“If you gain every morsel of your bread from the powers that be, and you wish to be sure of getting that little bit extra, then you are wise to give up thinking altogether,”
Nadezhda Mandelstam, cited in “Democracy, Fascism, and the New World Order, ” Ivo Mosley.
July 07, 2007
By Seth Sandronsky
[The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media By Lila Rajiva (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2005), 224 pp. Paper, $14.95.]
When the Iraq war began in 2003, Lila Rajiva quit her job teaching school. Based in Baltimore, the author tracked press coverage as a web activist and sent out anti-war petitions. In late April 2004, the U.S. TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” ran photos of naked Iraqi men, sexually disgraced, in detention at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Rajiva penned a series of web articles on publications such as Dissident Voice and Counterpunch. They considered the absence of imprisoned Iraqi women in the torture photos, and how the media had covered – and covered up – Abu Ghraib and other reports of torture in the war on terror since the attacks of September 11 generally. Web journalism surfaced as a popular press during the lively 1999 street protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.
In The Language of Empire, Rajiva studies the factors and forces behind Iraqi detainees’ torture, shining a light on corporate journalism and its role as a service provider to the second Bush administration, which claimed, falsely and in violation of international law, that the U.S. had to go to war with Iraq, on the grounds of its involvement in the September 11 attacks and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
With a keen eye, Rajiva clarifies and demystifies the official narrative of the U.S. forces (including private contractors), to show how, corporeally, psychologically and sexually, they tortured Iraqi detainees. For the record, a partial list of such torture included asphyxiation, actual and simulated drowning and execution, rape and sodomy, prolonged incarceration in putrid, tiny metal cages in extreme weather and desecration of the Qur’an. She begins by analyzing circumstantial evidence from the scandal at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqis had also been tortured during the regime of Saddam Hussein. And she casts a critical eye on U.S. civilian and military policy-makers, broadly defined as the neo-conservative faction in the second Bush administration. Questions of what they knew and when they knew it remain unanswered, as the US occupation of Iraq officially ended in June 2004.
One of the convicted, photographed torturers of racially brutalized Iraqis at Abu Ghraib was Charles Graner, a former prison guard in Pennsylvania’s maximum-security penitentiary where black author and journalist Mumia Abu Jamal has also been held for years on death row. Crucially, Rajiva untangles the class-based media attacks on Graner as a kind of rogue redneck, cast as the proverbial bad apple in an otherwise pristine barrel and sentenced to eight years for his crimes. This framing of the scandal, according to Rajiva, had the partial effect of absolving U.S. policy-makers of legal and moral accountability – though one high-level official involved in authorizing the torture of Iraqi detainees was Michael Chertoff, head of the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department. He was later promoted to head of Homeland Security…..
[First published in Race & Class in January 2007]
My Comment:
Seth Sandronksy, hat tip to him, was one of the first and very few journalists (besides Jeff St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn, Ward Churchill, and Vijay Prashad) to take notice of the book in 2005, when it came out. I wrote about how the torture fit into the general scheme of things – the first to do so, I believe. I don’t recall any other magazine even deigning to give the book a review. Seth was so kind as to write this in 2007 when he noticed the lack of reviews.
Another friend, Suhayl Saadi, the gifted Pakistani-born Scottish novelist (whose novel Psychoraag is reckoned one of the 100 top Scottish novels) , attempted to get a review in the UK, but there were no takers because – this was the reason they gave — the book was not stocked on regular book shelves. But it was available and selling quite reasonably even without reviewer notice, on Amazon. In fact. it was at the top of the political best sellers in a couple of countries abroad. And nearly 300 universities in the US and abroad have it on their shelves, including Princeton, Yale Law School, Harvard, Columbia, Heidelberg, Monash, and many others. (See WorldCat for a list that is almost, but not quite, complete) and it has been on the reading list of St. Andrew’s University and Amherst in political science undergraduate courses. So you have a book which is:
1. The first book about the media coverage of the torture scandal
2. The first book to state that the absence of the women in the photos was deliberate and critical
3. The first to analyze the hearings and document the discrepancies in the testimony of Rumsfeld and Cambone
4. The first to address the use of the Nick Berg beheading in covering up the scandal (the first book dealing with Berg, as well)
A book
5. Published almost TWO years before the recent (March 2007) Taguba inteview, which reveals that the women’s photos are in fact out there
6. Written and previewed THREE years before it (see my article in Counterpunch on Christian Zionism, excerpted from the last chapter book in January 2005 when I completed and submitted the manuscript).
Now we have the confirmation from Taguba that, yes, there are hundreds of photos, including many pictures of rapes of women and worse. as Iraqi reports have claimed all along.
