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Government caves in to pressure from Bush
Monday, June 16th, 2008
The real purpose of George Bush’s visit to London became clear this afternoon, as Des Browne was set to announce more British troops are to be sent to Afghanistan, and Bush and Gordon Brown declared their intention to enforce further sanctions on Iran.
The tea in Windsor Castle and dinner in Downing St made the visit look like a social occasion, a farewell tour for an outgoing president. But the real reason for visiting Britain was never tea and cakes with the queen. Bush has been travelling round Europe trying to secure support for sanctions and a possible future attack on Iran, for greater support in Afghanistan and for backing for permanent US bases and occupation in Iraq.
Protesters attempting to highlight opposition to these policies were refused the right to march up Whitehall and were attacked by the police. This government appears to have no shame. It has followed its bribery and bullying
to win the vote on 42 day detention without charge for terrorist suspects with
attacks on our right to protest. It has now added further escalation of the
war
on terror to these attacks on our civil liberties. Gordon Brown is continuing
Tony Blair’s abject loyalty to the most unpopular US president of recent
times.
The Stop the War Coalition has written to the Home Secretary complaining about
the decision to ban protestors from Whitehall and violent police tactics on
the
day.
The letter is below
Jacqui Smith, Secretary of State
Home Office, 3rd Floor, Peel Building
2 Marsham Street
London, SW1P 4DF
Cc: Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair
16 June
Dear Home Secretary
We are writing to protest in the strongest possible terms concerning the
conduct of the Metropolitan Police at yesterday’s demonstration organised by
the Stop the War Coalition, CND and the British Muslim Initiative.
In particular, we wish to raise two decisions with you. First, the decision
to
ban the march from proceeding peacefully up Whitehall after rallying in
Parliament Square. There can be no justification for this arbitrary
abridgement of our right to peacefully protest. As you may know, the Stop the
War Coalition has organised over twenty major demonstrations in the last seven
years, nearly all of them in London. There has been no disorder, let alone
violence, at any of them. The idea that we could have presented any physical
threat to the President of the United States is laughable. This decision
smacks of a growing authoritarian clamp-down on the right to demonstrate,
bearing in mind that the Metropolitan Police also tried to prohibit our march
in Whitehall last October, and is indicative of your government’s increasingly
cavalier (to put it gently) attitude towards civil liberties. It further
contradicts the Prime Minister’s stated intention, on his accession to office
last summer, to take a more liberal approach to protest around Parliament and
the seat of government.
Second, we ask you to address urgently the violent policing of the
demonstration itself. This arises, of course, from the undemocratic nature of
the decision to ban our march. However, there could under no circumstances be
any justification for the repeated and uncontrolled assault on peaceful
demonstrators who at most were doing no more than attempting to proceed up
Whitehall and in many cases were actually endeavouring to comply with police
instructions. A large number of our supporters, none of whom, of course, were
in any way prepared for any sort of physical confrontation, sustained injuries
from baton-wielding police officers and others were arbitrarily arrested. We
refer you, inter alia, to the attached letter from George Galloway MP to the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police which details some of the gross and
unjustified brutality which accompanied much of the policing operation.
We hold that this conduct is entirely unacceptable in a democratic country.
The determination of the police to ensure that our voices cannot be heard in
Whitehall on an issue of urgent public controversy, at the apparent behest of
the US President, presents a bleak picture of the government’s priorities.
We are therefore seeking an urgent meeting with you to discuss this issue.
You
will understand that there can be no question of any further co-operation
between the Stop the War Coalition and the Metropolitan Police in regard to
future protests until these concerns are addressed to our satisfaction.
Yours
Andrew Murray
Lindsey German
Have Your Say: Government caves in to pressure from Bush
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Commons report: British “surveillance society”
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
QAS | The Commons’ home affairs committee has submitted a report warning of the danger of Britain becoming a surveillance society. The report calls on the government to promise the proposed ID card scheme will not be used to spy on people.
“We recommend that the Home Office produce a report on the intended functions of the national identity scheme in relation to the fight against crime, containing an explicit statement that the administrative information collected and stored in connection with the national identity register will not be used as a matter of routine to monitor the activities of individuals,” the report reads.
ID cards will become compulsory for non-Europeans living in Britain later this year.
Airport workers and Olympic staff will also be issued with them in 2009 and the government will then decide whether to roll the scheme out across all British citizens at a cost of £4.4 billion.
Previous concerns have been expressed about the risks of the cards, which will contain biometric data such as fingerprints, such as identity theft, with many worried that some cards could fall into the wrong hands.
Have Your Say: Commons report: British “surveillance society”
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Our Government’s Dirty Little Secrets
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
By George Galloway | A Government ready to rely on those friends of liberty, the Democratic Unionist party, to shred the liberties of our own people are almost by definition unembarrassable, but I hope this evening to add to the issues ventilated in a recent Channel 4 “Dispatches” programme to adumbrate the extent to which the tragedy in Somalia, which so many people are now becoming aware of, is another of our Government’s dirty little secrets.
We must start the story in Ethiopia, where 4 million people, according to the United Nations, are facing starvation and 120,000 Ethiopian children have just one month to live, according to last week’s media reports. Television viewers were shocked to see the pictures last week of the widespread suffering redolent of 1984 and the great famine of that year.
The US and Britain immediately pledged $90 million in famine relief. Just one week after its appeal to the international community for famine relief, the Ethiopian Government increased their military budget by $50 million to $400 million. The regime in Addis Ababa—when I knew them in the 1980s, they were pro-Albanian Maoists—are the most militarised and heavily armed in Africa. They are in a state of perpetual war or preparation for war with one neighbour, Eritrea, and they are supporting anti-Government rebels in Sudan, many believe with western connivance.
Most astonishingly of all, the Government of Ethiopia—that starving country whose little children are fly infested, kwashiorkor swollen, famished and famine stricken—have been encouraged, armed, trained, financed and otherwise facilitated to invade and occupy their neighbour, Somalia, and create a reign of terror in that land, which is testified to by this voluminous Amnesty International report, which, if I had time, I would extensively quote from.
Somalia has lost thousands of dead as a result of the Ethiopian invasion. Millions have been displaced. Somalia, under Ethiopian occupation, is the grimmest prison state in Africa—far worse than Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Who has done the encouraging, the arming, the training, the financing and the facilitating? The same US and British Governments who donated the $90 million to the same Ethiopian Government who are burning their money and burning the villages, the neighbourhoods and the people of occupied Somalia.
This Government are never done talking about the shortcomings of African leaders. Just last week in Rome, the Secretary of State for International Development was roaring at Robert Mugabe, yet there has not been a squeak out of him, or any other Minister, about the much bigger crime in which we are ourselves deeply complicit. Is it any wonder that African opinion considers so much of what we have to say about misgovernance in Africa to be the deepest, most cynical hypocrisy?
Two weeks ago, Channel 4’s “Dispatches” team took terrifying risks to bring us the latest from occupied Mogadishu. That was undoubtedly an award-winning documentary. It was memorable for many reasons, not least the scene in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when the Minister of State, Lord Malloch-Brown, his face frozen in horror, was confronted by Aidan Hartley with the central case of the documentary makers. For the benefit of Members who did not see the programme—the Minister will certainly have seen it; she would hardly be sent out to bat on this wicket without being shown it—that central case was that, in the grim prison state of occupied Somalia, the fingerprints of our country and our Government were all over the scene of the crime.
The President of the puppet regime imposed by the Ethiopian army in Somalia turns out to be British. He spends much of his time here—well, it is dangerous in Somalia, after all—and has property and family here. After presiding over a gang of torturers, murderers, grand larceners and extortionists, he flies back to England. Then there is the police chief whose officers kidnap people for ransom, which they extort from people living in our own country—in Leicester, in Birmingham, in London. They torture people, make them disappear, and kill them if their families will not pay. He too is British. As for the former Interior Minister who presides over an interior of mass refugee camps, starvation and misery, and who stands accused of stealing international aid and diverting food for political purposes—why, he is British as well.
Guess who is paying the wages of the murdering, kidnapping, torturing, quisling police force in Ethiopian-occupied Somalia? That’s right: we are. The public dictatorship in Somalia is a very British crime, especially as our own Government—in particular, that pocket-sized Palmerston to whom I referred earlier, the Secretary of State for International Development—are so voluble on the subject of other problems in Africa.
So how did we get here? How did we get into bed with the former pro-Albanian Maoists of the Government in Addis Ababa? I am afraid that the answer is our old friend, our old acquaintance, the policy of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. The policy that has got us into so much trouble, from Afghanistan to Iraq and many other parts of the world, is what lies behind this obscene paradox.
We are supporting the Ethiopian Government’s occupation of Somalia because George Bush told us to: because Somalia is a front line in George Bush’s ill-conceived, counter-productive, utterly discredited, “about to be booted out in the United States” so-called war on terror. We were against the former Government of Somalia because they were an Islamic Government, just as we are against the Government in Sudan because they are an Islamic Government, and just as Ethiopia, on our behalf, opposed the Government in Eritrea because they are an Islamic Government.
This policy, having been such a disaster around the world, is now in full force in Somalia, and but for Channel 4’s “Dispatches” hardly anyone in Britain would know anything about it. No British Minister has come to the Dispatch Box to explain why British taxpayers’ money is being paid to a police force in Mogadishu that is accused of kidnapping people and extorting ransom money from British citizens. No British Minister has come to explain—unless we interpret Lord Malloch-Brown’s frozen face as an explanation—why we are so heavily involved with a puppet regime that is bereft of political and public support in Somalia.
This policy of backing anyone whom Bush tells us to back—this policy of backing anyone who is against those whom we, today, perceive ourselves to be against—is morally utterly vacuous. Arguably worse than that, however, is the fact that it is a total, dismal failure, as we have found in Afghanistan to our bitter, bitter cost, not least this very week. The very mujaheds whom Mrs. Thatcher’s Government lauded, supported and armed are now murdering and killing our soldiers in Afghanistan.
This policy is not only morally bankrupt, it is politically disastrous. Afghanistan is the perfect example, but the Ethiopian Government preside over a country where famine and mass starvation stalk the land. They are being helped militarily to invade, occupy and threaten their neighbours. What can that conceivably do for our standing in Africa, or for our credibility when we lecture the Governments of Sudan or Zimbabwe?
It would be bad enough if our difficulties in that respect were confined to Africa, but the problem is much worse. The Somalians are the tallest people on earth, but they are virtually invisible, politically, on the international stage and in this country. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Somalians here, either because they have European Union passports or because they are refugees from the very fighting that we initiated and are now fuelling. Increasingly, young Somalis are furious, bitter and angry. They nurse their wrath as they watch—on Somali television or other Muslim channels—the carnage being wrought in their country.
Two million people in Somalia are living as refugees, out of a population of 11 million. That is almost a fifth of the total: to scale it up, in our country that would amount to 12 million people. There are another 1 million Somali refugees in neighbouring countries, and God knows how many hundreds of thousands are scattered across the EU.
In their bitter exile, the sons—and may be the daughters too—of those Somali families are being brought up bitter and furious at the role played by the west in the problems that they see on their televisions screens. We have spent hours this afternoon trying to deal with the problem of terrorism, but we cannot see how that connects with the way that we constantly infuriate young Muslim boys and girls with the double standards and injustices of our policy towards their countries and the countries from which their parents come.
We cannot see the connection between the growth of extremism and our actions. The Government are always looking for a cleric or an organisation to ban or to blame for the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain. But those young people do not need a cleric or an organisation to radicalise them: they just have to watch the news and see what our Government are doing in Muslim countries such as Somalia.
