The Ruthless Truth blog

David Sirota
AlterNet
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:56 EST

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When people like General McCrystal go rogue, it undermines the chain of command and challenges the Constitution.
"I am in control here in the White House." — Secretary of State Alexander Haig, 1981
Ah, the good old days when even a big shot like Gen. Al Haig, who died early Saturday, could get in trouble for such mavericky declarations that defy basic constitutional precedents.
In the 21st century, that’s ancient history. We’ve so idealized cowboy-style rebellion in matters of war and law enforcement that "going Haig" is today honored as "going rogue." Defiance, irreverence, contempt — these are the moment’s most venerated postures, no matter how destructive or lawless.
The Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping and torture sessions were the most obvious examples of the rogue sensibility on steroids. But then came McCain-Palin, a presidential ticket predicated almost singularly on the rogue brand. And now, even in the Obama era, that brand pervades.
It began reemerging in September with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghan escalation plan. McChrystal didn’t just ask President Obama for more troops — protocol-wise, that would have been completely appropriate. No, McChrystal went rogue, preemptively leaking his request to the media, then delivering a public address telling Obama to immediately follow his orders.
Incredibly, few politicians or pundits raised objections to McChrystal’s behavior. Worse, rather than firing McChrystal, Obama meekly agreed to his demands, letting Americans know that when it comes to foreign policy, the rogue general — not the popularly elected president — is in control in the White House.
Of course, while McChrystal’s insubordination was extra-constitutional in spirit, he at least made the effort to obtain the commander-in-chief’s rubber-stamp approval. The same cannot be said for the rogues inside Obama’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Recall that one year ago, Obama instructed the DEA to follow his campaign pledge and respect local statutes legalizing medicinal marijuana. When the DEA kept raiding pot dispensaries in states that had passed such laws, Attorney General Eric Holder reiterated the cease and desist decree, stating that "What (Obama) said during the campaign is now American policy."
As even more raids nonetheless continued, the Justice Department then issued an explicit memo ordering federal agents to refrain from prosecuting those who are in "compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
And yet the DEA has recently intensified its crackdown. Here in Colorado — where voters enshrined medical marijuana’s legality in our state constitution — the feds not only raided two dispensaries, but did so in a way that deliberately humiliated their superiors.
In January, the DEA stormed a company that performs cannabis quality tests. The firm’s alleged infraction? Following protocol and formally applying for a federal equipment license. DEA rogues responded to the request not with thanks or — heaven forbid — approval, but instead with the gestapo.
This was topped last week when DEA agents arrested a medical marijuana grower who dared discuss his business with a local news outlet. Sensing a P.R. opportunity, DEA agent Jeffrey Sweetin used the spectacle to insist that he will not listen to stand-down directives from his bosses.
"The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody," Sweetin menacingly intoned.
Once again, a rogue going wild and once again, tacit acceptance. Rather than personnel changes reining in the out-of-control agency, the president has nominated the acting Bush-appointed DEA administrator, Michele Leonhart, to a full term.
The message, then, should be clear: If you’re looking for who is "in control" of our military and police forces, don’t look to the established chain of command and don’t look to constitutional provisions that mandate civilian authority over the government bayonet. Look to the most reckless rogues — it’s a good bet they’re the ones running the show.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/203540-Who-s-Really-In-Control-of-the-White-House-Maybe-Not-Obama

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http://RevolutionNews.us — November 2009 — It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got…BECAUSE THE OWNERS OF THIS COUNTRY DON’T WANT THAT. I’m talking about the real owners now…the REAAL owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.”..
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you dont. You have no choice. You have OWNERS. They OWN *you*. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. Theyve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but Ill tell you what they dont want . . . they dont want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They dont want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. Theyre not interested in that . . . that doesnt help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They dont want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly theyre getting ***** by a system that threw them overboard 30 *****’ years ago. They dont want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly ***** jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now theyre coming for your Social Security money. They want your *****’ retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? Theyll get it . . . theyll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this *****’ place. Its a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, its the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesnt matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich ***** who dont give a ***** about you. They dont give a ***** about you . . . they dont give a ***** about you. They dont care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their ***** everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. Its called the American Dream, ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it . . .
-George Carlin

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Joel Beinin
Middle East Report Online
Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:40 UTC