7. Published by a well known socialist press
8. Written quite accessibly, but in a measured way. I tried to keep it thoughtful rather than sensational to minimize the offensiveness, since I am a non-native. Nor is it arcane, although it is pretty analytical.
9. I write regularly for websites, work with a well known financial writer, and have been interviewed on dozens of progressive radio stations; I graduated from a respected international relations department, am a Christian, not a Muslim, and a 15 year immigrant There is nothing in that resume or background that would suggest any ulterior motive.
And everything I state in the book is sourced and carefully researched.
The book was also
8. Blurbed by some well-known names.
9. Submitted to dozens of progressive outlets and writers to review.
And besides a few activists and smaller magazines, not one of them wrote a review. Good or bad.
Nothing really unusual there. I am just pointing out to people how these things work.
So why the sudden printing of this piece? Maybe, the Taguba interview with Hersh earlier this year and sounds from establishment figures threatening more revelations (the CIA disclosures might be one rumble); maybe, some other establishment pundits now turning up the heat – prompted this. Who knows?
Notice how all of these things happen in tandem — the alarm goes off and mainstream and fringe, government and critics, all rush out of their opposing corners of the field and get into a public scrimmage..
Actually, I should say that several people asked me to send the MS in, and then never reviewed it. Or even answered my email inquiries. That might just be standard DC treatment of small fry by big fry. Only now I find that couple of them have gone on to use some of the material in their own work without citing their source.
News these days is a commodity — of which there is only so much in circulation. Too much can send down prices… The establishment would not be able to make their own roles in the business central and keep the thread of the story firmly in their hands.
So that, friends, is how kinder, gentler censorship works. No gulags for writers here. Only tenure denials and years of low-paid untenured work (ala Norman Finkelstein), or isolation and the intellectual cold shoulder (Chomsky, until he got too famous to be ignored), or aspersions of antisemitism.
So what is my theory about all of this?
A combination of several things.
(And here I am not talking about the commercial issue – the fact that it’s really hard to get anything published at all, let alone sell it or review it.
Or that authors are pretty much on their own with publicity…
Putting that aside – it boils down to this:
I am not the right person to say what I said. And I am not saying it in the only way it would be acceptable.
For one thing, because I wasn’t born in this country.
Fair enough.
Atrocity stories – especially dealing with intelligence – are delicate ones to negotiate, even for natives. In some countries, you would be hauled off to jail or shot, I’m sure, for venturing into that territory. But those are dictatorships or outright police states, like North Korea. I hope that that’s not now the standard for constitutional republics.
That is why I didn’t try to write an investigative book. I doubt if anyone would have told me anything news worthy, or if they had, it would have been vetted so much it wouldn’t have been any use.
I wrote an analysis instead that might have some merit even when the mainstream investigative reports came out. One that wouldn’t become dated.
Meanwhile, Anglophone journalists who know NOTHING about the history of a country, don’t speak its language, have never lived in it for any length of time, or know its conventions, get to go in with camera crews to depict anything that goes on there, analyze sensitive events of all kinds, in any way they want, with the whole force of network TV behind them and with US laws and armed forces to back up any thing they do ,if necessary.
Night after night, they can pound those images onto screens all over the world. However wrong their stories are. And the same goes for Anglophone scholars. They can hold forth on just about anything, and no one questions any of it.
[ I don’t deny that people are probably doing that in other languages too. But the difference is, those countries aren’t hyperpowers with nuclear weapons].
No matter how contrary to what’s in front of their eyes, people bow and scrape and suck it all in. Not just here, but abroad. No one holds a gun to anyone’s head to make them do it either. But they all still fall in line. Even people who know what’s going on. Why?
It’s not that people are silenced — it’s that they only speak in turn. They moderate their views and tune them to the orchestra. Why? Because funding depends on it. It doesn’t negate the good they do. It doesn’t mean they aren’t well-meaning, thoughtful, sincere people who know what’s going on. But it means they have to toe a line that they didn’t get to draw. They could lose their jobs, otherwise. They speak — but they are also spoken through.
Which is why, it’s the citizens – the ordinary folks on the ground – who have to take up the burden of truth in any society.
I’m the wrong person as well, because I am unaffiliated. I don’t write my stories for any reason except they seem important to me.
Sure, I have a boss. But I don’t subscribe to everything he thinks or says and he is nice enough not to make me. No fear of university boards or tenure committees. And while we differ on many economic and financial issues, I’ve actually found him to be a fair-minded and courageous person, given his circumstances. And his antiwar stance is more humane and scrupulous than many more close to my way of thinking.
On the left, businessmen are all supposed to be war-mongering hypocrites. That is a myth. As much a myth that intellectuals are only concerned about the public good rather than about their own careers and vanity.
