This long email is a shocker, and so well worth reading to the end.
MCM [Mark Crispin Miller]
From http://blackboxvoting.org/:
Wisconsin is set to ratify a '5-year plan' which will advocate looking into forced mail-in voting, Etch-a-Sketch-style electronic voter registration tablets which eliminate the physical signature, and Internet voting. The combination of mail-in voting and physical signature removal pulls the wheels right off of mail-in voting checks and balances -- and safeguards for mail-in voting are already inadequate.
By the way, the primary architect of current mail-in vote authentication software is Jeffrey Dean, perhaps the most colorful character ever to hit the election scene; at one point he worked for the man who headed the White House Plumbers unit from the Watergate scandal. Jeff Dean has been to prison twice in the last 15 years, once on multiple counts of computer fraud used for embezzlement.
Wisconsin's new 5-year plan echoes new proposals and changes in many states (New York-failed this time, will be brought up again; Florida, part-way there; Indiana, part-way there, California, most of the way there, Arizona, most of the way there, Colorado, most of the way there...).
Wisconsin's plan, touted by Kevin Kennedy, director of the Government Accountability Board, would cost $17 million to make all the changes. Claims that mail-in voting increases participation, or is less expensive, are now being questioned by many researchers. Some data indicates that mail-in voting actually produces LOWER participation, and the high costs associated with authentication software hint that it may actually be more expensive than polling place voting.
The runaway vote-by-mail train requires that I bring this up, whether it's politically correct or not:
If you're concerned about bogus voters being entered onto the voter registration rolls by groups like ACORN, take a deep breath. With mail-in voting, an even bigger concern is dumping REAL voters who are UNLIKELY TO VOTE onto the rolls.
Black Box Voting research into the software used to authenticate votes indicates that people unlikely to vote can be targeted to have an insider vote for them. Traditionally non-mainstream populations like prisoners, the homeless, and low income may participate in elections at lower than average rates -- there is not enough data yet to know. We really don't have any adequate authentication mechanisms to determine whether the mail-in ballots submitted are real, from real voters, or counterfeit, cast en masse by insiders for specific target groups deemed less likely to vote. If insiders counterfeit votes for real people who didn't vote, it will be almost impossible to detect.
VOTE-BY-MAIL SOFTWARE APPEARS TO BE SET UP FOR JUST SUCH A SCENARIO
Black Box Voting has obtained this court testimony, by programmer Brian Clubb, pertaining to a software programming revision ordered by Jeffrey Dean:
"...if this voter showed up in the subsequent upload, then I need to find where he appeared in the first upload, tell them what envelope number, what ballot number he was assigned so they can pull it back out. "
One implication of the above programming change: It allows an insider cast votes for a selection of voters deemed unlikely to vote. If a voter actually does vote, it enables you to pull the bogus vote back out of the system. (see pp. 1-20 for more background on above quote; full transcript: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/1-10-06-04kim-v-dean.pdf - 1,007 KB)
By eliminating physical signatures, maximizing mail-in votes, and pushing real people who are less likely to vote onto the rolls, you set the stage for wholesale inside "VoteR" fraud which will be very difficult to detect.
INTERNET AND MAIL-IN VOTING = CONCEALING KEY COMPONENTS OF THE ELECTION
Internet and mail-in voting conceal the counting of the vote, conceal who showed up to vote (and Internet voting eliminates the physical record for who voted). Both systems open the gate for removal of political privacy. Internet voting removes the hard copy evidence of the vote, just as the new Internet voter registration systems remove physical evidence of the signature. Both Internet and mail-in voting remove neighborhood polling places, a key battleground for restoring public right to know and public controls over elections. Once removed, it's difficult to restore them.
While well intended, many local officials are buying into a sales plan cooked up by think tanks and vendors. The evidence does not support the sales pitch that these tactics increase voter turnout or that it saves money. Here is the progression we are seeing nationwide:
THE THINK TANK PLAN
1. Implement "no-excuse" absentee voting
2. Authorize Internet voter registration and "voter registration modernization" (have voters sign Etch-a-Sketch style electronic tablets instead of physical signatures on registration cards).
3. Authorize opt-in "permanent absentee voting" (further increases percentage of mailed-in votes)
4. Send press releases about the high percentage of mail-in voting, citing this as justification for moving to all-mail-in voting (forced mail-in).
5. Convert to forced mail-in voting for small elections; then convert state to mail-in voting.
6. Experiment with Internet voting.
Note that each step involves removal of physical evidence and concealment of more election processes from the public. These steps are being pushed all over the United States in cookie-cutter legislation. Local officials believe they are implementing just one step, but a review of national actions shows that once one step is achieved the next one is proposed. The steps are almost identical from state to state.
Signature matching is one of the key "checks and balances" cited to tell us mail-in voting is secure. Really? A dog's paw-print made it through signature checks in Washington State for two elections in a row. Yes, a dog named Duncan was registered to vote, using his pawprint for a signature. Most people do not realize that the physical signatures are not examined -- only the scanned computer image.
Using computers, one scanned signature can be stretched and colors changed. Scanned images can be imported and exported from the incoming absentee envelopes into the database containing scans of the voter registration signatures. Note that with Internet voter registration and electronic tablet registration, there is no physical copy of the signature on the voter card.
WHO IS JEFFREY DEAN?
Well, you just can't make this stuff up. He developed VoteRemote, one of the most widely used signature authentication software programs. Jeffrey Dean's prison documents are posted on the Black Box Voting Web site - Here's the link: http://www.bbvdocs.org/dean/dean-criminal-docs.pdf
Jeff Dean was sentenced to four years in prison on 23 counts of embezzlement, achieved by modifying a computer accounting program. He returned to prison in 2004 for contempt of court, and has been back in court since on civil litigation. Black Box Voting has examined over 900 pages of testimony from his various courtroom adventures, and we have learned that he personally ordered several modifications in the mail-in voting software which disable some of the checks and balances. His court transcripts are posted on our Web site.
You really can't make this up: Before his prison stint, Jeffrey Dean worked for the law firm where Egil "Bud" Krogh was a partner. Egil Krogh went to jail after being in charge of Nixon's White House "Plumber's" unit, the source of the Watergate scandal which led to the downfall of Nixon's presidency.
While still in prison, on work release, Jeffrey Dean was given a contract working for King County, Washington (together with his brother, Neil Dean), to develop mail-in voting software. Public records obtained by Black Box Voting show that Jeffrey Dean was given a key to, and 24-hour access to, the King County voter registration database, mail-in ballot program, ballot printing system and vote tabulation software. Jeff Dean sold his "Vote Remote" mail-in software to Diebold Election Systems (Now called Premier); his brother Neil Dean sold his company to Pitney Bowes. The other large mail-in software system is now made by Pitney Bowes.
Mail-in voting software is unregulated and uncertified, and under control of the handful of insiders who run the databases. Black Box Voting is one of the only voting rights groups investigating this.
CASTING MULTIPLE VOTES WITH INTERNET VOTING
If you like the idea of a neighbor rounding up access codes of the disinterested to multi-vote himself, you'll love Internet voting. The Internet voting mechanism used in Hawaii -- voting at home with a four-digit pin code mailed to voters -- was an open invitation to vote selling, coercion, and contamination by insiders. Some people voted more than once.
TERRIBLE PARTICIPATION
Only 6.3 percent of Hawaii's eligible voters cast votes on the new Internet system (as compared with 28 percent in a previous similar election), a record low. Vendor's response: "Our systems aren't really about turnout. They're more about accessibility to participation." Huh? The election commission leaped off the democracy boat altogether with this: "The technology side, it works."
Your self-cleaning oven probably works too, but it's not a democracy. For democratic elections to work, you need public controls, you can't have concealment of key processes, and you need participation.
Important steps -- I know, it's swimming against the current if you are a Democrat. But mail-in voting is just as concealed and undemocratic as paperless touch-screen voting.
Block mail-in and Internet voting efforts: Internet and mail-in voting systems violate your inalienable rights because they transfer control to insiders and conceal essential election processes. Help to kill these proposals.
This message was sent by: Black Box Voting, Inc., 330 SW 43rd St Suite K - PMB 547, Renton, WA 98057
* * * *
Black Box Voting is one of the ONLY voting rights organizations doing tough-minded research into the new vote-by-mail craze. If you believe our work is important, please consider support with a donation: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K - PMB 547
Renton WA 98057
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Monday, August 10, 2009
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Democracy Now: Jeremy Keenan: West's Manufactured Terror extends to Africa
August 06, 2009
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/6/keenan
British Anthropologist Jeremy Keenan on “The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa”
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues her seven-nation tour of Africa, we hear from British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan. He traces AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa, to a 2003 kidnapping of European tourists. The hostage taking was widely blamed on Islamic militants thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, but Keenan argues that the Bush administration and the Algerian government were the ones responsible. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Jeremy Keenan, Professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His latest book is The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa. Its sequel, The Dying Sahara, will be released next year.
AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emphasized that her seven-country tour of Africa is intended to promote democracy, fight corruption, and boost US investments in African trade and agriculture.
We turn now to another issue that’s widely expected to be discussed on every stop: AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa, which has been publicly opposed by every country on the continent except Liberia.
