Bill Moyers Journal

Bill Moyers and Richard Trumka: Americans Need Jobs -- Does Obama Finally Get It?

Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO and Bill Moyers discuss the drastic steps Obama must take to quell the frustration and anger over joblessness.

February 1, 2010 |

Editor's note: In the following interview AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka talks about what should be Obama's highest priority: creating jobs.

BILL MOYERS: You no doubt noticed that president Obama had something on his mind in that state of the union speech Wednesday night.

FOOTAGE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S SPEECH: And we're on track to add another one and a half million jobs...Jobs...Jobs...Jobs...Job creation...New jobs...Job market...New jobs...Create jobs right here in the United States of America.

BILL MOYERS: That's right, jobs. Twenty-nine times he mentioned jobs. And well he might. In 43 states last month the number of people out of work was higher than a month earlier. This month, one million people will run out of unemployment compensation. Voters in Massachusetts had jobs on their mind, too - and sent Washington a message saying, "Pay attention!"

My next guest has been saying the same thing for months now and often directly to the president. He thinks the message finally broke through.

Richard Trumka is the head of the AFL-CIO, representing eleven million members and 57 national and international unions. He became its president less than six months ago, after serving 15 years as the AFL's secretary-treasurer.

The son and grandson of coal miners, he made his way through college and law school working as they did -- blasting, drilling and hauling coal from the dangerous depths of the Pennsylvania coal fields.

He climbed his way up the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America at a time when that union was still rocked by violence and corruption. Leading a reform ticket, at age 33, he became the Mine Workers' youngest president. The AFL-CIO leadership marked him as a comer.

He's still out there with the workers, even getting himself arrested with more than a hundred union members just a couple of weeks ago, demanding a fair contract for San Francisco hotel workers.

As we saw in Obama's election, the political clout of labor remains potent. While their numbers have dwindled, unions are still a source of money and people power. But are they getting what they had hoped for from the Obama presidency? That's just one of the reasons I wanted to talk with Rich Trumka. Welcome to the JOURNAL.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Bill, thanks for having me on.

BILL MOYERS: Did the President's speech this last Wednesday night convince you that he gets it?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, I think he does get it. I think the speech was interesting in a lot of ways. He knows that there's a lot of anger and frustration out there. And he was willing to look at people and say, "You're an obstructionist." He looked right at the Republicans and said, "You can't say no to everything and call that leadership." He looked at the Supreme Court and said, "You made a bad decision that's going to hurt this country. Corporations already have too much power. You just handed them more."

So, I think he's starting to understand and feel the anger. And I think he's willing to work his way through. Now, the question becomes, will he do it on a scale that's necessary or essential to solve the problem.

BILL MOYERS: What kind of scale?

RICHARD TRUMKA: That's the issue. It has to be a large scale. We lost eight million jobs, plus we have two million that we needed for growth. So, we're 10 million jobs in the hole. In order to do that, it's going to take more than a little stimulus package or a little job bill. Because if all we do is the same thing that Japan did in the early '90s. They would spend a little, look like they're coming out of recession. And then stop and it would drop back down.

They did that for a whole decade. They lost a decade. And our country just can't stand that. So, our job is to make sure that his understanding of the anger, translates out into a jobs program of sufficient size to solve the problem.

BILL MOYERS: So, what are your economists, your experts, your scholars, your academicians telling you we should be spending for the jobs program that you'd like to see, that you think will really make a big contribution to closing the gap.

RICHARD TRUMKA: First of all, we have to extend unemployment benefits. You got almost six million people who have been unemployed for longer than six months. If they lose those benefits, they stop consuming. If they stop consuming, the economy contracts pretty significantly.

So, we have to extend benefits. And we suggested a year's extension, so that everybody knows where they're going to be. Second of all, we needed money for the state and local governments. They are going to have about $178 billion deficit. And if they stop spending, anything we spend on the federal side just negates one another. So, we have to make sure that we don't lose education, like teachers, firemen, police officers, and all those jobs that are necessary. So, we think there should be aid to state and local governments.

We think there ought to be a major investment in infrastructure. We have a $2.2 trillion deficit in this country when it comes to our infrastructure. Bridges are crumbling. Schools are crumbling. Other places, roads are done. So, we need to make a major investment in that. And quite frankly, we think that the government ought to signal or say that they're going to do that over a number of years.

Because if they do that, and say, "We're going to make a ten-year commitment to rebuilding our infrastructure," then they can bring in private funds. We can leverage that money and private funds will come in as well. The fourth thing we think we need in the short term is direct funding of jobs. I'll give you a couple of examples. You go into an area where schools are, where the students are hurting, because of a low tax base. And you say, "I'm going to provide tutors." Now, that creates a job and it helps a student with better schooling, better education, and being able to do better. And then the last thing the President announced he was going to do was that we think that we ought to use the TARP money to give to regional and community banks so that they can lend to small and mid-sized businesses that create that. And we think this year, we need to be on the range of at least $400 billion. That will get us about 4 million jobs back.

BILL MOYERS: Where does this money come from? I mean, we have increased our deficits to record highs. People are really concerned. The President indicated Wednesday night that he's concerned. Where is this money coming from? We don't want to be taxed anymore.

RICHARD TRUMKA: It's a real simple thing. You know, let's look at who created the mess. The banks created this mess. Wall Street created this mess. And the super rich have had a tax break from Bush of $1.2 trillion. We can take a little bit back from the rich that have really enjoyed the last ten years in an unprecedented way, and pay for the creation of jobs that they actually destroyed.

BILL MOYERS: But realistically, Rich, less than five percent of American households make more than $250,000 a year. Do you think you can tax them to fund the kind of jobs program you really want to see?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, I'll give you an example. Nancy Pelosi in the House said, "We will put a 5.6 percent tax surcharge on any income over $1 million. Just money over $1 million." And that would have produced $400 billion. Enough to pay for four million jobs.

BILL MOYERS: Your message is very clear. Tax the rich.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Of course. They've had a ten year free ride.

BILL MOYERS: WALL STREET JOURNAL is going to come out next week and say Trumka says that class war is on again. And I'm serious about that.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, the class war's been on, except my class has been losing.

BILL MOYERS: You spoke at the National Press Club with this tough warning to the President, the Democrats on the 11th of January.

RICHARD TRUMKA: We worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the difference between the policies of the two parties. So politicians who think that working people have it too good, too much health care, too much Social Security, too much Medicare, too much power on the job - are actually inviting a repeat of 1994.

BILL MOYERS: Is that exactly what happened when the Republican Scott Brown defeated the Democrat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race.

RICHARD TRUMKA: It was a wakeup call. And we were predicting that. We said, "Look, they're angry. They're frustrated. And if you're not on the side of creating jobs, jobs, jobs. If they don't believe that, and you're not acting that on the scale that they think is necessary, you're going to face a bad time." And that's exactly what happened.

BILL MOYERS: The Senate vote showed that 49 percent of union households in Massachusetts voted for the Republican.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Here's what they were saying. Here's what our members were saying. Here's what the general public said. Here's what working America's saying. That wasn't about Obama's agenda. They were saying, "You haven't overreached. You've under-reached. You haven't produced enough change. So, we're going to help you. You think the status quo's great. We'll show you." They want change. They want their problems solved.