I know that the Minister has seen Channel 4’s “Dispatches” programme. She will not claim otherwise, even though she is answering a debate on human rights in Somalia. I hope that she will do a better job than Lord Malloch-Brown did when it comes to explaining how are taxes are being used. Among other things, that tax money could be used to help starving people in Ethiopia. It could be used to keep our pensioners warm in winter or to keep some post offices open.
I see that the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick), who is Under-Secretary of State for Transport and the Minister responsible for closing post offices, is standing by your Chair, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I hope that that counts as being in the House and that it is therefore in order for me to refer to him.
The British tax money that I have mentioned could have been used for a better purpose, but instead it is being spent on the security forces in Somalia, which Amnesty International, as well as Channel 4, accuses of widespread abuses of human rights—of torture, murder, disappearances, kidnapping, extortion and grand larceny.
Why are we allowing the Interior Minister of Somalia to travel back and forth into our country unmolested when he is accused by aid agencies of purloining international aid—desperately needed emergency aid for hungry people—for himself and for political purposes for his political clan? Why are the Government not stopping him at the border and questioning him about where the money went that was put into Somalia and has disappeared?
Aid agencies will not now, by and large, set foot in Somalia, so catastrophic has the situation there become. I ask the Minister why we are supporting the President, the Interior Minister and the chief of police in Somalia, and allowing them to come and go freely without answering the charges that are being made against them?
When will the Government at least condemn the human rights abuses in Somalia? Amnesty has voluminously recorded them, but not a squeak has come from the Government, which has never done roaring at Sudan or Zimbabwe. Why? Because we are deeply complicit in that. Indeed, we are paying for it; we are paying for the security services that are committing these crimes in Somalia.
The Government might think that because most Somalis in Britain do not, for one reason or another, have votes, they can be ignored—that tall as they are, they can be disregarded. However, the truth is that the Somali community in Britain’s loathing of the actions of our Government is a ticking time bomb in Britain.
I, if not the Minister, am constantly exposed in my constituency, and in Birmingham and Leicester and other places, to the anger of these young Somalis. There is a disaster waiting to happen. I hope that the Minister will announce today that, in the wake of the Channel 4 revelations, she will investigate the allegations properly, and that she will report her findings to the House.
I am talking in my speech tonight about not only the current British Government’s foreign policy towards the horn of Africa and Afghanistan, but about previous Governments’ foreign policies, too. I remember being on the Opposition Benches and accusing the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher, of having opened the gates to the barbarians by her support for the so-called mujaheddin in Afghanistan so many years ago. The policy that our Governments have followed of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” has proved to be fatally flawed everywhere that it has been tried, and it is now being tried all over again in Somalia.
Many Somalis will be watching our debate this evening—word is out about it in the Somali community, and it is being shown on Universal TV and other Somali channels. For their sake, I hope that the Minister will come clean about the dreadful problems that exist, and I also hope that she will say some words to the Ethiopian Government.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Conservative): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on having secured this debate. I apologise for having arrived late for it; I was caught somewhat unawares as it began early. What is best for Somalia and its people is, of course, security.
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the Ethiopian Government are providing security in Somalia at present, and that they want to withdraw from Somalia at the earliest possible moment? Will he also join me in encouraging the United Nations, the African Union Mission in Somalia—AMISOM—and the African Union to ensure that troops are put back into Somalia in order to give Somalis that security, which they need? Ethiopian troops want to return to Addis Ababa.
Mr. Galloway: I do not accept that at all, and it seems that I know the Ethiopian Government rather better than the hon. Gentleman does. As I explained before he came in, I knew them when they were pro-Albanian Maoist guerrillas in the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front. I knew all the leaders—they are now the Government Ministers—and I know that they have no intention of withdrawing from Somalia unless they are forced to do so.
They want to occupy Somalia because they have been paid to do so by the Government of the United States and our own Government. The Ethiopian Government are doing a job for what they imagine to be the western part of the international community. I see the Minister for closing post offices laughing. His constituency contains many Somalis, as does mine, and I hope that the camera caught him laughing.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Jim Fitzpatrick): I apologise for intervening on the hon. Gentleman, but I must point out that I did not laugh at anything that he has been saying so far.
Mr. Galloway: I shall not go further down that track. Perhaps the camera caught the verisimilitude.
The truth is that the Ethiopian Government are carrying out a service for the people who give them weapons, for the people who give them money and for the people who give them diplomatic and political support. They are having a beano in the Ethiopian embassy next week.
Perhaps the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) will go to it; he will certainly get an invitation in the post following his intervention. The Ethiopian Government are having a beano in the Ethiopian embassy in London to celebrate the 17th anniversary of their coming to power, and it is going to be a very grand event.
That event comes at a time when the Ethiopian Government’s own people are starving to death. Their children are starving to death—120,000 children have a month to live—they are invading and occupying their neighbouring countries and nobody says boo about it. In fact, far from saying boo, people are saying, “Here’s some more military and financial aid to do it.”
That is because the Government of President Bush, who are utterly discredited and on their way out, with virtually nowhere to go except Downing street on Sunday for one last photo call, regard the defeat of the former Islamic Government in Somalia as part of their war on terror.
That is what this is all about. Ethiopia is playing the role of hammer in the horn of Africa for the policy of the United States and its war on terror. That is what Ethiopia is doing, so it will not withdraw until a new American Government, hopefully with a Kenyan-affiliated President, tell them that actually this policy is deeply flawed.
The puppet regime of British citizens imposed on Somalia by the Ethiopian invasion would not last five minutes if the Ethiopian forces withdrew—that regime would have to withdraw with them. So, any Government who come to power in Somalia in the future will be filled with hatred of Britain and the United States.
That is the problem that we keep making everywhere; we intervene either to prop up tyrants or to support tyrants because we do not like the tyrants that they are fighting against, and we generate still more problems for ourselves. We wonder why that is, and we agonisingly debate anti-terrorism laws. We wonder why so many people in the Muslim world want to hurt us.
We wonder why so many young people in the Muslim world are so bitter and angry about us that they want to hurt us. Is it any wonder? Can it be any wonder to any sane person? I beg the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to believe me when I say that it is because of the kinds of policies that I have described.
I talk to Somalis all the time, and I know that the rage the Somali community both in Britain and around the world feels about Britain and America’s role in their country generates terrorists. As the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), who saved the Government’s bacon earlier this evening, is in his place and as we spent so many hours discussing anti-terrorism, let me spell it out: we are making new terrorists in Britain with our policy towards Somalia, with our double standards and with our hypocrisy.
Mark Pritchard: While the Government of Ethiopia are not perfect—indeed, there are Governments closer to home who are not perfect—it is right that human rights abuses by the Somali security services are fully investigated. Nevertheless, does the hon. Gentleman accept that if Ethiopian troops withdrew, it would create a security vacuum in which terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, would create mayhem in the horn of Africa, which is a key strategic location, and that would come back to haunt us?
Mr. Galloway: I said in this House when it was recalled a few days after the atrocity of 9/11 that if we handled it the wrong way we would make 10,000 new bin Ladens. We have handled it the wrong way, and we have made 10,000 new bin Ladens. The problem of al-Qaeda in Somalia has been made worse by the western intervention and the Ethiopian invasion. Far more people have been recruited to a narrow, fundamentalist, separatist, violent Islamism by our policy than ever would have been if that policy had never been formed.
The hon. Gentleman obviously has not read the Amnesty International document. The Ethiopian forces are not providing security: they are providing mass murder and terror in occupied Somalia. The refugee camps are full with 2 million people. No one can walk on the streets of Mogadishu. Channel 4’s reporters were almost killed making their programme. Some of the team on the same vehicle with them were shot dead live on television—
Mark Pritchard: By Somalis.
Mr. Galloway: I do not know if they were shot by Somalis or Ethiopians. The point is that the country has been plunged into utter lawlessness, and to pretend that the Ethiopian Government are providing security is completely ridiculous. The words Somalia and security should not even be mentioned in the same sentence.
There may be a need for African Union forces or Arab League forces. This conflict will go on and I hope that the Minister will not claim that the deal reached this week is any kind of solution to the problem. The people who are doing the fighting are not involved in the deal. It is like a peace process in the north of Ireland that excluded the people who were doing the fighting. That is what has happened in relation to Somalia in the past few days.
I am grateful for the extra time that I had for this debate, and I apologise for my churlish point of order, which turned out to be entirely misconceived. I hope for some answers from the Minister this evening.
Have Your Say: Our Government’s Dirty Little Secrets
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Change, What Change?
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
CounterPunch | On Tuesday June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the presidency. The very next day the salesman of “change” raced from Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of an organization whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States government. The terms of Obama’s surrender exploded like rhetorical cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbors it surely signaled that whoever moves into the White House next January, there will be no swerve from Bush’s role as guarantor of Israeli intransigeance.The conferences of the American Israel Public Committee have become showcases for the political clout of this lobbying group. The clout is real . A politician angering the Lobby can see campaign funds dry up and surprise challenges by well financed opponents. Back in September, 1991 President George Bush Sr, took on the Lobby pointing out that the U.S. spends nearly $1,000 a year for every Israeli and suggested this was extortion at the hands of AIPAC. “I’m up against some powerful forces,” he said at his press conference. “They’ve got something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy here doing it.” He want that particular battle, but some count the resultant enmity of AIPAC as a serious factor in his defeat by Clinton the following year. If so, George Jr took the lesson to heart.As US reps and senators and their staffs crowded the back of the convention center, the audience of 7,000 from across the US cheered as politician after politician marched to the rostrum for the politically rewarding declarations of loyalty to Israel.
Before he began his drive to the nomination Obama took good care to get the support of influential American Jews in Chicago like the Crown family, associated with the aerospace firm, General Dynamics.
As I wrote here back in February, a notorious scandal of the Kennedy years was JFK’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, overruling all expert review and procurement recommendations and insisting that General Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon’s history. The suspicion was that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois, to the impotent fury of the teenage Hillary Clinton, who was a poll watcher for Nixon. Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob’s money in General Dynamics’ debentures, and after the disaster of the Convair, General Dynamics needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up, taking the mob’s $300 million with it.
Henry Crown has passed on to the great pork barrel in the sky, but his descendants in the Crown clan are devoted contributors to Obama, giving him tens of thousands of dollars, as a glance at the website of the Center for Responsive Politics swiftly attests. The Crown family is still deeply involved in the affairs of General Dynamics. Lester and James Crown have both had seats on the company’s board in recent years. General Dynamics has ties to Israeli military contractors. A 2003 General Dynamics corporate handout cited by Chicago Indymedia proclaimed “a strategic alliance with Aeronautics Defense Systems, Ltd.,” an Israeli firm based in Yavne. Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd. is the firm that developed the Unmanned Multi-Application System (UMASa) aerial surveillance tool which the Israeli military uses to “provide a real-time ‘bird’s eye view’ of the surveillance area to combatant commanders and airborne command posts.” The Indymedia story quoted then-Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,as saying the agreement between General Dynamics and Aeronautics Defense Systems to bring together “both companies’ state-of-the art technologies in defense and homeland security” was “additional proof of the technological and commercial benefits that alliances between industries from the U.S. and Israel can produce.” An eye in the sky over Gaza ends up as a dollar in Obama’s war chest.
