Pope Francis in Washington DC

Robert Hunziker

On the heels of his Papal Encyclical about sustainability, due in June ‘15, Pope Francis is scheduled to address Congress this coming September.

Meanwhile, and only four months before the Pope’s scheduled address: “The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted Thursday to cut deeply into NASA’s budget for Earth science, in a clear swipe at the study of climate change,” Michael Hiltzik (The Economy Hub), The GOP Attack on Climate Change Science Takes a Big Step Forward, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2015.

The Holy See does not hand out Papal Encyclicals every day. Rather, an encyclical, which may address bishops, as well as all Christendom, is a sacred papal letter that addresses the pressing issues of the times.

The upcoming June ’15 Papal Encyclical will address ecological sustainability. Environmentalists have their fingers crossed, hoping the Pope hits the ball out of the park. Climate change deniers, to a great extent, hope he strikes out at the plate.

In preparation, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican’s research unit, recently hosted a one-day conference, bringing together scientists and spiritual leaders from around the world.

Only the highest-ranking Vatican officials know the contents of the upcoming encyclical. Nevertheless, according to Bloomberg news reporter Eric Roston, The Pope Is About to Release His Secret Climate Change Plan, Bloomberg Business, May 1, 2015.

According to Bloomberg’s report, “the letter itself is finished.” Inside the Vatican, theologians and translators are putting together the greatly anticipated letter in the languages of the world. After all, the Pope is the leader of 1.2 billion Catholics, and certainly one of the most influential people on the planet. It makes perfect sense he address worldly issues.

Clues about contents of the preeminent encyclical may be discerned by reading-between-the-lines the origin behind the recent meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute is one of the key organizers. According to Mr. Sachs, “We’re here today because sustainable development is far off course.”

“Sustainable development is far off course” is a polite way of saying “degradation of the planet sucks.”

Further clues as to the Pope’s position are found on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences web site under the heading: “Statement of the Joint PAS/PASS Workshop on Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility,” wherein it states:

“The massive fossil fuel use at the heart of the global energy system deeply disrupts the Earth’s climate and acidifies the world’s oceans.”

Well, well now, it is very doubtful much changed with ocean acidification or fossil fuel use since the Joint PAS/PASS affaire in 2014. Those conspicuous clues are likely as valid as a handprint in dried concrete Therefore, we know where the Pope is coming from and likely what he’ll say. Namely, fossil fuels have got to go, the sooner the better. How else interpret the statement that fossil fuel “deeply disrupts” the Earth’s climate?

Not only that, but the biggest clue to the contents of the encyclical is this: Why, in the first instance, conduct a meeting about “sustainability” if the planet is already sustainable? End of story.

But, the story continues as Pope Francis is, after all, scheduled to address Congress this September. Talk about a clash of interests. “Republicans don’t like the idea of addressing climate change head-on,” Ibid.

It doesn’t get much more “head-on” than an address by the Pope, who commands attention whenever and wherever he speaks, especially on the heels of a Papal Encyclical.

How will America’s climate change pooh-pooh entourage in Congress handle such an affaire?

Keeping Time for the Grateful Dead

Ron Jacobs

In a decade that was replete with important years, 1965 was one of the most important in terms of politics, civil rights, rock and roll and the counterculture. If one was a teenager with any awareness about the world outside their everyday life, it would have been hard to stay put and pretend that life was like it appeared on television’s Leave it to Beaver or even My Three Sons. Protesters against US apartheid were getting beaten and hosed in the American South while others protesting their racist conditions enforced by racist police burnt up parts of Watts in Los Angeles. The US war on the Vietnamese was ramping up, with bombers attacking Vietnamese villages daily while at home the military draft stepped up its game. There had been a huge antiwar protest in Washington, DC in the spring organized by a New Leftist student group called Students for a Democratic Society and their message had reached millions of young men around the nation who were considering their options when the letter from the draft board came. The Beatles “invaded” the United States the year before. Bob Dylan released (or was in the process of releasing) two albums that changed the world of rock music forever. The Rolling Stones were kicking it up with their own versions of American blues numbers and the radio played their hit tune “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” repeatedly. Then, there was this stuff called LSD.

Bill Kreutzmann was one of those teenagers. His family life had created a situation where he was living on his own at age sixteen. He was learning drums and he had met this older cat named Jerry Garcia. They knew this other guy named Bob Weir and this rugged fellow named Ron McKernan. They all liked music and a couple of them could even play (or sing.) So, that’s what they did. Their first bass plyer didn’t pan out and Garcia found a guy named Phil Lesh, who was studying music composition across the Bay from San Francisco. From these beginnings, a band was formed. Add a connection to the scene (nominally “lead” by writer Ken Kesey) existing outside of Stanford University in a Palo Alto district called Perry Lane and one arrives at the band called the Grateful Dead.

This band was more than the jingle to everyone else’s jangle in the heyday of the counterculture. It was also more than a flashback to those times after they had passed. A quote from the Egyptian Book of the Dead that they placed on their second album hints at their role: “In the land of the night/the ship of the sun is drawn by the grateful dead.” This type of understanding, however grandiose it may seem to those not attracted to the phenomenon of the counterculture or the Grateful Dead, is emblematic of how they were (and maybe still are) perceived by millions.

Like any cultural phenomenon with its heft, the Grateful Dead has had a few books written about them. From the original band biography written by hippie hustler Hank Harrison titled The Dead to Candace Brightman’s (who was also a light technician with the Dead) cultural history Sweet Chaos: The Cultural History of the Grateful Dead; from band biographer Dennis McNally’s comprehensive history titled A Long Strange Trip to Perspectives on the Grateful Dead: Critical Writings—just to name a few—the Grateful Dead and their storied history is well documented. In addition to the histories and cultural analyses, there are the memoirs by band members and members of the broader Grateful Dead family. The most recent of the latter is drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s Deal: My Thirty Years of Drumming, Drugs and Dreaming with the Grateful Dead.

Kreutzmann, who was a founding member of the band, tells a story of the Grateful Dead from its beginnings in the 1965 San Francisco Bay Area to its last show in Chicago in 1995. In telling his tale, he also chronicles the freewheeling anarchy of the counterculture and its demise. Likewise, he reflects on the institutionalization of rock and the commodification of the scene. Like other rock biographies, there are tales of hijinks on the road, women, and drugs. There is also a lot of discussion about drumming; time signatures and tricks with the sticks. What is different from other rock biographies, though, is Kreutzmann’s everyman observation. According to Kreutzmann, he was always a fan of Jerry Garcia, even thirty years after he started playing drums behind him. Although he ultimately became a rock star like his bandmates, the story he relates in these pages indicate an ability to ignore much of the ego stroking that comes along with that stardom. In part, this is due to the nature of the Grateful Dead and its existence for much of its life as something like a house band for hippies and their hangers on. The pedestal of stardom where performers like Mick Jagger and so many of today’s superstars seem to thrive was not where the Dead preferred to be. Much of this can be attributed to their beginnings as participants in the Acid Tests organized (if that’s the word) by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. If it does anything to most people, LSD makes one realize they are not any better than anyone else. Of course, there are some exceptions to this truth; one thinks of manipulators in the counterculture scene who took advantage of people on psychedelic drugs. The worst example of the phenomena would be Charles Manson, although there were others (Tim Leary, Mel Lyman) whose head trips pissed plenty of people off.

