in the Middle Ages—people cooking over a fire, tradesmen building something, crowds gathered at a fair or outdoor market, students taking notes. Where, one is finally compelled to ask, is the human connection between the victims and those tormenting or watching them?

In the hope of ending on a somewhat positive note, its worth noting Milgrim’s observations on the variations that would cause the experimenters to loose their power over the teachers. Think of it as a strategy for fighting organized evil:

The experimenter's physical presence has a marked impact on his authority—As cited earlier, obedience dropped off sharply when orders were given by telephone. The experimenter could often induce a disobedient subject to go on by returning to the laboratory.

Conflicting authority severely paralyzes actions—When two experimenters of equal status, both seated at the command desk, gave incompatible orders, no shocks were delivered past the point of their disagreement.

The rebellious action of others severely undermines authority—In one variation, three teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and shocks. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, thirty-six of forty subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well.

Twenty-Seven Million Slaves

2009-09-21T07:19:00.001-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/27-million-slaves_b_290057.html

Twenty-Seven Million Slaves
Russell Simmons
The Huffington Post
Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:54 UTC

Human trafficking, otherwise known as child labor, migrant smuggling, sex worker trafficking, debt bondage, or good old fashioned slavery, adds up to one inescapable reality. An estimated 27 million human beings worldwide today are living lives of exploitation and humanity stripped bare beyond the bone of basic human rights. This is a bigger number than at any point in documented history.

They are objects of ownership, forgotten as children in need of love, nurturing and protection; forgotten as flesh and blood creatures that bruise and bleed and are more than vessels for sex; forgotten as individuals with the desire for purpose and peace and protection from the violence and intimidation they face every day. If they are not a source of revenue for those who own them, they are a useless, expendable tool. The physical pain and the psychological scars that result are indelible. Globally, some 24 percent of victims of human trafficking are children, and 66 percent overall are women. Not surprisingly, 79 percent of the victims are subjected to sexual exploitation.

None of this is acceptable on any level, but it goes on at such staggering levels every day. How? We know that no human being should be the property of another. So how can this be happening? Didn't we learn anything from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the 400 years of injustice that has followed for its African victims? Why do we need so many dedicated organizations at work every day addressing human trafficking? The world needs to know about the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and their intensive work to begin to understand the scope and patterns involved, including the governmental, criminal and legal ramifications of human trafficking. We need to support NGOs and grass-roots efforts for victim's rights/recovery and global awareness such as Free the Slaves world-wide, Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia, and Touch a Life Foundation in Ghana. It is inspiring to see some efforts are founded or shaped by the direct involvement of those formerly enslaved, who are determined to help others suffering the same fate.

While we are getting a handle on how big the issues of human trafficking are from a humanitarian, economic and criminal perspective, we can't escape the truth that this will not go away without addressing the root causes of poverty and ignorance. To heal the wounds inflicted on survivors of human trafficking we can't look away. We have to demand as the human race, at bare minimum, we must make a human being endowed with the inalienable right of dignity so that they cannot be bought or sold.

A few months ago, I was appointed the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Permanent Memorial to Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which will be erected on the grounds of the UN in New York City. It's an honor to be of service in memorializing such a defining chapter in human rights and history. But that's just the thing -- it's a chapter. We've got to be focused on writing the rest of the book and we've got to make sure that humanity does better than allowing the continued slavery of our sisters and brothers who need their race to care.

America's Tortured Past

2009-08-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-s-Tortured-Past-by-Stephen-Lendman-090831-624.html

August 31, 2009

America's Tortured Past
By Stephen Lendman

On August 24, an ACLU press release stated:

In response to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, "The government today handed over to the American Civil Liberties Union (one of dozens of documents comprising an unprecedented 130,000 previously secret pages, including) a detailed official description of the CIA's interrogation program."

Referring to a heavily redacted December 2004 report (originally commissioned by CIA director George Tenet) detailing torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, it "describes the use of abusive interrogation techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and stress positions." Far worse ones were understated or redacted entirely.

According to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

The report "is a profoundly disturbing document that illustrates, as well as anything could, how far the CIA strayed from the law and from values that are integral to our democracy. That the barbaric methods outlined in the paper were approved by the country's senior-most officials is particularly appalling."

Bush's Justice Department office of legal counsel head, now a federal appeals court judge, Jay Bybee, advised the CIA that torture and threats of imminent death were legal if they didn't cause mental harm even though US and international law forbid all forms at all times with no exceptions allowed for any reason.

Given America's tortured past, none of this should surprise. More on that below.

On August 25 in The New York Times, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti headlined: "Report Shows Tight CIA Control on Interrogations." Claiming it "focused on aberrations in the field," the writers said "by no means (did it represent) gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from CIA headquarters and the Department of Justice - control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal."

These same officials said:

-- federal courts have no jurisdiction and can't review detainee mistreatment or mistaken arrests;

-- US and international laws don't apply in the "war on terror;" and

-- the President as Commander-in-Chief enjoys "the fullest range of power to protect the nation....(that he has) complete discretion in the exercise of his authority in conducting operations against hostile forces."

The 2006 Military Commissions Act authorized torture, created the lawless category of "unlawful enemy combatants," denied them judicial fairness, claimed they can be disappeared, indefinitely detained with no right to counsel, then tried by kangaroo tribunals with no right of appeal and executed.

To protect national security, they may be subjected to all forms of abuse, innocent or guilty, and the right of "military necessity" justifies the most extreme mistreatment.

Any form of intense and prolonged physical and psychological torture may be inflicted short of causing injuries resulting in death, organ failure, or permanent damage - continuing America's long tradition of inflicting abusive barbaric treatment.

The Times gave examples, but omitted prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, painful shackling, severe beatings, electric shocks, induced hypothermia, exposure to bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day, denial of medical care, proper food or enough of it, excruciating force-feeding to hunger-strikers, induced psychological trauma, forced sodomy, threats and bites by attack dogs, being blindfolded and hung from the ceiling by their wrists, and subjected to repeated humiliations, indignities and barbarism for months, even years, although most Guantanamo detainees (and others) committed no crime and were turned in for bounties that snared children as young as 13.

Deaths resulted from asphyxiation, extreme beatings, and deprivation prolonged enough to cause organ failure. Yet Attorney General Eric Holder plans no more than prosecutorial investigations (by a career Justice Department insider) of "rogue" agents, not top officials who authorized their crimes and bear main responsibility for them.

At the same time, Obama's Interrogation and Transfer Policy Task Force will continue the Bush administration's policy of extraordinary renditions to countries with disturbing histories of torture, provoking outcries from human rights activists. It assures continuation of abusive practices despite hollow assurances of closer monitoring, more humane treatment, and greater access for diplomats - the same never honored Bush administration pledges suggesting a similar betrayal by Obama.

Revealed CIA Report Abuses

On August 28, the Washington Post headlined, "CIA Releases Its Instructions For Breaking a Detainee's Will," then continued:

"As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee's head against a wall."

"After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face (followed by more slaps). Next comes head-slamming, or 'walling'....'twenty or thirty times consecutively' is permissible (and) if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried."

The New York Times said the Bush administration's Justice Department knew about two dozen abuse cases years ago but declined to pursue prosecutions despite detainee deaths and other extreme examples of torture.

Manadel al-Jamadi was a victim. Captured by Navy Seals in October 2003, he was beaten and tortured, then suspended from a barred window with his arms tied behind his back. He died in November. Army reservist Charles Graner was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Eight Navy Seals received light administrative punishment for torturing al-Jamadi and other prisoners. Higher-ups at Abu Ghraib remained free to abuse others.

Redacting the worst crimes and omitting all committed at secret "black sites," the CIA report revealed the following:

-- one or more detainees were told their mothers would be raped in their presence;

-- CIA operatives conducted mock executions by firing guns in adjoining rooms even though a federal law expressly forbids threatening detainees with imminent death;

-- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was told his children would be killed if America experienced another terrorist attack;

-- a detainee was repeatedly knocked out from pressure to his carotid artery;

-- inmates were threatened with guns;

-- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the October 2000 US Cole bombing, was terrorized with a power drill, nearly drowned by waterboarding, and according to a 2006 ICRC report was threatened with sodomy and the arrest and rape of his family;

-- other evidence from an internal Justice Department investigation revealed reports of prisoners abused in US military custody as early as 2002; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was informed and did nothing to stop them;

-- a December 2004-initiated Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation revealed that top White House, Defense Department and CIA officials turned a blind eye to repeated acts of torture and abuse; in addition, the FBI knew about them, failed to act, and only belatedly reported them after Abu Ghraib photographs became public.

CIA officials knew they faced "potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the program, particularly (their) use of (extreme interrogation practices) and the inability of the US Government to decide what it will ultimately do with terrorists detained by the agency." They also feared public knowledge could "seriously damage....the reputation and effectiveness of the agency itself." Yet they continued the most abusive practices and still do given the cover afforded them by the Obama administration.

America's Tortured Past

Many, perhaps most or all countries have used torture at times in their past, so it shouldn't surprise that America did as far back as before the republic's birth. Accused 17th century Salem witches faced abusive interrogations, a less extreme form of waterboarding, grueling trials, death by hanging for those convicted, and at least one victim was crushed to death under heavy boulders. None so far as known was burned alive.

Native Americans were (and still are) victims of genocide through mass slaughter, starvation, neglect, and by exposing them to deadly pathogens like smallpox and other diseases, including influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, plague, cholera, and scarlet fever.

Entire tribes were annihilated. Columbus exterminated the whole Hispaniola population by torture, mass-murder, forced labor, starvation, disease, despair, stabbing natives for sport, dashing babies' heads on rocks, letting children be eaten by dogs, beheadings, and burning people at the stake among other atrocities, including especially brutal treatment of women.

In the antebellum South, slaves were tortured by whipping, painful restraint, prolonged isolation in a sealed shed with choking tobacco smoke, and by other punishments. Theodore Roosevelt defended water torture (today's waterboarding) called the "water cure" to extract confessions from Filipinos because "nobody was seriously damaged."

In 1995, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39) authorizing extraordinary rendition to other countries for interrogations and torture.

Torture As A Weapon of War

In his book, "War Without Mercy," John Dower documented atrocities by both sides in the Pacific war. American forces "mutilat(ed) Japanese war dead for souvenirs, attack(ed) and (sank) hospital ships, sho(t) sailers who had abandoned ship and pilots who had bailed out, kill(ed) wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and tortur(ed) and execut(ed) prisoners."

Japanese ones aside, American atrocities included civilian abuse, burying combatants alive, and routinely using torture against a race called so vile and subhuman that all forms of barbarism were justified to exterminate them.

In the Korean War, mass indiscriminate killing of civilians was commonplace. It got General Curtis LeMay to boast that US planes "burned down every town in North Korea," killing 20% or more of the population. Both sides committed barbaric acts, including massacres and torture.

Korean expert Bruce Cumings explained the "extraordinary destructiveness of the United States air campaigns, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons," to the use of biological weapons, to incinerating whole towns and villages, turning the entire North to rubble, and slaughtering millions of its people, mainly civilians.

In Hwangjoo County, US forces designated one area a hand-grenade field, killing 500 civilians. Prisoners and civilians were buried alive, burned, drowned, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death. In Hwemun Village in Erang County, one woman, after arrest, was forcibly mutilated. Her breasts, legs, and arms were cut off. Then her eyes were gouged out before she was stabbed to death. Others were beheaded. Thousands of civilians were brutally tortured. One family of six was hanged upside down from a tree and burned alive. Another civilian was skinned alive, then burned to death.

Still others were murdered with bats, spears, stones, sticks, clubs, flails, and pickaxes. Women were assaulted and raped. In all, US forces massacred tens of thousands of civilians systematically, ruthlessly, and brutally, including by disemboweling them while alive.

Barbarity in Vietnam was even worse. Atrocities were widespread and commonplace, including massacres, rape, torture, mutilations, wanton mass destruction, use of chemical and biological weapons, and as Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger: "We're gonna level that goddam country. We're gonna hit 'em, bomb the livin' bejusus out of 'em." Kissinger concurred in replying: "Mr. President, I will enthusiastically support that, and I think it's the right thing to do."

US forces got carte blanche to carpet bomb, incinerate entire villages, burn people alive, fire freely on civilians, murder wounded prisoners or beat them to death, throw people out of helicopters, torture sadistically, gang rape young girls, and commit every imaginable atrocity to people called gooks, vermin, or as General William Westmoreland described them, "worthless termites." Against them, as in the Middle East and Central Asia, inflicting any form of human suffering is permissible.

