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EMPIRE OF THE VANITIES

Monday, July 7th, 2008

SchNews | In the run up to the annual meet and greet by world leaders (and ensuing mass insurrection on the other side of the police lines) at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, it’s time we took another look at the Group of Eight (the USA, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Canada, Japan and Russia).

The G8 has been top of activists’ hit lists since the ’90s when the leaders of the world lorded it over the planet, playing the world’s population like puppets on its strings through the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, keeping the deck of international power and capital firmly stacked in favour of the rich.

The G8 is sometimes known as the G7 plus Russia - which has been the odd man out since it joined (due more to its ownership of thousands of nuclear weapons than its position on the global rich list). It is the one international forum that brings together the world’s trade and financial institutions. Simply put it’s the world’s biggest cartel.

Throughout the ‘90s, via innocuous sounding edicts such as the ‘Treaty Regarding Property Rights (TRIPS - keeping knowledge locked away amongst a handful of electronics and bio-tech firms) and ‘Structural Adjustment Policies’ (a euphemism for the looting of entire economies by modern day corporate privateers), the world was fully under the control of USA and its allies. The Soviet Union had been defeated by the power of Democracy Inc. and the US had no rivals anywhere. It was economic liberalism and US-style democracy all the way, with Slick Willy Clinton at the helm. It was the ‘End of History’, as triumphantly proclaimed by right wing thinkers.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

But it all turned out to be a little premature. In the twilight months of the Bush administration, the G8 looks more like a global spectator than the sole player. Across the world countries that the West had gotten used to ordering around have begun to dance to their own tune. Even ‘reliable’ US allies like Saudi Arabia aren’t afraid to say ‘no’ to the US’s face (they recently they turned down a request to release more oil into the global markets despite Dubya’s personal intervention). Around the world the battle for drug patents has basically been won by the third world drugs producers (Brazil, Thailand, India) after the G8 realised that neither the western pharma companies or the WTO could stop them.

Latin America has now pretty much thrown out the IMF and their ilk, refusing to sup from the poisoned chalice of Structural Adjustment any more. During the ‘80s and ‘90s Argentina followed the dictates of the IMF & World Bank faithfully, only to be rewarded with the total collapse of their country’s economy - banks and factories closed overnight, and the Argentinian people responded with massive strikes and worker occupations of bankrupt factories (See SchNEWS 350). The elites of Argentina sensibly saw which way the wind was blowing and stepped aside to make way for the centre-left (and hardly revolutionary) government of Nestor Kirchner, who chucked out the IMF, WB, WTO and their advisors and refused to listen to the financial advisors who predicted doom and catastrophe. They were wrong, and since they stopped listening to the globalists both the Argentinean economy and average standard of living (not the same thing by the way) have gone up and up.

Since then two-thirds of Latin America has followed suit, and the hemisphere, once America’s back yard, has begun to make faltering steps towards integration - independent of the gringos - via organisations such as MERCOSUR and the (much more ambitious) Bolivaran Alernative for the Americans (ALBA).

But even this is just the tip of the iceberg. The economies of Asia, traditionally heavily dependent on the Americans, still remember the battering they took in the late 90s during the collapse of the ‘Asian bubble’. Since then they’ve made sure that there’s plenty of extra dosh in their state coffers, ensuring that no matter how bad things get they don’t have to go down the path of short term gain for long term pain of IMF loans.

The lack of customers has effectively ruined the IMF. From a budget of over $100 billion four years ago, they can now barely scrape together $10 billion, most of which now goes to just two countries: Turkey and Pakistan. The organisation which once played the role of global loanshark is now feeling itself the pinch. Once Turkey pays off the last of its outstanding loans, the IMF will basically run out of fresh sources of cash from the world’s poor.

The net result of the failure of these US created and led institutions is that the G8 has lost control of global policy, in what even people inside the establishment are calling ‘a guerilla assault on the Washington Consensus.’ There’s still plenty of countries that are suffering horrendously from the same privatise-and-be-damned ideology of neoliberalism, but the tide is noticeably turning. States from China to Bolivia are turning state coffers over to internal development and poverty reduction, and in the process creating markets outside of the control of the G8.

Stuggling against the tide the G8 is bringing in some of the larger non-western countries into the fold, intending to co-opt them into selling out the rest of the developing nations and making it worth their while to play ball according to US/European rules. The so-called ‘Outreach Five (not the latest boy-band) consist of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Last year, whilst the black block was busy shutting the city down, the G8 nations were kick-starting the ‘Heiligendamm Process’ aimed to get these countries on board. The problem (from the G8’s perspective), is that these countries aren’t likely to leave it at the level of discussion. They’re demanding an ever larger slice of the pie.

END OF AN ERROR?

Just about the only place where you can see the aggressive introduction of old-school neoliberal policies on weaker nations is in the countries occupied as part of the ‘War on Terror’. In Afghanistan - and especially Iraq - entire state industries were privatised with a stroke of the American Proconsul’s pen. Water, health, education, industry were all declared open for the attentions of multinational corporations. The result has been as brutal as it has been predictable. Iraq’s public services (once the best in the Middle East) were destroyed almost overnight, spiralling its population further into poverty and easing Iraq’s population into armed resistance that has all but destroyed American plans for Iraq. It is to nobody’s surprise that the oil laws being drafted by the ‘sovereign’ state of Iraq allow for the return of all the major US oil companies, 36 years after they were kicked out by Ba’athist nationalism.

The Iraq war looks more like one last desperate throw of the dice by a visibly weakening empire. Bush’s legacy may well be that the United States is now seen as a fundamentally dangerous country that smaller nations can band together against. In the process this has created organisations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – See SchNEWS 551) which now holds joint military exercises “to fight back against new threats and challenges.” They also have an energy policy, the Asian Energy Security Grid, which has the potential to effectively counter US control the Middle-East’s oil.

With this shift in global political power the West is likely to get increasingly desperate as their economies go down the pan and oil resource pressures start to bite. The likely consequences may not be pretty as the US and its allies up their military spending and repression to counter the largely phantom threat of terrorism. But it’s reassuring to SchNEWS that there are still those in the beast of the belly willing to counter it.

* More info on G8 in Japan: www.jca.apc.org/alt-g8/en and http://a.sanpal.co.jp/no-g8

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Domestic spying quietly goes on

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Bradley Olson | With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”

Federal rules limit the ways some of the information can be used and shared among government agencies. Pending changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act contain numerous provisions set up to safeguard the privacy of Americans. But there are few similar protections with other types of surveillance.

