InThis Edition:
- North East Oregon Wolves: Lawsuit to Stop Unwarranted Killing of Wolves.
- Chris Hedges and Phyllis Bennis on bin Laden and Terrorism.
- William Blum on Libya_____
Edited 5/4/11]
North East Oregon WolvesFrom the US Fish & Wildlife
press release:
Lethal control measures will be handled by the Service and will involve capturing and euthanizing two un-collared sub-adults from the Imnaha pack. This control effort will avoid breeding adults and pups, and will not jeopardize the continued existence of the pack. The Service and partners have taken similar action in other areas throughout the Rocky Mountain region, such as northwestern Montana, to manage the size of wolf packs. This approach is intended to encourage wolf packs to target their natural prey and reduce attacks on livestock.
Comment & Questions:
The last sentence is complete nonsense unless they know something I don't know. Do they have a heart to heart with the wolves and explain to them
why they are killing two sub-adults. What is the link between killing two subadults and changing wolf behavior?
Also. no fladry or RAG boxes might be understandable, but why no herder or any measures at all to protect their cattle from predators? [Chris]
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Fish & Wildlife Service Photo (above)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Lawsuit Filed to Stop Unlawful Killing of Endangered Wolves in OregonPORTLAND ORE May 03, 2011
Four conservation groups today moved to stop the killing of two wolves from the Imnaha Pack in eastern Oregon. They filed suit in federal court against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has ordered and plans to carry out the killing of two wolves from the pack in response to a late April wolf kill of a calf. Cascadia Wildlands, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, Center for Biological Diversity and Oregon Wild brought the suit, arguing that the Fish and Wildlife Service has not conducted the necessary environmental review to kill wolves in Oregon and that such killing violates the federal Endangered Species Act which, at least for the time being, still protects Oregon’s wolves. . . . .“
Wolves have only begun to recover in Oregon with fewer than 25 wolves in two packs. Despite their small numbers, Oregon wolves will be removed from federal Endangered Species Act protection very soon under a congressional rider attached to the budget bill funding the government for the remainder of 2011.
Oregon’s struggling wolf population cannot sustain these killings,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The killing of these two wolves highlights why Congress should not meddle in complex scientific decisions over the management of our nation’s endangered species. Oregon wolves are nowhere near recovered and continue to need protection.”
The kill order stems from a wolf depredation of a calf last weekend, another in February, and six cattle depredations in May and June 2010 attributed to the Imnaha Pack. Nonlethal measures to keep wolves away from livestock – including fencing, a range rider, hazing and cleanup of livestock carcasses – are being used and appear to have some success. It is also notable that ranchers are compensated for livestock losses to wolves, which is not the case with the far more common occurrence of other predators taking livestock. In 2005, for example, domestic dogs killed 700 sheep and cows in Oregon, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. . . . .
(See
URL above for rest of article.)
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New billboard by NE Oregon Ecosystems will greet travelers in La Grande, ORFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 3, 2011
Contact:
Wally Sykes, Northeast Oregon Ecosystems, wally_sykes2000@yahoo.com
(Phone number available upon request)
Suzanne Stone, Defenders of Wildlife, 208.424.9385, sstone@defenders.org
Greg Dyson, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, 541.963.3950 x22, greg@hellscanyon.org
Rob Klavins, Oregon Wild, 503.283.6343 ext 210, rk@oregonwild.org
Billboard backers hope wolves, wildlife will stir Wallowa County tourism
Advertising effort draws attention to Wallowa County’s unique potential as Oregon’s ecotourism
hotspot
La Grande, OR - A new billboard by NE Oregon Ecosystems will greet travelers in La Grande, OR near the Interstate exit onto Highway 82 eastbound. The ad displays a wolf and an American eagle against a backdrop of the Eagle Cap Wilderness, advertising the “Wallowa Country” as a tourist destination for wildlife watching.
“Wallowa County has one of Oregon's greatest raptor environments on the Zumwalt Prairie and is home to both of Oregon's two wolf packs. The draw of wolves, raptors, elk, even an occasional moose, wolverine, and now, buffalo – amid the largest native bunchgrass prairie in the NW, in the mountains and vales of two Wilderness Areas (one the largest in Oregon), and in spectacular Hells Canyon– makes our County a premier location for this booming recreational activity,” said Wally Sykes, a cofounder of NE Oregon Ecosystems.