Now Secretary Clinton will not be visiting the countries in and around the oil- and gas-rich Sahara desert—Mali, Niger, Chad, Algeria and Mauritania. But a new book by British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan argues this area is crucial to understanding the birth of AFRICOM and the Bush administration’s expansion of the global war on terror into Africa.
Keenan is a professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has spent over four decades working in and writing about this region. He traces AFRICOM and the US military concern over al-Qaeda’s presence in Africa back to the February 2003 kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists in Algeria’s Sahara desert. The hostage taking was widely blamed on Islamic militants thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, but Professor Keenan argues that the Bush administration and the Algerian government were the ones to blame.
His latest book is called The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa. Its sequel is called The Dying Sahara, will be released next year.
Anjali Kamat and I spoke with Professor Keenan last week and asked him to lay out the story.
JEREMY KEENAN: Really, the story begins in 2002. That, you will remember, is after the Americans had thought they had successfully defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. So we move from Afghanistan at the end of 2001 with the America now sort of launching its global war on terror. And there was a feeling—there was very little evidence for this, but at least the American military felt, and they were saying, that the terrorists that they thought they had dislodged from Afghanistan had moved across through that part of Asia, across the Horn of Africa, into the Sudan and across into the Sahara, and from there, they were going to attack Europe. There was absolutely no evidence for that, and that, of course, is really a figment of imagination. And that was in sort of 2002.
And what America was trying to do or the Bush administration was trying to do was to justify the militarization of Africa. In other words, the early seeds, the growth of AFRICOM. It wanted a reason, an excuse, to, if you like, secure Africa, primarily for its oil resources, the gradually increasing threat of China on the continent. But it hadn’t got a reason, or it hadn’t got an excuse or a justification to do so. And the war on terror provided just such a reason. It provided the justification for the Bush administration, if you like, to get a grip on Africa and to launch the war on terror in Africa.
The problem was, there was very little terror in Africa. In fact, if we exclude the incidents in Mombasa in the hotels in 1998, a few incidents in Egypt, in North Africa and the Algerian coast, all of which are rather marginal to the main oil areas of Africa, which are around Nigeria and West Africa, there was effectively no terrorism on the continent.
And so, what happened was they fabricated it. And what they did was to kidnap, hijack and take hostage seven different groups of tourists, Europeans, traveling in the Central Sahara in Algeria, the Central Algerian Sahara. And over a period of about three to four weeks, seven different groups literally just disappeared into thin air. There were all sorts of stories of sort of Bermuda Triangles in the Sahara and so forth. Gradually, the idea or the news came out that these had been taken by Islamist or Islamic terrorists. But there was no certainty. It was being manipulated by Algeria, the Algerian secret services, working with the Americans.
And the name of the leader gradually sort of percolated out, only after about three or four months, as a man called El Para. That was his pseudonym or his war name. He had twelve—he has at least twelve aliases that I know of. There’s even a rumor that he was trained as a Green Beret in America in the 1990s. Certainly, he was working for the Algerian DRS. That’s the Algerian security services, secret military intelligence services. He was in charge of a group of so-called terrorists who kidnapped, took hostage these thirty-two European hostages. That was the beginning of the story.
That incident itself ran on for six months. The tourists were held in two different hideouts in the Algerian Sahara, literally hundreds of miles—thousands of miles from anywhere. One group was released under a rather theatrically established attack, a sort of false attack, by the military after three months. Then the second group were taken all the way south into Mali. That’s two, two-and-a-half thousand miles, sort of—or kilometers south of the Mediterranean coast, right into bottom half of the Sahara. And eventually, they were released, after six months in captivity.
Now, by this time, America was talking, or the Bush administration was talking about the Sahara being a swamp of terror. “We’ve got to drain it.” El Para was being described as Osama bin Laden’s man in the Sahara. And so on and so forth. And there were lots of little incidents along the way, so to speak. El Para, himself, over the next six months was allegedly chased by combined forces of American Special Forces along with the Mali army, Algerian army, the Nigerian army, into Chad, a story which all the evidence suggests never even ever took place. This lasted for almost two years, a year and a half. And it provided the Bush administration with, if you like, the information or the disinformation to launch a new front in the war on terror, what they call the Saharan front or a second front. And I should say the word “second front” was used by the Americans for almost every new phase in the war on terror, every part of the world where they launched a new front was usually called a “second front.” So there were lots of second fronts—in Latin America, in the Far East, in Southeast Asia, and, of course, in the Sahara. And that was really the story.
What is extraordinary is that, by a thousand-to-one chance, million-to-one chance, I was sort of there in the region for two or three years, more or less continuously, before this incident took place. I was there for much of the time while it happened and afterwards. And I’ve been working there for a long time, so I knew—I had a network of very close friends all through this region, local people. I mean, I talk about this region, we’re talking about a very large sort of chunk of the Sahara, much of the Central Sahara and what we call the Sahel. That’s the southern shore. So, all this region, I had a sort of network of close friends, people I’d been working with, local people, mostly Tuareg, Tuareg tribesmen, who were able to provide me with details of what didn’t happen in the area. You know, we’re talking about events which were being fabricated.
But it provided the basis for launching this new front in the war on terror, and that has become, if you like, the base for more or less everything that has happened in Africa since then. When I say everything that’s happened, in terms of the development of AFRICOM and much of the ideology, if you like, that propaganda, if you want to call it that, that the Americans have used to justify much of the military action that they have taken in the rest of the continent. And when they talk about the threat of terrorism in Africa, various countries to the south, the justification for this, the argument is, “Look what happened in the Sahara. This is where al-Qaeda was, and now is. And these vast, ungoverned spaces, these are the dangerous areas, the failed states, the areas which aren’t being governed. This is where terrorists are lurking, where they’re hanging out. They’re threatening Europe. They’re threatening the rest of Africa.” So, this story, which was fabricated over this period of time, 2003 and 2004, has become, if you like, the base, the fact, the truth behind what is really an enormous lie.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Keenan, who ordered the kidnapping?
JEREMY KEENAN: The leader was a man called El Para. We know that he is—there is overwhelming evidence that he is an agent for the DRS. So the question is who—the DRS is the Algerian—
AMY GOODMAN: The DRS being…?
JEREMY KEENAN: That’s the Department of Renseignement et Sécurité, the Department of Information and Security, so the secret military intelligence services in Algeria. The head of that, or the operational head, was a man called General Smain Lamari. His boss, the overall command, is General Mohamed Mediène. Mediène is still alive. He still holds that job. Smain Lamari, who almost certainly managing the operation, died in August two years ago. So he was managing it, and it is almost certain that he would have been ordering it and controlling it from Algiers itself.
ANJALI KAMAT: You talk about how Algeria colluded with the United States, but what’s in it for Algeria?
JEREMY KEENAN: With 9/11, Algeria saw an opportunity, and the President, Bouteflika, President Bouteflika—I think I’m right in saying—was the first foreign president to visit George Bush in the States. And I think I’m correct in saying he probably undertook more visits than almost any other at that time. Anyhow, the development of a very close relationship between Algeria and America.
I should say, at that time, it was Algeria being a bit pushy. And what they wanted, in essence, was a deal with America, the deal being that Algeria was saying, “Look, you’ve had this horrific atrocity happen in America, 3,000 people killed, but we know this. We understand this. We’ve been the front line against terrorism for the last ten years. We’ve had 200,000 people killed. You know, we are in the same boat together.” So, Algeria wanting to, if you like, get into bed with America. What America—what Algeria wanted, of course, was high-tech equipment for its army, surveillance equipment, communications equipment. Ideally, they wanted attack helicopters and night-vision equipment and so forth.
America, for its turn, was saying, “Look, it’s all very well, you know, you saying these things about us, but, you know, you’re on top of the terrorist situation. You know, really, you don’t need this sort of equipment. You know, the country is the best it’s been now for well over—you know, for ten years. There’s very little terrorism left. There are a few incidents up in the east in the mountains, but, by and large, you know, you’re in control of the situation.” So this was the American excuse, if you like, for not delivering, you know, what Algeria was wanting. That was in September.
Literally a month later, there was the first kidnap attempt on European hostages in the Sahara. And what Algeria was saying, to itself, was, “Look, you know, we’ve got to show to the Americans that we’re not on top of terrorism. We’ve got to show that it exists and it’s a problem.” And also, at that same time, the Algerians knew that the Americans were sort of imagining, if you like, this movement of Taliban terrorists from Afghanistan through the southern Sahara, weaving across and getting up into Europe in that way, which is a crazy idea. So the Algerians were saying, “Well, if we can sort of get some terrorism in that area, we can hopefully win the argument that we’re not on top of it, and also we can sort of give the Americans some concrete evidence to bolster their own theory,” which was based on no intelligence at all.
ANJALI KAMAT: Let me fast-forward to the present. In your book, you talk about the role of General Jim Jones, who is now national security adviser to President Obama. Can you talk about current US policy in Africa and what the current status of AFRICOM is, now that you’ve set up for us the story of what created the rationale for AFRICOM?