Under the FISA proposal, for example, a CIA transcript or NSA summary of an innocent social conversation between a foreign terrorist and his relative in the United States would not be shared with other intelligence analysts. Even if the conversation was later found to have investigative merit, the U.S. relative’s name and other identifying information would either be redacted or revealed only under limited circumstances to select agencies.

The Bush administration argues that the privacy and civil liberties protections in place for surveillance not covered by the FISA rules are “unprecedented.” In addition to the data-mining, use of financial transaction databases and satellite imagery, the surveillance includes monitoring the travel patterns of airline passengers.

Use of satellites by local law enforcement agencies, for instance, is supposed to go through a stringent approval protocol at the Department of Homeland Security’s newly formed National Applications Office.

But critics say the safeguards don’t always work. Some blunders in the use of such protections have become public. NewYorker writer Lawrence Wright wrote in January about one such experience. In 2002, while he was researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaida, two members of an FBI terrorism task force arrived at his home. Why, they asked, had his daughter been speaking with someone in the United Kingdom who was in touch with suspected al-Qaida operatives?

It wasn’t his daughter, he told them flatly. Wright himself had made the calls. And the person he contacted was a British civil rights lawyer who had asked him not to speak with her clients, some of whom are relatives of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant.

“My daughter is no terrorist - she went to high school with the Bush twins,” Wright said. “I was taken aback. They were apparently monitoring my phones.”

Wright said he was particularly surprised because he was aware of protections supposedly in place to conceal his name and other identifying information that would have been gathered during the creation of transcripts of the call.

Wright said he doubted the government would have been able to get a warrant for the information, and he said he didn’t know how the FBI obtained his daughter’s name, let alone got the impression that she was communicating with the British lawyer.

Critics say such stories recall 1960s and 1970s-era abuses - the CIA’s involvement in political activities, and the FBI monitoring of peace groups and civil rights activists - that prompted Congress to pass far-reaching laws bringing foreign-intelligence gathering and any domestic surveillance under strict controls and judicial oversight.

Although the latest FISA proposal includes numerous provisions for a secret court to monitor and authorize surveillance, and for inspectors general to keep tabs on who’s being monitored by various agencies, little oversight exists for surveillance programs that fall outside FISA scrutiny.

Congress has requested, and in many cases received, briefings on some of the programs. But its dissatisfaction with the amount of information provided by the administration has frequently resulted in holding back funding for programs.

The House Appropriations Committee took such a step this week, holding back funding for the National Applications Office’s effort to use U.S. satellites for domestic purposes until August, when the Government Accountability Office will release a report about how the program will handle civil liberties and privacy concerns.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the department had repeatedly met with lawmakers and would comply with any review process. He called efforts to stall the funding “misguided” and a potential threat to public safety and security missions.

Even when Congress has received information, lawmakers say their questions or concerns are often addressed within the agency that is responsible for the surveillance, amounting to a practice of self-policing.

“You don’t have to look far into history to know that when the government, any government, is given secret authorities, that those authorities are ultimately abused,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “You don’t even have to attribute bad motives to anyone. In an intelligence officer’s zeal to protect the country, they often will overstep their bounds.”

In part to assuage privacy concerns, the Department of Homeland Security has established a privacy czar to ensure that the technologies and programs initiated by the federal agency do not erode privacy laws or violate civil liberties. While many have lauded the creation of such a position, some believe it should be expanded to a Cabinet-level post in the executive branch, a step that some advocates say would send a powerful message in an age when digitized communications have ballooned and made safeguarding private information vastly more complicated.

“We should have what Canada has, which is a minister of privacy, someone looking out for the privacy issues of Americans,” said James Bamford, an intelligence expert and author on two books about the history of the NSA. “We have armies of people out there trying to pick into everyone’s private life, but we have nobody out there who’s an advocate.”

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There’s even more evidence that Bush was wrong on torture approach

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Who would have thought that Chinese communists would become a model for U.S. interrogators? What a disgrace.

The New York Times reported last week that U.S. military trainers at the Guant�namo Bay prison in 2002 taught a set of interrogation techniques that originated with a 1957 Air Force study of how Chinese communists forced confessions, often false, out of American prisoners in the Korean War. U.S. interrogators went on to use techniques described as torture in the study, including stress positions and exposure to cold, against some prisoners at Guant�namo before Congress banned coercive methods by the military in 2005.

But earlier this year, President George W. Bush rejected a chance to make a clean break from torture. He vetoed a bill that would have put CIA interrogators under the same rules as the military’s.

Torture is not only an affront to American values. Interrogators from the FBI, CIA and military have testified that it doesn’t produce reliable intelligence.

Recently, a bipartisan group of 200 retired generals, religious leaders and former top U.S. government officials — including George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state — called on Mr. Bush to issue an executive order unequivocally rejecting torture.

If the president isn’t worried about his own reputation if he rebuffs this group, he should be worried about the nation’s. Even the possibility that U.S. interrogators could use torture degrades America’s moral authority, one of its most potent weapons in the war on terrorists.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-ed07208jul07,0,4204549.story

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I assume that everything I do is probed and examined by omnipotent corporations

Monday, July 7th, 2008

The Guardian | I’ve got the opening scene of a dystopian thriller all worked out. It’s a hot summer night in a typical suburban flat. A young woman (let’s call her Alison) stands over the body of her boyfriend, who she’s just killed in a fit of madness. A crime of passion. She didn’t mean to do it, but gah - now look at the mess she’s made.

She’s quivering, gazing down at the body like someone staring into a hitherto undiscovered dimension filled with swirling nightmarish tapestries, still clutching the murder weapon in her dismal little fist, breathing through her nose like a cornered church mouse, and somewhere in the background the phone is ringing. Ringing, ringing, ringing. It takes her an age to notice. In a daze she answers it, her eyes still harpooned to the corpse. She presses the receiver to her ear and someone in a call centre greets her by name.

“Hello Alison,” says the voice, which - while friendly - sounds as though it’s reading from a card, for the 50,000th time. “I’m calling from OmniCorps Ltd, and according to our predictive software there’s a 97.8% chance you’ve just murdered your boyfriend. Now, we’re obligated to pass this information on to the authorities, which means the police are already on their way, but before they arrive we’d like to offer you the opportunity to take advantage of an exciting offer. So if you’d like to go to your window and look outside, our escape van should be arriving any moment…”

Alison parts the curtains: it’s already there, impatiently tooting. “Just get in the van,” says the voice. “Get in, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Still in a trance, she goes downstairs. She gets in. In the back are three other people. All have committed similar crimes within the past hour. Speckled with blood, they stare at each other in crazy silence as the van pulls away.