Sykes pointed out that wildlife watchers spent $45 billion in 2006, and said they would like to see this region share in the booming industry. A recent study by the University of Montana showed that the desire to see wolves alone brings an additional $35 million a year to the area around Yellowstone National Park.
“Last year NE Oregon Ecosystems helped with some early wolf-related tours and events,” he said, “and the response was terrific. Local inns have had inquiries for this summer, and we've been contacted by tour operators hoping to set up regular scheduled excursions.”
He added that a growing number of visitors were interested in animal tracking, bird watching, photography, hiking, and camping, especially where they might hear a wolf howl, see its tracks or, best of all, actually have the thrill of seeing one.
“Wallowa County is already special because of its wilderness and wildlife, prairies and mountains, Hells Canyon, Wallowa Lake, the friendly people,” Sykes said. “For many, being in wolf country adds that extra draw that will make them choose our county over other destinations.”
The billboard, which will be up for a year, was paid for by NE Oregon Ecosystems with contributions by Oregon Wild, Hells Canyon Preservation Council and Defenders of Wildlife.
An earlier billboard by the same sponsors publicized the $10,000 reward for information on the illegal killer of the Wenaha Pack wolf shot last fall. That billboard was removed after a complaint by the property owner. It was replaced by local stockgrowers with an image of a menacing wolf and a political message.
NE Oregon Ecosystems is a group of Oregonians, mostly from Wallowa, Union, and Baker counties, who support sound conservation and environmental policies, and promote the economic benefits which they produce. Last year it sponsored showings of the documentary Lords of Nature in Baker City and Enterprise, and arranged a presentation by Timmothy Kaminski of Mountain Livestock Cooperative, Bozeman, Montana, on ways to reduce livestock/wolf conflict. It contributed last summer to the
program which provided a range rider to patrol Wallowa County grazing allotments in wolf territory.
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Enviros sue to stop feds from killing wolvesMay 3, 2011 | 12:15 PM | By Cassandra Profita
Four conservation groups are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the plan to kill two wolves in the Imnaha pack.
That was fast! The plan was just announced at the end of the day yesterday after it was confirmed that another calf in Wallowa County was indeed killed by the same pack that has killed several other calves over the past year.
The conservation groups – Center for Biological Diversity, Cascadia Wildlands, Hells Canyon Preservation Council and Oregon Wild – say the feds haven’t done the proper environmental reviews, and that killing the wolves would be a violation of the Endangered Species Act (Gray wolves in Oregon are, for now, still listed as threatened. But they’re due to be delisted any day now.). . . .
(See
URL above for rest of article.)
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Chris Hedges and Phyllis Bennis on bin Laden and Terrorism.On Osama Bin Laden’s Death
By Chris Hedges
Editor’s note: Chris Hedges made these remarks about Osama bin Laden’s death at a Truthdig fundraising event in Los Angeles on Sunday evening.
May 02, 2011 "Truthdig"
-- I know that because of this announcement, that reportedly Osama bin Laden was killed, Bob wanted me to say a few words about it … about al-Qaida. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaida for The New York Times. It was the work in which I, and other investigative reporters, won the Pulitzer Prize. And I spent seven years of my life in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I’m an Arabic speaker. And when someone came over and told Jean and me the news, my stomach sank. I’m not in any way naïve about what al-Qaida is. It’s an organization that terrifies me. I know it intimately.
But I’m also intimately familiar with the collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world. The expansion of military occupation that took place throughout, in particular the Arab world, following 9/11 – and that this presence of American imperial bases, dotted, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Doha – is one that has done more to engender hatred and acts of terror than anything ever orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.
And the killing of bin Laden, who has absolutely no operational role in al-Qaida – that’s clear – he’s kind of a spiritual mentor, a kind of guide … he functions in many of the ways that Hitler functioned for the Nazi Party. We were just talking with Warren about Kershaw’s great biography of Hitler, which I read a few months ago, where you hold up a particular ideological ideal and strive for it. That was bin Laden’s role. But all actual acts of terror, which he may have signed off on, he no way planned.
I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the whole rise of al-Qaida is that when Saddam Hussein … and I covered the first Gulf War, went into Kuwait with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was in Basra during the Shiite uprising until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard. I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Within that initial assault and occupation of Kuwait, bin Laden appealed to the Saudi government to come back and help organize the defense of his country. And he was turned down. And American troops came in and implanted themselves on Muslim soil.
