Feel guilt, then move on
By Naomi Klein
Feb. 20-- It was Mary Vargas, a 44-year-old engineer in Renton,
Washington, who carried US therapy culture to its new zenith. Explaining
why the war in Iraq was no longer her top election issue, she told Salon,
the online magazine, that “when they didn’t find the weapons
of mass destruction, I felt I could also focus on other things. I got
validated.”
Yes, that’s right: war opposition as self-help. The end-goal is
not to seek justice for the victims, or punishment for the aggressors,
but rather “validation” for one’s position. Once validated,
one can reach for the talisman of self-help: “closure.” In
Britain, it’s Blair who adopted the language of self-help: validated
by the Hutton whitewash, he is urging the nation to “draw a line”
and “move on.”
In the US, it’s the Democrats who have the therapy market cornered.
Howard Dean’s wild scream was not so much a gaffe as the second
of the five stages of grieving: anger.
The scream was a moment of uncontrolled release, a catharsis, allowing
American liberals to externalize their rage and then move on (as they
must do now that Dean has dropped out), transferring their affections
to more appropriate candidates.
There is more counseling to come from John Kerry and John Edwards, for
whom the war was less an attack on another sovereign nation than a traumatic
assault on America’s own psyche and self-esteem.
“The price of unilateralism is too high and Americans are paying
it -- in resources that could be used for healthcare, education, and
our security here at home,” Kerry said on December 16. “We
are paying that price in respect lost around the world.” And most
importantly, that price is paid in the lives of young Americans forced
to shoulder the burden of the mission alone.
Conspicuously absent from Kerry’s tally are the lives of Iraqi
civilians lost as a direct result of the invasion. Dean suffered from
the same myopic math. “There are now almost 400 people dead who
wouldn’t be dead if we hadn’t gone to war,” he said in
November. In January he updated the number to “500 soldiers and
2,200 wounded.”
But on February 8, while Kerry was campaigning in Virginia and Dean
was in Maine, the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion
reached as high as 10,000. That number is the most authoritative estimate
available, since the occupying authorities in Iraq refuse to keep count.
It comes from Iraq Body Count, a group of respected British and US academics
that bases its figures on cross-referenced reports from journalists
and human rights groups in the field.
John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, told me that the passing
of the grim 10,000 mark received “scandalously little attention
in the US, even as Democratic candidates were hammering Bush over his
faulty intelligence.”
If the war was fought on false pretences, Sloboda says, “then every
death caused by the war is a death on false pretences. And if that’s
the case, the most urgent question is not who knew what when, but who
owes what to whom?”
In international law, countries that wage wars of aggression must pay
reparations. Yet in Iraq, this logic has been turned on its head. Not
only are there no penalties for an illegal war, there are prizes, with
the US actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction
contracts.
When the reconstruction spending has attracted controversy, it has not
been over what is owed to Iraqis for their tremendous losses, but over
what is owed to European corporations and to American taxpayers.
“This war profiteering is poison to America, poison to Americans’
faith in government and poison to our allies’ perception of our
motives in Iraq,” John Edwards said in December. True, but he somehow
failed to mention that it also poisons Iraqis -- not their faith, or
their perceptions, but their bodies.
Every dollar wasted on an over-charging, under-performing US contractor
is a dollar not spent rebuilding Iraq’s bombed-out water treatment
and electricity plants. And it is Iraqis, not US taxpayers, who are
forced to drink typhoid- and cholera-infested water, and then to seek
treatment in hospitals still flooded with raw sewage, where the drug
supply is even more depleted than during the sanctions era.
There is no plan to compensate Iraqi civilians for deaths caused by
the willful destruction of their infrastructure, or as a result of combat
during the invasion. The occupying forces will only pay compensation
for “instances where soldiers have acted negligently or wrongfully.”
According to the latest estimates, US troops have distributed roughly
$2 million in compensation for deaths, injuries and property damage.
That’s a third of what Halliburton admits two of its employees
accepted in bribes from a Kuwaiti contractor.
To talk about the price of the Iraq war strictly in terms of military
casualties and US tax dollars is an obscenity. Yes, Americans and British
citizens were lied to by their politicians. Yes, they are owed answers.
But the people of Iraq are owed a great deal more, and that enormous
debt belongs at the very center of any civilized debate about the war.
