Pirates vs. Emperors

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Joseph Nevins
May 7, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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History shows that when a powerful empire sets sail overseas its spokespeople often depict the undertaking as an effort to create order and bring peace. When a pirate ship ventures into the open seas, by contrast, the empire portrays the endeavor as a crime against humanity. The difference is not so much what emperors and pirates do—both pillage and plunder, albeit to vastly different degrees. What matters most is which of the two is in a position to effectively define right and wrong.

This history seemed to repeat itself on April 20—only days after Barack Obama called the United States a "nation of laws" and said that his administration would not prosecute Americans for torture. On that night, police and FBI agents led a shackled Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, a teenager from war-ravaged, poverty-stricken Somalia accused of piracy, into federal detention for his role in an American ship captain's kidnapping. While presented as a step toward law-based accountability, the scene evokes images of an old story—the reigning double standards of what passes for international justice.

About 16 centuries ago the renowned theologian St. Augustine related a tale about a pirate captured by Alexander the Great who asked his prisoner "how he dares molest the sea." "How dare you molest the whole world?" responded the pirate. "Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor."

Centuries later, this unjust dynamic became widespread as Western powers carved up the globe. Throughout their colonies they established courts that prosecuted crimes defined by the occupying power. Not surprisingly, the courts typically focused their efforts on the alleged crimes of imperial subjects, while upholding the institutionalized injustices and the acts of physical violence needed to sustain it.

The creation of the United Nations was, among other things, an attempt to overcome the resulting impunity for the relatively powerful. But while the U.N. has had much success in setting international legal and human rights standards, it has been largely ineffective in enforcing them, especially when doing so would challenge the interests of powerful member-states.

This failure is principally one of design, one embedded in the United Nations' very structure due to the World War II victors' efforts to ensure that the new international body would allow them to pursue their interests on the global stage. As the Mexican delegate to the founding convention in San Francisco in 1945 noted, the U.N. Charter assured that "the mice would be disciplined, but the lions would be free."

More than 60 years later, his words have proven to be prophetic. Accountability for "mice" and impunity for "lions" — and the mice with whom they are on good terms — has become the rule, not the exception in international affairs.

Among many examples, witness the current international tribunal in Cambodia. Between 1969 and 1973, the U.S. military carpet-bombed Cambodia, causing the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of civilians, while indirectly contributing to the Khmer Rouge's seizure of power. Yet the U.N.-backed court will not try any U.S. officials for committing serious crimes.

As Marlon Brando, in his role as a human rights lawyer in apartheid-era South Africa in the 1989 film, A Dry White Season, explained, "Justice and law could be described as distant cousins, and here … they're not even on speaking terms."

Bridging the gap between law and justice requires that we in the United States acknowledge the double standards that effectively allow a small number of powerful countries to determine who should face international justice, while exempting themselves from scrutiny. We must reject President Obama's statement upon the recent release of the torture memos that "nothing will be gained by … laying blame for the past" —words that seem to apply only to some crimes and wrongdoers.

It requires that we imagine the possibility that people like "us," and the officials from countries with which we ally ourselves, might also be held legally accountable for actions abroad, and to endeavor to make the possibility real.

Until we do so, let us not pretend that law and justice are one and the same, or that emperors and pirates are compelled to live by the same standards.

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Joseph Nevins is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College. His latest book is Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#30610029

Can the Neocons Jump to the Dems?

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Ivan Eland
May 4, 2009 - Consortiumnews

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Consortiumnews Editor's Note: Just a few years ago, the acolytes of George W. Bush were dreaming about transforming the United States into essentially a one-party state with the Republicans as the permanent majority, the neoconservatives as the party's intellectual core, and the Democrats kept around for show.

However, a series of policy disasters – many caused by the neocons, like the Iraq War – have left the Republicans foundering as a national party, which may mean the neocons will attempt to jump ship to the Democrats, as the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland notes:

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Neoconservatives used the Republican Party as a vehicle to promote and employ their policies of muscular nation-building overseas.

But like the parasite that eventually kills its host, the Republican Party's virtual collapse, in large part because of the failed nation-building adventure in Iraq, has left neoconservatives discredited and facing policy extinction. Unfortunately, neoconservatism will probably live on by changing hosts.

