The American Police State
October 30, 2007
Chris Hedges on the rise of the US police state.
A Dallas jury, a week ago, caused a mistrial in the government case against this country’s largest Islamic charity. The action raises a defiant fist on the sinking ship of American democracy.
If we lived in a state where due process and the rule of law could curb the despotism of the Bush administration, this mistrial might be counted a victory. But we do not. The jury may have rejected the federal government’s claim that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funneled millions of dollars to Middle Eastern terrorists. It may have acquitted Mohammad el-Mezain, the former chairman of the foundation, of virtually all criminal charges related to funding terrorism (the jury deadlocked on one of the 32 charges against el-Mezain), and it may have deadlocked on the charges that had been lodged against four other former leaders of the charity, but don’t be fooled. This mistrial will do nothing to impede the administration’s ongoing contempt for the rule of law. It will do nothing to stop the curtailment of our civil liberties and rights. The grim march toward a police state continues.
Cindy Rages
September 25, 2007
Once again, Cindy Sheehan offers a corrective for the distorted lens of US mainstream discourse. He reminds them if they are looking for a ‘Petty and Cruel Dictator‘ they need not look farther than their own capital.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the president of Iran spoke at Columbia University today. I heard that he was invited there because the President of Columbia wanted to foster a “free exchange of ideas.” Even though I am not an Ahmadinejad supporter, I know he was elected in Iran in a knee-jerk and understandable response to the USA’s bloodily unnecessary invasion of Iraq, as many reactionery governments have been elected in that region and all over the world in response to the spreading US corporate and military empire.
Citing such human rights’ violations in the form of imprisonment and executions, the President of Columbia University, very boorishly said that Ahmadinejad appeared to be a “petty and cruel dictator.” First of all, how does one invite someone to your place for a “free exchange of ideas,” and be such a rude American? Did he only invite Ahmadinejad so he could publicly scold him or to become the darling of Fox News?
Secondly, what about our President who appears to be a “petty and cruel dictator?” George Bush presided over a stunning amount of executions when he was Governor of Texas and the US is operating torture prison camps, openly and secretly, all over the world. BushCo has fought the Supreme Court and Congress for the right to hold thousands of humans without their human rights of due process and they have also been strenuously committed to the strategy of torture—or “enhanced interrogation methods” as the Ministry of Truth likes to call it. A Reverend gets beaten down in the halls of Congress; nooses are being hung in the south; students are being tased on campuses and Congress is censuring Freedom of Speech…how much evidence do we need before we decide that something is profoundly wrong in present-day America?
In 2006, China, the leading practitioner of state sanctioned murder in the form of execution, killed 8000 people in this manner. However, the Premier of China is welcomed to the US by George Bush who is probably envious of President Hu Jintao’s record . We borrow vast sums from China to wage our wars and China is our major trading partner. Wal-Mart’s cheap and dangerous crap is manufactured by near slaves there, but somehow that is okay? Somehow it is okay to welcome Communist China with open arms, but demonize and disparage a Socialist like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? America has a very lucrative prison business and is the only country in the Americas that practices execution. A barbarian is a barbarian no matter what color, religion or nationality they are.
George Bush has added signing statements to almost 1000 bills that he has signed into law saying that he doesn’t have to obey those very same laws. We have the Nazi-ist sounding Department of Homeland Security which seems to be obsessed with keeping my un-zip-locked baggied lip-gloss off of flights. The un-Patriot Act and breaking of FISA laws and our 4 th Amendment right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure have turned the “Land of the Free” into the “Home of the Slaves.”
To put the cherry on the sundae of the crimes that BushCo have committed, they have sent hundreds of thousands of our own sons and daughters to occupy a country that was no threat to America or its neighbors. Thousands of Americans are dead, wounded or mentally screwed up and millions of Iraqis are dead, wounded, mentally screwed up or displaced from their homes.
Another boorish American, Scott Pelley (of 60 Minutes) hammered Ahmadinejad about sending weapons into Iraq without even once acknowledging the immoral tons of weapons that we rained on the citizens of Iraq during “shocking and awful;” the cluster bombs that look like toys that litter the killing fields of that country and have killed and maimed so many children; the mercenary killers that outnumber our troops and use the people of Iraq for target practice; the thousands of tons of weapons that the US let out of such weapons dumps as al-Qaqaa that were left unguarded while the oil ministry was heavily fortified. Not to mention that America supported Iraq in its eight year long war with Iran that killed an unbelievable amount of people on both sides of the border. The hypocrisy of our system is spectacular and deadly in both ignorance and arrogance.
We here in America are living in a fascist state that regularly puts corporate profits and an insatiable and evil thirst for power above people and their needs. Our supercilious leaders and media are so busy calling the kettle black, they don’t notice or care how dark our pot is. We are supporting Israel in their human rights violations against Palestine, illegally occupying two countries on our own and we have the nerve to claim any kind of moral superiority over anybody?
The fascist, near dictatorship of the Bush regime (a la Nazi Germany) has even intimidated universities to align with their hypocritical murderous rhetoric. Universities should feel free to invite anyone to speak to open much needed dialogue in our country and in the world. And if a person is invited, they should be treated by the person who invited them with a slight modicum of courtesy and then let the rocking and rolling begin with the “Q & A”…which would truly be a free exchange of ideas. I am surprised President Bollinger didn’t have President Ahmadinejad tased.
Peace is going to take all the nations working in cooperation to limit naked aggression and human rights’ violations, not just the ones which the US declare as evil. How many nukes do we have? How many does Pakistan have? How many does India, Israel, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union have? Should the rhetoric be about destroying all weapons of mass destruction and not just prohibiting Iran from obtaining one?
Many countries are committing human rights’ violations and sending arms and troops into many parts of the world. America’s biggest export is violence and we would do well to call for an end to all occupations and violence by beginning to end our own.
Let’s clean our own filthy house before we criticize someone else for theirs.
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.
The War on Democracy
August 22, 2007
John Pilger’s superb new film. A must see. (Thanks Dave)
Big Brother in America
August 10, 2007
And of course I am not talking about the reality show. Here Tim Shorrock reveals the ugly reality of America Under Surveillance.
In the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 1, 2005, a U-2 surveillance aircraft known as the Dragon Lady lifted off the runway at Beale Air Force Base in California, the home of the U.S. Air Force 9th Reconnaissance Wing and one of the most important outposts in the U.S. intelligence world. Originally built in secret by Lockheed Corp. for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U-2 has provided some of the most sensitive intelligence available to the U.S. government, including thousands of photographs of Soviet and Chinese military bases, North Korean nuclear sites, and war zones from Afghanistan to Iraq.
But the aircraft that took off that September morning wasn’t headed overseas to spy on America’s enemies. Instead, for the next six hours it flew directly over the U.S. Gulf Coast, capturing hundreds of high-resolution images as Hurricane Katrina, one of the largest storms of the past century, slammed into New Orleans and the surrounding region.
The U-2 photos were matched against satellite imagery captured during and after the disaster by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Relatively unknown to the public, the NGA was first organized in 1996 from the imagery and mapping divisions of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that builds and maintains the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. In 2003, the NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon. It is responsible for supplying overhead imagery and mapping tools to the military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies — including the National Security Agency, whose wide-reaching, extrajudicial spying inside the United States under the Bush administration has been a heated political issue since first coming to light in the media nearly two years ago.
The NGA’s role in Hurricane Katrina has received little attention outside of a few military and space industry publications. But the agency’s close working relationship with the NSA — whose powers to spy domestically were just expanded with new legislation from Congress — raises the distinct possibility that the U.S. government could be doing far more than secretly listening in on phone calls as it targets and tracks individuals inside the United States. With the additional capabilities of the NGA and the use of other cutting-edge technologies, the government could also conceivably be following the movements of those individuals minute by minute, watching a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, Calif., or drive a car from Chicago to Detroit.
