Lock Up Everybody !  

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging has an excellent and - given the news flow this week - pertinent essay on why sustainability, not terrorism, should be our real security focus (though I'd class the Cato-ites as borderline libertarian, with an unfortunate tendency towards conservatism and corporate Libertarianism).

The Cato Institute (a conservative thinktank) has released an outstanding paper, A False Sense of Insecurity, which makes the point that in any rational assessment, terrorism is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been "killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts." Whatsmore, many WMD threats are overblown and largely preventable. Indeed, with exhaustive research, the authors can conclude that:

Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.

The costs of terrorism are often the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.

A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are misplaced, unjustified and counter productive.

We, especially those of us in the U.S., have been kept in a panic state for the last five years, told constantly that not only is terrorism an immediate threat to ourselves and the ones we love, but that it is a danger to our very civilization. The result has been both that terrorists have been more successful in spreading terror and that authoritarian politicians have taken the opportunity to reduce government transparency and citizen oversight and erode protections for human rights and democratic process.

It also hasn't made us one lick safer, since, while we've been freaking out, fighting an unjustified war and pouring money into the terrorism porkbarrel, we've essentially ignored very big, well- documented threats, from the climate crisis to the weakening of the global public health system and the rise of epidemic disease to the destruction of New Orleans.

War with Iran still seems to be on the cards, with Past Peak pointing to the selling of the "Noble Cause". I've noticed the war drums are still beating steadily, with every mention of the still simmering Israel-Lebanon conflict in the media including a reference to Iran - and we've got the next showdown at the UN over the Iranian nuclear program at some point in the next week or so).

As Greenwald points out, this passage is noteworthy for its complete disdain for democracy. The population may be tired, with "low blood-sugar", but that "counts not at all". The President is The Decider, and since 9/11 Bush is, in fact, more than a President. Greenwald:

The 9/11 attacks justify all of this because it made the President something more than a President; it made him a Great Cause. As Gerson puts it, after recounting his most melodramatic 9/11 memories: "Starting in those days, I felt not merely part of an administration, but part of a story; a noble story." Nothing as lowly or ephemeral as public opinion is going to impede this "noble story," driven by this great man with his mission of overarching moral imperatives. In many ways, that is the Bush presidency in a nutshell.

Greenwald (an attorney) says the White House clearly believes it has the power to go to war with Iran without the approval of Congress or anyone else. Greenwald:

I have written before that the administration's theory of executive power almost certainly means that they believe they have the right to initiate a war on Iran even without any declaration of war or any other form of Congressional approval. Indeed, they would be empowered to do so even in the face of Congressional opposition. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation have made clear that in the wake of 9/11, there can be no limits on the President's decision-making powers with regard to the use of military force.

As Greenwald points out, Gerson's essay is significant because of Gerson's status as a Bush insider and confidant. This is no rant from a Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, or Ann Coulter. I think we have to assume it's part of a PR campaign to soften us for an attack that's probably already in the works. We're being fed a steady diet of accusations against Iran — nukes, Iraq IEDs, Lebanon and Hezbollah — just as we were regarding Iraq (WMD, etc.). You'd think there'd be greater media skepticism this time around, but you'd be wrong.

Past peak also has a look at why the IDF didn't fare well in Lebanon (and why the US isn't faring well in Iraq) in "Brutality corrupts".

Tom Segev, writing in Haaretz, suggests some other hypotheses. The most interesting of these is "the internal connection between the quality of the IDF's functioning in Lebanon and the occupation and the oppression in Gaza and the West Bank." Segev:

There is a generation of soldiers whose main military experience involves the oppression of the Palestinian population in the territories; they have not been trained for real war.

Like the chief of staff, the soldiers of the occupation have developed infinite arrogance. Every private is a king in the territories: If he so wishes, he allows a Palestinian to go through the roadblock; if he so wishes, he orders him to remove his pants. The power of the occupation has implanted a profound contempt for the Palestinians in many soldiers, and this is the essence of their experience as soldiers.