Throughout American history, the structure of the political systems has ensured that only two major parties would be viable at any one time. They haven't always been the Democrats and Republicans. They have always been the Democrats and one other party. First, it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally, from just prior to the Civil War to the present, the Republicans.

The Republicans started out as a regional party of the Northeast. The only reason they ever took power away from the Democrats, the only true national party at the time of the Civil War, was because the Democratic Party split into northern and southern wings over the slavery issue.

Thus, the Civil War was essentially caused by the fracture of the Democratic Party. Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election with only 39.8 percent of the national popular vote, beating two Democrats and one minor party candidate. Southern states, fearing a Republican's potential policies on slavery, didn't even wait until Lincoln's inauguration before they began to secede from the union.

Ironically, today, the Republican Party, which once had hopes of becoming the majority party in the country, has followed George W. Bush over a cliff and has once again been reduced to largely a regional party of the old South and a few other conservative states.

As long as Democrats in more libertarian mountain states stand up for gun rights, most states in that entire region are ripe for permanent status in the Democratic column. The most telling moment in the 2008 election was when Arizona, the Republican nominee's home state, was too close to call. It would have gone Democratic had a native son not been running.

If the Republican Party doesn't now move to extinction like its Federalist and Whig predecessors, it is likely to remain only a regional party for a long while.
It's intolerant conservative social views scare most other Americans. More important, the one issue on which many Republican conservatives differed from President Bush — immigration — could be the death knell of the party.

When the party alienated Hispanics (including even some Cubans, who were previously one of the most loyal Republican constituencies), the fastest growing minority in the United States, with nativist diatribes on immigration, other minorities, such as Asians and Native Americans realized that they could be victimized too.

In the 1990s, Republican Governor Pete Wilson made California overwhelmingly Democratic with his immigration policies. The same has just happened at the national level. After the immigration debate in the late Bush years, it will be hard for the Republican Party to ever woo back Hispanics.
Does the long-term demise (and maybe extinction) of the GOP leave the neoconservatives up the creek without a paddle? Not necessarily.

The neoconservatives started out as liberals and socialists in the Democratic Party. They were never really that conservative on economic policy, only belligerent in foreign and defense policies. And in those two latter policy areas, the Democratic Party is still dominated by their close cousins, the liberal Wilsonian interventionists.

Although the liberal Wilsonians — such as Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, and Madeleine Albright — are less unilateralist than the neoconservatives and are much more in love with international organizations, they share the neoconservatives' passion for armed social work and nation-building.

Besides, when you're deep in the wilderness and your horse is dying, you can't be too concerned with pimples on your new steed.

The neoconservatives will probably eventually realize that the Republican Party is dying, and will seamlessly re-infest the Democratic mother ship to preserve themselves. And again, they will probably severely debilitate their host.

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Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

US Security Firm Blackwater Ends Iraq Operation

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May 07, 2009 - Agence France Presse

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US security firm Blackwater ended its operations in Iraq on Thursday closing a controversial era for the company whose guards shot dead 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

"The task order for security protection operations held by Blackwater comes to an end today in Baghdad," American embassy spokeswoman Susan Ziadeh said, adding that Triple Canopy will replace it.

Triple Canopy, a Virginia-based firm, was appointed at the end of March by the US State Deparment to take over the multi-million-dollar contract to protect US government personnel working in Iraq.

Linked agreements such as that for Presidential Airways, part of Blackwater that operates helicopter escorts throughout the country for secure air travel, will expire soon, Ziadeh added.

The State Department refused to renew annual contracts for Blackwater which renamed itself Xe after the Iraq government banned it in January over the killings in Baghdad's Nisur Square on September 16, 2007.

An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians died and 20 were wounded when Blackwater guards opened fire with automatic weapons while escorting an American diplomatic convoy through the square.

US prosecutors say 14 civilians were killed in the incident. Five former Blackwater guards pleaded not guilty at a federal court in Washington in January to manslaughter charges.

The shooting focused a spotlight on the shadowy and highly lucrative operations of private security operations. Blackwater guards were reported to earn as much as 1,000 dollars a day each in Iraq.

Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Xe, said the firm remains proud of its work in Iraq.

"When the US Government initially asked for our help to assist with an immediate need to protect Americans in Iraq, we answered that call and performed well," she said in comments emailed to AFP.

"We are honored to have provided this service for five years and are proud of our success - no one under our protection has been killed or even seriously injured."

"We always knew that, at some point, that work would come to a close."

Foreign security teams in Iraq have long operated in a legal grey area, but under a military accord signed with Washington last November, Iraq won a concession to lift the immunity to prosecution previously extended to US security contractors.

Blackwater first came under scrutiny on March 31, 2004, when four of its employees were killed by an angry mob in Fallujah, then a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold.

The crowd mutilated their bodies and strung them from a bridge, shocking images that were broadcast worldwide and led to a month-long assault on Fallujah that left 36 US soldiers, 200 insurgents and 600 civilians dead.

North Carolina-based Blackwater has been protecting US government personnel in Iraq since the 2003 invasion and has had around 1,000 staff in the violence-wracked country, making it among the largest security firms operating there.

In the wake of the scandal over civilian deaths in Iraq, its founder Erik Prince announced in March that he was stepping down as chief executive, but would stay on as chairman.

Michael Moore Takes On The "Beast" Of Capitalism

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Bill Gallagher
May 6, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Michael Moore, the Academy Award winning filmmaker and disturber of the peace for the powerful, is preparing a scathing assault on America's economic system with his new film set for release in October. As usual, Moore pulls no punches proclaiming the three things wrong with capitalism: "It's anti-Jesus, it's anti-democratic and it just doesn't work."

Moore previewed the themes in the film during a speech last Saturday at a Michigan Peace Team dinner and fundraiser. The MPT trains ordinary citizens in the creative use of nonviolent conflict interventions and the origination has built an admirable record working in troubled spots of the world such as Bosnia, Palestine and along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Father Peter Dougherty, a Catholic priest and a founder of MPT, is a long time friend of Moore's who introduced him as a man with "a passion for justice" and reminded the audience that the Flint, Michigan native - who is a lightning rod for right wing rage - is "very real" and "what you see is what you get."

I can vouch for that. I met Michael when he was poor and obscure and we've been friends for nearly 25 years. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Moore's first film, "Roger and Me." I had the privilege of helping to collect some of the video used in the film and made my silver screen debut in an excerpt from a news report where I stood in Flint describing the devastating impact General Motors' plant closings were having on the town where the giant corporation began.

"Roger and Me" was a seminal piece of filmmaking, revolutionizing the documentary genre. As Moore said in his remarks, the film was not really about Roger Smith, the late GM chairman who squandered billions of dollars in non-auto business fiascos, nor was it about Michael and his zany quest to confront the isolated and aloof executive. The film was about "an economic system that is unfair, unjust and not democratic," Moore said.

"Roger and Me" was prescient and prophetic and, had General Motors and the other domestic automakers paid attention to its message instead of denouncing Moore as a grandstanding trouble maker, they might be in better shape today.

As Chrysler plunges into bankruptcy and General Motors could soon follow, Moore reminded us that GM "has brought about its own demise." He recited the corporate legacy where "They have fought everything good for the planet and good for people." At one time GM opposed rear view mirrors and turn signals and "dragged every step of the way to build safe and fuel efficient vehicles."

Moore blasted the years of planned obsolescence in U.S. auto making where the martini sippers who ran the companies decided, "Let's build a piece-of-shit vehicle that will last three years." In the short term, that strategy lined the pockets of the executives that forged it, but long term it perversely branded American products as poor in quality even when they had improved. That "arrogance and greed drove Detroit where we are," Moore sadly noted.

Moore's films are timely, poignant and pointed - made for people to understand what's really happening in the world rather than the bland, sanitized and ultimately distorted messages the mainstream media feeds to the uninformed.

"Bowling for Columbine" showed how a gun-worshiping society spawns promiscuous violence and human degradation. Moore's microphone was shut-off and he was booed off the stage as he used his Academy Award acceptance speech for "Bowling" to denounce the war in Iraq which began five days earlier. The blood still flows in Iraq six years later; the war is a recruitment gift for Islamic revolutionaries. Moore had the guts to speak the truth and those who booed him should feel shame today.

