'High Risk, High Reward' - the Sarah Palin Gamble

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John McCain Was Looking for a Way to Shake Up His Campaign. He Took a Surprising Gamble on a Relative Unknown.

 
Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson
August 3, 2009 - Washington Post

Adapted from the book "The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election"

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A black car pulled up next to the stairs of a Learjet parked at the executive terminal at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. Inside was Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, driven by her husband, Todd. It was shortly before 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008, and Palin had just finished an appearance in town. She told Todd goodbye and, along with aide Kris Perry, boarded the plane quickly, lest anyone notice her leaving. In minutes she was airborne. All arrangements had been handled in strict confidence.

Twenty minutes into the flight, she was handed a phone-book-sized packet of materials by Davis White, John McCain's director of advance, who had slipped into Alaska late Monday night to oversee the secret journey. The packet contained her reading for the long flight south: McCain's speeches, a schedule and other background on the campaign. White explained two possible outcomes. They would fly to Boeing Field in Seattle to refuel, and then on to Flagstaff, Ariz. She would meet with McCain on Thursday morning. If all went well, she would become his vice presidential running mate and not see Alaska for many days. If not, she faced a quick trip home and a return to relative obscurity.

What happened next is the extraordinary tale of how a campaign desperate to shake up the race took a huge gamble that would dog McCain until Election Day.

In conservative circles, Palin had begun to develop a following, but she still remained a dark-horse candidate whose inexperience made her a risky choice for the Republican ticket. She had been in office less than 20 months and though popular at home had remained out of the national debates. But as her plane headed to Arizona, she now had the inside track to win the job of McCain's running mate.

McCain believed he needed someone dramatic to transform the presidential race. Though he had knocked Barack Obama back in early August with ads featuring Britney Spears and Paris Hilton that belittled his celebrity appeal, everyone around McCain knew that was merely a summertime diversion, a tactical exercise that quickly would be overwhelmed by Obama's convention. The McCain team may have mocked Obama's Greek temple setting in Denver, but it needed a real strategy, propelled by a bold choice for vice president, to preserve any hope of winning in November.

As McCain approached his convention, his advisers saw the challenges as overwhelming -- and contradictory. First, he needed to distance himself decisively from the president. Second, he needed to cut into Obama's advantage among female voters. Despite the bitterness of the primaries and some of the mutinous talk among Hillary Rodham Clinton's most vocal holdouts, the polls showed Obama consolidating most of the Clinton vote. By midsummer, this had become an acute problem for McCain. Third, he needed to energize the lethargic Republican base. While polling showed McCain now winning roughly the same level of support among Republicans as Obama was receiving among Democrats, McCain enjoyed little enthusiasm among conservatives. They might turn out to vote for him -- might -- but would they staff local offices, make phone calls, knock on doors, contribute money, and rally friends and neighbors as they had done for President Bush four years earlier? Fourth,
and perhaps most important, McCain had to regain the one advantage he had always counted on: his identity as a reformer. As senior adviser Steve Schmidt put it, "We had to get that reform mojo back."

Obama had gone the safe route in his selection of Joe Biden, a do-no-harm pick that followed the classic vice presidential manual. McCain did not have such a luxury -- or so argued some of his closest advisers. Schmidt and campaign manager Rick Davis believed McCain's only hope of winning was to make an out-of-the-box choice. If we pick a traditional candidate and run a really good race, Schmidt told top adviser Mark Salter late one night, we still lose.

Palin arrived in Flagstaff after dark. Christian Ferry, McCain's deputy campaign manager, met the plane and drove the group to the home of Robert Delgado, the CEO of Hensley & Co., the large beer distributorship started by Cindy McCain's father. Though it was late, Palin still had a long night ahead of her. Waiting there to see her were Schmidt and Salter. Waiting back in Washington to talk to her by telephone was A.B. Culvahouse, a White House counsel under Ronald Reagan who was in charge of the vetting process and needed to conduct the all-important personal interview. Waiting in Sedona to receive her the next morning was McCain. McCain's team now had barely 12 hours to complete the vetting process, take a face-to-face measure of their leading candidate, decide whether McCain and Palin had the chemistry to coexist as a ticket, and make a judgment about whether she was ready for the rigors of a national campaign.

* * *

McCain's search for a running mate had started in the spring with about two dozen names. Palin was not a serious candidate. One person said she wasn't even on the initial list; others said she was -- barely. It was only later in the summer, when the campaign team became alarmed at the size of Obama's lead among women, that she was added to the list of genuine contenders. "Toward the end of the process, in July, we started taking a look at, like okay, who are we missing? Let's take a sharper look at women candidates and try that one more time," Davis said. "That's when Palin came on." Palin, he added, "stood out significantly from the rest of that list."

Eventually, McCain narrowed his choices to six finalists. In addition to Palin, they were independent-Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, McCain's former rival Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal might have been a finalist had he not taken himself out of contention.

Until days before McCain's deadline, Lieberman appeared to be in the lead, although one top official later said it was never as clear-cut as that. "If you characterize this as yes or no on Lieberman and then someone else [became the top contender], that's not it at all," he said. "Was he the romantic pick? Yes."

Certainly none of the others had the kind of relationship with McCain that Lieberman did. The Connecticut senator ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000, but broke with his party over the war in Iraq. In August 2006, he lost his primary election to antiwar businessman Ned Lamont, who attracted enthusiastic support from liberal bloggers furious about Lieberman's support of Bush's war policies. Defeated, Lieberman ran as an independent and was reelected. McCain and Lieberman shared almost identical views on the war. If anything, McCain was a more vocal critic of Bush's policies, but both strongly opposed withdrawal timetables and believed victory could be achieved. They were steadfast in their views when public opinion about the war was running strongly in the other direction.

Lieberman traveled regularly with McCain, who loved him. He admired Lieberman's probity, enjoyed his corny Borscht Belt humor and most of all trusted his judgment. They differed on many aspects of domestic policy, but they saw a dangerous world through the same prism.

Advisers thought picking Lieberman would alter the race, particularly if coupled with the move McCain was seriously considering: a pledge to serve just one term. Virtually all his top advisers favored the idea. Such a pledge had long been talked about inside the campaign. At the time of McCain's announcement in April 2007, the draft of his speech included a statement that he would serve only four years. But Davis strongly opposed the idea, and McCain was dubious, believing that it would unnecessarily limit his power. The pledge was removed less than 24 hours before the speech, according to two advisers, but resurfaced as part of plans for a possible McCain-Lieberman ticket.

The appeal of picking Lieberman was that it would send a powerful signal that a McCain administration would represent an attempt to break out of partisan politics in Washington, that as president he would actively seek to build a governing consensus at the center of the electorate. The one-term pledge would add an exclamation point to this message, allowing McCain to argue that his administration would have but one goal: to clean up a toxic political system in Washington and take on the most intractable issues that had resisted solution without having to worry about how it might affect his reelection. By now, even Davis had softened in his opposition.