On January 11 of this year, hot on the heels of an editorial praising Obama as a Friend of Israel in the rabidly Zionist New York Sun, Lester Crown circulated a testimonial through the Jewish community, expressing his eagerness “to share with you my confidence that Senator Barack Obama’s stellar record on Israel gives me great comfort that, as President, he will be the friend to Israel that we all want to see in the White House-stalwart in his defense of Israel’s security, and committed to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors. Few public figures inspire as much hope and optimism as Barack Obama. Please pass on this message to all who are interested.”
Worried about rumors fanned by the Clinton campaign that he was still a secret Muslim, Obama insisted that before the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, a state with a politically significant Jewish vote, his campaign start a Hebrew-language blog in Israel.
So Obama came to this year’s AIPAC conference determined to dispel all remaining doubts that he’s a Friend of Israel. “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran,” he assured AIPAC.” I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.” He swore he wouldn’t talk to the elected representatives Palestinians, Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,”
As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist expostulated here furiously in the wake of this last sentence: “Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan ‘Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity’. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared - quietly, almost secretly - from the arsenal of official slogans. No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also called the Temple Mount), one of the three holiest places of Islam and the most outstanding symbol of Palestinian nationalism, is not transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. That is one of the core issues of the conflict. On that very issue, the Camp David conference of 2000 broke up.”
Obama’s foreign policy advisors were tearing their hair out and the next day his campaign issued a clarification. “Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.” All the same, they insisted, Jerusalem in Obama’s eyes must be the capital of Israel.
Obama’s most egregious talent is the ability to adapt his rhetoric with ominous speed, to allay any suspicion among the powerful, that he really will rock the boat in a way they might not care for. Earlier in the campaign he was criticized for not wearing the American flag as a lapel pin. At the AIPAC event he wore a double lapel pin, with both the US and Israeli flags. Is there a “real Obama” waiting to emerge, once the messy business of pleasing the voters is over? Not really.The making of the “real” Obama is an ongoing project, ad the AIPAC an important marker in the evolution of “change”.
Although Obama’s groveling got wide coverage across the Middle East, the press here, from the New York Times to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” (see Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s piece on this site last week) kept silent. It was evidently taken as a given, unworthy of editorial remark, that a man who might very well be the next president, was de-activating the policy of “change” precisely where it is most needed at the behest of the men Jon Stewart edgily derided on his show as “the elders of Zion”. Stewart fired off some pretty sharp comments about AIPAC, on the grovelfest, somewhat to my surprise, since I’m not a big Stewart fan, having found that it has become a cultic affair, devoted to the greater glory of Stewart, somewhat in the same manner as “Democracy Now” for Goodman’s devotees, who approach her broadcasts as yet one more variety of religious experience.
The sequestration of the American people from important world news is one of the prime tasks of the press here. A couple of weeks ago Patrick Cockburn had two very important scoops,
(www.counterpunch.org/patrick06052008.html &
www.counterpunch.org/patrick06062008.html) outlining the precise terms of the secret “agreement” the US is trying to ram down the throat of the Iraqis on permanent military bases. It was a huge political story in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. It was covered in Europe. I found a detailed account of Patrick’s scoops, with intelligent comment, in Trinidad’s leading paper. But I found almost nothing here. Not in the New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not on the networks. On June 12 Goodman and Gonzalez did have Patrick on “Democracy Now” and did a useful interview with him. And on Friday June 13, CSPAN had Patrick on its Washington Journal program and CSPAN’s viewers learned what their government is up to.
Asian Fury at Laura Bush
First Ladies are expected to pick an issue and make it their own. Ladybird Johnson toiled to make America more beautiful. Nancy Reagan said No to drugs. Laura Bush has taken Myanmar, aka Burma, to her heart. But now she’s put her foot in it.
In the wake of the terrible cyclone the First Lady said the United States would consider sending relief assistance to Burma only if the Burmese military junta accepts a U.S. disaster assistance response team to assess the scope of the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis. Many in the region think the prime role of such a team would be to prep international opinion for “humanitarian intervention”. “‘The U.S. first lady’s political demands were inappropriate,’ said Aung Naing Oo, an exiled Burmese political analyst. ‘This is a time when people are dying and suffering to a horrible degree, so if the U.S. really wants to help, it can help without making political demands,’ “
The cynical way the US has responded to the killer cyclone and the resentment this has caused in Asia is the subject of Peter Lee’s fascinating report in the new crackerjack edition of our newsletter.
Here also are terrific pieces by Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St Clair.
A taster from Kevin, on “Why Blacks Keep Quiet About Obama”:
“Black people always have to navigate race fear; the long Democratic primary season has just underlined that. Joking, comedian Jon Stewart asked Obama, if elected, “Will you pull a bait and switch and enslave the white race?” Kinda funny. Except that’s precisely the sentiment that underlies white race fear. I’ve heard the same thing said in seriousness by more than one white person. “If Obama gets the White House what will they want next?” Or, “if Obama wins, blacks will think they’re running things.”. . .Give a listen to the corporate media, and it’s pretty clear what tune black voices are supposed to be singing. Obama is constantly called on to swear allegiance to America – to prove he isn’t swearing allegiance to blacks. The other way to say that is he’s supposed to swear allegiance to white, not black, America. Meanwhile, the back end of that deal is that black Americans are required to substitute Obama for real structural racial progress. As in, “You got your nominee. See, we’re not so racist or bad after all. Now shut up!”
Jeffrey St Clair writes on Los Angeles’ weapon of mass destruction: air. By the time average L.A.-born kids reach eighteen, they will have breathed enough toxic air to place them 344 times over what the EPA considers an acceptable lifetime exposure to these contaminants.
All this in the new CounterPunch newsletter, for subscribers only.
Footnote: A shorter version of the first item in this Diary ran on The First Post last Friday. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
Have Your Say: Change, What Change?
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It’s Conyers’s Time to Act on Impeachment
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
Dennis Kucinich is saying exactly what you were saying before you became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Now you have the power. Use it. To hell with Pelosi and Hoyer.
By Matthew Rothschild | Now. Not to delay. Not to cower. Not to bend to the will of Nancy Pelosi. But to stand up tall for the Constitution as head of the House Judiciary Committee. By introducing 35 thoughtful and detailed articles of impeachment against President Bush on June 9, Dennis Kucinich has put Conyers on the spot.
It’s “to be, or not to be” time.
And Conyers knows what’s right. He himself introduced a bill to explore grounds for impeaching Bush—but that was in 2005, before the Democrats came to power.
Lewis Lapham of Harper’s interviewed Conyers and wrote about his brave and quixotic stance back then. Why was Conyers for impeachment then? “ ‘To take away the excuse,’ he said, ‘that we didn’t know.’ So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, ‘Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?’ when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that ‘somehow it escaped our notice’ that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.”
So why is Conyers doing nothing now, when, as the Supreme Court ruled again this week, the President has essentially set himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law?
Because Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, the cowardly leaders of the Democratic Party in the House, have told him to. They claim, in public, that it would be a waste of time, since Bush’s term is running out, or that they have more important things to do. But privately I’m sure they are saying it might not be good for the party in November. I believe they are wrong about that, since Bush is extremely unpopular, and impeachment would galvanize the progressive base. But even if they’re right, they’re putting petty party politics above the Constitution.
Jack Cafferty of CNN made a similar point in a great commentary on CNN.
And Jonathan Turley and Keith Olbermann have been going over the grounds of impeachment on MSNBC.
The Washington Post covered it.
The AP ran a story. So did the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
And Rochelle Riley of the Detroit Free Press wrote an impressive column praising Kucinich.
But The New York Times didn’t do its own story, taking only a handful of words from the AP. And impeachment did not exactly lead the nightly network news programs.
I also wonder why more members of the House haven’t endorsed Kucinich’s resolution.
At this moment, there are only three: Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee of California, and Robert Wexler of Florida.
“A decision by Congress to pursue impeachment is not an option, it is a sworn duty,” Wexler said. “It is time for Congress to stand up and defend the Constitution against blatant violations and illegalities of this Administration.”
Woolsey focused on the crime of the Iraq War. “More than 4,000 brave men and omen have paid for President Bush’s mistake with their lives,” said Woolsey. “And tens of thousands of others will forever bear the physical and mental wounds of war. As a coequal branch of government, the Congress owes it to each one of them, and their families, to hold those who led us to war under false pretenses accountable.”
For her part, Lee, too, cited “the President’s abuse of the public trust in his fateful and calamitous decision to launch an unnecessary war in Iraq.” But she also remarked upon Bush’s “campaign of fear mongering and demagoguery to curtail the civil liberties of Americans at home in the name of fighting the so-called War on Terror. Congressman Kucinich has performed a valuable service to our nation by documenting for the record this tragic history.”
Lee, Woolsey, and Wexler are showing the kind of principle that should be commonplace but alas is not in Congress. Where are the other decent Democratic members of the House? What are they hiding from? Where is their spine?
Despite the lack of coverage and support, Kucinich trudges on in his lonely battle in defense of our Constitutional government.
If the Judiciary Committee fails to hold hearings within the month, Kucinich says he’ll reintroduce his bill.
“We must not only create an historical record of the misconduct of the Bush Administration,” he said, “but we must make sure that any future Administration is forewarned about the Constitutionally proscribed limits of executive authority and exercise of power contravening the Constitution.”
John Conyers, are you out there?
Are you listening?
Dennis Kucinich is saying exactly what you were saying before you became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Now you have the power. Use it.
To hell with Pelosi and Hoyer.
This is your moment for courage.
Have Your Say: It’s Conyers’s Time to Act on Impeachment
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Democracy in the EU Institutions
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
Blair Watch | There is much debate over the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty, but what I’m finding interesting is how a democratic decision by an electorate is regarded in the EU institutions. Remember, most nations have ratified the treaty by shoving it through their national parliament, often with little debate.
How people respond and react will say a lot about how democratic Europe really is. This is a little difficult, with the Eurosceptics being too hungover to speak and many others keeping their heads down, but let’s see if we can round-up the blogs etc and see what we find.
Earlier I said how I overheard Andrew Duff, leader of the Liberal Democrats say ‘We will not accept this decision’. So far there is no confirmation that ZANU-PF have offered him a job as Press Spokesman.
Tory MEP Richard Corbett has a thoughful piece wondering where to go from here, but pointing out that Ireland must have an internal debate about what they want from a treaty and how to address these concerns. Stanley Crossick thinks
We already knew that the referendum is not an appropriate mechanism for approving a complex treaty. We already knew that the European Union has not successfully been ‘sold’ to its citizens. We already knew that a veto is unacceptable in a union of 27.
One wonders if he would have written the same thing about the mechanism if the vote has been Yes, but the fact that the EU hasn’t been ’sold’ is the key point.
Aiden Gibson makes a case for a Pro-Europe No vote. EU Observer supports the Lisbon treaty but reflects that the EU hasn’t made enough progress on improving democracy, thansparency or efficiency. A very interesting article.
In a disturbing development, the Irish Daily Mail has published a secret memo where EC Vice-President Margot Wallstrom will ‘tone down or delay and pronouncements from Brussels that may be unhelpful’. Bruno Waterfield of the Daily Telegraph takes up the story.
More comment is here. We will add links as we find them, please leave your suggestions in the comments.
So what’s really going on?
The EU was designed from the very start to be a top down organisation, mainly by people who were deeply affected by WWII and its aftermath. They designed a set up where ‘we know what’s best for you’ ruled the day. They also narrowed down decision making to make it more manageable, or malleable depending on your perspective.
For many years this did reasonably well and life carried on.
Today things are different. Politics has changed, on the one hand many parties have moved to the centre and blurred the lines between them. Younger readers may not know this, but in the UK there once was a very real difference between Labour the Conservatives. Really.
