AlterNet.org


WORLD

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Nuclear Experts: Japan Nuclear Disaster Unprecedented -- No Way to Know About US Impact

Events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented and the situation appears to be deteriorating.


March 15, 2011 |

In the days after a massive earthquake battered Japan – triggering a deadly tsunami, shifting the earth several inches off its axis, and most frighteningly, damaging one of the most powerful nuclear power plants in the world – many nuclear engineers sought to reassure the American public that while the crisis was a serious one for Japan, there was no cause for Americans to be alarmed. But experts interviewed by AlterNet cautioned that the events taking place in the Fukushima No. 1 power plant are simply unprecedented, and noted that the situation appears to be deteriorating.


On March 13, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a statement confidently assuring the American public that because of “the thousands of miles” separating us from the site of several crippled reactors at the Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear power plant, “Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity.”

The announcement was widely reported, but seems to have been premature. “NRC's statement was so absurd,” Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist, told AlterNet. “They made that statement when we certainly didn't know how bad it would get, and it has gotten much worse in the past days.”

That uncertainty lies at the heart of the matter. “We're facing six reactors that can have the worst accident possible in those types of designs,” Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of Green Action, a Japanese environmental group, told AlterNet. “And if the chances are fifty-fifty in six reactors, we know what the math is – that means three will go. So if we have six that look really serious, that's something we've never seen before. And it's just playing out right now – it seems there's no way of stopping it, although there's an attempt to.” On Wednesday, white smoke appeared streaming from Unit 3, and officials said that a breach had likely occurred in the reactor's containment vessel -- the second at the plant in two days.

Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, told AlterNet that so far, as dire as the situation looks for Japan, there's little cause for concern in the U.S. “There a lot of other assumptions you have to build into that, like the winds blowing the fallout towards the United States; they could also blow it over Russia. I think Hawaii would be the first place I'd be concerned about, and the plumes would have traveled a significant distance, so they'd be pretty dilute.”

But, he said the crisis is “not getting better, and it's actually getting worse.” He wouldn't speculate how bad a worst-case scenario might get on the distant shores of the U.S., because he was still “trying to get my head around how much [radioactivity] would be released in terms of multiple reactor meltdowns.”

Kamps agreed that a number of factors would have to play out in order for the catastrophe 5,000 miles away to pose a threat to public health in the U.S. It would “depend on the direction of the wind, the nature of the radioactive clouds, and if they were able to maintain their concentration and not disperse.” But that “has happened,” he warned. “It happened at Chernobyl, with fallout of a very high level of concentration falling hundreds of miles from the disaster.”

There is quite a lot of debate about just how serious Chernobyl's impact on human health was. The World Health Organization says that only a handful of deaths can be attributed to what is widely considered to be the worst nuclear accident in human history. But last year, Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, Belarus, published the findings of an extensive literature review and concluded that almost a million people may have died as a result of the disaster. "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power," the authors said. "No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe... Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere."

Arnie Gunderson, an engineer and former nuclear industry insider, told Democracy Now! that those desperate attempts to avert disaster at Fukushima No. 1 are likely to be hampered by the March 14 evacuation of hundreds of workers who were trying to contain the disaster. “These 750 people that are being evacuated were doing critical work. They weren’t sweeping floors and washing windows,” he said, calling the decision to pull the crews, “an indication that management at the site has thrown in the towel and is going to let this thing run its course without any more human intervention.”

For Japan, the crisis is already very serious, with tens of thousands of nearby residents evacuated from their homes and low but elevated radioactivity readings recorded in Tokyo. “This could be enormously harmful to the whole country,” said Robert Alvarez, adding that aside from any potential harm to human health, “this is the kind of event that will sink the third largest economy in the world.”

Mioko Smith said the Japanese government has been less than forthcoming about the severity of the disaster. “The French government held a press conference [on March 15], and the head of the French nuclear safety agency said that all six of the reactors are close to level 7 on the IMIS scale – that's the international scale for ranking nuclear accidents, and 7 is the highest,” she said. “So, this is the French government giving a press conference in France saying, 'look, all six reactors at Fukushima are close to level 7.' Well, the Japanese government isn't telling people that.”

“Everyone thinks a meltdown is a quiet thing,” she added, “but it's not. You get massive releases of hydrogen, which causes explosions. Which means the material coming out of the reactor gets dispersed. How much, we don't know.”

Asked what might bring about the worst-case scenario, Kamps said it would be a combination of the containment chambers housing the reactor cores being breached and the highly radioactive spent fuel rods stored in “cooling pools” outside the containment catching fire. “If we were to have three core meltdowns and containment breaches, and six storage pools catching fire, those pools being outside the containment, that radioactivity would be directly released into the environment. That would be the worst-case scenario,” he said.

The cooling pools are where highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored. Explosions in at least two of the reactor buildings blew the roofs off the pools, exposing them to the environment. With cooling system failures and the spent fuel exposed to the atmosphere, the risk of a very difficult to extinguish chemical fire is high, and experts believe that's what happened at Fukushima Unit 4. And when the fuel rods burn, as they can for extended periods, they release highly toxic steam into the environment. “It’s worse than a meltdown,” David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists told the New York Times.

The Times noted that “the good news is that the Japanese have a relatively long time to deal with the problem,” but “the bad news is that if efforts to deal with the emergency fail, the results could be worse.” Arnie Gunderson told Democracy Now! that one of the reasons he was so concerned about the workers being evacuated from the plant was “that a large group of personnel were fighting the fire in the fuel pool on Unit 4.”

Aftershocks continue to batter Japan. According to the government, the island-nation has experienced 250 aftershocks registering 5.0 or higher on the Richter scale since the initial quake. Gunderson noted that the vulnerable plants could face more serious consequences yet. “I’m particularly concerned about another aftershock... on the weak Unit 2 containment, which already apparently has failed, and an aftershock would make it worse,” he said.

While nobody can say what will transpire in Japan in the coming days and weeks, one need not look east to find a threat of nuclear catastrophe for the U.S. Robert Alvarez told AlterNet that a study he had conducted found uncontained cooling pools currently operating at 103 reactors in 65 nuclear power plants spread across 31 states. “It's an unacceptable risk for the American public for these reactors to have their spent fuel densely compacted in these pools,” he said. “We were looking at this in the context of acts of terror, but our analysis suggests that the worst possible event that could start a spent fuel fire would be an earthquake.”