After reading this book and enjoying the stories and anecdotes therein, whether the story was about Bob Dylan showing up at the Dead’s San Rafael studio and playing the Beatles song “Nowhere Man,” or a tale about a pot bust in New Orleans, I realized the underlying context of this book is the transition of the Grateful Dead from a bunch of hippies to a corporation. Implicit in this tale is the similar trajectory of the counterculture the Grateful Dead sang to and for. It is a story with as many different reasons and interpretations as there are tellers. Bill Kreutzmann’s is one more. It is a personal tale of universal intention told with humor and the sense of fun that was crucial to the experience of a Grateful Dead concert and the counterculture itself. Like the daily lives of every hippie freak (or an acid trip), it wasn’t always easy street, but it was always an adventure.

Selling the Olympics

Binoy Kampmark

The merchants of the Olympic brand are running out of ideas. For decades, the deception of common humanity and the broader interests of building peace before the terror of war supposedly immunised the Olympics from slander and critique. Olympism was a high-ended spectrum of nobility, though it reeked of the body beautiful and a state sponsored cult of blood.

It also meant that countries, and more to the point cities, were encouraged to host the large scale event before a rather inflated name. Megalomaniacs, dictators, and gullible democracies joined in the profligate fun. Even mayor Jean Drapeau of Montreal, host city of the 1976 Summer Games, could claim in a moment of suspended sanity that “the Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby.” It took till 2006 for the accrued $1.5 billion debt to be paid off.

The bidding process, positively smacking with corrupt wheeling and unscrupulous dealing, would throw up a doomed unfortunate who would, after the hangover from the celebrations, sober up to the prospect of excessive cost over poor returns and revenue.

As economist Victor Matheson has pointed out in rather damning fashion, “Public expenditures on sports infrastructure entail reductions in other government services, an expansion of government borrowing, or an increase in taxation, all of which produce a drag on the local economy.” (Importantly, such infrastructure tends to be deemed equivalent to general public infrastructure, a sophistic nonsense.)

Matheson throws cold water on any such notions that these events actually bring in the attractions of the purse, or the prospect for greater employment to the local economy. “At best public expenditures on sports-related construction or operation have zero net impact on the economy as the employment benefits of the project are matched by employment losses associated with higher taxes or spending cuts elsewhere in the system.”

More states are realising that the Olympics is a factor for the production of white elephants, mouldering and festering structures that have seen more weeds than spectators over their lifetime.

The 2022 Winter Olympics saw numerous withdrawals last year. Cities such as Krakow, Munich, and Davos-St. Moritz scrapped their bids in the face of public rejection. Lviv’s withdrawal was a disaster of history – revolution and war put pay to any idea that hosting an Olympics might actually be wise, while sane heads in Stockholm did the sums and decided that earnings would, in fact, be poorer than expenditure.

The results for countries showing greater reluctance for hosting the Olympics is that its organisers are returning back to police state and authoritarian sponsors. But the IOC is also trying to hunt for fresh pastures, approaches and, to be frank, the plain gullible. One has been a recent suggestion for encouraging multicity-bids in an effort to distribute the financial folly. Even a few countries – take Malaysia and Thailand – are rumoured to be putting in joint bids for the 2024 games.

Some have fallen for the trick. The bun fights are already starting in Australia about such a move regarding the 2028 games, which various cities vying off for the richest events. Brisbane’s Lord Mayor thinks his city is in with a jolly chance, showing that even a prospective Olympic bid can distract from the impact of environmental disasters in the state.

The Herald Sun was keen to parade Melbourne’s gold-studded sporting attributes in a manner to outshine other cities who might partake in the co-hosting. The brunt of the boast was, invariably, Sydney. The Melbourne Cricket Ground’s capacity of 100,000 was superior to other stadia in the country. The city’s Hisense Arena for cycling is close to the central station, while Sydney’s Dunc Gray Velodrome is 24km west of the city. As for sailing: “We’ve got water, and it’s windy all the bloody time.”

In what is absurd Olympic speak, commentary abounds that the $50 million or more necessary to mount such a bid would actually be “a worthy investment” (Sydney Morning Herald, Apr 29). They point to the Melbourne games of 1956, the same city’s hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2006 and Sydney’s 2000 effort as “positive” achievements.

Again, stubborn mendacity prevails, with the view that winning an Olympic bid somehow enriches the local environment in terms of development and modernisation. Justin Madden, a senior infrastructure consultant working at Arup, falls for the IOC propaganda with striking ease. A bid by Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne might spur on a “city-to-city ultra-fast rail” that would invigorate the eastern seaboard. With “critical time lines” pressing down on construction efforts, this might make such a project “possible”.

Anyone with any sense of Australia’s record on trains and modernisation will understand that obstacles tend to prevail over achievement and speed. Inter-state obstinacy, to take one stellar example, made sure that each state, even at federation, retained its own rail gauge system.

In such an environment, the public will generally matters less than buffoonish government self-promotion. Sporting events of such scale have always been about spectators and image, even if that image proves far from convincing on the ledger.

America’s God Complex

William E. Alberts

American presidents reverently end their speeches with the audience-approving Benediction, “God bless America.” What they are really communicating is that God favors America. That, today, America is God’s chosen people. Even more! They are equating America with God. Which— in the magical twinkle of a rationalizing mind’s eye—means that America is God—white America, that is. As political leaders like to assert: America is today’s embodiment of Jesus’ teaching that “a city set on a hill cannot be hidden,” and by inference, his followers, “are the light of the world.” (Matthew 5: 14-16) With a “manifest destiny” that swept our white forefathers across the American continent, over the bones of indigenous people and on the backs of black persons forced into slavery—today’s continuation of which includes a trail of bodies, citizens killed by police “while being black.”

America also sees itself as “the leader of the free world,” possessing the gold standard of morality, and thus determining which countries need to be liberated and which are state sponsors of terrorism.  America’s unmatched military force allows it to live in a parallel universe, and assume the role of judge, jury and executioner over much of the world with its economic power, sanctions and “kill lists.” A dominant majority of its citizens are conditioned to believe that they are the “good guys” and those who resist America’s policies “the bad guys.” All of which means that other people worship lesser gods, and therefore don’t count, and are disposable.

