Feeding Democracy

America's Terrorist Training Camp, By George Monbiot, Guardian, October 30, 2001.

"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.

For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.

Until January this year, WHISC was called "the School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946 SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch shows, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.

In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's "D-2", the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores studied at SOA.

In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.

Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefitted from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.

All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA's graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven ex-pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year a SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its graduates from Colombia than from any other country.

The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts ...intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.

Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself WHISC. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress, "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic."

But visit WHISC's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. WHISC's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations." Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that WHISC's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them.

We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the Al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia?

Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.

You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But, try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan.

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History of Indian America

On September 21, the National Museum of the American Indian will open its doors. In an interview early this year, the museum’s founding director, W. Richard West, declared that the new institution would not shy away from such difficult subjects as the effort to eradicate American Indian culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a safe bet that someone will also, inevitably, raise the issue of genocide.

The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard. Jackson’s book, which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has persisted to this day.

Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a "vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record." By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people." In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a 'race' of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history."

The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians became especially popular during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict began drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of a supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white peoples. The historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the command of the Indian scout Kit Carson, called them "forerunners of the Burning Fifth Marines" who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how America’s civilization had originated in "theft and murder" and "efforts toward . . . genocide."

Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches adopted a resolution branding this event "an invasion" that resulted in the "slavery and genocide of native people." In a widely read book, The Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American successors with pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated for four centuries. Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues that extermination was the "express objective" of the U.S. government. To the Cambodia expert Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the "only appropriate way" to describe how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth.

That American Indians suffered horribly is indisputable. But whether their suffering amounted to a "holocaust," or to genocide, is another matter.

II

It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000 native Americans were still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of the 19th century. Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians alive at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject speak of an inflated "numbers game"; others charge that the size of the aboriginal population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the decline seem less severe than it was.

The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the ethnologist James Mooney proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5 million, nearly five times as high as Mooney’s, while Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the aboriginal population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the present territory of the United States at about 10 million.

From one perspective, these differences, however startling, may seem beside the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival of the white man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native Americans. Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone do not prove the occurrence of genocide.

To address this issue properly we must begin with the most important reason for the Indians’ catastrophic decline—namely, the spread of highly contagious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known by scholars as a "virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was the norm.

The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.

About all this there is no essential disagreement. The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, concludes Alfred Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.

To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant the term genocide. David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died of disease and starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, Indians who died of introduced diseases "were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocidal conditions, Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as "furnaces of death."

But right away we are in highly debatable territory. It is true that the cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and bad sanitation, encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of their native converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the Indians labored—obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical care, corporal punishment—their experience bore no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghettos. The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the diseases that afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they could do for them. By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghettos, and quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and medicine; unlike in Stannard’s "furnaces of death," the deaths that occurred there were meant to occur.

The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard’s idea of disease as an expression of "genocidal war." True, the forced relocations of Indian tribes were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the Mississippi in 1838 took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail of Tears. But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of divine providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that Europeans did not come to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.

Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a step further than Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the way the great bulk of North America’s native population disappeared: "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." In brief, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.

Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single instance of such warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the Allegheny mountains. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw as the Indians’ treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as follows to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."

Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's suggestion, but whether he himself carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt did give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s quarantined hospital to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal: "I hope it will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the tribes of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds died.

A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense "'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter’s. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to scatter and seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives.

In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were "virtually exterminated," and other tribes suffered similarly devastating losses. Citing a figure of "100,000 or more fatalities" caused by the U.S. Army in the 1836-40 smallpox pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll "several times that number"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival.

Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who write that "the distribution of smallpox- infected blankets by the U.S. Army to Mandans at Fort Clark . . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." In evidence, they cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.

But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that the U.S. Army distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on the inadvertent spread of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the "100,000 fatalities," not only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers, but he too points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the cause. Another scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also refuted the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.

Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of the United States government at this time to vaccinate the native population. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program continued in force for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on the part of some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: "Vaccination of American Indians did eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox."

To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for a variety of reasons, but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens was not one of them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be held responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the American-Indian population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the large number of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a genocidal design.

III

Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered instances of genocide?

We may examine representative incidents by following the geographic route of European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies. There, at first, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as potential friends and converts. But their Christianizing efforts showed little success, and their experience with the natives gradually yielded a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists but by most other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually ensued, caused in part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became actively engaged on the Puritan side.

Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of several colonists. When the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of indemnification, a punitive expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first resident governor of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, the Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader, tied to a stake in sight of the fort, was tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his skin with the help of hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.

The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot. Among those—Indian or European—taken back to the village, some would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe's losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.

Despite the colonists' own resort to torture in order to extract confessions, the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least in part for the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a force commanded by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised about half of the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.

The intention of the colonists had been to kill the warriors "with their Swords," as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to capture the women and children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot warriors had arrived in the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians' numerical strength, the English attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside the palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone seeking to escape; a second cordon of Narragansett Indians cut down the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered several hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors also fell.

A number of recent historians have charged the Puritans with genocide: that is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots. The evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account stresses that the burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a pre-planned massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention.

A second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip’s War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all American wars, took the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the colonies; large numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into captivity. Fifty-two of New England’s 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were even higher, with many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery abroad.

The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its outset, a colonial council in Boston had declared "that none be Killed or Wounded that are Willing to surrender themselves into Custody." But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to the laws of war or to the law of nature, would "skulk" behind trees, rocks, and bushes rather than appear openly to do "civilized" battle. Similarly creating a desire for retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when ambushing English troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children.

Before long, both colonists and Indians were dismembering corpses and displaying body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three squaws and three Indian children; all were found guilty and two were executed.)

The hatred kindled by King Philip’s War became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French against the British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In 1704, this was amended in the direction of "Christian practice" by means of a scale of rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the case of children under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from evident; the practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.

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World Map

Never before, perhaps, in the history of any great nation, was there a time when wise, honest and unswerving men were necessary at the helm of the great social and political ship of American freedom than at the present time, in order that she may weather the blasts, pass in safety the dangerous reefs and shoals of any party politics, maintain the majesty of her laws, grow strong in truth, making aggressive warfare upon error and superstition, "and having done all to stand entire at last, " "with her lamps trimmed and burning," her liberty enlightening the world. One of our great minds has said: "Our country, though rich in men of faithfulness and power, and having escaped from the difficulties of earlier times, perceives new questions which demand whatever of counsel the wise and thoughtful can give," for an era so active in thought and impulse is always perilous to the nation and need of strong men, wise and calm in the midst of her greatest storms.

Many of our nation's noblest sons within a short span of time have bowed in obedience to the behest of that monarch whose summons all must obey. In our minds we go back to that period when our country was young, and behold manly forms, marked by intellectual dignity, and bearing in their countenance the unmistakable insignia of true and noble manhood. They, too, have passed away, and home and sanctuary know them no more; but the light found in such characters assist in solving the difficult problems of today. Our nation's God can make of a poor and humble craftsman a mighty statesman. Many such lives are poured full of honors, and their graves are fresh and green in our memories.

Nothing can equal in grandeur the interminable extent of our vast prairies, covered with blossoming buds. Every lover of nature, and home and country can daily hear a grand anthem of praise ascend to God for the munificence of his unspeakable gifts. "From that cathedral boundless as our wonder Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply." These pastoral symphonies are dear to all our hearts. We love our country, and gazing upon our glorious flag, we feel it means to "Friends a starry sky," But to foes "A storm in every fold." Untarnished its honor, and the undimmed radiance streaming down from every star upon our glorious banner for over one hundred years, what usurper dare insult her national prowess and trail her honors in the dust, of flaunt the red flag of anarchy and socialism in the face of our national greatness? Anarchy cannot prevail, as "order is heaven's first law," and "eternal vigilance the price of liberty."

