A grim view of the nation's energy future, and its implications for the military, emerges in a just released report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
"The days of inexpensive, convenient, abundant energy sources are quickly drawing to a close," says the report, titled "Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations." It concludes that at the current rate of consumption and production decline, the lifetime of proven domestic oil reserves is only 3.4 years. It projects the lifetime of proven worldwide oil reserves at 41 years, but with declining availability, noting that Saudi Arabia ? home to the bulk of those reserves ? has not increased production in three years.
The report was completed in September but was not released publicly until a request was made earlier this week by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican who has made several speeches in recent months warning that the world is in the grip of "peak oil" ? a time of declining production and rapidly escalating prices. The theory is highly controversial, and the oil industry maintains that there are abundant untapped resources, although admittedly more expensive to develop than has historically been the case. In a speech on the House floor Tuesday night, Bartlett quoted extensively from the report.
"The Army operates in a domestic and world energy situation that is highly uncertain," the report says. Even its outlook on nuclear energy, a key component of Bush administration policy, is not positive. "Our current throwaway nuclear cycle will consume the world reserve of low-cost uranium in about 20 years," the report says.
The researchers conclude that the military needs to take major steps to increase energy efficiency, make a "massive expansion" in renewable energy purchases, and move toward a vast increase in renewable distributed generation, including photovoltaic, solar thermal, microturbines, and biomass energy sources.
US Army: Peak Oil and the Army's future
RT On Air
Saturday, 18 March 2006
Lessons of Iraq War start with U.S. history
By Howard Zinn
March 8, 2006
On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.
I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.
One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.
If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.
President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.
President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.
President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.
President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."
And everyone lied about Vietnam -- President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.
President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.
The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.
And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 -- hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.
There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.
If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values -- democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise -- to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.
We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the
U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is not a history of which we can be proud.
Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.
But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?
A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.
It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.
Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories Press, 2004). He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
March 8, 2006
On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.
I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.
One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.
If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.
President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.
President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.
President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.
President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."
And everyone lied about Vietnam -- President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.
President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.
The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.
And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 -- hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.
There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.
If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values -- democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise -- to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.
We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the
U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is not a history of which we can be proud.
Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.
But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?
A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.
It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.
Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories Press, 2004). He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate
Dear Ms. Shirin Ebadi:
The appeal you and Mohammad Sahimi addressed to "Western democracies" in the International Herald Tribune on January 19 disappointed this former admirer of yours. Your invitation to the current and previous imperial powers to intervene for human rights in Iran fails precisely on grounds of the noble principles you invoked to construct your argument.
These were:
1.Respect for historical accuracy;
2.Promotion of transparency; and
3.Accountability on the part of the powerful.
I will address the second and third of these in my follow-up essay next week.
read on with links below
Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate by Rostam Pourzal
Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate: Part 2
The appeal you and Mohammad Sahimi addressed to "Western democracies" in the International Herald Tribune on January 19 disappointed this former admirer of yours. Your invitation to the current and previous imperial powers to intervene for human rights in Iran fails precisely on grounds of the noble principles you invoked to construct your argument.
These were:
1.Respect for historical accuracy;
2.Promotion of transparency; and
3.Accountability on the part of the powerful.
I will address the second and third of these in my follow-up essay next week.
read on with links below
Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate by Rostam Pourzal
Open Letter to Iran's Nobel Laureate: Part 2
Friday, 17 March 2006
More proof that Johnny is a Liar
Smoking gun drama for PM
AUSTRALIA'S intelligence services told the Federal Government five years ago that Saddam Hussein's regime was charging kickbacks on all humanitarian contracts at the time
AWB was the largest supplier of humanitarian goods to Iraq.
Explosive documents released yesterday by the Cole oil-for-food inquiry also show the Government was told as early as 1998 that a Jordanian company part-owned by Iraq was being used as a conduit for payments to Iraq in breach of UN sanctions. The company, Alia, was used by the monopoly wheat exporter AWB to funnel almost $300 million in bribes to Iraq.
Fifteen intelligence reports on the corruption in the UN's oil-for-food program were earlier suppressed by the Cole inquiry at the request of the Government on national security grounds. The released summaries of these reports will put the Prime Minister, John Howard, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and the former defence minister Robert Hill under renewed pressure over the scandal.
The damning material was supplied by foreign intelligence services between 1998 and 2004 and then distributed throughout the bureaucracy. According to a sworn statement to the Cole inquiry, it was passed to "departments, other agencies and certain ministerial offices in accordance with normal agency practice and as shown on each document distribution list".
Despite these reports, the Government did not order its own agencies to collect intelligence on AWB and other Australian companies dealing with Iraq under the oil-for-food program. Nor did the reports provoke the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department to take steps to ensure there was no breach of UN sanctions.
Last night the Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said the new evidence showed Mr Howard was a "liar".
Mr Howard had said on February 12 that all documents had been provided to the enquiry, Mr Rudd said. But subpoenas were issued five days later to extract this information from the intelligence community. "We now have some idea why the
Prime Minister was so reluctant to provide it."
Mr Downer has repeated his claim that the intelligence had not raised any concerns about AWB. "There wasn't any Australian intelligence reporting and there wasn't any intelligence reporting from our foreign partners that specifically mentioned AWB."
However, the reports set out in precise detail the system of kickbacks now known to have been used by AWB. Alia was identified as early as 1998 as "part owned by the Iraqi government and ? involved in circumventing UN sanctions on behalf of the Iraqi government".
One summary says: "By March 2001 the AIC [Australian intelligence community] held intelligence of endeavours by Iraq to breach sanctions by, amongst other methods, collecting commission on contracts for humanitarian goods imported into Iraq under the [oil-for-food program]." Several reports say this system was "rigidly enforced" by Iraq.
However, one intelligence report of November 2003 said: "Not all large companies had agreed to pay the Iraqi-imposed surcharges, and cited as an example wheat imports from Australia."
But by this time the United States Defence Audit Agency had named AWB as inflating their contracts with the 10 per cent kickback.
Foreign Affairs witnesses have told the Cole inquiry that they had not seen any of the 15 intelligence reports and were familiar with little of their substance.
A spokesman for Mr Downer's office last night said the new evidence does not link Alia to AWB.
AUSTRALIA'S intelligence services told the Federal Government five years ago that Saddam Hussein's regime was charging kickbacks on all humanitarian contracts at the time
AWB was the largest supplier of humanitarian goods to Iraq.
Explosive documents released yesterday by the Cole oil-for-food inquiry also show the Government was told as early as 1998 that a Jordanian company part-owned by Iraq was being used as a conduit for payments to Iraq in breach of UN sanctions. The company, Alia, was used by the monopoly wheat exporter AWB to funnel almost $300 million in bribes to Iraq.
Fifteen intelligence reports on the corruption in the UN's oil-for-food program were earlier suppressed by the Cole inquiry at the request of the Government on national security grounds. The released summaries of these reports will put the Prime Minister, John Howard, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and the former defence minister Robert Hill under renewed pressure over the scandal.
The damning material was supplied by foreign intelligence services between 1998 and 2004 and then distributed throughout the bureaucracy. According to a sworn statement to the Cole inquiry, it was passed to "departments, other agencies and certain ministerial offices in accordance with normal agency practice and as shown on each document distribution list".
Despite these reports, the Government did not order its own agencies to collect intelligence on AWB and other Australian companies dealing with Iraq under the oil-for-food program. Nor did the reports provoke the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department to take steps to ensure there was no breach of UN sanctions.
Last night the Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said the new evidence showed Mr Howard was a "liar".
Mr Howard had said on February 12 that all documents had been provided to the enquiry, Mr Rudd said. But subpoenas were issued five days later to extract this information from the intelligence community. "We now have some idea why the
Prime Minister was so reluctant to provide it."
Mr Downer has repeated his claim that the intelligence had not raised any concerns about AWB. "There wasn't any Australian intelligence reporting and there wasn't any intelligence reporting from our foreign partners that specifically mentioned AWB."
However, the reports set out in precise detail the system of kickbacks now known to have been used by AWB. Alia was identified as early as 1998 as "part owned by the Iraqi government and ? involved in circumventing UN sanctions on behalf of the Iraqi government".
One summary says: "By March 2001 the AIC [Australian intelligence community] held intelligence of endeavours by Iraq to breach sanctions by, amongst other methods, collecting commission on contracts for humanitarian goods imported into Iraq under the [oil-for-food program]." Several reports say this system was "rigidly enforced" by Iraq.
However, one intelligence report of November 2003 said: "Not all large companies had agreed to pay the Iraqi-imposed surcharges, and cited as an example wheat imports from Australia."