Prior to Katrina, the NGA had been used sporadically during domestic crises. Its first baptism of fire came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the agency collected imagery to help in the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the storm of 2005 triggered NGA activity on a scale never before seen inside the borders of the United States. “Hurricane Katrina changed everything with what we do with disasters,” John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA’s Office of Americas, told Salon. In New York after 9/11, the NGA had only a handful of people on the ground, but “with Katrina, we put a lot of people down in the theater,” he said, using a term usually reserved for overseas military battlegrounds. The agency now deploys its staff on a regular basis to hurricane zones and also provides assistance to law enforcement agencies during events such as the Super Bowl, the baseball All-Star Game and political conventions.
On one level, the engagement of the NGA and the U-2 flights over the Gulf Coast during Katrina were commendable efforts to use America’s vast surveillance powers for the safety and support of its citizens. But at the same time, the incident apparently marked the first time in history that U.S. intelligence agencies created to spy on foreign countries were deployed to collect extensive information on the U.S. “homeland.” Their role during Katrina is just one aspect of an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure put in place by the Bush administration ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sparked a radical restructuring and expansion of America’s intelligence system. Although the full scope of domestic surveillance under Bush remains elusive, we now know from press accounts, lawsuits, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush officials’ descriptions and denials that the NSA has been involved in multiple domestic surveillance programs — in apparent violation of federal law — including spying on Americans’ telecommunications and Internet traffic, as well as data mining.
In December 2004, the NSA and the NGA announced the signing of an agreement to share resources and staff and to link their “sources, data holdings, information infrastructure, and exploitation techniques.” The document spelling out the agreement itself is classified. But in a press release the NGA explained that the pact allows “horizontal integration” between the two agencies, defined as “working together from start to finish, using NGA’s ‘eyes’ and NSA ‘ears.’”
The collaboration makes it possible for the agencies to create hybrid intelligence tools that enhance the ability of U.S. forces in combat. By combining intercepts of cellphone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for example, intelligence analysts can track suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq in real time. Last November, NGA director Robert B. Murrett disclosed that it was through such technology that the U.S. military was able to locate and bomb the safe house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was staying in June 2006. “Eventually, it all comes down to physical location,” he told reporters. When NSA and NGA data are combined, he added, “the multiplier effect is dramatic.”
Nine months prior, during Hurricane Katrina, the NGA’s sophisticated surveillance tools, which can create three-dimensional maps, helped first responders identify hospitals, schools and areas where hazardous materials were stored in the Gulf Coast region. And in an unprecedented move, the NGA distributed thousands of unclassified images of stricken areas, via the Internet, to the public. “People could actually see their houses,” said retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper, the NGA director at the time of Katrina. In an interview with Salon before his appointment in April as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Clapper said that the NGA’s work during the hurricane was “the most graphic example in my 40 years of intelligence of coming to the direct aid of people in extreme circumstances.”
The purpose and utility of such intelligence tools in a disaster area, or in a war zone, are clear. But given the Bush administration’s highly secretive, aggressive policies in the war on terror, what’s to stop the NGA and the NSA from collaborating on other types of real-time surveillance at home?
This past Saturday, Congress approved legislation expanding the ability of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects terrorists may be involved. The legislation, which expands the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was negotiated between the White House and lawmakers in response to a federal court ruling this summer determining that the NSA’s past eavesdropping had violated the law. Mike McConnell, the retired Navy admiral who was appointed last January as the nation’s second director of national intelligence, told Congress that the ruling drastically reduced the ability of the NSA to track terrorists, while Bush warned that, because of the ruling, the government was “missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.”
The fear of Democratic leaders that their party might be further accused of being soft on terrorism apparently prompted them to vote for the new FISA legislation — handing new unilateral surveillance powers to the executive branch while significantly diminishing judicial oversight. Civil liberties groups and lawmakers opposed to the legislation believe the changes will make it easier for the government to spy on U.S. citizens, because the more loosely defined FISA statute now allows warrantless surveillance of people communicating with others who are “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.” During the House debate last Saturday night, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., described the bill as an enormous loophole that will grant the attorney general the ability to “wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances.”
President Bush signed the measure into law on Sunday.
The NGA, which has a staff of 14,000 and an estimated budget of about $2.5 billion (the actual amount is classified), buys most of its imagery from commercial satellite vendors, but it also relies on highly classified overhead photography captured by the National Reconnaissance Office’s fleet of military satellites. According to David H. Burpee, the NGA’s director of public affairs, the agency operates under strict oversight rules that ban it from collecting imagery over the United States without a formal request from a “lead” domestic agency coordinating efforts during a disaster. In the case of Katrina, the NGA’s assistance was requested by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. In a statement to Salon, Burpee said that the NGA collects intelligence “in accordance with Constitutional law, federal law, and executive policies such as Executive Order 12333.” (That order, signed in 1981 by President Reagan, includes a mandate for federal agencies to cooperate with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.) Any questions involving domestic operations would have to be directed to the lead agency requesting NGA support, Burpee added.
It is unclear how the latest changes to FISA might affect other intelligence agencies besides the NSA. But the zeal with which McConnell and Bush pursued the new legislation unbridling the NSA — which could presumably tap the NGA for assistance with operations at home, just as it does in the war zones — raises stark questions about the administration’s intentions with domestic intelligence.
A close look at the NSA programs suggests that the Bush administration is casting the widest net possible. To date, President Bush and administration officials have acknowledged only a narrow aspect of domestic spying — referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program — which they admitted, in the wake of media reports, included the warrantless wiretapping of phone calls. But in May 2006, USA Today reported on a program that involved the NSA’s gaining access to huge customer databases maintained by AT&T and other telecommunications providers. In another alleged program, discovered by AT&T technician Mark Klein and disclosed in a lawsuit against the telecom provider filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the NSA attached what amounts to an electronic hose to AT&T Internet data lines in San Francisco and other cities and diverted global Internet traffic and phone calls to a special room, where calls and messages were analyzed with powerful computers to find clues to terrorist cells. A Salon report in June 2006 uncovered what appeared to be a nexus for such activity in a secret room at an AT&T facility in St. Louis.
Then, last month, the New York Times disclosed that a dispute in 2003 between the White House and the Justice Department over NSA operations involved a potential fourth program using “computer searches through massive electronic databases” that contained the records of tens of thousands of domestic phone calls and e-mails. McConnell acknowledged multiple programs, albeit without specifics, in a July 31 letter to Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “A number of these intelligence activities were authorized in one order” by Bush shortly after 9/11, McConnell wrote. With regard to the administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, he added: “This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged.” Many FISA experts, such as James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, have concluded that the NSA was running at least three domestic surveillance programs, including data mining. “I think the TSP was an after-the-fact name given to an activity, or a set of activities, or a whole subset of activities” by the NSA, Dempsey said.
After 9/11, the paradigm for domestic law enforcement shifted radically, by making it the duty of the government to use its intelligence resources to help law enforcement agencies preempt attacks before they happened, beyond the traditional practice of gathering evidence to prove that a crime had already occurred. The idea that the U.S. homeland was now a battleground (or a “theater”) first took hold in 2002, when the Pentagon established the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado to provide command and control of military efforts within U.S. borders. Northcom was given two primary responsibilities: providing military security during national emergencies, including terrorist attacks and natural disasters; and protecting important U.S. military bases in the 50 states. As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2002. But CIFA soon became a weapon against anyone suspected of harboring ill-will against the Bush administration and its policies. CIFA was caught spying on antiwar groups, Quakers and other organizations. Even though Clapper and his boss, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, have expressed concerns about CIFA’s reach, the agency remains an integral part of the Pentagon’s counterterrorism efforts.
