Thank you, science, for finally ending what has been one of the most moronic debates of our time: whether or not homosexuality is a 'choice.' It isn't. There we go. But, by ending one issue, we've led ourselves to a much bigger and more complex situation. If homosexuality is the result of hormonal exposure and genetics, could we, in fact, cure homosexuality? This poses many more questions in the long run, many of which I am unable to answer.
Brokeback Mutton
Gay sheep and human destiny.
By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 7:08 PM ET
www.slate.com
Just up the road from Brokeback Mountain, closeted away in their own private Idaho, the gay sheep were getting it on.
Well, it wasn't exactly private. They were doing it in front of scientists at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station near the Idaho-Montana-Wyoming border. The scientists arranged the trysts. It's called "sexual partner preference testing."
According to an article by researchers involved in the project, here's how it works. In a 15-by-10-foot "arena," a young ram is offered four choices: two ewes in heat and two rams. "The four stimulus animals are restrained in stanchions so that they can only be approached from the sides and rear." For 30 minutes, the unrestrained ram does as he pleases. The scientists count his "anogenital sniffs," "mounts," and "ejaculations."
A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay.
Why so many gay rams? Is it too much socializing with ewes? Same-sex play with other lambs? Domestication? Nope. Those theories have been debunked. Gay rams don't act girly. They're just as gay in the wild. And a crucial part of their brains—the "sexually dimorphic nucleus"—looks more like a ewe's than like a straight ram's. Gay men have a similar brain resemblance to women. Charles Roselli, the project's lead scientist, says such research "strongly suggests that sexual preference is biologically determined in animals, and possibly in humans."
Roselli's interest is in the science. He figured the political upshot, if any, would be gay-friendly. After all, surveys show that if you think homosexuality is biologically determined, you're less likely to be anti-gay.
Roselli didn't just prove homosexuality in rams was natural. He tried to engineer it. In a 1999 grant application, he proposed "to determine [whether male-oriented] preference behavior can be artificially produced in genetic male sheep" by depriving male lamb fetuses of estrogen stimulation. Seven months ago, he reported that the experiment failed. The point wasn't to promote homosexuality. The point was to learn what causes it.
You'd expect conservatives to demand that the government stop funding this research. But science is tricky. If you figure out how to make sheep gay, you can probably figure out how to make them straight. And maybe you can do the same to people.
Roselli studies hormones, brains, and behavior. He works at Oregon Health and Science University, a medical institution. But his collaborator, Fred Stormshak, is an animal scientist affiliated with Oregon State University, which focuses more on agriculture and economics. Gay rams are "a costly problem for sheep producers because breeding rams are worth $300 to $500 each," Stormshak told OSU's agricultural newsletter a decade ago. "Outwardly, there is no way to tell whether a ram is male-oriented, so the producer runs the costly risk of buying an animal that will never produce any offspring."
Identifying gay rams wasn't enough. In 2000, Stormshak described an attempt to "alter" them. The idea was to "enhance their sexual behavior or performance" by making them act like straight rams. Three years later, Roselli told an OHSU committee that, among other things, "information gained about the hormonal, neural, genetic, and environmental determinants of sexual partner preferences should allow better selection of rams for breeding and as a consequence may be economically important to the sheep industry." OSU president Ed Ray says the research "may define biological tests that can be used to identify" gay or asexual rams, "thus eliminating their use for general breeding purposes."
Notice the lack of animus in these explanations. Breeders don't care whether rams are gay or simply unmotivated. All that matters is "performance." And when Ray talks about "eliminating" such rams from breeding, he leaves open the possibility of a happy old age munching grass. But you can smell the slaughterhouse.
Which brings us to the animals whose breeding we really care about: our children.
Passing on your genes is life's deepest drive. You don't just want kids. You want grandkids. An Israeli woman, with court approval, is already using her dead son's sperm to inseminate a stranger. I know a guy whose future mother-in-law put him through a fertility test before approving his marriage. Then there are all the parents who pressure their adult children to marry and procreate. In a recent survey, 73 percent of Americans said they'd be upset to learn that their child was gay. To many parents, "I'm gay, Mom" means "No grandkids for you."
Roselli offers lots of evidence that human homosexuality is linked to biological conditions, some of them genetic. If he figures out how to manipulate sexual orientation in sheep, will others try to manipulate it in humans? We already have. Doctors used to "treat" homosexuality with hormone injections. Some still do. This idea failed miserably in adults, but it might work in fetuses, since their brains are forming. And if we can't engineer sexual orientation, maybe we can select it. Millions of Asians have used modern sex tests to identify and abort female fetuses. If we learn how to recognize gay brains in development, look out.
But killing is the horror scenario. The more likely path is gentler. Science will gradually convince us that sexual orientation is innate, more like the color of your skin than like the content of your character. Condemnation of homosexuality as a sin will subside. Freed from the culture wars, we'll turn to the biological differences between race and sexual orientation: Homosexuality defies the aspiration to procreate with your mate, and it's easier to isolate and alter in embryonic development. Resentment will give way to pity. We'll come to view homosexuality as a kind of infertility—a disability, like deafness. The rhetoric of "acceptance" will shift from liberals to conservatives. We'll inoculate our offspring against homosexuality out of love, not hate.
The sheep researchers intend nothing like this. But they didn't foresee the initial uproar over their work, either. It has come from the left, not the right. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has tried to quash their research, falsely depicting them as bigots. PETA, like President Bush, thinks that bad ideas come from bad people, and you have to stamp out the whole lot.
But bad ideas—communism, eugenics, wars of liberation—don't happen because they're bad. They happen because, in the beginning, they're good. What we do with the biological truth about homosexuality, for good or ill, isn't written in our hormones or our genes. It's up to us.
Wool and Graze
Gay sheep revisited.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007, at 7:34 AM ET
www.slate.com
Sometimes you come across a topic too big for the space you're writing in. This is one of those times. The topic is research on gay sheep and what it might mean for gay people. It's hugely complicated, and some of the complications didn't fit the space I had in print last week. Slate has plenty of cyberspace to talk things through, so let's talk. Gay sheep are more than joke material. They can teach us a lot about how science, technology, economics, motives, and morality fit together. Here are a few lessons.
1. Scientific motives can differ from technological motives. The sheep researchers—Charles Roselli of Oregon Health and Science University and Fred Stormshak of Oregon State University—are investigating biological factors in homosexuality. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals accuses them of trying to "cure" homosexuality. Not true. Roselli and OHSU's publicist, Jim Newman, have spent months dousing this fire. Roselli has never said or written anything against homosexuality. In fact, he has said that studies suggesting a biological basis for homosexuality tend to encourage tolerance.
