The classic “outside agitators” can not only foment dissent through propaganda, adding to already existing dissent, but they can serve to mobilize the public to strongly demonstrate against the government. In 1953, when the CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, they paid people to agitate in front of Mossadegh’s residence and elsewhere and engage in acts of violence; some pretended to be supporters of Mossadegh while engaging in anti-religious actions. And it worked, remarkably well.¹ Since the end of World War II, the United States has seriously intervened in some 30 elections around the world, adding a new twist this time, twittering. The State Department asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown of its service to keep information flowing from inside Iran, helping to mobilize protesters.² The New York Times reported: “An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).”³

In recent years, the United States has been patrolling the waters surrounding Iran with warships, halting Iranian ships to check for arms shipments to Hamas or for other illegal reasons, financing and “educating” Iranian dissidents, using Iranian groups to carry out terrorist attacks inside Iran, kidnaping Iranian diplomats in Iraq, kidnaping Iranian military personnel in Iran and taking them to Iraq, continually spying and recruiting within Iran, manipulating Iran’s currency and international financial transactions, and imposing various economic and political sanctions against the country.⁴

“I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs,” said US President Barack Obama with a straight face on June 23. Some in the Iranian government [have been] accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd.⁵

“Never believe anything until it’s officially denied,” British writer Claud Cockburn famously said.

In his world-prominent speech to the Middle East on June 4, Obama mentioned that “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” So we have the president of the United States admitting to a previous overthrow of the Iranian government while the United States is in the very midst of trying to overthrow the current Iranian government. This will serve as the best example of hypocrisy that’s come along in quite a while.

So why the big international fuss over the Iranian election and street protests? There’s only one answer. The obvious one. The announced winner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Washington ODE, an Officially Designated Enemy, for not sufficiently respecting the Empire and its Israeli partner-in-crime; indeed, Ahmadinejad is one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy in the world.

So ingrained is this ODE response built into Washington’s world view that it appears to matter not at all that Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s main opponent in the election and very much supported by the protesters, while prime minister 1981-89, bore large responsibility for the attacks on the US embassy and military barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of more than 200 Americans, and the 1988 truck bombing of a US Navy installation in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons. Remarkably, a search of US newspaper and broadcast sources shows no mention of this during the current protests.⁶ However, the Washington Post saw fit to run a story on June 27 that declared: “the authoritarian governments of China, Cuba and Burma have been selectively censoring the news this month of Iranian crowds braving government militias on the streets of Tehran to demand democratic reforms.”

Can it be that no one in the Obama administration knows of Mousavi’s background? And do none of them know about the violent government repression on June 5 in Peru of the peaceful protests organized in response to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement? A massacre that took the lives of between 20 and 25 indigenous people in the Amazon and wounded another 100.⁷ The Obama administration was silent on the Peruvian massacre because the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is not an ODE.

And neither is Mousavi, despite his anti-American terrorist deeds, because he’s opposed to Ahmadinejad, who competes with Hugo Chavez to be Washington’s Number One ODE. Time magazine calls Mousavi a “moderate,” and goes on to add: “It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged,” offering as much evidence as the Iranian protestors, i.e., none at all.⁸ It cannot of course be proven that the Iranian election was totally honest, but the arguments given to support the charge of fraud are not very impressive, such as the much-repeated fact that the results were announced very soon after the polls closed. For decades in various countries election results have been condemned for being withheld for many hours or days. Some kind of dishonesty must be going on behind the scenes during the long delay it was argued. So now we’re asked to believe that some kind of dishonesty must be going on because the results were released so quickly. It should be noted that the ballots listed only one electoral contest, with but four candidates.

Phil Wilayto, American peace activist and author of a book on Iran, has observed:

Ahmadinejad, himself born into rural poverty, clearly has the support of the poorer classes, especially in the countryside, where nearly half the population lives. Why? In part because he pays attention to them, makes sure they receive some benefits from the government and treats them and their religious views and traditions with respect. Mousavi, on the other hand, the son of an urban merchant, clearly appeals more to the urban middle classes, especially the college-educated youth. This being so, why would anyone be surprised that Ahmadinejad carried the vote by a clear majority? Are there now more yuppies in Iran than poor people?⁹

All of which is of course not to say that Iran is not a relatively repressive society on social and religious issues, and it’s this underlying reality which likely feeds much of the protest; indeed, many of the protesters may not even have strong views about the election per se, particularly since both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are members of the establishment, neither is any threat to the Islamic theocracy, and the election can be seen as the kind of power struggle you find in virtually every country. But that is not the issue I’m concerned with here. The issue is Washington’s long-standing goal of regime change. If the exact same electoral outcome had taken place in a country that is an ally of the United States, how much of all the accusatory news coverage and speeches would have taken place? In fact, the exact same thing did happen in a country that is an ally of the United States, three years ago when Felipe Calderon appeared to have stolen the presidential election in Mexico and there were daily large protests for more than two months; but the American and international condemnation was virtually non-existent compared to what we see today in regard to Iran.

Iranian leaders undertook a recount of a random ten per cent of ballots and recertified Ahmadinejad as the winner. How honest the recount was I have no idea, but it’s more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.

By what standard shall we judge Barack Obama?

Many of my readers have been upset with me for my criticisms of President Obama’s policies. Following my last two reports, more than a dozen have asked to be removed from my mailing list. But if you share my view that the numerous atrocities US foreign policy is responsible for constitute the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity and happiness, then I think you have to want leaders who are unambiguously opposed to America’s military adventures, because those interventions are unambiguously harmful. There’s nothing good to be said about dropping powerful bombs on crowds of innocent people, invading their land, overthrowing their government, occupying the country, breaking down the doors of the citizens, killing the father, raping the mother, traumatizing the children, torturing those opposed to all this … Barack Obama has no problem with this, if we judge him by his policies and not his rhetoric.

And neither does Al Franken, who’s about to become a Democratic Senator from Minnesota. The former Saturday Night Live comedian would like you to believe that he’s been against the war in Iraq since it began, but he’s gone to Iraq four times to entertain the troops. Does that make sense? Why does the military bring entertainers to soldiers? To lift the soldiers’ spirits. Why does the military want to lift the soldiers’ spirits? A happier soldier does his job better. And what’s the soldier’s job? All the charming things listed above. Doesn’t Franken know what these guys do? He criticized the Bush administration because they “failed to send enough troops to do the job right.”¹⁰ What “job” did the man think the troops were sent to do that had not been performed to his standards because of lack of manpower? Did he want them to be more efficient at killing Iraqis who resisted the occupation?

Franken has been lifting soldiers’ spirits for a long time. This past March he was honored by the United Service Organization (USO) for his ten years of entertaining troops abroad. That includes Kosovo in 1999, as imperialist an occupation as you’ll want to see. He called his USO experience “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”¹¹ Franken has also spoken at West Point, encouraging the next generation of imperialist warriors. Is this a man to challenge the militarization of America at home and abroad? No more so than Obama.

Tom Hayden wrote this about Franken in 2005 when Franken had a regular program on the Air America radio network:

Is anyone else disappointed with Al Franken’s daily defense of the continued war in Iraq? Not Bush’s version of the war, because that would undermine Air America’s laudable purpose of rallying an anti-Bush audience. But, well, Kerry’s version of the war, one that can be better managed and won, somehow with better body armor and fewer torture cells. This morning Franken was endorsing Sen. Joe Biden’s proposal to send 5,000 NATO troops to close the Syrian-Iraq border, bring in foreign trainers for the Iraqi officer corps, and put Iraqis to work cleaning up the destruction of our invasion. … Now that Bush has manipulated us into the invasion, Franken thinks we have no choice but to … stay until we crush the insurgents. It’s a humanitarian excuse for open-ended American occupation. And it’s shared widely by the professional political and pundit class who think of themselves as the conscience of the American establishment and the leadership of the Democratic Party.¹²

I know, I know, I’m taking away all your heroes. But such people shouldn’t be your heroes. You can learn to see through the liberal, Democratic Party apologists for the empire. Only a week ago, documents released by the Nixon Library in California revealed that five days before US and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970 — which elicited widespread, angry protests in the US, resulting in the fatal shootings by the National Guard of students at Kent State University in Ohio — President Richard Nixon got approval for the invasion from the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi. Stennis told the president: “I will be with you. … I commend you for what you are doing.”¹³

Long live the Cold War

President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a military coup June 28 because he was about to conduct a non-binding survey of the population, asking the question: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?” One of the issues that Zelaya hoped a new constitution would deal with is the limiting of the presidency to one four-year term. He also expressed the need for other constitutional changes to make it possible for him to carry out policies to improve the life of the poor; in countries like Honduras, the law is not generally crafted for that end.

At this writing it’s not clear how matters will turn out in Honduras, but the following should be noted:

The United States, by its own admission, was fully aware for weeks of the Honduran military’s plan to overthrow Zelaya. Washington says it tried its best to change the mind of the plotters. It’s difficult to believe that this proved impossible. During the Cold War it was said, with much justification, that the United States could discourage a coup in Latin America with “a frown.” The Honduran and American military establishments have long been on very fraternal terms. And it must be asked: In what way and to what extent did the United States warn Zelaya of the impending coup? And what protection did it offer him? The response to the coup from the Obama administration can be described with adjectives such as lukewarm, proper but belated, and mixed. It is not unthinkable that the United States gave the military plotters the go-ahead, telling them to keep the traditional “golpe” bloodiness to a minimum. Zelaya was elected to office as the candidate of a conservative party; he then, surprisingly, moved to the left and became a strong critic of a number of Washington policies, and an ally of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, both of whom the Bush administration tried to overthrow and assassinate.

Following the coup, National Public Radio (NPR) showed once again why progressives refer to it as National Pentagon Radio. The station’s leading news anchor, Robert Siegel, interviewed Johanna Mendelson Forman, of the conservative think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies:

Siegel: “There hasn’t been a coup in Latin America for quite a while.”

Forman: “I think the last one was in 1983.”

Siegel did not correct her.¹⁴

This is ignorance of considerable degree. There was a coup in Venezuela in 2002 that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, a coup in Haiti in 2004 that permanently overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and a coup in Panama in 1989 that permanently overthrew Manuel Noriega. Is it because the US was closely involved in all three coups that they have been thrown down the Orwellian Memory Hole?

1. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 9.
2. Associated Press, June 16, 2009.
3. New York Times, June 21, 2009.
4. See Seymour Hersh, New Yorker magazine, June 29, 2008; ABC News, May 22, 2007; and Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch, June 19-21, 2009 for descriptions of some of these and other anti-Iran covert activities.
5. White House press conference, June 23, 2009.
6. The only mention is by Jeff Stein in “CQ Politics” [Congressional Quarterly], online, June 22, 2009, “according to former CIA and military officials.”
7. Center for International Policy (Washington, DC) report, June 16, 2009.
8. Time magazine, June 29, 2009, p.26.
9. AlterNet.org, June 14, 2009; Wilayto is the author of In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation’s Journey through the Islamic Republic.
10. Washington Post, February 16, 2004.
11. Star Tribune (Minneapolis), March 26, 2009.
12. Huffington Post, sometime in June 2005, but it may no longer be there.
13. Washington Post, June 30, 2009.
14. NPR, All Things Considered, June 29, 2009.

That’s the logic of power-over: One either dominates or eventually is dominated. The potential of a challenge from below means that no amount of power is enough; more always must be accumulated to ward off threats. Along the way, people pursuing these goals tend to justify the concentration of power as in the best interests of all; the enlightened ones with the power tell us that they will use it benevolently in the interests not just of themselves but also those less fortunate. All of human history argues against having faith in this power-seeking, with its accompanying hubris and self-delusion. But history is conveniently ignored by the powerful as they congratulate themselves on their vision and fortitude, while at the same time they work feverishly to propagandize the powerless, lest those below see the shell game for what it is and rebel.

It’s tempting to say that this power-over exercised on earth is illusory, that real power rests with God or on some other plane of existence. The problem, of course, is that the suffering caused by the exercise of power-over is not illusory and does not exist at some other level. It is felt by people and other living things in the here-and-now. The need to challenge power-seeking, domination, and injustice is not otherworldly but of this world. Still, it is not merely rhetorical to mark that power-over is dead power. It is ultimately the power of death, and also is a power that comes only to those whose souls are dead. The poet Muriel Rukeyser expressed clearly the nature of this power and why we should reject it:

Dead power is everywhere among us—in the forest, chopping down the songs; at night in the industrial landscape, wasting and stiffening a new life; in the streets of the city, throwing away the day. We wanted something different for our people: not to find ourselves an old, reactionary republic, full of ghost-fears, the fears of death and the fears of birth. We want something else. ³

We want something else, but our systems and institutions rarely provide it. Even the church itself, where we might assume we could find that “something else,” is mired in a domination/subordination dynamic. Much Christian theology is rooted in the idea that people are so inherently evil that we must subordinate ourselves to God, and then—convenient for church officials—to a calcified dogma and doctrine propagated by the church. It shouldn’t be surprising that this conception of Christianity coexists comfortably with the power-over exercised by the contemporary nation-state and corporation. These groups of elites—political, economic, religious—take for themselves the right to dominate in their arena, eyeing the other elites nervously, knowing they must collaborate with each other but always aware they also are in nervous competition in the struggle for primacy. Such is the nature of life, even for the ultra-privileged, in a power-over world.

We must give this kind of system its due: Clearly, a system based on power-over can be productive—it can extract resources from the earth and energy from people to produce a vast array of goods and services, which brings some benefits to some people. But just as clearly, such a system can never be truly creative—it cannot create a world in which all people flourish, create new ways of understanding, or create solutions to the problems power-over inevitably generates. Such flourishing, understanding, and problem-solving come not from power-over but from power-with, an understanding of power not based in assertions of independence and destructive dominance but in an embrace of interdependence and creative cooperation.

In a hyper-individualized society based on capitalism’s glorification of greed, it’s not surprising that an adolescent conception of selfish independence would define our political and economic institutions and dominate our cultural imagination. Of course the struggle for a certain kind of independence—being free from the imposition of power-over—is not a trivial matter; we see what inhumanity is possible when people are not truly free to act as individuals, and we know that independence at the personal level matters in our lives. Yet we all know that we are not independent beings but profoundly interdependent with each other, other organisms, and the non-living world. The task is to create a system that gives us freedom from the illegitimate authority that people and institutions attempt to impose on us, but recognizes our obligations to each other. One way to think through this is to imagine what a world would look like if power were not “over” but “with,” if we understood that our power can be magnified in collaboration with others.

Even in the midst of a capitalist economy structured on power-over, experiments in power-with go forward, such as worker cooperatives that are owned and controlled by members. The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives estimates that there are more than 300 such democratic workplaces in the United States, employing 3,500 people and generating about $400 million in annual revenues, mostly concentrated in the Northeast, West Coast and Upper Midwest. Worker cooperatives tend to create stable jobs, foster sustainable business practices, and support linkages among different segments of the community. The principles articulated by the federation capture the spirit behind, and organization of, cooperatives: voluntary and non-discriminatory open membership; control by members; equitable and democratic control of capital; commitment to education and training of members; cooperation with other cooperatives; and a commitment to sustainable community development.⁴

One exciting example of this model is Green Worker Cooperatives, which was established to incubate worker-owned and environmentally friendly cooperatives in the South Bronx. The first cooperative they launched, the ReBuilders Source, is a retail warehouse for surplus and salvaged building materials recovered from construction and demolition jobs. In the Green Worker Cooperatives’ own words:

Our approach is a response to high unemployment and decades of environmental racism. We don’t have the luxury to wait for new alternatives. That’s why we’re creating them. We believe that in order to address our environmental and economic problems we need new ways to earn a living that don’t require polluting the earth or exploiting human labor.⁵

For many, it’s Forhard to imagine working in institutions based on real cooperation because the society in which we live is structured on such a different notion. Yet if we think of experiences when we feel authentically most at home—not just our home with family, but with friends, in political groups, at church, in a community association—we typically feel powerful not because we can force people to do things or can ignore other people’s needs in our decisions; we feel powerful when we come together with others to create something we couldn’t have created alone.

Though it sounds paradoxical in this culture, this leads to an important insight:

We are most free when we are most bound to others.

When bonds are created under conditions of mutual respect and shared power, our freedom is deepened by such interdependence. Our strength is not sapped by these bonds but is enhanced by the emergent properties of collective human action. The individual efforts of numerous people cannot simply be added together and plugged into an equation to predict the outcome, but rather their simple actions come together in a collective result that is novel and irreducible. The most creative force does not come from a power, centralized either in one person or one institution and its bureaucracy, which imposes its will on others and treats people as inputs whose energy can be plugged into a formula for production. The most creative force comes from distributed power that channels the contributions of many into ends that people define collectively. This goes against the cultural icon of the heroic figure, who may enlist the help of others but, in the end, draws on a power that is individual and ultimately in conflict with other power in the world. Heroic figures typically are overrated, as those who are put in that role often understand. In Brecht’s play Galileo, the famed scientist’s assistant is devastated when Galileo recants his scientific beliefs under threat from the Inquisition. Andrea confronts Galileo: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo responds, “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”⁶

1. The power-over/power-with distinction is usually credited to Mary Parker Follett, a theorist, political organizer, and social activist who wrote several influential books in the first half of the twentieth century. The terms are used today in a variety of academic, political, and business settings. I first encountered this term in discussions with feminist activists. For a review, see “Feminist Perspectives on Power,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 2005.
2. Quoted in Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 18-19.
3. Muriel Rukeyser, quoted in Adrienne Rich, What is Found There (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), page preceding preface. Originally published in The Life of Poetry (New York: Current Books, 1949).
4. United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, “About Worker Cooperatives.” See also, International Organization of Industrial, Artisan and Service Producers’ Cooperatives, “World Declaration on Cooperative Worker Ownership,” February 2004.
5. Green Worker Cooperative, “Advocating Zero Waste.”
6. Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (New York: Grove Press, 1940), p. 115.

Israel’s murderous 22-day offensive last December/January left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties, 200 schools, 39 mosques and two churches damaged or destroyed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair”, unable to rebuild their lives because Israel, having wantonly wrecked their civil society and infrastructure, is blocking efforts to bring in the necessary repair materials. Those on board the Spirit of Humanity were acting in accord with donors’ pledges of $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and US President Obama’s request to Israel to let those supplies pass.

The mercy ship sailed from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Israeli warships surrounded it and threatened to open fire if the crew didn’t turn back. When they refused to be intimidated, the Israelis jammed their instrumentation and blocked their GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting all lives at risk.

The ship had been searched and given security clearance by the Port Authorities in Cyprus before sailing, and posed no threat.

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, says the seizing of the Spirit of Humanity is unlawful and the continuing blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity. Yes, yes, Mr Falk. But the question as always is, what is your paralytic, useless organization doing about it? Or is hand-wringing all it’s good for?

Many here, including myself, immediately wrote to David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, about the outrage. Two days later I called the Palestine desk at the Foreign Office in London. The person I spoke to sounded uncomfortable having to trot out the same old gobbledigook about “working hard to resolve the problem” and “doing all we can”. He said the six Brits were in Israeli custody and nobody was sure where exactly the incident took place. However, the vessel was fitted with a SPOT GPS tracker, so the system should have a record of their position when attacked.

The real problem, as I suggested, is that Israel dares to kidnap Brits on the high seas and doesn’t fear the consequences – no doubt confident there won’t be any. I was reminded that Israel had issued warnings (and so had the Foreign Office) not to travel in that area. What area? Mustn’t one travel in international waters?

The spokesman assured me that progress was being made. There was “movement” on getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza, but I pointed out that nobody had seen any evidence of Israel conforming with international law and Geneva Conventions. He claimed there was also “movement” on halting settlements on occupied territory, although I observed that the Israelis had just OK’d more illegal building.

I also reminded him about the ramming of the MV Dignity on a similar mission by an Israeli gunboat on 30 December, 53 miles from shore, and how people here were still hopping mad that nothing had been done about it. The vessel, with 16 on board, was badly damaged and had to limp to a safe Lebanese port. As far as I know, there was never an offer of compensation and no demand from London. As usual, somebody else had to pick up the tab for Israel’s unbridled destruction.

The Dignity had a cargo of 3.5 tonnes of medical supplies, the majority donated by the Cyprus government, and a British skipper and a Greek mate. It carried fourteen passengers, one of whom was Cynthia McKinney. There were also two surgeons and a Palestinian physician. A friend of mine was among them and wrote this chilling account of the attack…

At 04.55 hrs EMT on 30 December, searchlights appeared astern. There were two Israeli gunboats. They came abreast, circled and stayed with us. These boats can do over 45 knots, carry ten tonnes of fuel and have sophisticated weapon systems including Hellfire missiles. Tracer bullets were fired skywards, forming ellipses, and flares put up. At 05.30 hrs approximately, one gunboat was playing its searchlight on the port side of ‘Dignity’. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash at the bow, and then another almost simultaneously, and another on the port beam… The bow dipped and it seemed the boat was breaking up. It was dark, the wind force was 4 to 5 and there was a 10ft sea. The master shouted ‘we have been rammed’. It was feared the boat would sink. He broadcast a Mayday distress signal; there was no response.

Cynthia McKinney and Caoimhe Butterly could not swim; the life jackets were rapidly deployed to all. The hull was taking water but bilge pumps were working. The first words from a commander of one of the gun boats came over the radio. First there was the accusation that the ship’s company was involved with terrorists and that it was subversive. Then there came the threat to shoot. The master was forbidden from making for Gaza or further south to El Arish in Egypt. He was ordered to return to Larnaca – about 160 miles, even though the boat was badly damaged and the Israeli did not know whether there was sufficient fuel, which there was not. He set a northerly course and the boat stayed buoyant in a moderating sea. A crew member arranged with the Lebanese authorities for a safe harbour in Sour (Tyre) where jubilant crowds thronged the quays. A UNIFIL ship came out to escort us and the Israeli gunboats, which were following, fell back.

Was there lethal intent? A gunboat came out of the black of night with no lights showing whilst a searchlight from the other gun boat displayed our port hull as its target. It would have approached at about 30 degrees to the Dignity’s port and at speed. The intention to sink the Dignity and thus to drown its company was clear. If the hull had been GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic) it would have shattered and the boat would have sunk like a stone 53 nautical miles off Haifa. Fortunately, the hull was constructed of marine ply with timber ribs and survived…. The ship’s company were repatriated except for a resolute Scot, Theresa McDermott. She was imprisoned in Ramleh gaol. When the British Consulate in Israel was contacted for assistance in finding Teresa, staff refused to help locate her saying they couldn’t provide assistance to a UK citizen unless she personally requested it. Teresa was released after six days, her ‘crime’ probably being a member of the International Solidarity Campaign like Rachel Corrie before her.

My written question to Mr Miliband was simply this: “Why isn’t Her Majesty’s Government providing the mercy ship ‘Spirit of Humanity’ with an escort to protect against the unlawful, piratical interference and threat to life by the Israeli navy? There have been repeated incidents of harassment, damage, theft and armed aggression on the high seas or in Palestinian waters by the Israeli regime against unarmed vessels”.

