Thursday 26 February 2009
by: Chip Ward, TomDispatch.com
Common to sudden catastrophes is the shock of finding the world upside down. The water is suddenly on top instead of under; the rumbling earth swallows houses and spits out lava; the mud wall slides down from above; the flames roar up; the wind spins; the tower topples. In an instant, everything is broken and nothing works. What you relied upon is gone.
The destruction of the World Trade Center towers was that kind of deep disturbance, even if it was man-made. The shock of 9/11 was so profound that we thought it would define the twenty-first century, and even now it's hard for any event to match the immediacy, the drama, the sheer horror of that single autumn day. When the smoke cleared we learned that we had never really been quarantined from the epidemic of planetary violence that, until 9/11, was always "over there." Suddenly, the shocking violence most of us only witnessed on our television screens had blown back to our very doorstep. Our world shifted over night. Fear reigned. It became our ideology. It became their means of controlling us. It was called "homeland security."
In the second big shock of the young century, seven years later, Wall Street collapsed. Although a few wise voices had warned us it could happen, we didn't see that one coming either. If 9/11 put an American sense of physical safety to flight, the meltdown of casino capitalism took away our economic security.
The debris from economic earthquakes may appear less obvious - being failed institutions rather than twisted beams - but the damage couldn't be more real. All that wealth incinerated almost overnight translates into lost jobs, lost homes, lost businesses, lost retirements, lost health care, lost education, lost options, lost dreams. Shredded investments and failed businesses mean that struggle, diminishment, indignity, anxiety, anger, defeat, depression, stress, and hardship will stalk us for years to come. What we once counted on is just as gone as any house or community washed away or burned to the ground. Like 9/11, the economic disaster shook the ground we walked on. This time, stress joined fear.
On 9/11, towers crashed to the ground. In this recent crisis, an entire empire of belief went down.
What do you do when your system fails? Start over, sure; but look, we're stuck with a lot of it. The institutions and agencies that were the instruments of the debacle are still with us and we're hard pressed to invent new ones. Wal-Mart is still with us. So is Exxon. So is the Federal Reserve. So is the Department of Homeland Security. And the agencies we look to for rescue are populated with the incompetent and demoralized bureaucrats of George W. Bush's two terms.
There are termites in the walls. Much of the movement that elected Barack Obama will be devoted to reforming that given world. But remember that, when any mature system - be it a forest loaded with fuel or an economy loaded with debt - collapses, enormous amounts of energy are released. Capturing that energy and directing it in new ways is the opportunity that lurks in the midst of this crisis.
The future - the sustainable future where we survive - will not be created by those who invented the world we have just lost and are reluctantly giving it up, while salvaging as much of their privilege from the ruins as they can. It will be invented by people who have only each other to lose and understand that, in the coming era of chaos, collapse, and reconstruction, we will find support, security, comfort, and solutions within the context of communities - on the ground, online, overlapping, and emerging. While Washington salvages the past, citizens in unlikely places like Detroit and Moab, Utah, are building the future. "Think globally, act locally" has never rung truer. "Think security, act locally" will also be true and real security will be homegrown, not "homeland."
Chip Ward introducing a post by Chip Ward
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After the Green Economy, Green Security
How to Build Resilient Communities in a Chaotic World
Chip Ward
Now that we've decided to "green" the economy, why not green homeland security, too? I'm not talking about interrogators questioning suspects under the glow of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or cops wearing recycled Kevlar recharging their Tasers via solar panels. What I mean is: Shouldn't we finally start rethinking the very notion of homeland security on a sinking planet?
Now that Dennis Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, claims that global insecurity is more of a danger to us than terrorism, isn't it time to release the idea of "security" from its top-down, business-as-usual, terrorism-oriented shackles? Isn't it, in fact, time for the Obama administration to begin building security we can believe in; that is, a bottom-up movement that will start us down the road to the kind of resilient American communities that could effectively recover from the disasters - manmade or natural (if there's still a difference) - that will surely characterize this emerging age of financial and climate chaos? In the long run, if we don't start pursuing security that actually focuses on the foremost challenges of our moment, that emphasizes recovery rather than what passes for "defense," that builds communities rather than just more SWAT teams, we're in trouble.
Today, "homeland security" and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that unwieldy amalgam of 13 agencies created by the Bush administration in 2002, continue to express the potent, all-encompassing fears and assumptions of our last president's Global War on Terror. Foreign enemies may indeed be plotting to attack us, but, believe it or not (and increasing numbers of people, watching their homes, money, and jobs melt away are coming to believe it), that's probably neither the worst, nor the most dangerous thing in store for us.
Outsized fear of terrorism and what it can accomplish, stoked by the apocalyptic look of the attacks of 9/11, masked the agenda of officials who were all too ready to suppress challenges by shredding our civil liberties. That agenda has been driven by a legion of privateers, selling everything from gas masks to biometric ID systems, who would loot the public treasury in the name of patriotism. Like so many bad trips of the Bush years, homeland security was run down the wrong tracks from the beginning - as the arrival of that distinctly un-American word "homeland" so clearly signaled - and it has, not surprisingly, carried us in the wrong direction ever since.
In that context, it's worth remembering that after 9/11 came Hurricane Katrina, epic droughts and wildfires, Biblical-level floods, and then, of course, economic meltdown. Despite widespread fears here, the likelihood that most of us will experience a terrorist attack is slim indeed; on the other hand, it's a sure bet that disruptions to our far-flung supply lines for food, water, and energy will affect us all in the decades ahead. Nature, after all, is loaded with disturbances like droughts (growing ever more intense thanks to global climate change) that resonate through the human realm as famines, migrations, civil wars, failed states, and eventually warlords and pirates.
Even if these seem to you like nature's version of terrorism, you can't prevent a monster storm or a killer drought by arresting it at the border or caging it before it strikes. That's why a new green version of security should concentrate our energies and resources on recovery from disasters at least as much as defense against them - and not recovery as delivered by distant, fumbling Federal Emergency Management Agency officials either. The fact is that pre-organized, homegrown (rather than homeland) networks of citizens who have planned and prepared together to meet basic needs and to aid one another in times of trouble will be better able to bounce back from the sorts of disasters that might actually hit us than a nation of helpless individuals waiting to be rescued or protected.
Imagine redubbing the DHS the Department of Homegrown Security and at least you have a place to begin.
Homegrown Security for a Cantankerous Future
Homeland security, post-9/11, has been highly militarized and focused primarily on single-event disasters like attacks or accidents, not on, say, the infection of critical grain crops by some newly evolved disease or, as is actually happening, the serial collapse of ocean fisheries. Unlike a terrorist attack, such disasters could strike everywhere at once, rendering single-point plans useless. If Miami goes down in a hurricane, FEMA can (we hope) feed people via trucks and airlifts. If some part of the global food trade were to shut down, hundreds of thousands of community gardens and networks of backyard farmers ready to share their harvests, not warehouses full of emergency provisions, could prove the difference between crisis and catastrophe. Systemic challenges, after all, require systemic responses.
Food and security may not be a twosome that comes quickly to mind, but experts know that our food supply is particularly vulnerable. We're familiar with the hardships that follow spikes in the price of gas or the freezing of credit lines, but few of us in the U.S. have experienced the panic and privation of a broken food chain - so far. That's going to change in the decades ahead. Count on it, even if it seems as unlikely today as, for most of us, an economic meltdown did just one short year ago.
Our industrialized and globalized food production and distribution system is a wonder, bringing us exotic eats from distant places at mostly affordable prices. Those mangos from Mexico and kiwis from New Zealand are certainly a treat, but the understandable pleasure we take in them hides a great risk. If you're thinking about what the greening of homeland security might actually mean, look no further than our food supply.
The typical American meal travels, on average, 1,000 miles to get to your plate. The wheat in your burger bun may be from Canada, the beef from Argentina, and the tomato from Chile. Food shipped from that far away is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions - a calamitous storm that hits a food-growing center; spikes in the price of fuel for fertilizer, farm machinery, and trucking; internecine strife or regional wars that shut down harvests or block trade routes; national policies to hoard food as prices spike or scarcities set in; not to speak of the usual droughts, floods, and crop failures that have always plagued humankind and are intensifying in a globally warming world.
An interruption of food supplies from afar is only tolerable if we've planned ahead and so can fill in with locally grown food. Sadly, for those of us who live outside of California and Florida, local food remains seasonal, limited, and anything but diverse. And don't forget, local food has been weakened in this country by the reasonably thorough job we've done of wiping out all those less-than-superprofitable family farms. U.S. agriculture is now strikingly consolidated into massive, industrial-style operations. So chickens come from vast chicken farms in Arkansas, hogs from humongous hog outfits in Georgia, corn from the mono-crop Midwestern "cornbelt," and so on.
Such monolithic enterprises may be profitable for Big Ag, but they're not going to do us much good, given the cantankerous future already inching its way toward us. When a severe drought in Australia led to plummeting rice production in the Murray River Basin last year, the price of rice across the planet suddenly doubled. The spike in rice prices, like the sudden leap in the cost of wheat, soy, and other staples, was primarily due to the then-soaring price of oil for farm machinery, fertilizer, and transport, though rampant market speculation contributed as well. At that moment, the collapse of Australian rice farming pushed a worsening situation across a threshold into crisis territory. Because the world agricultural trade system is so thoroughly interconnected and interdependent, a shock on one part of the planet can resonate far and wide - just as (we've learned to our dismay) can happen in financial markets.
Think of the shortages and ensuing food riots in 30 countries across the planet in 2008 as grim coming attractions for life on a planet with unpredictable extreme weather, booming populations, overloaded ecosystems, and distorted food economies. The spike in prices that put food staples out of reach of rioting masses of people was soon enough mitigated by the collapse of energy prices when the global economy tanked. Make no mistake, though: food shortages and the social unrest that goes with them will eventually return.
And here's something else to take into consideration: Nations that suffer food shortages may, when their hungry citizens demand food sovereignty, protect their agricultural sectors by erecting trade barriers - just as is beginning to happen in other areas of production under the pressure of the global economic meltdown. The era of globalized food production, whose fruits (and vegetables) we Americans have come to consider little short of our supermarket birthright, may contract significantly in the relatively near future. We should be prepared. And that's where a Department of Homegrown Security could make some real sense.
Most American cities, after all, have less than a week's worth of food in their pipeline and most of us don't stockpile, which makes city dwellers especially vulnerable to disruptions of the food supply. Skip your next three meals and you'll grasp the panic likely to arise if the American food chain is ever broken in a significant way. The question is: How can we address rather than ignore this vital, if underappreciated, aspect of homeland security?
