Wikileaks: US military: Human Terrain Team Handbook, Sep 2008

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 16 2008 11:49 utc | 4

What ThePaper said.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Dec 16 2008 14:37 utc | 6

from counterpunch

In a similar state of denial, the Handbook includes the admonition that personnel should: “avoid direct involvement in tactical questioning. Tactical questioning is a function of the intelligence world and designed to elicit primarily lethal-targeting information. It would also endanger relationships with the local population if HTTs are seen being involved with the “interrogating” of friends/family.” This statement pretends that the world of the intelligence community is neatly compartmentalized and could not possibly have access to HTT reports, and that by insisting that HTT personnel avoid “direct involvement” with the intelligence community somehow means that whatever passive involvement they have is acceptable. The Handbook does not address the possibility that as Human Terrain Personnel collect information reporting identities of cooperative and compliant individuals or groups as “not” Taliban or “not” sympathetic to al-Quaida, those occupying the negative space of these composite pictures risk becoming targets.

how could they not be targets? they are part of the operation whose mission (as made clear in the ‘Essence of HTS’ graph on pg 29 of the handbook) it is threat identification > threat elimination. on pg 26 under ‘roles and responsibility’ it states as a key task ‘cultural preparation of the environment'(CPO) which is similar to traditional Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB).
you can’t insert a cast of characters into war/occupation, slap a fancy title on them, assign them to be ‘info collectors’ or ‘cultural attaches’ and assume the population are a bunch of idiots. children may fall for this facade but adults won’t. what you are essentially doing is creating a ‘new way’ to relate hoping the population will play along, and the may play along w/the facade (knowing if they don’t they may end up dead meat), doesn’t mean they wouldn’t stab you in the back at first opportunity. the quality of death (by burning) is a very public statement i would interpret as intended to be a threat to others. obviously the guy could have killed her in a less conspicuous manner. the ‘punishment’ of Ayala may not have been targeted at Ayala at all, but on the population as a message of ‘we will not condone, because we are ‘humane’ and therefore we will treat our own the same way we treat the population. IOW using Ayala as a showpiece, part of his ‘job’ to be caged.
in his position I am reasonably certain I would’ve acted as he did
uncle, i am a little surprised at this sentiment. if it were me i would have understood it meant my services (and those of my team) were neither warranted or appreciated by the population and gotten the hell out of dodge.
what the paper said @ 5.

Posted by: annie | Dec 16 2008 18:02 utc | 8

NATO Supply Route Imperiled As Pakistani Truckers Refuse To Carry Goods
“In response to the increased danger, an alliance of some 3,500 truck and fuel tanker owners announced on December 15 that it would no longer make deliveries for NATO along the alliance’s main overland supply route.”

Posted by: Dick Durata | Dec 16 2008 20:48 utc | 10

Thanks for clearing that up, Uncle. I thought that seemed a bit out of line with my perception of your character when I read it the first time.

Posted by: Monolycus | Dec 17 2008 3:40 utc | 12

Welfare Rolls See First Climb in Years

FORT MYERS, Fla. — For the first time since welfare was redefined a dozen years ago, weaning millions of poor Americans from monthly government checks, the deteriorating economy is causing a surge in welfare rolls in a growing number of states.
The swelling caseloads pose the first hard test of the premise behind transforming the old system of welfare, once considered an open-ended right, into a finite program built to provide short-term cash assistance and steer people quickly into jobs.

What I find most disturbing about this isn’t so much the article, as bad as it is, but the discussions we’ve had recently about US food and gas supplies some of us have had recently. I had yet another experience at one of the local grocery stores, they were out of a certain brand of eggs, of all things, and didn’t have any in stock, after inquiring I was yet again told in no uncertain terms, that it is not the stores responsibility, that it was the vendors. I further inquired and was told that all stock these days are out sourced in this fashion, and this is after, checking with various different chains.
It may be nothing, however, I can’t help but think, in some type of national disaster, these chains now have no stock. The article and lecture/talk about having only three days worth of gas and food supplies is prime opportunity for nefarious hijinks by those whom would rule. God forbid one would have to rely on F.E.M.A..

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 17 2008 8:56 utc | 14

thanks uncle

Posted by: annie | Dec 17 2008 12:28 utc | 16

great link shanks
hizbollah:
We have noted that these kinds of attacks that struck India are often a prelude to U.S. security and military interference that confiscates the sovereignty of states at the pretext of fighting terrorism. These attacks will be an opportunity for the U.S. administration to blackmail both Pakistan and India and infringe on their sovereignty.”

Posted by: annie | Dec 17 2008 17:37 utc | 18

(This must be the longest article published in the Post this year.)
NY Post (!) covers FBI suit by Ivins coworkers!

