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Noam Chomsky on Marijuana

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By John Veit - HIGH TIMES MAGAZINE | A hundred years from now, Avram Noam Chomsky is going to figure in the history books as the prime voice of conscience, dissent and reason in the wars and social catastrophes of the late 20^th century. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, he began an intellectual revolution in the understanding of linguistics which very efficiently challenged and subverted the old knee-jerk behavioristic worldview that nourished the Cold War. His seamless critical essays on American foreign and domestic policies since then have unerringly diagnosed their fallacies, relentlessly dissecting the propaganda of the power establishment. We thought it was time he addressed the Drug War.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioUd3NHRM9o[/youtube]

HIGH TIMES: You’ve defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control. How does it accomplish that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the counterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the time were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot popular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular forces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United States simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number of ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on, but they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control measures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration camps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror.

You have the same problem domestically, where the public is constantly getting out of control. You have to carry out measures to insure that they remain passive and apathetic and obedient, and don’t interfere with privilege and power. It’s a major theme of modern democracy. As the mechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth, the need to control people by other means increases.

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It’s not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals. You have to “fight the everlasting battle for the minds of men,” in their standard phraseology, to indoctrinate and regiment them in the way that armies regiment their bodies. Those are population-control measures. This engineering or manufacture of consent is the essence of democracy, because you have to insure that ignorant and meddlesome outsiders - meaning, we, the people - don’t interfere with the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests of the privileged.

HIGH TIMES: How does the War on Drugs fit into this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, one of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people in every society, whether it’s a military dictatorship or a democracy, is to frighten them. If people are frightened, they’ll be willing to cede authority to their superiors who will protect them: “OK, I’ll let you run my life in order to protect me,” that sort of reasoning.

So the fear of drugs and fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrial societies. On the other hand, fear of crime is far beyond other societies, and mostly stimulated by various forms of propaganda. The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from whom we have to protect ourselves. It is also a direct form of control of what are called the “dangerous classes,” those superfluous people who don’t really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth. They have to be somehow taken care of.

HIGH TIMES: In some other countries you just hang the rabble.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, but in the U.S. you don’t kill them, you put them in jail. The economic policies of the 1980s sharply increased inequality, concentrating such economic growth as there was, which was not enormous, in very few hands. The top few percent of the population got extremely wealthy as profits went through the roof, and meanwhile median-income wages were stagnating or declining. People have to work harder, and public support systems for poor and hungry people have been declining sharply ever since the ’70s. You’re getting a large mass of people who are insecure, suffering from difficulty or misery, or something in between. A lot of them basically are going to be arrested, because you have to control them.

The Drug War is used for that purpose. It very explicitly targets young black males. When the War on Drugs was re-declared in the late ’80s, Senator Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) pointed out that if you just look at social statistics, you can see that we are calling for a war against poor minorities, black males basically.

HIGH TIMES: It’s obviously true, but how do you prove it?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was peaking in the late ’70s, but there was not much criminalization. You didn’t go to jail for life for having marijuana then because the people using it were nice folks like us, the children of the rich. You don’t throw them into jail any more than you throw corporate executives in jail - even though corporate crime is far more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the ’80s the use of various “unhealthy” substances started to decline among more educated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee, this whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among poorer sectors of the population. In the United States, poor and black correlate - they’re not identical, but there’s a correlation - and in poor, black and Hispanic sectors of the population the use of such substances remained pretty steady.

So take a look at those trend lines. When you call for a War on Drugs, you know exactly who you are going to pick up: poor black people. You’re not going to pick up rich white people; you don’t go after them anyway. In the upper-middle-class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs some cocaine the police don’t break into their house.

So there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor, largely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid of. During the period these economic policies were being instituted, the incarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn’t, it was steady or declining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late ’80s, in terms of imprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the rest of the world, way ahead of any other industrial society.

HIGH TIMES: Who benefits from incarcerating young black males?

NOAM CHOMSKY: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you’re afraid of these people, then you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it’s a state industry. Since the 1930s, every businessman has understood that a private capitalist economy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is what form that state subsidy will take. In the United States the main form has been through the military system. The most dynamic aspects of the economy - computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry, pharmaceuticals - have fed off the military system. But the crime-control industry, as it’s called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America.

And it’s a state industry, publicly funded. It’s the construction industry, the real-estate industry, and also high-tech firms. It’s gotten to a scale sufficient that high-technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just monitored to track when they do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.