Vertical Farms and Victory Gardens
Because cities are so dependent on daily food shipments, local food security in urban areas might well mean storing more food for emergencies; this would certainly be the old-school approach to disaster planning, and it has worked well enough over the short run. Over the long run, however, what makes real sense is to encourage urban and suburban community gardens and farmers' markets, and not just on a scale that ensures a summer supply of arugula and fresh tomatoes, but on one that might actually help mitigate prolonged food disruptions. There are enough vacant lots, backyards, and rooftops to host many thousands of gardens, either created by voluntary groups or by small-scale entrepreneurs. Urban farming could even go big. Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier recently unveiled his vision of a "vertical farm," a 30-story tower right in the middle of an urban landscape, that could grow enough food to feed 50,000 people in the surrounding neighborhood.
Cultural historian and visionary critic Mike Davis has already wondered why our approach to homeland security doesn't draw from the example of "victory gardens" during World War II. In 1943, just two years into the war, 20 million victory gardens were producing a staggering 30-40% of the nation's vegetables. Thousands of abandoned urban lots were being cleared and planted by tenement neighbors working together. The Office of Civilian Defense encouraged and empowered such projects, but the phenomenon was also self-organizing because citizens on the home front wanted to participate, and home gardening was, after all, a delicious way to be patriotic.
Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the de-industrialized ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as "not quite post-apocalyptic but ... post-American," people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer. The catastrophe that is Detroit didn't happen with a Hurricane Katrina-style bang, but as a slow, grinding bust - and a possibly haunting preview of what many American municipalities may experience, post-crash. Solnit claims, however, that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It's also a living guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial muscle while creating a more secure - and resilient - America.
As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools can start "edible schoolyard" gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The food-growing skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.
The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal bounty so it can be eaten next winter?
It's not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond, share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been called "community greening" or "civic ecology," but the traditional name "grassroots democracy" fits no less well.
Ideally, the greening of homeland security would mean more than pamphlets on planting, but would provide actual seed money - and not just for seeds either, but for building greenhouses, distributing tools, and starting farmers' markets where growers and consumers can connect. How about raiding the Department of Homeland Security's gluttonous budget for "homegrown" grants to communities that want to get started?
Here's the interesting thing: Without federal aid or direction, the first glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It goes by the moniker "relocalization," and if that's a bit of an awkward mouthful for you, it really means that your most basic security is in the hands not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits alone, or waiting for the helicopters to land.
Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization Network to "make other arrangements for the post-carbon future" of their communities. In Great Britain, an allied "Transition Towns" movement has sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods. With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step. Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental recovery key priorities.
In the U.S., "post-carbon" working groups are beginning to sprout across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions. Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.
The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments to enhance "emergency preparedness" in the 2009 Department of Homeland Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and other anti-terror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.
Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown (instead of homeland) security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security could also be re-imagined, if only official Washington weren't so stuck in the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security to back them, are already doing so - and helping prepare us all as best they can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry us to safety.
Perhaps it's not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit TVs and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback Stadium in Arkansas.
In the meanwhile, let's encourage projects that are building resilience in communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it, and feed it, and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home, or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.
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Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He described his political adventures in "Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West" and "Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land." Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah.
http://www.truthout.org/022609T
Friday, February 27, 2009
Senate to Investigate CIA's Actions Under Bush
Friday 27 February 2009
by: Greg Miller, The Los Angeles Times
"Fact-finding" effort seeks details on secret prisons and interrogation methods.
Washington - The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to launch an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs under President Bush, setting the stage for a sweeping examination of some of most secretive and controversial operations in recent agency history.
The probe is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed -- from the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites to the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda prisoners, according to Senate aides familiar with the inquiry plans.
Officials said the inquiry is not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. "The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future," said a senior Senate aide, who like others, described the plans on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public.
Still, the investigation is likely call new attention to the agency's conduct in operations that drew condemnation around the world. It is also bound to renew friction between Democrats and Republicans who have spent much of the last five years fighting over the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism.
The investigation also could draw comparisons to the special Senate committee formed to investigate the CIA in 1975 and headed by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. Revelations by the Church Committee led to greater congressional oversight and legislation restricting intelligence activities.
The terms and scope of the new inquiry still were being negotiated by members of the committee and senior staffers Thursday. The senior aide said the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public.
The inquiry, which could take a year or more to complete, means the CIA will once again be the target of intense congressional scrutiny at a time when it is engaged in two wars and its ongoing pursuit of Al Qaeda.
The agency was been stripped of some of its power and prestige after coming under severe criticism in previous investigations of its failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.
But whereas those investigations focused largely on errors in the CIA's analytic efforts, the new probe will dive directly into its most sensitive operations, seeking to unearth details that previous generations of agency officials referred to as the "crown jewels."
During the Bush administration, the agency was often able to safeguard many of those secrets. Lawmakers have never been told the locations of the CIA's secret prisons overseas, for example.
But the Obama administration is expected to give congressional investigators new access to classified records as well as individuals who took part in operating the secret prisons and interrogating detainees.
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta pledged this week that he would cooperate with any congressional probe.
"If those committees are seeking information in these areas, we'll cooperate with them," Panetta said in a meeting with reporters Wednesday. "I think that we have a responsibility to be transparent on these issues and to provide them that information."
Panetta argued that CIA officers should not face prosecution if they were acting on orders in accordance with Bush administration legal opinions.
"I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals," Panetta said. "I think they did their job, they did it pursuant to the guidance that was provided them, whether you agreed or disagreed with it."
News of the probe was greeted with concern among agency veterans.
"There is a good deal of investigation fatigue, and a feeling that the agency has become even more than before a piata," said a former high-ranking CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The new investigation is likely to "stimulate more risk aversion," the former official said. "There's a potential cost to other operations down the road when the current administration says, 'We would like you to take this operation, it's been blessed by lawyers and briefed by Congress.' Why should we do anything anywhere near cutting-edge if down the road the next administration can decide to get back at their political opponents?"
Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.
The Senate probe will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.
The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA's operations.
The investigation comes at a time when the Obama administration is in the midst of making dramatic changes in the CIA's counter-terrorism programs.
Last month, Obama ordered the CIA to close its secret prison facilities and to abandon "enhanced" interrogation measures, including waterboarding, a method that simulates drowning. Instead, Obama ordered the agency to abide by the Army Field Manual on interrogation.
The administration has also established a task force to look at the interrogation programs, although that effort is mainly designed to examine their effectiveness and determine whether the CIA should again be granted authority beyond the Army Field Manual.
Senate investigators plan a similar line of inquiry, with a goal of assessing the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA, including sleep deprivation and subjecting prisoners to cold temperatures.
Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has defended the agency's use of such methods and argued that the agency should not be bound by the constraints of the Army Field Manual.
Hayden has said that the agency had held fewer than 100 prisoners in custody since the Sept. 11 attacks, and that less than one-third of those were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation measures. Three prisoners, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were subjected to waterboarding.
There has also been a push from other lawmakers to launch an independent investigation of the CIA's operations. The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing next week on a proposal to create a commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks to examine CIA counter-terrorism operations under Bush.
"The last administration justified torture, presided over the abuses at Abu Ghraib, destroyed tapes of harsh interrogations," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of that committee. "How can we restore our moral leadership and ensure transparent government if we ignore what has happened?"
But the Senate Intelligence Committee has direct jurisdiction over U.S. spy agencies, and is launching its probe in part to make sure its members have independent data and are in position to influence future interrogation and detention policies, officials said.
Aides said the negotiations were aimed at producing a probe with broad support from members of both parties. Republicans have argued that the investigation be focused on CIA programs and not become a referendum on Bush administration policies, such as the Justice Department legal memos that underpinned the program.
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the ranking Republican on the committee, "does not think that witch hunts and discussions of the legality of [Justice Department] memos are in any way helpful at this point," another Senate aide said.
http://www.truthout.org/022709J?print
by: Greg Miller, The Los Angeles Times
"Fact-finding" effort seeks details on secret prisons and interrogation methods.
Washington - The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to launch an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation programs under President Bush, setting the stage for a sweeping examination of some of most secretive and controversial operations in recent agency history.
The probe is aimed at uncovering new information on the origins of the programs as well as scrutinizing how they were executed -- from the conditions at clandestine CIA prison sites to the interrogation regimens used to break Al Qaeda prisoners, according to Senate aides familiar with the inquiry plans.
Officials said the inquiry is not designed to determine whether CIA officials broke laws. "The purpose here is to do fact-finding in order to learn lessons from the programs and see if there are recommendations to be made for detention and interrogations in the future," said a senior Senate aide, who like others, described the plans on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public.
Still, the investigation is likely call new attention to the agency's conduct in operations that drew condemnation around the world. It is also bound to renew friction between Democrats and Republicans who have spent much of the last five years fighting over the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism.
The investigation also could draw comparisons to the special Senate committee formed to investigate the CIA in 1975 and headed by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. Revelations by the Church Committee led to greater congressional oversight and legislation restricting intelligence activities.
The terms and scope of the new inquiry still were being negotiated by members of the committee and senior staffers Thursday. The senior aide said the committee had no short-term plans to hold public hearings, and that it was not clear whether the panel would release its final report to the public.
The inquiry, which could take a year or more to complete, means the CIA will once again be the target of intense congressional scrutiny at a time when it is engaged in two wars and its ongoing pursuit of Al Qaeda.
The agency was been stripped of some of its power and prestige after coming under severe criticism in previous investigations of its failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.
But whereas those investigations focused largely on errors in the CIA's analytic efforts, the new probe will dive directly into its most sensitive operations, seeking to unearth details that previous generations of agency officials referred to as the "crown jewels."
During the Bush administration, the agency was often able to safeguard many of those secrets. Lawmakers have never been told the locations of the CIA's secret prisons overseas, for example.
But the Obama administration is expected to give congressional investigators new access to classified records as well as individuals who took part in operating the secret prisons and interrogating detainees.
CIA Director Leon E. Panetta pledged this week that he would cooperate with any congressional probe.
"If those committees are seeking information in these areas, we'll cooperate with them," Panetta said in a meeting with reporters Wednesday. "I think that we have a responsibility to be transparent on these issues and to provide them that information."
Panetta argued that CIA officers should not face prosecution if they were acting on orders in accordance with Bush administration legal opinions.
"I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals," Panetta said. "I think they did their job, they did it pursuant to the guidance that was provided them, whether you agreed or disagreed with it."
News of the probe was greeted with concern among agency veterans.
"There is a good deal of investigation fatigue, and a feeling that the agency has become even more than before a piata," said a former high-ranking CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The new investigation is likely to "stimulate more risk aversion," the former official said. "There's a potential cost to other operations down the road when the current administration says, 'We would like you to take this operation, it's been blessed by lawyers and briefed by Congress.' Why should we do anything anywhere near cutting-edge if down the road the next administration can decide to get back at their political opponents?"