Our measureless prosperity as a nation have caused ample folds of our grand old flag, many representatives from almost every nation under the sun, to whom have been extended all the rights, social, civil, religious and political, of free-born American citizenship, while obedient to its laws. We who seek this country as our home, because of its advantages and the superior
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facilities for obtaining a livelihood or of amassing wealth, can be guilty of no baser act than to endeavor to sow the seeds of discord and confusion among the peaceful and wee-organized brotherhood in this land of freedom and prosperity; and all violations of good and wholesome law, endangering the peace and prosperity of citizens, or the overthrow of our national institutions, are deserving of the nation's frown. What greater insult can be offered to the children of freedom than for people of foreign birth to usurp the birthrights and trample upon the institutions for which their fathers bled and died? Never before were citizens of any country placed on trial for so grave and flagrant a transgression, who received such consideration and fairness at the hands of the administrators of law and justice as did the participants in the Haymarket tragedy.

In view of the deep turpitude of their crime great credit is due to all the standard papers of the city of Chicago, and the Press of the United States, for the fair and impartial manner in which they represented the Anarchists' case during the trial and pending the execution. The articles appearing from time to time in their columns seemed ever tempered with mercy. Yet firmness characterized all their expressed opinions. The institutions of our country are dear to every true and loyal American. The outrage perpetrated upon our high order of civilization called for life in exchange for the lives sacrificed by the tragic events of the night of May the 4th, 1886. Every right-thinking journalist acknowledged the justice of the sentence and said, so let it be; believing that when "judgment and justice are abroad in the land the people will learn righteousness."

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Mutual Understanding

By NEIL CLARK

LONDON - First, they tried to dismiss Iraqi resistance as the work of “Saddam loyalists”. Then they sought to blame “outside forces”. Now, as it becomes clear that Iraqis of all sects oppose the occupation, a third explanation has arisen. Terrorism, anarchy and criminality are prevalent in Iraq because ... er ... terrorism, anarchy and criminality are what Iraqis do.

Arabophobia has been part of Western culture since the Crusades, with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden only the latest in a long line of Arab bogeymen. For centuries the Arab has played the role of villain, seducer of our women, hustler and thief — the barbarian lurking at the gates of civilization.

In the 20th century new images emerged: The fanatical terrorist, the stone-thrower, the suicide bomber. Now, as the Project for a New American Century suffers its first major setback in the back streets of Baghdad and Basra, Arabophobia has been given a new lease of life. “I read TE Lawrence before I came here,” a British officer was quoted in the Mail on Sunday. “A century ago he recognized dishonesty was inherent in Arab society. Today is the same. They do nothing for love and nothing at all if they can help it.”

The attitudes of the officer, shocking though they are, only mirror those of the people who sent him to war. Scratch a neocon and you find an Arabophobe. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser, has berated Arabs on the “need to change their behavior”. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has talked of Israel’s “moral superiority” over its neighbors. And the veteran foreign policy hawk Richard Perle, when asked about the fears Egyptians had of the Iraq war provoking an Arab backlash, replied: “Egyptians can barely govern their own country, we don’t need advice on how to govern ours.”

For the first time, we have an American administration that talks of “de-Arabizing” the Middle East — the ultimate Perleian dream of Arab nations governed by clones of Ahmed Chalabi, their bazaars buried under shopping malls and Arab hospitality (not good for business) replaced by Western corporate ethics.

It is not hard to find evidence of the increased pervasiveness of neocon-induced Arabophobia in our media, whether intentional or not. Contrast Jeremy Paxman’s handling of Ruth Wedgewood, an American neoconservative, and Imad Moustapha, Syria’s deputy ambassador to the US, on Newsnight recently. Professor Wedgewood was treated with a deference you would expect Paxman to reserve for his great aunt, Dr. Moustapha with a withering contempt and studied condescension (why should we believe you, “old chap”?). But with respect, Jeremy, why should we not believe Dr. Moustapha? Wedgewood was speaking for a nation that launched an illegal war of aggression on grounds which have proved to be false. Moustapha was the representative of a country which is in no breach of international law and has called for the removal of all WMD from the Middle East.

Issues of mendacity have, of course, been a major theme in international events this year. The British public had to decide who was telling the truth: Tony Blair, with his claim that Iraq posed “a very real threat to Britain”, or Saddam, with his repeated denials. The neocons knew that their case for war was painfully thin. But they banked on Arabophobia — stoked by their allies in the media — to do the rest: Tony, the white, middle-class churchgoer, or Saddam, the swarthy Arab? For many, there was no contest. Of course, Saddam couldn’t possibly be telling the truth about not possessing WMD. He’s an Arab. Arabs lie. We know this from TE Lawrence.

Critical to the neocon plan to obtain control of the resources of the Middle East is a need to portray Arabs not just as mendacious, but also as “barely capable” of running their own countries without benign outside interference. The neocon notion that Arabs need “civilizing” and “assistance” in shaping their future differs very little from the attitudes of the first British imperialists in Africa more than a century ago. The British and American officers who now talk of Iraqi “dishonesty”, and seek to portray Iraq as a backward and savage land, would rather we forget that up until the imposition of sanctions by Britain and the US, independent Baathist Iraq, although a dictatorship, had the most developed infrastructure, the best healthcare and the best universities of any country in the Middle East.

“Iraqis are the world’s best dodgers and thieves — they are descended from a direct line of Ali Babas,” says Corporal Kevin Harnley of the Royal Engineers, bemoaning the black market in British-issue police uniforms. The irony, that he himself has been an accomplice to one of the most audacious smash-and-grab enterprises in the history of thievery, seems to have been lost on him.


About the Author: Neil Clark is a writer and journalist specializing in Middle Eastern and Balkan affairs

Source: The Guardian

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'Oil War' Questions

STOCKHOLM - ''It is important that Halliburton, which has massive government contracts (including for the rebuilding of Iraq), not get away with Enron-style accounting tricks and alleged misdeeds,'' said Tom Fitton, president of the group Judicial Watch, in a statement.

Fitton's salvo was prompted by a federal judge's dismissal this week of the group's lawsuit against Halliburton and Cheney, the company's chief executive officer (CEO) from 1995 to 2000.


A federal appeals court on September 11, 2003 refused to reconsider its ruling against Vice President Dick Cheney in his effort to keep secret the documents of his energy task force. The U.S. Court of Appeals voted 5-3 against rehearing the case, leaving Cheney and his Justice Department lawyers with the option of either appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court or complying with a lower court order to release information about White House contacts with the energy industry. (David Rae Morris/Reuters)

But while Judicial Watch has been stymied on one front, earlier this summer it unearthed Commerce Department documents the group says illustrate that Cheney and his cronies were eyeing Iraqi oil two years ago.

”Opponents of the (Iraq) war are going to point to the documents as evidence that oil was on the minds of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war,” Fitton was reported to have said.

The documents, he added, ''show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public''.

A Judicial Watch lawsuit is pending to discover more information, and other bodies are also questioning Cheney's actions.

On Aug. 25, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, released its report on the efforts of Cheney's 2001 energy task force, which the vice president has fought ferociously to keep from the public's eye.

Congressman John Dingell, the ranking Democrat on the House of Representative's Energy Committee, called the GAO report ''a sad chronicle of the efforts of the office of the vice president to hide its activities from the American people''.