HIGH TIMES: House arrest for the masses.

It’s enough of an industry so that the major defense-industry firms are interested; you can read about it in The Wall Street Journal. The big law firms and investment houses are interested: Merrill Lynch is floating big loans for prison construction. If you take the whole system, it’s probably approaching the scale of the Pentagon.

Also, this is a terrific workforce. We hear a fuss about prison labor in China, but prison labor is standard here. It’s very cheap, it doesn’t organize, the workers don’t ask for rights, you don’t have to worry about health benefits because the public is paying for everything. It’s what’s called a “flexible” workforce, the kind of thing economists like; you have the workers when you want them, and you throw them out when you don’t want them.

And what’s more, it’s an old American tradition. There was a big industrial revolution in parts of the South in the early part of this century, in northern Georgia and Kentucky and Alabama, and it was based mostly around prison labor. The slaves had been technically freed, but after a few years they were basically slaves again. One way of controlling them was to throw them in jail, where they became a controlled labor force. That’s the core of the modern industrial revolution in the South, which continued in Georgia to the 1920s and to the Second World War in places like Mississippi. (It should be noted that when “involuntary servitude” was abolished, the only exception was criminals convicted of crimes. WFI Editor)

Now it’s being revived. In Oregon and California there’s a fairly substantial textile industry in the prisons, with exports to Asia. At the very time people were complaining about prison labor in China, California and Oregon are exporting prison-made textiles to China. They even have a line called, “Prison Blues.”

And it goes all the way up to advanced technology like data processing. In the state of Washington, Boeing workers are protesting the export of jobs to China, but they’re probably unaware that their jobs are being exported to nearby prisons, where machinists are doing work for Boeing under circumstances that the management is delighted over, for obvious reasons.

HIGH TIMES: And most of these prisoners are now nonviolent drug offenders.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The enormous rate of growth of the prison population has been mostly drug-related. The last figures I saw showed that over half the federal prison population, and maybe a quarter in state prisons, are drug offenders. In New York State, for example, a twenty-dollar street sale or possession of an ounce of cocaine will get you the same sentence as arson with intent to murder. The three-strikes legislation is going to blow it right through the sky. The third arrest can be for some minor drug offense, and you’ll go to jail forever. (Another side effect of the three-strikes laws has been a dramatic increase in the number of high-speed police car chases, and car-chase-related car accidents. Knowing that they are up against a life sentence, even petty criminals try to escape now, instead of surrendering. WFI Editor)

HIGH TIMES: The Drug Czar’s office estimates that Americans spend $57 billion annually on illegal drugs. What effect does this have on the global economy?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug trade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion - half a trillion dollars a year - in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil, something like 10 percent of world trade. Where this money goes to is mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 % of it passes through U.S. banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It’s so obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to. But the Commerce Department every year publishes figures on foreign direct investment, where U.S. investment is going, and through the ’90s the big excitement has been the “new emerging markets” like Latin America. And it turns out that a quarter of U.S. foreign direct investment is going to Bermuda, another 15% to the Bahamas and Cayman Islands, another 10% to Panama, and so on. Now, they’re not building steel factories. The most benign interpretation is that it’s just tax havens. And the less benign interpretation is that it’s one way of passing illegal money into places where it will not be monitored. We really don’t know, because it is not investigated. This is not the task of the Justice Department, which is to go after a black kid in the ghetto who has a joint in his pocket.

HIGH TIMES: What do you think of the U.S. policy of offering trade and aid favors to countries who promulgate so-called anti-drug initiatives?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Actually, U.S. programs radically increase the use of drugs. Look at the big growth in cocaine production that has exploded in the Andes over the last few years, in Colombia and Peru and Bolivia. Why are Bolivian peasants, for instance, producing coca? The neo-liberal structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are run by the U.S., try to drive peasants into agro-export, producing not for local consumption but for sale abroad. They want to reduce social programs, like spending for health and education, cutting government deficits by increasing exports. And they cut back tariffs so that we can then pour our own highly subsidized food exports into their countries, which of course, undercuts peasant production. Put all that together and what do you get? You get a huge increase in Bolivian coca production, as their only comparative advantage.