I’d rather side with people of principle, even if I disagree with half of what they say, than with unscrupulous people who might be in full and complete agreement with everything I say. If we stopped listening only to what we want to hear and responded instead to the quality of person we were dealing with, we would hear things and learn things we did not know. Otherwise, we become prisoners of our own logic and victims of our own limitations. Wisdom comes often against either our logic, or our will, or even — at any given moment – our conscience. For, dormant parts of our own being are awakened by contact with what is alive in others…
On some social issues I think I’m quite close to progressive positions. But for the rest, I believe in free enterprise; it’s just that I don’t think you have much of that going on now. That far I agree with a lot of the Marxist diagnosis. But not much of the prognosis.
I always reside quite gingerly wherever I am, since I don’t subscribe to more than half the dogmas that can be found on any given site — and even then I take them – as I take most theories – with a grain of salt.
You don’t get to pick who publishes you always, or why. And I have to respect the people who do, however different their views.
I see no reason to hug in a global kumbaya before we stop slaughtering each other. We can keep a healthy space from each other and still survive.We only need to do our own thinking for ourselves…
“The Killing Machine: Reflections from a target of the CIA,”
Fidel Castro, June 9, 2007.
“It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day. No coherent explanation was given. Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.The first package of declassified documents goes by the name of “The Family Jewels”; it consists of 702 pages on illegal CIA actions between 1959 and 1973. About 100 pages of this part have been deleted. It deals with actions that were not authorized by any law, plots to assassinate other leaders, experiments with drugs on human beings to control their minds, spying on civil activists and journalists, among other similar activities that were expressly prohibited.
The documents began to be gathered together 14 years after the first of the events took place, when then CIA director, James Schlessinger became alarmed about what the press was writing, especially all the articles by Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein published in The Washington Post, already mentioned in the “Manifesto to the People of Cuba”. The agency was being accused of promoting spying in the Watergate Hotel with the participation of its former agents Howard Hunt and James McCord.
In May 1973, the Director of the CIA was demanding that “all the main operative officials of this agency must immediately inform me on any ongoing or past activity that might be outside of the constituting charter of this agency”. Schlessinger, later appointed Head of the Pentagon, had been replaced by William Colby. Colby was referring to the documents as “skeletons hiding in a closet”. New press revelations forced Colby to admit the existence of the reports to interim President Gerald Ford in 1975. The New York Times was denouncing agency penetration of antiwar groups. The law that created the CIA prevented it from spying inside the United States.
Kissinger himself warned that “blood would flow” if other actions were known, and he immediately added: “For example, that Robert Kennedy personally controlled the operation for the assassination of Fidel Castro”. The President’s brother was then Attorney General of the United States. He was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968 elections, which facilitated Nixon’s election for lack of a strong candidate. The most dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he had reached the conviction that John Kennedy had been victim of a conspiracy. Thorough investigators, after analyzing the wounds, the caliber of the shots and other circumstances surrounding the death of the President, reached the conclusion that there had been at least three shooters. Solitary Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have been the only shooter. I found that rather striking. Excuse me for saying this but fate turned me into a shooting instructor with a telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries. I spent months practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a stationary one it disappears from view with each shot and so you need to look for it all over again in fractions of a second.
Oswald wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country’s embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn’t authorized. They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby, –a man openly linked to the Mafia– unable to deal with so much pain and sadness, as he said, assassinated him, of all places, in a precinct full police agents.
Subsequently, in international functions or on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I met with the aggrieved Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The former president’s son, who was a very small child when his father was killed, visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.
The young man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically died in an airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to Martha’s Vineyard with his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue with any of those relatives. In contrast, I pointed out that if the president-elect had then been Nixon instead of Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs disaster we would have been attacked by the land and sea forces escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries would have paid a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited himself to saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For the record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs adventure; he was led there by Eisenhower’s military reputation and the recklessness of his ambitious vice-president.
I remember that, exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean Daniel. He told me that he was bringing a message from President Kennedy. He said to me that in essence he had told him: “You are going to see Castro. I would like to know what he thinks about the terrible danger we just experienced of a thermonuclear war. I want to see you again as soon as you get back.” “Kennedy was very active; he seemed to be a political machine”, he added, and we were not able to continue talking as someone rushed in with the news of what had just happened. We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought was now pointless.
Certainly I lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one that would take the first strike, but we did not agree with the concessions that were made to the United States. I have already spoken of this before.
Kennedy had emerged from the crisis with greater authority. He came to recognize the enormous sacrifices of human lives and material wealth made by the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism. The worst of the relations between the United States and Cuba had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn’t resigned himself to the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile Crisis. The blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination plots multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.
