The term comes from a tactic that was commonly employed many centuries ago by all the navies of fledgling empires. Although these navies very occasionally engaged in heroic battles with each other in order to protect the citizens of their countries from invading hoards, as our history books suggest, the far more common use of mighty battleships was for theft. Sinking an enemy ship was never the intention of these engagements, and would have been seen as something of a failure. The purpose was to capture the ship, preferably undamaged, and steal anything and everything from the personal possessions of the crew to the very ship itself, which would then be recycled by the victors. After all, what could possibly be the point of sinking an expensive ship, laden to the gunnels with the riches of plundered foreign colonies, when its capture would serve exactly the same political purpose, as well as providing vast wealth?

The Royal Navy, for example, routinely operated a “prize” system right up until quite recent times; and although acts of piracy don’t form quite the same staple diet in the senior service as they used to do, prize legislation remains on British statute books to this day. Right up until the nineteenth century “prize courts” would routinely assess and divvy-up the wealth of ships that had been attacked and seized by the jolly Jack Tars. Some of the plunder was apportioned to the ship’s crew. Of course, it wasn’t an equal distribution of wealth, where the loblolly boy, say, received as much of a cut as the captain; nor was the cut in any way equal to the share gifted to the high and mighty Lords of the Admiralty, who weren’t required to do anything more dangerous for their cut than over-indulge themselves in London society. However, some small portion of the “prize” would find its way to even the lowliest cabin boy – the original “trickle-down” effect perhaps. In short, the routine day-job of the glorious Royal Navy was plunder. In fact, the only way the great sailors of Nelson’s day differed from common pirates was that the piracy of Nelson’s navy was simply deemed to be legal. It’s a similar principle to the one that’s alive and well to this day, and helping to keep investment bankers out of jail.

But even hardened cynics such as myself find it difficult not to admire the considerable skill that was often required for some of the encounters that took place between the mighty warships of Nelson’s day. In the days before modern communications these great behemoths, seventy metres long with a thousand souls on board, could only use the power of the wind to move around, so finding and engaging and defeating an enemy in thousands of square miles of empty ocean was no easy matter, and the seamanship required for these encounters was often truly amazing. Apart from some acts of genuine courage, with perhaps just a hint of insanity, these sailors also relied on a host of devious tricks and raw cunning to capture a “prize”. Apart from plenty of luck, you also needed a good brain to be an effective captain in Nelson’s day; and it’s hardly surprising, given hundreds of years of regular practice in the dark arts of subterfuge and deceit, that the roots of the British intelligence service were established in the Royal Navy.

One of the many tricks used in the days of sail was to make your ship appear friendly to the watchful telescopes of the prospective prize; and the easiest way to do this was to ensure the flags your ship were flying were not those of your own country but were either exactly the same as those of the prize, or the same as those of whichever country was friendly to the prize. This simple ruse would, of course, eventually be discovered as a trick; and, of course, every ship’s crew knew about the trick. However, it would invariably buy some invaluable time, making all the difference between success and failure, enabling the hunter to get close enough to his prey to capture him before the darkness of night might come to the hapless victim’s rescue.

This tactic is still very much alive and well, and survives in modern language usage as the “false flag” attack, to mean an attack by someone who isn’t quite who they seem to be. Variations of it include attacks perpetrated by people pretending to be enemies of the state. These attacks may be carried out by the state’s own armed forces, or by paid mercenaries, or by allies of the state. History is rich with evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous sinking of the Maine. In 1898, when the US was beginning to flex its expansionist muscles abroad, the battleship USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbour. Although there was no evidence to support it, the incident was blamed on Spain, who controlled Cuba at the time; and it had the desired effect of triggering the Spanish American war which eventually led to Spain’s eviction from the island and the installation of a US puppet regime – a model that would be successfully repeated time and again for many decades to come. Fifty-five years later something very similar happened again – this time without going to the extra expense of actually sinking any ships.

On August 4, 1964 the world was informed that another US warship, the USS Maddox, had come under sustained attack by North Vietnam. It was the event which directly led to ten years of total hell for tens of millions of people in South East Asia, and whose effects are still being felt to this day. Fifty years after the false flag event of the Maddox, declassified documents revealed that the US government was fully aware at the time that no such attack had taken place. But by then, of course, the false flag had long served its purpose.

Although the term “false flag” originated from these naval deceptions, false flag incidents have never been solely confined to the high seas. Armies have always used any number of devices to deceive their victims, and anyone who’s ever watched a Hollywood war movie is probably aware of it; for how many of these movies have included a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys dress up in the uniforms of their enemy in order to carry out some raid or another? Is that not a completely routine story-line? Although many of these movies are obviously fictitious, these deceptions, which might also be called “false flag” adventures, are based on normal military tactics which have been used by almost every army, probably since the beginning of civilisation.

However, Hollywood movies seldom reveal the true evil and cynicism of war. Therefore not many of the 99%, who obtain much of their understanding of the world in general and history in particular from the silver screen, know anything at all about the truly dark side of all armies in general, and their leaders in particular. For how many Hollywood movies tell the stories of how armies routinely slaughter defenceless people? Although they will sometimes depict the enemy of the day carrying out these atrocities, they never show the so-called “good guys” doing it – which creates in the mind of the viewer the impression that our armies never behave in such a beastly fashion. But they most certainly do.

Consider the vast number of movies that came out of Hollywood telling how the west was won – how handfuls of brave adventurers defeated marauding hoards of screaming bloodthirsty savages, which was, in fact, a complete inversion of the truth. And how many war movies told the truth about the bombing of Dresden, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These completely needless events took place in the closing days of World War Two, when Germany and Japan were already crushed nations. They were events which deliberately targeted hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians, and served absolutely no military purpose whatsoever. They were war crimes, already outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Not many Hollywood movies tell us that.

It’s important to grasp this principle of war that not even Hollywood can glamorise: that our trusted leaders can and do routinely issue orders to slaughter innocent defenceless civilians, and that brainwashed young people then carry out those orders, and that society is then brainwashed into considering these young people to be heroes. Not even Hollywood can glamorise the deep cynicism of that fact.

Although the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians is a different aspect of the cynicism of war, and cannot be considered a false flag adventure, it’s important to cite it as evidence of the psychotic ruthlessness of our own trusted leaders and the brainwashed youngsters who are routinely conditioned to obey an order, any order.

My own personal first-hand experience of false flag adventures was obtained in the late seventies, in Rhodesia, where I was batting out my national service as an intelligence officer. Our army had a small unit of people called the Selous Scouts. They were considered the elite of the elite, and were supposedly originally created by a couple of junior officers serving in the Rhodesian SAS who thought the SAS wasn’t quite hard enough. I did some of my training with the Scouts. They were definitely different.

Later on, when I was operational, I was based in a small rural outpost called Rusape. For me it was a very comfortable posting and, I’m very glad to say, I managed to see out my time there without being injured and, I’m even more glad to say, without causing injury to anyone else.

Each morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I would saunter over to the operations room to see what was going on. Like almost every military operations room in the world, one wall of it was given over to a huge map of our area of responsibility. Most of the time it was just a map of rural Rhodesia, with little coloured stickers on it depicting some sort of recent “terrorist” incident – such as a landmine going off, or an attack on some isolated school or clinic. My job would be to go out to investigate these incidents and report on them. Sometimes it was very harrowing, but mostly it was a fairly pleasant way to sit out the war.

But every now and then I would turn up to the ops room in the morning and would be met with the sight of a sizeable chunk of the map covered over in hatched lines. Everyone understood that that area had been “frozen”. This meant that no army personnel or police were to go into that area. The Scouts had moved into it. For a few weeks after that life went on pretty much as normal everywhere else on the patch; but no information at all emerged from the area with the mysterious hatching; and then one morning I’d turn up for work and the hatching would have been removed from the map as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

Within a day or two of that happening the reports would start rolling in from where the Scouts had been, about “terrorist” murders at some isolated village or another, of a “terrorist” rocket attack on a small business centre perhaps, or a “terrorist” landmine blowing up a rural bus. These would all have been carried out by the Scouts, dressed up as “terrorists” and using “terrorist” weaponry.

The purpose of these attacks was a variation of that old favourite: the hard cop/soft cop routine. The Scouts’ role was to try to out-terrorise the forces working for the likes of Robert Mugabe, to try to alienate the local population from Mugabe’s men by pretending to be Mugabe’s men and committing such atrocities that the locals would be repulsed by them. Then when the soft cops turned up in the shape of government forces, the locals would feel like offering their help and support. It’s called winning hearts and minds, and was a tactic that had already been used by US special forces in Vietnam before that, and by British special forces all over the place before that: Malaya, Congo, Kenya, Aden…

Some would dismiss false flag adventures as conspiracy theory, which is, of course, a very convenient way to persuade the 99% that our trusted leaders couldn’t possibly stoop so low. But history is rich with proof that they most certainly do stoop so low, with amazing frequency. So the really important lesson to learn in all of this is that whenever a so-called “terrorist” outrage occurs, especially those outrages where the perpetrators haven’t been caught in action (and rounding up “suspects” after the event cannot be trusted either – as the “Guildford Four” and “Birmingham Six”, for example, could confirm)… always, always recall the very real world of false flag adventures.

One of the more prevalent images in the current epoch is that of militarization. The armed forces now take part in Hollywood production (the recent film Act of Valor, for example), one of the top selling video game series, Call of Duty, promises the most authentic war experience, and the line between news and military action is blurred by the embedding of journalists in active units – a move that has the potential to disrupt objective reporting on the events that occur. Popular musicians appear in videos aimed at increasing the levels of military recruits, and the ever-changing military slogans enter common lexicon at a rapid pace. This conflation of military advertising is by no accident. Ever since the creation of so-called “military Keynesian”¹ during the Cold War, the armed forces industry has risen to be one of the key sectors of both the US and global economy. The financial aspects of the military, be it the armament, logistics, or marketing sectors, are indeed a business, and they have a product to sell – war.

The military image is conducted upon the utilization of symbols that are branded as the Other, the enemy that threatens the sanctity or livelihood of the nation’s population. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the Other, portrayed in a manner that contrasted sharply with the domestic propaganda of the American Way of Life. The image of the USSR was used to sell to the American public unprecedented weapons build-up, violent interventions overseas, and the importance of US global supremacy. The largest post-Cold War conflict, the current War on Terror, saw Islamic fundamentalism – and centrally Osama Bin Laden – become the dominant symbol of evil, and it was used to justify expensive and needless wars, not to mention the rolling back of vital civil liberties on the home front.

Yet Bin Laden is now dead, and the wars rage on, unmoored from their symbolic context. Contrived justifications are wearing thin on a population growing wearing from the deaths, the costs, and the gruesome stories pouring forth from the television. With the branded image, war cannot exist, and without the war a dominant aspect of the economy is threatened to its very roots.

Enter Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army – a roving band of guerrilla fighters that consists primarily of kidnapped children-turned soldiers. Fueled by a curious combination of nationalism, Christianity, and occultism, Kony’s crimes – which include the aforementioned kidnappings and militarization of the youth, child sex slavery, and the massacring of civilian populations – have led to his indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and his placement on the US’s list of known terrorists in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While the horrors Kony have visited upon Uganda have been some of the egregious human rights abuses in the modern era, his forces have subsequently thinned out and have left Uganda, becoming scattered across the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.²  Regardless, this pivotal fact has not fazed an effective international campaign calling for the US to intervene into Uganda to finally fulfill the ICC’s mandate.

Kony 2012

On March 5, 2012, a thirty minute video titled simply “Kony 2012” was released on the social media platform Vimeo, a higher quality alternative to Youtube. In the short half hour running time, the viewer is given a crash course in the developed world’s opposition to Kony, including action kits to buy, campaigns to conduct, and requests to make of government leaders. Set to the tune of pop music and dubstep, the film’s primary mechanism for informing the viewer of the situation in Africa is the director, Jason Russell, explaining to his five year old son that Kony “is a bad guy.”

The video went viral immediately, with over 16 million views by the close of March. The aim of the film – “to make Kony famous” – was accomplished with unprecedented success, catapulting the warlord’s name one truly heard around the world. It’s an exciting prospect – thanks to the internet, the global citizenry can partake in a legitimate dialogue over problems facing the world and not be obstructed by geographical boundaries or racial and gender differences. It’s the latest event in a long line of actions derived from the modern era’s new technological prowess, following closely on the heels of the Obama election campaign, the Arab Spring revolutions, and Occupy Wall Street. But while these instances veer from the top-down (Obama’s treatment of new media forms) to the bottom-up (Arab Spring and OWS’s decentralized ethos), the true position of Kony 2012 and the Stop Kony movement that it spearheads has yet to be truly seen. There is gradually emerging evidence, however, that the campaign to raise awareness about Kony, while playing an essential role for the emergent global society, may be more in line with top-down procedures connected directly to the military establishment.

Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, a program officer at Clark University’s Strassler Center” for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, has noted that the Kony 2012 film is conducted not as a thoughtful analysis; instead, she argues, it’s rooted in simplistic advertising-style systematics.³ Facts are cast aside for emotional appeals, and viewers are, in a way, talked down to as broad comparisons permeate social consciousness that equate Kony with Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. Such relations are inherently linked to a militarized mindset – while, yes, Kony, Hitler, and Bin Laden were and are violent figures, juxtaposing their images together simultaneously creates an aura of evil that, historically, has only been toppled by the utilization of military force. The enemy, keep in tune with wartime propaganda, is reconfigured in the national perception as the embodiment of evil, one that we, as a benevolent and enlightened populace, have a responsibility to unseat.

Such imagery-based maneuvering, especially the utilization of figures that have been the center of two of the US’s larger conflicts, could lead the Kony 2012 to be seen as an exercise in aspects of “pre-propaganda,” a little known yet effective procedure that helps condition a population into a certain mental framework. Jacque Ellul describe pre-propaganda’s function as helping to:

prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective… It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes.⁴

The Stop Kony movement does carry with it a certain lack of concrete ideology. While the campaign does seek to raise awareness and to create a grassroots lobby to bringing Kony to justice before the close of 2012, the details are hidden behind vague terms such as “arrest,” and we are none the wiser as to what this truly details. Will it be, indeed, military intervention, or will it be some other action conducted in transnational comity? Perhaps the unwillingness to address such questions directly comes from the fact that much of the LRA consists of child soldiers and thus themselves the victims of human rights abuses. A conflict between well-trained Special Forces and children would certainly raise a few eyebrows.

It’s this very specter of international intervention that has caused some outcry against the film in Uganda – “Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” says one blogger from the country.⁵  Other Ugandans have criticized the film’s presumptuous tone, noting that as time has gone on Kony’s forces have lost much of their might and have become scattered. A spokesman from the Uganda government went as far to state “It is totally misleading that the war is still in Uganda… I suspect that if that’s the impression that they are making, they are doing it only to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda.” ⁶  Regardless, the anti-Kony movement is preparing to conduct a national “Cover the Night” campaign for late April, involving the plastering of high-visibility parts of US cities with awareness-raising posters.

So who are the organizations behind Kony 2012? As one would suspect, none of them are Ugandan institutions; instead, the coalition consists of powerful American bodies with deep pockets and political clout. Primarily, the organizations are Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and Resolve (Uganda).⁷  Invisible Children is the only one of the three which could be certifiably grassroots, being run by several young filmmakers who produced a 2006 documentary of the same name. However, Enough and Resolve “are closely related to one another and to the upper echelons of the US government’s foreign policy establishment.” ⁸

Michael Barker has observed the interrelated nature of the two organizations, writing in a piece for Swans Commentary that “the former acting executive director of Enough (Cory Smith) is the vice president of Resolve; while Peter Quaranto, one of the four individuals who founded Resolve with the aid of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, presently works in the office of the US State Department’s Special Envoy to Sudan.” Meanwhile, Resolve’s founding Executive Director Michael Poffenberger has worked at the USAID-funded Grassroots Reconciliation Group.

Enough, launched in 2007, is itself a joint project of two, well-entrenched political machines, the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the Center for American Progress (CAP),⁹ and is partnered with equally prolific international bodies such as Human Rights Watch, the Genocide Intervention Network, the aforementioned Grassroots Reconciliation Group, and the Save Darfur Coalition. Reflecting these partnerships, Enough’s governing body interlocks closely with quite a few of them – for example, the organization’s co-chair, John Prendegast, is an adviser to both the ICG and the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, a director for the Save Darfur Coalition, and an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network. His co-chair, Gayle Smith, became a senior fellow at CAP after a time at USAID, the World Bank, and an advisory position at Save Darfur’s sister organization, Olympic Dreams for Darfur. These ties are certainly not indicative of sinister conspiracy; they do represent common interests in troubled reasons – yet one certainly has to ask what drives these interests. While a great deal of members surely are involved for altruistic reasons, a closer look at Enough’s parents, the ICG and CAP, reveal a connecting thread of militarized rhetoric and certainly deserve deeper scrutiny.

The origins of the ICG date back to the mid-1990s, when Mark Molloch Brown, a PR man turned World Bank vice president, was joined by Morton I. Abramowitz, a State Department official and board member of the International Rescue Committee to create a “conflict prevention” organization in (rather ironically) the build-up to the NATO airstrikes in Serbia. ¹⁰  The seed money was provided by the liberal billionaire philanthropist, who now has been a long-time fixture on the ICG’s executive committee. By the same token, his primary philanthropic vehicle, the transnational Open Society Institute (OSI) has been a longtime funder of the organization.

Sitting alongside Soros in the ICG’s administrative wings are a practical who’s who of the military and corporate establishments. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, former Boeing executive Thomas Pickering, NAFTA negotiator Carla Hills, former International Monetary Fund deputy director Stanley Fischer, and former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark have all served the ICG in some capacity. Thus, it’s not surprising that by the organization’s own admission, the impetus behind their creation was to “persuade governments to do what it believes has to be done – if necessary by taking military measures.” ¹¹

The ICG goes to great lengths to cloak their militarized viewpoint in a liberal and humanitarian veneer, aligning itself with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). Under R2P, a concept that has received the endorsement of Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the World Federalists, and other transnational moderate bodies, [developed] nations have a responsibility to intervene in the affairs of [underdeveloped] countries or regions in order to ‘protect’ the population from human rights abuses – ignoring that frequently these very abuses stem from US military’s fist or from the imposition of Western economic models. The R2P doctrine was injected into transnational diplomacy following its drafting at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was chaired by the Australian politician Gareth Evans. Incidentally, Gareth Evans went on to act as president of the ICG.¹²

Despite its recognition from the foreign policy elite, the doctrine has been met with criticism by those who see the potentials for conflict of interest in its implementation. Noam Chomsky, in a talk given at the UN General Assembly, attacked the tendency for R2P adherents to act rather selectively in their invocations of the doctrine:

The natural interpretation of the timing gains support from the selectivity of application of R2P. There was of course no thought of applying the principle to the Iraq sanctions administered by the Security Council, condemned as “genocidal” by the two directors of the oil-for-food program, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom resigned in protest. Von Sponeck’s detailed study of the horrendous impact of the sanctions has been under a virtual ban in the US and UK, the primary agents of the programs. Similarly, there is no thought today of protection of the people of Gaza, also a UN responsibility, along with the rest of the “protected population” (under the Geneva Conventions), denied fundamental human rights.¹³

Chomsky goes on to point out that the R2P doctrine was never invoked during the crisis in East Timor, where Indonesian occupying forces (with US backing) were conducting ethnic cleansing against the region’s indigenous populations. Perhaps the silence was due to the fact that none other than Gareth Evans, at the time acting as Australia’s foreign minister, had signed lucrative contracts with the Indonesia government to drill in East Timor.¹⁴  Evans subsequently declared the Indonesian occupation as “irreversible” and flippantly commented that there were “zillions” of dollars to be made by the country’s joint oil programs.¹⁵

The Center for American Progress (CAP),¹⁶ on the other hand, is a relatively new US-based political advocacy organization, having been started in 2003 with financial backing from Hebert M. and Marion O. Sandler (the liberal philanthropists behind the investigative journalism non-profit, ProPublica). While Sandlers may have put up the money for CAP, it was John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, who crafted the organization into a well-oiled political machine. Modeled on powerful right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, Podesta envisioned the CAP as a “think-tank on steroids”– its program follows closely with the consumer-propaganda mentality, hosting a “edgy website,” maintaining a daily-operating “war room” to crank out talking points, and the recruitment of “hundreds of fellows and scholars” to draw up policy recommendations.¹⁷

The CAP’s agenda is costly, yet the majority of its financial backers remain undisclosed by the organization. It is known, however, that they have received money from Wal-Mart,¹⁸ a corporation that been represented on Capital Hill by Podesta’s lobbying company, the Podesta Group.¹⁹  Major funding also comes, much like the ICG, from George Soros, with the OSI providing CAP with $30,000 in 2006 for “general support” and much more money ever since.²⁰ Thus it’s not surprising that the OSI maintains high profile ties with the CAP: Morton H. Halperin, the director of the U.S. Advocacy at the Institute is a senior fellow at CAP;²¹ his son, David Halperin, is the senior VP of CAP’s subsidiary organization, Campus Progress. Furthermore, CAP is also funded in part by the Democracy Alliance,²² a consortium of high-profile liberal philanthropists that includes Drummond Pike (founder of the Tides Foundation), Robert H. Dugger (chief economist for the American Bankers Association), Gara LaMarche (former vice president of U.S. Programs at the OSI), and Soros himself on its membership rosters.

The CAP worked with another Soros-funded venture in 2007, MoveOn, as part of the pro-Democrat Party coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI). A faux-grassroots movement that was taking its marching orders from inside the Washington Beltway, the AAEI utilized the rage surrounding the American offensive in Iraq as a rhetorical talking point to channel activists into support for Democrat political candidates. As journalist Matt Taibbi observed:

[M]uch of the [AAEI’s] leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes Consulting — whose partners Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. … This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community. … The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it’s now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they’ve made to the contrary, in the end they’ve done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they’ve been asked to give, every step of the way.²³

In an extension of its support for Democrat Party politics, the CAP, much like MoveOn, was a primary supporter of the Obama campaign, working with yet another OSI-supported outfit, Media Matters, to launch a PR organization simply titled “Progressive Media.”²⁴  Not surprisingly, veterans from the AAEI, Tom Matzzie and Tara McGuinness, were tapped to help run the operation. Subsequently CAP has operated quite closely with the administration, endorsing and campaigning for President Obama’s health care plan. Earlier, John Podesta himself had been selected to serve as co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.²⁵

Just as Matt Taibbi predicted, the utilization of anti-war rhetoric served only to capture the activist voting bloc, while expedited troop de-escalation and withdrawal was never even near the table. In an about-face characteristic of the Democratic Party as a whole, the CAP went from opposing Republican-led maneuvers in the Middle East to arguing for an increase in military efforts under Obama. Their recommendations for a more hawkish approach to Middle East policy came in a report titled “Sustainable Security in Afghanistan,” and was the subject of a CAP-hosted forum called “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan.” ²⁶  In a complete evisceration of so-called progressive credentials, the report’s authors include Lawrence Korb, a director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Vice President of Operations at the defense contractor Raytheon; and Frederick Kagan, a senior scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the notoriously militaristic Project for the New American Century.²⁷

Contrasting sharply with the ICG and CAP, Invisible Children lacks direct ties to the transnational military establishment; its realm is far more grounded in the grassroots activist spectrum (although their board of directors includes Dave Karlman, who has been attached to the International Rescue Committee). ²⁸  Acting in this grassroots space, Invisible Children – in contrast from the ICG and CAP – does not receive funding from the large liberal foundational complex. Instead, as a quick peruse through the organization’s financial statements (which, in a meaningful display of transparency, are posted for all to view on the Invisible Children’s website), the bulk of the funders are either individual donors, smaller businesses, schools, and religious organizations. With this funding, the Invisible Children organization has been able to conduct an impressive strategy that engages the population by hosting school events, protests, and arranging conservations with important policy-makers.

Aside from Dave Karlman, the overwhelming majority of Invisible Children staffers come from religious organizations or joined up following screenings of the film that launched the movement, Invisible Children. Religion plays an important role in the initial motivators behind Invisible Children’s Action; Jason Russell himself is an evangelical Christian and has acknowledged that his worldview is related to his charitable work.²⁹  Thus, because of this, it has not been uncommon to see Christian missionaries, such as Living Waters International, at work with Invisible Children in Uganda on some of their more functional community-based programs, such as the repairing or construction of infrastructure that had been damaged during the war.

As Michael Barker and others have pointed out, one of the organizations that has been subsidizing Invisible Children is ProVision, an extension of the religious, right-wing National Christian Foundation.³⁰  He notes that this combine has been a financial clearinghouse for a myriad of organizations that make up the tapestry of the evangelical community – including “The Family,” (also known as “The Fellowship”), a Washington D.C.-based religious organization that hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Ironically, given the National Christian Foundation’s connection to Invisible Children, The Family itself has complicity in human rights abuses in Uganda: as reported by investigator Jeff Sharlet, a “core member” of the organization, the Uganda parliamentarian David Bahati, helped pushed forward the proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”³¹  This act, which is still being debated in the Ugandan parliament, would make homosexuality a capital offense and punishable by death.