"The president lied to invade another country," Moore said. "Is there a greater crime than that?" He called the war a "black mark on the American soul" and asked, "What do we have to do to redeem ourselves?"

"Fahrenheit 911," Moore's brilliant film about George W. Bush, his exploitation of the Sept. 11th attacks, and the rush to war in Iraq, will become a standard in high school American History classes used to help students understand the madness that gripped this nation.

"Sicko" exposed the failures of a greed-driven health care system where even those with insurance suffer and are denied basic coverage. Moore dissected a failed system that costs twice as much as anywhere in the industrialized world while falling behind "Third World" nations in basic health measurements such as life expectancy and infant mortality rates.

Moore's newest film project pits him against American "banksters", the crooks in suits responsible for "The largest robbery in the history of the world." That's not hyperbole. Look at the numbers.

Moore calls the evolution of unbridled capitalism in America, "The beast." He sees these money-addicted bastards - with their indispensable allies in politics - coming up with trick after trick to lure and push working-class people into economic slavery locked in "the chains of debt."

The banks are the "new conquistadors", who brought slavery to the Western Hemisphere and committed genocide on many of the native peoples to accelerate a rapacious and bloody capitalism aimed at amassing unrivaled wealth. The methods are different, less openly brutal, but the enslavement is similar.

Moore argues that wildly expanded credit offered to those unable to afford it, usurious interest rates for credit cards, costly student loans that force recent graduates into low-paying jobs to pay back the banks, home equity loans, mortgage refinancing, and the whole sub-prime scam suck up the limited resources of working people and pump the proceeds into the pockets of the already filthy rich.

Moore sees the dream world of George W. Bush's "ownership" society - where Americans rely on 401 k accounts as a substitute for employer-employee supported fixed pension benefits - as a disaster, that would have been devastating had Bush succeeded in his mad quest to funnel Social Security payroll taxes into the stock market.

"Enough" is the dirtiest word among the rich capitalists who've been gaining a greater share of our total national wealth since 1980, when Ronald Reagan first came into office, while their tax burden has been reduced significantly. The debt-financed tax cuts were passed out to wage earners who accepted Reaganomics, as Moore contends, in a bizarre social contract where "the oppressed believe the oppressor is their friend."

Moore showed a snip of the trailer for his new film (rumor is it's titled "Bailout" but he's not saying) where he's looking into the camera wearing his signature baseball cap, making what sounds, at first, to be a sincere appeal to help those suffering in the economic melt-down.

He's holding a coffee can, asking for donations. Then - with a straight face - he pleads for money for Bank of America, Citi Group and the other suffering banks. The label on the can reads: "Save Our CEOs."

The film is being shot in Michigan and Michael is secretive about the project because, he said, "I want to live to finish it." He quipped the Bush people he took on were "pretty dumb" but the "banksters" are smarter, and even more ruthless than his earlier adversaries.

Reporter Amy Lange and her husband, photographer Michael Shore, are friends and colleagues and vigilant voices for the suffering in our society. Amy ably served as emcee for the packed crowd at MPT's "Evening with Michael Moore."

Amy and Mike are preparing a visual and narrative display for Marygrove College in Detroit called "Portraits in Social Justice," Michael Moore among them. Shore's compelling photographs of these committed people present faces etched in high purpose.

After his speech, we ushered Moore into an adjoining room where Shore had to shoot some photographs of him for the display. Moore already had a long day shooting his own interviews for his upcoming film.

As Shore got him to pose, he hoped for a serious expression and asked Moore to think of Dick Cheney. Moore obliged, looking somewhat severe, while never fully suppressing the ever-present twinkle in his eyes.

He is an extraordinarily creative communicator who breaks down complex issues into understandable human stories. He is an exceptional filmmaker and the most effective social critic of our times.

Like Mark Twain, his predecessor on this American stage, his wonderful wit usually wins the day. And also like Twain, my old friend Michael Moore's greatest gift is that he knows and shares the awful truth.

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Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News.