Rounding Up U.S. Citizens

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."

Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism.

Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.

Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants.

Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.

Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.

The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).

During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting."

One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress.

The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round- up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy- three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Read on >>

Bush's Twin Masters

George W. Bush's two masters - the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians - were the guiding force behind his decision to invade Iraq, change its regime, and control it permanently.

The neocons' blueprint for Bush's war can be found in a 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on Post-Cold War Strategy, prepared by Paul Wolfowitz. It said, "Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia to] preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

The US had played a pivotal role in the Middle East for 50 years. One year before the Shah was toppled, I visited Iran as an international observer on behalf of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Tehran sported a US corporation on nearly every corner, but the people were mired in poverty. In 1953, the CIA had overthrown the democratically-elected secular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, whose government had nationalized the British oil company. The US installed the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, ushering in a 25-year reign of terror.

Iran became the largest customer for United States arms. US-based oil companies replaced the British. When Iranians began to rise up against the Shah, the US told the Shah it supported him "without reservation" and encouraged him to use force to maintain his power, even trying to engineer a military coup to save him. In 1979, a broad-based united front consisting of nationalists as well as militant Muslims coalesced around the Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah, and inaugurated a theocracy of religious fascism.{mosgoogle right}

Because of Washington's longstanding support for the Shah, Khomeini's government became a model for fundamentalist anti-US Islamic regimes. The United States was eager to counter the now anti-American Iranian government and prevent it from controlling the Persian Gulf, the largest oil source in the world.

To keep both Iran and Iraq from controlling the Gulf, the US quietly encouraged Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, with the promise of financing from Saudi Arabia. The US removed Iraq from its list of terrorist nations, and allowed the transfer of arms to Iraq, while simultaneously permitting Israel to arm Iran.

The United States supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons. Even after Iraq used its chemical weapons in the early 1980s, the US restored diplomatic relations with Iraq. Still playing both ends against the middle, the US itself supplied arms covertly to Iran in 1985.

Thinking the United States was still his ally, Saddam let April Glaspie, the career Foreign Service officer who headed the US mission in Iraq, know that he was about to invade Kuwait in 1991. Glaspie responded with a green light, and Saddam invaded. But the US, not wanting Iraq to dominate the western shore of the Persian Gulf, reacted by re-invading Kuwait. The United States didn't really wish to destroy Iraq; it still wanted Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. But the US underestimated Saddam's ability to maintain his position of control over the Kurds and the Shiites - both politically and through the use of terror. The survival of Saddam represented a severe limitation on American political power.

Employing the same strategy it later used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States attacked the infrastructure of Iraq in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from disease caused by unclean water. During Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the US bombed Iraq after Saddam refused to let UN inspectors into Iraq, on the grounds they were spying for the CIA. It turns out they were indeed CIA spies, according to the Washington Post.

By mid-2000, the United States had dropped 88,000 tons of bombs over Iraq, killing many civilians. Between 4,000 and 5,000 children per month died in Iraq as a result of prior US bombing and sanctions.

After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration mounted a concerted campaign to prepare the American people for war on Iraq. Although unable to find any weapons of mass destruction or evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, Bush never wavered in his march toward war.

Bush's Iraq war is consistent with his new military strategy of "pre-emptive" war set forth in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, and the Project for the New American Century's September 2000 document.

But there was no danger to pre-empt in Iraq, which had not invaded any country for 12 years. Iraq's military, severely weakened by the Gulf War, years of sanctions and intrusive inspections, never posed a threat to the US or other countries in the region.

A quarter of a million US and UK troops launched numerous 2,000-pound bombs on Baghdad in rapid succession. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed and tens of thousands have been wounded. Nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died and thousands more have been wounded.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found and the Iraq/al-Qaeda link has been discredited. Indeed, Wolfowitz admitted in Vanity Fair that the weapons of mass destruction rationale was a "bureaucratic" excuse for war, upon which "everyone" could agree. In light of the failure to find any WMDs, Wolfowitz revealed a new rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom: using Iraq to redraw the Middle East in order to reduce the terrorist threat to the United States.

Two years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration's plan to take military control of the Gulf region regardless of whether Saddam was in power was detailed in the Report of The Project for the New American Century. It says: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Indeed, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has confirmed that toppling Saddam was on George W. Bush's agenda long before 9/11.