The British government has loudly pledged Royal Navy help to stop the “smuggling” of arms to the Gaza resistance but won’t protect Gaza’s fishermen from being fired on by Israeli marauders while trying to earn their living. And evidently the government can’t be bothered to protect our own people going about their lawful business.

But, sure enough, they kicked up an almighty fuss when Iran nabbed 15 British sailors two years ago for allegedly straying into Iranian waters.

For our sins we are saddled with a foreign secretary who calls for Israeli tank crewman Gilad Shalit’s release but not the release of 11,000 Palestinian civilians – some of them women and children – rotting in Israeli jails. He even allows the British ambassador to become a dogsbody of the Jewish community in this one-sided campaign. On 25 June Miliband said: ‘Today is the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Both British Ministers and the British Ambassador in Israel have had repeated contact with Gilad’s family and emphasized our support for Gilad’s immediate release. Last September, the Ambassador helped to deliver over 2,000 Jewish New Year cards for Gilad to the ICRC as part of a campaign organized by the UK Jewish community. I repeat the UK’s call to Hamas for his immediate, unconditional, and safe release. We share the Shalit family’s dismay at Hamas’s refusal to allow the ICRC access to Gilad.

It’s shameful that his dismay doesn’t extend to the 11,000 Palestinian families.

British people are waking up to the truth about Israel’s lawlessness. In the absence of firm action from the British government they are taking reprisals of their own, in the form of boycotts, which has driven Mr Miliband to complain that “the Government is dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at trade union congresses and conferences this summer”. He insists that boycotts “obstruct opportunities for co-operation and dialogue and serve only to polarise debate further. Boycotts would only make it harder to achieve the peace that both Palestinians and Israelis deserve and desire”.

Mr Miliband hasn’t learned the lesson of the last 61 years. And our prime minister-in-waiting, David Cameron (a Zionist and, like Brown and Blair, a patron of the Jewish National Fund), is no different. He says: “I think there’s something else we need to do, which is to say to our academics in this country that boycotts of Israel are completely unacceptable, and I think we also need to say that to the trade unions.”

Nowadays you have to carefully to pick your way through a veritable obstacle-course of pro-Zionists, Chosen Ones and Israeli stooges that inhabit every nook and cranny in the corridors of power and dominate Britain’s key defence bodies. These Israeli flag-wavers seem only too happy for the Israelis to piss on us – and on the rest of the world – while rewarding them with more and more trade and scientific co-operation.

The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO’s logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.

Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.

The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing the political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, despite NATO’s need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Apr. 1, “In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban.”

Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels Jun. 12, “Iran is playing a double game” in Afghanistan by “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and coalition forces.”

The State Department’s annual report on terrorism, published Apr. 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian Qods Force had “provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons.” It also charged that Iran had “arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members.”

The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.

A military official who refused to be identified told IPS the charge of Iranian assistance to the Taliban is based on “an intelligence assessment”, which was limited to “suspected” Iranian shipment of arms to the Taliban and did not extend to training. That admission indicates that the charge of shipments of weapons to the Taliban by Iran is not based on hard evidence.

The only explicit U.S. claim of specific evidence relating to an Iranian arms shipment to insurgents in Afghanistan has been refuted by data collected by the Pentagon’s own office on improvised explosives.

In an April 2008 Pentagon news briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in reference to Iranian authorities, “[W]e’re seeing some evidence that they’re supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan”.

When pressed by reporters for the evidence, however, Mullen admitted that there was no “constant stream of arms supply at this point” and that the basis for the charge was primarily “evidence some time ago” that Iranians were providing amour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) to the Taliban.

That was a reference to a July 2007 allegation by the U.S. command in Afghanistan, under obvious pressure from the White House, that Iranian-made EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan.

Col. Tom Kelly, a U.S. deputy chief of staff of the ISAF, told reporters Jul. 18, 2007 that five EFPs that had been found in Herat near the Iranian border and in Kabul were “very sophisticated”, and that “they’re really not manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran”.

That was the same argument that had been used by the U.S. command in Iraq to charge Iran with exporting EFPs to Shi’a insurgents there.

But in response to a query from this writer last July, the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO), which is responsible for tracking the use of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, provided the first hard data on EFPs found in Afghanistan. The data showed that there was no connection on which to base even an inferential connection between those EFPs and Iran.

Every one of the 13 EFPs reported to have been found in Afghanistan up to that time were “crude and unsophisticated”, according to Irene Smith, a spokesperson for Gen. Anthony Tata, JIEDDO’s deputy director for operations and training. In fact, the insurgents in Afghanistan had not shown the ability to make the kind of EFPs that had been found in Iraq, Smith said.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan, moreover, does not appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of the administration’s political line on the issue. NATO officials began a serious dialog with Iran last March which focused on the possibility of moving supplies for NATO troops to Afghanistan from Iranian ports.

At an off the record seminar in Washington last month, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan said the Iranian policy toward Afghanistan is neither a “major problem” nor a “growing problem” for the war against the Taliban, according to one of the attendees.

The lack of enthusiasm of the U.S. command in Afghanistan for charges of Iranian support for the Taliban suggests that the impetus for such charges is coming from those in the administration who are trying to ramp up the overall pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme.

Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says he sees sharp differences between the position of those responsible for Afghanistan and those whose primary concern is Iran’s nuclear programme.

“You have one discourse of officials in Afghanistan, who would support collaboration with Iran,” Dorronsoro said in an interview with IPS. “It’s very clear that those people don’t want a crisis with Iran and don’t want to push Iran too far.”

But those who want to put pressure on Iran to stop its enrichment programme, he said, “are acting as though they are building some kind of legal case against Iran.”

The Bush administration initially claimed it had evidence of Iranian aid to the Taliban in 2007 that didn’t exist, only to have it refuted by the U.S. command in Afghanistan.

In April and May 2007, NATO forces in Helmand province found mortars, C-4 explosives and electrical components believed to have been manufactured in Iran. Then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns asserted that the United States had “irrefutable evidence” that those weapons were provided to the Taliban by the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

When State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was questioned about the Burns statement on Jun. 13, 2007, McCormack admitted that the charge was an inference.

Gen. Dan McNeill, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, rejected the idea that any official Iranian role could be reasonably inferred from Iranian weapons showing up in Afghanistan.

“[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here,” he told Jim Loney of Reuters. McNeill said he had “no information to support that there’s anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here.”

The obvious alternative explanation for Iranian weapons in arms shipments is that drug lords and the Taliban have used commercial arms smugglers to get the weapons from Iran into the country. Arms dealers have close ties with Afghan officials, and have been reported to use police convoys to carry smuggled arms, according to a BBC2 television report last September.

While some elements are fairly predictable, and almost welcome from a liberal, social democratic point of view, like United States President Barack Obama’s star rating and the dire overall ratings for Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the poll, which interrogated almost 20,000 people across the globe from April 4 to June 12 about which world leaders they trusted, raises some questions with no clear answers. The selection of world leaders about whom respondents were asked reveals some bias.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, Putin, Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ahmadinejad have certain logic. But where were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African President Jacob Zuma, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other Third World luminaries?

Japan provided neither candidates nor voters it seemed. Such shortcomings notwithstanding, the poll was interesting. To no one’s surprise except for the deluded few in the US who believed their own lies, Obama’s support is much higher than George W Bush’s was.

But the results also call into question some Western media assumptions. Yes, it is possible to be repressive and popular at the same time, at home and abroad. In Russia and China, respondents supported not only their own leaders, but also each other’s, and indeed did not trust those who challenged them, with Sarkozy in particular paying the price in declining support in China.

While the Chinese were happy with Obama, in Russia the American president is mistrusted, although whether that was in his own right or as representative of the nation whose advisors and economists did so much damage to Russia, is not clear.

Obama’s high global ratings, 61%, came after his speeches in Turkey, but before he made his most definitive pitch for Muslim support in Cairo. Despite his high global ratings, there were reservations about him in Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, doubtless reflecting skepticism about the US role in the region and his sincerity in changing that role. On the other hand, India gave him an 80% rating, which marched strangely with the 40% for Ahmadinejad. The mainland Chinese gave him a higher rating than the Taiwanese gave Hu.

Most intriguingly of all, Hu, hardly the most charismatic leader on the bloc, came in big in, of all places, Taiwan, and even in South Korea. He had 60% confidence in Taiwan and over 90% in Hong Kong and Macau matching his 94% in the mainland. How does that reconcile with the concerns about civil liberties in those places, and the definite reluctance of Taiwanese to let Hu run their affairs?

Was this because, or despite, the squeeze on civil liberties in China? Or was it pride in the local boy whose economy was the only one left growing as all the erstwhile colonial big boys took a haircut that looked like a scalping? But then, Hu’s 80% support in Pakistan was balanced by 50% in India with the latter being interestingly high in view of the traditional rivalry. His negative ratings in the US, Germany and France (70%) almost certainly reflect concern over human-rights issues in China – along with what one suspects as some apprehension about the rising power in the East.

Almost the biggest surprise was that United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon came second. No one would suspect from the in-house gossip, Western media coverage and reportage from the UN, that Ban was so well regarded.

One suspects that part of all of this is name recognition. No other world politician got more than a 40% confidence rating and that was Ban, who has certainly been globe-trotting, and more likely to be known internationally than heads of the also-ran states in what is still a US dominated world. He was mistrusted in Turkey, Egypt, Palestine – and the US, very likely because the former see him as pro, and the latter see him as anti-Israel. Overall, the result reflects greater support for, and attention to, the UN in most of the world, which makes him much more visible in his efforts than in the US media.

Of course, the UN has had a perennial beating in the US media, but Obama even got 70% support from US respondents for his handling of world affairs – which includes a call to support the UN. And while Putin and Hu rely on their home base for the big cheers, Obama’s overseas cheerleaders overtake his domestic support. When they like him they like him very seriously, like 92% of the British. But then Brown is much more popular (64) in the US than he is the UK (46).

However, reading the Western media on color revolutions in all their rainbow hues, who would suspect that Putin, a low scorer outside Russia where he gets an almost Stalinist 85% support would be twice as popular in Ukraine (57%) as Obama (35%)? While India has had a long love affair with Moscow, his 65% rating there is almost as surprising as his support in China (64%), taking us way back before Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev started calling each other names.

And if the spirit of non-alignment is so high in India to give Ahmadinejad his only non-Muslim country star status (42% positive, 30% negative) in India, then how come the country has just elected and allegedly pro-Western free economy government whose vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency was instrumental in getting Iran on the Security Council agenda? Indeed, maybe this is the basis for peace talks between the two sub-continental giants since 75% of Pakistanis were also rooting for the Iranian leader – as were, understandably, the Palestinians, whose friendlessness could easily lead them to embrace any oasis in a desert.

So are there conclusions? A poll like this deals in broad-brush strokes. One can support the foreign policy stand of a leader without endorsing domestic policies, so for example, Taiwanese partiality to Hu may reflect a recent lack of bellicosity from China and the improvement in cross-strait relationships. In the Muslim world, perceived attitudes to the Israel-Palestinian problem are clearly the big issue – Sarkozy and Brown for example, are punished for their support for Israel. Obama certainly knows that and is acting on it.

In China and Russia, national pride is a big factor, which is why, whatever you think of his principles, Sarkozy has blown it with the Chinese, between meeting the Dalai Lama and the boycott threat to the Olympics. In contrast, India wants it all ways and seems to have taken sentimental alignment with all as the logical extension of its non-aligned history.

The numbers do suggest a hard core of mistrust for the US, and indeed the West, in major parts of the world. It is clear that in many places democracy and human rights are not as big an issue either in country or in assessing other countries’ leaders as Western politicians and policy makers would assume.

That is not just the neo-conservatives but genuine human-rights advocates and so the figures would tend to support Obama’s neo-realist foreign policy of negotiating with regimes that he would otherwise deplore. World public opinion seems to support those who do not threaten with missiles, which is, as they say, hardly rocket science. But it is a lesson that seems to bear constant repetition in some quarters.

According to the New Bethel Church website, the “Open Carry Celebration” was held on a Saturday instead of a Sunday, so that it was clear that it was “not a church worship service, where the focus is on Jesus and our responsibility to Him. Rather,” Pagano, a former Marine weapons instructor, pointed out, “this is merely a church-hosted event, similar to any other event that any other church may do to celebrate their heritage.”

The “Open Carry Celebration” was held several weeks after Pagano had encouraged his parishioners to bring the guns to a church-sponsored picnic. “Honestly, I would really like to see this mushroom into a Thunder over Louisville, where we are just inundated with civil-minded responsible gun owners,” Pagano said.

“As a Christian, I believe, and as an American this country was founded on the deep-seated belief in God and firearms — without which we wouldn’t be here today,” Pagano told FOX News during the run-up to the “Open Carry” event. “There is nothing illogical nor immoral about being a God-fearer and a decent community-minded individual who believes in rights to bear arms and use firearms for self-defense if necessary or just for sporting purposes.”

Ministry Today reported that “Pagano got the idea after hearing several of his congregants voice concern over the Obama administration’s views on gun control.” (During last year’s presidential campaign, Obama’s comment during a San Francisco fundraiser — just before the Pennsylvania primary – that it was “not surprising” that in tough economic times, people then “get bitter, [and] they cling to guns or religion …“ continues to feed the right wing rumor mill that the Obama administration has plans to fiddle around with the Second Amendment.)

Pagano had recently “preached a sermon called, ‘God, Guns, Gospel and Geometry,’ and during the [‘Open Carry Celebration’] … he met applause after declaring, ‘But for a deep-seated belief in God and firearms, this country would not be here today,’” Ministry Today reported.

Pagano’s “Open Carry Celebration,” which had been announced on the heels of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita, Kansas church, was not without its critics. “I’m not opposed to people having guns. I have three,” said Rev. Jerry Cappel, president of the Kentuckian Interfaith Community, a coalition of local religious leaders in the Louisville area, “You can be OK with the right to carry arms, but still find that joining the right to carry and Christ to be misguided,” Cappel added.

Pam Gersh, a Louisville resident who helped organize a Million Mom March against gun violence in the area in 2000, told ABC News that “The serious issue of gun violence [wa]s not being addressed. I don’t really understand the purpose of what Pagano is doing here.”

“Where there are killings of people like Dr. Tiller in church and there is no discussion of gun violence and only of abortion, then it shows there’s no real open dialogue about how to solve this problem,” said Gersh.

Lynn Joyce Hunter recently pointed out at politicsdaily.com that “Pagano’s plan may indicate the rise of a new phenomenon in American religion: the NRA Christian.” Hunter pointed out that “even putting aside the Sermon on the Mount and such biblical imagery as the beating of swords into plowshares, one must question whether an embrace of guns is the best way to claim a national identity and celebrate our patriotism — in or out of church.”

Hunter maintained that what particularly bothered her about “Pagano’s bring-your-gun-to-church-day, … [was] not the thought of Independence Day revelers enjoying a Second Amendment theme party, but the advent of NRA Christian evangelism. The murder of George Tiller was particularly eerie because he was shot and killed in his church. Christian churches have long been considered places of peace, and sanctuaries from societal violence. When this presumption of sanctuary becomes violated — from Archbishop Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral to the 1980 slaying of Salvadorian Archbishop Oscar Romero — there is a sense that our worship has been desecrated.”

Earlier this year, the Arkansas House of Representatives created quite a stir when it was considering a bill that would have allowed concealed hand guns in churches across the state. In late February, the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee voted not to allow that bill out of committee.

Pagano, who appears to maintain that without the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms – there would be no First Amendment – the right to free speech – and therefore no America as he knows it, has again placed the issue of carrying guns in the pews on the table. At the same time, his well-publicized event gave the pastor more than his fifteen minutes in the national spotlight.

As for the debate over guns, in a short post at Beliefnet, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, author, radio and TV talk show host, and President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, asked: “Whatever one thinks about guns, gun ownership, or gun laws, do we really need any more religious leaders officiating over a marriage between faith and firearms?”

One Hirschfield reader responded unambiguously: “The US Constitution is divinely inspired, and nowhere is the hand of the Almighty in the creation of our country more evident in the glorious right of all its citizens to defend themselves enshrined in the Sacred Second Amendment. To me, bringing firearms to church, synagogue, or mosque is a joyful act of worship and thanksgiving for this our most sacred right, to defend our very lives from royal oppression.”

When President Obama told gathered physicians at the American Medical Association’s annual meeting in his home town this month, “I’m not advocating caps on malpractice awards which I believe can be unfair to people who’ve been wrongfully harmed,” he was booed like Chicago Cub Milton Bradey. “Yank him,” was probably next.

Who remembered that in 1993 a similar message by his Secretary of State–another homey named Hillary–received a standing ovation? (Though the long knives did come out later.)

Of course you can’t blame the 236,000 member AMA for wanting to conduct medicine instead of defensive tests to ward off lawsuits that sit on medicine. Hello?

Less forgivable are the “issues” the AMA pursues like cruise ship hygiene and physician penmanship even as two Iraq wars and one Afghanistan war have raged.

Can we expect resolutions like “AMA Decries Use of Plastic Spatulas,” or “Doctors Worried About Increase in Planetary Tilt,” asked Mark DePaolis, MD in the Star Tribune in 1994.

It’s not that the AMA doesn’t know the issues. It has taken up elder abuse, bullying, corporeal punishment in schools, alcohol abuse, highway safety, binge drinking, medical marijuana, cosmetic sun tanning, medical waste, livestock antibiotics, organ donation, terminal care, physician assisted suicide, women, gay and patient rights, AIDS ethics and patient privacy in the past.

In the 1990’s it confronted Big Tobacco–and embarrassment over its own tobacco stock holdings–with a high profile, physician-led “Dump the Hump,” Walk a Mile Against Joe Camel parade in Chicago’s Loop.

Nor has the AMA shrunk from addressing the “intentional violence” of boxing, violent movies and video games, “private ownership of rapid fire assault rifles” and physician involvement in executions–though a resolution against the death penalty itself was defeated in 2000. (It “wasn’t the AMA’s business,” said Colorado AMA delegate Steven Thorson, MD.)

It’s just that some issues are more equal than others.

So even though AMA delegates passed a resolution against direct to consumer (DTC) drug advertising in 1991– the “ads mislead the public and add to the cost of medication,” it stated–and even though it reaffirmed the stance in 2001–it’s like a competition “to see who can sell more of antihistamines or nasal sprays,” said New Jersey AMA delegate Angelo Agro, MD–the AMA reversed itself in 2005 and decided the notorious, ask-your-doctor ads were a First Amendment issue.

And speaking of the First Amendment, the AMA’s controversial and semi-hidden practice of selling its physicians’ personal prescribing information to marketers was also called “free speech” in recent court rulings in Maine and New Hampshire.

For more than 50 years, the AMA has profited by selling physicians’ personal data “to pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical colleges and universities, medical equipment and supply companies, and other institutions interested in supplying goods and services to physicians and group practices,” it admits on its website. “AMA’s Database Licensees are specialized in direct mail, telemarketing, sales call reporting, and other database marketing services,” it says.

Physicians are free to opt out of the $50 million a year scheme, censured at the AMA’s 2007 annual meeting by Lydia Vaias, MD of the National Physicians Alliance and John Santa, MD of the Prescription Project, a group against such access–if they know about it.

But 40 percent of physicians surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2007 didn’t–and 74 percent disapproved.

No, the AMA’s “issues agenda” is as plain as the drug ads which adorned its website as recently as 2007.

Why, for example, does it resolve this year to go after hormone selling “for-profit Web sites, anti-aging clinics and compounding pharmacies,” when it has given hormone giant Wyeth who’s hoaxed women into cancer causing hormone therapy for four decades a pass?

Why resolve this year there is “no need” for more research into a vaccine/autism connection and support “universal vaccination” while pledging to explore non-vaccine links further? Maybe green beans?

Why ignore the taxpayer funded warehousing of so many of the nation’s children, poor and elderly on “atypical antipyschotics” even as over 20 states sue?

And why ignore the epidemic of veteran suicides and suicides on asthma, seizure, pain and anti-smoking medications approved as “safe”?

Why ignore “checkbook science” in a year in which two leading researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, two at Emory University and one at the University of Minnesota are exposed for pay-for-play drug schemes that promote unsafe drugs?

Maybe it’s someone else who should get booed.

He revisited it in his 2008-09 Project Censored award- winning article titled: “Economic Meltdown – The ‘Dollar Glut’ is What Finances America’s Global Military Build-up” in which he explains the following – the “inter-related dynamics” of:

– “surplus (US) dollars pouring into the rest of the world for yet further financial speculation and corporate takeovers;”

– global central banks “recyl(ing) these dollar inflows (into) US Treasury bonds to finance the federal US budget deficit; and most important (but most suppressed in the US media),”

– “the military character of the US payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit.”

In other words, the global “dollar glut” finances US corporate takeovers, speculative excesses creating bubbles and global economic crises, America’s reckless spending, foreign wars, hundreds of bases worldwide, “military build-up,” and culture of militarism and belligerence overall at the expense of democratic freedoms, beneficial social change, and human and civil rights.

In softer form, it’s what former US diplomat, advisor, father of Soviet containment, and dove compared to others at that time George Kennan believed should be America’s post-WW II foreign policy. In his February 1948 “Memo PPS23, he stated:

…we have 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. (It makes us) the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships (to let us) maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national society. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…

We should dispense with the aspiration to ‘be liked’ or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism….We should (stop talking about) unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans (ideas and practices), the better.

Yet Kennan advocated diplomacy over force in contrast to Paul Nitze, Dean Atcheson and other Truman and succeeding administration officials favoring hardline militarism, future wars, and National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) policies to contain the Soviet Union. In 1962, nuclear disaster nearly resulted. The threat remains, more menacingly than ever by “forc(ing) foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire” through recycling their dollars into US Treasuries – something the mass media call “showing their faith in US economic strength.

Hudson refers to a “sinister dynamic,” not involving consumers or private investors, but central banks putting “their money” in US Treasuries, but “it is not ‘their money’ at all. They are sending back the dollars that foreign exporters and other recipients turn over to their central banks for domestic currency.”

“When the US payment deficit pumps dollars into foreign economies, these banks (have) little option except to buy US Treasury bills and bonds which the Treasury spends on financing an enormous, hostile military build-up to encircle (today’s) major dollar-recyclers China, Japan and Arab OPEC oil producers” – essentially a process by which they finance their own endangerment.

Up to now it’s continued, but, given the reckless dollar glut in recent months, with less enthusiasm by bigger buyers and hints of a possible end game or at least less buying than previously – mostly among BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and OPEC countries but other emerging economies as well getting more interdependent on themselves than on America.