But by this time the United States Defence Audit Agency had named AWB as inflating their contracts with the 10 per cent kickback.
Foreign Affairs witnesses have told the Cole inquiry that they had not seen any of the 15 intelligence reports and were familiar with little of their substance.
A spokesman for Mr Downer's office last night said the new evidence does not link Alia to AWB.
Thursday, 16 March 2006
Uncle Chutzpah and His Willing Executioners on the Dire Iran Threat: With Twelve Principles of War Propaganda in Ongoing Service
By Edward S. Herman
Deja Vu All Over Iran
Back at the time of a major Bush-1 "drug war" in 1989, Hodding Carter pointed out that with increasing attention to the newly declared "crisis" by the administration and media, the public's estimate of the importance of the drug problem rose spectacularly. "Today's big news is the drug war. The president says so, so television says so, newspapers and magazines say so, and the public says so." Today's big news is the possibility that Iran, the Little Satan, might some day acquire a nuclear weapon: the administration says so, the media say so, and now three times as many people regard Iran as the U.S.'s greatest menace than four months ago and 47 percent of the public agrees that Iran should be bombed if needed to prevent its acquiring any nuclear weapon capability.
The system works this mobilization process like a well-oiled propaganda machine--which it is--and it can apparently sell almost anything in the way of justifying external violence to a large fraction of the populace, at least in the short run. The attack on Iraq was a remarkable achievement in this respect, given that it was built on a series of lies about Iraq weapons, links, and threats that were extremely dubious at best, a number clearly false and even quite silly (the mushroom cloud and threat to U.S. national security); and given that the actions taken were in blatant violation of the UN Charter. To put this over required tacit collusion between the administration and mainstream media, with the latter serving as de facto propaganda arms of the war-makers.
We may recall that the justification for NATO's bombing of the Serb TV broadcasting facilities in 1999 (killing 16 people) was that it was a propaganda arm of the Serb military. On that logic, accepted by respectable opinion and Carla Del Ponte on behalf of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, in a just world, where Bush and company would surely be brought to trial for manifold war crimes in the Iraq aggression-occupation, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, Donald Graham, Leonard Downie, Jr., Richard Cohen, George Will, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly, and numerous others would be in the dock alongside them.
The further remarkable thing is that, despite their semi-apologies for betraying the public interest and their readers in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq--at least at the New York Times and Washington Post--the media are going through the same routines of propaganda service in the buildup to a possible attack on Iran. They quite generally avoid mentioning the similarity of the arguments made earlier, or that the administration lied egregiously earlier, or their own earlier hyper-gullibility. A tabula rasa is required if the system calls for serial propaganda service that entails the serial conveying of disinformation and suppression of inconvenient evidence. The "Drumbeat sounds familiar" to Simon Tisdall in the London Guardian (March 7, 2006), but not to the servants of power in the U.S. media.
Twelve Principles of Propaganda Used in Setting the Stage for War: the Iran Case
The first principle in manufacturing propaganda for the U.S. war party is to take it as a given that the United States has the legal and moral right to take the lead in making a case that the international community must act-here to stop Iran's nuclear program. Consider that the United States is in the midst of an occupation in Iraq in which it is daily committing war crimes, all of which follow on a major act of aggression that violated the UN Charter. A lesser power doing this would be declared an international outlaw, and would not be considered a proper leader to guide the international community in the pursuit of villainy. In fact, containing the outlaw would be deemed of primary importance. Furthermore, the United States showed its contempt for the rule of law and for any UN legal procedures in the runup to the Iraq war, when it fabricated a crisis-Iraqi violation of international rules and an Iraqi threat to U.S. national security-and on that basis simply ran roughshod over UN processes and international law.
Beyond these outrages, the United States has unclean hands as regards the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran is allegedly violating: as a signatory to the NPT, the United States pledged "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." It has not met this pledge, nor the promise not to threaten or use nuclear weapons against signers who agreed to forego developing nuclear weapons. It is even "upgrading" and "modernizing" its nuclear weapons to make them more "practical." In theory, Iran or any other party could complain to the IAEA that the United States is in clear breach of the NPT, but somehow this doesn't happen; only possible breaches that the United States sees fit to pursue can be attended to in the New World Order. Furthermore, the United States has given crucial support to Israel, engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing operation in violation of international law, with both superpower and client simply brushing aside a stream of UN rulings and an International Court condemnation of Israel's apartheid wall. The United States has either aided or given tacit approval to breaches of the NPT by Israel, Pakistan and India. In short, its moral right to challenge Iran is non-existent-it can do so only by virtue of power, bribery and threats, and because the patriotic mainstream media take its moral right as an undiscussible given.
The second principle, paralleling the U.S. right to do as it pleases, is the absence of the target's right even to defend itself. The United States and Israel may possess nuclear weapons, the latter refusing to subject itself to the NPT and the former violating it and threatening Iran with "regime change," but any Iran move to right the balance by acquiring such weapons for itself is a terrible thing that threatens "international peace and security," as stated in House Concurrent Resolution 341. The United States and Israel have been bringing "peace and security" to the Middle East! It should be noted that in the EU negotiations on Iran's nuclear activities, the United States has refused to give any security guarantee to Iran as part of the package, making its un-peaceful intentions toward Iran clear, but this still does not give Iran the right to acquire weapons that might reduce that open threat. For the media this is all irrelevant, as its leadership says that Iran is a menace and nothing else matters.
A third principle is inflating the menace that would follow from Iran's possession of nuclear weapons. This of course parallels closely the earlier inflation of the Iraq threat, where the Bush administration propagandists were not laughed off the stage for talking about mushroom clouds off New York and other dire threats. Then and now the media have not pointed out that Saddam Hussein had only used chemical weapons in the 1980's against Iran (and Iraqi Kurds) at a time when he was serving U.S. interests--and therefore with tacit U.S. approval--but that he didn't use them at all in the Persian Gulf War when the United States was the opponent and could retaliate in kind and with greater force. By the same token, as the United States and Israel have enormous retaliatory capability, the Iranians could never use nuclear weapons as an offensive tool without committing national suicide. But nuclear weapons would serve as a default weapon if Iran were attacked; that is, it would contribute to self-defense. This line of argument is carefully avoided in the mainstream propaganda flow.
Of course, demons shouldn't have the right of self-defense, and the fourth principle applied in the media's beating the drums of war is unrelenting demonization of the target. This was easy to do with Saddam Hussein, but it can be worked for almost anyone, as there are few political leaders who don't have some unsavory elements in their record or who haven't made indiscreet or wild statements that can be latched onto, taken out of context, and used to suggest irresponsibility and menace. Iran's mullahs have run a fairly repressive state, although its repression has eased up and democratic voices have not been silenced. The newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, of course, made an indefensible statement on the Holocaust (a "myth") and a wild statement that Israel should be "wiped off the map." In his recent classic of war propaganda ("Judicious Double Standards," Washington Post, March 7, 2006), Richard Cohen even says that the Iranian leader is a "zealot who has pledged to eradicate Israel," a straightforward lie. Victor David Hanson makes the current scene one of "appeasement." as in the treatment of Hitler in the 1930s, and Iran now a threatening "bully." ("Appeasement 101: dealing with bullies," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 2006). Iran of course has zero nuclear weapons, whereas the United States and Israel both have massive numbers and delivery systems, and Iran hasn't once moved beyond its borders, whereas the United States and Israel have done so regularly and are pummeling Middle East populations right now, but Iran is the "bully," and appeasement means failing to make sure by threat or violence that it cannot ever acquire a single nuclear weapon. But lies and inflated rhetoric are par for the course, and in the panicky environment of the pre-war threat buildup there is no cost to lying or comical threat inflation.
A fifth principle is to avoid discussion of any current relationships with governments that might deserve demon status as much or even more than the target (here Iran). Saudi Arabia is more fundamentalist Islamic and more repressive than Iran, and Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Uzbekistan are at least as vulnerable to criticism for undemocratic practice as Iran, but they are U.S. client states, hence relatively free from criticism let alone threat of destabilization or attack. Pakistan even has nuclear weapons, and the United States finds that tolerable.