The Palestinian terror and its suppression have also granted legitimacy to a very serious systematic undermining of the Palestinians' human rights. The expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes, as though it were permissible routine, was carried out in this spirit as well. As opposed to the past, there was almost no protest in Israel...

Actions have consequences. Chickens come home to roost. Brutality blunts and weakens the perpetrator. If you act like oafish goons, before long you become oafish goons. You forget who you were before.

Israeli brutality vis-a-vis the Palestinians is bad enough, but what the US is doing in Iraq is far worse. The impact on our national character is already being felt. The longer we continue, the more hideous the consequences will be. Call it karma, if you like, or just call it psychology. But one way or the other, we will pay.

Bart at Energy Bulletin had some interesting comments on Grist's piece "The Priest and the Prophet"

From my reading of Jensen, he is not a "planner of a future sustainable society" as author Charles Shaw claims, but rather a fiery prophet of industrial civilization. I'd argue that the permaculturalist and related movements have a counter-culture vision of sustainability that is much more solid and defined.

I think Charles Shaw erred by defining the sustainability movement as being a one dimensional axis bounded at one end by a patrician led "green industrial revolution" and at the other by a primitivist "engineered collapse". I'd tend to characterise it as at least 2 dimensional (much as I'd characterise the political landscape), with the top right quadrant [free market / centralised] containing the greenwashed transnationals (GE, Walmart, BP etc), the bottom right [free market / decentralised] containing those advocating viridian style solutions - including McDonough's "cradle to cradle" industrial system, the upper left [centrally planned / centralised] containing those who advocate a government led move towards sustainability - maybe advocates of the various oil depletion protocols fit in here, and the lower left [encouraged / welcomed collapse of industrial civilisation] containing the eco-anarchist / primitivist / "deep ecologist" crowd - with Jensen fitting into this quadrant (presumably the recent RU Sirius show examining John Zerzan and the question Is Civilization A Mistake ?" explores this line of thinking, though I haven't listened to it yet).

In a related vein, permaculture activist Toby Hemenway asks Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?. I guess the permaculture movement doesn't fit neatly into my matrix defined above - they may perhaps be better representatives for the lower left quadrant [now cooperative / decentralised rather than collapsist] with the collapsists moved out to a dimension of their own.

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state. Those are big claims, so let’s explore them.

Permaculture, although it encompasses many disciplines, orbits most fundamentally around food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food defines culture more than our two other physical needs of shelter and reproduction. A single home-building stint provides a place to live for decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in children. But food must be gotten every day, usually several times a day. Until very recently, all human beings spent much of their time obtaining food, and the different ways of doing that drove cultures down very divergent paths.

Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many subsequent scholars break human cultures into five categories based on how they get food. These five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), horticulturists, agriculturists, pastoralists, and industrial cultures. Knowing which category a people falls into allows you to predict many attributes of that group. For example, foragers tend to be animist/pantheist, living in a world rich with spirit and in which all beings and many objects are ascribed a status equal to their own in value and meaning. Foragers live in small bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better than others at certain skills, like tool making or medicine, but almost none have exclusive specialties and everyone helps gather food. Though there may be chiefs and shamans, hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or three deaths is a major war. Most of a forager’s calories come from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers.(4) It’s rare that a forager will overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so tight that destruction of a resource one season means starvation the next. Populations tend to peak at low numbers and stabilize.

Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose message usually is that humans are chosen beings holding dominion, or at least stewardship, over creation. This human/nature divide makes ecological degradation not only inevitable but a sign of progress. ...

Lester Brown has an article on "America's Eco-Refugees" in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Those of us who track the effects of global warming had assumed that the first large flow of climate refugees would likely be in the South Pacific, with the abandonment of Tuvalu or other low-lying islands. We were wrong.

Interestingly, the country to suffer the most damage from a hurricane is also primarily responsible for global warming. The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the United States.

Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in late August 2005, forced a million people from New Orleans and the small towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts to move inland either within their state or to neighboring states, such as Texas and Arkansas. Although nearly all planned to return, many have not.

Unlike in previous cases, when residents typically left areas threatened by hurricanes and returned when authorities declared it was safe to do so, many of these evacuees are finding new homes. In this respect, the U.S. hurricane season of 2005 was different. Record-high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico surface waters helped make Hurricane Katrina the most financially destructive hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere.

...

The experience with more destructive storms in recent years is only the beginning. Since 1970, the Earth's average temperature has risen by one degree Fahrenheit, but by 2100 it could rise by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

More destructive storms are an early manifestation of global warming. The longer term risk is that rising temperatures will melt glaciers and polar ice caps, raising sea level and displacing coastal residents worldwide. The flow of climate refugees to date numbers in the thousands, but if we do not quickly reduce CO2 emissions, it could one day number in the millions.

Don Voelte at Woodside is making the (in my mind highly unlikely) prediction that oil prices will eventually return to U$40 per barrel. I guess in a deep enough recession that might be true - but thats not a pleasant prospect.

Woodside Petroleum boss Don Voelte says world oil prices will return to reasonable levels of about $US40 a barrel, but it won't happen any time soon.

The chief executive of Australia's biggest independent oil and gas producer said demand for the resource, with prices soaring in recent months, plus disruptions to supply and world-wide tensions, would keep prices up probably until next year.

"I'd say at least for the rest of this year, probably into next, what you see is what you'll get," Mr Voelte told ABC TV. "(But) I do predict oil to come back down I think in a reasonable level. "I think the area we have to prepare for is about $US40 a barrel, somewhere in that range."

...

Asked whether the company would like to exit the troubled Chinguetti project in Mauritania in Africa, where a dispute with the government has led to commissioning issues, Mr Voelte said: "We're not at that point at this point."

He said in the first half, Woodside had made just under $100 million in earnings before interest and tax on the project - which has so far cost it more than about $700 million - and it was a very profitable business.

Mr Voelte also said the company's upcoming Pluto and Browse developments would each more than double Woodside's LNG resources. The Pluto development, off Western Australia's northwest shelf, was given board approval for a $192 million front end engineering and design study last week.

"Our present projections is that the cash flow that spins off it (Pluto) because of our high equity, will be equal to or nearly equal to, the money we make off our northwest shelf or even greater than in the future years to our northwest shelf," he said. "So impact-wise to our company, we'll be more than doubling our company in LNG resources."

He said the LNG market was currently strong, a situation expected to continue until about 2012/2013, and the company was trying "to capture Browse and Pluto inside that window".

Asked how large the company could get, Mr Voelte said: "There are people out there that project that by 2015, we could be, if we develop Pluto and Browse on top of our northwest shelf, that excluding national oil companies, we could be the second largest producer of LNG in the world."

A review of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Centre" points out the surprisingly large number of Americans who think Iraq had something to do with 911 - one more victory for propaganda over reality I guess.

As of early 2005, according to a Harris poll, 47% of Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein actually helped plan the attack and supported the hijackers. And in February, 2006, according to a unique Zogby poll of American troops serving in Iraq, "85% said the U.S. mission is mainly ‘to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks'; 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was ‘to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'"

The Big Lie, first coined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf,was made famous by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich. The idea was simple enough: Tell a whopper (the larger the better) often enough and most people will come to accept it as the truth. During World War II, the predecessor of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, described how the Germans used the Big Lie: "[They] never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Doug Newman asks "Is it just me, or does anyone else feel the vise grip tightening ?". Apparently Mike Ruppert, who seems to have freaked out entirely now, felt some sort of vice tightening as he has now fled the US and landed, possibly temporarily, in Venezuela. I may be being a bit harsh here, but I fail to see why the US government would bother killing a professional conspiracy theorist who runs a web site - its not like they aren't a dime a dozen, and its not like they have any significant impact on most of the population. The mass media serves its purpose - and that leaves individuals, by and large, to say whatever they feel like (whistleblowers and people with genuinely sensitive inside information are another matter of course).