After the Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor would we have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle for socialism. Cuba would have never severed relations with the USSR as it had been asked to do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware of what a war could be using weapons of mass destruction they would have ended the Cold War earlier and differently. At least that’s how we felt then, when there was still no talk of global warming, broken imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and the sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to the youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.
President Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency. “We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve it”, he said.
As a result of the Commission’s investigations that were led by Senator Frank Church, President Ford signed an executive order which expressly prohibited the participation of American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.
The documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my assassination.
Details are also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at least seven years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with the mission to infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate “the international activities of radicals and black militants”. The Agency compiled more than 300,000 names of American citizens and organizations and extensive files on 7,200 persons.
According to The New York Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American anti-War movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he ordered the CIA to produce evidence.
The documents recognize, furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists like Jack Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and carried out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of human beings to certain drugs.
In a memorandum sent to Colby in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant to John McCone, CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about discussions in the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: “I know that whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were transcribed. During the McCone years there were microphones in his regular offices, the inner office, the dining room, the office in the East building, and in the study of his home on White Haven Street. I don’t know if anyone is ready to talk about this, but the information tends to be leaked, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable in this case”.
The secret transcripts of the CIA directors could contain a great number of “jewels”. The National Security Archive is already requesting these transcripts.
A memo clarifies that the CIA had a project called OFTEN which would collect “information about dangerous drugs in American companies”, until the program was terminated in the fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports that manufacturers of commercial drugs “had passed” drugs to the CIA which had been “refused due to adverse secondary effects”.
As part of the MKULTRA program, the CIA had given LSD and other psycho-active drugs to people without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive, Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency Mind Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having made available the poison that was going to be used in the assassination attempt on Patrice Lumumba.
CIA employees assigned to MHCHAOS the operation that carried out surveillance on American opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents expressed “a high level of resentment” for having been ordered to carry out such missions.
Nonetheless, there is a series of interesting matters revealed in these documents, such as the high level at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken.
The technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use of computers.
For The New York Times, large censored sections reveal that the CIA still cannot expose all the skeletons in its closets, and many activities developed in operations abroad, checked over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a presidential commission, are not in the documents.
Howard Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the “jewels” compiled by his office. He lists eight cases including the recruiting of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro but they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn’s initial list: two and a half pages.
“The No. 1 Jewel of the CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the second one is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro by Roselli,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive who requested the declassification of “The Family Jewels” 15 years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is notable that the administration which has declassified the least information in the history of the United States, and which has even started a process of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the decision to make these revelations.
I believe that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said: “The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very different Agency.”
Needless to say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions within the very United States.
The New York Times wrote that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the revelation of the documents is an attempt to distract attention from recent controversies and scandals plaguing the CIA and an Administration that is living through some of its worst moments of unpopularity.
The declassification could also be an attempt at showing, in the early stages of the electoral process that the Democratic administrations were as bad, or worse, than Mr. Bush’s.
In pages 11 to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can read:
“In August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with the objective of determining whether the Security Office had agents who could help in a confidential mission that required gangster-style action. The target of the mission was Fidel Castro.
“Given the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only to a small group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was informed and he gave it his approval. Colonel J. C. King, Head of the Western Hemisphere Division, was also informed, but all the details were deliberately concealed from officials of Operation JMWAVE. Even though some officials of Communications (Commo) and the Technical Services Division (TSD) took part in initial planning phases, they were not aware of the mission’s purpose.
“Robert A. Maheu was contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and he was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type elements as a first step for achieving the desired goal.
“Mr. Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him informally through clients, but he had been told that he was a member of the upper echelons of the ‘syndicate’ and that he was controlling all the ice machines on the Strip. In Maheu’s opinion, if Roselli was in effect a member of the Clan, he undoubtedly had connections that would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.
“Maheu was asked to get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him that recently he had been contracted by a client who represented several international business companies, which were suffering enormous financial losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the elimination of Castro would be a solution to their problem and they were ready to pay $ 150,000 for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be made perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. government knew nothing, nor could it know anything, about this operation.
“This was presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of New York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved but after Maheu’s persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a friend, Sam Gold, who knew “some Cubans”. Roselli made it clear that he didn’t want any money for his part in all this, and he believed that Sam would do likewise. Neither of these people was ever paid with Agency money.
“During the week of September 25, Maheu was introduced to Sam who was living at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. It was not until several weeks after meeting Sam and Joe who was introduced as courier operating between Havana and Miami that he saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade. They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante, respectively. Both were on the Attorney General’s list of the ten most wanted. The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in Chicago and Al Capone’s heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban operations of the Cosa Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office upon learning this information.