JEREMY KEENAN: Yes, certainly. General Jim Jones plays an interesting role in this. He was, if you like, at the beginning of the story, and he’s at the end of it, or if you talk about the present, now, as of course Obama’s head of national security, national security adviser. At the beginning of this story, in 2002, 2003, he was head of EUCOM, so the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and head of EUCOM, and EUCOM, that’s European Command, of course covered Africa. Africa was minute; it took up very little attention from EUCOM. But that has changed. And so, in a sense, the growth of AFRICOM out of EUCOM, European Command, sort of covers this period. So it began with General Jones, when he was in charge, and the story that I’ve just told you, that was under his—on his watch, so to speak. And, of course, now he is Obama’s national security adviser.
So what is happening with American policy in Africa now? There was a huge amount of optimism, of course, with Obama coming to power. I think now, a few months further on, we are a little bit more cautious and uncertain of what is actually happening, particularly on the AFRICOM front. At the sort of time of Obama’s election, I think there was a feeling amongst or within AFRICOM that it might well get the chop. There was certainly political pressure, and still is, in Washington not to use a military presence in this way. But what we’ve seen in the last few months suggests, and it’s still early days for Obama, that in fact he is following rather in the lines—in the footsteps of his predecessor in promoting and pushing AFRICOM.
And this, I think, is very serious for Africa, and it is not going to do American foreign policy any good at all, because what we’re seeing at the moment, in the last few months there’s been almost a replay of the story I’ve just told you and the same individuals concerned. That is, the people who took the hostages in 2003, the same people, have been taking hostages again now—a very complicated story; I won’t go into the details of it—but since last December, that’s December 2008, and up until last month. So more hostage takings again by the same people who kidnapped them in 2003. So we know that there is some involvement of the Algerian security forces, and the question is, is America involved again?
Now, in what I have written on this in the last few weeks and so forth, I have been very careful to say that I have no evidence, direct evidence, of America being involved in the way that it was in 2003 and during the Bush period. However, I do not know if the odd phone call took place. Just because I don’t have evidence doesn’t mean to say there is no involvement.
What is worrying is that the AFRICOM and America now, the American government, is now talking, again, in the same language as in 2003, ’04: “Yes, we’ve got al-Qaeda all over the Sahara. This is a security threat, and need AFRICOM,” etc. So, this is very worrying. Again, as I emphasize, it’s the early days in the Obama administration. I don’t think he’s being particularly well advised on this, the what’s going on in Africa in this particular context. But it does—it sounds very, very familiar: the same place, exactly the same people, the people who assassinated the hostage who was killed on the 31st of May, a man called Edwin Dyer, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a tourist. He happened to be British, living in Austria. The person who assassinated him and beheaded him was the same person who took—who was El Para’s number two, who took the hostages in 2003, the same people.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Keenan, I wanted to ask you about Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa, seven countries. She’ll be going to Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Liberia, Cape Verde. The significance of these countries and US policy in Africa?
JEREMY KEENAN: Well, I remain a little reserved. Trips and words are one thing; actions are another. And while, of course, one obviously welcomes this apparent change in policy between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, and, if you like, the attempts to reconstruct better relations between America and the rest of the world, as long as America is peddling the AFRICOM idea and, if you like, giving primacy to the military, because this is what is happening, AFRICOM is the front line, if you like, of American policy in Africa. As long as that line is being pushed, we’re not going to have really much change in Africa.
The present line of giving primacy to AFRICOM, given its history and given what it is doing, is not what Africa itself wants. And I think the question is quite self-evident: why is it that, so far, every single country in Africa has said, “We do not want AFRICOM?” What could be clearer than that? So no matter what Hillary is doing running around Africa, the message from Africa has been, even from rulers who are fairly despotic and certainly by no means very democratic. Authoritarian rulers who have done the bidding of the United States over these years are saying, “We do not want AFRICOM in our country,” as at least a base for it.
So, until America gets that message onboard, loud and clear, and it sees and understands the history of how AFRICOM has developed from this very, very murky past, which I document in this volume—then the second volume will be out in the beginning of the year, that covers the last two or three years of what is happening—American-African policy is—sure, it will improve, because it can’t get any worse, but it’s going to be very suspect. And it is not, in my view, the right path.
AMY GOODMAN: British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan. His latest book, The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/6/keenan
British Anthropologist Jeremy Keenan on “The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa”
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues her seven-nation tour of Africa, we hear from British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan. He traces AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa, to a 2003 kidnapping of European tourists. The hostage taking was widely blamed on Islamic militants thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, but Keenan argues that the Bush administration and the Algerian government were the ones responsible. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Jeremy Keenan, Professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His latest book is The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa. Its sequel, The Dying Sahara, will be released next year.
AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emphasized that her seven-country tour of Africa is intended to promote democracy, fight corruption, and boost US investments in African trade and agriculture.
We turn now to another issue that’s widely expected to be discussed on every stop: AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa, which has been publicly opposed by every country on the continent except Liberia.
Now Secretary Clinton will not be visiting the countries in and around the oil- and gas-rich Sahara desert—Mali, Niger, Chad, Algeria and Mauritania. But a new book by British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan argues this area is crucial to understanding the birth of AFRICOM and the Bush administration’s expansion of the global war on terror into Africa.
Keenan is a professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has spent over four decades working in and writing about this region. He traces AFRICOM and the US military concern over al-Qaeda’s presence in Africa back to the February 2003 kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists in Algeria’s Sahara desert. The hostage taking was widely blamed on Islamic militants thought to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, but Professor Keenan argues that the Bush administration and the Algerian government were the ones to blame.
His latest book is called The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa. Its sequel is called The Dying Sahara, will be released next year.
Anjali Kamat and I spoke with Professor Keenan last week and asked him to lay out the story.
JEREMY KEENAN: Really, the story begins in 2002. That, you will remember, is after the Americans had thought they had successfully defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. So we move from Afghanistan at the end of 2001 with the America now sort of launching its global war on terror. And there was a feeling—there was very little evidence for this, but at least the American military felt, and they were saying, that the terrorists that they thought they had dislodged from Afghanistan had moved across through that part of Asia, across the Horn of Africa, into the Sudan and across into the Sahara, and from there, they were going to attack Europe. There was absolutely no evidence for that, and that, of course, is really a figment of imagination. And that was in sort of 2002.
And what America was trying to do or the Bush administration was trying to do was to justify the militarization of Africa. In other words, the early seeds, the growth of AFRICOM. It wanted a reason, an excuse, to, if you like, secure Africa, primarily for its oil resources, the gradually increasing threat of China on the continent. But it hadn’t got a reason, or it hadn’t got an excuse or a justification to do so. And the war on terror provided just such a reason. It provided the justification for the Bush administration, if you like, to get a grip on Africa and to launch the war on terror in Africa.
The problem was, there was very little terror in Africa. In fact, if we exclude the incidents in Mombasa in the hotels in 1998, a few incidents in Egypt, in North Africa and the Algerian coast, all of which are rather marginal to the main oil areas of Africa, which are around Nigeria and West Africa, there was effectively no terrorism on the continent.
And so, what happened was they fabricated it. And what they did was to kidnap, hijack and take hostage seven different groups of tourists, Europeans, traveling in the Central Sahara in Algeria, the Central Algerian Sahara. And over a period of about three to four weeks, seven different groups literally just disappeared into thin air. There were all sorts of stories of sort of Bermuda Triangles in the Sahara and so forth. Gradually, the idea or the news came out that these had been taken by Islamist or Islamic terrorists. But there was no certainty. It was being manipulated by Algeria, the Algerian secret services, working with the Americans.
And the name of the leader gradually sort of percolated out, only after about three or four months, as a man called El Para. That was his pseudonym or his war name. He had twelve—he has at least twelve aliases that I know of. There’s even a rumor that he was trained as a Green Beret in America in the 1990s. Certainly, he was working for the Algerian DRS. That’s the Algerian security services, secret military intelligence services. He was in charge of a group of so-called terrorists who kidnapped, took hostage these thirty-two European hostages. That was the beginning of the story.
That incident itself ran on for six months. The tourists were held in two different hideouts in the Algerian Sahara, literally hundreds of miles—thousands of miles from anywhere. One group was released under a rather theatrically established attack, a sort of false attack, by the military after three months. Then the second group were taken all the way south into Mali. That’s two, two-and-a-half thousand miles, sort of—or kilometers south of the Mediterranean coast, right into bottom half of the Sahara. And eventually, they were released, after six months in captivity.
Now, by this time, America was talking, or the Bush administration was talking about the Sahara being a swamp of terror. “We’ve got to drain it.” El Para was being described as Osama bin Laden’s man in the Sahara. And so on and so forth. And there were lots of little incidents along the way, so to speak. El Para, himself, over the next six months was allegedly chased by combined forces of American Special Forces along with the Mali army, Algerian army, the Nigerian army, into Chad, a story which all the evidence suggests never even ever took place. This lasted for almost two years, a year and a half. And it provided the Bush administration with, if you like, the information or the disinformation to launch a new front in the war on terror, what they call the Saharan front or a second front. And I should say the word “second front” was used by the Americans for almost every new phase in the war on terror, every part of the world where they launched a new front was usually called a “second front.” So there were lots of second fronts—in Latin America, in the Far East, in Southeast Asia, and, of course, in the Sahara. And that was really the story.