The link between Pentagon-driven intelligence operations and the homeland was underscored during the Katrina crisis by the NGA’s deployment to New Orleans of a special vehicle called a Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System, or MIGS, which is loaded with equipment that allows NGA analysts to download intelligence from U-2s and U.S. military satellites. The vehicles were first deployed by the NGA in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later to the Gulf Coast. “They’re pretty much the NGA in a Humvee — very military,” said Goolgasian, the NGA official. “But it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb if you’re driving into an urban area” in the United States. As a result, the NGA has painted its domestic vehicles blue and renamed them Domestic MIGS, or DMIGS.
Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous “fusion centers” around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency’s day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO,” the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.
John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the NGA is unlikely to be called upon for surveillance of an individual inside the United States. “NGA imagery is not what you would use to track people,” he said. But as the intelligence infrastructure, including the kinds of local camera-surveillance systems that proved so useful in identifying the perpetrators of the London subway bombings, expands in the United States, it raises the specter of a nationwide surveillance web. “These networks are going to get denser and going to cover more area over time,” Pike said. “At some point in time somebody’s going to drop in an automated face-print recognizer, and then they’re off to the races. Anybody who is currently wanted by the authorities, well, there’s just going to be parts of the country where such a person could not enter.”
The expanding role of U.S. intelligence agencies on the home front raises serious issues, according to Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, the commanding general on the scene in the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. Last fall, during a national conference on geospatial intelligence, he said, “Most of our capability [in the military] is kept on the classified side because that’s the best way to fight the enemy.” But the situation in the Gulf Coast, as the lines blurred, was complicated by conflicting policy directives. There were some people in government saying, “You’re not going to use the intel stuff on us,” Honoré recalled, while others were saying just the opposite: “Why aren’t you using that intel stuff to tell us what’s going on down there?” And then, there were people sitting back, saying, “They can’t do that inside the United States,” he said, adding, “This is one of the things government has to work out.”
In light of the mounting revelations about the Bush administration’s domestic spying, civil libertarians no doubt strongly agree.
Rapture Ready: The Christians United for Israel Tour
August 6, 2007
A marriage made in heaven: Christian fascists unite with Zionuts.
Max Blumenthal’s latest takes us on a shocking and at times bizarre tour of right-wing Pastor John Hagee’s annual Washington-Israel Summit, blowing the cover off the Christian Zionist movement in the process. Starring Joe Lieberman, Tom DeLay, Pastor John Hagee, Ambassador Dore Gold and a host of rapture-ready evangelicals praying for Armaggedon.
Proto-Fascist?
August 1, 2007
In Breaking the Silence at one point John Pilger asks the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern his view on Norman Mailer’s statement that the United States is in a pre-Fascist state. McGovern replies: “I hope that is true because there are others who think it already is a Fascist state”.
Careful: The FB-eye may be watching
“The FBI is here,”Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it’s not, because Mom isn’t that funny.
“The who?” I say.
“Two FBI agents. They say you’re not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store.”
I work in a small, independent bookstore, and since it’s a slow Tuesday afternoon, I figure, “Sure.” Someone I know must have gotten some government work, I think; hadn’t my consultant friend spoken recently of getting rolled onto some government job? Background check, I think, interviewing acquaintances … No big deal, right? Then, of course, I make a big deal about it in front of my co-workers.
“That was my mom,” I tell them. “The FBI’s coming for me.” They laugh; it’s a good joke, especially when the FBI actually shows up. They are not the bogeymen I had been expecting. They’re dressed casually, they speak familiarly, but they are big. The one in front stands close to 7 feet, and you can tell his partner is built like a bulldog under his baggy shirt and shorts.
“You Marc Schultz?” asks the tall one. He shows me his badge, introduces himself as Special Agent Clay Trippi. After assuring me that I’m not in trouble, he asks if there is someplace we can sit down and talk. We head back to Reference, where a table and chairs are set up. We sit down, and I’m again informed that I am not in trouble.
Then, Agent Trippi asks, “Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?” And I realize this meeting is not about a friend. Despite their reassurances, and despite the fact that I haven’t committed any federal offenses (that I know of), I’m starting to feel a bit like I’m in trouble.
They ask me if I was driving my car on Saturday, and I say, reasonably sure, that I was. They ask me where I went, and I struggle for a moment to remember Saturday. I make a lame joke about how the days run together when you’re underemployed. They smile politely. Was I at work on Saturday? I think so.
“Were you at the Caribou Coffee on Powers Ferry?” asks Agent Trippi. That’s where I get my coffee before work, and so I tell him yes, probably, just before remembering Saturday: Harry Potter day, opening early, in at 8:30.
So I would have been at Caribou Coffee that Saturday, getting my small coffee, room for cream. This information seems to please the agents.
“Did you notice anything unusual, anyone worth commenting on?” OK, I think. It’s the unusual guy they want, not me. I think hard, wondering if it was Saturday I saw the guy in the really cool reclining wheelchair, the guy who struck me as a potential James Bondian supervillain, but no: That was Monday.
Then they ask if I carried anything into the shop — and we’re back to me.
My mind races. I think: a bomb? A knife? A balloon filled with narcotics? But no. I don’t own any of those things. “Sunglasses,” I say. “Maybe my cell phone?”
Not the right answer. I’m nervous now, wondering how I must look: average, mid-20s, unassuming retail employee. What could I have possibly been carrying?
Trippi’s partner speaks up: “Any reading material? Papers?” I don’t think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: “I’ll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that’s why we’re here, just checking it out. Like I said, there’s no problem. We’d just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can’t, then you may have a problem. And you don’t want that.”
You don’t want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?
The partner speaks up again: “Maybe a printout of some kind?”
Then it occurs to me: I was reading. It was an article my dad had printed off the Web. I remember carrying it into Caribou with me, reading it in line, and then while stirring cream into my coffee. I remember bringing it with me to the store, finishing it before we opened. I can’t remember what the article was about, but I’m sure it was some kind of left-wing editorial, the kind that never fails to incite me to anger and despair over the state of the country.
I tell them all this, but they want specifics: the title of the article, the author, some kind of synopsis, but I can’t help them — I read so much of this stuff.
“Do you still have the article?” Probably not, but I suggest we check behind the counter. When that doesn’t pan out, I have the bright idea to call my dad at work, see if he can remember. Of course, he can’t put together a coherent sentence after I tell him the FBI are at the store, questioning me.
“The FBI?” he keeps asking. Eventually I get him off the phone, and suggest it may be in my car. They follow me out to the parking lot, where Trippi asks me if there’s anything in the car he should know about.
“Weapons, drugs? It’s not a problem if you do, but if you don’t tell me and then I find something, that’s going to be a problem.” I assure him there’s nothing in my car, coming very close to quoting Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite: “There’s nothin’ in my trunk, man.”
The excitement of the questioning — the interrogation — has made me just a little bit giddy. I almost laugh out loud when they ask me to pop my trunk.
There’s nothing in my car, of course. I keep looking anyway, while telling them it was probably some kind of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it article about the buildup to Gulf War II. Trippi nods, unsatisfied. I turn up some papers from the University of Georgia, where I’m about to begin as a grad student. He asks me what I’m going to study.
“Journalism,” I say. As I duck back into the car, I hear Agent Trippi informing his partner, “He’s going to UGA for journalism” in a way that makes me wonder whether that counts against me.