Faced with a preceived lack of difference or choice, allied to the rise of the internet, people became disillusioned and cynical. They also felt less involved, less interested. One aspect is the rise of single issue politics, either as a simple “Out of Europe Now’ or protests against veal calf exports, road building etc.
People still have some sort of connection to their MP, but not to their MEP’s who have unmanagabley large constituencies. They are also working in Brussels and Strasbourg, physically remote from their constituents. Indeed one reform that could be helpful is to close down Strasbourg and have one seat of government.
The Irish citizens, like a great many other countries inhabitants, would if they were allowed to, have given the EU a bloody nose. Not entirely because they want out of the EU, but they want an accountable and democratic EU. The message is clear: “We’re here, take notice of us”.
Will Europe make real and serious attempts to be open, transparent and above all, democratic? The replies of Eurocrats and Brussels insiders to the referendum will be the earliest indication.
Watch them like hawks. We disagree with UKIP as we feel there is a chance, albeit slim and against massive odds, to build an open Europe, but an essential requirement is that those employed or funded by the European institutions must be willing do do whatever it takes to ensure these fundamental reforms are discussed and implemented, and we mean a lot more action than writing meaningless, bland and turgid press releases and reports that essentially say as little as possible or occasional maealy mouthed press conferences.
Jean -Paul Satre Famously said ‘Hell is other people’, If he’d been still around he would realise that Hell is in fact reading EU documents.
We need a real commitment to transform the European Project from a top-down institution to a bottom up one.
Have Your Say: Democracy in the EU Institutions
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A New Kind Of Corporate Slavery
Saturday, June 14th, 2008
Corporations are getting rich using federal prisoners as captive labor pools.
By Betty Brink | Unless she’s dying or recovering from surgery, a patient at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell must work. The hospital out on the banks of
Just across the street from the hospital complex is a camp for minimum-security women prisoners who are not ill. They get most of the hot, hard jobs — cleaning boilers, welding, mowing. The pay is a lousy 12 cents an hour with no raises. That’s why a job that many on the outside would take only as a last resort is the most coveted in the compound: Ernestine the telephone operator.
So when you call directory assistance using, say, Excel Telecommunications, chances are good your inquiry might be answered by a federal prisoner. At Carswell, a fifth of the prison workforce — most from the camp but a few from the hospital as well — get to sit in cubicles in an air-conditioned building, start at almost double the pay of the regular prison jobs, and, if they behave and don’t make mistakes, get regular raises until they reach the maximum pay of — hold onto your hat — $1.45 an hour. Of course, they have to work seven and a half years to reach that maximum. And since this center hasn’t been open long enough for anyone to make the maximum, the highest pay at Carswell is $1.15 an hour.
With toothpaste at $5.95 in the prison commissary, inmates who take those calls for Excel have to work between five and 25 hours to earn enough for one tube. But by comparison, they’re lucky: Women who work at other prison jobs have to sweat out 49 hours for the luxury of brushing their teeth.
The math on the other end is even simpler, if grander in scale: Excel, a $2.5 billion global company, comes out the clear winner. If the 19-year-old Irving-based long-distance carrier had to pay no more than minimum wage to non-prison
But the Carswell prisoners are far from the only ones participating in this exercise in government-assisted capitalism.
How many people know that when they dial 411, the operator at the other end of the call is often a federal prisoner? Or that when they call to reserve a camping space at a national park, the person taking their personal information may be sitting in a cubicle in a maximum-security prison? Or that the body armor for the soldiers fighting in
In what critics call slave labor and advocates call job training, more than 100 factories and service centers in federal prisons across the United States employ inmates in jobs such as those above and hundreds more, making everything from underwear to military gear to intricate electrical components, all under the umbrella of a near-billion-dollar corporation known as the Federal Prison Industries, Inc., trade name Unicor.
This little-known and wholly owned arm of the BOP has come under fire in recent years from environmentalists, prison reform groups, and congressional investigative committees for, among other things, exposing inmate workers to dangerous levels of lead and other toxins in its computer recycling centers. The company has also been investigated for profiting from sales of tens of thousands of excess Defense Department computers that were supposed to be given free to low-income schools around the country and, what may be worse, failing to remove sensitive data from the computers it resold. Unions and even the U. S. Chamber of Commerce are up in arms over its use of dirt-cheap prison labor to take jobs from the private sector.
The prison workers are just as unhappy. Unicor and the companies it contracts with “are making a killing off of us here,” one of the Carswell workers wrote recently to Fort Worth Weekly. “And then we leave prison and have nothing to fall back on. Just think how beneficial it would be if they paid at least minimum wage, paid into Social Security … so that we would have something when we leave, old and broken down.”
There’s another Carswell prisoner who may be in a better position than most to help shine a spotlight into this dark corner of the federal prison system. “This prison is making huge profits off of nothing more than slave labor and then marking up prices by as much as 50 percent in the commissary, making even more profit off of all us,” Karen Lucchesi Lewis said.
Lewis has been a lot of things in her 42 years. She has known fame as the daughter of legendary Texas Rangers baseball manager Frank Lucchesi. She has owned and managed a multi-million-dollar spa and wellness center. She has been an honored volunteer fund-raiser for charities in her hometown of Colleyville. And, as a sufferer from lupus, she has been a proponent of naturalized medicine. What she never dreamed of becoming was an advocate for women in prison — especially one advocating from inside the walls. But that is exactly what she is these days, turning a shattering life change into a “mission from God,” as she calls it.
For the last three years Lewis has been doing time at Carswell, after getting caught up in a money-laundering sting aimed at the man who at that time handled legal matters for her business and who got off with a light sentence after testifying against her. In court, her criminal lawyer presented a defense so weak that even the sentencing judge commented on it. Still, Federal Judge John McBryde sent her to prison for 78 months.
While her new attorney, her family, and supporters such as North Side businessman Mike Costanza are working to get her conviction overturned, Lewis is on another quest. She wants to expose the injustices that she said she has witnessed since she entered the Carswell compound in 2004 — everything from “terrible medical neglect to women being used as slave labor for the prison to make millions in profits.”
Regardless of whether one believes in her innocence, Lewis is a high-profile inmate who is unafraid to speak out about a culture of abuse at Carswell that has been reported by the Weekly in an ongoing series since 1999. Now, to the prison’s litany of well-documented medical horror stories, rape, and sexual misconduct cases, are added allegations that the inmates are being exploited by a government industry that few citizens have ever heard of — even though it has been around since 1934. Someone’s making millions off the labor of the women at Carswell and thousands like them across the country — but it sure isn’t the inmates.
During the depths of the Great Depression,
Prison industry advocates say the “factories with fences” train inmates for jobs on the outside. They say the work reduces recidivism and boredom and gives inmates a source of income to help pay their court fines, support families, or spend at the commissary. Critics, on the other hand, describe them as Dickensian places where laborers have no workplace protection, are routinely exposed to cancer-causing toxins, and are exempt from federal labor laws, which means they can be forced to accept wages lower than those in
For the last several years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions, and prison reform groups such as FedCure have all pushed for legislation that would outlaw Unicor’s preferential treatment and require the corporation to pay minimum wage. Members of Congress from states whose manufacturing businesses have lost millions in government contracts to Unicor have taken up the cause, but to date the corporation has been able to fend off all such efforts.
By 2006 Unicor had come a long way from that initial $4 million. Last year, according to its annual report, the corporation held assets of $730 million in 108 factories and service centers at 79 prisons across the country. Its gross sales were $718 million with profits of $71.2 million. Those profits were produced by more than 21,000 inmate laborers who made, on average, $1,700 for a year’s work. The profits aren’t, as one might suspect, plowed back into the prison system to, say, improve healthcare services at Carswell or reduce the inflated prices for basic personal hygiene supplies at prison commissaries. Instead, it is plowed back into Unicor.
One its harshest critics is U. S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who has been trying since at least 2000 to get legislation passed that would reform Unicor and force it to compete with private companies. He said that the requirement that federal agencies must buy from Unicor allows it to perpetuate itself without regard to whether that is the best option for agencies and for prisoners themselves.
One congressional aide, who asked for anonymity, said that Hoekstra has found no evidence that those who run the corporation are enriching themselves. But, he said, it’s a “giant Ponzi scheme,” that requires more and more millions to feed its ever-expanding enterprises.
In recent years, Unicor has added to its list of factory-made products what it calls “services”: computer recycling centers, industrial laundry services, printing shops, and call centers — all for sale to private, for-profit companies in spite of the law’s prohibiting language. BOP Director Harry Lappin, who is also head of Unicor, maneuvered around that little obstacle in the law, apparently successfully, when he testified before a congressional committee last year that the corporation’s new offerings are “a service, not a product” and that therefore the law does not apply. Unicor now advertises its call centers on its web page and in its catalogs as “domestic outsourcing at offshore prices.”
Three major national communications networks use the “domestic outsourcing” call center at Carswell for their directory assistance services, according to FPI program director Todd Baldau. Baldau refused to name the clients, citing “proprietary information.” However, two inmates who currently work at the center, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the companies are Excel Telecom, Cricket Communications, and Metro 411. Calls and e-mails to the three companies were not returned. Baldau would not say what the companies pay Unicor for inmate labor for their call centers, but the corporation’s 2006 annual report listed sales of $27.8 million from its 18 service centers, including Carswell, with profits of $2.5 million.
The policy that all prisoners in federal lockups must work, including the less critically ill patients in prison hospitals, is designed to keep prisoners occupied as much as anything, bureau spokesman Mike Truman said in an interview for an earlier story. “Life can get very boring in prison,” he said, and reducing boredom reduces the potential for trouble among inmates.
Working for Unicor “is a privilege for good inmates with a smidgen of education,” said a former Carswell prison employee who asked not to be named. “They are monitored heavily, are lectured frequently, and really do their jobs in fear of losing them if they mess up. … The work is easy, conditions are better [than any other jobs there], and the work is useful on their resumés once they get out. … That’s why jobs with Unicor are coveted.” The call center at Carswell has been open for more than five years. Women sit in a small, guarded, air-conditioned building near the center of the compound, taking directory assistance calls in eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day.
Sweatier non-Unicor jobs basically cover maintenance work at the prison camp and hospital, including groundskeeping, floor-scrubbing, plumbing, welding, carpentry, and cleaning the boilers that provide hot water and heat for the compound. “They even work on the elevators,” said former inmate Dana Corum. “And that’s a full-time job because those dang elevators were always out.”
Prison officials also refused to discuss details of Unicor pay scales. But one of the inmates who provided the names of the Unicor client companies wrote to the Weekly that the pay starts at 23 cents an hour with incremental raises that top out at $1.15 an hour. She said that after 18 months on the job, the women get an additional 10 cents an hour for “longevity” and another 5 cents an hour for each 18 months after that up to 80 months. At that point, they will have “maxed out” at around $1.45 an hour. “There are a few ‘premium pay’ positions that rate an extra 25 cents an hour … for being extra important to the operations — or the most liked,” she wrote. It takes “political … shit to get these spots.”
The Spokane Area Journal of Business reported last year that regular call center jobs in this country start their workers at more than $11 an hour, plus benefits. Call center personnel in
And since the prison laborers receive no benefits: and no Social Security, the private companies that contract with the prisons save on those substantial costs as well. Average cost to an employer for health insurance for a family of four in 2007 is around $9,000 a year according to Towers Perrin, a global business financial management firm. And then there’s that 9.1 percent matching contribution to Social Security and Medicare for each employee.