SCIENTISTS SLAM FBI ‘THRAX PROBE IN BID TO CLEAR BUDDY ‘DR. DOOM’
By SUSANNAH CAHALAN
The colleagues of Army scientist Bruce Ivins , named last summer as the man behind the fatal post-9/11 anthrax mailings, want to sue the FBI, who they say fingered the wrong man.
Last updated: 4:02 am
November 2, 2008
Posted: 3:21 am
November 2, 2008
It was an open-and-shut case, the FBI said.
But three months after agents pinned the post-9/11 anthrax mailings on Army scientist Bruce Ivins – who committed suicide as the FBI closed in on him – his former colleagues have approached a lawyer to sue the feds for fingering the wrong man, The Post has learned.
They argue that the FBI abused its power and violated its own policies as they probed an innocent man for six months.
One of Ivins’ former colleagues was being aggressively pressured to confess to the crimes just two months before Ivins killed himself on July 29, he told The Post. And he identified at least one other employee who was under the same pressure.
The move by the Army scientists comes on the heels of a Senate Judiciary Committee demand for an independent review of the case following a hearing with FBI Director Robert Mueller in which committee members called the bureau’s case an “open matter.” The bureau has named a panel of independent scientists to review the evidence against Ivins – a probe that will take six to 18 months.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, a target of the 2001 anthrax attacks, said at the Judiciary Committee hearings that he doubted Ivins, who worked at Fort Detrick, Md., could have acted alone and that he believes “there are others who could be charged with murder.”
Anthrax-laced letters were also mailed to then-Sen. Tom Daschle and news media outlets, including The Post.
“The people at Fort Detrick would love to see some suit brought, some way of reckoning, adjudicating this,” said Ivins’ Maryland-based lawyer, Paul Kemp. The Pentagon had refused a request to allow Ivins’ colleagues to speak to Kemp.
The case the feds presented rested mainly on these FBI claims:
* The dry anthrax used in the mailings shared key genetic variables unique to a wet anthrax strain created by Ivins in his lab at Fort Detrick.
* Ivins logged an increasingly large amount of after-hours overtime in his lab in the weeks leading up to the anthrax mailings.
* Ivins submitted false samples of anthrax from his lab to the FBI for forensic analysis in order to mislead investigators.
* Ivins was psychologically troubled and told co-workers that he had “incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times” and that he feared he might not be able to control his behavior. They cited his preoccupation with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma – which included altering its Wikipedia page, e-mailing former members and spreading Internet chatter about the sorority – as indications of an unstable and obsessive mind.
In interviews with a dozen of Ivins’ colleagues at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, his friends and independent scientists, The Post found many of them would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they believed they were still under FBI surveillance and their phones were being tapped .
Together, those closest to Ivins cited a laundry list of holes in the feds’ conclusions. They include:

Much more at the link…
a fascinating and important read in regards to the ongoing “investigations” into the anthrax mailings of ’01.
But, what the bleedin’ hell is “‘thrax?” Is it cool to have funky abbreviated nicknames for bioweapons? Are words of two syllables simply too long? Is using the “a” and “n” just two letters too many?
But lets face it, there will never be a real investigation into these crimes. It’s just like 911. It would lead to some of the top people in the country, and such revelations would be potentially too damaging to “the system.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 18 2008 3:22 utc | 20

Compare
Mineta testimony on Cheney stand down/shoot down censored
&
Contrast
Career Army officer sues Rumsfeld, Cheney, saying no evacuation order given on 9/11

Career Army officer sues Rumsfeld, Cheney, saying no evacuation order given on 9/11
Stephen C. Webster
Published: Wednesday December 17, 2008
A career Army officer who survived the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, claims that no evacuation was ordered inside the Pentagon, despite flight controllers calling in warnings of approaching hijacked aircraft nearly 20 minutes before the building was struck.
According to a timeline of the attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration notified NORAD that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked at 9:24 a.m. The Pentagon was not struck until 9:43 a.m.
On behalf of retired Army officer April Gallop, California attorney William Veale has filed a civil suit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and former US Air Force General Richard Myers, who was acting chairman of the joint chiefs on 9/11. It alleges they engaged in conspiracy to facilitate the terrorist attacks by not warning those inside the Pentagon, contributing to injuries she and her two-month-old son incurred.
“The ex-G.I. plaintiff alleges she has been denied government support since then, because she raised ‘painful questions’ about the inexplicable failure of military defenses at the Pentagon that day, and especially the failure of officials to warn and evacuate the occupants of the building when they knew the attack was imminent” said Veale in a media advisory.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK ___
APRIL GALLOP, for Herself and as Mother and Next Friend of ELISHA GALLOP, a Minor, No. _____________
Plaintiff, Jury Trial Demanded
vs.
DICK CHENEY, Vice President of the U.S.A., DONALD RUMSFELD, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, General RICHARD MYERS, U.S.A.F. (Ret.), and John Does Nos. 1– X, all in their individual capacities, Defendants.
__________________________________________
COMPLAINT FOR VIOLATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS, CONSPIRACY, AND OTHER WRONGS

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 18 2008 4:11 utc | 22

Spy v Spy:

Iraq has arrested about 50 interior ministry officials for plotting a coup against the government, a senior Iraqi security official says.
“Fifty interior ministry civil servants, including senior officials, were arrested over the past three days for trying to topple the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,” the official said.
General Ahmad Abul Rif, the ministry’s security chief, was among those seized, he said.
“They were linked to the Al-Awda (The Return), a clandestine group that was working to bring the Baath Party back into power,” he said.
They had been “quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party” and were in “the early stages of planning a coup,” officials told The New York Times….

Badger has also picked up the story with more details.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Dec 18 2008 11:06 utc | 24

TypePad has began sporadically demanding that I sign-in before I can post a comment. Not being a member, I can’t sign-in; and I’d rather not register for anything. Can this be resolved?

Posted by: Alamet | Dec 18 2008 21:17 utc | 26

CSM
Afghanistan: Soviet failures echo for US
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Recent headlines from Afghanistan have read like a history lesson from the Soviet 1980s.
That war “devolved into a fight for control of … the road network,” concludes a 1995 US Army study. Militants are now stepping up attacks against American supply routes, destroying some 200 trucks in Pakistan this month.
Anti-Soviet militants controlled “the rural areas,” says a former Soviet official. Today’s militants have a “permanent presence” in 72 percent of the country, according to a Dec. 8 study.
There are differences between then and now. Yet 20 years later, many problems are similar: The US and NATO control neither the countryside nor the militants’ hideouts in Pakistan, and as civilian casualties increase, Afghan anger is mounting.
To succeed, America needs solutions that eluded the Soviets. “It doesn’t really matter what you do in Kabul or the provincial capitals,” says David Isby, author of “War in a Distant Country – Afghanistan: Invasion and Resistance.”
The problem, Mr. Isby adds, is that the Soviets “weren’t able to control the grass roots.”
a decent msm article