Israel of course has a sizable nuclear arsenal, which the United States helped Israel develop and which the United States accepts as reasonable. Richard Cohen explains that this is part of the judicious double standard because "Israel has not threatened to blow Iran off the map; because it is vastly outnumbered in a tough, belligerent neighborhood; and because it is the lone real democracy in a region run mostly by thugs." But Israel has threatened to bomb Iran, and made this threat long before Ahmadinejad's pugnacious statements, which have never been as specific or realistic as Israel's threats; and Israel has regularly invaded its neighbors, which Iran has not done (although it was invaded by Iraq, which was helped in this by the United States). Cohen fails to mention that the "thugs" in the neighborhood are mainly U.S. client states, whose thuggery is accepted because used only against their own citizenry. Israel is "outnumbered" in people but not in tanks, modern aircraft, missiles, and nuclear arms, and it has the full backing of the United States, so that it threatens and beats up others, but remains invulnerable. It is not a true democracy-it is a racist democracy, and it is the world's only state that is free to occupy another people's land and ethnically cleanse them over many years in violation of international law and accepted standards of morality, from which it is exempt by virtue of its and its patron's military power. In short, this "judicious double standard" is built on racism, lies, and Orwellian thought, now institutionalized (see my "Ethnic Cleansing and the 'Moral Instinct'," Z Magazine, March 2006).
A sixth and closely related principle is the need to keep under the rug any awkward past actions or relationships with the target that might show both hypocrisy and the fraudulence of the claimed threat. This was dramatically so in the case of Saddam Hussein, aided and protected by U.S. (and British) officials in the 1980s when he was actually using the dread "weapons of mass destruction," although he was using them on a U.S.-approved target (Iran) as well as on some of his own citizens. In the case of Iran, the United States actually promoted that country's development of nuclear energy when the Shah of Iran was in power. He was far more oppressive of his people than the mullahs are today--his torture chambers were state-of-art, with U.S. and Israeli aid--but he took orders, so using Cohen's "judicious double standards" it was reasonable that he should be encouraged to go nuclear. The media's ability to forget these inconvenient facts and to dredge up long neglected "principles" now applied to Iran with the utmost seriousness is a reminder of the principles of Newspeak (Ingsoc) described in Orwell's 1984.
A seventh principle is keeping under that (rapidly bulging) rug any current actions of the United States that might appear incompatible with its harsh stand opposing Iran's pursuing any nuclear program. Most obvious today is the new agreement with India just signed by U.S. president George Bush and Indian president Manmohan Singh, that offers U.S. nuclear aid to India for its civilian uses of nuclear energy, but which therefore frees India's ongoing processing of nuclear fuel for use in its nuclear weapons program. The mainstream media have not buried the fact of this agreement, but they have done an outstanding job of avoiding any stress on its violation of principles: India, a country that has avoided joining the NPT and instead built nuclear weapons, instead of being penalized for this evasion and contribution to nuclear proliferation is accepted as a nuclear weapons power and helped to enhance its nuclear status, civilian and military; whereas Iran, which did sign that treaty and allowed itself to be subjected to IAEA inspections, and which has no nuclear weapons, is denied even the right to civilian uses of nuclear energy and is threatened with sanctions and even attack.
An eighth principle is that the United States not only has a right to ignore the NPT as it applies to itself, it can also alter the terms of the NPT as it applies to its target. In this case, the NPT gives Iran the "inalienable right to develop, research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" (Art. IV.1). But the U.S. Ambassador to the UN has asserted that "no enrichment in Iran is permissible" because it "could give Iran the possibility of mastering the technical difficulties it's currently encountering in its program," and having done that it could use these processes elsewhere. Once again, the law is irrelevant, and the violator of the UN Charter in the Iraq aggression is once again threatening aggression because it deems Iran to be a menace. Of course all the serious threats are emanating from the United States and Israel, and there is no hard evidence that Iran is going beyond its perfectly legal rights under the NPT, but these considerations can be disregarded as the biggest and strongest has spoken.
A ninth principle is that if the target cannot prove a negative, the severity of the threat to U.S. "national security" requires that Iran be bombed and that there be a change in regime to one that can be trusted (like that of the Shah of Iran, or Sharon, or Musharraf). This of course parallels the course of events in Iraq in 2002-March 2003, where the inspectors found nothing, despite very extensive searching (including searches in all places that U.S.-British intelligence had suggested as promising), but on this principle an invasion was required because the negative was not (and could not be) proved. We may see the same process in the Iran case.
A tenth principle is to use the mechanisms of international regulation linked to the UN to serve the war and goal of regime change: by pushing for ever more intensive inspections and ultimatums; by denigrating the adequacy of inspections; by taking any absence of proof of the negative and any target country foot-dragging on cooperation with increasingly intrusive inspections to demonstrate its nefarious character and virtual proof of its secret operations; and by getting the UN and Security Council to make concessions appeasing the aggressor that give his aggression an aura of semi-legality. The UN and France and Germany took a lot of flak in the runup to the Iraq aggression for failing to give the United States carte blanche, although they all bent over backwards to placate the aggressor (and eventually gave their sanction to his illegal and murderous occupation). In the runup to the attack on Iran, the United States has kept intense pressure on the IAEA and EU to condemn Iran for its "concealment" and lack of "transparency," pressing the IAEA to inspect frequently and intensively (it has put up 17 written and four oral reports on its inspections of Iran to its board since March 17, 2003), possibly hoping that Iran will be provoked into withdrawing from the NPT and giving the aggressor his casus belli. Again, this is being pressed by an aggressor who has still not digested his last meal and that is himself in gross violation of the NPT.
An eleventh principle is to pretend that all the frenzy and activity of the Great Powers to deal with the Iran threat is based on a universal worry, and does not reflect U.S. power and the attempts to appease that power. The EU has cooperated with the Bush administration even more willingly than they did before the attack on Iraq, going along with publicizing and condemning Iran's supposed misbehavior, and pressing the IAEA to go after Iran more aggressively-while of course ignoring completely the U.S. violations of the NPT, its open threats directed to Iran and openly announced programs of intervention and destabilization, threats that once again violate the UN Charter. So the "international community" is actively cooperating in a planned and threatened further U.S. aggression.
A twelfth principle is to disregard any hidden agenda the U.S. may have in going after Iran. In fact, as the explicit agenda of removing a threat to U.S. national security is as fraudulent as the threat to U.S. security posed by Iraq, and as the United States refuses to give Iran a security guarantee as part of a weapons control package, the failure to examine the real reasons for the U.S. program is the height of "international community" and journalistic irresponsibility. Is it a simple projection of power by an imperial state, as urged by many Bush officials in the Project for a New American Century, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) and spelled out in the "National Security Strategy of the United States" (2002)? Is it part of a quest for domination of oil supplies, which may call for a controlled client state in Iran as well as Iraq? Is it to prevent the rise of an oil bourse in Iran and potential diminution of the role of the dollar as a dominant currency? Is it to prevent an energy-based power alignment between Iran, China, and other Asian countries? Is it to help Israel retain its dominance in the Middle East and its ability to continue the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem without any interference? Some combination of these undoubtedly underlies the U.S. bullying and threats. A democratic media and a responsibility international community would be debating these and drawing the proper conclusions.
Conclusions
Uncle Chutzpah and his willing executioners-the media, UN and coalition of the cowardly and bribed-have isolated Iran and set her up for possible destabilization and aggression. One wouldn't think this possible given the remarkable parallels in argument and (phony) evidence in this case and that of the failed aggression in Iraq, but the power of the aggressor and subservience of the media and international community are apparently boundless.
It is certainly not assured that Iran will be attacked, and if it is attacked that is most likely to be by bombs only, but it can well happen. The stage is being set, and the folks likely to make those decisions are proven killers, torturers and law violators, confident in their military superiority and invulnerability to prosecution for criminal behavior and with a great capacity for righteous self-deception. And the international community is not only doing nothing to stop them, it is helping them prepare the "(im)moral" and quasi-legal groundwork . The leaders of the aggressor state are also politically astute, and recognize the political value of war as a means of retrieving political fortunes. They may be failures at home as well as abroad, but their service to the business community has been far-reaching, and those successes have protected and sustained them. To continue them, as they damage the great majority, may require forcible action. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, "The direct cultural value of a warlike business policy is unequivocal. It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace?At the same stroke, it directs popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth" (The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904], pp. 391-3). When each day you are adding to your service to the rich and damaging the majority, war can come in handy to get folks to turn again to the "nobler, institutionally less hazardous" matters like stopping the dire threat of an Iranian bomb.
Deja Vu All Over Iran
Back at the time of a major Bush-1 "drug war" in 1989, Hodding Carter pointed out that with increasing attention to the newly declared "crisis" by the administration and media, the public's estimate of the importance of the drug problem rose spectacularly. "Today's big news is the drug war. The president says so, so television says so, newspapers and magazines say so, and the public says so." Today's big news is the possibility that Iran, the Little Satan, might some day acquire a nuclear weapon: the administration says so, the media say so, and now three times as many people regard Iran as the U.S.'s greatest menace than four months ago and 47 percent of the public agrees that Iran should be bombed if needed to prevent its acquiring any nuclear weapon capability.