It turns out that the marketing arm of OmniCorps Ltd has been automatically tracking the entire nation’s internet activity, viewing habits, credit card transactions, use of public transport etc for years, in order to build an exhaustive database of consumer profiles. They’ve become so good at profiling, they’re able to accurately predict whether a given individual will commit a crime, and if so, what time of day they’ll do it. They’re like the “Pre-Cog” department in Minority Report, except that, instead of arresting murderers, they offer them an escape route. But once Alison gets in the van, she’s driven off to a gigantic underground sweatshop, where she and thousands of other murderers are doomed to spend the rest of their lives slaving on a production line, creating bargain-basement products for - you guessed it - OmniCorps Ltd.

That’s the basic idea. It needs work. OmniCorps Ltd needs a better name, obviously. Also the story doesn’t have a second or third act (some sort of prison breakout is in order, I guess). Worst of all, our main protagonist is a murderer, so the average non-murdering audience member might find it hard to empathise with her. Originally, Alison was a man; I made her a woman to sweeten the pill a tad, but maybe her boyfriend needs to have been a serial cheat, or a violent drunk, or at the very least have a taste for plodding indie stadium-rock or something, so we can comfortably forgive her for bashing his skull in with a steak tenderiser or whatever she used.

Anyway, it’d be worth watching, if only because the premise is 23% more plausible now than it was five years ago when I thought of it. Back then, my biggest fear was the mild intrusion of Nectar points. Now I simply assume everything I do is comprehensively probed by the invisible fingers of the central scrutiniser as a matter of course.

In my flat, there’s a full-length balcony window, with no curtains, situated right outside my bedroom. I sleep naked, so if I go for a piss in the middle of the night, I end up flashing the neighbours twice - once on the way to the bathroom, and once on the way back. First time it happened, I vowed to put up an opaque blind. But I haven’t. Partly because after a while I figured, hey, they’ve seen it all before - why deprive them now? But mainly because I live in London, European Graveyard of Privacy.

This place is a joke. Each day I move around carrying a mobile phone (traceable) and an Oyster card (trackable), monitored, on average, by 10 times as many CCTV cameras as there are in the Big Brother house. Wherever I go, a gigantic compound eye peers at the back of my neck. I’m another bustling dot in the ant farm.

Hide indoors? Ha. I’ve got Sky TV. I can’t even draw the curtains and watch Bargain Hunt without some whirring electronic prick making a note of what I’m doing. And forget the internet. Today I blew 20 minutes pointlessly looking up an old kids’ TV show called Animal Kwackers on YouTube. A record of this decision will soon be automatically winging its way to Viacom. I haven’t just wasted my own time; I’ve wasted theirs too. The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric “peep” noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.

But I don’t get angry. I shrug. They won. They won years ago. Like a bear in a zoo, I can rub my head against the wall in despair, or ignore the onlookers and forlornly shuffle around as normal. Past that balcony window. Where each time they get an eyeful, an electric peep sounds somewhere in the dark.

Yeah. Never mind a boot stamping on a human face forever. A smug electric peep each time they catch sight of your bumhole. That’s your future, right there.

· This week Charlie spent an inordinate amount of time playing the Pixies’ Doolittle album - not on a stereo, but actually physically playing it, sort of, courtesy of Rock Band on the X-Box 360: “It’s not tragic, all right, because it’s a multi-player activity, with real, live friends in the room joining in. Even if I am ultimately a man in his mid-30s playing a plastic guitar.”

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‘Big Brother’ government costs us £20billion

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Andrew Porter | The cost of Britain’s “surveillance society” measures is now running at £20 billion, a new report reveals today.

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CCTV row breaks out in crime-free village

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Daily Record | VILLAGERS are up in arms after CCTV was installed in an area where crime is almost unknown.

Nearly all of them have signed a petition to have the spy cameras removed.

Highland Council put the £1200 system on the village pier at Elgol on Skye along with prominent warning notices.

That followed arguments among local boat owners about berthing rights.

But residents say the camera system invades their privacy and overlooks the village beach where children play.

They say it also gives tourists the impression that Elgol is a crime blackspot.

Most of the 100 residents in the village have signed the petition, which will be presented to councillors later this year.

One of the organisers, Melanie McKinnon, said: “The beach is right next to the pier and it’s the only beach in Elgol, so children go to play there after they’ve been at school.

“Why should they be under 24-hour surveillance?”

She added: “On the first day the camera went up, 10 people went into the shop to ask about crime levels in Elgol.

“It’s embarrassing. People are asking whether it’s safe to leave their cars. There hasn’t been crime here in the 10 years Ihave lived here.”

The camera was installed after a dispute between the boatmen who compete to take tourists on trips to view the mountains and wildlife.

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Bush-Led ‘Disaster Capitalism’ Exploits Worldwide Misery to Make a Buck

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Naomi Klein The Nation | Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well — until it doesn’t.

For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government … . Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years.”

There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.

It’s been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today’s preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.

And the disaster capitalists have been busy — from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California’s wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress. The bill contains little in the way of affordable housing, shifts the burden of mortgage default to taxpayers and makes sure that the banks that made bad loans get some payouts. No wonder it is known in the hallways of Congress as “The Credit Suisse Plan,” after one of the banks that generously proposed it.

Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It

But these cases of disaster capitalism are amateurish compared with what is unfolding at Iraq’s oil ministry. It started with no-bid service contracts announced for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies — not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. As London-based oil expert Greg Muttitt points out, the contracts make sense only in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq’s oil fields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anticolonial struggles. According to Muttitt, the assumption until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop brand-new fields in Iraq — not to take over ones that are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. “The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company,” he told me. This is a total reversal of that policy, giving INOC a mere 25 percent instead of the planned 100 percent.

So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Ironically, it is Iraq’s suffering — its never-ending crisis — that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain its treasury of its main source of revenue. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology and the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that’s where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as “a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future.” Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil under secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as “a primary objective.”

Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure — including its oil infrastructure — is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.

Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again

Iraq isn’t the only country in the midst of an oil-related stickup. The Bush Administration is busily using a related crisis — the soaring price of fuel — to revive its dream of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And of drilling offshore. And in the rock-solid shale of the Green River Basin. “Congress must face a hard reality,” said George W. Bush on June 18. “Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels — or even higher — our nation must produce more oil.”

This is the President as Extortionist in Chief, with gas nozzle pointed to the head of his hostage — which happens to be the entire country. Give me ANWR, or everyone has to spend their summer vacations in the backyard. A final stickup from the cowboy President.

Despite the Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less bumper stickers, drilling in ANWR would have little discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would “send a message” to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which would cause them to start betting down the price.