In his 2002 preface, Hudson noted that “the US Treasury (pursued the same balance-of-payment) ‘benign neglect’ (strategy as) it did thirty years” earlier. In 1971, it “caused a global crisis when its $10 billion (level) led to a 10 per cent dollar devaluation.” Now it’s hundreds of billions annually and still high during the current economic crisis when exports and imports are lower.

Earlier and especially now, if Europe and Asia let the dollar deflate, their exporters will be disadvantaged at a time they can least afford it. So they’re forced to “support the dollar’s exchange rate by recycling their surplus dollars back to the United States” by buying US Treasuries.

Sooner or later, it’s a losing proposition, especially in today’s climate with the Federal Reserve sacrificing dollar strength to bail out Wall Street and trying to keep long rates low to contain borrowing costs. Yet the greater the dollar erosion, the more losses foreign investors will incur and less likely they’ll tolerate more by buying bad assets.

So far, however, they’re still recycling their dollar inflows to fund America’s budget deficit and global militarism – something Hudson calls a “Free Lunch in the form of compulsory foreign loans to finance US Government policy.”

Even so, they have no say over US policies, yet America and international lending agencies, like the IMF and World Bank, “use their dollar claims” on indebted nations to enforce Washington Consensus diktats. Independent-minded states face sanctions, isolation, coups or wars if they refuse.

Until Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971, America couldn’t run unlimited balance-of-payments deficits. However without gold convertibility, it’s continued for nearly 40 years along with protectionist policies through generous subsidies to US exporters – most notably to agribusiness. As a result, Hudson sees international tensions growing for the next generation, perhaps even greater now given America’s reckless monetarism and perpetual wars.

His book “provid(es) the background for US – European and US – Asian financial relations by explaining how (post-1971) the US Treasury-bill standard came to provide America with a Free Lunch.” Also how the IMF promoted debtor nations’ capital flight and the World Bank supported “foreign trade dependency on US farm exports…”

The early 1970s dollar crisis and balance-of-payments deficits seem small compared to today. Yet the “Treasury-bill standard (frees) the US economy from (doing) what American diplomats (force on) other debtor nations (with) payments deficits: impose austerity to restore balance in its international payments. The United States alone has been free to pursue domestic expansion and foreign diplomacy with hardly a worry about the balance-of-payment consequences.” No other nation has that luxury.

Post-WW II, Washington made other countries dependent on America, something it eschewed after WW I, staying isolationist instead to pursue internal development.

In the 1970s, emerging nations proposed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) through the UN Conference on Trade and Development to promote their own trade and other concerns. It “originated as a response to America’s aggressive world economic diplomacy, and how US strategy has provided other nations with a learning curve that they may follow in pressing their own national and regional interests.”

The more reckless and belligerent America becomes, the more incentive they have to try – and in greater alliance, with BRIC country partners, may have a greater chance for success.

Introduction

Post-WW II, on the pretext of national security, America pursued “world power…and economic advantage as perceived by American strategists quite apart from the profit motive of private investors.”

After WW I, it achieved world creditor status from its “unprecedented terms (in extending) armaments and reconstruction loans to its wartime allies.” In 1917, it entered the war late when it felt staying out would “entail at least an interim economic collapse (the result of) American bankers and exporters (getting) stuck with uncollectible loans to Britain and allies.” So it joined the Triple Entente as an associate, not a full partner, to protect its $12 billion investment.

Post-war, America was the world’s major creditor – but one “to foreign governments with which it felt little brotherhood” and no obligation to stabilize world finance and trade. Unlike its post-WW II policy, it didn’t extend loans to foreign countries so they could finance their US-owed debt. Nor did it open its markets to foreign imports. It wanted Europe’s empires dissolved, their military spending cut, their wealth “to flow out and their prices to fall” – the idea being in this way to re-establish world payments equilibrium, a very unrealistic notion, but many leading Europeans embraced it. It didn’t work and made repayment of foreign debts impossible.

The “world economy emerged from World War I shackled with debts far beyond its ability to pay,” except by “borrow(ing) funds from private lenders in the creditor nation to pay the creditor-nation government.”

A more enlightened policy would have turned “other countries into (US) economic satellites.” But America eschewed European imports, and US investors preferred its own outperforming stock market. On trade and finance, US policies “impelled European countries to withdraw from the world economy and turn within.”

America’s isolationism prevented it from collecting its foreign debts. “Its status as world creditor proved ultimately worthless as the world broke into nationalist units,” and sought independence from foreign trade and payments.

Washington pursued isolationism, thus prompting other nations to seek self-sufficiency. A bankrupt Britain convened the 1932 Ottawa Conference “to establish a system of Commonwealth tariff preferences.” By the mid-1930s, Germany began preparing for war. At the same time, the Depression affected one country after another as private capital dried up while at the same time Britain and other nations had mounting debt problems. It begs the question as to why they let them get so onerous in the first place.

American Plans for a Post-WW II “Free-Trade Imperialism”

Early in the war, US officials and economists knew America would prevail and emerge as the world’s dominant power. However, transitioning from war to peace needed large export volumes to stimulate economic growth and full employment. “This in turn required that foreign countries be able to earn or borrow dollars to pay” for what they got. So America supplied them through government loans and private investment.

In return, it “name(d) the terms on which” they were provided and structured the IMF and World Bank so countries could “pursue laissez faire policies by insuring adequate resources to finance the international payments imbalances,” the result of opening their markets to US imports. It was thought that free trade and investment would result in “balanced international trade and payments…under US leadership.”

Post-war, America was the only dominant nation intact, so it alone had enough foreign exchange to invest substantially abroad. Its commercial strength turned other economies into US satellites and assured America achieved maximum world power by:

• having European nations let US investors buy extractive industries in their former colonies, especially Middle East oil;
• less developed nations would supply America with raw materials rather than develop their own competitive manufacturing infrastructure;
• they’d also buy US products and services; and
• the resulting trade surplus would provide enough foreign exchange for US investors to buy the world’s most productive resources and make America even stronger.

The goal was short-lived as:

• America had tariffs on commodities that other nations could produce more cheaply;
• the International Trade Organization, in place to subject all economies to the same rules, was scuttled; and
• private US investment abroad was never enough to finance sufficient foreign purchases of US exports; IMF and World Bank loans also fell short.

America accumulated a payments surplus. It, in turn, weakened its export potential. The lesson learned was that “Beyond a point, a creditor and payment-surplus status can be decidedly uncomfortable.”

At first, the enlightened solution wasn’t taken – extended foreign aid for rebalancing as Congress put internal interests ahead of foreign policy.

The Cold War Pushes America’s Balance-of-Payments into Deficit

Cold War strategy gave Congress an anti-communist reason to “bribe foreign governments” to fight the red menace as well as open their markets to US exporters. It got the Marshall Plan and other aid agreed on to “keep its fellow capitalist countries solvent” and not tempted to turn left. The possibility continued foreign aid for several decades.

At the same time, America’s balance-of-payments reached never before attained levels and needed rebalancing “to promote foreign export markets and world currency stability.” To buy US products and services, other countries needed resources to pay for them, something only Washington could arrange at a time when they weren’t creditworthy.

However, what worked early on became destabilizing as America began “sink(ing) into the mire that had bankrupted every European power that experimented with colonialism.” Unlike foreign investors that cut their losses when necessary, national security interests (and industries profiting from them) trump other considerations even when counterproductive. Once begun, military spending takes on a life of its own – something very apparent given its current out-of-control level and growing.

New Characteristics of America’s Financial Imperialism

A growing US balance-of-payments surplus was “incompatible with continued growth in world liquidity and trade.” So America had to buy more foreign products, services and capital assets than it supplied to foreign buyers. At the same time, it shifted more dollars abroad through a payments deficit, easily handled in the 1950s and 1960s as long as Washington could redeem them with gold. But that game had a limited life span as “Attempts by governments to repay their debts beyond a point extinguish(es) their monetary base.”

…”international money (is also) a debt of the key-currency nation.” Providing other countries with assets involves going into debt, and repaying it “extinguish(es) an international monetary asset.”

By the early 1960s, America approached “the point at which its debts to foreign central banks soon would exceed the value of the Treasury’s gold stock.” It happened in 1964 the result of Vietnam War spending at an early stage in the conflict. Just as two world wars bankrupted Europe, Vietnam threatened the same fate for America, but it didn’t curtail spending and still doesn’t.

Earlier, the result was a run on gold with foreign central banks “cash(ing) in their dollar surpluses for American gold almost on a monthly basis.” By March 1968, the US Treasury suspended its sales, and informally world central banks agreed to stop converting dollars into the metal. The result: the dollar gold price link was broken, and in August 1971, Nixon closed its window with an official embargo.

Henceforth, in place of gold, the US Treasury-bill (dollar-debt) standard began. No longer able to buy US gold, substituting Treasuries became the only option and “to a much lesser extent, US corporate stocks and bonds.”

From then to now, foreign central banks have recycled their dollars to the US government. “Running a dollar surplus in their balance of payments became synonymous with lending (it) to the US Treasury.” For its part, America borrows from other central banks and runs trade deficits. The larger they get, the greater the amount available to be loaned back, so today the volume is enormous.

For both sides, the problem is that Washington’s guns and butter economy (including trillions to Wall Street) creates greater deficits and inflated spending. America’s dominance is maintained, and foreign economies are obliged to finance it. Failure to support the dollar will inflate their own currencies, give US exporters a competitive edge, and ultimately let the world monetary system break down.

The “unique ability of the US Government to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens (through taxes) is one of the economic miracles of modern times. Without it, the war-induced American prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s would have ended quickly….”

How America’s Payment Deficit Became a Source of Strength, not Weakness

It let America achieve what no earlier empires did – “a flexible form of global exploitation that controlled debtor countries by imposing Washington Consensus (diktats).” It’s used the IMF, World Bank and other international lending agencies for its purposes, while the Treasury-bill standard “obliged the payments-surplus nations of Europe and East Asia to extend forced loans to the US Government.” If they don’t, world economies face monetary crisis.

Implications for the Theory of Imperialism

Hudson calls it a “new form of imperialism” under which America exploits other nations “via the central banks (and international lending agencies) rather than via the activities of private corporations seeking profits.”

A “Super Imperialism” model “pressed foreign governments to regulate their nations’ trade and investment to serve US national objectives…Washington Consensus (diktats) made aid borrowers more dependent on their creditors, worsened their terms of trade by promoting raw materials exports and grain dependency, and forestalled needed social modernization such as land reform and progressive income and property taxation.”

US companies thus achieved a competitive advantage, not in the marketplace, but by Washington Consensus rules and the Bretton Woods institutions it controls – the IMF, World Bank, etc. What’s good for US business benefits America overall and its Super Imperial ambitions.

Today’s Source of Financial Instability Compared to the 1920s

The earlier period had a shortage of liquidity. By the early 1970s, it was in surplus, the result of the enormous volume of dollar inflows in world economies. The Korean War began shifting America’s balance-of-payments from surplus to deficit. In 1971, Vietnam forced it off gold and “induced a US debtor-oriented international financial policy (with) the rest of the world” – something other nations have been trapped by ever since.

US deficits have disrupted world economies, but its character has changed. Not only does it finance US militarism, but it also “sustain(s) America’s stock market and real estate bubble” while at the same time industrial America erodes. In addition, pressure is applied to privatize public enterprises to let this sector pass “into the hands of global finance capital….controlled and shaped by the Washington Consensus.”

Under a “new state-capitalist form of imperialism,” central banks, not industry, “are the vehicle for balance-of-payments exploitation” with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It’s Super Imperialism because one nation alone gets a Free Lunch right to benefit by getting others to finance its deficits and reckless spending.

The system’s unique feature is that other countries may extract their citizens’ wealth, but only America extracts theirs through the sale of its Treasury securities.

The World’s Need for Financial Autonomy from Dollarization

In its relationship with client countries, America’s dollarization policy imposes dependency, not self-sufficiency. It drains “the financial resources of its Dollar Bloc allies (and retards) the development of indebted third world raw-materials exporters….” But its gain isn’t put to productive use. It’s used instead for militarism and financialization at the expense of its former industrial strength.

It’s an unsustainable system, but for other countries to break away, they’ll have to renounce Chicago School alchemy, the austerity programs it imposes, and advantages it gives America in trade and other relations. It drains other nations’ resources by trapping emerging economies in chronic debt and developed ones into forced buying of US Treasuries.

In return, America gets a Free Lunch. It rules as world debtor, forces other countries into creditor bondage, and threatens to bring down the global monetary system if enough of them balk. So far it’s worked because Europe and Asia lack the political will to devise a “New International Economic Order” so nations producing economic gains can keep them and not let America use them to reinforce its “new kind of centralized global planning” – one based on financialization and a US Treasury securities standard, not industrial mechanisms. In WTO terms, it transfers foreign trade gains from other economies to the US, drains their resources overall, promotes dependency, not self-sufficiency, and backs it with hardline militarism and threats of systemic monetary collapse.

Eventually, exploited countries won’t tolerate more “taxation without representation,” a “quid without quo,” a Free Lunch from “the world’s payments-surplus nations.” The longer America demands it by glutting world economies with dollars, the more likely disadvantaged nations will object. Hudson put it this way in his Project Censored award-winning article:

Today, “the only way a nation can block capital movements is to withdraw from the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). For the first time since the 1950s, this looks like a real possibility, thanks to the worldwide awareness” of America’s dirty game and how it harms them.

“De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Empire”

In his June 14, 2009 article, Hudson explained that “Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)” had a two-day June 15 – 16 meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with Brazil attending on the 16th. SCO countries include Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan, Uzbekistan with Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia having observer status.

The meeting’s stated purpose was “to discuss mutual aid,” not challenge America’s financial and military empire. Yet it potentially may be pivotal by doing just that.

On June 5, Medvedev told the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russia, China and India have an opportunity to “build an increasingly multipolar world order” away from America’s “artificially maintained unipolar system (based on) one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks.”

In other words, America “makes too little and spends too much,” especially with regard to its military. It also gluts the world with dollars that end up in foreign central banks. Either they recycle them into US Treasuries or “let the ‘free market’ force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets, creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.”

Given a choice up to now, they’ve had to choose the least bad alternative. “Now they want out” as Medvedev explained in St. Petersburg saying: “what we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries will not dominate.” How so is the question, and can it work?

“For starters, the six SCO (and other BRIC) countries intend to trade in their own currencies” to benefit by what America “until now has monopolized for itself.” China’s central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan wants a new reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.” It was discussed in Yekaterinburg.

These and other countries see America as “a lawless nation, not only financially but also militarily.” It forces its rules on others but won’t abide by them itself – a practice now intolerable, and there’s more.

So much of America’s budget is for militarism that the Pentagon faces overstretch while the nation is so indebted it’s effectively a deadbeat with amounts impossible to repay. For countries like China, the problem is especially acute given its $2 trillion holdings “denominated in yuan.”

A “return to the kind of dual exchange rates common between World Wars I and II” may be the solution – “one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments.”

With or without these controls, “foreign nations are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars” that face lower valuations the more of them America prints. If SCO countries and Brazil have their way, America “no longer (will) live off the savings of others…nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures.” For these nations and many others, it can’t come a moment too soon.

The impetus for developing this new generation of airliners is the need to improve fuel economy so as to maintain the profitability of the passenger air transport industry. Between 1986 and 2001, the world price of crude oil remained steady at near $22 a barrel. From 2002 to 2008, the world price of crude oil rose steadily from $25 to $95 a barrel (the prices quoted are rough averages, and in 2007 dollars). Modern airliners that are lighter and stronger than their older-generation all-metal size equivalents can carry more payload with less fuel consumption, and this translates to economic sustainability.

The quest for a more efficient airliner began with the first example of the type, Igor Sikorsky’s S-22 of 1913, the Ilya Muromets, a four engine biplane with an enclosed cabin for 16 passengers. Russia’s military needs in WW1 swallowed up the commercial potential of the S-22, and the production was shifted to bombers. The post-war rebirth of commercial aviation began with the Farman twin engine biplane transport of 1919, the F-60 Goliath, seating 14 passengers. Since then the quest for “better, faster and cheaper” passenger aviation has never stopped.

In 1972, Airbus introduced its A300, the first twin turbofan widebody air transport. The Boeing Commercial Airplanes company introduced its first widebody twin turbofan airliner, the 767, in 1981. Airbus chooses to be an airplane manufacturer that leads the industry in the application of engineered materials (composites) and computer-controlled aviation. Boeing is an airplane manufacturer that seeks to maintain its reputation for robust, reliable and increasingly efficient designs, which it gained early in its history with airplanes like the revolutionary 247 of 1933, the first truly modern airliner (all-aluminum monoplane of semi-monocoque construction with cantilever wings, wing flaps, retracting landing gear, trim tabs, autopilot, and deicing boots for the wings and tailplane).

Airbus and Boeing are today’s main competitors for new airplane orders worldwide. As noted earlier, it is the cost of fuel that drives the economics of commercial air transport, and in turn the replacement of older aircraft with newer models. The competing demands of safety, reliability, strength, carrying capacity, volumetric efficiency, speed and fuel economy drive airplane designers toward a convergence of characteristics, so that today both Airbus and Boeing airliners look, sound and feel largely the same to most passengers.

Each iteration of a manufacturer’s model type will have a higher proportion of weight-saving composite material, and a more extensive array of electronic and computer systems. How and where composites and computers are used by Airbus and Boeing may be quite different between their competing models of comparable type, but inevitably both manufacturers increase their use of both composites and computers, to remain competitive. The Airbus A330 and A340 series of airplanes, introduced in 1992 and 1993, and their classmate the Boeing 777, introduced in 1995, will be replaced by the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, set for introduction in 2010, and the Airbus A350, set for introduction in 2013. Both the 787 Dreamliner and the A350 are nearly all-composite airplanes. The 787 Dreamliner is 80% composite by volume, and by weight it is: 50% composite, 20% aluminum, 15% titanium, 10% steel and 5% other. By weight, the A350 is: 53% composite, 19% aluminum and aluminum-lithium, 14% titanium, 6% steel and 8% other.

The challenge facing the civil aviation industries today is to answer the questions raised by the mysterious loss of Air France Flight 447, and to convince the public that any problems that may be uncovered about the use of composites and computers in AF447 will be fully understood and solved before building and flying all-composite airliners with even more complicated computerized control systems.

So, it is no wonder that Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney defended electronic flight control technology and the Airbus A330, in an interview prior to the Paris Air Show: “The causes of the [AF447] accident are unknown, and I don’t think there is any link with a serious fault with the aircraft…the A330 is a reliable and proven aircraft.”¹

The AF447 crisis in civil aviation may be similar to that of the two de Havilland Comet crashes of 1954. The Comet, introduced in 1949, was the world’s first passenger jet transport. During both January and April of 1954, de Havilland Comet airplanes broke apart at altitude while flying in clear weather over water. After the second crash, the fleet was grounded, many pieces were recovered from the seabed to assemble partial reconstructions, and many tests were conducted on another intact airframe. The cause of spontaneous disintegration was eventually found to be metal fatigue in the aluminum alloy used for the skin, by the cumulative effect of many cycles of cabin pressurization and de-pressurization.

The changes in design, materials and manufacturing techniques needed to solve the problems of the de Havilland Comets of 1949-1954 were used to produce an improved Comet, which returned de Havilland to passenger aviation in 1958. However, those same lessons had already been divined by Boeing to produce the 707, their first commercial jet transport, which was also introduced in 1958 and immediately went on to dominate passenger air transport through the 1960s.

If the air transport industries fail to fully resolve the AF447 mystery, then a portion of the public will assign an apprehensive image to the coming generation of composite computer-controlled air transports, a psychology we could think of as “‘54 Comet dread,” as opposed to “’60s 7-0-7 optimism.”

AF447 In The Clouds

In the early pre-dawn hours (~2:15 UTC) of 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris fell out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean near the equator about midway between Brazil and Senegal, with the loss of all 228 people aboard. The aircraft was one of the most modern, a dual engine Airbus A330-200.

(UTC is Coordinated Universal Time, which replaced Greenwich Mean Time in 1964 and is defined for the time zone straddling much of 0 degrees longitude. There are 24 time zones each generally of 15 degrees longitude, but there are numerous deviations of time zone boundaries.)²

The accident occurred after the airplane had flown over 90% of its planned northeast-directed transect of 227 km through the width at mid length of a mesoscale convection system (MCS), a cluster of storms 800 km long east to west, and 160 km wide north to south.³

The last radio message from the crew of AF447 was a routine notification at 1:33 UTC that the flight at 35,000 feet (10,671 m) along oceanic high altitude route UN873 had reached waypoint INTOL, near the outer boundary of airspace monitored by radar from Brazil. The pilots of AF447 expected to reach waypoint TASIL, near the edge of airspace radar-monitored from Senegal, in 50 minutes (by 2:23 UTC), a distance of 663 km between waypoints. A mid Atlantic gap of at least 500 km exists between the limits of Brazilian and Senegalese air traffic radar surveillance.⁴

Between about 1:46 UTC to 1:56 UTC, AF447 flew through the western fringe of the top of a storm that reached to between 35,000 feet (10.67 km) and 40,000 feet (12.2 km). It seems AF447 had shifted somewhat to the left, or westward, from its planned flightpath in order to avoid the brunt of this storm, and in anticipation of weaving between storm cells ahead. Thunderstorms in the tropics are usually very localized, of short duration, and produce abundant rainfall. They can develop so quickly that a Paris-bound flight 4 hours out from Rio de Janeiro might encounter an active storm cell over a patch of ocean that had been cloudless prior to takeoff. This is why airplane weather radar had been developed, to alert pilots of weather threats ahead, and to guide their weaving between active storm cells when they became unavoidably embedded in weather systems with numerous storms. After crossing about 42 km of clear airspace, AF447 entered the main MCS thunderstorm cluster, at about 1:59 UTC.

A sequence of satellite images of the MCS cluster show the large 800 km by 160 km (roughly) cloud mass with its variegated edge, drifting, evolving and fragmenting during that day. These images show the merged shape seen from above of the laterally spreading “anvil” tops of the many individual storm cells in the cluster. The updrafts in these cells had sufficient energy to push moisture up to between 40,000 feet (12.2 km) to 56,000 feet (17.1 km). Moisture that rises into the base of MCS clouds, perhaps near 3281 feet (1 km) at 20 C (68 F), can be chilled by strong updrafts to arrive at -40 C (-40 F) at the 10.67 km cruising altitude of AF447, and continue rising and chilling to as low a temperature as -80 C (-112 F) at 17 km elevation. This storm cluster was typical, not unusual, for the location and time of year.

AF447 proceeded northeast through the MCS cluster, guided by its weather (moisture, rain, hale) radar along a corridor of mild radar reflectivity (and of anticipated least relative ’storminess’), about equidistant between a strong cell to the west and the strongest cell of the moment, which was about 30 km east. About 8 minutes after entering the MCS system (2:07 UTC), AF447 began penetrating what was probably the most energetic part of the storm cluster along its flightpath.