The system works this mobilization process like a well-oiled propaganda machine--which it is--and it can apparently sell almost anything in the way of justifying external violence to a large fraction of the populace, at least in the short run. The attack on Iraq was a remarkable achievement in this respect, given that it was built on a series of lies about Iraq weapons, links, and threats that were extremely dubious at best, a number clearly false and even quite silly (the mushroom cloud and threat to U.S. national security); and given that the actions taken were in blatant violation of the UN Charter. To put this over required tacit collusion between the administration and mainstream media, with the latter serving as de facto propaganda arms of the war-makers.
We may recall that the justification for NATO's bombing of the Serb TV broadcasting facilities in 1999 (killing 16 people) was that it was a propaganda arm of the Serb military. On that logic, accepted by respectable opinion and Carla Del Ponte on behalf of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, in a just world, where Bush and company would surely be brought to trial for manifold war crimes in the Iraq aggression-occupation, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Bill Keller, Thomas Friedman, Donald Graham, Leonard Downie, Jr., Richard Cohen, George Will, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly, and numerous others would be in the dock alongside them.
The further remarkable thing is that, despite their semi-apologies for betraying the public interest and their readers in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq--at least at the New York Times and Washington Post--the media are going through the same routines of propaganda service in the buildup to a possible attack on Iran. They quite generally avoid mentioning the similarity of the arguments made earlier, or that the administration lied egregiously earlier, or their own earlier hyper-gullibility. A tabula rasa is required if the system calls for serial propaganda service that entails the serial conveying of disinformation and suppression of inconvenient evidence. The "Drumbeat sounds familiar" to Simon Tisdall in the London Guardian (March 7, 2006), but not to the servants of power in the U.S. media.
Twelve Principles of Propaganda Used in Setting the Stage for War: the Iran Case
The first principle in manufacturing propaganda for the U.S. war party is to take it as a given that the United States has the legal and moral right to take the lead in making a case that the international community must act-here to stop Iran's nuclear program. Consider that the United States is in the midst of an occupation in Iraq in which it is daily committing war crimes, all of which follow on a major act of aggression that violated the UN Charter. A lesser power doing this would be declared an international outlaw, and would not be considered a proper leader to guide the international community in the pursuit of villainy. In fact, containing the outlaw would be deemed of primary importance. Furthermore, the United States showed its contempt for the rule of law and for any UN legal procedures in the runup to the Iraq war, when it fabricated a crisis-Iraqi violation of international rules and an Iraqi threat to U.S. national security-and on that basis simply ran roughshod over UN processes and international law.
Beyond these outrages, the United States has unclean hands as regards the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that Iran is allegedly violating: as a signatory to the NPT, the United States pledged "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control." It has not met this pledge, nor the promise not to threaten or use nuclear weapons against signers who agreed to forego developing nuclear weapons. It is even "upgrading" and "modernizing" its nuclear weapons to make them more "practical." In theory, Iran or any other party could complain to the IAEA that the United States is in clear breach of the NPT, but somehow this doesn't happen; only possible breaches that the United States sees fit to pursue can be attended to in the New World Order. Furthermore, the United States has given crucial support to Israel, engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing operation in violation of international law, with both superpower and client simply brushing aside a stream of UN rulings and an International Court condemnation of Israel's apartheid wall. The United States has either aided or given tacit approval to breaches of the NPT by Israel, Pakistan and India. In short, its moral right to challenge Iran is non-existent-it can do so only by virtue of power, bribery and threats, and because the patriotic mainstream media take its moral right as an undiscussible given.
The second principle, paralleling the U.S. right to do as it pleases, is the absence of the target's right even to defend itself. The United States and Israel may possess nuclear weapons, the latter refusing to subject itself to the NPT and the former violating it and threatening Iran with "regime change," but any Iran move to right the balance by acquiring such weapons for itself is a terrible thing that threatens "international peace and security," as stated in House Concurrent Resolution 341. The United States and Israel have been bringing "peace and security" to the Middle East! It should be noted that in the EU negotiations on Iran's nuclear activities, the United States has refused to give any security guarantee to Iran as part of the package, making its un-peaceful intentions toward Iran clear, but this still does not give Iran the right to acquire weapons that might reduce that open threat. For the media this is all irrelevant, as its leadership says that Iran is a menace and nothing else matters.
A third principle is inflating the menace that would follow from Iran's possession of nuclear weapons. This of course parallels closely the earlier inflation of the Iraq threat, where the Bush administration propagandists were not laughed off the stage for talking about mushroom clouds off New York and other dire threats. Then and now the media have not pointed out that Saddam Hussein had only used chemical weapons in the 1980's against Iran (and Iraqi Kurds) at a time when he was serving U.S. interests--and therefore with tacit U.S. approval--but that he didn't use them at all in the Persian Gulf War when the United States was the opponent and could retaliate in kind and with greater force. By the same token, as the United States and Israel have enormous retaliatory capability, the Iranians could never use nuclear weapons as an offensive tool without committing national suicide. But nuclear weapons would serve as a default weapon if Iran were attacked; that is, it would contribute to self-defense. This line of argument is carefully avoided in the mainstream propaganda flow.
Of course, demons shouldn't have the right of self-defense, and the fourth principle applied in the media's beating the drums of war is unrelenting demonization of the target. This was easy to do with Saddam Hussein, but it can be worked for almost anyone, as there are few political leaders who don't have some unsavory elements in their record or who haven't made indiscreet or wild statements that can be latched onto, taken out of context, and used to suggest irresponsibility and menace. Iran's mullahs have run a fairly repressive state, although its repression has eased up and democratic voices have not been silenced. The newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmandinejad, of course, made an indefensible statement on the Holocaust (a "myth") and a wild statement that Israel should be "wiped off the map." In his recent classic of war propaganda ("Judicious Double Standards," Washington Post, March 7, 2006), Richard Cohen even says that the Iranian leader is a "zealot who has pledged to eradicate Israel," a straightforward lie. Victor David Hanson makes the current scene one of "appeasement." as in the treatment of Hitler in the 1930s, and Iran now a threatening "bully." ("Appeasement 101: dealing with bullies," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 2006). Iran of course has zero nuclear weapons, whereas the United States and Israel both have massive numbers and delivery systems, and Iran hasn't once moved beyond its borders, whereas the United States and Israel have done so regularly and are pummeling Middle East populations right now, but Iran is the "bully," and appeasement means failing to make sure by threat or violence that it cannot ever acquire a single nuclear weapon. But lies and inflated rhetoric are par for the course, and in the panicky environment of the pre-war threat buildup there is no cost to lying or comical threat inflation.
A fifth principle is to avoid discussion of any current relationships with governments that might deserve demon status as much or even more than the target (here Iran). Saudi Arabia is more fundamentalist Islamic and more repressive than Iran, and Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco, and Uzbekistan are at least as vulnerable to criticism for undemocratic practice as Iran, but they are U.S. client states, hence relatively free from criticism let alone threat of destabilization or attack. Pakistan even has nuclear weapons, and the United States finds that tolerable.
Israel of course has a sizable nuclear arsenal, which the United States helped Israel develop and which the United States accepts as reasonable. Richard Cohen explains that this is part of the judicious double standard because "Israel has not threatened to blow Iran off the map; because it is vastly outnumbered in a tough, belligerent neighborhood; and because it is the lone real democracy in a region run mostly by thugs." But Israel has threatened to bomb Iran, and made this threat long before Ahmadinejad's pugnacious statements, which have never been as specific or realistic as Israel's threats; and Israel has regularly invaded its neighbors, which Iran has not done (although it was invaded by Iraq, which was helped in this by the United States). Cohen fails to mention that the "thugs" in the neighborhood are mainly U.S. client states, whose thuggery is accepted because used only against their own citizenry. Israel is "outnumbered" in people but not in tanks, modern aircraft, missiles, and nuclear arms, and it has the full backing of the United States, so that it threatens and beats up others, but remains invulnerable. It is not a true democracy-it is a racist democracy, and it is the world's only state that is free to occupy another people's land and ethnically cleanse them over many years in violation of international law and accepted standards of morality, from which it is exempt by virtue of its and its patron's military power. In short, this "judicious double standard" is built on racism, lies, and Orwellian thought, now institutionalized (see my "Ethnic Cleansing and the 'Moral Instinct'," Z Magazine, March 2006).