"My opposition to it in the primary was that it really was a cheap way to try to win the primary," he later said. "It wasn't worth making that sacrifice for a primary win. . . . That being said, I understood the need for a device like that if you were going to sell Lieberman, because Lieberman was going to be a hard sell."

Both Davis and Culvahouse raised the one-term pledge directly with Lieberman. "My answer to both of them was, 'Hey, guys, I didn't expect to be considered for vice president at all,' " Lieberman told us. "I still think it's a long shot, so you're asking if it happens would I agree to do it for only four years, that's an easy question. Of course I would." Even McCain had come around, according to his most senior advisers. "There would have to be a one-term pledge," one said. "McCain knew that."

McCain's team also knew there would be conservative opposition to Lieberman because of his views in support of abortion rights and gay rights. It developed a plan to reach out to delegates before the convention, with Charlie Black dispatched to St. Paul, Minn., early for that purpose. As late as the third week of August, the vetting operation was still working hard to finish Lieberman's background checks, questionnaire and personal interview with Culvahouse. Lieberman joked to Culvahouse that the questionnaire was so personally intrusive that the only thing he had not been asked was "whether I had had sexual relations with an animal." (Culvahouse's team found one potentially serious problem with picking Lieberman. Laws in some states prohibited a candidate from running for office from one party or another unless he had been registered with that party for a specified period of time. No one really wanted another Bush v. Gore to sully the 2008 election.)

Ironically, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Lieberman's main advocates, hurt Lieberman's chances by talking openly about his possible selection, allowing conservative opposition to intensify. "Lindsey was out talking to people before he should have and the story got ahead of us," one McCain adviser said.

McCain's team had circled the three days between the Democratic and Republican conventions as the time to announce its vice presidential choice and scheduled big rallies on all three days to give McCain flexibility to make his decision. But they preferred Friday, Aug. 29, the day after the Democratic convention, as the best way to stop Obama's momentum.

On Sunday morning, Aug. 24, McCain's senior staff members met at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix to review their options. The group included Rick Davis, Schmidt, Charlie Black, pollster Bill McInturff, media adviser Fred Davis, and senior adviser Greg Strimple, although only Rick Davis, Schmidt and Black had been privy to the details of the selection process. During the meeting, McInturff went through the results of his latest polling and analysis. He argued that McCain's position had improved since early July, particularly in battleground states. But much work remained.

McCain needed to reinforce his maverick label; a Republican would have trouble winning in November but a maverick McCain might be able to. Given the political climate, McCain would need an unconventional and unorthodox campaign and message.

But McInturff raised serious questions about picking Lieberman, or anyone who favored abortion rights, as a vice presidential running mate. That included Mayor Bloomberg and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. Days earlier, McInturff tested abortion-rights attitudes in a poll. Forty percent of McCain's core supporters said they would be less likely to support him if he selected a running mate who backed abortion rights.

McInturff sketched out a possible doomsday scenario. First, he said, there was no way anyone could predict or control how the selection of a running mate who supported abortion rights would be covered by the media. Would the story line be "McCain the maverick" -- as everyone hoped -- or would it be "McCain shatters the Republican coalition"? Second, he asked, had anyone read the rules of the convention? Majorities of just four state delegations could force a roll call on the vice presidential nomination. Picking a running mate like Lieberman virtually guaranteed a divisive floor fight over abortion. While McCain might be able to impose his choice in St. Paul, the damage would be too costly. The story in September would be about a divided Republican Party, not about McCain's position on the economy or the war or his criticisms of Obama. Others in the campaign later said McInturff's analysis ended any realistic chance of Lieberman becoming vice president,
although one senior official said McCain had not totally ruled out Lieberman even at that point.

The group briefed McCain that afternoon. McInturff shared his findings and repeated his assessment of what could happen in St. Paul. McCain listened, but "John was very inscrutable," one person who attended the meeting recalled. "He was in his quiet, subdued, shoulder-hunched listening mode. . . . We said to each other after the meeting, 'From that conversation, we have no clue.' "

At that point, there seemed to be only two realistic finalists: Pawlenty and Palin, although media speculation focused mostly on Pawlenty and Romney. Romney's star had risen over the summer. He was not a Washington insider and could talk about the economy in ways McCain could not. Furthermore, his relationship with McCain had warmed considerably since the primaries. McCain was impressed by how hard Romney was willing to work to get him elected. Romney's prospects may have ended after a McCain gaffe the previous week. In an interview with Politico, the candidate said he couldn't remember how many homes he and Cindy owned, making him sound badly out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. Romney owned four homes. Amid such economic hardship, Republicans could not present voters with nominees who between them owned nearly a dozen homes.

Pawlenty was young and vigorous, a conservative who had grown up in a blue-collar family -- his father was a truck driver -- and he was anti-abortion. He had won reelection in the Democratic year of 2006 and was seen as a future leader of the GOP, an advocate of modernizing the party without abandoning its conservative principles. Though not particularly flashy, he was seen as a more than credible choice, a running mate who might keep the Upper Midwest competitive. He was the safe choice if Palin faltered.

That Sunday night, Rick Davis and Schmidt went alone to see McCain at his apartment in Phoenix. They urged him to take a hard look at Palin. Davis had been talking with her regularly all through August as part of a confidential plan designed to keep secret the fact that she was even under serious consideration. That weekend, Davis checked with Culvahouse to ask if he could complete a thorough vetting of Palin in the short time remaining. Culvahouse said he could. With that reassurance, McCain called Palin, who was at the Alaska State Fair, and invited her to come to Arizona to meet with him.

* * *

By the time Palin arrived at Delgado's house on Wednesday night, Culvahouse's team members already knew much about her. They had scoured the public record. They had looked closely at an investigation that came to be known as "Troopergate." The investigation centered on whether Palin had pressured and then fired the state public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, after he refused to fire her former brother-in-law, who was in a divorce and child-custody fight with her younger sister. Culvahouse's team examined Palin's tax returns and other financial records. Nothing appeared amiss. A small blemish did turn up: Palin had once been fined for fishing without a valid license.

Culvahouse did not send Palin the lengthy questionnaire that all finalists were asked to complete until McCain invited her to Arizona. The survey ran to 70 questions. Some were highly intrusive, the kind once saved for a personal interview: Did you ever fail to pay taxes for household help? Have you ever filed for bankruptcy? Have you undergone treatment for drug or alcohol abuse? Have you ever downloaded porn from the Internet? Have you ever paid for sex? Have you ever been unfaithful?

Palin's questionnaire turned up one new piece of information: Her husband had once been arrested for driving while intoxicated. The survey also asked if there was anything particularly sensitive that a prospective candidate preferred to discuss verbally. Palin indicated there was.

At the Delgado house, Palin spoke with Culvahouse. It was now well after 10 p.m. Phoenix time, and their interview lasted between 90 minutes and three hours. She was direct and cooperative, according to officials privy to the conversation, and revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter Bristol was pregnant. When Culvahouse finished, he gave Rick Davis a readout of the conversation.