Torture by US Police

For decades to the present, police have used torture to intimidate, extract confessions, treat people of color especially sadistically, especially black men. In Chicago, the practice has been scandalous according to the Human Rights at Home Chicago Police Torture Archive. Below is the timeline of one of the most egregious examples:

-- in May 1972, the notorious Jon Burge (trained in torture techniques in Vietnam) was assigned to the Area Two detective division on the city's South Side, a predominantly black community;

-- in August 1972, allegations of torture against him and other detectives surfaced;

-- in May, 1973, Anthony Jones was tortured by electric shock and suffocation with a plastic bag;

-- in 1977, Burge was promoted to sergeant;

-- from 1973 - 1981, torture allegations were made against him and his men; Russian roulette, brutal beatings, and other abuses were cited;

-- in 1981, Burge was promoted to lieutenant in charge of the Violent Crimes Unit at Area 2;

-- from 1981 - 1993, dozens of victims made torture accusations, suits were filed, but through 1990, the administration and City Council took no action; Mayor Daley made "no comment whatever;"

-- after torturing detainees for 21 years, the Chicago Police Board fired Burge;

-- in March 1993, the Fraternal Order of Police planned to honor him with a float in the annual St. Patrick Day's parade; community outrage stopped it;

-- in 1993 and 1994, torture allegations against other officers were investigated; through 1998, no action was taken;

-- in November 1999, torture expert Dr. Robert Kirschner testified that abuses by Chicago police followed a pattern found in nations where the military and other security forces practice it;

-- in 2004, several former black detectives under Burge admitted in sworn statements that they saw or heard evidence of torture, saw implements used (including Burge's "shock box"), and that abusive practices were an "open secret" at Area 2;

-- Burge was never charged with a crime, is retired, and now lives in Florida; and

-- the Burge case was notorious in Chicago, but is just the tip of the iceberg there and throughout the country; rarely are abusers held accountable; often they're rewarded and promoted.

Torture in US Prisons

Imprisonments are to punish, not rehabilitate, as those confined can attest, and what's experienced inside is shocking and lawless, but prisoners are powerless to resist:

-- savage beatings by prison guards and other inmates;

-- psychological intimidation and abuse;

-- attacks by fierce dogs;

-- arbitrary abusive shakedowns;

-- lengthy solitary confinement for minor infractions;

-- abusive strip searches;

-- extended lockdowns during which prisoners are confined to their cells;

-- electroshocks with cattle prods and 50,000 volt emitting Tasers that leave victims shaking for hours and are potent enough to kill;

-- assaults by toxic chemicals like pepper spray or mace that cause severe pain, second degree burns, temporary blindness, and occasionally death; and

-- sodomy by guards and other inmates.

CIA's black sites, illuminated

2009-08-31T11:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cia-detainee31-2009aug31,0,1384401,full.story

Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times
Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:34 UTC

The facilities were never meant to be 'ordinary prisons,' recently released documents reveal in meticulous detail.

Their transformations took place in a sensory cocoon: aboard a CIA aircraft, shackled in place, deprived of sight and sound by blindfolds, headsets and hoods.

They emerged into an existence that was hidden for most of the last eight years, but now is possible to glimpse through dozens of declassified files released by the Obama administration last week.

Scattered throughout, in the CIA's clinical style, are descriptions of the prisoners' surroundings, the extraordinary security measures with which they were handled, the often brutal search for answers they were thought to possess, and what passed for everyday life.

Some days seemed endless, illuminated around the clock by a pair of 17-watt fluorescent bulbs. White noise from the walkways filtered through the cell walls usually "in the range of 56-58" decibels, about as loud as people generally talk.

There were touches of CIA hospitality. Prisoners were given books, movies and checkerboards to pass the time. They could hit the gym for exercise, and let their hair grow as long as they liked.

But there were also long stretches designed to break prisoners' will.

They were stripped, shaved and shoved against walls the moment they arrived. What came next was an escalating menu of interrogation options, culminating in a method used in the Inquisition -- waterboarding -- to make them think they would drown.

The purpose, of course, was to make them talk. The Bush administration said the United States was in danger of additional assaults after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. CIA interrogators were under orders to get a lot of information, fast. Whether the harsh interrogation methods were necessary to gather the intelligence is still a matter of dispute.

The only glimpse?

The secret overseas "black sites" where the CIA conducted the interrogations are empty now, if not already dismantled. They were never examined by a congressional committee, nor inspected by the international Red Cross.

"These papers may provide the only picture that history gets of what life was like in these facilities," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

The black sites not only imprisoned men but reduced them to a near helpless state. The aim, as outlined in one document, was to teach every detainee "to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting."

The prisoners' arrival -- almost always in diapers -- was engineered to achieve that end.

After being shaved, stripped and photographed nude, detainees were examined by CIA medical and psychological personnel. Then came a preliminary interrogation that would determine the prisoners' fate.

Only those considered extremely cooperative would avoid a trio of techniques designed to produce a "baseline, dependent" state: the deprivation of clothes, solid food and sleep.

Follow-up sessions would start with the prisoner standing with his back against a wall and a towel or collar to prevent whiplash wrapped around his neck. He could be thrown against the wall just once "to make a point, or 20 to 30 times consecutively."

Prisoners so abhorred the repeated slamming that they would remain in so-called stress positions, such as painful kneeling postures, for hours to avoid a return to the wall, according to one Dec. 30, 2004, memo that amounts to a CIA blueprint for breaking a detainee's will.

Meticulous detail

The rules for administering such methods were spelled out precisely. Detainees could be kept in a large box for 18 hours a day, but small boxes for only two hours at a time. They could be hosed with water for 15 minutes, but the air temperature had to exceed 65 degrees if they weren't to be given a towel.

The detainee "finds himself in the complete control of Americans," the memo said. "The procedures he is subjected to are precise, quiet and almost clinical."

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released a series of Justice Department memos laying out legal rationales for the array of coercive interrogation methods the CIA employed.

The documents -- including an internal report by the CIA inspector general and correspondence between the agency and the Justice Department -- show that the agency also sought Justice Department review of the basic conditions in which prisoners were kept.

The agency had to use extraordinary security measures inside the prison walls, the records indicate, because keeping the facilities' purpose secret meant the CIA could not surround them with guards and barriers that would attract attention from the public.

The black sites "were not designed as ordinary prisons, much less as high-security detention centers for extremely dangerous, and often highly sophisticated, international terrorists," one Justice Department memo said. "They are a serious risk to escape and to the safety of CIA personnel."

About 100 prisoners passed through the CIA system. Among them were a handful of "high-value detainees" including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Some detainees attacked guards, according to the documents, and the sites themselves were also seen as potential targets for terrorist attacks.

Total isolation

The records don't say where the prisons were, but news reports and accounts from former U.S. officials indicate the sites included Thailand, Poland, Romania, Morocco and Lithuania.

Internal security measures included the "white noise" in the prison walkways to prevent detainees from communicating. The upper limit was 79 decibels -- about the level of a garbage disposal -- to avoid permanent harm to detainees' hearing.

Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and allowed no communication with the outside world. Any time they were moved, they were shackled and outfitted in blacked-out goggles to prevent them from seeing the layout of the prison, or getting any clues to where it was.

Their cells were illuminated and monitored via closed-circuit video 24 hours a day. "Some detainees are provided eyeshades to permit them to block out the light when they are sleeping," an Aug. 31, 2006, Justice Department memo said.

In some sections, the memos seem contradictory, describing ways to reduce prisoners to an infantile state while insisting that the agency be committed to "minimizing the physical discomfort and psychological distress that detainees are likely to suffer."

As a result, after prisoners were broken by a regimen of sleep deprivation, slamming them against the wall, and in three cases waterboarding, they were often given items to ease their sense of isolation. Among them were "a wide variety of books, puzzles, paper and 'safe' writing utensils, chess and checker sets, a personal journal, and access to DVD and VCR videotapes."

Blackwater Founder Accused in Court of Intent to Kill

2009-08-30T10:53:00.001-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/28/AR2009082803782.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Blackwater Founder Accused in Court of Intent to Kill

Jerry Markon
Washington Post
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:22 UTC

The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.

The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company's owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims' estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies.

"The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,'' Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. "He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.''

Judge T.S. Ellis III expressed deep skepticism about the claims. "Are you accusing Mr. Prince of saying 'I want our boys to go out and shoot innocent civilians?' '' he asked the attorneys."These are certainly allegations of not engaging in very nice conduct, but where are the elements that meet the elements of murder? I don't have any doubt that you can infer malice. What you can't infer, as far as I can tell, is intent to kill these people.''

Attorneys for the former Blackwater company denied the allegations at the hearing, which was called to consider their motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Ellis said he would issue a ruling "promptly.''

The hearing -- combative in its words but respectful in tone -- was the latest fallout from Blackwater's controversial actions in Iraq. The North Carolina company, which has provided security under a lucrative State Department contract, has come under scrutiny for a string of incidents in which its heavily armed guards were accused of using excessive force.

The deadliest was a September 2007 shooting in central Baghdad in which Blackwater guards opened fire on Iraqis in a crowded street, killing 17 civilians. The company has said the guards' convoy came under fire. Five former Blackwater guards have been indicted on federal charges in 14 of those shootings. A sixth guard pleaded guilty.

The lawsuit cites that incident and other shootings to accuse the company of "lawless behavior." A consolidation of five earlier lawsuits, it says the company covered up killings and hired known mercenaries. In sworn affidavits recently filed by the plaintiffs' attorneys, two anonymous former Blackwater employees also say -- without citing evidence -- that the company may have conspired to murder witnesses in the criminal probe.

Attorneys for Blackwater say the lawsuit should be dismissed on a variety of legal grounds and that although the deaths were tragic, the guards were closely supervised by U.S. government officials. The allegations "go far beyond describing the harm allegedly suffered by Plaintiffs,'' the Blackwater attorneys wrote in their motion to dismiss. "They include an encyclopedia of vituperative assertions.''

The Blackwater attorneys are also calling on the judge to strike the affidavits from the former employees from the court record, calling them "scandalous and baseless" and designed to get publicity. Ellis has yet to rule on that motion.

The Shills at work: The Washington Post's One-Sided Account of Torture and Abuse

2009-08-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

http://pubrecord.org/commentary/4287/washington-postone-sided-account/

The Shills at work: The Washington Post's One-Sided Account of Torture and Abuse

Melvin A. Goodman
The Public Record
Sat, 29 Aug 2009 06:16 UTC

The lead story in today's Washington Post, headlined "How a Detainee Became An Asset," provides a one-sided and distorted account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the urgent need for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive and authoritative narrative of the eight years of misgovernment of the Bush administration.

The prosecution of low-level CIA officials and government contractors for resorting to torture and abuse beyond the sordid guidelines of the Justice Department will allow the major players of the Bush administration as well as the lawyers of the Justice Department to escape retribution and judgment. Since President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would never be held accountable, the entire nation would be better served by a full understanding of the war crimes that they authorized in our name.

Today's article argues that the techniques of torture and abuse turned KSM into the CIA's "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. Citing an intelligence assessment by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which was presumably prepared for Vice President Cheney, the Post article argues that waterboarding was the key to breaking KSM's spirit and eliciting valuable intelligence on the "inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group's plans, ideology, and operatives."

This view contradicts the findings of the authoritative 2004 report on detainees and interrogations of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as well as the personal views of the Inspector General (IG) himself.

As the Post acknowledges, John Helgerson, the former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said that the work of the OIG did not permit "definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods." Helgerson acknowledged that waterboarding and sleep deprivation "elicited a lot of information," but the OIG didn't "do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

As a result, Helgerson recommended (but the Post article chose to omit) the creation of an independent panel of experts to "systematically evaluate the quality of the intelligence gained as related to the specific techniques used, or not used, in particular cases. This would clarify the value of the information and the utility of various approaches." This recommendation was one of ten recommendations in the 2004 IG report; unfortunately, the Justice Deparment (presumably due to the importuning of the CIA) chose to redact all ten IG recommendations from the declassified report.

There is ample testimony to challenge the view that torture and abuse worked. There were FBI agents at the site where KSM was held who testified that torture and abuse didn't lead to eliciting valuable intelligence. And a CIA operative has noted that KSM was willing to talk before being tortured, noting that "tea and crumpets" were all that was needed. The former head of U.S. Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, remarked in 2006 that "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that.