Posted by: annie | Dec 19 2008 0:18 utc | 28

Can this be resolved?
Welcome to the typepad sucks ass and is getting worse club…
I’ve cut back on posting here as much for that very reason. It seems upwards of 50% of the time typepad has some problem or another. And it’s just become to cumbersome.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 19 2008 1:05 utc | 30

Source to above

Posted by: estouxim | Dec 19 2008 3:39 utc | 32

Zionism: Shady land deal unfolds from West Bank to California strip mall

The transformation of a piece of West Bank land from a Palestinian field into a Jewish settlement has roots in an unlikely place – Orange County, California – and in a document that a man supposedly signed more than four decades after the date of his death.
…
In this case, a 2004 document shows a Palestinian farmer named Abdel Latif Sumarin sold a plot long tended by his family near the village of Burqa, east of the city of Ramallah, to a company with an Arabic name. The paper contains Sumarin’s signature in clear English script and that of a California notary.
But an Associated Press investigation that made use of court papers, public records and interviews in the West Bank, Israel and the U.S., shows that the document is a poorly executed forgery.
There’s no evidence Sumarin ever visited America, his family says he couldn’t write English, and public records show he died in 1961. The notary in California says he did not sign the paper either.

Posted by: b | Dec 19 2008 12:30 utc | 34

i meant scot- free, not shot free. although he did commit suicide, or so they say.

Posted by: annie | Dec 19 2008 19:05 utc | 36

i can easily believe that malooga, however it is OT wrt the issue i was addressing.

Posted by: annie | Dec 19 2008 19:42 utc | 38

thank you for the heart-felt comments annie. one thing that does represent change is me, and many members of my generation. If my son is gay, he has two loving parents that won’t blink when it comes to supporting him.
i’m so god-damned tire of religious intolerance, that the fact this homophobe asshole is given a national stage disgusts me. the fight continues…

Posted by: Lizard | Dec 19 2008 20:38 utc | 40

The first wave.Praise the lawd.

U.S. Military Now in the Christian Reality TV Business
By Chris Rodda Mon Dec 15, 2008 at 12:54:04 PM EST
Talk To Action
U.S. military involvement in entertainment productions is nothing new. This has been going on since the earliest days of film, with a collaboration between Hollywood and the government’s Committee on Public Relations to produce a series of World War I films using footage shot in Europe by the army’s Signal Corps. Back in 1918, the reason the government agreed to get involved in these civilian productions was their benefit in boosting civilian morale and maintaining support for the war. Today, legitimate reasons to justify the military’s participation or assistance in entertainment productions range from making the military look cool to aid in recruitment and retention efforts to simply helping film and television producers to accurately depict military characters or activities.
According to Department of Defense (DoD) policies and regulations, the rigorous approval process for the use of military personnel and assets in an entertainment production typically starts with the approval of the production’s script by the appropriate branch’s Entertainment Liaison’s Office. The project then has to make it through several levels of approval in the DoD’s Public Affairs Office, including a screening of the final product before it is released or aired on television. But, despite the DoD’s many policies and regulations, which all look good on paper, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) continues to uncover case after case of military involvement in religious entertainment productions that not only violate DoD Public Affairs regulations, but a host of other military regulations, as well as the Constitution.
Travel the Road
“Travel the Road,” a popular Christian reality TV series produced by the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), follows the travels of Will Decker and Tim Scott, two “extreme” missionaries. As these missionary adventurers circle the world, they get chased by lions, attacked by leeches, and eat stuff as disgusting as anything on Survivor — all while fulfilling their mission: “Preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission.”
Season 2 of this series ended with three episodes filmed in Afghanistan: “Journey to the Line: Afghanistan: Part 1,” “Terrors of the Night: Afghanistan: Part 2,” and “Fog of War: Afghanistan: Part 3.” For these episodes, the TV star missionaries were actually permitted to be embedded with U.S. troops. They stayed on U.S. military bases, traveled with a public affairs unit, and accompany and film troops on patrols — all for the purposes of evangelizing Afghans and producing a television show promoting the Christian religion.
The Department of Defense Public Affairs regulations violated by the military in its participation and assistance in producing this religious program alone are staggering, not to mention other military violations documented in the content of the program, which include the outrageous violation of the United States Central Command’s General Order 1-A, which absolutely prohibits any proselytization whatsoever in the Middle Eastern theater of operations. In complete disregard of this bedrock standing order, the U.S. Army facilitated the evangelizing of Afghans by these Christian missionaries, which included the distribution of New Testaments in the Dari language, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.

I’m to tired to look it up right now, but does anyone remember right before the onset of the Iraq war the first wave was missionaries.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 19 2008 23:17 utc | 42

Gee, I can’t wait for the first Gay Secretary of War Defense.
Mores in a society always change. In Athens, men were suppossed to be bi-sexual. But the poor are always despised.
It is great that Gays are accepted. The Stonewall riots happened only seven years before I moved to NY’s Village, but by 1976, it seemed like ancient history. Jeez, we had a Gay Mayor by then (not completely out). Six short years later, AIDS appeared. Anyway, things have come a long way, even outside of NY, SF, LA, Ft. Laud, and P-town.
But the point I am making is not OT. We have at least two known Gay Senators now (both Repub). Both are despicable human beings, as are Colin Powell and Condi Rice (blacks), and Joe Lieberman and Chuck Schumer (Jews). Hell, Hitler was a vegetarian. I guess that meant that he was non-violent, or something.
Capitalism will appropriate everything — even identity politics, in the violent pursuit of its furtherance. But that acceptance will only be skin deep, as Capitalism needs to set interest group against interest group in order to rule.
If you doubt me, read Chris Floyd’s latest post.