“We warned that this was a problem in the United States in 2003,” he continued, “and a year later the National Academy of Sciences agreed that our analysis was correct about the consequences and said the NRC needs to take this seriously.” But, he added, “the NRC has simply thumbed its noses at everybody because the industry doesn't want to spend the money” required to contain the waste.

This week, German chancellor Angela Merkel ordered seven of her country's power plants shut down pending a review, and the catastrophe in Japan has caused European states to “stress test” all of their reactors. Guenther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner, told reporters, "There is talk of an apocalypse and I think the word is particularly well chosen." He added that the catastrophe "has to raise the question of whether we in Europe, in the foreseeable future, can secure our energy needs without nuclear power.”

Meanwhile, CBS reported that the “Obama administration on Tuesday insisted that nuclear power plants in the United States are safe,” in an attempt to protect the industry from the kind of public backlash that followed the Three Mile Island disaster.

CBS added: “Twenty-three of the nuclear reactors in the United States use the same design as those found at the plant that failed in Japan” and every plant in the U.S. “shares key design traits with the Japanese plant.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Collateral Damage: Self-Inflicted and Otherwise

counterpunch

Weekend Edition
January 21 - 23, 2011

CounterPunch Diary

Collateral Damage

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It’s too soon to say of course, but it really does look as though though the Tucson shooter has done Sarah Palin serious damage. A Gallup poll run at the end of last week gives her a 53 per cent unfavorable rating, the lowest level she's sunk to in public esteem since she was first lofted to national prominence as John McCain's vice presidential pick in 2008.

Only 38 per cent now have a favorable view of the former Alaska governor.

Palin has only herself to blame. Against accusations that her bulls-eye campaign map targeted Democrats, including Gabrielle Giffords, she could have countered with measured expressions of sympathy for the dead and wounded, and a more in-sorrow-than-in-anger reproof for the over-hasty accusers.

Instead of which she came out with eight minutes of self-defensive whining on Facebook, and caused great annoyance to Jewish groups by filching the "blood libel" charge on which they have had copyright since the Middle Ages. Since then, she's done nothing to improve her performance, complaining that Obama had given a campaign speech at the memorial in Tucson.

Her charge was true, but the trouble is that most Americans liked Obama’s campaign speech. It was essentially the same speech that got him into the White House in the first place. While Palin was plummeting in the polls, approval for the President's Tucson performance was up in the high 70s percentile.

Before the shootings the Republicans were rearing and plunging as they burst out of the starting gate for the new Congressional session. John Boehner (dry eyed when talking about what happened in Tucson) went through a couple of cambric kerchiefs wiping the tears from his eyes in his “maiden” address as Speaker while down on the floor manly Republicans like Steve King of Iowa exulted that the blood-dimmed tides of payback were about to be loosed.

It was King, back in September, who fretted that the Republican leadership might go soft on reforming Obamacare, and that “a blood oath” of fortitude was necessary. It was King too who talked about the necessity of there being “blood on the floor” in the struggle for America’s future. Their first legislative target, Obama's health insurance bill, which passed into law last summer, was rolled out under the title, ‘Repeal of the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act'. They just couldn’t get enough of blood or killing. One columnist did a search on how many bills have had the word "killing" in the title. He found that "almost no legislation in 20 years used the word".

Then real blood splattered across the parking lot of a Tucson Safeway. The sheriff of Pima Country blamed poisonous rhetoric. Panic-stricken Republicans spent the next two weeks embarking on a fairly successful campaign to persuade the press that two years worth of incendiary, para-homicidal rhetoric could by definition have absolutely no measurable effect on any psychotic in America, including Loughner. Liberal pundits like Jonathan Alter obediently clicked their heels and agreed that putting targets on electoral maps was as influential in measurable consequence as sticking a soft toy on the window of a Volvo.

They may have counter-attacked with some effect in this skirmish, but even now about a third of the country still believes that violent political rhetoric helped provoke Loughner's rampage.

The Republicans have lost their ’mo, at least for a while. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

Meanwhile Obama is looking more chipper than he has in the whole of the last year, a unifier at last, acting presidential as he triangulates just as Bill did in 95 and the years thereafter. Clinton and Gore “reinvented government” and Obama vows to do away with irksome regulations (like storing long form birth certificates securely) that hold America back.

Where is Monica Lewinsky now that we need her? Coming off the Tucson memorial service and the performance of the intern who may have saved Giffords’ life Slate compiled a list of Great Contributions by Interns in History. Of course it failed to include Monica Lewinsky and her almost single-handed salvation, exclusively reported here in CounterPunch, of Social Security which Clinton was on the very edge of “reforming” before the scandal forced him to drop his plans.

Fawning Piers

Piers Morgan got whacked by the critics for being too fawning in his first outing as CNN’s replacement for Larry King. He was interviewing Oprah Winfrey. It’s true. He did fawn. It seems to come as naturally to him as to a hungry curate in Trollope buttering up a bishop. But he’s not alone. Here’s Kitty Kelley, the great, most definitely non-fawning, biographer of Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the Bush Family and the British royal family, writing in the December edition of The American Scholar:

“Shortly after my book Oprah: A Biography was published last April, one of Oprah Winfrey’s open-minded fans wrote to her website saying she wanted to read the book. Oprah’s message-board moderator hurled a thunderbolt in response: ‘This book is an unauthorized biography.’ The word unauthorized clanged on the screen like a burglar alarm. Suddenly I heard the rumble of thousands of Oprah book buyers charging out of Barnes & Noble—empty-handed.

“Days before this exchange, I had felt the chill of media disdain when my publisher began booking my promotion tour. Larry King barred the door to his CNN talk show because, he said, he didn’t want to offend Oprah. Barbara Walters did the same thing, proclaiming on The View that the only reason people wrote unauthorized biographieswas to dig ‘dirt.’

“There was no room for me at Charlie Rose’s roundtable and no comfy seat next to David Letterman. The late-night comic had recently reconciled with Oprah after a 16-year rift and did not want to risk another. On my 10-city tour I made few, if any, appearances on ABC-owned-and-operated stations because most of the stations that broadcast The Oprah Winfrey Show are owned by ABC or its affiliates. No one wanted to displease the diva of daytime television.”