Two points follow from this approach. First, trying to psych out hyperactive commodity traders is what passes for governing in the Bush era, even in the midst of a national emergency. Second, it will never work. If there is one thing we can predict from the oil market’s recent behavior, it is that the price is going to keep going up regardless of what new supplies are announced.

Take the massive oil boom under way in Alberta’s notorious tar sands. The tar sands (sometimes called the oil sands) have the same things going for them as Bush’s proposed drill sites: they are nearby and perfectly secure, since the North American Free Trade Agreement contains a provision barring Canada from cutting off supply to the United States. And with little fanfare, oil from this largely untapped source has been pouring into the market, so much so that Canada is now the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Between 2005 and 2007, Canada increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels. Yet despite this significant increase in secure supplies, oil prices have been going up the entire time.

What is driving the ANWR push is not facts but pure shock doctrine strategy — the oil crisis has created the conditions in which it is possible to sell a previously unsellable (but highly profitable) policy.

Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation

Intimately connected to the price of oil is the global food crisis. Not only do high gas prices drive up food costs but the boom in agrofuels has blurred the line between food and fuel, pushing food growers off their land and encouraging rampant speculation. Several Latin American countries have been pushing to re-examine the push for agrofuels and to have food recognized as a human right, not a mere commodity. United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has other ideas. In the same speech touting the US commitment to emergency food aid, he called on countries to lower their “export restrictions and high tariffs” and eliminate “barriers to use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology.” This was an admittedly more subtle stickup, but the message was clear: impoverished countries had better crack open their agricultural markets to American products and genetically modified seeds, or they could risk having their aid cut off.

Genetically modified crops have emerged as the cureall for the food crisis, at least according to the World Bank, the European Commission president (time to “bite the bullet”) and Prime Minister of Britain Gordon Brown. And, of course, the agribusiness companies. “You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms,” Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, told the Financial Times recently. The problem with this argument, at least for now, is that there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them.

But even if there was a simple key to solving the global food crisis, would we really want it in the hands of the Nestlés and Monsantos? What would it cost us to use it? In recent months Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF have been frenetically buying up patents on so-called “climate ready” seeds — plants that can grow in earth parched from drought and salinated from flooding.

In other words, plants built to survive a future of climate chaos. We already know the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its intellectual property, spying on and suing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one year to the next. We have seen patented AIDS medications fail to treat millions in sub-Saharan Africa. Why would patented “climate ready” crops be any different?

Meanwhile, amid all the talk of exciting new genetic and drilling technologies, the Bush Administration announced a moratorium of up to two years on new solar energy projects on federal lands — due, apparently, to environmental concerns. This is the final frontier for disaster capitalism. Our leaders are failing to invest in technology that will actually prevent a future of climate chaos, choosing instead to work hand in hand with those plotting innovative schemes to profit from the mayhem.

Privatizing Iraq’s oil, ensuring global dominance for genetically modified crops, lowering the last of the trade barriers and opening the last of the wildlife refuges … Not so long ago, those goals were pursued through polite trade agreements, under the benign pseudonym “globalization.” Now this discredited agenda is forced to ride on the backs of serial crises, selling itself as lifesaving medicine for a world in pain.

Naomi Klein’s latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

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Protesters train at camps before Japan G8 summit

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Danielle Demetriou | Dreadlocks flailing in the wind, the man emitted a fierce cry as he ran down the quiet country lane towards me, brandishing a bamboo stick in each hand.

Normally, I would turn and flee. But we were both playing roles in a training exercise for demonstrators preparing for Monday’s G8 summit in Hokkaido in northern Japan, and my own face was covered by a menacing revolutionary scarf.

Thousands of protesters have marched, danced and drummed their way through the streets near a highly secured hotel on the remote Lake Toya where the leaders will meet.

For many people, the focus has already shifted from Gordon Brown’s stance on climate change and the contents of Carla Bruni’s wardrobe to the students, farmers, trade unionists and anarchists trying to disrupt proceedings.

Japan, where such protest training camps have never been set up before, is taking the threat very seriously: it has deployed 40,000 armed police across the country and is spending £142 million on security.

The police have arrested three demonstrators after angry scuffles, including the disc-jockey on a mobile protest float.

The protesters have been carefully planning their response in a rural camp in nearby Tobetsu.

The programme covers direct action workshops, protest tactic discussions, legal advisory training, puppet making, football tournaments and drumming sessions.

In the guise of a Western protester, The Telegraph infiltrated the camp, which adheres to a strict “no media” policy.

It was a 20-minute walk through green fields backed by mist-shrouded mountains and drizzly skies. But as the string of colourful tents came into view, a car could also be seen in the distance, manned by plain clothes police keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.

The camp was set in the grounds of a former school, where flourescent anti-G8 banners fluttered in the breeze and a large sign read: “Alternative village.”

Inside a reception tent, two Japanese activists slouched on a sofa, handed out a list of rules and politely asked for a daily Y1,500 (£7) donation to help run the camp.

About three quarters of the protesters are Japanese from a variety of backgrounds, including trade unionists, farmers, activists, and the Japanese Communist party.

Many of them are students, but there were plenty of older Japanese citizens as well, including Hiroshi Tsuchira, 71, a retired airport worker.

“Life is difficult for people in Japan and I have never been to march this big before but it is important for people to hear our voice,” he said. “Our future will not be good if it lies in the hands of the G8 leaders.”

Other activists came from San Francisco, London and Nantes.

They included people from charities like Oxfam and more riotous protesters from a French anarcho-syndicalist commune.

“We are protesting against a structure of capitalism that has been created by the G8 summit,” said Nakata-san, a political science student from Tokyo. “We want to create our own ideal system in this campsite community.”

Despite its anarchic credentials, the campsite offers a perfect template of Japan’s renowned organisational skills. Neat piles of placards, T-shirts and recycling bins line the entrance, while leaflets offer advice on protest etiquette.

Japanese bamboo flute music is as prominent as punk rock on the internal sound system, which also broadcasts sudden and surreal messages: “Will volunteers please help peel vegetables for dinner!” or “Rave party in the gym at 5pm!”

The gym is a vast space filled with piles of anti-G8 banners and brightly coloured protest “puppets” – including eight wooden creations on sticks emblazoned with skulls on one side and the faces of G8 leaders on the other.

And there are many meetings. After a long discussion about colour-coded washing-up bowls and whether sheets should be used with futons, the cultural differences suddenly came to light.

“Is there nothing else to talk about?” muttered Sarah, a straight-talking activist who spent two months travelling overland to Japan from London. “I’m stunned.”

Beneath the veneer of domesticity, serious training sessions are under way for the 1,000 protesters at three camps near Lake Toya.