BILL MOYERS: They voted for the Republican.

RICHARD TRUMKA: They did. But they did it because they were angry and they were frustrated and they wanted to demonstrate that change wasn't happening fast enough. And they were going to help it along.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they want?

RICHARD TRUMKA: They want jobs. That's one thing they want. They do want health care reform. They still want it. But they don't want their benefits taxed in the process. And remember, Massachusetts has universal health care in the state. They were worried about losing what they did have. So, that played into it. Here's a startling figure. For people who thought that their benefits were going to be taxed in Massachusetts, they voted 64 to 32 for Brown.

BILL MOYERS: So, what happens now to health care?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, we still have a chance to get it done. I think the ball is in the Senate's court. We said to them, there aren't the votes in the House to pass the Senate bill. So, what they'll do, what we should do is, the Senate has to demonstrate that they have 51 votes for a plan that America will accept and the House can pass. And when they do that, the House can do it quickly.

BILL MOYERS: You've been negotiating with Obama on all this. Is your message getting through? Does he hear you?

RICHARD TRUMKA: He listens to us all the time. We'll see what the results are. And some of it, you know, it may not be what he wants to do, but what he thinks he can do. Or what he can't do. So, it's not, I mean, it's not, I don't think it's fair to just say he could do this if he wanted to. Because there's the Senate, which has been timid about everything. They've been willing to coddle millionaires. You know? It's going to cost them in the long run, I think.

BILL MOYERS: I'm curious, Rich, about why we haven't been seeing more public demonstrations from people who have lost their job? I mean, we covered a story early last year in Chicago of workers who sat in, when it looked as if their factory was going to be closed down. Why has there been so little of that?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, you know what? I think some of it is people have been so beat down, that they -- we sort of plucked the hope out of them. And what we have to do is restore that hope. They don't think that there's anything that they can do. They feel hopeless. Corporations are so powerful, and they control the political process so much that there's nothing we can do. They're wrong, of course. And we're getting more and more people that are willing to start coming out now.

BILL MOYERS: So, what's happened that unions don't seem to be fighting back the way they did in the 1930s?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, I don't think that's so. I think we are fighting back. You know, first of all, you have a larger array of forces against us. You have a recession right now that's caused a lot of our members to get laid off, just like other Americans out there. You have a set of labor laws that are totally inadequate, and they're not even enforced. Now, President Obama's trying to. But he can't even get people from the N.L.R.B. confirmed.

BILL MOYERS: The National Labors Relations Board.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Yeah, the National Labor Relations Board.

BILL MOYERS: There are several vacancies on there, that you want to see filled.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Of course. And the Republicans, all they do is filibuster. They don't want him to succeed. And so they keep people, quality people that are needed to make government effectively. They keep them out of the spotlight and off the job.

BILL MOYERS: But the Democrats have 59 Members of the Senate. They have a 78 vote majority in the House. They got the President of the United States. And they can't deliver anything labor wants from them?

RICHARD TRUMKA: No, I want to say it a different way. I want to say they haven't delivered anything. They can. And it's up to us, and we're getting there.

BILL MOYERS: But how do you explain that?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Slowly but surely.

BILL MOYERS: Because you really worked for Obama in '08.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Yes, I did.

BILL MOYERS: And yet, so far, one year into his administration, you haven't gotten anything that I can see that you wanted in '08.

RICHARD TRUMKA: That's not so. There have been a number of executive orders that have provided collective bargaining people. I mean, the people he's appointed, Hilda Solis is terrific. Even the people in the Commerce and Treasury are far more cognizant of our position. So, he hasn't been able to pass the big bills yet, but we're getting there. And we'll get them done.

BILL MOYERS: What's happened to the one thing that was most important to labor back in '08? Obama seemed to promise the Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA as - it's come to be known, very important to labor. What happened to it?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, it's still there. We're still pushing it forward. He still supports it. The Vice President still supports it. A vast majority- at least 59 Senators in the Senate support it. And over a vast majority in the House support it.

BILL MOYERS: So, will you get it?

RICHARD TRUMKA: I think we will.

BILL MOYERS: You will- you still think you'll get it.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Yeah, I do. I still think we will. It'll take some creative doing. But we'll do it.

BILL MOYERS: And why is it so important to you?

RICHARD TRUMKA: What an Employee Free Choice Act does is the following: It takes the choice of having a union away from the employer, which is where it is right now, and gives it to the employee. Under today's circumstances, let's say you have a unit of 100 people. And all 100 people say, "I want a union and I want it right now. I want it. I deserve it. I need it." It's the employer who says, "No, I'm not giving it to you. I demand a secret ballot." What this does, it takes the choice out of the employer's hand and puts it into the worker's hands, who have the right. If they want a secret ballot, they get it. If they say, "I want a union without a secret a ballot, then they wouldn't get it." And let me just go back and frame this for one second. From 1946 to 1973 in this country, productivity doubled. And so did wages. It was the greatest expansion of wealth and distribution of wealth in any country, anywhere in the world.

BILL MOYERS: Some people say it created our strong middle class.

RICHARD TRUMKA: It did. And the interesting thing, Bill, is the bottom two quartiles back then, their income was increasing faster than the people at the top. And so, the wage gap was collapsing. Back during that time, workers had collective bargaining in 35 to 40 percent of the shops out there. So, we were making sure that profits got spread evenly. From '73, wages stayed flat. Productivity continued to go up, but wages stayed flat. And the amount of money between wages and productivity going up, went to the top one percent. And that's why the Employee Free Choice Act is so important. It's important as part of the economic recovery program so that workers can get a fair share of what they produce. Their productivity gains ought to be split in some manner with their employer. And the only way that that happens is through collective bargaining. So, you get collective bargaining. Wages start to rise again. The consumers start to spend again. The economy's rebuilt again.

BILL MOYERS: In your recount of the past, there seems to be one very important thing that you don't include. And it makes me sometimes wonder why you hang around with Democrats so much, because it was a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, and a Democratic Vice President, Al Gore, who fought hard for NAFTA. And at the time, I-- it seemed to me that the Democrats were destroying their working class base by agreeing to ship industrial and manufacturing jobs abroad.

RICHARD TRUMKA: You know, really, I agree with everything you just said. We opposed NAFTA. We said it was going to be bad. Everything we predicted has come true. And even Bill Clinton understands now that it was a bad thing. We have to change the way we do it. He won't say that trade is bad, and neither will we. 'Cause we think trade is a good thing. Exporting our products is a good thing. Not exporting our jobs. I wish, though-- I wish there were Republicans that I could support. But they're so rabidly anti-worker. They're so rabidly anti-union. I wish that there were dozens of them out there that we could run out and embrace and say, "This is our person." Now, there are a few. But the number is less and less and less each year.