End Torture Now!

In our latest newsletter Joann Wypijewski gives CounterPunchers a very important story, not only about the present elevated status of torture in America, but about the church-led campaign led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) which is striking a match amid the darkness. Five years ago, NRCAT announced its arrival in the form of banners that suddenly festooned churches and other religious institutions, declaring, “Torture Is a Moral Issue.”

“There are reasons for being discouraged, of course,” NRCAT’s Rev. Rich Killmer tells JoAnn, “ but I’ve seen more movement on this issue for a longer time than any other issue I’ve been involved with in all my years of religious social justice work.” That’s 42 years, some of them with the National Council of Churches, working on environmental, peace, justice, anti-nuclear issues.”

NRCAT aims to abolish torture in U.S. prisons as well, meaning eliminating long-term solitary confinement, the internal gulag of 45 SuperMax prisons that hold some 62,500 souls, and other forms of isolation warehousing that hold thousands more in standard prisons.

Subscribe to CounterPunch and read Wypijewski’s very important piece.

Also in this latest newsletter, Diana Johnstone explores the one of the sinister monuments of the Clinton years, when liberal intervention surged to full crest in the onslaughts on Yugoslavia. Her point of departure is the terrifying report to the Council of Europe by Swiss liberal senator Dick Marty.

As Diana begins: “U.S. media have given more attention to hearsay allegations of Julian Assange’s sexual encounters with two talkative Swedish women than to an official report accusing Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, of running a criminal enterprise which, among almost every other crime in the book, has murdered prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market.”

Thaci, now gangster in chief in Kossovo was handpicked back in 1999 by Madeleine Albright and the late Richard Holbrooke. Johnstone paints a searing portrait of Criminal Kosovo: America’s Gift to Europe.

Please, subscribe now! And have this newsletter your inbox, swiftly deliveredas a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Collateral Damage: WikiLeaks In The Crosshairs

by Media Lens / January 21st, 2011

The horrific killing of six people in Arizona, and the wounding of a dozen more, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, generated a wave of discussion on the impact of violent political rhetoric. A leading article in The Times commented:

American politics has a strain of mean-spiritedness that, when it connects to disturbed individuals, can have terrible consequences.

True enough, although Britain certainly has its own “strain of mean-spiritedness”. It is possible to disagree with others “in a reasonable way”, The Times observed, without giving “unintended succour to those on the fringes who harbour extreme views and even worse methods”. ¹

In August 2002, Times journalist Michael Gove – variously, the paper’s comment, news, Saturday and assistant editor – wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. ²

Gove suffered no ill effects from this expression of “extreme views and even worse methods” – he is now Secretary of State for Education.

In January 2003, also gunning for war, David Aaronovitch wrote in the Guardian:

If I were an Iraqi, living under probably the most violent and repressive regime in the world, I would desire Saddam’s demise more than anything else. Or do we suppose that some nations and races cannot somehow cope with freedom?

Again, extremism was given no ”unintended succour” – later that year, the judges of the 2003 What the Papers Say awards made Aaronovitch columnist of the year, commenting:

At a time when most left-leaning commentators were opposing the war in Iraq, he took a brave and consistent stand, presenting the case for action in the most coherent and persuasive manner.

Speech that incites violence against individuals at home is unacceptable. Speech that incites mass death and destruction against entire nations is met with indifference, and/or high office and awards!

In Mediaspeak, the word ‘violence’ actually refers to crimes committed by the ‘bad guys’ against the ‘good guys’, ‘us’. ‘We’ do not commit violence, ‘we’ deploy ‘assets’ to ‘neutralise’ ‘targets’. ‘We’ ‘intervene’ to bring ‘security’ and ‘humanitarian relief’.

Because ‘we’ don’t commit violence, it is fine for ‘us’ to non-violently kill ‘our’ enemies. Thus, columnist, Jeffrey T Kuhner, wrote in the Washington Times last month:

We should treat Mr Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.

William Kristol, former chief of staff to vice president Dan Quayle, pleaded:

Why can’t we act forcefully against WikiLeaks? Why can’t we use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible?

The net hosts numerous articles with titles like ’5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange.’

On the BBC website, Matt Frei praised Barack Obama’s mollifying response to the Arizona massacre:

The president kept it personal and poignant. He reined in the attack dogs on all sides and called for a more civil, gentle tone. The tragedy has allowed him to play the role of consoler-in-chief with conviction.

Perhaps not on all sides. The “consoler-in-chief” had nothing to say about the crosshairs hovering over Julian Assange.

Of Wikiblokesphere And Lying Feminist Slags

Responding to the killings in the Independent, Joan Smith lamented the state of political debate, recalling “a concept I’m very keen on but haven’t heard much in recent years: civility”. The abuse is rampant:

Among the online-abuse community, it’s beyond question that Julian Assange’s accusers are lying feminist slags.

There was precious little civility in this ugly distortion. If a minority of bigots do perceive Assange’s accusers this way, they have not been contributing to the rational, awesomely well-informed discussions we have seen.

John Pilger has commented on the playing of what might be called ‘the feminist card’ in the WikiLeaks debate. The gambit has form. In December 2007, we found that, over the previous 12 years, the terms ‘Taliban’ and ‘women’s rights’ had been mentioned in 56 Guardian articles. Of these, 36 had appeared after the September 11, 2001 attacks. As Pilger noted last month in the New Statesman:

The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was supported by leading feminists, especially in the US, where Hillary Clinton and other false tribunes of feminism made the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women the rationale for attacking a stricken country and causing the deaths of at least 20,000 people while giving the Taliban new life.

Something similar is happening now, Pilger writes, “as a group of media feminists joins the assault on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks… From the Times to the New Statesman, apparent feminist credence is given to the chaotic, incompetent and contradictory accusations against Assange in Sweden”.

Some of the worst examples have appeared in the Guardian, one of WikiLeaks’ “media partners”. Libby Brooks identifies an “unlikely alliance between leftwingers and the misogynists of the Wikiblokesphere,” which has seen them “indulge in the basest slut-shaming and misogyny”.