In a brief post yesterday, I wrote that African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to apologize for making such a controversial — and flagrantly incorrect — statement. Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild. For as a new article in The Nation forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class citizens in the United States; they are treated as wild animals to be hunted down and shot in cold blood.

Of course, this was when we had a Black Sec’y of State. What did our Black President, then Senator, have to say about this?
Being made a “made” member of the ruling class means that your ties to that class — and its interests to stay comfortable, wealthy, unchallenged, and in power — must surpass your ties to anything else, any other group to which you belong, even your humanity.
But most of you think that I am being insensitive, that I’m hurting your delicate sensibilities. I really should shape up and look up to my rulers, and respect them for the state violence they wield, like y’all do. I know. I’m working on it. I really am.
Anyway, when y’all stop chattering, read your Walter Benn Michaels:

The rich are different from you and me, and one of the ways they’re different is that they’re getting richer and we’re not. And while it’s not surprising that most of the rich and their apologists on the intellectual right are unperturbed by this development, it is at least a little surprising that the intellectual left has managed to remain almost equally unperturbed. Giving priority to issues like affirmative action and committing itself to the celebration of difference, the intellectual left has responded to the increase in economic inequality by insisting on the importance of cultural identity. So for thirty years, while the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, we’ve been urged to respect people’s identities—as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor. From the economic standpoint, however, what poor people want is not to contribute to diversity but to minimize their contribution to it—they want to stop being poor. Celebrating the diversity of American life has become the American left’s way of accepting their poverty, of accepting inequality.
I have three goals in writing this book. The first is to show how our current notion of cultural diversity—trumpeted as the repudiation of racism and biological essentialism—in fact grew out of and perpetuates the very concepts it congratulates itself on having escaped. The second is to show how and why the American love affair with race—especially when you can dress race up as culture—has continued and even intensified. Almost everything we say about culture (that the significant differences between us are cultural, that such differences should be respected, that our cultural heritages should be perpetuated, that there’s a value in making sure that different cultures survive) seems to me mistaken, and this book will try to show why. And the third goal is—by shifting our focus from cultural diversity to economic equality—to help alter the political terrain of contemporary American intellectual life…
In the Class Matters series of the New York Times, for example, the class differences that mattered most turned out to be the ones between the rich and the really rich and between the new rich and the old rich or between rich people who choose to save some money by shopping at Costco and rich people who have to save some money to shop at Chanel. Indeed, at one point in the series, the Times started treating class not as an issue to be addressed in addition to (much less instead of) race but as itself a version of race, as if the rich and the poor really were, as Fitzgerald thought, different races, and so as if the occasional marriage between them were a kind of interracial marriage. Indeed, the only thing missing was an account of the children of mixed (wealth) marriages, half rich, half poor, confronting a world in which they can’t quite find a place. And, actually, the Times even provided a version of that in its profile of one of the (rare) people who has moved up in class, treating her predicament with all the pathos of the torn-between-two-worlds “not fully at ease”-in-either stories that have been a staple of American literature since the first tragic mulatta found herself at home nowhere. Americans like stories in which the big problem is whether or not you fit in. It’s as if being born poor and managing to become middle-class were like being born light skinned into a dark-skinned family—too white to be black, too black to be white. Or (our favorite story of all) like being the child of immigrants, with a loyalty to two different cultures.
But classes, as I will be arguing, are not like races and cultures, and treating them as if they were like races or cultures—different but equal—is one of our strategies for managing inequality rather than minimizing or eliminating it. White is not better than black, but rich is definitely better than poor. Poor people are an endangered species in elite universities not because the universities put quotas on them (as they did with Jews in the old days) and not even because they can’t afford to go to them (Harvard will lend you or even give you the money you need to go there) but because they can’t get into them…
But it’s the response to Katrina that is most illuminating for our purposes, especially the response from the left, not from the David Brooks right. “Let’s be honest,” Cornel West told an audience at the Paul Robeson Student Center at Rutgers University, “we live in one of the bleakest moments in the history of black people in this nation.” “Look at the Super Dome,” he went on to say, it’s “a living hell for black people. It’s not a big move from the hull of the slave ship to the living hell of the Super Dome.”7 This is what we might call the “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” interpretation of the government’s failed response to the catastrophe. But nobody doubts that George Bush cares about Condoleezza Rice, who is very much a black person and who is fond of pointing out that she’s been black since birth. And there are, of course, lots of other black people—like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell and Janice Rogers Brown and, at least once upon a time, Colin Powell—for whom George Bush almost certainly has warm feelings. But what American liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists. We want the black people George Bush cares about to be “some of my best friends are black” tokens. We want a fictional George Bush who doesn’t care about black people rather than the George Bush we’ve actually got, one who doesn’t care about poor people.
Although that’s not quite the right way to put it. First because, for all I know, George Bush does care about poor people; at least he cares as much about poor people as anyone else does. What he doesn’t care about—and what Bill Clinton, judging by his eight years in office, didn’t much care about, and what John Kerry, judging from his presidential campaign, doesn’t much care about and what we on the so-called left, judging by our willingness to accept Kerry as the alternative to Bush, don’t care about either—is taking any steps to get them to stop being poor. We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality.
Indeed, diversity has become virtually a sacred concept in American life today. No one’s really against it; people tend instead to differ only in their degrees of enthusiasm for it and their ingenuity in pursuing it. Microsoft, for example, is very ingenious indeed. Almost every company has the standard racial and sexual “employee relations groups,” just as every college has the standard student groups: African American, Black and Latino Brotherhood, Alliance of South Asians, Chinese Adopted Sibs (this one’s pretty cutting-edge) and the standard GLBTQ (the Q is for Questioning) support center. But (as reported in a 2003 article in Workforce Management) Microsoft also includes groups for “single parents, dads, Singaporean, Malaysian, Hellenic, and Brazilian employees, and one for those with attention deficit disorder.” And the same article goes on to quote Patricia Pope, CEO of a diversity-management firm in Cincinnati, describing companies that “tackle other differences” like “diversity of birth order” and, most impressive of all, “diversity of thought.” If it’s a little hard to imagine the diversity of birth order workshops (all the oldest siblings trying to take care of each other, all the youngest competing to be the baby), it’s harder still to imagine how the diversity of thought workshops go. What if the diversity of thought is about your sales plan? Are you supposed to reach agreement (but that would eliminate diversity) or celebrate disagreement (but that would eliminate the sales plan)?…
In fact, the closest thing we have to a holiday that addresses economic inequality instead of racial or sexual identity is Labor Day, which is a product not of the multicultural cheerleading at the end of the twentieth century but of the labor unrest at the end of the nineteenth. The union workers who took a day off to protest President Grover Cleveland’s deployment of twelve thousand troops to break the Pullman strike weren’t campaigning to have their otherness respected. And when, in 1894, their day off was made official, the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, looked forward not just to a “holiday” but to “the day to which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and wrongs would be discussed.” The idea was not that they’d celebrate their history but that they’d figure out how to build a stronger labor movement and make the dream of economic justice a reality.
Obviously, it didn’t work out that way, either for labor (which is weaker than it’s ever been) or for Labor Day (which mainly marks the end of summer). You get bigger crowds, a lot livelier party and a much stronger sense of solidarity for Gay Pride Day. But Gay Pride Day isn’t about economic equality, and celebrating diversity shouldn’t be an acceptable alternative to seeking economic equality. In an ideal universe we wouldn’t be celebrating diversity at all—we wouldn’t even be encouraging it—because in an ideal universe the question of who you wanted to sleep with would be a matter of concern only to you and to your loved (or unloved) ones. As would your skin color; some people might like it, some people might not, but it would have no political significance whatsoever. Diversity of skin color is something we should happily take for granted, the way we do diversity of hair color. When you go to school or to work—just like when you go to vote—the question of whether you’re black or white, straight or gay, a man or a woman shouldn’t matter any more than the question of whether you are blond or brunette. An important issue of social justice hangs on not discriminating against people because of their hair color or their skin color or their sexuality. No issue of social justice hangs on appreciating hair color diversity; no issue of social justice hangs on appreciating racial or cultural diversity.
If you’re worried about the growing economic inequality in American life, if you suspect that there may be something unjust as well as unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, no cause is less worth supporting, no battle is less worth fighting than the ones we fight for diversity. While some cultural conservatives may wish that everyone should be assimilated to their fantasy of one truly American culture, and while the supposed radicals of the “tenured left” continue to struggle for what they hope will finally become a truly inclusive multiculturalism, the really radical idea of redistributing wealth becomes almost literally unthinkable. In the early 1930s, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana proposed a law making it illegal for anyone to earn more than a million dollars a year and for anyone to inherit more than five million dollars. Imagine the response if—even suitably adjusted for inflation—any senator were to propose such a law today, cutting off incomes at, say, $15 million a year and inheritances at $75 million. It’s not just the numbers that wouldn’t fly; it’s the whole concept. Such a restriction today would seem as outrageous and unnatural as interracial—not to mention gay—marriage seemed or would have seemed then. But we don’t need to purchase our progress in civil rights at the expense of a commitment to economic justice. More fundamentally still, we should not allow—or we should not continue to allow—the phantasm of respect for difference to take the place of that commitment to economic justice. In short, this book is an effort to move beyond diversity—to make it clear that the commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position—and to help put equality back on the national agenda.