Senate aides declined to say whether the committee would seek new testimony from former CIA Director George J. Tenet or other former top officials who were involved in the creation and management of the programs.
The Senate probe will examine whether the detention and interrogation operations were carried out in ways that were consistent with the authorities and instructions issued in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.
The panel will also look at whether lawmakers were kept fully informed. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the committee, and others have said that the Bush administration improperly withheld information from Congress on the CIA's operations.
The investigation comes at a time when the Obama administration is in the midst of making dramatic changes in the CIA's counter-terrorism programs.
Last month, Obama ordered the CIA to close its secret prison facilities and to abandon "enhanced" interrogation measures, including waterboarding, a method that simulates drowning. Instead, Obama ordered the agency to abide by the Army Field Manual on interrogation.
The administration has also established a task force to look at the interrogation programs, although that effort is mainly designed to examine their effectiveness and determine whether the CIA should again be granted authority beyond the Army Field Manual.
Senate investigators plan a similar line of inquiry, with a goal of assessing the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA, including sleep deprivation and subjecting prisoners to cold temperatures.
Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has defended the agency's use of such methods and argued that the agency should not be bound by the constraints of the Army Field Manual.
Hayden has said that the agency had held fewer than 100 prisoners in custody since the Sept. 11 attacks, and that less than one-third of those were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation measures. Three prisoners, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were subjected to waterboarding.
There has also been a push from other lawmakers to launch an independent investigation of the CIA's operations. The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing next week on a proposal to create a commission like the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks to examine CIA counter-terrorism operations under Bush.
"The last administration justified torture, presided over the abuses at Abu Ghraib, destroyed tapes of harsh interrogations," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the chairman of that committee. "How can we restore our moral leadership and ensure transparent government if we ignore what has happened?"
But the Senate Intelligence Committee has direct jurisdiction over U.S. spy agencies, and is launching its probe in part to make sure its members have independent data and are in position to influence future interrogation and detention policies, officials said.
Aides said the negotiations were aimed at producing a probe with broad support from members of both parties. Republicans have argued that the investigation be focused on CIA programs and not become a referendum on Bush administration policies, such as the Justice Department legal memos that underpinned the program.
Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), the ranking Republican on the committee, "does not think that witch hunts and discussions of the legality of [Justice Department] memos are in any way helpful at this point," another Senate aide said.
http://www.truthout.org/022709J?print
Freeing Up Resources... for More War
by Norman Solomon
Friday, 27 February 2009 07:58
Hours after President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, the New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw “American combat forces” from Iraq during the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the pullout will include “relieving the strain on the armed forces and freeing up resources for Afghanistan.”
The president’s speech had little to say about the plans for escalation, but the few words will come back to haunt: “With our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Al Qaida and combat extremism, because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens halfway around the world. We will not allow it.”
Obama didn’t mention the additional number of U.S. troops — 17,000 — that he has just ordered to Afghanistan. But his pledge that he “will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people” and his ringing declaration, “We will not allow it,” came just before this statement: “As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy.”
Get the message? In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world — in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan too — will make Americans safer. With drumrolls like that, the mission could outlive all of us.
And so, a colossal and fateful blunder, made by a very smart leader, arguably our best and brightest, is careening forward with the help of silence that defers all too readily to power. This is how the war in Vietnam escalated, while individuals and groups muted their voices. Many people will pay with their lives.
The reasons why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won are directly connected to why the war is wrong. In essence, people do not like their country occupied for years on end, especially when the occupiers are routinely killing civilians (whatever the rationale). Monochrome words like Taliban and “terrorists” might seem tidy and clear enough as they appear in media coverage, or as they roll off a president’s tongue, but in the real Afghan world the opponents of the U.S. war are diverse and wide-ranging. With every missile strike that incinerates a household or terrorizes a village, the truly implacable “extremists” can rejoice at Uncle Sam’s assistance to their recruiting efforts.
Those who are fond of talking and writing about President Obama’s admirable progressive values will, sooner or later, need to come to terms with the particulars of his actual policies. In foreign affairs, the realities now include the ominous pairing of his anti-terrorism rhetoric and his avowed commitment to ratchet up the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
I don’t often make predictions, but I’m confident about this one: Within a few years, some members of Congress, and leaders of some progressive groups with huge email lists, will look back with regret as they recall their failure to clearly and openly oppose the pivotal escalation of the Afghan war.
They could save themselves a lot of shame, and save others their lives, by speaking out sooner rather than later. In the process, they might help save the Obama presidency from running aground in Afghanistan.
Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For video of his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to discuss Obama and the war in Afghanistan, click here.
Friday, 27 February 2009 07:58
Hours after President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, the New York Times printed the news that he plans to gradually withdraw “American combat forces” from Iraq during the next 18 months. The newspaper reported that the advantages of the pullout will include “relieving the strain on the armed forces and freeing up resources for Afghanistan.”
The president’s speech had little to say about the plans for escalation, but the few words will come back to haunt: “With our friends and allies, we will forge a new and comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat Al Qaida and combat extremism, because I will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people from safe havens halfway around the world. We will not allow it.”
Obama didn’t mention the additional number of U.S. troops — 17,000 — that he has just ordered to Afghanistan. But his pledge that he “will not allow terrorists to plot against the American people” and his ringing declaration, “We will not allow it,” came just before this statement: “As we meet here tonight, our men and women in uniform stand watch abroad and more are readying to deploy.”
Get the message? In his first speech to Congress, the new president threw down a 90-month-old gauntlet, reaffirming the notion that committing to war halfway around the world — in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan too — will make Americans safer. With drumrolls like that, the mission could outlive all of us.
And so, a colossal and fateful blunder, made by a very smart leader, arguably our best and brightest, is careening forward with the help of silence that defers all too readily to power. This is how the war in Vietnam escalated, while individuals and groups muted their voices. Many people will pay with their lives.
The reasons why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won are directly connected to why the war is wrong. In essence, people do not like their country occupied for years on end, especially when the occupiers are routinely killing civilians (whatever the rationale). Monochrome words like Taliban and “terrorists” might seem tidy and clear enough as they appear in media coverage, or as they roll off a president’s tongue, but in the real Afghan world the opponents of the U.S. war are diverse and wide-ranging. With every missile strike that incinerates a household or terrorizes a village, the truly implacable “extremists” can rejoice at Uncle Sam’s assistance to their recruiting efforts.
Those who are fond of talking and writing about President Obama’s admirable progressive values will, sooner or later, need to come to terms with the particulars of his actual policies. In foreign affairs, the realities now include the ominous pairing of his anti-terrorism rhetoric and his avowed commitment to ratchet up the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.
I don’t often make predictions, but I’m confident about this one: Within a few years, some members of Congress, and leaders of some progressive groups with huge email lists, will look back with regret as they recall their failure to clearly and openly oppose the pivotal escalation of the Afghan war.
They could save themselves a lot of shame, and save others their lives, by speaking out sooner rather than later. In the process, they might help save the Obama presidency from running aground in Afghanistan.
Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For video of his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” to discuss Obama and the war in Afghanistan, click here.
World faces last chance to avoid fatal warming: EU
Fri Feb 27, 2009 9:28am EST
By Gergely Szakacs
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - The world faces a final opportunity to agree an adequate global response to climate change at a U.N.-led meeting in Copenhagen in December, the European Union's environment chief said on Friday.
World leaders from about 190 countries meet in Copenhagen in December to try to agree a global framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol on fighting global warming, which expires in 2012.
"It is now 12 years since Kyoto was created. This makes Copenhagen the world's last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return," European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference in Budapest on Friday.
"Having an agreement in Copenhagen is not only possible, it is imperative and we are going to have it," Dimas said.
With greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than projected, Dimas said it was essential that big polluters such as the United States and emerging economies in the Far East and South America also sign up for an agreement. "President Obama's commitment to re-engage the United States fully in combating climate change is an enormously encouraging sign that progress is possible. So are positive initiatives coming from China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies."
Dimas said an agreement in Copenhagen should aim to limit global warming below the critical 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, or less than 1.2 degrees above the current level, by at least halving global emissions by 2050 from 1990 levels.
"Developed countries will have to go further, with cuts of 80-95 percent in order to (enable) developing countries to lift themselves out of poverty," he said.
Dimas said rich nations had a moral obligation to lead the war against global warming and the EU was ready to commit to deeper emissions cuts, provided that developed countries match those cuts with similar reductions.
"The European Union is committed to increasing its reductions targets from 20 percent to 30 percent (by 2020) on two conditions," Dimas said.
"Firstly that our partners in the industrialized world commit to comparable cuts, secondly, that developing countries agree to take action in line with their capabilities."
However, he said richer countries should provide financial incentives for emerging economies to facilitate a deal.
"The Copenhagen agreement will have to involve a major scaling up of financial aid to help developing countries to both mitigate emissions and adapt to climate change," Dimas said.
"If there is no money on the table there will be no deal."
(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs, Editing by Peter Blackburn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE51Q22X20090227
By Gergely Szakacs
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - The world faces a final opportunity to agree an adequate global response to climate change at a U.N.-led meeting in Copenhagen in December, the European Union's environment chief said on Friday.
World leaders from about 190 countries meet in Copenhagen in December to try to agree a global framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol on fighting global warming, which expires in 2012.
"It is now 12 years since Kyoto was created. This makes Copenhagen the world's last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return," European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference in Budapest on Friday.
"Having an agreement in Copenhagen is not only possible, it is imperative and we are going to have it," Dimas said.
With greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than projected, Dimas said it was essential that big polluters such as the United States and emerging economies in the Far East and South America also sign up for an agreement. "President Obama's commitment to re-engage the United States fully in combating climate change is an enormously encouraging sign that progress is possible. So are positive initiatives coming from China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies."
Dimas said an agreement in Copenhagen should aim to limit global warming below the critical 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, or less than 1.2 degrees above the current level, by at least halving global emissions by 2050 from 1990 levels.
"Developed countries will have to go further, with cuts of 80-95 percent in order to (enable) developing countries to lift themselves out of poverty," he said.
Dimas said rich nations had a moral obligation to lead the war against global warming and the EU was ready to commit to deeper emissions cuts, provided that developed countries match those cuts with similar reductions.
"The European Union is committed to increasing its reductions targets from 20 percent to 30 percent (by 2020) on two conditions," Dimas said.
"Firstly that our partners in the industrialized world commit to comparable cuts, secondly, that developing countries agree to take action in line with their capabilities."
However, he said richer countries should provide financial incentives for emerging economies to facilitate a deal.