When I was in New York, as some of you were, on 9/11, I was in Times Square when the second plane hit. I walked into The New York Times, I stuffed notebooks in my pocket and walked down the West Side Highway and was at Ground Zero four hours later. I was there when Building 7 collapsed. And I watched as a nation drank deep from that very dark elixir of American nationalism … the flip side of nationalism is always racism, it’s about self-exaltation and the denigration of the other.
And it’s about forgetting that terrorism is a tactic. You can’t make war on terror. Terrorism has been with us since Sallust wrote about it in the Jugurthine Wars. And the only way to successfully fight terrorist groups is to isolate themselves, isolate those groups, within their own societies. And I was in the immediate days after 9/11 assigned to go out to Jersey City and the places where the hijackers had lived and begin to piece together their lives. I was then very soon transferred to Paris, where I covered all of al-Qaida’s operations in the Middle East and Europe.
So I was in the Middle East in the days after 9/11. And we had garnered the empathy of not only most of the world, but the Muslim world who were appalled at what had been done in the name of their religion. And we had major religious figures like Sheikh Tantawy, the head of al-Azhar – who died recently – who after the attacks of 9/11 not only denounced them as a crime against humanity, which they were, but denounced Osama bin Laden as a fraud … someone who had no right to issue fatwas or religious edicts, no religious legitimacy, no religious training. And the tragedy was that if we had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had built on that empathy, we would be far safer and more secure today than we are.
We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.
These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.
And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know it’s intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become a monster that we are attempting to fight.
Thank you.
See
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28010.htm for their reader's comments.
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Justice or Vengeance?
By Phyllis Bennis
In the midst of the Arab Spring, which directly rejects al-Qaeda-style small-group violence in favor of mass-based, society-wide mobilization and non-violent protest to challenge dictatorship and corruption, does the killing of Osama bin Laden represent ultimate justice, or even an end to the "unfinished business" of 9/11?
May 02, 2011 -- IPS
-- Amman, Jordan — U.S. agents killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, apparently without cooperation from the government in Islamabad. The al-Qaeda leader was responsible for great suffering; I do not mourn his death. But every action has causes and consequences, and in the current moment all are dangerous. It's unlikely that bin Laden's killing will have much impact on the already weakened capacity of al-Qaeda, which is widely believed to be made up of only a couple hundred fighters between Afghanistan and Pakistan — though its effect on other terrorist forces is uncertain. Pakistan itself may pay a particularly high price.
As President Barack Obama described it, "After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden." Assuming that was indeed the case, this raid reflects the brutal reality of the deadly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that preceded it and that continue today, 10 years later — it wasn't about bringing anyone to justice, it was about vengeance.
And given the enormous human costs still being paid by Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and others in the U.S. wars waged in the name of capturing bin Laden, it's particularly ironic that in the end it wasn't the shock-and-awe airstrikes or invasions of ground troops, but rather painstaking police work — careful investigation, cultivating intelligence sources — that made possible the realization of that goal.
President Obama acknowledged that the post-9/11 unity of the people of the United States "has at times frayed." But he didn't mention that that unity had actually collapsed completely within 24 hours of the horrifying attacks on the twin towers. September 11, 2001 didn't "change the world;" the world was changed on September 12, when George W. Bush announced his intention to take the world to war in response. That was the moment that the actual events of 9/11, a crime against humanity that killed nearly 3,000 people, were left behind and the "global war on terror" began. That GWOT war has brought years of war, devastation and destruction to hundreds of thousands around the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond.
There was an unprecedented surge of unity, of human solidarity, in response to the crime of 9/11. In the United States much of that response immediately took on a jingoistic and xenophobic frame (some of which showed up again last night in the aggressive chants of "USA, USA!!" from flag-waving, cheering crowds outside the White House following President Obama's speech). Some of it was overtly militaristic, racist and Islamophobic. But some really did reflect a level of human unity unexpected and rare in U.S. history. Even internationally, solidarity with the U.S. people for a brief moment replaced the well-deserved global anger at U.S. arrogance, wars, and drive towards empire. In France, headlines proclaimed "nous sommes tous Américaines maintenant." We are all Americans now.
But that human solidarity was short-lived. It was destroyed by the illegal wars that shaped the U.S. response to the 9/11 crime. Those wars quickly created numbers of victims far surpassing the 3,000 killed on September 11. The lives of millions more around the world were transformed in the face of U.S. aggression — in Pakistan alone, where a U.S. military team assassinated bin Laden, thousands of people have been killed and maimed by U.S. drone strikes and the suicide bombs that are part of the continuing legacy of the U.S. war.