Not all of National Christian Foundation’s funding recipients are religious-oriented, however. A large portion of their money is marked for free-market think-tanks that lobby for neoliberal economic reforms; these include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.³²  While at first this may seem like a curious anomaly, the fact that a religious organization is supporting a certain economic platform is not a new phenomenon. The two have been essentially conjoined at the hip for much of modern American history – religious integration has been utilized as a perfect vehicle for economic imperialism and vice-versa.

One worthwhile study of this complex has been Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.³³ In their sprawling work, the two authors have tracked an extensive history showing the often-indirect (but undeniable collusion) between the religious right (mainly Christian missionaries), progressive politicians and figureheads (such as the Rockefeller family) and US foreign policy agencies in bringing that unruly hotbed of Leftist, Central and South America, in line with American geopolitical and economic imperatives. Earlier still, the Rockefellers had already noted that religious work operated rather harmoniously with market prerogatives. Frederick Taylor Gates, the family’s administrator of philanthropic funding, took careful note that “Missionary enterprise, viewed solely from a commercial standpoint, is immensely profitable. From the point of view of means of subsistence for Americans, our import trade, traceable mainly to channels of intercourse opened by missionaries, is enormous.”³⁴

One last important example of the relationship between religion and elite strategy is the case of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive yet powerful consortium of right-wing politicians, businessmen, and evangelical leaders. In the early 1980s the CNP was joined by Colonel Oliver North, who saw in the organization a potential cash-cow for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.³⁵ The move proved to be wildly successful, and the evangelical community became an informal extension of US foreign policy in the south by providing both money and media coverage to help unseat the left-wing Sandinista government. Perhaps importantly, the CNP and the National Christian Foundation were established a mere six months apart and maintained an interlocking relationship between their founders.³⁶ Furthermore, the Foundation maintained funding ties to Christian charities run by the sister of Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the CNP’s original benefactors and one of North’s key Contra supporters.³⁷  To show just how closely aligned this world is, Hunt was also found to be one of the primary financiers of missionary work in South America, much to the benefit of the Rockefeller family and the US government.³⁸

Managing the Spectacle for Larger Ambitions

In bringing together the ICG, CAP, and Invisible Children together under a common rubric, a multi-tiered advocacy campaign is capable of being launched across normal class, ideological, and geographical divisions. At the top level, the ICG is capable of managing the flow of information coming from Uganda and can effectively craft policy recommendations on the actions that it sees fit. Likewise, CAP can work on the national level, and with its extensive relationship with the PR industry, drive a campaign while simultaneously conduct political lobbying. Invisible Children’s impact is primarily on a localized, community level, using clever campaigning to create a grassroots voice demanding action from the leaders in Washington. Working in tandem, a Spectacle is woven that promotes a singular mindset that, as discussed earlier, reflects the top-down pop consumer mentality of the society it was fomented in.

The Spectacle, in the hands of those who seek aggression, can be a powerful tool; it can overwhelm an opposition, as in the case of  the Iraq War, and one just has to turn on the television set to see the sabre-rattling being conducted towards Iran. Gerald Sussman, Professor of Urban Studies and Communications at Portland State University, has written that contrary to the ideas of many scholars, information – the cornerstone of the Spectacle³⁹ – does not, in the modern epoch, have a neutral character:

In the consumer economy, the prevailing uses of processed data are not simply informational in character or designed as a public good… Rather they are primarily promotional, which involves a control of language in ways that displaces the value of general wisdom and “common sense” that historically emerged in sites where public conversation, debate, and consensus on necessities and meanings took place (the public sphere). ⁴⁰

Kony 2012, by eschewing analysis and legitimate education in favor of easily digestible talking points and emotional appeals, creates a rather hollow framework that helps to undermine the complex conversations that must be had on the issue. The conditioning of society to consume hollow informational bits – a topic far beyond the scope of this article – allows a cohesive aura to be constructed, and the result in this case is the mass calls for what appears to indeed be an intervention in Uganda. A recent Reuters piece quotes John Campbell, an African specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that the “campaign… definitively energizes the political level and that in turn energizes the diplomatic machine.”⁴¹  The article also quotes an official from the ICG, who notes that while the “campaign aims to harden the U.S.’s engagement in the fight against the LRA,” fears of the negative fallout from troop deaths could spell disaster for Obama in the upcoming electoral season.

The irony is that while the Kony awareness campaign is utilizing people power to pressure politicians into action, a great many players in the campaign are themselves members of the transnational foreign policy elite who operate outside of the White House. The ICG itself has already successfully utilized its standing in shaping President Obama’s policy towards Uganda; in 2010 it issued a report that recommended that the US government dispatch a team of specialists to help run an “intelligence platform” to centralize efforts between the country’s military and other regional armies. ⁴²  The Obama administration, in a very under-reported move, did just that – and the Kony 2012 video proceeded to cite this as an example of people power interacting with their government.

This rise of interventionist mindset towards Africa follows closely on the heels of NATO’s excursion into Libya, situated at the northern edge of the continent. The Libyan venture, explained away to the US population as support for the country’s rebels seeking to unseat the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is a picture-perfect example of the R2P doctrine in action. Although, unlike the current Stop Kony campaign, it was not preceded by a seemingly politically engaged citizenry – it was a decision reached behind closed doors and far away from Congress. The primary catalyst for the excursion was one of Obama’s picks for his National Security Council, the self-proclaimed “humanitarian hawk” ⁴³  Samantha Power. ⁴⁴

Described by Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth as “[having] the president’s ear,” Power skyrocketed to prominence in 2003 after publishing A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which argued that the US government is the solution to much of the world’s problems. In crafting this argument, however, she curiously sidesteps instances where the US has been the catalyst for human rights abuses or simply obfuscates the nation’s complicity. Critic Edward Herman has observed that one such instance is the earlier-discussed mass extermination in East Timor: Power’s treatment of the crisis is limited to noting that “when… the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away” – ignoring that America “gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response… and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.” ⁴⁵  Regardless, Power’s work was heavily endorsed by the foreign policy establishment and during the year of its publication, was awarded the Council on Foreign Relation’s Arthur Ross Book Award.

Power’s position in the Obama administration has been dominated by an elite-centric and rather technocratic state of mind connected directly to managing the flow of information and leveraging propaganda in favor of government action. Her husband and longtime Obama confidant, Cass Sunstein, was also tapped for a governmental position after the election as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is tasked with “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,”⁴⁶ something that may be unsettling when one takes into consideration their new director has argued in a college thesis that the government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government. ” The justification, he continues, is that actions deemed to be conspiratorial are good, as long as it serves the “greater good.” ⁴⁷

In a similar vein, Power stated in a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose that controlling information would be required in the era of Obama, particularly when it came to the hope that US forces would be leaving Iraq – “Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally.”⁴⁸  Following this statement, she proceeded to deny that the Obama presidency would be viewed as a wartime leadership – and in the process revealed her elite-centric view towards US supremacy:

Part of having a credible American leader again who is unimplicated with the war in Iraq who is very attractive to people around the world, is to somehow use that early wind at his back to try to extract commitments to patrol the commons, to actually deal with these broken people and broken places.

In other words, the presence of a commander-in-chief who is outside of what is normally perceived as the military establish will be more conductive to militarized behavior. She attaches this rhetoric to references to “broken people and broken places” – linking the military directly to humanitarian relief, while her belief in the necessity of “patrolling the commons” reveals a distinctive police mentality.

Power has deep ties to foreign policy complexes, including ones that are directly tied to the current “Stop Kony” campaign. In 1996 she was a policy analyst for the ICG, and she has been a director at the International Rescue Committee. She was the founding executive director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; the organization, which interlocks with the ICG through Morton Abramowitz, would go on to be involved in developing counter-insurgency doctrines during the War on Terror. ⁴⁹  She is linked to the Investors against Genocide group – much like the Enough Project’s John Prendergast. Furthermore, Resolve lists her as a “LRA Strategy Power Player,” the group of politicians involved in the movement to intervene in Uganda.⁵⁰

Samantha Power is certainly not the centerpiece of the humanitarian intervention complex – but she is indicative of the prevailing attitude that military force can be used for good. By repositioning it in a liberal context, it’s distanced from the neoconservative “Peace through Strength” diplomacy that the Left has so long castigated. Yet America (and the UN and NATO by extension) has, historically, been selective in its military offensives and interventions; where there are no economic gains to be had or geostrategic interests to be defended, the financial and physical costs of war have never been put to use. Thus, the flowery rhetoric about humanitarian intervention and “responsibility to protect” has to be taken lightly.

When one pulls back the cover behind the “Stop Kony” people power, the usual collusion of business and military can be found. The military advisers dispatched to Uganda on the ICG’s recommendations operate under the auspices of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the umbrella group overseeing all of the US’s actions on the African continent.⁵¹  While the creation of AFRICOM, which occurred under the George W. Bush administration, was shrouded in humanitarian overtones, it came about following a lobbying campaign conducted by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG). ⁵²  The AOPIG, in turn, is a consortium of representatives from the CIA, African oil companies, and other private interests. It is also linked to the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies – an Israeli-based think-tank that seeks to “shift America’s dependency on oil from the Gulf nations — hostile towards Israel — to other parts of the world.”⁵³ The AOPIG also has ties to the Free Africa Foundation, an African-oriented free-market advocacy group with its own connections to a network of US-based conservative foundations and think-tanks.⁵⁴

The existence of AFRICOM and its connections hint at a wider geopolitical agenda. While we now veer into the area of conjecture, it is certainly interesting to observe that many have linked AFRICOM to the presence of Chinese petroleum interests on the African continent: “Officials say that Chinese efforts to exert its military influence in Africa have drawn the interest of U.S. military planners,” Fox News reported,⁵⁵ while the BBC drew attention to the fact that “the US gets more than 10% of its oil from Africa and is worried about increased economic and diplomatic competition from China.” ⁵⁶ Extrapolating from that, the Libyan intervention can be viewed in a new light: Gaddafi’s government had entered into an oil partnership with the China, providing the country with 3% of its oil needs in 2010.⁵⁷ The Libyan rebels made a point to attack these Chinese oil installations, disrupting worker camps and breaking down the lines of communication. ⁵⁸  Chinese African oil interests are not only limited to Libya; the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation also signed exploratory deals with the government of Somalia⁵⁹ (another spot of interest for the US military), and has also been engaging in talks with Uganda’s up and coming oil industry.⁶⁰

Regardless of the ultimate reason for AFRICOM and the surge in US interest on the African continent, many Africans have worried that the American command umbrella will lead to a militarization of the continent’s culture. “Africa is going to look at all its development efforts through the lens of the Pentagon. That’s a truly dangerous dimension. We don’t need militarisation of Africa, we don’t need securitisation of aid and development in Africa,” the BBC quoted Kenyan columnist Salim Lone as saying.⁶¹  This militarized mindset, driven by AFRICOM, is indivisibly linked to the Stop Kony movement through both logistics (the presence of military advisers) and rhetoric (the innocuous calls for the warlord’s arrest). It has the potential to serve further goals, beyond just the possible short-term gains of geopolitical interest, but also sets a precedent for future propaganda about the role of the military in alleviating humanitarian crises.

The election of President Obama was fueled, in large part, by the population’s disgust in war. Organizations capitalized on this sentiment, funneling discontent into a powerful voting bloc, and now the same organizations are pushing for military action with a citizenry – legitimately concerned with the plight of the world’s oppressed and exploited – acting as the primary vanguard of the movement. This is no small part thanks to a well-orchestrated management of the flows of information, rooted in a mental framework that is all pervasive throughout modern society. This is a byproduct of informational breakdown, the obfuscation of motivation, and the possibility for the elite to derive action from conditioned emotional responses. It is through oversimplification and ‘digestible’ sound bites and images that important and worthwhile education of human abuses and global affairs – things that must be known and discussed – can be transmuted into a space where the adage “War is Peace” rings true.

1. “Military Keynesianism” refers to the methodology of utilizing military spending to inject money into the national economy, leading to a cozy relationship between the armed forces, the corporations that produce goods used by the armed forces, and the wings of the government that hold control over military activities. President Eisenhower immortalized the concept as the “military-industrial complex.”
2. Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: What’s the Real Story”, The Guardian, March 8, 2012
3. Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, “Consumerism Trumps Education”, Huffington Post March 11, 2012
4. Jacque Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Vintage Books, 1965, pgs. 30-31
5. Mike Pflanza, “Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film”, The Telegraph, March 8, 2012
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Barker, “KONY 2012” Swans Commentary March 26, 2012
8. Ibid
9. “About” Enough Project
10. Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group”,  New Left Review, May-June 2010
11. See Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group“
12. Michael Barker, “Imperial Crusader for Global Governance”, Swans Commentary, April 20, 2009
13. Noam Chomsky,  “The Responsibility to Protect”,  Talk given at the UN General Assembly, New York City, July 23, 2009
14. Edward S. Herman, David Petersen,  “The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights”,  MRZine, August 24, 2009
15. Barker “Imperial Crusaders for Global Governance”
16. For more information the Center for American Progress, see my “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power” Dissident Voice December 21, 2012
17. Matt Bai,  “Notion Building”, The New York Times,  October 12, 2003
18. John McCormmack,  Corporatism and the Center for American Progress, The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2010
19. Justin Elliot, “Who’s Doing Mubarack’s Bidding in Washington?” Salon, January 28, 2011
20. Various Open Society Institute reports
21. Halperin is also on the steering committee of the Democracy Coalition Project, an initiative of the Open Society Institute that works closely with the UN Democracy Caucus.
22. Jim VandeHei, Chris Cillizza, “A New Alliance of Democrats Spreads Funding”, The Washington Post, July 17, 2006
23. Matt Taibbi, quoted in “Americans Against Escalation in Iraq”, Sourcewatch
24. John Strauber, “Progressive Media – A PR War Room for Obama”, March 28, 2009
25. Sam Stein, “Obama, McCain Transition Efforts are Worlds Apart”, Huffington Post, October 8, 2008
26. “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan”, Center for American Progress, April 3, 2009
27. The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, had been a coalition of neoconservatives that had come together during the Clinton administration to lobby for an increase in military action to maintain global American supremacy – an outgrowth of the “Peace Through Strength” mentality that had been the hallmark of Reagan-era foreign policy. Over twenty members of the PNAC went on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush, whose foreign policy followed their recommendations very closely.
28. Barker, “Kony 2012”
29. “Jason Russell and Alex Harris – Liberty University Convocation”
30. Michael Barker, “Kony 2012”
31. “The Secret Reach of ‘The Family’”, NPR interview between Terry Gross and Jeff Sharlet, November 24, 2009
32. M. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”, Political Cortex, October 29, 2006
33. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Harper Collins, 1995
34. E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, University of California Press, 1979 pg. 123
35. This will be discussed in my forth-coming book on the history of American democracy promotion.
36. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
37. See Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
38. See Colby and Dennett, Thy Will Be Done
39. The “Spectacle” referred to here is the superficiality of informational communication flows and mass media present in the age of advanced (or Late) capitalism. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red 2010 (reprint edition). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri summarize Debord’s notion of the Spectacle as “an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.” Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 321
40. Gerald Sussman, Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Peter Lang, 2010, pg. 11
41. Peter Apps, “Seen by as seen by millions, will Uganda Kony video matter?” Reuters
42. “LRA: A regional strategy beyond Killing Kony”,  International Crisis Group,  April 28, 2010
43. Sholto Byrnes,  “Interview: Samantha Power“,  New Statesmen,  March 6, 2008
44. Sheryl Gay Strolberg,  “Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside“,  The New York Times,  March 29, 2011
45. Edward Herman,  “Response to Zinn on Samantha Power”,  ZNet,  August 27,  2007
46. “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs”
47. Glenn Greenwald,  “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal“, Salon,  January 15, 2010
48. Paul Street,  “‘Calibrating’ HOPE in the effort to “Patrol the Commons:” Samantha Power and the Hidden Imperial Reality of Barack Obama”,  ZNet,  February 25,  2008
49. Tom Hayden,  “Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks”.  The Nation,  July 14, 2007
50. “Samantha Power”
51. Thomas P.M. Barnett,  “Africom to Work Lord’s Resistance Army Problem With Uganda”, Time,  October 17, 2011
52. “Ghana Oil – Seeking National or Some Personal Selfish Interests?” GhanaWeb,  February 1, 2010
53. Paul-Michael Wihbey,” Africa Energy Intelligence, November 5, 2002
54. One of the supporters of the Free Africa Foundation is Peter Ackerman, the managing director Rockport Capital Incorporated. Ackerman also holds deep ties to the US democracy promoting complex, acting as chairman of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which is funded in party by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Ackerman’s further credentials include acting as the former chairman of Freedom House, which also receives funding from the NED. Furthermore, Ackerman is a board member of the libertarian CATO Institute. In a similar vein, the Free Africa Foundation’s president, George Ayittey – who is also a member of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group – is a scholar at the CATO Institute, while another Free Africa Foundation board member, Theodore J. Forstmann, serves on the board of both CATO and Freedom House.
55. “Bush Approves New US Command in Africa”,  February 6, 2007
56. “US to get Africa command center”,  BBC News,  February 6, 2007
57. “Gaddafi’s fall threatens Chinese investments in Libya”,  Asia News,  August 24, 2011
58. Leslie Hook and Geoff Dyer,  “Chinese oil interests attacked in Libya”,  Financial Times,  February 24, 2011
59. Barney Jopson,  “Somalia Oil Deal for China”,  Financial Times,  July 13, 2007
60. “China’s State Oil Company in Talks for Uganda Refinery”,  Voice of America,  February 23, 2012
61. Daniel Gordon,  “The Controversy Over Africom”, October 3, 2007

On December 10th, police in Banda Aceh, capital city of Indonesia’s Aceh territory, raided a local concert. Featuring several local punk groups, the show was held as a fundraiser for the area’s orphans; punks from all over Indonesia had reportedly travelled to attend. None of this apparently mattered to the police, who stormed into the venue with batons swinging. Of the 100 people in attendance, 64 were arrested and taken to a detention center 30 miles outside the city.

There, the 59 men and 5 women had their clothes confiscated: dog collars and chains, spiked belts and tight jeans. They were all given toothbrushes and ordered “use it!” by prison guards. After being taken outside, guards forcibly shaved off their mohawks and long hair; women were given a short bob. They were then bathed in a nearby lake before being subjected to “moral re-education” classes.

The Associated Press quoted one young punk, identified as 20-year-old Fauzan: “Why? Why my hair?” he said, pointing to his head. “We didn’t hurt anyone. This is how we’ve chosen to express ourselves. Why are they treating us like criminals?”

Banda Aceh’s Deputy Mayor Illiza Sa’aduddin Djamal, remained unapologetic, claiming the detainees were in violation of the region’s interpretation of Islamic law: “The presence of the punk community is disturbing, and disrupts the life of the Banda Aceh public. This is a new social disease affecting Banda Aceh. If it is allowed to continue, the government will have to spend more money to handle them. Their morals are wrong… This training will be an example in Indonesia of the reeducation of the punks.

Meanwhile, perhaps feeling the pressure of international scrutiny, Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf claimed the punks’ reeducation wasn’t so much for sake of Islam as it was for their own good. Speaking at Indonesia’s presidential palace, he told reporters that “the government needs to think of their future.” Insisting that most don’t have jobs or go to school, he asked “if they don’t work, what will they be?”

This flies in the face of what some of the detainees have told reporters. One anonymous punk from the Medan area of North Sumatra said he worked as a contractor at a bank. “I’ll probably be sacked for not coming into work for a week.” Nonetheless, Djamal has promised the raids will continue until all punks have been caught and reeducated — personal consequences be damned.

At the time of this writing, the Banda Aceh 64 are scheduled to be released on Friday, December 23rd. For their own part, the detained punks have remained defiant

Aceh is somewhat unique in Indonesia. After the 2004 tsunami, newly-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono brokered a peace deal with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that allowed for a relative amount of autonomy from the central government in Jakarta. Since then, the region has become Indonesia’s most conservative, embracing what governing politicians call “key elements of Sharia.” Adultery in Aceh is punishable by stoning to death, and residents fingered as gay or lesbian have been caned in public.

Persecution of music, however, isn’t as singular for Indonesian authorities. The 32-year rule of dictator Suharto (backed till the end by the US, of course) maintained a stranglehold on mainstream culture, including disappearances of dissident artists and musicians. When East Timor was occupied by the Indonesian military in 1976, traditional Timorese songs were banned. Bella Gahlos, a Timorese activist who fled the country in the early ‘90s, estimates that “thousands of people have been killed for singing these songs.

By the early ‘90s, not even MTV was allowed to broadcast in Indonesia (Suharto’s censors were notoriously paranoid of what they deemed culturally seditious). Nonetheless, songs from America’s “punk revival” began to seep through the nation’s archipelagic borders. It wasn’t too long until a growing number of bands began to spring out of an already vibrant underground rock community, armed with little more than a righteous sense of rage that had been pent up for way too long. Though still restricted to the extreme fringes of society, the burgeoning punk scene was an enthusiastic part of the revolutionary upsurge that overthrew Suharto in 1998. Says ethnomusicologist Jeremy Wallach:

Almost from the beginning, musicians in the Indonesian underground movement performed songs attacking the corruption of the Suharto government, even when it was dangerous to do so. Thus, although Indonesian punk is as politically divided as its western counterparts, it is not surprising that many Indonesian punks place their movement and their allegiance in the context of the struggle against Suharto.

Punks’ support for that struggle could indeed be dangerous. Rumor has it that during these uprisings there was an unofficial order for army and police to “shoot anyone with a tattoo,” so widespread was the counter-culture’s involvement.

Now, almost fifteen years after the end of Suharto’s rule, the Indonesian punk scene is the most vibrant in Asia and, according to some, among the largest in the world. Its beginnings might have sprouted initially from the import of America’s most mainstream groups (Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid). But since then its roots have deepened, and the movement has blossomed into one both uniquely Indonesian and organically interwoven with a global sub-culture motivated by a strong DIY ethic and profound distrust of authority.

A small handful of bands, like Bali’s Superman Is Dead, have gone on to a measure of international acclaim and signed to Sony Records (even while encouraging their fans to “steal” their albums). Others, like Jakarta-based Marjinal, have made a name for themselves playing entirely in Indonesia’s kampung (poor urban neighborhoods), giving their tapes away for free and teaching street kids how to busk on trains and corners.

Homeless youth are among the most neglected and abused in Indonesian society. Since 2001, Jakarta’s government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “anti-poverty” initiatives that consist of nothing but hiring out local thugs to round up homeless youth and turn them into the police. Naturally, these types of programs have accelerated with the economic crisis. Given the popularity of the sub-culture among poor and working class youth, punks have found themselves frequently in the cross-hairs of such initiatives.

Mike, lead-singer of Marjinal,told a journalist for Time magazine in 2007 “Music gives these kids a way to survive, to make some kind of living… Punk, to me, is addressing the things that are rotten in society. It tells us that we have the ability to be independent and take care of each other.” It’s a spirit of camaraderie familiar to anyone who’s been in attendance at a local gig, be it in Milwaukee, Prague, Johannesburg or Tokyo.

Little wonder that the global punk community has rallied so fiercely around the Banda Aceh 64. When the Guardian and other major outlets picked up on the story, punk websites blew up in protest and solidarity. Propagandhi, well-known as a fiercely anarchist group for almost two decades (who also paid tribute to Bella Gahlos in 2001) was one of the first to release a statement:

In the past Propagandhi has received letters from people in Banda Aceh and all over Indonesia so any one of these people could be the same people who have contacted us… In the off chance that they might see this post I’d like to say to all the Punks who’ve been victimized by authorities in Indonesia that we, the members of Propagandhi, are supporting you and admire that you have expressed yourselves even at your own expense.

They weren’t alone.A petition supporting the kids and released on Change.org gained over 8,500 signatures in five days. Seattle-based Aborted Society Records has announced a “mix tapes for Aceh” initiative, asking people to donate homemade mix CDs to eventually be sent to Aceh. German band Red Tape Parade have launched a similar campaign, urging their fans to send them not just CDs but ‘zines, records, shirts, pins and anything else for support.

Already, demonstrations and actions by local scenesters have taken place at Indonesian embassies and consulates in London, Moscow and Los Angeles. And in Jakarta, the Bendera Hitam punk collective protested outside the Aceh representative’s office.

Almost as troubling as the events in Banda Aceh has been the reactions of some here in the western world–specifically the anti-Muslim bigotry that they’ve attempted to promote. Mainstream media, including the AP and Guardian, have emphasized the religious fundamentalism of Aceh’s government, meanwhile failing to provide a wider context.

For the most part, there’s been little mention of the vibrancy of Indonesia’s punk scene, its class characteristics, or the long history of harassment its endured, even in more moderate regions. And while questions are asked of Aceh’s governor, there don’t seem to be any questions asked about why the US continues to give support to a government guilty of such flagrant violations of cultural rights.

Instead, the problem is made out to be one of Sharia law, and, in turn, Islam. This has suited the “stop Islamization” crowd just fine, most of whom couldn’t care less about punk rock. Unfortunately, while many of these professional Islamophobes may be on the extreme right of the political spectrum, their ideas have become common currency, even in parts of the punk community.

