The work was advising a joint venture, errands like gauging risk and return, or squeezing ministerial face for a competitive edge. Life went on throughout the Congo war, and so did commerce. The trick is to find a niche on the ragged edges of the war. If you live in a place where capital markets are ropy, war torn countries are not a bad place to salt your long-term capital away. Some Israelis were in on the joint venture: Israelis don’t mind war, when the other side is helpless, and in this war almost everyone was helpless. A farmer’s rusty panga could be an overwhelming force. The Mai Mai used spears to great effect. Molars and penises served as weapons, for cannibalism and rape.

The war still smolders today, in Kivu, Ituri, and Katanga. It causes us no disquiet. But what if we got greedy for peace? What if peace changed from a heartwarming word to a remorseless objective like efficiency or profit? What if we demanded more and more?

Well, it’s happening, and it makes our rulers nervous. In the Wikileaks cable dump, American diplomats reticently quote a novel term, the right to peace. Officials from Spain and Russia invoke it. The UN Secretary General is heard to say it. The conjunction of two freighted terms sounds like heartwarming blather, but from the mouths of shrewd statesmen, it’s of import. Even the most aristocratic Hotchkiss/Harvard meathead will begin to think that something is afoot.

For our war machine and its government, peace is always trouble. In the run up to World War I our government sent a presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs,  to jail. His crime was opposing conscription. Socialist Charles Schenk was convicted of espionage. Schenk got a look at the Constitution, and pointed out that conscription looks a lot like unconstitutional involuntary servitude. Back then our antisemitism was for Jews, not Arabs, and we sent a few Jews up for twenty years. It seems they threw some leaflets out a window. In English and, insidiously, Yiddish, the alien anarchists denounced our invasion of Russia. They called for an end to arms production.

In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Smith Act to silence commie putschists and their nonaggression, and in the traditional patriotic frenzy that invariably cascades into backwoods slapstick, Mississippi took the concept and ran with it, crafting its own national security law. They convicted some Jehovah’s Witnesses of questioning the point of war. In this case, though, peace might not have been what tore it. In what was probably the crucial atrocity, the Dixie heretics also linked the origins of our Pledge of Allegiance to the convent-school rites of French Papists.  In Mississippi, that’s a clear and present danger.

This embarrassing arc of American history still bends toward idiocy, with every provincial rent-a-cop and stewardess a homeland security hero. Arabic lettering on a t-shirt gets you kicked off a plane and questioned (though nowadays Yiddish is mostly OK.) The nation teems with deputized authorities demanding fatuous reverence to our proletarian cannon fodder and their hopeless anti-terror snipe hunts.

It’s not quite classic Orwell: to patriotic Americans, war may not be peace, but peace is insidious war. The government charged a Vietnam War protester with sedition for grabbing the leg of the recruit who stepped on him. It seems the mere word peace can be seditious. “Make love for peace… We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know.” John Lennon’s mischievous wordplay triggered a federal investigation — and eventually, a traditional American lone nut came along and solved the nation’s problem.

The war on peace is heating up again. Led by Patrick Fitzgerald, hero of the wet-squib Scooter Libby trial, federal agents infiltrated peace groups, and squads of paramilitary commandos raided their homes.  The pretext was an edict criminalizing support for terror, an ingenious Ermächtigungsgestz that could put Jimmy Carter away. The guilty peaceniks were foiled by state-of-art security innovations: from their elite squadron of burly termagants to the FBI deployed fake lesbians as agents provocateur.

To observe the 2011 United Nations International Day of Peace, the US scheduled the launch of a Minuteman III ICBM. True to American traditions of hearty redneck defiance, we were to spend the day of global ceasefire plinking at the Marshall Islands, our backyard tin can target. But word got out, and with a week to go the government postponed the launch, spoiling some unsung Air Force Strangelove’s fun.

Peace was all right in the old days. Back then it was exclusively the bailiwick of states, a stateman’s concern that was above their subjects’ pay grade. The League of Nations’ remit was the peace of the world. The members were states, monolithic black boxes interacting for the peoples sealed inside. The scope of their covenant was international law and treaty. To safeguard peace, the covenant provided for dispute resolution: by arbitration, by a new International Court of Justice, or by unanimous decision of the Great War’s victors in Council. The League bound its member states into a defensive alliance. The League’s covenant mandated disarmament and arms control.

The covenant looked inside states for one purpose only. Its disarmament provisions were based on a shrewd appraisal of the danger of war profiteering: “The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections.”

Objectionable or not, war profiteering is the prerogative of America’s ruling class, and so Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman built us a top-quality enemy to fight. The two bankers were discreet stewards for Germany’s munitions, mining, and slaving interests.  Bush’s Nazi clients blew the League to smithereens.

The war made the allies nostalgic for peace. Perhaps they even idealized peace a bit, for they imagined it without misery. In June 1941, fourteen allies set out The Saint James Agreement, declaring:

the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security; and that it is their intention to work together, and with other free peoples, both in war and peace to this end.

The US had not yet joined the war and did not have occasion to sign on. But that summer, in The Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged to “lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.” The peace they promised to all men in all lands would let them “live out their lives in freedom from fear and want,” and it specifically included improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security. You could tell the commies had them running scared.

The United Nations first came on the scene not as an institution but as a group of belligerents. The Washington Declaration was their war cry. In the Washington Declaration the United Nations threw ‘human rights’ into the mix, more as a bonus of victory than of peace. Enumerated rights were then just a gleam in the eyes of Roosevelt’s Brains Trust, but rights were soon to take on a life of their own and complicate peace.

The Moscow Declaration of 1943 looked ahead to the end of war, to arms control and an international organization. The unnamed organization would keep the peace “with the least diversion of the world’s human and economic resources for armaments.” That principle carried through to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals defining the United Nations. Swords were to give way to ploughshares.  It was official. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference institutionalized well-being as part of peace.

The UN Charter was shot through with peace, as a purpose and a principle, but the institutional arrangements for pacific settlement of disputes left societies and associations out of it, focusing on states. Civil society was allowed a look in only on economic and social matters.

Peace waxed and waned. By 1984, the US had renewed its arms race. America planned to stud Europe with nuclear missiles. Europe reacted with mass protests for a nuclear freeze. The United Nations General Assembly weighed in with Resolution 39/11. Its Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace made explicit use of pervasive nuclear fears. The onus of peace-building was to fall on state policies and international dispute resolution, but the impetus had come from below. President Reagan blamed Soviet agents but he came to embrace arms reduction.

War returned to Europe and we bombed it to a frenzy in the Balkans, trying to help. The horn of Africa got out of hand too. America swaggered into the Somalia saloon to break it up and came back out through the window ass-up. This wasn’t what we had in mind at all.

Pacifists concluded that peace was too important to be left to the authorities. The Hague Agenda proposed the New Diplomacy, a collaborative process for citizens, pressure groups, and states. To put human and ecological needs ahead of national sovereignty and borders, they would “wrest peace-making away from the exclusive control of politicians and military establishments.”  The New Diplomacy dovetailed with the old pinko tradition of internationalism from below, which aimed to weaken states by linking different peoples across borders.

In 2000 the General Assembly adopted the Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace.  As the UN members redefined it, peace is not merely the absence of conflict. It’s a process, a treadmill of dialogue and conflict resolution. Fractious masses get involved. No more master strokes of deft diplomacy, no more parceling out nations on scraps of paper, fifty-fifty, ninety-ten — the Great Men of Yalta were dead, and the world they left us was bursting at the seams. The genial shipboard tea or walk in the woods was now to be supplanted by a bewildering welter of responsibilities, some defined in treaty law, some not. Tolerance. Solidarity. Cooperation. Pluralism. Cultural diversity. Dialogue. Understanding.

It could have been terribly cumbersome but the Supreme Court installed George Bush, scion of war profiteers and secret agents, the Saudis stuck a thumb in America’s eye, and that took care of the Culture of Peace.

The peaceniks saw it coming. They were ready. The world let the first illegal war slide: America milked universal sympathy to get a Security Council resolution authorizing nothing, and waved it like a banner as they marched off to war in Afghanistan. Worked like a charm, thanks to Americans’ blissful ignorance of the supreme law of the land. No one here knows what UN Charter Chapter VII says.  It never came up.

But when America tried that again, with Iraq, the world dug in its heels with the largest coordinated mass protest in history. February 15th, 2003 saw public assemblies in 794 localities worldwide.¹

In America a lot of militarist energy went into mocking pacifists as mournful chubbies holding candles, begging pardon for things they had no hand in. Jingoes derided as affectations their gentle demeanor and the compassionate sidelong inclination of their heads. America’s home-front warriors poked at their Achille’s heel: their inner peace was ineffectual here, in the land of war and death. But the new pacifists are hard-nosed guerreros wielding the disruptive potential of law and institutions against the American rogue state. Their brand of peace would drop a wrench into the works of our national meat grinder, impoverishing death merchants, dispossessing kleptocrats, and bringing murderous authorities to book. They set guns against butter in a battle to the death.

The UN set out to make peace an endless chore of states. To do it they went back to their Atlantic Charter roots. The UN Human Rights Commission got into the peace business with Resolution 2002/71. Peace was vital for human rights, they declared. War was a competing claim on resources that states need to improve living conditions, as required by social and economic rights. The Commission tied peace to development, subordinating guns to butter.

Making war and social justice an either/or choice helped consolidate dissent in the US. Now a common ideal brought the peace movement together with the more rambunctious sorts who besieged the WTO or spiked trees. Labor groups took up the antiwar cause. The peace movement gained troublemaking know-how, clever means of escalating pressure. United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) coalesced, clogging the streets of Washington in 2003, falling in with 3 million people worldwide in 2004, and sparking protests in 750 US cities in March 2005.² Without losing focus they opposed trade pacts, Israeli genocide, and the boot we keep on dark-skinned peoples’ necks. Now there was something for everyone in peace. The October 2011 protests explicitly link our Afghan war to current economic deprivation.

Peace as social justice means the outrage never ends. Peace as not-war had kept pacifists reactive, their impetus dependent on imminent rumors of war. Antiwar energy flags when wars stop, or as they drag on. In America, party loyalty undercuts opposition to the wars your party starts or inherits. Political opposition to the Iraq war was tamped down once it had served its purpose as a Democratic party cause célèbre.

The work of linking peace with social justice brought the movement in America in line with the rest of the world. In America, a comprehensive view of law and human rights was confined to two distinct elements of society: governing elites and native peoples. By contrast, outside the US, peace and social justice movements had long fought for all the same things. Their governments do not shout down the UN or the ICC, so their societies could see human rights entwining with humanitarian law. For the rest of the world, questions of war and peace naturally involve rights: civil and political, economic, social and cultural. The European Social Forum spilled a million antiwar demonstrators into the streets in their usual overwhelming variety. The Jakarta Peace Consensus planned a people’s war-crimes tribunal to combat malefactors including neo-liberalism, corporate looters, the WTO and the World Bank.