A sixth and closely related principle is the need to keep under the rug any awkward past actions or relationships with the target that might show both hypocrisy and the fraudulence of the claimed threat. This was dramatically so in the case of Saddam Hussein, aided and protected by U.S. (and British) officials in the 1980s when he was actually using the dread "weapons of mass destruction," although he was using them on a U.S.-approved target (Iran) as well as on some of his own citizens. In the case of Iran, the United States actually promoted that country's development of nuclear energy when the Shah of Iran was in power. He was far more oppressive of his people than the mullahs are today--his torture chambers were state-of-art, with U.S. and Israeli aid--but he took orders, so using Cohen's "judicious double standards" it was reasonable that he should be encouraged to go nuclear. The media's ability to forget these inconvenient facts and to dredge up long neglected "principles" now applied to Iran with the utmost seriousness is a reminder of the principles of Newspeak (Ingsoc) described in Orwell's 1984.
A seventh principle is keeping under that (rapidly bulging) rug any current actions of the United States that might appear incompatible with its harsh stand opposing Iran's pursuing any nuclear program. Most obvious today is the new agreement with India just signed by U.S. president George Bush and Indian president Manmohan Singh, that offers U.S. nuclear aid to India for its civilian uses of nuclear energy, but which therefore frees India's ongoing processing of nuclear fuel for use in its nuclear weapons program. The mainstream media have not buried the fact of this agreement, but they have done an outstanding job of avoiding any stress on its violation of principles: India, a country that has avoided joining the NPT and instead built nuclear weapons, instead of being penalized for this evasion and contribution to nuclear proliferation is accepted as a nuclear weapons power and helped to enhance its nuclear status, civilian and military; whereas Iran, which did sign that treaty and allowed itself to be subjected to IAEA inspections, and which has no nuclear weapons, is denied even the right to civilian uses of nuclear energy and is threatened with sanctions and even attack.
An eighth principle is that the United States not only has a right to ignore the NPT as it applies to itself, it can also alter the terms of the NPT as it applies to its target. In this case, the NPT gives Iran the "inalienable right to develop, research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes" (Art. IV.1). But the U.S. Ambassador to the UN has asserted that "no enrichment in Iran is permissible" because it "could give Iran the possibility of mastering the technical difficulties it's currently encountering in its program," and having done that it could use these processes elsewhere. Once again, the law is irrelevant, and the violator of the UN Charter in the Iraq aggression is once again threatening aggression because it deems Iran to be a menace. Of course all the serious threats are emanating from the United States and Israel, and there is no hard evidence that Iran is going beyond its perfectly legal rights under the NPT, but these considerations can be disregarded as the biggest and strongest has spoken.
A ninth principle is that if the target cannot prove a negative, the severity of the threat to U.S. "national security" requires that Iran be bombed and that there be a change in regime to one that can be trusted (like that of the Shah of Iran, or Sharon, or Musharraf). This of course parallels the course of events in Iraq in 2002-March 2003, where the inspectors found nothing, despite very extensive searching (including searches in all places that U.S.-British intelligence had suggested as promising), but on this principle an invasion was required because the negative was not (and could not be) proved. We may see the same process in the Iran case.
A tenth principle is to use the mechanisms of international regulation linked to the UN to serve the war and goal of regime change: by pushing for ever more intensive inspections and ultimatums; by denigrating the adequacy of inspections; by taking any absence of proof of the negative and any target country foot-dragging on cooperation with increasingly intrusive inspections to demonstrate its nefarious character and virtual proof of its secret operations; and by getting the UN and Security Council to make concessions appeasing the aggressor that give his aggression an aura of semi-legality. The UN and France and Germany took a lot of flak in the runup to the Iraq aggression for failing to give the United States carte blanche, although they all bent over backwards to placate the aggressor (and eventually gave their sanction to his illegal and murderous occupation). In the runup to the attack on Iran, the United States has kept intense pressure on the IAEA and EU to condemn Iran for its "concealment" and lack of "transparency," pressing the IAEA to inspect frequently and intensively (it has put up 17 written and four oral reports on its inspections of Iran to its board since March 17, 2003), possibly hoping that Iran will be provoked into withdrawing from the NPT and giving the aggressor his casus belli. Again, this is being pressed by an aggressor who has still not digested his last meal and that is himself in gross violation of the NPT.
An eleventh principle is to pretend that all the frenzy and activity of the Great Powers to deal with the Iran threat is based on a universal worry, and does not reflect U.S. power and the attempts to appease that power. The EU has cooperated with the Bush administration even more willingly than they did before the attack on Iraq, going along with publicizing and condemning Iran's supposed misbehavior, and pressing the IAEA to go after Iran more aggressively-while of course ignoring completely the U.S. violations of the NPT, its open threats directed to Iran and openly announced programs of intervention and destabilization, threats that once again violate the UN Charter. So the "international community" is actively cooperating in a planned and threatened further U.S. aggression.
A twelfth principle is to disregard any hidden agenda the U.S. may have in going after Iran. In fact, as the explicit agenda of removing a threat to U.S. national security is as fraudulent as the threat to U.S. security posed by Iraq, and as the United States refuses to give Iran a security guarantee as part of a weapons control package, the failure to examine the real reasons for the U.S. program is the height of "international community" and journalistic irresponsibility. Is it a simple projection of power by an imperial state, as urged by many Bush officials in the Project for a New American Century, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) and spelled out in the "National Security Strategy of the United States" (2002)? Is it part of a quest for domination of oil supplies, which may call for a controlled client state in Iran as well as Iraq? Is it to prevent the rise of an oil bourse in Iran and potential diminution of the role of the dollar as a dominant currency? Is it to prevent an energy-based power alignment between Iran, China, and other Asian countries? Is it to help Israel retain its dominance in the Middle East and its ability to continue the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem without any interference? Some combination of these undoubtedly underlies the U.S. bullying and threats. A democratic media and a responsibility international community would be debating these and drawing the proper conclusions.
Conclusions
Uncle Chutzpah and his willing executioners-the media, UN and coalition of the cowardly and bribed-have isolated Iran and set her up for possible destabilization and aggression. One wouldn't think this possible given the remarkable parallels in argument and (phony) evidence in this case and that of the failed aggression in Iraq, but the power of the aggressor and subservience of the media and international community are apparently boundless.
It is certainly not assured that Iran will be attacked, and if it is attacked that is most likely to be by bombs only, but it can well happen. The stage is being set, and the folks likely to make those decisions are proven killers, torturers and law violators, confident in their military superiority and invulnerability to prosecution for criminal behavior and with a great capacity for righteous self-deception. And the international community is not only doing nothing to stop them, it is helping them prepare the "(im)moral" and quasi-legal groundwork . The leaders of the aggressor state are also politically astute, and recognize the political value of war as a means of retrieving political fortunes. They may be failures at home as well as abroad, but their service to the business community has been far-reaching, and those successes have protected and sustained them. To continue them, as they damage the great majority, may require forcible action. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, "The direct cultural value of a warlike business policy is unequivocal. It makes for a conservative animus on the part of the populace?At the same stroke, it directs popular interest to other, nobler, institutionally less hazardous matters than the unequal distribution of wealth" (The Theory of Business Enterprise [1904], pp. 391-3). When each day you are adding to your service to the rich and damaging the majority, war can come in handy to get folks to turn again to the "nobler, institutionally less hazardous" matters like stopping the dire threat of an Iranian bomb.
Understanding Islamism
Rami G. Khouri
15/3/2006
Mainstream Islamist political parties that win elections throughout the Middle East and Asia are often perceived in Western lands and Israel as a dire threat. Not all Arabs and Asians are happy with the victorious Islamists, either. It is important to interpret correctly why the Islamists are winning, and what they really represent.
I have had many opportunities in the past few years to participate in conferences, seminars, lectures and friendly dinner conversations with colleagues from throughout the Arab, Asian, European and North American worlds. Analysts from outside this region quickly become hopelessly confused by the synthesis of several phenomena that manifest themselves simultaneously in Islamist politics, in a way that they do not do in Western cultures. These include: religion, national identity, legitimate good governance and resistance to foreign occupation or subjugation.
So, many analysts in the West and Israel explain Islamist victories with ideas about hopes for a revived Islamic caliphate, suicide bombers enticed by virgins in heaven, Islamo-fascism, the need for reformation and modernization in Islam, the urgency of embracing secularism in Arab-Islamic society, problems with madrasas (and education more broadly), the anti-American, anti-Israeli incitement tendencies of Arab media and other ideas.
Such views suffer from two fundamental constraints: They reflect Western historical traditions and assume that Islamic societies must follow the same trajectory of democratic reform and modernity; and they hear only the religious vocabulary of the Islamists, without grasping the underlying political and national issues that drive them.