Again, if this is true somewhere, it is not true of serious, left online debate, where words like “slut” are simply abhorred. In a similarly one-sided Guardian report, Amelia Gentleman quoted Swedish tabloid journalist Oisin Cantwell, who argued, quite outrageously, that the “celebrity support for Assange was similar to the support offered by Hollywood stars to Roman Polanski when he was arrested last year, accused of raping a 13-year-old…”

Nick Davies, the leading Guardian reporter who originally organised the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership with Assange, before the two sides fell out, wrote a piece titled: ’10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange.’

This included salacious tidbits such as:

Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had ‘the worst sex ever’ with Assange: ‘Not only had it been the world’s worst screw, it had also been violent’.

And:

Police spoke to Miss W’s ex-boyfriend, who told them that in two and a half years they had never had sex without a condom because it was ‘unthinkable’ for her.

Bianca Jagger noted in Huffington Post that Davies had published “selective passages from the Swedish police report, whilst omitting exculpatory evidence contained in the document”.

Assange was, Jagger wrote, being “subjected to a ‘trial by newspapers,’ in an effort to discredit him”.

Assange’s former barrister James Catlin commented:

The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.

With “media partners” like these, WikiLeaks hardly needs enemies.

Blood On The Guardian’s Hands?

Worse was to come from the Guardian. On December 27, Africa correspondent David Smith reported:

Zimbabwe is to investigate bringing treason charges against the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other individuals over confidential talks with US diplomats revealed by WikiLeaks.

Treason charges could mean the death penalty, which, one would guess from this article, could mean blood on WikiLeaks’ hands.

One week later, on January 3, James Richardson, an “account services director for Hynes Communications”, wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian claiming: “now, with the recent release of sensitive diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks may have committed its own collateral murder, upending the precarious balance of power in a fragile African state and signing the death warrant of its pro-western premier…”

WikiLeaks, Richardson argued, should just shut up:

Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled – in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump – WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it – at least to those who understand the value of a life.

Political analyst Glenn Greenwald commented on Salon:

There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn’t WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that.

In fact the Guardian decided to publish the cable about Tsvangirai, not WikiLeaks, which only published the leak after the Guardian had done so.

The reaction in the US press was predictable enough. An article in the Wall Street Journal was titled, ‘Julian Assange’s reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe’s leading democrat his life.’ Who was to blame? “Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.” A piece in the Atlantic observed: “WikiLeaks released [this cable] to the world” and so “provided a tyrant with the ammunition to wound, and perhaps kill, any chance for multiparty democracy”. ³

Responding to criticism, the Guardian amended Richardson’s opinion piece, noting:

This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks.

The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz, worked hard to explain why David Smith had reported that WikiLeaks, rather than the Guardian, had published the Tsvangirai cable. Katz wrote: “it would be fair to describe us as joint publishers of any cables we have selected, with joint responsibility for any consequences of their release”. Using the WikiLeaks name was “a piece of widely understood journalistic shorthand. The material was routinely referred to as a ‘WikiLeaks revelation’”.

If the term “WikiLeaks revelation” is “shorthand” that is “widely understood” to refer to the Guardian’s status as joint publishers with WikiLeaks, why did David Smith not turn to his own editor for comment on the Guardian’s shared responsibility in the news piece reporting that Morgan Tsvangirai faced a treason inquiry? Has any Guardian journalist ever turned to the Guardian editor for comment on allegations that the Guardian-WikiLeaks partnership had endangered life? We asked Ian Katz on Twitter but he failed to reply. It seems clear that the Guardian has not rushed to advertise its shared responsibility – we suspect it will be news to many people.

The crucial point, in light of the Guardian’s amendments, is that mainstream media outlets have shown flat zero interest in accusing the Guardian of having blood on its hands for publishing the Tsvangirai cable. But why? There is only one explanation: the earlier media outrage was motivated, not by a desire to protect life in Zimbabwe, but by a desire to demonise and destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

A related propaganda theme is that WikiLeaks has recklessly “dumped” a “flood” of diplomatic cables on the web, so endangering lives. Arch-war monger John Bolton wrote in the Guardian:

WikiLeaks has yet again flooded the internet with thousands of classified American documents, this time state department cables” which was the “third document dump.

The Daily Mail reported: “Then this week he [Assange] disclosed around 250,000 cables from U.S. embassies, many containing sensitive information.”

This, also, is nonsense. In reality, WikiLeaks has, so far, slowly and carefully released only about 2,000 documents in close cooperation with its media partners.

Greenwald explains the rationale behind the selective outrage and false claims:

To justify this assault, the U.S. Government needs to claim that WikiLeaks is somehow distinct from what other press outlets do. So it invents outright falsehoods to do so: unlike newspapers, WikiLeaks indiscriminately dumps diplomatic cables without editorial judgment; unlike newspapers, they refuse to be transparent about their methods (nobody is less transparent about what they do than large newspapers); and now, WikiLeaks endangers people’s lives by recklessly publishing a cable which leaves democratic leaders in Zimbabwe vulnerable to attack, even though it wasn’t published by them at all, but by The Guardian.”

Once again, the mainstream media has distorted and deceived to manufacture, isolate and target a ‘threat’ for destruction. Certainly WikiLeaks is embarrassing the powers that be much more effectively than mainstream journalism. But mainstream outlets also publish government leaks, including ‘Top Secret’ information, which the diplomatic cables are not. Assange is a journalist and he is engaging in journalistic activity. The “collateral damage” of his destruction might well involve the freedoms enjoyed by the very journalists currently seeking that outcome.

1. Leading article, ‘A Mean Spirit,’ The Times, January 10, 2011 [↩]
2. Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002 [↩]
3. Ibid [↩]

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The second Media Lens book, NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

This article was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 7:01am and is filed under Disinformation, Media, Obama, Sweden, Wikileaks, Zimbabwe.

AlterNet

CIVIL LIBERTIES

ColorLines / By Seth Freed Wessler

Why Are the Feds Cultivating Their Own "Homegrown Terrorists"?

High profile domestic terrorism plots appear to have increased in recent months, but they’ve been largely concocted.

December 12, 2010 |

The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the government’s implementation of it’s ongoing war on terror.

The recent case involves 21-year-old from Baltimore named Antonio Martinez, who’d reportedly converted to Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Hussain and planned to blow up a bomb outside a military recruitment center in Baltimore. None of the plot, however, existed before the FBI instigated it and Martinez had no contact with any real terrorist organization.