Nor has Roselli tried, in any experiment, to make sheep turn out straight. He has tried the opposite: to make them turn out gay. He does this not to promote homosexuality but to find out whether the mechanism he's testing—deprivation of estrogen during fetal development—accounts for homosexuality. Scientists such as Roselli don't focus on achieving a preferred outcome. They focus on learning mechanisms. They want to know how systems—in this case, biological systems—work.
What Roselli and Newman have labored to convey in their fight with PETA is that you can't infer motives from research on mechanisms. That's absolutely true. Mechanisms are detachable from motives. But that truth cuts both ways. You can't infer Roselli's motives, nor you can you predict the motives of people who might exploit, in a later technological program, the mechanisms he's clarifying. And there's the rub.
2. When people mix, motives mix. The sheep research is a collaboration between a behavioral neuroendocrinologist (Roselli) and an animal scientist (Stormshak). It's also a collaboration between a medical institution (OHSU) and a more agricultural-industrial institution (Oregon State University). Each of these participants has distinct interests and obligations. So do the project's funders: the National Institutes of Health (specifically, the National Center for Research Resources) and the National Science Foundation.
NCRR's mission statement says it funds "discoveries that begin at a molecular and cellular level, move to animal-based studies, and then are translated to patient-oriented clinical research, resulting in cures and treatments for … diseases." It expects a human therapeutic payoff. Stormshak, for his part, has made clear that he's interested in sheep fertility as an economic outcome of his work. Gay rams, he notes, obstruct efficient breeding.
These aren't Roselli's main concerns. He's trying to figure out the system of hormones, brain, and behavior. Sheep just happen to be a useful species for his work. But as he collaborates with OSU, requests experimental animals, and seeks funding from NCRR, he invokes the interests of colleagues and evaluators. He adds "better selection of rams for breeding" to his rationales. He says his work might help to clarify the biology of human sexual orientation, alleviate sex-related disorders, and resolve difficulties in sex assignment of infants with ambiguous genitals. These applications to sheep and people appear in his writing not because they motivate him, but because the research is bigger than he is. It's a group project. He can speak for himself, but he can't guarantee whose motives will prevail or where they will lead.
3. Differences among motives matter, even when they're subtle. PETA has made hay of a 2000 paper in which Stormshak posited that gay rams "may not be exposed to the same levels" of estrogen as straight rams. "If this is true," he wrote, then estrogen therapy "might alter their sexual behavior to the point of being more like" the behavior of straight rams. PETA thinks this study threatens to advance the eradication of homosexuality.
But look more closely. The paper's title is "Influence of castration and estrogen replacement on sexual behavior of female-oriented, male-oriented, and asexual rams." And that's what the study examines: All the rams, not just the gay ones, are castrated and given estrogen. The point isn't to make the gay rams straight; it's to "restore sexual behavior" in general. And the experiment fails. Stormshak concludes:
Because there are no readily apparent phenotypic traits that characterize the male-oriented or asexual ram, these animals are frequently selected as flock sires and hence contribute to decreased fertility of ewes and economic loss to the sheep industry. Treatment of these types of rams with estrogens to enhance their sexual behavior or performance may not be practical.
Notice that Stormshak never singles out gay rams. He worries about rams that are gay "or asexual." He's not trying to get rid of homosexuality; he's trying to promote fertility. What a ram does on his own time is his own business, as long as he "performs" on the job: impregnating ewes.
Purging homosexuality and promoting fertility are not identical. If all you care about is producing more sheep, you can pursue that today through cloning, which also gives you total control of the genome. A ram's orientation wouldn't matter, particularly if most of what causes that orientation turns out not to be genetic. And if your motive is economic rather than normative, there's no reason to assume you'd tinker with people the way you tinker with sheep. Lambs are exploitable property. Babies aren't.
4. Motive-framing is a potent weapon in the politics of science. PETA opposes the manipulation, exploitation, and killing of animals. Not many people share its zeal about stamping out those practices. But lots of people get upset at the idea of using chemicals to wipe out homosexuality. So PETA has blurred the two issues, accusing Roselli and Stormshak of the latter when, at worst, they're guilty of the former. That's why so many gays and liberals have joined the outcry against the research.
5. Science and technology can change morality. Ethics doesn't float above science while judging it. Ethics has scientific assumptions built in. For instance, most people who regard homosexuality as a sin assume you can regulate your sexual orientation. If studies prove orientation is biologically determined, this objection collapses.
But the upheaval doesn't end there. Most people who defend homosexuality as a biological trait assume it can't be changed. Martina Navratilova, for example, is asking the universities to shut down the sheep research and spend the money instead on fostering "acceptance for people of all sexual preferences." What if the research destroys that assumption, too? What if it proves that sexual orientation is biologically based and that we don't have to accept it? What if science makes it possible to chemically reduce the prevalence of homosexuality without oppressing anyone?
That's the first reason not to squelch basic research. If you let it run its course, it might disabuse you of the assumptions that made you want to squelch it. The same can be true of technology. Looking back at the wretched history of hormone therapy for homosexuality, it's easy to say, "Never again." But the latest, albeit unsuccessful, interventions in sheep are at the fetal stage, when the brain is taking shape. If you don't regard the human fetus as a person—precisely because its brain hasn't fully formed—can you really say it was ever gay? Does your objection to medicating gay people still apply?
That's another reason to let research go forward: It might expose contradictions in your politics. You might find yourself in the odd position of pleading for acceptance of homosexuality as a natural condition while at the same time denouncing Catholic bishops who plead for acceptance of infertility as a natural condition. Is one kind of infertility more sacred than another?
The final reason to be wary of stifling research is that half-developed technology can be worse than the finished product. The sheep investigators have already identified brain markers that roughly correlate with homosexuality. What they deny doing—and PETA, in its efforts to stop the research, accuses them of doing—is trying to alter orientation in the womb. But if doctors learn to spot emerging gay brains and are unable to alter them, parents who are determined not to raise gay children will do what's already done to female fetuses in much of the world: abort them.
Science is scary. It can change your body and your mind. But smothering it can be just as dangerous. The wisest course is to keep an eye on its participants, their motives, and potential applications of their work, never letting one motive or application obscure others. Political attacks that blur these differences don't help.
Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?
www.albertmohler.com
Posted: Friday, March 02, 2007 at 3:40 am ET
What if you could know that your unborn baby boy is likely to be sexually attracted to other boys? Beyond that, what if hormonal treatments could change the baby's orientation to heterosexual? Would you do it? Some scientists believe that such developments are just around the corner.