In the days after her selection, Palin's vetting became a major question, with top officials insisting that nothing of significance had surfaced after her selection. Although they didn't learn of her daughter's pregnancy until she was about to meet McCain, they agreed that it should not be disqualifying. The appearance of haste in choosing her fueled speculation that McCain had acted impulsively. But if there was a breakdown, it appears not to have been in the review but rather in a decision made without a deeper understanding of whether Palin would be judged ready to sit a heartbeat away from the presidency. As one person close to the campaign put it, Palin may have received a thorough legal vetting, but what she didn't receive was a thorough political vetting. Those closest to the decision said that in the weeks before the choice they discussed with McCain the pros and cons of picking Palin as much as they talked about other finalists. They believed
the potential reward outweighed the risk.

While Palin talked with Culvahouse, Schmidt and Salter waited impatiently. They approached the decision from different perspectives. Schmidt was more committed. Like Davis, he believed she was the best remaining chance to change the dynamic of the campaign. One of his business partners worked in Alaska; through those contacts, he had become aware of Palin. He checked her with people he knew, and the reviews were positive. She represented a risk, but one Schmidt believed worth taking. Salter was more skeptical, but he was open to the possibility. And he was utterly loyal to McCain.

The two advisers spent an hour or more with Palin, impressing on her the degree to which her life would be turned upside down. Nothing she had ever experienced would prepare her for the scrutiny, the intensity and the outright brutality of a presidential campaign. Schmidt did most of the talking. You're going to be very far from home, he told her. You will have executive and constitutional duties in Alaska, but short of an emergency in the state, you're not likely to be going back. This is incredibly demanding and rigorous. Your advisers and people with opinions back in Alaska will not have a seat at the table. Your job in this race, should this project go forward, is to perform at your highest level of ability every day.

Palin, unruffled and self-confident, said she got it. Salter asked her about her statements in support of creationism. Did she disbelieve the theory of evolution? "No," she told them. "My father's a science teacher." Salter later told journalist and author Robert Draper how "tough-minded and self-assured" Palin was that night.

Early Thursday morning, the group set off for Sedona. The campaign had taken every precaution to preserve secrecy about Palin. The next challenge was getting her to Sedona without being recognized. Christian Ferry bought sun shields to cover the windows of the SUV. The advance team asked the Secret Service to withdraw to an outer perimeter around McCain's compound. The group arrived without incident about 8:30 a.m. McCain greeted Palin, offered her coffee, and then took her down to a bend in the creek where he often liked to sit and watch a hawk's nest in the tree above.

While Palin was being driven to Sedona, McCain spoke to Culvahouse by telephone about the previous night's interview. Culvahouse gave a positive report. She had knocked some of the broader questions out of the park, he told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on Jan. 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are. Culvahouse believed she had a lot of capacity. "What's your bottom line?" McCain asked. Culvahouse later told an audience that he responded, "John, high risk, high reward."

He said McCain then replied, "You shouldn't have told me that. I've been a risk-taker all of my life."

* * *

The previous February, McCain had met Palin in Washington when he hosted several governors attending a National Governors Association meeting. She had impressed him during a discussion of energy policy. Palin also was at a reception McCain hosted for all Republican governors and they spent a few more minutes talking that night.

Now they talked for about an hour down by the creek and were joined toward the end by Cindy McCain. That was the extent of McCain's personal interview with the woman he was about to thrust into the national spotlight. When they finished their conversation, McCain took a short walk with Cindy. He then huddled with Schmidt and Salter, who by prior arrangement argued the case for and against her. Schmidt restated his case: McCain needed to scramble the race; Palin's profile would reestablish his reform image; Pawlenty was credible and acceptable, but once the convention was over he would disappear. Salter argued that Palin was untested nationally and a high risk. He also said that, for all the talk about "country first" in his campaign, McCain could be accused of making a political choice designed only to help him win the election, not enhance his ability to govern. Pawlenty, he argued, was solid, had an attractive biography, and could talk to both the
Republican base and swing voters.

Their conversation over, McCain returned to the deck of his cabin and offered Palin the job. After pictures were taken, McCain and Cindy left. He would see his running mate again the next morning in Dayton, Ohio.

Advisers later said that the decision was McCain's, that he was in no way forced to take Palin against his better judgment. What persuaded him? In part he believed that, in Palin, he had found a fellow reformer who would help him transform the special interest-dominated culture of Washington. But there was more to it than that, as Rick Davis later explained. "I think he realized that everything that was an indicator of success in the campaign was pointing down for us," he said. That included the economy, the country's pessimistic mood, the president's unpopularity, and McCain's belief that the media were in Obama's corner. "When you looked at everyone else, they all were good, solid selections in their own right, but who was really going to help us try and push back all these signals that said we were going to lose? Sixty days wasn't enough time to crawl our way back into the election."

Nor did McCain's advisers worry about seeming to give away the experience argument he had been using all summer against Obama; they did not believe that alone could win it for McCain, any more than it had for Clinton. "We couldn't win with experience," Davis said. "McInturff, when he came back on payroll, said experience will get you to 47 [percent]. Well, good luck."

If that were true, however, they had wasted weeks making the case. It was an example of the campaign's inability to settle on a message, emblematic of larger disorganization.

After the McCains departed, Palin and the others waited until they were certain that no reporters remained in the area, then she was driven back to Flagstaff for the flight to Ohio. En route, her plane touched down in Amarillo, Tex., to refuel -- and to refile the flight plan to make tracking the aircraft more difficult for reporters trying to learn the name of McCain's running mate.

McCain's team was determined not to let the choice leak that night, partly out of deference to Obama, who was to give his acceptance speech in Denver. McCain did not want to be accused of sabotaging that event. But his team also wanted the element of surprise to dramatize the choice. The goal was to keep Palin under wraps until the moment she stepped onto the stage in Dayton.

Earlier in the week, the campaign had put in motion a stealthy plan designed to get Palin and her family to Ohio without anyone knowing. Davis White had called Tom Yeilding, a close friend in Alabama who had once done advance work for Vice President Dick Cheney. "I need you to get on a flight to Cincinnati today," White told him. Yeilding, who worked for a company called CraneWorks, protested, saying he was on a construction site. "You're the only one who can do this," White implored him. Yeilding walked off the site and headed for Ohio. His role, as White later put it, was to "catch the package" there on Thursday night. The plan called for Palin and the others to stay at the Manchester Inn in Middletown, 30 miles south of Dayton. Yeilding made reservations for them under the name of the Uptons (Yeilding's bosses). The cover story for airport workers, who might wonder why jets were arriving from Arizona and Anchorage, was that they were part of a family
fishing trip in Alaska. Meanwhile, Schmidt had sent his colleague Jonathan Berrier to Alaska to assist in getting Palin's family to Ohio.