The latest news strengthens the conviction, sparked by the previous disclosures of documents in and around the administration, that Iraqi oil was a goal long before President George W. Bush invoked the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction as a reason to invade that country.

In May, it emerged that a high-level Pentagon policy document, 'Strategic Assessment 1999', had acknowledged that ''oil war'' was considered a legitimate U.S. military option while former president Bill Clinton was still in office.

But while the Pentagon might have articulated the policy under Clinton, the Bush administration bears responsibility for questions of its pursuit, as well as where and when that pursuit was discussed.

Bush created the Cheney energy task force during his second week in office with the stated aim of developing ”a national energy policy designed to help the private sector''.

But controversy has swirled about the group since the summer of 2001, when the White House took the unusual step of refusing to publicly disclose internal Task Force documents.

Bush has argued that disclosing such information would go against the U.S. Constitution's demand for a ''separation of powers'' between the different branches of government.

Like Bush, Cheney comes from an oil background, having served as CEO of Halliburton -- the Texas oil and gas giant whose Kellogg Brown and Root subsidiary provides much of the U.S. military's worldwide support services, especially in Iraq -- from 1995 until his run for the vice presidency.

Cheney's relationship with the energy industry has been the basis of considerable speculation, particularly as his Task Force was reported to have provided the industry with preferential treatment when it prepared the National Energy Policy.

Following the Policy's debut, news reports detailed how particular Industry ''wish-lists'' had been pursued almost verbatim.

But while questions of preferential access and treatment were piquing the interest of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) -- soon spawning their lawsuits as well as the first such GAO suit against the White House in its 81-year history -- the broader context of events has been slow to emerge.

Early in the Bush presidency the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) had joined with the James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy to draft an energy proposal for the new administration.

'Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century' was the result. It forecast critical energy shortages unless oil and gas production was substantively boosted or conservation measures pursued, calling upon the administration to admit ''these agonising truths to the American people''.

The report also saw both Caspian and Iraqi oil as answers to the projected crisis, additionally citing the possible need for ''military intervention'' to secure energy supplies.

Following in the footsteps of the Pentagon's ''oil war'' policy, the report's authors went on to urge that Cheney's task force include participation by the Department of Defence.

The Task Force's recommendations were being delivered at about the same time that the U.S. Army War College featured a paper by Jeffrey Record, a former staff member of the Senate armed services committee, whose work has been promoted on the CFR website.

Record argued the legitimacy of ''shooting in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices'', additionally advocating that a president paint over such actions with a high-minded veneer, transforming them into a ''principled crusade''.

Two months ago, a group of senior-level former U.S. intelligence officers sent an open letter to Bush calling for Cheney's resignation. They accuse the vice president of leading a ''campaign of deceit'' in promoting the Iraq war.

To date, the only Cheney task force materials released have been obtained via the governmental groups that the Task Force dealt with, and only as a product of lawsuits. But media reports have intimated a political bias behind some of the key court decisions concerning the Task Force.

In December 2002, the GAO's suit was dismissed by Judge John Bates, a recent Bush appointee. Bates' decision found that the body had ''no standing'' to sue Cheney or any other executive branch official for information.

Legal commentator John Dean (a former Republican presidential counsel) observed that Bates' ruling meant that the investigative arm of Congress had less power to compel the release of governmental information than an ordinary citizen.

But while the GAO suit is dead, a federal Appeals Court ruling in July has sparked political speculation anew.

The Appeals Court rejected Cheney's efforts to block a lower court order that the Task Force begin turning over its records in the Judicial Watch suit or declare that the information contained in them is privileged and explain why.

In reporting the decision by a three-judge panel of the court, media reports highlighted that the ruling split along political party lines.

The case could now be appealed to either a full panel of the Appeals Court or to the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest judicial body and one with a majority of Republican appointees.

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The Woman of Peace

Self-satisfaction and the pleasure of helping others are among the rewards volunteers receive for their time and dedication to a cause. As Leaders, our hearts glow every time we find out that we were able to help a nursing couple. That knowledge is more than enough to brighten our day. But every now and then, one of our colleagues receives more than that.

One day in 2004, Guatemalan Leader Mimi de Maza received an unexpected phone call. Somebody from the Women's Peacepower Foundation was telling her that she had won the Women of Peace Award. At first Mimi didn't understand what was going on. She comments:

I told the woman who was calling that there must be a mistake, that I was not an award-winning type of person. But she reassured me that indeed I was, that I had been nominated and selected among a group of women. Then I cried tears of joy and happiness.

Mimi received a beautiful silver necklace with a dove and the engraving "Woman of Peace," $250 (US), a pin, and a shirt with the logo of the Foundation. But what she treasures most is the diploma that reads:

For all the time you've spent thinking, dreaming, planning, and creating ways to make your world a better place to live. For all the times you thought you were just an everyday, ordinary person, but somehow you pushed beyond what you had been told you could accomplish. For all the times you have spoken up for what you believe in. For the financial risks you have taken. For the inner courage you manage to rely on even when you don't think you have any courage. For keeping a sense of humor, even when things looked bad. For bringing hope to us all because of your commitment.

The Women's Peacepower Foundation, Inc., declares Irma "Mimi" de Maza to be a Woman of Peace.

Mimi has been a Leader for 20 years. She found LLL when she was breastfeeding her fourth child. Mimi has been very active training peer counselors not only in Guatemala, but also in other parts of the world, such as Ghana. She has been Regional Administrator of Leaders for Latin America and just stepped off the LLLI Board of Directors where she was a member for the past six years.

When asked what receiving this award means to her, Mimi said:

Everything I have been able to accomplish in the field of breastfeeding and infant feeding I have learned in LLL. I owe all my experience, knowledge, and inspiration to this organization. La Leche League is part of my life, my being, my family, and my work. This award has intensified my commitment to LLL, to my country, and to the mothers and babies for which I work.

Congratulations, dear Mimi, for this recognition. You make us proud! The Women of Peace Award is awarded annually to "selfless, passionate individuals working to empower women through innovative programs." If you want to learn more about the Women Peace Power Foundation, visit www.womenspeacepower.org

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US Investigate Pyongyang Prison

In his 1997 history Korea’s Place in the Sun, Bruce Cumings predicted, “... if and when the [North Korean] regime falls, we will probably learn of larger numbers [of people held in prisons and reform-through-labor camps] and various unimaginable atrocities...”4

Korea specialists Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig have noted that increasing diplomatic ties “are not accompanied by people-to-people relations as North Korea’s borders remain closed. In North Korea it is an article of faith to keep outsiders guessing about what is happening in the country.... This lack of transparency forces outsiders to draw conclusions based on fragmentary evidence.”5

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of North Korean defectors and escapees have obtained asylum in South Korea. A small number of these desperate, famine-fleeing North Koreans received media and diplomatic attention in 2001 and 2002, when they broke through gates or climbed the fences of various embassies, consulates, and missions in Beijing. Much larger numbers of North Koreans have fled to China across the Yalu or Tumen rivers into the area of northeast China formerly known as Manchuria and reached South Korea via an extraordinary 4,000- to 5,000-mile trek involving some combination of bus, train, car, motorbike taxis, and walking. They travel south to Beijing, Shanghai, or Kunming, and then down through Burma, Laos, or Vietnam into Cambodia before reaching Thailand, and then flying to Seoul. Other escapees reach Seoul by traveling to Mongolia or Hong Kong.

A number of these North Korean escapees and defectors6 were either prisoners or guards in a variety of prison camps and detention/punishment facilities in North Korea. Their fragments of information are accumulating and now afford a closer look at the North Korean system of forced-labor camps and the unimaginable atrocities taking place under the rule of Kim Jong Il. This report is based on a review of materials written in English and on thirty in-depth interviews with former North Koreans who found asylum in South Korea. These interviews were conducted largely in Seoul in August 2002, November–December 2002, and February 2003.