The same is true in Colombia, where U.S. “food for peace” aid, as it is called, was used to undercut or destroy wheat production by essentially giving food - at what amounts to U.S. taxpayer expense - through U.S. agro-exporters to undercut wheat production there, which later cut coffee production and their ability to set prices in any reasonable fashion. And the end result is they turn to something else, and one of the things they turn to is coca production. In fact, if you look at the total effect of U.S. policies, it has been to increase drugs.

HIGH TIMES: Well, anybody who looks into the history of American drug policies in this century…

NOAM CHOMSKY: I’m putting aside another factor altogether, namely clandestine warfare. If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the U.S. White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to re-institute the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was re-constitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the Mafia doesn’t do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they allowed them to re-institute the heroin-production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship: They didn’t want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the U.S. re-constituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That’s where the famous French Connection comes from.

That was the main heroin center for many years. Then U.S. terrorist activities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well, if you need to hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren’t many options. One of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug-producing area with the help of the United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations.

In Central America, it was partly exposed in the Contra hearings, though it was mostly suppressed. But there’s no question that the Reagan administration’s terrorist operations in Central America were closely connected with drug trafficking. Afghanistan became one of the biggest centers of drug trafficking in the world in the 1980s, because that was the payoff for the forces to which the U.S. was contributing millions of dollars: the same extreme Islamic fundamentalists who are now tearing the country to shreds. It’s been true throughout the world. It’s not that the U.S. is trying to increase the use of drugs, it’s just the natural thing to do. If you were in a position where you had to hire thugs and gangsters to kill peasants and break strikes, and you had to do it with untraceable money, what would come to your mind?

HIGH TIMES: Where do you stand on drug legalization?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Nobody knows what the effect would be. Anyone who tells you they know is just stupid or lying, because nobody knows. These are things that have to be tried, you have to experiment to see what the effects are. Most soft drugs are already legal, mainly alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco is by far the biggest killer among all the psychoactives. Alcohol deaths are a little hard to estimate, because an awful lot of violent deaths are associated with alcohol. Way down below come “hard” drugs, a tiny fraction of the deaths from alcohol or tobacco, maybe ten or twenty thousand deaths per year. The fastest-growing hard drugs are the APS, amphetamine-type substances, produced mostly in the U.S.

As far as the rest of the drugs are concerned, marijuana is not known to be very harmful. I mean, it’s generally assumed it’s not good for you, but coffee isn’t good for you, tea isn’t good for you, chocolate cake isn’t good for you either. It would be crazy to criminalize coffee, even though it’s harmful. The United States is one of very few countries where this is considered a moral issue. In most countries you don’t have politicians getting up screaming about how tough they’re going to be on drugs. So the first thing we’ve got to do is move it out of the phase of population control, and into the sphere of social issues. The Rand Corporation estimates that if you compare the effect of criminal programs versus educational programs at reducing drug use, educational programs are way ahead, by about a factor of seven.

HIGH TIMES: But alarmist drug-propaganda programs like DARE and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s TV ads have been found to increase experimentation among teenagers.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The question is, what kind of education are you doing? Educational programs aren’t the only category. Education also has to do with the social circumstances in which drugs are used. The answer to that is not throwing people in jail. The answer is to try and figure what’s going on in their lives, their family; do they need medical care and so on? This very striking decline in substance abuse among educated sectors, as I said, goes across the spectrum - red meat, coffee, tobacco, everything. That’s education. It wasn’t that there was an educational program that said to stop drinking coffee, it’s just that attitudes toward oneself and towards health, how we live and so on, changed among the more educated sectors of the population, and these things went down. And none of it had to do with criminalization. It just had to do with a rise in the culture and educational level, which led to more care for oneself.

SOURCE: Excerpted from the April, 1998, issue of High Times Magazine.

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Howard accused of war crimes

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

ABC News | A legal brief has been sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging former prime minister John Howard committed a war crime by sending troops to Iraq. A loose alliance of peace activists, lawyers, academics and politicians is behind the brief, organised by the ICC Action group in Melbourne.

Organiser Glen Floyd says Mr Howard should be held accountable for sending troops to a war not sanctioned by the United Nations.

“We have produced a 52-page brief of evidence which states to the chief prosecutor of the criminal court that we allege John Howard’s actions are war crimes under article 8 of the Rome Statute,” he said.

Democrats Senator Lyn Allison says the legal brief sent to the ICC is justified.

Senator Allison, who is one of several eminent people supporting the move, says accountability is important.