BILL MOYERS: Why did the A.F. of L.C.I.O. then file a friend of the court brief to support the conservative effort recently that, led to the Supreme Court deciding that they would take the limits off of what corporations and--

RICHARD TRUMKA: We didn't. Our amicus brief didn't say that. There was a provision in the law that said you couldn't do ads 30 days before primaries and 60 days before elections. It was very, very loosely written. And it was a criminal prosecution. So, if we tried to communicate with our members. And we were wrong. Because the word that was in the statute was, if it refers to a candidate or refers to the election in the wrong way, it was a criminal statue. We thought that was absolutely wrong for anybody. And we tried to defend the union's point of view and say, "We ought to have a chance to get rid of this." And they could- this Supreme Court could have ended the case by saying, "That's right." It's constitutionally vague. They win." But they didn't do that. They went far beyond that. They become the most activist judges the country's ever seen. And took away the last limit on corporate spending.

BILL MOYERS: But they made you equal with corporations.

RICHARD TRUMKA: No.

BILL MOYERS: They said, in effect, that corporations are persons for the purpose of political advertising. And that money is speech. They also said unions can do exactly what corporations are going to do.

RICHARD TRUMKA: We're willing to forego that because we think it's wrong. First of all, I don't think the framing fathers ever agreed or imagined that corporations ought to have more rights than we the people. And this court has given corporations more rights than we the people. And gave corporations that are already too powerful. And already control the political process too much. They gave them more power on that day.

BILL MOYERS: But the Supreme Court gave corporations and unions the right to spend as much money as they want to leading up to an election.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, anybody, quite frankly, not just--

BILL MOYERS: Private groups, associations--

RICHARD TRUMKA: And it's- yeah, anybody. So, I mean, I don't know your point other than to say--

BILL MOYERS: Well, the point-- John Nichols, a progressive writer, whom I think you know, said: "What are the leaders of the Labor Federation thinking? They imagine that with spending limits removed, organized labor will be able to buy enough--

RICHARD TRUMKA: We never argued--

BILL MOYERS: "--television time to reward their political friends and punish their political enemies."

RICHARD TRUMKA: Look, we've never been able to compete with them money wise. They outspend us ten, 12, 15 to one, all the time. But we never argued that. We never said take away the limits. We said completely the opposite. We said there ought to be limits on them. What we said was this language is constitutionally vague.

BILL MOYERS: So, would you support a constitutional amendment to reverse that decision and at least to take away the identity of corporations as persons?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Oh, short answer is yes. I want to be a little cautious about tinkering with the First Amendment. Because the First Amendment is really what makes us separate from much of the rest of the world. It's a wonderful right. And we have to protect it. So, I would want to be careful that we didn't have some unintended consequences with it. But, yeah, I would.

BILL MOYERS: So, how do you make unions relevant in a world where capital is mobile. Moving around. And the gap between capital and working people continues to increase no matter what happens.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to just touch on the relevancy thing. In the last election, we were about 25 to 26 percent of the vote. That's pretty relevant to anybody-- according to anybody's scale. But one of the things that we have to do, and I think in the past we haven't done a good enough job at this. We've expected young workers who are working in a different type of economy to change the way that they make a living to fit our model. Right now, we're in the process of changing our model so that we fit the way they make a living.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, workers used to get one job-- take my dad. My dad went to work in-- well, my grandfathers went to work in a coal mine. My dad and his two brothers went to work in the same coal mine. I went to work in the same coal mine. My dad was there 44 years in the same coal mine. People don't do that now. They're going to be in two, three, four, five, six, seven places. So, we have to be able to accommodate them. Our model has to say, "We can help you. And- in the way you're making a living." Not say to them, "Well, figure out a way to stay 44 years at one place and we'll help you." So, it's up to us, and we're changing. And we're working real hard at it. And we're reaching out to young people. And we're reaching out into the community. And we're building allies and it's starting to have some effect, real fast.

BILL MOYERS: You are taking to the streets. I mean, you were arrested a few weeks ago in that demonstration for hotel workers out in San Francisco. Are you calling for more militancy? For more mobilization? More action in the street?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Absolutely. More mobilization. More education. I don't know whether you call it militancy or not. But it is more education, so our members know who is really doing it to them. Here's the model that we see. Instead of going after a politician and elected 60 people to the Senate, we create a groundswell of support for an issue that will get more than 60 votes. And those that don't vote for it do so at their own peril.

BILL MOYERS: So California Nurses, S.E.I.U., A.F. of L.C.I.O., all of you were out there mobilizing this last year, but we still didn't get a health care bill that you like.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Yeah, I think we mobilized around politicians rather than around the issue of health care. Now, that's a subtle difference, but a major one. Because if we continue to educate and mobilize around issues, then 60 votes doesn't matter anymore. It matters that people support that, and they'll lose just like they did in Massachusetts, if you don't grab onto that-- to the thing that they're supporting.

BILL MOYERS: From what interests you, from what you want from this Administration, what grade would you give the President, not just on his speech, but on what he's actually calling for and says he will do about the fix we're in?

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, let's tick down the items. One, we're about jobs, jobs, jobs, and creating jobs. And I think he said and advocated that a number of times in the speech. And he convinced me that he understands and he's serious about that. He also understands that look, we can't just replicate the old economy. Because if we do, the same thing will happen. So, what we do-- we have to re-regulate Wall Street. And let me say this to you, Bill. 'Cause I think this is an extremely important point. There are two economies in this country. There's the real economy that makes things. And there's the financial economy that was supposed to provide them with the capital to make things. And they-- this was subservient, and the real economy was supposed to be the master. Somewhere along the line, that got turned on its head. And the financial community became the master. And they actually started sucking money out of the real economy, 'cause you could get a better return passing complex instruments around, rather than making steel or autos or anything else. So, it's up to us to correct that imbalance. To make it so that the real economy is actually the dominant economy. And the financial economy is a servant to make them- enable them to do their job. And that's going to take re-regulation so if we enacted everything he said with the jobs bill, that's an A minus. He's trying to fight for jobs. We're going to fight with him. Our job, all of us, as Americans, is to make sure that we push the Congress and the White House to do a jobs program that's of sufficient size to fix the problem. Not just dribble at it. But to fix the problem. And that's what we're hoping to do

BILL MOYERS: Richard Trumka, thank you very much for being with me on the Journal. I've enjoyed the conversation.

RICHARD TRUMKA: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

RICHARD TRUMKA: The economy's been all but destroyed, and we have to build a new one. A whole new one, based on good jobs not bad debt with America investing in an exporting technology and world class products, not financial crisis....

Bill Moyers is the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

U.S. Government Welcoming the Taliban with Open Arms

Welcoming the Taliban with Open Arms

Defectors and Deception in Afghanistan

by Douglas Valentine / February 1st, 2010

This week the U.S. Government began floating the idea of welcoming low and mid-level Taliban defectors into its war on terror against Al Qaeda. After waging an eight-year “dirty war” against the Taliban, U.S. military commanders and politicians are publicly acknowledging their “insurgent” enemy is actually part of the “fabric” of Afghan society.

U.S. and NATO officials are also offering bribes from a billion dollar “Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund” to Taliban fighters to defect.