These wars have brought too much death and destruction. Too many people have died and too many children have been orphaned for the United States to claim, as President Obama's triumphantly did, that "justice has been done" because one man, however symbolically important, has been killed. However one calculates when and how "this fight" actually began, the U.S. government chose how to respond to 9/11. And that response, from the beginning, was one of war and vengeance — not of justice.
The president's speech last night could have aimed to put an end to the triumphalism of the "global war on terror" that George W. Bush began and Barack Obama claimed as his own. It could have announced a new U.S. foreign policy based on justice, equality, and respect for other nations. But it did not. It declared instead that the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and beyond will continue.
In that reaffirmation of war, President Obama reasserted the American exceptionalism that has been a hallmark of his recent speeches, claiming that "America can do whatever we set our mind to." He equated the U.S. ability and willingness to continue waging ferocious wars, with earlier accomplishments of the U.S. — including, without any trace of irony, the "struggle for equality for all our citizens." In President Obama's iteration, the Global War on Terror apparently equals the anti-slavery and civil rights movements.
Today, the Arab Spring is on the rise across the Middle East and North Africa. It's ineffably sad that President Obama, in his claim that bin Laden's death means justice, didn't use the opportunity to announce the end of the deadly U.S. wars that answered the attacks of 9/11. This could have been a moment to replace vengeance with cooperation, replace war with justice.
But it was not. Regardless of bin Laden's death, as long as those deadly U.S. wars continue in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and beyond, justice has not been done.
Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at IPS. She is also a fellow of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She has been a writer, analyst, and activist on Middle East and UN issues for many years. In 2001 she helped found and remains on the steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.
For some comments on this piece, see:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28011.htm_____
Libya
Why is Libya the Target for US/NATO Missiles?By William Blum
May 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --
See Also
William Blum pageLibya: Let us not be confused as to why Libya alone has been singled out for "humanitarian intervention".
On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of "war criminal" and "torturer". (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can't Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: "Aren't you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?" She also threw in another line that's become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that's used when all other arguments fail: "The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God." 1
My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that "you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God." ... The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.
Unfortunately, they've lost just about everything else as well. Twenty years of American bombing, invasion, occupation and torture have led to the people of that unhappy land losing their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... more than half the population either dead, disabled, in prison, or in foreign exile ... the air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.
In 2006, the UN special investigator on torture declared that reports from Iraq indicated that torture "is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein." Another UN report of the same time disclosed a rise in "honor killings" of women. 2
"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.
"I am not a political person, but I know that under Saddam Hussein, we had electricity, clean drinking water, a healthcare system that was the envy of the Arab world and free education through college," Iraqi pharmacist Dr. Entisar Al-Arabi told American peace activist Medea Benjamin in 2010. "I have five children and every time I had a baby, I was entitled to a year of paid maternity leave. I owned a pharmacy and I could close up shop as late as I chose because the streets were safe. Today there is no security and Iraqis have terrible shortages of everything — electricity, food, water, medicines, even gasoline. Most of the educated people have fled the country, and those who remain look back longingly to the days of Saddam Hussein." 3
And this from two months ago:
"Protesters, human rights workers and security officials say the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has responded to Iraq's demonstrations in much the same way as many of its more authoritarian neighbors: with force. Witnesses in Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk described watching last week as security forces in black uniforms, tracksuits and T-shirts roared up in trucks and Humvees, attacked protesters, rounded up others from cafes and homes and hauled them off, blindfolded, to army detention centers. Entire neighborhoods ... were blockaded to prevent residents from joining the demonstrations. Journalists were beaten." 4
So ... can we expect the United States and its fellow thugs in NATO to intervene militarily in Iraq as they're doing in Libya? To protect the protesters in Iraq as they tell us they're doing in Libya? To effect regime change in Iraq as they're conspiring, but not admitting, in Libya?
Similarly Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria ... all have been bursting with protest and vicious government crackdown in recent months, even to a degree in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive societies in the world. Not one of these governments has been assaulted by the United States, the UK, or France as Libya has been assaulted; not one of these countries' opposition is receiving military, financial, legal and moral support from the Western powers as the Libyan rebels are — despite the Libyan rebels' brutal behavior, racist murders, and the clear jihadist ties of some of them. 5 The Libyan rebels are reminiscent of the Kosovo rebels — mafiosos famous for their trafficking in body parts and women, also unquestioningly supported by the Western powers against an Officially Designated Enemy, Serbia.