“This action has been taken to hold those accountable for their action, so it’s essentially our prime minister - he was the one at the time [who] was the executive of government, made the decision,” she said.

‘It wasn’t put to the Parliament and as we all know, it turned out to be unjustified.”

A similar brief has been sent by a group from the United Kingdom regarding former prime minister Tony Blair. The United States is not a signatory to the court.

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Australian police use national DNA data to solve crimes

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Police in Australia’s state of New South Wales have begun using a national D-N-A database to help investigate unsolved crimes. The database matches evidence collected at crime scenes with criminal profiles to track down offenders who may have moved interstate.

New South Wales State Police Minister David Campbell says the national database is helping solve crimes across Australia.

“This is about breaking down state borders, sharing information and sharing data about criminal activity and criminals dna profiles and that means that it is much more difficult for criminals to move interstate to avoid detection.”

Source

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New High In U.S. Prison Numbers

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By N.C. Aizenman | More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.

The report compiled and analyzed data from several sources, including the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and Bureau of Prisons and each state’s department of corrections. It did not include individuals detained for noncriminal immigration violations.

Although studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect may be less influential than changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents and the proportion of young people in the population, report co-author Adam Gelb said.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals — who make up about half of the incarcerated population — less-expensive punishments such as community supervision, electronic monitoring and mandatory drug counseling might prove as much or more effective than jail.

For instance, Florida, which has almost doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, has reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

“There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved,” said Gelb, who as director of the Center’s Public Safety Performance Project advises states on developing alternatives to incarceration. “On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost — while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims and paying child support.”

Sociologist James Q. Wilson, who in the 1980s helped develop the “broken windows” theory that smaller crimes must be punished to deter more serious ones, agreed that sentences for some drug crimes were too long. However, Wilson disagreed that the rise in the U.S. prison population should be considered a cause for alarm: “The fact that we have a large prison population by itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country.”

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction. And the report also documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they devote larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent; spending on higher education rose 21 percent.

Five states — Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware — now spend as much as or more on corrections as on higher education. Locally, Maryland is near the top, spending 74 cents on corrections for every dollar it spends on higher education. Virginia spends 60 cents on the dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation’s incarcerated population has been growing more slowly since 2000 than it did during the 1990s, when harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law (since revised) mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the 1990s, many states adopted “three-strikes-you’re-out” laws and curtailed the powers of parole boards.

Many state systems also send offenders back to prison for technical violations of their parole or probation, such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment with a supervisory officer. A 2005 study of California’s system, for example, found that more than two-thirds of parolees were being returned to prison within three years of release, 40 percent for technical infractions.

“We’re just stuck in this carousel that people get off of, then get right back on again,” said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who as New York City police commissioner in the 1990s oversaw a significant reduction in crime.

Because of these policy shifts, the nationwide prison population swelled by about 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, increasing by as much as 86,000 a year. By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, that population increased by 25,000, a 2 percent rise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states — including Texas, which has the country’s second-highest incarceration rate — are seeking to reduce their prison population by adopting alternative punishments.

Last year, Maryland officials began developing a new risk-assessment system to ensure that low-level offenders are not kept in jail longer than necessary, said Shannon Avery, executive director of a policy planning division of the state’s Department of Public Safety.

“That’s what you have to do when you don’t have enormous amounts of tax dollars available for building prisons,” she said.

Among the early innovators that states can look to is Virginia, which overhauled its system for sentencing nonviolent offenders in the mid-1990s. Although the state’s incarceration rate remains relatively high, Virginia has managed to slow the growth of its prison population substantially and reduce the share of its budget spent on corrections while still reducing its crime rate.

State judges use a point system to weigh factors believed to predict a lawbreaker’s likelihood of becoming a repeat offender or otherwise pose a threat to public safety. Those deemed low risk are given alternative sentences. As a result, the share of Virginia prison beds occupied by nonviolent convicts has dropped, from 40 percent in 1994 to 23 percent in 2007.

“The idea is to make a distinction between the people we’re afraid of and the ones we’re just ticked off at,” said Rick Kern, director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission. “Not that you shouldn’t punish them. But if it’s going to cost $27,500 a year to keep them locked up, then maybe we should be smarter about how we do it.”

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In-flight surveillance in every seat

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

New Scientist | CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next. A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and “Big Brother” software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.