According to O'Neill, in January 2001, Rumsfeld articulated the desire to "dissuade" other countries from "asymmetrical challenges" to United States power, a characterization strikingly similar to that in Wolfowitz's 1992 Pentagon paper. Rumsfeld's advocacy of a pre-emptive attack "matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination," O'Neill later said.

Five months later, Vice President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, in a May 2001 report, called on the White House to make "energy security a priority of US trade and foreign policy" and to encourage Persian Gulf countries to welcome foreign investment in their energy sectors.

When US-UK forces took control of Iraq, their first order of business was to secure the oil fields instead of the hospitals. Meanwhile, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root was awarded a controversial $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq's oil fields.

In July 2003, the public interest group Judicial Watch finally secured some of the documents from Cheney's energy task force meetings. They contain the smoking gun: "a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects" and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents are dated March 2001, two years before Bush invaded Iraq.

Bush's twin masters are the neocons and the right-wing Christians.

The United States' uncritical support for Israel, and the installation of a US- and Israel-friendly regime in Iraq, is not motivated by love for the Jewish people. Rather, this support is critical to the right-wing Christian agenda. In order to fulfill the Scripture's promise, the right-wing Christians want to transfer the temple mount in Jerusalem from Muslim to Jewish hands, to facilitate the rebuilding of the temple so Jesus can return.

US assistance to Israel maintains that country as an America-friendly presence in the midst of countries that are exploited by and resent the policies of both the United States and Israel. Instead of fighting terror - as Bush likes to proclaim - his war on Iraq has drawn foreign terrorists into Iraq to fight against the Western infidels.

Its success in removing Saddam's regime made way for the United States to construct 14 US military bases in Iraq. All of these bases are instrumental to Washington's strategy to maintain hegemony in the Middle East. Kellogg Brown & Root, which built the infamous tiger cages in Vietnam and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, got the no-bid contract for reconstruction in Iraq, and in New Orleans as well.

Our government's atrocious neglect of the poor and marginalized people of the Gulf Coast before and after Hurricane Katrina has come into full focus. And Bush's opposition to the Kyoto Protocol - which would require US corporations to sacrifice some of their profits to combat global warming - has come home to roost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Nearly half the National Guard and many high-water vehicles were in Iraq when they should've been in New Orleans.

The Bush administration has spent more than $200 billion on an illegal and unjustified war of conquest in Iraq and continues to send $3 billion of aid per year to Israel to fund its brutal military occupation of the Palestinian people. It is time for the US to get out of the business of funding killing and occupation, and into the business of funding healthcare, jobs, education and housing.

Read on >>

Getting Away with Murder

As we walked out of Hotel Rwanda, my teenage son asked me, "So why did we go into Iraq, but not Rwanda?" This youngster was horrified that the United States not only sat on the sidelines during the genocide that killed 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, but then prevented the United Nations from acting to stop it.

What was a little genocide, after all, when the U.S. powers-that-be had no strategic interest in intervening to stop the Hutu from massacring the Tutsi in Rwanda? Bill Clinton, still smarting from the public relations disaster that followed the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia, didn't want to get involved in Rwanda.

Clinton did, however, engineer NATO's war in Kosovo five years after the Rwandan genocide. He called it a "humanitarian intervention," to prevent ethnic cleansing of the Albanians by the Serbs.

Four years later, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush started a war in Afghanistan, justified as "self defense" against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

After Bush ousted the Taliban and installed former Unocal consultant Hamid Karzai to protect U.S. interests in Afghanistan, he went after Iraq, two years ago yesterday.

Billed as necessary to save us from "weapons of mass destruction," Bush replaced Saddam Hussein with a U.S.-friendly regime, one that would welcome the 14 permanent military bases we are constructing in Iraq. When the dreaded weapons didn't materialize, Bush's rationale morphed into "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people."

All three wars - Clinton/NATO's war in Yugoslavia, and Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Canadian law professor Michael Mandel - were unlawful. None was undertaken in self-defense, or approved by the Security Council, the only two instances in which the United Nations Charter permits the use of armed force.

In his new book, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity, Canadian law professor Michael Mandel argues that NATO's Kosovo war set the precedent for the United States' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It broke a fundamental legal and psychological barrier. When Pentagon guru Richard Perle 'thanked God' for the death of the UN," writes Mandel, "the first precedent he could cite in justification of overthrowing the Security Council's legal supremacy in matters of war and peace was Kosovo."