Unlike Indian workers, American inmates don’t have to pay for all their living costs from those salaries — but Indian workers, on the other hand, don’t have to pay almost $2 for soap. Inmates are required to buy all personal items, and often meet some dietary needs, from the prison’s commissary.
Most can’t afford just the basic things that are necessary for their health and hygiene, said Lewis, who is one of the few who has a family able to put money into her prison account, to a maximum of $300 a month. A commissary price sheet lists a bar of bath soap at $1.65, deodorant at $2.80, and a box of regular tampons at $5.30. For diabetics, who must buy their own non-sugar products, a 50-count box of Equal packets costs $3.80. Many of the women at Carswell come from poor families. Some have been abandoned by their families, and only a few have loved ones who can send them money for such basic needs.
Corum, a diabetic, spent five years at Carswell, off and on. She was sent to
Even though the women work under strict guidelines, which forbid them to ask callers for personal information or tell them their calls have been routed to a prison, the jobs can be enjoyable and provide some relief from the rigidity of prison life, Corum said. “They had some fun, but the pay is still lousy,” she said, “and the whole thing is a racket that’s making money for the prison and unfairly competing with legitimate businesses.”
Unfair competition with private business is high on the Communications Workers of America’s list of concerns with the federal call centers because of the resulting loss of jobs for its members, said Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the national union. “Generally, outsourcing has been the big issue” with American communications workers, she said. “But if those [outsourcing] companies are now bringing back that work to the federal prisons, and still paying the same low wages, that is still an unfair advantage over the other companies that have stayed here and are trying to provide good-paying jobs and good service.” Johnson said the CWA believes the prison jobs do not provide the training that such work requires in order to give good customer service. “Good companies value good customer service,” she said. That was a big problem with the call center jobs that were sent overseas in the first place, she said: Foreign workers read from scripts, and if the customer’s problems didn’t fit the script, the employee was stumped and the customers ended up angry and frustrated. For that reason, she said, companies like AT&T and U. S. Airways are in the process of bringing their call centers back to this country. “People [in prison] need the opportunity to learn skills” but Unicor is not the answer, she said.
The system has its defenders outside the prison system. Journalist Harry Sheff, in an article for a web-based business magazine, wrote in July that “Unicor call centers don’t compete with American jobs — they only take on contracts that were about to be outsourced overseas.”
Other voices of protest are coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose director of legislative affairs told National Public Radio in September, “We do not believe Federal Prison Industries should continue its unfettered expansion into the commercial marketplace. … The business community is extremely concerned about this.” Future expansion by Unicor is possible because of the enormous increase in the prison population in recent years — an involuntary workforce numbering close to 200,000 now and increasing by about 2.5 percent annually.
Unicor now offers more than 140 products and services for sale to other government agencies, with more than half its output bought by the Department of Defense — by far its largest customer, especially since the beginning of the Iraq war. Like every other defense contractor, Unicor has benefitted from the war and dislikes competition. “While we expect the continuing war effort [to] provide another year of excellent work opportunities for our inmates, that situation will not last indefinitely,” Unicor directors wrote in the 2006 annual report. “We are positioning to a post-war environment.”
Another similarity between Unicor and other military contractors has been its propensity for corruption.
When she was at the Federal Correctional Institution Marianna in
Corum wasn’t exaggerating. In 2000, Rep. Hoekstra, chairman of the House subcommittee on education and the workforce, opened an investigation into the “racket” that Corum had witnessed, albeit a small part of it. The FPI “has been taking tens of thousands of items in excess federal government equipment, especially computer equipment, and using them to fuel an entry of unknown scope into the commercial marketplace,” he said at the opening of the subsequent hearing. In other words, they were selling used government equipment, improperly and in huge quantities.
According to Hoekstra’s office and transcripts of the hearings, Unicor acquired the computers through a process that allows federal agencies that are replacing equipment to pass along outdated but still operable items for use by other agencies. If other federal agencies don’t need the hand-me-downs, the equipment is supposed to be dispersed, free, to nonprofit groups, schools, or state governments. It is never supposed to be sold.
In this case the computers were destined to be sent to poor school districts under a presidential order of Bill Clinton. Somehow, FPI got to them first, hauled them out of the warehouses, and began a huge, illegal, garage sale, Hoekstra said. He noted that at the time the U.S. Department of Justice was conducting a criminal investigation of Unicor. “It is high time,” he said. “FPI has been out of control for years, exceeding its statutory authority and running wild through the marketplace without any Congressional … authority.”
Hoekstra’s evidence showed that during 1999 FPI took almost 60,000 excess items from the Defense Department alone, worth $481 million, and in 2000 added 83,000 more excess items with value estimated at just under $89 million. The company would have topped the $1 billion mark in illegal sales, the chairman said, if not for the “vigilance of a dedicated public servant” who blew the whistle. FPI’s defense was the “dubious claim” Hoekstra said, that it did not break the law governing its existence because selling the equipment was a service and not a product, the same justification echoed by Lappin last year when Congress questioned the call centers.
As a result of his own investigation, Hoekstra introduced legislation that would have reined the corporation in. It didn’t pass that year, but his spokesman said Hoekstra will keep reintroducing the bill for as long as it takes to get it passed.The most recent scandal involved Unicor’s recycling centers. A single personal computer contains a toxic cocktail of cancer-causing chemicals, including up to eight pounds of lead, according to a report by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. In 2002 SVTC found that prisoners at a maximum-security prison in
By 2005 the BOP had admitted that in at least three of its factories, prison workers had been exposed to higher than safe levels of toxic chemicals — but officials said the problem had been fixed. Not true, said the government’s Office of Special Counsel and called for an investigation by the Justice Department. The investigation is ongoing. In the meantime, Unicor clients such as Dell and the state of
Worker exposure to deadly lead, followed by denials and cover-ups, is not new in the prison agency. The Weekly reported on a similar incident that happened at Carswell in 1999, when three federal maintenance workers and a half-dozen female inmate workers were ordered to dismantle a lead-lined medical radiology room at the hospital. They were given no protective clothing or breathing equipment, even though they were working in a small room and had to crawl into some of the lead-lined cabinets and grind the lead out. Three of the civilian workers suffered such serious and irreparable lead poisoning that they can no longer work, and their doctors have said it will shorten their lives. Even their wives and children had high levels of lead in their blood.
Karen Lucchesi Lewis wishes that the same kind of pressure brought against Dell could be brought against the telephone companies under Unicor contract at Carswell. But she is realistic enough to know that it is unlikely to happen. Women in prison, she said, are forgotten by the public and the Congress — and that includes a woman who ran an $8 million business before her conviction.
Lewis has much more outside support than the average inmate. Nelson Thibodeaux, editor of a Colleyville online newspaper, Localnewsonly.com, has written extensively about her case.
But others from the Colleyville business community and women’s groups she once participated in have abandoned her. She was a major fund-raiser for many charities in Colleyville and North Texas including the Colleyville Woman’s Club, the Christ Haven Shelter for women, the
At Carswell, Lewis was at first put to work mowing the grounds. “They never considered the fact that someone with lupus is supposed to stay out of the sun,” she said. Later she was moved inside to help clean the boilers. She has not applied for work with Unicor, she said. Instead, she has established a health education and exercise class for the women. That takes up “all of my spare time,” she said. Her lupus is currently in remission, she said.
Lucchesi said that her memories of growing up as Frank and Kathy Lucchesi’s youngest child sustain her. “We had a very old-fashioned Italian upbringing,” she wrote in one letter. “I used to love to go to the games to watch Papa on the field and then eat late at night.” But her famous dad, who was manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, the Chicago Cubs, and the Texas Rangers, kept her away from the players he managed, she said. “I was never allowed to date them.” After Frank retired, the whole clan lived near one another in Colleyville.
All of that familial happiness came to a crashing end in 2004 when Karen was taken in handcuffs and leg-irons through the clanging prison gates of Carswell, bringing her to a cramped, four-person cell in the austere prison where she was destined to spend the next six and a half years.
“I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it was really happening,” she said. “I have never even had a traffic ticket.” But in October 2003, a traffic ticket was not the issue. Dirty money was. That month Lewis was found guilty by a federal jury in
Her long-time friend and business attorney Anand “Ani” Alloju had introduced her to a wealthy Mexican citizen and supposed drug dealer allegedly interested in investing in her business. Lewis said she was never told by Alloju that the man was a dealer. In fact, he was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration working a sting operation aimed at Alloju. The lawyer, who had access to Lewis’ bank accounts, laundered the $20,000 through those accounts without her knowledge, she said, even forging her signature on some checks.
The DEA agent claimed she was a willing participant. On the stand, Alloju’s testimony about Lewis’ knowledge of the scheme was vague and contradictory. The jury believed the agent. And even though Alloju was the primary target of the sting and admitted in court that he had washed $200,000 in what he clearly understood was illegal drug money through various other phony accounts he set up, he was sentenced to two years and spent only 11 months in prison, getting out early after completing a drug rehab course. By pleading guilty and testifying against Lewis, Alloju got a reduced sentence and a pass for his psychiatrist wife Lisa Alloju, who, according to her husband, deposited the drug money in Lewis’ accounts. Lisa had just completed a probated sentence for drug possession and was never charged in the money-laundering case. The 41-year-old Alloju did not enjoy many days of freedom; he died of unknown causes a little more than a month after his release in 2005.
“Even if you don’t believe [Lewis] was railroaded — and I do — the trial was a farce,” said Costanza. “Then she gets three times the sentence that the slime-bag who set her up got. It makes no sense.” He and other supporters of Lewis think that the undercover agent went after her as a trophy. “A big name gets more print and more glory for the undercover guy,” Costanza said. “Karen wouldn’t be in prison if her name had been Smith.”
The pain her incarceration has caused her close-knit family seems to weigh heaviest on Lewis these days. “When a family member goes to prison, the whole family goes to prison,” she said. “Everyone’s life is put on hold.”
But she seems to have come to terms with her imprisonment. She’s campaigning to let the world know of the injustices she has witnessed there. The most recent, she wrote to the Weekly, was the death of Genevieve Ramirez, 64, who on Aug. 1 fell in her room and hit her head around 1 a.m. Lewis and several other inmates “couldn’t find or get medical help till after 3 a.m.,” she wrote. “She had a brain aneurysm. They took her to [an outside] hospital and she was put on life support for two days, then they pulled the plug.” The BOP has not returned calls requesting information on Ramirez’ death.
Weekly reporters, except in rare instances, have been banned since 1999 from entering the prison to interview women such as Lewis. But she is one of the many who have managed to be the eyes and ears for reporters in keeping tabs on what goes on there. It takes courage. Many who have done so say they have suffered retaliation — including Corum, who suffered such gross medical neglect that when she left two years ago, her kidneys were near failure and her heart was critically damaged. She has had multiple surgeries since she got out. Other women have been sent to solitary on trumped-up charges or transferred to other prisons where they could not get the medical help they needed.
Lewis said that, even when she gets out, she won’t give up on her efforts to help the women at Carswell. And others, including current and retired judges, are working to focus congressional attention on the conditions there.
Congressional attention apparently is what it will take to change anything in
And then there were the women prisoners who also worked in the lead-contaminated rooms at Carswell eight years ago. They, too, showed signs of higher than normal levels of lead in their blood. But they were scattered to other prisons, and the bureau refuses to release information on their whereabouts.
Have Your Say: A New Kind Of Corporate Slavery
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A Cynic’s Guide To 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
Friday, June 13th, 2008
The Wolverhampton Radiophonic Institute has just broadcast a seventeen minute documentary which examines the British Truth Movement. The show includes Paul Stott of 9/11 CultWatch and John White of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The show highlights some of the uglier sides to the British Truth movement - which must not be ignored, including abundant racism, a cult like mentality and the refusal to objectively look at hard facts.