I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that." And more recently, several veteran FBI and military interrogators called for an investigation of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT)," because of their concerns about the legality, morality, and effectiveness of EITs.

It is important to remember that the 2004 IG report emphatically stated that the information elicited by torture and abuse "did not uncover any evidence that [any] plots were imminent." Other CIA memoranda stated that information gained from detainees led to "arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress," but did not attribute this information to the use of torture and abuse.

The IG study could not even determine if the 83 waterboardings given to Abu Zubaydah were the reason for his increased willingness to talk. The study noted, moreover, that torture was contrary to the Eighth Amendment against "cruel and unusual punishments;" the 1984 UN Torture Convention, which the United States took the lead in drafting and ratifying; and domestic law.

Finally, it is more important to remember that torture and abuse are evil. Illegal, immoral, counter-productive, but most importantly evil. George Bush told a press conference in 2005 that "this country does not believe in torture,"but the fact is we conducted torture on those who were guilty and those who were innocent.

And Dick Cheney, who has fanatically been waging his own personal jihad in defense of torture and abuse, told Fox News in an interview that will air tomorrow that CIA interrogators were justified in exceeding even the broad authorizations provided by the Justice Department, suggesting that the ends justify the means. Perhaps the Washington Post could give front-page coverage to the 18-page memorandum that the CIA gave to the DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel in 2004, which provides extraordinary details of the interrogations in plain, but sordid and sadistic, language.

Two years ago, then CIA director Michael Hayden released a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detailed domestic spying, assassination plots, and other CIA misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s. In releasing the documents, known as the "family jewels," Hayden told a group of historians who had been pressing for greater disclosure from the Agency, that the documents provided a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency." He also stated that, when the government withholds information, myth and misinformation "fill the vacuum like a gas."

In order to prevent the Washington Post and others from adding to the myths and misinformation of torture and abuse, it is time to appoint a blue ribbon commission to study all aspects of the CIA's detentions and interrogations policies.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record's National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Scope of Human Trafficking Remains Largely Unknown

2009-08-29T03:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2542831,00.html

21.05.2007
Scope of Human Trafficking Remains Largely Unknown

The mammoth proportions of human trafficking make combating it difficult. Representatives of NGOs and OSCE governments continue the fight at a Vienna meeting on Monday.

"We operate in an information fog," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told reporters last month. "We don't know the scope of threats we face and can't gauge global trends. We just see the tips of icebergs."

It's a fog that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is hoping it will be able to at least partially lift with a conference Monday focusing on collection and reporting methods for victims of human trafficking.

"It's very difficult to solve a problem when you don't know how big it is," said Blanca Tapia, a spokeswoman for the OSCE's office to combat trafficking in human beings. "All the countermeasures are going to be wrong if you don't know what you are facing."

Estimates vary

The United Nations estimates that there are as many as 2.5 million victims of trafficking or forced labor; the International Labor Organization placed its worldwide estimate at 12.3 million in 2005; and the International Organization of Migration put the number of victims in 2001 at 400,000.

The breadth of the problem makes it difficult for legislators and law enforcement to deal with it effectively, especially since the authorities who come into contact with forced laborers are not always trained to recognize it or given guidelines on how to handle victims.

"When the police raid a brothel, they check identification cards. But the people have usually had their passports and documentation taken away from them, so the police say they are illegal immigrants who have to leave the country," Tapia said. "Instead of being the victim, they become the bad person who is thrown into jail."

Beyond the sex trade

Western Europeans frequently believe the crime of human trafficking does not affect their countries, Tapia said. Bundling together trafficking victims and illegal immigrants often shields them from the scope of the problem.

"Some European countries cover the problem of human trafficking in illegal immigration," she said. "They say the people entered the country illegally, and too bad if they got the worst jobs and end up in slavery conditions."

While many connect trafficking with forced prostitution, the OSCE and international rights organizations estimate that the sex trade accounts for 50 percent of victims. The remaining 50 percent are forced into working for minimal or no compensation in a variety of fields, including agricultural and construction work, sweatshop labor and as domestic caregivers.

Cutting demand

Instead of focusing their efforts on finding victims, who are often reluctant to speak with police out of fear that they or their families could be endangered if they supply information about their situation, Tapia said the OSCE would focus on limiting demand for slave and enforced laborers.

One move that would help constrain demand would be added inspections of businesses, according to European Union Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini. He called on EU members to increase the number of businesses inspected for employing illegal migrants from 2 percent to 10 percent.

"Very often we note slavery-like working conditions, workers are exploited, they are underpaid and they live in very poor and desperate conditions in EU territory," he said. "We can no longer tolerate this situation."

Lower prices through slave labor

Frattini estimated that as much as 16 percent of business in the EU is done off the books and said EU member states needed to institute hefty fines and jail sentences in serious cases to combat illegal worker exploitation.

With close links to organized crime, the worldwide market for trade in humans is between $30 billion and $40 billion, according to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office of Drug and Crime.

A supply of cheap labor provided by trafficking and forced labor often amounts to lower prices for the consumer and higher profits for companies, Tapia said.

"We would not be getting very cheap strawberries or other foods we are getting right now if the wages for the people who are actually doing the work were higher," she said. "This is a big industry and a lot of money is made."

Sean Sinico

Saved From the Slave Trade in Moldova

2009-08-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3721692,00.html

18.10.2008
Saved From the Slave Trade in Moldova

There were over 2,000 registered victims human trafficking victims last year alone in Moldova. The women are sent abroad to be prostitutes, men are forced into slave-like wage labor and children have to become beggars.
He's heard the remarks that you never know what you're getting into when you go abroad, nods Viorel Gorceag as he loses the calm that he normally emanates. "What do you think?" he asks.

"Do you think any of those that went abroad ever dreamt they'd be assaulted 70 times a day, be sold for a dollar per minute, beaten or forced to take drugs or give birth to a child only so that it could be sold later?"

"I could tell you stories," says Viorel Gorceag. "You would ask how something like that is possible." The young psychologist with large hands and dark eyes runs Moldova's only rehabilitation center for victims of human trafficking. He also took care of Maria. She was brought from Chisinau to Moscow to work on the market as a saleswoman.

But when she arrived in the capital, she was suddenly forced into street prostitution.

Beaten into prostitution

Rescued after three months by pure chance, she can now put her trust in the psychologist from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Her pimps "beat her and locked her in a basement for three days without any food or water." When they let her out, she gave in and worked on the streets. "If I didn't want to go with a john, I would be beaten," the young woman explains.

Maria, whose name has been changed, is one of the more than 2,000 women that Gorceag and the IOM team were able to help between 2001 and 2006. The organization' rehabilitation center has been housed in a new building of a Chisinau clinic for a year and half now. There is a kitchen and dining room on the main floor and the women's and children's room are on the floor above. There are also offices and doctors' rooms, as well as a playroom and a fitness room.

Corrupt government officials involved?

In the beginning, the rehabilitation center was financed solely by the IOM. Since 2007, however, it has also been receiving support from the Moldovan government, which is also operating a reintegration program and diverse prevention measures. Despite these measures, there are accusations, for example, from the American Ministry of Foreign Affairs that corrupt government officials are also entangled in the human trafficking.

Ana Ravenco is the director of "Lad Strada," a help organization that has been operating an emergency hotline for victims of human trafficking since 2001. The organization also offers information that is intended to prevent human trafficking. According to Ravenco, in Moldova the lack of money paved the way for a booming modern slave trade.

Slave traders among acquaintances

"Many women decide to leave the country because of poverty, the lack of perspectives and due to other economic factors like the wide-spread domestic violence," explains Ravenco. "Women receive false job offers, which sadly come most of the time from people within their circle of friends or relatives – from people they trust."

Instead of doing housework for family acquaintances in Italy as promised, the girls – who are mostly between the ages of 19 and 29 – end up in a nightclub in Turkey where they are forced to work in the sex trade. Since they can neither speak the language nor do they know a single person – plus most of the time their passport was taken from them – they are completely helpless.

Gaining perspective against the stigmatization

In order to offer long-term perspective to the victims of human trafficking in search of help and to protect them from a social stigmatization upon their return to Moldova, the rehabilitation center in Chisinau educates the women in the field of business. This starts by helping them with small loans. And it is successful. Only about five percent of the victims make their way back to their torturers, says project leader Victor Lutenco.

"Long-term reintegration programs are indispensable for the rehabilitation of human trafficking victims," he emphasizes. "These programs are conducted where the victims live, because otherwise this group of people would be exposed to a high risk of once again finding themselves in the hands of human traffickers."

Men and children also victims

The IMO and non-government organizations like "La Strada" have to be thanked for the fact that there are any numbers on human trafficking victims at all. As of now, there is no central database for human trafficking in the Republic of Moldova. Experts estimate that there have been several thousand Moldovan victims of human trafficking since the country gained independence from the former Soviet Republic. Women are just a part of the group affected.

Children are employed as beggars, human organs are sold and Moldovan men are forced into modern-day slavery on foreign construction sites, in warehouses and field work. Somewhere in between Western Europe and the Middle East. The men, says Viorel Gorceag, have the most problems admitting their exploitation. The ones who go back are often spoken about as having had no luck. "But we're not talking about luck here – we're talking about human trafficking."

Modern-day slavery rears its ugly head around the globe

2009-08-29T03:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4584481,00.html

22.08.2009
Modern-day slavery rears its ugly head around the globe

It's been over 200 years since the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. UNESCO now commemorates its hard-won struggle, but combatting the modern slavery prevalent in many societies today is equally challenging.
"By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of a tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized, and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember," UNESCO's director-general said during the 2004 launch of the international year to commemorate the struggle to end the slave trade.

Slavery in the world today
It has been over 200 years since the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but, despite that, the practice still continues in various forms all over the world. In 2005, the International Labor Organization estimated that just over 12 million people were working as forced laborers in the world.

Siddarth Kara, in his book "Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery," says that there were just over 28 million slaves worldwide in 2006 divided into three categories: bonded labor/debt bondage, forced labor and trafficking slaves.

According to Kara, the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 were just over $91 billion. That is second only to drug trafficking in terms of global criminal activities.

"Information on slavery is very inexact. But we believe that the majority of slave victims - in the neighbourhood of 80 percent - are the female gender, and that around 50 percent are children. We believe that the largest category of slavery is sex slavery. This is not to minimize other large categories - domestic servitude slavery, forced labour in farms and factory slavery, child soldier slavery," said John Miller, director of the US State Department‘s Office for Monitoring and Combating Trafficking in Persons.

"Human trafficking is synonymous with slavery. Human trafficking relies on coercion and exploitation. It thrives on converting hope to fear. It's maintained through violence. The trade in people is a major source of revenue - in the billions [of dollars per year] - for organized crime, along with the drug trade and the arms trade. Let there be no misunderstanding, modern slavery plagues every country in the world - including the United States," Miller said.

Sex slavery endemic – an economic reality

These days, human trafficking, otherwise known as sex slavery, is the fastest-growing form of organized crime in eastern Europe. Sex trafficking has become a multi-billion dollar underground industry.

Tom Porteous, the director of Human Rights Watch in London, told Deutsche Welle that "the major factor contributing to sex slavery is supply and demand. There is a huge demand for prostitution and an equally huge supply of participants because of the economic situation in the world."

An estimated half a million women are trafficked annually for the purpose of sex slavery. They are exported to over 50 countries including Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, Canada and the United States. Sex slaves are smuggled taking a route known as the "Eastern route" from eastern European countries, through Poland and subsequently into European Union countries. The cities of Prague, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt are common final destinations for the slaves.

"The susceptibility of victims despite the publicity focused on the issue is a question of economic reality and economic desperation. The countries which provide the bulk of the victims in sex slavery are poor; the victims are predominantly of the poorest countries," said Porteous.

"Enforcement of the law needs to be strengthened, along with the formation of international treaties that could properly deal with sex slavery. More information on the reality of the situation needs to be disseminated directly to the communities that provide the bulk of the supply in sex slavery i.e. the economically challenged," he added.

Germany’s fight against sex slavery

Germany is known as a “receiving country” in the sex slavery industry; a destination and transit country for the trade, with scores of victims coming in from eastern Europe and also Asia and Africa.
Berlin has in turn proven itself a leader in many aspects of the fight against modern slavery.