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The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the oldest such festival in the United States, was founded in rebellion against received wisdom. Since 1980, the festival has promoted independent Jewish films that contest the conventional Hollywood depiction of Jewish life, particularly its lachrymose over-concentration on Jewish victimhood, and regularly presented "alternatives to the often uncritical view of life and politics in Israel available in the established American Jewish community." The festival’s audience, mostly Jewish, has reacted positively to this policy, even in 2005, when the organizers decided to show Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the theme of which is suicide bombing.
Critical Israeli Jewish auteurs have also been welcome. In 2008, the Israeli director Shai Carmeli Pollak came to San Francisco to present his film, Bil’in Habibti (Bil’in, My Love), which records the non-violent struggle of Palestinians, supportive Israelis and internationals to stop construction of Israel’s separation barrier in a West Bank village. The festival has previously screened two films by Simone Bitton, a Moroccan-born, dual Israeli-French citizen. The first, Mahmoud Darwich: The Land as Language (1998), is an appreciative biopic about the late Palestinian poet laureate. The second, Wall (2005), is an unflattering examination of the separation barrier.
Bitton’s current work, Rachel (Ciné-Sud Promotion, 2008), is not yet in distribution. It has appeared only at film festivals, in Berlin, Paris, New York, Sarajevo, Toronto and elsewhere. In the fall of 2009 it will play at the Haifa Film Festival in Israel. On July 25 and August 4, it was shown at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The festival’s board of directors surely knew that showing Rachel — which investigates the violent death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old American peace activist, at the hands of the Israeli army — would discomfit some Jewish viewers. But they were likely unprepared for the strident, even hysterical, objections of the official organizations of the Bay Area Jewish community. In light of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s history, it is difficult to imagine that these organizations were exercised primarily by the content of the film. Indeed, they saved their strongest language for the "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic" co-sponsors of the screening, Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the decision of the festival organizers to invite Rachel’s mother, Cindy Corrie, whom they dubbed an "Israel basher," to take part in a question-and-answer session after the lights went up.
But generic anger at "Israel bashing" is an unsatisfying explanation for the Jewish organizations’ ire, since Jewish Voice for Peace had previously co-sponsored films at the festival and Carmeli Pollak and other Jewish filmmakers had criticized Israel’s occupation policies in much sharper terms than anything anyone in the Corrie family has said on the record. Perhaps the problem was that the festival organizers brought non-Jews — AFSC and Cindy Corrie — under the community tent to witness something of which many members of the community are ashamed.
Forensic Investigation
The death of Rachel Corrie brought a raft of journalistic inquests, all ostensibly concerned to sift through the competing claims of her fellow activists in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who say she was murdered, and the Israeli state, which prefers to call her untimely end a "regrettable accident." Some of the media accounts were skeptical of the army’s internal inquiry, others less so. Many reporters seemed more eager to grill the ISM activists who were present than the soldiers, in lockstep with the Israeli army’s own counterattack: "We are dealing with a group of protesters who are acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone." And the army, despite Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reported promise to President George W. Bush of a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation, was hardly open to outside scrutiny. Human Rights Watch, which included a section on Corrie in a June 2005 report on faulty Israeli military inquiries, was unable to pronounce a verdict upon how she died, but did conclude that "the impartiality and professionalism of the Israeli investigation into Corrie’s death are highly questionable." In any event, the following facts are not in serious dispute.
On March 16, 2003, Corrie, a senior at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza. The mammoth Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, custom-fitted with armor by Israel, was leveling the ground and demolishing Palestinian homes in the city of Rafah along the Philadelphi axis — the road that runs along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Many homes and buildings had already been destroyed to create an open space in preparation for constructing a wall on the border. Corrie was working with the ISM, an organization dedicated to non-violent, direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian people under military occupation. She was killed as she stood, unarmed, in front of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah, in an attempt to prevent the bulldozer from razing it.
Rachel is a deeply moving portrayal of Rachel Corrie the person and ISM volunteer. And though no firm conclusion is asserted, the film is also the most thorough, credible and transparent investigation yet conducted into exactly how she died and who was responsible. As Bitton has written, on a Facebook page dedicated to Rachel, it "does some of what a court should have done" in putting the Israeli state’s narrative of Corrie’s death under the microscope.