It was not unheard of in America to link injustice and war. Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, “A Time to Break Silence,” did just that, defining war as an enemy of the poor and rejecting the distinction between rights as a cause and peace. But then the Memphis police disbanded King’s security detail, a traditional American lone nut came along, and we heard nothing more of that for a long time.

Now, with peace propounded as a human right, legal experts worked to present peace and justice standards to the General Assembly. In 2006 a Spanish human-rights coalition met to write The Luarca Declaration on the Right to Peace.  The document left primary responsibility for peace with the UN and its member states, but it stepped back from war, as King did, to consider the desperation or predation that drives it, and linked war to the economic order. It defined human security in material terms as “instruments, means, and resources.” To permit mass participation it reaffirmed a right to truthful information. Since the most effective curb on war is populations dragging their feet, the Luarca Declaration asserted individual and collective rights of disobedience, objection, and denunciation.

The Luarca declaration spurred a hundred conferences and seminars in fifty cities worldwide. Local and regional governments signed on, along with universities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The ferment spawned Right to Peace declarations in Bilbao, Barcelona, La Plata, Yaounde, Bangkok, Johannesburg, Sarajevo, Alexandria, and Havana.

In June 2010 the UN Human Rights Council formally requested a draft declaration from The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace. Four experts drafted the Santiago Declaration as a UN General Assembly Resolution.

When founding mother Virginia Gildersleeve wrote the soaring preamble of the UN Charter, the self-evident poesy of it left peace undefined. The Right to Peace movement now defined peace as the sum of all the specific requirements of UN charter documents and treaties. Since each UN body justified its mission as a means to the end of peace, it was easy to trace the legal authority back to the UN. UN members created the Human Rights Commission because rights and freedoms are requisite for peace. They created the World Health Organization and UNESCO because health and development are requisite for peace. They created the International Labor Organization because peace takes social justice. They created the Food and Agriculture Organization because hunger threatens peace. It’s all there in black and white in the constitutions of the UN agencies, adopted by the world by acclamation.

Peace then encompasses all state duties set out in the UN Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and evolving humanitarian law. Any lapse of the state through overreach or neglect violates the people’s right to peace, even absent war. Peace is a continuous series of popular demands, an unending test for the state, a regimen that saps the energy for war. Under this conception of the right to peace, the simple two-finger gesture holds our government to the detailed, objective standards of the civilized world. In a word or a sign, peace confronts our state with its manifold failure.

The Right to Peace provides a unifying framework for the growing body of treaty law that subordinates the state to its people. It has much in common with another effort at synthesis, a doctrine promoted by the UN Secretariat called Responsibility to Protect. But Responsibility to Protect is focused on averting the most serious crimes. By contrast, peace is a continuum. There is no threshold for minor failings. The Right to Peace means each state must always do its best. Oppression, exclusion, and impoverishment all compromise peace.

Peace so defined is a right for people and a duty of states. The Santiago Declaration sets out specific implications of the right to peace. Several of the declaration’s clauses mean trouble for our exceptional American state.

Article 2: People have a right to education that embeds peace in their culture, and helps them resolve conflicts. This provision is a straight forward affirmation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 26 (2). The disruptive impact of this demand is fairly clear.

This is the land of Columbine and Virginia Tech, where massacre is practically an intramural sport. Competence in peacemaking would be something of a wrench here too, where conflict resolution is the purview of jack-booted school police who reprove their errant charges with handcuffs and Tasers, and of the paramilitary commandos who besieged a school in the war on tasteless bathroom pranks. When the yellow school bus lets them out under the protective wing of the No Passing sign, our men in blue shoot them dead. Yet it’s not all strictness and discipline. For tiny tots there are exciting helicopter visits from the National Guard for sanitized war play (we don’t make them play at pulping their little Pakistani pen pals from drones, not until they’re older.)

Extracurricular brutality aside, peace as a subject of inquiry is suspect here. The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a standardized course of study for the children of the international technocratic elite. It covers science, math, and the humanities. Despite its suspicious foreign provenance, the IB’s comprehensive rigor won the endorsement of the rock-ribbed jingoes of George W. Bush’s Education Department. The IB is an optional curriculum for No Child Left Behind. Today US schools conduct more than 1,300 IB programs, more than any other country. But the coursework includes subversive matter such as human rights and peace. In Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Utah, and even in the shadow of the imperial capital, Fairfax County, Virginia, the IB has come under attack.

The IB is not Judeo-Christian enough for Pennsylvania youth. Or it’s anti-American. Or Marxist. So say a slate of school board crackpots pledged to defend American values against their pupils’ desire to get into a decent college.  In the Republican gentile-Chełm of Fairfax, Virginia, the IB stands accused of encouraging “disarmament, socialism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.” Peace and conflict studies were a particular sticking point, though experimental science also rankled. The Fairfax cosmopolites smelled international conspiracy in the IB’s fancy foreign books. In a woebegone town in Minnesota, parents fear the IB will suborn all the above-average children to atheism and one-world government.

In their struggle against popular demand, canny nativists have learned to attack the IB in technocratic terms. The Pennsylvania board took issue with the higher indirect costs of the small classes enjoyed by the ambitious minority. IB courses don’t pack their classrooms tight enough, it seems. Utah eccentric Margaret Dayton slashed IB funding out of a hazy sense that it was Not Invented Here (and to be fair, it does slight indigenous local traditions such as polygamy and messianic cults.) The problem is, she says, America is special. It needs special education.

Factional strife in provincial backwaters has confined peace education to more cosmopolitan cultural centers. The philosophical underpinning of peace has become one more class marker to stratify our society. A grounding in rule of law and world-standard governance is most sought after in exclusive private schools and in the segregated districts of the dominant class. The privileged students who learn it are absorbed into the ruling elite, where they can use peace as our government intended, as a weapon to attack other countries and justify our wars. The masses remain largely insulated from subversive ideas about social justice, dignity or development.

As a result, it falls to civil society to inculcate a culture of peace. UFPJ stresses education for its organizing cadres. The International Congress on the Human Right to Peace has drawn religious organizations into a consultation process. Armed with the Right to Peace, these sects can ground the sentimental notion of peace in dispassionate rights and rule of law. The result is a well-established threat to the state, the sort of thing that got the old-time Christians crucified. In Latin America, US clients exterminated bumptious exponents of liberation theology for decades. When the Berlin Wall fell, we let freedom ring with a mass murder of Salvadoran clergy by assassins we trained at Fort Bragg.  Just this year in US satellite Colombia, unknown assailants bagged us six priests. The Week of Peace had just ended when they chopped the last one up.  Inside America, repression is somewhat less straight forward.

Other articles are also problematic. Take Article 3: People must have freedom from fear and want. States must protect you from violence or threat of any kind. You cannot be reduced to desperation. This is pure old-time Americana. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

Or take Article 4: Our right to peace entails development, including freedom from unjust debt, and release from the sort of unfair order that leads to poverty and exclusion. We have a right to environmental safety, free from weapons that damage the earth.

Or Article 6: You must be permitted to resist oppression by breach of law or rights. War propaganda is prohibited – no more indoctrination in the glory or necessity of war.

Security, development, and freedom are always just around the corner. Our state is beavering away for peace, we’re told, but we can’t have it yet. The ill-will of a few dozen mad bombers on the other side of the world requires a globe-girdling police state, Soviet-style secret law, automated blanket surveillance, and abject deference to arbitrary authority. Resistance to war and oppression must be punished as a threat to our existence. So freedom from fear is a luxury we can’t afford.

As for freedom from want, don’t even think it. We’re tapped out, having gone deeper into debt to give bankers several trillion. The bankers needed it, you see, they ran their firms into the ground. The bankers took it home, every last trillion, and now you have to pay it back. So social security has to go. Kiss your right to health goodbye. A decent home and living? Maybe someday.

So after paying for the bare necessities of overwhelming, crushing might, a totalitarian police state, and state-sanctioned predatory fraud, there’s no money left for peace. The sheer spendthrift recklessness of putting human security first would ruin this state, which defines itself as anything but peace.

The Santiago Declaration has an answer to that objection. Under Article 7, States must disarm at their people’s demand, and fairly distribute the resources freed for equitable development, poverty reduction, and protection of the vulnerable. States may not delegate their war powers to private institutions.

But don’t the authorities know best? They have secret information. That dodge fails the test of Article 8: You have the right to information, to see war coming and to freely denounce it. States may not manipulate you into backing war. Your peaceful culture must not be suppressed.

When driving us to war in Iraq, the US government relied on suppression of information for a veneer of legitimacy. Its best trick was illegal collusion with its satellite Columbia, which held the UN Presidency at the time. Colombia accepted the IAEA report on Iraqi compliance with disarmament, and immediately turned it over to US officials, who took it home and censored it. US spooks cut out three-quarters of it and came back to pass out bowdlerized pap to an incredulous Security Council. The resulting preparatory fog of war concealed the profiteering that impelled the war and helped Colin Powell’s whoppers pass the laugh test.

To pull this stunt the US government flouted Articles 19 and 20 of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR). The CCPR binds our state as treaty law, as we acknowledged when we signed up. It trumps our neo-Soviet secrecy rules. But the CCPR’s sole sanction is shame, and international disgrace was no deterrent to a government bent on war.

So the Santiago Declaration enlists the people to turn over our rogue state’s rocks. As the US went to war in Iraq, whistleblowers and foreign journalists gave the world a glimpse of what our government had to hide. Now independent entities such as Wikileaks help officials maintain their integrity and air the putrefaction of our wars. American activists such as David House risk vindictive prosecution to free our information.

You’d think there ought to be a role here for the authors of Pacem in Terris, with their universal viewpoint, but there is not. Ask the Catholics about cultural suppression. In Vatican doctrine, economic and social rights, the means of life, are as much a part of Catholicism as the right to life. But Catholic institutions and associations in America have been muzzled with respect to those bolshy rights. Perhaps it’s to do with the pyramid of priestly skulls down south. While the Catholic colleges do work of unique value, on UN reform and human rights – real advocacy, not foreign-service Pecksniffery – the laity by and large gets nothing out of human rights but monomaniacal fetus-hugging. The syncretic genius of the universal church makes room for lots of flag worship too. Say what you like about the Catholic Church, they certainly know how to ingratiate themselves with primitive cultures.

Consider Articles 9 and 10: Refugees and emigres must be protected when their human security is threatened. To safeguard their rights, they may participate in public affairs wherever they reside.

These articles would infringe quite drastically on American cultural identity. We love to torture migrants.  It’s the national pastime. It keeps us in touch with our genocidal folkways and helps insulate us from the global South’s dangerous ideas.