In the case of Ex Parte Milligan in 1866, Supreme Court Justice David Davis wrote: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism."

The anarchy of which Justice Davis wrote was that of unrestrained power. When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz.

So what do we do about terror? Simple. Get out of the superpower business. Stop trying to run the whole world. When you have troops in 130 countries, is it any wonder that so many people hate you? Bring the troops home. Use your military to defend your shores and borders and be done with it.

It is hard for a lot of Americans, blinded as they are by hubris, to understand, but most of the world does not want our way of life. And the more bombs we drop, the more they will hate us.

As Pat Buchanan has stated, "To Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders." And they want the Crusaders gone. Buchanan has also stated that, "The price of empire is terror. The price of occupation is terror. The price of interventionism is terror."

Terrorists do not "hate us for our freedom." They hate our relentless meddling in the internal affairs of their nations. The problems of the Arab world are not America's to fix. So let us quit trying to fix them.

The people who have no problem with the advancing police state are many of the same people who so harshly criticized France for not joining America in invading Iraq in 2003. France had a terrorist problem at one point. And then they pulled out of Algeria.

George Monbiot's recent piece " The Generals’ War" suggests Israel's invasion of Lebanon was just another example of the use of the "Power of Nightmares".

The evidence I presented last week suggests that the soldiers planning this assault envisaged an operation lasting for three weeks. They would storm into Lebanon, eliminate Hizbullah and storm out again. Since the attack began, Israel has been pressing for someone else – the “multinational force” – to patrol southern Lebanon on its behalf. Though the government is incapable of learning from 1996, it still seems to remember the lesson of May 2000, when the Israeli armed forces discovered than an occupation of southern Lebanon was impossible to sustain. I have not been able to find any evidence that Ben-Gurion’s successors contemplated annexation. Even Ariel Sharon, who engineered Menachem Begin’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, envisaged not a land grab but the establishment of a puppet government and the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in the hope that the West Bank – not southern Lebanon – could be incorporated into Israel. This is not an attempt to seize more territory.

But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. We are familiar with military dictatorships. But Israel is unique in being a military democracy(5). An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors, and sometimes (I am thinking of Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon) war criminals. Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals. To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war. As Moshe Dayan observed, military retaliation is a "life drug". Avi Shlaim summarises Dayan’s argument thus. “First, [retaliation] obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and in the army”.

The warriors in Israel have almost always been empowered by armed action. Even while planning the biggest political disaster in Israeli history – Suez – Ben-Gurion was able to depose his peace-seeking foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. Their interests are best served by escalation, however inappropriate. After the latest attack on Lebanon began, the generals demanded to intensify it. At the cabinet meeting of July 27th, when it had already become clear that the assault was turning into a strategic and political disaster, they insisted that they be allowed to mount a full-scale ground offensive.

Who loses from this war? The people of Lebanon and northern Israel, of course, and maybe – one day – the rest of us. The civilians in the Israeli government, perhaps including Ehud Olmert. But not Hizbullah, who are now proclaimed as heroes in Muslim nations across the Middle East. Not Bush or Blair, for whom every attack by terrorists – even those motivated by opposition to their policies – is a further vindication of their war on terror. And not the Israeli Defence Forces. Faced with emboldened enemies, they can demand more resources and greater powers. The generals did not intend to lose, but even this disaster has done them no harm. It has made the Israeli people less secure, and therefore more inclined to vote for those who promise to defend them.

On a tinfoil note, the enigmatic "Sploid" has now ceased publishing - and while its not a site I ever bothered reading I did enjoy this little note on the UK terror alerts and the head of the secret police in the US, Michael Chertoff, who really looks the part.

Michael Chertoff -- who many say looks just like an undead version of Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin -- says the United States needs more constant surveillance of everybody so he can lock up more "possible terrorists."

It's just the latest outrage from an administration desperately trying to turn last week's phony terrorist scare into justification for more fascist laws before the bogus scare is completely forgotten by Americans.