In their own historical and national contexts, the Islamist movements are not a new or sudden phenomenon. In fact, the current wave of Islamist political movements winning elections in the region is the third wave of Islamism in our generation since the 1970s, and probably the most important one.
The first wave, in the late 1970s-mid 1980s, challenged Arab regimes largely as clandestine opposition movements or low-key social organizations. It was harshly suppressed politically throughout the Levant and North Africa. The second wave of Islamism in the 1990s took a violent form, in Algeria, Syria, Egypt and other places, including bin Ladenist-style terror. This primarily targeted Arab regimes, not Israel or the United States, especially-as in Algeria and Egypt-where terror followed failed attempts at political inclusion and participation. Islamists were returning home from Afghanistan with heightened political militancy, technical training in explosives and other violent methods and a sense of invincibility after helping to liberate Afghanistan from Russian occupation.
So we now witness the third wave of Islamism in our time, with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Jamaa Islamiya, and Justice and Development parties in several countries winning power through democratic elections. They learned the hard lessons of 1975-2001, that neither brute terror nor clandestine social activism will achieve their goals.
The significant new element in this wave of Arab-Asian electoral Islamists is that they have combined into a single force those separate elements that had previously fragmented their citizen activists and mass movements. Islamists now should be called religio-nationalists, or theo-nationalists, because they combine the twin forces of religion and nationalism.
"My god and my people" may be the two most powerful mass mobilization forces ever invented by human beings and exploited by political minds. Islamists use religion and nationalism efficiently, having crafted a message of hope, defiance and self-assertive confidence that responds directly to the multiple complaints of their fellow citizens.
The wide extent of triumphant political Islamism provides important clues about its real meaning and impetus for those who wish to see the real world, rather than imagine a more exotic and menacing world out there. Islamists of various hues and shades have won big, or become a significant opposition force, virtually every place they have competed politically in the past few years, at municipal or national levels, from Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, to Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq and Lebanon, to mention only the most notable.
This wave of victories is not due primarily to a longing for virgins in heaven or the end result of lousy primary schools. It is the consequence of a modern history that combines the grueling, cumulative pain of poor, often corrupt and brutal, domestic governance, with foreign military occupations and threats (mostly from Israel, the United States and the U.K. recently). Huge numbers of ordinary Arabs and Asians consequently feel they have long been denied their cultural identity, political rights, national sovereignty, personal freedoms and basic human dignity. Islamist groups have responded with a powerful package that speaks to their citizenry about religion, national identity, legitimate good governance and resistance to foreign occupation and subjugation.
There is nothing surprising about victorious Islamists who appeal to their constituents with a religio-nationalist message, any more than a victorious George Bush who makes similar successful appeals to his voters. The best response to the triumphant Islamists, whether you like or dislike them, is to understand the political, national and personal issues that have generated their victories and to address those real grievances, rather than to wander off into intellectual swamps and fantasylands.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
15/3/2006
Mainstream Islamist political parties that win elections throughout the Middle East and Asia are often perceived in Western lands and Israel as a dire threat. Not all Arabs and Asians are happy with the victorious Islamists, either. It is important to interpret correctly why the Islamists are winning, and what they really represent.
I have had many opportunities in the past few years to participate in conferences, seminars, lectures and friendly dinner conversations with colleagues from throughout the Arab, Asian, European and North American worlds. Analysts from outside this region quickly become hopelessly confused by the synthesis of several phenomena that manifest themselves simultaneously in Islamist politics, in a way that they do not do in Western cultures. These include: religion, national identity, legitimate good governance and resistance to foreign occupation or subjugation.
So, many analysts in the West and Israel explain Islamist victories with ideas about hopes for a revived Islamic caliphate, suicide bombers enticed by virgins in heaven, Islamo-fascism, the need for reformation and modernization in Islam, the urgency of embracing secularism in Arab-Islamic society, problems with madrasas (and education more broadly), the anti-American, anti-Israeli incitement tendencies of Arab media and other ideas.
Such views suffer from two fundamental constraints: They reflect Western historical traditions and assume that Islamic societies must follow the same trajectory of democratic reform and modernity; and they hear only the religious vocabulary of the Islamists, without grasping the underlying political and national issues that drive them.
In their own historical and national contexts, the Islamist movements are not a new or sudden phenomenon. In fact, the current wave of Islamist political movements winning elections in the region is the third wave of Islamism in our generation since the 1970s, and probably the most important one.
The first wave, in the late 1970s-mid 1980s, challenged Arab regimes largely as clandestine opposition movements or low-key social organizations. It was harshly suppressed politically throughout the Levant and North Africa. The second wave of Islamism in the 1990s took a violent form, in Algeria, Syria, Egypt and other places, including bin Ladenist-style terror. This primarily targeted Arab regimes, not Israel or the United States, especially-as in Algeria and Egypt-where terror followed failed attempts at political inclusion and participation. Islamists were returning home from Afghanistan with heightened political militancy, technical training in explosives and other violent methods and a sense of invincibility after helping to liberate Afghanistan from Russian occupation.
So we now witness the third wave of Islamism in our time, with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Jamaa Islamiya, and Justice and Development parties in several countries winning power through democratic elections. They learned the hard lessons of 1975-2001, that neither brute terror nor clandestine social activism will achieve their goals.
The significant new element in this wave of Arab-Asian electoral Islamists is that they have combined into a single force those separate elements that had previously fragmented their citizen activists and mass movements. Islamists now should be called religio-nationalists, or theo-nationalists, because they combine the twin forces of religion and nationalism.
"My god and my people" may be the two most powerful mass mobilization forces ever invented by human beings and exploited by political minds. Islamists use religion and nationalism efficiently, having crafted a message of hope, defiance and self-assertive confidence that responds directly to the multiple complaints of their fellow citizens.
The wide extent of triumphant political Islamism provides important clues about its real meaning and impetus for those who wish to see the real world, rather than imagine a more exotic and menacing world out there. Islamists of various hues and shades have won big, or become a significant opposition force, virtually every place they have competed politically in the past few years, at municipal or national levels, from Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, to Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq and Lebanon, to mention only the most notable.
This wave of victories is not due primarily to a longing for virgins in heaven or the end result of lousy primary schools. It is the consequence of a modern history that combines the grueling, cumulative pain of poor, often corrupt and brutal, domestic governance, with foreign military occupations and threats (mostly from Israel, the United States and the U.K. recently). Huge numbers of ordinary Arabs and Asians consequently feel they have long been denied their cultural identity, political rights, national sovereignty, personal freedoms and basic human dignity. Islamist groups have responded with a powerful package that speaks to their citizenry about religion, national identity, legitimate good governance and resistance to foreign occupation and subjugation.
There is nothing surprising about victorious Islamists who appeal to their constituents with a religio-nationalist message, any more than a victorious George Bush who makes similar successful appeals to his voters. The best response to the triumphant Islamists, whether you like or dislike them, is to understand the political, national and personal issues that have generated their victories and to address those real grievances, rather than to wander off into intellectual swamps and fantasylands.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Tuesday, 14 March 2006
Ethanol Producers Encouraged by New Study
Ethanol Producers Encouraged by New Study
© 2006 The Associated Press
WATERLOO, Iowa - Ethanol supporters say they're encouraged by the results of a recent study refuting the notion that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the corn-based fuel saves.
Ethanol producers say the study should be enough to convince skeptics that cleaner-burning ethanol is good for both the environment and the economy.
"The new study reaffirms what we already know: Ethanol is energy positive, and it grows," said Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Hawkeye Renewables in Iowa Falls.
The study results are especially positive for supporters of E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
Supporters say ethanol-blended fuel tends to be less expensive than regular unleaded gasoline, the auto industry has started marketing more cars and trucks capable of using E85, Congress has passed renewable fuel standards that increase the use of ethanol and grant money is available to help install E85 pumps.
Lucy Norton, the association's managing director, said she hopes the study puts the question of whether ethanol is worth producing to rest.
Alex Farrell, co-author of the latest study, said previous research didn't take into account ethanol byproducts such as distiller grains and corn oil. Corn turned into ethanol also feeds animals and is used for other purposes, he said, which displaces competing products that require energy to make.
Since the latest research wasn't funded by any special interest group and used the most up-to-date data, Farrell said his group's information is the most accurate.
"We focused on energy, not the farmer," Farrell said. "It's crystal clear transparent that it (the study) may help Iowa farmers."
Brazil is the World's Ethanol Superpower
SAO TOME, Brazil, March 13, 2006
(AP) In an agroindustrial complex ringed by fields of 12-foot-high sugar cane, a giant mechanical claw dumps stalks by the tons into an even larger crushing machine. Here's where the renewable fuel used to power seven of every 10 new Brazilian cars gets its start.