The 1999 war in Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia was not a "humanitarian intervention," but rather a crime against humanity, in the judgment of Mandel. He notes that "of the 385 murders in the original ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia] indictment of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, 340 were alleged to have occurred after the bombing started."

In support of his claim that NATO's bombing constituted a crime against humanity, Mandel cites its use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and the targeting of civilians. Between 500 and 1800 civilians of all nationalities were killed during the 78-day bombing campaign, which used "about 25,000 of the world's most devastating non-nuclear bombs and missiles," according to Mandel.

A year after the bombing, I visited Belgrade as a participant in an international conference on humanitarian intervention. Between meetings, we toured the surrounding area and saw the bombed out rubble of what were once apartments, schools, bridges, and a television and radio station. As I walked through the rubble, I was cautioned, much to my dismay, that the soil could contain depleted uranium.

Joining together with other Canadian law professors and lawyers and the American Association of Jurists, Mandel filed a complaint against NATO leaders with the ICTY. Although Amnesty International concurred that NATO had committed war crimes, the tribunal dismissed the complaint without serious investigation.

Mandel documents why this tribunal was created and functions in the service of United States interests. "For the first time in history," writes Mandel, we had "an international criminal tribunal established prior to the war whose criminals it was putting on trial, and therefore capable of playing a role in that war."

"The point is not that Milosevic was charged with atrocities in Kosovo, it's that Clinton wasn't too," writes Mandel.

NATO intervened militarily in Yugoslavia to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in its struggle against Milosevic. A year before, the United States government had listed the KLA, which had received assistance from Osama bin Laden, as a terrorist organization. After Milosevic's forces were defeated by NATO, the KLA moved into Kosovo and began a reign of terror against non-Albanians, which Mandel calls "reverse ethnic cleansing." When I was in Belgrade, I saw documentation of the destruction of 25 of Kosovo's medieval Serbian Christian Orthodox monasteries.

Mandel points to the Security Council Resolutions passed before the NATO bombing, which "were even-handed in their condemnation of 'the use of excessive force by Serbian police forces against civilians and peaceful demonstrators in Kosovo,' and 'all acts of terrorism by the Kosovo Liberation Army.'"

The "Racak massacre," widely viewed as the event that precipitated NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, is the subject of considerable controversy. According to the Serb version, all 45 of the dead ethnic Albanians "were either KLA fighters or civilians caught in the crossfire. There was no massacre of civilians, but the KLA had plenty of time to dress their dead fighters in civilian clothes." A team of Finnish forensic investigators sent by the European Union to perform autopsies on the Racak bodies "confirmed the Serb version in most respects, though the change-of-clothes hypothesis was discounted," writes Mandel. In his opinion, Racak was a pretext to begin the bombing.

On the day before the bombing began, Clinton declared, "If we're going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key. That's what this Kosovo thing is all about." Supreme NATO Commander Wesley Clark admitted one month into the bombing campaign that it "was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing."

I wrote in a 2002 article that the NATO bombing was about economic hegemony, access to Caspian Sea oil, and the promotion of a global free market economy, not ethnic cleansing. Milosevic's socialist government, which had tried to stop the market reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, was in America's sights early in the 1990s.

Mandel describes "the history of the West's complicity in the 'Balkan tragedy,' which," he writes, "is a story of the rich countries of Europe and America taking advantage of the sad state of the post-Soviet economies to impose solutions (sometimes known as 'Shock Therapy') through powerful credit institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Part of the goal was to encourage the fragmentation of the old Soviet bloc to create in its place 'hub and spoke' arrangements dependent on the West." This resulted in "the West's economic strangulation of Yugoslavia."

Against this backdrop, Milosevic was elected President in 1989. The Albanians employed a campaign of non-violent opposition to Serb rule, boycotting Serb institutions and setting up parallel ones. "The turn to violence came only in 1997, and appears to have had nothing to do with Serb repression," writes Mandel, but rather with the rise of the KLA.

In the year before NATO's bombing campaign, "violence dramatically increased in Kosovo, though the 2,000 dead on both sides combined were no more numerous than in many contemporary conflicts where the U.S. chose not to intervene," in Mandel's opinion. Rwanda is a prime example.