What is extraordinary is that, by a thousand-to-one chance, million-to-one chance, I was sort of there in the region for two or three years, more or less continuously, before this incident took place. I was there for much of the time while it happened and afterwards. And I’ve been working there for a long time, so I knew—I had a network of very close friends all through this region, local people. I mean, I talk about this region, we’re talking about a very large sort of chunk of the Sahara, much of the Central Sahara and what we call the Sahel. That’s the southern shore. So, all this region, I had a sort of network of close friends, people I’d been working with, local people, mostly Tuareg, Tuareg tribesmen, who were able to provide me with details of what didn’t happen in the area. You know, we’re talking about events which were being fabricated.
But it provided the basis for launching this new front in the war on terror, and that has become, if you like, the base for more or less everything that has happened in Africa since then. When I say everything that’s happened, in terms of the development of AFRICOM and much of the ideology, if you like, that propaganda, if you want to call it that, that the Americans have used to justify much of the military action that they have taken in the rest of the continent. And when they talk about the threat of terrorism in Africa, various countries to the south, the justification for this, the argument is, “Look what happened in the Sahara. This is where al-Qaeda was, and now is. And these vast, ungoverned spaces, these are the dangerous areas, the failed states, the areas which aren’t being governed. This is where terrorists are lurking, where they’re hanging out. They’re threatening Europe. They’re threatening the rest of Africa.” So, this story, which was fabricated over this period of time, 2003 and 2004, has become, if you like, the base, the fact, the truth behind what is really an enormous lie.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Keenan, who ordered the kidnapping?
JEREMY KEENAN: The leader was a man called El Para. We know that he is—there is overwhelming evidence that he is an agent for the DRS. So the question is who—the DRS is the Algerian—
AMY GOODMAN: The DRS being…?
JEREMY KEENAN: That’s the Department of Renseignement et Sécurité, the Department of Information and Security, so the secret military intelligence services in Algeria. The head of that, or the operational head, was a man called General Smain Lamari. His boss, the overall command, is General Mohamed Mediène. Mediène is still alive. He still holds that job. Smain Lamari, who almost certainly managing the operation, died in August two years ago. So he was managing it, and it is almost certain that he would have been ordering it and controlling it from Algiers itself.
ANJALI KAMAT: You talk about how Algeria colluded with the United States, but what’s in it for Algeria?
JEREMY KEENAN: With 9/11, Algeria saw an opportunity, and the President, Bouteflika, President Bouteflika—I think I’m right in saying—was the first foreign president to visit George Bush in the States. And I think I’m correct in saying he probably undertook more visits than almost any other at that time. Anyhow, the development of a very close relationship between Algeria and America.
I should say, at that time, it was Algeria being a bit pushy. And what they wanted, in essence, was a deal with America, the deal being that Algeria was saying, “Look, you’ve had this horrific atrocity happen in America, 3,000 people killed, but we know this. We understand this. We’ve been the front line against terrorism for the last ten years. We’ve had 200,000 people killed. You know, we are in the same boat together.” So, Algeria wanting to, if you like, get into bed with America. What America—what Algeria wanted, of course, was high-tech equipment for its army, surveillance equipment, communications equipment. Ideally, they wanted attack helicopters and night-vision equipment and so forth.
America, for its turn, was saying, “Look, it’s all very well, you know, you saying these things about us, but, you know, you’re on top of the terrorist situation. You know, really, you don’t need this sort of equipment. You know, the country is the best it’s been now for well over—you know, for ten years. There’s very little terrorism left. There are a few incidents up in the east in the mountains, but, by and large, you know, you’re in control of the situation.” So this was the American excuse, if you like, for not delivering, you know, what Algeria was wanting. That was in September.
Literally a month later, there was the first kidnap attempt on European hostages in the Sahara. And what Algeria was saying, to itself, was, “Look, you know, we’ve got to show to the Americans that we’re not on top of terrorism. We’ve got to show that it exists and it’s a problem.” And also, at that same time, the Algerians knew that the Americans were sort of imagining, if you like, this movement of Taliban terrorists from Afghanistan through the southern Sahara, weaving across and getting up into Europe in that way, which is a crazy idea. So the Algerians were saying, “Well, if we can sort of get some terrorism in that area, we can hopefully win the argument that we’re not on top of it, and also we can sort of give the Americans some concrete evidence to bolster their own theory,” which was based on no intelligence at all.
ANJALI KAMAT: Let me fast-forward to the present. In your book, you talk about the role of General Jim Jones, who is now national security adviser to President Obama. Can you talk about current US policy in Africa and what the current status of AFRICOM is, now that you’ve set up for us the story of what created the rationale for AFRICOM?
JEREMY KEENAN: Yes, certainly. General Jim Jones plays an interesting role in this. He was, if you like, at the beginning of the story, and he’s at the end of it, or if you talk about the present, now, as of course Obama’s head of national security, national security adviser. At the beginning of this story, in 2002, 2003, he was head of EUCOM, so the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and head of EUCOM, and EUCOM, that’s European Command, of course covered Africa. Africa was minute; it took up very little attention from EUCOM. But that has changed. And so, in a sense, the growth of AFRICOM out of EUCOM, European Command, sort of covers this period. So it began with General Jones, when he was in charge, and the story that I’ve just told you, that was under his—on his watch, so to speak. And, of course, now he is Obama’s national security adviser.
So what is happening with American policy in Africa now? There was a huge amount of optimism, of course, with Obama coming to power. I think now, a few months further on, we are a little bit more cautious and uncertain of what is actually happening, particularly on the AFRICOM front. At the sort of time of Obama’s election, I think there was a feeling amongst or within AFRICOM that it might well get the chop. There was certainly political pressure, and still is, in Washington not to use a military presence in this way. But what we’ve seen in the last few months suggests, and it’s still early days for Obama, that in fact he is following rather in the lines—in the footsteps of his predecessor in promoting and pushing AFRICOM.
And this, I think, is very serious for Africa, and it is not going to do American foreign policy any good at all, because what we’re seeing at the moment, in the last few months there’s been almost a replay of the story I’ve just told you and the same individuals concerned. That is, the people who took the hostages in 2003, the same people, have been taking hostages again now—a very complicated story; I won’t go into the details of it—but since last December, that’s December 2008, and up until last month. So more hostage takings again by the same people who kidnapped them in 2003. So we know that there is some involvement of the Algerian security forces, and the question is, is America involved again?
Now, in what I have written on this in the last few weeks and so forth, I have been very careful to say that I have no evidence, direct evidence, of America being involved in the way that it was in 2003 and during the Bush period. However, I do not know if the odd phone call took place. Just because I don’t have evidence doesn’t mean to say there is no involvement.
What is worrying is that the AFRICOM and America now, the American government, is now talking, again, in the same language as in 2003, ’04: “Yes, we’ve got al-Qaeda all over the Sahara. This is a security threat, and need AFRICOM,” etc. So, this is very worrying. Again, as I emphasize, it’s the early days in the Obama administration. I don’t think he’s being particularly well advised on this, the what’s going on in Africa in this particular context. But it does—it sounds very, very familiar: the same place, exactly the same people, the people who assassinated the hostage who was killed on the 31st of May, a man called Edwin Dyer, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a tourist. He happened to be British, living in Austria. The person who assassinated him and beheaded him was the same person who took—who was El Para’s number two, who took the hostages in 2003, the same people.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Keenan, I wanted to ask you about Hillary Clinton’s trip to Africa, seven countries. She’ll be going to Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Liberia, Cape Verde. The significance of these countries and US policy in Africa?
JEREMY KEENAN: Well, I remain a little reserved. Trips and words are one thing; actions are another. And while, of course, one obviously welcomes this apparent change in policy between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, and, if you like, the attempts to reconstruct better relations between America and the rest of the world, as long as America is peddling the AFRICOM idea and, if you like, giving primacy to the military, because this is what is happening, AFRICOM is the front line, if you like, of American policy in Africa. As long as that line is being pushed, we’re not going to have really much change in Africa.
The present line of giving primacy to AFRICOM, given its history and given what it is doing, is not what Africa itself wants. And I think the question is quite self-evident: why is it that, so far, every single country in Africa has said, “We do not want AFRICOM?” What could be clearer than that? So no matter what Hillary is doing running around Africa, the message from Africa has been, even from rulers who are fairly despotic and certainly by no means very democratic. Authoritarian rulers who have done the bidding of the United States over these years are saying, “We do not want AFRICOM in our country,” as at least a base for it.
So, until America gets that message onboard, loud and clear, and it sees and understands the history of how AFRICOM has developed from this very, very murky past, which I document in this volume—then the second volume will be out in the beginning of the year, that covers the last two or three years of what is happening—American-African policy is—sure, it will improve, because it can’t get any worse, but it’s going to be very suspect. And it is not, in my view, the right path.
AMY GOODMAN: British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan. His latest book, The Dark Sahara: America’s War on Terror in Africa.
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Friday, August 7, 2009
Robert Dreyfuss: Billion Dollar Mystery in Iraq
Billion-Dollar Mystery in Iraq
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 08/04/2009 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/458866/print
A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.