Posted by: Malooga | Dec 20 2008 1:30 utc | 44

for the first time ever, i have come to the moon and not seen r’giap listed on the right. i’ve been buried under a mountain of end of semester projects and am out of touch. is he okay? can anyone shed light?

Posted by: sharon | Dec 20 2008 2:23 utc | 46

malooga, maybe something i said suggested to you i think gay marriage is the most important issue to me right now, or more important than poor people.
maybe i should make myself a little clearer at the risk of offending lizard. i responded to his post partly because i am rick warren’d out. if one checks out the obama WH blog or kos you would think the sky had fallen over this invocation prayer. with everything going on re the economy and iraq the hallabaloo over this prayer guy, ONE homophobe has completely dominated the discourse. my original point in responding to the fuck warren poem was white phosphorous
or the growth of mass graves at our origin in
bleeding Africa do seem like things that never change but all this attention on one fucking guy doing a prayer, it just empowers him and his people to focus on the one issue while the fucking sky is burning down. so it isn’t just the faithful haters of what could be lusting for dumb rapture so afraid of the day their rose will die they won’t see the horrors, it is also the faithful lovers of social equality (good intentions all around) so afraid their day may never come they don’t see the horrors either.
my point was that this social battle is changing and will continue to change, not that it is what should be our first priority.
that said, this is the OT thread and fucking pardon me for interupting your rant on the poor by discussing part of lizards poem w/him. i’m just warren’d out thats all. fuck it. i could fucking care less who fucking says a fucking prayer at the fucking inauguration.
Gee, I can’t wait for the first Gay Secretary of War Defense.
yeah, i fucking got it malooga. while were at it lets just take a stab in the heart of civil rights because everyone and their brother knows it will never hold a candle to your pain.

Posted by: annie | Dec 20 2008 3:16 utc | 48

sorry. i shouldn’t have gone off like that. i’m going to turn off my computer and have a drink, bury my head and hope you’ll all forgive me by the morn.