A classic example of America’s God complex is the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. An unnecessary, horribly destructive pre-emptive war against the Iraqi people, which author, political commentator and social justice activist Noam Chomsky calls, “The major crime of this millennium.” (“’Any reader of Orwell would be perfectly familiar’ with US maneuvers—Chomsky to RT,” rt.com/usa,April 17, 2015)

A “Christ changed my heart”-President George W. Bush said, at a March 2003 news conference on Iraq, “I pray daily . . . for peace.” Two weeks later, America was hell-bent for war against Iraq. A war based on trumped-up lies accusing President Saddam Hussein of possessing mushroom-cloud”-threatening weapons of mass destruction and ties to the 9/11 attacks against America. And “God” was reverently woven into these manipulating falsehoods.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, a preying President Bush declared, “We seek peace. . . . And sometimes peace must be defended. . . . If war is forced upon us (italics added), we will fight in a just cause and by just means.” The “just cause?” “If Saddam does not fully disarm, for
the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him,” Bush declared to applause. And that “coalition” included a divine Partner. “We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence,” Bush asserted, “yet we can trust them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.” (“State of the Union-President George W. Bush,” The White House, Jan. 28, 2003)

The “ways of Providence” led to the horrible war crime against Iraq, which was marketed for American consumption as “Project Iraqi Freedom.” And a devout President Bush continued to remind red-blooded, white evangelical Christians especially and other believers that, “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world; freedom is almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in the world.” (“Text: President Bush’s Acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention,” FDCH E-Media, Inc., The Washington Post, Sept. 2, 2004)

Many God complex-motivated white evangelical Christians got the message. Their faith leaders were reported to have preached “war sermons” with a “common theme,” which was, “Our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned (italics added) that God’s will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.” (“Wayward Christian Soldiers,” By Charles Marsh, The NewYork Times, Jan. 20, 2006)

Besides, supporting the pre-emptive war against Iraq had other faith-based benefits. While American-led multinational corporations were coveting the enormous reservoir of oil under Iraq’s ground, evangelical Christians, with their God complex, saw the invasion as a “unique opportunity” to convert Muslims fortunate enough to survive above ground.

Not that all faiths accommodated President Bush’s criminal war against Iraq. Numerous faith groups and their leaders protested early on. Some strongly. But, in time, with American boots on Iraqi ground, and most of mainstream media cheer-leading the war, the prophetic voices of faith lessened in intensity, and then became silent. The United Methodist Church, the country’s second largest Protestant denomination) is a classic case in point—especially with President Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, being United Methodists.

On November 8, 2005, over two-and-a-half years after the invasion of Iraq, the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops released a “Statement of Conscience” against the Iraq war. The 94 Bishops began by “repent[ing] of our complicity in what we believe to be the unjust and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Then vagueness took over. “In the face of the United States Administration’s (italics added) rush toward military action based on misleading information, too many of us were silent.” The Bishops committed themselves “to peacemaking . . . without being so cautious in confronting evil(italics added) that we lose our moral authority.” They issued a call to “all United Methodists to “object with boldness when governing powers (italics added) offer solutions of war that conflict with the gospel message of self-emptying love.” (“94 Methodist Bishops Sign Statement of Conscience Repenting Complicity with the Iraq War,”www.worldcan’twait.net, Nov. 8, 2005) (For a fuller discussion of the Bishops’ “Statement of Conscience , see Alberts, “Jesus, the Theological Prisoner of Christianity: Time to Stop Evangelizing and Start Liberating,Counterpunch, Aug. 25/26, 2007)

“The United States administration?” “Without being so cautious in confronting evil?” “Governing powers?” The 94 United Methodist Bishops could not even bring themselves to name the two “governing powers” most responsible for the horribly “evil” deaths and destruction unleashed upon the people of Iraq—and America—their own church members: President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

No problem. Today, The United Methodist Church has created the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University. Here is seen the rationalizing power of the God complex: a Christian denomination creating a noble monument to the war criminal most responsible for “the major crime of this millennium.”

Here is also seen the moral bar for the selection of United Methodist Bishops: most clergy-candidates for bishop have demonstrated their creativity serving as chaplains of the status quo, rather than confronting political and corporate power with reality and moral truth. Which means that more prophetic United Methodist ministers are often passed over for bishop, or their candidacy undermined.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum needs to be viewed in the light of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies’ “gruesome” findings on Iraq. In “looking back on ten years of war, trauma, death and displacement,” the Center qualified its findings with, “These are the results of the war that we know. And the overall figures are stunning. The findings: “4.5 million displaced, 1-2 million widows, 5 million orphans, about one million dead—in one way or another, affecting nearly one in every two people in Iraq with tragic life-altering (or ending) impacts.” (‘IN THE BUSH PRESIDENCY; HOW MANY DIED,’ Iraq: the Human Cost, web.mit.edu) And the Bush administration’s “major crime of this millennium,” with its horrible brutality, has fathered the birth of the brutally vengeful Islamic State, or ISIS.

Those possessed with the God complex, or the related ethnocentric disease of American exceptionalism, need to hear the message of MIT’s study: “The American public still for the most part has no idea what the United States did to that country, and until we Americans take responsibility for the harm we do to others with our perpetual wars, we can never recover from our war sickness, which drives us to resort to violence in international affairs in a way no other democracy routinely does.”   MIT’s message continues: “The news media rarely describes the ruinous consequences of U.S. policy and war-making for Afghanis and Iraqis. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture the suffering either.” (Ibid)

But the suffering of American victims of our government’s “perpetual wars” is greatly lauded and publicized as a noble sacrifice in defense of our country’s freedom. An American soldier is killed in Iraq, or Afghanistan, and the media carry stories of people lining the streets as the hearse passes slowly by, carrying his or her body to the house of worship, where he or she is lovingly eulogized. A tragic ritual repeated countless times in cities, towns and villages across the country—of precious American lives needlessly sacrificed in our government’s immoral “perpetual wars.” Immoral wars masked by political leaders, and accompanying mainstream media, as defensive, to protect Americans, but, in reality, are launched to control other countries and their energy resources—for the benefit of America’s military, industrial, energy, intelligence complex.

In a like manner, blow back violence against Americans is reinterpreted to accommodate our country’s God complex. The massive publicity surrounding the victims of the tragic 2013 Boston Marathon bombings illustrates just how sacred America lives are portrayed in relation to the unknown, nameless millions killed and maimed and widowed and orphaned by their government– in their name.

The heart-wrenching stories of Boston Marathon victims, presented at the recent penalty phase of the trial of accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, made headlines. Like, “Jurors hear of lives torn apart by bombings.” (By Milton J. Valencia and Patricia Wen, The Boston Globe, April 21, 2015). And, “In Boston courtroom, a procession of heartbreaking loss in Tsarnaev sentencing,” (By CNN Wire Service,Fox6now.com, April 22, 2015) Heart-wrenching testimony of victims’ families that led several jurors to “wipe away tears.” “She was the light of my life,” said the father of Krystle Marie Campbell, one of three victims who died in the bombings. (By Milton J. Valencia and Patricia Wren,Ibid) The courtroom testimonies greatly humanized all of the victims, portraying their loss and injury and aspirations—and “the light” they provided for their loved ones lives. As prosecuting attorney Nadine Pellegrini “told jurors in her opening statement . . . ‘you know how Krystle, Lingzi, Martin and Sean died. . . . Now you need t know how they lived. You need to know and understand why their lives mattered.’” (Ibid)