Under Article 11, victims have a right to know the truth, and a right to justice, including identification and punishment of those responsible, and redress, compensation and reparation. All their rights must be restored. This comes straight from the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, supreme law of the land.

Except… No. America’s Supreme Court³ fears that judicial redress might inhibit our courageous officials from using their authority. Authority here is understood to encompass murder, torture, and the highest crime, criminal aggression. In today’s America, justice is what our executive chooses to do.

Under Article 12, vulnerable groups must be protected. Vulnerable groups include individuals deprived of their liberty – even the bewildered children and dotards swept up in our terror dragnet. American public discourse distinguishes battlefield mayhem from torture as distinct technical problems. The Right to Peace says violence is violence. That includes even our venial violence to helpless captives – beating their hooded faces, gouging their eyes, slitting their genitals, drowning them, freezing them, pulping their flesh, asphyxiating them, leashing them, forcing them to masturbate, or raping them.

This provision really cramps our style. It fails to respect American culture in all its bestial glory. Our anti-terror gulag is run in precise accord with the exemplary domestic penal practices of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, which is organized into White Supremacist gangs meting out lethal beatings and rape.

So in each of its aspects, peace rubs our government the wrong way but our ruling class accepts it, as a means to the end of social control. Democratic party placemen tried to channel pacifist ferment for partisan advantage and turn it off for subsequent wars. They were thwarted by the comprehensive demands of the right to peace. Public resentment mounted despite the party’s efforts to silence or deride dissent. Democrats showed they never wanted economic rights with their attacks on social programs. They showed they had no use for civil or political rights when they tightened the grip of the police state. They held the UN Charter in contempt when they tore up their authorizing resolution to topple a sovereign state and render one side defenseless in Libya’s civil war. They came out for state predation and exclusion when they propped up criminal banks that loot wealth worldwide.

When you assert your right to peace, neither party measures up. Voting is a pointless waste of time. The right to peace itself offers much more effective recourse: to disobedience, conscientious objection, denunciation, and non-participation, as set out in Article 5. You have a right to conscientious objection on non-religious UN Charter grounds. You may publicly denounce armaments production or development, and withhold participation. The troops may disobey unlawful orders – and orders without UN authorization are illegal under US law.

Organized groups exercising these rights could paralyze an outlaw state’s war apparat. America’s overwhelming destructive capacity can stand against the world, but not against its people. The requisite repression would bleed this weakened state white. Jihadist terror opened a vein, sapping the nation with a frenzied response of repression, profiteering, and war. As the state lurches toward failure, all opposition becomes a threat. Mounting repression marks a brittle and exhausted state. Consider the state’s torture and degradation of Bradley Manning for allegations that amount to crucial protections of the Santiago Declaration: the human right of disobedience under Article 5(4); and the peoples’ right to information under Article 8(1) and (2). Or take the pressure on Canada to extradite Jeremy Hinzman for exercising his right to conscientious objection under Article 5(3). When presidential candidate Ron Paul objected to US militarism and war, statist media engaged in a concerted campaign to silence him and shunt him aside.

It wouldn’t occur to a provincial like Paul to stand on his rights. Yet taxpayers like Paul who object to the use of their taxes for war would have recourse to Article 5(6): states must provide them with alternatives compatible with peace. Declining to pay taxes to the war machine, that is the A-bomb of peace. Libertarians, like all Americans, are trained to recoil from the UN as an overweening alien authority, but the rules of the so-called New World Order subject states to humans. In America, human rights are strictly diplomatic weapons, used by our state to club disobedient countries. By contrast, the Santiago Declaration uses human rights as intended, to help people resist overreaching states.

War, like peace, takes constant work. The population has to be brutalized every day. The preparatory propaganda for the Iraq war effectively demonized Saddam Hussein with nightmarish tales of torture from captured pilots. This proved to us that Saddam was a cowardly animal. The government knew that when our turn came to be cowardly animals, all loyal Americans would turn on a dime and torment the designated victims. The state maintains our bestiality with human sacrifice by lethal injection. Crowds celebrate each new sacrifice outside the prison, and party activists cheer the death toll in political rallies.

To America’s dominant religious tradition, war is sacred.  The right kind of war fulfills the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, lifting a curse, renewing heaven and earth, annihilating unbelievers, and uniting obedient Christians with their god. This is no outcast cult. Its worshipers include leading legislators, presidential candidates, senior special forces staff, and an Air Force hierarchy that coercively proselytizes cadets. Their final battle’s coming: they’ve poured out the sixth bowl. Their enemy is peace. We are the mirror image of Iran, with vulnerable humanists struggling to appease a hostile blood-and-soil theocracy.

Death and suffering, that’s the critical national resource. The state has harnessed them to generate power. Death and suffering power this state. We’re the wasting assets being depleted. But weak nations and powerless peoples have begun to form a sort of cartel. They want to take control of death, constrict supply and raise its price. The Right to Peace is an OPEC for blood.

1. Bennis, Phyllis, Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power, Northampton MA, Interlink Publishing Group, 2006, p. 261.
2. Bennis, op. cit., p. 63-67
3. Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2087 (2011) Kennedy, J., concurring

Five years later I was still protesting Vietnam, although long gone from the State Department. Then came Cambodia. And Laos. Soon, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Then Panama was the new great threat to America, to freedom and democracy and all things holy and decent, so it had to be bombed without mercy. Followed by the first war against the people of Iraq, and the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. Then the land of Afghanistan had rained down upon it depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous bombs, and other witches’ brews and weapons of the chemical dust; then Iraq again. And I’ve skipped a few. I think I hold the record for most times picketing the White House by a right-handed batter.

And through it all, the good, hard-working, righteous people of America have believed mightily that their country always means well; some even believe to this day that we never started a war, certainly nothing deserving of the appellation “war of aggression”.

On that same snowy day last month Julian Assange of Wikileaks was freed from prison in London and told reporters that he was more concerned that the United States might try to extradite him than he was about being extradited to Sweden, where he presumably faces “sexual” charges.¹

That’s a fear many political and drug prisoners in various countries have expressed in recent years. The United States is the new Devil’s Island of the Western world. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th, political prisoners were shipped to that god-forsaken strip of French land off the eastern coast of South America. One of the current residents of the new Devil’s Island is Bradley Manning, the former US intelligence analyst suspected of leaking diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Manning has been imprisoned for seven months, first in Kuwait, then at a military base in Virginia, and faces virtual life in prison if found guilty, of something. Without being tried or convicted of anything, he is allowed only very minimal contact with the outside world; or with people, daylight, or news; among the things he is denied are a pillow, sheets, and exercise; his sleep is restricted and frequently interrupted. See Glenn Greenwald’s discussion of how Manning’s treatment constitutes torture. ²

A friend of the young soldier says that many people are reluctant to talk about Manning’s deteriorating physical and mental condition because of government harassment, including surveillance, seizure of their computer without a warrant, and even attempted bribes. “This has had such an intimidating effect that many are afraid to speak out on his behalf.” ³ A developer of the transparency software used by Wikileaks was detained for several hours last summer by federal agents at a Newark, New Jersey airport, where he was questioned about his connection to Wikileaks and Assange as well as his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ⁴

This is but a tiny incident from the near-century buildup of the American police state, from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the crackdown against Central American protesters in the 1980s … elevated by the War on Drugs … now multiplied by the War on Terror. It’s not the worst police state in history; not even the worst police state in the world today; but nonetheless a police state, and certainly the most pervasive police state ever — a Washington Post study has just revealed that there are 4,058 separate federal, state and local “counterterrorism” organizations spread across the United States, each with its own responsibilities and jurisdictions. ⁵ The police of America, of many types, generally get what and who they want. If the United States gets its hands on Julian Assange, under any legal pretext, fear for him; it might be the end of his life as a free person; the actual facts of what he’s done or the actual wording of US laws will not matter; hell hath no fury like an empire scorned.

John Burns, chief foreign correspondent for the New York Times, after interviewing Assange, stated: “He is profoundly of the conviction that the United States is a force for evil in the world, that it’s destructive of democracy.” ⁶ Can anyone who believes that be entitled to a full measure of human rights on Devil’s Island?

The Wikileaks documents may not produce any world-changing revelations, but every day they are adding to the steady, gradual erosion of people’s belief in the US government’s good intentions, which is necessary to overcome a lifetime of indoctrination. Many more individuals over the years would have been standing in front of the White House if they had had access to the plethora of information that floods people today; which is not to say that we would have succeeded in stopping any of the wars; that’s a question of to what extent the United States is a democracy.

One further consequence of the release of the documents may be to put an end to the widespread belief that Sweden, or the Swedish government, is peaceful, progressive, neutral and independent. Stockholm’s behavior in this matter and others has been as American-poodle-like as London’s, as it lined itself up with an Assange-accuser who has been associated with right-wing anti-Castro Cubans, who are, of course, US-government-supported. This is the same Sweden that for some time in recent years was working with the CIA on its torture-rendition flights and has about 500 soldiers in Afghanistan. Sweden is the world’s largest per capita arms exporter, and for years has taken part in US/NATO military exercises, some within its own territory. The left should get themselves a new hero-nation. Try Cuba.

There’s also the old stereotype held by Americans of Scandinavians practicing a sophisticated and tolerant attitude toward sex, an image that was initiated, or enhanced, by the celebrated 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), which had been banned for awhile in the United States. And now what do we have? Sweden sending Interpol on an international hunt for a man who apparently upset two women, perhaps for no more than sleeping with them both in the same week.

And while they’re at it, American progressives should also lose their quaint belief that the BBC is somehow a liberal broadcaster. Americans are such suckers for British accents. The BBC’s Today presenter, John Humphrys, asked Assange: “Are you a sexual predator?” Assange said the suggestion was “ridiculous”, adding: “Of course not”. Humphrys then asked Assange how many woman he had slept with. ⁷ Would even Fox News have descended to that level? I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He would then have known precisely how to reply to such a question: “You mean including your mother?”

Another group of people who should learn a lesson from all this are the knee-reflex conspiracists. Several of them have already written me snide letters informing me of my naiveté in not realizing that Israel is actually behind the release of the Wikileaks documents; which is why, they inform me, that nothing about Israel is mentioned. I had to inform them that I had already seen a few documents putting Israel in a bad light. I’ve since seen others, and Assange, in an interview with Al Jazeera on December 23, stated that only a meager number of files related to Israel had been published so far because the publications in the West that were given exclusive rights to publish the secret documents were reluctant to publish much sensitive information about Israel. (Imagine the flak Germany’s Der Spiegel would get hit with.) “There are 3,700 files related to Israel and the source of 2,700 files is Israel,” said Assange. “In the next six months we intend to publish more files.” ⁸

Naturally, several other individuals have informed me that it’s the CIA that is actually behind the document release.

