Bulletin N° 204

Subject : ON DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN EXISTENCE : FROM THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.

22 October 2005
Grenoble, France


Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

The "enemies of democracy" seem to be turning to the defensive at this moment in United States history. We at CEIMSA continue to receive articles which indicate a new level of awareness arising from the hitherto silent zones in American society. Is this evidence of a new potential for meaningful change? Maybe, maybe not ! The jury is still out. . . .

From Information Clearing House, Tom Feeley (no relation) of Boston, Massachusetts warned recently the "Police State Is Closer Than You Think", and he sent a series of pithy quotes which may remind some of us of gestalt therapy techniques used against the pathogenic obsessions bred by capitalist accumulation in the 1970s.

For example :

"I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally
controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are
manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that
dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can
hardly be described as democracy either."
--Edward Zehr


"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism
because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
-- Benito Mussolini


"Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Item A. is an article from Grenoble economist Jean-Pierre Juy, who shares a Marxist analysis of the AFL-CIO split taken from the New York City web site :  www.marxist.com.

Item B. is an article forwarded to us by our research associate Professor John Gerassi, at Queens College, in New York City. Will we one day be able to send a post card to George W. Bush behind bars? The dream is worth contemplating, according to Professor Gerassi.

Item C. is from Grenoble librarian, Karin Busch, who is focusing on those insatiable monsters, "The Corporations", and their renewed interest in Chile. [Please see the animated attachment Ms. Busch has sent us, which can be accessed by clicking on the icon at the very bottom of this page.]

Item D., an article from John Pilger, reminds us of the heritage of modern imperialism and the contemporary history of men acting like "demi-gods," determining life-or-death for millions of people according short-term economic interests or simply by caprice.

Item E. is an article forwarded to us from Professor Richard Du Boff, who warns of a "double standard" which has effectively disarmed the American nation for many, many years and today risks to annihilate the world by "the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists."


Sincerely
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble III
Grenoble, France
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/

_______________
A.
from Jean-Pierre Juy
18 septembre 2005

Salut Francis,
J'ai trouvé un article que je trouve bien intéressant sur le ""split AFL-CIO". Il est en attaché. Il fait suite à ton dernier bulletin.
 Tu peux le trouver sur WWW.marxist.com
à bientôt,
Jean- Pierre

 AFTER the Split of AFL-CIO.doc

_______________
B.
from John Gerassi
22 October 2005
Subject: Gag order lifted on Canadian torture charges against Bush.
Date:  Fri, 21 Oct 2005

Francis,
Light at the end of the tunnel?
I hope so.
Tito

Gag Order Lifted on Canadian Torture Charges Against Bush

Vancouver B.C. – Lawyers Against the War (LAW) has achieved what it is calling a "very important victory" in its battle to have George W. Bush face criminal charges in Canada for torture.

The charges stem from the notorious cases of torture carried out by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, first exposed in a series of gruesome private photos that scandalized the world in early 2004. Torture charges were laid against Bush on the occasion of his controversial visit to Canada in November of that year.

The charges were laid under sections of the Canadian Criminal Code enacted pursuant to the United Nations Torture Convention, which requires extra-territorial jurisdiction to be exercised against officials, even Heads of State, who authorize or oversee torture.

On Monday, the Supreme Court of British Columbia quashed an order banning publication of everything having to do with the case. In a secret hearing held December 6th 2004 in Provincial Court, the charges against  Bush were rejected on the basis of arguments by the Attorney General of British Columbia that the visiting president was shielded from prosecution by diplomatic immunity. The ban on publication of anything to do with the proceedings was imposed at the same time.

The secrecy, the immunity claim and the ban were vigorously opposed by LAW, who appealed all aspects of the decision.

On Monday, Justice Deborah Satanove of the Supreme Court of British Columbia quashed the publication ban after government lawyers failed to come up with any argument to defend it. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Associatio had intervened on the side of LAW against the ban.

“This is a very important victory”, said Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson, who laid the charges for LAW, “because it ensures that the proceedings will be scrutinized by people in Canada and throughout the world, to make sure that the law is applied fairly and properly and, above all, to make sure that Bush doesn’t get away with torture.”

“The American legal system seems incapable of bringing him to justice and there are no international courts with jurisdiction. So it’s up to Canada to enforce the law that everybody has signed on to but nobody else seems willing to apply.”

The next hearing in the case will take place on November 25th 2005, at 10:00 a.m. at the B.C. Supreme Court, 800 Smithe Street, Vancouver, B.C., when government lawyers have said they will argue that the issue is now “moot” because the Attorney General of Canada has not yet consented to the prosecution. Toronto law professor Michael Mandel, co-chair of LAW, calls this argument “bogus”: “It’s irrelevant to the issues before the court. Anyway it's hard to see how the Attorney General can withhold his consent to simply let justice take its course. Irwin Cotler's credo is supposed to be "Justice, justice shall you pursue" not ingratiation with superpowers who practice torture. Bush is still guilty, he’s still on the loose and we still have our obligations under the United Nations Convention to bring torturers to justice.”

Lawyers Against the War is an international group of jurists based in Canada with members in fourteen countries.