For some time now, scientists have been looking for a genetic or hormonal cause of sexual orientation. Thus far, no "gay gene" has been found -- at least not in terms of incontrovertible and accepted science. Yet, it is now claimed that a growing body of evidence indicates that biological factors may at least contribute to sexual orientation.
The most interesting research along these lines relates to the study of sheep. Scientists at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station are conducting research into the sexual orientation of sheep through "sexual partner preference testing." As William Saletan at Slate.com explains:
A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay.
Why so many gay rams? Is it too much socializing with ewes? Same-sex play with other lambs? Domestication? Nope. Those theories have been debunked. Gay rams don't act girly. They're just as gay in the wild. And a crucial part of their brains--the "sexually dimorphic nucleus"--looks more like a ewe's than like a straight ram's. Gay men have a similar brain resemblance to women. Charles Roselli, the project's lead scientist, says such research "strongly suggests that sexual preference is biologically determined in animals, and possibly in humans."
What makes the sheep "sexual partner preference testing" research so interesting is that the same scientists who are documenting the rather surprising sexual behaviors of male sheep think they can also change the sexual orientation of the animals. In other words, finding a biological causation for homosexuality may also lead to the discovery of a "cure" for the same phenomenon.
That's where the issue gets really interesting. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] has called for an end to the research, while tennis star Martina Navratilova called the research "homophobic and cruel" and argued that gay sheep have a "right" to be homosexual. No kidding.
Homosexual activists were among the first to call for (and fund) research into a biological cause of homosexuality. After all, they argued, the discovery of a biological cause would lead to the normalization of homosexuality simply because it would then be seen to be natural, and thus moral.
But now the picture is quite different. Many homosexual activists recognize that the discovery of a biological marker or cause for homosexual orientation could lead to efforts to eliminate the trait, or change the orientation through genetic or hormonal treatments.
Tyler Gray addresses these issues in the current issue of Radar magazine. In "Is Your Baby Gay?," Gray sets out a fascinating scenario. A woman is told that her unborn baby boy is gay. This woman and her husband consider themselves to be liberal and tolerant of homosexuality. But this is not about homosexuality now; it is about their baby boy. The woman is then told that a hormone patch on her abdomen will "reverse the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes." The Sunday Times [London] predicts that such a patch should be available for use on humans within the decade. Will she use it?
This question stands at the intersection of so many competing interests. Feminists and political liberals have argued for decades now that a woman should have an unrestricted right to an abortion, for any cause or for no stated cause at all. How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual? This question involves both abortion and gay rights -- the perfect moral storm of our times.
Homosexual activists have claimed that sexual orientation cannot be changed. What if a hormone patch during pregnancy will do the job?
As Gray suggests:
In a culture that encourages us to customize everything from our Nikes to our venti skinny lattes, perhaps it is only a matter of time before baby-making becomes just another consumer transaction. Already have a girl? Make this one a boy! Want to impress your boho friends? Make a real statement with lesbian twins!
More to the point, Gray understands that such a development would reshape the abortion and gay-rights debates in America:
Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy (assuming the stigma on homosexuality survives the scientific refutation of the Right's treasured belief that it is a "lifestyle choice.") Pro-choice activists won't be spared either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?
The development of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis [PDG] is one of the greatest threats to human dignity in our times. These tests are already leading to the abortion of fetuses identified as carrying unwanted genetic markers. The tests can now check for more than 1,300 different chromosomal abnormalities or patterns. With DNA analysis, the genetic factors could be identified right down to hair and eye color and other traits. The logic is all too simple. If you don't like what you see on the PDG report . . . just abort and start over. Soon, genetic treatments may allow for changing the profile. Welcome to the world of designer babies.
If that happens, how many parents -- even among those who consider themselves most liberal -- would choose a gay child? How many parents, armed with this diagnosis, would use the patch and change the orientation?
Christians who are committed to think in genuinely Christian terms should think carefully about these points:
1. There is, as of now, no incontrovertible or widely accepted proof that any biological basis for sexual orientation exists.
2. Nevertheless, the direction of the research points in this direction. Research into the sexual orientation of sheep and other animals, as well as human studies, points to some level of biological causation for sexual orientation in at least some individuals.
3. Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God's judgment.
4. The biblical condemnation of all homosexual behaviors would not be compromised or mitigated in the least by such a discovery. The discovery of a biological factor would not change the Bible's moral verdict on homosexual behavior.
5. The discovery of a biological basis for homosexuality would be of great pastoral significance, allowing for a greater understanding of why certain persons struggle with these particular sexual temptations.
6. The biblical basis for establishing the dignity of all persons -- the fact that all humans are made in God's image -- reminds us that this means all persons, including those who may be marked by a predisposition toward homosexuality. For the sake of clarity, we must insist at all times that all persons -- whether identified as heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, or whatever -- are equally made in the image of God.
7. Thus, we will gladly contend for the right to life of all persons, born and unborn, whatever their sexual orientation. We must fight against the idea of aborting fetuses or human embryos identified as homosexual in orientation.
8. If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.
9. We must stop confusing the issues of moral responsibility and moral choice. We are all responsible for our sexual orientation, but that does not mean that we freely and consciously choose that orientation. We sin against homosexuals by insisting that sexual temptation and attraction are predominately chosen. We do not always (or even generally) choose our temptations. Nevertheless, we are absolutely responsible for what we do with sinful temptations, whatever our so-called sexual orientation.
10. Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic sinfulness of all homosexual behavior. The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This does not alter God's moral verdict on homosexual sin (or heterosexual sin, for that matter), but it does hold some promise that a deeper knowledge of homosexuality and its cause will allow for more effective ministries to those who struggle with this particular pattern of temptation. If such knowledge should ever be discovered, we should embrace it and use it for the greater good of humanity and for the greater glory of God.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
Our Moral Superiority
During his recent interview on the Daily Show, former statesman and current author Zbigniew Brzezinski highlighted America's decidedly "Manichean" superiority complex. (To roughly summarize) Our belief in our current moral superiority has led us down a path of committing incredibly immoral acts. Nothing demonstrates this dilemma clear than our treatment of detainees throughout the War on Terror. The article below is one of their stories.
To be fair, the relationship between the Western world and modern Islam is incredibly complex. While America is currently the leader in fostering this antagonistic relationship, few Western countries have actually demonstrated a willingness to accept Islam into their societies.