So why is only Libya the target for US/NATO missiles? Is there some principled or moral reason? Are the Libyans the worst abusers of their people in the region? In actuality, Libya offers its citizens a higher standard of living. (The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income ranked Libya first in Africa.) None of the other countries has a more secular government than Libya. (In contrast some of the Libyan rebels are in the habit of chanting that phrase we all know only too well: "Allahu Akbar".) None of the others has a human-rights record better than that of Libya, however imperfect that may be — in Egypt a government fact-finding mission has announced that during the recent uprising at least 846 protesters were killed as police forces shot them in the head and chest with live ammunition. 6 Similar horror stories have been reported in Syria, Yemen and other countries of the region during this period.
It should be noted that the ultra-conservative Fox News reported on February 28: "As the United Nations works feverishly to condemn Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi for cracking down on protesters, the body's Human Rights Council is poised to adopt a report chock-full of praise for Libya's human rights record. The review commends Libya for improving educational opportunities, for making human rights a "priority" and for bettering its "constitutional" framework. Several countries, including Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia but also Canada, give Libya positive marks for the legal protections afforded to its citizens — who are now revolting against the regime and facing bloody reprisal."
Of all the accusations made against Gaddafi perhaps the most meaningless is the oft-repeated "He's killing his own people." It's true, but that's what happens in civil wars. Abraham Lincoln also killed his own people.
Muammar Gaddafi has been an Officially Designated Enemy of the US longer than any living world leader except Fidel Castro. The animosity began in 1970, one year after Gaddafi took power in a coup, when he closed down a US air force base. He then embarked on a career of supporting what he regarded as revolutionary groups. During the 1970s and '80s, Gaddafi was accused of using his large oil revenues to support — with funds, arms, training, havens, diplomacy, etc — a wide array of radical/insurgent/terrorist organizations, particularly certain Palestinian factions and Muslim dissident and minority movements in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; the IRA and Basque and Corsican separatists in Europe; several groups engaged in struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa; various opposition groups and politicians in Latin America; the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang.
It was claimed as well that Libya was behind, or at least somehow linked to, an attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Cairo, various plane hijackings, a bomb explosion on an American airliner over Greece, the blowing up of a French airliner over Africa, blowing up a synagogue in Istanbul, and blowing up a disco in Berlin which killed some American soldiers. 7
In 1990, when the United States needed a country to (falsely) blame for the bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libya was the easy choice.
Gaddafi's principal crime in the eyes of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) was not that he supported terrorist groups, but that he supported the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Gaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Washington was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.
And if all this wasn't enough to make Gaddafi Public Enemy Number One in Washington (Reagan referred to him as the "mad dog of the Middle East"), Gaddafi has been a frequent critic of US foreign policy, a serious anti-Zionist, pan-Africanist, and pan-Arabist (until the hypocrisy and conservatism of Arab governments proved a barrier). He also calls his government socialist. How much tolerance and patience can The Empire be expected to have? When widespread protests broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, could Washington have resisted instigating the same in the country sandwiched between those two? The CIA has been very busy supplying the rebels with arms, bombing support, money, and personnel.
It may well happen that the Western allies will succeed in forcing Gaddafi out of power. Then the world will look on innocently as the new Libyan government gives Washington what it has long sought: a host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US." 8 Another thing scarcely any African country would tolerate is an American military base. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.
And remember — in the context of recent history concerning Iraq, North Korea, and Iran — if Libya had nuclear weapons the United States would not be attacking it.
Or the United States could realize that Gaddafi is no radical threat simply because of his love for Condoleezza Rice. Here is the Libyan leader in a March 27, 2007 interview on al-Jazeera TV: "Leezza, Leezza, Leezza ... I love her very much. I admire her, and I'm proud of her, because she's a black woman of African origin."
Over the years, the American government and media have fed us all a constant diet of scandalous Gaddafi stories: He took various drugs, was an extreme womanizer, was bisexual, dressed in women's clothing, wore makeup, carried a teddy bear, had epileptic fits, and much more; some part of it may have been true. And now we have the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, telling us that Gaddafi's forces are increasingly engaging in sexual violence and that they have been issued the impotency drug Viagra, presumably to enhance their ability to rape. 9 Remarkable. Who would have believed that the Libyan Army had so many men in their 60s and 70s?