Update: Be sure to bookmark the Wolverhampton Radiophonic Institute web site as they plan to investigate other myths and theories, which can be heard via their site.
[audio:http://rinf.com/multimedia/cynicsguideto911.mp3]
Direct download
Have Your Say: A Cynic’s Guide To 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
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Exposing Bush Administration Corruption
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
By Stephen Lendman - RINF | Information for this article comes from long-time business, finance and political writer and analyst Bob Chapman who publishes the bi-weekly International Forecaster. It’s power-packed with key information and a valued source for this writer. He obtained voluminous material directly from its source. People need to know it. Read on.
SueAnn Arrigo is the source. She was a high-level CIA insider. Her title was Special Operations Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). She also established the Remote Viewing Defense protocols for the Pentagon in her capacity as Remote Viewing Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It earned her a two-star general rank in the military. She called it a “ploy” so the Pentagon could get more of her time and have her attend monthly Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings. Only high-level types are invited, and she was there from October 2003 to July 2004.
Part of her job involved intelligence gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan - until August 2004 when she refused to spread propaganda about a non-existant Iranian nuclear weapons program and left. She followed in the footsteps of others at CIA who resigned for reasons of conscience and became critics - most notably Ray McGovern, Ralph McGehee, and Phil Agee.
On May 16, 2008, Arrigo sent extensive government corruption and cover-up information to Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee - in 12 separate cases. This article covers four of them or about one-third of what Congress got. The 12 are explosive and revealing but just the tip of the iceberg:
– of government corruption and war profiteering;
– sweetheart deals and kickbacks;
– high-level types on the take;
– trillions of missing dollars;
– on September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld admitting “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions;”
– imagine the current amount;
– its corrosive effect on the nation; and people should
– demand accountability - who profits, who pays and what are the consequences of militarism gone mad.
SueAnn Arrigo offers a glimpse and at great personal risk. In August 2001, DCI George Tenet told her to assemble “a moving van full of Pentagon documents showing Defense Contractor kickbacks to Pentagon officials.” She did as instructed but not to expose corruption as she learned - to conceal it and in her judgment so CIA could divert defense business to Halliburton and “Carlyle-related contractors.” She stated: “The mood at the CIA and Pentagon was ‘war is coming’ because the Bush Family stands to make billions from it — so get ready.”
Arrigo was shocked at what she found and how brazenly the Pentagon wrote it up because it feels untouchable, especially since 2001. That notion proved misguided after CIA used the material to blackmail or bribe its officials “into ‘working on’ the Halliburton-Carlyle team.” Top CIA types were involved, and Tenet laid it out for Arrigo: You’ve “given me the keys to the kingdom. (These) documents will make me rich.”
She collected three types. Her report covers one but has plenty of incriminating evidence. Her precise recall of dates and names is incomplete, but events are factually right and damning on how Washington operates. It’s always been this way but never to the degree as under George Bush. Arrigo exposes the scheme - the systematic looting of the treasury to enrich contractors and high-level officials at Pentagon, CIA and others well-placed in government. Precise amounts are unknown, but at mimimum are countless multi-billions, even trillions - at taxpayer expense and diverted from essential social and infrastructure needs.
Case 1: Ordering Unneeded New Fighter Aircraft
Arrigo discovered high-level Pentagon corruption. It involved bid-rigging and implicated “an Air Force general on the JCS and a Defense Contractor, Boeing.” She disclosed it to JCS Chairman Hugh Shelton and DCI George Tenet, and in both instances drew blanks. She also reported it to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress. It was vetted and confirmed, but left unaddressed the larger issue of whether new generation planes are needed at an enormous cost to taxpayers. Arrigo believed not, and several Air Force generals agreed. Not other JCS members, however, who she learned are on the take.
There’s more. They “had the gall to try to force through another unneeded plane contract for Boeing.” At an early 2004 JCS meeting, Arrigo complained about the previous undelivered order because it didn’t meet Pentagon specifications. Yet one general in particular tried “to force the US military to buy another (unneeded) upgrade.” One other JCS member backed her to no avail, and the new order went through. Arrigo rightfully concluded that new plane orders were to enrich Boeing and high-level Pentagon types getting kickbacks for their cooperation.
She also learned how much - an average $22,000 “for each (JCS meeting) vote according to their bank” records. Not US ones. CIA-arranged Swiss accounts specifically for this purpose. Everyone at the meeting cashed in, except Arrigo and one dissenting general. More disturbing is that this is standard Pentagon practice - handouts to contractors; kickbacks to complicit brass; and taxpayers out multi-billions - year after year.
Jeff St. Clair wrote about it in his 2005 book “Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror.” It’s an explosive account of how contractors like Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel and the Bush family-connected Carlyle Group scam multi-billions at taxpayer expense and not a whiff of it in the mainstream. It’s the reason US annual “defense” spending tops $1.1 trillion (conservatively) with all military, homeland security, veterans, NASA, debt service and other allocations included.
Case 2: Halliburton Delivers Half Full Cartons to the Pentagon’s “Swing Shift”
Arrigo refers to the Pentagon’s Receiving Department “swing shift” personnel. They alone are on the take so other shifts are shut out and can’t report it. As a CIA insider, she checked and found damning evidence - about “the military (not) getting supplies to the troops on time.” She also learned that Halliburton has its “Representative to the CIA,” and one at the Pentagon as well. Both get federal salaries but neither was “hired by CIA or the military through their personnel departments. Neither had done military training or trained at (CIA’s) ‘Farm’ as a spy.” Arrigo was disturbed and with good reason when orders from the top said back off.
It got worse. Arrigo worked at CIA for over 30 years and reported directly to Tenet. But she wasn’t prepared for what she found - a new section at the Agency without her knowledge. It employed 40 people, all working for Halliburton “while being paid by the US taxpayer as if they were CIA.” It was secret. No files were on them. They were never interviewed, never vetted, and she concluded: “CIA had a back door in its security to let Halliburton put anyone they wanted in (its) hallways. It was an outrageous (breach) of US National Security,” and in a post-9/11 “war on terrorism” climate.
She was shocked and told Tenet. His reply: “Yes, I know.” Head of CIA building security also knew. Arrigo asked what he’d do about it. His answer: “Keep my mouth shut so I can stay alive and I suggest you do the same.” She asked if he, CIA or Halliburton would kill her if she talked. He didn’t think so. Would national security firm CACI do it because it’s affiliated with Halliburton and also has a CIA back door for its personnel at the Agency.
Arrigo dug deeper. She got inside Halliburton’s area and asked questions. Why was the company shipping half the contracted for amounts and shortchanging the troops and taxpayers. It was no different for war zones. Halliburton “set up the same corrupt system of swing shift receivers (for) at least 3 continents. They received the cartons and signed (off) that the goods were all received properly. Then the shortages later were chalked up to thefts or war damage, etc.”
Arrigo again informed Tenet. His answer: “This is nothing new,” then added: “Have a report about it on my desk before Christmas (2001).” It got worse. Arrigo told Tenet he’s responsible for “correct(ing) Halliburton’s short-shipping and its invasion of the CIA.” He said he couldn’t because the White House tied his hands. Call Congress, Arrigo said. DCI “should be a man of courage.” Tenet ignored her, so Arrigo faxed documents revealing Halliburton fraud to GAO - omitting national security secrets. One of them crowed about the scheme’s profitability, and having high-level officials involved made it foolproof.
It was clever and even more devious than Arrigo imagined. Halliburton uses each shortage complaint as a new order. “In that way (it) never (loses) by having to make good for (what’s) missing,” and (it gets) paid double for the same merchandise.
Arrigo knew too much, took risks to learn it, and what happened next is shocking. Halliburton’s “CIA Representative” confronted her, tore out her phone, ransacked her office, removed every shred of paper, and hauled her off bodily “to a prison cell” inside its basement offices. She was intimidated and threatened. Thought she might be killed. She survived, but the message was clear. She complained to Tenet. Showed him her bruises. He responded dismissively: “There, there, everything will be all right in the morning.”
GAO still has Arrigo’s files. It began investigating but stopped. She thinks that Congress can resume it and asked Waxman to do it. That’s where things now stand.
Case 3: The White House Conspiracy to Cook the Books - Halliburton, Carlyle and CIA
In 2002, Arrigo tried a new tact - ingratiating herself with “Halliburton’s Man” and using it to her advantage. She offered cooperation for access to his space and make him think she was on his side. It worked, went on for four and one-half months through late May, and it paid off - with plenty of insider knowledge “about Halliburton and how it works.” Enough to fill a book, she says, but her account sticks to highlights.
First off, it’s pure myth that Dick Cheney stopped running the company. “He called in orders to the man I worked for almost every day and sometimes two or more times a day. He remained (Halliburton’s) functional head in all but name. No one….had the power to override his orders.” Second, Cheney never divested himself of Halliburton profits. “He merely hid how (he got them) through a series of shell companies.”
One of Arrigo’s jobs was to liaison between Halliburton and CIA’s “creative accounting departments.” In other words, their co-conspiratorial treasury looting efforts, and Arrigo got insider access to it. Her advanced math and computer software training qualified her. In a few months, she became expert in how CIA and Halliburton hid their “financial illegalities.”
She explained - “Computers are good ways to fool most people because (they don’t) look inside of them.” They can be programmed “to print out one set of books for regulators, another for Defense Contractors, another for the Pentagon, another for the taxpayer,” and so forth. It’s simple. Decide what you want, and machines will create it in any desired form. The trick is doing it expertly, most criminals can’t, so they need professionals to do it for them. It means crimes are never secret, and many computer experts know about them. CIA has always been tainted, kept it secret since inception, so far has been untouchable, but remains vulnerable to exposure by people of conscience like Arrigo.
She explained: Halliburton has eight software programmers at CIA. Its home office has many more. She was on conference calls with 60 of them on ways to conceal illegalities and assure none of it leaks out. The company has less expertise than CIA so the Agency took charge to make the two systems compatible. It took several years and over 100 programmers. They came, left for other jobs, and took insider knowledge with them. It risks more leaks about Halliburton, other contractors, CIA, the Pentagon, high-ups in government, and the Basel-based Bank of International Settlements for its part in corruption.
Many investigations are ongoing, but huge pressure is exerted to quash them. It’s feared leaks may unravel the whole scheme - a vast corruption web involving countless numbers of contractors, related companies, and many high level government and Pentagon insiders. Cover-up software hides it. Taxpayers fund it. Amounts keep getting greater, and they’re up to unimaginable levels.
Arrigo explained the system. Suppose Halliburton sold product A in 100 Lot Sizes, in Quantity X at Price Y to the Pentagon on a given date. Most civilian invoices disclose this. Pentagon ones don’t so contractors can cheat and Pentagon brass profit. Missing information conceals whether all merchandise was delivered as nothing indicates quantities shipped. Further, repackaging also hides proper amounts. Omitting the price alone conceals whether a shipment was shorted, but CIA is more clever than that. It experimented with “tested receivers at some of its front companies” to learn how best to deceive them. What works best is “shifting prices around like random noise” - one day this cost, another a different one, and so forth.
One company used a “gross overcharge method” that looked suspicious. It got receivers to discover the real price, and that defeated CIA’s scheme. When it works, it cooks the books, and no one’s the wiser. Ledger entries are inflated, undercut, omitted, added, or varied in amounts of similar transactions. Like a “professional crime institution,” CIA is expert at falsifying books so no one catches on. How? By random price variations to keep auditors off balance and unable to discover corruption patterns.