The right to secrecy

Many of us are pretty tired of supporters of Israel labeling as “anti-Semitic” most any criticism of Israeli policies, which is virtually never an appropriate accusation. Consider the Webster Dictionary definition: “Anti-Semite. One who discriminates against or is hostile to or prejudiced against Jews.” Notice that the state of Israel is not mentioned, or in any way implied.

Here’s what real anti-Semitism looks like. Listen to former president Richard Nixon: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality. … most of our Jewish friends … they are all basically people who have a sense of inferiority and have got to compensate.” This is from a tape of a conversation at the White House, February 13, 1973, recently released. ⁹ These tapes, and there are a large number of them, are the Wikileaks of an earlier age.

Yet, as the prominent conservative Michael Medved pointed out after the release of Nixon’s remarks: “Ironically, though, no American did more to rescue the Jewish people when it counted most: after the 1973 Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack destroyed a third of Israel’s air force and killed the American equivalent of 200,000 Israelis, Nixon overruled his own Pentagon and ordered immediate re-supply. To this day, Israelis feel gratitude for this decisiveness that enabled the Jewish state to turn the tide of war.” ¹⁰ So was Richard Nixon anti-Semitic? And should his remarks be kept secret?

In another of his recent interviews, Julian Assange was asked whether he thought that “a state has a right to have any secrets at all.” He conceded that there are circumstances when institutions have such a need, “but that is not to say that all others must obey that need. The media has an obligation to the public to get out information that the public needs to know.” ¹¹

I would add that the American people — more than any other people — have a need to know what their government is up to around the world because their government engages in aggressive actions more than any other government, continuously bombing and sending young men and women to kill and die. Americans need to know what their psychopathic leaders are really saying to each other and to foreign leaders about all this shedding of blood. Any piece of such information might be used as a weapon to prevent yet another Washington War. Michael Moore has recently written:

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a Wikileaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

And, dear comrades, let us not forget: Our glorious leaders spy on us all the time; no communication of ours, from phone call to email, is secret from them; nothing in our bank accounts or our bedrooms is guaranteed any kind of privacy if they wish to know about it. Recently, the FBI raided the midwest homes of a number of persons active in solidarity work with Palestinians, Colombians, and others. The agents spent many hours going through each shelf and drawer, carting away dozens of boxes of personal belongings. So what kind of privacy and secrecy should the State Department be entitled to?

Preparing for the propaganda onslaught

February 6 will mark the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The conservatives have wasted no time in starting the show. On New Years Day a 55-foot long, 26-foot high float honoring Reagan was part of the annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, California. To help you cope with, hopefully even counter, the misinformation and the omissions that are going to swamp the media for the next few months, here is some basic information about the great man’s splendid achievements, first in foreign policy:

Nicaragua

For eight terribly long years the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Ronald Reagan’s proxy army, the Contras. It was all-out war from Washington, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the Sandinista government — burning down schools and medical clinics, mining harbors, bombing and strafing, raping and torturing. These Contras were the charming gentlemen Reagan called “freedom fighters” and the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers”.

El Salvador

Salvador’s dissidents tried to work within the system. But with US support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protestors and strikers. When the dissidents took to the gun and civil war, the Carter administration and then even more so, the Reagan administration, responded with unlimited money, military aid, and training in support of the government and its death squads and torture, the latter with the help of CIA torture manuals.

US military and CIA personnel played an active role on a continuous basis. The result was 75,000 civilian deaths; meaningful social change thwarted; a handful of the wealthy still owned the country; the poor remained as ever; dissidents still had to fear right-wing death squads; there was to be no profound social change in El Salvador while Ronnie sat in the White House with Nancy.

Guatemala

In 1954, a CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military-government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims — indisputably one of the most inhumane chapters of the 20th century. For eight of those years the Reagan administration played a major role.

Perhaps the worst of the military dictators was General Efraín Ríos Montt, who carried out a near-holocaust against the indians and peasants, for which he was widely condemned in the world. In December 1982, Reagan went to visit the Guatemalan dictator. At a press conference of the two men, Ríos Montt was asked about the Guatemalan policy of scorched earth. He replied “We do not have a policy of scorched earth. We have a policy of scorched communists.” After the meeting, referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses, Reagan declared that Ríos Montt was getting “a bad deal” from the media.

Grenada

Reagan invaded this tiny country in October 1983, an invasion totally illegal and immoral, and surrounded by lies (such as “endangered” American medical students). The invasion put into power individuals more beholden to US foreign policy objectives.

Afghanistan

After the Carter administration provoked a Soviet invasion, Reagan came to power to support the Islamic fundamentalists in their war to eject the Soviets and the secular government, which honored women’s rights. In the end, the United States and the fundamentalists “won”, women’s rights and the rest of Afghanistan lost. More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees; in total about half the population. And many thousands of anti-American Islamic fundamentalists, trained and armed by the US, on the loose to terrorize the world, to this day.”To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom,” declared Reagan. “Their courage teaches us a great lesson — that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors.” ¹²

The Cold War

As to Reagan’s alleged role in ending the Cold War … pure fiction. He prolonged it. Read the story in one of my books. ¹³

Some other examples of the remarkable amorality of Ronald Wilson Reagan and the feel-good heartlessness of his administration:

Reagan, in his famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing”, which lifted him to national political status: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

“Undermining health, safety and environmental regulation. Reagan decreed such rules must be subjected to regulatory impact analysis — corporate-biased cost-benefit analyses, carried out by the Office of Management and Budget. The result: countless positive regulations discarded or revised based on pseudo-scientific conclusions that the cost to corporations would be greater than the public benefit.”

“Kick-starting the era of structural adjustment. It was under Reagan administration influence that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment — featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending — that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, ‘adjustment is particularly costly in human terms’.”

“Silence on the AIDS epidemic. Reagan didn’t mention AIDS publicly until 1987, by which point AIDS had killed 19,000 in the United States.”

– Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman¹⁴

“Reagan’s election changed the political reality. His agenda was rolling back the welfare state, and his budgets included a wide range of cuts for social programs. He was also very strategic about the process. One of his first targets was Legal Aid. This program, which provides legal services for low-income people, was staffed largely by progressive lawyers, many of whom used it as a base to win precedent-setting legal disputes against the government. Reagan drastically cut back the program’s funding. He also explicitly prohibited the agency from taking on class-action suits against the government — law suits that had been used with considerable success to expand the rights of low- and moderate-income families.”

“The Reagan administration also made weakening the power of unions a top priority. The people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board were qualitatively more pro-management than appointees by prior Democratic or Republican presidents. This allowed companies to ignore workers’ rights with impunity. Reagan also made the firing of strikers an acceptable business practice when he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Many large corporations quickly embraced the practice. … The net effect of these policies was that union membership plummeted, going from nearly 20 percent of the private sector workforce in 1980 to just over 7 percent in 2006. ”

– Dean Baker¹⁵

Reaganomics: a tax policy based on a notion of incentives which says that “the rich aren’t working because they have too little money, while the poor aren’t working because they have too much.”

– John Kenneth Galbraith

“According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system — in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian — cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald’s, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.”

– Harold Meyerson ¹⁶

Throughout the early and mid-1980s, the Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan — the so-called “yellow rain” — and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The “yellow rain”, it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.¹⁷

Reagan’s long-drawn-out statements re:  Contragate (the scandal involving the covert sale of weapons to Iran to enable Reaganites to continue financing the Contras in the war against the Nicaraguan government after the US Congress cut off funding for the Contras) can be summarized as follows:

• I didn’t know what was happening.
• If I did know, I didn’t know enough.
• If I knew enough, I didn’t know it in time.
• If I knew it in time, it wasn’t illegal.
• If it was illegal, the law didn’t apply to me.
• If the law applied to me, I didn’t know what was happening.

1. Sunday Telegraph (Australia), December 19, 2010
2. December 15, 2010, “The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention“. See also his attorney’s account of Manning’s typical day; and Washington Post, December 16, 2010
3. The Guardian (London), December 17, 2010
4. New York Times, December 19, 2010
5. Washington Post, December 20, 2010
6. Diane Rehm show, National Public Radio, Dec. 9, 2010
7. The Guardian (London), December 21, 2010
8. Information Clearing House, December 23 2010, WikiLeaks to Release Israel Documents in Six Months
9. Washington Post, December 12, 2010
10. From Medved’s radio show, December 14, 2010; Nixon: The Anti-Semitic Savior of Israel
11. Al Jazeera, December 22 2010, Frost Over the World: Julian Assange interview
12. March 21, 1983, in the White House
13. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, p.17-18. Also for the five countries listed above, see the respective chapters in this book
14. June, 2004; Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter; Weissman, editor of the Multinational Monitor, both in Washington, D.C.
15. April, 2007; Baker is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC
16. Washington Post columnist, June 3, 2009
17. Killing Hope, p.349

“Those who intentionally target innocent civilians must be held accountable, and we will continue to support institutions and prosecutions that advance this important interest,” states the NSS, even while later admitting that the United States refuses to hold itself to the same standard by refusing to officially be party to the International Criminal Court, currently the main vehicle for prosecuting alleged crimes against humanity.

Charges of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities are just the latest in the list of imperial alibis Washington uses to promote its narrow foreign policy objectives of resource accumulation and global hegemony. This effectively fills the vacuum first created by the end of the Cold War, the subsequent near-disappearance of the use of state communism, and then later with the Bush administration’s ineffective brand management of the “Global War on Terror.”

The Obama administration’s predisposition toward humanitarian intervention, and the popularity the concept has taken in liberal circles, makes Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s new book The Politics of Genocide (published by Monthly Review Press) a timely and indispensable read.

Herman and Peterson challenge conventional narratives concerning so-called genocides and mass atrocities in countries such as Darfur, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – places supported for intervention by actors across the political spectrum (left, liberal, and right). The book uses a framework established by Herman and Noam Chomsky in the early 1970′s for a study they penned about U.S. mass killings in Vietnam entitled Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda. In it, Herman and Chomsky establish four categories of bloodbaths: “Constructive,” “Benign,” “Nefarious,” and “Mythical.” Herman and Peterson adopt these categories for The Politics of Genocide, where the authors use case studies to similarly illustrate how “U.S. officials, with the help of media and establishment intellectuals [produce] a stream of propaganda to divert attention away from U.S.-organized and -approved violence, and onto that of its enemies.”

Herman and Peterson’s first target, classified as a “Constructive Genocide,” is the U.S.-U.K. led sanctions against Iraq after the first Gulf War, something the authors label as “perhaps the largest genocidal act in the last thirty years.” These sanctions prevented Iraq from repairing its infrastructure which had been deliberately destroyed during the war’s massive bombing campaign.