Sugary slurry flows into a row of gleaming stainless steel distilling tanks, transforming cane harvested only hours earlier by machete-wielding farm laborers into ethanol, the alternative fuel now promoted by President Bush to end what he calls America's addiction to imported oil.
While Mr. Bush set 2025 as the target date for replacing three-fourths of the oil imported from the Middle East with American ethanol, Brazil already satisfies nearly half of its domestic passenger vehicle fuel demand with ethanol.
After decades of government intervention and subsidies, the industry here is a thriving free market business, complete with ethanol pumps at every filling station in Latin America's largest country. Millions of cars run on either ethanol, gas or any combination of the two. And there's plenty more land available for sugar cane cultivation as the planet's biggest sugar producer gears up to become its undisputed long-term ethanol supplier.
Brazilian ethanol producers and international energy experts agree that the United States will probably never come close to reaching Brazil's potential as an ethanol superpower. But they say Brazil offers clear lessons on how to boost domestic ethanol use.
What the United States needs most, they say, are more cars that run on the fuel - and filling stations that offer it.
"Petroleum is almost history," warned Celso dos Santos, commercial director of the Cocamar farmers cooperative that owns the Sao Tome distillery. "People stopped using wood for fuel and replaced it with coal. Then came petroleum, but we're getting to the end of the petroleum era."
With the sickly scent of pure alcohol wafting through the air around the Cocamar plant, a thousand workers toil around the clock during the March to November cane harvest season, distilling 92,500 gallons of ethanol daily that is trucked away for immediate sale at the pumps.
Sugarcane waste is burned to generate steam for the turbines, meeting all the plant's electricity needs. Excess power will soon light up half the homes in Sao Tome, a southern Brazilian town of 6,000 people.
The technology isn't even cutting edge, but the industry is making profits like never before and has a bright future thanks to a 1970s decision by Brazil's former military dictators to subsidize ethanol production and require distribution at every gas station.
A 1980s Brazilian fad with cars that ran only on ethanol petered out when oil prices fell in the early 1990s. But the fuel came back into vogue in 2003, when automakers started rolling out cars that run on gasoline, ethanol or any combination of the two. With international oil prices reaching record highs, Brazilian drivers turned to "flex-fuel" cars, buying ethanol at half the price of gas until late last year.
Some experts predict flex-fuel car sales will reach 90 percent of Brazil's new car market within several years, while others say recent ethanol price hikes could keep penetration at the current level.
Getting a fraction of that acceptance in the United States could take decades, analysts say, even with new incentives and regulations. "Since the government does not dictate what happens in the marketplace, the process will be much slower than what Brazil experienced," said Amani Elobeid, an economist and international sugar analyst at Iowa State University.
A small but growing percentage of American-made vehicles are manufactured to run on the U.S. version of ethanol called E85, which is 85 percent alcohol distilled from corn and 15 percent gasoline. But many American drivers don't even know their vehicles can run on E85, and the fuel is available at only 610 American filling stations.
Brazil's state-imposed pump price for gasoline includes much higher taxes than the price U.S. consumers pay. Gas in Brazil now costs the equivalent of $4.69 per gallon. Pure ethanol - taxed at slightly lower levels and cheaper to produce - goes for about $3.59 per gallon at all of the nation's 30,000 stations. It fueled 48 percent of Brazil's passenger vehicles last year. Meanwhile, Brazil is trying to encourage ethanol use in countries from Asia to Europe.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in Britain this week that Brazil wants "to plant the oil of the future" and promote radical changes in how world generates energy.
Brazilian ethanol makers intent on boosting exports have been beaming ever since Mr. Bush used his January State of the Union address to plug ethanol.
"We felt that in our share price," said a smiling Paulo Diniz, chief financial officer of Grupo Cosan, Brazil's largest ethanol producer and the world's second largest after the U.S.-based Archer Daniels Midland Co.
A few years ago, Cosan was lucky to host a tour every four or five months for big foreign investors. Now the firm gets visits every two weeks, including a VIP tour in February for Google Inc. billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Cosan is considering an initial public offering on Wall Street within the next year and a half, Diniz said. Other foreign companies may consider jumping on the bandwagon by buying Brazilian ethanol firms.
"Phones have been ringing all over the world after Mr. Bush spoke," said Cristoph Berg, an ethanol analyst with Germany's F.O. Licht, a commodities research firm. Investors "are waking up to the notion that ethanol really seems to have entered the mainstream."
Brazil's ethanol experience hasn't been so rosy for consumers in recent months. Prices surged during the annual November-March production lull while the cane grew. Ethanol remains cheaper than gas, but flex-fuel car drivers can get better fuel efficiency with gas when the price difference between the two narrows significantly.
In Sao Tome, the cooperative that owns the ethanol distillery is betting on its best profits since it bought the operation in 1993. Cocamar's production cost is $1.10 per gallon, and wholesalers are buying the fuel for $2.68 - up from $1.44 last year.
About the only thing that could hurt Brazil's ethanol industry now would be an almost unimaginable plunge in international crude oil prices, currently trading above $60 per barrel, said Almir Hawthorne, the distillery's industrial manager. "Oil could drop to $35 or $40 per barrel, and ethanol producers would still make money."
© 2006 The Associated Press
WATERLOO, Iowa - Ethanol supporters say they're encouraged by the results of a recent study refuting the notion that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the corn-based fuel saves.
Ethanol producers say the study should be enough to convince skeptics that cleaner-burning ethanol is good for both the environment and the economy.
"The new study reaffirms what we already know: Ethanol is energy positive, and it grows," said Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Hawkeye Renewables in Iowa Falls.
The study results are especially positive for supporters of E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
Supporters say ethanol-blended fuel tends to be less expensive than regular unleaded gasoline, the auto industry has started marketing more cars and trucks capable of using E85, Congress has passed renewable fuel standards that increase the use of ethanol and grant money is available to help install E85 pumps.
Lucy Norton, the association's managing director, said she hopes the study puts the question of whether ethanol is worth producing to rest.
Alex Farrell, co-author of the latest study, said previous research didn't take into account ethanol byproducts such as distiller grains and corn oil. Corn turned into ethanol also feeds animals and is used for other purposes, he said, which displaces competing products that require energy to make.
Since the latest research wasn't funded by any special interest group and used the most up-to-date data, Farrell said his group's information is the most accurate.
"We focused on energy, not the farmer," Farrell said. "It's crystal clear transparent that it (the study) may help Iowa farmers."
Brazil is the World's Ethanol Superpower
SAO TOME, Brazil, March 13, 2006
(AP) In an agroindustrial complex ringed by fields of 12-foot-high sugar cane, a giant mechanical claw dumps stalks by the tons into an even larger crushing machine. Here's where the renewable fuel used to power seven of every 10 new Brazilian cars gets its start.
Sugary slurry flows into a row of gleaming stainless steel distilling tanks, transforming cane harvested only hours earlier by machete-wielding farm laborers into ethanol, the alternative fuel now promoted by President Bush to end what he calls America's addiction to imported oil.
While Mr. Bush set 2025 as the target date for replacing three-fourths of the oil imported from the Middle East with American ethanol, Brazil already satisfies nearly half of its domestic passenger vehicle fuel demand with ethanol.
After decades of government intervention and subsidies, the industry here is a thriving free market business, complete with ethanol pumps at every filling station in Latin America's largest country. Millions of cars run on either ethanol, gas or any combination of the two. And there's plenty more land available for sugar cane cultivation as the planet's biggest sugar producer gears up to become its undisputed long-term ethanol supplier.
Brazilian ethanol producers and international energy experts agree that the United States will probably never come close to reaching Brazil's potential as an ethanol superpower. But they say Brazil offers clear lessons on how to boost domestic ethanol use.
What the United States needs most, they say, are more cars that run on the fuel - and filling stations that offer it.
"Petroleum is almost history," warned Celso dos Santos, commercial director of the Cocamar farmers cooperative that owns the Sao Tome distillery. "People stopped using wood for fuel and replaced it with coal. Then came petroleum, but we're getting to the end of the petroleum era."
With the sickly scent of pure alcohol wafting through the air around the Cocamar plant, a thousand workers toil around the clock during the March to November cane harvest season, distilling 92,500 gallons of ethanol daily that is trucked away for immediate sale at the pumps.
Sugarcane waste is burned to generate steam for the turbines, meeting all the plant's electricity needs. Excess power will soon light up half the homes in Sao Tome, a southern Brazilian town of 6,000 people.