Palin arrived early in the evening and was taken to her hotel. Next to arrive were Nicolle Wallace, a former White House communications director who served as spokeswoman for McCain, and Matthew Scully, a former Bush White House speechwriter who would be writing Palin's speech. Schmidt led them to room 508. "I'm about to introduce you to our nominee," he said. No BlackBerry communications, no calls to family.

When they walked in and saw Palin, they were astonished. Wallace remembers Palin that night as "super mellow . . . really calm."

Davis White drove to Dayton at midnight to check out the event site. He found one problem: The lectern was set up for a tall person -- the assumption among the advance team was that Romney was the choice. "When I told them to lower it for someone who was 5-7, they thought it was Bloomberg," White said.

The secret held until morning and then exploded across the country, provoking a sense of disbelief. McCain called Lieberman, who was vacationing on Long Island, to give him the news before it was confirmed publicly. Lieberman was stunned. "I said, 'No kidding!' " he told us. "I was surprised. I said, 'Gee, I don't know much about her.' "

Palin's selection created a frenzy. Reporters scrambled to confirm the choice, then to explain who she was and why she was picked. Few people knew anything about her background or record, including those in the McCain campaign now charged with helping to introduce her to the country. Scully -- who thought McCain had made a bold choice -- had spent part of the night on the Internet gathering information about Palin to include in her speech.

At McCain headquarters in Virginia, the communications team was caught off guard. No one had given members the advance word that they needed to prepare background material. Inundated by media calls trying to confirm the choice, they were helpless, some of them not sure how to pronounce her name. One staffer was frantically trying to download information about Palin when the overloaded Alaska state government Web site crashed. Unable to get answers to basic questions, the campaign gave out inaccurate information, telling one news organization she had been to Iraq when she had only been near the border on a visit to Kuwait. "It was horrific," one campaign official said. "It was a disaster. It was a huge disaster."

Conventional wisdom gyrated wildly in those opening days. Republicans in St. Paul were ecstatic about their new vice presidential candidate, but each day brought new questions or rumors about her. Not all of them were accurate, but enough were to keep alive questions about McCain's judgment.

"Sarah who?" had been replaced by "Who is Sarah?"

"What was John McCain thinking?" had been replaced by "What did John McCain know?"

Military Killer Robots 'Could Endanger Civilians'

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Action on a global scale must be taken to curb the development of military killer robots that think for themselves, a leading British expert said.

August 3, 2009 - Telegraph/UK

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"Terminator"-style machines that decide how, when and who to kill are just around the corner, warns Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield.

Far from helping to reduce casualties, their use is likely to make conflict and war more common and lead to a major escalation in numbers of civilian deaths, he believes.

"I do think there should be some international discussion and arms control on these weapons but there's absolutely none," said Prof Sharkey.

"The military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction. The nub of it is that robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability. They can't distinguish between combatants and civilians. It's hard enough for soldiers to do that."

Iraq and Afghanistan have both provided ideal "showcases" for robot weapons, said Prof Sharkey.

The "War on Terror" declared by President George Bush spurred on the development of pilotless drone aircraft deployed against insurgents.

Initially used for surveillance, drones such as the Predator and larger Reaper were now armed with bombs and missiles.

The US currently has 200 Predators and 30 Reapers and next year alone will be spending 5.5 billion dollars (£3.29 billion) on unmanned combat vehicles.

Britain had two Predators until one crashed in Iraq last year.

At present these weapons are still operated remotely by humans sitting in front of computer screens. RAF pilots on secondment were among the more experienced controllers used by the US military, while others only had six weeks training, said Prof Sharkey. "If you're good at computer games, you're in," he added.

But rapid progress was being made towards robots which took virtually all their own decisions and were merely "supervised" by humans.

These would be fully autonomous killing machines reminiscent of those depicted in the "Terminator" films.

"The next thing that's coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots," said Prof Sharkey speaking to journalists in London. "The robot will do the killing itself. This will make decision making faster and allow one person to control many robots. A single soldier could initiate a large scale attack from the air and the ground.

"It could happen now; the technology's there."

A step on the way had already been taken by Israel with "Harpy", a pilotless aircraft that flies around searching for an enemy radar signal. When it thinks one has been located and identified as hostile, the drone turns into a homing missile and launches an attack - all without human intervention.

Last year the British aerospace company BAe Systems completed a flying trial with a group of drones that could communicate with each other and select their own targets, said Prof Starkey. The United States Air Force was looking at the concept of "swarm technology" which involved multiple drone aircraft operating together.

Flying drones were swiftly being joined by armed robot ground vehicles, such as the Talon Sword which bristles with machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles.

However it was likely to be decades before such robots possessed a human-like ability to tell friend from foe.

Even with human controllers, drones were already stacking up large numbers of civilian casualties.

As a result of 60 known drone attacks in Pakistan between January 2006 and April 2009, 14 al Qaida leaders had been killed but also 607 civilians, said Prof Sharkey.

The US was paying teenagers "thousands of dollars" to drop infrared tags at the homes of al Qaida suspects so that Predator drones could aim their weapons at them, he added. But often the tags were thrown down randomly, marking out completely innocent civilians for attack.

Prof Sharkey, who insists he is "not a pacifist" and has no anti-war agenda, said: "If we keep on using robot weapons we're going to put civilians at grave risk and it's going to be much easier to start wars. The main inhibitor of wars is body bags coming home.

"People talk about programming the 'laws of war' into a computer to give robots a conscience, so that if the target is a civilian you don't shoot. But for a robot to recognise a civilian you need an exact specification, and one of the problems is there's no specific definition of a civilian. Soldiers have to rely on common sense.

"I'm not saying it will never happen, but I know what's out there and it's not going to happen for a long time."

Study Finds Hope in Saving Saltwater Fish

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Cornelia Dean
July 30, 2009 - New York Times

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Can we have our fish and eat it too? An unusual collaboration of marine ecologists and fisheries management scientists says the answer may be yes.

In a research paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science, the two groups, long at odds with each other, offer a global assessment of the world's saltwater fish and their environments.

Their conclusions are at once gloomy — overfishing continues to threaten many species — and upbeat: a combination of steps can turn things around. But because antagonism between ecologists and fisheries management experts has been intense, many familiar with the study say the most important factor is that it was done at all.

They say they hope the study will inspire similar collaborations between scientists whose focus is safely exploiting specific natural resources and those interested mainly in conserving them.

"We need to merge those two communities," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "This paper starts to bridge that gap."

The collaboration began in 2006 when Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and other scientists made an alarming prediction: if current trends continue, by 2048 overfishing will have destroyed most commercially important populations of saltwater fish. Ecologists applauded the work. But among fisheries management scientists, reactions ranged from skepticism to fury over what many called an alarmist report.