Simone Bitton focuses first on the last eight weeks of Corrie’s life, her reasons for going to Gaza, her relationships with several Palestinians, with whom she became quite close, and the work of the ISM in Rafah. The ISM was conceived in the spring and summer of 2001. During the first three weeks of the second intifada, which erupted following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in September 2000, the right-wing Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported that Israeli forces fired a million bullets at mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. This hail of lead flew before any suicide bombings or other acts of terror inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel took place. (The last suicide bombing had been in 1996.) In the face of this imbalance of force, Ghassan Andoni, George Rishmawi, Huweida Arraf and others developed the idea that a non-violent international presence could protect Palestinians from the ravages of the Israeli military. In addition, they thought, international witnesses who communicated what they saw and experienced could enhance international awareness and media coverage of Israeli violence. The first ISM contingent arrived in Palestine in August 2001. Corrie was an enthusiastic participant, writing home, "Coming here is one of the best things I’ve ever done." The recitation of these words in the film is a gut-ripping moment, as those in the audience know that Rachel Corrie will soon die.
At Pains to Explain
Rachel devotes very careful attention to the circumstances of the protagonist’s death. Like a forensic detective, Bitton gathered pertinent oral testimonies, documents, photographs and video footage. Only the voices of those directly involved are heard: Corrie’s ISM colleagues and Palestinian friends and hosts in Rafah, ISM co-founder Andoni, the Israeli military police officer who investigated the case, the Tel Aviv coroner who examined the body, and Jonathan Pollak, a member of the Israeli group, Anarchists Against the Wall (and brother of filmmaker Shai Carmeli Pollak), who put up Corrie’s colleagues in his Tel Aviv home after she died. Rachel Corrie herself is heard as well, through a narrator’s readings of her e-mails home.
There are no abstract political proclamations. Conflicting testimonies are juxtaposed. It is notable that, of all the persons interviewed, Andoni is the only one who considers that he may bear some responsibility for Corrie’s death, since he trained her and sent her to Rafah. Simone Bitton proceeds like an attorney questioning witnesses, sans speeches to the jury or inferences from the testimony. This technique makes the film a powerful documentary record whose value goes far beyond Bitton’s obvious sympathy for Corrie and her questioning of the official story.
That story — "It is clear the death of Ms. Corrie was not caused as a result of a direct action by the bulldozer or by its running her over" — does not hold up well under Bitton’s lens. On camera, the Israeli military police officer who led the investigation expresses a twinge of doubt about his own conclusions. He admits that he did not visit the site of the Nasrallah home and relied primarily on the testimony of soldiers. Among the eyewitnesses he did not interview were the ISM volunteers who saw the bulldozer run over Corrie from a distance of as little as ten yards. They maintain that their comrade was quite purposely run over, not once, but twice. The official claim that the bulldozer driver did not see Corrie because she was behind a pile of dirt is definitively disproved by Israeli army video footage that shows her standing on top of the mound, wearing a highly visible reflective orange jacket, as the bulldozer approached.
In April 2003, Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine released an autopsy report that attributed Corrie’s death to "pressure on the chest (mechanical asphyxiation) with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung with hemorrhaging of the pleural cavities." How could this finding — she was crushed — be squared with the military police’s seeming absolution of the bulldozer? As the coroner who performed the autopsy is at pains to explain to Bitton, it is possible that Corrie was killed by the weight of the dirt on her body as the bulldozer was passing over her. Since there was no indication that metal had touched her body, he could not conclude that the bulldozer itself killed her.
It is not only the Israeli officials whose conduct is suspect, the film goes on to show. The coroner acknowledges that the Corrie family had a right to be present at the autopsy; since they could not attend, it would have been proper for the US embassy in Tel Aviv to send a representative. Yet embassy officials, despite the request of the Corrie family that they witness the procedure, told the coroner that they were not interested in doing so. Therefore, he proceeded on his own.
The Corrie family has tried persistently to get the US government to mount its own inquiry. A resolution introduced by their congressman, Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), directing the Department of Justice to open an investigation received 78 co-sponsors but died in committee. John McKay, the former US Attorney for western Washington and one of eight US attorneys fired by the Bush administration in 2006, told the Corries, "There will never be a US investigation into Rachel’s case." The US government remains loath to intercede despite its own position, recorded in a letter to the Corries from former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson and never rescinded, that Israel’s investigation was inadequate.
Did the bulldozer driver, whose name is kept confidential by the Israeli army, intentionally kill Rachel Corrie? The film is agnostic on this point. According to Bitton, "The intentional crime my movie addresses is not Rachel Corrie’s death. It is the willful destruction of entire neighborhoods, carried out with the knowledge that people who stay in their homes or attempt to defend them will be killed in the process. One clearly sees where this leads us: Six years later, in the same spot, the same army kills hundreds of innocent victims in supposedly targeted bombings. Today the end result has been reached: All Palestinian civilians, as well as anyone seeking to give them assistance, are potential collateral victims; their lives are, strictly speaking, not worth anything anymore. Talking about war crimes or bringing up the Geneva Conventions makes you look naïve, archaic."
These words were written in early 2009, on the heels of Israel’s "all-out war" upon "Hamas and its kind" in Gaza, an operation that left well over 1,000 unarmed Palestinians dead, but they were applicable in 2003 as well. The Israeli army began destroying blocks of homes in Rafah, to cap the same cross-border supply tunnels that achieved such notoriety during the Gaza war, in 2001.
The Value of One Life?