"The Copenhagen agreement will have to involve a major scaling up of financial aid to help developing countries to both mitigate emissions and adapt to climate change," Dimas said.
"If there is no money on the table there will be no deal."
(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs, Editing by Peter Blackburn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE51Q22X20090227
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Bush's "icy smile" enraged Iraq shoe-thrower
By Khalid al-Ansary Khalid Al-ansary 2 hrs 36 mins ago
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An Iraqi reporter who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush said in the past he had videotaped himself practicing the Arab insult to use against the president whose "icy smile" had filled him with uncontrollable rage.
Muntazer al-Zaidi said on Thursday at the start of his trial in Baghdad on charges of assaulting a foreign leader that he took a recording of his shoe-throwing training two years ago and had hoped to accost Bush in Jordan but this did not take place.
Zaidi, who was hailed across the Middle East by critics of the Iraq invasion and who also called Bush a "dog," told the court he had acknowledged making a training film under interrogation after his arrest at a Baghdad news conference.
"I said this before the guards of the prime minister after I was beaten and after my body was devoured by electricity," said Zaidi, who added that his original plan had been to throw the shoes at Bush during a news conference in Amman.
But Zaidi, whose unusual protest overshadowed Bush's final visit to Iraq in December, insisted he had not planned to attack Bush this time.
Instead, he said Bush's smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq had made him think of "the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women," and enraged him.
"He was talking and at the same time smiling icily at the (Iraqi) prime minister. He said to the prime minister that he was going to have dinner with him," Zaidi told a three-judge panel, a small army of 25 defense lawyers lined up next to him.
"Suddenly I saw no one in the room but Bush. I felt the blood of innocents was running under his feet while he was smiling coldly as if he had come to write off Iraq with a farewell meal."
Zaidi added: "After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction ... I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him."
At the time, Zaidi shouted at Bush that the shoe-throwing was a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."
The trial had barely begun at Iraq's Central Criminal Court in the heavily fortified Green Zone before the judges postponed proceedings until March 12 so it could be determined if Bush was truly on an "official" visit to Iraq as a head of state.
ZAIDI DRAPED WITH FLAG
When Zaidi appeared in court, family members waiting for him ululated wildly and draped an Iraqi flag across his shoulders.
Zaidi, 30, who faces up to 15 years in prison, has been detained for more than two months.
The reporter for an Iraqi television station based in Cairo became a hero in much of the Middle East and his protest was played by television stations around the world.
Bush, whose support of Israel and decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein made him passionately disliked in the region, nimbly ducked out of the way of the first shoe and made light of the incident.
The second shoe also missed the American president.
The invasion plunged Iraq into six years of sectarian warfare and insurgency that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Although some in Iraq condemned Zaidi for disrespectful behavior, the incident resonated among many ordinary Iraqis.
Haider Ahmed, a government employee, called Zaidi a patriot. "He allowed us to hold our heads high," he said.
Zaidi's lawyers lost an appeal to have the charges reduced to insulting Bush. They argued he could not have hurt Bush with a shoe.
Zaidi himself said he could not be charged with assaulting a visiting head of state when that leader was also the chief of an occupation force. "How can he be a guest in an area that they themselves run?" he said.
"I did not intend to kill U.S. President Bush. But I wanted to express what is inside of me and what is inside all Iraqis, from north to south and east to west, the hatred we have for this man."
(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami; Writing by Missy Ryan; Editing by Michael Christie and Peter Millership)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090219/wl_nm/us_iraq_shoe_2
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An Iraqi reporter who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush said in the past he had videotaped himself practicing the Arab insult to use against the president whose "icy smile" had filled him with uncontrollable rage.
Muntazer al-Zaidi said on Thursday at the start of his trial in Baghdad on charges of assaulting a foreign leader that he took a recording of his shoe-throwing training two years ago and had hoped to accost Bush in Jordan but this did not take place.
Zaidi, who was hailed across the Middle East by critics of the Iraq invasion and who also called Bush a "dog," told the court he had acknowledged making a training film under interrogation after his arrest at a Baghdad news conference.
"I said this before the guards of the prime minister after I was beaten and after my body was devoured by electricity," said Zaidi, who added that his original plan had been to throw the shoes at Bush during a news conference in Amman.
But Zaidi, whose unusual protest overshadowed Bush's final visit to Iraq in December, insisted he had not planned to attack Bush this time.
Instead, he said Bush's smile as he talked about achievements in Iraq had made him think of "the killing of more than a million Iraqis, the disrespect for the sanctity of the mosques and houses, the rapes of women," and enraged him.
"He was talking and at the same time smiling icily at the (Iraqi) prime minister. He said to the prime minister that he was going to have dinner with him," Zaidi told a three-judge panel, a small army of 25 defense lawyers lined up next to him.
"Suddenly I saw no one in the room but Bush. I felt the blood of innocents was running under his feet while he was smiling coldly as if he had come to write off Iraq with a farewell meal."
Zaidi added: "After more than a million Iraqis killed, after all the economic and social destruction ... I felt that this person is the killer of the people, the prime murderer. I was enraged and threw my shoes at him."
At the time, Zaidi shouted at Bush that the shoe-throwing was a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog."
The trial had barely begun at Iraq's Central Criminal Court in the heavily fortified Green Zone before the judges postponed proceedings until March 12 so it could be determined if Bush was truly on an "official" visit to Iraq as a head of state.
ZAIDI DRAPED WITH FLAG
When Zaidi appeared in court, family members waiting for him ululated wildly and draped an Iraqi flag across his shoulders.
Zaidi, 30, who faces up to 15 years in prison, has been detained for more than two months.
The reporter for an Iraqi television station based in Cairo became a hero in much of the Middle East and his protest was played by television stations around the world.
Bush, whose support of Israel and decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein made him passionately disliked in the region, nimbly ducked out of the way of the first shoe and made light of the incident.
The second shoe also missed the American president.
The invasion plunged Iraq into six years of sectarian warfare and insurgency that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Although some in Iraq condemned Zaidi for disrespectful behavior, the incident resonated among many ordinary Iraqis.
Haider Ahmed, a government employee, called Zaidi a patriot. "He allowed us to hold our heads high," he said.
Zaidi's lawyers lost an appeal to have the charges reduced to insulting Bush. They argued he could not have hurt Bush with a shoe.
Zaidi himself said he could not be charged with assaulting a visiting head of state when that leader was also the chief of an occupation force. "How can he be a guest in an area that they themselves run?" he said.
"I did not intend to kill U.S. President Bush. But I wanted to express what is inside of me and what is inside all Iraqis, from north to south and east to west, the hatred we have for this man."
(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami; Writing by Missy Ryan; Editing by Michael Christie and Peter Millership)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090219/wl_nm/us_iraq_shoe_2
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Los Angeles nears water rationing
Tue Feb 17, 2009 9:10pm EST
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California's latest drought, the nation's biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, homes and businesses would pay a penalty rate -- nearly double normal prices -- for any water they use in excess of a reduced monthly allowance.
The five-member board plans to formally vote on details of the measure next month.
The rationing scheme is expected to take effect in May unless the City Council acts before then to reject it -- a move seen as unlikely since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for the measure under a water-shortage plan last week.
The only other time such penalty pricing was imposed to force conservation in the nation's second biggest city was a rationing system put into effect for a year starting in March 1991, at the height of California's last statewide drought.
That measure cut citywide water use by about 25 percent, DWP spokesman Joseph Ramallo said.
The DWP board also voted unanimously to restrict lawn sprinkler use to two days a week, as urged by the mayor. Outdoor irrigation accounts for 40 percent of residential water use in the city, DWP officials say.
The agency is the largest municipal utility in the United States, supplying water and electricity to some 3.8 million households and businesses in Los Angeles.
San Diego and other cities throughout California are weighing similar measures to cope with a water shortage that is adding to the woes of a state beset with rising unemployment, high mortgage foreclosure rates and a budget crisis.
DROP IN THE BUCKET
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, one of the state's chief sources of fresh surface water, is far below normal, and reservoirs fed by Sierra runoff are badly depleted as well, due to a statewide drought now in its third year.
State water managers have said the current dry spell could prove to be the worst ever in California, owing to rising demands from steady population growth.
Recent heavy rains, and mountain snowfall, have provided a welcome respite from California's driest January on record, but "this latest set of storms did not get us out of the woods by any means," water manager James McDaniel told the DWP board.
Complicating matters are federal court restrictions on water that can be pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in northern California, which furnishes much of the state's irrigation and drinking supplies, in order to protect endangered fish species.
As a result, state water managers have cut the amount of delta water they provide to irrigation districts and cities around the state to 15 percent of their usual contracted allotment for the year and may curb those deliveries further.
Another major source of imported water to Southern California, the Colorado River basin, is emerging from an eight-year drought, but its reservoirs remain low.
(Editing by Mary Milliken)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51H0AL20090218
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California's latest drought, the nation's biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, homes and businesses would pay a penalty rate -- nearly double normal prices -- for any water they use in excess of a reduced monthly allowance.
The five-member board plans to formally vote on details of the measure next month.
The rationing scheme is expected to take effect in May unless the City Council acts before then to reject it -- a move seen as unlikely since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for the measure under a water-shortage plan last week.
The only other time such penalty pricing was imposed to force conservation in the nation's second biggest city was a rationing system put into effect for a year starting in March 1991, at the height of California's last statewide drought.
That measure cut citywide water use by about 25 percent, DWP spokesman Joseph Ramallo said.
The DWP board also voted unanimously to restrict lawn sprinkler use to two days a week, as urged by the mayor. Outdoor irrigation accounts for 40 percent of residential water use in the city, DWP officials say.
The agency is the largest municipal utility in the United States, supplying water and electricity to some 3.8 million households and businesses in Los Angeles.
San Diego and other cities throughout California are weighing similar measures to cope with a water shortage that is adding to the woes of a state beset with rising unemployment, high mortgage foreclosure rates and a budget crisis.
DROP IN THE BUCKET
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, one of the state's chief sources of fresh surface water, is far below normal, and reservoirs fed by Sierra runoff are badly depleted as well, due to a statewide drought now in its third year.
State water managers have said the current dry spell could prove to be the worst ever in California, owing to rising demands from steady population growth.
Recent heavy rains, and mountain snowfall, have provided a welcome respite from California's driest January on record, but "this latest set of storms did not get us out of the woods by any means," water manager James McDaniel told the DWP board.
Complicating matters are federal court restrictions on water that can be pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in northern California, which furnishes much of the state's irrigation and drinking supplies, in order to protect endangered fish species.
As a result, state water managers have cut the amount of delta water they provide to irrigation districts and cities around the state to 15 percent of their usual contracted allotment for the year and may curb those deliveries further.