Back in the store, Trippi gives me his card and tells me to call him if I remember anything. After he’s gone, I call my dad back to see if he has calmed down, maybe come up with a name. We retrace some steps together, figure out the article was Hal Crowther’s “Weapons of Mass Stupidity” from the Weekly Planet, a free independent out of Tampa. It comes back to me then, this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country’s media, focusing mostly on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch — really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11. So I call the number on the card, leave a message with the name, author and origin of the column, and ask him to call me if he has any more questions.
To tell the truth, I’m kind of anxious to hear back from the FBI, if only for the chance to ask why anyone would find media criticism suspicious, or if maybe the sight of a dark, bearded man reading in public is itself enough to strike fear in the heart of a patriotic citizen.
My co-worker, Craig, says that we should probably be thankful the FBI takes these things seriously; I say it seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees.
Special Agent Trippi didn’t return calls from CL. But Special Agent Joe Parris, Atlanta field office spokesman, stressed that specific FBI investigations are confidential. He wouldn’t confirm or deny the Schultz interview.
“In this post-911 era, it is the absolute responsibility of the FBI to follow through on any tips of potential terrorist activity,” Parris says. “Are people going to take exception and be inconvenienced by this at times? Oh, yeah. … A certain amount of convenience is going to be offset by an increase in security.”
Marc Schultz is a freelance writer in Atlanta. The Weekly Planet happens to be Creative Loafing’s sister paper in Tampa. For a copy of the column that got Schultz in hot water, go to here.
Ship of Fools: American Fascists
July 18, 2007
The following piece by Iraq war propagandist-turned-neocon critic Johann Hari has some interesting anecdotes — almost surreal – from a cruise he went on, organized by William Buckley Jr.’s neocon rag, National Review, except that the picture presented implies it is only conservatives who bear blame for America’s recent disasters. In fact, the roots of American interventionism abroad lie in the globalist ideals of Enlightenment liberalism it was founded on, and the Liberal zionist publication this article first appeared in was itself, like the author, a staunch proponent of the invasion of Iraq and Martin Peretz, its editor, is one of the strongest purveyors of the ‘Islamic threat’.
A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
I am getting used to these moments – when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”
I am travelling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino – and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run…
I. From sweet to suicide bomber
…I adjust and stiffly greet the first man I see. He is a judge, with the craggy self-important charm that slowly consumes any judge. He is from Canada, he declares (a little more apologetically), and is the founding president of “Canadians Against Suicide Bombing”. Would there be many members of “Canadians for Suicide Bombing?” I ask. Dismayed, he suggests that yes, there would…
To my left, I find a middle-aged Floridian with a neat beard. To my right are two elderly New Yorkers who look and sound like late-era Dorothy Parkers, minus the alcohol poisoning. They live on Park Avenue, they explain in precise Northern tones. “You must live near the UN building,” the Floridian says to one of the New York ladies after the entree is served. Yes, she responds, shaking her head wearily. “They should suicide-bomb that place,” he says. They all chuckle gently. How did that happen? How do you go from sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds?
The conversation ebbs back to friendly chit-chat. So, you’re a European, one of the Park Avenue ladies says, before offering witty commentaries on the cities she’s visited. Her companion adds, “I went to Paris, and it was so lovely.” Her face darkens: “But then you think – it’s surrounded by Muslims.” The first lady nods: “They’re out there, and they’re coming.” Emboldened, the bearded Floridian wags a finger and says, “Down the line, we’re not going to bail out the French again.” He mimes picking up a phone and shouts into it, “I can’t hear you, Jacques! What’s that? The Muslims are doing what to you? I can’t hear you!”
Now that this barrier has been broken – everyone agrees the Muslims are devouring the French, and everyone agrees it’s funny – the usual suspects are quickly rounded up. Jimmy Carter is “almost a traitor”. John McCain is “crazy” because of “all that torture”. One of the Park Avenue ladies declares that she gets on her knees every day to ” thank God for Fox News”. As the wine reaches the Floridian, he announces, “This cruise is the best money I ever spent.”
They rush through the Rush-list of liberals who hate America, who want her to fail, and I ask them – why are liberals like this? What’s their motivation? They stutter to a halt and there is a long, puzzled silence. ” It’s a good question,” one of them, Martha, says finally. I have asked them to peer into the minds of cartoons and they are suddenly, reluctantly confronted with the hollowness of their creation. “There have always been intellectuals who want to tell people how to live,” Martha adds, to an almost visible sense of relief. That’s it – the intellectuals! They are not like us. Dave changes the subject, to wash away this moment of cognitive dissonance. “The liberals don’t believe in the constitution. They don’t believe in what the founders wanted – a strong executive,” he announces, to nods. A Filipino waiter offers him a top-up of his wine, and he mock-whispers to me, “They all look the same! Can you tell them apart?” I stare out to sea. How long would it take me to drown?
II. “We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”
…The first of the trip’s seminars is a discussion intended to exhume the conservative corpse and discover its cause of death on the black, black night of 7 November, 2006, when the treacherous Democrats took control of the US Congress.
…Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” the writer Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”
The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”
Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says, “The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”
No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis – who was deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney’s spine in the run-up to the war – declares, “The election in the US is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” …
Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley – two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party – begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking – “I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants –and Buckley says to the chair, ” Just take the mike, there’s no other way.” He says it with a smile, but with heavy eyes.
Podhoretz and Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs…Today, [Podhoretz] is a bristling grey ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims: “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and ” thank God” for that.
Buckley is an urbane old reactionary, drunk on doubts. He founded the National Review in 1955 – when conservatism was viewed in polite society as a mental affliction – and he has always been sceptical of appeals to ” the people,” preferring the eternal top-down certainties of Catholicism. He united with Podhoretz in mutual hatred of Godless Communism, but, slouching into his eighties, he possesses a world view that is ill-suited for the fight to bring democracy to the Muslim world. He was a ghostly presence on the cruise at first, appearing only briefly to shake a few hands. But now he has emerged, and he is fighting.
“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf War I, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this ” rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.” The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward”. His wife nods and says, ” Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.
I decide to track down Buckley and Podhoretz separately and ask them for interviews. Buckley is sitting forlornly in his cabin, scribbling in a notebook. In 2005, at an event celebrating National Review’s 50th birthday, President Bush described today’s American conservatives as “Bill’s children”. I ask him if he feels like a parent whose kids grew up to be serial killers. He smiles slightly, and his blue eyes appear to twinkle. Then he sighs, “The answer is no. Because what animated the conservative core for 40 years was the Soviet menace, plus the rise of dogmatic socialism. That’s pretty well gone.”
This does not feel like an optimistic defence of his brood, but it’s a theme he returns to repeatedly: the great battles of his life are already won. Still, he ruminates over what his old friend Ronald Reagan would have made of Iraq…Lest liberals be too eager to adopt the Gipper as one of their own, Buckley agrees approvingly that Reagan’s approach would have been to “find a local strongman” to rule Iraq.
A few floors away, Podhoretz tells me he is losing his voice, “which will make some people very happy”. Then he croaks out the standard-issue Wolfowitz line about how, after September 11, the United States had to introduce democracy to the Middle East in order to change the political culture that produced the mass murderers. For somebody who declares democracy to be his goal, he is remarkably blasé about the fact that 80 per cent of Iraqis want US troops to leave their country, according to the latest polls. “I don’t much care,” he says, batting the question away. He goes on to insist that “nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo” and that Bush is “a hero”. He is, like most people on this cruise, certain the administration will attack Iran.