There is undoubtedly something disturbing about making a film focused on the life and death of one young American woman while Israel has killed thousands of non-combatant Palestinians since the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987. One justification is that both the Jewish and Muslim traditions affirm that the value of the life of every human being is equally boundless. Another is the testimony of the soldier who says, "We didn’t know they were foreigners; we thought they were Palestinians." Does this suggest that, if Rachel Corrie had been a Palestinian, it would have been routine to kill her? Might the world media have failed to notice her death, particularly since any investigation would have been perfunctory at best? Israel’s record in the Occupied Territories and the corporate media’s response to it indicate that this surmise is not unwarranted. Yet the response to Corrie’s death has not been overwhelming either.
Until Corrie’s death, the ISM did not imagine that the Israeli army might kill internationals. In fact, she was the first of several international victims. On April 11, 2003, another young ISM activist, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli sniper, Taysir al-Hayb. (Al-Hayb is a Bedouin with several family members serving in the Israeli military.) Hurndall went into a coma and died nine months later. In April 2005 an Israeli military court convicted al-Hayb of manslaughter and obstruction of justice; he was sentenced to eight years in prison. A year later, a British inquest jury determined that Hurndall was a victim of "unlawful killing." According to the Hurndall family lawyer, this legalism means "intentionally killed," or murdered.
On May 2, 2003, James Miller, a Welsh filmmaker, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier, Capt. Hib al-Hayb. The Israeli military police concluded that they could not determine that al-Hayb’s shot was responsible for Miller’s death. The captain was disciplined for violating the rules of engagement, however, and for changing his account of the incident. In April 2006, an inquest jury of a London coroner’s court returned a verdict of unlawful killing. In August 2007 the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that the British attorney general had written to his Israeli counterpart requesting a criminal investigation, on the basis that ballistic tests carried out in Israel "could only show that the bullet that killed James [Miller] did not come from the rifle barrels of the weapons that were examined." On the basis of their own ballistic analysis, the British believe the Israelis tested the wrong rifles or even switched the barrel of the offending weapon. Israel has not prosecuted Capt. al-Hayb.
There have been non-lethal shootings as well. On April 5, 2003, Israeli forces shot many rounds of machine gun fire at the face of Brian Avery, an American volunteer with the ISM in the West Bank town of Jenin. The shots broke his jaw and eye socket, and Avery sued for damages. The army refused to investigate the case, claiming that no soldiers had reported the incident. In February 2005 the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the army to reopen the case. Avery settled out of court for $150,000 in November 2008. Most recently, on March 13, 2009, 37-year old Tristan Anderson from Oakland, California suffered critical brain damage in the West Bank village of Ni’lin when Israeli forces shot him in the head with a new high-velocity tear gas canister which has been used since the December 2008 launch of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Anderson was demonstrating, along with villagers, Israelis and other internationals, against the separation barrier Israel is constructing that would effectively annex one quarter of Ni’lin’s land. A resident of Ni’lin was shot in the leg with live ammunition in the same demonstration. Anderson remains in critical condition, and his long-term prognosis is uncertain.
Rachel does not address these casualties or attempt to assess the long-term effect of the ISM’s interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since no form of resistance — non-violent or armed — was able to deter Israel’s slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009, perhaps it is fair to say that the most substantial impact of the ISM’s work was on the volunteers themselves. The film briefly explores the variety of personal and political motives that brought Rachel Corrie and her colleagues to Palestine. Among them are untutored idealism and youthful naïveté (which they themselves acknowledge in retrospect). None of them were "experts" in the history of the conflict or fully understood the complexities of the Palestinian society into which they inserted themselves. But now they have learned a hard lesson: Anyone who gets in Israel’s way may be killed.
Crossing a Line
While Ghassan Andoni and some of the ISMers demonstrate some capacity for critical reflection about Rachel Corrie’s death, the official institutions of the Bay Area Jewish community were united in rejecting such reflection. The official Jewish institutions certainly were not ready to consider Jonathan Pollak’s climactic explanation for his willingness to host ISM volunteers in his home: "I could not live in this place without resisting, not merely verbally, but by action." Pollak, an Israeli Jew, has been injured several times by the Israeli army while demonstrating non-violently in Bil’in. A soldier shot him in the head with a tear gas canister in April 2005, causing two internal brain hemorrhages and a wound requiring 23 stitches. Since the Jewish institutions have not erupted in protest over equally provocative films in the past, perhaps their over-the-top reaction to the screening of Rachel was a form of circling the wagons after the widespread international condemnation of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
The faceoff in the Bay Area Jewish community was initiated by an editorial in the Jewish weekly, J, which was particularly incensed that, since Simone Bitton was unavailable, Cindy Corrie would take questions after the screening. "Cindy Corrie’s appearance crosses a line," the J editors wrote. "The Jewish Film Festival is under no obligation to offer a microphone to Israel bashers." Suggesting that there are and ought to be "lines" marking the boundaries of "acceptable discourse" in the Jewish community, to use a term employed by the festival’s executive director Peter Stein at the screening, sounds suspiciously like the McCarthyite notion of "un-American activities." Why the elder Corrie was presumed to be an "Israel basher" the editors did not specify.