“After analyzing the possible methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of deadly pill, something to be put into Castro’s food or drink, this would be a much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible candidate in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been receiving bribery payments in the gambling racket, and who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
“The TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal pills.
“Joe delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta appears to have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission. He suggested another candidate who made several unsuccessful.”
Everything that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe well, dear readers, the methods that were already being used by the United States to rule the world.
I remember that during the early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He was a respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The decades have gone by and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I can’t lay my hands on information to immediately prove what happened to him. Accept my apologies if I involuntarily have offended a relative or a descendent, whether the person I have mentioned is guilty or not.
The empire has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only of the CIA and its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive intelligence and security super-structures, and he has transformed all the air, sea and land forces into instruments of world power that take war, injustice, hunger and death to any part of the globe, in order to educate its inhabitants in the exercise of democracy and freedom. The American people are gradually waking up to this reality.
“You cannot fool all of the people all of the time”, said Lincoln.
“Pentagon whistleblower still paying the price for telling the truth”
WASHINGTON–From a cramped motor home in a Montana campground where Internet access is as spotty as the trout, Richard Barlow wakes each morning to battle Washington.
Once a top intelligence officer at the Pentagon who helped uncover Pakistan’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Barlow insisted on telling the truth, and it led to his undoing.
He complained in 1989 that top officials in the administration of President George H.W. Bush–including the deputy assistant secretary of defense–were misleading Congress about the Pakistani program. He was fired and stripped of his security clearances. His intelligence career was destroyed; his marriage collapsed.
Federal investigations found Barlow was unfairly fired, winning him sympathy from dozens of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and public interest groups. But for 17 years, he has fought without success to gain a federal pension, blocked at every turn by legal and political obstacles also faced by other federal intelligence whistle-blowers.”
LR: And who were these top officials? Stephen J. Hadley, Paul D. Wolfowitz…..Dick Cheney — all reincarnated in the Bush II administration and all guilty of manipulating intelligence on the Iraq war to fit political goals.
“This is such an extraordinary case,” Brian said. “He was trying to say ‘Wait a minute, Congress needs to be told the truth because they’re making important decisions about nuclear proliferation,’ and the guy is living in a trailer.”
More by Lindsey Layton at the Washington Post.
Now, here is my thought:
Could there be some people in government — stated policy to the contrary — who gain by nuclear proliferation?
Of course there could be…..more later….
Short Cuts
– J. Hoberman
From the London Review Bookshop, courtesty of Lew Rockwell.
In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK.
It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell’s death in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance in the operation – possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell’s widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real.
Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of Hollywood’s Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis de Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine’s innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called ‘journalistic features’ for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI’s role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13 Rue Madeleine, celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS director, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, resulted in the organisation’s being disguised as an intelligence outfit called ‘0-77’.
De Rochemont subsequently became an independent producer affiliated with the Reader’s Digest. In 1951, while preparing a new FBI collaboration, Walk East on Beacon (adapted from an article by J. Edgar Hoover originally published in the Digest), he was recruited by the CIA’s blandly titled Office of Policy Co-Ordination to produce an animated Animal Farm. The CIA was already engaged in spreading the Orwellian gospel – as was the clandestine Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. (Both agencies had been engaged in making translations and even comic-book versions of Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor were the CIA and the IRD the only interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of Animal Farm’s film rights.
The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial ‘passing’ drama Lost Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and, given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his ‘investors’ had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team’s proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953, but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more aggressively ‘political’ voice-over narration and were concerned that Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as too sympathetic.
Most problematic, however, was Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm’s mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which – abandoning Truman’s aim of containing Communism – planned a ‘roll back’, at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script’s many advisors put it, Animal Farm’s ending should be one where the animals ‘get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors’.
Animal Farm’s world premiere was held at the Paris Theatre in December 1954, then as now Manhattan’s poshest movie-house, and was followed by a gala reception at the United Nations. The movie received respectful reviews – as it did when it opened several months later in London – but performed poorly at the box office. (Its major precursor as a ‘serious’ animation, Disney’s 1943 collaboration with the aviator Alexander de Seversky, Victory through Air Power, was also a flop.) Halas and Batchelor did achieve a reasonable approximation of stretchy, rounded Disney-style character animation but, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed, ‘the shock of straight and raw political satire is made more grotesque in the medium of cartoon.’ This was a dark cuteness. While praising Animal Farm as ‘technically first-rate’, Crowther concluded his review by advising parents to not ‘make the mistake of thinking it is for little children, just because it is a cartoon.’
Actually, Animal Farm was ultimately seen mainly by schoolchildren – particularly in West Germany. Possibly the movie was perceived by this captive audience as an unaccountably dour and violent version of Walt Disney’s Dumbo. But, however the CIA’s fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with ‘help from the outside’) was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm’s European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising.”