At 2:10 UTC, the first of a series of automated signals was sent by AF447’s onboard computerized maintenance system, via satellite, to Air France computers in Paris logging maintenance information. The series of automated messages had a combined time span of 1 minute and occurred until 2:14 UTC; 5 failure reports and 19 warnings were transmitted. The earliest automated messages reported on the failure of the Pitot Tube sensors, which measure the airspeed of the airliner and provide an estimate of altitude based on the static pressure of the atmosphere. Subsequent messages in the initial burst indicated that the auto-pilot (automatic ’steering’) and auto-thrust (automatic ‘gas pedal’) systems had been disengaged, the collision avoidance system (to detect other nearby airliners) had a fault, that the flight control computers (three for redundancy) had shifted to an “alternate” mode where they made fewer automatic adjustments to the airplane’s control surfaces, and placed fewer limits on the range of manual inputs by the pilots that would be implemented as motions of the control surfaces (ailerons, rudder and the many types of flaps).⁵

From 2:11 UTC to 2:14 UTC, messages indicated the failure of the gyroscopes (air data inertial reference system, ADIRU, used to provide the artificial horizon orienting the sense of ‘up,’ ‘down,’ and ‘level,’ essential during nighttime) and resulting faults in the instrument panel displays (screens and electronic images instead of mechanical dial gauges); there was disagreement between systems that interpreted air data (such as for airspeed and angle of attack of the wings into the airflow); that a fault had occurred in the flight control computer system (that transmits commands to the hydraulic actuators that physically move control surfaces); that a fault had occurred in the computer system that captures and processes pressure and electrical outputs from air and motion sensors that supply data; and finally, a “cabin vertical speed warning” indicating a rapid loss of cabin air pressure, due to either a rapid descent or a breaching of the cabin shell.

AF447 may have entered its period of most severe jolting, buffeting and external cooling near 2:07 UTC, when it began crossing the core of the MCS cluster between its most active cells. Some as yet unknown excessive structural strain — perhaps exacerbated by material embrittlement or loss of plasticity and cohesion due to excessive cooling, such as by micro-strains induced by the expansion of trapped moisture freezing inside composite materials — may have been delivered by turbulence and initiated the subsequent fragmentation of the aircraft.

Pressure sensor icing sustained during at least the three minutes prior to 2:10 UTC seems to have initiated the cascade of air data (speed, pressure, altitude and attitude) processing and instrumentation failures, and contributed to the growing uncertainty of the decision-making electronic processing for the navigation and flight control systems.

Pilots rank their priorities during flight, especially in emergencies, as: “aviate, navigate, communicate.” The pilots of AF447 would be working first to keep their airplane at a proper speed: fast enough to stay aloft at the given elevation and weight of the airplane, and not too fast to damage the structure because of excessive pressure differences produced by airflows near the speed of sound, and by excessive structural stresses induced by the alternating jolts of updrafts and downdrafts in turbulent air spaces. Given that the aircraft remains aloft and is not being rattled to pieces, the next priority is to point it in a safe direction, for example away from active thunderstorm cells, and along the best route to a safe landing. The third priority is to communicate the status of the flight to air traffic controllers, a useful task as long as it is not a distraction from essential aviating.

Troubleshooting a torrent of error messages from a computerized flight control system to then compose a radio report for air traffic controllers is not a sensible allocation of attention during an emergency to control an airliner in a storm. We can understand why the crew of AF447 might not send any radio messages during their 3 minutes (and possibly as much as 11 minutes) of weaving between the storm cells and riding the waves of turbulence, before the first automated alarm of trouble was transmitted at 2:10 UTC. At this point, AF447 had crossed 154 km of the MCS cluster, the last 42 km of which were probably the roughest. During the next 4 minutes, when the automated messages were sent, the flight probably travelled 56 km. At 2:14 UTC, AF447 was about 2 to 3 minutes (28 km to 42 km, at 14 km/minute) from exiting the northern edge of the MCS cloud system, and it sent its last transmission.

AF447 Into The Sea

The search for AF447 began at 2:23 UTC. Brazilian air traffic controllers called their Senegalese counterparts when they failed to receive the expected confirmation that AF447 had announced itself to Senegal by radio, as required upon entry to a new airspace. The Brazilian Air Force dispatched search planes, a Spanish maritime patrol plane searched southwest from the Cape Verde Islands, and the search effort quickly expanded in the following days to include Brazilian naval vessels, cargo ships within the search area, French military planes and ships, and satellites.⁶

Fernando de Noronha is an archipelago of 21 islands 354 km (220 miles) northeast from the eastern tip of Brazil. AF447 flew past (~1:18 UTC) and to the west of Fernando de Noronha on route to waypoint INTOL at 565 km (351 miles) from the coast. At about 2:44 UTC, the pilots of a TAM Airlines flight from Europe to Brazil reported observing “orange dots” on the surface of the ocean — burning wreckage? — when they were approximately 1300 km (808 miles) from Fernando de Noronha. This would put them about 515 km (320 miles) northeast of the last known position of AF447, 30 minutes after its last transmission.

If AF447 broke apart at 2:14 UTC, some wreckage might fall as far as 130 km from this location (an estimate based on the debris scatter from China Airlines Flight 611, a Boeing 747 that broke apart at 35,000 feet in 2002). Powered flight by AF447 beyond 2:14 UTC was unlikely since there were no subsequent automated messages (presumably, all power generation, controlled motion and thrust had ceased). If the “orange dots” were burning AF447 wreckage, then the TAM pilots had the ability to see glows no less than 380 km ahead of them. So, the “orange dots” sighting is probably unrelated.

The Brazilian Air Force spotted floating debris 650 km (404 miles) northeast of Fernando de Noronha on 2 June, the next day a Brazilian Navy patrol boat arrived in the area. On 6 June, bodies and debris from AF447 were recovered. On 8 June, the vertical stabilizer and rudder of the Airbus A330-200 was found and recovered.⁷

By 26 June, when the search for human remains ended, 51 bodies and 600 pieces of debris had been recovered from two debris fields about 80 km (50 miles) apart on the surface of the ocean. The finds were concentrated along a 150 km track almost due north from the last known position of AF447; debris (but apparently not bodies) was scattered as far as 50 km east and west of this track. The tendency of flat pieces of debris to glide haphazardly as uncontrolled airfoils would scatter them much further from the last heading of the airplane than more compact objects, which developed no aerodynamic lift.⁸

Autopsies revealed the victims to have fractured limbs and hips, no seawater in their lungs, no signs of burning or charring, and some had little or no clothing. The presumptions are that AF447 broke up at altitude without a fuel explosion causing a cabin fire, that the victims were ejected from the wreckage at high altitude, which sucked out their breath and quickly made them unconscious, that the high speed air blast tore off their clothing, and that their bodies were not fragmented on hitting the sea because they fell more slowly individually than if they had been attached to a much heavier mass like a wrecked fuselage.

An explosion and fire in the lower fuselage (below the floor of the passenger cabin, in the center fuel tank or the cargo holds) cannot be ruled out because the passengers would be shielded from such a blast and fire, and the airplane still disintegrate in flight. Recovery of a sufficient number of parts from the lower fuselage will resolve the question of fire (no evidence yet). The recovery of parts has so far been restricted to those that float, so a great deal of plastic and composite material, and not so much metal.⁹

The official investigators are anxious to find the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder (the “black boxes” which are actually orange), which lie somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. To help locate them, each is equipped with a sonic emitter (”pinger”) with a range of 2 km. The sea floor is between 2.5 km and 4 km deep below the suspected crash site, and is quite mountainous since it is close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (the boundary from which tectonic plates originate and spread eastward and westward). The recorder cases can withstand pressure down to a depth of 6 km, and the pingers are designed to operate for at least 30 days, after which their signals fade.

Questions And Speculations

The sequence of known events for AF447 has been laid out in the sections above. The distances and UTC times quoted are either from news accounts or my simple calculations, which do not account for factors such as the curvature of the Earth and headwinds, which pilots, navigators and meteorologists use to arrive at precise numbers. Unless Airbus can make a more detailed analysis of AF447’s automated messages, and until more parts of the airplane are recovered and analyzed, especially the voice and data recorders, we are left without more facts. So, now we ask 5 questions and speculate.

Question 1. AF447 flew into a line of thunderstorms and was destroyed. Is this a case of pilot error?

The ranking for safety of nine modes of transportation on the basis of deaths per billion journeys (the basis of insurance rates) is: bus (4.3), rail (20), van (20), car (40), foot (40), water (90), air (117), bicycle (170), motorcycle (1640).¹⁰

The primary causes for the complete loss of commercial jet aircraft in accidents during 1996 through 2005 were found to be the: flight crew (55%), airplane (17%), weather (13%), miscellaneous other (7%), air traffic control (5%), maintenance (3%).¹¹

Airline travelers demand rapid transit across vast distances with the punctuality of well-run train services. They also crave comfort, meal services and entertainment during their trips. Personal safety and incident-free travel are usually taken for granted, but highly prized when thought about. And, passengers want it all cheap. Everything about passenger airplane design and airline operations is focused on producing this type of experience for the flying public. An accident like that of AF447 is simply an unpleasant reminder that nature may not always be as conveniently benign as we had assumed and planned for in the design of our passenger airplanes and the operations of our air travel industry. Our margins may be too thin because we are in too much of a hurry, and too cheap.

Passenger airplanes are designed to withstand forces comparable to about 2 to 2.5 times their maximum loaded weight (2 to 2.5 times their total mass times the constant of gravitational acceleration, g = 9.81 meters per second-squared). We could design passenger airplanes that are essentially unbreakable, like the F-35 fighter now under development, which can be stressed to 8 or 9 g, and uses composite materials for its wing and nacelle skins. However, ‘unbreakable’ passenger airplanes would be much smaller and slower than the 200-500 seat turbofan-propelled transports we are used to. They would be more like the Lockheed P-3 Orion that has been used as a “hurricane hunter,” flying through violent storms to gather meteorological data. The P-3 Orion (1962-1990) is a maritime patrol plane developed from the Lockheed Electra passenger airplane (1957-1961), which could carry about 120 people. The four engine turboprop P-3 Orion has an operational limit of 3 g, but the plane was shown to survive a 7 g stall recovery in 2008; see the photo of the wing.¹²

Compare the photo of the overstressed P-3 Orion wing to photos of a recovered spoiler (wing flap) from the AF447 airplane.¹³

We could restrict air travel to times and routes of guaranteed clear weather, but then direct flights between Brazil and Europe would be impossible because planes would be barred from crossing the approximately 700 km wide Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a permanent band of thunderstorms that circles the globe near the equator. Flights are often grounded or diverted to alternate destinations when dangerous weather develops, but neither the flying public nor the airline operators are eager to expand this practice to the point of avoiding any possibility of contact with rain, snow, ice, lightning, turbulent air and birds.

So, on the basis of accepted practice, the Captain of AF447, Marc Dubois, did not make an error to set off on his fateful flight. It remains to be determined if he and his two assisting pilots made the right decisions in maneuvering the airplane through the atmospheric conditions they encountered, and in responding to the technical problems that erupted.

There are three possibilities of root causes here: human error, systemic error, or natural catastrophe. If the pilots made mistakes, then the information on the voice cockpit recorder and the flight data recorder will probably reveal them (if the recorders can be found). If the piloting was flawless, then the accident could be a systemic failure, a result of inadequacies in: airplane performance, design, maintenance, certification (the performance and safety standards we choose to adhere to, through government regulation), and the operational practices of the air travel industry.

The third possibility, that an unusual and rogue natural force overwhelmed AF447 and could not have been anticipated, lets humanity off the hook. The current best guess for an AF447 natural catastrophe is wind shear, a large and abrupt change in wind velocity experienced in crossing an invisible plane through the atmosphere. But this excuse is weak. Wind shear produced by the updrafts and downdrafts in thunderstorms is now monitored by onboard Pulse-Doppler weather radar. Clear air turbulence (CAT) is a form of cloudless wind shear that is difficult to avoid because it cannot be detected visually nor with radar (a laser range-finding and reflectivity-measuring system called Doppler LIDAR is needed). CAT is created near the four high-altitude jet streams that ring the earth, in the wind shadows of mountain peaks, and as the wake turbulence of large airplanes. AF447 was far from all of these.

The Captain of AF447 was 58 and had 21 years of piloting for Air France. He had undoubtedly flown Airbus planes between Rio de Janeiro and Paris many times. On the 31st of May, he probably saw nothing unusual in the weather predicted along his route (see Figure 4 in Reference 3, and the associated maps of higher elevation winds). He expected the usual thunderstorms near the equator and would be sure to monitor his weather radar during flight, to adjust his course as needed to evade active storm cells that might develop along his intended track.

The northern hemisphere’s trade winds move southwest, and the southern hemisphere’s trade winds move northwest; they converge in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The converged masses of heavily laden moist air then rise to great height (17 km) before diverging into a northward flow north of the equator, and southward flow south of the equator. These high-altitude flows toward higher latitudes sink to low elevation at 30 degrees north and south latitude, and then skim along the surface of the Earth westward and toward the equator, as the trade winds. These toroidal patterns of atmospheric circulation are called Hadley Cells. The ocean regions of the ITCZ were called “the doldrums” by early European mariners because of the typical absence of surface winds. The tropical heat and vertical trend of atmospheric circulation within the ITCZ continuously spawns thunderstorms, and these can group into squall lines or clusters now called mesoscale convection systems (MCS). The updrafts in these storms can reach 17 km, well past the usual 10-11 km cruising altitude of airliners. Pilots experienced at transoceanic flight, like those of AF447, would understand the nature of the air spaces they intended to cross, and plan accordingly.

At least 12 other airplanes passed through the area of AF447’s disappearance during the period from 3 hours before, to perhaps 1 hour after 2:15 UTC. It is likely most were Airbus airplanes since the carriers were Air France (four, besides AF447), Air TAM (three), Air Iberia (two), Lufthansa (two) and British Airways (one). One Air France plane left São Paulo bound for Paris on 31 May 2009 at 22:10 UTC after AF447 left Rio de Janeiro at 22:03 UTC that same day, so they must have been as close to each other on the same route as allowed by regulations for safe separation. Several of the other planes passed AF447’s last known position within 30 minutes of the disappearance. None reported anything unusual (one passenger on a flight 40 minutes behind AF447 recalled a half hour of turbulence near the equator).

The effects causing AF447 to fall from flight were extremely localized and short-lived.

Question 2. Pitot Tubes measure airspeed, but on AF447 they failed due to icing. Did a loss of speed data cause the flight control computers to issue bad commands, which led to a loss of control in bad weather?

A Pitot probe is a small tube facing into the airflow from the nose of an airplane; it’s purpose is to sense ram pressure, which is interpreted for speed. Obviously, the speed sensor fails if the tube becomes plugged. It has to be maintained and cleared of insect nests, insects impacted during flight through swarms, and dirt; it has to drain off rainwater without distorting the pressure reading; and it has to be equipped with a heater to melt impacted ice.

A number of Airbus planes have had problems with Pitot probes that failed due to icing, and the entire A330 and A340 series have been undergoing retrofits. The AF447 Airbus A330-200 did not yet have the improved Pitot tubes, but since its loss Air France has speeded the retrofitting of its Airbus fleet, and all carriers are now quite focused to complete this task. There have been many recent articles in the news and in pilot forums like airliners.net, about the Pitot tube problems on Airbus planes.

The Airbus A330 uses three Pitot tubes, and its air data computers select the reading from any two that agree. None agreed on AF447 (at 2:10 UTC) so the flight control system informed the pilots that speed data was unreliable — absent — and it shifted flight control from the fully automatic mode to an alternate mode, which is comparable to the amount of computerized flight control on a Boeing 777.

Airbus pilots have a back-up procedure for estimating speed on the basis of other instruments (angle of attack and engine power) in case their airspeed indicators fail. This procedure is simplified to about three simple control settings (for thrust), for low, medium and high altitude; and which are to be committed to memory for use in emergencies.¹⁴

The computerized flight control system does not blindly use inconsistent data to compute bad commands to control surface actuators. Instead, it flags the discrepancy and turns control over to the pilots, and the pilots have their back-up procedure for flight with unreliable speed data. The loss of speed data alone is not sufficient to cause the loss of flight control.

Question 3. Did a loss of speed data cause the AF447 pilots to overspeed the airplane to the point of structural damage, because they believed they were preventing a stall?

An airplane must move fast enough to generate the aerodynamic lift force that holds its weight aloft. The stall speed is the minimum for flight. Stall speed increases with altitude because the atmosphere becomes thinner. The stall speed for the AF447 Airbus A330-200 at 35,000 feet was 759 kph (472 mph).

Airliners are designed to fly at high subsonic speeds because supersonic travel requires much higher fuel consumption. They have swept wings that remain behind the curved pressure wave the airliner’s nose plows before it, and which becomes a shock wave when the airplane moves at or above the speed of sound.

Consider a straight-wing airplane moving at sonic to low supersonic speed. The outer parts of the wings will extend ahead of the curved bow wave, and produce additional shock waves. Because neither flight speed nor incoming air density and temperature are perfectly uniform, shock waves will oscillate about some mean position relative to the airplane, causing fluctuations in the distribution of pressure force on the aircraft surface. Also, shock waves that cross the surfaces of wings will cause the flow to separate, destroying the lift. Shock waves create drag, and more shock waves create more drag. Maintaining high speed against high drag requires large engines with high fuel consumption. Supersonic airplanes are equipped with very powerful engines to accelerate them quickly from the subsonic to supersonic regime.

The maximum speed for a subsonic airliner is set by the criterion of ensuring no localized sonic flows nor shocks. For example, flow scooting around the joint of a wing and the fuselage, or some bulge on the skin, might be locally faster than the average aircraft speed. That average must be kept below the point where the fastest localized flows are sonic. Besides ensuring a smooth attached flow over the skin of the airplane, the absence of shock waves ensures there are no abrupt changes in pressure from point to point along the airframe. Such jagged and fluctuating distributions of aerodynamic force would produce large stresses and torques on airframes, and require they be much more robust. Robust equals heavier equals smaller equals less payload equals more fuel consumption equals unprofitable civil air transport like the now-retired Concorde. The upper speed limit for AF447, at 35,000 feet in clear weather, was 913 kph (567 mph).

The speed of sound depends entirely on the temperature of the air, and as this cools with elevation (below the stratosphere where most civil aviation occurs), the speed of Mach 1 decreases with height. Since stall speed increases with height, an altitude is reached beyond which a given airplane cannot fly. This is called the “coffin corner.” A pilot cruising near this altitude has only a narrow window of safe speed. This pilot must be alert to stay ahead of a stall while not speeding too quickly and subjecting the airplane to large fluctuating forces pounding and ultimately breaking it. AF447’s speed window at 10.67 km altitude was 759-913 kph (472-567 mph, Mach 0.72-0.86).

AF447’s nominal cruising speed of 871 kph (Mach 0.82) was relative to headwinds of about 28 kph, so its speed relative to the earth (ground speed) was 843 kph (524 mph).

If AF447 had only lost its speed data the pilots would used their back-up speed scale (BUSS), described earlier, and the flight would have continued. There had to be additional problems to rob the pilots of the readings on which the BUSS relied, or to distract them from aviating. Additional problems could be natural: the ‘act of god’ catastrophic updraft or turbulence that went undetected by all and disappeared with AF447; the problems could be multiple and simultaneous aircraft systems failures; and the additional problem could be the pilots’ own mistake in becoming absorbed in trying to interpret the cascade of error messages and to reboot their computer systems, and so lose sight of their drifting airspeed until it was too late.

The mystery at this point is that nature does not seem to have been unusually unkind at that time and place, it is hard to believe the airplane would have multiple systems failures and suffer a catastrophic disintegration without some overwhelming external force being applied, and it is hard to believe the flight crew was anything other than highly competent, experienced, prepared and alert.

Question 4. Can lightning more easily penetrate the composite panels of the Airbus A330-200, and this effect initiate the problems of AF447: by causing an electrical fault disrupting computer systems, or sparking a fire or fuel explosion?

The first 20 years of aviation were dominated by composite airplanes, which were made of resin-painted canvas-covered wood frames, a construction method used earlier for canvas-covered canoes. Metal airplanes were built to meet the demands of higher speeds, larger load capacity and greater reliability. Aside from its aerodynamic and mechanical functions of producing lift, reducing drag, and containing cabin pressure, the surface of a metal airplane has the electromagnetic function of acting as a Faraday Cage, shielding the interior (passengers and crew, cargo, fuel system, electronics and control systems) from any external electromagnetic threats, such as lightning.

Electromagnet waves and arcs (like lightning) will easily penetrate composite panels unless they contain layers of metal foil or metallic fibers, which are connected to grounding points so as to short-circuit and bleed away incident electric currents. Composite panels designed for airplane skins must incorporate such metallic lamina to shield the aircraft from lightning, and to ensure that no external electromagnetic emissions can penetrate to sensitive electronic systems within the airplane and interfere with their operation (electrical noise shielding). Engineers are aware of these requirements and have standards (and regulations) to guide their design efforts.

The electronics and computer systems in airliners today are so complex and sensitive that the electromagnetic shielding has to be a critical part of the design of the airframe. Ideally, a new design is tested against real electromagnetic waves and electric arcs, and not just “virtually” with computer simulations, to verify the Faraday Cage performance of the structure. Since the average airliner experiences about one lightning strike a year, reality eventually weeds out the bad designs.

The fact of the automatic messages from AF447 shows that electrical power was available until at least 2:14 UTC that day, there were no indications of interruptions or surges.

Also, there was no indication that lightning occurred near AF447’s last known position during the time of its disappearance (based on NASA surveillance). Storms in equatorial oceanic regions exhibit an unusual lack of lightning, a fact motivating current meteorological research. See (3) for sources on this topic.

So, it seems lightning is a very unlikely contributing factor to the disappearance of AF447.

Question 5. Do composites degrade more easily and quickly than aluminum and steel, and are composite airplanes more fragile that all-metal airplanes?

The contemporary use of composite materials for aircraft structures is very new, and there is less than twenty years experience with them in the field. From the very studies that were used to devise these engineered materials, scientists learned about their weaknesses as well. Composites are fibrous or mesh layers (lamina) bonded together by a resin or cement matrix. Shock and cyclic stresses can lead to failure of the material by separation of layers — delamination.

Cyclic stresses can be from pressurization and de-pressurization, or cycles of temperature extremes that cause stresses by thermal expansion and contraction, or severe vibration and repetitive torquing. A composite panel may develop an interior separation that remains unnoticed for some time before the complete failure of the panel. The integrity of composite airliner panels must to be checked periodically, by visual inspection and acoustic probing (which might be tapping to hear a ‘funny’ sound).

In 2002, airplane mechanics working for the Federal Express delivery service discovered that the hydraulic fluid used in the actuators of an Airbus plane had dissolved some of the composite material of the rudder, causing a separation from control rods, and difficulties during flight. In 2005, a rudder removed for inspection revealed extensive delamination between its outer layer and its inner core; traces of hydraulic fluid were found between these layers in the area of separation.