While J arrogated to itself the right to draw lines, the two leading Jewish charitable foundations in the Bay Area, Koret and Taube, pushed the panic button. The foundations attacked the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival for making "three egregious errors": First among them was "partnering with Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, two virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Both are closely associated with the International Solidarity Movement and other groups that aid and abet terror against the Jewish state. These groups cross the line for inclusion in the Jewish community." Second was "to present a film that lays blame for the accidental death of a civilian at the door of the State of Israel." And third was to "invite Cindy Corrie into our community. This bereaved mother cannot help but have a negative bias toward Israel. Why would a Jewish organization hand her a microphone and a soapbox from which to condemn Israel as Jewish audiences are expected to sit and listen politely? There is no possible counterbalance to an emotional, grieving mother."
The foundations’ rhetoric is tendentious, at best. Jewish Voice for Peace forthrightly supports selective divestment, targeting US companies that aid Israeli occupation policies, and its members have been active in the effort to induce Caterpillar to stop selling Israel the bulldozers that knock down Palestinian residences in violation of international law. The organization does go further than many Jewish anti-occupation groups in refusing to condemn more expansive boycott and divestment campaigns. Its website is articulate on the point that such endeavors, and criticism of Israel generally, are not perforce anti-Semitic or even "anti-Israel." Jewish Voice for Peace has, indeed, published a book-length refutation of that canard, Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives (2002). At the same time, the organization’s members insist on speaking out against the occupation as Jews, rather than merely as US citizens or defenders of human rights, precisely because (according to the website) "as Jews, we can make the distinction between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue to shield Israel from legitimate criticism." The foundations’ attack on the venerable Quaker peace organization, AFSC, is similarly reliant on an untenable definition of "anti-Israel" that brooks no quibble with the Jewish state’s policies. And since two key staffers of AFSC’s Middle East program in San Francisco, including Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, are Jewish, the allegation of anti-Semitism is predicated upon the insipid idea that these Jews are "self-hating."
Is Cindy Corrie in the grip of "negative bias toward Israel" and its partisans in the United States? Judging by the YouTube video of her post-film discussion with Stein and the audience, no. Asked by Stein if she understood the vehement protests against her presence, she said she regarded them as part of a "very healthy discussion" within the Jewish community. She further remarked that members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), with whom she disagrees politically, "believe they’re doing good." Her comportment was consistent with the words of Rabbi Brian Walt, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America: "If I were in [the Corries'] situation, I would imagine that the temptation to hate those who killed my daughter would be hard to resist…. Despite their daughter’s tragic death, the Corries have never spoken in a hateful way toward Israel or Jews. On the contrary, they are deeply committed to peace and to the security of all people in the conflict, Israelis and Palestinians." Indeed, the 1,200 people (mostly Jews) in the Castro Theater on July 25 seemed generally appreciative of Corrie’s remarks.
Nonetheless, the film festival organizers clearly felt the pressure mobilized by the official Jewish organizations. Five days before the festival began, board president Shana Penn resigned with five months left on a two-year term, citing "healthy differences on how to approach sensitive issues." (She will remain on the board.) In the end, the organizers allowed Michael Harris of San Francisco Voice for Israel (affiliated with the ultras of Stand With Us) to speak briefly before what he called "the Rachel Corrie hagiography" played on screen. His remarks are also on YouTube. Where Cindy Corrie was conciliatory, Harris was pugilistic, saying that Rachel "intentionally put herself in harm’s way," enumerating the names of suicide bombing victims who were doing nothing "more risky than riding a bus, or going to buy a slice of pizza or a cup of coffee" and even averring (to loud boos) that these deaths explained why the bulldozer that killed Rachel was operating in Gaza.
It is difficult to imagine that Jewish Voice for Peace or Simone Bitton would be invited to counter the presentation of a speaker from San Francisco Voice for Israel, or AIPAC, or the Israeli consulate. So were the Bay Area Jewish organizations really upset about lack of balance? The leading figures at J and the Koret and Taube Foundations certainly know that there is sharp debate among Israelis about the occupation, home demolitions and the morality of army actions, so were they really concerned with protecting the security of Israel? A more convincing hypothesis is that their outcry is about power. The official institutions of the Jewish community are built on a foundation of money (lots of it) and draw their strength from the two main pillars of American Jewish identity — Holocaust commemoration and unquestioning "support for Israel." Taking away one of these pillars would be an institutional disaster.
Although the furor over Rachel in the San Francisco Jewish community is a tempest in a teapot compared to the daily catastrophes suffered by the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it does have some significance. It demonstrates as definitively as possible that the American Jewish community is deeply split on the question of Israel-Palestine. Public opinion polls suggest that the Koret and Taube Foundations represent the minority position in the community, certainly among Bay Area Jews. More and more American Jews find themselves attracted to the moral commitment that animates Rachel, and left cold by the tactics of pressure groups that spend so much money to shut down debate over Israel and its occupation policies. And that is why the pressure groups are beginning to fail.