As I write this, US/NATO missiles have slammed into a Libyan home killing a son and three young grandchildren of Gaddafi, this after repeated rejections of Gaddafi's call for negotiations — another heartwarming milestone in the glorious history of humanitarian intervention, as well as a reminder of the US bombing of Libya in 1986 which killed a young daughter of Gaddafi.
Two more examples, if needed, of why capitalism can not be reformed.
Transocean, the owner of the drilling rig that exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico a year ago, killing 11 workers and sending two hundred (200) million gallons of oil cascading over the shoreline of six American states, has announced that (through using some kind of arcane statistical method) it had "recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company's history." Accordingly, the company awarded obscene bonuses on top of obscene salaries to its top executives. 10
In Japan, even as it struggles to contain one of history's worst nuclear disasters, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has proposed building two new nuclear reactors at its radiation-spewing power plant. The plan had taken shape before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and TEPCO officials see no reason to change it. The Japanese government agency in charge of approving such a project has reacted in shocked horror. "It was just unbelievable," said the director of the agency. 11
Which leads us to A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America, speaking to the Greater Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, in 1970:
"It may sound heretical to some in this room to say that business enterprise is not an absolute necessity to human culture ... Ancient Egypt functioned more than 3000 years without anything resembling what we today understand by the term 'corporate enterprise' or even 'money'. Within our span of years, we have witnessed the rise of the Soviet Socialist empire. It survives without anything you or I would call a private corporation and little that approaches our own monetary mechanism. It survives and is far stronger than anyone might have expected from watching its turbulent beginnings in 1917 ... It is easy to mislead ourselves into thinking that there is something preordained about our profit-motivated, free-market, private-enterprise system — that is, as they used to say of gold, universal and immutable."
Items of interest from a journal I've kept for 40 years, part III
• Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story, pages 349-350: April 6, 2004. Sanchez was in Iraq in video teleconference with President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. One major American offensive was in operation, another about to be launched. According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: "We've got to smash somebody's ass quickly, "Powell said. "There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power." Then Bush spoke: "At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone. At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out. Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"
• Noam Chomsky: "If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that's essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That's what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinist Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini's fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it."
• To Hitler, America was both the enemy and a role model, inspiring in its imperial seizure of great territories by force, its use of slave labor, its eradication of native populations.
• NATO's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, made clear in a speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington in 2008 that western interests in Afghanistan went well beyond good governance to the strategic interest in having a permanent military presence in a state that borders central Asia, China, Iran and Pakistan.
• CIA Special Collections of documents; "Instances Of the Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 - 2010"
• Michael Collon: "Let's replace the word 'democratic' by 'with us', and the word 'terrorist' by 'against us'."
• Ron Paul: "Those who caution that leaving Iraq would be a disaster are the same ones who promised the conflict would be a 'cake-walk'."
• Spc. Alex Horton, 22, writing in a blog while a marine in Iraq in 2007: "In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn't deem that idea unpatriotic."
• Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on –– and even precedent value for –– other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it."
• Paul Craig Roberts: "International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else."
• Chris Hedges: "If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist 'madrassa,' or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace."
• "The US has never had a 'foreign policy' but a fanatical domestic policy which, once it had bled through to the Pacific, sought new hosts on which to feed." Patrick Wilkinson
• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956): "The only seriously accepted plan for 'peace' is a fully loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States."
• The United States goes around the world sprinkling democracy dust.
• Iran, the latest threat to life as we know it.
• "Iran hit back at US allegations that it has failed to crack down on fugitive al-Qaeda members, calling on Washington to apologize to the world for its own past support of the network. 'The Americans should present a full apology to the international community for the support they gave to al-Qaeda,' said the foreign ministry, referring to a period in the 1980s when millions of dollars of covert US aid was channeled — through the Pakistani secret service — to Islamist groups battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan." (Agence France Presse, June 2, 2003)
• Tom Hayden: They believe that the exposure of the generals to a civilian academic atmosphere may humanize the process of war-making, not worrying that the actual danger may be the militarizing of the university.
• Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his 2007 book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World": "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."After an avalanche of commentary, Greenspan backpedaled and obfuscated in his comments. He insisted he was talking about "oil security" and "the global economy". But this was just proving his own point that mentioning oil as a motivation for war is "politically inconvenient". It's no way to get young men to kill other young men who've never done them any harm.
• The American people have no more authentic control over their government than do people in countries that we call dictatorships, particularly on issues of foreign policy.
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