"It's not like the 20th century, where you had time to get warrants," the little totalitarian said Sunday on one of those political talk shows.

"We've done a lot in our legal system the last few years, to move in the direction of that kind of efficiency. But we ought to constantly review our legal rules to make sure they're helping us, not hindering us."

Chertoff, who presided over the horrific drowning of more than 1,500 citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is very excited about the opportunity to put anybody in jail for no reason at all.

While the White House and the administration's henchmen in Congress rush to pass new laws that will make everyone a potential terrorist and Halliburton builds the new concentration camps that will soon hold hundreds of thousands of "political prisoners," Chertoff is pursuing a two-pronged assault on Americans.

First, his goons at airports around the nation are methodically getting Americans "comfortable" with constant fear, harassment and intimidation. Second, his outrageous public statements are intended as a "trial balloon" to see just how much the White House can get away with.

The lack of outrage over Chertoff's latest insane proclamations will be used as "proof" that the administration can move ahead with the next phase of canceling the "g-ddamned piece of paper" known as the U.S. Constitution.

Proving the "U.K. terror plot" was manufactured fearmongering, U.S. airports have already been told the "threat level" has been reduced to the usual constant hysteria rather than the top-level hysteria enacted last week.

And I'll close with one more piece of tinfoil, this one from a recent post at RI about the evolution of the Belgian component of Operation Gladio - commenter starroute claims:

Reinhard Gehlen was largely responsible for setting up NATO's intelligence structures in the late 40's and 50's, including the stay-behind/Gladio groups, which is why they were dominated by old fascists.

(Although the germ of the idea seems likely to have originated with Allen Dulles, who spent World War I as a young State Department punk in Switzerland, working with Slavic nationalists who were looking to throw off the yoke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Gehlen retired as head of the German Intelligence Bureau in 1968, and around that same time -- there being no Communist yoke in Western Europe to throw off, and not much chance of one developing -- Gladio got reoriented towards Strategy of Tension operations, intended to destabilize left-wing governments in general.

General Limnitzer was another figure closely involved with Allen Dulles and the creation of the stay-behind networks. (I believe it was something posted here last week that got me looking into Lemnitzer.)

Lemnitzer went from stay-behind to plotting Operation Northwoods in 1962, then became supreme commander of NATO from 1963-69 (during Gehlen's final years), and did a final turn in the middle 70's with the Committee on the Present Danger -- a group which was pivotal in George H.W. Bush's creation of an alliance among the CIA, the crazy anti-communist generals, and the fledgling Neocons.

Alexander Haig served as supreme commander of NATO just a few years after Lemnitzer, from 1974-79. He and Kissinger are alleged to have started directing funding to Gladio by 1973, when Haig was Nixon's chief of staff. There are also claims that both of them, as well as Bush, were involved with P2.

Gladio reached its climax of activity in 1978-81, coinciding with the end of Haig's period at NATO, his involvement in the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, and his brief but infamous period as Reagan's Secretary of State.

There is a very tight line of development here -- with Dulles, Lemnitzer, and Gehlen at one end and Bush and Haig at the other -- that suggests a single directing vision among a small group of individuals over a period of 30 years.

It's what's happened since then, though, with things apparently spinning out of control, as in Belgum, that raises real questions of who, if anyone, is now running the show -- and what their motivations may be.

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a part Italian friend who is visiting Europe at the moment. He isn't bothering to visit the italian side of his family while he is up there, and when I asked why, he said that they are a bit odd, being old style fascists from the 1930's. The reason for not visiting was not so much beacuse they were once fascists - he pointed out (correctly) that this was very common at the time, but that they are bitter and twisted about everything because in the post war period they had most of their land taken by the government (on which an airport was then built) and that their few remaining buildings had been surrounded by a train line and a freeway with an expressway built over the top of the main house.

So it would seem the far authoritarian right isn't as all-powerful as some conspiracy theories would have it...