Comment: Read also: Thou shalt not present the Truth! Documentary sparks uproar at Jewish film fest

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/191023-Rachel-Corrie-in-Palestine-and-in-San-Francisco

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by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, August 11, 2009

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961, [1]

"My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington." Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]

"We make American military doctrine" Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]

The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur

In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence.

The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing "the Great Game," and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan.

Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged "science" of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the "World Island," let alone the world.

Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: "By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium."[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7]

Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied:

"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’"

Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"

Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, "Nonsense!"[8]

In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of "controlling" the Eurasian heartland:

For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power." (p. xiii)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)

"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)[9]

This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby: "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, "Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations."[12]

Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts.

The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence

The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. "Vassals" are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13]

The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the "agitated Muslims" which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14]

Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15]

As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16]

In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney’s Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine "Exploration Blocks." One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."[18] Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for "an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."[19]

Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called "faith-based intelligence," became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted.

Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that "Saddam was not only behind the ‘93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself."[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23]

Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit

The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich:

the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That’s not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24]

Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25]

With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was "to buy reprieve by offering bribes."[27])

To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.)

Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived "War on Terror."

Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party."[29]

Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence

Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, "set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients."[30]

Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997.

Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off:

Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]

Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as "a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects."[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times:

New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33]

The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates.

Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele,

SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism." SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmare—the "military-industrial-counterterrorism complex."[35]

(Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: "at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.")[36]

Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC’s board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC’s payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37]

SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq.

SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission’s deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC’s sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC’s Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38]

Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

that Saddam Hussein "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction" and that "military action is needed." He warns that unless America acts now "we’re going to find the world’s greatest military with its hands tied."

Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis "are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a "military analyst." It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC’s board of directors and a company stockholder….

9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take "a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure." In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39]

Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing "for centrifuges and not rocketry." Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that "During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey," (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40]

I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous.

The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander,

Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern.

Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it "empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts."[41]

Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by "the marketplace of ideas." He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42]

What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.

The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors — domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out.

“As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts…. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43]

These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources.

One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats:

During 2003-2004, she was "working for SAIC" as a force protection analyst with "SAIC’s" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was "a contractor for SAIC", specifically, "SAIC’s" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC’s Crisis Action Center.[46]

Peter Dale Scott  is a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a poet, writer, and researcher of the New World Order. Visit his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net/

Notes

[1] Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.

[2] Former SAIC manager, in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1.

[3] The Economist, July 8, 1999.

[4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9.

[5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919).

[6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999).

[7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc.

[8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Un ion, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal.

[9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40.

[10] Memorandum of February 18, 1992, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm.

[11] For specific parallels to The Grand Chessboard, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 191-2.

[12] "Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance," DefenseLink,
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289, emphasis added.

[13] Zeyno Baran, "Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency," Nixon Center, December 2004,
www.HizbutahrirIslamsPoliticalInsurgency.pdf.

[14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71).

[15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Geopolitically Speaking: Russia’s `Sphere of Influence’ – Chechnya and Beyond," Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24,
http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_brzezinski.html.
This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, "Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-Pepe-Escobar/3149.

[16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79.

[17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, "Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force," Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: " A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that ‘gave detailed energy policy recommendations’ to the task force."

[18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes," Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, "Contract Sport," New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004.

[19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; "Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century," Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added.

[20] Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?" New Yorker, May 6, 2003

[21] Michael Massing, "Now They Tell Us," New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922.

[22] Peter Bergen, "Armchair Provocateur — Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons’ favorite conspiracy theorist," Washington Monthly, December 2003,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html.

[23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie).

[24] Jon Wiener, "Obama’s Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich," Nation, August 28, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s_limits_an_interview_with_andrew_bacevich.
Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. "Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War," MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679. Peter Bergen agrees: "Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11" (Bergen, "The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages," Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."

[25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, "The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications," U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002,
www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith.pdf, 104.

[26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22.

[27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286.

[28] "Iraq Reviewing Security Firms After Blackwater Shooting," FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007,
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297153,00.html.

[29] "The former Betsy Prince — Edgar and Elsa’s daughter, Erik’s sister — married into the DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees" (Ben Van Heuvelen, "The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater," Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/).
Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006).

[30] David Isenberg , "Corporate Mercenaries – Part 2: Myths and mystery," AsiaTimes, May 19, 2004, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE20Ak02.html.

[31] David Isenberg, "Myths and mystery," Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street," Mother Jones, November 2008,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street).

[32] Douglas Jehl, "Washington Insiders’ New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq," New York Times, September 30, 2003.

[33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence’s vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush’s top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64).

[34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: "More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.’s ex-campaign manager to "take advantage of business opportunities" in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week."

[35] "SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a "stealth company" with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work" (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1).

[36] Barlett and Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow."

[37] Barlett and Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow: "Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement." Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street).

[38] Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow."

[39] Barlett and Steele, "Washington’s $8 Billion Shadow."

[40] Fritz W. Ermarth, "Colin Powell’s Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer," In the National Interest, http://inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Powell%27s%20UN%20Speech/Powell%27s%20UN%20speech%20ermarth.html. Ermarth’s remarks were also posted by Laurie Mylroie, "Fritz Ermarth, Iraq & Al Qaeda, In The National Interest," February 5, 2003, www.mail-archive.com/sam11@erols.com/msg00040.html.

[41] Anna Leander, "The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies," Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from " sources in the Bush administration" an allegation that "members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic" ("Iraq ‘behind US anthrax outbreaks,’" Observer, October 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan6).

[42] Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security (Summer 2004). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v029/29.1kaufmann.html. Neither SAIC nor Diligence is mentioned in his essay.

[43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344.

[44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards."

[45]  Phil Leggiere, “Napolitano Praises Fusion Centers.” HSToday, March 13, 2009, http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/7616/149/ .

[46] Assange, “The spy who billed me twice.”

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott

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by Patrick O’Connor.