Podhoretz excitedly talks himself into a beautiful web of words, vindicating his every position. He fumes at Buckley, George Will and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He announces victory…
III. The Ghosts of Conservatism Past
The ghosts of Conservatism past are wandering this ship. From the pool, I see John O’Sullivan, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. And one morning on the deck I discover Kenneth Starr, looking like he has stepped out of a long-forgotten 1990s news bulletin waving Monica’s stained blue dress…
Enough – I see another, more intriguing ghost. Ward Connerly is the only black person in the National Review posse, a 67-year-old Louisiana-born businessman, best known for leading conservative campaigns against affirmative action for black people. Earlier, I heard him saying the Republican Party has been “too preoccupied with… not ticking off the blacks”, and a cooing white couple wandered away smiling, “If he can say it, we can say it.” What must it be like to be a black man shilling for a magazine that declared at the height of the civil rights movement that black people “tend to revert to savagery”, and should be given the vote only “when they stop eating each other”?
I drag him into the bar…he never really becomes animated until I ask him if it is true he once said, “If the KKK supports equal rights, then God bless them.” He leans forward, his palms open. There are, he says, “ those who condemn the Klan based on their past without seeing the human side of it, because they don’t want to be in the wrong, politically correct camp, you know… Members of the Ku Klux Klan are human beings, American citizens – they go to a place to eat, nobody asks them ‘Are you a Klansmember?’, before we serve you here. They go to buy groceries, nobody asks, ‘Are you a Klansmember?’ They go to vote for Governor, nobody asks ‘Do you know that that person is a Klansmember?’ Only in the context of race do they ask that. And I’m supposed to instantly say, ‘Oh my God, they are Klansmen? Geez, I don’t want their support.’”
This empathy for Klansmen first bubbled into the public domain this year when Connerly was leading an anti-affirmative action campaign in Michigan. The KKK came out in support of him – and he didn’t decline it. I ask if he really thinks it is possible the KKK made this move because they have become converted to the cause of racial equality. “I think that the reasoning that a Klan member goes through is – blacks are getting benefits that I’m not getting. It’s reverse discrimination. To me it’s all discrimination. But the Klansmen is going through the reasoning that this is benefiting blacks, they are getting things that I don’t get… A white man doesn’t have a chance in this country.“
He becomes incredibly impassioned imagining how they feel, ventriloquising them with a shaking fist – “The Mexicans are getting these benefits, the coloureds or niggers, whatever they are saying, are getting these benefits, and I as a white man am losing my country.“
But when I ask him to empathise with the black victims of Hurricane Katrina, he offers none of this vim. No, all Katrina showed was “the dysfunctionality that is evident in many black neighbourhoods,” he says flatly, and that has to be “tackled by black people, not the government. ” Ward, do you ever worry you are siding with people who would have denied you a vote – or would hang you by a rope from a tree?
“I don’t gather strength from what others think – no at all,” he says. “Whether they are in favour or opposed. I can walk down these halls and, say, a hundred people say, ‘Oh we just adore you’, and I’ll be polite and I’ll say ‘thank you’, but it doesn’t register or have any effect on me.” There is a gaggle of Reviewers waiting to tell him how refreshing it is to “finally” hear a black person “speaking like this”. I leave him to their white, white garlands.
IV. “You’re going to get fascists rising up, aren’t you? Why hasn’t that happened already?”
…Dinesh D’Souza announced as we entered Mexican seas what he calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: ” The quality of an immigrant is inversely proportional to the distance travelled to get to the United States.”
In other words: Latinos suck.
I return for dinner with my special National Review guest: Kate O’Beirne. She’s an impossibly tall blonde with the voice of a 1930s screwball star and the arguments of a 1890s Victorian patriarch. She inveighs against feminism and “women who make the world worse” in quick quips.
As I enter the onboard restaurant she is sitting among adoring Reviewers with her husband Jim, who announces that he is Donald Rumsfeld’s personnel director. “People keep asking what I’m doing here, with him being fired and all,” he says. “But the cruise has been arranged for a long time.”
…I drop into the conversation the news that there are moves in Germany to have Donald Rumsfeld extradited to face torture charges.
A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, ” If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to witter on about the Pinochet precedent, and Kate snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: ” Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.”
“Exactly,” adds Jim. “And he privatised social security.”
The table nods solemnly and then they march into the conversation – the billion-strong swarm of swarthy Muslims who are poised to take over the world. Jim leans forward and says, “When I see these football supporters from England, I think – these guys aren’t going to be told by PC elites to be nice to Muslims. You’re going to get fascists rising up, aren’t you? Why isn’t that happening already?” Before I can answer, he is conquering the Middle East from his table, from behind a crème brûlée.
“The civilised countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won’t take the money ourselves, but we’ll manage it so the money isn’t going to terrorists.”
The idea that Europe is being “taken over” by Muslims is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles cruises. Some go on ballroom dancing cruises. This is the “The Muslims Are Coming” cruise – drinks included. Because everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. Everyone dreams it. And the man responsible is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn.
He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright, bright shirt that fits the image of the disk jockey he once was. Sitting in this sea of grey, it has an odd effect – he looks like a pimp inexplicably hanging out with the apostles of colostomy conservatism.
Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races” i.e., white people – “are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be ” large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015″ as Europe is ceded to al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.”
He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures – he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping.
But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block – already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times – I counted – when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States of America.
At one of the seminars, a panelist says anti-Americanism comes from both directions in a grasping pincer movement – “The Muslims condemn us for being decadent; the Europeans condemn us for not being decadent enough.” Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz’s wife, yells, “The Muslims are right, the Europeans are wrong!” And, instantly, Jay Nordlinger, National Review’s managing editor and the panel’s chair, says, ” I’m afraid a lot of the Europeans are Muslim, Midge.”
The audience cheers. Somebody shouts, “You tell ‘em, Jay!” He tells ‘em. Decter tells ‘em. Steyn tells ‘em.
On this cruise, everyone tells ‘em – and, thanks to my European passport, tells me.
V. From cruise to cruise missiles?
…As Bernard Lewis disappears onto the horizon, I wonder about the connections between this cruise and the cruise missiles fired half a world away.
I spot the old lady from the sea looking for her suitcase, and stop to tell her I may have found a solution to her political worries about both Muslims and stem-cells.
“Couldn’t they just do experiments on Muslim stem-cells?” I ask. ” Hey – that’s a great idea!” she laughs, and vanishes. Hillary-Ann stops to say she is definitely going on the next National Review cruise, to Alaska. “Perfect!” I yell, finally losing my mind.
“You can drill it as you go!” She puts her arms around me and says very sweetly, “We need you on every cruise.”
As I turn my back on the ship for the last time, the Judge I met on my first night places his arm affectionately on my shoulder. “We have written off Britain to the Muslims,” he says. “Come to America.”
Israelization of Europe
July 16, 2007
Adopting from Ariel Sharon’s vocabulary, George Bush has already harkened in the decline of the American Empire, just as Pervez Musharraf has set his country on the path to possible disintegration on the other side of the globe. Now its Europe’s turn.
The only positive aspect to the following news is the response of the German society.
The firestorm surrounding German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s recent comments on national security shows no sign of abating. Even the nominally ceremonial German President Horst Köhler weighed in over the weekend, and the parliamentary head of Germany’s center-left Social Democrats (SPD) said Schäuble’s loose reading of the German constitution could threaten Berlin’s fragile coalition government, which pairs the SPD with Schäuble’s conservatives.