Among the most prominent critics was Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. Yet the disagreement did not play out in typical scientific fashion with, as Dr. Hilborn put it, "researchers firing critical papers back and forth." Instead, he and Dr. Worm found themselves debating the issue on National Public Radio.

"We started talking and found more common ground than we had expected," Dr. Worm said. Dr. Hilborn recalled thinking that Dr. Worm "actually seemed like a reasonable person."

The two decided to work together on the issue. They sought and received financing and began organizing workshops at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, an organization sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At first, Dr. Hilborn said in an interview, "the fisheries management people would go to lunch and the marine ecologists would go to lunch" — separately. But soon they were collecting and sharing data and recruiting more colleagues to analyze it.

Dr. Hilborn said he and Dr. Worm now understood why the ecologists and the management scientists disagreed so sharply in the first place. For one thing, he said, as long as a fish species was sustaining itself, management scientists were relatively untroubled if its abundance fell to only 40 or 50 percent of what it might otherwise be. Yet to ecologists, he said, such a stock would be characterized as "depleted" — "a very pejorative word."

In the end, the scientists concluded that 63 percent of saltwater fish stocks had been depleted "below what we think of as a target range," Dr. Worm said.

But they also agreed that fish in well-managed areas, including the United States, were recovering or doing well. They wrote that management techniques like closing some areas to fishing, restricting the use of certain fishing gear or allocating shares of the catch to individual fishermen, communities or others could allow depleted fish stocks to rebound.

The researchers suggest that a calculation of how many fish in a given species can be caught in a given region without threatening the stock, called maximum sustainable yield, is less useful than a standard that takes into account the health of the wider marine environment. They also agreed that solutions did not lie only in management techniques but also in the political will to apply them, even if they initially caused economic disruption.

Because the new paper represents the views of both camps, its conclusions are likely to be influential, Dr. Murawski said. "Getting a strong statement from those communities that there is more to agree on than to disagree on builds confidence," he said.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Dr. Worm said he hoped to be alive in 2048, when he would turn 79. If he is, he said, "I will be hosting a seafood party — at least I hope so."

Are Wind farms a Health Risk? US Scientist Identifies 'Wind Turbine Syndrome'

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Noise and vibration coming from large turbines are behind an increase in heart disease, migraine, panic attacks and other health problems, according to research by an American doctor

Margareto Pagano
August 2, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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Living too close to wind turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraines and sleep deprivation, according to groundbreaking research to be published later this year by an American doctor.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the symptoms displayed by people living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for more than five years. Her findings have led her to confirm what she has identified as a new health risk, wind turbine syndrome (WTS). This is the disruption or abnormal stimulation of the inner ear's vestibular system by turbine infrasound and low-frequency noise, the most distinctive feature of which is a group of symptoms which she calls visceral vibratory vestibular disturbance, or VVVD. They cause problems ranging from internal pulsation, quivering, nervousness, fear, a compulsion to flee, chest tightness and tachycardia - increased heart rate. Turbine noise can also trigger nightmares and other disorders in children as well as harm cognitive development in the young, she claims. However, Dr Pierpont also makes it clear that not all people living close to turbines are
susceptible.

Until now, the Government and the wind companies have denied any health risks associated with the powerful noises and vibrations emitted by wind turbines. Acoustic engineers working for the wind energy companies and the Government say that aerodynamic noise produced by turbines pose no risk to health, a view endorsed recently by acousticians at Salford University. They have argued that earlier claims by Dr Pierpont are "imaginary" and are likely to argue that her latest findings are based on a sample too small to be authoritative.

At the heart of Dr Pierpont's findings is that humans are affected by low-frequency noise and vibrations from wind turbines through their ear bones, rather like fish and other amphibians. That humans have the same sensitivity as fish is based on new discoveries made by scientists at Manchester University and New South Wales last year. This, she claims, overturns the medical orthodoxy of the past 70 years on which acousticians working for wind farms are using to base their noise measurements. "It has been gospel among acousticians for years that if a person can't hear a sound, it's too weak for it to be detected or registered by any other part of the body," she said. "But this is no longer true. Humans can hear through the bones. This is amazing. It would be heretical if it hadn't been shown in a well-conducted experiment."

In the UK, Dr Christopher Hanning, founder of the British Sleep Society, who has also backed her research, said: "Dr Pierpont's detailed recording of the harm caused by wind turbine noise will lay firm foundations for future research. It should be required reading for all planners considering wind farms. Like so many earlier medical pioneers exposing the weaknesses of current orthodoxy, Dr Pierpont has been subject to much denigration and criticism and ... it is tribute to her strength of character and conviction that this important book is going to reach publication."

Dr Pierpont's thesis, which is to be published in October by K-Selected Books, has been peer reviewed and includes an endorsement from Professor Lord May, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. Lord May describes her research as "impressive, interesting and important".

Her new material about the impact of turbine noise on health will be of concern to the Government given its plans for about 4,000 new wind turbines across the country. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has made wind power a central part of his new green policy to encourage renewable energy sources. Another 3,000 are planned off-shore.

Drawing on the early work of Dr Amanda Harry, a British GP in Portsmouth who had been alerted by her patients to the potential health risk, Dr Pierpont gathered together 10 further families from around the world who were living near large wind turbines, giving her a cluster of 38 people, from infants to age 75, to explore the pathophysiology of WTS for the case series. Eight of the 10 families she analysed for the study have now moved away from their homes.

In a rare interview, Dr Pierpont, a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Independent on Sunday: "There is no doubt that my clinical research shows that the infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms which I am calling wind turbine syndrome. There are about 12 different health problems associated with WTS and these range from tachycardia, sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, nausea, visual blurring, panic attacks with sensations of internal quivering to more general irritability.

"The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking. The wind industry, however, is not composed of clinicians, nor is it made up of people suffering from wind turbines." The IoS has a copy of the confidential manuscript which is exhaustive in its research protocol and detailed case series, drawing on the work of leading otolaryngologists and neurotologists - ear, nose and throat clinical specialists.

Some of the earliest research into the impact of low-frequency noise and vibrations was undertaken by Portuguese doctors studying the effects on military and civil personnel flying at high altitudes and at supersonic speed. They found that this exposure may also cause the rare illness, vibroacoustic disorder or VAD, which causes changes to the structure of certain organs such as the heart and lungs and may well be caused by vibrations from turbines. Another powerful side effect of turbines is the impact which the light thrown off the blades - known as flicker - has on people who suffer from migraines and epilepsy.

Campaigners have consistently argued that much research hitherto has been based on written complaints to environmental health officers and manufacturers, not on science-based research. But in Denmark, Germany and France, governments are moving towards building new wind farms off-shore because of concern over the potential health and environmental risks. In the UK there are no such controls, and a growing number of lobbyists, noise experts and government officials are also beginning to query the statutory noise levels being given to councils when deciding on planning applications from wind farm manufacturers. Lobbyists claim a new method of measuring is needed.