The FBI deployed an informant to pose as an accomplice by adding Martinez as a friend on Facebook and communicate with him through Facebook messages. Martinez reportedly updated his status with comments about his devotion to Jihad. Once the young man had been identified as a target, the FBI informant helped imagine and orchestrate the plot, and supplied Martinez with a fake bomb and a vehicle to transport it. After he attempted to detonate the explosive remotely, the FBI arrested Martinez. If convicted of charges, he could face life in prison.

The case is the second since Thanksgiving and one of many more over the past decade, in which the federal government has deployed informants to “catch” terrorists inside the country. It’s all part of the FBI’s wider practice of targeting American Muslims—largely, according to some reports, Muslim converts as well as American born black Muslims. But far from stopping ongoing plots and interrupting “radicalization,” the FBI is fabricating plans, providing the tools to carry out attacks and inciting suspects to do so.

As U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein told the AFP, “There was no actual danger,” because the people posing as accomplices were FBI employees.

Nonetheless, the FBI claims that Martinez posed a real threat because, according to Richard McFeely, an FBI special agent, the young man was “absolutely committed to carrying out an attack which would have cost lives.”

“The case,” reports the AFP:

bore a striking resemblance to that of a Somali-American arrested in Portland, Oregon, last month after trying to set off what he thought was an explosives-laden van parked near a Christmas tree ceremony.

The device was actually a dummy bomb supplied by undercover FBI agents who had contacted him months before and pretended to be accomplices, and the would-be attacker, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was charged with “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.”

The informant program targeting American Muslims is part of a larger and developing FBI policy. As I wrote in October:

An extensive investigation, Anjali Kamat reports that the FBI has repeatedly used secret informants to gather questionable information and even entrap groups of people into supporting acts of terrorism. These informants are often Muslim men found guilty of non-terrorism related crimes and who face deportation or jail time.

In numerous cases, documented at length by the DN investigation, there are serious questions as to whether the tactic is creating crimes out of thin air. In one case, an FBI informant befriended a Muslim business owner. When that business started failing, the informant, who was himself facing deportation, offered the other man a loan that was allegedly laundered for weapons buying. The exchange led to terrorism convictions.

Karen Greenberg of the NYU Center for Law and Security explains, “the conviction rate for cases that involve informants is almost 100 percent.” But according to James Wedick, a former FBI agent, “90 percent of the cases that you see that have occurred in the last 10 years are garbage.”

Wedick also says that economic strains are often the way that informants entrap others. In Newburgh, NY, an FBI informant allegedly entrapped four black Muslim men from a poor neighborhood, pushing them to participate in an attempted attack on a synagogue in the area

High profile domestic terrorism plots appear to have increased in recent months, but they’ve been largely concocted. As the 10th anniversary of September 11th approaches, the government appears to be one of the key players in the maintenance of a believable terrorist threat.

Amna Akbar, fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of New York University School of Law, says, “What’s really interesting is that there’s been a significant increase in high profile so-called homegrown terrorism cases recently where the the actual threat is constructed by the government. There does not seem to be very much actual threat to justify the ongoing ‘war on terror’ and there are serious questions about why the government is going to such lengths in these cases.”

An archive of writer Seth Freed Wessler's articles for RaceWire's Colorlines Blog is available here.

Moral hazards - and consequences: Just Look at the GOP!

SF Gate

David Sirota

Archive

Moral hazards - and consequences

David Sirota, 2009 Creators.com

Washington's favorite term these days is "moral hazard." Though this buzzphrase may seem like an intimidating idea, most of us understand the principle.

Applaud your kid for punching another kid - rather than grounding him - and you've created a moral hazard that means he'll probably punch other kids in the future. In short, without consequences - or worse, with rewards - for wrongdoing, there is an incentive to do wrong. That's moral hazard.

To date, the national discussion about this concept has revolved specifically around financial moral hazard. And, as evidenced by trillions of dollars in public loans, guarantees and subsidies given to speculators to cover their massive losses, leaders in both political parties have no interest in preventing financial moral hazard - despite stern press releases insisting the contrary.

But financial moral hazard is only half the story. The other half is political moral hazard - the mother of all other moral hazards.

Consider, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He's the top regulator who not only sowed financial moral hazard with the Fed's post-meltdown bailouts, but openly admits that as the crisis developed, his Federal Reserve "should have done more - we should have required more capital, more liquidity (and) we should have required tougher risk management controls."

Firing Bernanke would tell other regulators that there are consequences for negligence. Instead, President Obama rewarded Bernanke with renomination and thus manufactured a pernicious problem. As economist Dean Baker says, just as bailouts create a financial moral hazard giving speculators no incentive to avoid excessive risk, Bernanke's renomination creates a political moral hazard whereby regulators "will not have an incentive to do their jobs properly (because) there are no consequences" for failure.

The Democratic Congress, of course, could reject Bernanke's nomination. But that seems unlikely.

When Senate Democrats ratified Obama's nomination of New York Fed chief Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary, they rewarded yet another shill who also fell down on the regulatory job. When those same Senate Democrats considered the nomination of Gary Gensler to head the agency regulating derivatives, they could have rejected him for championing derivatives deregulation as a Clinton official and then cashing in as a Goldman Sachs executive. Instead, Democrats backed his nomination.

And let's be fair - it's not just Democratic politicians who are creating political moral hazard. Many Democratic pundits, activists and voters continued cheering on President Obama while he stuffed his administration full of Wall Streeters.

Come election day, if there are no consequences at the ballot box for the politicians who legislated bailouts, supported these appointments and are now working to undermine proposed Wall Street reforms, then America will have created the biggest moral hazard of all.

David Sirota is the author of "The Uprising." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

This article appeared on page A - 124 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/11/EDQF1B27IU.DTL#ixzz0Zaybl4Pa

Profiles of Intentional Collateral Damage: Obama's Afghanistan Decision

Published on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama's Afghanistan Decision

by Kathleen Barry

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for being an empathetic model of manhood and further, for bringing that quality into the American Presidency. But how do you explain those dead Afghani and Pakistani daughters, mothers, sons and fathers, killed by US forces since you took office, to your own daughters who you want to develop the kind of empathy you have. You are teaching them how to understand the suffering of others. In Ghana you took them to the slave port and said that you wanted them to "engage in the imaginative act of what it would be like if they were snatched away from Mom and Dad and sent to some place they had never seen before." You want them to identify with the suffering of others, "And get them to - to make sure that they are constantly asking themselves questions about whether they are treating people fairly and - and whether they are examining their own behavior and how it affects others."