PunkNews.org, an otherwise apolitical site who have nonetheless done an excellent job reporting in solidarity with the kids in Aceh, have been the most obvious example, albeit briefly. The site’s initial post on December 13th made the assertion that not just Aceh but all of Indonesia was under Sharia — a factual error. The editors were quickly called on it, and two days later they retracted that portion of the post. Even more disheartening, though, was that they linked to Robert Spencer’s reprehensible “Jihad Watch” blog.

Spencer, who many will surely remember from his role in the hate campaign against the “Ground Zero mosque” earlier this year, never misses a chance to smear Islam as a religion of hate. Though he obviously cares not an inkling for the right to cultural expression, he inevitably released a story on Jihad Watch entitled “In Aceh, Sheena is not a punk rocker.

Spencer may be smiling at the supposed cleverness of such a title (I happen to think it’s a bit cheap and obvious). His editorializing, however, is nothing but pure bigoted vitriol:

Aceh is a case study in how creeping Sharia works. It gets a foot in the door with promises of moderation, tolerance, and limited applications… As its proponents gain confidence, enforcement of Sharia becomes more aggressive and intrusive on private behavior, because, in truth, Sharia is a comprehensive system of governance for every aspect of human life, and knows no compartmentalization of public and private behavior… Muhammad’s well-known antipathy toward musical instruments can’t help.

One might wonder which part of his own ass Spencer pulled this argument out of, but it’s hard to tell with his head still up there. He is willfully oblivious to the similarity his description holds with any form of religious fundamentalism, and to how such extreme ideas are more a tool of state repression rather than the root. Look, for example, at how the Christian fundamentalism of John Ashcroft and George W Bush ran perfect cover for the crimes at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

Spencer also deliberately ignores that what we have come to refer to as “Sharia” was, for most of its history, a set of clerical guidelines for living and governing rather than a political dogma. Deepa Kumar, in a recent article on political Islam, distinguishes: “While the clergy insisted that the potent rule society in a way that conformed to Sharia law, they viewed their role as censures of a bad ruler rather than rulers themselves.”

In other words, religious ideologies are bent to political agendas; not the other way round. As for the assertion that Muhammad hated musical instruments, it’s groundless. While zealous sects have interpreted it as such over the past hundred or so years, most mainstream Islamic scholars are in agreement that it was only vulgar songs that were proscribed; what counts as vulgar is open to interpretation. Muhammad was known to have musicians play and sing at his wedding.

The editors of PunkNews.org never responded to an email calling them on the inclusion of the link to Robert Spencer’s blog. They did, however, sever the link the next day. Once again, this is to their credit. However, if a reputable punk site can link to a blog like this without thinking twice, it reveals just how deep Islamophobia runs through post-9/11 America.

What makes this so especially tragic is that there is a brilliant history within punk of fighting bigotry. The very existence of a thriving Indonesian punk scene proves that it long ago ceased being a “white boy thing.” Back here on this side of the pond, there are punkers of every race and creed — from the Afro-punk movement to Chicano and Latino communities to yes, even Muslim punks.

Tanzila Ahmed, a Los Angeles activist and writer, lays it out straight up. “In America, being Muslim is an act of defiance,” says Ahmed. “That’s punk.” Ahmed, or “Taz” as she prefers to be called, runs the Taqwacore Webzine.

For the uninitiated, “Taqwacore” is the name for the movement of openly Muslim punk rockers that has taken hold over the past decade in North America. Since writer Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2002 novel The Taqwacores, the scene has coalesced around bands like Al Thawra and the Kominas. In 2010, director Omar Majeed released the documentary Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, currently making the rounds at festivals around the world.

In a commentary on the site, Ahmed puts her identity, her faith, and the idiocy of both the Aceh “Sharia police” and American Islamophobia, all in perspective:

My baptism wasn’t by lake water but by fire, avoiding the glares of Christian fundamentalists with their barking dogs on the street corner protesting outside my American mosque, or being pulled out by TSA in airport security lines. My Islamic baptism happens when I watch my back for hate-crimes when walking down the street defiantly brown in a white America or when I get told by drunk bigots at parties to go back to where I came from. My boycott these days is of a hardware supply store for not supporting a reality show. That is the American Muslim punk baptism right there.

Taz’s experience — absorbing the sneers of a repressive society bent on shoving you into a box — isn’t unique among punks. And it’s certainly not unique among Muslims. It could justifiably be said that Taqwacore kids bear a double burden. One of the most poignant and enraging scenes in Majeed’s doc is when a Detroit club cancels a Taqwa gig, claiming they’re wary of “the Muslim thing”.

It goes without saying that the righteous indignation that Spencer spewed out against the raid in Banda Aceh doesn’t extend to the kids who have their shows shut down thanks to anti-Muslim bigotry. Neither for the punks thrown in prison in Indonesia’s more “moderate” provinces, squatters evicted from viable homes in London’s St. Agnes Place in 2005 or the countless gigs shut down by cops every year in Europe and America.

For the most part, the response to the arrests in Aceh among punks in the west has dodged this kind of blatant anti-Muslim bigotry. Even before PunkNews.org severed the link to Jihad Watch, people who left comments like “Fuck Islam. If I could put a picture of Muhammed [sic] here I would” were quickly rebuked by several other visitors to the site. Perhaps that’s because the instinct among punks — that repression is repression is repression — continues to ring true. And with it the time-honored suspicion of well-dressed people with cowardly ideas.

In the midst of all this, it’s worth stepping back and asking why, thirty-five years after the Sex Pistols first called Bill Grundy a “dirty fucker” on national television, despite so many attempts to sanitize and market it, punk can still be a threat. Indeed, how is it that this culture hasn’t only refused to fade into oblivion, but found its niche in almost every nation on the planet?

Ultimately, it’s because amidst the crumbling economic casualties of corporate globalization there continues to be a vast, pulsing mass of human beings sick of being pushed to the margins. The flip-side of that coin, then, must be that these indignant many deserve to run the world for themselves — be they black, brown or white, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist. It’s a dream that throughout history has been called a utopian pipe dream. But then, is there anything more punk than making the impossible possible?

Andiko, Executive Director of the Indonesian community rights NGO, HuMa said: “Forced evictions at gun point and the destruction of the homes of men, women and children without warning or a court order constitute serious abuses of human rights and are contrary to police norms. The company must now make reparations but individual perpetrators should also be investigated and punished in accordance with the law.”

The operations occurred in the 20,000 hectare oil palm concession of PT Asiatic Persada, a 51%-owned subsidiary of the Wilmar Group. Singapore-based Wilmar is represented on the Executive Board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and as well as holding over 600,000 ha. of plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, has expansion plans in other continents, is the world’s largest palm oil trader and has processing facilities in Sumatra and Europe.

Abetnego Tarigan, Executive Director of the Indonesian NGO, SawitWatch, which is also a board member of the RSPO, stated, “Frankly we are very disappointed. We expect leading members of the RSPO to scrupulously adhere to the agreed standard, which includes respecting peoples’ customary rights and resolving disputes. RSPO member companies should pro-actively reach out to communities and not resort to the heavy-handed tactics of past eras.”

As detailed in the report, underlying the present problems is a long-standing land conflict with the local communities whose lands were taken over by the oil palm plantation without recognising their rights, without compensation and without their consent. Wilmar, which took over the plantation in 2006, has declined to recognise the communities’ land claims or offer them smallholdings within its concession instead offering them shares in a 50/50 1000 ha joint venture further west. Some community members, who did join this scheme, have since repudiated it claiming it has brought them few benefits and further conflicts.

Marcus Colchester, who led the field team that investigated the situation and who is Director of the international human rights group, Forest Peoples Programme, noted that the NGOs have now filed a third complaint about Wilmar with the International Finance Corporation’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO). The previous complaints had led to the suspension of all World Bank funding to the palm oil sector worldwide. Currently, the CAO still has an ongoing process to mediate the disputes between Wilmar subsidiaries and the communities. However, in Jambi, these efforts broke down in June this year.

Colchester said: “The good news is that Wilmar has apparently now agreed to the CAO returning to mediate in resolving this land conflict. Let’s hope this time both the CAO and the company invest enough to resolve these disputes in line with the IFC Performance Standards, the RSPO standard and international human rights norms. But we can’t help asking, why is it taking so long? The delays in achieving redress and justice for local communities are unacceptable.”

Ten people are believed to have died when Indonesian security forces broke up the rally of independence activists last month.

Watch footage of the attacks (©SBS TV/West Papua Media, WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT):

The video comes ahead of a visit to Bali by the US President and Secretary of State, for a regional summit. The US has applauded its ‘new partnership’ with Indonesia, but only last week Hillary Clinton criticized its human rights abuses.

The disturbing footage was smuggled out of West Papua exactly one year after scenes of Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan men caused worldwide revulsion.

These latest clips allegedly show a local police commander giving the order to break up the rally on the outskirts of Jayapura – and the brutal and unprovoked violence that ensued.

Victim is found after Indonesia's violent crackdown on West Papuan Congress © Tapol/Down to Earth/West Papua Media

Indonesian security forces, many in plain clothes and wearing crash helmets, are seen randomly firing their weapons and arresting scores of people, many of whom are punched, kicked, beaten or forced to crawl along the ground.

Reverend Benny Giay from West Papua says violence has escalated since the Congress was dispersed. ‘I think maybe this is the Indonesian military and police’s response to the international pressure. The response is that they are being sent to Papua to kill, terrorize and abduct Papuans, but please do keep on the international pressure. Please tell people what is happening here for the sake of our future, our lives, our culture, our identity and our very existence.’

West Papua has been ruled by Indonesia since 1963, and more than 100,000 civilians are believed to have been killed during its occupation.

More clips are available for download from West Papua Media

In our previous article, “The Real Delusion Part I,”¹ we argued that, despite their emphases on religious skepticism and open scientific inquiry, the New Atheists² * have betrayed the spirit of the Enlightenment and have instead veered toward an obdurate and uninspiring offensive against superstition that blames most of the world’s current ills on irrational religious belief. Enlightenment thinkers assailed religious superstition because it was part and parcel of a powerful institutional framework that most found abhorrent; furthermore, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that religious toleration was a noble desideratum.³ The New Atheists, on the other hand, believe that religious toleration is potentially destructive.⁴,⁵ More importantly and dangerously, they have promulgated the idea that religious belief imperils Western society, convincing myriad people that such concerns are dire and distracting attention from other, more urgent political issues.

We also noted that human political nature could be usefully understood with the aid of two important concepts: reverse hierarchy egalitarianism and coalitional competition. Using these concepts, we traced the rise of the modern state, noting that legitimation narratives are an important component of state formation and maintenance. Although the earliest legitimation narratives were religious, growing skepticism and secularism gradually eroded the efficacy of religious narratives in the West. This led to the development of secular narratives and eventually to the neoliberal nationalist narrative that is predominant today. Finally, we argued that Harris’ contentions about the nature of Islam and its effects on believers are often erroneous, unempirical, and dangerous because they could potentially contribute to Western Islamophobia.⁶ *

In this article, we will continue our analysis of the Enlightenment and its tradition, specifically focusing on Noam Chomsky. We will first situate Chomsky historically, noting that he is profitably viewed as perhaps the most representative intellectual of the Enlightenment heritage. His radical critique of power and ideology, exposure of moral hypocrisy, and praise for intellectual integrity, represent the true spirit of the Enlightenment and will inform our criticism of modern power and the narratives it uses to cloak its machinations. This will be accomplished by focusing on three domains: the mainstream media, domestic policy, and foreign policy. We will conclude by completing our critique of the New Atheists in light of the previous analyses.

Continuing the project of the Enlightenment

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is humankind’s emergence from a self-created cocoon of immaturity and ignorance; and the Enlightenment, the age that finally began to offer the freedom needed to thus emerge.⁷ The most important obstacles to this desired freedom were powerful institutions and the narratives they propounded; the institutions because they coerced behavior and the narratives because they encumbered and enslaved reason. An important and instructive example of this spirit is found in the works of Thomas Paine, particularly in his two major treatises: The Rights of Man (1791), ⁸ and The Age of Reason (1794-1807).⁹ In The Rights of Man, Paine excoriated corrupt and tyrannical forms of government and the narratives used to justify them. Monarchy, he asserted, was an affront to reason and human dignity, and he endlessly attacked the pomp and pageantry used to mystify it. Paine believed that illegitimate forms of government were based on either superstition or power–the former government based on priestcraft and the latter on conquerors. The only legitmate government arose from the consent and reason of the governed. The age of Reason, like The Rights of Man, was a sustained attack on power and privilege, this time aimed at the “adulterous” nexus of church and state. Paine believed that the institutions of the church were iniquitous and that priests lusted power and wealth rather than human betterment. As Paine acerbically put it, “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”¹⁰ Paine also panned the doctrines of Christianity, but it is important to remember that churches wielded a significant amount of political power at the time he was writing and that his chief concern was social justice.* This concern permeates his writings and is the fount of both his bitterness and his optimism.

The legacy of the Enlightenment, then, is a healthy skepticism of power and of the narratives propounded by the powerful. It is true that Enlightenment thinkers also sought to advance scientific thinking and to dispel various kinds of superstitions, but most were satisfied with a “non-overlapping magisteria”¹¹ arrangement: science tackled empirical problems, and religion tackled existential issues.¹² (It is useful to remember that some of the most brilliant embodiments of the Enlightenment were quite religious–Newton, for example.) Viewed from this perspective, no one better encompasses the spirit of the Enlightenment than Noam Chomsky, who has tirelessly attacked powerful and unjust institutions, intellectual hypocrisy, erroneous political narratives, and the moral laziness that leads to a passive acceptance of power no matter how grievous the consequences. Perhaps Chomsky’s most general statement of the appropriate task of intellectuals is found in his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”¹³ The first and most obvious responsibility, Chomsky argues, is “to speak the truth and to expose the lies” of powerful institutions like corporations and governments; this burden is placed on “intellectuals” because Western democracies “provide” them “with the leisure, the facilities, and the training” to pierce the patina of distortion that cloaks the operations of power. The intellectual does not mock doctrines that have little influence on social injustice, or those held by official enemies (say, in many cases, Islam), but rather confronts, first and foremost, the image in the mirror.¹⁴ For a citizen of the United States, that means focusing on the policies of our own government rather than self-righteously lampooning the ignorance or stupidity of the beliefs of “official enemies or those designated as unworthy in the prevailing political culture.”¹⁵ These are responsibilities that Chomsky has taken seriously for more than 40 years, working indefatigably to dismantle the narratives and ideologies of the powerful. His work offers the modern activist a fruitful heuristic for combating the myths, lies, and distortions that obscure the machinations of powerful coalitions and the institutions they control. This critique, not the New Atheists’ criticisms of religious faith, represents the true spirit of the Enlightenment.

Once again with human political nature and coalitional conflict

In our previous article, we argued that humans possess a suite of behavioral propensities that interact with the environment to give rise to political systems [see reference 1]. We focused on two of these tendencies: egalitarianism and coalition formation. The first manifests itself in a hatred of despotism and in the formation of reverse hierarchies in order to thwart despotic upstarts;¹⁶ the second, in the creation of unified coalitions of people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” granting moral status to ingroup members that is denied to outgroup members. For this article, we will also focus on a third fundamental component of human political nature: the motivation to control.¹⁷ * According to cognitive and educational psychologist, David Geary, the motivation to control is “an evolved disposition and is implicitly focused on attempts to control social relationships and the behavior of other people, and to control the biological and physical resources that have historically covaried with survival and reproductive prospects in the local ecology.” [page 24] Put more colloquially, the motivation to control is a biological tendency to desire control over people and resources. Politically, this essentially reduces to a desire for power, although it does not always need to manifest in a reprehensible form. For example, an activist concerned with inequality desires the ability to implement policies that will alleviate America’s inequitable economic distribution; the activist desires, in other words, the power to control economic policy.

The combination of these propensities leads to nearly incessant conflict between coalitions over finite resources. (The conflict need not be violent. Much of it is ideological, for example, and amounts to arguing with friends, groups, and large coalitions about how resources should be distributed.) In complicated, industrialized states, human egalitarian tendencies are often no match for the power of integrated coalitions; however, the combination of egalitarian proclivities and the motivation to control leads to anger and moral outrage from people and coalitions that do no reap the benefits of the institutional and coalitional arrangements (for example, women or minorities who were/are discriminated against in the labor market or victims of the financial machinations of Wall Street.).¹⁸ This necessitates some form of population control. In more democratic societies, the bludgeon is not an effective instrument and some attention must be paid to popular sentiment.¹⁹ The control of this popular sentiment through propaganda (political narratives) is therefore vital for the power elite. It is vital because it 1) limits the domain of thinkable thoughts and 2) limits the domain of acceptable debate. In the United States, the power elite (which consists of the corporate community, the upper class, and the policy planning network),²⁰ although only a tiny fraction of the entire population, controls a staggering proportion of the country’s available resources. This inequitable distribution of resources requires justification: it will not do for the power elite to simply assert, “we are better than the rest of you and therefore we own a significant proportion of the country’s wealth.” In the United States, as we argued in part I, the current political narrative is the neoliberal nationalist narrative. Because the mainstream media are an important conduit* of this narrative, it is important for a politically conscious person to analyze and criticize the media. Probably the most powerful framework for such a task comes from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.²¹

Power nexus 1: The mainstream media (obscuring institutional analysis)

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky offer a compelling institutional analysis of the media. Instead of tramping down the well worn and distracting trail of liberal versus conservative analysis,* Herman and Chomsky ask a simple question: what are the media? The straight forward but illuminating answer: “…the major media–particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow–are corporations ‘selling’ privileged audiences to other businesses.”²² That is, the media are enormous, profit seeking corporations that raise revenue by selling space for advertisers. They can charge more for such space if their readership includes the proper demographics–so, in essence, they are “selling” their audience to other businesses (namely, advertisers). In a certain functional sense, the “news” is simply a lure to attract audiences, which are the primary product that the media offers on the market.

Before continuing, it seems profitable to make a few remarks on institutional analysis. Perhaps one of the more impressive accomplishments of modern propaganda is effectively to eliminate this kind of straight forward analysis from mainstream consideration. In a famous scene from the documentary Manufacturing Consent, for example, the author Tom Wolfe calls Herman and Chomsky’s observations about the operations of the media “patent nonsense,” and conflates them with a conspiratorial view of the media, complete with elites in a “beige room” deciding what can and cannot be distributed. This is stunning because Herman and Chomsky explicitly assert the opposite: there are no central control stations or informational bureaus; rather, there are institutions functioning exactly as one would expect them to function. Wolfe, like most of the population, is almost certainly unfamiliar with the style of analysis Herman and Chomsky use and probably honestly confuses it with the picture he presents in the documentary–a confusion that is common and prevents such analysis, although obvious and highly informative, from becoming common place. Since we are surrounded by powerful institutions, this dearth of institutional analysis is particularly pernicious. For those not properly acclimated to our intellectual environment, it might seem risible that a number of intellectuals (the New Atheists) assail the “irrationality” of religious belief and fulsomely praise the virtues of skeptical inquiry while utterly ignoring the functions of the institutions that dominate modern society (and therefore greatly shape the lives of people on the planet), but such protestations of open skepticism have often been coupled with unquestioning acceptance of contemporary institutional structures and in this the New Atheists have ample company. Nevertheless, if one wishes to be serious about skeptical inquiry, one should extend its reach beyond relatively obvious belief structures and into domains of real power.

Herman and Chomsky’s basic institutional framework led to their propaganda model of the media. The propaganda model is a theoretical description (Chomsky calls it “virtually just an observation”²³ ) of the forces that shape the content of the media; it also describes the type of content one would expect given the structure of those forces. According to the model, there are five basic filters that affect the content of the media: ownership, sources of funding, sourcing, flak, and fear mongering (anti-communist or anti-terrorist ideologies). Of these, the first three are the most important.

–Ownership. The media are large corporations; therefore the content is owned by large, profit seeking institutions.* Through interlocking directorates, the corporations which own the major media outlets are linked to the corporate community in general. This shapes the content of the media because it is in the interest of corporations to instill a consumerist mentality and subservience to power. And it is certainly against the interests of corporations to teach institutional skepticism.

–Sources of funding. The media “sell” audiences to other businesses. It follows that the elite media wishes to attract affluent readers and to convey a consumerist message so that businesses will desire advertising space. A newspaper, for example, that is highly critical of corporations and profit seeking in general cannot attract advertisers and is at a serious funding disadvantage. In a very real sense, the function of the “news” is not to provide trenchant analysis of the political world, but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent*; the news, in other words, is not the primary product. (This does not mean that individual journalists are conscious of this; rather, it means that the news functions as a lure for audiences.)

–Sourcing. The media require sources of information and individual reporters desire access to “privileged” insider information. This makes the media highly dependent upon official sources, like the pentagon or the central government. If a reporter writes a story critical of some aspect of foreign policy, for example, she might lose her source. Since reporters compete for sources, such a loss can be devastating. In a larger sense, each media outlet is dependent upon information from official sources because an outlet cannot possibly put reporters all over the globe. Reporters are concentrated in informational areas: the pentagon or the White House, for example.

This institutional arrangement leads to the propagation of a corporate friendly narrative in the same way that the institutional arrangement of ESPN leads to the propagation of a sports friendly narrative. Doubtless, many journalists within the framework earnestly feel that they are “free” to publish and discuss what they desire, and visible evidence of censorship is kept to a minimum (although it is certainly not non-existent²⁴ ). Overt censorship is rare precisely because it is not necessary. Individual journalists and reporters who succeed within the establishment do so because they have either 1) internalized the neoliberal nationalist narrative or 2) have not desired to directly confront it in any meaningful way. Those who challenge the framework, like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Jack Rasmus, et cetera, are weeded out well before they reach elite centers of news distribution.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious effects of the mainstream media is the creation of an illusory boundary of reasonable debate. Subjugating thought to a manufactured framework with narrow limits, this boundary determines what can and cannot be discussed, even contemplated, in the United States. If one does transcend the boundary and attempt to criticize institutional structures, one is reduced to speaking an incomprehensible language. For example, asserting that the United States is the largest purveyor of terrorism in the world is not just considered erroneous, it is considered insane–it is virtually a meaningless sentence in the English language (at least in the U.S.). Most people would react to that and other similar statements in the same manner they would react to a person asserting that the home sports’ team should pull its best player so that it can lose as many games as possible–with bemused indignation. Let us consider a concrete example.

While “cool” and “rational” pundits like Jon Stewart* bemoan the increasing polarization of media outlets in America, the real polarization between the rich and the poor continues at an alarming rate.²⁵ This was shockingly evinced in the media’s coverage of the budget battles of 2011. Representative Paul Ryan, a self-styled votary of the mythological Reagan, unveiled his budget plan on April 5 to a prodigious amount of media hype. Many fulsomely praised the unflinching “seriousness” of Ryan’s plan, which managed to manhandle reality “with both hands” and forced “everybody else to do the same.”²⁶ Meanwhile, the progressive congressional caucus also forwarded a budget (April 13) that would balance the budget while leaving in place the legacy of the New Deal. While the “People’s Budget” received praise from some notable economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who called the plan “genuinely courageous,”²⁷ it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media,²⁸* apparently lacking the “seriousness” of the Ryan plan, despite the fact that it managed to balance the federal budget within a decade (the People’s Budget projected a $30.7 billion dollar surplus in 2021²⁹ ) without eviscerating important social programs. What condemns the media more forcefully than this disparity in coverage, however, is their utter disregard for the opinions and desires of the majority of the United States’ population. While David Brooks and others continue to praise the boldness, seriousness, and courageousness of robbing the poor to fund the rich (for example, while the Ryan plan cuts $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, it offset this with $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, at least two thirds of which come from programs for those of moderate means. See analyses of the Ryan plan³⁰,³¹ ) the majority of the population believes that income should be more equally distributed (on the level of Sweden) and, in fact, believes that it is already much more evenly distributed than it is–a great success of the propaganda system no doubt.³²

It is important to note that the Ryan plan, the People’s Budget, and other proposed fiscal policies have enormous concrete effects on normal citizens. While the New Atheists deploy witty one liners about the follies of faith, write books about why god is not great, and lament the irrationality of religious belief, millions of people are unable to perceive the reality of important political policies that will, to a significant degree, determine the future state of our society. The first and most salient reason is the shameful content of the mainstream media, something that those who desire a more “rational” world should focus their energy on combating and correcting.

Power nexus 2: Domestic policy and power (in praise of mythical markets)

The media are, in a very real sense, an extension of the centers of domestic power; therefore, it is important to understand and criticize these domestic power centers. Significantly, domestic power and policy has shifted dramatically since the 1960’s, leading from the Keynesian era to the triumph of neoliberalism (or, what has been aptly dubbed ‘the Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick.³³ This shift has profoundly impacted society, drastically increasing inequality (see figure 1²⁵ ), while concomitantly decreasing investment in social programs and infrastructure. In other words, an increasingly small fraction of society (a small coalition) has appropriated more of the resources. Noam Chomsky has been a leading critic of this trend, consistently pointing out the astonishing disconnect between the narratives used to justify this pattern of appropriation (“free markets dispassionately distributing resources”) and the reality behind it. In a society where narratives often serve the function of the bludgeon, it is important to escape one’s voluntary servitude by increasing one’s knowledge of 1) economic and political reality and 2) the content of the narratives used to justify the underlying reality.