Posted by: annie | Dec 20 2008 4:09 utc | 50

@44Anyway, when y’all stop chattering…
malooga, in this particular case i think a fellow bar mate should be spared your crosshairs. i didn’t realize to what degree this has been a talking point thing at Kos @ Co. because i don’t travel those spheres, so maybe take that into account when measuring annie’s response to my fresh-to-the-news anger.
but i guess if all i’m doing is chattering, there’s not much incentive for you to hear what it is i’m saying.

Posted by: Lizard | Dec 20 2008 6:34 utc | 52

Opposing (a little perversely) the argument advanced in the article cited by b @53, I should say that the Pentagon is best overwhelmed by tasks beyond its competence, at a speed and magnitude precluding any possible assimiliation of the tasks proposed.
Let chaos reign: complex tasks assigned to incompetent people, minimal liaison between missions, a budget so irrational that it can only be spent on wasteful and self-destructive exercises of utter corruption–thus, and only thus, will the war machine be fated to flounder and crash into a state of utter paralysis and irreversible ruin.
The damage thus done to the American economy–not to mention its “leadership” role on the international scene–will once and for all eliminate its status as a super-power. Our self-appointed role as a “beacon of democracy” will run out of candle-power, and the few lost souls who let themselves be guided by its signals, will be shattered on the very rocks, reefs and shoals they hope to avoid.
This all comes at a cost, of course, but since that cost has already long been exacted, and will continue to be exacted, I see no reason to suppose that it can be reduced or reversed in any productive way.
The US is quickly arriving at the point of implosion. It long ago lost the credibility of its claims as a ” peacekeeper” of the world; its pretensions to being a democracy–Obama notwithstanding–have long been the laughing stock of world’s other democracies. More to the point, the country’s wealth will soon be gone–posing for the rest of the world’s economies the interesting adventure of having to work it out on their own.
As went the Ottoman, the Russian, the British, the Spanish and the Austro-Hungarian empires, so let the American empire sink in the tarpits and quicksands of its own misquided and antisocial mission. Let its missionaries, be they Mormons or foreign-service officers, be swiftly dispatched according to the indigenous practices of all who know how to do such things in their own very grisly ways.
There should be no American response to such insults–no possible response, given the clueless incompetence of their fellow-countrymen to come to their rescue. Let the American public watch, on Al Jezeera, the exquisite beheading of every man, woman and child connected with mischief beyond the American borders.

Posted by: alabama | Dec 20 2008 12:12 utc | 54

Throwing shoes. Pfft. Amateurs. Real democracy doesn’t happen without sledgehammers and electric saws.
Snip:

Scuffles broke out as dozens of opposition members and their aides attempted to push their way into the office. TV footage showed people from both sides shoving, pushing and shouting in a crowded hall at the National Assembly building amid a barrage of flashing cameras.
Opponents later used a sledgehammer and other construction tools to tear open the room’s wooden doors, only to find barricades of furniture set up inside as a second line of defense.
Cable news channel YTN reported that an electric saw was used to open the door. YTN footage showed security guards spraying fire extinguishers at those trying to force their way inside and one man with blood trickling down his face.
The opposition attempt failed, and 10 GNP legislators introduced the bill to the committee.

Americans do like to make sport of this kind of behaviour, which they feel is entirely inappropriate in a legislative setting and should only be reserved for use at Wal-Marts on the first shopping day of the Christmas holiday season.

Posted by: Monolycus | Dec 20 2008 16:48 utc | 56

Also, an analysis of the Russia/Iran relationship: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JL20Ag01.html
And, the situation facing Obama in South America: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JL19Ad01.html

Posted by: Malooga | Dec 20 2008 16:56 utc | 58

Good morning annie.
🙂

Posted by: beq | Dec 20 2008 17:27 utc | 60

btw re 59, wsj’s marketwatch is actually reporting this story! shock of shocks, they usually stay clear of anything having to do w/the ongoing ohio election theft story.

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation
Last update: 11:24 a.m. EST Dec. 20, 2008
WASHINGTON, Dec 20, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ — Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution (“VR”), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”
A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.
On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.
An associate of Mr. Connell’s told VR that Mr. Connell was involved with the destruction of the White House emails and the setting up of the off-grid White House email system.
Mr. Connell handled all of John McCain’s computer work in the recent presidential campaign. VR has received direct evidence that the McCain campaign kept abreast of the legal developments against Mr. Connell by reading the VR dedicated website, http://www.rovecybergate.com.
VR demands that the Ohio Attorney General and the United States Justice Department conduct a complete investigation into the activities of Mr. Connell and determine whether there was any foul play in his death. VR demands that federal law enforcement officials place the following people under protective custody pending this investigation. Heather Connell who
is the owner of GovTech Solutions, Randy Cole, the former President of GovTech Solutions, and Jeff Averbeck, the CEO of SmartTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Both GovTech and SmartTech have been implicated in the rigging of the 2000 and 2004 elections and the White House email scandal. Our prior request to have Mr. Connell protected went unheeded and now he is dead.

will the really WH water carrying fishwrap msm(nyt/wapo) actually cover this???

Posted by: annie | Dec 20 2008 17:56 utc | 62

Malooga, thank you for the Walter Ben Michaels excerpt @ 44, it is a very good read! I’ve come across a lot of pieces here and there over the years, pointing out how this exaltation of divisive diversity did not just happen by chance. It was pushed, promoted, and funded very generously. And because it worked so well in the imperial center, it is now actively being nurtured in the peripheries. See this appendix to an Indian report on the World Social Forum for example:
Ford Foundation — A Case Study of the Aims of Foreign Funding

(snip)
Ford has chosen to focus on three particularly oppressed sections of Indian society — adivasis, dalits, and women. All three are potentially important components of a movement for basic change in Indian society; indeed, some of the most militant struggles in recent years have been waged by these sections. However, FF takes care to treat the problems of each of these sections as a separate question, to be solved by special “promotion of rights and opportunities”. Since FF’s funds are negligible in relation to the size of the social problems themselves, the benefits of its projects flow to a small vocal layer among these sections. These are persons who might otherwise have led their fellow adivasis, dalits and women on the path of “confrontation with the government” in order to bring about basic change, change for all. Instead special chairs in dalit studies will be funded at various institutions; women will be encouraged to focus solely on issues such as domestic violence rather than ruling class/State violence; adivasis will be encouraged to explore their identity at seminars; and things will remain as they are.