One teaches how to avoid arrest. “It was hands on, direct and practical,” said James, a 19-year-old Cambridge undergraduate. “It’s useful for people who want to go to these protests and make an impact without getting arrested.”

From intricate diagrams of where to stand in a crowd to stunts like dressing up as clowns, the discussions are painstakingly detailed.

For protesters who need to sleep, there are tents or, for an additional fee, three neatly organised rooms, equipped with futons and blankets.

And for those too hungry to continue training on behalf of the world’s poor, there are delicious vegan meals of curry, risotto, seaweed salad and fresh fruit prepared by a “food collective” that also works around the clock to make fresh hemp bread from cannabis seeds.

Late arrivals were disappointed to learn that they had missed the last of the direct action workshops laid on over previous days. They were masterminded by Lisa Fithian, an American activist - and so fearful are the Japanese authorities over the risk of disruption to the summit that she was reportedly only allowed into the country on condition that she left before the summit had even begun.

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MPs accuse Washington of lying over rendition flights

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By David Connett | MPs are to launch an investigation into US activities on Diego Garcia after accusing Washington of lying about extraordinary rendition flights from the British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean. They described false assurances given by the US about its use of Diego Garcia for the controversial flights as “deplorable”.

 

Following one of the strongest British condemnations of the US rendition policy, by which terror suspects are sent overseas for interrogation, the influential Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) plans to scrutinise Whitehall’s supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from there.

The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was forced to apologise to the Commons in February after it was revealed that two US “extraordinary rendition” flights had landed on UK territory in 2002. Britain had previously been told that no such flights had passed through its territory.

His apology came after the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, admitted that two suspects had been on flights to Guantanamo Bay and Morocco in 2002 that had stopped to refuel on Diego Garcia. In a report published today, the MPs conclude that it is “deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the US administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK government inadvertently misleading our select committee and the House of Commons.”

Andy Tyrie, a Tory MP, welcomed the report last night. Mr Tyrie, chair of the parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said: “In October 2007, I started asking questions about Diego Garcia. I was very concerned that Britain and British territory could have become complicit in America’s programme of extraordinary rendition, whereby people have been kidnapped around the world and taken to places where they may be maltreated or tortured. The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances. My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary’s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

He continued: “We must get to the bottom of British involvement in rendition. The Foreign Secretary’s latest attempt to do so is wholly inadequate. We must have confidence that the US has not been using our airports to service their planes to or from a rendition, but the Foreign Secretary has refused to even ask the Americans if this is the case. This is yet another issue on which a weak and indecisive Prime Minister should have given leadership.”

The FAC said the Government should also do more to support exiled inhabitants who were forcibly removed from Diego Garcia and adjoining islands when the US established a military base there.

In addition, it called for a public inquiry into allegations of official corruption in the Turks and Caicos islands, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. MPs who visited the islands described the allegations as “very serious”, saying they had experienced “a palpable climate of fear” while there, and warning they would take action against anyone who tried to intimidate witnesses who had spoken to them.

They also demanded evidence from the Foreign Office that it was fully investigating allegations of corruption in Bermuda and Anguilla, accusing the Foreign Office of being “too hands-off” in its administration of overseas territories.

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UK lawmakers to launch new rendition probe

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By DAVID STRINGER | Lawmakers pledged Sunday to study the movements of planes and ships traveling to the remote British outpost Diego Garcia amid persistent suspicion it is used by U.S. authorities to detain or transfer terrorism suspects.

Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee said it plans a thorough investigation of the use of the Indian Ocean island, which hosts a U.S. military base. Britain leased Diego Garcia, which is halfway between Africa and Southeast Asia, to the United States, and in 1971 barred anyone from entering the islands except by permit.

The United States initially denied using the island for extraordinary rendition flights. However, it acknowledged in February that it had misled the British government and that two suspects had been on flights that stopped to refuel on Diego Garcia en route to Guantanamo Bay and Morocco in 2002.

Reprieve, a British human rights organization, claims the U.S. has used military ships off Diego Garcia as prisons to detain suspects in terror cases. The U.S. Navy has previously said ships elsewhere have been used to hold a few prisoners for short periods, but denied that there are long-term floating prisons.

Committee chairman Mike Gapes said the United States’ initial lack of transparency makes it necessary to scrutinize “all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

“We found it deplorable that previous U.S. assurances about rendition flights through Diego Garcia had turned out to be false,” he said.

The new study comes only days after British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the United States had studied a list of 391 flights compiled by British human rights groups and lawmakers and told Britain it had found no further extraordinary rendition flights that passed through British territory.

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Ending Poverty in a Carbon Constrained World

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Andrew Simms -The New Economics Foundation | Several years ago the International Red Cross sent me on behalf the World Disasters Report to assess the early impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations. What I saw in Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, and learned from other small island states, about being resilient in the face of an unpredictable and extreme climate, may hold lessons now for how many millions more can withstand the upheaval of global warming on our small island planet. Tuvalu is living a uniquely modern paradox. It won the lottery of the internet age being awarded the domain name ‘.tv.’ Allegedly it has a bigger delegation in Los Angeles to sell rights, than it has here at the UN to protect its political interests. But, lying just a few metres above sea level, Tuvalu is in acute danger of losing its real home, just as it benefits from its new, virtual one.

We can learn a lot from the mere fact that island communities like this survived for so long on remote shards of land, exposed to the full force and vagaries of nature To do so, first they had to respect their obvious environmental limits. Next they evolved resilient local economies that helped them cope with extreme and unpredictable weather. These were, of necessity, based on reciprocity, sharing and co-operation, and not unlimited growth fed by individualistic, beggar-thy-neighbour competition.

Today, as collectively we face and exceed the limits of the earth’s bio-capacity, we are challenged at the global level to learn in a few short years, lessons that such small communities often took millennia to arrive at. Our task is enormously complicated by the intricate interdependence of the modern global economy, the unbalanced distribution of power and benefits within it, and a pace of international decision making that, until the ice started to melt so rapidly, I would have described as glacially slow. Fortunately there is much that we already do know to guide our actions, drawing on decades of experience in dozens of countries and through thousands of community based organisations around the world.

For example, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, a coalition of leading NGOS based in the UK, that we helped to form, spelt out in a series of reports looking in detail at different global regions, how climate change, if unchecked, stands not only to block further progress on the Millennium Development Goals, but to reverse gains hard won over many years. Our conclusion was that irreversible global warming, which appears perilously close, would mean not just greater hardship for millions, but the end of development as we have understood it for the last half a century.