The key to the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia can be found in a 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on post-Cold War Strategy, prepared under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz. It advocated discouraging other advanced industrialized nations "from challenging our leadership" or "aspiring to a larger regional or global role." The document declares, "Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia] to preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

Bush's wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are consistent with this strategy, as are his appointments of Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq war and "preemptive war" doctrine, as head of the World Bank, and John Bolton, avowed U.N.-hater, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

After NATO conquered Yugoslavia, Halliburton's Brown and Root constructed Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, the largest foreign U.S. military base built since the Vietnam War. Besides the Great Wall of China, the only other earthly thing visible from outer space is Camp Bondsteel. Brown and Root is also building the 14 permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Mandel's indictment of the United States' policies in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda does not ignore the complicity of the other dark forces in those conflicts. He writes, "The fact that the Americans and their allies have been the supreme criminals in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq does not mean their enemies are innocent. The fact that the Americans and the Europeans were directly and indirectly complicit in the atrocities of Rwanda, and the fact that their Tutsi clients in the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] committed them too, does not mean that the Hutu government and militias did not."

The Nuremberg Tribunal found the greatest sin to be the waging of aggressive war, or war as an instrument of national policy. Mandel characterizes the U.S. wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq as wars of aggression. "Humanitarian intervention," he notes, (which violates the U.N. Charter anyway) "is forever doomed to be an 'asymmetrical right, the right of the powerful to intervene in the affairs of the weak and not vice versa.'" United States support for Croat soldiers in their 1995 ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina belies America's humanitarian motives four years later in Kosovo.

Michael Mandel's book is finally an indictment of international criminal law, of "victor's justice," in which only the vanquished are put on trial. "Exactly like the other elements of 'globalization,' the globalization ('universalization') of human rights is just a euphemism for the strong calling the shots."

Read on >>

Guarding the Guardians of Peace

In 1945, the United Nations Conference in San Francisco gave birth to the United Nations Organization. In the wake of two world wars that claimed 55 million lives, the U.N. Charter pledged to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war."

The Charter allows a member state to use armed force in only two instances: 1) in self-defense, or 2) when the Security Council determines force is necessary to meet "any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression."

President Harry Truman said, "No one nation, no regional group, can, or should expect, any special privilege which harms any other nation." Referring to World War II, Truman observed, "Out of this conflict have come powerful military nations, now fully trained and equipped for war. But," he proclaimed, "they have no right to dominate the world."

Although heralded as a product of consensus of the nations of the world, the Charter was conceived and drafted by the United States, and ultimately, reflected the agenda of the victorious military powers after World War II.

Most significantly, they insisted on the veto power for themselves, the five permanent members of the Security Council - Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, France and the United States, notwithstanding opposition from the smaller nations. Without that veto power, they would not likely have signed on to the U.N. Charter.

The veto power reserved for Security Council members has hobbled the U.N. for decades. At the behest of the veto-bearing United States, the U.N. sat on the sidelines during the genocide in Rwanda, when 800,000 people were slaughtered.

Also at the urging of the U.S., the Security Council put its imprimatur on the imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq, which were responsible for the deaths of one million Iraqis, mostly children, during the 1990s. The Council didn't condemn the "no-fly-zones" over Iraq, which it never sanctioned, and which were used by the U.S. and U.K. to bombard Iraq on nearly a daily basis in the years leading up to "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

The Security Council never condoned the recent U.S.-U.K. wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. But, because of pressure and the threatened veto by the United States, the Council never condemned them either. The attack on Yugoslavia was justified as "humanitarian intervention," in spite of "ethnic cleansing" by both sides in that conflict. And, the Bush administration rationalized the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as self-defense, even though neither country ever posed an imminent threat to the United States.

In 1995, in a moment of candor, then Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine Albright declared, "the U.N. is a tool of American foreign policy." Indeed, before its invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration frequently threatened the United Nations with becoming "irrelevant" if it did not give its blessing to the war.

But even in the face of threats, the Security Council refused to approve Bush's war on Iraq. Bush then cobbled together prior Council resolutions, none of which, individually or collectively, authorized the use of force in Iraq. Although he claimed to be enforcing Security Council resolutions, the Charter empowers only the Council to enforce its resolutions.

After the invasion, however, the Security Council capitulated to pressure from the United States, and authorized the U.S.-U.K. as the occupying authority in Iraq, giving the occupiers an international mandate to maintain troops in Iraq while a new government is established.