Another major source of imported water to Southern California, the Colorado River basin, is emerging from an eight-year drought, but its reservoirs remain low.
(Editing by Mary Milliken)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51H0AL20090218
Monday, February 16, 2009
Blackwater by Any Other Name Would Still Smell Like Sh*t
By ZP Heller, Brave New Films
Posted on February 14, 2009, Printed on February 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://bravenewfilms.org/126967/
Blackwater Worldwide, the ultimate mercenary firm and war profiteer, wants to shed its vile brand name, according to the Associated Press. They’re switching over to the name Xe (like in the words xenophobia or xenobiotic, which fittingly refers to a chemical substance that is foreign and usually harmful to living organisms). The funny part is Blackwater claims the name change is to “focus away from the business of providing private security.” You don’t say!
This falls under the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit school of logic, considering the Iraqi government recently labeled Blackwater “criminals” and banned the private contractor over the 2007 Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 civilians. That prompted the US State Department to declare it wouldn’t renew Blackwater’s contract to protect diplomats after it expires this May; the State Dept also announced it would scrutinize Blackwater’s conduct in Afghanistan.
Maybe Blackwater thinks that by changing their name they can distance themselves from the manslaughter charges facing five Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting. Maybe they think it will help them escape accountability for the 2006 Christmas Eve killing of a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president inside the Green Zone, or any of the other controversies that have dogged them over the years. What’s clear is that Blackwater wants to reinvent themselves in order to move into the business of chasing Somali pirates and intelligence gathering under their private CIA venture called Total Intelligence Solutions, as The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill has suggested. And yes, I said business, since Blackwater took over $1.3 billion in private contracts from Iraq when all was said and done, despite all their heinous crimes over the years.
I always thought Blackwater was a fitting name for the shadow army that has long slipped between the legal cracks, operating as a State Department contractor that cannot be easily prosecuted under military law. Looks like I’ll have to add “Xe” to my Google alerts to keep up with their criminal behavior.
ZP Heller is the editorial director of Brave New Films. He has written for The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Huffington Post, covering everything from politics to pop culture.
© 2009 Brave New Films All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://bravenewfilms.org/126967/
Posted on February 14, 2009, Printed on February 16, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://bravenewfilms.org/126967/
Blackwater Worldwide, the ultimate mercenary firm and war profiteer, wants to shed its vile brand name, according to the Associated Press. They’re switching over to the name Xe (like in the words xenophobia or xenobiotic, which fittingly refers to a chemical substance that is foreign and usually harmful to living organisms). The funny part is Blackwater claims the name change is to “focus away from the business of providing private security.” You don’t say!
This falls under the you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit school of logic, considering the Iraqi government recently labeled Blackwater “criminals” and banned the private contractor over the 2007 Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 civilians. That prompted the US State Department to declare it wouldn’t renew Blackwater’s contract to protect diplomats after it expires this May; the State Dept also announced it would scrutinize Blackwater’s conduct in Afghanistan.
Maybe Blackwater thinks that by changing their name they can distance themselves from the manslaughter charges facing five Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting. Maybe they think it will help them escape accountability for the 2006 Christmas Eve killing of a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president inside the Green Zone, or any of the other controversies that have dogged them over the years. What’s clear is that Blackwater wants to reinvent themselves in order to move into the business of chasing Somali pirates and intelligence gathering under their private CIA venture called Total Intelligence Solutions, as The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill has suggested. And yes, I said business, since Blackwater took over $1.3 billion in private contracts from Iraq when all was said and done, despite all their heinous crimes over the years.
I always thought Blackwater was a fitting name for the shadow army that has long slipped between the legal cracks, operating as a State Department contractor that cannot be easily prosecuted under military law. Looks like I’ll have to add “Xe” to my Google alerts to keep up with their criminal behavior.
ZP Heller is the editorial director of Brave New Films. He has written for The American Prospect, AlterNet, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Huffington Post, covering everything from politics to pop culture.
© 2009 Brave New Films All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://bravenewfilms.org/126967/
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Poll: Most want inquiry into anti-terror tactics
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Even as Americans struggle with two wars and an economy in tatters, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds majorities in favor of investigating some of the thorniest unfinished business from the Bush administration: Whether its tactics in the "war on terror" broke the law.
Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.
CALLS TO MOVE ON: Even reversed, Bush policies divide
Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.
The ACLU and other groups are pressing for inquiries into whether the Bush administration violated U.S. and international bans on torture and the constitutional right to privacy. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and his Senate counterpart, Patrick Leahy, have proposed commissions to investigate.
Asked Monday about Leahy's plan, President Obama said he would look at it. He added, "my general orientation is to say, let's get it right moving forward." Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have declined to rule out prosecutions. Leon Panetta, named to head the CIA, said this month that CIA officers would not be prosecuted for harsh interrogations authorized by the Bush White House.
Leahy, D-Vt., this week proposed a "truth commission" to assemble facts. He said the panel could offer immunity from prosecution for everything but perjury. "We need to get to the bottom of what happened and why," he said.
Conyers, D-Mich., has called for a panel that would gather facts and make recommendations, and could possibly lead to prosecutions. "This isn't payback," he said. "We are getting things straightened out for the future."
The Republican viewpoint was summed up recently by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. "If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it," he said. "This is not Latin America."
The politics of any investigation would be delicate. "You'd need people who haven't made up their minds," says Tom Kean, a Republican who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-02-11-investigation-poll_N.htm
WASHINGTON — Even as Americans struggle with two wars and an economy in tatters, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds majorities in favor of investigating some of the thorniest unfinished business from the Bush administration: Whether its tactics in the "war on terror" broke the law.
Close to two-thirds of those surveyed said there should be investigations into allegations that the Bush team used torture to interrogate terrorism suspects and its program of wiretapping U.S. citizens without getting warrants. Almost four in 10 favor criminal investigations and about a quarter want investigations without criminal charges. One-third said they want nothing to be done.
CALLS TO MOVE ON: Even reversed, Bush policies divide
Even more people want action on alleged attempts by the Bush team to use the Justice Department for political purposes. Four in 10 favored a criminal probe, three in 10 an independent panel, and 25% neither.
The ACLU and other groups are pressing for inquiries into whether the Bush administration violated U.S. and international bans on torture and the constitutional right to privacy. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and his Senate counterpart, Patrick Leahy, have proposed commissions to investigate.
Asked Monday about Leahy's plan, President Obama said he would look at it. He added, "my general orientation is to say, let's get it right moving forward." Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have declined to rule out prosecutions. Leon Panetta, named to head the CIA, said this month that CIA officers would not be prosecuted for harsh interrogations authorized by the Bush White House.
Leahy, D-Vt., this week proposed a "truth commission" to assemble facts. He said the panel could offer immunity from prosecution for everything but perjury. "We need to get to the bottom of what happened and why," he said.
Conyers, D-Mich., has called for a panel that would gather facts and make recommendations, and could possibly lead to prosecutions. "This isn't payback," he said. "We are getting things straightened out for the future."
The Republican viewpoint was summed up recently by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa. "If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it," he said. "This is not Latin America."
The politics of any investigation would be delicate. "You'd need people who haven't made up their minds," says Tom Kean, a Republican who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-02-11-investigation-poll_N.htm
U.S. links Moscow help on Iran to missile shield
Fri Feb 13, 2009 7:23pm EST
By James Kilner and Ross Colvin
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States signaled a willingness on Friday to slow plans for a missile defense shield in eastern Europe if Russia agreed to help stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Plans for the shield have contributed to a deterioration in U.S.-Russian ties over the past few years, but the new administration of President Barack Obama has said it wants to press the "reset button" and build good relations with Moscow.
"If we are able to work together to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, we would be able to moderate the pace of development of missile defenses in Europe," a senior U.S. administration official told Reuters.
It was the most explicit statement yet by an administration official linking the missile shield to Russia's willingness to help resolve the international stand-off over Iran's nuclear program.
He spoke as Undersecretary of State William Burns held talks in Moscow, the most senior U.S. official to do so since U.S. President Barack Obama took office last month.
Burns signaled the United States was ready to look at remodeling its missile defense plans to include Moscow.
"(Washington is) open to the possibility of cooperation, both with Russia and NATO partners, in relation to a new configuration for missile defense which would use the resources that each of us have," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. Burns gave no details.
In another sign that strained relations may be thawing, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would meet Russia's foreign minister in Geneva next month.
The more flexible U.S. position on its missile shield addressed one of Russia's chief complaints against Washington. Moscow viewed the plan to site missiles in Poland and a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic as a threat to its security in its traditional backyard.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a security conference in Munich, Germany, last week that the United States would press ahead with the missile defense shield, but only if it was proven to work and was cost-effective.
TACKLING IRAN
The Kremlin has been pressing Washington to give ground on the missile shield in exchange for Russia helping supply the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.
But the U.S. official in Washington focused on Iran.
"The impetus for the deployment of the missile defense systems is the threat from Iran. If it is possible to address that, then that needs to be taken into consideration as you look at the deployment of the system," the U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
The United States has led a drive to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, which the West fears is a cover to develop atomic weapons and Tehran insists is for the peaceful generation of electricity.
Russia and the United States agree that world security would be threatened if Iran acquired nuclear weapons but they disagree over whether Tehran is actively pursuing a weapons program.
Moscow, which plans to start up a nuclear reactor at Iran's Bushehr plant by the end of the year, has used its veto in the United Nations Security Council on a number of occasions to water down or defeat U.S.-led efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.
Obama has said he is prepared to talk to Iran's leaders and offered economic incentives if Tehran "unclenches its fist." But he has also warned of tougher economic sanctions if Tehran does not halt its nuclear program.
(Writing by Alan Elsner and Ross Colvin; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51C66420090214
By James Kilner and Ross Colvin
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States signaled a willingness on Friday to slow plans for a missile defense shield in eastern Europe if Russia agreed to help stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Plans for the shield have contributed to a deterioration in U.S.-Russian ties over the past few years, but the new administration of President Barack Obama has said it wants to press the "reset button" and build good relations with Moscow.
"If we are able to work together to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons capability, we would be able to moderate the pace of development of missile defenses in Europe," a senior U.S. administration official told Reuters.
It was the most explicit statement yet by an administration official linking the missile shield to Russia's willingness to help resolve the international stand-off over Iran's nuclear program.
He spoke as Undersecretary of State William Burns held talks in Moscow, the most senior U.S. official to do so since U.S. President Barack Obama took office last month.
Burns signaled the United States was ready to look at remodeling its missile defense plans to include Moscow.
"(Washington is) open to the possibility of cooperation, both with Russia and NATO partners, in relation to a new configuration for missile defense which would use the resources that each of us have," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. Burns gave no details.