One severe drought in Australia has already partly triggered world-wide food shortages and high and rising prices, creating shocks that ripple from the High Street in Britain to the markets of Dhaka and Port au Prince. And the UK’s official Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, recently concluded based on a moderate scenario for change, that the percentage of the Earth’s land surface prone to extreme drought having already trebled to three per cent in less than a decade, will rise to fully one third by 2090, with droughts also longer in duration.

More worrying still, the edge of the climate cliff is not clearly visible. Scientists such as NASA’s James Hansen believe we may already be tipping over. This means not just stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gases, but reducing them, with unimagined implications for the global economy. Oddly-named ‘positive environmental feedbacks’ are volatile, hard to predict and may be terrifyingly sudden. So we must act on precaution and the best estimates available.

Because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biosphere we have no choice but to act, using precaution and the best information available. An individual may recover from financial bankruptcy, but if we allow our ecological debts to bankrupt a climate conducive to human civilisation, geological history shows that it could take tens of thousands of years to be restored if, indeed, it ever is.

We already know that people living in poverty are hit first and worst by global warming. This and the challenge of reducing poverty in a carbon constrained world calls for a new development model which is climate proof and climate friendly. From now on, all decisions will need to be scrutinised for whether they will increase or decrease vulnerability to climate change. We must look through the lenses of building resilience at the community level, and reducing risk. And, it is the communities at risk who must shape our plans.

Parallel to the approach of the IPCC, the recent report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology showed that a massive shift of support to small scale farmers using a diverse range of agro-ecological methods would be one of the most efficient ways to build resilience, inoculate against food crises, and insure against increasingly hostile weather patterns. Community-based coping strategies such as the use of seed banks, water management, vulnerability mapping, storm and flood protection that works with the local environment, and the conservation of forests and other ecosystems – all represent effective ways for threatened communities to adapt.

If replicated and scaled-up, small-scale renewable energy projects promoted by governments and community groups can help both to tackle poverty and reduce climate change. But this needs political commitment, significant new funds from governments and a major shift in priorities for energy lending by the World Bank and other development bodies. There is no either/or approach possible; the world must meet both its commitments to achieve the MDGs and tackle climate change. The two are inextricably linked.

Here we crash headlong into another, equally large problem. It is clear that conventional economic growth will happen in poor countries as a consequence of effective poverty reduction. But at a global level, the policies designed to pursue growth have become a mask for making the rich, richer, whilst leaving the poor with few benefits and abandoned to deal with growth’s environmental consequences. During the 1980s – what was called lost decade of development – from every $100 worth of global economic growth, around $2.20 found its way to people living below the absolute poverty line. A decade later that had shrunk to just $0.60c, and the actual mean income of those living under $1 per day in Africa also fell.

There has been, in effect, a sort of ‘flood-up’ of wealth from poor to rich, rather than a ‘trickle-down.’ It means, perversely, that for the poor to get slightly less poor, the rich have to get very much richer, implying patterns of consumption which, in a world facing climate change, cannot be sustained. It now takes around $166 worth of global growth – made up of all those energy-hungry giant flat screen TVs and sports utility vehicles – to generate a single dollar of poverty reduction for people in absolute poverty, compared with just $45 dollars in the 1980s. Earnings of between $3 and $4 per day is the approximate level at which the strong link between income and life expectancy breaks down. So, let us ask what would happen if we agreed $3 per day as the minimum level of income to escape absolute poverty?

Using the ecological footprint measure, if the whole world wished to consume at the level of the United States – a consumption pattern which has been fuelled, incidentally, by the credit binge which led to the current economic crisis – we would need, conservatively, over 5 planets like earth to support them. But, under the current pattern of unequally distributed benefits from growth, to lift everyone in the world onto a modest $3 per day, would require the resources of around 15 planets like ours. Where, you might ask, will the other 14 come from?

To tackle poverty in a carbon constrained world, then, we need a new development model, based on better measures of progress, and a shift from relying on unequal global growth to serious redistribution. If we think of the planet as a cake, we can slice it differently, but we surely cannot bake a new one. Climate change is not the only reason that we have to learn to live with far fewer fossil fuels. Development must also contend with the high and rising price of oil, and the imminent global peak and long decline of oil production.

What, if any, guides do we have to surviving these multiple shocks?

One country, much maligned, provides a glimpse of a near future that many more may face. Almost like a laboratory example, positioned on the flight path of the annual Hurricane season, since 1990 Cuba has lived through the economic and environmental shocks that climate change and peak oil hold in store for the rest of the world.

The sudden loss of cheap Soviet oil and its economic isolation were so extreme at the end of the cold war, and its reaction to the shock was so contrary to orthodox approaches, and relatively successful, that it was dubbed in Washington the ‘anti-model.’ Then oil imports dropped by over half. The use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers dropped by 80 percent. The availability of basic food staples like wheat and other grains fell by half and, overall, the average Cuban’s calorie intake fell by over one third in around five years.

But, serious and long-term investment in science, engineering, health, education, plus land redistribution, reduced inequality and research into low-input ecological farming techniques, meant the country had a strong social fabric and the capacity to act.

At the heart of the transition after 1990 was the success of small farms, and urban farms and gardens. Immediate crisis was averted by food programmes that targeted the most vulnerable people, the old, young, pregnant women and young mothers, and a rationing programme that guaranteed a minimum amount of food to everyone. Soon, half the food consumed in the capital, Havana, was grown in the city’s own gardens and, overall, urban gardens provide 60 percent of the vegetables eaten in Cuba. The threat of serious food shortages was overcome within five years.

Time magazine recently called for a ‘War on Climate Change,’ and, interestingly, Cuba’s experience echoed what America achieved in a more distant time of hardship during World War II. Then Eleanor Roosevelt led the ‘victory gardening movement’ to produce between 30-40 percent of vegetables for domestic consumption, and public education campaigns warned that wasting fuel was like fighting for the enemy. Cuba demonstrated it is possible to feed a population under extreme economic stress with very few fossil fuel, but there were other surprises too.

As calorie intake fell by more than one third, of necessity the proportion of physically active adults more than doubled and obesity halved. Between 1997-2002, deaths attributed to diabetes halved, coronary heart disease fell by 35 percent, and strokes and other causes by around one fifth. The approach was dubbed the ‘anti-model’ because it was both highly managed and led by communities, it focused on meeting domestic needs rather than exports, was largely organic and built on the success of small farms. The same countrys approach to disaster preparedness and management is also instructive.