Domestically, neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a set of policies aimed at increasing profitability while stripping away the foundations of the New Deal settlement (e.g., constraining upper class incomes, pursuing full employment, increasing labor’s share of the national income, etc.³⁴ That is, these policies are designed to enrich the oligarchical power elite, who are, in Chomsky’s words, “vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.”³⁵,³⁶ These policies include liberalizing trade and finance while promoting macroeconmic stability, privatization, and deregulation.³⁷* The monetary outcome of these policies, as indicated by a plethora of data, is continually increasing inequality and economic insecurity;³⁸ psychologically, there are plausible but still controversial interpretations of data that claim these policies have led to increases in antisocial behavior, including narcissism, and in potentially serious mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.³⁹ If our general outline on human political nature is correct, the increasing prevalence of these conditions is entirely understandable. Humans desire control and some form of egalitarianism. Just as a dearth of food leads to predictable physiological responses and pain, so a dearth of control leads to predictable psychological ailments.⁴⁰,⁴¹ However, because of the power of the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the increasing popularity of libertarian philosophies, many people are ignorant of the causes of inequitable resource distribution and the many troubling symptoms it causes. It may turn out that many of us are suffering from a curable disease but are unable to discern its cause. Furthermore, there is good evidence that inequality promotes religiosity where as religiosity does not promote inequality–in other words, there is good evidence that inequality causes increases in religious belief (at least in the United States).⁴² Those who desire that religion disappear might want to pay some attention to such recalcitrant facts as they recommend a strategy much different from the currently fashionable activity of denigrating the beliefs of religious adherents.

Because the policies of neoliberalism would be repugnant to most citizens, they are justified with narratives about the efficiency and fairness of free markets.⁴³,⁴⁴ In fact, it would be difficult to find another mythical entity that provokes such effusive praise and elicits such unthinking devotion. As Chomsky points out, many miracles are imputed to the creative efficiency of free markets that were actually the result of careful social planning and federal investment: the internet, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the high tech industry in general,… the list is nearly inexhaustible. In fact, one of the vital roles of the pentagon in the United States’ economy is to fund high tech industry, a simple fact that should be known by every citizen but is safely hidden by the propaganda system. The basic argument that “free market fundamentalists” (a truly scary form of fundamentalism) make thus rests upon a false premise. Consider one representative example. In a 20/20 episode on free market health care,⁴⁵ John Stossel argues against Michael Moore’s concerns about the free market, noting that free markets have created all kinds of brilliant things like cell phones, computers, and helpful medicines. Unfortunately, Stossel does not bother to note the incredible amount of federal funding that went into creating these technologies, the patent monopolies that drug companies use to boost profits and thwart competition, or the direct investment line from the enormous corporations that produce these goods into politicians who doubtlessly return the favor with friendly policies. (Corporations aren’t investing in politicians so that they will increase competition and lower profits.)

Like most fundamentalists, free market votaries almost invariably misrepresent the ideas of their supposed ancestors. A particularly illustrative example is Adam Smith, the nearly flawless and peerless demigod who begat the notion of the ‘invisible hand,’ and supposedly showed how a laissez faire system could, as if through some form of economic alchemy, change the base metal of selfishishness into the gold of economic prosperity for all. As Chomsky has noted numerous times,⁴⁶ the phrase “invisible hand” appears exactly once in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (it appears one other time in his other works⁴⁷), and Smith does not use it to describe how selfish humans behaving for profit unknowingly but ineluctably bring prosperity to others; rather, Smith uses it to assuage fears of capital flight, arguing that people will prefer to invest in domestic markets rather than foreign markets.⁴⁸ Smith’s arguments were subtle and sophisticated, but he generally favored market policies because he believed that they would produce economic equality. He had nothing but scorn for the “masters of the mankind,” who lived by the “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”⁴⁹ Like most enlightenment thinkers, he assailed the established powers of his time: the merchants and the policies that favored them. Had he lived to see the modern corporate revolution, he undoubtedly would have execrated the corporations that eventually supplanted the merchants that he so effectively attacked.

In a country with a reasonable educational system and tolerable media content, the above would be recognized for what it is: a series of facts and truisms. Since the myths that disguise these truisms actively promote the interests of the “masters of mankind,” however, they are eagerly promulgated and the truths that they hide are relegated to the margins of scholarship. Again, those who desire to liberate the mind from the shackles of irrational mythologies, especially when those mythologies have serious repercussions, should actively attack and encourage others to attack the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the myths it promotes. To consider just one example of the seriousness of the repercussions of neoliberal policies concretely, it is worth contemplating the following: the September 11 attacks (of which more below) tragically killed 3,000 individuals. However, an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance.⁵⁰ This is an astonishing number that is absolutely preventable, unlike the deaths that result from the actions of official enemies. It may comfort us to focus on those crimes while ignoring our own, but it does not improve our society. Although, as Noam Chomsky notes in a related context, it is not surprising that we often choose to ignore these inconvenient facts “given our principled exemption from moral truisms.”⁵¹

Power nexus 3: Foreign policy and power (noble intentions)

The neoliberal nationalist narrative promotes a consistent picture of American foreign policy: it stems from “benevolent” intentions and “clear moral purpose.”⁵² Sometimes, in fact, the intentions become so altruistic that it is appropriate to assert that “America is going through a noble phase” in foreign policy, one shrouded in a “saintly glow,” and committed to ideals that might actually be injurious to American interests because of their utter beneficence.⁵³ Although the language here might be a bit hyperbolic, it is not anomalous. In a 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza, for example, we learn that America is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever,” an “abstaining superpower” that could “conquer” the world but has not interests in doing so.⁵⁴ In fact, the idea that the United States is the single greatest force “for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity” is a virtual truism.⁵⁵ Attempting to find assertions to the contrary in the mainstream commentary poses an enormous challenge. If one veers to the extreme left of mainstream debate, one might find arguments that American intervention across the globe is wrong, not because it is criminal, but because it is too costly or because America is not “winning.” More often the focus is turned toward our “kindergarten” allies and their inability to cooperate.⁵⁶ The function of the narrative is clear. It dissuades criticism, refuting counterarguments not with logic but with a simple tautology algorithm: if America intervened, it did so from noble intentions. Statements to the contrary are simply not allowed to register in the minds of most citizens; therefore, even on the rare occasions that such arguments are broadcast, they are nearly incomprehensible. A hypothetical Martian might be forgiven for wondering why a group of “free thinkers”* finds it so necessary to demolish the relics of irrational religions, while sedulously ignoring (or underplaying) the horrific brutality of American foreign policy and leaving the basic narratives that support it untouched. Again, to find a trenchant analysis of the exercise of institutional power (this time, in the realm of foreign policy) that preserves the spirit of the enlightenment, one should turn to Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, the basics of inter-state relations are simple and are captured to a first approximation by the maxim of Thucydides: “the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”⁵⁷ Because the United States has been the most powerful country on the planet since World War II, it has done what it wishes, and its victims have suffered as they must.* The important thing, then, is to understand what America wishes; or, in other words, to understand its goals and how they lead to the particular interventions it has engaged in. The most basic goal “is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S. based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance.”⁵⁸ Countries that do not cooperate with this motive are punished through the two basic weapons America has at its disposal: military might and economic leverage. The examples of Chili and Indonesia are highly informative in this respect.

In 1970, Chile (democratically) elected Salvador Allende, a nationalist and Marxist, president. American policy planners were horrified. According to a 1975 Church Commission Report,⁵⁹ Washington had spent millions of dollars campaigning against Allende in prior elections even carrying out “spoiling operations” to prevent an Allende victory.⁶⁰ In 1970, however, he won by a narrow margin and policy planners immediately scrambled to undermine his regime. Nixon feared that Allende might become another “Castro,” meaning someone who refused to take orders from Washington, an overwhelming fear of policy elites. Two basic plans were designed: a Track I strategy that relied on political sabotage and economic warfare (making the “economy scream” according to the notes of DCI Helms.⁶¹ Nixon believed this would have “one hell of an effect.”⁶² ); and a Track II strategy that involved the CIA initiating a coup to prevent Allende from taking office. Both strategies failed to prevent Allende from taking over, but the economic warfare did have a serious, deleterious effect on the country. Eventually, General Augusto Pinochet was able to organize a bloody coup and overthrew Allende on September 11th, 1973 (now sometimes called “the first 9-11.”⁶³ ). Although there is no evidence that the CIA was directly involved in this coup, they were quite aware of it, and the Nixon administration was privately delighted (this was somewhat disguised in public).The death toll of the coup was over 3,000, and the horrors of the tortures implemented during Pinochet’s regime are ghastly.⁶⁴,⁶⁵ Not unsurprisingly, little time was wasted by policy elites ruing these tragedies. Today, the Pinochet regime is often remembered for being “tough,”⁶⁶ but for creating an “economic miracle”–one orchestrated by the “Chicago Boys,” who were “inspired” votaries of Milton Friedman’s “free market” principles. As Chomsky notes, this “miracle” is more mirage than substance, as the economy under Pinochet actually floundered, and the state had to take over much of the banking system to save the falling fragments of a failing economy. This is sometimes sardonically called “the Chicago road to socialism”–an apt phrase, although one not ordinarily encountered in mainstream literature on the topic.

In Indonesia in the 50’s and 60’s, after briefly expressing tepid support for him, America worried that president Sukarno was a dangerous “neutralist” and decided to take covert action to oust him. This attempt failed, so America decided to build up the Indonesian military, hoping for a coup. In 1965, there was a bloody coup and a subsequent “purging” of “communists” in the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI).⁶⁷ Suharto ascended to power and an estimated half a million people were killed.⁶⁸ While America was not directly involved in the coup, policy elites supported it, desiring to extirpate the PKI.⁶⁹ This support went as far as providing lists of thousands of “communists” to the Indonesian military.⁷⁰ In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and overthrew the Fretilin headed government. They continued to occupy the island until 1999, when Clinton finally noticed that some bad things had happened and “informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes.”⁷¹ Although the exact number of dead in East Timor is unknown, it is estimated that at minimum 102,800 East Timorese perished; while a higher end “speculation” of the number dead due to “conflict related hunger and illness” reached 183,000 (the CAVR report, from which these numbers are taken, did not issue a maximum estimate).⁷² Staggering numbers made even more heinous because they could have been easily prevented: Without direct support from Washington, as is clear from later events, the massacres would not have happened.⁷³ * As noted by Chomsky, what is astonishing about all of this is that it has been converted into a proof that America had entered a “noble” phase of foreign policy.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, most citizens remain unaware of the horrific tragedy, another impressive achievement of the propaganda system.

What the examples in Chili and Indonesia (the cases could be multiplied ad nauseam) incontestably illustrate is that American foreign policy is not about high moral values, benevolence, altruism, or other idealistic phantasms; rather, it is about the exercise and continuation of power. In Latin America, the U.S wanted to guarantee itself access to important resources while concomitantly allowing for a continued corporate presence in the region. Allende threatened these goals; consequently, the people of Chile had to suffer while their economy “screamed.” In Southeast Asia, the goals were the same, and the people of Indonesia, regrettably, were just some of the hapless victims. The horrific invasion of South Vietnam, saving it from “internal aggression” (against U.S. military and an U.S. supported regime), and near destruction of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, follows the same pattern. Importantly, U.S. foreign policy is not the manifestation of a “national interest,” unless one conflates the small coterie of elites who control foreign policy with the American population. Indeed, foreign policy follows the same basic pattern as domestic policy: a group of elites controls and benefits from the policies, while the vast majority of the population either suffers or reaps marginal rewards (and massive consequences from “blowback.”⁷⁵ It should be sobering to recognize that these terrible crimes, with prodigious and horrendous body counts, occur with the implicit consent of American intellectuals who, although granted unknown luxury and freedom, seldom rise from the comfort of their positions in academic institutions or branches of the government to protest against them.

Terrorism: Theirs and ours (intentional ignorance)

The events of 9-11 were, in many ways, the catalyst for the development of the New Atheism. Prior to 9-11, America had enjoyed almost absolute immunity from the kind of horrifying crimes it regularly doles out around the world. On 9-11, that changed. Understandably, many people were confused and emotionally disturbed by the tragedy and looked for answers to George W. Bush’s poignant question “why do they hate us”⁷⁶ * (Although, as Chomsky notes, the question is improperly phrased. “They” do not hate “us.” They hate the crimes that are perpetrated by the government, which should not be confused with the population of America.⁷¹ ) As Chalmers Johnson notes, this is a part of the blowback phenomenon.⁷⁵ Civilians, unaware of their government’s machinations in the affairs of other countries, suffer the consequences without knowledge of the reasons. Into this vacuum, a number of intellectuals provided a simple answer: they hate us because they are “simply evil” adherents of a “kind of death cult” religion,⁷⁷ a religion of a failed civilization that despises Western freedoms and values. And the attacks, so Richard Dawkins informs us, were made possible by the alluring image of 72 virgins in a paradisaical afterworld.⁷⁸ This, Dawkins also notes, is the source of the “underlying divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated” the attacks in the first place. In light of the grisly consequences of the 9-11 attacks, these intellectuals asseverated that it was no longer morally proper or decent to remain taciturn in the face of irrational belief systems, supposedly sacred or not. A number of subsequent bestsellers were penned and published, including Harris’s The End of Faith, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God is not Great, that assailed religion and the supposedly heinous crimes it can compel believers to commit.⁷⁹,⁸⁰,⁸¹ One of the consistent themes of these books is that religion, at least the Abrahamic religions, is a barbaric relic of the middle ages and should be eschewed by rational and enlightened adults in an enlightened society (“the delusions of our ignorant ancestors,” according to Harris⁸² ). It is also implied, both implicitly and explicitly, that without religion, the horrific 9-11 attacks would not have occurred. (This is spelled out quite clearly in the rather unfortunate posters that read “Imagine a world without religion” and show the twin towers standing in front of a glistening sun.)

The New Atheists, then, systematically ignore or downplay the importance of politics. Specifically, they ignore the legitimate rage that many around the world feel because of years of suffering from American atrocities and cast blame at a more palpable (because easily known) target: religion. Harris, for example, goes so far as to say that we are at war “with precisely the vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”⁸³ (It is hard to tell if Harris is aware of the last 60 plus years of Middle Eastern history.) This trajectory of thought is often presented (in tone and rhetoric) as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a desire to use reason to slay the bogeyman of superstition and promote the values of skepticism and science. We have no disagreement with the second part of this desire. However, the most noble traditions of the Enlightenment would recommend a rather different course of action: acutely analyze political reality–the nature of the institutions and power structures that dominate the world today, the effects of foreign policy interventions, past and present, and the struggles of those who have not benefited from the “values” and “freedoms” of the West–and contextualize the behaviors of others in light of this analysis. Moral decency also offers another simple recommendation: look in the mirror before excoriating official enemies. In the political arena, this is often called “liberal masochism,” but in everyday life it is recognized as a noble virtue.

There were edifying responses to the events of 9-11, responses that followed the better spirit of the Enlightenment. Of the responses, Chomsky’s stands out for its lucidity and moral integrity*. Instead of using the tragedy to foment hatred, attack religion, or clamor for revenge, Chomsky sought to contextualize the event, noting that “we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.”⁸⁴ That is, we may imitate Nietzsche’s portrait of the powerful and ignorantly persevere, paying no attention to the myriad legitimate grievances of those we regularly victimize, or we may behave like enlightened citizens and attempt understand the causes of the almost global antipathy against the U.S., antipathy that does not justify senseless murder, but that remains, in itself, reasonable given the history of U.S. foreign policy. Germane to the topic of terrorism are many polls, pointed out by Chomsky in his initial responses, that demonstrated that the majority of Muslims were (and still are) angered by U.S. policies, especially toward Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Further concerns included the U.S. role in propping up oppressive regimes and appropriating the great wealth of the region.⁸⁵ This is a view shared by Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald, who, in testimony before the 9-11 commission, asserted that “[Al Qaeda and other ‘terrorist’ groups] identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with the people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”⁸⁶ This is a conclusion that stems back to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower was concerned about a “campaign of hatred” against the United States–a concern apparently elicited by NSC explanations that majority of Arabs believe that the U.S. is concerned with protecting its oil interests by supporting the status quo, a status quo that stultifies economic and social progress.⁸⁷ Recent psychological research supports this general outline, and indicates that coalitional commitment, not religious belief, is a strong predictor of support for suicide attacks.⁸⁸,⁸⁹, ⁹⁰ If one is committed to a coalition that is regularly victimized, it is not difficult to understand why one might desire some form of violent revenge. Suicide bombers, then, are not psychologically different from average humans nor are they “misguided missiles” who are mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.* Rather, they are committed members of a coalition they feel is existentially threatened by the actions of the U.S.. Although their actions may be barbaric, their motivations, contra Hitchens, are not. It might not be palatable, but it is true that the same basic psychological forces that lead to suicide terrorism also lead to some of the most noble behaviors humans are capable of. The goal is to guide humans to the noble path and away from the destructive.

Conclusion

The general desideratum of the Enlightenment was, we believe, a noble one. Skeptical thinking and science are undeniable virtues. It is tragic, then, that the New Atheists actually betray these virtues by expending their cognitive resources in an obstinate battle against religion–without citing or apparently consulting important scientific research on the topic–while ignoring the more powerful institutional structures and narratives that shape and will continue to shape the social life of humans on this planet for years to come. We believe that the motivation to control provides the “best guess” at the puzzle of human (political) nature and that, combined with the other sources of human political nature we covered (reverse hierarchy formation, and ingroup/outgroup propensities), it should provide a starting point for a basic analysis of political phenomena. These (psychological propensities) interact in important ways with institutional structures and political narratives and give rise to the multifarious political behavior manifested in the world. In order to create a just, moral, and decent society, one should focus on the effects of these institutions and narratives on human well-being. There is good evidence that the current structure of society does not promote human flourishing; and there is incontrovertible evidence that the current structure leads to terrible consequences across the globe. The responsibility of intellectuals, to rephrase Chomsky, is to remain as impervious as possible to the propaganda of power and to criticize the shortcomings of institutional structures. This was a consistent theme of Enlightenment authors and we should honor their legacy by continuing that task. To this end, the New Atheists represent a betrayal of the Enlightenment and Chomsky, one of its most productive offspring. The planet will remain replete with apologists for power, no matter how grievous its crimes; we should honor the few who resist this all-too-human propensity and fight to promote the always precarious inheritance of skeptical inquiry.

* “New Atheists”: The term was first used in Wired magazine⁹¹ to refer to people who are not just atheists but who believe that irrational religious belief should not be tolerated and should be impugned by science and reason. Wired specifically cited Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as examples of New Atheists. More recent members of the informal group include Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. Whether or not there is anything “new” about the New Atheism is debatable. Frederich Nietzsche, to name one example, had nearly endless scorn for religion (although for different reasons than the New Atheists adduce) and did not believe “tolerance” was an appropriate reaction. It is perhaps unfortunate to lump a number of intelligent people into one group; however, for the purposes of our articles, the lumping is not terribly unfair and makes exposition much easier. Where appropriate, we attempt to single out particular scholars. At times, we are also more interested in the cultural idea of “New Atheism” than the actual people referred to by the term.

* “Islamophobia”: Sam Harris has argued that “Islamophobia” is a concocted “psychological disorder” used by “apologists” of Islam to protect it from legitimate criticism.⁹² We do not believe–and in fact, few people who use the term do believe–that Islamophobia is a disorder. It is, rather, the result of an ugly but “natural” proclivity toward demonizing the beliefs of outgroup members. Harris also argues that it is not possible to be “Islamophobic” because Islam is a set of ideas and practices that one can attack like any other set of ideas. This ignores two important facts. First, religion is not just a set of beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a system of sacred values that is often essential to a person’s sense of identity. Attack the beliefs and practices too vitriolically and you inevitably attack “the person.” This is not always illegitimate–but it should be approached with caution and civility. (We can see a person legitimately attacking Nazism, for example, or the ideas of Jihadis–and many Muslims do.) And second, what is objectionable in Harris’ writings (what contributes to Islamophobia) is not his abstract criticism of Islam, but rather his insistence, often absent of evidence, on blaming Islam for everything from terrorism to genital mutilation. We note that the great theologian, Hans Kung, offers pointed criticisms of specific aspects of Islam while presenting a historically grounded and balanced appraisal and no reasonable scholar would accuse Kung of Islamophobia.⁹³ John Esposito has written an excellent article on Islamophobia and contends that it consists of these beliefs:

1. Islam, not just a small minority of extremists and terrorists, is the problem and threat to the West
2. The religion of Islam has no common values with the West
3. Islam and Muslims are inferior to Judaism and Christianity
4. Islam is an inherently violent religion and political ideology rather than a source of faith and spirituality
5. Muslims cannot integrate and become loyal citizens
6. Most mosques should be monitored for embedded cells
7. Islam encourages its followers to launch a global jihad against all non-Muslims but in particular against the West.⁹⁴

As with any term that can be misused (e.g., anti-Semite, racist, misogynist), one should be careful when using it.

* “…was social justice.”: We have not and do not wish to argue that it is inappropriate to pen a book about the silliness of certain religious doctrines. What we object to, instead, is the strident tone, the unempirical assertions, the intolerance, and the unfair and inflammatory attacks against a specific religion (Islam), found in the books of the New Atheists (particularly in Sam Harris’ books). The rest of our objections–the main substance of our argument–is found in part I and the end of this article.

* “motivation to control.”: This was assumed but never explicitly articulated in our previous article.

* “Because the mainstream media is an important conduit…”: We note that the mainstream media is only one part of a larger “opinion-shaping network” that includes public relations/affairs institutions, think tanks, academia, etc.

* “…liberal versus conservative analysis…”: Debates about political bias in the media are not only a complete distraction but are often astonishingly removed from empirical reality. For example, self proclaimed media watchdog and president of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, in a review of the media’s performance in assessing Barak Obama’s first 100 days, plaintively asserts the following: “None of the three broadcast networks aired a single story on whether the new president’s economic policies were driving America towards European-style socialism. Not a single network news reporter used the term “socialist” to describe how his policies are shifting economic authority to the federal government. On only four occasions was the word “socialist” used on-camera at all – all by outside sources.”⁹⁵ We have yet to confirm if Bozell’s spaceship is set to return from his long sojourn on Neptune.

* “…owned by large, profit seeking institutions.”: As of 2009 there were six major media corporations: General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS. These massive corporations own and control output in the television, publishing, film, and internet industries.⁹⁶

* “…but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent”: Chomsky, for example, makes a distinction between the elite “agenda setting” media which attract the most privileged audiences (business managers, professors, political managers, etc.) and the “mass media” proper which attract the rest of the population. As Chomsky puts it: “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that.”⁹⁷ Since 1997, when these lines were written, the awesome ability of the mass media to distract the population has substantially increased.

* “…pundits like Jon Stewart”: Despite Stewart’s facility with humor, his analysis of the media is unenlightening. The “rally to restore sanity” and other subsequent interviews illustrate the virulence of the neoliberal nationalist virus.

* “…it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media”: A google search of the terms “the Ryan plan” and “The People’s Budget” brings up 224 million and 69 million hits respectively. Thus, the Ryan plan has received 3.24 times as many linked pages as the People’s Budget. This is obviously not a a scientific survey but it is telling.

* “…and deregulation.”: We note that the precise causes of these policies are hotly debated, complex, and would take a great deal of space to explicate. See the referenced sources for more thorough analyses.

* “…group of ‘free thinkers.’”: Christopher Hitchens certainly addresses foreign policy issues, but a conversation about his political beliefs would require another article. Harris and Dawkins generally stick to more parochial concerns about the deleterious effects of religion on foreign policy (theirs, not ours). Dennet, so far as we can tell, does not bother much with politics. Many campus groups, inspired by “free thought” movements, exist and few, to our knowledge, seriously challenge current political narratives save for when they are directly related to religious issues.

* “…and its victims have suffered as they must.”: For an extensive, though partial, list of the victims one can do no better than read William Blum’s Killing Hope.⁹⁸

* “…massacres would not have happened.”: Kissinger noted somewhat cryptically that these events had taken place not willingly but “illegaly and beautifully.”⁹⁹ It is unclear which “events” in particular Kissinger is referring to. However, the illegal component rings true enough.