I did a piece on this in Countercurrents on the CIA and modern art.
“One should not be too straightforward. Go and see the forest. The straight trees are cut down, the crooked ones are left standing.”
Kautilya, Indian political philosopher of the third century,
Arguments about the use of the Holocaust in public debate don’t constitute an “intra-Jewish fight.” It would be much more accurate to say that they involve questions of state policy in this country (and in Israel) and of propaganda in the west at large — an issue which affects ALL writers, journalists, thinkers, intellectuals, scholars and even citizens who just want to be informed accurately — not simply Jews.
It amazes me how so many Anglophone intellectuals (even well-meaning ones) feel completely qualified to analyze atrocities and abuses anywhere in the world, loudly and superfically (if not downright incorrectly), often with the sketchiest and most second-hand knowledge (gleaned from the English language writings of their own DC-N. York journalist buddies or from scholars at various “prestigious” universities, all sharing exactly the same myopic viewpoint ).
A notable recent example is Martha Nussbaum, whose latest book on India (preparatory, I imagine, to humanitarian bombing, somewhere down the line) can only annoy anyone who knows anything about the subject. When it comes to their own backyard, however, these soi-disant arbiters of universal values frigidly ignore views that aren’t self-selected, insular and distinctly obsequious to their pet theories about life outside hard cover. Prizes, tenures, sinecures, reviews, cocktail parties and the rest of the glitz of intellectual life follow in lock step. A nice system….
Now, good for those who make their living from it – I don’t knock them.
As long as they remember that’s all it is – a living. A way of paying their bills that has little do with the real life of the mind — which might sooner take place in some scorching megapolis abroad or ghetto stink-hole here than at one of their blow-dried soirees. And might take place silently as much as it does vocally.
On the outside, we know this. On the outside, we know it is their self-regarding attitude that makes mainstream idealogues less than credible, less than admirable in the eyes of ordinary human beings. The criticism of these “smatterers” is always within a select framework, in which they and they alone are true subjects.
A fitting response is to hold their opinions in equal disdain. A favorable review from one of them should be treated much as one treats an alarming bug of some kind….you hope you’ll get through, but it might be the beginning of a fatal contamination…
Is this a viable position for a struggling writer? Yes, indeed.
Blogging makes it possible for books to sell and sell well even without reviews from the establishment. Fellow bloggers and dissidents are willing to say a good word here and there. A reader. An unknown collegaue. The pleasure of having the good will and encouragement of those who share your sympathies and your aloneness is something surely far more satisfying than the brittle praise of people whose main concern is pleasing the right people and stepping on the obscure in their frantic rush to the limelight.
In fact, a new ambition — I hope to forego a publisher altogether and publish directly. Perhaps those two lengthy chapter on media ownership in this country that were cut out summarily (would offend too may people, they said), will see the light that way.
So, what has this to do with Finkelstein?
Everything.
The central issue in this country and in many western countries is not globalization or imperialism; it is not torture or the CIA; it is not humanitarian intervention…or realpolitik…or peacekeeping.. or even war.
The central issue is brainwashing. Whether it is at universities or in the press or in think-tanks; whether in war or in peace-time. Whether the subject is Israel or imperialism or the family or women or money or IQ tests or immigration or race.
The issue now is how we think. Or don’t. And what we get to think about. Who does it for us. Why. And where it is leading us.
“Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who directed the federal program to compensate relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will oversee the distribution of the $7 million that has been donated to Virginia Tech after the April campus massacre, university officials said Thursday.”
More here at the New York Times.
Well, now, this is nice ‘n all…but is 7 million serious money, taking into consideration everything? Let’s see. Our math skills are a wee bit rusty — so please correct us, if needed — but here’s what we figure:
“32 who were killed, about 30 people who were injured during the incident and an untold number of people who sustained psychological harm , ” says the Times gravely.
That would be 62 physically injured… plus, let’s say, six hundred (that’s the ‘untold’ part) for the others. 700 altogether. OK – that’s 7 million minus two zeros (pardon my antiquated methods here…)- which is 70,000. Divided by 7, that would be $10,000 apiece.
A pittance.
But, obviously we have to increase that sum for the dead and physically injured and cut it down by an equal amount for the others. Let’s say we give a $1,000 each to the psychologically damaged. That’s 600 times 1000 or $600,000 there, which is $6,400,000 for the rest. Now we get $64,000 for each physically injured victim.
Hmmm.. that’s more than many sparrows, for sure, but in the circumstances, not too much more.
Are there any other sources that might be tapped?