According to a joint study carried out by the World Health Organization and UNICEF in 1999, these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of approximately 500,000 children under the age of 5, “more children than died in Hiroshima.” Dennis Halliday, the first UN Coordinator of Humanitarian affairs in Iraq resigned in 1998, having labeled the effects of sanctions “genocide.” But Herman and Peterson point out that “Iraq’s hundreds of thousands of victims were unworthy of official notice and therefore of no interest to the establishment media and intellectuals.” The authors reveal the media bias towards U.S. based-crimes by tabulating newspapers’ use of the word genocide for the Iraq sanctions regime and comparing it to cases in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The table notes the estimated deaths per theater and the number of instances newspapers use the word genocide to describe the conditions of the locality to show the ratio of deaths to genocide usage. In Iraq the rate was 10,000 deaths to 1 use of the word genocide with 80 instances (with an estimated 800,000 deaths from the sanctions). Meanwhile Kosovo, with an estimated 4,000 deaths, genocide usage has a ratio of 12 to 1 with 323 instances.

The other “constructive” genocide the authors use is the more recent U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, where well over a million Iraqis have died. The invasion was illegal, a clear violation of the UN Charter that ensures force can only be used when authorized by the Security Council, while the authors also point out that under Nuremberg (which Obama cites in his NSS) the invasion would be classified as a “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” So the authors ask where were the R2P advocates in calling out for sanctions or military intervention to protect Iraqi civilians from mass atrocities. (The Bush administration even brazenly announced that it would execute a “Salvador option”, where it would employ the use of Death Squads to pacify the country as it had done during the Cold War in El Salvador in the 1980′s.)

One of the “Nefarious Genocides” that Herman and Peterson dissect is Darfur, “the 21st Century’s First Genocide.” Darfur is an “acceptable” focus on villainy for reasons including that its government is run by Muslim Arabs, there is oil in Sudan, and China has become a principal business partner of Khartoum. Herman and Peterson call it “the most successful propaganda campaign of its kind this decade.” Quoting Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, authors of The Scramble for Africa: Darfur Intervention and the USA, unlike “[e]fforts to halt Western-backed humanitarian catastrophes, such as the bloodbath in Iraq, or the Israeli occupation, [which] fail to attract corporate funding or sympathetic pledges from the Oval office,” Darfur activism thrives because it is “largely rooted in establishment-friendly ideals such as Western ‘purity of arms’…and the use of force in this case by self-designated benevolent Westerners to save darkskinned vicitms from their Arab tormentors.”

But while the deaths and suffering in Darfur is horrendous, it does not constitute genocide. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commented that the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” In fact, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, established by the UN Security Council with US support, ruled that the violence and killings carried out by Sudan’s Government did not amount to genocide. Furthermore, the authors point out that more than three times as many people died in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 than in Darfur. Another African theatre where the authors argue genocide has been politicized and distorted, and which may shock some readers, is Rwanda. “To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside down,” write Herman and Peterson.

The authors reveal the role current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S.-backed (and trained) former military officer of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), of fomenting the violence that spiraled into epic proportions between April and July in 1994. The RPF, formerly a wing of the Ugandan army (where Kagame formerly served as intelligence director) took part in the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in 1990, displacing several hundred thousand Hutu farmers.

Herman and Peterson point out that noticeably missing was any kind of action by the UN Security Council, which took swift action when Iraq, no longer of use to Washington, invaded Kuwait that same year. The RPF has also been accused of carrying out the assassination of former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994, an act that many believe triggered the Hutus’ bloody response. It should also be noted that Kagame has come recently under fire for arresting and detaining an American lawyer who had filed a lawsuit against Kagame in Oklahoma City accusing the president of the former president’s assassination, and who has been representing a Rwandan and Kagame opponent against trumped up charges of genocide. Further evidence Herman and Peterson use to dismantle the simplistic, yet politically useful perpetrator-victim narrative includes International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda testimony and rulings.

As for “Benign Bloodbaths,” the authors turn to Israel as one of their examples. From Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in approximately 15,000 to 20,000 deaths, to its recent assault on Gaza in late December 2008 which caused destruction “ten times greater than an earthquake,” Washington’s strongest ally in the Middle East enjoys the ability to commit war crimes and what could be considered acts of genocide with impunity from justice and serious scrutiny in the media. Herman and Peterson turn their attention to treatment of the Goldstone Report as an example to support their argument. The report found that the Israeli onslaught was a form of collective punishment and that it caused “the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses.” The authors note that “there was no one within the establishment prepared to argue that Gaza Palestinians also possess a right to defend themselves or that other states bear a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.’” The other “Benign Bloodbaths” the authors cover, for which Washington bears responsibility, include East Timor, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Finally, the “Mythical Bloodbath” addressed is the Račak massacre, where Kosovo Serbs allegedly massacred dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians on January 15, 1999. The authors argue, with the aid of cited testimony, reports and articles, that this massacre never happened, and that the media storm it created provided a pretext for Washington and NATO to launch air strikes in former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia territory. One of the more interesting figures responsible for manufacturing the “massacre” whom Herman and Peterson write about is William Walker, “a veteran U.S. administrator of Reagan-era wars in Central America” who helped cover-up the Jesuit murders in El Salvador. Walker served as an official for the Organization of Security Cooperation of Europe in Kosovo at the time and was the first to report the “massacre” to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

I would have liked this slim, yet very informative book to use this definition and apply it on a case-by-case basis to specifically determine whether the atrocities that they scrutinized qualified as genocide or acts of genocide. Instead the book often relied on comparing the magnitude and treatment of the aforementioned atrocities to show that those committed by Washington or U.S. client states were downplayed or whitewashed (and were largely more egregious), while the ones committed by U.S. enemies or targeted states were exaggerated and manipulated in order to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives and maintain our woeful global status-quo regarding international peace and justice. But the book clearly shows the politicization of the term genocide and the dangers and contradictions behind humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect.”

“Just as the guardians of ‘international justice’ have yet to find a single crime committed by a great white northern power against people of color that crosses their threshold of gravity, so too all of the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the end of impunity has never once been extended to the victims of these same powers, now matter how egregious the crimes,” Herman and Peterson astutely point out.

Until we address and correct these inadequacies, biases and contradictions within the global hierarchy, international justice system and current human rights regime history will continue to be littered by the corpses of the innocent, whether genocide is the goal or the alibi. This book can be used as a reference by activists and policy makers to help us right these wrongs. We can’t afford to wait.

Nowadays an authentic Christian conversion must lead to an unmasking of the social mechanisms that turn the worker and the peasant into marginalized persons. Why do the rural poor become part of society only in the coffee-and-cotton-picking seasons?

– Archbishop Oscar Romero

In concrete terms capitalism is in fact what is most unjust and unchristian about our own society.

– Archbishop Oscar Romero

The dammed blood burst, a scarlet torrent cascaded through his skull, down into his mouth, then gushed onto his purple-and-white vestments as he slumped to the floor at the foot of the large crucifix behind the altar. Opening his arms to offer the Eucharist, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the heart, the most forgiving heart in San Salvador. The unforgiving bullet scattered fragments through his chest, triggering massive internal hemorrhage.

While friends dashed to his side and flipped him on his back, the killer, escorted to the mass by two police patrols, escaped into the street. Then a photographer shot Romero again with flashes.

Unconscious, gasping, lifeblood ebbing away, Romero was carried from the chapel to a small truck and driven to the hospital, where he was laid out on a table in the emergency room. A nurse probed for a vein in his arm, but all had collapsed.

He strangled to death in his own blood.

Stunned by the news blaring from every radio, Salvadoreans poured into the streets as twilight fell. Sadly chimed the church bells of the Cathedral of San Martin, quickly followed by those of Palmar and San Francisco. In Santa Ana all the bells rang in unison, while back in San Salvador enormous crowds wandered the streets aimlessly, staring in disbelief.

Mourners swarmed into the capital for days, standing in line for hours to catch a glimpse of the man whose belief in their humanity cost him his life. Dozens of foreign bishops and church dignitaries flew in to pay their last respects.

Six days after the assassination, one hundred thousand people jammed the cathedral square for the funeral. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire from the second floor of the National Palace interrupted the proceedings. Bullets ripped into the grieving crowd, killing forty people. The Salvadorean government issued a press release denying troops were in the area.

Few could have guessed that Romero was destined to be a martyr. When he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was a conservative who only felt at ease when he was alone with God, a God that stood apart from the people. Distrustful of new ideas and social change reformers, he issued polite sermons that earned him the applause of the powerful.

But living among the poor gradually converted him to the radicalism of the Gospel. Witness to their suffering, he developed an insatiable appetite for justice, and came to see God as the risen Christ of the crucified Salvadorean people. When he began speaking of redemption for them, he was accused of hatred.

By 1979 he openly welcomed the Christian-Marxist revolution in neighboring Nicaragua, its guarantee of human rights, independent judges, freedom of speech, worship, and association, the termination of arbitrary arrest, search, torture, and murder. He applauded its efforts to bring dictator Anastasio Somoza’s officials to justice for crimes against the people.

His sole ambition became to intoxicate the world with the Gospel, and he held out hope that even the nuncios and military vicariates might someday be converted. A disciple of Vatican II, he embraced liberation theology’s “preferential option for the poor,” seeing the Church’s mission as establishing community in harmony with Divine law while enlightening the people’s legitimate aspirations for a just society by the example of Christian faith and hope. Peace would come, he preached, but could not until justice and love opened the way for it.

He denounced violence as “unchristian,” and believed its most acute form was institutionalized violence, the planned injustice of depriving poor majorities of the necessities of life. Encouraged by an emerging culture of resistance, he saw Salvadorean popular organizations struggling for change as “signs of God’s presence and purposes,” while their violent persecution represented “structural sin embedded in our society.” He conceded that Marxism was a useful tool of social analysis, but denied it could substitute for the inner conversion essential to loving community. Private property was legitimate, but he insisted it came with a heavy social mortgage: derived from God, wealth “should reach all in just form, guided by justice and accompanied by charity.”

In El Salvador, such an interpretation of the Gospel was guaranteed to be treated as a social cancer requiring immediate radical surgery, and so it was. According to the Human Rights office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, Archbishop Romero’s assassination was one of 8062 cases of “Persons of the popular and progressive sectors killed for political reasons” in 1980, “not in military confrontations, but as a result of military operations by the Army, Security Forces, and paramilitary organizations coordinated by the High Command of the Armed Forces.” These were just the murders where information could be “fully checked”; they did not include bombing victims or the more than 600 campesinos butchered in the Rio Sumpul massacre by a joint Honduran-Salvadorean military operation, not to mention killings in the countryside, where “verification was impossible.”

United States officials conceded that Salvadorean security forces were responsible for 90 percent of such atrocities, which was the political response to the growth of unions, Christian base communities, and peasant associations seeking to advance the interests of the poor majority against the entrenched Salvadorean oligarchy Washington had long favored. The U.S. never wavered in its support for this oligarchy, and in the years from 1979 to 1994 approximately 70,000 Salvadoreans were massacred by death squads to preserve its privileges. The tactics employed derived from U.S. counterinsurgency training, and included bombing, napalm attacks, razing of villages, rape, torture, crop burning (to create starvation), machine-gunning of patients in hospitals, and public display of mutilated corpses as a form of political education.