In the US, a good start would be for the Democratic candidates to acknowledge
some collective responsibility. Bush may have been the war’s initiator
but in the language of self-help, he had plenty of enablers. They included
Kerry and Edwards, among the 27 other Democratic senators and 81 Democratic
members of the House of Representatives who voted for the resolution
authorizing Bush to go to war.
Why does this history matter? Because so long as Bush’s opponents
cast themselves as the primary victims of his war, the real victims
will remain invisible. The focus will be on uncovering Bush and Blair’s
lies -- a process geared towards absolving those who believed them,
not on compensating those who died because of them.
In the five stages of grieving, there is a step that comes after anger.
It’s guilt, when the grieving party starts to wonder whether they
did enough, if the loss was somehow their fault, how they can make amends.
Moving on -- the final stage -- is supposed to come after that reckoning.
Source: Guardian
Another day in the empire
By Kurt Nimmo
Remember when we were told that the TIA (Total Information Awareness)
program was terminated? The Senate supposedly cut funding for the program
last September, according to the Congressional Record. This followed
the ditching of retired Adm. John Poindexter, Iran-Contra criminal and
mastermind behind TIA, due to his “terrorism futures” idea,
or Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP). It was just too
“unorthodox” for the folks in Congress.
I recall thinking at the time: intelligence agencies simply don’t
get rid of ideas like TIA, especially after money and work has been
poured into them. Instead, they transfer the research and money elsewhere
and continue to develop the programs.
In essence, this is what happened to TIA.
“Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing
this terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare
innocent Americans,” writes Michael J. Sniffer of The Associated
Press.
“Still, some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter’s
Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to US intelligence
offices, congressional, federal, and research officials told The Associated
Press.
“In addition,” he continues, “Congress left undisturbed
a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known
office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA,
that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter’s program.
“’The whole congressional action looks like a shell game,’
said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which
tracks work by US intelligence agencies. ‘There may be enough of
a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical
purposes the identical work is continuing.’
“...Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs
were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge
of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some
of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter’s research as Evidence
Extraction and Link Discovery,” Sniffen reports.
In addition to Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, Poindexter’s
group was working on other numerous data-mining programs, including
Genoa II, Babylon, Communicator, Genisys, HumanID, Bio-Surveillance,
TIDES, EARS and WAE.
These TIA programs were specifically designed to allow snoops to tap
into private data.
As James Bovard pointed out in an article on David Frum and Richard
Perle’s book The End of Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, TIA
and other snoop programs are simply too valuable to give up, privacy
considerations be damned. Bovard writes:
“Frum and Perle champion another surveillance monstrosity at least
partially thwarted by Congress — a Total Information Awareness-type
system to allow the government to compile dossiers on ‘an individual’s
credit history, his recent movements, his immigration status and personal
background, his age and sex, and a hundred other pieces of information.’
Frum and Perle insist that the government can be trusted with such data
because procedures could be developed to link the data to a specific
name only if ‘probable cause’ of criminal conduct exists.
In other words, regardless of the vast temptation for political and
bureaucratic abuse of such data, the authors blithely assume that government
officials — at least in the future — will be angels.
“Frum and Perle also call for a National ID card, including ‘biometric
data, like fingerprints or retinal scans, or DNA.’ Again, they
shrug off any concerns about how such a system could be used to sabotage
people’s lives and privacy, asserting, ‘The victims of executive
branch abuse will be able to sue the wrongdoers and collect damages;
the victims of a mass terrorist attack will have no such recourse.’
This would be hilarious except for the possibility that people who watch
Fox News might actually believe such a remedy exists.”
In other words, the neocons and their friends in the Senate, House,
and especially the Pentagon have no intention of getting rid of TIA-like
programs.
You will be snooped.
And if you think the government will limit the massive amount of collected
data to terrorism, recall the abuses of COINTELPRO. “The mandate
of [COINTELPRO] was spelled out in one of the stacks of secret documents
released by Senate investigators in 1976: to ‘disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, and neutralize’ groups and individuals the FBI considered
politically objectionable. Those targeted in nearly all cases were not
foreign spies, terrorists, or individuals suspected of criminal acts,”
notes Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
Deje vu, anyone?
Source: http//:kurtnimmo.com