The technology isn't even cutting edge, but the industry is making profits like never before and has a bright future thanks to a 1970s decision by Brazil's former military dictators to subsidize ethanol production and require distribution at every gas station.
A 1980s Brazilian fad with cars that ran only on ethanol petered out when oil prices fell in the early 1990s. But the fuel came back into vogue in 2003, when automakers started rolling out cars that run on gasoline, ethanol or any combination of the two. With international oil prices reaching record highs, Brazilian drivers turned to "flex-fuel" cars, buying ethanol at half the price of gas until late last year.
Some experts predict flex-fuel car sales will reach 90 percent of Brazil's new car market within several years, while others say recent ethanol price hikes could keep penetration at the current level.
Getting a fraction of that acceptance in the United States could take decades, analysts say, even with new incentives and regulations. "Since the government does not dictate what happens in the marketplace, the process will be much slower than what Brazil experienced," said Amani Elobeid, an economist and international sugar analyst at Iowa State University.
A small but growing percentage of American-made vehicles are manufactured to run on the U.S. version of ethanol called E85, which is 85 percent alcohol distilled from corn and 15 percent gasoline. But many American drivers don't even know their vehicles can run on E85, and the fuel is available at only 610 American filling stations.
Brazil's state-imposed pump price for gasoline includes much higher taxes than the price U.S. consumers pay. Gas in Brazil now costs the equivalent of $4.69 per gallon. Pure ethanol - taxed at slightly lower levels and cheaper to produce - goes for about $3.59 per gallon at all of the nation's 30,000 stations. It fueled 48 percent of Brazil's passenger vehicles last year. Meanwhile, Brazil is trying to encourage ethanol use in countries from Asia to Europe.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in Britain this week that Brazil wants "to plant the oil of the future" and promote radical changes in how world generates energy.
Brazilian ethanol makers intent on boosting exports have been beaming ever since Mr. Bush used his January State of the Union address to plug ethanol.
"We felt that in our share price," said a smiling Paulo Diniz, chief financial officer of Grupo Cosan, Brazil's largest ethanol producer and the world's second largest after the U.S.-based Archer Daniels Midland Co.
A few years ago, Cosan was lucky to host a tour every four or five months for big foreign investors. Now the firm gets visits every two weeks, including a VIP tour in February for Google Inc. billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Cosan is considering an initial public offering on Wall Street within the next year and a half, Diniz said. Other foreign companies may consider jumping on the bandwagon by buying Brazilian ethanol firms.
"Phones have been ringing all over the world after Mr. Bush spoke," said Cristoph Berg, an ethanol analyst with Germany's F.O. Licht, a commodities research firm. Investors "are waking up to the notion that ethanol really seems to have entered the mainstream."
Brazil's ethanol experience hasn't been so rosy for consumers in recent months. Prices surged during the annual November-March production lull while the cane grew. Ethanol remains cheaper than gas, but flex-fuel car drivers can get better fuel efficiency with gas when the price difference between the two narrows significantly.
In Sao Tome, the cooperative that owns the ethanol distillery is betting on its best profits since it bought the operation in 1993. Cocamar's production cost is $1.10 per gallon, and wholesalers are buying the fuel for $2.68 - up from $1.44 last year.
About the only thing that could hurt Brazil's ethanol industry now would be an almost unimaginable plunge in international crude oil prices, currently trading above $60 per barrel, said Almir Hawthorne, the distillery's industrial manager. "Oil could drop to $35 or $40 per barrel, and ethanol producers would still make money."
Monday, 13 March 2006
South Africa win the greatest match of all
Seven years ago, in the semi-final of the 1999 World Cup, South Africa and Australia contested what has widely come to be regarded as the definitive one-day international. A total of 426 runs in two innings, twenty wickets in the day and world-class performances across the board - a match that built to a pulsating finale in which South Africa threw away their place in the World Cup final with what also came to be regarded as the definitive one-day choke.
Today, however, South Africa can be called chokers no longer, after burying the ghosts of 1999 with victory in a match even more extraordinary and nail-shredding than its illustrious forebear. Never mind 426 runs in a day, Australia had just posted a world-record 434 for 4 in a single innings - the first 400-plus total in the history of the game - with Ricky Ponting leading the line with an innings of cultured slogging that realised 164 runs of the highest class from just 105 balls. And yet they still lost - by one wicket, with one ball to spare, and with the Wanderers stadium reverting to the sort of Bullring atmosphere on which it forged its intimidating reputation.
Today, however, South Africa can be called chokers no longer, after burying the ghosts of 1999 with victory in a match even more extraordinary and nail-shredding than its illustrious forebear. Never mind 426 runs in a day, Australia had just posted a world-record 434 for 4 in a single innings - the first 400-plus total in the history of the game - with Ricky Ponting leading the line with an innings of cultured slogging that realised 164 runs of the highest class from just 105 balls. And yet they still lost - by one wicket, with one ball to spare, and with the Wanderers stadium reverting to the sort of Bullring atmosphere on which it forged its intimidating reputation.
Sunday, 12 March 2006
Loose Change - 2nd Edition
"Loose Change 2nd Edition" is the follow-up to the most provocative 9-11 documentary on the market today.
This film shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States government.
Evidence is derived from news footage, scientific fact, and most important, Americans who suffered through that tragic day.
IT IS EVERYONE'S DUTY TO VIEW THIS FILM!
Internet blows CIA cover
It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
By John Crewdson Tribune senior correspondent Published March 12, 2006
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."
Dyck declined to detail the remedies "since we don't want the bad guys to know what we're fixing."
Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and the agency's small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they claimed to have been tortured.
Although finding and repairing the vulnerabilities in the CIA's cover system was not a priority under Goss' predecessor, George Tenet, one senior U. S. official observed that "the Internet age didn't get here in 2004," the year Goss took over at the CIA.
CIA names not disclosed
The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk. The CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by the Tribune.
At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.
Covert employees discovered
But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.
Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is one in Chicago.
Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.
A senior U. S. official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."
Down on 'The Farm'
For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."
But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.
Although the Tribune's initial search for "Central Intelligence Agency" employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U. S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U. S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."
One senior U. S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
Coverts especially important
And yet, experts say, covert operatives who pose as something other than diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on terror.
"In certain areas you just can't collect the kind of information you need in the 21st Century by working out of the embassy. They're just not going to meet the kind of people they need to meet," said Melvin Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more than 20 years before he retired.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC--as was attempted with Valerie Plame--creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name . . and find out all sorts of holes?"
In Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U. S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant."
The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the very outset of their careers, "taking risks with younger people, worrying about the reputation of people before they have one. Or create one."
Shortage of 'mentors'
But that approach also has a downside, in that "you're getting into the problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of veteran CIA people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the number of operational people in an environment where there are no mentors. Who's going to train these people?"
In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft" following the disclosure that several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction of a radical Muslim preacher in Milan, Italy, had registered at hotels under their true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations that made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and for Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.
Tribune researcher Brenda J. Kilianski contributed to this article from Chicago.
By John Crewdson Tribune senior correspondent Published March 12, 2006
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."
Dyck declined to detail the remedies "since we don't want the bad guys to know what we're fixing."
Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and the agency's small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they claimed to have been tortured.
Although finding and repairing the vulnerabilities in the CIA's cover system was not a priority under Goss' predecessor, George Tenet, one senior U. S. official observed that "the Internet age didn't get here in 2004," the year Goss took over at the CIA.
CIA names not disclosed
The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk. The CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by the Tribune.
At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.
Covert employees discovered
But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.
Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is one in Chicago.
Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.
A senior U. S. official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."
Down on 'The Farm'
For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."
But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.
Although the Tribune's initial search for "Central Intelligence Agency" employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U. S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U. S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."
One senior U. S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
Coverts especially important
And yet, experts say, covert operatives who pose as something other than diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on terror.
"In certain areas you just can't collect the kind of information you need in the 21st Century by working out of the embassy. They're just not going to meet the kind of people they need to meet," said Melvin Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more than 20 years before he retired.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC--as was attempted with Valerie Plame--creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name . . and find out all sorts of holes?"
In Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U. S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant."
The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the very outset of their careers, "taking risks with younger people, worrying about the reputation of people before they have one. Or create one."
Shortage of 'mentors'
But that approach also has a downside, in that "you're getting into the problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of veteran CIA people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the number of operational people in an environment where there are no mentors. Who's going to train these people?"
In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft" following the disclosure that several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction of a radical Muslim preacher in Milan, Italy, had registered at hotels under their true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations that made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and for Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.
Tribune researcher Brenda J. Kilianski contributed to this article from Chicago.
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