Compared to the deaths and destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, when Hurricane Michelle hit Cuba in 2001 only 5 lives were lost, and recovery was quick. It was due to proper planning, and a collective approach managed by government, but owned at the local level. Disasters expert Dr Ben Wisner commented on the evacuation of 700,000 of Cuba’s 11 million population, ‘This is quite a feat given Cuba’s dilapidated fleet of vehicles, fuel shortage and poor road system.’ At least one analyst suggests that the Cuban experiment, ‘may hold many of the keys to the future survival of civilisation.’

Currently, according to our calculations, in a given calendar year the world as a whole goes into ecological debt around October 7th – by which time we have consumed more and produced more waste than ecosystems can deal with. The results are seen in climate change, oceans emptied of fish, and desertification. Forty years ago Robert Kennedy said that economic growth measured everything apart from that which really matters. But it is possible to assess if we are achieving human development whilst living within our environmental means.

nef’s own ‘Happy Planet Index’, compares the relative success of nations at delivering long life expectancy and high levels of well being, compared to their size of ecological footprint. The results reveal many middle income countries performing well, with good life expectancy and well-being, and relatively low footprints. Strikingly, some of the best performers are small island states. Somehow, they have worked together to produce more convivial communities, whilst respecting environmental limits.

The UN faces huge challenges. Not least is how to recognise and protect the large and growing number of people we can expect to be displaced in a warming world. The climate refugee crisis will dwarf that of political refugees. What will happen to the nationhood and economic areas of countries that could disappear entirely, like Tuvalu? How can we change our locked-in thinking about economic development, and reorganise around the principles of resilience, social justice, sufficiency, ecological efficiency, and the capacity to adapt?

We might begin by asking, as acid tests:

• Will what we do make people more or less vulnerable?
• Will it move us toward truly sustainable, one-planet-living?
• Will it move us fast enough to prevent irreversible, catastrophic climate change?

When the people of Tuvalu first encountered Europeans in the 19th century, they gave them the name palangi. Victorian travellers translated the word to mean “heaven bursters,” a reference to their ship’s guns. Now, some of our lifestyles truly threaten to burst the heavens. At the very least, to achieve poverty reduction in world threatened by climate change, we know that rich countries must radically cut their own consumption to free-up the environmental space in which others can pursue, as a first step, the Millennium Development Goals.

The good news is that we now know from the literature on human well-being, that making the rich, richer does nothing to increase their life satisfaction. On the contrary, numerous studies confirm that once your basic needs are met, you are just as likely to have high life satisfaction, whether your ecological footprint is large or small. My conclusion is that a new development model is needed as much, if not more, in countries like Britain and the US as the majority world. We have to demonstrate that good lives do not have to cost the earth.

Impassable ecological obstacles lie on the path down which we chase the shadows of over-consumption to deliver our well-being, expecting the poor to be grateful for and crumbs that fall from our plates. The good news is that another way is not only possible, as the philosopher A.C. Grayling writes, it is better, richer and more enduring.

Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate change programme at nef (the new economics foundation). This article is from a speech he gave to the UN ECOSOC special session on climate change and the MDGS, New York, 2 May 2008.

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Files show US military planned nerve gas testing in Australia

Monday, July 7th, 2008

There are revelations the United States military was planning to test deadly nerve gas in north eastern Australia in far north Queensland rainforest in the 1960s.

Australian Defence Department files obtained by Australian television station Channel Nine, show the US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops by aerial bombing areas around Lockhart River.

The plan never went ahead, but American survey teams inspected the proposed testing site.

Former Democrats Senator Lyn Allison says the current government should make the documents public.

Source http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200807/s2295630.htm

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TOWER 7 REPORT EXPECTED TO BLAME FIRE FOR COLLAPSE

Monday, July 7th, 2008

It wasn’t only the Twin Towers that collapsed on September 11. A third World Trade Center tower that wasn’t hit by the planes also fell. As a report into Tower 7 prepares to publish its findings, Mike Rudin considers how this conspiracy theory got to be so big.

9/11 is the conspiracy theory of the internet age.

Put “9/11 conspiracy” into Google and you get 7.9 million hits. Put in “9/11 truth” and you get more than 22 million.

Opinion polls in the US have picked up widespread doubts among the American people.

A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2006 found that 53% of those questioned thought the Bush administration was hiding something. Another US poll found a third of those questioned thought government officials either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or allowed them to happen.

In the UK a survey by the BBC’s The Conspiracy Files, carried out by GfkNOP in 2006, found that 16% of those questioned thought there was a “wider conspiracy that included the American government”.

This summer will be a key moment for those who question the official explanation of what happened on 9/11, the self-styled “9/11 truth movement”.

Nearly seven years after the terrible events of that September day, the US authorities are due to publish the final report on a third tower that also collapsed on 9/11. Unlike the Twin Towers, this 47-storey, 610-foot skyscraper was not hit by a plane.

And Tower 7 has become a key issue for “truthers” like Dylan Avery, the director of the internet film about 9/11 called Loose Change.

“The truth movement is heavily centred on Building 7 and for very good reason a lot of people are very suspicious about what went down that day,” he says.

Avery points out that Tower 7 housed some unusual tenants: the CIA, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the very agency meant to deal with disasters or terrorist attacks in New York - the Office of Emergency Management. And some people think Tower 7 was the place where a 9/11 conspiracy was hatched.

The official explanation is that ordinary fires were the main reason for the collapse of Tower 7. That makes this the first and only tall skyscraper in the world to have collapsed because of fire. Yet despite that all the thousands of tonnes of steel from the building were carted away and melted down.

The way official bodies have investigated Tower 7 at the World Trade Center has made some people think they’re hiding something. Its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

An inquiry by the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building for emergency generators. But its report said this had “only a low probability of occurrence” and more work was needed. That was in May 2002.

The task has now fallen to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based at a sprawling campus near Washington DC. For more than two-and-a-half years, scientists there have been studying Tower 7.

Inevitably the officials have been criticised for being slow and even of being frightened to publish.

But the lead investigator at NIST, who heads up their World Trade Center inquiry, Dr Shyam Sunder, says that two-and-a-half years is typically how long an aeroplane crash investigation takes. He added that only in the last few years did they begin to hear criticism from the “truth” movement.

“It’s only at the very end in 2005 that this group became more vocal and we found them coming to some of our meetings. But for a long time they were not even present. It wasn’t the delay that really caused them, they just woke up one morning and decided to take this on as an issue.”

Soul searching

In April 2005, the first thousand DVDs of Dylan Avery’s Loose Change movie were pressed. It cost just $2,000 to make. It was a critical moment for the development of the movement. The makers of Loose Change claim it has now been viewed by more than a hundred million people.

Steven Jones, a former physics professor at Brigham Young University, who has become the leading academic voice in the movement, first watched a video of the collapse of Tower 7 in the spring of 2005. But when he did, he said he was taken aback as a physicist.