Global Research, August 11, 2009

World Socialist Web Site

US military and intelligence agencies are studying the strategic implications of global warming, including preparations for military interventions, the New York Times reported Sunday.

“The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say,” the Times explained. “Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.”

The article noted that, while there has been previous discussion within the military and intelligence establishment on the implications of climate change, “The Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.” Amanda Dory, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning. She told the New York Times that she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking on the issue in the last year.

War games and intelligence studies have reportedly identified several vulnerable regions—including sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia—which over the next two and three decades face food and water shortages and severe flooding, potentially “demanding an American humanitarian relief or military response”.

The National Defense University, a Defense Department funded institution, last December conducted an exercise examining the potential strategic implications of a major flood in Bangladesh sending hundreds of thousands of refugees into India, and triggering religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases, and widespread infrastructure damage.

The Defense Department is now including climate change in its strategic calculations, utilizing climate modeling based on advanced Navy and Air Force weather programs and research conducted by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In addition, the New York Times explained: “The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.”

As well as examining the potential impact of climate change on food and water supplies, disease, and mass migration, some of the official studies carried out have pointed to more direct implications for the military.

Many key installations are vulnerable to rising sea levels and intensified storms. The headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet, located in Norfolk, Virginia, could be submerged with just a three-foot ocean level rise. Similarly, the US air base on the British island protectorate of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean lies just above current sea levels. Diego Garcia has played a critical role in US imperialism’s drive to control the Middle East’s oil and gas reserves; the air base provided the platform for the air bombardment of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in both 2003 and the 1991 Gulf War.

Washington’s concern over the long term implications of climate change is directly bound up with concerns over its declining global hegemony and control over key resources in the face of challenges from rival powers in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

The New York Times noted: “Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be defended and undersea resources that are already the focus of international competition.”

Last year the National Intelligence Council (NIC) issued its first assessment of the national security implications of global warming. NIC Chairman and deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis Thomas Fingar appeared before a joint meeting of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence and Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on June 25, 2008. He noted that the US required “access to critical raw materials such as oil and gas”, and warned that climate change could affect this supply, “with significant geopolitical consequences”.

Fingar discussed the strategic implications in different parts of the world, particularly emphasizing Africa. “The United States’ new military area of responsibility—Africa Command—is likely to face extensive and novel operational requirements,” he concluded.

Global warming has featured prominently in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s seven-country tour of Africa now underway. In South Africa, the New York Times reported, “Mrs. Clinton said she wanted the nation to play a larger role not just in Africa but on the global stage as well, helping in the battle against climate change, for instance.”

Democratic Senator and failed 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry highlighted Africa in his remarks cited by Sunday’s New York Times article. He argued that the ongoing conflict in southern Sudan was the outcome of drought and desert expansion. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.

What is being prepared here is a humanitarian and even environmental pretext for military interventions aimed at advancing Washington’s strategic and economic interests.

Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, convened a Senate hearing in July to hear testimony from military and intelligence analysts on the global security implications of climate change. Introducing the discussion, Kerry declared: “Just as 9-11 taught us the painful lesson that oceans could not protect us from terror, today we are deluding ourselves if we believe that climate change will stop at our borders…. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system.”

The Massachusetts senator told the New York Times that he has been emphasizing the “national security” issue in his efforts to persuade other senators to back the Obama administration’s “cap and trade” legislation limiting carbon dioxide emissions.

In June the House narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which mandates a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 4 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. This is far below what is recommended by climate scientists with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—in 2007 they called for advanced economies to cut emissions by between 25 to 40 percent over the same period.

Some climate scientists have since argued that the latest climate data indicates that the 2007 IPCC recommendation significantly underestimates what is required. Even if Obama’s “cap and trade” scheme is enacted, in other words, there is little likelihood that severe environmental consequences, with the accompanying geo-strategic effects, will be avoided.

It remains to be seen whether the “cap and trade” legislation will be put to the Senate as scheduled in October, and if it is, whether enough votes can be found in favor. Many Democrats with close ties to mining companies and other fossil fuel industries are reluctant to endorse any emissions trading scheme that involves the major corporate polluters incurring even minimal costs.

The New York Times cited an earlier statement issued by General Anthony Zinni, former head of the Central Command: “We will pay for this one way or another. We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.”

Patrick O’Connor is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Patrick O’Connor

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