The European Union’s Security of Aircraft in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) project uses a camera in every passenger’s seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing terrorist activity or “air-rage” incidents, by tracking passengers’ facial expressions.

The system performed well in tests this January that simulated terrorist and unruly passenger behaviour scenarios in a fake Airbus A380 fuselage, say the researchers that built it.

Systems to analyse CCTV footage – for example, to detect violence (with video) or alert CCTV operators to unusual events – have been designed before. But the SAFEE software must cope with the particularly challenging environment of a full aircraft cabin.

Threat indicators

As crew and passengers move around they often obscure one another, causing a risk the computer will lose track of some of the hundreds of people it must monitor. To get around this, the software constantly matches views of people from different cameras to track their movements.

“It looks for running in the cabin, standing near the cockpit for long periods of time, and other predetermined indicators that suggest a developing threat,” says James Ferryman of the University of Reading, UK, one of the system’s developers.

Other behaviours could include a person nervously touching their face, or sweating excessively. One such behaviour won’t trigger the system to alert the crew, only certain combinations of them.

Ferryman is not ready to reveal specifically which behaviours were most likely to trigger the system. Much of the computer’s ability to detect threats relies on sensitive information gleaned from security analysts in the intelligence community, he tells New Scientist.

Losing track

But Mohan Trivedi of the University of California, San Diego, US, is sceptical. He has built systems that he says can track and recognise individual people as they appear and disappear on different floors of his laboratory building.

It correctly identifies people about 70% of the time, and then only under “optimal conditions” that do not exist inside an airplane cabin, he says.

“[Ferryman's] research shows that a system detects threats in a very limited way. But it’s a very different thing using it day in and day out.” Trivedi says. “Lighting and reflections change in the cabin every time someone turns on a light or closes a window shade. They haven’t shown that they have overcome these challenges.”

Ferryman admits that his system will require thousands of tests on everyday passengers before it can be declared reliable at detecting threats.

The team’s work is being presented this week at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Greece.

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On Trial for Protesting a Weapons Maker

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By Socialist Worker | Eamonn McCann is a founder of the 1960s civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, a veteran socialist and trade unionist, and one of Ireland’s most widely read journalists. He is the author of War and an Irish Town, Bloody Sunday in Derry: What Really Happened and other books.

In 2006, as a response to Israel’s savage war on Lebanon, Eamonn and other members of the Derry Antiwar Coalition organized an occupation of a local facility of Raytheon, the U.S.-based weapons maker and world’s largest producer of guided missiles. Nine activists were arrested and charged with vandalizing the building. They are on trial now, and could face time in prison if convicted.

In July 2006, members of the Derry Antiwar Coalition organized a protest, occupation and decommissioning of the local Raytheon facility there. Why did you decide to take action?

Our motivation was to prevent war crimes. Israel’s bombardment was causing carnage and destruction in Lebanon, and we knew they were using Raytheon manufactured bombs.

We were particularly outraged by the bombing of the town of Qana. Israel dropped a bomb on one complex there, killing 28 people, the majority of them women and children, crushed and suffocated beneath the rubble.

We believed this required an immediate response. We decided to take action to disrupt, delay and hamper Raytheon’s ability, in whatever way possible, to deliver weapons of mass destruction to Israel and participate in war crimes.

As the number of dead and maimed in the Middle East mounts, Raytheon recently announced a further growth of revenues and profits. How do you view Raytheon’s relationship to war crimes?

Raytheon, like all arms companies, profits from bloodshed. And after all, if there were no wars, governments would not feel the need to buy the high-tech munitions that Raytheon manufactures.

Raytheon is one of the many companies that fuels war for profit. But the Raytheon company also has a political agenda. Adam Cherill, the business manager of Raytheon, if my memory is correct, has said that the Palestinian people have no connection to the land of Palestine—that they have no culture, no society and no historical ties to the land. Now, that is not a commercial statement. That is a political statement.

The Raytheon company is closely tied to the top brass of the Pentagon. So they are complicit in everything that happens in the Middle East. In particular, they are complicit in war crimes committed through the use of Raytheon munitions.

We know that towards the end of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in the summer of 2006, Raytheon rushed so-called bunker-buster bombs. They delivered a rush-order, of these bombs just a short time before the war ended so that Israel could continue bombing.