* “…George W. Bush’s poignant question ‘why do they hate us.’”: These plaintive questions and the jejune answers, which almost invariably support elite interests, are reminiscent of debates about Spanish policy toward the native inhabitants of the New World. Bartolome de las Casas described the treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispanolia in graphic detail:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.”¹⁰⁰

It is not difficult to understand why the indigenous people were angered by such brutal treatment–allowing for the fact that de las Casas utilized hyperbole for effect. However, rather than comprehend the obvious, apologists for the colonialists and landowning elite, such as Jaun Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the Spaniards were simply superior to the “Indians” and had no option but to declare war against them, enslave them, and, ultimately, Christianize them.¹⁰¹ If the native Hispanolians had succeeded in a stunning and brutal attack against innocent Spaniards, Sepulveda could certainly have been counted on to explain that the indigenous people practiced a barbarous type of paganism that instructed them to eat human flesh and that this superstition was both the necessary and sufficient cause of the attack. If de las Casas mentioned the brutality of the colonial project as a contributing factor, he could be dismissed as an “apologist for terror” and Sepulveda could wax about Spanish freedom and benevolence. He could even dub the attack “simply evil” and attempt an hermeneutic of the “Indian mind” to better explain their hatred of freedom. While we rightly scoff at the notion of books explicating the “Indian mind,” it is worth noting that there are many books about the “Arab mind.”¹⁰²,¹⁰³,¹⁰⁴

This is not to say that the events of 9-11 were not a terrible atrocity. They certainly were. It is only to underscore the point, using a detached, historical example, that it is important to understand the grievances that lead to terrorism rather than bloviate about how “good” we are and how “evil” they are.

* “…lucidity and moral integrity.”: This is not to compare the value of the responses, but to note that Chomsky’s response was particularly compelling and worth contemplation.

* “…mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.”: While studies on the motivations of suicide bombers can elucidate and potentially have salubrious purposes, there is something rather distasteful in the obsessive quest for fundamental motivations. As Chomsky notes, “[e]veryone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s an easy way: Stop participating in it.”¹⁰⁵ That is, as American citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the terrorism perpetrated by our government. In other words, instead of attempting to penetrate the supposedly unfathomable depths of the “terrorist mind,” perhaps we should worry about our own global atrocities. We have yet to see a book on the “Depraved soul of the American: Explaining global terrorism that emanates from Washington.” To paraphrase G.W. Bush’s favorite philosopher, we should examine the log in our own eye before we criticize the sliver in another’s.

1. Bo Winegard & Ben Winegard (July 27th, 2011). The New Atheists, Political Narratives, and the betrayal of the Enlightenment. The Real Delusion: Part I. Dissident Voice.
2. Several concerns were raised with the first article about definitions. To address those concerns, we have included an appendix that defines and/or elaborates potentially confusing terms or arguments.
3. Voltaire (1763/accessed August 1, 2011). A Treatise on Toleration.
4. Dawkins, R. (2008). The god delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
5. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton.
6. Muslim-Western Tensions Persist (July 21, 2011). Pew Research Center.
7. Kant, I. (1784/2010). What is enlightenment? New York: Penguin.
8. Paine, T. (1791 accessed July 31, 2011) The rights of man.
9. Paine, T. (1974). The age of reason (P.S. Foner, Eds.). New York: Citadel Press, 1974.
10. Ibid. Pg. 53.
11. Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the enemy: Faith, brotherhood, and the (un)making of terrorists. New York: Harper Collins.
12. Stephen Jay Gould (March, 1997). Nonoverlapping Magisteria. Natural History.
13. Noam Chomsky. (February 23, 1967). The Responsibility of Intellectuals. New York Review of Books.
14. Chomsky, N. (2001) A new generation draws the line: Kosovo, East Timor, and the standards of the West. New York: Verso.
15. Ibid. Pg. 9.
16. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
17. Geary, D. C. (2005). The motivation to control and the origin of mind: Exploring the life-mind joint point in the tree of knowledge. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61, 21-46.
18. Rai, T.S., & A.P. Fiske. (2011). Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality. Psychological Review, 118, 57-75.
19. Noam Chomsky (January, 1992). On Propaganda. WBAI.
20. Domhoff, G.W. (2010). Who rules America? Challenges to corporate and class dominance. (6th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.
21. Herman, E.S., & Chomsky, N. (2002/1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon.
22. Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary illusions: Thought control in democratic societies. Boston, MA: South End Press. Quote from page 8.
23. Chomsky, N. (2002). Understanding power: The indispensable Chomsky. (J. Schoeffel & P. Mitchell, eds.). New York: The New Press.
24. Project Censored (2005). Censored Story of 2005 #11, The Media can Legally Lie.
25. Emmanuel Saez (July 17, 2010). Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top incomes in the United States (Updated with 2008 estimates).
26. David Brooks (April 4, 2011). Moment of Truth. New York Times.
27. Paul Krugman (April 24, 2011). Let’s Take a Hike. New York Times.
28. Peter Hart & Julie Hollar (June, 2011). ‘Serious’ Republicans vs. ‘Starry-Eyed’ Progressives: Beltway media scorn People’s Budget, hail Ryan hoax. Extra!
29. Fieldhouse, A. (2011). The people’s budget: A technical analysis. Economic Policy Institute, Working paper #290.
30. Horney, J.R. (April 8, 2011) Ryan budget plan produces far less real deficit cutting than reported: Plan’s 4.3 trillion in program cuts, offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, yield just $155 billion in deficit reduction. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
31. Greenstein, R. (April 20, 2011). Chairmen Ryan gets nearly two-thirds of his huge budget cuts from programs for lower-income Americans. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
32. Norton, M.I., & Ariely, D. (2011). Building a better America—one wealth quintile at a time. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 61, 9-12.
33. Madrick, J. (2011). The age of greed: The triumph of finance and the decline of America, 1970 to the present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
34. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford.
35. Winters, J.A., & Page, B.I. (2009). Oligarchy in the United States. Perspectives on Politics, 7, 731-751.
36. Noam Chomsky (February 28, 2009). A New American Era? An Interview with Noam Chomsky on American Society, Politics and Foreign Policy.
37. Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people: Neoliberalism and global order. New York: Seven Stories Press.
38. Hacker, J.S. (2006). The great risk shift: The assault on American jobs, families, and retirement and how you can fight back. New York: Oxford University Press.
39. Ben Winegard & Cortne Jai Winegard (April 19, 2011). The Awful Revolution: Is Neoliberalism a Public Health Risk? Dissident Voice.
40. Brown, J.D. & Siegel, J.M. (1988). Attributions for negative life events and depression: The role of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 316-322.
41. Abramson, L.Y., Seligman, M.E., & Teasdale, J.D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49-74.
42. Solt, F., Habel, P., & Grant, J.T. (2011). Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity. Social Science Quarterly, 92, 447-465.
43. Baker, D. (2006). The conservative nanny state: How the wealthy use the government stay rich and get richer.
44. Noam Chomsky (November, 1997). Market Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality. Z Magazine.
45. 20/20 (accessed September 4, 2011). John Stossel interviews Michael Moore.
46. Noam Chomsky (April 21, 2011). Is the World Too Big to Fail? The Contours of Global Order. TomDispatch.
47. Grampp, W.D. (2000). What did Smith mean by the invisible hand? Journal of Political Economy, 108, 441-465.
48. Smith, A. (1776, accessed September 4, 2011). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. See book 4, chapter 2, Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries.
49. Ibid. See book 3, chapter 3, Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns.
50. Wilper, A.P., Woolhander, S., Lasser, K.E., McCormick, D., Bor, D., & Himmelstein, D.U. (2009). Health insurance and mortality in US adults. American Journal of Public Health, 99, 1-7.
51. Chomsky, N. (2005). Simple truths, hard problems: Some thoughts on terror, justice, and self defence. Philosophy, 80, 5-28.
52. Kristol, W., & Kagan, R. (1996). Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy. Foreign Affairs.
53. Sebastion Mallaby (September 21, 1997). Uneasy Partners. New York Times.
54. Dinesh D’Souza (April 26, 2002). In Praise of American Empire. Christian Science Monitor.
55. Bill Clinton (April 28, 1996). Remarks by the President to 1996 American-Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference.
56. Thomas Friedman (February 10, 2003) Pardon my French, but Paris is just Posturing. New York Times.
57. Noam Chomsky (April 15, 2009). Iran is pressured because of its independent stance. Tehran Times.
58. Chomsky, N. (1987). On power and ideology: The Managua lectures. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
59. Church Commission Report (1975).
60. Hinchey Report (September 18, 2000). CIA Activities in Chile.
61. CIA Machinations in Chili in 1970 (Accessed September 10th, 2011).
62. Richard Nixon (January 17, 1972). Transcript 650-012. Nixontapes.org.
63. Noam Chomsky (December 17, 2004). Civilization versus Barbarism. Left Hook.
64. Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (‘Rettig Report’) (February, 1991).
65. Valech Commission Report (November 10, 2004). First report; complementary report of 2009.
66. Chomsky, N. (1993). Year 501: The conquest continues. Boston, MA: South End Press.
67. Stephen R. Shalom, Noam Chomsky, & Michael Albert (October, 1999). East Timor Questions & Answers. Z Magazine.
68. Cribb, R. (2002). Unresolved problems in the Indonesian killings of 1965-1966. Asian Survey, 42, 550-563.
69. Armando Siahaan (June 17, 2009). Historian Claims West Backed Post-Coup Mass Killings in ‘65. Jakarta Globe.
70. Kathy Kadane (May 20, 1990) Ex-agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians.
71. Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America’s quest for global dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books. Quoted from page 54.
72. Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor Leste (January 20, 2006). Chega!
73. Simons, G. (2000). Indonesia: The long opression. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
74. Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America’s quest for global dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books.
75. Johnson, C. (2004). Blowback. (2nd ed.). New York: Holt Paper Back.
76. George W. Bush (September 20, 2001). Address to the Nation.
77. Christopher Hitchens (September 5, 2011). Simply Evil: A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida. Slate.
78. Richard Dawkins (September 15, 2001). Religion’s misguided missiles. The Guardian.
79. Hitchens, C. (2007). God is not great: How religion poisons everything. New York: Twelve Books.
80. Dawkins, R. (2008). The god delusion. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
81. Harris, S. (2004). The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: Norton.
82. Sam Harris (September 9, 2011). September 11, 2001.
83. Sam Harris (August 15, 2004). Holy Terror; Religion isn’t the solution–it’s the problem. Los Angeles Times.
84. Noam Chomsky (September 12, 2001). A Quick Reaction. Counterpunch.
85. Chomsky, N. (2001). 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press.
86. James Bamford (August 20, 2006). Intelligence Test. New York Times.
87. Noam Chomsky (April 2, 2010). Breeding violence. In These Times.
88. Ginges, J., Hansen, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2009). Religion and support for suicide attacks. Psychological Science, 20, 224-230.
89. Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science, 299, 1534-1539.
90. Ginges, J., Atran, S., Sachdeva, S., & Medin, D. (2011). Psychology out of the laboratory: The challenge of violent extremism. American Psychologist, 66, 507-519.
91. Gary Wolf (November, 2006). The Church of the Non-Believers. Wired.
92. Sam Harris (August 13, 2010). What Obama got wrong about the Mosque. The Daily Beast.
93. Kung, H. (2007). Islam: Past, present, and future. Oxford, England: Oneworld.
94. John L. Esposito (August 10, 2010). Islamophobia: A Threat to American Values? The Huffington Post.
95. L. Brent Bozell III(April 29, 2009). A Hundred Days of Love. Media Research Center.
96. Ownership Chart: The Big Six (accessed August 13, 2011). Freepress.
97. Noam Chomsky (October, 1997). What makes Mainstream Media Mainstream? Z magazine.
98. Blum, W. (2008). Killing hope: U.S. military and C.I.A. interventions since World War II–updated through 2003. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.
99. National Archives, Record Group 59, Department of State Records, Transcripts of Staff Meetings of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 1973-77, box 9.
100. de las Casas, B. (originally published in 1552, accessed September 10, 2011). A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
101. Bonar Ludwig Hernandez (accessed September 10, 2011). The Las Casas-Sepúlveda Controversy: 1550-1551.
102. Patai, R. (1983). The Arab mind. New York: Scribner’s.
103. El-Bendary, M. (2011). The “Ugly American” in The Arab mind: Why do Arabs resent America? Dulles, VA: Potomac Books.
104. Abdennur, A. (2008). The Arab mind: An ontology of abstraction and completeness. Ottawa: Kogna.
105. Chomsky, N. (2003). Power and terror: Conflict, hegemony, and the rule of force. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Quote pp. 19-20.

These figures are enough to enrage anyone with an ounce of humanity in their soul. So what does he propose to do about this nasty form of capitalism? His answer: new rules to compel companies to make public the pay packets of top bankers and top executives as a multiple of an average UK employee wage. Get real, Mr. Cable. They will not be shamed or deterred by exposing the obscenity of their wealth.

The dictionary defines empathy as “the capacity for imaginatively sharing in another’s feelings or ideas.” The “moneymen” have zero empathy with those struggling simply to survive the extreme hardship ordinary people are experiencing. Lest we forget, these “moneymen” are the ones who had the effrontery to demand huge bonuses to add to their massive salaries, after their institutions were rescued to the tune of billions of dollars by the taxpayer following the financial meltdown caused by their greed, incompetence, and casino-type banking.

Here is a suggestion for you, Mr. Cable, and the Chancellor to consider, which is progressive, fair and serves the interests of the ordinary citizen. Decide what multiple of the average pay of a UK employee is a fair wage for those masters of the universe, 10 times say. Any pay above that, tax at a punitive rate rising in very steep steps to a level of 90% or more. If this does not moderate the pay, it will have the effect of returning money to the government to help those most in need.

New research published by Merrill Lynch cited in the Guardian article shows that “the number of wealthy individuals in the world has reached 10.9 million – more than existed before the 2008 banking crises. Their collective wealth, $42.7 trillion, has also topped the levels it reached in 2007, before the crash and recession sparked by the crisis.” Isn’t that obscene? Ordinary people in their millions, in the US, Europe and beyond, are being told by those “moneymen” that they must tighten their belts, and accept austerity measures that are severely blighting their lives.

This is what happens when the tyranny of capital is unchecked. This is what happens when the voracious appetite of global corporations and the ultra rich for more power and wealth is not controlled, and allowed free reign to exploit and enslave millions worldwide.

The trajectory of this tyrannical form of capitalism is heading towards the slave-like exploitation of people in the third world, described by John Pilger in an excellent video made four years ago. It describes the exploitation of the poor in Indonesia under the banner of “globalisation” entitled The New Rulers of the World. The conditions presented in the video could equally apply to any poor third world country. He describes the pitiful working conditions in factories making designer brand goods (Nike, adidas, GAP, etc) destined for the US and Western markets. The workers were paid a dollar a day, the minimum legal wage in Indonesia. These workers live in labour camps with open sewers, no running water, with their children undernourished and prey to disease. A shocking statistic is that Tiger Woods was paid more to promote the Nike brand than the entire work force making the product in Indonesia.

He describes a wedding reception in Jakarta thus: “Here are some of the staggeringly wealthy. This is a wedding in Jakarta of the Indonesian elite; two merchant families are being united… We calculate that it would take an Indonesian worker like this waiter 400 years to pay for a wedding reception like this.” The gulf between the rich and the poor has become even bigger since that film was made four years ago, as the figures in the Guardian show.

It looks like the gap between rich and poor in the US and the West is accelerating towards the levels that are now prevalent in the third world. There are now families in the UK that are relying on charitable donations of food to survive. The tyranny and dictatorship of corporations and the ultra rich are causing levels of hardship and pain that, if unchecked, will lead to civil unrest, and crime, and threaten community cohesion.

Politicians take heed. Governments must find practical and effective ways of dealing with this extreme inequality in our society. Shaming and embarrassing the super rich into moderating their greed and wealth acquisition will not cut it.

200,000 Skeletons in Richard Holbrooke’s Closet
by Sunil K. Sharma
March 22, 1999

Much ado has been made in the press and academic discussions about how Richard Holbrooke has been a force for peace in the Yugoslavia imbroglio. The reality behind Holbrooke’s activities in the former Yugoslavia has been excellently exposed in recent issues of Covert Action Quarterly and elsewhere by journalist and Yugoslavia expert Diana Johnstone.

A little known chapter in Holbrooke’s career in the US government is his complicity in Indonesia’s campaign of genocide against East Timor. Holbrooke was head of the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Carter Administration. On December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, which it continues to occupy today, killing over 200,000 Timorese in the process, approximately 1/3 of the pre-invasion population. The US supported Indonesia in ways that are already well known; there is no doubt that the invasion, ongoing occupation, and genocide could not have been possible without US support.

Following Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the US supposedly imposed an “arms ban” on Indonesia from December 1975 to June 1976. The ban was a secret. In fact the ban was so secret that the Indonesians were completely unaware of it as they unpacked the American weapons that flowed to them unabated. This fraud was later exposed by Cornell University professor Benedict Anderson in his testimony before Congress in February 1978. Anderson cited a report, “confirmed from the Department of Defense printout,” showing that there never was an arms ban, and that the US initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians during the period of the alleged ban:

If we are curious as to why the Indonesians never felt the force of the U.S. government’s “anguish,” the answer is quite simple. In flat contradiction to express statements by General Fish, Mr. Oakley and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, at least four separate offers of military equipment were made to the Indonesian government during the January-June 1976 “administrative suspension.” This equipment consisted mainly of supplies and parts for OV-10 Broncos, Vietnam War era planes designed for counterinsurgency operations against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons, and wholly useless for defending Indonesia from a foreign enemy. The policy of supplying the Indonesian regime with Broncos, as well as other counterinsurgency-related equipment has continued without substantial change from the Ford through the present Carter administrations.¹

Indeed by late 1977 the Indonesians literally began to run out of weapons in its campaign to destroy the Timorese. The Carter Administration stepped in and increased military aid and weapons sales to the Indonesians, which fueled Indonesia’s stepped up campaigns of 1978 to 1980 when the level of killing reached genocidal proportions.

When asked by Australian reporters at a press conference about atrocities in East Timor, Holbrooke responded:

I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today . . . [Asked about how many Timorese were killed in the past] . . . we are never going to know anyway.²

The date of this press conference was April 6, 1977. Holbrooke would most certainly have been aware that a few days earlier (April 1) the Melbourne Age quoted Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik as saying that, “50,000 people or perhaps 80,000 might have been killed during the war in Timor, but we saved 600,000 of them.” Also on April 1, the Canberra Times quoted Malik as saying:

The total may be 50,000, but what does this mean if compared with 600,000 people who want to join Indonesia? [sic!] Then what is the big fuss. It is possible that they may have been killed by the Australians and not us. Who knows? It was war.

Malik’s claim that perhaps 10% of the Timorese population may have been killed in less than two years was a bit much for the United States: Australian state radio reported, “The State Department is clearly embarrassed by Adam Malik’s statement that the number killed in East Timor might have been as high as 80,000.”³ Fortunately the State Department could rely on the US media’s overwhelming silence on the subject of East Timor and American complicity to spare them from any embarrassment here at home.

In September 1978, US Ambassador to Indonesia Edward Masters went to East Timor accompanied by an entourage of Indonesian diplomats. While there, Masters visited refugee camps — concentration camps to be more precise — that the Timorese had been herded into by the Indonesians, where they where subjected to a forced starvation policy. According to one US reporter who was there, Masters and company “came away so shocked by the conditions of the refugees that they immediately contacted the governor of East Timor . . . to explore the possibilities for providing foreign humanitarian assistance.” However, it would not be until a full nine months had passed that Masters (in June 1979) would urge the US to provide humanitarian assistance. The timing of Masters’ silence coincided with Indonesia being bolstered by a huge shipment of US military aid and weapons described above. As Benedict Anderson told Congress in 1980:

In other words, for nine long months, from September 1978 to June 1979, while “in ever increasing numbers the starving and the ailing, wearing rags at best, drifted onto the coastal plain,”⁴ Ambassador Masters deliberately refrained, even within the walls of the State Department, from proposing humanitarian aid to East Timor. Until the generals in Jakarta gave him the green light, Mr. Masters did nothing to help the East Timorese, although Mr. Holbrooke insists that “the welfare of the Timorese people is the major objective of our policy towards East Timor.⁵

Despite the fact that the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor was and is an egregious violation of international law and an act of genocide, the Carter administration and Holbrooke in particular, while acknowledging that the East Timorese had not been allowed to carry out an act of self-determination, regarded the situation as a fait accompli.⁶

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who at the time was the US ambassador to the UN, boasted in his memoir that he effectively prevented the UN from implementing resolutions calling on Indonesia to withdraw immediately from Timor and which affirmed the Timorese people’s right to self-determination:

The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.⁷

The State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs was Holbrooke’s fiefdom. While the State Department made great efforts to interview Cambodian refugees in order to assess the level of human rights violations by the Khmer Rouge, the opposite was true of Timorese refugees who were easily accessible in Australia and Portugal. A Christian Science Monitor article from 1980 on East Timor and the State Department’s indifference to the plight of the Timorese is worth quoting at length:

Francisco Fernandes, a Roman Catholic priest who served for several years as head of the Timorese refugee community, said he knew of no attempt by US officials to seek out and interview any of the more than 2,000 such refugees who have been living in Portugal for the past several years.

Even today, with the magnitude of the East Timor problem better known, refugees going directly to the State Department in Washington with their stories find that most officials here give the benefit of the doubt to the Indonesians.

“He acted like a lawyer for the Indonesians,” said one refugee after talking with a State Department official recently. . . .

What many Timorese would like . . . is the departure of the Indonesians and control over their own affairs. The Timorese identity and languages are distinct from those of the Indonesians.

But in deferring to Indonesia on this issue, the Carter administration, like the Ford administration before it, appears to have placed big-power concerns ahead of human rights: Indonesia is an anticommunist, largely Muslim, oil-producing nation with the fifth-largest population in the world. It commands sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke recently declared it is potentially one of the great nations of the world.

US policy toward East Timor has been made for the most part by the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, headed by Mr. Holbrooke. The bureau most concerned with human rights, which is headed by Assistant Secretary Patricia Derian, was barely getting organized in 1977 when East Timor policy was first set by the Carter administration.

However, it was Ms. Derian, not Mr. Holbrooke, who was in the position of having to answer questions about East Timor, among other subjects, at a recent congressional hearing. Mr. Holbrooke let it be known he was too busy preparing for a trip to appear at the Feb. 6 hearing. He did have the time, however, to play host at a black-tie dinner later the same day.⁸

All of this stands in stark contrast to Holbrooke’s impassioned defense of the right of Kosovar Albanians to “autonomy”. Perhaps he’s had some kind of religious conversion in recent years.

The Carter Administration’s position on Indonesia and East Timor was best summed up by Assistant Secretary Holbrooke in a more honest moment:

The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer — which plays a moderate role within OPEC — and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. President Suharto and other prominent Indonesian leaders have publicly called for the release of our hostages in Iran. Indonesia’s position within the Association of South East Asian Nations — ASEAN — is also important and it has played a central role in the supporting Thailand and maintaining the security of Thailand in the face of Vietnam’s destabilizing actions in Indo-China [sic]. Finally, Indonesia has provided humane treatment for over 50,000 Indo-Chinese refugees and taken the initiative in offering an island site as an ASEAN refugee processing centre. Indonesia is, of course, important to key US allies in the region, especially Japan and Australia. We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia.⁹

If there was a world in which an International Court of Justice had any meaning, Richard Holbrooke’s shameful service to State power would surely be characterized as a series of Crimes Against Humanity. For now, such a thought is merely a fantasy for those of us who seek peace and justice.

1. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations. US Policy on Human Rights and Military Assistance: Overview and Indonesia, February 15, 1978.
2. John Hamilton, “Timor death toll not the issue: US,” Melbourne Herald, April 7, 1977.
3. Australian sources cited in Chomsky, Noam and Edward S. Herman. The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I (South End Press, 1979), pp. 174-175.
4. Anderson is quoting from an article by Henry Kamm in the New York Times, January 28, 1980.
5. Holbrooke, written statement to the House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs, December 4, 1979. The topic of the hearing was East Timor, which Holbrooke did not bother to attend. Anderson’s statement: Benedict R.O.G. Anderson, testimony at the Hearings before the Subcommittees on Asian and Pacific Affairs and on International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 96th Congress, 2nd Session, February 1980 (US Government Printing Office, 1980).
6. Holbrooke said as much to author James Dunn. Timor: A People Betrayed (The Jacaranda Press, 1983), p.351.
7. Moynihan, Daniel P with Suzanne Weaver. A Dangerous Place (Little Brown, 1980), p.247.
8. Daniel Southerland, “US Role in Plight of Timor: An Issue That Won’t Go Away”, Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1980, p.7.
9. Foreign Assistance and Related Programs: Appropriations for 1981. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 96th Congress, June 1980. Cited in ibid. p.354.

Reverend Benny Giay, an outspoken defender of human rights in West Papua, has found himself on a list of ‘enemies’, which appears to have been leaked by Indonesia’s Kopassus forces. US assistance to Kopassus was renewed in July this year.

Kopassus is notorious for human rights violations in West Papua and East Timor. Rev. Giay told Survival International that by renewing ties with Kopassus, ‘The US is supporting the policy to oppress the Papuans, to wipe us out.’

The leaked documents show Indonesia’s special forces to be targeting church leaders and unarmed civilian activists in Papua, defining them as Kopassus’s main ‘enemy’. The Indonesian military has not denied the veracity of the documents.