These and other incidents of composite material-related rudder malfunctions on Airbus planes cast doubt on the ascription of pilot error as the cause of the American Airlines Flight 587 accident of 12 November 2001. An Airbus A300-600 just airborne and climbing crossed into the wake turbulence of a nearby Boeing 747; the first officer made aggressive rudder motions to keep the Airbus plane upright, and the rudder snapped off followed by the vertical fin, leading to a horrific crash into a residential neighborhood of Queens, New York City. What if the strength of the rudder and its joints to its actuators and axle had been seriously degraded earlier?

William John Cox has reviewed many incidents and accidents with Airbus planes in which the composite-material vertical stabilizer and rudder was a key factor. The strength of his doubts about composite rudders is reflected by the title of his article, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?”¹⁵

The overall technical question that has to be answered about composite materials used in aviation is: what causes them to degrade during their service life, and how long is that service life? We can break down the overall question to types of sources of both sporadic and cyclic stress: aerodynamic (pressure), mechanical (vibration, torque, impact, shock), thermal (heated expansion and cooled contraction), chemical (surface reactions with gases and liquids found in aviation, the effect on bulk integrity by the absorption of moisture, gases, volatile organic compounds), electrical (corona and arc discharge effects on surface integrity) and radiative (ultraviolet light embrittlement).

There is no technical reason why composite-material aviation structures should be less safe than their metal counterparts. But, it may be that an equivalent degree of safety would require that composite panels, shells and structures be replaced more often than metal pieces, because the composites may degrade more quickly under the combined actions of the pressurization and deep cooling cycles of flight, the corrosive and embrittling effects of ozone and ultraviolet light, the dissolving and delaminating effects of hydraulic fluids and volatile organic compounds (fuel and solvent vapors), and the fracturing by impact with hail and other hard airborne grit.

The loss of AF447 underscores the need to answer these questions.

An Imagined Final Sequence

Assume AF447 flies into a patch of especially dense and especially cold fog whose supercooled droplets freeze on contact to rime ice, which clings tenaciously; 12 other flights miss as intense a fog freeze. Supercooled fog droplets are small and have low reflectivity to radar, pilots have to tilt their radar antennas down and turn up the gain to see the rain and hail at lower elevations ahead to infer a high concentration of ice crystals and supercooled fog above, assuming there is little horizontal wind shear so the high ice and fog have not moved laterally from their formative updraft and rainout downdraft. But, this can happen as the cloud’s anvil, so perhaps fog freeze is unavoidable if the flight is weaving between storm cells. Rime ice sticks on contact, accumulating into a solid mass with many air pockets. Twenty four steps of an imaginative sequence follow.

1. Gradual icing reduces the inlet areas of all 3 Pitot probes, uniformly. The angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor is a weathervane attached to a horizontal shaft at the side of the aircraft near its nose. The AOA measures the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis of the airplane. Assume the AOA vane also ices, swiveling gradually to higher angle. Both effects cause a gradual speed-up on auto-thrust (the airplane version of cruise control).

2. Pitot icing blockage becomes severe and non-uniform; a 50 kph discrepancy between probes is recorded.

3. The Pitot system fails at 2:10 UTC, auto-pilot and auto-thrust go to the “alternate” mode, which is comparable to the combination of automatic and manual control used on the Boeing 777. The rudder is no longer limited to only 5 degrees of deflection because the flight control programming presumes the pilots would need the freedom of greater motion to perform recovery maneuvers. The shift to alternate mode is not a failure of the automated system, but the response programmed for the situation.

4. The speed window (”coffin corner”) at 35,000 feet is 757-913 kph (Mach 0.72-0.86). The pilots had set auto-thrust to maintain a speed near 881 kph (Mach 0.83). They are fooled into thinking their present speed is about 834-850 kph because of the last presumably good speed readings they observed prior to the warnings of 2:10 UTC. They assume the current power settings are for this speed, when actually the speed has crept up to 913-929 kph without notice.

5. Arriving at excessive speed causes 1.3 g shaking, which is self-induced but they interpret as atmospheric turbulence. If they were really cruising at 881 kph (Mach 0.83) and had encountered turbulence, then they should have reduced their speed to 819 kph (Mach 0.77). Assuming this is their situation, they try reducing speed by using the ‘no airspeed data’ flying procedure. They throttle back a bit, guessing at a 16-32 kph reduction based on the combination of the AOA sensor (which is iced and showing too high an angle) and the power setting. They assume the power setting accounts for a higher headwind than is the case (because it seems high), and they want to be assured of avoiding a stall, so they actually only reduce power to slow down by 16 kph to 897-913 kph (a good thing, too!), imagining they are now flying at 819-834 kph.

6. The AOA system fails at 2:11 UTC. Either the vane stalk is frozen into position, or the 1.3+ g shaking from excessive speed has caused too many erratic and wide swings of the vane, and it has faced broadside into the flow and become heavily balled up in ice. So, speed guessing is now nearing impossible. They are at about 897-913 kph when they should be 819 kph, assuming turbulence; and there may actually be some real turbulence as well. The majority of the “turbulence” they are experiencing is really the buffeting effect of excessive speed caused by the erratic shock and pressure jumps along the fuselage, wings, tailplanes, vertical stabilizer and rudder during transonic cruise. At 2:12 UTC, air data discrepancies are flagged; perhaps icing and transonic flow (shock wave effects) prevent other measurements such as of total air temperature.

7. Swept-wing transports have a tendency to swing back and forth in a lateral rolling motion called a Dutch Roll. A combined yaw and roll make the nose point left and the right wing dip (or go into the opposite combination), which is countered by the ailerons to level the wings, and the rudder to steer back on track. But, the lag in response swings the plane past straight and level into a nose pointing right and the left wing down attitude. The Dutch Roll is an oscillation between control inputs and lateral swings. Part of the automatic flight control system is a yaw damper, a slight shifting of the rudder back and forth as needed to keep the airplane straight and level.

At 2:13 UTC, AF447 was flying at excessive speed, the surrounding atmosphere may have exacerbated flight instability by being turbulent, and the flight control system no longer limited rudder deflection to 5 degrees. Yaw damping became ineffective. Because of the 1.3+ g shaking and the shock-induced flow disruptions of transonic cruise, the responses to the deflections of the ailerons and rudder became erratic, and an amplifying Dutch Roll oscillation sets in.

8. A big tail swing right is countered by a rightward rudder deflection of greater then 5 degrees, and the combined moment (torque) to the right and the air resistance against the vertical fin (to the left) puts a greater then 2.5 g load on the vertical stabilizer, and snaps the entire fin-plus-rudder assembly off to the left.

9. The loss of the vertical stabilizer releases resistance to the rightward moment, and an instant angular acceleration of 3.5 to 5 g, or more, swings the tail rightward.

10. The rear pressure bulkhead in the fuselage has a pressure force directed rearward, from the pressurized cabin and cargo hold toward the unpressurized tailcone. During a rightward tail swing, this force points to the back and rightward. At the same time, the rightward moment acting on the tailcone puts a lateral force on it, which is to the left and increasingly back during the rightward swing. With the tail wagged right, the rear bulkhead is tilted forward on right side, backward on left side, and the resultant force on it is more or less straight back. This causes a rotation of the bulkhead so as to open its seam on the right side of the fuselage, breaching the pressure seal and allowing the cabin to de-pressurizes rapidly.

11. An automatic signal sent at 2:14 UTC announces cabin de-pressurization.

12. The unimpeded rightward tail swing sweeps the right wing square into the airstream while the airplane is near its maximum speed, about 881-913 kph (Mach 0.83-0.86). This swings the right wing leading edge forward at a higher relative speed than Mach 1, so it moves forward of the leading shock.

13. The shock extends along the middle chord of right wing, now angled more squarely into the flow, and causes flow separation behind it, with a complete loss of lift; shock stall.

14. The plane’s nose is yawed left in a rightward tail swing, the right side losses lift force while left keeps it, and the result is a sudden strong moment causing a rotation (perhaps 5 g) about the plane’s longitudinal axis: left side/wing up, right side/wing down.

15. The excessive right twist of the fuselage causes engine pylons to fail. Engine number 1 (left side) breaks off — cutting electrical power — rotating in an upward swing right, smashing into the bottom of the left wing near the wing root and trailing edge, and then smashing into and through the left side of the fuselage just past the left wing root.

16. Engine number 2 (right side) swings up and right to twist bottom-up through the right wing leading edge, outboard of the engine location, and the outer wing then snaps off by rotating about the rip, with a tip upward motion. Air blast through its underside blows off upper surface spoilers like the one recovered by the Brazilian Navy.

17. The tailplanes probably snap off at the same time as the engines.

18. The reduction in mass on the right side, relative to the left, gives a boost (less inertia and drag) to the rightward roll underway.

19. The rear section of fuselage twists off from its remaining right side connection with a leftward swing, and the tailcone section separates from it, tearing off from the right to left side of its pressure bulkhead seam.

20. The interior of the fuselage originally behind the wings experiences an air blast through its forward open section toward the tail end; many panels and weakly attached objects are blown out.

21. The still intact assembly of forward fuselage plus right wing stub plus left wing continues to roll completely over while also yawing back and forth, for several cycles. The wing experiences lift forces that make the entire body spin, like a maple seed pod, whose single airfoil causes it to gyrate during a swinging descent.

22. The angular force at the left wingtip and at the cockpit end of the fuselage are greatest, so the fuselage snaps apart aft of the cockpit and also ahead of the left wing root, while an outboard length of left wing also snaps off.

23. The sections of the airplane that fall are: the vertical stabilizer with its rudder (recovered by the Brazilian Navy), the tailcone (with or without tailplanes), the rear cabin section (probably further ruptured during descent by air blast), the engines, the right wing outboard of the number 2 engine location; then after a bit of ‘maple seed’ auto-rotating helicopter flight as a unit: the cockpit section of the forward fuselage, another length of the forward fuselage, an outer length of left wing and the wing root section of the fuselage with the remaining wing stubs.

24. The four sections of the cabin (the tailcone is a fifth fuselage section) guessed here might experience further air blast rupture and content ejection as they descend; and the large structural remnants hitting the water would then suffer collision fragmentation.

What’s Next?

Perhaps some day we will know the real sequence of events and apply its lessons to improve our aircraft, or modify our air transport habits.

To move beyond imagination we need more facts. If the voice and flight data recorders are ever recovered (lost under the ocean over a month at this point), then investigators will learn much more. The public may learn more soon because the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau (BEA) is set to issue an initial technical report on the 2nd of July.

1. Boeing Backs Airbus on AF447.
2. Map of Time Zones.
3. Tim Vasquez, “Air France Flight 447, A Detailed Meteorological Analysis.”
4. Map, From INTOL To TASIL.
5. Air France Flight 447, Wikipedia.
6. Simon Hradecky, “Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean,” The Aviation Herald.
7. AF447 Airbus A330-200 Vertical Stabilizer And Rudder, Wikipedia.
8. BEA’s AF447 “Sea Search Operations,” (link “sea search operations” produces PDF file with maps).
9. Brazilian Air Force, Information On AF447, see “fotos.”
10. Air Safety, Wikipedia.
11. Aviation accidents and incidents, Wikipedia.
12. P-3 Orion At 7 g.
13. AF A332 Crash (F-GZCP) Part 16, ‘Recovered Spoiler‘:

    Reply 204, Pihero,
    Reply 205, KingFriday013,
    Reply 242, Guillermo.

14. Joelle Barthe, procedure for Airbus flight without airspeed data.
15. William John Cox, “Should the Airbus Be Grounded?“

Will the once high-flying American wealth machine continue to produce the vast inequalities of the past?

Only two years ago, Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes magazine, declared 2007 “the richest year ever in human history.” During eight years of the Bush Administration, the 400 richest Americans, who now own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, increased their net worth by $700 billion. In 2005, the top one percent claimed 22 percent of the national income, while the top ten percent took half of the total income, the largest share since 1928.

In June 2009, the Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Report estimated the number of the world’s wealthiest people declined by 15 percent, the steepest decline in the report’s 13-year history. The number of millionaires in the U.S. fell by 19 percent to 2.5 million people.

Analysts tell us the economy is being restructured, but how will the disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor play out?

“The source of wealth has changed over the past thirty years; corporations have become the engine of inequality in the U.S.,” says Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. “In the past, wealth came from ownership: Today it comes increasingly from income.”

The highest incomes come from executive pay at top corporations. In 2007, the ratio of CEO pay to the average paycheck was 344 to one, lower than the record 525 to one ratio set in 2001, but substantial. This year’s ratio is estimated to decrease to 317 to one. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, the average ratio fluctuated between 30 and 40 to 1.

Over 40 percent of GNP comes from Fortune 500 companies. According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, the 500 largest conglomerates in the U.S. “control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60 percent of the sales, and collect over 70 percent of the profits.”

Corporations systematically created a wealth gap over the last 30 years. In 1955, IRS records indicated the 400 richest people in the country were worth an average $12.6 million, adjusted for inflation. In 2006, the 400 richest increased their average to $263 million, representing an epochal shift of wealth upward in the U.S.

In 1955, the richest tier paid an average 51.2 percent of their income in taxes under a progressive federal income tax that included loopholes. By 2006, the richest paid only 17.2 percent of their income in taxes. In 1955, the proportion of federal income from corporate taxes was 33 percent; by 2003, it decreased to 7.4 percent. Today, the top taxpayers pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as those making $50,000 to $75,000, although they doubled their share of total U.S. income.

“Over the past 30 years, the income of the top one percent, adjusted for inflation, doubled: the top one-tenth of one percent tripled, and the one-one-hundredth quadrupled,” says Pizzigati. “Meanwhile, the average income of the bottom 90 percent has gone down slightly. This is a stunning transformation.”

Meanwhile, wages for most Americans didn’t improve from 1979 to 1998, and the median male wage in 2000 was below the 1979 level, despite productivity increases of 44.5 percent. Between 2002 and 2004, inflation-adjusted median household income declined $1669 a year. To make up for lost income, credit card debt soared 315 percent between 1989 and 2006, representing 138 percent of disposable income in 2007.

According to Pizzigati, the wealth disparity is the result of corporations squeezing more profits from workers.

“In the past corporations laid off workers because business was bad,” Pizzigati says. “But over the past few decades, downsizing has been a corporate wealth generating strategy. Today, CEOs don’t spend their time making trying to make better products: they maneuver to take over other companies, steal their customers and fire their workers.”

Progressive taxation used to prevent the rich from capturing a disproportionate share of national compensation, and the labor movement, which represented 35 percent of private sector employees and today represents 8 percent, once served as a political force to limit excessive executive pay. The Reagan backlash cut the top income tax rates, and saw the creation of right-wing think tanks that spent $30 billion over the past 30 years, propagandizing for deregulation, privatization, and wealth worship.

Bubble economies over the past 30 years helped CEOs pump up their income, and efforts to corral their pay are weak and ineffective. CEO pay may fall during these economic hard times, but disparity isn’t going away. Without a strong movement for change, the wealth gap will only increase in this downturn.

“There won’t be a restructuring of the economy unless we take on executive compensation,” concludes Pizzigati. “Outrageously large rewards give executives an incentive to behave outrageously. If we allow these incentives to continue, we will just see more of the reckless behavior that has driven the global economy into the ditch.”

Panic ensued. The one hallway leading out of their attic apartment was engulfed in flames. Charles, Annie and James’ 19-year-old son, made a daring leap through the wall of fire and escaped, but the rest of the family was trapped. The only way out of the inferno was through the window; there were no fire escapes. Annie made it down to the second floor windowsill with the help of another son, Willis. The crowd below placed a pile of blankets on the ground to cushion her fall and told Annie, dangling for her life, to let go. She hit the pile and survived. Willis also jumped and survived. The fire, described by one Chicago firefighter as a “holocaust,” killed four of the Hickman children. They were found underneath the bed with Leslie (14), shielding the bodies of his younger siblings Elvena (9), Sylvester (7), and Velvena (3).

Hickman returned home the following morning to find his building gutted and his family gone. He recounted later that a neighbor approached him and broke the tragic news. “He said, ‘Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.’ And I weakened to the ground.” Even though he was distraught and wracked with pain, Hickman remembered a threat made by his landlord to burn out the tenants out of his building if they didn’t move out.

Hickman found his family, buried his children, moved into a new apartment, and returned to work. But justice eluded him. “Paper was made to burn, coal and rags. Not people. People wasn’t made to burn, ” he told his son. The police didn’t seriously investigate the case. Coleman, his landlord, was a free man. Over the next six months, Hickman became increasingly depressed and frustrated. His family worried about his mental stability. On July 16, he picked up his .32 caliber pistol and went to confront Coleman at his home on the Southside of Chicago. He found Coleman sitting in car outside his house and accused him of setting the fire. Hickman later claimed that Coleman admitted it. Hickman, a deeply religious man, raised his pistol, looked Coleman straight in the eye and said, “God is my secret judge,” and shot him four times. Coleman died three days later.

Police arrested James Hickman at his home and charged him with murder. State prosecutors sought the death penalty. The Hickman family saga could have ended with another tragedy with James facing life in prison or execution by the State of Illinois. But a small group of revolutionary socialists in Chicago, members of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), took the lead in putting together a vibrant community based campaign that ultimately resulted in James Hickman going free. How did they accomplish this?

Jim Crow Chicago Style

James Hickman, like many African Americans during and immediately following the Second World War, came to Chicago to escape the grinding poverty of life in the rural Deep South. Hickman was born on February 19, 1907 near Louisville, Mississippi. His parents were sharecroppers and at ten years old he went to work in the fields. When James was sixteen years old he married Annie, who was to be his wife for the rest of his life. They had nine children together. His first goal after arriving in Chicago was to find a decent paying job to support his large family. He eventually found one at International Harvester’s Wisconsin Steel plant near the Indiana border. But finding decent housing for his family was another story.

Hickman searched for housing in Chicago when the overwhelmingly bulk of the city’s growing African-American population was still confined to a narrow sliver of land on the Southside of the city starting at what was then called 22nd Street (now called Cermak) and stretching to 62nd Street between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues. More than 60,000 black workers came to Chicago from 1940 to 1944 seeking employment in war-related industries. This migration to Chicago continued after the war. “Between 1940 and 1950 Chicago’s black population swelled by 214, 534,” according to Chicago housing historian Arnold Hirsch, bringing it up to a total of 492, 265. The boundaries of the ghetto were walled off by restrictive “covenants”—deals between white homeowners and larger institutions, which stipulated that that only whites could buy homes in certain defined areas.

In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board began promoting racially restrictive covenants to YMCAs, churches, women’s clubs, the many chambers of commerce and property owners’ associations as a way of “protecting” the value of their property from incoming black families. This racist housing policy was backed by the city and by the policies of the federal government. It is believed that by the mid-1940s as much as 80 percent of Chicago’s residential housing was covered by restrictive covenants of one kind or another. The Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, the year following the Hickman case, though little would change for many years.

The available housing for Blacks in Chicago was confined almost entirely to the South Side ghetto, leading to massive overcrowding. A small enclave of Blacks was beginning to grow on the West Side of the city, but it was plagued by the same problems that residents struggled with in the South Side ghetto. In many cases, black landlords were as guilty as white landlords of making money hand-over-fist by cutting up apartments into smaller and smaller units called “kitchenettes.” The cute sounding word really meant a dilapidated one-room apartment. According to Hirsch, “The Chicago Community Inventory estimated that there were at least 80,000 such ‘conversions’ between 1940 and 1950.” Nicholas Lemann, in history of the black migration to Chicago, The Promised Land, vividly describes the kitchenettes as “rickety three-story tenemen…with heating, plumbing, and insulation that were rudimentary at best and often completely non-functional.” Yet, there was little to no options for black families seeking shelter. The housing crunch for blacks was made worse by returning veterans. Blacks faced white violence when they tried to move into predominately white communities. This is how Jim Crow worked in Chicago. This is also how James Hickman met David Coleman.

A dangerous man

David Coleman was also from the South and came to Chicago in 1943 with ambitions to be a businessman. Coleman met a woman in July 1946 with a building to sell at 1733 West Washburne, on the West Side of Chicago; he leased it from her shortly thereafter. In effect, he had day-to-day control of the property and he collected the rents.

In the middle of August 1946, Hickman heard that an apartment was available at Coleman’s building, which was subdivided into Kitchenettes. Coleman first showed him the basement apartment for $50 a month. Hickman later told journalist John Bartlow Martin, “The water was half a leg deep in the basement…no windows, no lights, no nothing in there.” Hickman declined the basement “apartment” but Coleman quickly offered him an attic apartment for $6 a week until the space on the second floor became free. “We walked up the stairs, it so dark,” Hickman later testified, “we almost had to feel our way…I am walking around looking at it, I don’t like this. She [Annie] said, I don’t nether but surely we can stay here because we ain’t got no place.” It was a small attic that adults could barely stand-up in, and there was no electricity, no gas, and only one window. But they needed shelter for their seven children. So, despite their reservations the Hickman’s told Coleman that they would take the attic “apartment” with the expectation that the second floor apartment would be theirs soon. They gave Coleman one hundred dollars as a down payment.

Days turned to weeks and still there was no word from Coleman on the promised apartment. Finally, Hickman confronted Coleman in mid-September 1946 and demanded back his $100 deposit so he could look for another place. Coleman refused. “I won’t pay you until I get ready,” Coleman barked at Hickman. In return Hickman said he would take him to court. Hickman recalled that Coleman threatened to burn him out. “He said he had a man on the East Side ready to burn the place up if…I had him arrested.” The Hickmans swore out a warrant for Coleman’s arrest but the police didn’t arrest him.

This wasn’t the first time that Coleman threatened to burn his building. The previous fall, tenants in Coleman’s building stopped contractors (who showed up with no notice) from further cutting up their apartments into smaller units. Coleman appeared at the scene and tenants told him that he would have to go to court to evict them. He declared, “I am the owner, I don’t have to go to Court to do that, I will get everybody out of here when I want if it takes fire.”

Coleman was clearly a dangerous man, but the city authorities did nothing. In fact, the coroner’s jury that heard testimony concerning the death of the Hickman children could not decide if the fire was accidental or deliberate, and recommended that the State’s Attorney initiate an investigation into it. No serious investigation was done. In the end, Coleman was fined by the city authorities for a series of safety and health violations—totaling $450—the equivalent of $112.50 a piece for each of the dead Hickman children.