A spokesman for Germany's criminal police office told Deutsche Welle that, "since the strong rise in trafficking of sex slavery victims into Germany in 2007, the problem has steadied in the subsequent years. Sex slavery is still a problem and prosecution of those involved relies largely on identification by the victims. The victims of sex slavery these days are members of EU countries and are thus legally permitted to stay in Germany if they so wish. Prosecution and curbing of this crime requires victims coming forward and identifying the criminals involved, achieving this would require efforts of both governmental and non-governmental organizations."

The basis of sex slavery, experts say, is economic. The industry renders billions of dollars in revenue for its perpetrators and the reality of the victims, who are predominantly from economically-challenged countries accounts for their susceptibility to the trade.

"There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that the economic crisis in the world has made the sex slavery problem even worse," said Tom Porteous.

Author: Faith Thomas
Editor: Rob Mudge

China admits to organ harvesting

2009-08-27T10:13:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm

Published on 08-26-2009

Source: BBC

China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants.

According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.

The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.

But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.

Thriving black market

About 1.5 million people in China need transplants, but only about 10,000 operations are performed annually, according to the health ministry.

The scarcity of available organs has led to a thriving black market in trafficked organs, and in an effort to stop this the government passed a law in 2007 banning trafficking as well as the donation of organs to unrelated recipients.

But in practice, illegal transplants - some from living donors - are still frequently reported by the media and the Ministry of Health.

Human rights groups have often criticised China for its lack of transparency over organ donation, but critics have focused particular concern on the use of body parts from executed prisoners.

In a rare admission of the extent to which this takes place, China Daily - citing unnamed experts - said on Wednesday that more than 65% of organ donations come from death row prisoners.

China executes more people than any other country. Amnesty International said at least 1,718 people were given the death penalty in 2008.

The China Daily quoted Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu as saying that condemned prisoners were "definitely not a proper source for organ transplants".

The new scheme is therefore designed to reduce the reliance on death row inmates, as well as regulating the industry by combating the illegal trafficking of organs.

The system will be piloted in 10 provinces and cities, and a fund will be started to provide financial aid to donors' families.

"Our sons plundered for their organs"

2009-08-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

This is psychopathic, monster capitalism at its ugliest where everything and everyone is for sale! What part of *Demonic Evil* don't you understand?

http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en

Donald Bostrom
TLAXCALA.es
17 Aug 2009

You could call me a "matchmaker," said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum's matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for $10,000, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for $160,000. The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: "Quite a lot. And I have never failed," he boasts. The business has been running for quite some time. Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, tells the same newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel, is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5 - 6,000 operations a year, about ten per cent of the world's kidney transplants are carried out illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions against Israel for seizing young men and having them serve as the country's organ reserve - a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that "the rest of the European countries are expected to follow France's example shortly."

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the 2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is the only western country with a medical profession that doesn't condemn the illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors participating in the illegal business - on the contrary, chief medical officers of Israel's big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register for post mortem organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in line for a kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza - meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still, waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone - not even a cat could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don't remember if our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village's carpentry workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught meant torture and death for these boys - they had to stay in the mountains at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked unprotected past the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother, knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. "Captain Yahya is the worst of them all," the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: "Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors," relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

"Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they performing an autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious? Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort? Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity interrupted?" Nafe's uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street, explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were between four months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians - of which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It's time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.

U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight

2009-08-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

Does this mean 'Torture Light' or torture with more psychopaths supervising? TORTURE IS TORTURE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25rendition.html?_r=5

August 25, 2009
U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.

Human rights advocates condemned the decision, saying that continuing the practice, known as rendition, would still allow the transfer of prisoners to countries with a history of torture. They said that promises from other countries of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.

“It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.

Ms. Singh cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cable despite assurances against torture.

The announcement, by President Obama’s Interrogation and Transfer Policy Task Force, seemed intended in part to offset the impact of the release on Monday of a long-withheld report by the C.I.A. inspector general, written in 2004, that offered new details about the brutal tactics used by the C.I.A. in interrogating terrorism detainees.

Though the Obama administration previously signaled that it would continue the use of renditions, some civil liberties groups were disappointed because, as a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama had strongly suggested he might end the practice. In an article in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 2007, Mr. Obama wrote, “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people.”

Mr. Obama continued, “This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.” In January, the president ordered secret prisons run by the C.I.A. to be shut down.

The task force has proposed a more vigorous monitoring of the treatment of prisoners sent to other countries, but Ms. Singh said the usual method of such monitoring — visits from American or allied consular officials — had been ineffective. A Canadian consular official visited Mr. Arar several times, but the prisoner was too frightened to tell him about the torture, a Canadian investigation found.

The administration officials, who discussed the changes on condition that they not be identified, said that unlike the Bush administration, they would operate more openly and give the State Department a larger role in assuring that transferred detainees would not be abused.

“The emphasis will be on ensuring that individuals will not face torture if they are sent overseas,” said one administration official, adding that no detainees would be sent to countries known to conduct abusive interrogations.

Rendition began to be used regularly under President Bill Clinton and its use expanded rapidly under President Bush after the terrorist attacks in September 2001. American intelligence agencies often appeared to send detainees to other countries to avoid the legal complications of bringing them to the United States.

Some human rights advocates said they thought the Obama administration was maintaining the rendition program out of fear that its elimination would force the government to accept additional detainees on American soil and threaten Mr. Obama’s pledge to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by January.

The task force that recommended the modified transfer policy was set up in January to study changes in rendition and interrogation policies under an executive order signed by President Obama.

Another recommendation approved by Mr. Obama was a proposal to establish a multiagency interrogation unit within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to oversee the interrogations of top terrorism suspects using largely noncoercive techniques approved by the administration earlier this year.

The creation of the new unit will formally strip the C.I.A. of its primary role in questioning high-level detainees, but agency officials said they would continue to play a substantial role.

“The C.I.A. took active part in the work of the task force, and the agency’s strong counterterrorism knowledge will be key to the conduct of future debriefings,” said Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman. “That won’t change.”

The new unit, to be called the High Value Interrogation Group, will be made up of analysts, linguists and other personnel from the C.I.A. and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It will operate under policies set by the National Security Council.

The officials said all interrogations would comply with guidelines contained in the Army Field Manual, which outlaws the use of physical force. The group will study interrogation methods, however, and may add additional noncoercive methods in the future, the officials said.

Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch said the new interrogation policy represented a significant step toward more humane treatment, though he expressed dismay that administration officials failed to impose stricter limits on rendition.

But he praised the Obama administration’s overall approach to difficult counterterrorism issues, saying the government had adopted “some of the most transparent rules against abuse of any democratic country.”

There Are More Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History

2009-08-26T03:38:00.000-07:00

Slavery is a monster system emulating the monster demigods of evil as these demigods want us all to be their unthinking slaves and thus lose our Souls. The humans who participate in this monstrous system are monsters and they're evil. People were meant to be *Free* to live and Create our Lives so we can *Shine*. Slavery suffocates these ideas and petrifies the Soul. Slavery is wrong, wrong, wrong.

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
August 26, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142171/

The world suffers global recession, enormous inequity, hunger, deforestation, pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc. To those who say we’re not really making progress, many might point to the fact that at least we’ve eliminated slavery.

But sadly that is not the truth.

One hundred forty-three years after passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and 60 years after Article 4 of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery and the slave trade worldwide, there are more slaves than at any time in human history -- 27 million.

Today’s slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning people like before, but about using them as completely disposable tools for making money.

During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery, he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident.

But Skinner is most haunted by his experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

Currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and previously a special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Skinner has written for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy and others. He was named one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year 2008. His first book, now in paperback, is A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery.

Terrence McNally: What first got you interested in slavery?

Benjamin Skinner: The fuel began before I was born. The abolitionism in my blood began at least as early as the 18th century, when my Quaker ancestors stood on soapboxes in Connecticut and railed against slavery. I had other relatives that weren’t Quaker, but had the same beliefs. My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery, believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed.

Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers, after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history.

TM: Is that raw numbers or as a percentage of the population?

BS: I want to be very clear what I mean when I say the word slavery. If you look it up in Webster's dictionary, the first definition is "drudgery or toil." It's become a metaphor for undue hardship, because we assume that once you legally abolish something, it no longer exists. But as a matter of reality for up to 27 million people in the world, slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. It's a very spare definition.

TM: Whose definition is that?

BS: Kevin Bales's. [His Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, and he is the president of Free the Slaves ] I'm glad you asked because he's not given enough credit. He originally came up with the number 27 million, and it's subsequently been buttressed by international labor organization studies. Governments will acknowledge estimates of some 12.3 million slaves in the world, but NGOs in those same countries say the numbers are more than twice as high.

Kevin did a lot of the academic work that underpinned my work. I wanted to go out and get beyond the numbers, to show what one person's slavery meant. In the process of doing that, I met hundreds of slaves and survivors.

TM: As an investigative reporter rather than an academic, you take us where the trades are made, the suffering takes place and the survivors eke out their existences.

BS: In an underground brothel in Bucharest, I was offered a young woman with the visible effect of Down syndrome. One of her arms was covered in slashes, where I can only assume she was trying to escape daily rape the only way she knew how. That young woman was offered to me in trade for a used car.

TM: This was a Romanian used car?

BS: Yes, and I knew that I could get that car for about 1,500 euros. While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport -- I was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think the asking price was?

TM: I don't know ... $7,500?

BS: They asked for $100, and I talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000.

TM: When I first read such big numbers, I was shocked.

BS: This is not to diminish the horrors that those workers would face, nor to diminish their dehumanization one bit. It was an abomination then as it is today. But in the mid-19th century, masters viewed their slaves as an investment.

But here's the thing: When a slave costs $50 on the street in broad daylight in Port au Prince -- by the way, this was in a decent neighborhood, everybody knew where these men were and what they did -- such people are, to go back to Kevin's term, eminently disposable in the eyes of their masters.

TM: If my reading is correct, the biggest concentrations of the slave trade are in Southeast Asia and portions of Latin America?

BS: If you were to plot slaves on the map, you'd stick the biggest number of pins in India, followed by Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan. There are arguably more slaves In India than the rest of the world combined.

And yet, if you look at international efforts or American pressure, India is largely let off the hook because Indian federal officials claim, "We have no slaves. These are just poor people. And these exploitive labor practices," -- if you're lucky enough to get that term out of them -- "are a byproduct of poverty."

Let me be clear, the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. Slavery in India is primarily generational debt bondage, people whose grandparents took a debt.

TM: To go back to the definition: Forced to work against their will with no escape.

BS: Held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. These are people that cannot walk away.

I stumbled upon a fellow in a quarry in Northern India who'd been enslaved his entire life. He had assumed that slavery at birth. His grandfather had taken a debt of 62 cents, and three generations and three slave masters later, the principal had not been paid off one bit. The family was illiterate and innumerate. This fellow, who I call Gonoo -- he asked me to protect his identity -- was still forced to work, held through fraud under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

Since he was a child, he and his family and his children, along with the rest of the enslaved villagers, took huge rocks out of the earth. They pummeled those rocks into gravel for the subgrade of India's infrastructure, which is the gleaming pride of the Indian elites.

They further pulverized that gravel into silica sand for glass. There's only one way that you turn a profit off handmade sand, and that's through slavery.

TM: Another method you describe: Someone shows up in a poverty-stricken village saying they need workers for the mines hundreds of miles away.

BS: It's a massive problem in the north of Brazil. What's tricky about this, in many cases these workers want to work. But they don't want to be forced to work under threat of violence, beaten regularly, having the women in their lives raped as a means of humiliating them, and then not being paid anything.

TM: They are transported to the mines, and when they arrive, they have a debt for that transportation, which is greater than anything they will ever be able to repay.

BS: And if they try to leave, there are men with guns. That's slavery. In the Western Hemisphere, child slavery, as we spoke of before, is most rampant in Haiti. According to UNICEF, there are 300,000 child slaves in Haiti.

TM: Does that mean in Haiti or originating in Haiti?

BS: That means within Haitian borders.

TM: So with all the poverty in Haiti, there are still people who can afford 300,000 slaves?

BS: Well if they're paying $50 ...

I went back last summer with Dan Harris of ABC Nightline. He was pretty incredulous of my claim. In fact, it ended up taking him 10 hours from ABC's offices in Manhattan, but by the end of those 10 hours, he'd negotiated with not one, but three traffickers who'd offered him three separate girls.

As he put it, the remarkable thing is not that you can get a child for $50, but that you can get a child for free. When you go up into these villages, you see such desperation on the parts of the parents.