Another example:
CIA varies its front company prices monthly. Suppose Halliburton made a purchase “when it (used) a cost inflation idea of cheating. Halliburton (has) an incentive to inflate the cost of its purchases (to) justify (its) high (price) to the military.” So as standard practice it uses CIA’s highest price and claims that amount for its cost.
But comparing two sets of books reveals the scheme. So methodology became more sophisticated to conceal it. Halliburton takes CIA prices and doubles them on its books. It then claims the Agency recorded half the charge “accidently,” says its front company promised a 50% discount, but never delivered. CIA looks bad, and it balked. No matter. Halliburton still does it, but CIA has “lots of fronts with lots of customers and worse problems (to hide) than merely jacking up prices. Some fronts (are) fictitious and (make) no products.” Others have real customers plus fake ones to launder money. CIA tries to “make (their) crimes ‘undetectable.’ ” Halliburton hopes to “sneak by” until caught, then find a way to weasel out of it with minimal damage or cost.
Case 4: Halliburton’s Rigged Back Door Accounting Computer at the Pentagon
In early 2002, GAO got damning evidence: that Halliburton overbills and short-ships - deliberate fraudulent acts as standard company practice, confident it can get away with it, and most often it does.
GAO has the goods to expose it from Halliburton and Pentagon invoices. They reveal a problem. They don’t match, are grossly inflated, and payments exceed amounts billed - by about 35%. Arrigo met with GAO and compared notes. Halliburton has similar Pentagon and CIA-paid staff, and George Bush approved it in a secret Executive Order Arrigo has for proof. She gave it to GAO plus other documents showing national security is compromised and taxpayers cheated - hugely.
One document lists Halliburton’s CIA and Pentagon staff, what little official records discloses about them, their secret office locations, and information on their private security staff. Arrigo discovered that Halliburton’s top CIA man served time for felony fraud. Another at Pentagon was convicted as well - for stealing Army vehicles, then profiteering by transshipping them overseas.
Dick Cheney knew, blocked background checks to conceal it, but Arrigo found out and about the Pentagon fraud that followed. She has a handwritten Cheney memo instructing his man “to make sure that the Pentagon pays us all that it owes us and then some.” CIA’s forgery department verified the writing is Cheney’s.
Arrigo also has a letter from Halliburton’s Pentagon man to his CIA counterpart, and it’s damning. He brags how he’s “getting more than we bargained for (from) the Pentagon” and suggested they get together to compare notes. They did and Arrigo taped it. The evidence once more is damning - about how easy it is to scam the system; befriend accounting personnel; install company programmers; check bills supposedly behind in payments; install a special software code for higher amounts; and do all of the above at Pentagon and CIA.
Arrigo informed George Tenet so he’d stop “Halliburton from ripping off the American taxpayer via the CIA and Pentagon.” Tenet hardly blinked and responded casually: “Well, you certainly have done a thorough job as usual.” He then offered to inform the White House to “correct the problem.” Arrigo did herself, GAO as well, and later learned that the Bush administration (likely Dick Cheney) blocked an investigation.
This article covers four of Arrigo’s 12 cases. Their evidence is damning and shows systemic contractor, government, CIA and Pentagon fraud involving enormous amounts of money. One or more articles will follow if more material can be obtained. It’s not what Pentagon and CIA want outed so getting it is never simple and revealing it not without risks.
Have Your Say: Exposing Bush Administration Corruption
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Are We Pro-Slavery?
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
By Walter Williams | Let’s do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery. You might say, “What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!” To get started, we might find a description that captures the essence of slavery. A good working description is: slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.
The average American worker toils from January 1st to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what’s taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.
You might ask, “Williams, aren’t you a bit off base? Slavery means that you are owned by another person.” Who owns a person is not nearly important as who has the rights to use that person. In other words, a plantation owner having the power to force a black to work for him would have been just as well off, and possibly better off, not owning him. Not owning him means not having to bear medical expenses and loss of wealth if the slave died. During World War II, Nazis didn’t own Jews, but they had the power to force them to labor for them. Not owning Jews meant that working and starving them to death had little cost to the Nazis. The fact that American slaves were owned, with prices sometimes ranging from $800 to $1,300, meant that owners had a financial stake in the slave’s well-being and they were not worked and starved to death.
You might argue that my analogy is irrelevant because unlike American slaves and Nazi concentration camp inmates, we can come and go as we please, live where we want, buy a car, clothes and other things with the money left over after the government gets four months’ worth of our earnings. But, does that make much of a difference?
During slavery, visitors to the South often observed “a great many loose negroes about.” Officials in Savannah, Mobile and Charleston and other cities complained about “nominal slaves,” “virtually free negroes,” and “quasi free negroes” who were seemingly oblivious to any law or regulation. Frederick Douglass, a slave, explained this phenomenon when he was employed as a Baltimore ship’s caulker: “I was to be allowed all my time; to make bargains for work; to find my own employment, and to collect my own wages; and in return for this liberty, I was … to pay him (Douglass’ master) three dollars at the end of each week, and to board and clothe myself, and buy my own caulking tools.”
There are some benefits to being a quasi free person such as Frederick Douglass. There are two ways U.S. Congress might force me to serve the purposes of another American. They might force me spend a couple of hours each day actually working, without compensation, for another American. Or, they might forcibly take a portion of my earnings so that American can hire someone. I see myself as being better off with Congress doing the latter — taking a portion of my earnings and giving it away.
Some might be put off by my thought experiment and consider it an illegitimate use of the term “slavery.” At what point should we consider ourselves a quasi free American — when government takes two-thirds or three-quarters of our earnings?
Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master’s degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
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Biometric scans raise spectre of Big Brother workplaces
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Management-Issues | As the FBI embarks on a $1bn programme to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, UK employers are being warned they need to think long and hard before introducing biometric technology such as iris, fingerprint and palm scans into the workplace.
British HR and employment law organisation Croner has said employers are increasingly turning to such technologies to enhance their security within the workplace, but there has as yet been little thought given to the possible data protection and human rights ramifications of doing this.
Biometric technologies can identify people by measuring an aspect of their anatomy or physiology through, for example, automatic fingerprint identification or iris and retina scanning.
The data captured is then converted into a biometric template against which the part of the body is compared when it is scanned.
The possible uses of the technology are wide-reaching and, in addition to protecting sensitive information, include controlling access to buildings and clocking-in systems.
Last month the FBI announced it was to spend $1bn building the world’s largest computer database of such physical characteristics, a project that observers warned would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals both within the U.S and people coming in from abroad.
Critics have expressed concern that people’s bodies will become de facto national identification cards and have argued that such initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.
Part of this 10-year project will see the agency retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks, so that they can be notified if employees have had any brushes with the law.
Within the UK, some employers are already looking to introduce such biometric systems to combat security breaches, said Croner, but any organisation doing so needed to be fully aware of the potential ramifications.
More widely, the UK Border Agency recently announced the use of fingerprint checks on all visa applicants.
So far 10,000 visa applicants have been identified that had previously been fingerprinted in connection with UK immigration or asylum cases.
Some schools have also introduced automated fingerprint testing systems into libraries for the loan of books and for cashless catering.
When introducing a new system using biometric technology, employees needed to be informed of the reasons for its introduction, how it works and the benefits to both employer and worker, advised Croner.
It is also good practice for the employer to hold meetings with staff to demonstrate it and answer any questions concerning its operation. It may be a good idea, too, to trial it before implementing it fully.
Employees, Croner added, will need to be reassured that their personal data (such as their fingerprints) will only be used for the purposes specified by the employer and that the information will be kept secure.
And employers need to ensure there are high standards of security in place to protect the information from being used for unlawful reasons or for any reasons which have not been communicated to the employees.
Finally, the information has to be protected from accidental loss, destruction or damage but that any biometric data is destroyed when it is no longer needed.
Gillian Dowling, employment consultant with Croner, said: “Advances in technology mean that this is now a realistic means of protecting property, data and personnel for employers and is no longer the exclusive preserve of high-security areas.
“Although it may sound futuristic, if the introduction is handled properly the benefits can be seen at all levels of an organisation in improved efficiency and security,” she added.
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Can the US empire strike back?
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
By Alex Callinicos | Despite opposing the war, Obama is committed to US imperialism. Imagine, in a galaxy far, far away, an empire in decline. A disastrous military adventure and the rise of new powers have exposed its weakness. To cap it all, the emperor himself is generally despised as a provincial clod.
But now his successor has to be chosen. What better way to rehabilitate the empire in the eyes of others than to select as emperor an eloquent, dynamic, relatively young man – a man who, while being utterly safe, not only belongs to the group of imperial subjects who are victims of its greatest historical injustice, but whose father comes from a foreign country and who himself spent some of his childhood in another?
Maybe this seems too cynical a view of Barack Obama’s bid for the US presidency. The success of his campaign for the Democratic nomination has been driven by a huge popular revulsion against George Bush’s discredited administration and by the desire finally to heal the wound in US society caused by slavery and racism.
But the real power of the US president lies abroad. President John F Kennedy asked Richard Nixon in 1961, “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like the confrontation between the US and Cuba.”
And, on foreign policy, there seems to be a big divide between the two presidential candidates. John McCain, the Republican nominee, is in favour of keeping US troops in Iraq for “maybe one hundred years”.
Obama, by contrast, gained his edge on Hillary Clinton in large part thanks to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is officially committed to withdrawing all US combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of becoming president.
But, in judging what Obama would actually do in the White House, it’s essential to remember what presidential elections are really about. Dominated by money – Obama’s victory over Clinton was clinched by his superior fund-raising – they are about choosing the leader who can best look after the global interests of US capitalism for the next four years.
Long before President Jimmy Carter officially proclaimed it in January 1980, a key objective of US foreign policy has been militarily and politically to dominate the Middle East. The current surge in the oil price has made securing this objective even more important.
So it’s striking, as the Washington Post has pointed out, that “when Mr Obama opened his general election campaign this week with a major speech on Middle East policy, the substantive strategy he outlined was, in many respects, not very much different from that of the Bush administration – or that of John McCain”.
Obama made the speech to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the key pro-Israel lobbying organisations. He seems to have had two aims. The first was to reassure a suspicious audience that his opposition to the Iraq war did not in any way weaken his support for Israel.
“Let me be clear,” Obama said. “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable, Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” He said he had been opposed even to letting Hamas contest the Palestinian elections in 2006 and promised Israel $30 billion US aid over the next ten years.
Secondly, Obama sought to toughen his line on Iran. He has been attacked by Bush and McCain for “appeasement” for promising to negotiate with the Islamic Republican regime in Tehran.
Not radical
Obama’s position isn’t exactly radical. The December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group, headed by Jim Baker, pillar of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, recommended negotiating with Iran as a way of getting out of the Iraq morass.
But Obama was determined not to allow McCain to outflank him. “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told AIPAC.
This would include “aggressive, principled diplomacy” backed up by tougher sanctions and the ultimate sanction of force: “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.”
This change in tone isn’t just about defeating McCain in the general election. The military surge hasn’t brought peace or stability to Iraq, but it has bought the US time to pursue its long term plans for the country.
The secret draft agreement for a “strategic alliance” between the US and Iraq revealed last week in Socialist Worker and the Independent indicate what these plans are – permanent US military bases in Iraq and the right for the Pentagon to pursue its operations without the say-so of its client regime.