Taliban leaders have condemned the buyout strategy as a “trick” to divide and conquer its forces, and said that offers of reconciliation were futile without a withdrawal of foreign troops.

This billion dollar buyout may, indeed, seem a bizarre reversal of fortunes, but only if one believes the U.S. genuinely wants reconciliation with the Taliban. In reality, defectors programs like the one proposed for Afghanistan are an essential part of the traditional U.S. pacification policy. For example, the so-called Chieu Hoi “Open Arms” program is touted by military historians as having produced positive results throughout the Vietnam War by offering “clemency to insurgents.”

Make no mistake about it: this too is propaganda. Defector “amnesty” or “clemency” or “open arms” programs are aggressive CIA intelligence operations and have nothing to do with reconciliation.

As former DCI William Colby told me, CIA political action teams in Vietnam (like Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan) employed defectors whose job was to “go around the countryside and indicate to the people that they used to be Vietcong and that the government has received them and taken them in, and that the Chieu Hoi program does exist as a way of VC currently on the other side to rally. [Defectors] contact people like the families of known VC,” Colby said, “and provide them with transportation to defector and refugee centers.”

Master spy Colby would certainly agree that information management – language – is the essence of political warfare in general and defector programs in particular. The first step in either case is concocting a slogan that appeals to the sensibilities of the targeted audience, which is why defectors programs are given names like “amnesty” or “clemency” or “open arms.”

Such cleverly crafted slogans need have no basis in reality. Instead, by appealing to American (not Vietnamese or Afghan) sensibilities (or lack thereof), these slogans serve as the first step in creating deniability for the CIA’s roll in organizing repression.

During Senate hearings into CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, deniability was defined by the CIA’s deputy director of operations Richard Bissell as “the use of circumlocution and euphemism in discussions where precise definitions would expose covert actions and bring them to an end.”

Apart from using circumlocution and euphemism, and Madison Avenue style slogans, the CIA creates deniability, and thus garners public approval, by composing and planting distorted articles in foreign and domestic newspapers. It also composes “official” communiqués which appear to have originated within, for example, the Karzai government in Afghanistan.

To ensure the deniability necessary for public support of its repressive policies, the CIA conducts covert action under cover of Civic Action programs that are advertised as fostering freedom, patriotism, brotherhood, democracy.

Likewise, the Taliban defector buyout program is said to foster reconciliation.

In CIA jargon this manipulation of language is called “black propaganda” and is the job of political and psychological (PP) warfare officers in the covert action branch. “PP” officers played a major role in packaging the Phoenix Program for sale to the American public as a program designed “to protect the people from terrorism.”"

CIA disinformation campaigns persuade predisposed Americans to offer their tax dollars to pay for the massive military and aid programs that support the CIA’s covert action programs. The proposed billion dollar Taliban defector program is just such a case.

Intelligence Potential

After arranging for deniability, the CIA will launch a covert action program like the Taliban defector program only if it has “intelligence potential.” Such a program must be able to produce information on an enemy’s political, military, and economic infrastructure or it will not be undertaken. The CIA after all, is not a “reconciliation” agency.

And defectors have superlative “intelligence potential.”

Not only are defectors valued for their ability to sap the enemy’s fighting strength and morale, but having worked on the inside, they are an accurate and timely source of intelligence on enemy unit strength and location. They also serve as guides and trackers, and after defecting, many are immediately returned to their area of operations with a reaction force to locate hidden enemy arms or food caches.

Others defectors, after being screened and interrogated by security officers, are turned into double agents. Defectors who return to their former positions inside enemy military units or political organizations are, as Colby explained, provided with a “secure” means of contacting their CIA case officer, to whom they feed information leading to the arrest or ambush of enemy cadres, soldiers, and secret agents.

Defector programs also provide CIA “talent scouts” with cover for recruiting criminals into counter-terrorist and political action programs. Burglars, arsonists, forgers, and smugglers have unique skills and no compunctions about preparing wanted posters or conducting interrogations.

In Vietnam, the entire Fifty-second Ranger Battalion was recruited from Saigon prisons.

With Obama’s surge and additional NATO forces providing cover for more expansive CIA covert actions, CIA political and psychological warfare experts are moving to the forefront of the occupation; and of course, their Provincial Reconstruction Teams are, as noted in a previous article, at the forefront of this “intelligence” surge. That is why the Taliban defector buyout program is being launched now.

Let me repeat: what makes such an intelligence operation “covert” is not any false impression on the part of the Taliban, but rather the CIA’s ability to deny its involvement in the defector buyout program to the American public.

A Case Study

Under cover of Civic Action, the CIA is waging a plausibly deniable dirty war against the Taliban using black propaganda, defectors, criminals, selective terror, indefinite detention and a slew of other devious tactics disguised as bringing freedom and democracy, but in fact designed to provide internal security for the puppet Karzai regime.

The CIA perfected this practice in Vietnam, where it waged clandestine political and psychological warfare with the U.S. Information Service (USIS).

Ostensibly the overseas branch of the U.S. Information Agency (which performed the same propaganda and censorship functions inside America), the USIS had as its raison d’être promotion of the “American way.” In its crusade to convert the world into one big happy Chamber of Commerce, the USIS employed all manner of “media,” from TVs, radios, and satellites to armed propaganda teams, wanted posters, and terrorism.

Frank Scotton, a CIA officer masquerading as an USIS officer, played a large role in political and psychological operations (psyops) in Vietnam. A graduate of American University’s College of International Relations, Scotton received a government graduate assistantship to the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

According to legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein, it was there that Scotton was recruited into the CIA.

About the CIA-sponsored East-West Center, Scotton said, “It was a cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to create agent nets.” After passing the Foreign Service exam, Scotton was persuaded to join the USIS, which “dealt with people,” unlike the State Department, which “observed from a distance.

After arriving in Vietnam in 1961, and initiating his vast agent net, Scotton turned his attention to “energizing” the Vietnamese through political action that advanced American policies.

In looking for individuals to mold into unilateral political cadres, Scotton turned to the CIA’s defector program, which in April 1963 was placed under cover of the Agency for International Development and named the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) amnesty program.

There Scotton found the raw material he needed to prove the viability of CIA political action and psywar programs. Scotton worked with Vietnamese Special Forces Captain Nguyen Tuy (a graduate of Fort Bragg’s Special Warfare Center who commanded the Fourth Special Operations Detachment) and Tuy’s case officer, U.S. Special Forces Captain Howard Walters in Pleiku Province.

As part of a pilot program designed to induce defectors, Scotton, Walters, and Tuy set up an ambush deep in Vietcong territory and waited till dark. When they spotted a VC unit, Scotton yelled in Vietnamese through a bullhorn, “You are being misled! You are being lied to! We promise you an education!” Then, full of purpose and allegory, he shot a flare into the night sky and hollered, “Walk toward the light!”

To his surprise, two defectors did walk in, convincing him and his CIA bosses that “a determined GVN unit could contest the VC in terms of combat and propaganda.”