Most of the information in this report comes from former prisoners, who during their interviews described in detail the situations of their imprisonment, their living and work units, and their treatment and observations while imprisoned or detained. These prisoners’ accounts are corroborated and amplified by accounts from former prison guards, who saw larger areas of the prison camps, as the prisoners were usually confined to cells and worksites. The perspectives of the prison guards are further amplified by a former prison-system official “defector,” whose account provides additional information on the workings of the prison-camp system. (See the Information Base for an overview of the prison camps and detention facilities where individuals interviewed for this report were incarcerated or employed.)

From the accumulated information, it is possible to outline two distinct systems of incarceration in North Korea. Both of these exhibit exceptional violations of internationally recognized human rights: an extremely brutal gulag of sprawling political penallabor colonies, called kwan-li-so in Korean, and prison-labor facilities, called kyo-hwa-so; and a separate but also extremely brutal system of imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and forced labor for North Koreans who are forcibly repatriated from China. This latter incarceration system includes police jails, called ka-mok, and police detention facilities, called ku-ryu-jang, along the North Korea–China border, and short-term detention/forced-labor centers, called jip-kyul-so, and even shorter-term, more localized detention/forced-labor training camps, called ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae.

The kwan-li-so include the repressive phenomenon of lifetime sentences for perceived political wrongdoers paired with guilt-by-association imprisonment for up to three generations of the supposed wrongdoers’ families. Whatever the category, all the prison facilities are characterized by very large numbers of deaths in detention from forced, hard labor accompanied by deliberate starvation-level food rations. Incarceration of Koreans repatriated from China includes routine torture during interrogation and the practice of forced abortion or infanticide inflicted upon babies borne by pregnant repatriates.

Note on Sources
Many of the former prisoners interviewed for this report, believing their relatives to be dead or now living in South Korea, agreed to have their names and, in some cases, their photographs published. Many others, however, knowing that the North Korean government practices collective punishment, would agree to be interviewed and provide testimony only under condition of anonymity, lest relatives remaining in North Korea be punished for the interviewees’ crime of escaping to the Republic of Korea. Such individuals are identified in this report with a number rather than a pseudonym (such as “Former Detainee #6,” for example, or “Former Prisoner #13”).

For some prison camps and detention facilities described in this report, more than one source of information was available. In such cases, one person’s account could be checked against another’s. In other cases, the description of a particular camp or facility rested on the testimony of one former prisoner. In those cases, I had to rely on the coherence and internal consistency of the testimony, and my professional experience.7 In more than thirty interviews in and around Seoul, only one struck me as sufficiently garbled and inconsistent as to be unreliable and unusable — from a very recent arrival who wanted to make declarations against North Korea but whose story and factual assertions dissolved under close questioning.

The phenomena of repression, in this case terrible human rights violations, happen to individual human beings. Their personal stories are at least as important as the information their stories provide about the prison-labor camps. Many former North Korean prisoners have, like the Cambodian and Rwandan survivors I interviewed in the 1980s and 1990s, extraordinary stories. Thus, brief sketches of their personal histories are provided along with their descriptions of the prison camps they survived. To a large extent, this report uses the format of briefly profiling a witness (under the heading “Witness”) before providing his or her testimony about the particular camp or facility in which he or she was incarcerated and the phenomena of repression endured and observed there (under the heading “Testimony”). In cases where more than one witness account of a given camp or facility was available, each witness is profiled separately before their combined testimony appears.

This is not to say that the interviewees’ memories are always entirely accurate or that some details have not been lost in translation. There may be minor errors in the accounts that follow. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the overwhelming bulk of testimony is reliable. And the stories in this report create a fuller picture of the phenomena of repression in North Korea than has previously existed in English-language sources.

This report does not claim, however, to be comprehensive, as the presently available database is not sufficient for such purposes. For example, evidence has emerged from various sources about the “9/27” camps for kotjebi, the young street children orphaned by the breakdown of families caused by extreme famine. But as the interviewees for this report, most of whom were middle-aged or young adults, provided no information on “9/27” camps, information about such facilities is not included.

Another example of missing information: Anne Applebaum notes in her book Gulag: A History, that the Soviet prison-labor camp system “produced a third of the Soviet Union’s gold, much of its coal and timber, and a great deal of everything else.”8 Given the breakdown of North Korea’s production system, one wonders about the economic role and significance of the prison-labor camps in North Korea. Former North Korean prison camp guard AHN Myong Chol states that Kyo-hwa-so No. 22 supplies some forty percent of the corn consumed in North and South Hamgyong provinces. Women at the Kaechon prison-labor camp, Kyo-hwa-so No. 1, produce — under abominable conditions — textile goods for export to the U.S.S.R., Japan, and France. Other prisoners interviewed for this report mined gold, coal, iron, and magnesite in slave-labor prison camps, exactly the extractive industries cited by Selig Harrison for North Korea’s export potential.9 But, on the whole, to my knowledge, production data from the camps is not available; and the economic role of the camps is not discussed in this report.

Nor is there enough data to project trends over time or to extrapolate beyond the places specifically identified. While I consulted several Korea experts in South Korea and the United States, primarily to fill in some gaps in my own understanding of the North Korean system, the accounts that follow adhere very closely to the information provided by the former prisoners and guards personally interviewed for this report. That information is sufficient to pinpoint the terrible phenomena of repression that victimizes tens or hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.

North Korean authorities deny that the kinds of prison camps described herein exist and that human rights violations occur in North Korea. Such governmental denials cannot be taken at face value. The only real way for North Korea to contradict or invalidate the claims and stories in the refugee accounts is by inviting United Nations officials, U.N. Human Rights Commission representatives, or reputable NGOs such as AmnestyInternational or Human Rights Watch to verify or invalidate on-site the allegations of former prisoners. Otherwise the refugees’ testimonies stand.

In the event that North Korean authorities decline to engage in the constructive and substantive dialogue with U.N. human rights officials requested in a recent resolution by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights,10 it can only be hoped that sufficient resources will be found to enable South Korean NGOs or independent human rights bodies to more thoroughly and systematically document the violations outlined in this report.

Not in a Vacuum
In 1988, the North Korean Ambassador to the United Nations wrote to the Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee that violations of human rights do not take place and are “unthinkable” in North Korea.11 In 1994, an official publication, The People’s Korea proclaimed, “...there is no ‘human rights problem’ in our Republic either from the institutional or from the legal point of view.”12 North Korean diplomats at the United Nations in Geneva continue to deny that there are any — any — violations of human rights in Korea.13

On the contrary, the extreme human rights violations documented in this report occur in an environment of the wholesale denial of fundamental rights and freedoms. For descriptions of the North Korean human rights situation generally, readers are referred to the 1988 Minnesota Lawyers/Human Rights Watch Report referenced above, the annual human rights reports by the U.S. Department of State, various reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and reputable web sites, including those of the Chosun Journal (chosunjournal.com), the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (nknet.org), and the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights (nkhumanrights.or.kr). By far the best survey of the overall human rights situation is the annual White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea published by the Seoul-based Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), which covers the categories and provisions of the International Covenants on Human Rights, and references or incorporates up-to-date information and analyses from the U.S. Department of State, press, and NGO accounts.14

Note on Translations
In reviewing the North Korea prison literature available in English and after initially conducting interviews through multiple translators, it became apparent that there is no standard or consistent translation of Korean prison or police terminology into English. Further, North Koreans sometimes use the same word inconsistently. For example, the term ku-ryu-jang is used generically by some to mean “detention” and more narrowly by others to mean “a detention room within a police station.” In such cases, the usage employed by the interviewee was retained for this report.