Along with deeply moving stories of loss and injury, there are much publicized stories of courage and perseverance. Like ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost part of one leg in the bombings. At Dshokhar Tsarnaev’s trial, “she testified that she thought she was dead when the second bomb exploded because she couldn’t hear herself scream.” Last year, she told the Huffington Post, “I absolutely want to dance again and I also want to run the marathon next year.” She did both this year, telling “the news outlet that it was an ‘incredible cathartic’ experience.” (Boston Marathon Survivor with Prosthetic Leg Dances the Foxtrot at the Finish Line,” By Caitlin Keating,www.people.com, 4/29/2015)

And, now, Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg, originally from Dorchester, Massachusetts, is planning to produce a movie on the Boston Marathon bombings, called “Patriots’ Day.” Our bipartisan political leaders could not ask for a more favorable script for its “perpetual wars.” Tony Press,CBS Film President, put the movie this way: “There is nothing more compelling than a real story populated by real heroes . . . . The team that we have assembled for this project is determined to give audiences a very personal look at what occurred during the days when the eyes of the world were on the city of Boston and how a group of contemporary patriots faced this crisis.” (“Mark Wahlberg to produce Boston Marathon bombing movie,“ By Jessica Derschowitz, CBS News, April 1, 2015)

Those “patriots” include Boston area faith leaders, whose voices and visibility were sought after the Marathon bombings and given much coverage by the dominant press. The same voices that are rarely heard confronting bipartisan political leaders with reality and moral truth for needlessly creating enemies and causing such blowback violence with their “perpetual wars.”

The references to Boston Marathon bombing victims is not intended, in any way, to minimize their suffering and courage and perseverance. The intent is to focus on the immorality of bipartisan political leaders’ “perpetual wars,” which are a primary cause of the blow back violence against the Marathon bombing victims and other Americans. Blowback violence that will continue with more victims, if we allow our bipartisan leaders and dominant media to continue justifying their “perpetual wars” by glorifying American lives and negating the humanity and existence of the wars’ countless victims.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald goes to the heart of America’s God and exceptionalism complexes, writing, “American and Western victims of violence by Muslims are endlessly mourned, while Muslim victims of American and Western violence are completely disappeared.” He continues, “When there is an attack by a Muslim on Westerners in Paris, Sydney, Ottawa, Fort Hood or Boston, we are deluged with grief-inducing accounts of the victims. We learn their names,” he goes on, “and their extinguished life aspirations, see their pictures, hear from their grieving relatives, watch ceremonies honoring their lives and mourning their deaths, launch campaigns to memorialize them.”   Greenwald has a name for it: “the ugliest propaganda tactic on which the War on Terror centrally depends . . . toxic tribalism that repeats itself over and over throughout the West. Western victims are mourned and humanized, while victims of Western violence are invisible and thus dehumanized.” (‘THE KEY WAR ON TERROR PROPAGANDA TOOL: ONLY WESTERN VICTIMS ARE ACKNOWLEDGED,’firstlook.org/theintercept, 4/24/2015)

Glenn Greenwald applies the God complex mentality to President Obama, who recently said that he “profoundly regretted” and “took full responsibility” for the drone strike deaths of two Al Qaeda hostages: American veteran aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto. “We all bleed when we lose an American life, Obama stated. “We all grieve when any innocent life is taken.” (“Hostage Deaths Show Risk of Drone Strikes,” By Peter Baker and Julie Hirschfeld Davis,The New York Times, April 25, 2015)

In response to President Bush’s apology, Glen Greenwald quotes “Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents 150 victims of American drones and was twice denied entry to the U.S. to speak about them.” Akbar told Greenwald’s ”Intercept colleague Ryan Devereaux how two of his child clients would likely react to Obama’s ‘apology’ yesterday:

Today, if Nabila or Zubair or many of the civilian victims, if they are watching on TV the president being so remorseful over the killing of a Westerner, what message is that taking? The answer, he argued is “that you do not matter, you are children of a  lesser God, and I’m only going to mourn if a Westerner is killed.” (‘THE KEY WAR ON TERROR PROPAGANDA TOOL: ONLY WESTERN VICTIMS ARE ACKNOWLEDGED,’ Ibid)

Prosecutors and mainstream media made much of the “incendiary photo” of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev giving the finger to a security camera in his cell “three months after the bombing.” (“After Jury Sees Gesture by Marathon Bomber, Defense Tries to Blunt Its Meaning, By Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, April 23, 20015) With their “perpetual wars” creating endless enemies and blowback violence. Their investment of America’s resources in destroying countless lives for the profit of those making money and maintaining political power off the wars. At the expense of countless citizens of color in Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, North Charleston and elsewhere in America. Citizens whose own neighborhoods are occupied, rather than protected, by the police. It is far past time for far more Americans to see that, while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may appear to be giving America the finger, our bipartisan political leaders are giving Americathe shaft with their “perpetual wars.”

I was privileged to work as a hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center for 22 years, over 18 full-time. With its diversity of patients, BMC is like a global neighborhood. And the sacred worth of every patient is seen with the sounding of Code Blue, signaling that one is in distress. When that alarm sounds, doctors and nurses and supporting staff rush to the bedside of the patient in crisis. Whatever the patient’s religion, race, nationality, economic status, or sexual orientation , his or her life matters. All deserve “exceptional care, without exception,” which is Boston Medical Center’s mission statement, and the commitment of other hospitals as well. America desperately needs revelations from the faith community of a global neighborhood god who cares for everyone—without exception.

The IDF’s New Tactics

Neve Gordon

Several months ago, a young woman working in Kibbutz Dorot’s carrot fields noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground with a short inscription in Arabic. It looked like a treasure map. She put it in her pocket. Some time later, she gave it to her friend Avihai, who works for Breaking the Silence, an organisation of military veterans who collect testimony from Israeli soldiers to provide a record of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Avihai was in the middle of interviewing soldiers about their experiences during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip last summer. He recognised the piece of paper as a leaflet that had been dropped by an Israeli plane above Palestinian neighbourhoods in the northern part of the Strip; the wind had blown it six miles from its intended landing point.

The leaflet helps explain why 70 per cent of the 2220 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians. The red line on the map traces a route from a bright blue area labelled Beit Lahia, a Palestinian town of 60,000 inhabitants at the north edge of the Strip, and moves south through Muaskar Jabalia to Jabalia city. The text reads:

Military Notification to the Residents of Beit Lahia

The IDF will be undertaking forceful and assertive air operations against terrorist elements and infrastructure in the locations from which they launch their missiles at the State of Israel. These locations include:

From east Atatra to Salatin Street. From west [unclear] to Jabalia Camp.

You must evacuate your homes immediately and head toward southern Jabalia town along the following road:

Falluja Road, until 12 noon, Sunday 13 July 2014.

The IDF does not intend to harm you or your families. These operations are temporary and will be of short duration. Any person, however, who violates these instructions and does not evacuate his home immediately puts his own life as well as the lives of his household in danger. Those who take heed will be spared.