“We got there first”

Soon after Hickman shot and mortally wounded Coleman, he returned home and waited for the police to arrest him. He offered no resistance and confessed to what would soon be the murder of David Coleman. While in jail Hickman was interviewed by a two of the most important newspapers in Chicago, the Chicago Daily Defender, the leading Black newspaper in Chicago, and the Chicago Daily Tribune. But by far the best piece of journalism on Hickman was written by Robert Birchman for The Militant, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who laid out the case. “The story of Hickman is the story of negligence and callous disregard of housing and health conditions. It is the story of the horrible slums in which the Negro people are forced to live in dilapidated, disease-ridden firetraps,” declared Birchman. “It is the most tragic of many calamities in which 22 persons have lost their lives, many others suffered injuries and hundreds made homeless as a result of fires in Chicago’s Negro ghettos since the first of the year.” Shortly after Birchman’s interview with Hickman, M.J. Myer, a Chicago labor attorney and co-counsel in the (historically important but largely forgotten) Minneapolis sedition trial of American Trotskyists in 1941, became lead counsel for Hickman. Myer released a statement shortly after the coroner’s inquest into Coleman’s death, that read in part, “In Hickman’s mind all evidence pointed to Coleman’s responsibility for the burning to death of his four children This idea has obsessed him until it reached a point where he no longer could control himself.” Myer also announced that a defense committee was being formed on Hickman’s behalf. Two other attorneys joined Myer; Leon Despres, then a counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and soon to be a famous Chicago alderman, and William H. Temple, an African-American criminal defense attorney and a member of the Chicago NAACP executive board, giving Hickman an effective legal team. They all agreed to represent him without compensation.

How did the SWP get involved in the case so rapidly? They had 150 members in the greater Chicago area, whereas the Stalinist Communist party, by far the dominant group on the U.S. Left, had easily ten times that number, if not more. “We got there first, not the Communist Party, because our members were involved in the neighborhood in tenant rights,” longtime socialist Frank Fried, told me in a telephone interview. “They were members of the Westside Tenant’s Union.” Fried had just left the navy and was active in the liberal American Veterans Committee; he would become a leader of the SWP-initiated Hickman Defense Committee.

Immediately following the fire, the tenants in Coleman’s building organized themselves into the Chicago Area Tenants Union, which members of the SWP were actively involved in. The driving force behind the tenants’ union was the Chicago SWP organizer, Milt Zaslow (who went by the public name of Mike Bartell) and his partner Edith. “The tenants’ rights organization that began in the building where Milt, Edith and their son lived,” wrote Karin Baker and Patrick Quinn in 1997 obituary of Zaslow/Bartell. “The group pushed for improved living conditions, among other demands. At one time a renters’ strike developed that involved thousands in the city of Chicago. The campaign got so big that people in distant neighborhoods were calling them, wanting to get involved.”

The SWP also benefited from the revival of civil rights activism following the end of the war. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1941 at the University of Chicago and pioneered many of the tactics that became mainstays of the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, took the lead in the fight against Jim Crow in Chicago. “Chicago CORE, after a year of inactivity, was revived in the autumn of 1945 under the chairmanship of the black schoolteacher and NAACP leader, Gerald Bullock.
Finding few members interested in action, he dropped the chapter’s rigid selection procedures and made a broad appeals for new members to which the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) responded,” according to historians Meier and Rudwick. Gerald Bullock would later play an important part in the Hickman defense campaign. An SWP member became the editor of the local Chicago CORE-News. One of the most successful campaigns of CORE, involving SWP members, was the campaign to desegregate the aptly named White City Skating Rink in 1946. “Although it was located in the predominantly African-American part of the city, only whites were allowed in certain areas of the park, such as the roller rink. The SWP under Milt’s leadership was central in implementing a broad-based campaign that broke the color barrier at White City.” Frank Fried recalls, “Mike was an organizer’s organizer. He got up everyday and read the four daily newspapers, and look for things to get involved in.” The Hickman case was one of them. Leon DesPres deeply believed that, “but for Mike, James Hickman would have been convicted.”

“Will you help us?”

Working quickly, SWP activists put together a Hickman Defense Committee on August 8, 1947. The focus of it’s work was, according to Fried, was “to make it politically impossible in the eyes of the people of Chicago for the prosecutors to convict Hickman, to put as much pressure that could be mobilized on the city, and take the case national to pressure the state and the city.” The committee received support from the Chicago Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Industrial Union Council, the American Federation of Labor Building services employees union, the American Veterans Committee, and the Baptist Ministers Conference of Chicago. A public appeal for Hickman was signed by Willoughby Abner, first vice-president of the Chicago CIO Council and chair of the Hickman defense committee; Charles Chiakulous, president of the UAW-CIO Local 477; and Bernis Johnson, chair of the Westside NAACP Youth Council.

Abner was important to the defense campaign because of his stature as a leading black trade unionist in the UAW in the Chicago area. According to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Abner “organized thousands during the war in several South Side foundries and small manufacturing facilities.” Sidney Lens, a local trade union official, who later become a nationally known historian and antiwar leader during the Vietnam War), also played a central role in Hickman’s defense campaign. “We put a collection can for donations, a petition and leaflets about Hickman in every store, bar or restaurant we could in the black neighborhoods in Chicago,” says Fried. “People gave generously. Everybody knew about Hickman. I think the prosecution was screwed from the beginning.”

Why was the Hickman cause so popular? The reasons were explained in an article written on the case for the journal Fourth International some time before Hickman’s trial. “Every so often a previously unknown individual suddenly attracts wide attention. There is usually a social reason for this. The story connected with the particular case epitomizes the plight of voiceless millions, focusing on the needs of one group and the crimes of another, bringing into the light of day the festering rottenness of class society…. Hickman’s story is the story of Jim Crow as it is practiced north of the Mason-Dixon line.” The tragedy of James Hickman personified the plight of Chicago’s black community.

Seeking to organize a large public display of support for James Hickman and his family, the defense campaign organized rallies at several churches across Chicago. The largest rally was held on September 28, 1947 at the Metropolitan Community Church on Chicago’s South Side. To build the rally, the campaign put up “hundreds of posters announcing the event,” canvassed the area with “two sound trucks,” and handed out “40,000 leaflets.” Over 1,200 people attended with the overwhelmingly African-American audience unanimously passing a resolution calling for Hickman’s release. The featured speaker at the rally was actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and was a member of a powerful Democratic Party family from Alabama. Her father had been speaker of the House of Representatives in the late 1930s, but she broke with her family over the conservatism of the Southern Democrats, particularly their virulent racism. Her involvement in the Hickman campaign was something of a “coup” for Sidney Lens. He recalled three decades later:

I was leaving my office on Dearborn Street one evening when I noticed her name on the marquis half a block away. She was starring in a new play. On the spur of the moment I went to the stage door and asked for her. To my surprise she knew about Hickman and was immensely sympathetic. When I asked her, however, to speak at the rally we planned at the Metropolitan Community Church, she shuddered as if I hit her with a blast of artic air. “Why, Mr. Lens, how can I make a speech?” It took a while to figure out that what she meant was that while she was capable of reciting other people’s lines, she was incapable of constructing a speech on her own. I agreed therefore to write a speech for her, and a couple of days later she advised that “I read it to my secretary and made her cry. I’ll be happy to deliver it.”

Bankhead, according to Lens, “drew tears from the whole audience, a couple of thousand people” with a riveting speech:

It seems to me a shameful condemnation of our society that 2000 years after Christ, people are still herded together into Black ghettoes merely because of their skins have different pigmentations than other people. No one condones murder or any act of violence. I hope the day shall come soon when humanity can resolve not only its racial problems but all problems coolly and rationally; when emotional acts of violence—be they individual or national—can be eliminated. So long, however, as there exists anywhere on earth one minority that is treated with contempt, that is herded into Black slum areas, that is abused and insulted, so long will we have violence, hate, brutality, savagery. So long as there exists a Jewish problem, or a Mexican problem—or a problem of any minority—so long will one form of violence beget another. I am proud to be one of the humble gladiators in this struggle against narrow prejudice and stupidity. I am glad to lend my efforts so that there shall be no more James Hickman tragedies.

Other speakers that night included the best-selling African-American author Willard Motely, and Chicago packinghouse union official Philip Weightman. Hickman’s attorney M.J. Myer roared to the crowd, “It is not Hickman who should be on trial, but the inhuman landlords and real estate interests who sacrifice human lives for profit, for they are the real criminals. They are the people who should be put behind bars and kept there.” The Communist Party, which could have contributed significant resources to the Hickman campaign, refused to participate and stood outside the Hickman defense rally handing out a pamphlet, The Great Conspiracy by Alfred Kahn, attacking the SWP and repeating old slanders that Trotskyism and fascism were in league against the Soviet Union.

Motley, author of the 1947 best-selling novel Knock on Any Door, which was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949, played an incredibly important part in the Hickman defense campaign. He had a huge reputation at the time of the case. His book sold 47,000 copies during its first three weeks in print and a total of 350,000 during the next two years. His involvement opened many doors for supporters of Hickman. However, the one door that Motley could not open was to the Chicago Sun (soon to be the Sun-Times). The Chicago based author met Hickman in prison and wrote an eloquent appeal that the defense committee attempted to publish in the Chicago Sun, one of the largest circulating newspapers in the mid-west. The Sun’s owner Marshall Field, heir to the Field family fortune and a publicly identified liberal, refused to printed Motley’s appeal even after the defense committee was prepared to pay for the space. Motley publicly attacked Field for his hypocrisy. He is one of those “rich liberals…who talk out of both sides of their mouths.” The defense committee had Motley’s appeal circulated to many of the largest Black newspapers in the country including the Chicago Daily Defender. Motley didn’t hold back his feelings about the Hickman case:

You have seen many pictures of men who have killed. You have seen the photographs of the returned soldier. Perhaps next door lives a boy who killed some other boy during the war. In the war millions of men killed other millions of men because they believed they were a threat to their homes, their wives, their children. This threat was thousands of miles from home. These were strangers killed, with whom there had been no personal contact. James Hickman killed the man who had threatened his wife and children with a death more horrible than the Nazi gas chambers. And carried it out. This is what I was thinking of as I sat talking to Hickman today. Hickman needs help. There are three children left who need him. A wife who needs him. Will you help us help him?

“This man has paid enough”

The defense campaign scored a major victory when the State’s Attorney office announced on the eve of the trial that it was dropping its demand for the death penalty. This changed the whole atmosphere surrounding the trial. Leon Despres, co-counsel for Hickman, said that it made the trial “less edgy.” It was also a backhanded admission that the pressure of the defense campaign was working. James Hickman went on trial for the murder of David Coleman on November 5 before a white judge and an all-white jury in the Cook County Criminal Court building. The presiding judge was Rudolph Desort, the prosecutor was Assistant State’s Attorney Samuel Friedman, and M.J. Myer was the lead counsel for the defense. The prosecution presented a total of eight witnesses that included four policemen and Coleman’s half-brother, Percy Brown, who under cross-examination gave testimony that reportedly contradicted statements he had made earlier to the police.

M.J. Myer in his opening statements argued that Hickman was not guilty because he was “temporarily insane” at the time of the shooting of David Coleman. Myer placed the blame for the shooting of Coleman on the terrible living conditions in Coleman’s building and the death of the Hickman’s four children. Myer called witnesses that testified to Coleman’s previous threats to burn the tenants out of the building and James’ anguished state of mind following the fire and deaths. Two psychiatrists testified for the defense. Dr. Boris M. Ury interviewed Hickman, while he was incarcerated at Cook County Jail. Hickman spoke about the divinely inspired “mission” of his dead children’s lives. “I see the future in these four was destroyed. They would have been great people had they lived. I had a vision, but their lives was cut-off.” Dr. Ury’s report went on: “Client continued to discuss the grandiose ‘mission’ of his children: ‘The Lord had work for them to do. He had picked them out…’ Examiner [Ury] inquired whether this godly mission would be confined to work among the colored people but he was assured by his client that the mission would be applicable to all people.” Dr. Ury concluded his report by saying that Hickman shot Coleman “in a schizoid, disassociated state, feeling he was accomplishing the Lord’s will.”

Leon Despres considered James Hickman’s testimony in court “magnificent” and, at times, “poetic.” Hickman sat solemnly in the witness chair and wore a modest gray suit with a white flower in lapel, according to Chicago Daily News reporter John Culhane, who pieced together the courtroom scene from interviews with Leon Despres and access to his Despres’ case files for an article he wrote in the mid-1960s.

“This was God fixed this,” Hickman testified.

I had raised these children up and God knowed that vow I made to him…that these children was a generation to be raised up. God wasn’t pleased what happened to them….

I had two sons and two daughters who would some day be great men and women, some day they would have married, some day they would have been fathers and mothers of children. These children would have children and these children would children and another generation of Hickmans could raise up and enjoy peace.

The trial lasted nine days. On November 15, after nineteen hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge that they couldn’t reach a decision. It was a classic “hung jury”—seven to five for acquittal. The State’s Attorney’s office initially declared that it would retry James Hickman the following January. But it soon reversed itself and announced that it was dropping the murder charge and recommending to the judge that Hickman be sentenced to two years probation if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He agreed and walked out of court a free man on December 16, 1947. Hickman had served a total of five months in jail. Samuel Friedman, the prosecuting attorney, said that one of the major reasons that his office didn’t want a retrial was the public support for Hickman from across the country as he held up letters of support for Hickman. “They are too numerous to read all of them here,” Freedman declared holding up a fistful of letters, resolutions and telegrams, “but the general opinion is to the effect that mercy ought to be shown to an individual who, under the stress of the loss of four children, has been punished to such an extent that society can be magnanimous and afford him a chance to return to his remaining children and his wife, and spend the rest of his lifetime in peace.” Though he admitted “some quarters” would disagree with his recommendation, Freedman concluded, “The state feels this man has paid enough with the loss of his children.”

“A chain of personal memories”

The Hickman family returned to the private lives after the trial. But within a year the case received it’s widest publicity (outside of Chicago) when Harper’s magazine commissioned renowned journalist John Bartlow Martin to write a story on the Hickman case. Martin’s writings would today be called “true crime,” but that would be a great disservice to them. They were neither lurid nor exploitative, as many true crime works are. Martin’s writing style combined the best techniques of a novelist and a journalist with the motivation of a socially conscious liberal. In his autobiography, written many decades after the Hickman case, he recounts how he approached writing the The Hickman Story:

In preparing to do the piece, I read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and other books, but only for my own background information—I wrote the piece almost entirely from interviews, especially interviews with Hickman and his wife and with the landlord’s relatives, I simply told the story of Hickman’s and the landlord’s lives and their world—the world below.

The “world below” was one of racism and poverty that greeted Black refugees from the Deep South. “I wanted to do not an article, crammed with demographers’ statistics, but, rather, a story about a man. James Hickman had been a sharecropper in Mississippi. He was deeply religious and deeply devoted to his children.” Martin’s article is great writing and deserves to be read by everyone today committed to social justice.

But what lift’s the story from the page is the illustrations of the Hickman case by the great American artist, Ben Shahn. Shahn’s name is not one that many Americans would recognize, but millions have seen his work, particularly his drawings of the martyred Sacco & Vanzetti, and the three murdered civil rights activists, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Shahn’s drawings of the Hickman case that hung on the east wall of Leon Despres’ old law office caught the eye of reporter John Culhane, prompting him to write one of the few profiles of the case to appear in the decades that followed the trial. Shahn later wrote of his own struggle to capture the enormity of the Hickman family tragedy:

I was asked to make drawings for the story and, after several discussions with the writer, felt that I had gained enough of the feel of the situation to proceed. I examined a great deal of the factual visual material, and then I discarded all of it. It seemed to me the implications of this event transcended the immediate story; there was universality about man’s dread of fire, and his sufferings from fire. There was a universality in the pity which such a disaster invokes, had its overtones. And the relentless poverty which had pursued this man, and which dominated the story, had its own kind of universality.

Sometimes, if one is particularly satisfied with a piece of work which he has completed, he may say to himself, ‘well done,’ and go on to something else. Not in this instance, however. I found that I could not dismiss the event about which I had made drawings—the so-called “Hickman Story.”… I had some curious sense of responsibility about it, a sort of personal involvement.

The Hickman tragedy “aroused in me,” Shahn recalled, “a chain of personal memories.”

There were two great fires in my own childhood, one only colorful, the other disastrous and unforgettable. Of the first, I remember only that the Russian village in which my grandfather lived burned, and I was there. I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere…The other fire left its mark upon me and all my family, and left scars on my father’s hand and face, for he had clambered up a drainpipe and taken each of my brothers and sisters and me over the house one by one, burning himself painfully in the process. Meanwhile our house and all belongings were consumed, and my parents stricken beyond their power to recover.

The most powerful of all of Shahn’s Hickman drawings is the four huddled, deceased children. His “personal involvement” led him to use his own siblings as the basis for the drawing. “They resemble much more closely my own brothers and sisters.” John Bartlow Martin’s story and Ben Shahn’s drawings remain the most powerful documents from that era of the Hickman case. Unfortunately, the Hickman trial transcript disappeared many decades ago along with much of the paperwork related to Hickman’s legal defense. The Sidney Lens Papers at the Chicago Historical Society has some of the Hickman defense campaign literature, flyers and brochure—just enough to give you a feel for the campaign.

“Dismiss it in a sentence or two”

Despite all of this, one has to ask, how can such a powerful story disappear from the public memory? This is an amazing story, not only of rapacious greed and racism that led to an excruciatingly painful family tragedy, but also the triumph of justice over very long odds. It didn’t take place in some remote part of the country, but played itself out in Chicago, who’s crime-obsessed, tabloid press salivated over stories of much less interest. I think there were several things working against the Hickman case getting the recognition that it deserved. The case took place in 1947; over the next few years the death-grip of the Cold War would tighten around U.S. society. A virulent level of repression would drive socialist, communists and radicals of various allegiances to the very margins of American society. In many ways, the campaign to save James Hickman was one of the last echoes of the great radicalization of the American working class of the 1930s and 1940s. A successful political campaign to free an African-American man who shot and killed his landlord led by revolutionary socialists is not the type of story to be embraced during the height of the American Century. The Hickman case was simply steamrolled over by a decade and half of political repression and cultural conformity. This, however, is only a part of the answer.

The other part lies, I believe, in who writes the history of the American Left. By-and-large they were historians that were members of the Communist Party and the New Left of the 1960s, few of who have shown any interest or political sympathy for the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the form Trotskyism in this country in the 1930s and 1940s. “Trotskyism has been written out of the history of the American left,” notes veteran revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. There are notable exceptions, such as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals or Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, but too often the most popular left-wing histories of the 1930s and 1940s simply dismiss, denigrate or out-rightly censure the role of Trotskyism in the radical movement.

One of the worst examples of this is Labor Untold Story by Boyer and Morais, published by the UE, one of the unions of the CIO era that was led by the CP. It strait-forwardly ignores the Trotskyist-led great Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934. It was the strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco that directly led to the formation of the CIO. This type of censorship may be extreme but not uncommon. This includes the 1941 trial of the Trotskyists of the SWP for “subversion” under the reactionary Smith Act that became the model for the trials that destroyed the CP after WWII. Yet, as Ellen Schrecker in her Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America notes, “There is little scholarship on the Trotskyist Smith Act case. While recognizing it implications for the later Smith Act cases, most writers tend to dismiss it in a sentence or two.” Instead of “dismissing it in a sentence or two,” it’s time that Trotskyism gets the proper recognition it deserves in American radical history.

There are many stories such as the Hickman case that need to be recovered from oblivion and retold. Last year Clint Eastwood’s film Changeling was released. Set in 1928 Los Angeles, it told the real-life story of Christine Collins and her search for the truth behind the kidnapping of her son and the mind-boggling public relations stunt by the LAPD, who sent her the wrong child and then attempted to shut her up when she refused to play along. It led to an explosion of public protest. The story disappeared from public memory for eight decades until screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist, was contacted by an old source at Los Angeles City Hall, who told him that the city was planning to destroy some of its archives and that there was “something [Straczynski] should see.” This turned out to be a transcript of a city council hearing of Collins’ case. There are thousands of stories of injustice and struggle hidden away in the archives of city halls around the country. Hopefully, younger historians can bring to light the many of these stories before they are lost to history.

I want to extend a special thank you to two people, Frank Fried and Leon Despres. Frank first told me about the Hickman case at Joel Geier’s 70th birthday party, and Leon Despres (who passed away on May 7, 2009 at 101 years old) for allowing me to discuss the case with him at his Hyde Park residence. Patrick Quinn has been extremely helpful in tracking down important sources of information on the case and commenting on the first draft of this article. I also want to thank the Chicago Historical Society for allowing me access to the Sidney Lens papers, and the Library of Congress for access to the Hickman files in John Bartlow Martin’s papers. The librarians in charge of the Willard Motley papers at the Northeastern Illinois University were very helpful but I ended up referencing different material on Motley’s role in the Hickman case.

The assumption that any disputes would occur behind the scenes became open to question during the Netanyahu-Obama press conference, when the two leaders claimed they were basically in agreement, but then made statements which demonstrated that the opposite was the case. But it is the recent acrimonious wrangling over the U.S. demand that all new construction in the occupied territories must halt, that has revealed that differences of opinion between Obama and Netanyahu have become more public, more quickly than expected. This surprising flare-up between the two close (I would say, too close) allies will undoubtedly be resolved with some diplomatic compromise, however, the brouhaha over the freeze may signify the first sign of possible problems ahead. Israel could be less willing than the Americans believe to agree to the type of peace that the Obama administration may envision.

Certainly all Israeli settlement activity must cease and George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy currently involved in the discussions, should not accept any compromise on halting all building in the territories. But I am not really surprised that on Tuesday he listened to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s compromise proposals for a temporary limited freeze. The meeting apparently ended with no agreement, but avoided any further public confrontation. If the Americans do not stand firmly behind the freeze demand, they will not help their already suspect credibility as a fair mediator in the peace process, although they will assuage Israel’s many powerful supporters in the United States.

In Mitchell’s view expanding the settlements is not compatible with pursuing peace negotiations, since the Palestinians claim the land upon which new housing is being built as part of their future state. According to Mitchell’s analysis, which is apparently presently the view of the Obama administration, who will get which territory should be decided in future negotiations. Any new construction and increased settler population would only make future agreements more difficult. And very importantly, although never mentioned by the Americans, according to international law, all settlements built in territory acquired as a result of war are illegal.

The Israelis have not worried about obeying international law for some time now and so a call for them to freeze all settlements has come as a great shock. It seems that the Americans badly miscalculated the Israeli reaction to their permanent freeze demand. Mitchell’s team should have known that no leading Israeli politician, especially the hard line Netanyahu, would publicly assent to an indefinite halt to building on land a majority of Israelis consider to be as much part of Israel as Tel Aviv.

Israeli expectations have changed and hardened over time. George Mitchell was originally sent to the region by President George W. Bush to produce guidelines for reviving the failed Oslo peace process. He first introduced the idea that a settlement freeze should be a precondition to negotiations in the 2001 report, which bears his name. The report states, “The GOI [Government of Israel] should freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements. The kind of security cooperation [from the Palestinians] desired by the GOI cannot for long co-exist with settlement activity.”

Despite U.S. efforts following the Mitchell Report to restart the peace negotiations, no significant agreements were reached between the parties. In 2003, Mitchell’s call for a freeze was incorporated into the Road Map, the Bush administration’s peace plan, which included the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Barack Obama has adopted the Bush Road Map as a guide in his attempt to establish an end to the conflict.

Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Prime Minister, signed the Road Map, although he made his acceptance of the agreement conditional on 14 restrictive reservations which were appended to the agreement, some of which made the successful implementation of the plan impossible. The first reservation declares that

Both at the commencement of, and during the process, and as a condition to its continuance, calm will be maintained. The Palestinians will dismantle the existing security organizations and implement security reforms during the course of which new organizations will be formed and act to combat terror, violence and incitement (incitement must cease immediately and the Palestinian Authority must educate for peace).

The second reservation states that, “The first condition for progress will be the complete cessation of terror, violence and incitement.” The bottom line is Sharon never intended to implement the Road Map, that is why he added conditions which he could later claim that the Palestinians were not fulfilling, e.g., “educating for peace.” Since the Palestinians would never meet his conditions as set forth in his reservations, the threat of a settlement freeze was negated. Even with the inclusion of Sharon’s reservations, the Road Map authorization passed through the cabinet with seven dissenting votes out of 19 in a particularly stormy session, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

During the Bush years, neither Sharon nor his successor Ehud Olmert took the freeze provision of the Road Map seriously. Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak proposed a temporary freeze of three to six months, with some territorial exclusions. The extension of the freeze would be conditioned on Palestinian and Arab responses. This is reminiscent of Sharon’s strategy of negating the Road Map by placing requirements upon others that can always be said to be unmet at some future time, thus freeing the Israelis from any obligation. Like the Israeli cabinet debate on acceptance of the Road Map, there was significant dissent among a small cabinet group that discussed the temporary freeze proposal. In what was described as a heated debate, three of the six members of the cabinet group expressed strong opposition to even a temporary freeze.

The political situation in Israel is very different today than it was during the days of the Oslo peace process of the nineties and during the turbulent time of the second intifada which followed. It is a mistake to assume that what was acceptable to the Israelis in those days is equally acceptable now. The Americans ignore this at their peril.

Two of the main reasons for the Israeli amenability to peace with the Palestinians no longer exist. Firstly, as Naomi Klein explains in her book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Israel had an economic incentive to pursue peace in the nineties. Israel hoped that a treaty with the Palestinians would enable it to become a center of commerce for the region. Today with the new reality of a global economy and the burgeoning Israeli technology and military industries, the idea of becoming a regional commercial center has lost much of its appeal. Secondly, Israelis were more willing to make concessions in exchange for a peace treaty because they were exhausted from the daily violence that they experienced as civilians and as soldiers in the occupied territories. Presently, many Israelis are of the opinion that no treaty with the Palestinians is possible, many believing that the Palestinians refused the best possible offer which was given by Barak at Camp David (untrue). They also are enjoying a lower level of violence because of the forceful repression of the Palestinians (true now, but probably will not be true indefinitely).

After the uncritical support that the Israelis enjoyed during the Bush years and the current public mood there, it would be a mistake to predict an Israeli willingness to work with the U.S. toward a peace agreement. The Israelis are going to be much less compliant with U.S. demands than they were during the Clinton administration. Neither Netanyahu nor Barak are now constrained by the Oslo agreements which they both publicly rejected but were forced to adopt during there respective terms as Prime Minister. In addition, the present right-wing government coalition, encourages its leaders’ most inflexible tendencies.

Given the present situation, it is hardly a surprise that Israel will not acquiesce to a complete freeze of the settlements. Mitchell and Obama will probably agree to a compromise in an attempt to avoid a crisis. In doing so they will lose credibility among Palestinians. If the United States wants a viable two-state solution, it will have to force the Israelis to cooperate. The measures required to halt all Israeli settlement activity, such as cutting military aid, are not ones to which the Americans will presently commit. But if the Americans are not prepared to employ harsh measures and take on their reluctant “peace partner” publicly, at some point, there will be no peace in the future.

According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM “will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010.”

Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters.

Gates’ memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM “must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners.”

Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command’s offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM’s operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to “harden” the “dot-mil” domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism’s adversaries.

One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America’s first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon’s geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.

In conjunction with “private-sector partners,” the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver “‘leap ahead’ concepts and capabilities.”

The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is “not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted.” Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: “This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department’s computer networks.”

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, “Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a “deterrent,” the bombers are preparing for take off.

As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.

A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.

In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce–and the bottom line–than in providing adequate protection against criminals.

Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission “to shut down Google’s so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can’t ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps,” The Register reported.

EPIC’s petition in part, was sparked “by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service,” according to The Register.

Infected computers are referred to as “zombies” that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by “master” machines. Unwary users are often “spoofed” by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into “cooperating” with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.

Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling “the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find.” In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.

“After that,” Col. Williamson avers, “the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.”

Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America’s, or any other nations’ communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to “generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control.” (emphasis added)

In other words, should an “individual theatre commander” desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation’s electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.

Other plans for “defending” Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.

STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that “the White House retains the option to respond with physical force–potentially even using nuclear weapons–if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks,” according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:

“I think you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?” …

Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Chilton said.

At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.

“I think that’s been our policy on any attack on the United States of America,” Chilton said. “And I don’t see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president’s hands? I can’t. It’s up to the president to decide.” (Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack,” Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009) blockquote>
While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM’s launch “is not about the militarization of cyber,” how else can it be characterized?

Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM “is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command.”

How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to “consolidate and streamline” DoD “capabilities” under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a “Unified Combatant Command” as clearly stated by General Chilton’s avowal to “leave all options on the table,” would combine cyber “defense” with STRATCOM’s global strike mission.

Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:

Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary’s terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, “Strategic Vision,” no date, emphasis added)

Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since “cyberspace and its associated technologies … are vital to our nation’s security,” the United States will “secure freedom of action in cyberspace” by standing-up a unified command “that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

Under NSA’s Operational Control

Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.

Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state’s .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.

Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans’ private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama’s purported “change” administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only “change” that’s come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.

The New York Times June 17, that the “National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” According to the Times, “The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.”

I take issue with the Times’ characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent “logistical difficulties.” As with a Times’ report in April which alleged that NSA’s driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of “overcollection,” far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress,” The New York Times, June 17, 2009)

Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans’ communications “so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals ‘reasonably believed’ to be overseas,” as the Times delicately put it.

CYBERCOM’s brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency’s powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about “privacy concerns,” the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, “it’s up to the president to decide.”

“One thing that is pretty clear,” Wired reports, “NSA will be leading this emerging command.” Indeed, NSA “may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well.” As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department’s 2010 budget “envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually.” In contradistinction to DoD, “the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year,” the Journal reports.

In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.

Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book’s 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.

While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does “not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government,” CYBERCOM’s stand-up, and Alexander’s near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/cyber-command-launched-us-strategic-command-to-oversee-offensive-military-operations/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/showdown-in-honduras-the-rise-and-uncertain-future-of-the-coup/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/showdown-in-honduras-the-rise-and-uncertain-future-of-the-coup/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:05:33 +0000 Benjamin Dangl http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8865 Worldwide condemnation has followed the coup that unseated President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras on Sunday, June 28. Nationwide mobilizations and a general strike demanding that Zelaya be returned to power are growing in spite of increased military repression. One protester outside the government palace in Honduras told reporters that if Roberto Micheletti, the leader installed by the coup, wants to enter the palace, “he had better do so by air” because if he goes by land “we will stop him.”

On early Sunday morning, approximately 100 soldiers entered the home of the left-leaning Zelaya, forcefully removed him and, while he was still in his pajamas, ushered him on to a plane to Costa Rica. The tension that led to the coup involved a struggle for power between left and right political factions in the country. Besides the brutal challenges facing the Honduran people, this political crisis is a test for regional solidarity and Washington-Latin American relations.

Manuel Zelaya Takes a Left Turn

When Manuel Zelaya was elected president on November 27, 2005 in a close victory, he became president of one of the poorest nations in the region, with approximately 70% of its population of 7.5 million living under the poverty line. Though siding himself with the region’s left in recent years as a new member of the leftist trade bloc, Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), Zelaya did sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2004.

However, Zelaya has been criticizing and taking on the sweatshop and corporate media industry in his country, and increased the minimum wage by 60%. He said the increase, which angered the country’s elite but expanded his support among unions, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.”

At a meeting of regional anti-drug officials, Zelaya spoke of an unconventional way to combat the drug trafficking and related violence that has been plaguing his country: “Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand.”

After his election, Zelaya’s left-leaning policies began generating “resistance and anger among Liberal [party] leaders and lawmakers on the one hand, and attracting support from the opposition, civil society organizations and popular movements on the other,” IPS reported.

The social organization Via Campesina stated, “The government of President Zelaya has been characterized by its defense of workers and campesinos, it is a defender of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), and during his administration it has promoted actions that benefit Honduran campesinos.”

As his popularity rose over the years among these sectors of society, the right wing and elite of Honduras worked to undermine the leader, eventually resulting in the recent coup.

Leading up to the Coup

The key question leading up to the coup was whether or not to hold a referendum on Sunday, June 28 — as Zelaya wanted — on organizing an assembly to re-write the country’s constitution.

As one media analyst pointed out, while many major news outlets in the US, including the Miami Herald, Wall St. Journal and Washington Post, said an impetus for the coup was specifically Zelaya’s plans for a vote to allow him to extend his term in office, the actual ballot question was to be: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?”

Nations across Latin America, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, have recently re-written their constitutions. In many aspects the changes to these documents enshrined new rights for marginalized people and protected the nations’ economies from the destabilizing effects of free trade and corporate looting.

Leading up to the coup, on June 10, members of teacher, student, indigenous and union groups marched to demand that Congress back the referendum on the constitution, chanting, “The people, aware, defend the Constituent [Assembly].” The Honduran Front of Teachers Organizations [FOM], with some 48,000 members, also supported the referendum. FOM leader Eulogio Chávez asked teachers to organize the expected referendum this past Sunday in schools, according to the Weekly News Update on the Americas.

The Supreme Court ruled that the referendum violated the constitution as it was taking place during an election year. When Honduran military General Romeo Vasquez refused to distribute ballots to citizens and participate in the preparations for the Sunday referendum, Zelaya fired him on June 24. The Court called for the reinstatement of Vasquez, but Zelaya refused to recognize the reinstatement, and proceeded with the referendum, distributing the ballots and planning for the Sunday vote.

Crackdown in Honduras

Vasquez, a former student at the infamous School of the Americas, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), went on to be a key leader in the June 28 coup.

After Zelaya had been taken to Costa Rica, a falsified resignation letter from Zelaya was presented to Congress, and former Parliament leader Roberto Micheletti was sworn in by Congress as the new president of the country. Micheletti immediately declared a curfew as protests and mobilizations continued nation-wide.

Since the coup took place, military planes and helicopters have been circling the city, the electricity and internet has been cut off, and only music is being played on the few radio stations that are still operating, according to IPS News.

Telesur journalists, who have been reporting consistently throughout the conflict, were detained by the de facto government in Honduras. They were then released thanks to international pressure.

The ambassadors to Honduras from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were arrested. Patricia Rodas, the Foreign Minister of Honduras under Zelaya has also been arrested. Rodas recently presided over an OAS meeting in which Cuba was finally admitted into the organization.

The military-installed government has issued arrest warrants for Honduran social leaders for the Popular Bloc Coordinating Committee, Via Campesina and the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, according to the Weekly News Update on the Americas.

Human rights activist Dr. Juan Almendares, reporting from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, told Democracy Now! that due to government crackdowns and the electrical blackout, there is “not really access to information, no freedom of the press.” He said, “We have also a curfew, because after 9:00 you can be shot if you are on the streets. So we have a curfew from 9:00 to 6:00 a.m.”

In a statement on the coup, Via Campesina said, “We believe that these deeds are the desperate acts of the national oligarchy and the hardcore right to preserve the interests of capital, and in particular, of the large transnational corporations.”

Mobilizations and Strikes in Support of Zelaya

Members of social, indigenous and labor organizations from around the country have concentrated in the city’s capital, organizing barricades around the presidential palace, demanding Zelaya’s return to power. “Thousands of Hondurans gathered outside the presidential palace singing the national hymn,” Telesur reported. “While the battalions mobilized against protesters at the Presidential House, the TV channels did not report on the tense events.” Bertha Cáceres, the leader of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares y Indígenas, said that the ethnic communities of the country are ready for resistance and do not recognize the Micheletti government.

Dr. Almendares reported that in spite of massive repression on the part of the military leaders, “We have almost a national strike for workers, people, students and intellectuals, and they are organized in a popular resistance-run pacific movement against this violation of the democracy. . . . There are many sectors involved in this movement trying to restitute the constitutional rights, the human rights.”

Rafael Alegría, a leader of Via Campesina in Honduras, told Telesur, “The resistance of the people continues and is growing, already in the western part of the country campesinos are taking over highways, and the military troops are impeding bus travel, which is why many people have decided to travel to Tegucigalpa on foot. The resistance continues in spite of the hostility of the military patrols.”

A general strike was also organized by various social and labor sectors in the country. Regarding the strike, Alegría said it is happening across state institutions and “progressively in the private sector.”

The 4th Army Battalion from the Atlántida Department in Honduras has declared that it will not respect orders from the Micheletti government, and the major highways of the country are blocked by protesters, according to a radio interview with Alegría.

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), condemned the coup, media crackdowns and repression, saying in a statement: “[T]he Honduran people are carrying out large demonstrations, actions in their communities, in the municipalities; there are occupations of bridges, and a protest in front of the presidential residence, among others. From the lands of Lempira, Morazán and Visitación Padilla, we call on the Honduran people in general to demonstrate in defense of their rights and of real and direct democracy for the people, to the fascists we say that they will NOT silence us, that this cowardly act will turn back on them, with great force.”

Washington Responds

On Sunday, Obama spoke of the events in Honduras: “I am deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya. As the Organization of American States did on Friday, I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

But the US hasn’t actually called what’s happened in Honduras a coup. Hillary Clinton said, “We are withholding any formal legal determination.” And regarding whether or not the US is calling for Zelaya’s return, Clinton said, “We haven’t laid out any demands that we’re insisting on, because we’re working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives.”

If the White House declares that what’s happening in Honduras is a coup, they would have to block aid to the rogue Honduran government. A provision of US law regarding funds directed by the US Congress says that, “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available . . . shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

“The State Department has requested $68.2 million in aid for fiscal year 2010 [for Honduras], which begins on October 1, up from $43.2 million in the current fiscal year and $40.5 million a year earlier,” according to Reuters.

The US military has a base in Soto Cano, Honduras, which, according to investigative journalist Eva Golinger, is home to approximately 500 troops and a number of air force planes and helicopters.

Regarding US relations with the Honduran military, Latin American History professor and journalist Greg Grandin said on Democracy Now!: “The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras. Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances. So if the US is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward. Zelaya will return . . .”

The Regional Response

The Organization of American States, and the United Nations has condemned the coup. Condemnation of the coup has come in from major leaders across the globe, and all over Latin America, as reported by Reuters: the Presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba have been outspoken in their protests against the coup. The French Foreign Ministry said, “France firmly condemns the coup that has just taken place in Honduras.” Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said, “I’m deeply worried about the situation in Honduras… it reminds us of the worst years in Latin America’s history.”

Even Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, a former foreign minister of Colombia told the NY Times, “It is a legal obligation to defend democracy in Honduras.”

Only time will tell what the international and national support for Zelaya means for Honduras. Regional support for Bolivian President Evo Morales during an attempted coup in 2008 empowered his fight against right wing destabilizing forces. Popular support in the streets proved vital during the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Chavez in 2002.

Meanwhile, Zelaya supporters continue to convene at the government palace, yelling at the armed soldiers while tanks roam the streets.

“We’re defending our president,” protester Umberto Guebara told a NY Times reporter. “I’m not afraid. I’d give my life for my country.”

* * *

Taking Action

If you are interested in rallying in support for the Honduran people and against the coup, here is a list of Honduran Embassies and Consulates in the US.

People in the US could call political representatives to denounce the coup, and demand US cut off all aid to the rogue government until Zelaya is back in power. Click here to send a message to Barack Obama about the coup.

Visit SOA Watch for more photos and suggested actions.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/showdown-in-honduras-the-rise-and-uncertain-future-of-the-coup/feed/ 21 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden-2/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden-2/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:04:55 +0000 Gareth Porter http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8863 WASHINGTON — In early November 1998, Louis Freeh sent an FBI team off to observe Saudi secret police officials interviewing eight Shi’a detainees from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center. He planned to use the Shi’a testimony to show that Iran was behind the bombing.

As expected, the stories told by the detainees recapitulated the outlines of the Shi’a plot that had already been described by the Saudis two years earlier. Now there were even more tantalizing details of direct Iranian involvement.

One of the detainees said Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Ahmad Sherifi had personally selected the Khobar barracks as a target. Another said the Saudi Hezbollah members had been not only trained but paid by the Iranians.

“We came away with solid evidence that Iran was behind it,” says a former FBI agent.

There was one problem with the evidence the FBI team collected: the Saudi secret police had already had two and half years to coach the Saudi Hezbollah detainees on what to say about the case, with the ever-present threat of more torture to provide the incentive.

But Freeh was not about to let the torture issue interfere with his mission. “For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing,” one former high-ranking FBI official told Inter Press Service (IPS). “We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up.”

When Freeh took the accounts from the Shi’a detainees in interrogations witnessed by the FBI team, however, the Justice Department didn’t buy them as valid testimony. The department refused to go ahead with an indictment as Freeh had desired, evidently based on the same objection that had been raised two years earlier: the Shi’a had been subject to torture.

But in January 2001, President George W. Bush kept Freeh on as FBI director. Freeh told the new president that Iran had masterminded the Khobar bombing, according to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and the Justice Department then began collaborating with Freeh on an indictment of the Saudi Hezbollah which implicated Iran in the Khobar bombing.

The indictment was announced on Jun. 21, 2001 — Freeh’s last day as FBI director.

Highly credible evidence soon showed, however, that the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, did indeed use torture and coercion to get detainees to tell the stories demanded by the Saudi regime — even in front of foreign observers — and that they did so to protect al Qaeda from investigation by the United States.

Three car bombings in Riyadh in November 2000 that had resulted in the death of a British citizen were generally believed to have been the work of al Qaeda. But four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian had confessed to the bombings, and their confessions had been broadcast on Saudi television.

After being released in 2003, however, the Canadian citizen, William Sampson, made public his dramatic account of beatings administered by the Mabahith while being hung upside down, including blows that made his testicles swell to the size of oranges. Sampson said the Saudis told him from the beginning what they wanted him to confess to, repeating it over and over while the beatings continued, and refined the story over time, constantly adding new details.

Six weeks into the interrogation, after Sampson began to tell them what they wanted, they started videotaping his confession, using a wall chart to help him remember in detail the movements he was supposed to have made.

The Saudis even coached Sampson on what to say when he was visited by Canadian embassy personnel, threatening him with further torture if he told the embassy officials the truth. When the embassy personnel came to talk with him, Sampson’s two torturers were present for the entire interview, just as they were presumably present at the questioning of the Shi’a detainees observed by the FBI team.

The other foreigners told similar stories of coerced confessions under torture. Sampson and the five foreigners were released only after a May 2003 suicide bombing by al Qaeda on a Riyadh compound housing 900 expatriates forced Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef to acknowledge al Qaeda as a terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defense lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.

Testifying before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees on Oct. 9, 2002, he whitewashed the Saudi policy toward the FBI investigation. Omitting any mention of the Saudi deception over the explosives smuggling incident and refusal to allow the FBI to pursue essential investigatory tasks, Freeh suggested that the Saudis had done everything that could be expected of them.

“Fortunately, the FBI was able to forge an effective working relationship with the Saudi police and interior ministry,” he said. Any “roadblock or legal obstacle” that “would occur,” Freeh asserted, was because of the “marked difference between our legal and procedural systems.”

Freeh paid tribute to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, as “critical in achieving the FBI’s investigative objectives in the Khobar case” and suggested that any such temporary problems “were always solved” by Bandar’s “personal intervention.”

Freeh misrepresented the arrangement under which the FBI team had observed the interrogation as “making these witnesses directly available.”

In an interview for a fawning biography of Prince Bandar, Freeh even went so far as to call the Saudi beheading of four jihadists who confessed to the OPM SANG bombing after refusing to allow the FBI to question them as “swift justice” on a “Saudi domestic matter.”

The final chapter of Freeh’s connection with Bandar and the Saudis, however, was still to come. In April 2009, Freeh appeared as Bandar’s defense lawyer in a British court case in which Bandar is accused of illegally taking two billion dollars in graft on a Saudi-British arms deal.

In the context of Freeh’s straightened financial situation and his very close relationship with Prince Bandar, this sequence of developments in Freeh’s relationship with the Saudis, culminating in being put on Bandar’s payroll, should have raised eyebrows in Washington.

With a wife and six children to support, Freeh had been far more vulnerable to Saudi blandishments than most senior administration officials. And Bandar had made no secret that he was willing to use the promise of financial benefits to influence U.S. officials while they were still in office.

He once told an associate, according to a February 2002 article by Robert G. Kaiser and David Ottaway of the Washington Post, “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

Freeh declined to be interview for this series.

In light of the history of Freeh’s relations with Bandar, his conduct of the investigation of Khobar Towers deserves new scrutiny. Freeh effectively shut down a probe of a terror bombing in which bin Laden was clearly implicated when the Saudis had refused to cooperate; he refused to pursue any investigation of a bin Laden role in the bombing; and he pushed a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing despite the fact that it was tainted by the likelihood of torture.

The result of Freeh’s blatant pro-Saudi bias was that Osama bin Laden was allowed more years of unhindered freedom in which to plan terrorist actions against the United States. Had Freeh not become an advocate of the interests of the regime whose representative in Washington eventually put him on his payroll, U.S. policy would presumably have been focused like a laser on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda two years earlier.

And perhaps the disinterest of the George W. Bush administration’s national security team toward al Qaeda before 9/11 would have been impossible.

* (This is the final installment of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden.” The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden-2/feed/ 4 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/israeli-doctors-colluding-in-torture-while-world%e2%80%99s-medical-ethics-chief-turns-blind-eye/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/israeli-doctors-colluding-in-torture-while-world%e2%80%99s-medical-ethics-chief-turns-blind-eye/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:03:44 +0000 Jonathan Cook http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8868 Nazareth — Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr. Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

The campaign against Dr. Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities could be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.

Until 1999, when Israel’s Supreme Court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.

During that period Dr. Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.

Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.

Last week, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.

The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.

According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.

Ishai Menuchin, the head of the Public Committee, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, Ticking Bombs, in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.

The Public Committee highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent”.

In June last year, Physicians for Human Rights drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.

Anat Litvin of Physicians for Human Rights told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net — take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”

The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.

In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.

Prof. Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.

“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr. Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.

“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”

This month, Defense for Children International issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”

The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated.”

Campaigners against Dr. Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.

Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr. Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”

Dr. Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous”, saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.

The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during the Second World War.