A secret report from the task force says the civilians are ‘much more dangerous’ than the armed opposition. For example, it states that the civilians persist in ‘propagating the issue of severe human rights violations in Papua’ i.e. ‘murders and abductions that are done by the security forces’.

Another Papuan churchman, Rev. Socratez Yoman, heads the list of Kopassus ‘enemies’. He told Survival, ‘I speak up for justice, peace, human rights and dignity. I must speak up for my people.’ He shrugged off the death threats and intimidation that he and many others on the list suffer, by saying, ‘This is our daily life.’

The revelations from Kopassus come only weeks after a shocking video was released of Indonesian soldiers torturing two tribal Papuan men.

Survival’s Director, Stephen Corry said, ‘It is shameful that the US has renewed its ties with Kopassus when they continue to target churchmen and civilians merely for speaking out about the suffering of their people.’

Indonesia’s security forces continue to operate with impunity under the old dictatorship’s rules: peaceful dissent is criminalized; civil society leaders are humiliated and intimidated and the international community is precluded from any effective monitoring of conditions in this besieged community.

The video is the second in recent months to offer graphic footage of Indonesian security force torture of Papuans. In it, a Papuan man is held to the ground while a hot stick, still smoldering from a fire, is held against his genitals. A plastic bag is wrapped around his head several times, a rifle held against him. Another man has a large knife held against him while he pleads: “I’m just an ordinary civilian, please…” One of his interrogators responds: “I’ll cut your throat… Do not lie, I will kill you! Burn the penis!” The video appears to have been taken on the cell phone of one interrogator. Although the interrogators are dressed in plain clothes, they speak in Javanese and in Indonesian with non-Papuan accents. Plain clothes dress is common for Indonesian security forces in West Papua. The techniques used used mean they are almost certainly trained security personnel in the Indonesian army or police. The dialect of the victims places them in the Puncak Jaya region, where security forces are accused of repeated rights abuses.

The extreme brutality revealed in this footage is not new. What is new is that there is now additional video evidence of the brutality suffered by Papuans for nearly five decades. The international community can now clearly witness the indisputably harsh reality of life for Papuans. While Indonesia continues on the path of democratization and peaceful resolution of disputes, one region is sent on the opposite path: towards ongoing military domination, widespread suppression of political activity, and routine use of torture and other severe violations of basic human rights. In West Papua, the brutal and unaccountable Indonesian military and its accomplices, the militarized police (Brimob), special forces (Kopassus) and “anti-terror” force (Detachment 88) continue to operate with impunity under the old dictatorship’s rules: peaceful dissent is criminalized; civil society leaders are humiliated and intimidated and the international community is precluded from any effective monitoring of conditions in this besieged community.

Thanks to the courage of Papuan human rights advocates in the face of harsh security measures designed to silence them, the world periodically has been witness to the harsh rule of West Papua. In the past, the faith in international justice and humanity demonstrated by these courageous Papuans has been betrayed by the international community’s deference to the Indonesian government’s insistence that neither its course nor rule there not be challenged. Numerous governments have placed the territorial integrity of Indonesia and the desire to support its democratization process first. In the process, however, they have abandoned what could have been constructive efforts to uphold human rights in West Papua, which continue to be systematically violated.

Geopolitical and commercial goals led the U.S. government to ignore Suharto dictatorship atrocities targeting its own people and the people of East Timor for decades. President Bill Clinton acknowledged this when East Timor gained its independence in 2002, saying: “I don’t believe America or any of the other countries were sufficiently sensitive in the beginning and for a long time, a long time before 1999, going all the way back to the ’70s, to the suffering of the people of East Timor.” It was the suffering of the people of East Timor that led to Congress deciding to suspend military cooperation with Indonesia.

Despite the continued human rights violations, the Obama administration has continued the Bush administration’s policy of support to the Indonesian security forces through the IMET program, and support to the notorious Detachment 88 of the Indonesian National Police, credibly accused of torture and other rights violations. It has resumed cooperation with the Indonesian special forces (Kopassus) notwithstanding that unit’s decades-old record of human rights abuse.

The system of security force rule and repression of peaceful dissent has been dismantled in much of Indonesia, but the same security system and the same systematic human rights violations continue in West Papua today. Such stopgap solutions as “special autonomy” have been clearly rejected by the Papuan people. Despite the continued human rights violations, the Obama administration has continued the Bush administration’s policy of support to the Indonesian security forces. It has continued support to the Indonesian military through the IMET program, and support through the Anti-Terror Assistance Program to the notorious Detachment 88 of the Indonesian National Police, credibly accused of torture and other rights violations. It has resumed cooperation with the Indonesian special forces (Kopassus) notwithstanding that unit’s decades-old record of human rights abuse including recent, credible accounts of brutality targeting Papuan civilians. In so doing the Obama Administration, like its predecessors, has wittingly or unwittingly made itself complicit in the repression now underway in West Papua.

The United States, under President John F. Kennedy, was responsible for the transfer of West Papua to Indonesian rule. In that act, the United States made itself co-responsible for the outcome of its actions. Successive administrations have not been sufficiently sensitive to the ongoing human rights violations, including torture to this day, which resulted from Indonesian rule.

President Obama’s upcoming visit to Indonesia offers an opportunity to end the silence on West Papua, and to craft new policies that advance human rights rather than lending support to human rights violators. Information about the ongoing human rights violations in West Papua was heard on September 22 by the House of Representatives Sub-committee on Asia, the Pacific.

The Obama administration should:

• Insist upon an investigation and prosecution of those who recently tortured Papuans in Puncak Jaya
• Seek an investigation by relevant United Nations human rights rapporteurs of this and other instances of torture in West Papua
• Suspend cooperation with Indonesian security forces accused of systematic human rights violations, including Detachment 88 and the Brimob (Mobile Brigade) of the National Police and the Indonesian special forces (Kopassus)
• Call for full and open access for journalists, humanitarian assistance personnel including the International Committee of the red Cross and other international monitors to all of West Papua
• Seek meetings between President Obama and Papuan human rights and civil society leaders during his visit to Indonesia
• Call upon the Indonesian government to carry out an internationally facilitated, senior-level dialogue process with Papuan officials and civil society designed to resolve the Papuan conflict peacefully, as was done in Aceh province.

“Slipping back into bed with Kopassus is a betrayal of the brutal unit’s many victims in Timor-Leste, West Papua and throughout Indonesia. It will lead to more people to suffer abuses,” said John M. Miller, National Coordinator of ETAN. “Working with Kopassus, which remain unrepentant about its long history of terrorizing civilians, will undermine efforts to achieve justice and accountability for human rights crimes in Indonesia and Timor-Leste (East Timor).”

“For years, the U.S. military provided training and other assistance to Kopassus, and when the U.S. was most involved Kopassus crimes were at their worst. While this assistance improved the Indonesian military’s deadly skills, it did nothing to improve its behavior,” Miller added.

“Engagement with Kopassus would violate the Leahy Law, which prohibits military assistance to units with unresolved human rights violations,” said Miller. “Even the previous Bush State Department’s legal counsel thought so, ruling that the Leahy prohibition applied to Kopassus as a whole.”

U.S. officials, speaking to the New York Times, distinguished between soldiers who were “only implicated, not convicted’ in human rights crimes. Administration officials have said that some Kopassus soldiers convicted of crimes no longer served with the unit, however many of them remain on active duty, including Lt. Col. Tri Hartomo, convicted by a military court of the murder of Papuan leader Theys Eluay in 2001.

The official American Forces Press Service wrote that a “senior defense official said Indonesia has pledged that any Kopassus member who is credibly accused of a human rights violation will be suspended pending an investigation, will be tried in a civilian court, and will be removed from the unit if convicted.” Legislation transferring members of military to civilian courts for trials has yet to pass.

“The problem remains that the Indonesian military (TNI) as a whole and Kopassus in particular rarely take accusations of human rights violations seriously and few end up in any court,” said ETAN’s Miller. “Engaging Kopassus with only token concessions will not encourage reform, respect for rights or accountability. It may do the opposite.”

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced in Jakarta that the U.S. “will begin a gradual, limited program of security cooperation activities” with Kopassus. U.S. officials told the media that “there would be no immediate military training.” However, Gates did not say exactly what criteria will be used to decide if  “to expand upon these initial steps [which] will depend upon continued implementation of reforms within Kopassus” and the TNI.

Background

Engagement with Kopassus has been opposed by human rights and victims associations in Indonesia, Timor-Leste and internationally. It has been debated within the Obama administration and in Congress.

In May 2010, 13 senior members of Congress wrote the Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Clinton concerning plans to cooperate with Kopassus. The letter called for “a reliable vetting process critical… for identifying Kopassus officials who have violated human rights” and said “the transfer of jurisdiction over human rights crimes committed by members of the military to civilian courts should be a pre-condition for engagement with Kopassus.” Legislation to transfer members of the military to civilian courts has long been stalled. Trials of some soldiers before ad-hoc human rights courts, such as on East Timor, have resulted in acquittals.

Kopassus troops have been implicated in a range of human rights violations and war crimes in Aceh, West Papua, Timor-Leste and elsewhere. Although a few special forces soldiers have been convicted of the kidnapping of activists prior to the fall of the Suharto dictatorship and the 2001 murder of Theys Eluay, the perpetrators of the vast majority of human rights crimes continue to evade prosecution. Kopassus and other troops indicted by UN-backed prosecutors in Timor-Leste for crimes committed in 1999 during Timor’s independence referendum remain at large.

Kopassus was involved in Timor-Leste from the killings of five Australian-based journalists at Balibo in 1975 prior to Indonesia’s full scale invasion through its destructive withdrawal in 1999. Kopassus soldiers are alleged to have been involved in the 2002 ambush murder of three teachers (including two from the U.S.) near the Freeport mine in West Papua. The crimes of Kopassus are not only in the past. A Human Rights Watch report published last year documents how Kopassus soldiers “arrest Papuans without legal authority, and beat and mistreat those they take back to their barracks.” A report by journalist Allan Nairn describes security force  – including a U.S.-trained Kopassus general – involvement in the killing of activists in Aceh last year. The leaders of Kopassus have consistently rejected calls to hold it accountable. In April 2010 at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the unit’s founding, Kopassus commander Maj. Gen. Lodewijk Paulus called allegations of past rights violations a “psychological burden.”  He told The Jakarta Globe, “Honestly, it has become a problem and people just keep harping on them. It’s not fair.”

Lt. Gen. Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, who served with Kopassus and is accused of human rights violations in East Timor and elsewhere, remains as deputy defense minister. His position is being challenged in court by victims of human rights violations in the 1998 Jakarta riots and the 1997/1998 kidnapping of student and political activists.

In 2005, the Bush administration exercised a national security waiver that allowed for full engagement with the Indonesian military for the first time since the early 1990s. The conditions for U.S. military engagement, which the Bush administration abandoned, included prosecution of those responsible for human rights violations in East Timor and elsewhere and implementation of reforms to enhance civilian control of the Indonesian military. The Bush administration waited until 2008 to propose restarting U.S. training of Kopassus, which was suspended in 1998. The State Department’s legal counsel reportedly ruled that the 1997 ban on training of military units with a history of involvement in human rights violations, known as the ‘Leahy law,’ applied to Kopassus as a whole and the training did not go forward.

Familiar with psychological operations (psy-ops) that involve lengthy pre-staging, Kumaat inquired of Rockefeller in Jakarta why that incident occurred at that time and place.

Kumaat also noted the curious timing of two other operations: (a) a Defense minister in India had recently been caught in a bribery scandal involving an Israeli company, and (b) that same Israeli firm attempted to bribe the Malaysian Defense Minister.

Six months prior to 911, the motivation for the Bamyan incident was difficult to discern. In hindsight, we now know that high profile event branded the Taliban globally as Evil Doers.

What about the briberies? The amounts involved were too small, Rockefeller suggested, to constitute real bribes. Rather, both were attempts to change key personnel though it was not yet clear to what end. Since 911, the reason for the timing of those Israeli operations comes more clearly into focus.

In national security parlance, the dynamiting of the Buddhas “prepared the mind” of a global public for whom the Taliban remained an obscurity until their extremism was branded by that well timed event. The briberies will be addressed in a subsequent analysis. Suffice it to say that both involved the pre-staging of “out-of-theater” operations.

By Way of Deception

For those skilled at Information Age warfare, the relevant battlefield is the public’s shared field of consciousness. In that intangible realm, the power of association is routinely deployed to create lasting impressions as a means of mental manipulation.

In preparing that ‘field’ for an emerging narrative, mainstream media depicted the incident at Bamyan as a “cultural Holocaust.” Akin to the casting of a movie, by September 11, 2001, the intolerant Taliban had already been cast as a credible enemy of liberal democracies.

When the reaction to 911 triggered a global search for a plausible Evil Doer, the narrative quickly became a morality play with the U.S. pitted against extremists who hate our values.

As a nation, we segued seamlessly from a global Cold War — against those who hate our values to a Global War on Terrorism — against those who hate our values.

The violence inflicted on the peaceful Buddhas of Bamyan also brought Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, onto the battlefield of consciousness — where he remains.

In the unfolding of this storyline, Omar became the oft-featured Epitome of Evil, akin to a Muslim Darth Vader from Star Wars films. Or Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to war in Iraq.

Best Story Wins

This brief overview of “field-based warfare” brings us to the latest incident in New York again featuring in a starring role Mullah Omar as leader of the “Pakistan Taliban.”

But first a brief review of three recent events.

Keep in mind that when waging game theory warfare, it is not the incident but the reaction that advances the narrative. The cascade of reactions to an incident is what gains traction for a storyline when manipulating minds in that “field.”¹

The first incident was the December 2007 murder of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazim biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice that the return to Pakistan of the corrupt but widely popular Bhutto was “the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact.”

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf had announced that an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine was critical to end the conflicts in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan. That comment made him a target of those for whom that occupation has long served a strategic purpose.

Bhutto’s death was blamed on the Pakistan Taliban. The reaction resulted in the replacement of Musharraf with Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s notoriously corrupt husband. By our alliance with Zardari, the U.S. could be cast as extending its corrupting influence in the region.²

In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Israeli arms and training. That out-of-theater crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Russia was then negotiating an energy agreement with Iran.

The incident in Georgia was the second of three prepare-the-mind events. Third was “India’s 911” in November 2008 when extremists recruited from the tribal regions of western Pakistan killed 173 and wounded more than 300 in Mumbai, India’s financial center.

The attack included a hostel run by Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from New York. In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced: “Our world is under attack.”

Livni then argued: “Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism.” By its exclusion, Pakistan was indicted.

By standing “shoulder to shoulder” with India (the signature phrase of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon), Tel Aviv associated India with Israel’s victim status.

The response to that attack drew Pakistani troops to its eastern border with India. That reaction left its Western tribal regions less well guarded and thereby plausibly more susceptible to extremist infiltrators from Afghanistan joining the Pakistan Taliban.

By May 2009, Israel had delivered to India its first of three Phalcon Airborne Warning & Control Systems (AWACS). That arms sale shifted the balance of conventional air power in the region. That military alliance also confirmed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced: “Our ties with India don’t have any limitation….”³

Whose Pakistan Taliban?

Now let’s turn to the latest incident — also attributed to the Pakistan Taliban. Keep in mind that when waging war on the battlefield of the public’s shared mind space, the power of association is routinely deployed as a form of weaponry.

The “Times Square terrorist” incident occurred at 6:30 pm on May 1st. That same day, reports emerged from London that more than 3,000 European Jews, including prominent intellectuals, had signed a petition speaking out against Israeli settlement policies and warning that systematic support for the Israeli government is dangerous.

That statement garnered high praise from those aware of how peace in the Middle East has long been kept beyond reach by Israeli agent provocateurs. Serial provocations around the settlements issue have long been a reliable catalyst for well-timed outrage that, in turn, is cited to again defer resolution of a six-decade conflict.⁴

Bernard-Henri Levy, a high-profile French writer, led that European effort. That development appeared quite positive when first announced. Then Levy began to appear as a commentator on television following the “Times Square Terrorism” as that incident was portrayed on the cover of Newsweek, a Washington Post magazine.

Rather than promote the petition and the urgent need to solve the settlements issue, instead Levy offered his appraisal of the Times Square incident. He described in depth how he studied what went on “inside the mind” of a Muslim Evil Doer who in 2002 slit the throat and then beheaded an American-Jewish reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

The Levy analysis injected into the “field” the most visually provocative image of the War on Terrorism featuring the epitome of both violence and extremist intolerance. Levy’s well-timed on-camera recitation refreshed in the public mindset the disturbing imagery of a Muslim Evil Doer who brutally murdered and dismembered a young professional with a pregnant wife.

Levy’s described for the television viewer the mental state of the psychopathic Muslim profiled in his book Who Killed Danny Pearl? Where did this evil doing occur? In Pakistan.

Is U.S. Foreign Policy Shaped from the Shadows?

As Levy’s account was injected into the field at the same time as the Time Square Bomber, the U.N. Security Council then had under review a 15-year old proposal for a treaty that would create a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

The timing of these developments could be coincidental. Yet consider another possibility.

Assume your numbers are few but your ambitions vast. The confirmed facts point to the manipulation of U.S. foreign policy from the shadows with phony intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq in pursuit of a Muslim Evil Doer that had nothing to do with that incident. Is it possible that this latest incident had a strategic purpose that is not yet clear to the public?

If, as the facts suggest, advisers to President Barack Obama are advancing a pro-Israeli agenda, could the timing of this incident be a means to exert influence from outside the White House?

Could that be because their influence inside the White House has become apparent?⁵

The facts suggest that Obama, as U.S. commander-in-chief, is feeling pressure from the military to change our policy on Israel. Did the timing of these “out of theatre” events help finesse that issue by refreshing a storyline that calls for the U.S. to lead a Global War on Terrorism?

Was this latest incident timed to provide a rationale with which our policy-makers can preempt Pentagon concerns about the effect of U.S.-Israeli policy on our troops in the field?⁶

How long ago would pro-Israeli White House insiders have known about the pending U.N. Security Council consideration of a treaty that could force Israel to forfeit its nuclear weapons? When was the Times Square Terrorist recruited by the “Pakistan Taliban”?

Is this how a war-making narrative is sustained, using well-timed crises staged in a nonlinear fashion such that their common origin is diffused in the “field”?

Could that explain the well-timed murder of Benazir Bhutto by the “Pakistan Taliban”? Could that explain the well-timed destabilizing impact on Pakistan of the recent “911” attack on Mumbai using operatives recruited and trained in Pakistan? Was this too the “Pakistan Taliban”?

In a televised May 10th interview, General Stanley McChrystal explained that winning the current war in the Middle East requires a “change in perception.” Is that the purpose of these well-timed crises? Are they meant to refresh our fear of the “Pakistan Taliban”?

The displacement of facts with false beliefs induced us to invade Iraq consistent with a narrative that was revitalized by this latest well-timed “incident.” Is the American public again being manipulated by those skilled at managing perceptions?

Is this incident a high profile example of field-based warfare being waged on America? Are we in the midst of another psy-ops?

Is that possible? Could there be a sufficient critical mass of like-minded operatives in positions of influence capable of inducing enough minds to freely embrace another war that is not in our interest?

Is it possible in the Information Age that psy-ops could operate on such a scale? Is there sufficient collateral support in key decision-making quarters to again deceive an entire nation in plain sight yet, to date, with legal impunity?

Pakistan has long been an ally of the U.S. So was Iraq. Likewise Iran was an ally in recent history. Where are we to find this purported “Axis of Evil”? Does its source reside in nation-states? Or does this evil reside in the mental state of those skilled at manipulating the minds of others to wage war on false pretenses?

War in Iraq Could Have Been Prevented

The answers to those questions may need to await an official, good faith investigation of the three-decade experience of Mel Rockefeller who has been profiling the common source of this duplicity — from the inside — since 1982. That experience remains ongoing.

In March 2001, he and Indonesian intelligence chief, Arie Kumaat, were not then able to detect the pre-staging of the mass murder on U.S. soil that emerged six months later.

After that provocation and before the manipulated response (the invasion of Iraq), Kumaat agreed to schedule a meeting for Rockefeller with former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid. A religious and political leader of 80 million moderate Muslim men, Wahid had recently presided over the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Rockefeller knew the Wahid meeting would lead to a meeting with Malaysian president Mahathir bin Mohamad. This Muslim leader was familiar with the common source of many of today’s troubles, including a well timed attempt to topple the Malaysian Minister of Defense.

Plus Kumaat had uncovered a multi-billion dollar Israeli bribe that would have destabilized the entire Indonesia government reportedly organized with the help of a nonprofit funded by American George Soros.⁷

With all two Muslim nations appraised of the common Israeli source of this manipulation, could the invasion of Iraq have been stopped?

With that knowledge, could a “coalition of the willing” have been assembled to support that U.S.-led invasion? Would other nations have been energized to resist? We may never know.

Soon after agreeing to set that meeting with Wahid, Arie Kumaat was poisoned. He received a state funeral in January 2002, four months after the provocation that took the U.S. to war against Muslim Evil Doers.

Though the official account of his death cited a heart attack, a family autopsy reportedly detected the poison used to induce a heart attack. That account was confirmed in an interview with Kumaat’s son, Henrie.⁸

The People in Between

In an October 2007 speech, Defense Secretary Robert Gates identified “the people in between” as the most problematic combatant when waging “unconventional warfare.” The facts suggest that such warfare is only “unconventional” for those targeted. For the aggressor, this form of warfare is standard operating procedure.

Those waging war from the shadows imbed their operatives in that realm “in between” a targeted populace and the facts they require for a system of governance reliant on informed consent. By displacing facts with false beliefs, mental manipulation can proceed in plain sight.

Between a deceived American public and the facts they required to assess whether to wage war in Iraq were legions of pro-Israeli operatives. Many of those operatives are imbedded in media, a key in-between domain essential for success in field-based warfare.

Thus, for example, the critical agenda-advancing role played by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He even branded his broadcasting set “The Situation Room” to lend White House-associative credibility on a network branded as “the most trusted name in news.”⁹

Likewise New York Times “reporter” Judith Miller who featured on its front page the false intelligence provided by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the credible-sounding “Iraqi National Congress.” This Iraqi expatriate and London-based Iraqi liar served as a reliable and pliable Israeli asset developed over two decades by pro-Israeli operatives, including Richard Perle who in 2001 became chairman of the U.S. Defense Policy Advisory Board.

This form of Information Age treason could only succeed if hidden in plain sight. Today’s fast-paced velocity of information ensures that media impressions now shape political agendas. Thus the importance of “the people in between” in manipulating U.S. foreign policy.

Out-of-Theater Repositioning

Pro-Israelis in the Obama administration could no longer directly shape Middle East policy after General David Petraeus, head of Central Command, complained to the Joint Chiefs about the adverse impact of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on U.S. interests in the region.

Could that explain the utility of an “out of theater” incident to refresh the narrative? That may explain the timing of an incident in a high-profile venue (Times Square) featuring a power-of-association component (New York) that could plausibly be attributed to Pakistan as a source of violent Islamic extremists.

The control wielded in Washington by the Israel lobby remains little known to mainstream Americans. As our representatives in what was meant to be a representative system of governance, the U.S. Congress now epitomizes “the people in between.”¹⁰

The accountability of Congress to the broader population — or even to our troops in the field — is now out of the question. Meanwhile those who deceived the U.S. to war in Iraq are working to induce us to war in Iran — or Pakistan.

If the consensus storyline cannot be sustained, the consequences are clear. If the War on Terrorism loses credibility, the resulting stability will provide Americans with the breathing space required to identify the real enemy. And to begin rooting out a deeply entrenched treason.

This Can Only End Badly

Meanwhile business-as-usual continues in plain sight. The day after Israel was admitted to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged that Iran is provoking Israel to wage war with Syria.

When President Shimon Peres denied this week that Israel would go to war with Syria, he meant that Syria is the likely rationale for the next crisis. When on May 11th he declared in Moscow that nuclear terror is the world’s greatest threat, rest assured that game theory war planners in Tel Aviv have in place a plausible plan for blaming such an incident on Iran-backed Hezbollah.

The same day that “proximity talks” began, the Palestinians confirmed that Israel had another settlement underway in East Jerusalem. The next day, the Israeli minister for public safety announced that Israel will demolish Arab homes in East Jerusalem.

On May 12th (“Jerusalem Day”), the U.S.-based Conference of Presidents (of Major American Jewish Organizations) took a full-page ad in The New York Times to proclaim “Jerusalem in the Heart of the Jewish People.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu announced from Israel, “We will never divide Jerusalem.”

When this Likud Party leader calls for peace while insisting on conditions that make peace impossible, rest assured that more provocations are planned.

The latest storyline in search of traction: Syrian-provided poison-gas missiles pose a threat to Israel from Lebanon-based, Iran-backed Hezbollah. As the war on terrorism is rebranded, it is not yet clear how the Pakistan Taliban will be worked into the narrative.

All we know for certain is that Muslims will remain the Evil Doers in this storyline. And that Israelis will once again be cast as hapless victims.