With more here.

Posted by: Alamet | Dec 20 2008 21:29 utc | 64

‘Boots throwing syndrome’ hits journalists worldwide

After Muthathar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, threw both his shoes at President George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad, the method of protest seems to be gaining popularity in other countries. In Odessa, during the opening ceremony of the Euro Atlantic Cooperation Centre which took place in the South-Ukrainian Pedagogical University, a journalist expressed his protest is a similar way.
Around 100 students were present at the ceremony. Oleg Soskin, a member of the Ukraine-NATO Social League Coordination Council, was making a speech when he was interrupted by a journalist from one of the local TV channels, who shouted: “Students, you’re young and promising, don’t you listen to these stupid and marasmic old men!” The journalist then took off his boots and threw them at Soskin.
Later the journalist, whose name is yet unknown, said that “the issue of boots’ is very vital in the world these days. Just remember how Bush had shoes thrown at him in Iraq… and as for our case, a boot is the most effective way to fight NATO’s expansion in Ukraine.”
(snip)

Posted by: Alamet | Dec 21 2008 0:23 utc | 66

preparation for battles in the near-future?
stars and stripes: Rota to have role in Africa missions

The Navy base and hospital in Rota, Spain, will be the primary go-to location for servicemembers freed after being held as prisoners of war or hostages while carrying out missions in Africa, officials said.
Rota was selected as U.S. Africa Command’s primary reintegration location because of Spain’s geographical proximity to Africa, and because the base’s airfield and hospital are within a mile of each other.
Rota is the alternate location for U.S. European Command for reintegration, the process of treating and debriefing members who had been prisoners of war or hostages. EUCOM’s primary medical site, Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, now will serve as AFRICOM’s alternate location, according to AFRICOM spokesman Vince Crawley.
“Let’s say a person is a POW or a hostage in Africa. When they’re returned or recovered, they’d go through the [reintegration] process here,” Rota spokesman Lt. Mike Morley said. “You don’t want to fly someone home and drop them at their front door without going through the process of being medically and psychologically helped.”
“Rota is a perfect spot,” John J.K. Whitley, a personnel recovery specialist for Africa Command, said in a statement released by the Navy.
…
Reintegration is broken into three phases, officials said, with the first beginning in the country were the member is recovered. Usually, after 48 hours the recovered person is taken to a military medical treatment facility to undergo a “decompression period” and what is called Survival Evasion Resistance Escape debriefing. The final phase is returning the member to his or her home.
“This process was developed to help them tell their story and get the help they needed so they can go back to their unit,” Whitley said in the statement. “Sometimes there is some guilt; sometimes there [is] a feeling that they weren’t able to save their buddy or aircraft. The decompression time is for them to normalize.”

Posted by: b real | Dec 21 2008 7:07 utc | 68

Thought this interesting on today’s winter solstice, particularly the 1st 2 principles:

MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000
IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE
GUIDE REPRODUCTION WISELY —
IMPROVING FITNESS AND DIVERSITY
a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, ancient Chinese, and Russian.

Georgia Guidestone
Of course before such maintenance, 6.2 billion would have to be culled.

Posted by: plushtown | Dec 21 2008 16:12 utc | 70

sharon
a belated response
this has been a terrible year for me physically. i have been in hospital 8 times – more than in the rest of my life. a lot of that still is unresolved – they find it impossible to regularise my diabetes – the medecines i take make my day to day life extremely difficult – & there are the risks on my heart which are not nothing
i work but i know i have less capacity than i had even 5 years ago – not in the listening, i hope that remains precise & clear but in the absorption i know i am considerably weakened. & at a time when all of the communities i work with are in great crisis & the next year i think we are going to see even worse. i do not know what lizard sees in america but here we are almost doubling the numbers in shelters, indeed they have opened up new spaces but with less support. the hospital, the prisons & the lycees are under great, great stress
& as you know i try to write – except i have about 50 or more works that are not completed – perhaps they never will but i fear not having the time to refine them in the way i want
the poems i post here are unfinished- are sketches, really towards other works
i do not post here as often not because i have lost interest, on the contrary the scope that is covered here especially by b & other posters make looking through the lens – clearer & i am thankful for that
i think if the moon was not here i would be lost in the pure emotional chaos of the work amongst the wretched of the earth. it is ironic & perhaps not that these people have helped me with the technical breakthroughs that walter benjamin demanded of a communist writer but on an emotional level – i feel like i have been dragged beind general dostrums tank half way through afghanistan
i sense, especially with malooga but with many others here – the pure madness of our times affects us physically, sociallly & self evidently economically
if i cannot post – i do as i do in the other communities – i listen
sharon, you know what it is like here so i thank you for yr thoughts, really
i hope the studies are well & the work not so oppressive
force et amité