The CIA's Italian Job
Mohamad Bazzi
posted March 22, 2007 (April 9, 2007 issue)
thenation.com
Cairo
From her third-floor balcony, the Egyptian woman saw the whole thing: a group of CIA and Italian agents snatching the imam of her local mosque off a Milan street, stuffing him into a white van and driving off. It was February 17, 2003, and Hassan Osama Nasr was walking to the mosque for noon prayers. He was stopped by a man waving a badge and shouting, "Police!" In perfect Italian, the man demanded Nasr's ID, wallet and cellphone. Then two men came up from behind Nasr, grabbed his arms and forced him into the van. It all took about three minutes.
But the agents didn't know that someone had seen the abduction. The woman called the mosque, and word spread among worshipers. By evening, the mosque's leaders suspected that Nasr--a cleric known as Abu Omar who had fled Egypt in 1990--would be sent back to his homeland. They phoned Montasser al-Zayyat, a prominent lawyer in Cairo who has spent his career defending Islamic militants. "The plan was that no one would see him being kidnapped and he would disappear," Zayyat said in an interview at his office. "But that Egyptian woman who happened to be standing on her balcony saved him."
Nasr, 44, is now at the center of the most politically explosive case involving the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition," in which a suspected militant is secretly abducted and taken to another country for interrogation and, usually, torture. After years of denial, the Bush Administration now acknowledges using the extra-judicial tactic but insists that it does not sanction the torture of suspects.
In February an Italian judge indicted twenty-six Americans--a US Air Force colonel and twenty-five suspected CIA operatives, including the former Rome station chief and former Milan sub-station chief--for their role in the months-long plot to abduct Nasr. Although none of the suspects are in custody, the trial is set to begin June 8, and it has already become an embarrassment for the Bush Administration and the Italian government.
The public relations disaster may have saved others from abduction and torture. "I suspect that Abu Omar's case has slowed down the policy of renditions," said John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. "It was an incredible embarrassment for the CIA. Undoubtedly, it made them think twice about other abductions."
But the star witness, Nasr, might not be able to testify in Italy. He was released from an Egyptian prison in February, but his lawyer says he is not allowed to leave the country or to make any public statements. "The Egyptian authorities warned him that if he speaks about the case, he will be sent back to prison," said Zayyat. (Egyptian officials had made good on an earlier threat to throw Nasr back in prison: After being released in April 2004, he was arrested twenty days later when the secret police learned that he had been discussing his abduction.)
American and Egyptian officials have refused to comment on the case. Egypt has even refused to confirm or deny that it had Nasr in custody. But a Cairo appeals court ordered his release after he'd been held in prison for four years without charge. And now Egypt, the second- largest recipient of US foreign aid after Israel, is trying to save its benefactor from further embarrassment by preventing Nasr from testifying in Italy. "The Americans want this case to go away," Zayyat said. "They don't want Abu Omar to publicly describe what happened to him."
It's hard to believe that the CIA didn't know what would happen to Nasr. "Egypt's intelligence services are infamous for using torture," said Sifton. "The Americans knew that by sending him to Egypt, he would be tortured," Zayyat said. "They wanted someone to do this dirty work for them."
The trial is likely to reveal new details about the CIA's covert operations and the complicity of Italian intelligence services, and to cast a harsh light on the Bush Administration's dealings with its European allies. Nasr's lawyer plans to travel to Italy for the trial and to file a lawsuit against the US and Italian governments, seeking $13 million in damages. Zayyat also plans to file a separate lawsuit against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, alleging that he personally approved the abduction. Berlusconi has denied having prior knowledge of the plan.
Nasr entered Italy illegally in 1997 and was granted political asylum four years later. He had fled Egypt after being imprisoned twice in the late 1980s for antigovernment sermons at a mosque in Alexandria. Although he has not been charged with a crime in Italy, he was under investigation for allegedly recruiting Muslim men to fight in Iraq. Italian officials have said they were about to detain him for questioning when the CIA abducted him.
"Abu Omar is prepared to go to Italy, even if he's going to be tried and imprisoned," Zayyat said. "He's convinced of his innocence, and he's confident in the Italian judiciary."
The lead Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said after the indictments were handed down that he wants Nasr to testify against the American agents, but Egypt has never responded to an Italian request for access to the cleric. "Obviously it would be useful to hear what he has to say," Spataro said. "If he is banned from leaving [Egypt], there's nothing we can do."
In April 2006 Nasr appeared in an Egyptian court for the first time and gave a detailed, two-hour account of his experience. Zayyat said Egyptian officials have refused to give him or Italian prosecutors a transcript of that session. But Zayyat provided The Nation with four pages of handwritten notes he took during his client's testimony. Nasr told the court that shortly after his abduction, US and Italian agents put a black hood over his head and "punched me in the stomach and all over my body." He was driven to Aviano Air Base, a joint US-Italian installation, where he boarded a small plane for a flight that lasted an hour and a half. As Nasr tried to resist, the beatings continued on the plane. "I was bewildered," he told the court. "I didn't understand what was happening around me."
At a US base in Germany, Nasr was led into a "large, cold room." His hands were untied and the hood was taken off. He saw a group of fifteen to twenty men all wearing masks and Special Forces uniforms. The men wrapped his entire head and face with duct tape and cut holes over his nose and mouth so he could breathe. He was stripped of his clothes and dressed in a jumpsuit, and his arms and legs were shackled. He was then hustled onto another plane. By that point, Nasr had stopped resisting--and the beating had ended. "I had given up," he said. "I was resigned to my fate."
After the plane landed at Cairo airport on February 18, 2003, a guard on the tarmac told Nasr, "You have arrived in Egypt, Abu Omar." Still blindfolded and shackled, he was stuffed into another van and driven to the Mukhabarat (secret police) headquarters outside Cairo. Guards removed the duct tape from his head and face, allowing his hair and beard to take their form. He was escorted into a room by an Egyptian security official who told him that "two pashas" wanted to speak with him.
Nasr testified that he recognized one of the men as Egypt's interior minister. The other man appeared to be an American. "Only the Egyptian spoke," Nasr said. "He offered me to become an informant. If I accepted, he said, I would be returned to Italy right away before anyone noticed my disappearance." Nasr refused, and the two men left. That's when the torture began. He testified that he was beaten with wooden sticks, given electric shocks and hung upside down. He was sometimes shackled to an iron rack, nicknamed "the Bride" and zapped with stun guns.