‘The significance of this leaflet,’ Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, ‘cannot be appreciated fully without reading our new report.’ The report is made up of 111 testimonies, provided by around seventy soldiers who participated in the fighting.

One thing is immediately clear from the interviews: the IDF’s working assumption was that once the leaflets were dropped, anyone who refused to move was a legitimate target:

Q: You said earlier that you knew the neighbourhood was supposed to be empty of civilians?

A: Yes. That’s what they told us … they told us that the civilians had been informed via leaflets scattered in the area, and that it was supposed to be devoid of civilians, and civilians who remained there were civilians who apparently chose to be there.

Q: Who told you that?

A: The commanders, in off-the-record type conversations, or during all kinds of briefings.

The IDF has the technology to tell whether people had actually left, but the claim that ‘no civilians should be in the area’ is a recurring refrain.

The land invasion began on 17 July and was generally limited to within a mile of the border. An infantry soldier deployed either in or near Beit Lahia described a typical incident:

There was one time when I looked at some place and was sure I saw someone moving. Maybe I imagined it, some curtain blowing, I don’t know. So I said: ‘I see something moving.’ I asked [permission] to open fire toward that spot, and I opened fire and [the other soldiers] hit it with a barrage …

Q: What were the rules of engagement?

A: There weren’t really any rules of engagement … They told us: ‘There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.’ Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn’t a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. First of all because it’s Gaza, and second because that’s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us – they told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to shoot,’ and they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.

It seems safe to assume, however, that most of the civilians who died weren’t killed by infantry troops. One of the IDF’s basic doctrines is to try to guarantee zero risk for its troops. The region was ‘softened’ by artillery fire for nine days before the ground forces were scheduled to invade. Planes, helicopters and drones (though the IDF does not admit to using killer drones) bombarded the region from the air, and there was heavy artillery fire from inside Israel. As one soldier put it,

We knew that by the time we got there on Friday there were not supposed to be any people in the area, since leaflets were dispersed and also because there wasn’t very much left of the place. The artillery corps and the air force really cleaned that place up.

The Israeli zero risk doctrine was developed with the help of Asa Kasher, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and one of the authors of the IDF’s ethical code. Kasher interprets just war theory and international humanitarian law as stipulating a hierarchy of protection: Israeli civilians must be protected at all costs, then come IDF soldiers, and only then do the enemy’s civilian population enter into the equation. ‘When it is impossible to accomplish a military mission without endangering the lives of a terrorist’s non-terrorist neighbours,’ Kasher writes in ‘The Ethics of Protective Edge’, ‘as much compassion as possible under the circumstances must be shown without aborting the mission or raising the risk to Israeli soldiers.’

As the troops prepared to enter Gaza, artillery and intelligence officers determined which targets should be eliminated before the ground invasion: tall buildings overlooking the incursion route, for example, and places from which rockets had been launched at Israel. One soldier describes a high-ranking officer looking at an aerial photo on which targets had been circled, and then pointing at several other Palestinian houses and instructing the artillery officer to eliminate them too.

The Israeli military fired 34,000 artillery rounds during the war: 12,000 smoke, 3000 illumination and 19,000 explosive. With an American-made Howitzer 155-millimetre cannon, a strike is considered precise when the round falls anywhere within 100 metres of the target. Howitzer shells can kill anyone within 50 metres and injure anyone within 100 metres.

There is this perception that we know how to do everything super accurately, as if it doesn’t matter which weapon is being used … But no, these weapons are statistical, and they hit 50 metres to the right or 100 metres to the left, and it’s unpleasant. What happens is, for seven straight days it’s non-stop bombardment, that’s what happens in practice.

The artillery officer has to ensure the target is a certain distance from sensitive sites, such as UN facilities, schools, clinics and hospitals. These distances are not set in stone, but determined by what the IDF terms ‘activity levels’. If, for example, the activity level is one, then the target of a 155-millimetre projectile can’t be within 500 metres of a school. But if the activity level is changed to three, then the safety range is decreased dramatically. An officer explains:

First level means you can fire artillery up to a certain distance from civilians, or from a place where you think it’s likely there’ll be civilians … For fighter jets and the bigger bombs of one ton, half a ton, it’s defined verbally … as ‘Low level of damage expected to civilians.’ Next is the second level. The mortar ranges stay the same, and for artillery the distance from civilians decreases. For jets, it says, ‘Moderate harm to civilians’ or ‘Moderate harm to civilians is expected,’ or ‘Moderate collateral damage’, something like that. This means something undefined, something that’s according to the way the commander sees things and the mood he’s in: ‘Let’s decide ourselves what “moderate” means.’ In the third level, the artillery’s [safety range from civilians] gets cut by about half. I’m not talking about jets, where there’s already significant damage and it’s considered acceptable, that’s the definition. We expect a high level of harm to civilians. Like, it’s OK from our perspective, because we’re in the third level. They aren’t given a specific, defined number, this is something I remember clearly. That’s left to the commander.

Another soldier adds that the activity levels reflect ‘the degree of collateral damage you’re allowed to cause. [They] reflect the means that you’re permitted to use, and the distance you need to maintain from sensitive locations when you shoot. They reflect a whole lot of parameters concerning the activation of fire.’

There can be many reasons for changing the activity level. Some have to do with the intensity of the fighting. When Hamas blew up an armoured personnel carrier in Shuja’iyya and killed seven Israeli soldiers, the activity level immediately changed:

There were many, many targets that [weren’t attacked] because they didn’t qualify under the firing policy, and then after Shuja’iyya for example, suddenly some of those targets did get approved. The sort of problematic targets that were at a certain distance from some school – suddenly stuff like that did get approved.

The activity level may also change due to specific intelligence, or simply because the only remaining targets are not within the range permitted by level one, ‘because the “target bank” had been depleted.’

‘Hamas is pushing for a display of victory,’ that’s always the expression used … this sweeping expression that’s used at the end of every round [of fighting]. [There is talk that] the delegations are in Cairo, or on their way to Cairo, or will soon be arriving in Cairo. But the fighting keeps going on, and even if you think it’s about to end – you have to keep acting like nothing’s about to end. So that’s why you go up a level, to turn the threat around and also as a show of force. And so it’s possible that the target will be approved if it’s justified, if there’s a good reason, if it’s a valuable target, or if there’s a good chance to hit it in a way that’ll look good to the Israeli audience, and look bad for the Palestinian audience. That’ll hurt the military rocket-firing capabilities of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or of other organisations …

Q: Collateral damage means only bodily harm, or also damage to property?

A: Bodily harm.

Q: Property isn’t counted at all?

A: Not as far as the levels – the levels are practically binary. These are the levels of collateral damage, and the grading is based solely on human lives.