Recently, the United Nations has found its backbone and challenged U.S. policy. In September, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, somewhat belatedly, called the war on Iraq "illegal." And he sent Bush a letter counseling against the recent attack on Fallujah.

This prompted some Republican members of the House of Representatives to call for Annan's resignation. The ostensible reason: corruption in the administration of Iraq's Oil for Food Programme from 1996 to 2003. "It's payback time for the U.N.," a Bush administration official told the Los Angeles Times, on condition of anonymity. "The bills are coming due for the U.N.'s noncooperation on Iraq, and the oil-for-food scandal is red meat for the U.N.'s critics."

But the oil-for-food excuse was a red herring. The Oil for Food Programme was created by a vote of the Security Council. Through it, Iraq sold about $65 billion worth of oil to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi people, to soften the harsh impact of the sanctions imposed to keep Saddam Hussein from rearming after the 1991 Gulf War.

The programme was micromanaged by the Council, particularly the United States. The U.S. scrutinized every purchase, holding up contracts for months, or even years. However, when overland oil was illegally smuggled to Jordan and Turkey, two favored U.S. allies, the United States quietly closed its eyes, according to the report of Charles Duelfer, the top U.S. investigator in Iraq.

ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil have been subpoenaed by the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether they paid kickbacks or bribes to unlawfully profit from Iraq's oil under the programme.

Moreover, earlier this week, an audit board set up by the Security Council to monitor oil sales in Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation found widespread mismanagement, faulty metering of how much oil was being pumped, and noncompetitive bidding procedures that awarded more than $10 billion in contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root.

When Republicans began gunning for Annan's neck, former South African president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the campaign against Annan "reprehensible and unjust," saying it reflected American arrogance. They wrote, in an open letter: "Those who call for his resignation betray the objectivity his position as secretary general demands and regard the United Nations as a mouthpiece to extol and exonerate the policies of the United States of America, right or wrong."

The same day, the Bush administration, mindful that it needs Kofi Annan's cooperation to pull off the Iraqi elections slated for the end of January, called off its dogs. "We are expressing confidence in the secretary general and in his continuing in office," said U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Danforth.

One week earlier, a blue ribbon panel of international experts Annan appointed a year ago to study the structure of the U.N. in the wake of the war on Iraq, issued a 99-page report. The panel determined there is no reason to amend the U.N. Charter's self-defense provision. Any arguments for the use of force must be addressed to the Security Council, as required by the Charter, the report says. In a rebuff to Bush's doctrine of preemptive war, the panel wrote: "For those impatient with such a response, the answer must be that, in a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all."

The report also notably identified poverty, despair, humiliation, political oppression, foreign occupation, extremism, and human rights abuse as the breeding ground for terrorism. It advocated nuclear disarmament by all countries, not simply the developing nations. And the report argued that all U.N. member states should ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Nevertheless, last week, Bush signed into law the Nethercutt Amendment, which mandates withholding aid from countries that refuse to grant immunity for U.S. citizens before the International Criminal Court. "As revelations of abuses continue," said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice program of Human Rights Watch, "U.S. insistence on immunity strikes a particularly raw nerve." Dicker maintained, "The United States is bullying smaller, weaker countries because of an ideological obsession with an illusory threat. It's putting its ill-conceived campaign ahead of other interests the U.S. government claims are its highest priorities."

George W. Bush has consistently challenged the legitimacy of the United Nations, manipulating the Security Council when it suits his purpose, attacking it when it doesn't. It remains to be seen how well the only organization charged with the maintenance of international peace and security, and the protection of human rights, will fare during Bush's second term.

Read on >>

Why Iraq and Afghanistan? Cheney Tells All: It's About the Oil

Now that the rationale provided by Bush & Co. for attacking Iraq is unraveling, it's time to ask what the true motivation was for the rush to war. Many dismissed the signs of antiwar protestors, which read "No blood for oil." But if we connect the oily fingerprints, beginning with Vice President Dick Cheney's, it appears those protestors were right.

Cheney's energy task force, in a May 2001 report, called on the White House to make "energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy" and encourage Persian Gulf countries to welcome foreign investment in their energy sectors. In August 2002, Cheney warned a meeting of veterans that Saddam Hussein could seek to dominate the Middle East's vast energy supplies, and said "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Before the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sought to decouple oil access from regime change in Iraq, which, he said, had "nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil." Rumsfeld, Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice all invoked Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his ties to Al Qaeda, neither of which has materialized to date, as imminent threats to the security of the United States. Three days before the attack on Iraq, Cheney said, "we believe he [Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." That claim, and Bush's Niger uranium statement in his State of the Union address, were bogus.