Dr Pierpont, who has funded all the research herself and is independent of any organisation, recommends at least a 2km set-back distance between potential wind turbines and people's homes, said: "It is irresponsible of the wind turbine companies - and governments - to continue building wind turbines so close to where people live until there has been a proper epidemiological investigation of the full impact on human health.

"What I have shown in my research is that many people - not all - who have been living close to a wind turbine running near their homes display a range of health illnesses and that when they move away, many of these problems also go away."

A breakthrough into understanding more of the impact of vibrations came last year, she said, when scientists at Manchester University and Prince of Wales Clinical School and Medical Research Institute in Sydney showed that the normal human vestibular system has a fish or frog-like sensitivity to low-frequency vibration. This was a turning point in understanding the nature of the problem, Dr Pierpont added, because it overturns the orthodoxy of the current way of measuring noise. "It is clear from the new evidence that the methods being used by acousticians goes back to research first carried out in the 1930s and is now outdated."

Dr Pierpont added that the wind turbine companies constantly argue that the health problems are "imaginary, psychosomatic or malingering". But she said their claims are "rubbish" and that medical evidence supports that the reported symptoms are real.

Case study: 'My husband had pneumonia, my father-in-law had a heart attack. Nobody was ill before'

Jane Davis, 53, a retired NHS manager, and her husband, Julian, 44, a farmer, lived in Spalding, Lincolnshire, until the noise of a wind farm 930m away forced them to leave

"People describe the noise as like an aeroplane that never arrives. My husband developed pneumonia very quickly after the turbines went up, having never had chest problems before. We suffer constant headaches and ear nuisance. My mother-in-law developed pneumonia and my husband developed atrial fibrillation - a rapid heartbeat. He had no pre-existing heart disease. Our blood pressure has gone up. My father-in-law has suffered a heart attack, tinnitus and marked hearing loss.

" I understand this can be regarded as a coincidence, but nobody was ill before 2006."

The defence: 'Wind turbines are quiet and safe'

The British Wind Energy Association, UK's biggest renewable energy trade association, said last night: "One of the first things first-time visitors to wind farms usually say is that they are surprised how quiet the turbines are.

"To put things in context: the London Borough of Westminster registered around 300,000 noise complaints from residents in 2008, none from wind turbines. The total number of noise complaints to local councils across the country runs into millions.

"In contrast, an independent study on wind farms and noise in 2007 found only four complaints from about 2,000 turbines in the country, three of which were resolved by the time the report was published.

"Wind turbines are quiet, safe and sustainable. It is not surprising that, according to a DTI report, 94 per cent of people who live near wind turbines are in favour of them. There is no scientific research to suggest that wind turbines are in any way harmful, and even many of the detractors of wind energy are honest enough to admit this.

"Noise from wind farms is a non-problem, and we need to move away from this unproductive and unscientific debate, and focus on our targets on reducing carbon emissions."

US Weighs Risks of Civilian Harm in Cyberwarfare

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John Markoff and Tom Shanker
August 1, 2009 - The New York Times

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It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government's financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

"We knew we could pull it off - we had the tools," said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

But the attack never got the green light. Bush administration officials worried that the effects would not be limited to Iraq but instead create worldwide financial havoc, spreading across the Middle East to Europe and perhaps to the United States.

Fears of such collateral damage are at the heart of the debate as the Obama administration and its Pentagon leadership struggle to develop rules and tactics for carrying out attacks in cyberspace.

While the Bush administration seriously studied computer-network attacks, the Obama administration is the first to elevate cybersecurity - both defending American computer networks and attacking those of adversaries - to the level of a White House director, whose appointment is expected in coming weeks.

But senior White House officials remain so concerned about the risks of unintended harm to civilians and damage to civilian infrastructure in an attack on computer networks that they decline any official comment on the topic. And senior Defense Department officials and military officers directly involved in planning for the Pentagon's new "cyber command" acknowledge that the risk of collateral damage is one of their chief concerns.

"We are deeply concerned about the second- and third-order effects of certain types of computer network operations, as well as about laws of war that require attacks be proportional to the threat," said one senior officer.

This officer, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work, also acknowledged that these concerns had restrained the military from carrying out a number of proposed missions. "In some ways, we are self-deterred today because we really haven't answered that yet in the world of cyber," the officer said.

In interviews over recent weeks, a number of current and retired White House officials, Pentagon civilians and military officers disclosed details of classified missions - some only considered and some put into action - that illustrate why this issue is so difficult.

Although the digital attack on Iraq's financial system was not carried out, the American military and its partners in the intelligence agencies did receive approval to degrade Iraq's military and government communications systems in the early hours of the war in 2003. And that attack did produce collateral damage.

Besides blowing up cellphone towers and communications grids, the offensive included electronic jamming and digital attacks against Iraq's telephone networks. American officials also contacted international communications companies that provided satellite phone and cellphone coverage to Iraq to alert them to possible jamming and ask their assistance in turning off certain channels.

Officials now acknowledge that the communications offensive temporarily disrupted telephone service in countries around Iraq that shared its cellphone and satellite telephone systems. That limited damage was deemed acceptable by the Bush administration.

Another such event took place in the late 1990s, according to a former military researcher. The American military attacked a Serbian telecommunications network and accidentally affected the Intelsat satellite communications system, whose service was hampered for several days.

These missions, which remain highly classified, are being scrutinized today as the Obama administration and the Pentagon move into new arenas of cyberoperations. Few details have been reported previously; mention of the proposal for a digital offensive against Iraq's financial and banking systems appeared with little notice on Newsmax.com, a news Web site, in 2003.

The government concerns evoke those at the dawn of the nuclear era, when questions of military effectiveness, legality and morality were raised about radiation spreading to civilians far beyond any zone of combat.

"If you don't know the consequences of a counterstrike against innocent third parties, it makes it very difficult to authorize one," said James Lewis, a cyberwarfare specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.

"Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic" - conventional - "weapons," said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement."

Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that "cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive."

That view is challenged by some legal and technical experts.

"It's virtually certain that there will be unintended consequences," said Herbert Lin, a senior scientist at the National Research Council and author of a recent report on offensive cyberwarfare. "If you don't know what a computer you attack is doing, you could do something bad."

Mark Seiden, a Silicon Valley computer security specialist who was a co-author of the National Research Council report, said, "The chances are very high that you will inevitably hit civilian targets - the worst-case scenario is taking out a hospital which is sharing a network with some other agency."

And while such attacks are unlikely to leave smoking craters, electronic attacks on communications networks and data centers could have broader, life-threatening consequences where power grids and critical infrastructure like water treatment plants are increasingly controlled by computer networks.

Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged. Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman's terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.

"Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war," said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. "The U.N. charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined."

A Wind Farm Is Not the Answer

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The green movement's fixation with technology reveals that we are asking the wrong questions

Paul Kingsnorth
August 1, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. They will be almost 500 feet high, and will be accompanied by 73 miles of road. The development will require the quarrying of 1.5m cubic metres of rock and the cutting out and dumping of up to a million cubic metres of peat.