It involves what the New York Times calls an "extremist Shiite group" that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq's ministry of finance in 2007.
The story so far:
Today, the Times reports:
"An extremist Shiite group that has boasted of killing five American soldiers and of kidnapping five British contractors has agreed to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis, after meeting with Iraq's prime minister.
"The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, met with members of the group, Asa'ib al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, over the weekend, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, confirming reports. 'They decided they are no longer using violence, and we welcome them,' he said in a telephone interview.
"Mr. Dabbagh first revealed the negotiations in remarks on Monday to Al Iraqiya, the state television network. 'We have reached an agreement to resolve all problems, especially regarding detainees who do not have Iraqi blood on their hands,' he said. He did not say anything about British victims of the group."
In other words, Maliki met with a bunch of Shiite terrorists, welcomed them with open arms. Why would he do that?
In addition, the Times reports, the terrorists have a "liaison to the government." By coincidence, his name is also Maliki, and he wants to get into the government's favor and take part in the "political process":
"Salam al-Maliki, the insurgent group's liaison to the government, said in a telephone interview that the group had not renounced fighting the Americans. 'Of course we want to get into the political process, because circumstances have improved, and the United States is out right now,' said Mr. Maliki, who is not related to the prime minister. 'We told the government anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands, you should keep him in jail. We are only fighting the United States.'"
The Guardian, in a related story, suggests that the kidnapping of the five Britons was carried out with government collusion by a team of 80 to 100 men, dressed as Interior Ministry police officials and driving a convoy of 19 white SUVs. Here's the Guardian story:
"An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds.
"A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.
"Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet."
And this crucial piece:
"Moore was employed to install a new computer tracking system which would have followed billions of dollars of oil and foreign aid money through the ministry of finance. The 'Iraq Financial Management Information System' was nearly complete and about to go online at the time of the kidnap.
"The senior intelligence source said: 'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre [at the ministry of finance], this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed.'"
The Times story, which notes that the terrorist group also killed five US soldiers, says that the five British contractors were seized in retaliation for the detention of some of the group's leaders, after the killing of the Americans. But that makes no sense. Why would they organize and carry out a 19-SUV, 80-person raid on the finance ministry just as retaliation? And could this group have done so? As the Guardian points out, only a government agency could have pulled off the attack.
You can watch a 12-minute video on the case at the Guardian site.
Curiously, the Times report adds: "American military officials say the group is supported by Iran."
I tried getting some background on the League of the Righteous, and I found a posting on the Long War Journal about them, including alleged ties to Iran's Qods Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards.
There's more background here, too, at the Long War Journal.
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 08/04/2009 http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/458866/print
A multi-billion dollar mystery is unfolding in Iraq, and it may reach to the highest levels of the Iraqi government.
It involves what the New York Times calls an "extremist Shiite group" that has now reconciled with Prime Minister Maliki and his regime. The group is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of five British contractors who, according to the Guardian, were installing a sophisticated financial tracking system in Iraq's ministry of finance in 2007.
The story so far:
Today, the Times reports:
"An extremist Shiite group that has boasted of killing five American soldiers and of kidnapping five British contractors has agreed to renounce violence against fellow Iraqis, after meeting with Iraq's prime minister.
"The prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, met with members of the group, Asa'ib al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, over the weekend, said Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime minister, confirming reports. 'They decided they are no longer using violence, and we welcome them,' he said in a telephone interview.
"Mr. Dabbagh first revealed the negotiations in remarks on Monday to Al Iraqiya, the state television network. 'We have reached an agreement to resolve all problems, especially regarding detainees who do not have Iraqi blood on their hands,' he said. He did not say anything about British victims of the group."
In other words, Maliki met with a bunch of Shiite terrorists, welcomed them with open arms. Why would he do that?
In addition, the Times reports, the terrorists have a "liaison to the government." By coincidence, his name is also Maliki, and he wants to get into the government's favor and take part in the "political process":
"Salam al-Maliki, the insurgent group's liaison to the government, said in a telephone interview that the group had not renounced fighting the Americans. 'Of course we want to get into the political process, because circumstances have improved, and the United States is out right now,' said Mr. Maliki, who is not related to the prime minister. 'We told the government anyone who has Iraqi blood on their hands, you should keep him in jail. We are only fighting the United States.'"
The Guardian, in a related story, suggests that the kidnapping of the five Britons was carried out with government collusion by a team of 80 to 100 men, dressed as Interior Ministry police officials and driving a convoy of 19 white SUVs. Here's the Guardian story:
"An investigation into the kidnapping of five British men in Iraq has uncovered evidence of possible collusion by Iraqi government officials in their abduction, and a possible motive – to keep secret the whereabouts of billions of dollars in embezzled funds.
"A former high-level Iraqi intelligence operative and a current senior government minister, who has been negotiating directly with the hostage takers, have told the Guardian that the kidnapping of IT specialist Peter Moore and his four bodyguards in 2007 was not a simple snatch by a band of militants but a sophisticated operation, almost certainly with inside help. Only Moore is thought still to be alive.
"Witnesses to the extraordinary operation which led to the abductions have also told us that they have been warned by superiors to keep quiet."
And this crucial piece:
"Moore was employed to install a new computer tracking system which would have followed billions of dollars of oil and foreign aid money through the ministry of finance. The 'Iraq Financial Management Information System' was nearly complete and about to go online at the time of the kidnap.
"The senior intelligence source said: 'Many people don't want a high level of corruption to be revealed. Remember this is the information technology centre [at the ministry of finance], this is the place where all the money to do with Iraq and all Iraq's financial matters are housed.'"
The Times story, which notes that the terrorist group also killed five US soldiers, says that the five British contractors were seized in retaliation for the detention of some of the group's leaders, after the killing of the Americans. But that makes no sense. Why would they organize and carry out a 19-SUV, 80-person raid on the finance ministry just as retaliation? And could this group have done so? As the Guardian points out, only a government agency could have pulled off the attack.
You can watch a 12-minute video on the case at the Guardian site.
Curiously, the Times report adds: "American military officials say the group is supported by Iran."
I tried getting some background on the League of the Righteous, and I found a posting on the Long War Journal about them, including alleged ties to Iran's Qods Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards.
There's more background here, too, at the Long War Journal.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
NYT: The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs
June 2, 2009
The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs
By DENISE GRADY
BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.
Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.
Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.
The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.
“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.
On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.
Mr. Makanza is an assistant medical officer, not a fully trained physician. Assistant medical officers have education similar to that of physician assistants in the United States, but with additional training in surgery. They are Tanzania’s solution to a severe shortage of doctors, and they perform many basic operations, like Caesareans and appendectomies. The hospital in Berega has two.
Abortions in Berega come in seasonal waves — March and April, August and September — in sync with planting and harvests, when a lot of socializing goes on, Dr. Mdoe said. He said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
“They just poke, poke, poke,” he said. “And then the woman has to come here.” Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis.
In the past some hospitals threatened to withhold care until a woman identified the abortionist (performing abortions can bring a 14-year prison term), but that practice was abandoned in favor of simply providing postabortal treatment. Still, women do not want to discuss what happened or even admit that they had anything other than a miscarriage, because in theory they can be prosecuted for having abortions. The law calls for seven years in prison for the woman. So doctors generally do not ask questions.
“They are supposed to be arrested,” Dr. Mdoe said. “Our work as physicians is just to help and make sure they get healed.”
He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.
The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.
In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.
But in other African nations like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, abortion is not available on request, and the figures on contraceptive use are even lower than Tanzania’s and maternal mortality is higher. Nonprofit groups are working with the Tanzanian government to provide family planning, but the country is vast, and the widely distributed rural populations makes many people extremely hard to reach.
Geography is not the only obstacle. An assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, said: “Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous.”
In interviews, some young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer.
Mr. Kaneno said the doctors were trying to dispel those taboos and convince women that it was a good thing to be able to choose whether and when to get pregnant.
“It is still a long way to go,” he said.
The Deadly Toll of Abortion by Amateurs
By DENISE GRADY
BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of “incomplete abortions.” A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother’s life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus.
Pregnancy and childbirth are among the greatest dangers that women face in Africa, which has the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality — at least 100 times those in developed countries. Abortion accounts for a significant part of the death toll.
Maternal mortality is high in Tanzania: for every 100,000 births, 950 women die. In the United States, the figure is 11, and it is even lower in other developed countries. But Tanzania’s record is neither the best nor the worst in Africa. Many other countries have similar statistics; quite a few do better and a handful do markedly worse.
Eighty percent of Tanzanians live in rural areas, and the hospital in Berega — miles from paved roads and electric poles — is a typical rural hospital, struggling to deal with the same problems faced by hospitals and clinics in much of the country. Abortion is a constant worry.
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Reliable figures on abortion in Tanzania are hard to come by, but the World Health Organization reports that its region, Eastern Africa, has the world’s second-highest rate of unsafe abortions (only South America is higher). And Africa as a whole has the highest proportion of teenagers — 25 percent — among women having unsafe abortions.
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions.
The medical director, Dr. Paschal Mdoe, 30, said many patients who had had the unsafe abortions were 16 to 20 years old, and four months pregnant. He said there was a steady stream of cases, much as he had seen in hospitals in other parts of the country.