After the 2006 Lebanon war, the IDF realised that its strictly hierarchical command structure had hindered the war effort. The idea, which is now common in the US military as well, is to create a network of interconnected decentralised cells with significant autonomy to make executive decisions. In the words of General Stanley McChrystal, who headed the US Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, ‘to defeat a networked enemy, we had to become a network ourselves.’ Each cell is made up of officers from different branches – infantry, artillery, air force, military intelligence, secret service agencies – who work together on the basis of shared information and shared strategy. The way the IDF cells function is classified, but it seems likely there are two main kinds: ‘attack cells’ and ‘assistance cells’. Attack cells would include ‘hunting cells’ whose goal is to hunt down Palestinian militants and assassinate them. There are also thought to be ‘fishing cells’, whose task is to monitor a particular area to determine who the ‘big fish’ in it are; and ‘real estate cells’, which identify and monitor strategic buildings and facilities so that they can be destroyed at the right moment if necessary.

One soldier, who was very likely a member of an ‘attack cell’, was asked what happens when the target bank is depleted, i.e. whether the IDF attacks the houses of lower ranking Hamas activists when most higher ranking targets have already been eliminated. The soldier replied:

Absolutely. See, you start the fighting with a very clear ‘target list’ that has been assembled over a long period of time, and there are also units whose objective is to mark new targets in real time. When we start running out [of targets], then we begin hitting targets that are higher on collateral damage levels, and pay less and less attention to this. But there are also all sorts of efforts aimed at gathering intelligence that’s specifically for establishing new targets like, for example, which areas are being used to launch [missiles or mortars toward Israel], statistics on where rockets are being fired from, where mortars are being fired from. [The co-ordinates] are calculated in a pretty precise way, and are used to try and figure out where it’s likely that there is a rocket-launching infrastructure. And you say: ‘OK, I’ll strike that piece of land, because every morning at 7 a.m., ten mortar shells are fired from there.’

After the nine-day artillery assault on the Gaza Strip, the troops marched in. The testimonies suggest that every infantry brigade was accompanied by a tank battalion, an engineering battalion and several D9 bulldozers, and had back-up artillery at its disposal as well as constant reconnaissance that was communicated to the officers on the ground through an assistance cell. The soldiers say that the ground troops had instructions to kill any person within range. Before they entered Palestinian houses, a tank would shoot a shell to create a way in or soldiers would use hand-held missile launchers. Anyone inside would be incapacitated and so unable to surprise the troops. Once they were in, any movement outside was considered suspicious.

Several soldiers said that at first there were arguments about how they should behave in the Palestinian houses they occupied. In briefings, soldiers were instructed not to loot or plunder, and some argued that they shouldn’t sleep on the mattresses or make coffee on the stove. Others disagreed:

The way I saw it, I pictured this family returning to their house and seeing it totally wrecked: the windows all broken, the floors torn up and the walls messed up by grenades; and they say: ‘The sons of bitches ate my cornflakes, I can’t believe it.’ No chance. They wouldn’t care if you used their cooking gas, if you used their kitchen. That’s total bullshit in my opinion. I don’t think that type of quandary is complex at all.

Many others began to understand that the ethical dilemmas raised in the briefings were a farce:

We knew that we were entering a house and that we could be good kids, on our best behaviour, but even then a D9 [armoured bulldozer] would show up and flatten the house. We figured out pretty quickly that every house we left, a D9 would show up and raze it. The neighbourhood we were in, what characterised it operationally was that it commanded a view of the entire area of the [Israel-Gaza border fence] and also some of the [Israeli] border towns. In the southern and some of the eastern parts of Juhar ad-Dik, we understood pretty quickly that the houses would not be left standing … At a certain point we understood it was a pattern: you leave a house and the house is gone; after two or three houses you figure out that there’s a pattern. The D9 comes and flattens it.

This is the Dahiya doctrine in action, named after the Beirut neighbourhood which Israel turned into rubble in 2006. According to Gabi Siboni from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, the IDF needs

to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritise damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.

According to the 2009 Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the essence of the doctrine was ‘widespread destruction as a means of deterrence’. Soldiers talk of the ‘day after’ effect:

Part of the [military] engineering rationale, of what’s called ‘the day after’ – I don’t know if that’s the term that’s published – is that when we blow up and flatten the area, we can in effect sterilise it. Throughout the period of combat, one keeps in mind that there is this thing called ‘the day after’, which is: the day we leave [the Gaza Strip], the more [areas] left wide open and as ‘clean’ as possible the better. One decides on a certain line – during the days after Operation Cast Lead it was 300 metres from the fence – and this area is levelled, flattened. Doesn’t matter if there are groves there, doesn’t matter if there are houses, doesn’t matter if there is a gas station – it’s all flattened because we are at war, so we are allowed to. You can justify anything you do during wartime … Everything suddenly sounds reasonable even though it isn’t really reasonable. We had a few D9s in our battalion and I can attest that the D9s alone destroyed hundreds of structures. It was in the debriefing. There were a few more structures that we blew up in the end. Obviously there were all kinds of other things, but the D9 was the main tool, it doesn’t stop working. Anything that looks suspicious, whether it’s just in order to clear a path, whether it’s some other thing, it takes it down. That’s the mission.

Another soldier describes the last hour before a ceasefire:

There was a humanitarian ceasefire that went into effect at 6 a.m. I remember they told us at 5.15: ‘Look, we’re going to put on a show.’ It was amazing, the air force’s precision. The first shell struck at exactly quarter past five and the last one struck at 5.59 and 59 seconds. It was crazy. Fire, non-stop shelling of [a] neighbourhood [east of Beit Hanoun] … Non-stop. Just non-stop. The entire Beit Hanoun compound in ruins.

Q: When you saw this neighbourhood on your way out, what did you see?

A: When we left it was still intact. We were sent out of Beit Hanoun ahead of the ceasefire, ahead of the air force strikes.

Q: And when you went back in [after the air strikes], what did you see of that neighbourhood?

A: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Like the opening scene in The Pianist. There’s that famous photo that they always show on trips to Poland that shows Warsaw before the war and Warsaw after the Second World War. The photo shows the heart of Warsaw and it’s this classy European city, and then they show it at the end of the war. They show the exact same neighbourhood, only it has just one house left standing, and the rest is just ruins. That’s what it looked like.

The U.S. Encouragement of Fanatic Islamism in the Arab World

GARY LEUPP

A beautiful essay posted on Medium.com, entitled “A Marine in Syria: Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence before the Devastation” by Brad Hoff, draws our attention to what for the warmongers in Washington is a highly inconvenient truth: the secular dictatorships in the Middle East the U.S. has sought to destroy since 9/11 (including most recently that of Libya) have been far more tolerant towards religious and cultural diversity than the regimes that have replaced them.

In particular, the much-vilified Baath Party, which governed Iraq during the Saddam years and continues to govern Syria, was and is based upon the principle of secularism (non-religious, relatively religiously tolerant) rule.