The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby who is probably in the pay of the coal or nuclear lobby, and you will campaign for thousands more like it to be built all over the country.

The project is, of course, a wind farm - or, if we want to be less Orwellian in our terminology, a wind power station. This particular project is planned for Shetland, but there are many like it in the pipeline. The government wants to see 10,000 new turbines across Britain by 2020 (though it is apparently not prepared to support the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight). The climate and energy secretary, Ed Miliband, says there is a need to "grow the market" for industrial wind energy, and to aid this growth he is offering £1bn in new loans to developers and the reworking of the "antiquated" (ie democratic) planning system, to allow local views on such developments to be overridden.

Does this sound very "green" to you? To me it sounds like a society fixated on growth and material progress going about its destructive business in much the same way as ever, only without the carbon. It sounds like a society whose answer to everything is more and bigger technology; a society so cut off from nature that it believes industrialising a mountain is a "sustainable" thing to do.

It also sounds like an environmental movement in danger of losing its way. The support for industrial wind developments in wild places seems to me a symbol of a lack of connectedness to an actual, physical environment. A development like that of Shetland is not an example of sustainable energy: it is the next phase in the endless human advance upon the non-human world - the very thing that the environmental movement came into being to resist.

Campaigners in Cumbria are fighting a proposed wind development near the mountain known as Saddleback, a great, brown hulk of a peak which Wordsworth preferred to call by its Celtic name, Blencathra. Wordsworth thought the wild uplands a place of epiphany. Other early environmentalists, from Thoreau to Emerson, knew too of the power of mountain and moor to provide a clear-eyed and humbling view of humanity.

Many of today's environmentalists will scoff if you speak to them of such things. Their concerns are couched in the language of business and technology - gigawatt hours, parts per million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers and "sustainable development". The green movement has become fixated on a single activity: reducing carbon emissions. It's understandable, what the science tells us about the coming impacts of climate change is terrifying. But if climate change poses a huge question, we are responding with the wrong answers.

The question we should be asking is what kind of society we should live in. The question we are actually asking is how we can power this one without producing carbon. This is not to say that renewable energy technologies are bad. We need to stop burning fossil fuels fast, and wind power can make a contribution if the turbines are sensitively sited and on an appropriate scale.

But the challenge posed by climate change is not really about technology. It is not even about carbon. It is about a society that has systematically hewed its inhabitants away from the natural world, and turned that world into a resource. It is about a society that imagines it operates in a bubble; that it can keep growing in a finite world, forever.

When we clamour for more wind-power stations in the wilderness, we perhaps think we are helping to slow this machine, but we are actually helping to power it. We are still promoting, perhaps unintentionally, the familiar mantras of industrial civilisation: growth can continue forever; technological gigantism will save us; our lives can go on much as they always have.

In the end, climate change presents us with a simple question: are we going to live within our means, or are we, like so many civilisations before us, going to collapse? In that question lies a radical challenge to the direction and mythologies of industrial society. All the technology in the world will not answer it.

Waterboarding Moment of the Day

Everyone Hates The Cops

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After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?

Ted Rall - July 31, 2009

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The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.

"How long as he been there?" I asked my host.

"Three, maybe four days," he said.

"What happened to him?"

"Shot, maybe," he shrugged. "Or maybe hit by a car. Something."

I didn't bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.

With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it's not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn't have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.

Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.

Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don't like cops either.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references "the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?"

Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious "driving while black" New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike--but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there's a policeman in the picture, it's best to be white.

Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger's day is ruined.

No one should be less scared of cops than me. I'm white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: "Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?" Yet I can't point to a single positive experience I've ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure--basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.

And lots and lots of negative ones.

Where to begin?

I'll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. "But you told me to," I protested. "Wrong place, wrong time," he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.

Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious--the fine would have been $400--that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.

When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn't begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, "Cheech and Chong"-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)

An LAPD cop--it bears mentioning that he was black--arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn't. I didn't resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.

And so on.

I admit it: I don't like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn't start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.

Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.

Don't worry, Professor Gates. We don't care what you said about the cop's mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.

Praying man let his daughter die

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August 2, 2009 - BBC News

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A US jury has found a man guilty of killing his sick 11-year-old daughter by praying for her recovery rather than seeking medical care.

The man, Dale Neumann, told a court in the state of Wisconsin he believed God could heal his daughter.

She died of a treatable disease - undiagnosed diabetes - at home in rural Wisconsin in March last year, as people surrounded her and prayed.

Neumann's wife, Leilani Neumann, was convicted earlier this year.

The couple, who were both convicted of second-degree reckless homicide, face up to 25 years in prison when they are sentenced in October.

A lawyer representing Dale Neumann said he would appeal.

'Faith healing'

During the trial, medical experts told the court that Neumann's daughter could have survived if she had received treatment, including insulin and fluids, before she stopped breathing.

On Thursday Neumann, who is 47 and studied in the past to be a Pentecostal minister, said he thought God would heal his daughter.

"If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God," he said. "I am not believing what he said he would do."

He also said he thought his daughter had had flu or a fever, and that he had not realised how ill she was.

Neumann's lawyer said he had been convinced that his "faith healing" was working, and that he had committed no crime.

The prosecution argued that Neumann had minimised his daughter's illness and that he had allowed her to die as a selfish act of faith.

They said the girl should have been taken to hospital because she was unable to walk, talk, eat or drink.

Instead, an ambulance was only called once the girl had stopped breathing.

Fox News has shaky grasp of Mideast geography

TOON

Unexploded Ordnance 'May Take Centuries to Clear' in Vietnam

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July 31, 2009 - Reuters

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HANOI - At the current pace, it will take 300 years and more than $10 billion to clear Vietnam of left-over bombs, shells and mines, a humanitarian and economic scourge in parts of the country, a senior military officer said on Friday.

With aid, the agency in charge of clearing unexploded ordnance estimated that only about half could be cleared by 2050, said Phan Duc Tuan, an army colonel and deputy head of the military's engineering command.

On Friday, the agency within the Vietnamese military that oversees clearance of unexploded ordnance and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation released a report detailing the problem in six central provinces that saw some of the heaviest fighting during the decade-long war with the United States.

The report said that since the war ended in 1975, bombs and mines had killed 10,529 people and injured 12,231 in the six provinces, which are situated near the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that divided Communist North Vietnam from the U.S.-backed south.

Most of the casualties were men collecting scrap metal, farming or herding, the report found, but many children were also killed or injured playing with unexploded ordnance.

Tuan, whose command oversees the centre charged with clearing unexploded ordnance, said aside from the humanitarian toll, there was also a significant economic impact.

In 2008 alone it cost the government about $69.5 million to clear land for construction projects, he told a news conference.

Unexploded ordnance also hindered infrastructure projects and blocked access to natural resources, said the report, which offered the most detailed data to date on the problem in Vietnam.