“It’s the same everywhere,” he said.
On a Friday in January, 6 of 20 patients in the women’s ward were recovering from attempted abortions. One, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, lay in bed moaning and writhing. She had been treated at the hospital a week earlier for an incomplete abortion and now was back, bleeding and in severe pain. She was taken to the operating room once again and anesthetized, and Emmanuel Makanza, who had treated her the first time, discovered that he had failed to remove all the membranes formed during the pregnancy. Once again, he scraped the inside of her womb with a curet, a metal instrument. It was a vigorous, bloody procedure. This time, he said, it was complete.
Mr. Makanza is an assistant medical officer, not a fully trained physician. Assistant medical officers have education similar to that of physician assistants in the United States, but with additional training in surgery. They are Tanzania’s solution to a severe shortage of doctors, and they perform many basic operations, like Caesareans and appendectomies. The hospital in Berega has two.
Abortions in Berega come in seasonal waves — March and April, August and September — in sync with planting and harvests, when a lot of socializing goes on, Dr. Mdoe said. He said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
“They just poke, poke, poke,” he said. “And then the woman has to come here.” Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis.
In the past some hospitals threatened to withhold care until a woman identified the abortionist (performing abortions can bring a 14-year prison term), but that practice was abandoned in favor of simply providing postabortal treatment. Still, women do not want to discuss what happened or even admit that they had anything other than a miscarriage, because in theory they can be prosecuted for having abortions. The law calls for seven years in prison for the woman. So doctors generally do not ask questions.
“They are supposed to be arrested,” Dr. Mdoe said. “Our work as physicians is just to help and make sure they get healed.”
He went on, “We as medical personnel think abortion should be legal so a qualified person can do it and you can have safe abortion.” There are no plans in Tanzania to change the law.
The steady stream of cases reflects widespread ignorance about contraception. Young people in the region do not seem to know much or care much about birth control or safe sex, Dr. Mdoe said.
In most countries the rates of abortion, whether legal or illegal — and abortion-related deaths — tend to decrease when the use of birth control increases. But only about a quarter of Tanzanians use contraception. In South Africa, the rate of contraception use is 60 percent, and in Kenya 39 percent. Both have lower rates of maternal mortality than does Tanzania. South Africa also allows abortion on request.
But in other African nations like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, abortion is not available on request, and the figures on contraceptive use are even lower than Tanzania’s and maternal mortality is higher. Nonprofit groups are working with the Tanzanian government to provide family planning, but the country is vast, and the widely distributed rural populations makes many people extremely hard to reach.
Geography is not the only obstacle. An assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, said: “Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous.”
In interviews, some young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer.
Mr. Kaneno said the doctors were trying to dispel those taboos and convince women that it was a good thing to be able to choose whether and when to get pregnant.
“It is still a long way to go,” he said.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Diana Johnstone: Zionist Terrorists Destroy a Parisian Bookstore: Sarkozy looks on
July 6, 2009
The Raids on the Resistances Bookstore
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris.
COUNTERPUNCH.ORG
http://counterpunch.org/johnstone07062009.html
Thousands of books drenched in cooking oil – that is the latest exploit of the Zionist fanatics who regularly attack property and people in Paris and get away with it.
In the early afternoon of Friday, July 3, five men, mostly masked, stormed into the “Resistances” bookstore located in a quiet residential neighborhood of the 17th arrondissement in northwest Paris. To the startled women working in the shop, as well as two customers, they announcing that they were from the Jewish Defense League and began ripping books off shelves and tables, dousing them heavily with cooking oil, and then smashing four computers before leaving rapidly in a waiting vehicle.
The bookstore is owned and operated by Olivia Zemor and Nicolas Shashahani, who are also the leaders of the very active militant group CAPJPO-EuroPalestine (CAPJPO stands for Coordination des Appels pour une Paix Juste au Proche Orient). In addition to a wide collection of books on the Middle East and other subjects, including fiction, the bookstore has a reading room and a lending library, gives courses in English and Arabic, and possesses a modest but well-attended auditorium where authors are invited to speak.
Two and a half years ago, on December 7, 2006, a similar attack squad threw teargas grenades into the bookstore as a crowd was gathering to listen to the late Israeli author Tanya Reinhart and her companion, the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai. On that occasion, Shashahani had to be treated for effects from the teargas but material damage was slight. This time, the entire shop is a shambles, with countless ruined books, and damage runs to tens of thousands of euros, according to Shashahani.
But, he stresses, this is only one in “hundreds of violent actions” carried out by the French version of the banned US Jewish Defense League in recent years. There is no reason to expect them to stop so long as they can count on indulgence on the part of French authorities and the silence of the mainstream media. The vandalism on the Resistances bookstore was reported by the French news agency AFP, but the dispatch was apparently carried only by the small tabloid Le Parisien and not by the major newspapers, much less by television. Usually, almost the only people who are informed about such events are in the politically active circles targeted for intimidation.
The general public remains ignorant of these aggressions, while it is regularly informed by television of even relatively minor acts of anti-Semitism – some of them imaginary (as the famous case a few years ago of the young woman who totally invented a story of being the victim of an “anti-Semitic assault” by blacks in the suburban commuter train in order to get attention from her family, and got the attention of everyone in France all the way up to the President of the Republic). Real “anti-Semitic acts” occur, but most are no more organized than school-yard insults. However, the publicity they receive serves to keep alive the notion that the very existence of Jews is under perpetual threat – the basic alibi used by the Jewish Defense League. The false claim that “the French government does nothing to protect Jews” is used as a pretext for aggressive “self-defense”.
As disciples of Meir Kahane, the JDL not only favors purifying an enlarged Eretz Israel of Arabs, but wants to bring the fight against Arabs and “Islamofascism” to France itself. Debate is not their style. After training in Israeli martial arts, they carry on their fight by physical means, attacking Arabs, Muslims and defenders of the Palestinian cause. The JDL is an informal group of a few hundred members, rather than a registered organization with a headquarters. The French police, adept at infiltrating every sort of political group, certainly must know who and where they are, but they seem never to be disturbed after one of their raids. Moreover, unless the aggressors identify themselves, victims cannot be sure whether they are being attacked by the LDJ or by Betar, an older Zionist youth organization founded back in 1929 by Vladimir Jabotinsky and close to Likud. Both use similar methods, and probably overlap, although the LDJ, as the more radical of the two, is said to be draining members from Betar.
In the rare cases when Zionist fanatics are actually arrested and put on trial, they are usually treated with uncommon indulgence. In December 2003, a group of pro-Palestinian students were violently attacked by the usual suspects. A Palestinian student suffered grave eye injuries. Faced with lackadaisical police, the students carried out their own investigation, leading to the conviction on September 16, 2004 of one Anthony Attal. He was given a suspended sentence of ten months.
LDJ or Betar members also have the advantage of a “sanctuary” – Israel. On October 25, 2006, a 68-year-old pro-Palestinian radical militant, Ginette Hess Skandrani, was attacked in her own home by three unknown men who beat her savagely, explaining only “you know why”. Hospitalized, her head wounds required several stitches. Last February 4, her aggressors were finally convicted and sentenced, but:
-- one of them, Ruben Colleu, was sentenced to two years in prison, of which 18 months were suspended – but he had already fled to Israel.
-- the second, Stevel Elie, was sentenced to three years in prison – but the French court had already given him permission to go to Israel “to do his military service” in Tsahal.
-- Only the third, Mike Sfez, was still around. Like Colleu, 18 months of his two year sentence were suspended, and the remaining six months could be transformed into social work.
Only recently, large squads of presumed LDJ thugs have attacked theater-goers outside a benefit for children of Gaza and attacked persons of Arab appearance on their way to a meeting of diverse groups scheduled to discuss the “Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions” movement.
The LDJ has its apologists in the police. On June 5, 2006, the head of the small right-wing Christian union “Action Police CFTC”, Michel Thooris, praised the LDJ and Betar for “performing a public service mission by defending people and property”. He was not publicly reprimanded by his big boss, the minister of the Interior at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The double standards of Sarkozy’s tough “law and order” policy are all too obvious. His ostentatious policy switch from a certain traditional French balance in the Middle East to strong support for Israel is only likely to encourage the LDJ in its feeling of impunity. This spring, a commercially successful author, Paul-Eric Blanrue, was unable to publish his book on “Sarkozy, Israel and the Jews” in France, and was obliged to find a publisher in Belgium. Still worse, the usual French distributor of his Belgian publisher refused to distribute the book in France. His press conference in Paris was unattended by any journalist and his book, which carefully documents Sarkozy’s policy of wooing Jewish support in France by aligning with Israel and attacking the “riffraff” in the suburbs, has been ignored by French reviewers.
Even though the market is saturated, there is always room in the media, however, for laments that France’s secular tradition is threatened by the “communitarianism” of… Muslims. The ideological and violent provocations of fanatic Zionists are rarely singled out as the main cause of this disturbing trend. Of course, France’s many militant intellectual Zionists do not resort to the methods of the LDJ and Betar. But the theme of Jewish victimhood, which is constantly present in schools, in cinema, in political discourse and in the media, provides a congenial atmosphere for the pathological violence of the Jewish militias in France, and for the indulgence with which they are treated.