In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/israeli-doctors-colluding-in-torture-while-world%e2%80%99s-medical-ethics-chief-turns-blind-eye/feed/ 8 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/open-letter-in-response-to-the-american-psychological-association-board/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/open-letter-in-response-to-the-american-psychological-association-board/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:00:17 +0000 Stephen Soldz http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8850 Today a number of psychological, health, and human rights organizations released the following statement criticizing the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Directors failure to accept responsibility for the APA’s role in facilitating psychologists’ participation in abusive national security interrogations. The coalition statement responds to a June 18 open letter from the APA Board acknowledging for the first time that psychologists have engaged in torture, but making no reference to the APA Board’s own apparently unanimous support extending over several years for psychologists’ right to participate in detainee interrogations.

The APA letter follows years of reports that psychologists designed, helped conduct, disseminated, and legitimated the use of abusive interrogation techniques carried out under the Bush administration. While other health professional organizations adopted policies prohibiting their members participation in interrogations at Guantanamo, CIA “black sites,” and elsewhere, the APA stood alone in claiming, against evidence, that psychologists’ presence at the detention sites was necessary “to protect” detainees. In fact, the APA went further, allowing psychologists involved in these very interrogations to design APA ethical policy on interrogations.

Although recent revelations, including a Senate Armed Services Report, have debunked the claim that psychologists were preventing torture, the APA leadership still refuses to acknowledge the extent of the harm psychologists have done. Nor does it propose adequate steps to address past abuses by psychologists or to prevent psychologists from contributing to future abuse. The organizations’ statement ‘calls for the APA to take five immediate steps to begin this process of corrective action. Among these steps are a call for an independent body to pursue accountability for psychologists found to be involved in torture or abusive interrogation practices, and further, for an independent investigation of possible collusion between the APA and the military/intelligence establishment that may have contributed to the APA’s polices in this area.

***********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 29. 2009

CONTACT:
Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu

Open Letter in Response to
the American Psychological Association Board

On June 18, 2009, the American Psychological Association [APA] Board issued an Open Letter on the subject of psychologists’ involvement in abusive national security interrogations. The letter is among the first formal acknowledgements from APA leadership that psychologists were involved in torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. We welcome this progress.

Similarly, the letter acknowledges APA’s member-initiated referendum prohibiting psychologist participation in detention centers that are in violation of international law and overturning APA Council’s repeated refusals to do so. This is an improvement over very recent messages from APA officials that characterized press descriptions of APA policy as supporting psychologist participation in such interrogations as “fair and balanced.”

Nevertheless, the letter is profoundly disappointing. It continues the long tradition of APA leaders minimizing the extent of psychologists’ involvement in state-sanctioned abuse as well as APA’s own defense of such involvement. The authors speak as though the information about psychologist’s involvement in torture is fresh news even though it has been available for a long time. Even now, the Board relies on the Bush Administration tactic, employed in the Abu Ghraib debacle, of blaming the abuse on a “few bad apples.” This minimization of the greatest ethical crisis in our profession’s history by those who claim to lead the profession is unacceptable. Similarly the APA Board continues to take no responsibility for its own grievous mismanagement of this issue. Instead, the tone of the letter suggests we should all come together and “reflect and learn,” because this has been difficult for all of us, collectively. The Board also presumes the authority to continue to speak for psychologists in the future with neither redress nor evidence of remediation for what they have done:

This has been a painful time for the association and one that offers an opportunity to reflect and learn from our experiences over the last five years. APA will continue to speak forcefully in further communicating our policies against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to our members, the Obama administration, Congress, and the general public. [Board letter, June 18, 2009.]

Any meaningful approach to this issue must start by acknowledging the fact that psychologists were absolutely integral to our government’s systematic program of torture. When the Bush administration decided to engage in torture, they turned to psychologists from the military’s SERE [Survival, Evasion, resistance, and Escape] program for help in designing and implementing the torture tactics. This fact was first reported in 2005, within days of the release of the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] report and was officially acknowledged by the Defense Department in its Inspector General’s Report, declassified in May 2007. Other psychologists monitored torture to calibrate how much abuse a detainee could tolerate without dying. Nonetheless, APA leaders continued, and still continue, to pretend that psychologists’ participation in abuse was the behavior of rogue members of the profession.

Similarly, the APA Board still refuses to acknowledge the evidence of apparent collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse. This collusion was most notable in the creation of the military-dominated PENS task force. Only a policy that comes to terms with this APA collusion can begin to reduce the furor among APA members, psychologists, and the general public.

APA leadership has much work ahead to begin to repair the harm they have caused to the profession, the country, former and current detainees and their families. At a minimum the APA leadership should do the following:

1. Fully implement the 2008 referendum as an enforceable section of the APA Code of Ethics. This entails a public announcement that APA policy and ethical standards oppose the service of psychologists in detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Air Base, CIA secret prisons, or in the rendition program.

2. Annul the June 2005 PENS Report due to the severe and multiple conflicts of interest involved in its production.

3. Bring in an independent body of investigative attorneys to pursue accountability for psychologists who participated in or otherwise contributed to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. APA should also: (a) clarify the status of open ethics cases and (b) remove the statute of limitations for violations involving torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, so as to allow time for information on classified activities to become public.

4. Develop a clear and rapid timetable to remove Sections 1.02 and 1.03 [the "Nuremberg defense" of following orders] from the APA Code of Ethics. [We note that the APA Ethics Committee has stated that they will not accept a defense of following orders to complaints regarding torture; this statement is a welcome improvement but it is clearly inadequate as it is not necessarily binding on future committees nor does it cover abuses falling under the category of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.] Revoke the equally problematic Section 8.05 of the Code, which dispenses with informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations,” and Section 8.07, which sets an unacceptably high threshold of “severe emotional distress” for not using deception in the ethics of research design.

5. Retain an independent investigatory organization to study organizational behavior at APA. Due to potential conflicts of interest, independent human rights organizations should be enlisted to select this investigatory entity. The study should address, among other things, possible collusion in the PENS process and the 2003 APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, attended by the CIA’s apparent designers of their torture program [James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] during which “enhanced interrogation” techniques were discussed. The study should explore how the APA governance system permits the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of individuals who are unresponsive to the general membership. It should also propose measures to return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints.

These five steps will not remove the terrible stain on the reputation of American psychology. However, by taking these steps the APA leadership would make both symbolic and substantive progress toward accountability for psychologists’ contributions to detainee abuse and the APA’s failure to adequately respond to the public record. These actions would constitute an important step toward rehabilitating the Association and restoring the good name of the profession itself.

Signed by:

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Physicians for Human Rights

Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Center for Constitutional Rights

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Network of Spiritual Progressives

National Lawyers Guild

Amnesty International USA

Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles

American Friends Service Committee, Pacific Southwest Region

Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles

Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT)

New York Campaign Against Torture (NYCAT)

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/open-letter-in-response-to-the-american-psychological-association-board/feed/ 14 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:03:34 +0000 Gareth Porter http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8841 WASHINGTON — Osama Bin Laden had made no secret of his intention to attack the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. He had been calling for such attacks to drive it from the country since his first fatwa calling for jihad against Western “occupation” of Islamic lands in early 1992.

On Jul. 11, 1995, he had written an “Open Letter” to King Fahd advocating a campaign of guerilla attacks to drive U.S. military forces out of the Kingdom.

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization began carrying out that campaign later that same year. On Nov. 13, 1995 a car bomb destroyed the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard (OPM SANG) in Riyadh, killing five U.S. airmen and wounding 34.

The confessions of the four jihadists from the Afghan War to the bombing, which were broadcast on Saudi television, said they had been inspired by Osama bin Laden, and one of them referred to a camp in Afghanistan that was associated with bin Laden.

“It was a backhanded reference to bin Laden,” says veteran FBI agent Dan Coleman.

The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh immediately requested that the FBI be allowed to interrogate the suspects as soon as their arrests were announced in April. But the Saudis never responded to the request, and on May 31, the embassy was informed only an hour and half before that the four suspects would be beheaded.

When the bomb exploded at Khobar Towers on Jun. 25, 1996, Scott Erskine, the agent in charge of the Riyadh bombing investigation, was about to return to the United States after another frustrating meeting in which Saudi officials were not forthcoming about whom they were going to prosecute. When FBI Director Louis Freeh visited Khobar a few days after the bombing, he was told not to expect any more information on the Riyadh bombing.

Instead of insisting that the Clinton administration put more pressure on the Saudis to cooperate on the possibility of links between the two bombings, Freeh quietly decided to drop the investigation of the Riyadh bombing entirely. The case was put on “inactive” status, according to two former FBI officials, meaning that no more actions were to be taken, even though it had not been formally closed.

Bin Laden made it more difficult to ignore his role, however, by publicly claiming responsibility for both the Riyadh and Khobar bombings. In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive U.S. soldiers out of the Kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al Quds al Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, “The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar.”

And in an interview published in the same newspaper Nov. 29, 1996, he was asked why there had been no further operations along the lines of the Khobar operation. “The military are aware that preparations for major operations require time, in contrast with small operations,” said bin Laden.

He then linked the two bombings in Saudi Arabia explicitly as signals to the United States from his organization: “We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible U.S. decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and U.S. forces,” said bin Laden, “but it seems that they did not understand the signal.”

According to Coleman, one of the FBI’s top investigators on al Qaeda, bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned but not for those he had not planned. For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the World Trade Centre bombing and told his former business agent turned FBI informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.

The Riyadh and Khobar bombings even had a common operational feature. As noted by the head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, in both cases, the vehicle was not parked so as to bring the entire building down. If the team executing the Khobar bombing had parked parallel to the security fence rather than backing up to it, says Scheuer, it would have destroyed the entire building. The same thing had happened in the OPM SANG bombing.

The bin Laden unit of the CIA had collected concrete intelligence on bin Laden’s role in planning the Khobar Towers bombing. In mid-January, 1996, according to the intelligence compiled by the unit, bin Laden traveled to Doha, Qatar, where plans were discussed for attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden arranged for 20 tons of high explosive C-4 to be shipped from Poland to Qatar, two tons of which were to be sent to Saudi Arabia, the report said.

Bin Laden specifically referred to operations targeting U.S. interests in the triangle of cities of Dammam, Dhahran and Khobar in Eastern Province, using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, according to the intelligence reporting.

FBI agents working on the Khobar case simply rejected any evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in Khobar, however, because the decision had already been made that the Shi’as were responsible.

David Williams, then the FBI agent in charge of counter-terrorism for the Bureau, recalls that he had read intelligence reports suggesting bin Laden’s involvement in the bombing, but says he had done so “with a suspicious eye”.

The FBI investigators dismissed the relevance of the evidence linking bin Laden to the Riyadh bombing. As one former FBI official explained the logic of that position to Inter Press Service (IPS), the Khobar Towers bombing was completely different from the Riyadh bombing seven months earlier: it was in an area of Eastern Province where Shi’a oppositionists were predominant and where al Qaeda had no known cell.

The facts, however, told a different story. The city of Khobar itself was predominantly Sunni, not Shi’a, and the triangular area of the three cities had a large population of veterans of the Afghan War who were followers of bin Laden. As the London-based Palestinian publication reported in August 1996, the six jihadis who confessed to the bombing were all from an area called Al Thoqba near Khobar.

One of the veteran jihadis detained after the bombing, Yusuf al-Ayayri, who was then the actual head of al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, was from Dammam and knew the jihadi community in that region very well, according to Norwegian specialist on al Qaeda Thomas Hegghammer.

The FBI and CIA knew nothing about bin Laden’s movement in that part of Saudi Arabia, however, because they were completely dependent on Saudi intelligence for such information. A CIA memorandum dated Jul. 1, 1996 said the Agency had “little information” about the “location, size, composition or activities” of opposition cells in Saudi Arabia.

Interviews with FBI officials involved in the investigation make it clear that they were not interested in evidence linking bin Laden to the bombing, because they understood their task to be limited to getting whatever information they could from Saudi officials.

Williams says he didn’t question the Saudi account of the Khobar plot, because, “You start to believe the people who are your interlocutors.”

Asked about the evidence that bin Laden was behind the plot, another FBI official with substantive responsibility for the investigation told IPS, “I didn’t get involved in that aspect. That wasn’t my job.”

(*This is the fourth of a five-part series, “Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden.” The work on this series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/khobar-towers-investigated-how-a-saudi-deception-protected-osama-bin-laden/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/another-coup-against-a-constitutional-process-honduras/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/another-coup-against-a-constitutional-process-honduras/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:02:59 +0000 Clifton Ross http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8846 Even in the best of times a coup in Honduras wouldn’t get much coverage in the U.S. since most North Americans couldn’t find the country on a map and, moreover, would have no reason to do so. Nevertheless, those in the U.S. who have been alert to the changes in Latin America over the past decade and almost everyone south of the border know that the coup d’etat (or “golpe de estado”) against President Manuel Zelaya has profound implications for the region and, in fact, all of Latin America. While the US press will glance from their intent gaze at reruns and specials on Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett only long enough to report on President Obama’s reaction to the coup, Latin Americans will keep their eyes on the governments of the region as well as the social movements in Honduras as they search for a key to how the whole affair will turn out.

In a power play between President Zelaya who maneuvered (some say illegally) to push a referendum on the constitution, and a congress that sees their jobs possibly go on the line if there is a new constitution, the military played the decisive role and ousted Zelaya in the early hours of the morning on Sunday, June 28, 2009, preempting the national referendum. After producing a forged letter of resignation, supposedly from President Zelaya, president of the congress Roberto Micheletti was sworn in. From exile in Costa Rica, President Zelaya denounced the forgery and maintained that he continued to be the only legitimate president of Honduras. Meanwhile, back at Micheletti’s solemn swearing-in ceremony, the AP reported, “outside of Congress, a group of about 150 people opposed to Zelaya’s ouster stood well back from police lines and shook their fists, chanting ‘Out with the bourgeoisie!’ and ‘Traitors!’”

Venezuelan-based Telesur, however, gave a distinctly different impression of the scene. It reported at least one hundred times that many people (“at least 15,000” — there were other estimates of 20,000) were gathered in a strike and a leader of the Bloque Sindical Popular (Popular Union Block), Ángel Alvarado, was calling for a general strike the following day. On the evening after the coup, Micheletti’s government put the country under curfew enforced by the military, which also enforced a ban on all news of the golpe. Meanwhile, regional leaders and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) met in Nicaragua where Chávez recalled the similarities between what happened to him in Venezuela in April 2002 and the events in Honduras. Chávez ended his tale calling on the “golpistas” (those who carried out the coup) to surrender, while Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa demanded that they be tried for treason.

If possibility for support for the “golpistas” looked slim in Latin America, things didn’t look better up north. Indeed, what was most striking about the coup, if The Wall Street Journal can be believed, is that it appears that the new administration of President Obama was opposed to the coup even in the planning stage. Paul Kiernan and Jose de Cordoba report in The Wall Street Journal that, “the Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated bluntly that, “The action taken against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all.”

For those hoping to see a new US policy in the region, this is indeed reason to be guardedly optimistic, even more so since Zelaya is a close ally to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. This will be among the first military coups in fifty-five years of coups throughout the continent that the U.S. wouldn’t have either perpetrated or backed after the fact — the first one being the four-hour-long coup in Ecuador in January 2000, carried out by center-leftists.

The Wall Street Journal article, however, offered a hardly credible reason for the coup: “Voicing the fears that sparked the military’s action, retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN en Español that Mr. Zelaya was a stooge for Mr. Chávez. He said that if the military hadn’t acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy.”

While it’s true that the most reactionary forces in the region see sinister motives behind Chavez’s generosity and do all they can to demonize the Venezuelan leader, the more obvious reason for the coup was the fact that Zelaya had called a referendum on the constitution, an act which has drawn a similar response from reactionaries in other countries in Latin America. The problems are the same: progressive leaders enter power on a wave of popular support only to find their hands bound by constitutions written by their neoliberal predecessors of the 1990s under the tutelage of Washington. The new leaders then face the choice of playing by the very limited rules of the neoliberal constitution or writing up a new charter. Even the proposal of new rules enrages the local oligarchy which, of course, was behind the neoliberal constitution in the first place, and the opposition to constitutions aimed at democratizing power has grown with each successive process.

President Hugo Chavez was the first progressive president of the region to call for a referendum on a nation’s constitution after his election. The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was written by thousands across the country and passed in popular referendum by nearly 72% of the people in a popular vote, establishing the “Fifth Republic.” Chavez then ran again for president, was re-elected with an even larger margin than before, and he now had the possibility of carrying out reforms that would have been impossible under the old, 1961 constitution of the Fourth Republic.

While the Venezuelan process was peaceful, when Rafael Correa came to power in Ecuador, his call for a constituent assembly to write the new constitution frightened the old congress, almost cost him his job and led to street battles and the cordoning off of the congress. Eventually that crisis passed, with Correa beating the old congress and a winning a new Constitution, the first in the world to guarantee the rights of Mother Earth and nature.

That mini battle in Ecuador between congressmen and police, however, was nothing compared to what nearly became a civil war in Bolivia over the proposed new constitution. The crisis, which left over 100 dead in the department of Pando, and nearly brought about the succession of the “Media Luna” departments from Bolivia, was eventually resolved and in the process set a new precedent for diplomacy in the region. For the first time in modern history a political crisis in Latin America was resolved not by the U.S. dominated OAS but by the newly formed UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) at a meeting held in Santiago, Chile presided over by the center-left President Michelle Bachelet and the notable absence of the United States, whose representatives were not invited. This was the first test of the newly formed UNASUR which had until then existed largely only on paper, and it was viewed everywhere as a great success, proving that the nations of the South American continent could resolve their own problems more effectively among themselves than under the aegis of the imperial eagle of the north. Evo returned to Bolivia with the full backing of UNASUR and nine countries of the region (including the neoliberal governments of Peru and Colombia) and eventually the “Media Luna” had to submit. The new Constitution was passed in the referendum in January of this year.

While it’s impossible to say how the coup in Honduras will play out, the new president sworn in on the day of the coup, Roberto Micheletti, may fare only a little better than the unfortunate Pedro Carmona, President-for-a-day in Venezuela (April 12-13, 2002) when Chavez was briefly overthrown. Micheletti hasn’t a single ally in Latin America, and even the Empire now seems to be resigned to the fact that military coups are a thing of the past and has turned its back on him. Elections and constitutions aimed at the transformation of nations in Latin America from “representative” to “participatory” democracy seem to be the wave of the future that even well-armed militaries will no longer be able to oppose.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/another-coup-against-a-constitutional-process-honduras/feed/ 11 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/jobs-first/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/jobs-first/#comments Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:01:30 +0000 Greg Moses http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8848 From a distance the Chinese mainland appears to be snorting through the global depression like a fire-breathing dragon. But a closer look at internet discourse reveals a giant in the throes of aftershock. When we hear tones of irritation from Chinese officials regarding “dollar problems” we could on the one hand consider their pain.

On the other hand, whether you are listening to pro-dollar or anti-dollar partisans today, there is an eerie agreement between Marxist and Friedmanite alike that return on capital is the main thing. What we need to hear more often from both sides of the global mouth is how capital will only grow through labor.

With the help of Google translate, the average monolingual yankee can cross the ocean and listen to the official pronouncements of ministers for the Communist Party of China (CPC) who have a thousand throats exhorting the masses to keep on the scientific path.

What the scientific path sounds like in China today is a lot like what you hear weekdays over the chatterbox at the Capitalism-Knows-Best Channel (CNBC). For instance, the Chinese “socialist market economy” is being redefined scientifically into a “modern market economy under rule of law,” which is exactly the way they like it at CNBC.

From both sides of the Pacific you get pretty much the same news: double-digit downturns in profits across the board, dozens of gigantic projects suddenly scrapped and unplugged, trade routes collapsing, pages snatched from memories of capitalism past, the better to remind us how to survive.

Even on the question of climate change there is a convergence of policy conviction that “the construction of ecological civilization” will help our damaged economies to “cope with the international financial crisis” through the material re-production of green technologies.

Tuning into the thoroughly capitalized culture at CNBC — coming at you “live from the financial capital of the world”–bust is generally accepted as the price of boom. Mad Money man Jim Cramer said recently that if the stock market were to take another 150-point dive on the S&P 500 Index, investors from the boo-yah land of Cramerica could consider it a gift — “A GIFT!!”

But over on the Chinese mainland, ministers seem to be talking to masses that haven’t quite learned how to appreciate the opportunities of economic collapse. This is the time, say the ministers, to vigorously seek innovations in technology, reconfigure business models, bury dead capacities, and evolve the community through decisive calculations of “M&A.”

In the chatter of Chinese ministers sounds a worry that the “socialist market economy” could come out of the economic crisis fatter than it needs to be and therefore vulnerable to all the lean dogs that global capital is breeding as we speak.

Of course every Wal-Mart shopper knows how much is owed to the enormous Chinese factories that punched out a dozen or so shopping seasons. But Chinese ministers know better how the tiny “Made in China” labels were not attached to Chinese-branded logos. And whereas the great logos of the global economy will likely recover on top of factories somewhere or anywhere (thank you Naomi Klein) there is no guarantee that the factories of China will be serving the logo powers next year.

There is enough worry to go around. In the USA we don’t know if the unemployment numbers will stop in time to provide the baby boom a respectful retirement. In China, the ministers don’t know if plants and projects will stop shutting down in time to prevent a more colossal sacrifice in capital spending.

Matching the positive image of the Chinese minister atop his nearly $2 trillion mountain of dollar reserves is the precise negative image of the average American consumer down in his valley of debt. And where the images should be joined at the middle term is across the rubbed glass surface of the Wal-Mart checkout counter, courtesy of MasterCard and Visa.

Of course, there was a time not too many months ago when the era of dollar-fed arrogance seemed to be stalking the world with unchecked power as “dollar hegemony” rolled around the globe with tsunami force. These days however the dollar gets pulled up off its knees by other currencies at the most curious times, exactly in moments when the whole flow of things seems to shudder with collapsing pipes.

What the dollar needs most right now is a national emergency declared in behalf of jobs. Enough diddling with yield curves and balance sheets already. Whatever it takes, we need folks back at work. Until we are busy creating value through labor, every dollar will stay busy shrinking.

Which brings us to the final correspondence between CNBC and the ministers of China. By and large all these voices fail to inflect the urgency of the single outcome that will count most toward economic health — getting everybody back to work. If you are holding a pile of dollars the immediate question should be how to transform that cash into tools of productivity for workers of the world. Wealth today is paralyzed from not knowing how to become productive. This is the real problem.

So whether you grew up on one side of the Pacific listening to warnings about the Midas touch or you grew up on another side of the Pacific sneaking lessons from Mencius you should know. When you mistake the real value of human economy for dollars, gold, or profit, you shall kill the order of things.

Something about the discourse of crisis is chilling to the ear. Neither side of the ocean is talking early or often enough about how to forge wealth into tools that can be put to work. There is still time perhaps to put jobs first.

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