Hoff, who “served” (as they say) as a Marine in Iraq between 2000 and 2004, first visited Syria in 2004 in order to study Arabic. He describes his surprise at how the experience challenged the “false assumptions” about the Arab world acquired during his “Texas Baptist childhood.” Describing Damascus in 2004 under Bashar Assad’s Baathist rule he writes:

“What I actually encountered were mostly unveiled women wearing European fashions and sporting bright makeup — many of them wearing blue jeans and tight fitting clothes that would be commonplace in American shopping malls on a summer day. I saw groups of teenage boys and girls mingling in trendy cafes late into the night, displaying expensive cell phones. There were plenty of mosques, but almost every neighborhood had a large church or two with crosses figured prominently in the Damascus skyline. As I walked near the walled “old city” section, I was surprised to find entire streets lined with large stone and marble churches. At night, all of the crosses atop these churches were lit up — outlined with blue fluorescent lighting, visible for miles; and in some parts of the Damascus skyline these blue crosses even outnumbered the green-lit minarets of mosques.

“Just as unexpected as the presence of prominent brightly lit churches, were the number of restaurant bars and alcohol kiosks clustered around the many city squares. One could get two varieties of Syrian-made beer, or a few international selections like Heineken or Amstel, with relative ease. The older central neighborhoods, as well as the more upscale modern suburbs had a common theme: endless numbers of restaurants filled with carefree Syrians, partying late into the night with poker cards, boisterous discussion, alcohol, hookah smoke, and elaborate oriental pastries and desserts. I got to know local Syrians while frequenting random restaurants during my first few weeks in Damascus. I came into contact with people representative of Syria’s ethnically and religiously diverse urban centers: Christians, Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, and even a few self-declared Arab atheists. The characterization of Syrian city life that increasingly came to my mind during my first, and many subsequent visits and extended stays, was of Syria a consciously secular society when compared to other countries in the region.”

Much of this description might have applied to Baghdad as well, before the ruinous U.S. invasion of 2003 based on lies and the subsequent occupation. The latter forcibly disbanded the Baath Party of Iraq. It destroyed the regime that had appointed a Christian (Tariq Aziz) as Foreign Minister and Deputy Vice President; refurbished the Baghdad synagogue; authorized liquor shops and bars; endorsed female education through the graduate level; supported the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra and promoted rock ‘n roll radio stations. During the years of Baath rule in Iraq (1963-2003) mixed marriages between Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians and others became common; mixed neighborhoods were the norm; and the regime’s often brutal repressive actions were largely directed towards activists opposed to secularism and favoring some form of Islamic rule.

Nowadays of course, anyone paying attention knows that the worst sort of Shiite fanatics control one part of Iraq, ethnically cleansing neighborhoods, driving out Christians and intellectuals, imposing a dress code, shutting down liquor and video stores, discouraging women from attending college. Meanwhile the worst sort of Sunni fanatics control Anbar province and adjoining areas to the north, beheading and crucifying, enslaving and forcing conversions.

Is it not apparent what even many anti-Baathists are now saying matter-of-factly: Things were better under Saddam Hussein?

There is no doubt that the Shiite majority population under the old regime were oppressed in many ways. The Baathists sometimes banned the Shiites’ traditional annual Karbala pilgrimage march, thinking it might produce violent demonstrations against the regime. Saddam was (perhaps) responsible for the murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadden al-Sadr, revered father of the currently powerful Muqtada al-Sadr, in 1999. (But for what it’s worth, Saddam condemned the murder and vowed to hunt down the perpetrators, while calling for Sunni-Shiite unity).

In the wake of the U.S. destruction of the Baath Party, the secular Iraqi national army, and the modern state itself, self-defined representatives of the Shiite majority assumed power with U.S. support while a broad section of the Sunni Arab minority (Kurdish Sunnis being a separate matter) found themselves suddenly unemployed, without income, denied any significant role in the new order. The Sunnis had held a privileged position in Iraqi society since the early 1920s when British colonialists had decided to impose a Sunni king (of the Saudi Hashemite line) on the arbitrary chunk of real estate they’d carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire that they decided to call Iraq. (Meanwhile the French created Syria, for a time privileging the Alawite minority in their colony, which helps to explain the power structure in that country today.)

To get a sense of the brutality of the British conquest of Iraq, achieved through the suppression of the Iraqi Revolt (or Great Iraqi Revolution) of 1920, it is enough to note that between 6,000 and 10,000 Iraqis were killed and the British seriously considered using mustard gas to suppress resistance. Winston Churchill positively advocated it at the time.

From 1921 to 1958, the British-installed monarchy of foreign origin beholden to Anglo-American imperialism ruled over Iraq, meeting with consistent opposition from the Shiites and Kurds who represent well over 60% of the population. In 1958 a group of nationalist military officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim seized power. Qasim’s regime angered Washington and London by withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact (an anti-communist military alliance of the U.K., Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan supported by the U.S.); embracing Egypt’s pan-Arabist president Nasser; establishing cordial ties with the USSR; legalizing the Communist Party of Iraq (which became the largest communist party in the Middle East) and demanding a 55% share in the profits of the Anglo-American owned Iraq Petroleum Company.

In 1959, the U.S. sought to engineer Qasim’s downfall, employing among others the young Saddam Hussein (then 22), who following a failed CIA-backed plot to assassinate Qasim fled to Cairo. There he remained in touch with his CIA patrons until the successful Baathist coup in 1963. Thereafter Saddam was in charge of the roundup and execution of Iraqi communists, gradually inching his way towards the presidency of the country in 1979.

The U.S. supported the Baathist Party at that time, as the only viable alternative to the Communists or the Islamists. Yes, it maintained the friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, and yes, it emphatically opposed the Israeli settler-state. But the relationship with the Baathists was useful to Washington—no more so than when, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iraq invaded its neighbor in an effort to produce the regime change that the U.S. so deeply craved. Who having seen them can forget those photos of Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad in 1983, smiling and shaking hands with Saddam as they discussed U.S. military aid including the provision of chemical weapons?

The U.S. had, at the behest of Israel, placed Iraq on its black list of “terror-sponsoring nations” but the Reagan administration removed it in 1982 to allow for greater trade and military support. When Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, the U.S. uncharacteristically joined the entire UN in condemning the aggression.

Of course, meanwhile, even as it allied itself with the Iraqi Baathists against the Shiite Islamists of Iran, the U.S. nurtured its closest Arab ties with Saudi Arabia, homeland of Sunni Islamism. If by “Islamism” we mean political Islam fired by an insistence on applying Sharia law, Saudi Arabia is of course the most striking example. While fearing the rise of Islamism elsewhere (for reasons which are now quite apparent to many people) Washington wedded itself to the Saudi regime.

This is an absolute monarchy dedicated to a Salafi version of Islam that makes no pretensions to any kind of democratic aspirations. There is no freedom of speech, press, assembly, conscience. The Shiite minority (maybe 20%) is grudgingly tolerated as a community of second-class citizens. Religious indoctrination is the crux of education. There are no open Christians in Saudi Arabia and to convert means death. (The many Filipinos and other Christians in the country as temporary workers may worship privately in their homes, but not hold services. Last September police from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice raided the home of an Indian Christian in Khafji, arresting 38 attending a prayer meeting and confiscating their bibles.)

Saudi women have few rights other than those accorded by thousand-year-old laws; as is well known, they are forbidden to drive or venture out into society without the company of male relatives and most be covered head to toe on such occasions. People convicted of crimes are maimed, stoned to death or beheaded every year. In short, Saudi Arabia is almost everything the U.S. deplores in the Taliban or ISIL.