Israel had dropped so many bombs over southern Lebanon, south Beirut and elsewhere that they were actually running out of supplies. Raytheon rushed two Airbus transport planes from the United States to Israel in order to replenish supplies, even though, at that point, it was known that their munitions were being used to bomb civilians, to target ambulances and civilian infrastructure. So this is a company which is knowingly involved in war crimes.

The trial of the Raytheon 9 began last week in Belfast. The trial was moved from Derry, and the presiding judge imposed a media gag on all discussion of the case. Why?

The trial was moved to Belfast because the judge reckoned that there would be sympathy for the Raytheon 9 in Derry, because the defendants were well known to a wide range of people in Derry.

Now, there also could have been hostility to the defendants in Derry. I wouldn’t rule this out, because all the main parties in Derry and in the local area were all sharply condemnatory of the Raytheon 9.

But anyway, the judge transferred it to Belfast and imposed a media gag because, he said, the coverage of the case would in itself have the potential to prejudice the jury’s decisions.

This was complete nonsense. Cases trialed in Northern Ireland are regularly covered in advance of the actual trial. It was completely out of order. So it was an absolutely meaningless reason for imposing the media gag. What it did was take the issue of the Raytheon 9 and anything controversial for the Raytheon company itself out of the public arena. And it meant that the media didn’t even report on developments at the Raytheon plant, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the case.

The Raytheon 9 has received tremendous support in Ireland and around the world. Among the many who have spoken out in your defense are Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Tony Benn, Christy Moore and George Monbiot. Yet none of the local political parties or their representatives have come to your defense. This is no surprise from the right-wing parties, but Sinn Fein, especially during the 1980s, prided itself on support for national liberation struggles in Central America and the Middle East, viewing itself in solidarity with all anti-imperialist struggles.

None of the mainstream parties—none of the four parties which form the new executive of Northern Ireland—has supported the Raytheon 9. And this is despite the fact that Sinn Fein, in particular, has always presented itself as a socialist organization, as an anti-imperialist organization.

But the truth is that the closer Sinn Fein got to power, the more they ditched their supposed socialist principles that would involve any anti-American activity.

Sinn Fein is determined to maintain the friendship of the Bush administration. Indeed, Martin McGuiness, the vice president of Sinn Fein, personally invited George Bush to visit Northern Ireland in June this year, in a couple weeks’ time. And he has publicly described George Bush as a “friend of Ireland” and “a man of peace.”

So the Sinn Fein party is not just compromised on its supposed anti-imperialist, socialist credentials, but it seems to have moved to the other side. Not really an uncommon thing for a nationalist organization once achieving office.

In 1968, you helped spark the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and resistance to the British-supported sectarian state. Today, you are still fighting against injustice.

There’s a straight line from 40 years ago to what is happening today. In 1968, we were outraged by the U.S. war in Vietnam and inspired by the Black struggle for civil rights. We were moved by this. In Ireland, we were fighting against local injustices, but we viewed ourselves and our struggles as part of an international struggle.

Today, we continue to fight against local injustices in Ireland, but we also see it as connected to a global struggle. There’s never been a contradiction between fighting local injustices and fighting injustice in the world.

The U.S. is attempting to violently dominate the Middle East and control the oil there. Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Palestine, are at the frontline of this struggle. The location of struggle may have changed, but the struggle for liberation and justice continues.

For information on how to support the Raytheon 9 and for daily updates on the trial, visit the Support the Raytheon 9 Web site.

Eamonn McCann’s article “Qana, Derry: The dead lie in familiar shapes” describes the activists’ trip to Lebanon and the action against Raytheon the visit motivated. He also talked about the case in a You Tube video.

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Iraq cites problems with US security pact

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

AP News | Iraq’s chief spokesman acknowledged differences with the United States over a proposed long-term security agreement and pledged on Sunday that the government will protect Iraqi sovereignty in ongoing talks with the Americans.

Australia became the latest member of the U.S.-led coalition to pull combat soldiers from Iraq, fulfilling an election promise that helped sweep Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to power in November.

Opposition has been growing in Iraq to the proposed security pact with the U.S., which will replace the current U.N. mandate and could provide for a long-term American military role in this country.

Much of the opposition comes from anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but statements critical of the deal have also been issued by mainstream Sunni and Shiite figures who fear it will undermine Iraqi sovereignty.

Chief government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the Iraqi negotiators have a “vision and a draft that is different” from the Americans but that the talks, which began in March, were still in an early stage.