You have shown how empathy does not conflict with strength, how it enhances rather than diminishes leadership. In this country, you have faced down the health insurance industry from the memory of how your mother suffered at their hands. At the same time, you bring your empathy together with the power of your leadership when a woman at one of your health care forums tells you through her tears of how her insurance company is denying her life-saving treatment. We saw you go to her as you asked her to come forward to you, and watched you embrace her telling her that she was not alone.

As you are making your decision on the fate of Afghanistan and Pakistan, I ask you, are the people there any less deserving of your empathy? When you took office you escalated the U.S. war in Afghanistan and allowed it to expand in Pakistan. By the end of June, over a 1,000 Afghani civilians were killed, 261 alone in the month of May. In other words, more than one-third of the number of people killed in the Al Qaeda attack on the US in 9-11-2001 are dead since January of this year in order to keep America safe, even though they had nothing to do with fighting then or when they died. And with the increase our bombings have caused in recruits to the Taliban, America is not more safe.

While you were telling Americans that you wake up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking of how to keep America safe, you were denying that safety to the families of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr. President, you know that the empathy that you so highly value cannot be selective. When you engage it for some, say Americans, and refuse it to others, like Afghanis and Pakistanis, you are telling the world that only Americans lives are of value and that everyone else's lives can be put at risk to protect American lives.

Still you have not lost your empathy or respect for the lives of people in countries the US bombs and attacks. On May 9, in a rare gesture of an American President, you apologized to President Karzai when he met with you in Washington a few days after the US military killed an estimated 140 Afghanis in Farah, 94 of them girls under the age of 18 who had gathered in a compound to take shelter from the fighting. Some villagers said the strikes hit an area which the Taliban had already left and where there was no fighting. You apologized but you did not stop the bombing. In fact, drone strikes on Pakistani villages three days later in South Waziristan killed 8 people. Four days after that, US forces killed 25 civilians in a village in North Waziristan. None were Taliban, none were Al Qaeda. And the drone attacks continue, weekly, daily sometimes.

How will your decision on troop levels and military plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan reflect what you are teaching your daughters about the value of human life? Will you show them the petitions from the women of Afghanistan brought to you by Medea Benjamin from Code Pink? Will you explain to them that Afghan women have asked that you disarm the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the Northern Alliance, none of whom have the support of the people?

In your April speech in Islamabad you said that you "have no sympathy and no patience for people who go around blowing up innocent people." If you engage the same kind of empathy you are teaching your daughters with the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, you will see that in their daily experiences of US bombings and drone attacks they see the US attacks in the same light that you see the terrorists who attacked the US.

Against a US force of 68,000 troops in Afghanistan before you make your announcement in a few days, Senator John Kerry, when he returned from Iraq last month, told us that there were not more than a thousand hard-core Taliban in Afghanistan. Women in Afghanistan estimate that there are not more than 100. The rest are boys and men who cannot find work, who are angry over the US bombing and occupation of their country, who are driven to fight back against the US military who killed their parents or their children.

How difficult would it be to announce a plan to disarm those "reconcilables" as General Patraeus calls them? To disarm not rearm! Rather than negotiating with the Taliban to sell out women's rights as Hammid Karzai has done, why not pay those fighters who are not hardcore terrorists to go home and restock their shops or rebuild their farms. Then withdraw US troops from Afghanistan and Pakistan allowing them to protect their people and their country from the small number of hardcore terrorists remaining?

You have expressed your pain and sorrow in phone calls to families of American soldiers who have lost a son or daughter, a husband or wife. But what about the soldiers still there in combat? If you are truly pained by the loss of American soldiers in this war, bring those who are still there in combat home and give them the support to put their lives back together.

Mr. President, it is frightening to look at your advisors and see mostly hawks who are proponents of unending war. From your Vice President to your Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you have surrounded yourself with people who dismiss the cost of human life in war in favor of war. They have left us with the blood of over a million Iraqis on our hands. We do not expect empathy from your Generals whom came to their prestigious ranks through the military whose job it is to kill and destroy. They coldly speak of killing civilians as "collateral damage" as if it is not killing, as if human life outside of the United States is as significant as paper clips.

You have shown us that we can expect empathy from you, except in war. Will you close that gap? If you have not turned over the Executive Authority of this country to the Generals as your predecessor had, as it appears that you did when you took office in January, we will expect your decision on troops in Afghanistan to be reflected in your empathy for Afghanis and Pakistani as well as for American soldiers.

We are awaiting your decision on troop levels for Afghanistan. More precisely, we are waiting to see if you or the Generals are running this country as they have been since 2001.

In closing, Mr. President, before announcing your decision, please think hard and long from that place of empathy within you of what it would feel like to receive that call telling you the fate of one of your daughters, the kind of call that far too many Afghanis have received about their boys and girls who are with them no longer.

With respect,

Kathleen Barry, Ph.D.

Kathleen Barry is Professor Emerita of Penn State University, a feminist and sociologist and the author of Unmaking War, Remaking Men forthcoming Spring, 2010.

unintended or unanticipated consequences

A Dictionary of Sociology | 1998 | GORDON MARSHALL | © A Dictionary of Sociology 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

unintended or unanticipated consequences

It is an old saying that things do not always turn out as we expect. The theme of the unintended consequences of action therefore has an understandably long pedigree in the social sciences. Many sociological observers have distinguished between the stated purpose or intent of social actions, and their generally unrecognized, but objective functional consequences. William Isaac Thomas noted how the co-operative institutions of Polish peasants served not just their specific objectives but also functioned to forge cohesion. More recently, Lewis Coser has argued that conflicts are not always destructive for an organization, but may, by their adaptive or safety-valve function, play a part in maintaining organizational stability (see The Functions of Social Conflict, 1965 ).