There are also different ways that Korean terms are romanized or transliterated into alphabetically rendered versions of the Korean hangul characters.

More problematically, some Korean prison terms are frequently translated in ways that are technically, literally correct but either meaningless or, worse, entirely misleading in English. For example, the term kwan-li-so (alternatively transliterated as gwalliso) is sometimes literally translated — as in the White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea published annually by the Korea Institute for National Reunification — as “management center,” which sounds rather like a business-consulting firm and is a meaningless translation for a political slave-labor concentration camp. The term kwan-li-so is also variously translated as “political-detention camp,” “prison camp,” or “concentration camp,” which are better translations. In this report, the term kwan-li-so is translated as “political penal-labor colony,” a more descriptive English rendering.

If the term kwan-li-so is meaninglessly translated as “management center,” even more misleading is translating the term kyo-hwa-so (alternatively transliterated as gyohwaso) as “re-education center,” as was done in the November 2002 Human Rights Watch report, or even as “enlightenment center,” a translation used by some South Koreans. In reality, of course, there is nothing educational, enlightening, or remotely rehabilitative about these “long-term prison-labor camps,” as they are accurately called in this report, since many are characterized by staggeringly high rates of deaths in detention resulting from forced labor under brutal conditions combined with starvation-level food rations.

For ease of reference, this report includes a “Glossary of North Korean Repression” — that is, a chart of common North Korean prison and police terms, listing the Korean characters, the Chinese characters, the formal and common Romanized renderings of the Korean characters, and finally the literal and more descriptive English translations. For clarity, the running text of this report includes the Korean terms used by the interviewees as adjective in front of the descriptive English translation.

Korean names usually appear with the family name followed by the given name, except for a few individuals who have, for English usage, adopted the Anglicized form of their given names and followed these with their family names. For ease of reference, in this report the first time a Korean name is used, it appears with the family name in capital letters and in the form provided when persons were introduced to the interviewer, usually in the Korean fashion (with the family name first).

INFORMATION BASE
Former North Korean prisoners and detainees interviewed for this report were detained and/or imprisoned at the following places and times:15

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Non Violence

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) has said conditions in Burma's prisons are worsening.

Days after another political prisoner died in detention and a month after International Committee of the Red Cross officials were forced to cancel a prison inspection, AAPP says conditions in Burma's notorious prisons are deteriorating.

Ko Khin Maung Lwin, 38, a political prisoner, was reported dead on Wednesday in Putao hospital, northern Burma after receiving inadequate medical treatment.

"He has been suffering from hypertension, heart disease, piles disease, malaria, and urethra stricture. And despite of the prison superintendent's recommendation for medical treatment at least five times, he was denied treatment," said AAPP secretary Tate Naing.

Ko Khin Maung Lwin was taken to Putao hospital on January 10 but died the next day.

AAPP said Ko Khin Maung Lwin was the 125th political prisoner to have died in a Burmese jail and Tate Naing said as the political situation in Burma deteriorated, so would prison conditions.

"The prison conditions are dependent on the political scenario of the country. For now, the government imposed visa ban to international communities like [Amnesty International] and Mr Pinheiro (UN Human Rights envoy to Burma), to come into the country and also disturb the working of the ICRC," said Tate Naing.

The ICRC was forced to cancel a prison inspection on December 12 after the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Association, insisted on being present during the visit.

"The misunderstanding was that we had to do our prison visits independently. The ICRC staff has to do prison assessment independently and that was a small problem because we were not able to work with other associations," an ICRC official in Rangoon told Mizzima.

The official also said the ICRC had not been able to conduct any inspections since the incident.

The ICRC, which began operations in Burma in 1999, have made more than 230 visits to 80 Burmese prisons, jails and detention centres, registering about 5,800 prisoners.

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Soviet Prisoner

President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison
Rape Elimination Act of 2003 today, marking the first time the U.S. government has ever passed a law to deal with sexual assault behind
bars.

“The passage of this law is a major milestone, finally bringing prisoner rape out of the shadows,” said Lara Stemple, executive director of Stop Prisoner Rape (SPR), a national human rights organization that has
worked on the issue for more than two decades.

The law calls for the gathering of national statistics about the
problem; the development of guidelines for states about how to address
prisoner rape; the creation of a review panel to hold annual hearings;
and the provision of grants to states to combat the problem.

“We hope this bill will be the beginning of real reform,” Stemple said.
“And, progress will also require improved mental health services for
survivors, lawsuits aimed at reform, and greater sympathy on the part of
the public.”

The president signed the bill this morning at an Oval Office ceremony
attended by two survivors of prisoner rape, Tom Cahill and Hope
Hernandez. Cahill serves as president of the Board of Directors SPR, and
Hope Hernandez is a member of the group’s Board of Advisors.

“We know we’ve come a long way when survivors of prisoner rape are
invited to the White House with dignity rather than marginalized and
ignored,” Stemple said.

In 1968, Cahill was beaten and gang-raped in San Antonio, Texas after
being arrested for civil disobedience. Hernandez, also a nonviolent
offender, was repeatedly raped by a corrections officer in 1997 in a
privately run facility adjacent to the Washington D.C. jail.

One in five men in prison has been sexually abused, often by other
inmates. Rates for women, who are most likely to be abused by male
staff, reach as high as one in four in some facilities.

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Freedom From Life

We are a network of scholars, both researchers and practitioners, dedicated to ending cycles of humiliation throughout the world.

We believe that by eliminating these harmful cycles, a space is opened for mutual respect and esteem to take root and grow, thereby leading to the resolution of previously intractable conflicts. We believe that both global sustainability of social cohesion and ecological survival require a mindset of connection and a spirit of shared humility - and not a mindset of humiliation.

As researchers we study the dynamics of humiliation, the antecedents and consequences of humiliating behaviors, and interventions that can help break the cycle of humiliation and restore human dignity. As practitioners we attempt to bring incidents of humiliation in international affairs to the attention of people across the globe, to create public awareness of the destructive effects of such humiliation, and to promote ways of dealing with tensions in human affairs that generate human dignity and respect.

Many reject research on "evil" as naïve appeasement. This is not our view. We believe that "understanding" and "condoning" ought not be conflated. Nelson Mandela showed the world that humiliation does not automatically lead to mayem. His example attests to the constructive ways out of humiliation that merit to be studied and promoted. We wish to learn from those constructive elements in Mandela-like or Gandhi-like approaches (please note that we are aware of the various criticisms that may be aimed at Mandela or Gandhi) - for example, Mandela could have instigated a genocide of the white elite, yet he did not.

In our work, we wish to make research relevant to practice and vice versa (as in participatory action research). We invite you, researchers and practitioners from around the world who share our goals, to join us. Please read our call for creativity, a detailed description of our mission and a short description of what we mean when we speak about humiliation. See also our newsletters and our collection of quotes.

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The Psycopat of War

The war between Iran and Iraq was one of the great human tragedies of recent Middle Eastern history. Perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees. The resources wasted on the war exceeded what the entire Third World spent on public health in a decade.<1>

The war began on September 22, 1980, when Iraqi troops launched a full-scale invasion of Iran. Prior to this date there had been subversion by each country inside the other and also major border clashes. Iraq hoped for a lightning victory against an internationally isolated neighbor in the throes of revolutionary upheaval. But despite Iraq's initial successes, the Iranians rallied and, using their much larger population, were able by mid-1982 to push the invaders out. In June 1982, the Iranians went over to the offensive, but Iraq, with a significant advantage in heavy weaponry, was able to prevent a decisive Iranian breakthrough. The guns finally fell silent on August 20, 1988.