Back in camp, Scotton told the VC defectors that they had to divest themselves of untruths. “We said that certainly the U.S. perpetrated war crimes, but so did the VC [substitute Taliban]. We acknowledged that theirs was the stronger force, but that didn’t mean that everything they did was honorable and good and just.” In this manner, Scotton indoctrinated cadres for his political action teams.

The chief of CIA covert action programs, Tom Donohue, recognized the value of intelligence obtained through defectors, and authorized the establishment of Chieu Hoi programs in each of South Vietnam’s provinces. In typical CIA style, there was nothing in writing, and nothing went through the central government.

The CIA’s security officer would oversee the Chieu Hoi Program in any particular province and select different defectors for different jobs, working with agents at the district level and into the villages.

If a defector had potential, the province security officer put him on an airplane and sent him to the central CIA re-indoctrination center, where he was plied with special attention and wowed with CIA gadgetry. The food was spectacular, full of protein, and the bullets weren’t flying. The training was vigorous, but the defector was treated for infections and put on weight. Other defectors then explained the beauty of the American Way, and other applicable lessons of the day.

This brainwashing is “precisely” what political warfare is all about: Having been selected into a “special” program and given “special” treatment, defectors are taught the corporate sales pitch, cross-trained as interchangeable parts for efficiency, then given one last motivational booster shot of schmaltz.

Scotton called his program “motivational indoctrination.”

This is deadly serious business, and conducted secretly at high security CIA bases in Afghanistan. All defector debriefing reports are certainly sent to the CIA station in Kabul for analysis and collation. Translations are, typically, never considered accurate unless read and confirmed in the original language by the same person, but that rarely happens. Likewise, interrogations conducted through defectors are rarely considered reliable, for significant information is generally lost or misrepresented. And thus, the defector program will likely be exploited by Taliban secret agents, just as the Chieu Hoi program was penetrated in Vietnam.

According to Douglas McCollum, who monitored the Chieu Hoi program in three provinces in Vietnam, “It was the biggest hole in the net. They’d come in; we’d hold them, feed them, clothe them, get them a mat. Then we’d release them, and they’d wander around the city for a while, and then disappear.”

What McCollom is referring to, “the revolving door syndrome,” is another reason the CIA is turning to the Taliban buyout program at this particular time, when Obama’s surge will produce thousands of more detainees and prisoners.

The CIA was plagued in Vietnam, as it is in Afghanistan, by overcrowding in prisons, defector, interrogation, and detention center. In Vietnam by 1966 there was little space available in the prison system for actual “Communist offenders.” And as more and more people were captured and placed in pens, a large percentage was necessarily squeezed out. Hence the revolving door.

Defectors and the Phoenix Program

In June 1967, the CIA’s Chieu Hoi defector program was incorporated within its newly established Phoenix Program, as it was organized by CIA officer Nelson Brickham, who appreciated Chieu Hoi as “one of the few areas where police and paramilitary advisers cooperated.”

The Phoenix program was designed to coordinate all intelligence programs in South Vietnam so thee CIA could more identify and neutralize Viet Cong political cadre. As Brickham said, “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them.”

Brickham also emphasized that Chieu Hoi was a means for the CIA to develop “unilateral penetrations unknown to the [South Vietnamese] police.”

In other words, the Taliban defector buyout program will be conducted unilaterally by the CIA, apart from the Karzai government.

From 1967 onwards, all “rallied” VC cadre were included in Phoenix neutralization statistics, and by 1969 more than a hundred thousand defectors had been processed through 51 Chieu Hoi centers. The Chieu Hoi program was managed from 1966 until March 1969 by Ogden Williams, and then by Eugene P. Bable, a career CIA officer who had served in the Flying Tigers.

The Phoenix Program sought to resolve the “revolving door syndrome” by arranging through the SIDE (Screening, Interrogation and Detention of the Enemy) Program the construction of permanent detention facilities; a registration system coordinated with Chieu Hoi programs; and judicial reform aimed at the rapid disposal of pending cases, as devised by Robert Harper, a lawyer on contract to the CIA.

Through Phoenix, the CIA also began a policy of offering Chieu Hoi status to informers.

From the language of the Phoenix reports, one could easily think that the Chieu Hoi program was a great success. But many Chieu Hoi defectors simply regurgitated the American line in order to win amnesty, make a quick visit to their families, enjoy a few home-cooked meals, and then return to the war for independence, fat and rested.

Legitimate Chieu Hoi defectors were pariahs who were not accepted back in their villages.

Jim Ward, the senior CIA officer in charge of Phoenix in the Delta (1967-1969) described Chieu Hoi as “a great program. Well done.”

Ward explained that most Chieu Hoi advisers were from the U.S. Information Service, although some were State Department or military officers. ”

Ward describes the defection process as follows: Upon arriving at the Chieu Hoi center, the defector was “interviewed” and, if he had information on the VCI, was sent to the CIA’s Province Interrogation Center; if he had tactical military information, he was sent to military interrogators.

Next came political indoctrination, lasting from 40-60 days, depending on the individual. “They had a formal course,” said Ward. “They were shown movies and given lectures on democracy.” Upon graduation each was given an ID card, a meal, some money, and a chance to repent. Political indoctrination was handled by defectors who said they had been well treated by the Americans and had decided it was better to live for a free Vietnam than to die for the totalitarian North Vietnamese.

“Chieu Hoi had lots of guys who had been with the enemy before,” Ward continued, “who knew how to talk to these people and would persuade them to join the Territorial Forces or the PRU.” Others joined armed propaganda teams, which went back into VC territory to contact Vietcong families and recruit more Vietcong defectors.

“The great thing about the Chieu Hoi program,” Ward noted, “is that we didn’t have to put people in jails or process them through the judicial system, which was already overcrowded.

Political and Psychological Warfare

Despite his praise for the Chieu Hoi program, Ward said that “Americans should have been targeted only against the North Vietnamese and left the South Vietnamese forces to handle the insurgency,” even though such a strategy would have precluded Phoenix.

The same lesson applies in Afghanistan. The U.S. has no legitimate reason to be there, and thus it must rely on psychological ploys, rather than any appeal to nationalism, to win the Afghanis over to the American Way of doing things.

That is how High Value Reward and bounty programs become business as usual. That is why the U.S. is instituting a defector program, with a publicity campaign managed in the field by psyops teams replete with radios, leaflets, posters, banners, TV shows, movies, comic books falling from planes, and loudspeakers mounted on trucks to spread the word.

On January 22, 1970, thirty-eight thousand of these leaflets were dropped over three villages in Go Vap District. Addressed to specific VCI members, they read: “Since you have joined the NLF, what have you done for your family or your village and hamlet? Or have you just broken up the happiness of many families and destroyed houses and land? Some people among you have been awakened recently, they have deserted the Communist ranks and were received by the GVN and the people with open arms and family affection. You should be ready for the end if you remain in the Communist ranks. You will be dealing with difficulties bigger from day to day and will suffer serious failure when the ARVN expand strongly. You had better return to your family where you will be guaranteed safety and helped to establish a new life. ”

This is how defectors will be created in Afghanistan as well. Psyops leaflets aimed at creating defectors will portray the Taliban as a socially disruptive force that can only be stopped by America.