At other times, Nasr testified, he was tied to a wet mattress on the floor. To prevent him from moving, a guard sat on a wooden chair on top of Nasr's shoulders. Another interrogator would then flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the mattress coils. For most of his four years in prison, Nasr was kept in solitary confinement. He testified that his cell had no toilet and no lights, and "roaches and rats walked across my body."
Nasr spent the first seven months at the Mukhabarat prison. He was then sent to a State Security prison, where he was regularly tortured during interrogations. Throughout this time, Zayyat was trying to confirm that Nasr was in Egyptian custody. "I was looking for him in the prisons where they keep political detainees. But I found nothing," Zayyat said. "I filed requests for information from the courts. Nothing."
A year after Nasr's abduction, Zayyat finally established his presence in Egypt when several Islamists detained in State Security told the lawyer that they had seen Nasr being moved around the prison. "It took one year to confirm that he was here," Zayyat said, shaking his head. "One year! And I still didn't receive any official word."
In March 2004 Zayyat filed a petition at the appeals court in Cairo seeking Nasr's release. The prosecutors filed a response, in which they sought to detain the cleric for "membership in an illegal organization"--usually a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood or Egypt's two violent Islamist groups, Gama'a Islamiya (Islamic Group) or Islamic Jihad. Prosecutors argued that Nasr was active in the Gama'a, which helped assassinate President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and later waged a bloody seven-year campaign to topple the government. But the court did not find the evidence sufficient, and it ordered Nasr's release. When I asked Zayyat if he had a copy of the court's decision, he laughed, saying, "We don't have those kinds of laws in this country."
In April 2004 State Security agents drove Nasr to his family's home in Alexandria. They told him to keep quiet if he wanted to stay out of prison. But Nasr immediately called his wife and friends in Milan and described his abduction in detail. He did not know that Italian prosecutors had tapped the phones at his home and mosque in Milan as part of their investigation into the CIA plot. Those wiretaps provided Italian investigators with their first full account of Nasr's case. When word got back to Egyptian authorities that Nasr was talking, he was arrested again.
"When they brought me back to State Security, they said, 'We warned you not to talk with anyone, but you violated our deal,'" Nasr testified. "'So now we're going to keep you.'"
During this second imprisonment, Nasr was held under Egypt's emergency laws--imposed by President Hosni Mubarak soon after Sadat's assassination and never rescinded--which allow authorities to hold anyone without charge for thirty days. But the police and intelligence agencies can renew the thirty-day period with little effort, turning it into indefinite detention. Nasr testified that he wasn't tortured as badly during his second stint, but he was again placed in solitary. Despairing and worried that he would never be released, he twice tried to commit suicide.
When Zayyat learned that his client was arrested again, he began filing monthly petitions for his release. "Every time the thirty-day period would expire, I would submit another petition," he said. "It would say, This person is being held without charge, and there's nothing to justify his detention." In the end, it was one of these procedural petitions--and, undoubtedly, the growing international scandal--that won Nasr's release.
On February 22 Nasr appeared unexpectedly at the trial of an Egyptian blogger in Alexandria [see Negar Azimi, "Bloggers Against Torture," February 19]. In front of the TV cameras, he pulled back his sleeves to show evidence of the torture he'd endured: scars on his wrists and ankles. He said there were more scars on his stomach and other parts of his body that he was too embarrassed to show. "I don't want any more trouble with anyone," he said. "My body cannot bear any more prison and torture." When journalists asked him for more details, he walked away, saying he feared going back to prison.
Veiled Intolerance
Richard Wolin
posted March 22, 2007 (April 9, 2007 issue)
thenation.com
Here are some scenes, culled from recent headlines, of a continent--"Eurabia"--seemingly on the brink:
§ A Berlin opera company abruptly cancels the performance of Mozart's Idomeneo--whose anticlerical finale features the bloody, severed heads of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad--for fear of provoking a violent response on the part of Muslims in Germany, who number some 3.3 million. Undoubtedly, in the back of the director's mind was: (1) the global rioting spurred by the Danish cartoon controversy, which featured demeaning images of the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist; (2) the detection last summer of undetonated terrorist bombs aboard the beloved Deutsche Bahn, or German railway system. Ultimately, the decision to cancel Idomeneo was rescinded and the opera was performed in December, without a hitch.
§ In a recent speech, Pope Benedict XVI approvingly quotes a fourteenth- century Byzantine emperor's bellicose claim: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Underlying the Pope's prejudicial characterization of Islam are his fears concerning ongoing negotiations over Turkey's admission to the European Union--an outcome that would result in an influx of some 70 million additional Muslims, thereby, in his view, challenging Europe's "Christian character." To his credit, the Pontiff modified his position on Turkey's admission to the EU during a November visit to Ankara, amid massive anti-Vatican protests.
§ In October Ekin Deligöz, a woman delegate to the German Bundestag, receives death threats for suggesting that Muslim immigrants remove their head scarves in order to "enter the historical present."
§ Robert Redeker, a high school philosophy teacher from Toulouse, publishes an incendiary article in the conservative French daily Le Figaro comparing Islam unfavorably with Christianity and Judaism ("Jesus is a master of love; Muhammad is a master of hatred"). Redeker is denounced by the Al Jazeera television network. Islamic groups post his photo, telephone number and home address on the Internet. Shortly thereafter, he must go into hiding in order to avoid numerous death threats.
§ British House of Commons leader Jack Straw admonishes Muslim women sporting the niqab, or full-face veil, for promoting social separatism. This stance is publicly endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who argued the niqab should be abandoned insofar as it constitutes a "mark of separation" and thus inhibits sociability. More important, Straw's and Blair's criticisms suggest that Britain and other European nations are re-examining their commitment to multiculturalism in the wake of fears concerning the rise of "Islamism": the idea that Islamic precepts should trump the rule of law and Western secularism.
Of course, underlying these European anxieties are the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid (191 deaths), the 2005 London Underground bombings (fifty-five deaths) and the September 11 attacks. The intemperate and overheated reactions to these events, however, indicate that it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to have a reasonable and fair-minded discussion about Islam and the West. Instead, in the Western mind, "Islam" has become inextricably associated with "Islamic fundamentalism": the attempt to subject all spheres of life to the theological precepts and strictures of the Koran.
Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of "Europe and Islam" immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany's Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.
The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua non observant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying. In Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, describes a discussion concerning the permutations of immigrant identity in which one woman avows, tongue-in-cheek: "We always mix up categories, so now I can be a française d'origine algérienne musulmane non-pratiquante"--a nonpracticing French Muslim of Algerian descent.