Primary responsibility for the eight long years of bloodletting must rest with the governments of the two countries -- the ruthless military regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the ruthless clerical regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Khomeini was said by some to have a "martyr complex," though, as U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wryly observed, people with martyr complexes rarely live to be as old as Khomeini. Whatever his complexes, Khomeini had no qualms about sending his followers, including young boys, off to their deaths for his greater glory. This callous disregard for human life was no less characteristic of Saddam Hussein. And, for that matter, it was also no less characteristic of much of the world community, which not only couldn't be bothered by a few hundred thousand Third World corpses, but tried to profit from the conflict.

France became the major source of Iraq's high-tech weaponry, in no small part to protect its financial stake in that country.<2> The Soviet Union was Iraq's largest weapon's supplier, while jockeying for influence in both capitals. Israel provided arms to Iran, hoping to bleed the combatants by prolonging the war. And at least ten nations sold arms to both of the warring sides.<3>

The list of countries engaging in despicable behavior, however, would be incomplete without the United States. The U.S. objective was not profits from the arms trade, but the much more significant aim of controlling to the greatest extent possible the region's oil resources. Before turning to U.S. policy during the Iran-Iraq war, it will be useful to recall some of the history of the U.S. and oil.

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Tax For World War

One day after the Pentagon declared an end to major combat in Iraq and began withdrawing forces from the region, President Bush moved to change the subject.

With some Air Force units already back and several Navy ships steaming home, Bush held a rally in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday to redirect public attention to the U.S. economy, particularly his plan for a major new tax cut.

The desire of both Bush and the nation to move on is natural. After barely four weeks of fighting, the military campaign has been a resounding triumph. U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, routed enemy forces except for scattered holdouts and limited U.S. casualties to 121 dead, 495 wounded and four missing.

Yet the military's victory marks only the first phase of a much longer and more challenging drive to rebuild Iraq into a prosperous democracy. Making good on that commitment requires the close attention of the Bush administration and support from the public, which will bear the costs.

The job ahead also highlights the inadvisability of the very tax-cut plan Bush is now aggressively pushing in the face of the war's crushing financial burden. The military campaign alone is expected to approach $80 billion. Add to that at least $20 billion a year for reconstruction and the long-term deployment of U.S. troops and civilian personnel.

An early sign of the daunting task surfaced Tuesday at a U.S.-led forum of Iraqis to shape the country's postwar government. The meeting was boycotted by representatives of the long-suppressed Shiite majority. Nearby, thousands protested the notion of a U.S.-run occupation.

In spite of the problems to come, Bush continues to sell the public on the idea that the U.S. can afford the war, Iraq's rebuilding and tax cuts. "We need tax relief totaling at least $550 billion to make sure our economy grows," he said Tuesday. Today Bush visits a St. Louis aircraft plant while 25 Cabinet officers and deputies fan the country to promote his plan.

Understandably, Bush is mindful that while his father also won a war, he lost re-election because of a struggling economy. But big tax cuts are the wrong solution at a time when the government is running record deficits and faces steep costs for the Iraq conflict.

And claims that the U.S. can afford it all — tax cuts, a war and mounting deficits — only encourage the kind of unrealistic thinking that caused the American public to tire of long-term commitments in the past. During the 1970s, for example, support for foreign aid and overseas troop deployments ebbed as domestic problems mounted.

The disconnect between the cost of the U.S. commitment in Iraq and tax cuts isn't lost on the public. According to an Associated Press poll released Monday, 61% said additional tax cuts should be put off for now because of the deficit and war costs.

Bush reminded the nation Tuesday that much work remains in Iraq. "We have waged this war with determination ... and we will see it through until the job is done," he said.

Doing so requires an honest accounting of how that job will be funded and what sacrifices it asks of the American public. At stake is not only Iraq's future, but also the credibility of the U.S. to keep its promises.

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Embedded Journalist

In his speech to last spring’s National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Bill Moyers accused the Bush Administration not merely of attacking his highly regarded PBS program NOW but of declaring war on journalism itself. “We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable,” explained Moyers. With the November resignation of Moyers’s nemesis, Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) board chair Ken Tomlinson, amid charges of personal and political wrongdoing and a host of other recent developments, it becomes increasingly clear that this White House is doing battle with the journalistic underpinnings of democracy.

To be sure, every administration has tried to manipulate the nation’s media system. Bill Clinton’s wrongheaded support for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 cleared the way for George W. Bush’s attempts to give media companies the power to create ever larger and more irresponsible monopolies. But with its unprecedented campaign to undermine and, where possible, eliminate independent journalism, the Bush Administration has demonstrated astonishing contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public. Consider the bill of particulars:

Corrupting PBS
Tomlinson’s tenure at the CPB, which annually distributes $400 million in federal funding to broadcast outlets, was characterized by an assault on the news operations of the Public Broadcasting Service in general, and Moyers in particular, for airing dissenting voices and preparing investigative reports on the Administration. His goal was clearly to fire a shot across the bow of all public stations so managers would shy away from the sort of investigative journalism that might expose Bush Administration malfeasance. On November 15, on the heels of Tomlinson’s resignation, the CPB’s inspector general issued a sixty-seven-page report documenting Tomlinson’s repeated violations of the Public Broadcasting Act, CPB rules and the CPB code of ethics with his political meddling, though it stopped short of calling for prosecution, or of examining the link between Tomlinson’s actions and White House directives.

Faking TV News
Under Bush Administration directives, at least twenty federal agencies have produced and distributed scores, perhaps hundreds, of “video news segments” out of a $254 million slush fund. These bogus and deceptive stories have been broadcast on TV stations nationwide without any acknowledgment that they were prepared by the government rather than local journalists. The segments—which trumpet Administration “successes,” promote its controversial line on issues like Medicare reform and feature Americans “thanking” Bush—have been labeled “covert propaganda” by the Government Accountability Office.

Paying Off Pundits
The Administration has made under-the-table payments to at least three pundits to sing its praises, including Armstrong Williams, the conservative columnist who collected $240,000 from the Education Department and then cheered on the ill-conceived No Child Left Behind Act.

Turning Press Conferences Into Charades
Bush has all but avoided traditional press conferences, closing down a prime venue for holding the executive accountable. On those rare occasions when he deigned to meet reporters, presidential aides turned the press conferences into parodies by seating a friendly right-wing “journalist,” former male escort Jeff Gannon, amid the reporters and then steering questions to him when tough issues arose. They have effectively silenced serious questioners, like veteran journalist Helen Thomas, by refusing to have the President or his aides call on reporters who challenge them. And they have established a hierarchy for journalists seeking interviews with Administration officials, which favors networks that give the White House favorable coverage—as the frequent appearances by Bush and Dick Cheney on Fox News programs will attest.

Gutting the Freedom of Information Act
As Eric Alterman detailed in a May 9 report, the Administration has scrapped enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act and has made it harder for reporters to do their jobs by refusing to cooperate with even the most basic requests for comment and data from government agencies. This is part of a broader clampdown on access to information that has made it virtually impossible for journalists to cover vast areas of government activity.

Obscuring the Iraq War
In addition to setting up a system for embedding reporters covering the war—which denied Americans a full picture of what was happening during the invasion—the Defense Department has denied access to basic information regarding the war, from accurate casualty counts to images of flag-draped coffins of US dead to the Abu Ghraib torture photos.