But Americans can only reach the Afghan “people” only through “media” like leaflets and loudspeakers – an indication of just how far removed the CIA is from the reality of life in Afghanistan’s rural villages.

And while the CIA relies on cartoons to sell itself, the Taliban go from person to person, proving that technology was no substitute for human contact. Ultimately the U.S. was defeated in Vietnam for just this reason.

The Taliban defector buyout program heralds just such a development in Afghanistan – defeat – and nothing more.

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban. Read other articles by Douglas, or visit Douglas's website.

This article was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 9:01am and is filed under Espionage, Language, Military/Militarism, Propaganda, Psychology/Psychiatry, Vietnam.

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by TruthDig.com

The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News

by Chris Hedges

Reporters who witness the worst of human suffering and return to newsrooms angry see their compassion washed out or severely muted by the layers of editors who stand between the reporter and the reader. The creed of objectivity and balance, formulated at the beginning of the 19th century by newspaper owners to generate greater profits from advertisers, disarms and cripples the press.

And the creed of objectivity becomes a convenient and profitable vehicle to avoid confronting unpleasant truths or angering a power structure on which news organizations depend for access and profits. This creed transforms reporters into neutral observers or voyeurs. It banishes empathy, passion and a quest for justice. Reporters are permitted to watch but not to feel or to speak in their own voices. They function as “professionals” and see themselves as dispassionate and disinterested social scientists. This vaunted lack of bias, enforced by bloodless hierarchies of bureaucrats, is the disease of American journalism.

“The very notion that on any given story all you have to do is report what both sides say and you’ve done a fine job of objective journalism debilitates the press,” the late columnist Molly Ivins once wrote. “There is no such thing as objectivity, and the truth, that slippery little bugger, has the oddest habit of being way to hell off on one side or the other: it seldom nestles neatly halfway between any two opposing points of view. The smug complacency of much of the press—I have heard many an editor say, ‘Well, we’re being attacked by both sides so we must be right’—stems from the curious notion that if you get a quote from both sides, preferably in an official position, you’ve done the job. In the first place, most stories aren’t two-sided, they’re 17-sided at least. In the second place, it’s of no help to either the readers or the truth to quote one side saying, ‘Cat,’ and the other side saying ‘Dog,’ while the truth is there’s an elephant crashing around out there in the bushes.”

Ivins went on to write that “the press’s most serious failures are not its sins of commission, but its sins of omission—the stories we miss, the stories we don’t see, the stories that don’t hold press conferences, the stories that don’t come from ‘reliable sources.’ ”

This abject moral failing has left the growing numbers of Americans shunted aside by our corporate state without a voice. It has also, with the rise of a ruthless American oligarchy, left the traditional press on the wrong side of our growing class divide. The elitism, distrust and lack of credibility of the press—and here I speak of the dwindling institutions that attempt to report news—come directly from this steady and willful disintegration of the media’s moral core.

This moral void has been effectively exploited by the 24-hour cable news shows and trash talk radio programs. The failure of the fact-based press to express empathy or outrage for our growing underclass has permitted the disastrous rise of “faith-based” reporting. The bloodless and soulless journalism of the traditional media has bolstered the popularity of partisan outlets that present a view of the world that often has no relation to the real, but responds very effectively to the emotional needs of viewers. Fox News is, in some sense, no more objective than The New York Times, but there is one crucial and vital difference. Fox News and most of the other cable outlets do not feel constrained by verifiable facts. Within the traditional news establishment, facts may have been self-selected or skillfully stage-managed by public relations specialists, but what was not verifiable was not publishable.

The cable news channels have cleverly seized on the creed of objectivity and redefined it in populist terms. They attack news based on verifiable fact for its liberal bias, for, in essence, failing to be objective, and promise a return to “genuine” objectivity. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly argues, “If Fox News is a conservative channel—and I’m going to use the word ‘if’—so what? … You’ve got 50 other media that are blatantly left. Now, I don’t think Fox is a conservative channel. I think it’s a traditional channel. There’s a difference. We are willing to hear points of view that you’ll never hear on ABC, CBS or NBC.”

O’Reilly is not wrong in suggesting that the objectivity of the traditional media has an inherent political bias. But it is a bias that caters to the power elite and it is a bias that is confined by fact. The traditional quest for “objectivity” is, as James Carey wrote, also based on an ethnocentric conceit: “It pretended to discover Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to describe a Universal Man. Upon inspection it appeared, however, that its Universal Man resembled a type found around Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws resembled those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal Truth bore English and American accents.”

Objectivity creates the formula of quoting Establishment specialists or experts within the narrow confines of the power elite who debate policy nuance like medieval theologians. As long as one viewpoint is balanced by another, usually no more than what Sigmund Freud would term “the narcissism of minor difference,” the job of a reporter is deemed complete. But this is more often a way to obscure rather than expose truth.

Reporting, while it is presented to the public as neutral, objective and unbiased, is always highly interpretive. It is defined by rigid stylistic parameters. I have written, like most other reporters, hundreds of news stories. Reporters begin with a collection of facts, statements, positions and anecdotes and then select those that create the “balance” permitted by the formula of daily journalism. The closer reporters get to official sources, for example those covering Wall Street, Congress, the White House or the State Department, the more constraints they endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates journalistic autonomy.

“Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers—but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror,’ ” Robert Fisk writes. “If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of 1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is on our side, call him a ‘strongman’. If he’s our enemy, call him a tyrant, or part of the ‘axis of evil’. And above all else, use the word ‘terrorist.’ Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Seven days a week.”

“Ask ‘how’ and ‘who’—but not ‘why’,” Fisk adds. “Source everything to officials: ‘American officials’, ‘intelligence officials’, ‘official sources’, anonymous policemen or army officers. And if these institutions charged with our protection abuse their power, then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age in which we now live, the age of terror—which means that we must live in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies.”

“In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk,” the former New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote. “Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says the rockets won’t work? We give you another who says they will. The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.”

Journalists, because of their training and distaste for shattering their own exalted notion of themselves, lack the inclination and vocabulary to discuss ethics. They will, when pressed, mumble something about telling the truth and serving the public. They prefer not to face the fact that my truth is not your truth. News is a signal, a “blip,” an alarm that something is happening beyond our small circle of existence, as Walter Lippmann noted in his book “Public Opinion.” Journalism does not point us toward truth since, as Lippmann understood, there is always a vast divide between truth and news. Ethical questions open journalism to the nebulous world of interpretation and philosophy, and for this reason journalists flee from ethical inquiry like a herd of frightened sheep.

Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees. They claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek their moral justification in the service of this nameless, faceless mass and speak little about the vast influence of the power elite to shape and determine reporting. Does a public even exist in a society as fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message?

The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became, as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals, a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial. Our elite oversaw the dismantling of the country’s manufacturing base and the betrayal of the working class with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the press dutifully trumpeted this as a form of growth. Our elite deregulated the banking industry, leading to nationwide bank collapses, and the press extolled the value of the free market. Our elite corrupted the levers of power to advance the interests of corporations and the press naively conflated freedom with the free market. This reporting may have been “objective” and “impartial” but it defied common sense. The harsh reality of shuttered former steel-producing towns and growing human misery should have, in the hands of any good cop reporter, exposed the fantasies. But the press long ago stopped thinking and lost nearly all its moral autonomy.