Contacts :

Michael Mandel, Professor
Osgoode Hall Law School
York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario
M3J 1P3
Tel : 416 736-5039
Fax : 416-736-5736
Email: MMandel@osgoode.yorku.ca

Gail Davidson
Tel: 604 738 0338
Fax: 604 736 1175
Email: law@portal.ca


_________________
C.
from Karin Busch
24 septembre 2005

Salut Francis
Ci-jointe une info sur les société américaines en Chilé.
Karin

___________________
D.
from
Michael Albert
15 October 2005
zmag.org


ZNet | Foreign Policy

Suharto to Iraq, Nothing has Changed
by John Pilger

"The propagandist’s purpose,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.” What has changed? 

“If we had all known then what we know now,” said the New York Times on 24 August, “the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organisations, had betrayed their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding out – by amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of challenging and exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion called “Shock and Awe” and the dehumanising of a whole nation.

This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the BBC, which continues to boast about its rigour and objectivity while echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did before the invasion. For evidence of this, there are two academic studies available – though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to be obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as “embedded” reporting justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as “rooting out insurgents” and swallows British army propaganda designed to distract from its disaster, while preparing us for attacks on Iran and Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had the BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent people almost certainly would be alive today.

When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers and analyse and confront the critical part they play in the violence of rapacious governments? An anniversary provides an opportunity. Forty years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a seizure of power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the CIA described as “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century”. Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret. None of the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali mentioned the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by Suharto and backed by the American and British governments.

Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the role of western business, laid the pattern for subsequent Anglo-American violence across the world: such as Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup was backed in Washington and London; the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police; and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas against the Kurdish village of Halabja.

In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto’s army, Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipmen! t whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.

The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.” The “little shooting” saw off between half a million and a million people. However, it was in the field of propaganda, of “managing” the media and eradicating the victims from people’s memory in the west, that the British shone. British intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. “Treatment will need to be subtle,” they wrote, “eg, a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.” To achieve this, the Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.

The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the “embedded” press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the fake story he had promoted – that a communist takeover was imminent in Indonesia – “went all over the world and back again”. He described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed “to give exactly your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery”. These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be “put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC”. Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia corres-pondent, was unaware of the slaughter. “My British sources purported not to know what was going on,” Challis told me, “but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”

The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of the western media. The headline news was that “communism” had been overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, “is the west’s best news in Asia”. In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva overseen by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With Suharto’s connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved up.

Suharto’s cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in 1998, it was estimated that he had up to $10bn in foreign banks, or more than 10 per cent of Indonesia’s foreign debt. When I was last in Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street and caught sight of the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in luxury. As Saddam Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto’s crimes, Saddam’s seem second-division. With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto’s army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of the populationof East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is “director emeritus”.) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed “project”, as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported. What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between Saddam’s regime (“monstrous”) and Suharto’s (“moderate” and “stable”).

Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say that they and many others “lie awake at night” and want to speak out and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.


__________________
E.
from Richard Du Boff
11 September 2005
Associated Press

U.S. Nuke Arms Plan Envisions Pre-Emption

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of pre-emption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies.

The "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,'' which was last updated 10 years ago, makes clear that "the decision to employ nuclear weapons at any level requires explicit orders from the president.''  But it says that in a changing environment "terrorists or regional states armed with WMD will likely test U.S. security commitments to its allies and friends.''

"In response, the U.S. needs a range of capabilities to assure friend and foe alike of its resolve,'' says the 69-page document dated March 15.

A Pentagon spokesman said Saturday evening that Navy Cmdr. Dawn Cutler, a public affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has issued a statement saying the draft is still being circulated among the various services, field commanders, Pentagon lawyers and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, .

Its existence was initially reported by The Washington Post in Sunday editions, which said the document was posted on a Pentagon Internet site and pointed out to it by a consultant for the Natural Resorces Defense Council.  The file was not available at that site Saturday evening, but a copy was available at www.globalsecurity.org.

"A broader array of capability is needed to dissuade states from undertaking ... courses of action that would threaten U.S. and allied security,'' the draft says. "U.S. forces must pose a credible deterrent to potential adversaries who have access to modern military technology, including WMD and the means to deliver them.''

It says "deterrence of potential adversary WMD use requires the potential adversary leadership to believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective.''
It says "this will be particularly difficult with nonstate (non-government) actors who employ or attempt to gain use of WMD. Here, deterrence may be directed at states that support their efforts as well as the terrorist organization itself.  However, the continuing proliferation of WMD along with the means to deliver them increases the probability that someday a state/nonstate actor nation/terrorist may, through miscaluation or by deliberate choice, use those weapons. In such cases, deterrence, even based on the threat of massive destruction, may fail and the United States must be prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary.''

It notes that U.S. policy has always been purposely vague with regard to when the United States would use nuclear weapons and that it has never vowed not to be the first to use them in a conflict.

One scenario for a possible nuclear pre-emptive strike in the draft would be in the case of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy.''

The Bush administration is continuing to push for development of an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, but has yet to obtain congressional approval.  However, the Senate voted in July to revive the "bunker-buster'' program that Congress last year decided to kill.

Administration officials have maintained that the U.S. needs to try to develop a nuclear warhead that would be capable of destroying deeply buried targets including bunkers tunneled into solid rock.

But opponents said that its benefits are questionable and that such a warhead would cause extensive radiation fallout above ground killing thousands of people. And they say it may make it easier for a future president to decide to use the nuclear option instead of a conventional weapon.

The Senate voted 53-43 to include $4 million for research into the feasibility of a bunker-buster nuclear warhead. Earlier this year, the House refused to provide the money, so a final decision will have to be worked out between the two chambers.

 On The Net:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/jp3_12fc2.pdf



*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université de Grenoble-3
Grenoble, France
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/