Pushing Media Monopoly
The Administration continues to make common cause with the most powerful broadcast corporations in an effort to rewrite ownership laws in a manner that favors dramatic new conglomeratization and monopoly control of information. The Administration’s desired rules changes would strike a mortal blow to local journalism, as media “company towns” would be the order of the day. This cozy relationship between media owners and the White House (remember Viacom chair Sumner Redstone’s 2004 declaration that re-electing Bush would be “good for Viacom”?) puts additional pressure on journalists who know that when they displease the Administration they also displease their bosses.

In his famous opinion in the 1945 Associated Press v. US case, Justice Hugo Black said that “the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.” In other words, a free press is the sine qua non of the entire American Constitution and republican experiment.

The Bush Administration attack on the foundations of self-government demands a response of similar caliber. Under pressure from media-reform activists Congress has begun to push back, with a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate Commerce Committee to limit the ability of federal agencies to produce covert video news segments and to investigate Defense Department spending on propaganda initiatives. But until the Administration is held accountable by Congress for all its assaults on journalism, and until standards are developed to assure that such abuses will not be repeated by future administrations, freedom of the press will exist in name only, with all that suggests for our polity.

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Teaching Tolerance

George Bush was in little doubt about how the US-led coalition would bring down Saddam Hussein.

At a prayer meeting, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he said: "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God."

Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God

But God's help was being invoked in Baghdad, too. Saddam Hussein told Iraqis: "Fight as God ordered you to do."

So does that makes last year's Iraq conflict a religious war? The authors of the War Audit suggest that it was arguably a war driven by religion.

But, as they point out, the Pope and the US Catholic bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury and many theologians around the world argued that it fell well short of the rigorous criteria for a "just" war.

President Bush and Saddam Hussein were only the most recent of a long line of political leaders who have drawn on religion to help them in battle or to justify a military campaign.

But the War Audit set out to identify conflicts that were more closely linked to religious belief than to political causes - that could most properly be called religious wars.

And that, it concluded, means going back to the wars of Islamic expansion beginning in the 7th Century, the Crusades starting in the 11th Century and the Reformation wars beginning in the 16th Century.

Here the wars were fought primarily because of religious differences. Most are much more complex. To some extent, the nature of a war is in the eye of the beholder.

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The Mahaguru

"Rebuilding America's Defenses (RAD)" is a policy document published by a neoconservative Washington think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Its pages have been compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf in that they outline an aggressive military plan for U.S. world domination during the coming century. And just as Hitler's book was not taken seriously until after his catastrophic rise to power, so it seems that relatively few Americans are expressing alarm at this published document that is a blueprint for many of the present actions of the Bush administration, actions which have begun to destabilize the balance of power between the nations of the world.

There is, indeed, much reason for alarm because PNAC is not an ordinary think tank and "RAD" is not an ordinary policy paper. Many PNAC members now hold key positions in the White House, Defense and State Departments, among them Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Lewis Libby, and John Bolton, along with others in lesser positions. William Kristol, writer for the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, is chairman of the group.

Some of these men have been advocating for a strong military posture since the ending of cold war hostilities with the Soviet Union. Wishing to capitalize on the fact that the US had emerged as the world's preeminent superpower, they have lobbied for increases in military spending in order to establish what they call a Pax Americana that will reap the rewards of complete military and commercial control of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. This, they said, would be accomplished by the waging of "multiple simultaneous large-scale wars" and one of their first orders of business was always the removal of Saddam Hussein, thereby giving the US a toehold in the oil-rich Middle East.

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North Korean Weapon

Jean Kumler was baking cookies when I called her at her home in Cincinnati the other day. Peanut butter, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, sugar cookies.

The cookies are to be sold at a fund-raiser tomorrow night to support Cincinnati's organized anti-war effort. When it's over, Kumler and about 35 other people will pile into a bus and ride 12 hours to New York, where they'll take part in Saturday's anti-war rally near the United Nations.

The polls say that more than 60 percent of Americans favor a war against Iraq. But the steady round of protests that are taking place here and abroad prove that many people oppose it. This Saturday, along with the thousands who're expected in New York, they'll be marching in Johannesburg, protesting in Great Britain and reading anti-war poetry in Vermont. Meanwhile, the heads of Germany's churches are criticizing the United States' rush to war, and an Irish group is trying to round up Westerners who're willing to go to Iraq and form a human shield for the Iraqis.

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May Peace Prevail

Unless Congress votes to end the war, the fourth year of fighting will begin on March 19. The costs so far …
over 28,000 Iraqi civilian lives (and some estimates are as high as 100,000 lives)
over 2,300 U.S. military lives
over 4,000 Iraqi police and military deaths
over 16,500 U.S. troops wounded in combat
$251 billion spent to date
$1.3 trillion estimated long-term bill

Call your Representative and Senators at 888-355-3588 today, and tell them: Not one penny more for war!

If your members of Congress haven't signed on to any legislation against the war, you need to have a serious conversation with them.
Give them a call: Call Congress at 202-224-3121.

Pay them a visit: Members of Congress are not in Washington all the time; call your Representative and Senators' local office to find out when they are home, and when you can meet with them.

Join our campaign to keep the pressure on Congress -- receive updates, legislative alerts and invitations to particpate in monthly conference calls and briefings. Register now to become a member of UFPJ's Legislative Action Network.

Click here to find out who your Representative and Senators are, or to get local contact information.

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Capitalism

Some will tell you that the sudden, seemingly inexplicable rush to war with Iraq is nothing more or less than a ruse to get economic scandals off the front pages and out of the nightly news cycles. July was a catastrophically bad month for the Bush administration. Every time George spoke on camera, the Dow Jones would melt through the floorboards. The shady, patently illegal dealings of his old company, Harken, were a regular topic for the news talk shows.

His Vice President had gone into hiding to avoid subpoenas that would compel him to spill the beans about another criminal enterprise, Halliburton, as well as the ways and means of the back-room corporate dealings that led to the Bush administration's energy plan. Hovering over it all like the raven was Enron, and all the winding financial roads that led from Ken Lay to the Oval Office.

If it was and is all a ruse, it has worked masterfully. The coming mid-term elections, which had appeared this summer to portend a fantastic wipeout at the polls for the Republican Party because of all the economic uncertainty, now will likely be all about Iraq and patriotism. This change in the conversation has been aided and abetted by the media, which would vastly prefer to report on war while broadcasting grainy green images of explosions far away.

The economic stuff was boring and depressing, and people were switching it all off because it was too much to bear. This change was also aided by Congressional Democrats who forgot all too easily about Enron and Harken, thus allowing Bush and his people to frame the conversation in much more comfortable terms. It is all a smokescreen, and there will be no war.

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Global Pax

A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure "regime change" even before he took power in January 2001.

The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a "global Pax Americana" was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

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Selanjutnya

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Burma's Prison

The experts, from seven nations, said physicians at the prison had to respect inmates' right to refuse treatment.

The letter, in the medical journal The Lancet, said doctors who used restraints and force-feeding should be punished by their professional bodies.

Some 500 terror suspects are being held without trial at Guantanamo Bay.

The US has argued that the Geneva Convention does not apply to prisoners at the camp, who, it says, are enemy combatants who continue to pose a threat to national security.