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2008 19:32 utc | 72

the old bugger, the grande general is in fact 97 or 98

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 22 2008 0:04 utc | 74

more on #67 above
east african standard: US role in ‘07 election questioned

More details have emerged about the controversial exit poll on last year’s General Election that was conducted by an American organisation — the alleged role of US Ambassador Michael Rannerberger and an ODM delegation visit to the US to seek the release of the poll.
…
Even as ODM disputed the election results and entered talks with PNU, it sent a team to Washington to press for the release of the exit poll.
Raila’s former spokesman Salim Lone yesterday disclosed that an ODM team was sent to the US in February at the height of chaos to plead with IRI to release the exit poll.
“Pentagon member Joe Nyaga and myself visited the US to brief Congressional leaders and the Bush administration officials over the election and international mediation,” Mr Lone said in a statement.
He went on: “In a briefing with US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, we repeatedly raised the issue of the IRI poll. We felt its release would have been beneficial. But they said only IRI could decide what it should do,” Lone said.
He went on: “In our meeting with IRI officials, VP Elizabeth Dugen trashed the exit poll as well as the methodology. But we expressed our incredulity over this, since qualified pollsters had prepared the methodology, and IRI had long experience with such polls.”

it’s a year too late for this stuff to be coming out now. too bad there were no investigative journalists in nairobi or elsewhere in kenya to ask harder questions & dig this kind of stuff up themselves. salim lone’s reportedly writing a memoir of the entire experience. he doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy to pull his punches, esp when it comes to u.s. foreign policies. i’m sure the reporters at the standard have access to alot more details than they let on.
the article finally acknowledges the december 10th story in the nation, which i pointed out in the previous OT thread here, featuring the IRI’s kenya official making it pretty clear that ambassador ranneberger was not interested in recognizing a fundamental pillar of democracy

Flottman recalls that in the months leading up to the vote, the US Embassy conveyed the impression that it believed Kibaki would win. “As time went on, some of the polling we were doing showed it was more complicated, but I got the sense that the embassy wasn’t interested in hearing it,” he says.
…
At times, according to Flottman, US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger appeared to him to be actively trying to help Kibaki’s chances. In one case, he says, when a horse-race poll done by the country’s top commercial pollster showed Odinga pulling ahead, Ranneberger “was keen to release our poll, which showed Kibaki was more popular.” Flottman declined.

the standard notes that

Yesterday, Ranneberger categorically denied involvement in influencing the presidential polls: “That is utterly nonsense. It is speculation and innuendo against me. There is absolutely no truth in the matter.”

will kenyans or the press there let him off that easily?

Posted by: b real | Dec 22 2008 5:35 utc | 76

Imad Khadduri’s Free Iraq blog gives a useful analysis of the recent “Baathist coup attempt” against Maliki, and an amusing Iraqi point of view on Maliki’s most notable recent efforts.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 22 2008 15:09 utc | 78

Rememberinggiap, be well my friend.

Posted by: Alamet | Dec 22 2008 17:17 utc | 80

what a wonderful voice

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 22 2008 23:37 utc | 82

“Don’t bend your head down…resistance is the only way”. That is what I have read on one of the sites that’s covering the Greek uprising. It’s something I’ve written about. The Greek rebellion has something in it that wakes up, shakes up, my sagging spirit.
R’giap, my friend, isn’t it amazing to read about a TV reporter unclipping the mike from his lapel and passing it along to a protester, who starts delivering his own comment? It could never happen over here, I guess; but the dream of solidarity is like a reviving elixir.

Posted by: Copeland | Dec 23 2008 0:02 utc | 84

tough year. howard zinn’s wife, rosyln, passed back in may & now carol chomsky. rip.

Posted by: b real | Dec 23 2008 6:05 utc | 86

Annals of Stupid Headlines – McClatchy: Iran’s unpopular president is favored to win re-election

Posted by: b | Dec 23 2008 7:05 utc | 88

Stage 2 Collapse ?

With the decline of one of the last vestiges of our manufacturing base, the auto industry, Detroit and the surrounding areas are described as “ground zero” for the meltdown that has been occurring. Places that just a few years ago seemed like icons — various restautants, movie theaters — are being shut down and boarded up. Meijers, Walmarts, Target are all cutting back their employees’ hours and making them work 32 hours a week instead of 40. Christmas sales are down this year, and retailers are just about giving their stuff away. There are rumors that many will further cut their already worried employees, and that others will go bankrupt.
In the last few years, roughly half of my neighborhood has gone up for foreclosure, and I live in a middle class neighborhood. I am still haunted my the memory of a neighbor down the street driving away with her 3 children, tears streaming down her face. She was a victim of the auto layoffs. I learned later that she stated that she had nowhere to go. Just a few months ago, the street was alive with the sound of children playing. Then the streets became silent. Homes that went up for sale are just sitting there, not being sold.
Many others are moving back in with parents, relatives, friends or family. Those who do not have such resources head for the homeless shelters, which, like the soup kitchens here, are bursting at the seams. Many people, when asked, will state with utter despair that they never thought they would have been in this predicament just a few months ago.
People who commit crimes do not want to leave jail. This is a first, to prefer prison over cold and hunger. Of those unemployed that do not prefer prison life, they will do just about anything to earn a dollar. There were stories on the local news last night about these people standing out in the frigid cold suffering from frostbite for a mere $40 to hold a “going out of business” sign for yet another store going belly-up. Other women whom I had met on the net and dated in my single years (my happy years) are degenerating from once happy and secure ladies to ones full of anguish and despair. Some are begging people to let them clean their houses, some are even thinking about selling themselves. There has been a large increase in prostitution in this area.
Local, country, and state governments are scaling back. I have noticed that it takes them what seems like forever to clear the highways after the recent snow storm. The medians along the highways are starting to look like they do in Iraq: cars spun out into ditches and medians, and abandoned.
I am one of the few who still has a job, as a nurse. Employers are developing a sadistic mentality: if you have a job, you had better work harder, or else you are out the door! Meanwhile, broke state governments are strapped for funds are doing everything they can to “regulate” our jobs, making an already hard and stressful job next to impossible.
In sum, things are bad and about to get much worse. Mr. Orlov is 100% on the money in my book.

Thoughts?

Posted by: Cloud | Dec 23 2008 20:10 utc | 90