Schäuble said last week in an interview with DER SPIEGEL that Berlin would have to “clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting new threats,” and mentioned a ban on Internet or mobile phone use for terrorist suspects or even “so-called targeted killings” as potential but legally uncertain measures against a growing threat of terrorism in Germany. He’s been in what German pundits call Erklärungsnot ever since — a crisis of having to explain himself.
President Köhler told German TV on Sunday that he doubts whether “the killing of a suspected terrorist without a trial can be done quite so easily.” He also questioned the public way Schäuble raised the idea.
Peter Struck, parliamentary chief of the SPD, told the Sunday weekly Tagesspiegel am Sonntag, “It won’t do for basic values of our constitution to be called into question. Human rights and the right to life are untouchable. This also goes for Osama bin Laden’s life.”
Schäuble said in his SPIEGEL interview that the “legal problems” his office had to wrestle with “extend all the way to extreme cases such as so-called targeted killing … Imagine someone knew what cave Osama bin Laden is sitting in. A remote-controlled missile could then be fired in order to kill him.”
“Germany’s federal government would probably send a public prosecutor there first, to arrest bin Laden…” said the SPIEGEL interviewers.
“… And the Americans would execute him with a missile,” said Schäuble, “and most people would say: thank God.”
‘Pure nonsense’
Schäuble reacted to the criticism by telling Reuters TV over the weekend that he suspected his remarks had been misunderstood “on purpose, by people who don’t want to have this debate … It’s as if someone has said we suddenly want to shoot certain suspected terrorists dead here (in Germany). That’s of course pure nonsense. No one wants to do that. And I have never suggested it.”
But Schäuble has sparked outrage in the past with other crime-fighting suggestions, like e-mail and phone-message surveillance of the German public, or questioning the right of a terrorism suspect to be innocent until proven guilty. “Schäuble paints one horror scenario after another on the wall,” said Struck, adding that Schäuble could “poison” the spirit of the grand coalition if Chancellor Angela Merkel — Germany’s ranking Christian Democrat — refuses to rein him in. Merkel has stayed out of the debate, aside from saying she prefers a minister who isn’t afraid of new ideas to a minister who follows the flock.
Schäuble sits in a wheelchair because of an attempt on his life in 1990, during his first term in office as Interior Minister. He told the Sonntag Aktuell newspaper over the weekend that a frank and open discussion of security matters was important and said it was “a defamatory insult” for some critics to suggest that his views were extreme and should be discounted just because “I myself have been a victim of an assassination attempt.”
The minister was likely referring to an offensive passage in a piece from the Süddeutsche Zeitung last week which wondered out loud what role his disability plays in his thought processes. “A man who experiences — and tries to overcome — his own physical weakness each day, likely has more difficulty tolerating the perceived weaknesses of his colleagues or the perceived weaknesses of the state.”
Spin and Rumour at the G8
June 28, 2007
A report from the G8 summit by fellow Spinwatch member, Kees Stad.
Two years ago, during the protests against the G8 in Gleneagles in Scotland, we had to pay an unexpected visit to the police station in Stirling because one of the Dutch activists had lost his passport. While we were in the waiting area we saw an electronic news display on the wall constantly making announcements about the protests. To our surprise there were horrendous stories about violence against the police, which I was sure were not true or at least grossly exaggerated. Suddenly that classic urban myth popped up: demonstrators had supposedly attacked one of the officers with a knife! At almost every large confrontation between police and protesters this story surfaces, although there has never been any evidence of it actually occurring.
During ‘Heiligendamm’ two police officers supposedly suffered knife attacks (Focus) . As usual some of the press willingly repeated this report without checking if it actually happened. You can count yourself lucky if there is any mention it is based on a police statement (1). It is remarkable that the media almost never ask for proof. These rumours are usually launched amidst a flurry of events, giving the reporters no time whatsoever to check on statements. If they did they would find the police unable to present the alleged ‘victims’, because they don’t actually exist.
When the dust finally settles the knife attack is but one minor incident among many, old news not worth rectifying or investigating. With such a pliant media there is no need to construct such ‘evidence’, which happened for example in Genoa during the G8 protests there in 2001 (2).
Arsenal
The imaginary stabbings are only a small part of an arsenal of lies and rumours about protesters that seep into mainstream media reporting. When the opening march on June 2nd ended in rioting the floodgates opened. Parts of the media, which had originally been suspicious of the state spin, did a u-turn. Suddenly protesters were supposed to be ‘capable of anything’ and it was a good thing the police had taken preventative measures to protect civilians and politicians. Again, to the attentive observer, these events turned out to be mostly staged. The riots had indeed been intense, but no more serious than the average clash involving autonomists. Media reporting was actively fed by the police and other authorities who produced dire reports about thousands injured, many of them seriously, including over 400 (433 to be precise) police officers. The high point was (again) the Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel which ran a headline about ‘a rain of rocks splintering riot squad helmets’. Of the Berlin police alone 18 officers were supposed to be in hospital with serious injuries.
These reports lead to grotesque scenes with the police managing to elevate themselves to the role of victims. The online chronology of Der Spiegel emphasised police injuries as well as their battle with the autonomists ([15:31] Einzelne Gruppen von Polizisten werden von Autonomen regelrecht gejagt.)
Days later some newspapers managed to deconstruct the story and found it had all been severely exaggerated. Every scratch and every blister had been included and the most serious injury sustained by an officer (a broken leg) had been caused by his own colleagues stumbling over him when they ran down a staircase while hunting for protesters. Two days later, according to the right-wing weekly Focus no-one was in the hospital anymore. This kind of rectification however never makes the front page. Meanwhile the image was already firmly in place and politicians and even spokespeople of NGO’s like Attac were falling over one another demanding tougher (!) measures against the protesters. A police union even demanded the use of rubber bullets. This wave of real or contrived indignation continues. Politicians have announced they will take further measures against what they call the ”black block”, like constructing special databases and a ban on dressing uniformly in addition to the long-time ban on face coverage already in place.
Purpose
Planning for this repressive operation had been taking place for some time. Many police departments as well as the army had already come to the aid of the local police, who were already well-prepared with 16,000 personnel and all kinds of technical equipment made available. Legally also they had little cause for complaint: the freedom to protest had been drastically reduced in many areas. The pre-summit smear campaign was meant to make the population and the media accept the repression, and preferably embrace it. Such reports were probably also meant to incite the officers themselves to take stronger action. They are human too, and sometimes question the justice of their ‘work’. A continuous stream of propaganda about the opposition’s malice can help to keep them motivated. A fourth target group of this barrage of false reports are people considering joining the protests. If they believe this might be life threatening or there might be hooliganism they are likely to decide to stay at home.
Provocation? I predict a riot…
There was much discussion among the protesters about the cause of the riots on Saturday afternoon. Rumours about police provocation were rife. The more radical segment of the activists had already been harassed for weeks, for example by the raids on 40 apartements on May 9th and on May 25th at a march against the EU-ASEM summit in Hamburg. This didn’t just happen in Germany: on May 5th an entire bicycle demonstration was arrested in Utrecht (Netherlands)(3).
As Heiligendamm drew closer the police activity intensified. It was clear that the dam would eventually burst. But the ‘blame’ of course isn’t entirely on one side. The ”black block” attended as usual and was rather large in Rostock (many sources estimate around 2000 people, some even 5000). These were people who no longer wanted to let themselves be pushed around and some probably felt like finally taking a stand against the police. (4)
It was typical that there had been almost no incidents during Saturday’s entire demonstration, including the “black block” (with the exception of one broken window at a Sparkasse bank and one at a supermarket, the origin of which was not clear). It is however interesting to investigate why things got out of hand at the close, in full view of the media cameras.