When U.S.-U.K. forces took control of Iraq, their first order of business was to secure the oil fields, instead of the hospitals and antiquities museums. Meanwhile, Kellogg Brown & Root was awarded a controversial $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq's oil fields. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company, formerly headed by Cheney before he was tapped for vice president. In a 1998 speech to the "Collateral Damage Conference" of the Cato Institute, Cheney said, "the good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

The business is in Iraq. Since April 2001, the public interest group Judicial Watch has sought public access to the proceedings of Cheney's energy task force meetings, under the Freedom of Information Act. Yet Cheney has fought tenaciously to keep them secret. On July 17, however, Judicial Watch secured some of the documents from the task force, which contain the smoking gun: "a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects" and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." The documents are dated March 2001, two years before Bush invaded Iraq.

The Bush administration's October 2001 bombing of Afghanistan, although justified as a response to the September 11 attacks, was also part of U.S. oil strategy. Afghanistan never attacked the U.S. Yet, the U.S. and U.K. ousted the Taliban and secured Afghanistan for the construction of an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan, south through Afghanistan, to the Arabian Sea. Bush had been uncritical of the Taliban's human rights record when Unocal oil company was negotiating for the pipeline rights before September 11. After assuming control of Afghanistan, Bush conveniently installed Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal official, as interim president of Afghanistan. "Operation Enduring Freedom" will allow oil corporations freedom to exploit Afghanistan for profit, while the Afghans continue to live in squalor.

Likewise, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has enabled U.S. corporations to exploit Iraq's oil, while thousands of Iraqis continue to die, lose their jobs, and live without electricity. American soldiers are still dying while U.S. taxpayers foot the $3.9 billion monthly bill. Oil has proven to be the most terrible weapon of mass destruction.

Read on >>

The War Profiteers: Tax Corporations on Excess War Profits

Basking in his high ratings from the Iraq war, George W. Bush turned his attention on April 15 to selling his tax-cut plan. Bush's proposal to cut taxes by $550 billion over the next decade has been roundly criticized as corporate welfare at its best.

Bush's timing could scarcely be labeled serendipitous. His tax-cut campaign coincides with USAID and Army Corps of Engineers awards of massive reconstruction contracts to corporations that have filled Republican Party coffers with hefty campaign donations. The most egregious aspect of these contracts is that they will result in windfall profits for the corporations that have landed them.

The list of companies that will profit handsomely from the contracts reads like a Who's Who of Republican loyalists. Topping the list is Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., headed by Dick Cheney before he was tapped for vice president, which was initially awarded the most lucrative Iraq reconstruction contract. The pact for emergency oil-field services may be worth $7 billion over the next two years. It could earn as much as 7 percent profit, or $490 million.

Strikingly, this contract was bestowed upon Kellogg Brown & Root without sending it out for bids, to the consternation of many in Congress. After the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, launched a wide-ranging inquiry into the award, the Army Corps of Engineers announced it would send the Halliburton contract out for competitive bids. It remains to be seen whether the Corps' about-face is simply a perfunctory move to forestall criticism, in which Halliburton will walk away with the contract in the end. Months before the Iraq war, Kellogg Brown & Root had been granted a separate Army logistics contract, which has the unprecedented distinction of carrying no price tag.

Another fat Iraq reconstruction contract for $680 million was awarded to Bechtel Group, which donated most of its $1.3 million worth of political campaign contributions since 1999 to the Republican Party. Bechtel has close ties to the Bush administration.

Donald Rumsfeld once served as a liaison between Bechtel and the Iraqi government to finesse the building of an oil pipeline. And former Secretary of State George Shultz, a member of the board of directors of Bechtel, is also chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a strongly pro-war organization with influence in the White House.

An accused human rights violator, DynCorp, a firm which provides security services and which has donated nearly $70,000 to the Republican Party, won a multi-million dollar contract to police post-war Iraq. DynCorp has been accused of engaging in the prostitution business in Bosnia, and it is being sued in a class action by a group of Ecuadorean peasants for spraying herbicides in Colombia that drifted across the border, killing children and crops.