Real reporting, grounded in a commitment to justice and empathy, could have informed and empowered the public as we underwent a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. It could have stimulated a radical debate about structures, laws, privilege, power and justice. But the traditional press, by clinging to an outdated etiquette designed to serve corrupt power structures, lost its social function. Corporations, which once made many of these news outlets very rich, have turned to more effective forms of advertising. Profits have plummeted. And yet these press courtiers, lost in the fantasy of their own righteousness and moral probity, cling to the hollow morality of “objectivity” with comic ferocity.

The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true, and where fantasy will be peddled as news. I will lament the loss of traditional news. It will unmoor us from reality. The tragedy is that the moral void of the news business contributed as much to its own annihilation as the protofascists who feed on its carcass.

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Howard Zinn’s Mirror

by David Potorti

Nine years ago, when a group of 9/11 family members including me began speaking out against our nation's militaristic response to the September 11^th attacks, it was a very different time. It was a fearful time, not just because we lost family at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on Flight 93, but also because America had become a fearful place. One of the people who made that time considerably less scary was Howard Zinn.

I had little idea who Zinn was until November, 2001, when a friend suggested I attend a speech he was giving at Elon University in North Carolina. After securing the assignment with a local newspaper, I schooled myself in Zinn's writings, did the requisite phone interview and attended his speech, which was entitled, "Bringing Democracy Alive." I was a receptive audience for his message, and had my first experience of historian as rock star. The auditorium was packed, the mood was electric and lively, and Zinn adroitly responded to questions of all kinds, including one he must have heard a thousand times: "Why do you still live in the United States, if you criticize the things the United States has done?"

"I'm not criticizing the United States," Zinn replied. "I'm criticizing the government of the United States. Patriotism means that you support the principles of the government. To criticize the government is the most American thing you can do."

Those were important words to me, and came at a crucial time. Only two weeks later, I joined other 9/11 family members in "a walk for healing and peace" from the Pentagon to the site of the World Trade Center where my brother had died on 9/11. The anti-war walk was organized by Kathy Kelly, then of Voices in the Wilderness, and with the family members I met there we would go on to create an organization called September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

After Zinn's speech at Elon, I handed him an envelope with some of the writing I had published since 9/11--an op-ed in Philadelphia, a first-person article in Durham, an anti-war quote I had made to the local newspaper running my brother's obituary. I was searching for some direction, some validation for my feelings. A poll taken in the days immediately after 9/11 showed that nearly half of Americans had misgivings about the bombing of Afghanistan if it would result in significant civilian casualties. I shared those sentiments, but as I watched the CNN graphics heralding "America's New War" and the bombing began, it became clear that I was going to part ways with the actions of my government. This was new territory for me, but Zinn's words proved to be a much-needed guiding light.

In subsequent months and years, as members of our group spoke out against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and shared our desire to spare other innocent families the losses we had incurred that terrible day, Zinn took notice of what we were doing. He quoted some of us in his book, Terrorism and War, mentioned our work in his column in The Progressive, and even enshrined the words of 9/11 family members Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez and Rita Lasar in Voices of A People's History of the United States.

By acknowledging what we were doing, and putting it into the larger context of people's movements throughout American history, Zinn gave me the personal validation and direction that I had been looking for back at Elon. He made me realize that what we were doing was not un-American or unpatriotic, and for that matter was not even unique or new. Instead, we were participating in the highest calling of American citizens: To claim our authentic voice. To speak truth to power. To remember that the government is our invention, rather than the other way around.

It was a powerful realization, and one that I carry with me after Zinn's death last week.

Pete Fornatale wrote a book about Woodstock's 40^th anniversary last year, and in it he quotes a guru at the time musing about the flower children who were swarming to the festival: "They are all searching for the necklace that's around their necks. Eventually they'll look in the mirror and see it."

It's easy to feel helpless about the feckless Obama, the reckless Supreme Court, and the ruthless corporate politics of our day, but Zinn continues to hold up a mirror to the power that we already possess to make change: the potency of our words, the strength of our convictions, and the long history of activism and resistance that is our birthright. The necklace is already around our necks, and it has always been. Perhaps the greatest thanks we can give to Howard Zinn is to see it--and to act.

David Potorti was one of the founders of September 11^th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. zinnmirror@gmail.com

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

Seven Days in January

How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington

by Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.

So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal "that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated... and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out."

In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller's parting January 23^rd piece on the trip:

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country's ‘trust deficit' with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,' the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States."

Just in case you've forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis -- of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today. ("I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.")

All three concerned nuclear politics, "oops" moments, and Washington. The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City. It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it's worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).

The third was the Secretary of Defense's top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: "You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!" In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d'état against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union. The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas. ("I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday...")

These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time. Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots. All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare. Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a "homeland" where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you. After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outré exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous. After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.

Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January.

After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.

Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest "budget outlook" indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn't even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).

Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.

To put just the president's domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president's team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn't include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country's citizens with "safety." That's what seven days in January really means.

Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police. Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it's ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies. Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever.

Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense's movie tastes: do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix. Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties "classics," Seven Days isn't likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there's little left to save -- and every week is the Pentagon's week in Washington.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Detente with Iran Recedes As US Builds Gulf Missile Shield

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by The Independent/UK

Detente with Iran Recedes as US Strengthens Gulf Defenses

Expansion of Patriot missile programme follows Obama's warning to Tehran

by Guy Adams

Days after a State of the Union address that threatened "growing consequences" if Iran continues to ignore international concerns over its nuclear programme, the Obama administration has quietly revealed plans to increase its military presence and step up arms sales to friendly regimes in the Persian Gulf.

A Patriot missile is launched during an Israeli-US military excercise in the Negev desert in southern Israel in February 2001. (Photograph: Reuters)

The US will provide new anti-missile systems to at least four Arab countries, and help Saudi Arabia triple the size of a 10,000-man force protecting its most important potential military targets from attack. America's Navy will also begin deploying ships capable of intercepting medium-range nuclear missiles off the Iranian coast at all times.

News of the moves slipped out in a mixture of off-the-record interviews and formal briefings over the weekend, and is likely to fuel concerns of an arms race among mutually suspicious regimes in the region. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have spent at least $25 billion [£15.6bn] on US-built weapons in the past two years.

For President Obama they represent a tangible shift in policy: in contrast with President Bush, he had until now hoped that quiet diplomacy might persuade Iran to rein back its nuclear programmes. However, his early efforts to make overtures towards Tehran have fallen flat and international inspectors have yet to be granted access to the country's nuclear development facilities.

That appears to have prompted the new, tougher line from the Obama administration. "As Iran's leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: they, too, will face growing consequences," said the President, in his State of the Union address last week.