A few incidents suggest police provocation. Firstly there was a lone police van parked in the middle of the protest marches’ route, while all other vehicles had been put safely in a guarded parking lot. There are striking film images of this. Also compare the reports on Spiegel TV in which at first a picture was painted that “the entire centre of Rostock is being smashed up by the “black block” (supposedly consisting of a mixture of neo-nazis and Iranian women?) and then mainly showed people blaming the police for the escalation.
When the riot didn’t kick off at the police van the famous pseudo-arrest incident occurred. While not much is happening an undercover police officer inside the march looks around and suddenly attacks a person dressed in black, pushing him to the ground (film). Some pushing and shoving ensues and a riot police ‘hundertschaft’ lined up nearby charges at the demonstration. People get angry, start throwing things, and suddenly a riot has begin. After that the riot police units and protesters were at it for hours. Every time things seemed to calm down riot police units attacked anew. There has been a lot of debate about this incident (for example here). There has been speculation that the two supposed ”black blockers’ were actually police officers, given that the prisoner doesn’t make any attempts to escape the arrest. The purpose of this operation would be to incite the crowd.
These events mainly took place in one single side street along the harbour square which was broken up to provide missiles. Some cars were turned upside down and one of them was set on fire. For days that one Ford was the main image on TV and in the newspapers. To continue that thread towards all protesters against the G8 seemed child’s play.
Spin machine
The big spin machine could be set in motion. Suddenly (the source turned out to be the German press agency DPA) a horribly mistranslated quote by one of the speakers on stage at the closing rally appeared in the media. Walden Bello, the well-known director of Focus on the Global South, had words put into his mouth claiming he had called for violent resistance, to “bring the war into the demonstration because with peaceful means we will accomplish nothing”. This suggested that Bello (and with him the entire organization of the march) was calling for violent resistance. In reality Bello had called attention to the war in Iraq and argued for the protest to include this because “without peace there can be no justice”. Hundreds of media repeated the DPA-version. Media activists immediately got to work publicising this scandal and spreading the true content of Bello’s speech, which led to an apology by Der Spiegel, but the damage had already been done.
Up a gear
In the following days the police, who suddenly thought themselves covered by massive support from the public, press and politicians, employed pretty much all means at their disposal to disable further protests. Protesters were continually being pulled from their cars and searched, demonstrations for which permits had previously been issued were made impossible and continually surrounded by large police forces. There are too many examples to list them all, but take this one as an indication.
It was clearly thanks to the protesters that things didn’t escalate further. On the way to a licensed demonstration at Rostock airport Laage one of our two buses was stopped for the upteenth time and everyone was arrested (including a mother with a three year old child who were also put in cages, ID’d and photographed!. Even the always calm and quiet photographer U. was roaring with anger that next time he would be throwing rocks.
Here you can see how an entirely peaceful demonstration (commemorating the Lichtenhage pogrom of 1992) is messed up by the police.
A recurring phenomenon after Saturday’s riots was police units attacking small groups of protesters to arrest people. Pepper spray and batons were used and caused many injuries. Peaceful situations kept getting transformed into chaos and panic. Even the local S-bahn trains (see film) on which activists traveled from one march to the other were
repeatedly stopped and raided by riot squads.New urban myths
All of this only sketches the context in which the rumours were released. A new high point was for example a story in Monday, June 4th’s Berlin Tagesspiegel predicting that Saturday’s riots were only child’s play compared to what was yet to come. Remember, the blockading of the G8 itself hadn’t even started yet. The journalist in question, Frank Jansen, quotes an anonymous ‘hochrangiger Sicherheitsexperten’ (renowned security expert) claiming to know that protesters are using ‘fruit containing razor blades or stanley knives’ as ammunition. This story is soon repeated by many other media. (5) The story mentions other absurd weapons like enormous catapults made of athletics training equipment and supposedly being assembled in the action camps. Again, there is not a shred of evidence and afterwards the police has never shown any of these contraptions to the media. A version of this story, about a potato with nails in it, appeared on local newspapers MV Regio’s website. A picture was published of a similar potato which according to the newspaper had been ‘displayed’ at the Reddelich action camp. In no time other media report this as fact.
In retrospect it is clear to see how the bizarre accusations often are a back and forth passing play between the press and the police. At a press conference or via the website a police spokesperson reports a gruesome bit of news, one of the media takes it up (and perhaps mentions that it is a police assertion): DPA: “Laut Polizei vermummen sich Autonome und bewaffnen sich mit Molotow-Cocktails und Steinen.” Then Spiegel Online and NDR-tv repeat it and present it as fact (source).
Criminalising clowns
One of the most bizarre urban myths concerns the clown army who form a specific problem for the police. They are not just being funny but actually take part in many of the actions: making the police look ridiculous, getting in the way and sometimes breaking through police barriers. The police had been warned in advance by the secret service about the clowns, who according to the service are a lot more dangerous than they pretend to be. An attempt was made to make the clowns look dangerous despite their hilarious outfits. Many clowns carried water pistols (after all, an army carries weapons) which they sprayed at both activists, onlookers and police. Soon the rumour was spread that the clowns’ water pistols didn’t contain water but a dangerous acid. Here is the report by tv-station NDR.
In retrospect this horror story could of course not be maintained. Asked about the background of this accusation the police version was that they had noted ’stripes on the uniforms’ of the officers who had been sprayed. Upon investigation however these turned out to be caused by soapy water. But by then the rumour had done its job. This story might well have been especially constructed to make the police take stronger action against the clowns.
On our way back to the Netherlands we met a large group of Bavarian riot police in a parking lot on the motorway, they were also on their way home. We couldn’t resist confronting them with the front page of the (Hamburg) paper Morgenpost, which broadly ran the story of the police provocateur who was exposed when he was collecting rocks and trying to incite the protesters to attack the police. The returning officers’ retort was a pathetic story about how terribly frightening their job had been over the last couple of days and the ‘clowns-with-acid-guns’ soon surfaced. We left convinced they actually believed it….
Provocateurs
After Saturday’s riots and the media storm that followed the situation seemed grim and fairly hopeless. Yet later on the atmosphere slowly changed again. One important reason for this was that the activists didn’t allow themselves to lose the plot and by the thousands they just went to work doing what they had come to do: building the camps, holding actions and demonstrations and preparing for the blockades. This shows the importance of having well organised movements, and also that part of the population is quite politicised. During the first three days the situation was nevertheless dramatic, because of the severe repression described earlier. An important switch came on Wednesday when the first blockade-actions were executed. The massive marches by determined and cheerful protesters, outsmarting the police and striking throughout the entire area surrounding Heiligendamm, made a strong impression on the onlookers, press and fellow protesters.
In addition the ban on demonstrating which had been instituted for the entire 5 km zone around Heiligendamm was rendered useless by people voting with their feet. Thousands upon thousands entered the area with the police unable to stop them. It remains bitter that in several places the police still responded with brutal violence. The feeling among the local population was also much better than was previously feared. Despite mentions in the media (like in the Dutch Volkskrant) that the population was hostile towards the activists, there were many expressions of the opposite. Many houses sported protest flags. Local people supplied water and food, and in the evening they handed out wood for the campfires. Even farmers whose fields were flattened by protesters walking through indicated that they mainly blamed the police.Another important event was the discovery of a group of police infiltrators at one of the non-violent sit-down blockades. They were busy bringing in rocks and tried to get the protesters to attack the police. However they did this so clumsily that the protesters became suspicious and started shouting they were police. They were surrounded and one was overpowered and recognised as an plain-clothes officer from Bremen. He was almost assaulted but activist lawyers accompanied him to the police and handed him over. Many media witnessed this incident. At first the police denied the plain-clothes officers were theirs, but after a while even they couldn’t stand up to the massive amount of evidence to the contrary and were forced to admit the men were infiltrators. The police continue to deny these infiltrators’ instructions were about incitement and provocation, claiming they were just gathering information as usual, but by now no-one believes this anymore. Many see this as evidence supporting other observations of police officers dressed in plain clothes actively trying to incite.