In another sign that strained relations may be thawing, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would meet Russia's foreign minister in Geneva next month.
The more flexible U.S. position on its missile shield addressed one of Russia's chief complaints against Washington. Moscow viewed the plan to site missiles in Poland and a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic as a threat to its security in its traditional backyard.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told a security conference in Munich, Germany, last week that the United States would press ahead with the missile defense shield, but only if it was proven to work and was cost-effective.
TACKLING IRAN
The Kremlin has been pressing Washington to give ground on the missile shield in exchange for Russia helping supply the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.
But the U.S. official in Washington focused on Iran.
"The impetus for the deployment of the missile defense systems is the threat from Iran. If it is possible to address that, then that needs to be taken into consideration as you look at the deployment of the system," the U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
The United States has led a drive to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, which the West fears is a cover to develop atomic weapons and Tehran insists is for the peaceful generation of electricity.
Russia and the United States agree that world security would be threatened if Iran acquired nuclear weapons but they disagree over whether Tehran is actively pursuing a weapons program.
Moscow, which plans to start up a nuclear reactor at Iran's Bushehr plant by the end of the year, has used its veto in the United Nations Security Council on a number of occasions to water down or defeat U.S.-led efforts to impose tougher sanctions on Iran.
Obama has said he is prepared to talk to Iran's leaders and offered economic incentives if Tehran "unclenches its fist." But he has also warned of tougher economic sanctions if Tehran does not halt its nuclear program.
(Writing by Alan Elsner and Ross Colvin; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51C66420090214
Global warming seen worse than predicted
Sat Feb 14, 2009 4:46pm EST
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
He said recent climate studies suggested the continued warming of the planet from greenhouse gas emissions could touch off large, destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests and melt permafrost in the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gasses that could raise global temperatures even more.
"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," Field, of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.
He pointed to recent studies showing the fourth assessment report underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said.
He said that trend was likely to continue if more countries turned to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. If so, he said the impact of climate change would be "more serious and diverse" than the IPCC's most recent predictions.
(Editing by Peter Cooney)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE51D29E20090214
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.
"The consequence of that is we are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we've considered seriously," Chris Field, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
Field said "the actual trajectory of climate change is more serious" than any of the climate predictions in the IPCC's fourth assessment report called "Climate Change 2007."
He said recent climate studies suggested the continued warming of the planet from greenhouse gas emissions could touch off large, destructive wildfires in tropical rain forests and melt permafrost in the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gasses that could raise global temperatures even more.
"There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years," Field, of Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science, said in a statement.
He pointed to recent studies showing the fourth assessment report underestimated the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years.
"We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected, primarily because developing countries, like China and India, saw a huge surge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal," Field said.
He said that trend was likely to continue if more countries turned to coal and other carbon-intensive fuels to meet their energy needs. If so, he said the impact of climate change would be "more serious and diverse" than the IPCC's most recent predictions.
(Editing by Peter Cooney)
© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE51D29E20090214
Friday, February 13, 2009
Gregg flip-flop emboldens GOP
Charles Mahtesian Charles Mahtesian Fri Feb 13, 4:07 am ET
Judd Gregg was all but dead to his Republican colleagues just a few days ago, another collaborator drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.
But the New Hampshire senator's surprise decision to remove himself from consideration as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary Thursday has provided the GOP with a new rallying cry, and a new hero against a foe who just a few weeks ago seemed almost unassailable.
In a way, it’s all a testament to just how far the Republican Party have fallen; what passes for victory now is an embarrassing flip-flop by an admired GOP senator and the passage of a massive economic recovery bill that most Republicans on the Hill oppose bitterly. When Obama’s stimulus bill clears the House today, Republicans will celebrate by pointing to how much House Democrats did without them – and then hope against hope that voters don’t notice if the economy improves as a result.
Republicans applauded boisterously when Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) opened a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement Thursday night by announcing Gregg’s withdrawal.
"He made a difficult decision to turn down a job that a lot of Republicans could take," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). "Here's a guy who's going to turn down his place in the history books."
In pulling out, Gregg pointed to “irresolvable conflicts” on the two issues behind which the Republicans have been closing ranks — the stimulus package and the alleged politicization of the census.
“We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy,” he said in a statement issued by his Senate office.
By citing reservations about the economic recovery package, Gregg reinforced widespread GOP criticism about wasteful spending that has less to do with reviving the economy than rewarding Democratic constituencies. And by noting his differing view on the census, Gregg breathed life into Republican charges of a White House power grab over a critical Commerce Department function.
Both issues are part of an emerging GOP case against Obama and the ruling Democratic Party: Strip away the new face, the lofty rhetoric and the promises of post-partisanship and you’ll find the same big-spending party of old, bent on politicizing government to consolidate its hold on power.
Even with the stimulus package on the verge of passing later this week, the unanimous GOP vote against the bill in the House and the near-unanimous opposition in the Senate revealed a Republican Party surprisingly united in direction and in message for perhaps the first time since losing its congressional majority in 2006.
The unity comes with huge risk, of course. A Gallup Poll out this week showed the public supporting passage of the economic recovery plan by nearly a two-to-one margin. By opposing it, the Republicans are making a long-term bet that the public will turn against the plan and those who pushed it – a bet, essentially, that the economy Obama inherited from a Republican president will continue to tank deep into the next election cycle.
It’s a massive gamble, and one the party might not have taken if the last two elections hadn’t all but purged it of its wayward moderates. In its diminished but highly concentrated form, the GOP is showing signs it’s regained its mojo, at least internally, and some see the withdrawal of Gregg – ironically, a moderate like the ones the party has been purging — as a pivotal moment in the building process.
"Sen. Gregg's decision reinforces suspicions about the stimulus bill and about moving the census from the Commerce Department to the White House," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
“By turning down a position of great honor, Sen. Gregg has made a bold statement for principle and responsibility today,” said Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) in a statement. “The president’s politically charged move to place the nonpartisan census process in the hands of his staff contradicts every pledge of openness he made on the campaign trail. While the White House continues to break promises for politics, I commend Sen. Gregg for acting with integrity. Sen. Gregg has shown the American people the type of selfless leadership they should only hope to see from the White House.”
Gregg’s own explanation for his decision was less aggressive. He said he expects “there will be many issues and initiatives where I can and will work to assure the success of the president’s proposals.”
He took no departing shots at Obama, instead acknowledging in an interview with Politico that he “should have faced up” to the conflicts he felt earlier. “The fault lies with me,” Gregg said. “I may have embarrassed myself, but hopefully not him.”
Nevertheless, for a Republican Party desperately careening from message to message, from “drill, baby, drill” to “the future is Cao,” Gregg’s move has rallied the troops and provided them with a set of organizing principles around which to begin rebuilding their tattered brand — or at least to sully Obama’s sterling brand.
The withdrawal was Obama’s third failed nomination in less than two weeks, an unexpected state of affairs for a president whose campaign was known for its discipline, flawless execution and ability to see around corners.
All in all, Gregg's decision in hardly the material to build a majority around, but given the GOP’s free-fall in recent years, even a minor victory has the feel of a major triumph.
"When your opponent trips and falls on his face, it certainly emboldens the opponent," added Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). "This has been blunder after blunder. As an administration, they are far from immune to tough days, weeks and months.
"It certainly emboldens us," McHenry said.
Patrick O’Connor contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090213/pl_politico/18821/print
Judd Gregg was all but dead to his Republican colleagues just a few days ago, another collaborator drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.
But the New Hampshire senator's surprise decision to remove himself from consideration as President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary Thursday has provided the GOP with a new rallying cry, and a new hero against a foe who just a few weeks ago seemed almost unassailable.
In a way, it’s all a testament to just how far the Republican Party have fallen; what passes for victory now is an embarrassing flip-flop by an admired GOP senator and the passage of a massive economic recovery bill that most Republicans on the Hill oppose bitterly. When Obama’s stimulus bill clears the House today, Republicans will celebrate by pointing to how much House Democrats did without them – and then hope against hope that voters don’t notice if the economy improves as a result.
Republicans applauded boisterously when Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) opened a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement Thursday night by announcing Gregg’s withdrawal.
"He made a difficult decision to turn down a job that a lot of Republicans could take," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). "Here's a guy who's going to turn down his place in the history books."
In pulling out, Gregg pointed to “irresolvable conflicts” on the two issues behind which the Republicans have been closing ranks — the stimulus package and the alleged politicization of the census.
“We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy,” he said in a statement issued by his Senate office.
By citing reservations about the economic recovery package, Gregg reinforced widespread GOP criticism about wasteful spending that has less to do with reviving the economy than rewarding Democratic constituencies. And by noting his differing view on the census, Gregg breathed life into Republican charges of a White House power grab over a critical Commerce Department function.
Both issues are part of an emerging GOP case against Obama and the ruling Democratic Party: Strip away the new face, the lofty rhetoric and the promises of post-partisanship and you’ll find the same big-spending party of old, bent on politicizing government to consolidate its hold on power.
Even with the stimulus package on the verge of passing later this week, the unanimous GOP vote against the bill in the House and the near-unanimous opposition in the Senate revealed a Republican Party surprisingly united in direction and in message for perhaps the first time since losing its congressional majority in 2006.
The unity comes with huge risk, of course. A Gallup Poll out this week showed the public supporting passage of the economic recovery plan by nearly a two-to-one margin. By opposing it, the Republicans are making a long-term bet that the public will turn against the plan and those who pushed it – a bet, essentially, that the economy Obama inherited from a Republican president will continue to tank deep into the next election cycle.
It’s a massive gamble, and one the party might not have taken if the last two elections hadn’t all but purged it of its wayward moderates. In its diminished but highly concentrated form, the GOP is showing signs it’s regained its mojo, at least internally, and some see the withdrawal of Gregg – ironically, a moderate like the ones the party has been purging — as a pivotal moment in the building process.
"Sen. Gregg's decision reinforces suspicions about the stimulus bill and about moving the census from the Commerce Department to the White House," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
“By turning down a position of great honor, Sen. Gregg has made a bold statement for principle and responsibility today,” said Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) in a statement. “The president’s politically charged move to place the nonpartisan census process in the hands of his staff contradicts every pledge of openness he made on the campaign trail. While the White House continues to break promises for politics, I commend Sen. Gregg for acting with integrity. Sen. Gregg has shown the American people the type of selfless leadership they should only hope to see from the White House.”
Gregg’s own explanation for his decision was less aggressive. He said he expects “there will be many issues and initiatives where I can and will work to assure the success of the president’s proposals.”