Iran continues to insist that its nuclear ambitions are civilian rather than military. After meeting allies in London last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that the US now hopes to convince the international community to increase sanctions against its government, and warned China that its opposition to that move was "short-sighted."

In an effort to sidestep allegations of warmongering, the Obama administration is eager to stress that all of its new deployments are entirely defensive in nature. They form part of an updated global ballistic missile defence policy that will be put to Congress today.

Outlining some details of the new US policy, General David Petraeus, the Central Command chief responsible for the Middle East, told a conference at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington that new systems being supplied to the region consisted of "eight Patriot missile batteries, two in each of four countries".

Those countries are thought to be Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain, which will join Saudi Arabia and Israel in possessing the equipment. Adding that Patriots are capable of shooting down short-range offensive missiles, General Petraeus said: "Iran is clearly seen as a very serious threat by those on the other side of the Gulf front."

He also revealed that the United States Navy
will now be keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf at all times, vessels which are generally equipped with radar systems that are designed to intercept medium-range missiles.

Accepting US military support can present political problems for Arab countries, and the White House did not formally comment on any of the moves.

© 2010 The Independent

'Climate Emails Hacked by Spies' But We Can Not Rule Out False Flags

Published on Monday, February 1, 2010 by The Independent/UK

'Climate Emails Hacked by Spies'

Interception Bore Hallmarks of Foreign Intelligence Agency, says Expert

by Steve Connor

A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government's former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit's emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation - especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (EPA File)

The emails were stolen from a backup computer server used by the University of East Anglia. They contained private discussions between climate scientists that have embarrassed those involved, particularly Professor Phil Jones, who has stepped down from his post as head of the unit pending an independent inquiry into whether there is any evidence of scientific misconduct. He is not implicated in the hacking.

In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said.

"A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here," Sir David said.

"Quite simply, it's the sophistication of the operation. I know there's a possibility that they had a very good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people," he said.

More than 1,000 emails, and some 2,000 documents, were stolen from a university back-up server where remote access is difficult. This represents a small fraction of the total number of emails for the period from 1996 to 2009, suggesting they had been selected for the most incriminating phrases relating to possible scientific misconduct and breaches of the Freedom of Information Act. The leak of the emails in the weeks running up to the climate change conference in Copenhagen appeared to be carefully timed to destabilise the meeting.

"I don't think that it's a coincidence that the stealing of the emails from the individuals involved in East Anglia was put out for publication one month before Copenhagen. That wasn't a coincidence," Sir David said. "The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years. It looks like possibly the work of an intelligence service. What it was was a very well co-ordinated part of a campaign. It was a difficult piece of work to get that done.

"I've no inside knowledge except for the fact that I did work with our [intelligence] agencies, and the American agencies, that I have some experience," he added.

The existence of the stolen emails came to light on 17 November when someone tried to load them onto the RealClimate website run by climate scientists, including Gavin Schmidt of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr Schmidt said that the hackers were using a legitimate computer based in Turkey as a proxy server but the attack could have been launched from another computer anywhere in the world.

He attempted to disable the hacking operation as it was taking place, but was prevented several times before finally succeeding because the hackers had penetrated deep into the website's database software. This required considerable skill and knowledge which an opportunistic hacker would not have had, he said. "That requires some kind of monitoring-tool set-up and required them to have more access than you would get by simply logging into the blog," Dr Schmidt said.

Two days after the attempted RealClimate hack, the file of stolen emails appeared on a server used by a company called Tomcity operating from the Russian city of Tomsk in Siberia. However, again, the uploading could have been done by someone operating a proxy server anywhere else in the world.

Experts have suggested that loading the email file onto a Tomsk computer server may have been a clumsy attempt to lay a trail to the door of the Russian intelligence service, which has since denied any involvement in the hacking incident. Some commentators in Russia have said that China had more to gain from destabilising the Copenhagen conference than Russia.

Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia's involvement. "If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency," he said.

"If it was a maverick group then I suppose it could be the Americans, but I am hazarding a guess as much as anyone else. The only thing is, I've worked within government and I've seen this in operation," Sir David added. "It was a sophisticated and expensive operation. In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system which is a very likely source of finance. Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them," he said.

Norfolk Constabulary is conducting an investigation into the hacking but said yesterday it would not comment on speculation that a foreign intelligence agency was involved. The University of East Anglia also said that it could not comment.

Cyber crime: The 21st century threat

*Espionage once conjured images of lonely spooks on foreign assignations during the height of the Cold War. Not any longer. The rise of capitalism, a free-market economy and an interconnected digital world have changed those terms of engagement.

Last week Hillary Clinton issued a warning to China and Russia to tighten up their internet security amid a growing threat of international cyber crime. "We cannot afford in today's interconnected world to have too many instances ... where companies' accounts can be hacked into," she said. It came after Google threatened to end its operations in China following what it described as a "sophisticated and targeted" cyberattack on Google, Adobe and 20 other US companies.

More recently MI5 has accused China of setting up so-called "honeytraps" with a view to obtaining sensitive commercial secrets from top UK companies. According to The Sunday Times, promotional gifts handed out at business trade shows included cameras and memory sticks have allegedly been found to contain bugs that provide the Chinese with remote access to users' computers.

Estonia, too, has been a victim of cyber crime. In 2007 it was subject to a three-week cyber attack that saw hackers permeate firewalls and infiltrate websites of banks and political institutions, in a move that threatened to wipe out the country's digital infrastructure. Nato has now established a cyber-defence centre in the region and the FBI has despatched a computer security expert.

Last year, Russian hackers were accused of a sophisticated cyber attack which temporarily shut down two social networking sites in order to silence a Georgian blogger critical of Moscow's policies.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri

*With his swept-back hair and wispy beard, Dr Rajendra Pachauri looks every inch the climate change visionary. And as chairman of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore in 2007 he has become an international figurehead in the battle against global warming and one of the most powerful figures at the Copenhagen summit. But a spate of controversy over recent IPCC research papers and a resurgent mood among challengers to the theory of man-made climate change have led many to wonder who, exactly, he is.

According to the "brief" two-page CV on his personal website, Dr Pachauri, 68, juggles his UN role with his position as chief executive of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) which has strong historic ties (although not for the past decade) with the Tata Group, India's largest privately-owned corporation which also owns Jaguar, Land Rover and steelmaker Corus in the UK. His critics say the other high-profile positions he holds - more than 20 - with banks, universities and think tanks could pose potential conflicts of interest with his UN role. Among his many directorships was one from 1999-2003 with the Indian Oil Corporation. Dr Pachauri says he receives no money for these roles.

Yet he began his career as an engineer working with the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi. Today, despite cooling relations with the Government, he is one of India's most famous figures, inhabiting the exclusive Golf Links area of Delhi where Lakshmi Mittal, Britain's richest man, owns a house and where, despite owning his own electric car, he was photographed this week being chauffeur-driven on the one-mile journey to his offices in a 1.8-litre Toyota.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the cricket-loving environmentalist showed yet another side to his personality with the publication this month of a raunchy novel, Return to Almora, about an ageing academic looking back over his spiritual and sexual journey through life.

© 2010 The Independent