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Death Tools

The Bush Butcher’s Bill: 30 US Military Deaths in Iraq from 1 through 13 February 2005 – Official Total of 1,532 US Dead to date (and rising)

U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals are not counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005.

by Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Reporter

See: http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1390.htm

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Bush-kopat Giring Iran

WASPADA Online


Oleh Djoko Sugiarno
Belakangan ini dunia sedang disuguhi skenario rutin Bush untuk menerkam mangsa baru. Setelah sukses mengoyak Afghanistan dan Irak dengan isu palsu, kini Bush bersiap menerkam Iran dengan isu perencanaan kepemilikan senjata nuklir. Penggiringan awal sudah dipersiapkan matang dengan menggunakan badan yang sama ketika mencaplok Irak tiga tahun lalu. Badan Tenaga Atom Internasional (IAEA-International Atomic Energy Association) pimpinan Mohammad El Baradei digunakan Bush untuk melempar umpan pertama. Kesediaan Iran menerima kunjungan tim IAEA berbuah penyegelan badan atom Iran. Ketika kemudian Iran membuka segel itulah-ini yang ditunggu Bush-maka serentetan skenario mulai dilakukan.

Trik Usang
Dengan alasan melanggar kesepakatan dengan IAEA, maka kini NATO sepakat mengajukan Iran ke Dewan Keamanan PBB yang anggotanya juga dedengkot NATO. Hasil akhirnya mudah diduga, Iran akan dituduh melanggar berbagai rambu yang dipasang Bush yang dengan ini, Iran akan dituntut memberikan akses seluas-luasnya kepada tim pemeriksa IAEA dan diharuskan bekerjasama penuh tanpa batas. Iran harus menerima tawaran ini jika tidak ingin menerima sanksi militer. Saddam Hussein juga mengalami titik ini, sebelum akhirnya Bush-tanpa restu PBB-melakukan agresi militer sampai sekarang. 30.000 nyawa warga sipil Irak telah diregang paksa oleh Bush, dan 2500 milisinya mati sia-sia, sementara ribuan lainnya menderita cacat akibat perang. Setelah Irak remuk, dan tuduhan kepemilikan senjata pemusnah massal sama sekali tidak terbukti, Bush tidak merasa menyesal, apalagi bersalah dan meminta maaf kepada rakyat Irak dan dunia. Tetapi alih-alih melegitimasi agresi buasnya itu, Bush menangkap Saddam dengan tuduhan pembunuhan terhadap warga Kurdi.

Kini Iran sedang digoreng dengan bumbu yang sama. IAEA sudah menyegel Badan Atom Nasional Iran, dan Iran sudah melanggar penyegelan itu, dan kini sedang dalam proses pengajuan ke DK PBB. Tak lama lagi, Iran akan dihadapkan pada pilihan pahit untuk menerima sanksi militer atau bekerja sama dengan tim PBB untuk meneliti instalasi nuklirnya tanpa batas akses. Kedua pilihan sama pahitnya dan Saddam telah merasakannya. Menerima tim secara total berarti membiarkan orang luar masuk ke semua tempat sensitif dan membuka aurat negara secara total. Dengan akses ini, Bush bisa mengetahui blue print pertahanan Irak semudah membeli pisang goreng. Menolak tim PBB berarti perang. Apa pun redaksinya, design trik usang itu juga yang akan dilakukannya terhadap Iran.

Sejarah kelabu peralihan kekuasaan dari Shah Reza Pahlevi kepada Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini yang berjalan revolusioner, telah memutuskan total hubungan diplomatik kedua negara yang bagi Amerika adalah sebuah kehilangan rezeki minyaknya. Keberanian para pengawal revolusi Islam di Iran dalam menyandera personil Kedubes Amerika di Teheran, telah menjadi catatan tersendiri, karena ternyata tokoh penyanderaan itu-Ahmadinejad-sekarang telah terpilih jadi presiden Iran. Ada dendam luka lama yang kembali tergores pedih.

Bayangan nikmatnya minyak Iran yang pernah dinikmati Amerika memang tak pernah lekang. Konsumsi domestik minyak Amerika yang mencapai 26 persen dari produksi minyak dunia, memaksa Bush untuk mencari sumber alternatif. Itulah sebabnya dia menguasai Afghanistan demi menjamin akses ke Laut Tengah yang memiliki cadangan minyak lebih dari 500 tahun, dan sumur-sumur minyak Irak yang masih sangat gemuk. Meningkatnya konsumsi minyak domestik Amerika dan kelangkaan pasokan membuat Bush geregetan untuk segera menyedot minyak di kawasan Teluk. Selain Arab Saudi dan Kuwait, Afghanistan Irak dan Iran adalah lemak Teluk yang menggiurkan untuk dikuasai. Karena itulah, Bush menggunakan segala siasat untuk bisa kembali menikmati minyak Teluk itu. Bush ini manusia normal atau seorang pengidap psikopat ?

Bush-kopat
Mengatakan Bush sebagai seorang psikopat nampaknya agak muskil karena sebagai seorang pimpinan negara adidaya tunggal yang bertingkah seperti globocop. Psikopat adalah kelainan jiwa di mana pengidapnya memiliki hasrat untuk membunuh tanpa henti, kelainan ini disebabkan oleh eksisnya perasaan inferiority, kegagalan beruntun atau kondisi hampa prestasi yang kronis. Pengidap psikopat selalu membutuhkan perasaan menang yang terus menerus, dan selalu mencari celah untuk mendapatkan pengakuan, dirinya kuat, hebat dan bisa mengalahkan orang lain. Susahnya, segala kemenangan itu harus dilihat dan diakui oleh orang lain.

Pada tataran masyarakat biasa, seorang psikopat adalah orang yang kalem, dingin, terkadang terkesan sebagai anggota masyarakat yang santun. Semua kesan ini memang dibuatnya untuk mengelabui gejolak keinginannya untuk membunuh. Hanya dibutuhkan sedikit saja rasa tersinggung untuk memicu sebuah aksi pembunuhan. Tetapi pada tataran kepala negara, seorang psikopat akan melakukan apapun dengan aparatus kenegaraan yang ada untuk dapat mengaut pujian atau pengakuan, dirinya hebat. Hitler, Mussolini. Idi Amin dan Polpot adalah figur pengidap psikopat akut yang pernah hidup di muka dunia ini. Tetapi dengan skala korban jiwa yang ditimbulkannya, maka Bush sudah berdiri jauh di atas keempatnya.

Bush juga tidak bisa dihentikan. Dia masih akan terus meningkatkan dosis korbannya dari 30.000 nyawa akan meningkat dalam waktu dekat. Penggiringan Iran ke DK PBB bisa disetarakan penggiringan sapi ternak ke kandang pejagalan oleh para koboy. Setelah masuk dalam perangkap, mereka tinggal menunggu giliran untuk dibantai. Inilah yang terjadi dengan Iran saat ini. Bush sudah membuktikannya dengan Irak dan Afghanistan. Kini Koboy Bush sedang menunggu sampai seluruh sapi Iran itu masuk dalam perangkapnya.

Sementara itu, adrenalinnya terus terpacu dan hasratnya untuk membunuh meningkat tinggi. Seringai buasnya memang sudah ditunjukkannya kepada dunia. Isu apa pun yang digunakannya untuk menggiring Iran menjadi tidak penting lagi. Satu-satunya agenda mendesak dalam benaknya adalah menyerbu Iran secepatnya, dengan atau tanpa restu PBB. Sebagai seorang psikopat sejati, Bush tidak akan membuang waktu satu detik pun tanpa darah tercecer. Hanya dengan jatuhnya korban saja seorang psikopat bisa bernapas lega. Perasaan hebat dan superior-semu yang dibutuhkannya sudah tergelar di depan mata. Garis ramalan ke depan tidak bisa lagi berbelok ke arah lain selain Iran akan menjadi korban berikutnya . Dunia akan segera melihat seorang Bush-kopat bersilat, melompat secepat kilat dari mayat ke mayat.

* Penulis adalah Ketua Divisi Education Watch IPBI

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