I want to make clear, I never paid for human life; I never would pay for human life. I talked to too many individuals who run trafficking shelters and help slaves become survivors. They implored me, "Do not pay for human life. You will be giving rise to a trade in human misery, and as a journalist, you'll be projecting to the world that this is the way that you own the problem." If you were to buy all 300,000 child slaves in Haiti, next year, you'd have 600,000.

TM: If you were to buy the 300,000 slaves in Haiti in one fell swoop, you would be telling traders, "Hey, business is good," and so they'd grab more slaves.

BS: You're talking about introducing hard currency into a transaction that in many cases hasn't involved hard currency in the past. You're massively incentivizing a trade in human lives.

TM: These are those who practice what they call redemptions, buying slaves their freedom. Who's doing it, and what's your analysis of it?

BS: On the basis of three months spent in southern and northern Sudan, two months in southern Sudan in particular. ... There was one particular evangelical group based in Switzerland, organized and run by an American who raised cash around the States. They'd go to a Sunday School or a second-grade class in Colorado, talk about slavery, and say, "Bring us your lunch money. If you can get us $50, we will buy a slave's freedom."

It was a very effective sales pitch. They managed to raise over $3 million dollars by my calculations over the course of the 1990s.

In theory, they were giving money to "retrievers" who would go into northern Sudan, and through whatever means necessary, secure the slaves' freedom and bring them back down into the south.

In the context of the Sudanese civil war, slavery is used as a weapon of war by the north. Northern militias raid southern villages, and in many cases, kill the men and take the women and children as slaves and as a weapon of genocide. That much is not questioned. There is no question that these slave raids were going on.

I found that redemption on the ground was enormously problematic. There was scant oversight. They were literally giving duffel bags full of cash to factions within the rebels that were at that point resisting an ongoing peace process.

What they risked doing, whether through recklessness or through intent, was to become essentially angels of destruction at a time when a negotiated peace was just beginning to take hold. Thankfully, at this point they've scaled back the redemptions.

TM: So they were collecting money in the States to free slaves, and then funding a rebel movement in a war, and ...

BS: Potentially prolonging the war.

Thankfully, in the end, the death of rebel leader John Gurang meant that a different faction came to be more powerful. From my perspective, however, what was going on there was largely fraudulent.

I went back and asked the rebel officials, "What do you do with this money?" and they said, "We use it for the benefit of the people." Which begs the question, "But I thought this was being used to buy back slaves. I don't get it."

And they said, "Well you know, there's clothes, uniforms ..." They didn't actually say arms, but they said all sorts of things that they needed hard currency for, and this was their way of getting the cash.

I don't blame the rebels. If I were in a similar situation, I'd probably do the same thing. The most important point is this: By the merest estimates there are still some 12,000 slaves held in brutal bondage in the north of Sudan, and the government has not arrested or prosecuted one slave raider, one slave trader, one slave master. And as long as that continues to be the situation, the government of Sudan is in gross violation of international law.

TM: How does the distinction between sexual slavery and other sorts of labor show up, and how does it matter?

BS: When we're defining slavery, fundamentally at its core it's the same in each and every circumstance. We're talking about people forced to work held through fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. If we're talking about forced commercial sexual slavery, forced prostitution, there's an added element of humiliation or shame, because we're talking about rape.

In many parts of the world and in many traditional societies, if a woman is raped it's her fault. If a woman is liberated and tries to go back to the village she comes from, she will never again lead a normal life.

I think it's safe to say even in the United States, which we assume is a much more welcoming, tolerant society, women who've been in prostitution, regardless if it's forced or not, have a difficult time leading a normal life afterward.

There is a school of thought that sexual slavery is somehow worse than other forms of slavery. I actually don't buy that. I think that all slavery is monstrous, and no one slave's emancipation should wait for that of another. At the same time, if some people are moved to fight sexual slavery and sexual trafficking at the exclusion of other forms of slavery, God bless them, as long as they're fighting slavery at the end of the day.

TM: Briefly, what is the situation in America?

BS: On average, in the past half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the United States into slavery. About 14,000-17,000 are trafficked into the U.S. each year and forced to work within U.S. borders under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence.

TM: What can people do?

BS: On a personal basis, they can support CAST (Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking) in Los Angeles. CAST has the oldest shelter in the country for trafficked women and has terrific programs that help victims of all forms of trafficking. It's a solid, mature organization.

They can also get involved with Free the Slaves. And they can talk about the issue more. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.

A quarter of Skinner's publishing royalties go to Free the Slaves.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit terrencemcnally.net for podcasts of all interviews, and more.

Face To Face With Dog Bricks

2009-08-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

http://thinkorbeeaten.blogspot.com/

THURSDAY, AUGUST 06, 2009

Face To Face With Dog Bricks

Perhaps I'd had one too many. Yet I was unaware of any untoward effects upon my speech or bearing. There was not to lead me to seriously consider the possibility. I did try a little, but it was difficult to tell. Besides, I was taken up most joyously with the ancient but familiar old refrain spilling forth from the color changing, five foot tall music box on the floor; K C and the Sunshine Band seemed almost to be there in person, and once again, like they used to do so long ago, were urging me on to come out and shake my booty. I only smiled and declined. I do not like to dance alone particularly, though I will do it if I really have to.

That would not happen on this night. Something much stranger was on the barkeep's menu. Something most unusual, quite bizarre and practically speaking, rather impossible was already taking form.

I was standing at the edge of the parquet dance floor, gently swaying to the melody. "She's a BRICK!, house." There was nobody in the whole place but myself. Excepting two other persons, an elderly man, seated two yards from my person with a younger man attending him at his side. They both wore suits, and expensive ones. They seemed an odd couple, and a bit jumpy. I paid them no mind, nor did I give them hail. I simply stood and gently tapped my little pump clad foot in a most ladylike fashion along with the music and memories they stirred. "Play that funky music white boy, lay down and boogie and play that funky music till you die."

In the midst of my tiny sing-along I felt suddenly compelled to gaze straight upon the two men seated nearby. A misty halo of white smoke was lazily curling around the old man's head, 'though no one in the place was smoking, and upon each end, on either side of his balding crown, arose a point, much like a little pair of horns. Upon perceiving his smoky "horns" I could not help but let out a little giggle.

The old man's head quickly snapped around, his face intensely searching the only three potential gigglers in the place, and it obviously wasn't the bus boy or the Latvian bartender, Boris, who weighed 250 pounds and had a voice as deep and gravelly as his frosted chest length beard. That pretty much left me.

The old man's eyes fixed on me and squinted hard. Without taking his steel cold gaze off me he spoke something to his aide, who quickly nodded, arose and approached me.

"My lord would ask of you to come and join us briefly for a cup of ale. He is lonesome for his home and you remind him much of his eldest daughter. Would you do this for an old and sickly man, nearing the end of his days and rightly missing the home fires on this full moon eve?"

"I was just about to leave," I lied in reply.

"Oh do delay, won't you? It would make him much less grim this evening. And forgive me for saying so this directly, but my lord is a man of very great means and tremendous fame. He gives not such invitations lightly. Very rarely indeed. Such has only happened twice before in the length of my service to him this many long twenty and two years. It would be understandable to feel complimented".

"I see", said I. "And whom pray tell is your lord. I recognize him not."

It was at this moment that the young man leant over to my ear and whispered into it a name so frightening, so very rich indeed, so revealing and shocking and unexpected that I nearly fell off my heels. The young man instantly reached out to steady my stance, which I quickly rebuffed. He then glanced at his master who was summoning him with a single crooked finger in the air.

"Think on it won't you?" he said, then quickly stepped he back to the master's table. As soon as he arrived there the old man arose smartly and began to walk out the tavern door, out into the lushly appointed lobby of the Grande Marquise Hotel.

As I am generally up for an adventure, especially on a full lit moon eve, I decided there was little to lose in taking him up on his offer. He was after all so rich and so famous and so completely, horribly, murderously, criminally dreadful that I hated him deeply. I thought I might have the unique opportunity to tell him so directly to his face. How could I pass this up?

Keeping several paces behind them, I followed the men to the gilded elevator and we all rode up to the top most suite together. Never had I seen such luxury and wealth. Everything was covered in silver and gold and shining beveled glass. The finest furniture appointed the parlour, and though I did not see the other rooms I am certain there were several more. I was thus forth queried as to my choice of beverage and graciously offered a seat in a rather resplendent white leather chair, which I don't mind saying suited me rather well. The old man sat in the matching chair to my own, mere inches away from me, only a small table between us, and we began to talk.

At first the talk was light and pleasant, but it did not take long before the tone took on a much more serious tenor. Shortly we bit upon a hard bone of contention, he and I, but to his credit he did not act rudely. Indeed, as the fine ale purified and enriched my courage I was soon doing precisely as I had come to do. The old man sat and listened. He did not interrupt. What follows is what I said to him, as closely as I can remember, once I had hit my stride. I did ride my anger and disgust for this man like a bold white stallion. I was fearless.

"How many long and odious days have I sat and watched you enrobed in your never-ending lies? How many long and hot and sleepless nights have I tossed and turned in the unquietable memories of your words and acts of brutal deceitful betrayals? Certainly I have lost count. That is to say, I have never kept count.

I'd much rather have been able to put it all aside and out of my mind, out of my consciousness, far from my awareness. In a way the answer to how many days and how many nights is "one". One endless, seamless, repeating nightmare; from the very first time I clearly heard you speak one of your typical vile deceits to the trusting, caring, loving faces of those who invested their precious trust in you, it never stopped. Not a moment, not a single minute has gone by since that day, wherein I thought you were being genuine, being human, telling the truth, being real. It has never happened in the entirety of your life.

You are like a garishly painted circus clown, performing in the giant tent; absolutely desperate to be believed. I have wondered often if you truly believe your own broken down lies or if in fact you know perfectly well what a dishonest chunk of dog excrement you are. Again and again I find myself aligned, comfortably, with the belief that it is the latter; for certainly any brick of dog droppings has no illusions about what it is. It is what it is made of, and you are made of lies. You have at least the intelligence of a dog brick, I would expect then that you do know exactly who and what you are.

I pity you. I try to feel sorry for you but in all openness, that is still too difficult for me to muster. I don't feel much in the way of compassion or concern for your well being. Please, don't think so ill of me for this; after all, for as much harm as you have done, as you continue to do every day of your life, you don't deserve a hug and a teddy bear and a warm glass of milk with two cookies and a bedtime story. You deserve the electric chair, the hangman's noose, to be burnt at the stake,
to have your skin pulled off by vultures whilst you are yet still alive and fully conscious. As terrible, as awful, as cruel sounding as my sentiments toward you may be I assure you, they pale in comparison to the realities you have perpetrated on countless innocent others, and always, without exception, you have done so for no reason other than you enjoy it.

Yes it's true, I haven't spent this eternal night suffering the flutters in my chest and stomach, holding back the bile wanting to squirt up from my guts, keeping down the last meal I dryly chewed without a trace of enjoyment for the magnitude of the stain that you are upon this earth; I have not gone through all of that without finally figuring you out.

You are one sorry mess of a person. I will refrain from pronouncing you human for truly, I am far from convinced that you are human. It is much more true to my heart to think of you as some form of alien species for there is little in the way of any trace of humanity that you have ever shown. Quite the contrary. You are quite skilled at mocking the genuine, that is true, but once I saw through you I now also instantly see straight through your pale pretending jest.

But I do not need to wildly speculate and accuse you of actually being a reptilian creature with a forked snake's tongue and a scaly skin, cold blooded, unfeeling, concerned only with self and appetite, it is not necessary to paint any such literal pictures. The measurable, evidentiary facts of your being speak plainly for themselves. Whether or not you are a lizardine species from some nether place above our atmosphere or from below it is mere evidence in excess of all that is there in such great quantity that shows beyond any shadow of any doubt that you are indeed, at least inside yourself, a cold blooded insect intellect, heartless, compassionless, an anti-human being, someone who for so many reasons hates humanity and wants nothing more than to hurt it, as much as he possibly can.

Whatever happened to you when you were just a babe that caused you to become such a vicious, hollowed out shell of a person? What manner of humiliation, or fear, or suffering, what method of deprivation was inflicted upon you at such a helpless age, that made you feel so much rage and hatred for everything that moves upon the face of this earth?