There are also prodigious generational differences among Europe's Muslims. As a rule, Islamism's greatest appeal is among second- or third- generation "immigrants": maladapted youth whom the integration process has failed and who feel desperately torn between two worlds--their parents' country of origin, which many have never seen, and their adoptive European homeland. Sadly, psychologists have shown that, whereas depression is prominent among first-generation immigrants who experience adaptational difficulties, schizophrenia predominates among mal adjusted second-generation migrants. Such youth turn to Islamism in order to resolve what is often a severe and protracted identity crisis. Given the prevailing logic of social exclusion, it is little wonder that Europe's immigrant ghetto communities are concentrated in dismal neighborhoods characterized by high unemployment, poverty and criminality. Under these circumstances, fundamentalist Islam provides "existential meaning," a sense of belonging as well as an astringent critique of Western mores, which are often perceived as "corrupt" and "materialistic"-- a critique that resonates profoundly with the immigrants' own severe adaptational disappointments and failures.
These facts strongly suggest that converts to Islamic fundamentalism are made and not born. In most cases, Islamism is a conscious choice embraced by frustrated second-generation immigrants who feel they are growing up in an ethnic and cultural no man's land. In French Hospitality (1984), Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer based in Paris, accurately describes them as "a generation doomed to cultural orphanhood and ontological fragility." Thus, Islam and Islamism are two different things--a point that "clash of civilization" theorists like Samuel Huntington have failed to register. (In a recent book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Huntington goes so far as to characterize Muslim immigrants as an "indigestible" minority.)
Thus the rise of Islamism in Europe has very little to do with the intrinsic nature of Islam as a religion and everything to do with the failures of integration and Muslim immigrants' sense of de-territorialization. As Olivier Roy comments in his foreword to Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse's Integrating Islam: "All serious studies of the formation of terrorism in Europe show that the process is more likely to be the result of alienation, isolation and generational crisis." This conclusion distinctly belies the claims of scaremongering jeremiads like Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and French author Emmanuel Brenner's The Lost Territories of the Republic, which misleadingly contend that, à la Bernard Lewis, Europe is undergoing a process of "reverse colonization." The implication is that in twenty years' time, Europe as we have known it will cease to exist; it will have instead become "Eurabia."
Official government policy toward Muslim immigrants has also differed vastly from nation to nation. Britain (1 million to 2 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 60 million) and Holland (1 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 16 million) have for the most part embraced a flexible, multicultural approach. Instead of assimilating, immigrants have been encouraged to maintain their time-honored, traditional religious and cultural orientations. In many instances, the state has actively nurtured such allegiances, practically, financially and rhetorically. As visitors to these countries well know, nightly newscasts might readily be confused with ad spots for the United Colors of Benetton.
Following the November 2004 murder of filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh--who was fond of referring to Muslims as "goat fuckers"--by a Moroccan Dutchman with Islamist leanings, Dutch patience with multiculturalism, already strained in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, seems to have reached a tipping point. In 1999 immigrants made up 45 percent of Amsterdam's population. Projections suggest that the percentage will increase to 52 percent by 2015. The authors of When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands deem the Dutch multicultural experiment to be a grand and unequivocal failure. In their view, multiculturalism and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Their argument is a relatively simple one: By encouraging "difference" among ethnic subgroups, multiculturalism ends up turning these groups into targets of resentment and thereby insuring their rejection by the majority culture. As the authors remark in mock astonishment: "No one anticipated that liberal values would be used to legitimize illiberal practices. But so they have. What other reaction could the majority have but to reject Muslim immigrants? What other conclusion could they draw but to oppose cultural pluralism and to press for assimilation?"
Yet behind such claims lies an additional, unsupported insinuation or suspicion: that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible. As others have noted, this perspective, rather than encouraging tolerance and openness among citizens, ends up blaming the victims and pandering to majority prejudice. Moreover, it conveniently overlooks the many highly successful instances of European Muslim integration. In France, for example, it has become fashionable to speak of the rise of a successful and prosperous beurgoisie French slang for second- generation North African immigrants.)
A similar disillusionment with multiculturalism suffused Britain after the July 2005 London Underground attacks. Yet, far from being a one-way street, the spiral of mistrust and suspicion has been mutual. The flip side of heightened European Islamophobia is that Muslim immigrants increasingly feel subject to the hurt and injustices of harassment and discrimination. As a Moroccan immigrant writer recently quipped: "When Samia wants to rent a studio apartment that has been advertised in Paris, she finds upon giving her name that the apartment has been unavailable since September 11." In Murder in Amsterdam, his recent book on the death of Theo van Gogh, Ian Buruma interviews a gifted Muslim law student who, with admirable concision, explains: "Before [September 11], I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim."
France is another case entirely. In keeping with the precepts of "Republicanism," it has followed a rigorously assimilationist approach--a color-blind, one-size-fits-all, "immigrants into Frenchmen" model of citizenship. The Hexagon experienced a foretaste of future difficulties during an October 2001 "friendly" soccer match between the French and Algerian national teams intended to promote interethnic solidarity. The match was staged at the Stade de France in Paris, the scene of France's brilliant 1998 World Cup triumph. Expectations were high. The black-beur-blanc French squad, which prominently featured Africans and Arabs (notably captain Zinedine Zidane), was a walking advertisement for multiculturalism. But with France leading 4 to 1 in the second half, things fell apart. Frustrated beur fans suddenly mobbed the pitch, and the match had to be discontinued.
According to the best available estimates, there are 5 million to 6 million Muslims in France out of a total population of 60 million. French republican ideology is so studiously tone-deaf to considerations of "difference" that the law forbids the statistical tracking of immigrants according to their ethnic or religious backgrounds. Whereas the rigidly assimilationist approach seemed to work well for an earlier generation of predominantly Eastern European immigrants, the balance sheet vis-à-vis North Africans and their descendants has been decidedly mixed. With the November 2005 riots in the cités, or suburban housing projects--events that gave the lie to the fiction that "there are no ghettos in France"--a point of no return was apparently reached. In the aftermath of the 2005 disturbances, French President Jacques Chirac explicitly instructed state-run television networks to begin featuring more persons of color. Even Interior Minister and presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy, who helped stoke the 2005 eruption with his racist characterization of Muslim youth as racaille, or "scum," has come round to embracing some form of affirmative action as both inevitable and indispensable, given the failings of France's traditional "integrationist" model.