He took no departing shots at Obama, instead acknowledging in an interview with Politico that he “should have faced up” to the conflicts he felt earlier. “The fault lies with me,” Gregg said. “I may have embarrassed myself, but hopefully not him.”
Nevertheless, for a Republican Party desperately careening from message to message, from “drill, baby, drill” to “the future is Cao,” Gregg’s move has rallied the troops and provided them with a set of organizing principles around which to begin rebuilding their tattered brand — or at least to sully Obama’s sterling brand.
The withdrawal was Obama’s third failed nomination in less than two weeks, an unexpected state of affairs for a president whose campaign was known for its discipline, flawless execution and ability to see around corners.
All in all, Gregg's decision in hardly the material to build a majority around, but given the GOP’s free-fall in recent years, even a minor victory has the feel of a major triumph.
"When your opponent trips and falls on his face, it certainly emboldens the opponent," added Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). "This has been blunder after blunder. As an administration, they are far from immune to tough days, weeks and months.
"It certainly emboldens us," McHenry said.
Patrick O’Connor contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090213/pl_politico/18821/print
Last Russian general warns US on Afghanistan
By JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer Jim Heintz, Associated Press Writer 45 mins ago
MOSCOW – Twenty years after Red Army troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the last general to command them says the Soviets' devastating experience is a dismal omen for U.S. plans to build up troops there.
On Friday, the anniversary of the Soviet departure from the Afghan capital, the Russian parliament's lower house adopted a resolution honoring the soldiers who "were faithful to the warrior's duty, who displayed heroism, bravery and patriotism."
In retired Gen. Boris Gromov's view, the valor was shown in an unwinnable battle.
"Afghanistan taught us an invaluable lesson ... It has been and always will be impossible to solve political problems using force," said Gromov, the last soldier to leave Afghanistan two days after the Kabul pullout.
He told reporters that U.S. plans to send thousands of new troops to Afghanistan would make no difference against a resurgent Taliban, who came to power in 1996 in the chaos after the Soviet withdrawal.
"One can increase the forces or not — it won't lead to anything but a negative result," Gromov said.
The parliament resolution credited the Red Army with the "repulsion of international terrorism and narcotics trade" and "averting a breeding ground for a new war" on Russia's border.
That appeared to blame Afghanistan's current fighting and soaring opium trade on the U.S.-led military operation launched in 2001 against the Taliban. Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has made the same suggestion recently, saying the alliance has repeated the Soviet Union's mistakes in Afghanistan and added its own.
The Soviet Union lost some 15,000 soldiers in the war, which began when Moscow sent in troops to battle guerrillas who were fighting a Soviet-supported government. The invasion brought international opprobrium on the Soviet Union — including a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow by countries including the United States, China and Japan.
It also shocked millions of Soviets who had been taught their massive military was the world's most potent, but saw their heavy equipment and powerful weaponry overwhelmed by ragged, Western-backed insurgents.
"I don't see any sense in that war," veteran Oleg Samoilov told Associated Press Television News. "What did we do, what did we achieve? Practically nothing. There were only dead people left, our dead comrades, their mothers and widows — and that's it."
Russia has given nominal support to the international anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, but did not send troops, and there are mixed signals on how fully it backs the operation.
This month, Moscow authorized a $2.15 billion package of aid to Kyrgyzstan that is widely seen as the key factor in the Kyrgyz president's announcement that a U.S. base will be closed. The base is an important transit point for coalition troops and cargo for Afghanistan and is the home to tanker planes that refuel warplanes over Afghanistan.
But Russia has granted some coalition countries permission to ship Afghanistan-bound military supplies through its territory; Germany even has permission to ship weaponry.
Washington and Moscow are negotiating a deal for the United States to use Russian territory to send supplies to Afghanistan through Russia; news reports this week cited Foreign Ministry officials as saying only some minor details remain to be worked out.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week suggested such cooperation could be expanded to allow weapons shipments if the United States shows good faith — presumably an indication that Russia would press Washington hard for concessions on sensitive issues such as NATO expansion and the controversial proposal to put U.S. missile defense elements in Eastern Europe.
___
Associated Press Television producer Olga Tregubova in Moscow contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090213/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_afghanistan_anniversary/print
MOSCOW – Twenty years after Red Army troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the last general to command them says the Soviets' devastating experience is a dismal omen for U.S. plans to build up troops there.
On Friday, the anniversary of the Soviet departure from the Afghan capital, the Russian parliament's lower house adopted a resolution honoring the soldiers who "were faithful to the warrior's duty, who displayed heroism, bravery and patriotism."
In retired Gen. Boris Gromov's view, the valor was shown in an unwinnable battle.
"Afghanistan taught us an invaluable lesson ... It has been and always will be impossible to solve political problems using force," said Gromov, the last soldier to leave Afghanistan two days after the Kabul pullout.
He told reporters that U.S. plans to send thousands of new troops to Afghanistan would make no difference against a resurgent Taliban, who came to power in 1996 in the chaos after the Soviet withdrawal.
"One can increase the forces or not — it won't lead to anything but a negative result," Gromov said.
The parliament resolution credited the Red Army with the "repulsion of international terrorism and narcotics trade" and "averting a breeding ground for a new war" on Russia's border.
That appeared to blame Afghanistan's current fighting and soaring opium trade on the U.S.-led military operation launched in 2001 against the Taliban. Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has made the same suggestion recently, saying the alliance has repeated the Soviet Union's mistakes in Afghanistan and added its own.
The Soviet Union lost some 15,000 soldiers in the war, which began when Moscow sent in troops to battle guerrillas who were fighting a Soviet-supported government. The invasion brought international opprobrium on the Soviet Union — including a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow by countries including the United States, China and Japan.
It also shocked millions of Soviets who had been taught their massive military was the world's most potent, but saw their heavy equipment and powerful weaponry overwhelmed by ragged, Western-backed insurgents.
"I don't see any sense in that war," veteran Oleg Samoilov told Associated Press Television News. "What did we do, what did we achieve? Practically nothing. There were only dead people left, our dead comrades, their mothers and widows — and that's it."
Russia has given nominal support to the international anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, but did not send troops, and there are mixed signals on how fully it backs the operation.
This month, Moscow authorized a $2.15 billion package of aid to Kyrgyzstan that is widely seen as the key factor in the Kyrgyz president's announcement that a U.S. base will be closed. The base is an important transit point for coalition troops and cargo for Afghanistan and is the home to tanker planes that refuel warplanes over Afghanistan.
But Russia has granted some coalition countries permission to ship Afghanistan-bound military supplies through its territory; Germany even has permission to ship weaponry.
Washington and Moscow are negotiating a deal for the United States to use Russian territory to send supplies to Afghanistan through Russia; news reports this week cited Foreign Ministry officials as saying only some minor details remain to be worked out.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week suggested such cooperation could be expanded to allow weapons shipments if the United States shows good faith — presumably an indication that Russia would press Washington hard for concessions on sensitive issues such as NATO expansion and the controversial proposal to put U.S. missile defense elements in Eastern Europe.
___
Associated Press Television producer Olga Tregubova in Moscow contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090213/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_afghanistan_anniversary/print
Monday, February 9, 2009
Why Our War in Afghanistan May Mean the End of American Empire
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War."
In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.
In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)
In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.
The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!
Masters of the Universe
The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris." The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.
Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.
In the 1990s, "globalization" -- the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse -- was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as "masters of the universe."
The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist's daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a few others -- how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe…") As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe's cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.
In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "discipline" them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus." (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)
Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration's deregulatory blindness and Wall Street's derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it's far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it's clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.
Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:
"Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme."
Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don't. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm's losses reached $27 billion.
At least now, however, no one -- except perhaps Thain himself -- would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.
As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American "masters of the universe," even if never given that label. I'm speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.
For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.
Twice in the Same Graveyard
It's here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway -- and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.
When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.
Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn't possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again -- this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.
What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush's crew, it turned out, didn't need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.
They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power -- financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their "caliphate" a joke, and Afghanistan -- for anyone but Afghans -- truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we're going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's people really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn't atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires," by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: "The United States must proceed with caution -- or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England's disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night's reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated "all of our mistakes," which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe -- and say so -- that we're, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won't be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking," some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to "lower expectations."
As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:
"This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money."
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an "Asian Eden," but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That's a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a "multi-polar world," rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have "reduced dominance," as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's "top analyst," suggested of the same moment:
"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military."
Still, it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.
Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War."
In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.
In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)
In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.
The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!
Masters of the Universe
The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris." The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.
Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.
In the 1990s, "globalization" -- the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse -- was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as "masters of the universe."
The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist's daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a few others -- how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe…") As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe's cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.
In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "discipline" them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus." (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)
Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration's deregulatory blindness and Wall Street's derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it's far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it's clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.
Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:
"Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme."
Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don't. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm's losses reached $27 billion.
At least now, however, no one -- except perhaps Thain himself -- would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.
As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American "masters of the universe," even if never given that label. I'm speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.
For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.
Twice in the Same Graveyard
It's here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway -- and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.
When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.
Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn't possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again -- this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.
What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush's crew, it turned out, didn't need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.
They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power -- financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their "caliphate" a joke, and Afghanistan -- for anyone but Afghans -- truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we're going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's people really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn't atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires," by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: "The United States must proceed with caution -- or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England's disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night's reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated "all of our mistakes," which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe -- and say so -- that we're, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won't be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking," some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to "lower expectations."
As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:
"This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money."
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an "Asian Eden," but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That's a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a "multi-polar world," rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have "reduced dominance," as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's "top analyst," suggested of the same moment:
"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military."
Still, it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.
Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
Bonobo Sex and 'Ladyboners': Is Women's Desire Really that Confusing?
By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
The top story of the week has been about the ladyboner.
"What Do Women Want?," an article about new research into female arousal, published in the NYT magazine, has been the most read story for five straight days, lit up the blogosphere and sparked a lightning storm of comments at the NYT and in blogs. Many sites have had to close their comments early, unable to keep up. The deepening financial crisis has been pushed aside.
The very long story, long blog posts, and longer list of letters are all deeply complex, confusing, contradictory, fraught, fascinating and overwhelming. Kind of like the overarching metaphor in the piece, first articulated by Meredith Chivers, a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queens University, and one of the scientists whose work is profiled: "I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest."
I'm thrilled people are trying to understand the ladyboner (blogger slang for female arousal that you won't find in the Times piece); amazed by the dedication of the scientists and the intelligent and nuanced approach of the writer; and delighted that the attempt to shed some light on what makes women's privates work has moved past the suggestion that we get out our lipstick mirrors and take a look "down there." Who wouldn't be?
Women: Nature's Rubik's Cube?