The classic sociological example of unanticipated consequences is found in Max Weber's thesis about the connection between the protestant ethic and the spirit of modern capitalism. The Calvinist doctrines of predestination and this-worldly asceticism had the unintended consequence of creating a climate suitable for the growth of capitalism by encouraging the accumulation of capital as a duty or end in itself. More recent illustrations are given by Jon Elster in Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989). One example deals with the way in which opinion polls can affect election outcomes. The publication of pre-election polls may actually alter the outcome of the election, either because they cause people to switch and support the leading candidate, or because people cast a sympathy vote for the apparent underdog. Of course, if everyone opted for the underdog, this would have the strange result of awarding victory to the less popular candidate. A somewhat similar example of the unintended is provided by the Hawthorne Studies, where the presence of the researchers inadvertently changed the behaviour of the workers they were studying, a phenomenon since designated the ‘Hawthorne effect’.

According to Robert Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949) the unintended consequences of actions are of three types: those which are functional for a designated system and therefore comprise latent functions; those which are dysfunctional for a designated system and are latently dysfunctional; and those which are irrelevant to the system since they have no functional consequences. As soon as these types are applied to a specific situation there are problems. Obvious questions include ‘Dysfunctional for whom?’ and ‘Performing a latent function for what?’ Moreover, it makes no sense to use unanticipated consequences to explain the function, because the consequences were not known at the time. An unanticipated consequence could, however, influence future actions. Think of a child throwing a tantrum in order to get an ice-cream. If the tantrum has the unintended consequence of attracting adult attention, then attention-seeking rather than ice-cream may motivate future tantrums.

Unanticipated consequences are important at the micro-level as social actors are often mistaken in their interpretation of the situation and can, by their action, bring unanticipated results. A special case of this is the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the pronouncement of an erroneous belief may evoke behaviour that (apparently) vindicates that belief, thus making the prophecy come true. The labelling theory of deviance postulates precisely such a mechanism. Thus, to quote the early formulation by Frank Tannenbaum in Crime and the Community (1938), ‘the very process of making the criminal is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing the very traits that are complained of …’ Unanticipated consequences are also important at the macro-level because so many events occur unintentionally. As Adam Ferguson observed, ‘History is the result of human action, not of human design.’ See also SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

Published on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 by The Washington Post

Another Wave of Foreclosures Looms

Ballooning Payments Put Mortgages at Risk, Posing New Setback to Market

by Dina ElBoghdady

The housing market faces the prospect of a new round of foreclosures as hundreds of thousands of risky home loans known as option adjustable-rate mortgages reset to significantly higher payments that could force borrowers to fall behind, according to a report released Tuesday by Fitch Ratings.

A bank owned for sale sign is posted in front of a foreclosed home seen here in Antioch, California in 2009. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Justin Sullivan)

About 70 percent of the $189 billion in outstanding option ARMs will reset by 2011, the report said, which would be another setback to a teetering housing market still struggling to recover from the mortgage meltdown that precipitated the financial crisis.

Option ARMs make up only 1.3 percent of percent of outstanding mortgages and were used by a far smaller segment of the population than subprime mortgages, according to First American CoreLogic, so the fallout from the resets should not be as devastating. But the unraveling of the option ARMs could be felt for years.

"It does tell you there's going to be continued front-page news about high levels of foreclosures as these loans continue to struggle," said Paul Miller, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets.

Option ARMs, also called pick-a-pay loans, allow borrowers to choose how much to pay each month. Nearly all the borrowers who took out this type of loan from 2004 to 2007 chose to pay less than the interest due. Sometimes they paid as little as 1 percent interest. But the loans eventually require the borrowers to start paying the principal and full interest rate, so the payments shoot up.

"It's a ticking time bomb for some people," said Brian Bethune, an economist at IHS Global Insight, who said banks have already written off about $500 billion of these loans and other risky mortgages. Consequently, foreclosures have substantially reduced the number of outstanding option arms.

In its report, Fitch estimates that $134 billion in option ARMs will reset in the next two years. It expects monthly payments to jump 63 percent on average, or $1,053 a month, for loans adjusting this year and next, prompting a rise in defaults and foreclosures.

One surprise is that many option ARMs have gone bad even before adjusting, suggesting that some of these borrowers didn't stand a chance, said Sam Khater, a senior economist at First American CoreLogic. As of April, more than 35 percent of option ARMs were at least two months late even though they had not reset.

"These people were having trouble making the minimum payment, let alone dealing with the payment shock once the loan adjusted," Khater said.

At the root of the problem is that many who took out option ARMs were betting that home prices would rise. The loans helped people buy homes at a time when prices surged to unprecedented highs. As long as home prices kept climbing, these borrowers could refinance before their loans adjusted. But once prices tumbled, that option vanished. Now many people cannot refinance because they owe more than their homes were worth.

The most severe problems have surfaced in states with the steepest price drops. About 75 percent of option ARMs financed homes in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, where prices have plunged on average 48 percent from the second quarter of 2006 to the first quarter of this year, according to Fitch.

But for people struggling to make the lower payment before the loan adjusts, refinancing probably won't help, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "Just about anything they refinance into is going to give them higher payments than they have now."

The Fitch Report covers only those mortgages that were securitized, meaning packaged into securities and resold. Fitch does not analyze that mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or lenders, hold in their portfolios.

Recognizing the troubles ahead, some of the nation's largest lenders have tried to limit losses by modifying or working with borrowers refinance the option ARMs remaining in the portfolios, Cecala said.

Among the most aggressive have been Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Each of these has recently acquired another major lender specializing in option ARMs: Countrywide, Washington Mutual and Wachovia, respectively.

As for the loans that were securitized, only 3.5 percent of the 1 million loans made in 2004 through 2007 and covered in the Fitch report have been modified.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

Europe’s Complicity in U.S. Imperialism

Europe’s Complicity in Evil

By Paul Craig Roberts

Address to Mut zur Ethik Conference, “Sovereignty or Imperialism,” Feldkirch, Austria, September 5, 2009

September 09, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- There is a widespread supposition that Obama, being black and a member of an oppressed race, will imbue US foreign policy with a higher morality than the world experienced from Bush and Clinton. This is a delusion.