The political and ideological challenges of reconciling republicanism with the demands of diversity are well illustrated by Azouz Begag's fine study, Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance. Begag was France's first minister for equal opportunities. He was also the first person of North African descent to occupy Cabinet-level rank. At one point in his narrative, Begag recounts his experiences as an Algerian growing up in Lyon, where he attended the Ecole Sergent-Blandan. It turns out that the school was named for an officer who, during the 1840s, played a prominent role in the French conquest of Begag's native Algeria. As Begag observes:
The day I learned the story of Sergeant Blandan I felt a strange combination of emotions. To think that he and I had been born in the same town, Lyon! To think that he had probably fought and killed some of my poor, defenseless ancestors in one of the tribes in the Sétif region.... To think that, a century later, I went to a school bearing his name and learned to become French there. It was in that same school that I also had my first experiences of racism.
Since, in France, discrimination against North Africans still abounds--"You kicked us out of Algeria in 1962; you're not going to take over here now" is Begag's apt summary of the prevailing anti- Maghrebian mentality--to redress this situation, Begag sees no alternative but to encourage, comme les Américains, some minimal form of multiculturalism. He gazes admiringly across the Atlantic at the "melting pot" model in America, where, unlike in France, the idea of hyphenated identities has gained broad public acceptance. Begag speaks glowingly--and perhaps naïvely--of his experiences as a visiting professor at Cornell University during the 1980s: "I have been fascinated by the pragmatic way in which different ethnic groups have been mixed together in that enormous country. I was struck the most by what I saw on television. Journalists of every color under the sun held front-rank positions in prime-time slots."
Begag is understandably frustrated with the snail-like pace of upward social mobility among France's North African immigrants, which in his view reveals the bankruptcy of the republican- assimilationist model. As he observes: "I am...disappointed personally by the extraordinary slowness of the system during an entire generation in responding to the urgent demands of young ethnics for proper social recognition." Yet, on the whole, and despite his coveting of cultural diversity à l'Amérique, Begag's remedies and proposals are quite timorous. In his view, measures bearing any resemblance to American-style affirmative action--what the French disparagingly refer to as la discrimination positive--are unacceptable, insofar as they remain irreconcilable with republican values. In Begag's view, French occupational life must come closer to being a genuine meritocracy, thereby harking back to the French revolutionary--and quintessentially republican--battle cry of "careers open to talent."
Begag's "equal opportunities" approach stresses the need to overcome racism and prejudice by insuring that qualified minority applicants gain access to the employment prospects from which, historically, they have been systematically excluded. But in what ways would this "occupational" approach effectively cut through the thick tangle of existing prejudice? And how, exactly, might Begag's "equal opportunities" desideratum be achieved in lieu of more active methods and approaches? On this matter, France's first minister for equal opportunities is strangely reticent: a good indication of just how difficult it remains--even for those with good intentions--to surmount those aspects of the republican tradition that remain irreconcilable with the realities of contemporary cultural diversity.
Three years ago, eyebrows were raised when, following a voluble public debate, France passed a draconian law banning the foulard, or Islamic head scarf, from public schools. The issue first arose during the late 1980s, following a series of Middle East-related terrorist attacks in Paris and the fallout over the Salman Rushdie affair (Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator was stabbed and his Norwegian publisher was brutally assaulted). Among the leading advocates of the ban were French feminists, who were concerned about Islam's repressive effects on girls. Confusing Islam and Islamism--and apparently oblivious to how their rhetoric might sound in some Muslim ears--women's rights advocates confidently decreed that the foulard was a sign of women's submission as well as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism.
But clearly, to sport the foulard in Bobigny, France, means something qualitatively different from wearing it in the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran or contemporary Saudi Arabia. In the French case, it bespeaks a conscious attempt on the part of second-generation "immigrant" girls to reconnect with an otherwise fragmentary religious heritage. In certain instances, it may indeed connote female servility, as Muslim feminist opponents of the foulard have argued. But many Muslim girls view the head scarf as a source of empowerment: a public profession of faith that provides their lives with an indispensable source of meaning and purpose. As John Bowen shows in his excellent book, sociological surveys have confirmed that "young women [choose] to adopt Islamic dress, including the headscarf, as part of efforts to negotiate a sphere of social freedom and authority and to construct an identity as a Muslim, and that the relative weight of these two reasons depended on their age and social situation."
The other major group to vigorously oppose the head scarf was committed republicans: a formidable alliance of socialists and left-leaning intellectuals. In their overwrought view, to allow the foulard in French public schools would represent the "Munich of the Republican school"--an ignominious surrender to the forces of ignorance and superstition. One of the signal achievements of French republicanism was the 1905 law establishing the rudiments of laïcité: delineating firm lines of separation between church and state but also insuring that, unlike in the ancien régime, public education would remain firmly in the hands of state officials. It was only at this point that French secularists definitively won a battle that had begun approximately 110 years earlier, with the July 12, 1790, Civil Constitution of the Clergy--the law that required clerics to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution.
In order to understand the often baffling complexities of the foulard affair, one must appreciate French republicanism's longstanding aversion to the idea of groups or associations trespassing on the sacrosanct terrain of state authority. From an orthodox republican standpoint, laicization's triumph was the result of a bitter and protracted Hundred Years' War against ecclesiastical backwardness. Republicanism's defenders were not about to cede to Muslim immigrants hard-won gains that had been made over the course of a century-long struggle against Catholicism. Nor was it by chance that the conflict over the public face of Islam erupted in that traditional republican bastion, the école, or public school system. For during the heyday of the Third Republic, it was the école that was charged with the herculean task of politically integrating France's culturally and linguistically diverse regions: turning an assortment of unruly provincials (Bretons, Languedocians, Basques and Corsicans) into loyal and committed "citizens of the Republic." French republicans proudly distinguish their étatiste conception of citizenship, which guarantees a neutral public space, from the atomistic Anglo-Saxon model, where the individual is the primary bearer of rights. As political philosopher Blandine Kriegel, head of Chirac's High Council on Integration, confidently asserts: "The public school is part of the public because it is where civic education takes place. And so is public administration. There will never be Sikh civil servants in France!"
Opponents of the head-scarf proscription aptly pointed out that if the overall goal was to facilitate Muslim integration, the ban would be radically counterproductive. For the penalty, expulsion, would merely result in the exclusion of Muslim girls from the public school system, that crucible of republican socialization. Thus, in the eyes of many, the ban seemed to be a classic instance of a cure that was worse than the disease. Fortunately, by the mid-1990s, the conflict over the foulard seemed to have been successfully defused via the tactful negotiation of individual cases at the local level. Why, then, in 2003 did the Chirac government decide to revisit the entire vexed and contentious issue? The decision seems especially baffling in light of the fact that, according to French government statistics, of an estimated 250,000 Muslim schoolgirls, a mere 1,200 wore the foulard with any regularity. Under the circumstances, why not leave well enough alone?