What to do?
Of course the activists did not sit still during this media frenzy. A well-equipped indymedia centre in Rostock was working full time publishing their own reports or correcting the commercial media. Various other media activists and bloggers threw themselves into the fray. But the playing field was far from level (also see a previous sketch: The Media gets the Massage)
It remains fascinating that the mainstream media systematically exaggerate militant actions by protesters and pay very little attention to police violence. At the end of the action-week about half the population of the action-camps was sporting bandages and splints as a result of police activity. Even one of the clowns speaking at the press conference sustained a broken finger on the final day. A number of people were seriously injured , some of them by the water cannons. At least two people are in danger of losing an eye. Have you seen any of this covered in your media? Or any of the innumerable smaller incidents like when a group of clowns were surrounded for an entire afternoon at a McDonalds on the way to Bad Doberan and forced to hand over all of their money as bail? The hundreds of arrests with no legal basis, the inhumane conditions in the cages on the industrial estate which were supposed to pass for prisons, the many incidents involving journalists or doctors being arrested by the police? At most the scandalous torpedoing of the Greenpeace boats received some media attention, but other than that it was utter crap.
The stupidest way to respond is by immediately becoming defensive and distancing yourself from ‘the violence’, like quite a few spokespeople for NGO’s and various left wing parties did. Continuous discussion about the chosen means of action is obviously necessary, but it became very clear in Heiligendamm that if we want to change the world we should not allow ourselves to be dictated by the government and the media. The most important victory of this G8 mobilisation is that the actions and blockades were executed so successfully. Now it is time to learn from this experience and to further strengthen the structures and resolve of the anti-globalisation movement.
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Also see the survey by the exellent Grundrechtekomitee.
A good survey of the reports about the G8 by the German mainstream media can be found at the Badespasz website.
The unsurpassed website gipfelsoli has set up an archive of the reports about repression .
Here is an English summary of police repression: http://de.indymedia.org/2007/06/185126.shtml
There are many analyses of the repression and the media lies to be found, for example here and here and here and here .
This analysis adresses how a naive reaction to media-manipulation can lead to a distancing from more militant forms of action.
And finally it needs to be said that not all mainstream media should be tarred with the same brush. there were some positive exceptions. Germany has a few progressive newspapers that reported differently (Junge Welt, Neues Deutschland, Jungle World. The Tageszeitung mainly howled along with the mainstream wolves…). Of the ‘quality press’ the Süddeutsche Zeitung provided a more balanced reporting. While one lokal newspaper Nordkurier committed mainly blatant propaganda for the G8 and the authorities, the other - Die Ostzeezeitung or OZ - appeared to be a relieving exception. Also see this hilarious report by the BBC.
(written by: Kees Stad, globalinfo.nl Translation: Hooligirl)
Notes
(1) Not only right wing papers traditionally slandering protesters like Bild or Focus, but also ‘quality papers’ like Financial Times Dld : “Mindestens ein Polizist wurde verletzt, als ein Demonstrant ihn mit einem Messer angriff.” or Der Spiegel.
Der Spiegel (in its online version) played a peculiar part in the reporting by systematically almost literally passing on the police reports.(2) Immediately afterwards a police spokesperson claimed that during the scandalous raid on the Diaz school one of the officers was attacked with a knife. The knife was supposed to have been deflected by the officer’s bullet-proof vest. This clearly slashed vest was presented to the media together with the knife supposedly belonging to the ‘attacker’. During later court cases however it was proven this knife could never have made the cut in the vest. Two molotov cocktails presented by the police as having been found in the school turned out to have been planted by the police themselves during the raid.
(3) The mass arrests, after which people were kept in inhumane conditions, caused little or no consternation with the press or politicians. Some of the detainees were among the people who were refused entry at the Germany border. This points to a cooperation between the Dutch and German police, using completely illegal blacklists.
(4) The many mysterious stories about the ”black block” form part of the criminalisation and smear campaign against protesters. The ”black block” is of course not a tight knit organisation at all, but a not very secretive demonstration-tactic: by dressing more or less the same and taking other preventative measures you can prevent being forced to follow the police’s whims. It enables the group, or members of it, to execute actions which would otherwise be impossible. The level of militance is usually kept within conscious limits and, unlike those of the police, there have never been any fatalities caused by this group’s activities. For more background information see the book ‘Les Black Blocs’ by Francis Dupuis Deri or ‘Autonome in Bewegung’ (AG Grauwacke).
Also see: interview with a Berlin autonome in the July 4th edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung .
(5) Via the newspaper’s office I got the e-mail address of the journalist concerned and politely asked him for his contact information so I could ask him a few questions about his story. So far he has not responded.
Collapse of the European Left
May 28, 2007
Jean Bricmont presents an excellent analysis of the developments that have made the European Left increasingly irrelevant. I haven’t read his new book Humanitarian Imperialism yet, but a good friend of mine rates it very highly. I’ll post a review here when I get around to reading it.
Once upon a time, there were, in France and in Europe, two ways to be on the left. One was fighting for social reforms, both in the factories (strengthening of the unions) and at the state level (extension and democratization of education and build-up of strong public services); this was the program of the social democrats but also, in France, for the second part at least, by the Gaullists. The other way to be on the left was hoping, or waiting, for a revolution, usuallly thought to be proletarian, similar to the Soviet revolution, or at least to what the dominant interpretation of that revolution was. That was the communist line, along with the one of smaller groups, trotzkyist or anarchist. No such revolution occurred, but, in practice, the two wings were helping each other–the fear of a revolution, which was overrated also by the right, for Cold War purposes, helped the reformists and, in any case, the communists were fighting energetically for reforms, while waiting for better times. Even the communists and the Gaullists, for all their rhetorical differences, were in practice quite close to each other : both were in favour of decolonization, a strong social state and an independent foreign policy. However, because De Gaulle was rather conservative, the social democratization of France was probably less pronounced that in Scandinavia or in Britain.
Then came the Mitterrand victory in 1981. His program was in essence social-democratic, but sold to some extent as revolutionary (”changing life”). But it came at a time when the reaction was gaining ground worldwide, with the election of Reagan, Thatcher and the crisis of communism. The victory of Mitterrand was not overwhelming, and was to some extent due to people being tired of the long conservative rule (from 1958 to 1981). France was certainly not in a revolutionary mood and not ready to cut itself off from the rest of Europe. So, after two years, Mitterrand changed course, with the “turn of rigour”, as they called it, and from then on, followed a “mainstream”social and economic policy, neoliberal in essence, but sometimes without the enthusiasm that existed elsewhere. When the Gaullists came back to power with Chirac in 1995, they followed similar policies, because no alternative was available, but maybe with even less enthusiasm than the socialists, since those policies were opposite to those of de Gaulle and the Gaullists, unlike the socialists, did not feel to have been proven wrong.
But once the left had been in power and, after merely two years, had admitted that its socio-economic program was inapplicable, what was it going to do? Basically, it went into moralism. The discourse changed from advocating concrete economic policies to praising “values”– antiracism, anti-antisemitism, and antifascism. The one concrete policy that it did support was “European construction”, meaning strengthening the powers of the European Union. This was partly justified in the name of values, mostly anti-nationalism, without seriously discussing what it meant in concrete socio-economic terms. What it did mean is to render social-dem