It could not have been too many people who might have been responsible for creating the monster that you are. After all, how many infants have overflowing address books and appointments to keep? The only appointments to keep at such a tender age are going to the bathroom in your own trousers and demanding your next meal and nap. Although there was something else you demanded, something perfectly reasonable, something you deeply suspected was yours to expect. But it was not forthcoming. Was it. No, it was not. And on a very rare and few occasions when those closest to you seemed to have suddenly realized that you had been deprived of your due, that you had not received your fair share of limitless love and kindness and joy and acceptance and respect and appreciation, they thought, "It is time to give it to you".

Your heart leapt with joy and anticipation. At last, they will love you. They will say that they love you but more, they will act as though they love you. They will look at you with large warm eyes which will melt as they gaze upon your innocent baby soft countenance. They will call you some sickly sweet adorable name and wrap their arms around you, so tenderly, so truly, and they will pull you to their breast and stroke your hair, and feel the rhythm of your breathing, up and down upon the softness of that bosom, and you will fall asleep in the loving, caring arms of someone who thinks you are the most wonderful, beautiful creature in all the world.

And they came toward you, arms extended and opened wide, and they smiled greatly, their eyes soft and glistening; "Come unto me boy" they said, and you ran to their arms. But just as you reached them they pulled away and spun 'round, leaving you running right past them and hurting yourself when you fell and hit your head on a table's corner, and then they laughed. They laughed at you good and long and hard as you bled. They howled and slapped their knees. Their laughter was not contained, the more they thought about your desperate hunger and need the more it amused them, the more they shouted out. They called everyone in the household, and then everyone in the yard, and told them all this funniest of stories and you were horrified. You were outraged. You were devastated, wounded, confused, betrayed, hurt, aching, you felt as if a knife had pierced your throat.

Everyone stood and laughed at you, at your foolishness, at your weak need for stupid love and tenderness. What an unfit, addlepated fool you were. You would grow up to be nothing and no one for you hadn't the right juice flowing in your veins. You needed ice and acid and you only had blood. You were the same as nothing. The same as all the rest of the fools, sheep and losers, those stupid bleating bleeding beating hearts out there. Inconsequential idiots with their wholly predictable insipid dreams, too soft to take the world by the jugular and choke it into submission, or to death.

It wasn't just that one time they humiliated you, and it wasn't just humiliation. They ignored you. They were never there. Not with you, not for you. There may as well not even have been a you for all they were interested. You had nothing to offer, you had only weakness and squalling and skin crawling need and they had infinitely better things to do with their perfect and special minds. They always had important work to do, or golf games to play, or time at the club, or with the boys, or the ladies, or the group or the dogs or the horses, or anything and anyone but you. You never even made it to their list. If you'd have been the last thing on it it would have been a huge step up. Indeed, you never even made their list.

There was no one to tell you that you were worthy, or wanted, or loved, or adored, or perfect or beautiful. They only showed up on rare occasions, unexpectedly and without warning or reason, to crush you, berate you, insult you, tell you how much you failed to meet their expectations. They regaled you with examples of your bottomless weakness and pointlessness, your questionable intellect, and the dubious nature of your future. You were a terrible disappointment to these people, not a joy, but an oozing scab on an embarrassing place visible to the public. How dare you?

I have not as hard a heart as yours so even as I speak these words I feel some rustling and movement inside my soul that tempts me to feel sorry for you. But I cannot. You do not deserve the slightest sorrow from me. Because you, like all of us, grew up and when that happened your life, your mind, your being, your soul, your beliefs, your actions, everything about you became your choice and your responsibility. And your choice was to become a liar and a thief, a murderer, thug and rapist, to eat the flesh of other people's infants, to steal the last few pennies from the old and sick and dying. Your choice was to make sure, absolutely certain, that no one, at no time, would ever be allowed to experience a moment of joy or pleasure or love or truth or sweetness; not if you couldn't have those things. If you had to pay the price you suffered then so shall everyone else.

You set your entire being, your mind, your body, your brain, to revenge long ago. You have spent every moment of your life seeking to repay, in pain, the pain that encompassed you and defined your miserable life. All the trappings and trimmings of wealth and prestige did give some physical comfort, some modicum of self-superiority and smugness, something to flaunt and waste in careless excess especially around those who never had enough. This pleased you somewhat, but not nearly enough. Not enough to fill the cavernous hole inside your chest where normal people's hearts reside.

Oh you protest, "I have a heart!", but you do not. That too is a lie. Your heart is an illusion, a mere hollowed out shell, like a crisp dried up leaf, curled in just such a way that it faintly resembles the shape of a heart. But if anyone came near it, if it were ever touched, even accidentally, that brittle empty shell would instantly turn to dust and fall to the ground. Much like the twin towers turned to dust on that terrible day but when it happened to them it was shocking and unexpected because unlike you they were solid and substantial. You are neither.

And I am sorry, but perhaps those who did you so much cruel harm were at least somewhat partially right. You may very well lack the ordinary brightness of the simplest soul because you stupidly take out your revenge on countless innocent others, those who have had not a whit, not an atom to do with the state of your life and mind and being, and they you punish relentlessly, demonically, and you enjoy it beyond the ability of words to describe. This is not vengeance you silly fool, this is your pathological, terminal immaturity at it's ugly best. For the only way you can ever reap revenge on those who hurt you so is to take it out on them. That is the only road to payback and the ghost of satisfaction you spend your every waking moment chasing with a net-less butterfly net. You'll never get there from here. You're not even pointing in the right direction. Clearly, if you had two functional brain cells to rub together this would be self evident. But it has escaped you entirely. Tsk, tsk.

Sorry for you, to add even more insult to more injury, those who deserve your wrath, those who have earned your hate and rage and overwhelming need to destroy all joy in this world, they are out of the limits for you, are they not? Is it not true that you fear them, that your body trembles at the sight of them, that the very idea of displeasing them in any way makes your stomach sour and curl up into itself? Yes it is true. It is unthinkable for you to approach them, to step directly in their path and put your face firm against theirs and tell them how you feel and what vengeance you will have. You could never do that. Admit why. Go on, I dare you.

Coward, you cannot. Then I will say it for you. Because you still, to this very day, decades after they murdered your spirit, even after the cruelty and the pain and the torture and the meanness and the abandonment, the disrespect, the mocking, the humiliation, the sickness of their own souls which they took out on you so effortlessly, even in spite of all of this, they have told you that they loved you even as they pulled your body apart and plunged daggers into your heart. Even as they backhanded you with the strength of lumberjacks, even as they humiliated you in front of servants and friends and betters, even as they laughed at you, taunted you, tortured you, rejected you with stinging insults, you still found yourself begging inside to feel their love for you. To really feel it. To really, for once, know what it feels like, to know that it is real, it is genuine, untouchable, unstoppable, unquenchable. You still want that so bad you can't bear to think about it. It makes you insane with anger and resentment and lunatic rage. You want to slash the face of the whole wide world, slice its guts out with the edge of your expensive knife, to spill it's innocent, beloved, respected, nurtured, appreciated blood, to waste it on the dirt of the earth, to spill it for no reason other than to watch the life drain away once and forever more. That, you believe, would feel good.

It will not assuage your tortured soul. It will not heal the festering wound of emptiness inside you. It will not provide a compass that will lead you to your salvation and reward. It will do nothing but leave more blood on your hands and even less chance that you will ever know how it feels to be cared for. You work against yourself every moment of your life, but will you listen to me? Ha. Of course not. You would rather die than listen to anyone. You are truly stupid. At least as stupid as you are despicable. I've had nicer scabs than you.

Do you know that you are like a hunchback amongst men? Truly, hear me out. Your hump is large and disfigured, perched there at the top and back of your bristle covered neck, swaying back and forth, to and fro, like an enormous glob of camel fat and semi hardened snot. A disgusting thing it is too. It cannot so much be seen as sensed, as determined to be there by default. All the required elements are there, therefore the hump is a given. But this is not just a simple hump of a simple hunchback, who through no fault of his own, some sad accident of birth, must go through his entire life with this extraordinary burden upon his neck and back which enslaves him forever and keeps him down underneath the saucy brows and fearfully unkind attitudes that shriekingly demand he act enslaved enough to allow others around him the comfort and security of feeling in control of him, and that hideous hump.

No, your hump is different than his, it is much more disgusting. And unlike his, if yours should touch another they would become poisoned and sick with the venom and pus that oozes constantly out of yours. That toxic, sticky fluid is your specialty, the product of your truest soul, and it bubbles up in endless supply in the sheer hope of infecting someone else every day of your life. Even though your hideous hump is not visible to the naked eye, you none the less have less than optimal luck in getting anyone to come near enough to you to be infected by a dollop of that dorsal putrefaction product of yours. Because its invisibility is made up for by its smell.

Oh Lord, the stench is overpowering. It is worse than decomposition, worse than a thousand toads vomit, worse than a million donkeys sweat and foul breath and infected oozing oral sores. It cannot be described, the stench is so foul that all those whose unfortunate nostrils are assaulted with the merest trace of that olfactory blackness feel their nostrils, of their own will, curl under and tighten with extreme prejudice as though their very lives depended upon avoiding that dreadful noxious odor. Unlike the ordinary skunk whose ripely unpleasant odor is merely a vehicle of self defense, yours is a warning to the soul of mankind. Let all those who aspire to heaven, who believe in God almighty, who defend love and honor and beauty and truth, loyalty and honesty and selflessness and sharing, be warned and run away as fast as you can lest you get some of this vile stuff on you and be made sick as a dying dog because of it. They instinctually know that they run the very real risk of catching the same infection of the soul and the mind and humanity that has so ravaged your being to the point of turning you into a gutless, cowardly, diaper-clad, obnoxious, cruel minded monster.

Ah, I see the curl of your upper lip. You hide a smile. You find this all quite amusing. You enjoy knowing how much you repulse me, how much I hate you, how much I wish you would die tomorrow. Why wait? Die today, won't you? At long last humanity would have reason to be grateful to you, for something. At long last you will have given a bona fide gift to this world, a gift that would keep on giving. Your absence from this earth plane is that gift. I ask you, do you truly wish to be here? Why would you? You despise every morsel of this place. Every blade of green grass offends you. Every new born lamb boils your blood with its innocence and sweetness, with its deservingness to live. Unlike yourself.

Tell me, what have you ever done to deserve all that you have been given? And it has been given to you, let us not play games. You've earned not a single thing, not a single penny of your immense, bulging, unnatural, unnecessary physical wealth. You're frankly too ugly to have so much for yourself, that alone disqualifies you. Yes you find that funny, but do you know why? I know why and will tell you why. You find it funny because it is so true. You know you are a piece of shit, but in your abstruse Picasso-like twisted essence, you are proud of being Feces Man.

That's another thing I've figured out about you by the way. While I'm here I may as well lay it all out and tell you all I know. At least all I care to tell. This much I also know, that you are obsessed with shit. I see it in your face, I have it right. You are endlessly drawn to shit, to human excrement. It excites you. You dream of it, you think of it, you want to touch it and smear it and smell it and eat it. You want to express your twisted sexuality in the anus of another, yes, that is your type. It is nothing new. You prefer young boys to women, that is also nothing new. You spend half the day away day dreaming the penetration of some young boy's greased and waiting anal orifice which you will jam and bang with rage and hatred and sick bottomless desire, pardon the unintended pun. You are hung up, completely and totally on butts and what comes out of them. It used to bother you but it doesn't anymore. It's been too many years and too much debauchery, too many rapes of innocent children, too much self satisfaction at the ruining, the torture, the defiling of an innocent. You are truly the lesser of an infected rat's droppings. They are your king. Trust me. You are despicable and should die. Soon.
As soon as possible.

Is there something I can offer to hasten that day? Any promise I can make? Any gift that I can construct with my own two hands, any words that I can say that would inspire you to go jump off the tallest building at your earliest convenience? To dive head first off the nearest tall cliff with shards of sharpest rocks strewn beneath you to soften your steadfast fall? Do you not wish to go down in history as the man who gave the most to the world in this day and age of history? Would that not go down better than being correctly exposed for the lying, cheating, betraying, twisted sack of dog bricks that you are? Your money will no longer shield you when you are dead. When you are dead your control is all over and people will say of you whatever they will. They will not hesitate to bring out their photos and written records and give oral testimony as to your depravity, the stench of your soul, the size and nastiness of your hump.