The situation is scarcely improved by the extreme fragmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement in France – which can be seen as just one aspect of the endemic sectarianism of the French left. The various victims of LDJ or Betar violence – such as CAPJPO, Ginette Skandrani, the comedian Dieudonné, etc., etc. – are often not on speaking terms with each other, so that even if they all profess solidarity with Palestine, there is very little or no solidarity between them.
However, one may hope that the July 3 attack on the Resistances bookstore may arouse a broader protest than other recent attacks, quite simply because of the strong connotations of destroying books. A protest demonstration has been called for the evening of Wednesday, July 8, to demand that the government finally ban the JDL, just as it has already been banned in the United States and Israel. This will be an opportunity to show solidarity in resistance to the most active form of fascism in France today.
Diana Johnstone is author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
The Raids on the Resistances Bookstore
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris
By DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris.
COUNTERPUNCH.ORG
http://counterpunch.org/johnstone07062009.html
Thousands of books drenched in cooking oil – that is the latest exploit of the Zionist fanatics who regularly attack property and people in Paris and get away with it.
In the early afternoon of Friday, July 3, five men, mostly masked, stormed into the “Resistances” bookstore located in a quiet residential neighborhood of the 17th arrondissement in northwest Paris. To the startled women working in the shop, as well as two customers, they announcing that they were from the Jewish Defense League and began ripping books off shelves and tables, dousing them heavily with cooking oil, and then smashing four computers before leaving rapidly in a waiting vehicle.
The bookstore is owned and operated by Olivia Zemor and Nicolas Shashahani, who are also the leaders of the very active militant group CAPJPO-EuroPalestine (CAPJPO stands for Coordination des Appels pour une Paix Juste au Proche Orient). In addition to a wide collection of books on the Middle East and other subjects, including fiction, the bookstore has a reading room and a lending library, gives courses in English and Arabic, and possesses a modest but well-attended auditorium where authors are invited to speak.
Two and a half years ago, on December 7, 2006, a similar attack squad threw teargas grenades into the bookstore as a crowd was gathering to listen to the late Israeli author Tanya Reinhart and her companion, the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai. On that occasion, Shashahani had to be treated for effects from the teargas but material damage was slight. This time, the entire shop is a shambles, with countless ruined books, and damage runs to tens of thousands of euros, according to Shashahani.
But, he stresses, this is only one in “hundreds of violent actions” carried out by the French version of the banned US Jewish Defense League in recent years. There is no reason to expect them to stop so long as they can count on indulgence on the part of French authorities and the silence of the mainstream media. The vandalism on the Resistances bookstore was reported by the French news agency AFP, but the dispatch was apparently carried only by the small tabloid Le Parisien and not by the major newspapers, much less by television. Usually, almost the only people who are informed about such events are in the politically active circles targeted for intimidation.
The general public remains ignorant of these aggressions, while it is regularly informed by television of even relatively minor acts of anti-Semitism – some of them imaginary (as the famous case a few years ago of the young woman who totally invented a story of being the victim of an “anti-Semitic assault” by blacks in the suburban commuter train in order to get attention from her family, and got the attention of everyone in France all the way up to the President of the Republic). Real “anti-Semitic acts” occur, but most are no more organized than school-yard insults. However, the publicity they receive serves to keep alive the notion that the very existence of Jews is under perpetual threat – the basic alibi used by the Jewish Defense League. The false claim that “the French government does nothing to protect Jews” is used as a pretext for aggressive “self-defense”.
As disciples of Meir Kahane, the JDL not only favors purifying an enlarged Eretz Israel of Arabs, but wants to bring the fight against Arabs and “Islamofascism” to France itself. Debate is not their style. After training in Israeli martial arts, they carry on their fight by physical means, attacking Arabs, Muslims and defenders of the Palestinian cause. The JDL is an informal group of a few hundred members, rather than a registered organization with a headquarters. The French police, adept at infiltrating every sort of political group, certainly must know who and where they are, but they seem never to be disturbed after one of their raids. Moreover, unless the aggressors identify themselves, victims cannot be sure whether they are being attacked by the LDJ or by Betar, an older Zionist youth organization founded back in 1929 by Vladimir Jabotinsky and close to Likud. Both use similar methods, and probably overlap, although the LDJ, as the more radical of the two, is said to be draining members from Betar.
In the rare cases when Zionist fanatics are actually arrested and put on trial, they are usually treated with uncommon indulgence. In December 2003, a group of pro-Palestinian students were violently attacked by the usual suspects. A Palestinian student suffered grave eye injuries. Faced with lackadaisical police, the students carried out their own investigation, leading to the conviction on September 16, 2004 of one Anthony Attal. He was given a suspended sentence of ten months.
LDJ or Betar members also have the advantage of a “sanctuary” – Israel. On October 25, 2006, a 68-year-old pro-Palestinian radical militant, Ginette Hess Skandrani, was attacked in her own home by three unknown men who beat her savagely, explaining only “you know why”. Hospitalized, her head wounds required several stitches. Last February 4, her aggressors were finally convicted and sentenced, but:
-- one of them, Ruben Colleu, was sentenced to two years in prison, of which 18 months were suspended – but he had already fled to Israel.
-- the second, Stevel Elie, was sentenced to three years in prison – but the French court had already given him permission to go to Israel “to do his military service” in Tsahal.
-- Only the third, Mike Sfez, was still around. Like Colleu, 18 months of his two year sentence were suspended, and the remaining six months could be transformed into social work.
Only recently, large squads of presumed LDJ thugs have attacked theater-goers outside a benefit for children of Gaza and attacked persons of Arab appearance on their way to a meeting of diverse groups scheduled to discuss the “Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions” movement.
The LDJ has its apologists in the police. On June 5, 2006, the head of the small right-wing Christian union “Action Police CFTC”, Michel Thooris, praised the LDJ and Betar for “performing a public service mission by defending people and property”. He was not publicly reprimanded by his big boss, the minister of the Interior at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy.
The double standards of Sarkozy’s tough “law and order” policy are all too obvious. His ostentatious policy switch from a certain traditional French balance in the Middle East to strong support for Israel is only likely to encourage the LDJ in its feeling of impunity. This spring, a commercially successful author, Paul-Eric Blanrue, was unable to publish his book on “Sarkozy, Israel and the Jews” in France, and was obliged to find a publisher in Belgium. Still worse, the usual French distributor of his Belgian publisher refused to distribute the book in France. His press conference in Paris was unattended by any journalist and his book, which carefully documents Sarkozy’s policy of wooing Jewish support in France by aligning with Israel and attacking the “riffraff” in the suburbs, has been ignored by French reviewers.
Even though the market is saturated, there is always room in the media, however, for laments that France’s secular tradition is threatened by the “communitarianism” of… Muslims. The ideological and violent provocations of fanatic Zionists are rarely singled out as the main cause of this disturbing trend. Of course, France’s many militant intellectual Zionists do not resort to the methods of the LDJ and Betar. But the theme of Jewish victimhood, which is constantly present in schools, in cinema, in political discourse and in the media, provides a congenial atmosphere for the pathological violence of the Jewish militias in France, and for the indulgence with which they are treated.
The situation is scarcely improved by the extreme fragmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement in France – which can be seen as just one aspect of the endemic sectarianism of the French left. The various victims of LDJ or Betar violence – such as CAPJPO, Ginette Skandrani, the comedian Dieudonné, etc., etc. – are often not on speaking terms with each other, so that even if they all profess solidarity with Palestine, there is very little or no solidarity between them.
However, one may hope that the July 3 attack on the Resistances bookstore may arouse a broader protest than other recent attacks, quite simply because of the strong connotations of destroying books. A protest demonstration has been called for the evening of Wednesday, July 8, to demand that the government finally ban the JDL, just as it has already been banned in the United States and Israel. This will be an opportunity to show solidarity in resistance to the most active form of fascism in France today.
Diana Johnstone is author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Obama Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Friday, July 3, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203022_pf.html
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?
If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day - the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly - to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains - encompassing about a million acres - buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia's rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not - obliterating the hemisphere's oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas - while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry's promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry's fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains - with their impoverished and alienated population - are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.
First, the White House should fix the "fill" rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the "fill" rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored "buffer zone" rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are "reclaimed."
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of "fill" permits that will cause "significant degradation" to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the "function and structure" of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine "may have significant environmental impacts," individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate - an illegal practice that should stop.
Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama's legacy.
President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining - then in its infancy - that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation's richest natural resources, was home to America's poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.
The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.
Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.
--------
The writer is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Friday, July 3, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070203022_pf.html
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?
If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day - the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly - to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains - encompassing about a million acres - buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia's rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not - obliterating the hemisphere's oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas - while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry's promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry's fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains - with their impoverished and alienated population - are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.
First, the White House should fix the "fill" rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the "fill" rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored "buffer zone" rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are "reclaimed."
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of "fill" permits that will cause "significant degradation" to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the "function and structure" of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine "may have significant environmental impacts," individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate - an illegal practice that should stop.
Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama's legacy.
President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining - then in its infancy - that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation's richest natural resources, was home to America's poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.
The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.
Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.
--------
The writer is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Monday, June 29, 2009
David Swanson: Emperor Barack's Signing Statements
The Emperor's Seven Signing Statements
By David Swanson
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/43996
Lawless detention is the least of it. State secrets and warrantless spying scrape the surface. Drone attacks and ongoing torture begin to touch it. But central to the power of an emperor, and the catastrophes that come from the existence of an emperor, is the elimination of any other force within the government. Signing statements eliminate congress. Not that congress objects. Asking congress to reclaim its power produces nervous giggles.
Look at how the latest war supplemental funding bill was passed. The Emperor's people wrote most of the bill. The Emperor combined it with the IMF banker bailout. The Emperor threatened and bribed his way to deals with enough congress members to pass it. The Emperor preemptively told other nations the bill would pass and then badgered congress with the claim that this nation (He, the nation) would be damaged if he turned out to have lied. The Emperor lied to congress members and the public that this would be the last war supplemental bill. Congress members claimed to back it because it was the last one (not that this made the slightest sense), and others openly, proudly, and obliviously declared that they were switching their votes to yes in order to please the Emperor.
When the bill came to Emperor Barack he signed it and released his sixth and only legal signing statement announcing that he'd signed it. Two days later (Fridays being the favored day for signing statements) Obama released his seventh signing statement, claiming to have signed the same bill on that day as well, but perhaps beginning to establish the precedent that "signing statements," like "executive orders," can be issued at any time. The seventh signing statement did what the first five had done: it illegally and unconstitutionally altered the law in favor of bestowing illegal powers on the Emperor. The seven statements are posted here. Here's the heart of the seventh statement:
"[P]rovisions of this bill within sections 1110 to 1112 of title XI, and sections 1403 and 1404 of title XIV, would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the congress prior to such negotiations or discussions. I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations."
An executive would be someone who executed the laws of congress, suggesting that a different capitalized E word is actually intended, that "Executive" is now a stand-in for "Emperor." Similarly, "constitutional" in this context refers to dictionary.com's third definition of "constitution", namely "the aggregate of a person's physical and psychological characteristics." In other words, "constitutional authority" is "imperial authority" derived from the character of the Emperor. We know this because the U.S. Constitution does not create any presidential authority to conduct foreign relations (only to "receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers") but does require the advice and consent and two-thirds approval of the Senate in order to make treaties, and does give congress the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign nations" as well as complete power over the raising and spending of public funds, not to mention the power "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
The sections of this latest law tossed out by Obama were ploys to win the bill's passage, including requirements that he work to strengthen labor and environmental standards at, and report to congress on the activities of, the IMF and the World Bank. Unlike an emperor, an executive would be required by the U.S. Constitution to "take Care that the Laws by faithfully executed," stated by candidate Barack Obama thus:
"I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law."
Obama's first signing statement made part of the law his right to use the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated in that bill in "new" and "far-reaching" ways that he would "initiate," as well as the understanding that an "oversight board" created by the executive branch -- rather than congress -- would oversee the activities of the executive branch, or as Obama calls it "the Federal Government."
Obama's second signing statement declared his intention to violate dozens of sections of the law he was signing, including sections providing for the spending of funds, sections related to the creation of international treaties, and sections restricting retaliation against whistleblowers.
Obama's third signing statement, on the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009," announced his intention to violate requirements in the law related to the appointment of a government commission.
Obama's fourth signing statement, on a bill creating a "Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission" threw out a requirement that the Emperor provide that commission with information.
Obama's fifth signing statement was applied to a bill that created a commission and included on it six members of congress. The signing statement declared that those six commission members Š
"will be able to participate only in ceremonial or advisory functions of [such a] Commission, and not in matters involving the administration of the act."
Is it time to stop endlessly being "shocked" by these yet? Obama, like Bush, argues in his signing statements that the sections of law he intends to violate are unconstitutional. The problem is not that either one of these presidents is necessarily always wrong or that such questions can ever be decided to everyone's satisfaction. The problem is that the Constitution requires the president to veto a bill or sign and faithfully execute it. The time to argue against the constitutionality of a provision is before a bill is passed or upon vetoing it. Such an argument can even be made upon signing a bill. It just can't be accompanied by a declaration of the power to violate the law.
Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton made innovations in the abuse of signing statements without which Bush Jr. could not have done what he did. Now Obama is further advancing the genre. At some point, of course -- as Germans once learned (and learned before nukes or climate crises were on the table) -- it can become too late to act.
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David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can pre-order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book
To receive updates from After Downing Street register at
http://afterdowningstreet.org/user/register
To subscribe to other lists go to
http://davidswanson.org/node/921
By David Swanson
http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/43996
Lawless detention is the least of it. State secrets and warrantless spying scrape the surface. Drone attacks and ongoing torture begin to touch it. But central to the power of an emperor, and the catastrophes that come from the existence of an emperor, is the elimination of any other force within the government. Signing statements eliminate congress. Not that congress objects. Asking congress to reclaim its power produces nervous giggles.
Look at how the latest war supplemental funding bill was passed. The Emperor's people wrote most of the bill. The Emperor combined it with the IMF banker bailout. The Emperor threatened and bribed his way to deals with enough congress members to pass it. The Emperor preemptively told other nations the bill would pass and then badgered congress with the claim that this nation (He, the nation) would be damaged if he turned out to have lied. The Emperor lied to congress members and the public that this would be the last war supplemental bill. Congress members claimed to back it because it was the last one (not that this made the slightest sense), and others openly, proudly, and obliviously declared that they were switching their votes to yes in order to please the Emperor.
When the bill came to Emperor Barack he signed it and released his sixth and only legal signing statement announcing that he'd signed it. Two days later (Fridays being the favored day for signing statements) Obama released his seventh signing statement, claiming to have signed the same bill on that day as well, but perhaps beginning to establish the precedent that "signing statements," like "executive orders," can be issued at any time. The seventh signing statement did what the first five had done: it illegally and unconstitutionally altered the law in favor of bestowing illegal powers on the Emperor. The seven statements are posted here. Here's the heart of the seventh statement:
"[P]rovisions of this bill within sections 1110 to 1112 of title XI, and sections 1403 and 1404 of title XIV, would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiations or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments, or by requiring consultation with the congress prior to such negotiations or discussions. I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations."
An executive would be someone who executed the laws of congress, suggesting that a different capitalized E word is actually intended, that "Executive" is now a stand-in for "Emperor." Similarly, "constitutional" in this context refers to dictionary.com's third definition of "constitution", namely "the aggregate of a person's physical and psychological characteristics." In other words, "constitutional authority" is "imperial authority" derived from the character of the Emperor. We know this because the U.S. Constitution does not create any presidential authority to conduct foreign relations (only to "receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers") but does require the advice and consent and two-thirds approval of the Senate in order to make treaties, and does give congress the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign nations" as well as complete power over the raising and spending of public funds, not to mention the power "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
The sections of this latest law tossed out by Obama were ploys to win the bill's passage, including requirements that he work to strengthen labor and environmental standards at, and report to congress on the activities of, the IMF and the World Bank. Unlike an emperor, an executive would be required by the U.S. Constitution to "take Care that the Laws by faithfully executed," stated by candidate Barack Obama thus:
"I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law."
Obama's first signing statement made part of the law his right to use the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated in that bill in "new" and "far-reaching" ways that he would "initiate," as well as the understanding that an "oversight board" created by the executive branch -- rather than congress -- would oversee the activities of the executive branch, or as Obama calls it "the Federal Government."
Obama's second signing statement declared his intention to violate dozens of sections of the law he was signing, including sections providing for the spending of funds, sections related to the creation of international treaties, and sections restricting retaliation against whistleblowers.
Obama's third signing statement, on the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009," announced his intention to violate requirements in the law related to the appointment of a government commission.
Obama's fourth signing statement, on a bill creating a "Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission" threw out a requirement that the Emperor provide that commission with information.
Obama's fifth signing statement was applied to a bill that created a commission and included on it six members of congress. The signing statement declared that those six commission members Š
"will be able to participate only in ceremonial or advisory functions of [such a] Commission, and not in matters involving the administration of the act."
Is it time to stop endlessly being "shocked" by these yet? Obama, like Bush, argues in his signing statements that the sections of law he intends to violate are unconstitutional. The problem is not that either one of these presidents is necessarily always wrong or that such questions can ever be decided to everyone's satisfaction. The problem is that the Constitution requires the president to veto a bill or sign and faithfully execute it. The time to argue against the constitutionality of a provision is before a bill is passed or upon vetoing it. Such an argument can even be made upon signing a bill. It just can't be accompanied by a declaration of the power to violate the law.
Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton made innovations in the abuse of signing statements without which Bush Jr. could not have done what he did. Now Obama is further advancing the genre. At some point, of course -- as Germans once learned (and learned before nukes or climate crises were on the table) -- it can become too late to act.
--
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David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can pre-order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book
To receive updates from After Downing Street register at
http://afterdowningstreet.org/user/register
To subscribe to other lists go to
http://davidswanson.org/node/921
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