Will the theories ever be laid to rest?

The American architect Richard Gage’s conversion came in 2006 when driving along he heard an independent radio station interviewing the theologian David Ray Griffin.

“I had to do some real soul searching and some research. And the more I discovered the more disturbed I became and realized I was looking for… the architects and the engineers.”

Finding that they hadn’t really entered the fray by then, Gage decided he had to act.

“It just came to me, I had to start an organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.”

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was a huge moment for “truthers”. Under the media spotlight protests intensified, websites were spawned and internet films proliferated.

With the publicity also came the “debunkers”, challenging the “truthers” at every stage.

After Loose Change came a website called Screw Loose Change. And internet film 9/11 Mysteries was followed by Screw 9/11 Mysteries.

Conspiracy splits

And the “truthers” have fought back. When the US technology magazine Popular Mechanics launched a book called Debunking 9/11 Myths, it was countered with a book by David Ray Griffin called Debunking 9/11 Debunking.

Over time the scale of the alleged conspiracy has grown and grown, encompassing not just sections of the Bush administration, intelligence, but also the fire service, the police, first responders, official investigators, experts, the building’s owner, and the media, and, oh yes, even the BBC.

George Bush is hiding something, says the 9/11 truth movement

And over time schisms have opened up in the 9/11 “truth” movement.

So-called “no-planers” believe that commercial aeroplanes did not actually crash into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon or a field in Pennsylvania. Some have suggested lasers from outer space were used.

“Planers” believe aeroplanes were used but argue that only controlled demolitions can explain the collapses of the World Trade Center towers.

Then there are the LIHOPs and MIHOPs. Most “truthers” are MIHOPs - they think the government Made It Happen On Purpose, planning and orchestrating the 9/11 attacks.

But LIHOPs believe the government just Let It Happen On Purpose, to allow them to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a clampdown on civil liberties.

Into this febrile atmosphere comes the final official report on 9/11.

This summer we will find out whether NIST’s report has answered the many questions that have been raised, or whether it will suffer the same fate as the Warren Commission on the assassination of President John F Kennedy and merely add fuel to the conspiracy theories.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7488159.stm

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Iraqi torture victims slam UK ‘contempt’

Monday, July 7th, 2008

The Observer | Iraqi civilians who were tortured by British soldiers say the government is treating them with ‘contempt’ ahead of a potential multi-million-pound payout for the abuse they suffered.

The eight Iraqis arrived in London yesterday for this week’s long-awaited mediation into how much compensation the government is willing to pay to civilians who were tortured while held in British custody. The eight accused the Ministry of Defence last night of trying to block them from attending the high-profile meeting.

The Iraqis will meet MoD lawyers on Wednesday inside the Treasury for negotiations presided over by the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, to determine a settlement which will include compensation for the death of Baha Musa.

The 26-year-old receptionist had suffered 93 identifiable injuries at the hands of British soldiers in Basra in September 2003. He had died after being subjected to 36 hours of beatings and abusive treatment, including being double-hooded with hessian sacks in stifling conditions.

Musa’s father, Dawood, a colonel in the Iraqi police force who had struggled for weeks to get a UK entry visa, was among the group that arrived in London yesterday. He said that the behaviour of the government in the five years since his son was killed had convinced him that the MoD viewed Iraqi lives as ‘cheap’.

Maithem al-Waz, who had been abused alongside Musa, accused the government yesterday of not helping the group to obtain UK visas to attend the high-profile hearing. ‘It took so long, from May until today, to get the visa,’ Waz said. ‘Although the MoD agreed to the mediation they gave no co-operation - we have struggled for two months to get our visas. I feel that they don’t want to co-operate. We are so disappointed by the way they have acted.’

He also voiced serious concerns over the treatment of himself and other witnesses at the 2006 court martial of seven soldiers charged with the killing of Musa. ‘At the court martial they put us in military camps, it felt as if we were in detention, they treated us very badly, the military shouted at us if we were just two minutes late. They wouldn’t allow us to leave the camp and said they would put us in prison if we left,’ he said. ‘At the court martial itself, we didn’t feel free to talk; we weren’t given enough time or freedom to express what we wanted to say. When they asked us questions at the court martial - [they] were so vague and unclear we didn’t always understand . If we get the same treatment at the mediation as we did at the court martial we will be very disappointed.’ Despite admitting liability over Musa’s death and the abuse of other detainees, the MoD is understood to have not accepted the psychological assessments detailing the trauma of those abused. It is also contesting elements of the beatings and hoodings British troops inflicted. Leigh Day, the law firm acting for the Iraqis, said the claimants were seeking ‘exemplary and aggravated damages’ from the MoD.

Following the court martial, only Corporal Donald Payne, of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (now renamed Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment), was convicted of inhumane treatment of a prisoner. However, The Observer has learnt that Payne has now been released from prison and is living with his family in the north of England after setting up his own business. Legal sources said he is furious with his treatment by the army and feels he was made a ’scapegoat’.

General Sir Richard Dannatt, the chief of the general staff, recently announced a public inquiry into the death of Musa. Dannatt said that it was still possible that some soldiers or officers might face disciplinary punishment if their conduct proved below the required standard. After a three-year investigation into the incident the MoD admitted last April that the Iraqis were ill-treated.

An MoD spokesman said they would not comment until the mediation had been concluded, most likely on Thursday.

Have Your Say: Iraqi torture victims slam UK ‘contempt’
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Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By ERIC LICHTBLAU | A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

Judge Walker’s voice carries extra weight because all the lawsuits involving telephone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program have been consolidated and are being heard in his court.

Jon Eisenberg, a lawyer for Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, the plaintiff in the case, said the legal issues Judge Walker’s ruling raised were significant. “He’s saying FISA makes the rules and the president is bound by those rules,” Mr. Eisenberg said.

A Justice Department official said the department was reviewing the opinion late Wednesday and would consider its options.

Officials at Al-Haramain say they were mistakenly given a government document revealing the N.S.A. operation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded the document back, and Judge Walker’s ruling made it more difficult for Al-Haramain to use what it claims to have seen . But he refused to throw out the lawsuit, giving the charity’s lawyers 30 days to restructure their claim. “We still have our foot in the door,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The clock is a minute to midnight, but we’ve been there before and survived.”

The ruling comes as the Senate is overhauling the foreign intelligence law. The measure would reaffirm FISA as the exclusive means for the president to order wiretaps through court warrants, but it would also provide legal immunity to phone companies involved in the eavesdropping program. A vote could come Tuesday.

The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.

 

Have Your Say: Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps
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