But the U.S. never undertakes to do what it might surely do at the drop of a hat: issue a devastating condemnation of the country as a human rights disaster far more egregious than anything seen in modern Iraq—or in Syria, which Obama seems determined to wreck just as his predecessor wrecked Baathist Iraq!

The reason for this is simple. Saudi Arabia with 16% of the world’s proved oil resources insures the supply of cheap oil to the west and Japan in return for U.S. military support. (Among the uses of U.S. supplied weaponry: the suppression of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations in Shiite-majority Bahrain against the absolute monarchy in 2013, to insure the Sunni king maintained control over the country that hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the current Saudi attack on neighboring Yemen to crush the Shiite-led challenge to the U.S.-backed pro-Saudi, pro-U.S. dictatorship.)

It pays to spend some time studying the history of these places—something U.S. secretaries of state seem uniquely incapable of doing. (Why bother them with dead facts, after all, while they’re hell-bent on making history themselves?) But if we do make the effort we realize that the Baathist movement (which rose to power in Iraq and Syria and has been a presence in Jordan and Yemen) arose in the 1940s under the leadership of a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian named Michel Aflaq, who while deeply respectful of the historical role of Islam in the formation of Arab culture, opposed the union of the mosque and state and promoted religious pluralism. This is what Brad Hoff witnessed in Damascus.

Aflaq partnered with a Syrian Sunni activist, son of a grain merchant, named Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and with Alawi Shiites associated with the philosopher and historian Zaki al-Arsuzi. Their Arab Baath Movement, which became the Arab Baath Party in 1947, was a Pan-Arabist, secular, modernizing movement—the opposite of fundamentalist Islam. Its achievements in Iraq include the fact that before the U.S. invasion Iraq boasted the best national education system in the Arab world, the highest number of PhDs, and the highest rate of female education. But the U.S. has crushed Baathism in Iraq. Now it is aiming at the Syrian variant, and in the process repeating its toxic achievement in Iraq.

That is to say, the U.S. by attacking precisely those secular forces that have most opposed the horrors of religious fanaticism—realizing, as they are best placed to do, its horrific potential—are actually working in tandem with the fanatics to inflict incomprehensible suffering.

What if a series of U.S. administrations (influenced to say the least by Israel and its powerful Lobby) hadn’t come to view Baathism as a greater enemy than Islamic fanaticism? What if the U.S. occupiers of Iraq had allowed the party to compete in elections and represent its traditional constituents? What if, instead of declaring Assad’s regime “illegitimate” (as though Obama can be any judge of such things) Washington had stayed out of the Syrian conflict since 2011 altogether?

“What if” history is a tricky business. We can’t turn back the hand of time and experimentally do things over again. Still, I think it difficult to imagine ISIL in its lightning rise to power over much of the Middle East, frying people alive in cages, crucifying, beheading, burying alive and enslaving, hacking to bits 3000-year-old artworks and world heritage monuments, if George W. Bush and his team hadn’t responded to 9/11 with an all-out assault on the most modernizing, secular forces in the Arab world, in alliance with some of the most backward.

If the groups of teenage boys and girls Hoff once saw in Damascus “mingling in trendy cafes late into the night,” wind up crucified, beheaded, buried alive or merely blown to bits—or even just consigned to lives of unparalleled oppression—we should know who to thank. If the ISIL or al-Nusra thugs smash the treasures of the National Museum and Historical Museum in Damascus, or blow up the glorious ruins of Palmyra, we should know where to point the finger. Barbaric though such actions may be, they pale before the horrific crime of the U.S. invasion of this region twelve years ago. It opened Pandora’s Box, which has unleashed nothing but death and evil ever since.

The USA Freedom Act Doesn’t End Bulk Data Collection

Bill Blunden

The business records provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, is scheduled to expire on June 1st. It’s the legal basis for the NSA’s collection of telephone metadata inside American borders. A few days ago the House Judiciary Committee proudly announced that it had approved a bill, (HR 2048/S.1123) the USA Freedom Act of 2015, which alters the provisions of Section 215. The Judiciary Committee claims that their proposed legislation “ends bulk collection.” At best this is a mischaracterization that flagrantly ignores additional surveillance laws.

According to language of the bill the revisions defined by the USA Freedom Act would narrow business record collection by restricting the “selection term” used to request call records to “an individual, account, or personal device.” In other words instead of requesting call record metadata from “everyone in the state of Ohio” government spies would be forced to explicitly limit the terms of their request to something like “John Q. Smith’s cellphone”. Though your author wonders if an Internet backbone router counts as a personal device.

The case for curbing phone record collection is fairly strong. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was ostensibly instituted in an effort to combat terrorism. Yet there’s very little evidence to suggest that vacuuming up telephone meta-data is useful as a way to prevent terrorism. In fact, Ed Snowden states for the record that it has more to do with imposing “social control.”

Hardly a Major Change

Even if phone record collection under Section 215 were to be completely eliminated it wouldn’t spell an end to “bulk collection.” No sir. What you’re witnessing is deft political sleight of hand. Instead lawmakers are probably betting that most people don’t realize that bulk collection would persist under the auspices of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and Executive Order 12333. This explains why one senior American spy described the USA Freedom Act of 2015 as “hardly major change.”

Let’s take a look at both of these legal mandates. Section 702 covers data that crosses the border. It allows the government to monitor communications (email, text messages, and phone calls) to acquire “foreign intelligence” on a non-citizen without a probable-cause warrant if that non-citizen is “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”

Executive Order 12333 is the big kahuna. Naturally it receives the least attention as spy chiefs in Washington quietly signal to lawmakers that they stay the hell away. EO 12333 covers surveillance in other countries, essentially granting free rein to government spies. No one, including American citizens, has any legal protections from EO 12333 outside of U.S. borders.

This underscores the importance of privacy as a basic human right. Consider, for a moment, how American citizens would respond if there was an autonomous foreign power capable of monitoring their every move with abandon?

Ever More Political Theater

Politicians will dither around the edges by tweaking peripheral rules like Section 215 so that they can brag to the public that they took action against mass surveillance. They’ll confidently assure us that minor adjustments are “a step in the right direction” and that more serious reform can be implemented in the future.

Never mind that in the future political representatives will subsequently resist additional measures claiming that they’ve already “been there, done that” with regard to mass surveillance. The promise of substantial reform will go out of fashion as media headlines shift to fresh issues. And in the meantime American spies will simply relocate domestic monitoring programs abroad to sidestep pesky legal constraints.

The unfortunate reality is that lawmakers won’t institute measures that impact the physical infrastructure that constitutes the global panopticon. Because that, dear reader, is what really counts. As long as the raw mechanisms of control remain in place the policy for wielding it can be [secretly] reinterpreted as needed [in classified memos] to accommodate whatever alleged emergencies might arise. Real change will require mass political upheaval that puts government back under popular control and that won’t happen until the voting public arises from its propaganda-fueled slumber.