Says the Times, “state funds typically pay between $2,500 and $5,000.”
Not so good.
Especially when the Times also tells us that 1 million of the 7 has already been spoken for:
“Approximately $1 million of the total donations have been designated by donors toward specific uses, leaving the balance for general use, including distributions.”
Oh?
What’s ‘general use’ ? Who knows. ..more ceremonies…a fund to keep the President’s PR machine going…more pepper spray for the police….could be anything.
But, let’s be charitable and assume that it’s all meant for the victims.
So back up a bit and do that whole divvying with 6 million, not 7. Or, easier yet, just make it 500 psychologically injured and 100 physically, or 600 altogether. And we still only get about $55,000 for each physically injured person.
That’s a rough and ready calculation. But you get the picture. A lawsuit would do a whole lot better for the victims.
Oh, but unlike the 9-11 deal, the victims could still sue, says the Times.
True. But, considering how high the barriers to suing are in the state school already, I wonder if paying off the victims doesn’t just raise them just that much more.
And the point isn’t only money, is it? These parents know that nothing is going to bring back their children. But a lawsuit might make the state and the school accountable. It might prevent other parents losing their children in the same way again.
And it might tell us what really happened at V-Tech on April 16.
“Center-stage in the upcoming debate are two pieces of legislation that would amend the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006 to “restore” the habeas corpus rights banned by that law.
In the Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and the Committee’s top Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, have introduced the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007. The measure would restore habeas corpus protections by repealing provisions of the MCA. The legislation was favorably reported out by the Judiciary Committee in May.
In the House, Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced legislation that would uphold the principle of habeas corpus by amending the MCA to allow individuals detained, often for many years without formal charges, to have their day in court.”
More at The World According to Bill Fisher.
What the new bills seek to do is to undo the worst part of the Military Commissions Act, under which the executive (i.s. the President and his advisors) got to determine — on their lonesome — who an enemy combatant was and got to strip him of all protection of federal laws.
That meant, he or she could be “disappeared” without so much as a by-your-leave.
Which is exactly what makes a police state….
Habeas Corpus, by the way, is the centuries old jewel of common law that has gone strong from 1215 to….well, until 2006….
“The MCA was rushed through Congress in September to overturn a Supreme Court decision that struck down Bush’s military tribunals and scorning of the Geneva Conventions. The new law -far more dangerous than the more controversial Patriot Act- is perhaps the biggest disgrace Congress has enacted since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane, notes, “The act grants fewer rights to defendants than the Nazis got at Nuremberg,”
said James Bovard in December 2006 at the American Conservative.
My Comment:
It’s interesting that John McCain, who was tortured in Vietnam, doesn’t think torture is the way to go. Guess he wouldn’t know, but a bunch of armchair theorists would.
The US managed to survive a world-wide communist threat (complete with a nuclear arsenal and super power status) for several decades without dismantling the constitution at home or violating anti-torture laws; but a few home-made bombs now — .and the big brave government is quaking. I don’t buy it. The anti-terror laws are a power grab…..nothing more or less, and people are too riled up by propaganda to see it.
By the way, do read the recently released CIA papers (far from exhaustive, of course, and heavily redacted) and you can see just how well covert ops and so-called extra-constitutional methods work (forget about the legality or morality, for a moment). Short answer is — they don’t. There is no information torture can get, which you can’t get from good research and analysis. Before dismantling the constitution and subverting the laws, why don’t they try hiring some trained Arab speakers. Do you know how few people they actually have? Here’s a quote from an article about it:
“Of the 1,000 employees of the massive new US Embassy inside the Green Zone bubble in Baghdad, there are – wait for it – SIX who are fluent in Arabic. In a very real sense, that pitiful number could be a metaphor for one of the most serious flaws in the entire Iraq adventure. We invaded a country about which we knew virtually nothing. Not only didn’t we know the Arabic language, we knew nothing about Iraq’s religious sects, tribes, culture, sensitivities, customs, traditions, mores, or the Byzantine interrelationships among all these attributes. And that predicament is not limited to the State Department, which runs the new embassy. It is also true of the armed services, the CIA, and all the many other parts of our national security apparatus.”
That’s from The World According to Bill Fisher, who’s run economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years.
The experience of countries who’ve suffered years of terrorism (about ten times more than the US or UK has) – such as India — shows that terror laws don’t work, as I point out in this article; they end up harming innocent people and letting the government control the population even more. Other countries are not setting out on unending wars and dismantling all the legal protections of their citizens just because of a few terror attacks. I thought the west was supposed to be the model for civil liberties. Guess it isn’t any more.
The working rule is — the means you use to tackle a problem have to be proportionate to the crime. When you have a murderer loose, you don’t bomb the entire neighborhood to catch him. You also don’t torture people to get information about him.