Obama represents the same ideology of American “exceptionalism” as other recent presidents. This ideology designates the United States as The Virtuous Nation and supplies the basis for the belief that America has the right, indeed the responsibility, to impose its hegemony upon the world by bribery or by force. The claim of American exceptionalism produces a form of patriotism that blinds the US population to the immorality of America’s wars of aggression.

Nothing is any different under Obama. Obama has escalated war in Afghanistan; started a new war in Pakistan; tolerated or supported a military coup that overthrew the elected president of Honduras; is constructing 7 new US military bases in Colombia, South America; is going forward with various military projects designed to secure US global military hegemony, such as the Prompt Global Strike initiative that intends to provide the US with the capability to strike anywhere on earth within 60 minutes; is working to destabilize the government in Iran, with military attack still on the table as an option; supports America’s new military African Command; intends to encircle Russia with US bases in former constituent parts of the Soviet Union; has suborned NATO troops as mercenaries in US wars of aggression.

How should Europe react? Europe should disassociate from the United States and go into active opposition to US foreign policy. Europeans should demand that their governments withdraw from NATO as it serves no European interest. The two aggressive militarist powers, the US and Israel, should be sanctioned by the UN and embargoed. Instead, Europe is complicit in US and Israeli war crimes.

Because of the cold war, Europe is accustomed to following US leadership. The financial convenience of the shelter provided by US military power negated independent European foreign policies. In effect, Western European countries became US puppet states.

How does Europe escape from a subservient relationship of many decades? Not easily. The US is accustomed to calling the shots and reacts harshly when it meets opposition. For example, French opposition to Bush’s invasion of Iraq brought about instant demonization of France by the US media and members of Congress.

The US government uses financial sanctions and threatened leaks of sensitive personal information gathered by its worldwide spy networks to discipline any independent-minded European leader.

Europe is essentially captive and forced to put US interests ahead of its own. Consequently, unless Europeans find their courage and discard their servile status, Europe will be badgered into more wars and eventually led into a devastating war with Russia. One European country can do little, but concerted action would be effective. For example, why do not Europeans protest that the war criminal Tony Blair was given a post in the EU?

The Obama administration’s attitude towards self-determination and the sovereignty of the people is that these grand-sounding concepts are useful platitudes with which to mask the hegemonic interests of the US government. US money and propaganda foment “velvet” or “color” revolutions that turn more countries into American puppet states.

The platitudes are useful also to disguise the overthrow of US civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, due process, and prohibitions against torture and preemptive arrest.

During the cold war era, one of the mainstays of US propaganda against the Soviet Union was the inability of Soviet citizens to travel within their country without the government’s permission. This indignity has now been inflicted upon US citizens. As of September, 2009, US citizens can no longer travel within their country by air without the permission of the Transport Security Administration.

The Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration’s search procedures. Under these rules travelers’ computers, cell phones, and other devices can be seized for searches that can take up to 30 days. If you are on your way to a meeting and your presentation is on your computer and your contacts’ numbers are on your cell phone, you are out of luck.

“Terrorist threat” is the excuse for these Gestapo practices. However, there have been no domestic acts of terrorism in 8 years. The few “plots” that led to arrests were all instigated by FBI agents in order to keep the nonexistent threat alive in the public’s mind. Yet, despite any real terrorist threat the police state continues to gain ground. Considering the extent of America’s oppression of peoples abroad, one would expect much more blowback than has occurred, assuming that 9/11 was not itself an inside job designed to provide an excuse for America’s wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Europe must look beyond the empty American political rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” and recognize the emerging Brownshirt American State. Democracy is slipping away from America. Its place is being taken by an oligarchy of powerful interest groups, such as the financial sector, the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned, and AIPAC. Political campaign contributions from interest groups determine the content of US domestic and foreign policy. A country in which political elites are above the law and can violate with impunity both laws against torture and constitutional protections of civil liberties is not a free country.

American political leaders and the American people need Europe’s help in order to avoid the degeneration of the American political entity. American freedom, as well as sovereign independence elsewhere in the world, require criticisms of US foreign and domestic policies. The US media, which was concentrated into a few hands during the Clinton administration, functions as a Ministry of Propaganda for the government. It was the New York Times that gave credibility to the neoconservative propaganda and forged documents that were used to sell the invasion of Iraq to the public. It was the New York Times that sat for one year on the evidence that the Bush administration was committing felonies by violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was not until after Bush was re-elected that the reporter was able to force his story through editorial opposition. Americans need criticism from Europe to compensate for the absence of an independent American media. Americans need outside help in order to reach an understanding of the immorality of their government’s policies, because they receive no such help from their own media. Without Europe’s help, Americans cannot regain the spirit of liberty and tolerance bequeathed to them by their Founding Fathers. America herself is a victim of the neoconservative and liberal internationalist pursuit of US hegemony.

We in America need to hear many voices telling us that it is self-defeating to become like an enemy in order to defeat an enemy. As Germans learned under Hitler and Russians learned under Stalin, it is the internal enemy--the unaccountable elite that controls a country’s government--that is the worst and most dangerous enemy.

If America has enemies who are against “freedom and democracy,” then America herself must make certain not to sacrifice her own civil liberties, and the sovereignty of other peoples, to a “war on terror.” Acts of terror are a small cost compared to the cost of the erosion of civil liberties that took centuries to achieve. Far more people died to achieve liberty than have died in terrorist attacks.

The United States cannot pretend to be a guarantor of liberty when the US government takes away liberty from its own citizens.

The United States cannot pretend to be a guarantor of peace and democracy when the US government uses deception to attack other lands on false pretenses.

Europe, whose culture was wrecked by 20th century wars, Europe, which has experienced tyranny from the left-wing and from the right-wing, has a right to its own voice.

America needs to hear this voice.

Paul Craig Roberts

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College. Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments, including Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. Dr. Roberts served in the Congressional Staff in the House and Senate and was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury by President Ronald Reagan. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1987. Dr. Roberts is author of 'Alienation and the Soviet Economy' and 'The Supply-Side Revolution'. He is coauthor with Matthew Stephenson of 'Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis'. He is coauthor with Karen LaFollette Araujo of 'Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy and ‘The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America'. He is coauthor with Lawrence Stratton of 'The New Color Line’ and ‘The Tyranny of Good Intentions'. His latest book, 'How The Economy Was Lost', will be published by CounterPunch in October 2009. Dr. Roberts is a columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.