Anticipating a tactical need to collapse another government, Israeli politicians are in discussions about an alliance between the Kadima Party and the Labor Party. When the latest Likud coalition falters, the resulting political instability will inject into the field the requisite “entropy” for Israel to continue on its current path without a government with whom other nations can negotiate.¹¹

What is the endgame for those once again defrauding the nation that befriended this enclave six decades ago and has since defended their interests without question?

What happens when Americans understand the depth and duration of this duplicity? And when the U.S. military confirms the common source of this ongoing treason?

What happens when a long-deceived global public grasps what this entangled alliance has cost them in blood and treasure over the past 62 years?

What Next for The People in Between?

The most recent Sunday edition of the New York Times is filled not with hopes of a nuclear-free Middle East but with fears of the future horrors inflicted on Americans by Muslim Evil Doers.

That storyline is reinforced on television by a reminder of the horrors inflicted on Danny Pearl. Meanwhile it’s made to appear that pro-Israeli moderates are busily working to restrain extremists in the Likud Party. That too is part of the storyline.

The Big Question is this: is anyone still buying it? Meanwhile the Big Sell continues.

The Sunday New York Times featured page after page marketing fear and insecurity:

• The front page featured a large photo of U.S.-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awaki who advised a series of alleged Evil Doers whose photos were also prominently displayed:
  • Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. See: Make the Real Terrorists Accountable
  • Umar Farouck Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day Bomber. See: Christmas Day Crotch Bomber tied to Israel, FBI
  • Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Bomber See: Pakistan the Evil Doer and the Times Square Fizzler

  The featured article consumed two full inside pages. There was no news coverage — none — of the pending U.N. proposal to free the Middle East of nuclear weapons.

  The front page of the commentary section in the national paper of record included two major articles. The first article warned that this enemy “may mutate and even grow.” The second analysis explored “when to suspend fear.”

  The book review section featured “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England,” and “Heidegger — The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.”

  The only mention of the pending U.N. proposal for ridding the Middle East of nuclear weapons appeared in the lead editorial titled “Fixing the Treaty.” The editors’ assessment of Israel giving up its nuclear weapons: “That is not going to happen any time soon.”

  To successfully wage war in the shared field of consciousness, an enemy must hide in plain sight. Otherwise, those deceived cannot be induced to believe.

  There lies the fast-emerging peril for those complicit in this ongoing treason. As the common source of this duplicity becomes transparent, its operatives are becoming apparent.

  1. See: “Can the U.S. Beat Israel at Their Game?“
  2. See: “What is Israel’s Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?“; ”Israel’s Role in Terrorism.”
  3. See: The India/Israel Alliance.
  4. See: “What Next for Israel: Entropy or Outrage?“
  5. See: “Will Israel Assassinate Barack Obama?”
  6. Note the military concerns described in Foreign Policy: The Petraeus Briefing – Israel Endangering U.S. Troops.
  7. See: “The Truth About America and Pakistan.”
  8. See: Zionist Dominance in the Obama Presidency.
  9. See: “Israel’s Fifth Column: The People in Between.”
  10. See: “How the Israel Lobby Controls U.S.“
  11. See: “What’s Next from Israel: Entropy or Outrage?“
  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/05/is-the-%e2%80%9ctimes-square-terrorist%e2%80%9d-more-field-based-warfare/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/expected-obama-administration-backing-for-indonesian-state-terror/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/expected-obama-administration-backing-for-indonesian-state-terror/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:00:06 +0000 Stephen Lendman http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=15655 Indonesia’s National Armed Forces (TNI), especially its thuggish Kopassus Special Forces Command, has a long, sordid human rights record, including political killings and massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians in East Timor, Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere in the country.

  In response to the November 12, 1991 Santa Cruz cemetery massacre of over 270 demonstrators in Dili, East Timor’s capital, Congress restricted Indonesia’s TNI from receiving International Military Education and Training (IMET). It brings foreign military officers to America for what’s taught at the infamous School of the Americas (SOA, renamed WHINSEC ) – namely, the latest ways to kill, maim, torture, oppress, exterminate poor and indigenous people, overthrown democratically elected governments, suppress popular resistance movements, assassinate targeted leaders, and work cooperatively with Washington to solidify hard-right rule, intolerant of democratic rights, social justice, and progressive change.

  The 1976 Arms Export Control Act requires US military hardware sales use only for defense or to maintain internal security. 

  In addition, the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act prohibits aiding governments that engage:

  in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person, unless such assistance will directly benefit the needy people in such country.

   The Leahy Law in the 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act (Sec. 8092 of PL 106-259) states:

  None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to support any training program involving a unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of Defense has received credible information from the Department of State that a member of such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights, unless all necessary corrective steps have been taken.

   The 2001 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act prohibits funding foreign security forces that commit gross human rights violations unless its government “is taking effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice.”

  In its final 2005 report, East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation called on nations to make Indonesian military aid:

  totally conditional on progress towards full democratization, the subordination of the military to the rule of law and civilian government, and strict adherence with international human rights, including respect for the right of self-determination.

   In September 1999, Pentagon – Indonesian military ties were severed over TNI and its militia proxies’ response to East Timorese independence, committing massacres and atrocities, UNAMET (the UN East Timor Mission) stating:

  The evidence for a direct link between the militia and the military is beyond dispute and has been overwhelmingly documented by UNAMET over the last four months. But the scale and thoroughness of the destruction of East Timor in the past week has demonstrated a new level of open participation of the military in the implementation of what was previously a more veiled operation.

  UNAMET warned that “the worst may be yet to come…. It cannot be ruled out that these are the first stages of a genocidal campaign to stamp out the East Timorese problem by force,” skills the TNI and its Kopassas killers honed since Indonesia’s 1945 independence.

  In 2005 (despite TNI’s unbroken record of human rights atrocities), the US State Department removed congressional restrictions on aiding Indonesia militarily, stating:

  “it is in the national security interests of the United States to waive conditionality pertaining to Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and defense exports to Indonesia.”

  In 2006, the Bush administration removed remaining TNI restrictions for training, supplying weapons and other forms of cooperation. In late 2007, it told Congress it planned to train members of Kopassas and Brimob (mobile brigade), Indonesia’s militarized police special operations unit, also notorious for committing well-documented human rights atrocities throughout the country.

  On March 18, 2010, in an open letter to President Obama, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) welcomed his upcoming visit, rescheduled for June, urging him “to avoid the destructive policies of the past” – specifically, “not offer(ing) military assistance (to the) notorious Kopassus special forces,” restricting it to other forms of security cooperation.

  ETAN believes “training Kopassas would violate US law which forbids training military units with unresolved human rights violations.” It’s meant to prevent future ones and encourage resolving others in the past. “This has clearly not happened.”

  Calling Kopassus training “a bad idea whose time has not come,” ETAN’s National Coordinator, John M. Miller said:

  Training Kopassas will set back efforts to achieve accountability for past and recent human rights violations and will do little or nothing to discourage future crimes…. It’s impossible to credit Kopassas with human rights reform when it retains active duty soldiers convicted of human rights violations…. For decades, the US military provided training and other assistance to Kopassas, despite the demonstrated failure of international assistance to improve its behavior. Its widely acknowledged abuses and criminal activity simply continued” to this day.

  Kopassas and Brimob have a long history of terrorizing civilians, committing atrocities, and undermining efforts for justice and human rights accountability. ETAN asked Obama to respect US law and the recommendation of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste (CAVR), urging nations to make military sales conditional on recipients’ adherence to international human rights laws. TNI, (including Kopassas) and Brimob systematically violate them.

  Since its 1952 founding, Kopassas has an unbroken reign of terror record that includes politically motivated arrests, assassinations/murders, massacres, brutal beatings, kidnappings/disappearances, bombings, and other crimes against humanity, still ongoing throughout the country.

  On March 21, investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported that:

  According to senior Indonesian officials and police and details from government files, the US-backed Indonesian armed forces (TNI), now due for fresh American aid, assassinated a series of civilian activists during 2009.

  They were part of a secret government program, “coordinated in part by an active-duty, US-trained Kopassus special forces General who has just acknowledged on the record that his TNI men had a role in the killings.”

  The news comes ahead of Obama’s expected announcement of new military aid, falsely claiming TNI and Kopassas “no longer murder civilians.” They always did and now do, according to a senior Indonesian official (unnamed for his safety), speaking out because he opposes the practice. 

  “TNI still practices political murder.” Yet America rewards it, despite being legally bound not to and to provide Congress with relevant information.

  Verified incidents include:

  – “a series of assassinations and bombings in Aceh (where) elections were being contested by the historically pro-independence Partia Aceh (PA),” the renamed former GAM (Free Aceh) rebel movement.

  In the run-up to the April elections, “At least eight PA activists were assassinated… according to officials with (specific) knowledge of the program” to suppress democratic speech in Aceh and throughout the country. 

  General Sunarko, the PANGDAM Aceh (TNI forces chief) coordinated the killings. He was recently “sent to Aceh by the President, Gen. Susilo, after having been the nationwide commander of Kopassas. (Previously, he was) chief of staff of Kostrad, the (TNI’s) huge Strategic Reserve Command that operates across the archipelago and is headquartered in Jarkata…”

  Earlier he oversaw occupied Timor militias, and “was a Kopassas intelligence chief there during the 1999 TNI terror…”

  Indonesian National Police (POLRI) confirmed the above account, but “with evident reluctance, even fear.” (POLRI) also kills and tortures civilians, and mounts joint task forces with TNI, (but TNI) has more guns and cash, and (they’re unencumbered by) POLRI’s political burden of having to claim that they’re enforcing the murder laws.”

  General Sunarko told Nairn “that he was an enthusiastic supporter of President Obama’s plan to boost aid to Kopassas and to TNI generally. (He said America and TNI have had) a long, close partnership that had ‘raised the capacity of TNI,’ and that Obama’s (full) restoration of aid would make for ‘a still more intimate collaboration.” Since the 1980s, he, in fact, was US-trained at various Indonesian sites along with many other TNI officers.

  In June, when Obama visits Indonesian leaders, “on the table is a big aid package for TNI, negotiated over recent months, the political centerpiece of which is an apparent renewal of open aid for Kopassas.”

  Among all Indonesian units implicated in past atrocities: 

  “those of Kopassas are the most celebrated, and, as their former commander, the US-trained Gen. Prabowo, once told me, they have historically been the unit most closely identified with Washington….Obama’s planned (restoration of aid) to Kopassas is now awaited by TNI as sweet vindication, and by many of (its) survivors” as the green light for terror.

  Other TNI components are also implicated, including “BAIS intelligence and the mainline regional and local commands, KODAM, KOREM, and KODIM, all of them, most importantly, reporting ultimately to” top TNI commanders and theirs in the government. 

  Importantly, whether or not Kopassas aid is restored, “TNI as a whole already has the green light,” 2,800 of its forces “being trained in the US (according to) Indonesia’s Defense Minister.” The Pentagon wants other weapons and equipment sales and US loans to “further empower TNI overall.”

  Also, in advance of Obama’s trip, “the Kopassas commanding general came to Washington and was welcomed by the Obama team.” Back home, they’re confident of being green-lighted to continue their old ways, ones never ended to receive full Obama administration backing.

  A Final Note

  On March 24, Nairn reported that the TNI threatened to arrest him for revealing its hit squad assassinations, “presumably on criminal defamation charges.” 

  On March 25, he added the following:

  The Indonesian news channel TV One is running text scrolls on their screen (saying the TNI) is either planning to or has already filed criminal charges against me. The crime, the scrolls say, consists of ‘defiling the good name of TNI.’ In today’s Indonesia it can be a crime to report assassinations, but, given that no Generals have gone to prison for such murders, it is not treated as a crime to commit them.

  Not is it in Washington to support or commit crimes of war, against humanity, or political killings. CIA and Pentagon hit squads do it daily.

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/expected-obama-administration-backing-for-indonesian-state-terror/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/a-call-for-common-sense-juan-coles-engaging-the-muslim-world/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/a-call-for-common-sense-juan-coles-engaging-the-muslim-world/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:30:51 +0000 Ron Jacobs http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=7262 When it comes to Washington’s dealings with the so-called Muslim world, common sense rarely enters the equation. Instead, fear, anger, and myth dominate the thinking behind those dealings. Al too often, in instances where Washington might otherwise attempt to negotiate a resolution in its favor if the people it was dealing with weren’t Muslim it seems that negotiations are not even considered. Prime examples of this reality are the beginnings of the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both US attacks on Iraq were preceded by ultimatums, not negotiation. Those ultimatums were accompanied by outright lies about Iraq’s intentions and capabilities. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was also preceded by a series of ultimatums that were called negotiations by Washington and the complicit US media. When the Taliban government in Kabul at the time attempted to honestly negotiate with Washington over the ultimatums it had been handed, the ultimatum was modified to include demands Washington knew Kabul could not meet. To use a sports analogy, every time it looked like Baghdad or Kabul might be able to meet the demands of Washington, the goalposts were moved. Washington had no intention of negotiating anything and its so-called negotiations were nothing more than preparations for war. A similar scenario seems to be at play in Washington’s dealings with Iran.

  Although the recently departed Bush administration made the approach described above into a diplomatic art form that drew more from television wrestling than any treatise on statecraft, they did not invent this approach. Nor will they be the last US administration to utilize it. Already, Obama’s Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has made comments regarding Iran that are equivalent to any threat made under George Bush’s watch. Furthermore, the men and women doing Obama’s work in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world are following the same trail already worn down by Bush’s people. Despite the hopes of millions who voted for Barack Obama, very little seems to have changed in the way Washington deals with its enemies. Into this impasse comes commentator and Mideast scholar Juan Cole and his new book titled Engaging the Muslim World.

  Nothing less than a call to use some common sense in dealing with that part of the world Washington defines as the Muslim World, Cole takes a sweeping look at the history of the region from Egypt to Iran; from Pakistan to Gaza; and asks what it is that causes Washington to deal with the peoples of these nations in a manner often quite different from the manner in which it deals with other nations. Cole ends each chapter with a brief series of suggestions as to how Washington might better approach the problems it believes exists with regard to the issues of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and the various Islamic popular movements that have all recently been placed on Washington’s enemies list. He asks questions that need to be asked yet seem to not even be considered. Why are US troops still in Iraq? Why does a nation (the US) that has the notion of religious freedom encoded into its constitution insist on making the religious beliefs of these nations a cause for enmity? If Washington won’t negotiate with its enemies, than who will it negotiate with? If Tel Aviv and Washington support democracy, why do they refuse to acknowledge the democratic victory of Hamas?

  Despite bringing up these issues, the real strength of Cole’s book is in the history he provides. Written for a western audience, the history surveyed here covers the genesis of the Islamist movements, their interaction with governments both local and internationally, yet it does not dwell on the religious aspects of those movements. instead, it discusses the political and economic role these movements have played and continue to play in the overall history of the nations involved. The anti-imperialist nature of the movements is discussed as is their popularity among the Muslim world precisely for their anti-imperialism. Underlying the historical narrative herein is a sincere and usually successful discussion of the complexities involved in that history. Unlike the dichotomous version of the world presented by the Bush administration and its allies, where Washington leads the good guys against the bad guys of Islam, Cole’s nuanced presentation of the history and current situation of US dealings with the Muslim world provide the reader with a clearer understanding of not only what is at stake, but also what is really going on. His perspective removes the often overwrought fears that have predominated mainstream US discourse on the subject at hand.

  If we are to have a future world where peace prevails, it will require Washington and its allied governments to coexist with the the part of the world we know as the “Muslim world.” The approach that demanded its subjugation to Washington’s whims has been shown to be bankrupt. To achieve coexistence, one must have understanding. Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World is the ideal primer.

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/a-call-for-common-sense-juan-coles-engaging-the-muslim-world/feed/ 6 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-intel-nominee-dennis-blair-lied-about-99-massacre-us-church-documents-show/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-intel-nominee-dennis-blair-lied-about-99-massacre-us-church-documents-show/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:30:15 +0000 Allan Nairn http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=6332 On the eve of his Senate confirmation hearing (due for 10am, Thurs. Jan 22), new information has emerged showing that Adm. Dennis Blair — President Obama’s nominee for US Director of National Intelligence — lied about his knowledge of a terrorist massacre that occurred before a pivotal meeting in which Blair offered support and US aid to the commander of the massacre forces.

  The massacre took place on at the Liquica Catholic church in Indonesian-occupied East Timor two days before Blair met face-to-face with the Indonesian armed forces commander, Gen. Wiranto (the massacre occurred on April 6, 1999; Blair and Wiranto met April 8).

  A classified US cable shows that rather than telling Wiranto to stop the killing, Blair invited Wiranto to be his guest in Hawaii, offered him new US military aid, and told the Indonesian general that he was “working hard” on his behalf, lobbying the US government to restore US military training aid for Indonesia. (That training had been cut off by Congress after the 1991 Dili, Timor massacre; for an account of the US cable and the April 8, ’99 Blair-Wiranto meeting see News and Comment posting of Jan. 6, 2009).

  Blair’s support at that crucial April 8 meeting buoyed Wiranto, and his forces increased the Timor killings, which came to include new attacks on churches and clergy, mass arsons, and political rapes. (For a detailed chronology based on a UN report, see News and Comment posting of Jan. 9, 2009).

  Since I disclosed the contents of that Blair-Wiranto meeting in a report filed in 1999 (see Allan Nairn, “US Complicity in Timor,” The Nation [US], Sept. 27, 1999, reprinted in the Jan. 6 ’09 News and Comment posting referenced above), Blair has defended himself by claiming that he went into the meeting with Wiranto not yet knowing of the Liquica massacre.

  The Associated Press reported this month, in a January 9 dispatch: “Blair has said he only learned of the massacre a few days after the meeting.” (Pamela Hess, “Obama to finalize national security team Friday,” Associated Press, Friday Jan. 9, 2009, 4:22 am ET; Blair made the same claim to the Washington Post, Dana Priest, “Standing Up to State and Congress,” September 30, 2000).

  But now, contemporaneous records have emerged — from the US Embassy in Jakarta, and from the Catholic Church — showing that the massacre was publicly described by Timor’s Bishop one day before the Blair-Wiranto meeting, and that while Blair was in Jakarta preparing for the meeting, US officials who were there with him were discussing the massacre in graphic detail.

  One written message from a US official even noted: “In the face of the scores of horrible slash wounds at Liquica, there are no surgeons to treat them.”

  The US official was referring to the fact that, as had been disclosed at the Timor Bishop’s April 7 press conference, dozens of refugees sheltering in the church had been hacked to death with machetes, but as Blair and Wiranto prepared to meet, some those slashed were still living.

  Another Jakarta dispatch by senior US personnel written prior to the Blair-Wiranto sit-down refers explicitly to Blair’s presence, to his impending meeting with Wiranto, and, crucially, to the detail and rough death toll of the already-known Liquica massacre.

  “[W]e have the CINCPAC here today (Command[e]r in Chief of the Pacific],” the message said, referring to Blair by title; and it stated, in regard to what Wiranto’s men had done: “Now we may have 40 people — who were cowering in a church — dead.”

  Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, had made the key facts of the massacre clear in his April 7, 1999 press conference, which took place the day before the Blair-Wiranto meeting.

  Belo was accompanied by Father Rafael Dos Santos, the Liquica pastor who survived the massacre. Their authoritative accounts received same-day coverage in the Western and local press and were also recounted in church bulletins and in US intelligence and diplomatic traffic.

  For Blair to claim that he did not know of these materials or his US colleagues’ discussions taking place all around him is to strain credulity to the breaking point, especially since he’s being nominated as intelligence chief, and since his meeting with Wiranto was cleared by Washington precisely to address the Timor crisis.

  Bishop Belo and Father Dos Santos said the following in their publicly broadcast remarks. This account is excerpted from “Timorese Bishop says more than 25 killed in church massacre,” DILI, East Timor, April 7 [1999], (AFP):

  Nobel peace laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo accused Indonesian-backed militia on Wednesday [April 7] of massacring more than 25 people in East Timor outside a church. Belo was speaking at a press conference with Father Rafael Dos Santos who described how refugees sheltering in his church and home at Liquisa [an alternate spelling of Liquica], 30 kilometers (20 miles) west of the Timorese capital Dili, were hacked down with machetes. Dos Santos said Indonesian mobile brigade police stood behind the militia during the attack, and fired into the air. When the attack began ‘people ran for cover wherever they could,’ he said. Some ran into his house and some into the church before being forced out when troops fired teargas into the buildings. ‘When they came out of the church, their eyes streaming, they were mown down, hacked to death with machetes, by the Besi Merah Putih (Red and White Iron militia),’ he said … Belo travelled to Liquisa earlier Wednesday to visit the site of the attack with Indonesia’s East Timor military commander Colonel Tono Suratman. ‘I have a paper from the military commander that there were 25 bodies inside the priest’s house,’ he said, ‘but according to other witnesses outside around the church there were other bodies. I don’t know exactly how many.’ Belo had been quoted by the Portuguese news agency Lusa on Tuesday [April 6] as saying he had first been informed by the Indonesian military of the deaths of 40 people in the church and five in the priest’s house… ‘Firstly I am sad, for what happened in Liquisa … secondly I am ashamed to be a citizen of the (Indonesian) republic. It has taken us back to the middle ages,’ Belo said.

  We shall now see where the Senate takes us.

  (For another contemporaneous — April 7, pre-Blair/Wiranto meeting — public report of the massacre see the report of Yayasan HAK, the leading independent East Timorese human rights group).

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-intel-nominee-dennis-blair-lied-about-99-massacre-us-church-documents-show/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:00:31 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=5642 The Wall Street Journal reported in its December 19 edition, that President-elect Barack Obama is slated to choose retired Vice Admiral Dennis Blair as his Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

  Blair’s choice as DNI would further cement Pentagon control over America’s intelligence apparatus. Currently, Air Force Lt. General Michael V. Hayden, a former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) is CIA Director while retired Vice Admiral and former chief at NSA, Mike McConnell is the current Director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the chief of America’s 16 spy agencies.

  The DNI position was established after Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-458), one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that “investigated” the September 11, 2001 attacks.

  Agencies overseen by the ODNI include: the Central Intelligence Agency; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency; Army Military Intelligence; Defense Intelligence Agency; Marine Corps Intelligence Activity; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Security Agency; Office of Naval Intelligence; the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration; the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

  Half of the agencies comprising the “Intelligence Community” over which the ODNI has statutory authority are embedded within the Pentagon. But this doesn’t quite tell the tale. ODNI is headquartered in McClean, Virginia, the capitol of militarist corporate grift. It employs some 1,500 people, largely drawn from the world of private intelligence contractors where top secret and above security clearances are marketable commodities. As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock wrote in his essential study, Spies for Hire:

  The bulk of this $50 billion [intelligence budget] is serviced by one hundred companies… The analogy between the intelligence industry and the military-industrial complex famously described by President Eisenhower in 1961 is fitting. By 2006, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 70 percent, or almost three-quarters, of the intelligence budget was spent on contracts. That astounding figure…means that the vast majority of the money spent by the Intelligence Community is not going into building an expert cadre within government but to creating a secret army of analysts and action officers inside the private sector. (Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 12-13)

  Among the firms embedded at ODNI are corporate heavy-hitters such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. A glance at the Project on Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) find all four firms prominently on display.

  Like McConnell, a ten-year veteran of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation where he served as a senior vice president overseeing the firm’s extensive contracts in the intelligence and national security areas, Blair currently sits on the boards of Tyco International, Iridium Satellite and the Center for New American Security, “a Washington think tank from which several Obama advisers hail,” according to the Journal.

  Obama’s choice for ODNI is well-placed to continue the mercenary “tradition” of intelligence outsourcing and what one can only describe as the corporatization of government. According to the Journal, some of the “tougher intelligence issues” the incoming Obama administration seeks to resolve “is weighing whether to propose the creation of a domestic intelligence agency,” modeled after Britain’s MI5.

  That’s worked out well in the UK, just ask the Irish! As investigative journalist Neil Mackay has documented in Glasgow’s Sunday Herald, both MI5 and the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) ran Ulster’s neofascist hit-squads during the dirty war period in Northern Ireland,

  Our investigations show that far from merely “turning” terrorists to work for the state, British military intelligence actually created loyalist murder gangs to operate as proxy assassins. They even cleared areas in which the gangs were operating of police and army, to allow them to carry out their hits and escape. (“How Britain created Ulster’s murder gangs,” Sunday Herald, 28 January 2007)

  Among the more stellar accomplishments of FRU and MI5 were the assassinations of civil rights attorneys Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson. Both were killed under “suspicious” circumstances. Finucane was shot and killed in front of his children in 1989, Nelson was the victim of a brutal car bomb attack a decade later. Responsibility for the murders were claimed respectively, by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVA). Both groups were under the operational control of FRU/MI5 handlers.

  More recently, members of the special police unit (SO19) which murdered Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, were trained by the British Army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment, comprised of veterans who worked closely with SAS, MI5, FRU and Special Branch hit squads in Northern Ireland.

  Like his British counterparts, Admiral Blair had more than a passing acquaintance with brutal counterinsurgency operations. Until his 2002 retirement from the Navy, Blair was the Commander in Chief of U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC). His tenure in that post however, was not without controversy.