Bailed-Out US Banks Gave Employees Billions in Bonuses in 2008

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Citigroup, one of the biggest recipients of US government bailout money, gave employees $5.3bn in bonuses for 2008, New York's attorney general said today in a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks.

July 31, 2009 - Associated Press

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The report from attorney general Andrew Cuomo's office focused on 2008 bonuses paid to the initial nine banks that received loans under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) last fall. Cuomo has joined other government officials in criticising the banks for paying out big bonuses while accepting US taxpayer money.

Citigroup, which gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1m, is now one-third owned by the US government as a result of its bailout. It paid bonuses of at least $3m to 124 of those employees, even after it lost $18.7bn during the year, Cuomo's office said.

The New York-based bank received $45bn in government money and guarantees to protect it against hundreds of billions of dollars on potential losses from risky investments.

Bank of America, which also received $45bn in Tarp money, paid $3.3bn in bonuses, with 172 employees receiving at least $1m. Of those, 28 received bonuses of more than $3m. Merrill Lynch, which Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America acquired during the credit crisis, paid out $3.6bn.

Cuomo's office said Merrill Lynch doled out 696 bonuses of at least $1m for 2008, with 149 of those workers getting bonuses of at least $3 million.

Bank of America has been sharply criticised for its acquisition of Merrill Lynch because of mounting losses at the Wall Street bank and the size of bonuses Merrill paid its employees.

A spokesman for Citigroup was not immediately available to comment on the report. Bank of America did not immediately comment on the report.

July 31, 2009 by the Associated Press
Bailed-Out US Banks Gave Employees Billions in Bonuses in 2008, Report Says
Citigroup, one of the biggest recipients of US government bailout money, gave employees $5.3bn in bonuses for 2008, New York's attorney general said today in a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks.

But the banks have said they needed to pay their top performing employees to prevent them from defecting to competitors. Companies that accepted Tarp money have had to comply with government restrictions on employee compensation, including bonuses.

JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, which have already repaid Tarp funds they received, paid out the most bonuses of more than $1m, the report said. However, they were considered among the healthiest of the bailed-out companies.

JPMorgan, which gave 1,626 employees at least $1m, paid back the $25bn it received in Tarp money last month. Goldman, which repaid its $10bn in government money last month as well, gave 953 workers bonuses of at least $1m. The two banks each gave more than 200 employees bonuses of more than $3m.

TOON

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire and 10 Ways to Do So

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The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment will condemn the U.S. to a devastating trio of consequences.

Chalmers Johnson
July 31, 2009 - Tomdispatch.com

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The Obama administration's plan to end production of the F-22 Raptor has received plenty of press coverage, but the Pentagon budget itself, even though it's again on the rise, hardly rates a bit of notice. In fact, amid the plethora of issues large and small -- from health care reform to Gates-gate, from energy policy to the culpability of Michael Jackson's doctor -- that make up the American debate in the media, in Washington, and possibly even in the country, what Chalmers Johnson has called "our empire of bases" goes essentially unmentioned. Not that we don't build them profligately. At one point, we had 106 of them -- mega to micro -- in Iraq alone; right now, we have at least 50 forward operating bases and command outposts in Afghanistan to go with a few giant bases (and the Pentagon is evidently now considering the possibility of creating a single, privatized, mercenary force to defend them, according to the Washington Post).

This is all staggering expensive. In an era when the need for funds at home is self-evident, on purely practical grounds -- and there are obviously others -- the maintenance of our global imperial stance, not to speak of the wars, conflicts, and dangers that go with it, should be at the forefront of national discussion. Instead, it has largely been left to oppositional websites to keep this crucial issue alive.

Our military empire, and the vast national security state and bureaucracy that go with it, have been perhaps the central focus of TomDispatch since it launched in late 2002. This site has concentrated on our military bases, the Pentagon's blue-sky thinking about future weaponry, air war as the American way of war, the defense budget, and the out-of-control nature of the Pentagon, among many other related issues. Nick Turse, associate editor at this site and an expert on the Pentagon, has even put its properties on "the auction block."

Since Chalmers Johnson first wrote of that empire of bases at this site back in 2004, no one has more cogently analyzed the dangers of militarism, military Keynesianism, and a Pentagon budget spun out of control. His trilogy of books on the subject, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis are already classics, and assumedly on the shelves of all TomDispatch readers.

Today, he turns to the issue which should be, but isn't, central to our moment: dismantling the empire. Think of this as the American health care reform program that no one is discussing.

- Tomdispatch.com

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However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:

"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

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Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

US Should Declare Victory and Leave Iraq, Says Top Military Officer

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Ed Pilkington
July 30, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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A top US military officer in Baghdad has stirred controversy by arguing in a confidential memo that the American presence in Iraq has outlived its welcome and that it was time "for the US to declare victory and go home".

The memo, leaked to the New York Times, was written by Colonel Timothy Reese who calls for all US troops to be pulled out of Iraq by August next year. He draws on the adage "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days," adding: "Since the signing of the 2009 security agreement, we are guests in Iraq and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose."

Under that Status Force Agreement, the US has agreed with the Iraqi government to complete withdrawal by the end of 2011. Though the numbers of troops pulled out so far is limited, the US military has begun to quit Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

The disclosure of the Reese memo comes a day after the US defence secretary Robert Gates said that the pull-back from Iraq could be sped up slightly with the inclusion of an extra brigade of about 5,000 troops by the end of this year on top of the two already planned. But that still leaves most US troops still inside Iraq at the time of the sensitive Iraqi elections in January.

Reese, an author of the official US army history of the Iraq war and a current adviser to the Iraqi military in Baghdad, is double-headed in his memo. He warns that there are still big problems within the Iraqi security forces, from corruption to ongoing political pressure from Shia politicians.

He also reports that since the US withdrawal of combat troops from Baghdad, there has been a "sudden coolness" shown by Iraqi military leaders towards US advisers. Iraqi units were now less willing to work with the Americans in joint operations.

Nonetheless, he goes on to argue that staying on will only foment further resentment among Iraqis.

The idea of a rapid acceleration in the pullout from Iraq was greeted with scepticism by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, a former adviser to General David Petraeus. Biddle said that it was not in the interests of either the Iraqis or the US to speed up withdrawal.

Biddle said that the main problem facing the military in Iraq was an "identity civil war" between Shias and Sunnis and potentially between Arabs and Kurds, comparable to the Balkans.

"Our mission is peacekeeping stabilisation in Iraq. I would like to see a long, slow drawdown to the level of a peacekeeping force, as we saw in the Balkans," Biddle said.

He added that his impression was that neither General Ray Odierno, the top US commander in Iraq, nor Petraeus who now heads US central command, would agree with the call for a faster departure.

A spokesman for Odierno told the New York Times that the Reese memo was not intended for widespread dissemination and did not reflect the view of the US military.