Many in Congress are miffed because the bidding process for these reconstruction contracts has taken place in secret. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Hillary Rodham Clinton (.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have cosponsored the Sunshine in the Iraq Reconstruction Contracting Act of 2003, to bring transparency to the awarding of these contracts.

Tony Blair must also be seething. Notwithstanding Blair's unwavering loyalty to Bush, Iraq reconstruction contracts will go exclusively to U.S. firms. Foreign corporations can only subcontract for these lucrative jobs.

Moreover, after the Bush administration succeeds in privatizing Iraq's oil, U.S. corporations will likely be first in line to do business. The hundreds of protestors chanting "No blood for oil" at ChevronTexaco's world headquarters in San Ramon the day before Bush launched his tax-cut campaign understood this well.

Defense contractors are also profiting handily from the war. SY Coleman, a key company connected to the U.S. Patriot missile system, is headed by Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the new "sheriff of Baghdad." And Northrop Grumman, which won $8.5 billion in contracts last year, has ties with the neoconservatives who provided the blueprint for Bush's doctrine of preemptive war, beginning with Iraq.

It is wrong for huge corporations to profit from war. During the Civil War, there was a public outcry in Georgia against profiteering from that national tragedy. Georgia's General Assembly responded by enacting a special profits tax.

Congress itself enacted "excess-profits taxes" during World Wars I and II and the Korean War, to prevent firms from making windfall profits from these conflicts. Democratic Rep. Clement C. Dickinson of Missouri eloquently stated the rationale for an excess-profits tax on the floor of Congress in 1917. He said that "those who reap large war profits in times of distress should help to bear the burdens of government, increased by reason of the very conditions that add to the wealth of those who flourish and fatten on the misfortunes of the country."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first radio address following the outbreak of World War II, declared that "no American has the moral right to profiteer at the expense either of his fellow-citizens or of the men, women and children who are living and dying in the midst of war in Europe." The U.S. had not yet entered the war at that point.

In a message to Congress in 1940, Roosevelt sought "a steeply graduated excess-profits tax" to ensure "that a few do not gain from the sacrifices of the many." The members of the U.S. armed forces who have served in the war on Iraq are not making excess wages for their sacrifices. Many will suffer for the rest of their lives with injuries and, likely, with Gulf War II Syndrome.

On Feb. 13, 2003, former Sen. George McGovern suggested on MSNBC's "Buchanan & Press" that Congress impose an excess-profits tax. "I don't think people ought to be making money out of young American blood in Iraq," McGovern said.

Excess-profits taxes are generally calculated in one of two ways. Any return on capital over a fixed percent may be considered excess profits. Or they might be defined as net income in excess of prewar levels.

In his farewell speech to America in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

George W. Bush has cited the lofty ideal of bringing freedom to the Iraqi people as justification for this war. He should not then oppose the imposition of an excess-profits tax on corporations that have secured contracts to rebuild Iraq.

Read on >>

Pacification for a Pipeline: Explaining the U.S. Military Presence in the Balkans

Despite President George W. Bush’s rhetoric about withdrawing our forces from the Balkans, we can expect a strong continuing U.S. presence there. Why? It’s all about the transportation of massive oil resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.

Although NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will transport Caspian oil through Macedonia and Albania. The pipeline is slated to carry 750,000 barrels a day, worth about $600 million a month at current prices.

Cooperation of the Albanians with the pipeline project was likely contingent on the U.S. helping them wrest control of Kosovo from the Serbs. The U.S. seeks to contain Macedonia as well, supporting both sides in the conflagration there. Military Professional Resources International, a mercenary company on contract to the Pentagon, has trained both the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Macedonian army. MPRI also supplied and trained the Croatian army in 1994 and 1995 before the Croatians cleansed more than 100,000 Serbs from the Krajina region.

The bombing was not aimed at ethnic cleansing. It was part of U.S.-run NATO’s eastward expansion as a counterweight to Russia, which wants the Caspian oil pipeline to run through its territory. NATO, created during the Cold War to protect Western Europe from the Soviets, should have disbanded after the breakup of the USSR.

But a 1992 draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance advocated continued U.S. leadership in NATO by “discouraging the advanced industrialized nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role.” Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said, if we decide to expand NATO, “we should not fear that Russia will object; we will do it because it is in our interest.”