“There is great emphasis by the Iraqi government on fully preserving the sovereignty of Iraq in its lands, skies, waters and its internal and external relations,” al-Dabbagh said. “The Iraqi government will not accept any article that infringes on sovereignty and does not guarantee Iraqi interests.”

U.S. officials have refused to comment on the talks until they are complete but have insisted they are not seeking permanent bases. The agreement is to replace a U.N. mandate for U.S.-led forces that expires at the end of the year.

President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said they were hoping to finish the negotiations by July to allow time for the Iraqi parliament to sign off on the deal.

But Iraqi officials said last month that talks were unlikely to wrap up by July because of wide differences over several issues, including immunity enjoyed by U.S. troops from prosecution in Iraqi courts and rules governing U.S. military operations.

In recent weeks, Iraqi forces have taken the lead in operations against Al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni militants in the northern city of Mosul and against Shiite militias in southern Basra and in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad.

But the government appears to be following a policy of negotiating with militants — a strategy that calmed the situation in the three cities but probably enabled some hardliners to slip away to fight another day.

During a press conference Sunday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, spoke out in favor of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement, saying Iraq’s forces still needed the support of the U.S.-led coalition.

“Our forces and capabilities haven’t reached the level of self-sufficiency,” Zebari said at a joint news conference with visiting French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. “We need this strategic security agreement … for the time being. But this is not open-ended.”

At the same time, the U.S. command is facing a dwindling coalition of allied countries that provide combat power in Iraq.

Australia, one of the first countries to commit troops to the Iraq war five years ago, ended its combat mission here Sunday and began sending its 550 combat troops home. A few hundred others will remain to train the Iraqis and protect Australian diplomats, officials said.

Rudd, the new prime minister, has said the Iraq mission had made Australia more of a target for terrorism and had promised to bring home his country’s combat soldiers by the middle of this year.

“We have to praise the role of the Australian troops in stabilizing the security situation in the province through their checkpoints on the outskirts of the city,” said Aziz Kadim Alway, the governor of Dhi Qar province where most of the troops were based.

The Iraqi government already has assumed security responsibilities for the Shiite-dominated province, which includes the volatile city of Nasiriyah. But the Australians had remained there in case the Iraqis needed help in maintaining order.

American troops will temporarily take over those responsibilities, the U.S. command said.

The Australians had “successfully accomplished their mission” and their contributions “assisted in the stabilization and development of Iraq,” U.S. military spokesman Col. Bill Buckner said in a statement.

Britain transferred security responsibilities for the main southern province of Basra last year and pulled its 4,000 soldiers back to the Basra airport last year. Britain suspended plans to remove another 1,500 troops after fighting broke out in Basra in March.

The Poles have also announced they will withdraw some of their 900 soldiers from Iraq by the end of October.

Meannwhile, an American soldier was killed Sunday by an armor-piercing roadside bomb in northeastern Baghdad, the military said. No further details were released.

A car bomb exploded Sunday in a parking lot across the street from the Iranian Embassy, killing at least two civilians and wounding five people, including three embassy guards.

Elsewhere in the capital, a senior police official was wounded and a traffic cop was killed when a bomb stuck to the official’s car exploded in a busy intersection.

Two civilians also were killed in separate roadside bombs Sunday near Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad. A policeman and a civilian were injured when a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Mosul, an official of the provincial operations center said.

The violence was reported by officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information.

Two U.S. soldiers were injured when their helicopter crashed Sunday south of Baghdad, the military said. The military said the crash was being investigated but appeared to be due to mechanical failure.

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US Paying Allies to Fight War in Iraq

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By Subodh Varma - TNN | NEW DELHI: The tale of massive fraud and embezzlement of millions of dollars by the US military in its operations in Iraq continues. Testifying before the US Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on 22 May, Mary Ugone, deputy inspector general of accounts in the Pentagon said that an audit of $8.2 billion spending related to the Iraq war showed that $7.8 billion had been improperly spent.

Over 180,000 payments, mostly since the war started in 2003, were made by the defense department to contractors for everything from bottled water to vehicles to transportation services.

In her testimony, Ugone also revealed that $135 million were given to forces from three countries UK, South Korea and Poland to facilitate their participation in the war. This is the first time that the US has officially admitted paying its allies in the so-called Coalition of the Willing that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

In his opening statement, Henry Waxman, chairman of the committee, said that wounded soldiers are getting notices from the Pentagon to return signing bonuses with interest since they had not completed the full term. “There is something very wrong when our wounded troops have to fill out forms in triplicate for meal money while billions of dollars in cash are handed out in Iraq with no accountability,” he said.