The body of information (sorry) about men's arousal is disproportionately swollen (sorry, again) because most scientists have been male, and most of the cultural focus has been on how to arouse men. And only recently, with a sudden "critical mass" of female scientists, and articles like this, has there been a serious attempt to address the "problem" Freud posed over a century ago: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Bonobo Sex, Yes or No?
There are some fascinating findings but, as I'll get back to in a minute, they all contain some hand wringing. First, some findings about flexosexuality (my term) or heteroflexibility (Slate's term). Meredith Chivers hooked up a plethysmograph (an apparatus that fits over the penis or in the vagina and measures blood flow), and gave subjects a keypad to indicate arousal, then showed men and women, both straight and gay, short clips of bonobo monkeys having sex, of human heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
The men responded the same way genitally and through the keypad. The heterosexual men were aroused by heterosexual or lesbian sex, by the masturbating and exercising women, and were unmoved by the other clips. The gay males were aroused in "the opposite categorical pattern."
But "all was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men ... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos."
Interesting, but oh so confusing and worrying!
Science Says Men Do Think With It ...
There's more. Men's narrower arousal isn't just due to inhibition, apparently. Chivers' colleague, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University, "took MRI scans of gay and straight men as they were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires."
And another piece: after the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s, drug companies wanted to find an equivalent drug for women. So they funded research to investigate physiological arousal. In short, researchers found female physiological arousal is pretty straightforward, but is totally separate from cognitive arousal, or lust. "In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the mind ... In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire."
... But Women Don't
The separation of physiological and conscious arousal has also been a finding in rape studies. Chivers argues that genital lubrication is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration ... Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring." (On this topic, later on in the piece, scientist Marta Meara adds, "Arousal is not consent." A statement which has proved of particular interest to dozens of commenters and bloggers.)
Next, the article talks about Chivers' findings that "women's system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.'" (Which got at least one blogger saying that she knows plenty of women who like to go out and pick up men, not just wait for an invitation).
'Being Desired Is the Orgasm'
Which in some ways is similar to Marta Meana's findings. In the article, Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said, "I consider myself a feminist. But political correctness isn't sexy at all," before declaring that for women, "Being desired is the orgasm."
"'Really, women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic' -- it is dominated by the yearnings of 'self-love,' by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. 'When it comes to desire,' she added, 'women may be far less relational than men.'"
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana sees those systems in a different way from her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the "impetus of value."
Another scientist, Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, finds that above all, female desire is dictated by intimacy and emotional connection, and is malleable. In writing a book, she studied 100 women for 10 years who self-identify as lesbian, bisexual or refuse a label, many of whom change in their orientations. A famous example is Anne Heche, who had "a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man."
Diamond argues that women's desire can't be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. (This assertion drew some blogger ire about the constant stereotyping of male gayness as real, but lesbian orientation as a kind of undergraduate, whimsical interest.)
Diamond's premise of emotionally based arousal is one that Meana rejects. Her research has found many women who report loving a partner very much, but not having any arousal for them.
'Core of Sexual Desire Is Deeply un-PC'
In short, the article reports that the core of sexual desire is deeply un-PC. Straight, bi and lesbian women are aroused by women and men; whereas, straight men are only aroused by women and gay men are only aroused by men. Many women get aroused during rape, but "arousal is not consent." There's a difference between physiological and cognitive arousal. Women's arousal might be based on receptivity, emotion or on narcissism. Or it might be none of the above. Got it?
A producer once told me that every good story is a mystery story. Complexity and contradiction are good things; they're what make us human, they're what keep us interested.
In fact, until I read this article, I'd always believed men's arousal was complex and mysterious, too. I've read articles claiming that women's historical preoccupation with fashion is actually based on satisfying the male genetic appetite for variety and promiscuity: that on some level, different outfits and hairstyles work to give men the sense of being with more than one partner. Or that by watching strippers or porn, men are more able to stay faithful in a monogamous relationship because it satisfies their genetic programming to seek as many partners as possible.
True? No idea. Also, haven't we all read countless articles about homo-eroticism in male sporting culture -- tight uniforms, skin-on-skin, sweat, bum pats? I'm not saying any of this is true, but it's entertaining to contemplate the possibilities, isn't it? And don't possibilities like this do more justice to men than suggesting they either like men or women?
So, by all means let's investigate, research and probe (intellectually), but worry less when the results are complex or seemingly contradictory. How about we suspend our desire for total clarity, in favor of paying more attention to and enjoying women's (and men's) sexually omnivorous and often mysterious desires?
But the metaphor of darkness, which permeates the well-researched article, many of the blog posts, and most of the comments, is itself, frankly, what's well-intentioned but sexist. The article reports that most research into sex used to take the premise that men and women were extremely similar; whereas, now research on differences are what gets funded. Fine. But the current research, or at least the way this article presents it, seems to consider men's arousal to be simple, clear and straightforward, and women's as opposite, unusual, other, "a problem," worrying and abnormal.
© 2009 The Tyee All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
The top story of the week has been about the ladyboner.
"What Do Women Want?," an article about new research into female arousal, published in the NYT magazine, has been the most read story for five straight days, lit up the blogosphere and sparked a lightning storm of comments at the NYT and in blogs. Many sites have had to close their comments early, unable to keep up. The deepening financial crisis has been pushed aside.
The very long story, long blog posts, and longer list of letters are all deeply complex, confusing, contradictory, fraught, fascinating and overwhelming. Kind of like the overarching metaphor in the piece, first articulated by Meredith Chivers, a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queens University, and one of the scientists whose work is profiled: "I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest."
I'm thrilled people are trying to understand the ladyboner (blogger slang for female arousal that you won't find in the Times piece); amazed by the dedication of the scientists and the intelligent and nuanced approach of the writer; and delighted that the attempt to shed some light on what makes women's privates work has moved past the suggestion that we get out our lipstick mirrors and take a look "down there." Who wouldn't be?
Women: Nature's Rubik's Cube?
The body of information (sorry) about men's arousal is disproportionately swollen (sorry, again) because most scientists have been male, and most of the cultural focus has been on how to arouse men. And only recently, with a sudden "critical mass" of female scientists, and articles like this, has there been a serious attempt to address the "problem" Freud posed over a century ago: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Bonobo Sex, Yes or No?
There are some fascinating findings but, as I'll get back to in a minute, they all contain some hand wringing. First, some findings about flexosexuality (my term) or heteroflexibility (Slate's term). Meredith Chivers hooked up a plethysmograph (an apparatus that fits over the penis or in the vagina and measures blood flow), and gave subjects a keypad to indicate arousal, then showed men and women, both straight and gay, short clips of bonobo monkeys having sex, of human heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
The men responded the same way genitally and through the keypad. The heterosexual men were aroused by heterosexual or lesbian sex, by the masturbating and exercising women, and were unmoved by the other clips. The gay males were aroused in "the opposite categorical pattern."
But "all was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men ... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos."
Interesting, but oh so confusing and worrying!
Science Says Men Do Think With It ...
There's more. Men's narrower arousal isn't just due to inhibition, apparently. Chivers' colleague, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University, "took MRI scans of gay and straight men as they were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires."
And another piece: after the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s, drug companies wanted to find an equivalent drug for women. So they funded research to investigate physiological arousal. In short, researchers found female physiological arousal is pretty straightforward, but is totally separate from cognitive arousal, or lust. "In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the mind ... In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire."
... But Women Don't
The separation of physiological and conscious arousal has also been a finding in rape studies. Chivers argues that genital lubrication is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration ... Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring." (On this topic, later on in the piece, scientist Marta Meara adds, "Arousal is not consent." A statement which has proved of particular interest to dozens of commenters and bloggers.)
Next, the article talks about Chivers' findings that "women's system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.'" (Which got at least one blogger saying that she knows plenty of women who like to go out and pick up men, not just wait for an invitation).
'Being Desired Is the Orgasm'
Which in some ways is similar to Marta Meana's findings. In the article, Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said, "I consider myself a feminist. But political correctness isn't sexy at all," before declaring that for women, "Being desired is the orgasm."
"'Really, women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic' -- it is dominated by the yearnings of 'self-love,' by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. 'When it comes to desire,' she added, 'women may be far less relational than men.'"
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana sees those systems in a different way from her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the "impetus of value."
Another scientist, Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, finds that above all, female desire is dictated by intimacy and emotional connection, and is malleable. In writing a book, she studied 100 women for 10 years who self-identify as lesbian, bisexual or refuse a label, many of whom change in their orientations. A famous example is Anne Heche, who had "a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man."
Diamond argues that women's desire can't be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. (This assertion drew some blogger ire about the constant stereotyping of male gayness as real, but lesbian orientation as a kind of undergraduate, whimsical interest.)
Diamond's premise of emotionally based arousal is one that Meana rejects. Her research has found many women who report loving a partner very much, but not having any arousal for them.
'Core of Sexual Desire Is Deeply un-PC'
In short, the article reports that the core of sexual desire is deeply un-PC. Straight, bi and lesbian women are aroused by women and men; whereas, straight men are only aroused by women and gay men are only aroused by men. Many women get aroused during rape, but "arousal is not consent." There's a difference between physiological and cognitive arousal. Women's arousal might be based on receptivity, emotion or on narcissism. Or it might be none of the above. Got it?
A producer once told me that every good story is a mystery story. Complexity and contradiction are good things; they're what make us human, they're what keep us interested.
In fact, until I read this article, I'd always believed men's arousal was complex and mysterious, too. I've read articles claiming that women's historical preoccupation with fashion is actually based on satisfying the male genetic appetite for variety and promiscuity: that on some level, different outfits and hairstyles work to give men the sense of being with more than one partner. Or that by watching strippers or porn, men are more able to stay faithful in a monogamous relationship because it satisfies their genetic programming to seek as many partners as possible.
True? No idea. Also, haven't we all read countless articles about homo-eroticism in male sporting culture -- tight uniforms, skin-on-skin, sweat, bum pats? I'm not saying any of this is true, but it's entertaining to contemplate the possibilities, isn't it? And don't possibilities like this do more justice to men than suggesting they either like men or women?
So, by all means let's investigate, research and probe (intellectually), but worry less when the results are complex or seemingly contradictory. How about we suspend our desire for total clarity, in favor of paying more attention to and enjoying women's (and men's) sexually omnivorous and often mysterious desires?
But the metaphor of darkness, which permeates the well-researched article, many of the blog posts, and most of the comments, is itself, frankly, what's well-intentioned but sexist. The article reports that most research into sex used to take the premise that men and women were extremely similar; whereas, now research on differences are what gets funded. Fine. But the current research, or at least the way this article presents it, seems to consider men's arousal to be simple, clear and straightforward, and women's as opposite, unusual, other, "a problem," worrying and abnormal.
© 2009 The Tyee All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
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