You are a pig, but it is an offense to lovely pigs to say so. There is as yet no word to describe the likes of one such as you, the lesser of a worm's puke, beneath the farts of Ebola viruses... it is pointless to continue. I only give you pleasure, in your sick preferred version of hate for life. You have not been so greatly amused for a long time. Few would dare say to your face the self same truth I tell you, not because these very same words are not on a hundred million lips, but because they have fear where I do not care whether or not you are pleased. In fact I duly hope you are not in the least bit pleased. It would leave room for hope if you hung your head in shame, if only just a smidgen. I might be convinced to believe you could regain your soul and turn your life around in the most amazing miracle of mind over matter. But I see that amuses you even more.

I also see you pulling out your blade and sharpening strap, so I will bid you adieu now. I will not become your next human pizza. Go find a dead rat to chew on, you are what you eat."

(I walked now quickly to my car, and hastened to lock the door while I turned the engine to be gone from this place of demon spawn and shit smell and anti-human carnivalia as fast as humanly possible. Does he come after me? Dare I look? The greatest serial killer of our times might be so inclined, especially since I may have pissed him off, just a tint. I do not see him. I floor the gas pedal because for all I know he can turn himself to stench and strangle me with my own nose hairs. That would not be a fitting end for one such as I. One who dared to tell the truth directly to the face of one of the greater infamous murderers of humanity and spirit and beauty and truth and justice. One who was able to call him a brick of dog doo and live to tell about it. But only, who will believe me? Witness, I hope it will be you.)

Who's the Cruelest Man in the World?

2009-08-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/07/whos-richest-man-in-world.html

Who's the richest man in the world?

FSK's Guide to Reality
Sat, 14 Jul 2007 02:36 UTC

Who's the richest man in the world? Your first guess is wrong. It's not Bill Gates, or anyone else whose name you'll ever hear mentioned in the news.

The leaders of the international banking cartel have wealth far beyond anything you can possibly imagine. Some sources list it at $300 trillion. Many of their businesses are privately held, which means that it would be hard to value them. With anonymous corporate ownership, it's hard to tell what their shareholdings are. Their private businesses are held in trusts that provide anonymity and tax protection. Plus, the international banking cartel doesn't just control businesses. They have their own spy networks and control governments. They have completely infiltrated most world governments. How would you place a market value on complete control of the US government? How would you place a market value on control of people via educational systems and the media?

The international banking cartel has a policy of intermarriage with relatives. This ensures that their wealth is not diluted. There are probably 50-100 insiders who have nearly full knowledge of the operations, all of them related to one another. They are able to keep their activities a secret, because the members would be killed if they defected. Every member is probably under constant surveillance by all other members; he couldn't effectively defect even if he wanted to.

This group of 50-100 insiders probably elect someone as their leader. Democracy is effective when everyone knows everyone else. On a scale of 50-100 people, it's possible for the leader to keep track of everything, and for everyone else to keep track of the leader.

So that's the richest man in the world. He's the Supreme Leader of Humanity, and knows it. His net worth is effectively the value of the entire world's economy. His organization has been using the Compound Interest Paradox for hundreds of years, enabling him to steal almost all of the world's wealth.

Most of the real work is delegated to outsiders. The outsiders are even deluded into thinking they have real power and influence. Just like several different layers of holding companies disguise corporate ownership, they have several different layers of secret societies to disguise the real power. Each layer gets power and privileges denied to lower layers. Each member is threatened with being killed or expelled if they reveal their secrets. That's how they disguise their power.

Most people are trained to believe that if you want power and influence, you need to be on television and in newspapers. It's much better to be the person who controls television and newspapers. It's better to be able to choose who the official rulers are. If your power is publicly known, then you're the target. The Supreme Leader of Humanity knows better than to announce his existence on television. Everyone would revolt against him if they figured out what was going on.

Besides, can you really blame the Supreme Leader of Humanity? After all, if he didn't do it, someone else would have instead. It's better to be the ruler than the slave. On the other hand, he has full awareness of all the things that his organization has done. He conditions other people to believe these things are bad, but he has no morals of that sort. His only goal is the accumulation of power.

What are the Supreme Leader of Humanity's crimes?

He has kept people poor, so they would be obedient workers. Poor people have no choice but to take a pointless time-wasting job.

He has kept people poor, to prevent them from having the spare time to detect his existence and oppose him.

He has stolen all of the productivity gains of a growing economy, and kept them for himself.

He has orchestrated wars. War destroys surplus productive capacity, and helps keep people poor. War is an excuse for governments to seize more power. War helps distract attention from himself. War is an excuse for governments to take on debt, allowing the Compound Interest Paradox to help him steal more wealth.

He has retarded scientific progress. His inner circle possesses inventions that are 50-100 years more advanced than what the average person possesses. Most scientific research is funded by the government. By infiltrating the government, he can decide what discoveries the public is allowed to have.

In every war for the past 300 years, he has secretly funded both sides. He has supported the USA, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China, al Qaeda, and every other major world power. Whenever a leader gets wise to his manipulations, that leader is assassinated or defeated.

He has made sure that there were variations in religion, and that people could be made to fight each other based on their religion.

He has agents working in every world government.

He has made sure that people are taught lies. He and his inner circle know the real truth, not the lies that are spread to the average person. That makes it easier for his inner circle to operate efficiently, because they are not encumbered with the false knowledge everyone else has.

He has made sure that everyone else has been taught morality and religion. He knows that they are just lies that make people more obedient slaves. (On the other hand, I disagree with The Supreme Leader of Humanity on this point. I think there is some intrinsic truth to morality. The accumulation of power is not the only goal that matters. Unfortunately, in a battle between someone who only cares about power and someone who values other things as well, the person who only cares about power usually wins. The only reason that evil might lose is because evil is inefficient.)

He controls all television and newspapers. That raises an interesting question. Why has he allowed the Internet to exist? Surely he could have crushed it as it was being created, when only military researchers used it. He could have destroyed it through excessive regulation. Did he intentionally leak the secret of the transistor and the Internet? What was the purpose of that?

What's Left for the Supreme Leader of Humanity to Accomplish?

What is there left for The Supreme Leader of Humanity to do? Is he completely and utterly insane? Is he bored? He doesn't view himself as a benevolent ruler. He knows that he's responsible for all the world's suffering. He has complete and absolute power. What else is there for him to do?

Does he want to resign? Maybe he would be willing to do so, if only he could be convinced that someone else would not replace him. Maybe he's looking for a political and economic system that doesn't require a Supreme Leader in order to be stable. If he started dismantling his population control engine, his subordinates would be reluctant to give up their perks and privileged status. He can't publicly admit the truth, because his inner circle would kill him if he tried.

Doesn't he realize that his complete and total victory is the end of history? It's the end of all social progress and scientific progress. Nothing can happen, except in accordance with his plan. His victory is the effective extinction of humanity.

Has this story been repeated on every other world where intelligent life develops? Someone seizes absolute control and brings scientific progress to a halt. Is that the reason why intelligent life has not been discovered on other worlds?

Is my Analysis Correct? Does it Matter?

Is it possible that I misanalysed things? Maybe the Supreme Leader of Humanity doesn't exist. Maybe there really are different groups competing with each other sincerely, rather than it being staged competition. Certainly, it seems like there's a malevolent force controlling everything. It's too well organized to be random. There are too many sensible rumors floating around for them to all be wrong.

You have to acknowledge that several secret groups exist. With several different competing secret groups, wouldn't it be natural for one group to win eventually? Has this group been in complete control for over 100 years?

It's impossible to be convinced one way or the other. Does the Supreme Leader of Humanity exist? I'm concerned that he might exist. What does he want? What is his purpose? He already has absolute power. He has technology far more advanced than what the average person knows about. What else can someone with absolute power want?

In a certain sense, it doesn't matter if the Supreme Leader of Humanity exists or not. There certainly are a lot of bad things happening. There needs to be an alternate mechanism for enabling people to work effectively.

The Concept of Evil– Why It is Intellectually Valid and Politically and Spiritually Important

2009-08-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

URL to article: http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?page_id=26

The Concept of Evil– Why It is Intellectually Valid and Politically and Spiritually Important
Posted By Andrew Bard Schmookler On October 14, 2005 @ 5:47 pm
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[This piece was first drafted in June, 2005, to serve as the basis for a talk that I would give in a variety of venues. Among these venues have been several Unitarian Churches, and a class at LifeLong Learning in Albuquerque. I remain available and eager to give this talk, and to discuss its ideas, to any venue, to any audience, where there is interest and where suitable arrangements can be made.

More recently, a version of this piece as appeared on the web on CommonDreams.org and on opednews.com. It is that version that I am presenting here.]
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Our present rulers don’t want the Geneva Conventions ban on torture to hold them back. Other Americans are struggling to return our country to a willingness to be ruled by law, and to sheer human decency.

Our present government has no interest in restraining greed to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change and other degradations of the biosphere. Others in this country are devoting our energies to moving America toward a way of life in harmony with earth’s living systems.

The forces now dominating America are moving relentlessly to shift power from the weak and vulnerable to those already mighty, and to transfer wealth from those who have less to those already rich beyond any rational need for more. Many of us are striving to create a country where principles of justice hold sway.

Such struggles have characterized the whole sweep of civilized history. On the one side are forces that care for life and work to create and maintain life-serving structures. On the other side are forces that tear such structures apart.

To understand the interplay among such forces, the religious tradition of our civilization has employed the idea of the struggle between good and evil.”

But that’s a concept rejected by many of my sophisticated —and, for the most part, liberal-minded—friends.

For one thing, some do not regard the moral dimension as being truly fundamental to the nature of reality. They’ve been persuaded by that philosophic current that sees an unbridgeable gap between is” and ought”; they believe that moral judgments are just subjective preferences.

But it is particularly the concept of evil” that they reject. Too primitive a notion, they say—manifesting black-and-white thinking. Too dangerous a notion—fostering demonization and self-righteous self-delusion.

By becoming more tolerant and more aware of psychological complexities, they see themselves as having advanced beyond the terms of our ancient spiritual traditions.

But I’ve come lately to believe that the concept of evil captures a vital human reality. So vital that its disappearance from the cognitive maps of many modern sophisticated people is a dangerous development—dangerous because when people do not recognize the nature of the forces they are up against, they will be less able to deal with them effectively.

How the concept of â€˜evil’ became more real for me

Much of my adult life has been spent studying the play of destructive forces in the human system. (The word â€˜evil’ even occurs in the subtitle of one of my books.) But it was not until recently that my experience of these destructive forces plumbed me so deeply that the notion of evil” became a palpable reality.

Part of what opened that door, I believe, was my having had, in the spring of 2004, a spiritual breakthrough regarding the very opposite of evil. This experience gave me a vision of a Wholeness and a deeper sense of reverence for the good, the true, and the beautiful. This experience seems, in retrospect, to have sensitized me to those forces that work to destroy such wonderful forms of good order.

Another part of what opened the door, it seems, was that for the first time it was from inside their domain that I was examining such evil forces. In other words, it is one thing to study the pathologies of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia from the safe remove —in space and time– of my own comparatively humane America. But it is quite another thing to experience dark forces coming to rule the world around me.

Political underpinnings of a spiritual realization

Although my thrust here goes beyond the level of politics, the best way to bring that realization to life here is to report on those perceptions of our contemporary political drama that brought the concept of evil to life for me.

Something important is now visible in our politics, but the heart of it is not at the political level—not, that is, at that level where liberals and conservatives divide. What’s alarming about the political forces that have taken over is not the conservative nature of their stated political positions, nor the traditional nature of their stated moral values. America would do fine, I believe, with leaders who were in reality the moral and political conservatives these people claim to be.

The problem with the forces now ruling America is, rather, at that deeper, moral and spiritual level—the level from which spring values like fairness and honesty and compassion that are shared by decent Americans of all political stripes.

It is at this level, as I see it, that these ruling forces have been unusually adept at obscuring their true nature: under the sheep’s clothing of a false righteousness, these forces are giving free rein to the wolf of their unbridled lust for self-aggrandizement.

Indeed, it was my witnessing the success of that deception in seducing many basically good people that led me to confront the nature of evil more deeply than I ever have before.

The face of evil hidden in plain view

The dark truth of America’s current peril is not hidden away, awaiting revelations from secret tapes. It’s right there in front of our faces, playing out chapter-by-chapter on the news on prime time TV.

It’s there in the way these forces have injected what I call a culture of falsehood” into the American body politic. With their almost habitual disregard of truthfulness in their own utterances, their contempt for science and for objective analysis of all sorts, their insistence on forcing reality to conform to their beliefs rather than vice versa—America’s current rulers are degrading that heritage of honest deliberation on which American democracy rests.

It’s visible in how unrestrained by any notion of justice or the common good these forces have been in their insatiable pursuit of wealth and power for themselves and their cronies.