Attempts to document the tsunami of violence were savagely repressed. Churches and Human Rights offices were attacked, and the judge investigating Romero’s assassination was driven out of the country by death threats and assassination attempts, this in the wake of government interference to make sure no investigation of the assassination could succeed. Meanwhile, Washington and its Salvadorean client government denied the involvement of the military and police in atrocities, whom they knew were responsible.

In such circumstances it would have been impossible for even the greatest faith not to doubt itself. Romero’s faith faltered in 1978 when Marianela Garcia Vilas, attorney for tortured and disappeared Salvadoreans, came to him not with the usual request to denounce or investigate a recent atrocity, but to report that she herself had become a victim of the security forces. She told him that the police had kidnapped her, tied her up, beaten and humiliated her, stripped her, and raped her. Romero was stunned into silence, not by the story itself, which was hardly unusual, but by the resonance of hatred in Vilas’s voice, that had never been there before. After a prolonged silence, Romero began his standard reply, saying that the Church did not hate or bear grudges against anyone, that all sins and crimes were part of the Divine order, that even criminals were spiritual brothers who should be prayed for, that one had no choice but to accept suffering. But in the midst of his sermon Romero abruptly stopped, lowered his gaze, and put his head in his hands. Shaking his head, he said, “No, I don’t want to know,” and began to cry. In that instant even he could not believe in a neutral God who loved and protected everyone equally. Instead of preaching, he wept.

The three years that Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador (1977-1980) coincided with the period when Washington became profoundly concerned about (1) the fall of the Somoza dictatorship in neighboring Nicaragua, and (2) the growth of Salvadorean popular forces (animated in no small measure by Bible study), which threatened to turn El Salvador into a real democracy with mass popular participation in the political process. This was intolerable to Salvadorean and U.S. elites, and they responded with unrestrained brutality.

In a public relations gambit designed to give the ruling junta a gentler image, the Carter Administration backed a coup by reformist military officers in October 1979, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the most ferocious military elements retained their dominant position. The reformist facade quickly crumbled amidst rising state terror, and power shifted completely to the murder machine churning out thousands of mutilated corpses a year. While crop dusters sent by plantation owners dropped DDT on the massive procession, sharpshooters and guardsmen opened fire on the largest peaceful march in Salvadorean history, leaving fifty dead on the sidewalk, a hundred wounded, and every sanctuary of Archbishop Romero’s diocese overflowing with terrified refugees. Romero announced that “the most repressive sector of the armed forces” was running the country, and called on the opposition Christian Democrats to resign the government. In his weekly homily to the nation, he quoted from a letter he wrote to President Carter, imploring the American president to suspend aid to the blood-drenched junta, which, if sent, could only serve to “intensify injustice and repression” against the people, who were fighting for their “most basic human rights.”

A right-wing group blew up the Church radio station. President Carter dispatched the aid.

Eleven days before Romero’s death the Salvadorean Human Rights Commission published a list of 689 political killings since the first of the year, nearly 90 percent by government security forces and affiliated death squads. In a reply to Romero’s letter, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance blandly intoned that, “The defense of human rights has been, and continues to be, one of the principal goals of the foreign policy of this administration.”

The day before his assassination, in a packed Metropolitan Cathedral, an eerie hush fell over the congregation when Romero appealed directly to the young conscripts ordered to kill in the name of national security: “Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God….In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you: stop the repression!”

For preaching this message, he was killed.

Romero once stated that he had been converted to the real meaning of Christ by the Salvadorean people. Once he saw God did not stand apart from them, he abandoned individualistic approaches to religion and began to draw strength from their struggles. Two weeks before he was gunned down he anticipated an untimely death, but also resurrection: “My life has been threatened many times. I have to confess that, as a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorean people.”

Thus, Romero died with his faith in redemptive suffering intact. Two months before his death he had said that “so much bloodshed and so much suffering … will not have been shed in vain,” but would nourish demands for change: “This blood and this suffering will fertilize a new and increasingly extensive seed, producing Salvadorans who will be conscious of their responsibility to build a more just and human society.” The appalling carnage that he witnessed in his final days were the birth pangs of a new society: “This blood and this suffering will bear fruit in the bold, radical structural reforms that our country so urgently needs.”

Today there is much speculation about whether Archbishop Romero will be canonized by Rome. It seems likely that he will be, though it should be recalled that when Romero visited Rome in 1979 to ask for help from Pope John Paul II, he was rudely rebuffed by the pontiff, who accused him of exaggerating his description of repression in El Salvador. In any case a more fitting tribute has already been paid by the Salvadorean people, and described as follows by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano: “In Cuscatlan Park, names on an infinitely long wall commemorate the civilian victims of the war. Thousands upon thousands of names are etched in white on black marble. The letters of Archbishop Romero’s name are the only ones that show wear.”

“From the touch of so many fingers.”

That’s the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D’Aubuisson) and the “maras” or gang members.

Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a “Gringo” multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community’s water.

In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one’s death, it’s always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air — that is, until they’re found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.

The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with “mara” gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.

There’s a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on “maras” to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn’t yet had to consider recruiting “civilian contractors” from the 100,000 or so “maras” operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the “golpista” Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it’s only surprising that more didn’t die.

The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the “subversives.” But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.

Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the “golpista” government isn’t any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent “golpe” (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.

One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call “the daily pack of lies.”

As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the “golpe” I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper — and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras’ El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of “maras” who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of “Al Qaeda sleeper cells” doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush’s America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.

I’m looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by “Hondurans for Democracy.” There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption “Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras.” Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, “But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom.” Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It’s a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the “deadly gringo.”

The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as “a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia.” The headline reads, “The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.

Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."

Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.

What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."

In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."

This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."

Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.

If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism.”

Now that’s interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it’s Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein “menace” doesn’t it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now “feared as terrorist.” Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that “we’ve confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran… to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua… there’s concern that there’s been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras].”

Here we’ve definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed “sleeper” cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.

These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn’t the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint? But the response is just as wild: “They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed.” But we’re to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman’s face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.

That’s all behind us now, I thought, as the green leaves and limbs blurred by in the magical landscape on the way into the city of San Salvador from the airport. The FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) evolved from an armed guerilla movement to an electoral party that won the presidency of the country this spring. During my first few days here, I kept being reminded that this is not the 1980s–but the poison from the past is as present as the promise of the future.

On the way into town, my taxi driver and I talked about the coup in Honduras. I admit to having been the one who brought it up. I had told him my own war story and ended by saying,

“I’m sure you have a few war stories yourself.”

He nodded. “Yes, we all do here in El Salvador.”

“Thank god that’s over now,” I said. “But the golpe in Honduras. It’s a return to the ’80s, isn’t it? And what sort of message is it sending out to the world? And to the Salvadoran military?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I worry about that.”

“Because the same military is still there, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, the same ones,” he agreed.

Later in the day I raised the question with Leah Wilson, a North American solidarity activist who has spent a lot of time in El Salvador, following the news and talking it over with astute political friends. Besides being a voracious reader of the news, she knows someone in just about every social movement in the country.

“Yes, I’ve thought about that myself,” she told me over lunch. “President [Mauricio] Funes doesn’t believe it can happen here. He says the military is the only institution that has been thoroughly ‘de-ideologized’ and followed through on the Peace Accords” that brought an end to the brutal civil war that took over 80,000 lives.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked her. She shrugged. “I’m not sure. And I’ve talked to other people who aren’t so sure, either. Either way, it’s a very bad message that they’re sending to the rest of Central America.” I took “they” to mean the coup plotters, then I realized that she was probably also talking about the United States.

Leah mentioned the full page ad ARENA just took out in a national paper. ARENA is El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance, founded by Archbishop Romero’s murderer Roberto D’Aubuisson, and modeled after the “grand old party” of Bush, Sr. and Jesse Helms. The ad called on President Funes to recognize the “de facto” “president” Micheletti and essentially told him to “look in the mirror.”

Other recent events recall the bad old days of the ’80s, like the death of Marcelo Rivera. His name is on most people’s lips these days here. Marcelo was a good revolutionary, a committed member of the FMLN, something that no longer will get you killed by anyone in the country. But he also went up against corruption in San Isidro, a small town in the department of Cabañas where he lived, and took on the Pacific Rim gold company. Pacific Rim hoped to mine the gold from Marcelo’s region and leave behind the poisonous environmental disaster gold companies are known to create – ask any Californian who has studied the Gold Rush in any detail and multiply that damage by a hundred.

The local prosecutor’s office and the police say Marcelo got killed because he had chosen the wrong drinking partners and fallen in with a gang in Ilobasco – something which people in his community say wasn’t at all like Marcelo. More likely, the word on the street goes, it was a death squad killing, done in collusion with the police and under orders of Pacific Rim and other mining interests.

Recent events in Marcelo’s life gave more credence to the word on the street than to the official story. Marcelo’s brother Miguel told the government-friendly Diario Co Latino that “Marcelo suffered previous death threats from the miners and there was also one failed attempt to run over him in an unidentified vehicle, and constant spying on him by the local police.”

Whatever happened, Marcelo’s body was found several days later in a well. He’d been strangled and his body showed signs of exactly the sort of torture the death squads of the 1980s used on their victims: burn marks, bruises from beatings, and all his fingernails had been torn out.

Twenty-five years ago, the murder would have struck fear in everyone’s heart and made people run for cover. Now there is outrage, and it’s gone public. On Friday, July 17th in the summer afternoon heat that drives most people to the shade trees of the parks, a few hundred people gathered at Plaza Civica in front of the National Palace in downtown San Salvador to celebrate Marcelo’s life and to denounce the murder of a worthy activist.

Ilma Alvarado had come down from San Isidro, Cabañas to join the protest and to “commemorate and celebrate” a man who she said, “always brought everyone together and inspired us to work.” She dismissed the official version of Marcelo’s death.

“He was killed for fighting the mines,” Alvarado said. “That’s why they killed him. He didn’t associate with the “maras” (gang members). He didn’t drink. He was a very healthy person. He headed the casa de cultura (cultural center), he led the marches, and he was the coordinator of the FMLN [in Cabañas]. He was a social leader who headed the casa de cultura but was also at the forefront of the struggle.”

In San Isidro the plaza is empty this Sunday afternoon, except for a full house at the Casa de Cultura which Marcelo and his younger brother, Miguel, founded nearly twenty years ago.

The building, Miguel tells me, served as a makeshift funeral home where the bodies of the victims of the civil war were stored before being shipped out to San Salvador. “You could look in here and see black bags piled to the ceiling sometimes,” Miguel says. Community members remember the Rivera brothers as bright, even brilliant, kids from a family so poor that they often went hungry, but a family with great dignity, known for honesty and commitment to the community.