  During the 1999 East Timorese scorched-earth campaign by the Indonesian military (TNI) and rightist militias controlled by the Army, Blair was instructed by President Clinton to demand that Indonesian Armed Forces Commander General Wiranto, shut down the death-squad operation. According to investigative journalist Allan Nairn, “the US military has, behind the scenes and contrary to Congressional intent, been backing the TNI.” Nairn reported that according to a leaked top secret cable, Blair continued the Pentagon’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the murderous Indonesian military.

  According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attaché in Jakarta, Admiral Blair “told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August ’99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and…selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures.”

  Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. (“US complicity in Timor,” The Nation, September 9, 1999)

  None of this is surprising, however. When the TNI seized power in 1965 in a violent takeover that murdered some 500,000-1,000,000 Indonesians accused of being “communists,” a monstrous purge repeated in 1975 when the TNI invaded East Timor with blessings from Washington, the CIA and the Pentagon were in the thick of it. As national security analyst William Blum documented in Killing Hope,

  Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of “Communist” operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over more than 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: “It was really a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

  “No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered, said Howard Federspiel, who in 1965 was the Indonesian expert at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “No one was getting very worked up about it.” (Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995, p. 194)

  Nor does it appear anyone is “getting very worked up about it” today.

  Blair’s cosy relationship with Indonesia’s murderous generals is referred to delicately in a Washington Post puff piece that claims the retired Admiral “is likely to face Senate questions about his role in maintaining U.S. military ties with Indonesia’s military during a period in which it engaged in human rights violations.”

  In the Pacific, he butted heads with the State Department and Congress over his desire to maintain ties with the Indonesian military despite its human rights record and its involvement in East Timor atrocities. “Militaries that are doing something bad at times go into their shell,” he said at the time. “It’s them against the world.” A more fruitful strategy, he insisted, is to make them feel a kinship with professional militaries. (Dana Priest, “Blair Is Steeped in the Ways Intelligence Works,” The Washington Post, December 20, 2008, A04)

  Nairn, the only Western journalist remaining in East Timor during the period, described how the TNI was “doing something bad at the time,” and why Blair was instructed to drop a dime on the generals:

  The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liquiça, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims’ flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor’s house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance. (Nairn, op. cit.)

  Given the U.S. military’s atrocious record in Afghanistan and Iraq, one can appreciate how Admiral Blair would have wished that the TNI “feel a kinship with professional militaries.”

  Business as Usual

  If there’s one inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from the dodgy culture of cronyism and corruption that pervades Washington, journalist Daniel Hopsicker hits the nail on its proverbial head: “Being connected means never having to say your sorry.” Where does Admiral Blair fit in to the mix?

  Blair served as the President of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which describes itself as “a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers to provide objective analyses of national security issues.” However, according to the Journal,

  he didn’t recuse himself from involvement in a study of a contract for the F-22 fighter jet. At the time, he was sitting on the board of a subcontractor on that program, EDO Corp. The inspector general found in a 2006 report that Mr. Blair violated the institute’s conflict-of-interest standards but didn’t influence the outcome for the study. Mr. Blair resigned from IDA over the matter, and he also stepped down from the EDO board. (Siobhan Gorman, “Obama Picks Military Man, Blair, as Top Spymaster,” The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2008)

  Sounds like more “change” from the “change president” to me! But other conflicts of interest are more troubling.

  Iridium Satellite LLC, is a privately held firm based in Bethesda, Maryland and is one of a nexus of companies that have extensive contracts with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the ultra-spooky outfit that designs and flies America’s fleet of military spy satellites. As ODNI, Blair would oversee NRO operations. As Tim Shorrock reported,

  With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC, contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the Intelligence Community (Spies for Hire, op. cit., p. 16)

  Iridium, according to its website, maintains a “constellation” of “66 low-earth orbiting (LEO), cross-linked satellites operating as a fully meshed network and supported by multiple in-orbit spares. It is the largest commercial satellite constellation in the world.”

  According to the firm, “through its own gateway in Hawaii, the U.S. DoD relies on Iridium for global communications capabilities.” Additionally, its Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services (EMSS) “is a DoD enhancement” that provides “end-to-end encryption” through DoD’s EMSS gateway for improved communications through the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN).

  When the company was sold by Motorola after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2000, current CEO Dan Colussy stepped in and rescued the firm from oblivion. Iridium went for a bargain price. Colussy’s group of investors, according to USA Today paid $25 million for a company that cost Motorola some $5 billion to create. Talk about a fire sale!

  But what Admiral Blair and other Iridium board members are not likely to trumpet during Senate hearings, USA Today reported in 2003,

  In an odd twist, the new Iridium is 24% owned by an investment firm controlled by Prince Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman of Saudi Arabia.

  The prince used to own a minority chunk of the old Iridium in partnership with the Saudi Binladen Group, the company run by Osama bin Laden’s family. So in a way, some of the money that gave a start to the world’s most notorious terrorist partly funded a communications system helping the U.S. military blast Saddam’s army. Now that’s globalization. (Kevin Maney, “Remember those ‘Iridium’s going to fail’ jokes? Prepare to eat your hat,” USA Today, April 9, 2003)

  Depending on one’s point of view there’s nothing odd at all, just business as usual!

  The company’s board of directors include, among others, Chairman of Iridium Holdings LLC, Dan Colussy, former CEO of United Nuclear Corporation and Chairman and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the defunct Pan American World Airlines. According to William Blum’s definitive account, “Pan Am has a long history of collaboration with the CIA.” Dennis Blair. Alvin B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the former Chairman of the Board of the investment banking firm Alex Brown Incorporated and Executive Director of the CIA. Steven Pfeiffer, a senior partner and Chair of the Executive Committee of the high-powered law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski. Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and two-term Governor of Pennsylvania. Lest we forget, amongst Ridge’s other “accomplishments” was his 1999 signing of a death warrant for framed-up journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, while Jamal’s case was on appeal.

  Pretty “smart” company Blair keeps! Which just goes to prove, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/feed/ 5 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/australias-hidden-empire/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/australias-hidden-empire/#comments Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:59:13 +0000 John Pilger http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/australias-hidden-empire/ When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable clichés of innocence — cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent “G’Day USA” campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade Americans that, unlike the empire’s problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George W Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, “sheriff of Asia.”

  That Australia runs its own empire is unmentionable; yet it stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the ancient hinterlands of the continent and across the Arafura Sea and the South Pacific. When the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologized to the Aboriginal people on 13 February, he was acknowledging this. As for the apology itself, the Sydney Morning Herald accurately described it as a “piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away . . . in a way that responds to some of its own supporters’ emotional needs, yet changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre.”

  Like the conquest of the Native Americans, the decimation of Aboriginal Australia laid the foundation of Australia’s empire. The land was taken and many of its people were removed and impoverished or wiped out. For their descendants, untouched by the tsunami of sentimentality that accompanied Rudd’s apology, little has changed. In the Northern Territory’s great expanse known as Utopia, people live without sanitation, running water, rubbish collection, decent housing and decent health. This is typical. In the community of Mulga Bore, the water fountains in the Aboriginal school have run dry and the only water left is contaminated.

  Throughout Aboriginal Australia, epidemics of gastroenteritis and rheumatic fever are as common as they were in the slums of 19th-century England. Aboriginal health, says the World Health Organisation, lags almost a hundred years behind that of white Australia. This is the only developed nation on a United Nations “shame list” of countries that have not eradicated trachoma, an entirely preventable disease that blinds Aboriginal children. Sri Lanka has beaten the disease, but not rich Australia. On 25 February, a coroner’s inquiry into the deaths in outback towns of 22 Aboriginal people, some of whom had hanged themselves, found they were trying to escape their “appalling lives.”

  Most white Australians rarely see this third world in their own country. What they call here “public intellectuals” prefer to argue over whether the past happened, and to blame its horrors on the present-day victims. Their mantra that Aboriginal infrastructure and welfare spending provide “a black hole for public money” is racist, false and craven. Hundreds of millions of dollars that Australian governments claim they spend are never spent, or end up in projects for white people. It is estimated that the legal action mounted by white interests, including federal and state governments, contesting Aboriginal native title claims alone covers several billion dollars.

  Smear is commonly deployed as a distraction. In 2006, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s leading current affairs program,Lateline broadcast lurid allegations of “sex slavery” among the Mutitjulu Aboriginal people. The source, described as an “anonymous youth worker”, was exposed as a federal government official, whose “evidence” was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and police. Lateline never retracted its allegations. Within a year, Prime Minister John Howard had declared a “national emergency” and sent the army, police and “business managers” into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A commissioned study on Aboriginal children was cited; and “protecting the children” became the media cry — just as it had more than half a century ago when children were kidnapped by white welfare authorities. One of the authors of the study, Pat Anderson, complained: “There is no relationship between the emergency powers and what’s in our report.” His research had concentrated on the effects of slum housing on children. Few now listened to him. Kevin Rudd, as opposition leader, supported the “intervention” and has maintained it as prime minister. Welfare payments are “quarantined” and people controlled and patronised in the colonial way. To justify this, the mostly Murdoch-owned capital-city press has published a relentlessly one-dimensional picture of Aboriginal degradation. No one denies that alcoholism and child abuse exist, as they do in white Australia, but no quarantine operates there.

  The Northern Territory is where Aboriginal people have had comprehensive land rights longer than anywhere else, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. The Howard government set about clawing them back. The territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, including huge deposits of uranium on Aboriginal land. The number of companies licensed to explore for uranium has doubled to 80. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the American giant Halliburton, built the railway from Adelaide to Darwin, which runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world’s largest low-grade uranium mine. Last year, the Howard government appropriated Aboriginal land near Tennant Creek, where it intends to store the radioactive waste. “The land-grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,” says the internationally-acclaimed Australian scientist and actvist Helen Caldicott, “but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump.”

  This “top end” of Australia borders the Arafura and Timor Seas, across from the Indonesian archipelago. One of the world’s great submarine oil and gas deposits lies off East Timor. In 1975, Australia’s then ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, who had been tipped off about the coming Indonesian invasion of then Portuguese East Timor, secretly recommended to Canberra that Australia turn a blind eye to it, noting that the seabed riches “could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia . . . than with [an independent] Timor.” Gareth Evans, later foreign minister, described a prize worth “zillions of dollars.” He ensured that Australia distinguish itself as one of the few countries to recognise General Suharto’s bloody occupation, in which 200,000 East Timorese lost their lives.

  When eventually, in 1999, East Timor won its independence, the Howard government set out to maneuver the East Timorese out of their proper share of the oil and gas revenue by unilaterally changing the maritime boundary and withdrawing from World Court jurisdiction in maritime disputes. This would have denied desperately needed revenue to the new country, stricken from its years of brutal occupation. However, East Timor’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, leader of the majority Fretilin party, proved more than a match for Canberra and especially its bullying foreign minister, Alexander Downer.

  Alkatiri demonstrated that he was a nationalist who believed East Timor’s resource wealth should be the property of the state, so that the nation did not fall into debt to the World Bank. He also believed that women should have equal opportunity, and that health care and education should be universal. “I am against rich men feasting behind closed doors,” he said. For this, he was caricatured as a communist by his opponents, notably the president, Xanana Gusmão, and the then foreign minister, José Ramos-Horta, both close to the Australian political Establishment. When a group of disgruntled soldiers rebelled against Alkatiri’s government in 2006, Australia readily accepted an “invitation” to send troops to East Timor. “Australia,” wrote Paul Kelly in Murdoch’s Australian, “is operating as a regional power or a potential hegemon that shapes security and political outcomes. This language is unpalatable to many. Yet it is the reality. It is new, experimental territory for Australia.”

  A mendacious campaign against the “corrupt” Alkatiri was mounted in the Australian media, reminiscent of the coup by media that briefly toppled Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Like the US soldiers who ignored looters on the streets of Baghdad, Australian soldiers stood by while armed rioters terrorised people, burned their homes and attacked churches. The rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, a murderous thug trained in Australia, was elevated to folk hero. Under this pressure, the democratically elected Alkatiri was forced from office and East Timor was declared a “failed state” by Australia’s legion of security academics and journalistic parrots concerned with the “arc of instability” to the north, an instability they supported as long as the genocidal Suharto was in charge.

  Paradoxically, on 11 February, Ramos-Horta and Gusmão came to grief as they tried to do a deal with Reinado in order to subdue him. His rebels turned on them both, leaving Ramos-Horta critically wounded and Reinado himself dead. From Canberra, Prime Minister Rudd announced the despatch of more Australian “peacemakers”. In the same week, the World Food Programme disclosed that the children of resource-rich East Timor were slowly starving, with more than 42 percent of under-fives seriously underweight — a statistic which corresponds to that of Aboriginal children in “failed” communities that also occupy an abundant natural resource.

  Australia is engaged in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, where its troops and federal police have dealt with “breakdowns in law and order” that are “depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities.” A former senior Australian intelligence officer calls these “wild societies for which intervention represents a blunt, but necessary instrument.” Australia is also entrenched in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rudd’s electoral promise to withdraw from the “coalition of the willing” does not include almost half of Australia’s troops in Iraq.

  At last year’s conference of the American-Australian Leadership Dialogue — an annual event designed to unite the foreign policies of the two countries, but in reality an opportunity for the Australian elite to express its historic servility to great power — Rudd was in unusually oratorical style. “It is time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” he said, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world . . . I look forward to more than working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom, in bringing about long-term changes to the planet.”

  The new sheriff for Asia had spoken.

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/australias-hidden-empire/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/suharto-the-model-killer-and-his-friends-in-high-places/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/suharto-the-model-killer-and-his-friends-in-high-places/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:00:31 +0000 John Pilger http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/suharto-the-model-killer-and-his-friends-in-high-places/ In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is an historically unique moment,” says one of them, “that is truly uniquely historical.” This is Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister. The other man is Ali Alatas, principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator, General Suharto. It is 1989, and the two are making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that allowed Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was “zillions of dollars.”

  Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Australian Parliament reported that “at least 200,000” had died under Indonesia’s occupation: almost a third of the population. And yet East Timor’s horror, which was foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was actually a sequel. “No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre.” He was referring to Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.

  To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer — “our” is used here advisedly. “One of our very best and most valuable friends,” Thatcher called him, speaking for the West. For three decades, the Australian, US and British governments worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto’s gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the British army and who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler and Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica “riot control” vehicles. Prevented by Congress from supplying arms direct, US administrations from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton, provided logistic support through the back door and commercial preferences.

  In one year, the British Department of Trade provided almost a billion pounds worth of so-called soft loans, which allowed Suharto buy Hawk fighter bombers. The British taxpayer paid the bill for aircraft that dive-bombed East Timorese villages, and the arms industry reaped the profits. However, the Australians distinguished themselves as the most obsequious. In an infamous cable to Canberra, Richard Woolcott, Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, who had been forewarned about Suharto’s invasion of East Timor, wrote: “What Indonesia now looks to from Australia . . . is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia. . . ”

  Covering up Suharto’s crimes became a career for those like Woolcott, while “understanding” the mass murderer came in buckets. This left an indelible stain on the reformist government of Gough Whitlam following the cold-blooded killing of two Australian TV crews by Suharto’s troops during the invasion of East Timor. “We know your people love you,” Bob Hawke told the dictator. His successor, Paul Keating, famously regarded the tyrant as a father figure. When Indonesian troops slaughtered at least 200 people in the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, East Timor, and Australian mourners planted crosses outside the Indonesian embassy in Canberra, foreign minister Gareth Evans ordered them destroyed. To Evans, ever-effusive in his support for the regime, the massacre was merely an “aberration”. This was the view of much of the Australian press, especially that controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose local retainer, Paul Kelly, led a group of leading newspaper editors to Jakarta, fawn before the dictator.

  Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto’s takeover of Indonesia in 1965-6 as “the model operation” for the American-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” he wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.” The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. “British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time . . . There was a deal, you see.”

  The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.” In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened.” Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil.”

  Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, “Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?”

  “No, not in the slightest,” he replied. “It never entered my head.”

  “I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Doesn’t that concern extend to humans?”

  “Curiously not.”

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/suharto-the-model-killer-and-his-friends-in-high-places/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/imposed-hunger-in-gaza-the-army-in-indonesia/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/imposed-hunger-in-gaza-the-army-in-indonesia/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:42:31 +0000 Allan Nairn http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/imposed-hunger-in-gaza-the-army-in-indonesia/ The UN World Food Program estimates that, in the wake of Israel’s cutoffs,”Food imports into the Gaza Strip are only enough to meet 41 percent of demand,” (paraphrase by the UN-sponsored news agency, IRIN. IRIN, Jerusalem, “Only 41 percent of Gaza’s food import needs being met,” 6 December 2007), ie. Gazan food intake has been cut by a shock 59 percent.

  Even a small cut in food consumption can stunt or kill already hungry people, particularly infants in the brain-development stage.

  The UN sponsored IRIN news service reports that “Israeli travel and trade restrictions have led to a decline in purchasing power in Gaza. A recent WFP survey found that of the 62 percent of people who said they had reduced their expenditure in recent months, 97 percent reported a decrease in spending on clothing and 93 percent on food.”

  IRIN cites the case of Naheda Ghabaien, “a mother of five in the Beach refugee camp in central Gaza” whose husband “used to work three or four days a week bringing home about US$10 a day” but now, post sanctions, “only works a few days a month.”

  At least the Ghabaien family is getting some aid, unlike so many other nutritionally threatened people around the world. Every twelve weeks, another UN agency (UNRWA) gives them “amounts of rice, flour, oil and sugar that can last for four to six weeks. The family rarely eats meat anymore, relying mostly on vegetables.”

  “‘When the agency food runs out,’” IRIN quotes Naheda Ghabaien as saying, “we buy the food we need on credit from the grocer. When my husband works, most of his daily earnings go to settling the debt.”

  The news agency notes that “(a)id workers say these sorts of coping mechanisms are reaching their limits” and cannot keep yielding food for Gaza’s straitened people much longer.

  Israel’s government says that its sanctions are legal — ie. are not a disproportionate reprisal, which is a war crime — so it is logically saying that these food and other cutoffs are not worse than the Gazan rocketing of Israel.

  So, if that is the case, Israel should be willing to agree to a simple switch: Gaza gets the power and right to effectively cut off 59% of Israel’s food (as well as being able to shut its electricity, fuel, communications, medical supplies, travel rights, airspace etc.), and Israel gets the right to rocket Gaza as Gaza has rocketed Israel, ie. in a manner that has killed Israeli civilians at the rate of roughly one every four months.

  Would the Israeli government agree to this bargain that is strictly based on its own legal logic?

  Of course not. They’d be foolish if they did. They already bomb and shell Gaza, and other places, at will, killing Palestinan and Arab civilians at roughly the rate of ten for each Israeli civilian (for statistics within the Occupied Territories, see the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, http://www.btselem.org), and if anyone were to cut more than half of Israel’s food, as Israel is now doing to Gaza, that place would immediately be leveled by Israel, and/or the United States.

  As in so many other cases, power, not a power-wielder’s own legal logic, prevails.

  In Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country ostensibly critical of Israel — but whose killer armed forces have discreetly taken Israeli aid — the President, Gen. Susilo, is in the process of appointing his country’s army commander as the overall armed forces chief, even though it is not the army’s turn in the supposed rotation.

  Reuters, Jakarta (November 28, 2007) calls it “a move some observers say will ensure [Susilo] the support of the powerful military in the run-up to 2009 elections” (also see AFP, Jakarta, December 6, 2007, which draws the same conclusion) which is required since, as political Jakarta knows, no one wins and governs without the army.

  The twist is that, a few years ago, when Indonesia started putting in non-army men (ie. air force and navy men) as armed forces commanders, this was hailed as progress and reform by the regime’s academic and political apologists.

  Their somewhat self-incriminating argument was that since most civilian killings were done by the army (which is true), things would be better with the navy (that helped abduct many tens of thousands in post-’99-vote Timor, and this year did a massacre in Java [see posting of November 13, 2007, "Vomiting to Death on a Plane. Arsenic Democracy."]) or the air force (that bombed Timor and Aceh) in charge.

  If they believed their own logic they should now say that this appointment of an army man is a regression, a conclusion unlikely to be drawn, since the US Congress is just now deciding just how many millions they are going to give these very armed forces.

  In fact, the State Department this week was putting out urgent queries around Washington that make it sound as if they are planning to openly aid Kopassus, the most notoriously sadistic army unit, and, historically, the most heavily US-trained one.

  (Gen. Prabowo, the most notorious of all Kopassus commanders — and that is saying a lot — did his training at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, among other places, and, his murderous record notwithstanding, was once cited in a US Embassy memo as an example of the success of US training, specifically the IMET [International Military Education and Training] program. Prabowo once complained to an American that all this had been a mixed blessing for him since, he said, some other Indonesian generals made fun of him because he spoke English so well; he said they called him “The American”).

  The phone number of the US Congress is 202-224-3121, the members of the deciding Conference Committee are listed below, and the East Timor & Indonesia Action Network, ETAN ( http://etan.org/) has documented background information and action suggestions, as a starting point.

  Activism actually beat the US Executive (under presidents Bush I and Clinton) and, through military aid cutoffs forced via Congress, helped to bring down Suharto and free occupied Timor.

  (Suharto’s old security chief, Adm. Sudomo once told me that Suharto fell because they failed to open fire early and thoroughly on the Jakarta student demonstrators, because they feared further US aid cutoffs, as were imposed after the ’91 Dili, Timor massacre. As I left his vast cement-bunker house, adorned with pictures of him and the US golfer, Arnold Palmer, I realized that he probably hadn’t paid attention to who he was telling this story to, since on the way out he gave me a book that condemned me for my actions at Dili, and after.)

  Those activist victories were possible in part because Indonesia was not a Washington priority. It was handled mainly by middle-level bureaucrats. The big boys were busy with other killer forces. Likewise, our entire fierce nine-year Congressional aid-cut struggle was ignored by the US corporate media, which was in a way frustrating, but in another way perhaps good, since that may have delayed the counter-mobilization by Jakarta, US corporations, and the US diplomatic/ military/ intelligence establishment that didn’t get serious until 1994 with the launching of the US-Indonesia Society lobby group (in which Gen. Prabowo had a hand), and other initiatives.

  Israel/ Palestine is an entirely different matter, top of the government, media, and counter-mobilization lists. Efforts to change that policy cannot hope to steal a march under the political radar. But the distinguished — and therefore, often vilified — scholar of the matter, Norman G. Finkelstein (highly praised by the most serious figures, eg. Raul Hilberg, Avi Shlaim, while, at the same time, lied about by others) believes that a slow shift in US opinion is underway, starting, interestingly, among younger US Jews.

  Power is one thing. Fact and logic are another. They should not be confused.

  The sooner people at our end, the trigger-end, honestly open their eyes and simply see, the sooner people at the exit-end — where the bullets and food-cuts come out — will stop having their own eyes forcibly and permanently closed by death.

  * * * * *

  Members of the US House – Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Conference Committee currently deciding on major parts of US military aid to Indonesia:

  House Democrats:

  Nita M. Lowey (NY), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chair [a critic of the Indonesian military, but has been under strong pressure from the Executive Branch and from her subcommittee's ranking Republican, Frank Wolf (VA); as with Sen. Leahy (VT), how strong a stand she takes will be crucial]
  Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (IL)
  Adam Schiff (CA)
  Steve Israel (NY)
  Ben Chandler (KY)
  Steven R. Rothman (NJ)
  Barbara Lee (CA)
  Betty McCollum (MN)
  Dave Obey (WI), Ex Officio, Appropriations Committee Chair [former strong critic of the Indonesian military, less involved in recent years]

  House Republicans:

  Frank R. Wolf (VA), Ranking Member [generally interested in human rights, but formerly a critic of the Indonesian military, and now a key supporter of them]
  Joe Knollenberg (MI)
  Mark Steven Kirk (IL) [former State Department official who professes interest in human rights]
  Ander Crenshaw (FL)
  Dave Weldon (FL)
  Jerry Lewis (CA), Ex Officio, Appropriations Committee Ranking Member

  Senate Democrats:

  Robert Byrd (WVA), Appropriations Committee Chair
  Patrick Leahy (VT), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chair [most important critic of the Indonesian military, but much depends on how strong a stand he takes]
  Daniel Inouye (HI) [single most important backer of the Indonesian military]
  Tom Harkin (IA)
  Barbara Mikulski (MD)
  Richard Durbin (IL)
  Tim Johnson (SD)
  Mary Landrieu (LA)
  Jack Reed (RI)

  Senate Republicans:

  Thad Cochran (MS), Appropriations Committee Ranking Member
  Judd Gregg (NH), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Ranking Member
  Mitch McConnell (KY), [longtime supporter of the Indonesian military]
  Arlen Specter (PA)
  Robert Bennett (UT)
  Christopher Bond (MO),[current lead Republican backer of the Indonesian military, and the Indonesian presidential intelligence agency, BIN]
  Sam Brownback (KS), [a Republican often receptive on human rights issues]
  Lamar Alexander (TN)

  All can be reached through the US Congressional Switchboard: 202-224-3121

  ]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2007/12/imposed-hunger-in-gaza-the-army-in-indonesia/feed/ 2