It’s visible in the unscrupulous way they pursue political advantage —for example in their consistent practice of character assassination against any who might meaningfully challenge them.

And it is visible, too, in their consistent fostering of division—both among groups within America and between America and the world. By systematically focusing on those issues that divide Americans, and never on those values that we share, these ruling forces have made the American people more polarized than the pollsters have ever seen before. And, by their way of wielding American power on the world stage, they have made this country the object of more hatred and distrust from the peoples of the world —even among our traditional friends—than ever before.

And it’s there perhaps above all in their consistent dismantling of the traditional structures of good order—in their consistent degradation of the structures of international order, of environmental regulation, of Constitutional restraint on political power—all those structures that might otherwise restrain their freedom of action.

If, as I believe, goodness is to be understood in terms of wholeness —the arrangement of the parts of a system in a harmonious, well-ordered and life-serving way—then surely evil, as the opposite of goodness, will involve the kind of destruction of harmony and good order manifested by such developments as those I’ve just described.

But it’s not only the destructiveness of these ascendant forces that led me to my new sense that evil was an important concept. There is also something in the dynamics of their rise to power, as I’ll soon relate, that made the ancient notion of the battle of good and evil” seem valid and important.

The liberal discomfort with the idea of evil

When I began to speak out about my sense that dark forces were consolidating their grip on our country, I did not feel a need to use the e-word. It seemed adequate to use less spiritually loaded terms like ruthless” and amoral” and dishonest” and bullying.”

But as I continued to explore the dark spaces that I’d seen, those words soon seemed insufficient. There was another element that these words did not capture, and soon I was speaking to liberal audiences about the evil forces” at work.

Although the people in these audiences opposed many of the same trends and practices that alarmed me, many were not comfortable with my using that ancient and freighted term evil” to describe them. I came to understand that underlying this discomfort was a worldview. And I’ve come to believe that this worldview —widespread in liberal America—is part of what has made it possible for such dark forces to gain power.

For this reason, I have been glad to confront the controversy raised by my using this deep and spiritual concept.

Objections to the concept of â€˜evil’

One objection I’ve heard from liberals is that it can’t be right to see our current ruling group as agents of evil forces because they really believe that what they’re doing is right.” But it is a complete non sequitur that if people believe in their rightness that they can’t be the instruments of evil.

As if most of the world’s evil weren’t done by people who’d persuaded themselves they were doing right —from the torturers of the Inquisitions, to the Nazi mass murderers, to the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

As if the psychologists hadn’t shown us that, if you understand people only in terms of the motives they acknowledge in themselves, you’ll hardly understand them at all.

Indeed, if part of the essence of evil is a pattern of brokenness, one would expect precisely that kind of psychic brokenness —that profound disconnect in the realm of self-knowledge—in which people can persuade themselves that they are doing God’s work when in fact they are serving their own darkest impulses.

A related objection —and perhaps the most frequent one—is that one should never label others evildoers” because, historically, so much human destructiveness has accompanied such accusations

Admittedly, through the millennia, great peril has surrounded people’s wielding of the ideas of good and evil. But the same has been true for all ideas about which people feel passionately—God, truth, love of country. Any beliefs that come from the core of people can lead to destructive or constructive consequences depending on how whole and clear, or how broken and twisted, are the souls or psyches of those who hold them.

So while there are reasons for great caution when operating from the deepest and most passionately felt beliefs, it hardly follows that we should reject these beliefs or ignore them when we act in the world. In particular, from the fact that the idea of evil” has often been used in distorted and destructive ways, it does not follow that it’s never important and right to label as â€˜evil’ the forces one sees at work.

Moral relativism and the opening of the door

Perhaps the deepest element in the widespread liberal resistance to the idea of evil lies in the strain of thought called moral relativism.” It’s surprising how widely such thinking has infiltrated our culture. Among students I’ve dealt with across two generations, it’s been common to hear —even from those who describe themselves as Biblical Christians—such statements as What the Nazis did at Auschwitz isn’t what I would have done, but from within their perspective it was right, and so it was right for them.”

The idea that there is no important distinction to be made between right desire and wrong desire has its sources in modern philosophical thought but is probably most powerfully driven by our consumerist economy, which doesn’t care what kind of impulse we gratify so long as we seek our gratification through what can be bought and sold.

But whatever the sources of this moral relativism, among the results of this failure to distinguish between choices that are good and those that are not has been a radical transformation —a degradation—in this nation’s cultural expressions.

Compare, for example, the films made in the 40s and 50s with those of more recent vintage. The older ones are filled with an ethos of aspiration toward an ideal, toward some image of how human life should be lived. In recent decades, movies are more likely to encourage us to indulge our most crass, even our most debauched, impulses. We’re more apt to see a film about a serial killer than about anyone worthy of our admiration.

This unraveling of old moral ideals, in which American liberalism has been largely complicit, is one of those cultural developments that has diminished the power of the forces of goodness to resist the advance of evil.

And it is in that interplay between opposing forces that we find one indication of the value of the idea of evil”: when there’s an opening, the forces opposed to goodness will advance. We see an opportunism in these forces, as if they were animated by some spirit of darkness looking to expand its empire.

â€˜Evil’ as transcending the level of the individual actor

Another clue comes from how, in this interplay, these forces work through human beings— as if the forces were the master and the people their instruments.

Some people reject the ideal of evil because they believe it takes what is happening inside human beings and projects it out onto some beyond us that works to drive human events in a twisted and destructive direction.

And accordingly, I have heard liberal and enlightened people say things like, This supposed â€˜evil’ is just a projection of what is really just inside us as human individuals.”

But talking about the motives for human action as lying within us is an over-simplification. Yes, of course, our motivations are inside us. But we ourselves are substantially molded by those systems —cultural, historical—in which we are embedded.

Just as a hen has been described as an egg’s way of creating another egg, so also can we human individuals” be seen as our culture’s way of perpetuating certain patterns. Through our socialization and our life-experiences generally our culture creates us —for better and for worse— in its own image.

History isn’t made just by people; it’s also made by forces.

This is the vital dimension that wasn’t captured by talking about the ruthlessness or amorality of individuals, and that led me to use the e-word.” I saw something about the way that those forces operate, about how patterns can lurk in the cultural interstices, awaiting the chance to impose themselves again.

When I saw, for example, how that manipulative genius, Karl Rove, effected his seduction of many traditionalist Americans, I recognized an old pattern—one used a century before to seduce poor whites in the Jim Crow South.

In the Jim Crow South, and now again in Karl Rove’s America, the leaders inflame passions around peripheral issues to distract their supporters from what the leaders are really doing with their power. A century ago, the hot-button distraction was racial purity. Now, the leaders whip people up about issues of moral purity. In both cases, unjust leaders use deception to exacerbate divisions useful to magnifying their own power and wealth.

Dark patterns lurk in the system, like some dormant virus, ready to erupt when the culture’s immune system weakens.

Good and evil as forces contending to spread their patterns

Wholeness begets wholeness; division begets division. The patterns compete in the human arena.

Wholeness within the human being consists of harmony among the elements of the psyche. The crucial challenge here is to reconcile the natural energies of the human creature with the need for order in the overarching human system. But when the surrounding order imposes too harsh and punitive a morality —when the culture wages war against the creature—such harmony becomes impossible.

Brokenness begets brokenness.

The broken regime of racial persecution in the American South—as Lillian Smith showed in her classic Killers of the Dream— built upon the broken psyche of white Southerners brought up with harsh moral strictures that prevented the harmonious integration of natural sexual impulses. The forbidden impulses were then projected out to be rediscovered —and punished—in the darker race.

In Nazi Germany—as Alice Miller showed in For Your Own Good—the broken regime of ethnic annihilation built upon the psychic brokenness created by generations of child-rearing practices that legitimated the systematic brutal treatment of children. What was driven underground in the child emerged with a fury against inferior peoples” to be destroyed in the name of the noble Fatherland.

In each case, the pattern of brokenness gets spread from the culture to the individual and then back again. The harsh culture, making war against the natural needs and will of the growing human, spreads its pattern of division by preventing the human creature from reconciling —or even acknowledging—the elements within it.

At its core, the lie of false righteousness is a lie to oneself—a basic split between a person’s real inner experience, which is rejected for being intolerably painful, and the false representation of that experience, which is fabricated as an escape from that pain.

And such a broken psyche -— with its conscious identification with a harsh morality and its estrangement from the natural creature —needs to find enemies” against whom to enact its inner conflicts and divisions.

It has been said, by their fruits shall ye know them.” Thus the nature of a ruling spirit shows itself by the pattern it imprints upon its domain. This is why that systematic fomenting of division and conflict —within America and between America and the world—is so clear an indication of the nature of the spirit that has lately been ruling this country. That spirit that tears things apart is an evil spirit.

The opportunism of â€˜evil forces’

What’s new in America is not the existence of these destructive patterns and forces but rather their ascendancy to such dominance.

America has long contained an empire-building impulse, but until now it has largely been balanced by ideals about a just order that should displace the rule of might makes right.” In earlier times, the American nation employed a destructive combination of arrogance and hypocrisy to dispossess the natives of this continent of their lands. But only now has that unwholesome posture become the essence of the face presented to the world at large.

American capitalism has long had an element of systemic insatiability, but till now that voraciousness has been held in check, at least to a meaningful degree, by ideas about responsibility to the greater good. We’ve long known, for example —from the stories of the tobacco and asbestos industries—that America’s corporate systems are prone to succumb to the temptation to put profits ahead of caring for life. But it is only now that — to the alarm of much of the rest of the world—the deadly pattern of those industries has become enshrined as national policy: in the present White House, we now know, the scientific reports regarding potentially catastrophic climate change was being denied and distorted to keep public concern from interfering with corporate America’s immediate profits.

In a morally healthy society, the darker elements are kept subordinate to the dictates of good order. They are held in check by those frameworks that a culture has developed at all levels —in the psyche, in the realms of cultural expression, in the domain of governance– to nurture and protect good order. But when these frameworks break down, as they have in America in our times, the dark forces —the old patterns of brokenness— that lurk in a society will arise opportunistically to tear things apart.

After decades of an imaginative life —in television and movies, for example—that continually rehearses Americans in the indulgence of their lower selves, fewer people can recognize the good, and fewer still are devoted to it. Amoral desire gains in force, and counterfeit goodness more readily passes as the real thing.

After well over a decade of a talk radio culture that teaches people to indulge their self-serving beliefs, the gratifications of wishful thinking erode the structures of integrity in the pursuit of truth. Without that ethic of intellectual responsibility that requires that we bow to the truth, it becomes far easier for deceptions to win out in the corrupted marketplace of ideas.”

The deep insight of the Western religious tradition

The nature of evil as I believe I’ve glimpsed it, then, goes beyond its being destructive of the good. It is also central to evil that —unlike the destructiveness of a tsunami—it works through the realm of human choice. And it is its use of the wounding and twisting of the human spirit that gives evil its morally dark and cruel aspect.

But it is also its operating on a scale far vaster than the individual human will, and its opportunism in spreading its patterns of brokenness, that give the impression of a vast spirit at work in the world, expanding its empire wherever there is an opening.

(The force of goodness works similarly in many ways. But not in all ways, for the process of building wholeness has inherent differences from the process of tearing it apart.)

I am not inclined, myself, to credit our religious tradition’s personification of these forces as mighty and eternal conscious beings —like God and Satan—possessing benign or malign intent, and standing behind the forces of good and evil at play in the world. To me, these forces have appeared as empirical forces embedded in the dynamics of human systems unfolding through time. These forces seem comprehensible in naturalistic terms, but also so vast and enduring that they require an expansion of our usual narrow perspective for us to perceive them; so subtle and transcendent in their operation that they do seem of a spiritual nature—acting as if they were animated by benign or malign intention.

But whatever the ultimate nature of these forces, the religious traditions of our civilization, it now seems to me, have grasped a most basic truth about how such forces —for good and for evil—act in the world. It no longer seems to me a primitive notion—but rather a factual reality—that there is a battle for the power to shape human affairs between the forces that weave things together well and those that tear things apart.

The traditional religious vision of the struggle between good and evil” I now see as embodying deep insight, as a way of naming something quite real and most fundamental in shaping our destiny. And calling things by their right names is important —particularly for those things that are at once so difficult for us to grasp on the basis of our immediate and mundane experience and so vital to understanding what’s happening in our world and what we are called upon to do to about it.

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