The community itself could have been described that way, according to Miguel, before Pacific Rim came into the area in the mid 1990s. “We never had crime here, not like other places. People worked hard and lived clean lives.” But then Pacific Rim arrived with lots of money to throw around at officials, and a marginal community, and things changed. After exploration by Pacific Rim revealed that there was, indeed, gold in the area, it’s alleged that they bought their way into mining permits. Marcelo led the local struggle against the mines and things got serious. One community member broke down at a community dinner and confessed that Pacific Rim had paid him $2000 to poison the food. “But I can’t kill anyone,” he told them.

In the January elections the ARENA candidate perpetrated a massive fraud to which Marcelo led protests and successfully had the election annulled – the only election to be annulled in the country. The second election, also under the ARENA government, was called, but this time ARENA brought in 300 gang members who terrorized the community by carrying around shotguns and Molotov cocktails and made threats against FMLN supporters. The “maras” were ironically accompanied by large numbers of National Police, soldiers and the situation was monitored by helicopters of the ARENA government. Busloads of ARENA supporters were brought in, as well as people from Honduras, to vote for the ARENA candidate, and he “won” the election.

The murder of Marcelo was a classic death-squad style murder with the same gruesome forms of torture. What was different about Marcelo’s case is that now the death squads seem to be using the “maras” rather than the police or military (as the government did in the 1980s) and, given this new turn of a situation and ARENA’s use of the gangs, the “maras” themselves present one of the knottiest social issues confronting the new FMLN government. President Funes has suggested sending the military into the streets to control them.

Mario, a student at the University of El Salvador, says the maras are, indeed, the most serious problem. “They’re really violent. They get on buses and murder the man collecting fares and take the money,” Mario said, adding that the maras used to be open and recognizable by tattoos and style but a government crackdown under the conservatives only sent them underground. The estimated 16,000 maras are now indistinguishable from anyone else, making them even more dangerous.

People are looking to President Funes to clean up the national police force, which turned rotten after a brief laundering during the Peace Accords. Hopes are high, and the social movements are more active than ever as they ride on the energy of the FMLN’s electoral victory. They’re determined to maintain an active, visible presence in the country and the government appears to be listening.

“The 1980s were also hard on the military and they don’t really seem to be interested in going back into a civil war,” Leah said. And on the same afternoon that environmentalists and anti-mining and water activists were holding their memorial to Marcelo in front of the National Palace, a demonstration against the coup in Honduras was winding through the streets in another part of town. There was no tear-gassing of demonstrators, much less beatings, imprisonments, or disappearances. The police, it seems, were as civil about it all as the demonstrators.

With their renewed hope, social movement organizations like Coordinadora del Bajo Rio Lempa are even taking on the maras. The Coordinadora encompasses about 64 communities on the banks of El Salvador’s largest river and along the Bay of Jiquilisco in Usulatan. The Coordinadora has many irons in the fire, but one of the more exciting is the youth program in Tierra Blanca community where the Coordinadora has been implementing what one board member called “crime prevention” by educating the community. “When we arrived there were lots of problems here, including assaults and robberies,” one of the board members told us in the air-conditioned office put together by particle board and concrete blocks.

The Coordinadora responded by developing youth programs where community members could come to learn to paint, dance and act. Gang members joined a more positive community through the project and, the board President said, “not to glorify ourselves, but the fact is that it worked.” Crime has dropped through a process of popular education and the offering of creative alternatives for youth.

Estela Hernández Rodriguez, the member of the board of directors who was our contact, said that their most recent focus has been on alternative agriculture, combining permaculture with community development. Permaculture, from “permanent agriculture” is a philosophy of agriculture that aims to use the least amount of energy to get the greatest amount of production and, in the process, to use all waste, that is, to produce no waste. To give us a taste of how that’s working out, she arranged for us to stay in one of the communities for the night. It’s called Ciudad Romero (Romero City) and it’s enough to say that it’s named after the martyred Bishop Oscar Romero. Before we drove the few miles to Ciudad Romero, Jose Amilcar, a young man who heads the agricultural program, took us for a short tour around the Coordinadora headquarters. It houses a community radio station (which was playing a muzak version of “Bridge over Troubled Waters”) and a small cashew-nut processing operation with three women using rudimentary, but very effective, equipment. Then we leave to Ciudad Romero.

The red flag of the FMLN flies high over the one corner store at the intersection of two unmarked dirt roads running through the center of what can only mockingly be called a “city.” The scrawny dogs didn’t bother to move for the black Sentra winding its way around the deep potholes and large rocks on the way into the community.

Jose arranged for us to visit Ernesto, whose house is just a couple of blocks away from the Coordinadora’s agricultural center. We walked slowly in the hot afternoon sun, but even so, my t-shirt was soaked from sweat by the time we arrived and move into the shade of the trees around the concrete fish pond where Ernesto, machete always in hand, was feeding his tilapia. The fish swam lazily through the green water and fed on the morsels Ernesto scattered over the surface like a man feeding chickens. After a few minutes of watching the fish eat, we followed Ernesto down a mercifully shaded road to his field. On the way, I asked Ernesto what percentage of the residents of Ciudad Romero did he figure voted for the FMLN. “We all did,” he said immediately, without needing to add, “of course.”

I felt cross-eyed and dangerously close to a heat stroke by the time we went the three or so blocks to the field and walked through the rows of new corn covered with the mulch formed of the plants from the cleared field. My companions recognized this (probably by my white face suddenly turning red) and Jose directed us into the shade at the field’s edge. We talked a little more and then, after the gringo recovered, turned back to “town.”

This community, Jose told us, has been in the process of putting together its common life over the past twenty years since its members returned from exile in Panama after the peace accords were signed in 1990.

They were viewed by the government, and rightly so, as guerrilla sympathizers. Since each returning exile was given a small piece of land, as agreed upon in the peace accords, the government was forced to fulfill its commitment and turn over land to the community. But the land the government gave this particular community was defined, by the government itself, as “uninhabitable” and “unproductive.” Moreover, the land alternately suffered drought and flooding, the latter caused by the indiscriminate release of water by the managers of the hydroelectric dam upriver.

There was no infrastructure for many years, and even now the dirt roads into Ciudad Romero can only be navigated at very slow speeds in our rented car. And ours is the only car we’ve seen in this “city.” Most people walk or ride bicycles. Nevertheless, the community has hung on, thanks in part to international solidarity, but also because of a deep commitment to each other, what one farmer called “compañerismo,” which might be translated into “neighborliness times ten.” Through the last two decades of conservative or far-right governments, the community has also moved forward by organized resistance. To stop the flooding, for instance, the communities that made up the Coordinadora launched protests and other acts of civil disobedience to force the government to stop the flooding of their land.

And finally, the land itself has sustained them. Long fallow and overgrown, it was, nevertheless, far from “uninhabitable” or “unproductive.” One farmer told us that the land once belonged “to the rich people, and they didn’t like the fact that it was now in possession of the guerrillas.” But the land has certainly taken to the “guerrillas,” who are carefully and slowly implementing a permaculture philosophy and ecological, organic methods of fertilization and pest control.

Jose took us to another neighbor’s farm which is really a food forest, a jungle of bananas, coconut palms, mango trees and papayas. The neighbor was away, but we took a stroll through the forest.

“This was all grown up with weeds and very few trees, this whole region. Since the community has arrived we’ve forested the area with fruit trees. None of them were here,” Jose told us as we passed a lime tree. “And this neighbor has a special interest in reforestation, to help bring the temperature of the planet down. It’s something we have to do to stop global warming.”

We returned to the car which I parked on the shoulder of the long road disappearing under a canopy of trees. For a moment I resisted getting back in the car and stood on the shoulder listening to a chorus, a symphony of birds, all unfamiliar to my ear. The trees the community planted have not only brought shade and food to the people struggling to make this area “habitable” and “productive,” but have provided habitat to another, symphonic community. In the end Ciudad Romero, with its slow, steady enrichment of rural community life based on ecological values and “compañerismo” makes up for what it lacks in services that would qualify it as a city.

Long-suffering Salvadorans recall the 1980s struggles when the Farabudo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) failed to end what the civil-military Junta leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte, told New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner in 1980:

“Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. (El Salvador’s) history (is pockmarked by) people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years, the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the opportunities.” Finally they rebelled but failed.

Throughout the decade, billions in US aid poured in, including weapons, munitions, training, and US advisors, troops, and CIA operatives on the ground supporting the government against resistance fighters in a struggle they had little chance of winning.

Roberto D’ Aubuisson founded ARENA in 1981 and was notorious for organizing and leading many of the right-wing death squads that still operate in El Salvador as “hired guns” or criminally embedded elements in the National Civilian Police (PNC), fully supported by Washington and the country’s business elites.

They tortured, disappeared, disabled, and murdered tens of thousands of Salvadorans, including Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 for his outspoken Liberation Theology, compassion for the poor and oppressed, and denunciation of the “war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population.” It’s now down-shifted to a lower gear but very much an ongoing enterprise.

ARENA took power in 1989 and held it for the past 20 years until March 15 when the New York Times headlined the next day: “Leftist Party Wins Salvadoran Vote” with Mauricio Funes the new president of a country troubled by crime, an epidemic of violence, corruption, deep poverty (between 60-70% of the population), and the specter of Washington in the wings. It’s why 500-700 undocumented Salvadorans come to America daily to earn money to send home to their families.

The FMLN won a plurality and will share power with a right wing National Assembly majority ARENA – PCN (National Conciliation Party) coalition.

It was a dirty campaign, replete with scare tactics, very similar to most others in the region with Washington calling the shots. Funes was called a communist, a foreign agent, and a Hugo Chavez-Castro tool. Bitter vitriol accused them of funding his campaign and plotting a dictatorship with his election.

Around 46 Republicans asked Obama to punish 260,000 undocumented Salvadorans in America, end their Temporary Protected Status (TPS), order them deported, and halt the $3-4 billion in annual remittances they send home to their families if Funes wins.

On March 11, Republican Dana Rohrabacher called the FMLN “pro terrorist,” and accused them of being “an ally of Al-Qaeda and Iran” for celebrating the 9/11 attack and burning the American flag in response. He cited a “new world reality of terrorism (and) the global offensive waged by terror groups against the United States and free world.” He said it’s “imperative to review our policies to protect the national security” in light of a possible FMLN victory.

He reflects the worst of American politics determined to deny Funes a moment’s peace and subversively plot against him unless he surrenders his government’s sovereignty to Washington. More on that below.

For the moment at least, El Salvador’s mood was celebratory after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced the results with over 90% of votes counted — 51.27% for the FMLN v. 48.73% for ARENA, so for the first time in 20 years, Salvadoran politics shifts left, but hardly enough to matter.