In an earlier report released in November 2007, the Inspector General had concluded that the Defense Department couldn’t properly account for over $5 billion in taxpayer funds spent in support of the Iraq Security Forces. It said that thousands of weapons, including assault rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers were unaccounted for, and millions of dollars had been squandered on construction projects that did not exist.

Ugones testimony gave detailed examples of the bizarre manner in which US defense officials doled out huge amounts of money without recording where it was going. In one case a sum of $320 million was paid an Iraqi official for paying salaries with only an incompletely filled voucher signed by one official. Since no details of the spending plan were attached as required by Pentagon rules the auditors have no clue as to where the money went. This payment was made from assets seized from Iraq.

Auditors found that the Pentagon gave away $1.8 billion from seized Iraqi assets. There were 53 vouchers noting these payments but not even one adequately explained where the money went.

In another instance, two vouchers, one for $5 million and the other for $2.7 million showed payments to a vendor for goods and services provided except that there were no details of what goods or services were actually delivered.

Over $2.7 billion was spent on providing equipment and services to the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF). The auditors found that $2 billion of this was not properly accounted for. For example, 31 heavy tracked recovery vehicles costing $10.2 million were given to the ISF, but 18 of them could not be traced because identification numbers were not recorded.

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US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor | The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

“Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time. Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush’s departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism.”

The Liberal Democrat’s foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: “If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly.”

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: “There are no detention facilities on US navy ships.” However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships “for a few days” during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as “prison ships”.

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband’s statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA “black sites” are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been “extraordinarily rendered” to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

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Brown told detention is excessive and out of step

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

By Alan Travis and Patrick Wintour | Europe’s human rights commissioner is to write to Gordon Brown this week warning him that the proposal to detain terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge is an “excessive” measure that will put Britain “way out of line” with the rest of Europe and will prove counter-productive.

The intervention from Europe’s human rights watchdog comes as the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, prepares to outline to Labour MPs tonight “concessions” designed to curb the scale of a backbench revolt a week on Wednesday, when the key vote is to be held.

Brown rang some potential rebels at the weekend. But his hopes of crafting a consensus will be undermined by the Council of Europe, and by the parliamentary joint select committee on human rights, which is expected to reject the compromise being touted by ministers. They have been privately suggesting that the detention powers would be triggered only in defined “grave exceptional circumstances”, such as multiple plots by terrorists.

Parliament would get to vote on the decision to use the detention powers within seven to 10 days of the decision to do so, and it would also require renewal by parliament every 30 days.

But the joint select committee is expected to agree tonight that it would be better for the government simply to derogate temporarily from relevant articles of the European convention on human rights if the country was under that level of attack.

In an attempt to lower the temperature, Brown will not attend tonight’s meeting of the parliamentary Labour party, even though it is the first since the Crewe and Nantwich byelection defeat.

The government’s claim that criminal suspects in Italy can be held for months without charge has also been dismissed by Italian parliamentary authorities. They have confirmed to Commons librarians that the maximum period of pre-charge detention under Italian law is four days.

Ministers have repeatedly cited the Italian “example” in an attempt to rubbish research by Liberty, the human rights organisation, showing that Britain’s existing 28-day limit is already longer than any comparable democracy.

In his letter to Brown, Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner will say: “I am concerned by the British government’s suggestion to allow terrorism suspects to be detained for 42 days without charge.

“This would be way out of line with equivalent detention limits elsewhere in Europe. We need to be more restrictive with such measures. Keeping people detained for such long periods before prosecution is excessive and will prove counter-productive,” he says. “I would urge members of the parliament to carefully review the government’s proposal.”

He is mandated to foster human rights standards across the 47 members of the Council of Europe and could have a role in any case at the European court of human rights testing the legality of 42-day detention.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: “When the Council of Europe human rights commissioner has cause to intervene in Britain, we should all be truly ashamed. The commissioner has endorsed Liberty’s view that 28 days is already way out of line with the rest of Europe.”

She claimed the government had been quick to try to smear Liberty’s evidence but had produced none of its own: “In recent weeks they’ve even started whispering that Liberty will support some desperate 42-day rescue package. They’ve lost both the argument and the humility to admit it.”

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