Bush is walking a delicate tightrope. He calls for Europe to do the grunt work in the Balkans, but also wants to prevent the European Union from becoming more powerful than U.S.-led NATO. A U.S. Army officer stationed in Bosnia, speaking anonymously to the Los Angeles Times, observed wryly, “The only thing the Europeans need us Americans for is the leadership.”

The U.S. has invested too much in the region to pull out. After the NATO bombing campaign, the U.S. spent $36.6 million to build Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo. The largest American foreign military base constructed since Vietnam, Bondsteel was built by the Brown & Root Division of Halliburton, the world’s biggest oil services corporation, which was run by Richard Cheney before he was tapped for Vice-President.

NATO’s bombs, never sanctioned by the United Nations, were not “humanitarian intervention.” The alleged mass graves were never found by the FBI, and the 10,000-11,000 bodies NATO touted turned out to number about 2000-3000, mostly in KLA strongholds. Even the Marine Corps Gazette concluded after the bombing that the “resulting deaths of thousands of Serbian soldiers, civilians, and Kosovar Albanians and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more can hardly be viewed as a victory for humanitarianism.”

It is the purview of the United Nations, not the United States, to authorize humanitarian intervention. If the U.S. really wanted to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Yugoslavia, it would encourage the International Monetary Fund to forgive $14 billion in loans from prior regimes, finance reparations to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by its bombs, and remove the U.S. troops from the region.

Read on >>

Cheney's “Black Gold”: Corporate Oil Interests to Drive U.S. Foreign Policy in Bush-Cheney Administration

What do the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and the Balkans have in common? U.S. domination in these areas serves the interests of corporate multi-millionaires such as Dick Cheney. As George Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Cheney was chief prosecutor of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Humanitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, the bombing of Iraq – which continues to this day – was primarily aimed at keeping the Persian Gulf safe for U.S. oil interests. Shortly after Desert Storm, the Associated Press reported Cheney’s desire to broaden the United States’ military role in the region to hedge future threats to gulf oil resources.

Cheney is C.E.O. of Halliburton, the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen have zeroed in on the world’s other major source of oil – the Caspian Sea. Its rich oil and gas resources are estimated at four trillion dollars by U.S. News and World Report. The Washington-based American Petroleum Institute, voice of the major U.S. oil companies, called the Caspian region, “the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East.” Cheney told a gaggle of oil industry executives in 1998, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”

But Caspian oil presents formidable obstacles. Landlocked between Russia, Iran and a group of former Soviet republics, the Caspian’s “black gold” raises a transportation dilemma. Russia wants Caspian oil to run through its territory to the Black Sea. The United States, however, favors pipelines through its ally, Turkey.

Although the cheapest route would traverse Iran to the Persian Gulf, U.S. sanctions against Iran belie this alternative. Cheney has lobbied long and hard, as recently as June, for the lifting of those sanctions, to lubricate the Iran-Caspian connection. This is consistent with his position, described in a 1997 article in The Oil and Gas Journal, that oil and gas companies must do business in countries with policies unpalatable to the U.S.

Cheney also favors the repeal of section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, which severely restricts U.S. aid to Azerbaijan because of its ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, a mountainous enclave in Azerbaijan. Why would Cheney choose to ignore Azerbaijan’s human rights violations? Because Azerbaijan, key to the richest Caspian oil deposits, is, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “in fact, the focal point of the next round in the Great Game of Nations, a dangerous, hot-headed place with a Klondike of wealth beneath it. It is Bosnia with oil.”

Cheney’s oily fingerprints are all over the Balkans as well. Last year, Halliburton’s Brown & Root Division was awarded a $180 million-a-year contract to supply U.S. forces in the Balkans. Cheney also sits on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. Replacing munitions used in the Balkans could result in $1 billion in new contracts. War is big business and Dick Cheney is right in the middle of it.

Meanwhile, energy and gasoline prices continue to soar in many parts of the United States. OPEC controls the oil production in the Persian Gulf. Cheney, worried about a fall-off in investment, spoke in favor of OPEC cutting oil production so oil and gasoline prices could rise.

Cheney is ineluctably invested in keeping the world safe for his investments. Although he is stepping down as C.E.O. of Halliburton to run for vice-president, his financial interests in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian region and the Balkans will invariably continue. Chosen by George W. Bush to bring foreign policy expertise to the ticket, we can expect a Republic administration to increase U.S. intervention in regions when it suits Dick Cheney’s oil and other corporate concerns.

Read on >>