Terrorists aren’t even simple murderers – they are political actors, mostly. So those rules should go double for them.
They are – whether we see it that way or not – people with political grievances, who are conducting war by other means…..just like those pilots who go into countries whose air defensives have been destroyed and carpet bomb civililans. I guess if that happened in the US – people here would fight back by any means too. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
We did not torture a psychopath like Ted Bundy. Why should we torture terrorists who are rational actors? Here’s the logic — terrorists are out to destroy our freedoms, so let’s give our freedoms up on our own, before the terrorists take them away – that’s a rather odd argument, I think.
And where are those freedoms now, anyway? Besides running our mouths on blogs, I can’t off-hand think of many ways we are all that free these days. Your property can be confiscated, the government can open your mail, tap your phones, look up your financial information, deny you work, prosecute you and jail you – under so-called terror laws – for just about anything — without due process. And they can strip you of all your rights and declare you a non-citizen, while they’re at it.
Who benefits?
And why worry about terrorists wanting to dismantle this country, when its own citizens –from its financiers and politicians down to the population – are doing a pretty good job on their own……
Explosives officers discovered the fuel and nails attached to a “potential means of detonation,” inside the vehicle. Officers “courageously” disabled the trigger by hand, he said. Security sources told CNN that the “relatively crude device” in the first car contained at least 200 liters, or about 50 gallons, of fuel in canisters.
You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.”
More from terrorism expert Larry Johnson at No Quarter
and a word of caution from John Chuckman at Counterpunch.
Just a coincidence, of course, that all this happened just after Gordon Brown, taking over from Tony Blair, made it clear that he was no slouch either in the occupation of Iraq or in the anti-terrorism department.
Only to be expected from a buddy of Henry Kissinger, as this piece by Craig Murray points out:
“Gordon Brown has been a personal friend of Henry Kissinger for a long time, and the last time Kissinger came to London, Brown and Kissinger spent two hours alone together in 11 Downing St discussing Kissinger’s latest book. That should disillusion those daft enough to believe that Brown’s five year support for Bush’s wars was a aberration forced upon him by circumstance.”
(Hat tip to Murray also for this tidbit in the same piece:
“Meanwhile Blair, for whom the House of Commons was never more than a vehicle for personal interest, has quit it even sooner than decently possible, so not a penny of the tens of millions of pounds about to flow his way from corporate America will have to be declared in the register of member’s interests.”)
Here’s an article from February 2006 by Brendan O’Neill (spikedonline.com) that takes on the new transatlantic national insecurity states.
Brown has urged more funding for experts to tackle the financing of terrorism. Translated, that means more snooping into financial accounts of all sorts of non-terrorists.
Joe Citizen, besides having to foot the bills for government-funded panic attacks, also has to clutch his bank statements closer to his heart – lest the larcenous fingers of the feds get into them.
Meanwhile, while Brown wants more tax-payer money for anti-terrorism, he’s not letting on too much about what he’s done with tax-payer moolah before — like losing a wad of it ($4.8 billion) when he sold off Britain’s gold reserves — against the advice of Bank of England officials – at only the bottom of the market between 1999-2002. Nice trade.
Maybe, just maybe, that ought to be a tad more worrisome to people than some half-cocked bomb scare.
Who were the lucky buyers, you ask? Why, none other than the Chinese.
So much for Brown’s national security cred…..
However, that might not carry much weight when measured against his pro-Israeli qualifications, noted in this Jerusalem Post report.
Several of his appointees also seem to share this pro-Israeli bias, James Purnell, for one, who is now secretary of state for culture, media and sport. In that role he’ll have oversight over the BBC and the rest of the British media. Here is Purnell on the subject of criticising Israel and anti-semitism in a letter to Prospect Magazine, in December 2004:
“Israel is a democracy, suffering terrorist attacks, surrounded by countries that don’t recognise its existence, the victim of well-funded terrorist organisations that preach antisemitic hate. The Palestinians deserve a viable state, and are suffering real poverty and hardship. There is suffering on both sides-neither can solve this problem without the other.
“So when some people talk as if Israel is entirely to blame, I ask why. The only answer I can find is that there is something deep in our cultural memory that makes us disposed to blame Jews. That tendency was put in its box by the Holocaust. But today it re-emerges-occasionally, but persistently. I would call it passive, or unexamined, antisemitism.” I wonder what Purnell would call it when anti-Zionist Jews are targeted by pro-Zionist Jews —
anti- antisemitic pro-semitism? Yes – that’s how ridiculous these word games are: “Hate-speech” laws, ” anti-terror” laws — nothing but pretexts for increasing control over people, their money and their lives….