Funes promised change, a fresh start, and offered “a new accord on peace and reconciliation.” He congratulated ARENA, said they’ll now be the opposition, but “in that capacity, rest assured that the party will be respected and heard.” He invited social and political groups to improve welfare for the people (with no specifics) and “appeal(ed) to other political forces to work for unity.” He promised to make El Salvador “the most dynamic economy in Central America…to be the president of social change and reconstruction (and) leave behind the revenges of the past.”

He also assured Washington and El Salvador’s elite that he’ll “build a dynamic, efficient and competitive economy and promote the creation of a broad business base.” He promised to respect “private property (and work for) macroeconomic stability and a responsible fiscal policy.” He told the Washington Post that he’ll “work to strengthen the relationship with the United Stats, to make the US more of a partner, and I think we will work well together.” His economy is closely tied to America, accounting for 60% of its exports with the dollar as its reserve currency.

He promised not to alter US-Salvadoran trade practices under DR-CAFTA or join Venezuela’s ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas). He likens himself to Brazil’s Lula, not Hugo Chavez or Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and intends to be very friendly to business. Perhaps too much, so it’s hard imagining that Salvadorans will benefit from him any more than Americans do under Obama or Brazilians from Lula.

During his campaign, he had right wing support, including from a group called “Amigos de Mauricio Funes,” whose members come from El Salvador’s ruling elite, and who apparently decided two decades of ARENA were enough and the country needed change, or at least its appearance given the extreme privation and fear it could boil over. For now it’s quieted.

Washington agreed, and it showed in a State Department Robert Wood statement “specifically congratulat(ing) Mauricio Funes as the winner of the presidential election…we look forward to working with the new government of El Salvador on our bilateral agenda.” US Charge d’Affaires in San Salvador, Robert Blau, added: “We have said many times that our intention is to continue with the good relations with El Salvador from government to government, and from people to people.” It’s clear Washington is comfortable with Funes, and that should be cause for worry.

In 1992, the party ended its armed struggle, signed a peace accord with ARENA, became the loyal opposition politically, and agreed to a law granting amnesty to its officials and death squad killers. During his campaign, Funes said he’ll honor it if elected and (sounding much like Obama) told Tecnovision news that “We have to look to the future; not more to the past. We cannot change the past of hatred, clashes and confrontation. But the future we can build in a different way.” That despite last fall others in FLMN demanding that amnesty be repealed so that murderers and torturers will be punished.

No longer in a direct affront to his supporters. Instead he assured business and the ruling elite he’s reliable while the message to Salvadorans is that promised change was just talk, not policy once he’s in office.

Funes is a political outsider, a new face, a moderate so he says, a former TV host and CNN reporter who gained prominence from his 1980-1992 civil war coverage. He’s young (age 49), intelligent, articulate and much like Obama in those respects. Last September 28, the FLMN nominated him to run against ARENA’s Rodrigo Avila, an establishment figure and former National Police director.

From most early signs, the power structure rests easy knowing Funes represents continuity; business as usual, not hoped for change; so Salvadorans, like Americans, soon enough will know they were fooled again. And if they need more convincing, the painful global economic collapse will be the clincher.

In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the “essential metaphorical thrust” of the film, which he said aimed “to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring “a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war…”

Rosenbaum indicted “the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”

In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: “It’s definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It’s about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents’ generation.”

But Rosenbaum’s Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film’s central relationship between Michael and Hanna.

Michael’s passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.

Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant’s favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don’t want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally — or perhaps surpassingly — guilty comrades.

The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna’s illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.

As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. “My parents, my teachers, everyone.” The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: “The only question is why you didn’t all just kill yourselves?”

Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the the Holocaust. The film’s underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge. Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.

Power’s book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world — in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere — over the past hundred years. “The key question” writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, “… is: Why does the United States stand so idly by? The most common response is, ‘We didn’t know.’ This is not true.”

“Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it,” Power says. “Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.’” It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand any action. Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act. U.S. officials “were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.”

Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government. We are, in this moment, as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich. We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation. Starting well before the invasion of Iraq — which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred — we knew the “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses. But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren’t sure.

In his Sunday column entitled: “What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us,” Frank Rich remarked upon this “American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago… Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.” Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, “How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead ‘normal’ lives while genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad. If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors.

For Bernard Schlink, this knowledge, that his parents’ generation denied, “makes me aware how thin the ice is on which we live.” Schlink believed that German culture and institutions like courts, universities, churches, unions and political parties “all seemed so solid.” And yet it all broke down, “relatively easily.” In America too. Somehow we allowed our government to invade a country that had committed no aggression toward the United States. We allowed our government to declare an emergency in order to violate human rights of many thousands of individuals, to commit torture, to incarcerate people for years without trial or hearings of any kind. And today we continue the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. We continue to jail and abuse individuals without charges. And we all know it’s wrong. And it’s time to deal with it before our “land of the free” is irreparably compromised.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has laid out The Case for a Truth Commission (Time, Feb 20). As Leahy says: “For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans. We need to get to the bottom of what happened — and why — to make sure it never happens again… to find the truth….

“But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America’s reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it…. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.”

It’s not just our right. It’s a fundamental need. German society is still — and may always be — in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years. Samantha Power is now an adviser to Barack Obama. Nobody knows better than she does the moral imperative for admitting and redressing the moral lapses of government. We must hope that she wields her influence to make the machinery of government responsive to the deepest needs of our culture. Karl Rove continues to flaunt congressional subpoenas to testify. He figures he can stonewall indefinitely, that there will be no day of reckoning for lawless U.S. officials. We must do everything in our power to prove him wrong.

Pacific Rim Mining Corp., using its Nevada-based subsidiary Pac Rim Cayman LLC, filed a Notice of Intent on Dec. 9 through provisions in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that allow transnational corporations to sue governments over laws and decisions that often put public interests ahead of corporate profits.

“We reject Pacific Rim’s claims. Giving over [exploitation] permission would be a death sentence from the country and the arbitration can’t be accepted because it is the mining company that should be sued,” the National Table Against Metallic Mining, and umbrella group of social movements and NGO’s, responded in a statement.

The company and government have 90 days to settle the dispute before the case goes before an arbitration tribunal, while the 90-day period ends just 5 days before the country’s presidential election. The company is looking for permission to begin mining for gold and silver at its El Dorado mine in the department of Cabañas, about 40 miles outside of San Salvador. The lawsuit threat also comes as the government is debating new mining laws.

“They’re either using the threat of a lawuit as leverage or it could be a strategy to help ARENA win the election,” said Burke Stansbury, of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a member of the Stop CAFTA Coalition. The right-wing, ruling Arena party is supportive of new mining laws that loosen restrictions for the industry, but has been delaying any actions because of upcoming local and national elections.

Timothy McCrum, the company’s lawyer in the dispute, in a conference call for investors co-hosted with Pacific Rim President and CEO Tom Shrake, noted a case filed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (which served as a model for CAFTA) he believes serves as a precedent that should work in the company’s favor. The dispute, between California-based Metalclad Co. and the Mexican government, ended with the Mexican government forced to pay the company $15.6 million in damages because it refused to grant Metalclad permission to build a toxic waste site in an area designated as an ecological preserve.

Andrew Gussert, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign (CTC), said his coalition opposes these provisions that were originally introduced in the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Chapter 11 investor rules.

“They’re ways to circumnavigate laws that cost these corporations profits. And these laws are mainly public interest laws dealing with environmental, health and labor standards,” Said Gussert. “That’s why we have to roll back these investors rights provisions, because we don’t want corporations to have more rights than people.

But the mining opposition, which includes social movements, the Catholic Church, NGO’s, local lawmakers and environmentalists, may have an unlikely ally–President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama, in a February letter to the Wisconsin Fair Trade Coalition (an affiliate of CTC), clearly stated his opposition to these “investor rights” provisions in free trade agreements.

“With regards to provisions in several FTAs that give foreign investors the right to sue governments directly in foreign tribunals, I will ensure that this right is strictly limited and will fully exempt any law or regulation written to protect public safety or promote the public interest,” said Obama, who voted against CAFTA while in the Senate.

Obama added that “we should add binding environmental standards so that companies from one country cannot gain an economic advantage by destroying the environment. And we should amend NAFTA to make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens in any of the three countries cannot be overridden simply at the request of foreign investors.”

Destroying the Environment

In 2005, hydrogeologist Robert Moran conducted a technical review of Pacific Rim’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the El Dorado Mine Project, concluding the company’s study was incomplete and lacked necessary data and testing.

“The El Dorado EIA, unfortunately, presents baseline data that are incomplete and which do not allow a reader to adequately evaluate the pre-mining water quantity conditions. To a lesser extent the baseline water quality data are also inadequate, especially with respect to ground water quality” wrote Moran. “The contents of the El Dorado EIA and the related public review process indicate clearly that neither the general public nor the Salvadoran regulators have been adequately informed regarding the possible environmental or socioeconomic impacts to the local populations.”

According to a study sponsored by the Catholic organization Caritas-El Salvador and the non-governmental Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES), local water supplies will be contaminated by mercury, cyanide, arsenic, zinc and aluminum, and can be expected to cause health problems for local populations.

“It is estimated that Pacific Rim will use 7,300 tons of cyanide in the El Dorado site in Cabañas,” said a staff member of U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities, a solidarity network that has been active in supporting anti-mining advocacy. “The left over cyanide would bring illness and contamination to the people living near and down river from the mining sites. Also open pit process uses 900,000 liters of water day, which is what a family consumes in 20 years.”

The Center for Research on Investment and Trade has also concluded in a study that intensive water use and contamination by the mining industry in El Salvador would devastate the country’s agricultural sector and in turn threaten food security as well as the livelihoods of campesino farmers.

But Pacific Mining CEO Tom Shrake dismisses concerns of long-term environmental damage as “preposterous.” On his conference call with investors he also accused NGO’s of employing “masked armed gunmen” to “chop down trees planted in our reforestation program.” His lawyer McCrum also took shots at the Catholic Church’s opposition to the company’s mine, as well as its criticism of free trade agreements like CAFTA. He said that the church “has allowed itself to be influenced by NGO’s,” has segments that are “almost radically left-leaning,” and that members of the church opposed to mining are not “acting consistent with Catholic doctrine.”

Carlos Peraza Alarcón, a member of Comunidades Unidas, calls mining projects like Pacific Rim’s El Dorado mine a “project of death.”

“These projects, if played out as planned, will destroy most of our resources just to satisfy the interest of a small group of people,” said Alarcón.

Meanwhile, this conflict presents a President Obama with an opportunity to show Latin America that he has the “audacity” to stand up to corporate power, and in the process begin to repair relations with the people of the region while forging a path to the creation of fair trade agreements. Salvadorans, Americans and the rest of the hemisphere will have to wait until after Jan. 20 to see if hope actually translates into change on this issue.