Democratic senators have denounced the proposal. Nevertheless, it is absolutely certain that Obama will fill what the Washington Post calls “the gap in his Middle East policy” by watering down his proposal to withdraw all US troops in Iraq.
But if president Obama would probably offer only more of the same in the Middle East, what difference would he make overall to the US empire?
After the Cold War, commentators talked about “the unipolar moment” – about overwhelming US global power. The Iraq debacle has reminded the world instead of US relative decline – a perception reinforced by the economic rise of China and the credit squeeze engineered by Anglo-American financial speculation.
Instead of the swaggering arrogance of power symbolised by Bush, Obama would offer the world’s ruling classes a different face of the US – one ready to negotiate and to cooperate, and in particular to address the issue of climate change rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.
But this more open stance would still rest on US military power – Obama wants to increase the size of the armed forces. He would make an attractive black emperor but he would still have his legions massed behind him.
Have Your Say: Can the US empire strike back?
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Washington ordered destruction of Guantánamo interrogation records
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
By Bill Van Auken | In another confirmation of the criminal character of Washington’s handling of so-called “enemy combatants,” a “Standard Operating Procedure” manual has come to light that explicitly instructs US interrogators at the American prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to destroy contemporaneous records of their interrogations.
The existence of the document was made public by the military defense attorney for Omar Khadr, a Canadian national who has been held for six years since being captured by American forces as a 15-year-old minor in Afghanistan.
The lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, filed an affidavit on the manual, reporting that it had been shown to him only last week.
The document, issued for “intelligence exploitation teams,” also known as “tiger teams” operating inside the Guantánamo camp, explicitly orders destruction of evidence to avoid potential exposure of government criminality.
“This mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify,” states the manual, cited in an affidavit filed by Kuebler. It continues, “Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues.”
Citing the document, the military attorney has asked for the charges against Khadr to be dismissed, on the grounds that his supposed confession, which comprises the core of the prosecution case, cannot be challenged as to its accuracy based on existing records.
The patent purpose of the order was to assure the destruction of evidence implicating the US government in the systematic torture of those it has detained in the so-called “global war on terrorism.”
Khadr is being tried as a war criminal for acts he is alleged to have committed at the age of 15. These acts stem from the siege mounted by US troops of a house in which Khadr was staying in an Afghan village.
The youth was captured after the house was demolished by 500-pound bombs, grenades and gunfire. He is accused of murder in connection with one US soldier killed by a grenade in the siege, though evidence—including the fact that the youth was shot in the back—suggests that he was not responsible.
The United Nations and numerous human rights groups have condemned the US for the prolonged imprisonment of Khadr and the attempt to try him as an adult on charges that could put him in prison for life.
“The government’s case against Omar is based almost entirely on statements interrogators extracted from him in the course of interrogations at Bagram [Afghanistan] and Guantánamo Bay,” Lieutenant Commander Kuebler told the Canadian daily Globe and Mail. “If handwritten notes were destroyed in accordance with the [Standard Operating Procedure manual], the government intentionally deprived Omar’s lawyers of key evidence with which to challenge the reliability of his statements.”
The Canadian youth was subjected to torture, beatings and abuse at both the Bagram and Guantánamo prisons. He was also denied adequate medical treatment for wounds suffered in the US assault, which have left him nearly blind in one eye and with severely impaired vision in the other.
The military defense attorney also indicated that he would seek to file his affidavit for a dismissal of the charges with the US Supreme Court. Earlier attempts to appeal to the high court have been rejected by the military authorities. The Supreme Court is expected to rule sometime this month on whether those held at Guantánamo have a right to challenge their detention.
The exposure of the manual ordering the destruction of evidence follows the Pentagon’s removal of the military judge charged with hearing Khadr’s case. The judge, Colonel Peter Brownback, was replaced last month after he ordered military prosecutors to turn over numerous documents they had been withholding to the defense. Included among them were records detailing Khadr’s treatment while at Guantánamo.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Sunday that the military defense attorney for another Guantánamo detainee—who was also arrested as a minor and charged as a war criminal—has asked that all charges against his client be dismissed based on the release of documents demonstrating that his client had been subjected to abusive treatment tantamount to torture.
The detainee, Mohammed Jawad, is accused of throwing a grenade at US military convoy in Afghanistan in December 2002, when he was 16 or 17 years old. He faces a possible death penalty based on this alleged act, which he denies committing.
These cell extractions, conducted every 2 hours and 55 minutes, were aimed at “breaking” the detainees through sleep deprivation. There has been no attempt to claim that Jawad held any intelligence value for the US military, and the tactic appeared to have been employed largely as part of the sadistic “standard operating procedure” utilized against all of the Guantánamo inmates. In Jawad’s case, the disorienting and abusive treatment was organized in 2004, just a few months after the youth had attempted suicide.
“I think it reflects the abandonment of basic American values of human decency that occurred on a widespread basis in detention operations in the first two to three years of the global war on terror,” Major Frakt said of his client’s torture. “What started as an effort focused on a few detainees believed to possess critical intelligence filtered down to ordinary detainees and became routine.”
The use of this procedure against Jawad also occurred two months after it was supposedly banned at Guantánamo in March 2004, after FBI interrogators filed reports expressing concern about it and other forms of torture being carried out at the offshore US detention facility. A subsequent military investigation claimed, falsely, that it had been carried out solely against so-called high-value detainees and discontinued. No mention was made in the report of Jawad’s treatment.
The military’s chief prosecutor at Guantánamo, Colonel Lawrence Morris, while acknowledging that Jawad had been subjected to the protracted sleep deprivation technique, insisted that just “because the government may have stumbled some in how he was treated,” this constituted no grounds for dropping the charges.
The 2006 Military Commissions Act, under which the detainees are to be tried, treats confessions extracted through torture as well as hearsay and secret evidence as admissible. It explicitly denies all those declared by the president to be “illegal enemy combatants”—US citizens and non-citizens alike—any rights under the US Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.
The new revelations of torture and cover-up in the cases of these two individuals—the first in history to be charged as war criminals for acts committed when they were minors—has served to further discredit the entire military commissions system, which is now being revved up to conduct a politically motivated show trial of individuals charged in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington.
Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, the legal advisor to the civilian appointees overseeing the trials, told the media over the weekend that the Pentagon has made the trials “the No. 1 obligation” for its legal services division and is dispatching another 108 uniformed lawyers to participate in the sham proceedings.
Hartmann has been charged by other participants in the process with politically interfering in the organization of the drumhead trials. Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who formerly served as the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, has given sworn testimony that Hartmann had instructed him to speed up trials of “sexy…high profile cases,” cases “with blood on them” in order to generate popular support for the military commissions.
Davis has likewise accused the second highest civilian official at the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, of demanding that he rush the prosecution of the 9/11 defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “because there could be strategic value before the [November] election.”
This process is moving full steam ahead. Five individuals allegedly involved in the planning of the September 11 attacks were brought before a military commission in Guantánamo for the first time last Thursday in preparation for a trial that is set to begin a week and a half after Republican presidential candidate John McCain is formally nominated and to run through the height of the election campaign.
In this initial arraignment, the defendants rejected their defense teams—uniformed lawyers presented to them on the eve of the trial after they had spent at least five years in isolation and undergoing torture.
While observers were allowed into the courtroom, they were seated behind soundproof glass and provided a time-delayed audio transmission of the proceedings, in which prisoners’ statements referring to their torture at the hands of interrogators, drugs that had been administered to them and the circumstances of their arrests were all deleted.
One of the defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi, mocked the military judge when he explained the “rights” of the accused. Speaking in fluent English, he declared, “Everything that has happened here is unfair and unjust.”
“Since the first time I was arrested, I might have appreciated that,” he said in response to the judge’s assurance that he would be provided free legal counsel. “The government is talking about lawyers free of charge,” he continued. “The government also tortured me free of charge all these years.”
The mounting revelations about the criminality dominating the imprisonment of detainees at Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons around the world have thoroughly discredited these sham legal proceedings before they can even begin.
More than ample evidence has been uncovered in the course of these exposures to place Bush, Cheney, Rice and other top officials in the Bush administration on trial for their own war crimes.
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Big Brother Britain
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
Employers could find themselves in hot water if they decide to follow a new government plan to record and store all of Britain’s emails, phone calls and text messages say lawyers at Glovers Solicitors. With privacy rights jeopardised, employers who choose to replicate the campaign may find themselves breaching the Human Rights Act and facing employment tribunals.
“The European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that, in order for such monitoring of an employee to be justified, the employer must make it absolutely clear to the individual that their privacy is not guaranteed and that monitoring may take place.” says Sikin Andela, partner and employment law specialist at Glovers. “The easiest way for an employer to do this is to ensure that their employment documentation (contracts and/or handbooks) contains a clear and formal policy on how workstations will be monitored and what will happen to the information that is collected.”
This strain on the fundamental trust between employer and employee could, if not approached correctly, raise a wide range of employment law issues. Through this monitoring an employer could discover information that leads to disciplinary action being taken. If an employee is not made aware that they are potentially being monitored then any claim they make to a tribunal will have a prospect of success.
“In short this “Big Brother” style of keeping tabs on everyone is potentially highly contentious” continues Andela. “In order to protect themselves in the workforce, employers must ensure that they have evaluated the business need of monitoring employees against the individual rights of workers, amended their policies and procedures and made every employee expressly aware that they may potentially be monitored at any time.”
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Presidential Directive Demands Widespread Sharing of Biometrics
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
By Matthew Rothschild | Big Brother wants your irises. George Bush just issued a directive to expand the acquisition of biometric information, and to ensure that agencies across the executive branch share it.
And the Bush Administration may give it to foreign governments, too.
All this according to National Security Presidential Directive Number 59, also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 24, which George W. Bush signed on June 5.
The directive is aimed at “known and suspected terrorists,” as well as “other persons who may pose a threat to national security.”
The directive does not say how these other persons who “may pose a threat” are to be defined.
And the directive is so broadly worded that it appears to cover anyone the government has biometric or other personal data on.
“To be most effective, national security identification and screening systems will require timely access to the most accurate and most complete biometric, biographic, and related that are, or can be, made available throughout the executive branch,” the
document states.
Bush ordered executive departments and agencies to “use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information of individuals.” Agencies are supposed to share this information with each other “to the fullest extent permitted by law” whenever “there is an articulable and reasonable basis for suspicion” that an individual poses a “threat to national security.”
The directive does not specify what an “articulable and reasonable basis” might be.
“Known and suspected terrorists,” or KSTs, as the document calls them, are not the only concern of the Bush Administration.
It has whole groups of other people that it wants to gather biometric information on.
Within 90 days, the Attorney General is tasked to “recommend categories of individuals in addition to KSTs who may pose a threat to national security,” and he is ordered to “set forth cost-effective actions and associated timelines for expanding the collection and use of biometrics to identify and screen for such individuals.”
The Attorney General is to coordinate this “with the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and the Director of Science and Technology Policy.”
The Attorney General is also required to identify “legal authorities” to implement the
directive.
The directive states that it wants to expand the use of biometrics on individuals “in a lawful and appropriate manner, while respecting their information privacy and other legal rights under United States law.”
But the directive offers no suggestion about how those rights would be protected.
The directive also says that the Secretary of State “shall coordinate the sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information with foreign partners.”
Under what circumstances the Secretary of State would share such information with “foreign partners” remains unclear. All the directive says is that it would happen “in accordance with applicable law, including international obligations undertaken by the United States.”
Give the Bush Administration’s demonstrated disdain for applicable law and international obligations, and given its record of violating people’s privacy rights, this is not reassuring.
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