Clearly, one of the reasons had to do with anti-immigrant candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's stunning showing in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, when, by edging out the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, he acceded to the second round against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. The mainstream political parties--especially Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement, which stood to lose the most--were determined not to leave the hot-button issue of Muslim integration to right-wingers like Le Pen. By resuscitating the foulard affair and flaunting a zero-tolerance approach vis-à-vis Islam, center-right politicians like Chirac and Sarkozy sought to exploit the issue for political gain. But was Islam really the issue, or did it merely happen to be the religious credo of France's largest immigrant group--a prospect that casts the head-scarf controversy in an entirely different light?
In fact, when viewed from a distance, it appears that the foulard affair has much less to do with Muslim integration than questions of French identity--an identity that, in recent years, has found itself markedly under siege. Among convinced republicans, drawing a line in the sand over the head scarf was a way of preserving Frenchness in an era when what it meant to be French had been exposed to a variety of threatening, centrifugal political chal lenges. In recent years France has, with varying degrees of success, attempted to fend off threats to national sovereignty from the European Union (hence the resounding no vote in the May 2005 referendum on the European Constitution) as well as the forces of globalization. Having to stand by helplessly in 2002-03 as America began recklessly funneling troops into the Middle East--a former French sphere of influence--seemed another cruel reminder of a once proud nation-state's geopolitical inconsequence. Moreover, the humiliating military defeats France endured in the era of decolonization--Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Algeria (1954-62)--have left permanent discernible scars on the national psyche. Thus, over the last several decades, the French state has seen its room for maneuver drastically curtailed in the realm of both foreign and domestic affairs.
Advocates of laicization thought that reviving the foulard controversy would allow them to engage in a last-ditch, rear-guard action to preserve the contours of French republicanism. Unfortunately, the thought that success might come at the cost of further alienating several million Muslims crossed their minds only after the fact--if at all.
To be fair, the relationship between the Western world and modern Islam is incredibly complex. While America is currently the leader in fostering this antagonistic relationship, few Western countries have actually demonstrated a willingness to accept Islam into their societies.
The CIA's Italian Job
Mohamad Bazzi
posted March 22, 2007 (April 9, 2007 issue)
thenation.com
Cairo
From her third-floor balcony, the Egyptian woman saw the whole thing: a group of CIA and Italian agents snatching the imam of her local mosque off a Milan street, stuffing him into a white van and driving off. It was February 17, 2003, and Hassan Osama Nasr was walking to the mosque for noon prayers. He was stopped by a man waving a badge and shouting, "Police!" In perfect Italian, the man demanded Nasr's ID, wallet and cellphone. Then two men came up from behind Nasr, grabbed his arms and forced him into the van. It all took about three minutes.
But the agents didn't know that someone had seen the abduction. The woman called the mosque, and word spread among worshipers. By evening, the mosque's leaders suspected that Nasr--a cleric known as Abu Omar who had fled Egypt in 1990--would be sent back to his homeland. They phoned Montasser al-Zayyat, a prominent lawyer in Cairo who has spent his career defending Islamic militants. "The plan was that no one would see him being kidnapped and he would disappear," Zayyat said in an interview at his office. "But that Egyptian woman who happened to be standing on her balcony saved him."
Nasr, 44, is now at the center of the most politically explosive case involving the CIA practice of "extraordinary rendition," in which a suspected militant is secretly abducted and taken to another country for interrogation and, usually, torture. After years of denial, the Bush Administration now acknowledges using the extra-judicial tactic but insists that it does not sanction the torture of suspects.
In February an Italian judge indicted twenty-six Americans--a US Air Force colonel and twenty-five suspected CIA operatives, including the former Rome station chief and former Milan sub-station chief--for their role in the months-long plot to abduct Nasr. Although none of the suspects are in custody, the trial is set to begin June 8, and it has already become an embarrassment for the Bush Administration and the Italian government.
The public relations disaster may have saved others from abduction and torture. "I suspect that Abu Omar's case has slowed down the policy of renditions," said John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch. "It was an incredible embarrassment for the CIA. Undoubtedly, it made them think twice about other abductions."
But the star witness, Nasr, might not be able to testify in Italy. He was released from an Egyptian prison in February, but his lawyer says he is not allowed to leave the country or to make any public statements. "The Egyptian authorities warned him that if he speaks about the case, he will be sent back to prison," said Zayyat. (Egyptian officials had made good on an earlier threat to throw Nasr back in prison: After being released in April 2004, he was arrested twenty days later when the secret police learned that he had been discussing his abduction.)
American and Egyptian officials have refused to comment on the case. Egypt has even refused to confirm or deny that it had Nasr in custody. But a Cairo appeals court ordered his release after he'd been held in prison for four years without charge. And now Egypt, the second- largest recipient of US foreign aid after Israel, is trying to save its benefactor from further embarrassment by preventing Nasr from testifying in Italy. "The Americans want this case to go away," Zayyat said. "They don't want Abu Omar to publicly describe what happened to him."
It's hard to believe that the CIA didn't know what would happen to Nasr. "Egypt's intelligence services are infamous for using torture," said Sifton. "The Americans knew that by sending him to Egypt, he would be tortured," Zayyat said. "They wanted someone to do this dirty work for them."
The trial is likely to reveal new details about the CIA's covert operations and the complicity of Italian intelligence services, and to cast a harsh light on the Bush Administration's dealings with its European allies. Nasr's lawyer plans to travel to Italy for the trial and to file a lawsuit against the US and Italian governments, seeking $13 million in damages. Zayyat also plans to file a separate lawsuit against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, alleging that he personally approved the abduction. Berlusconi has denied having prior knowledge of the plan.
Nasr entered Italy illegally in 1997 and was granted political asylum four years later. He had fled Egypt after being imprisoned twice in the late 1980s for antigovernment sermons at a mosque in Alexandria. Although he has not been charged with a crime in Italy, he was under investigation for allegedly recruiting Muslim men to fight in Iraq. Italian officials have said they were about to detain him for questioning when the CIA abducted him.
"Abu Omar is prepared to go to Italy, even if he's going to be tried and imprisoned," Zayyat said. "He's convinced of his innocence, and he's confident in the Italian judiciary."
The lead Italian prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said after the indictments were handed down that he wants Nasr to testify against the American agents, but Egypt has never responded to an Italian request for access to the cleric. "Obviously it would be useful to hear what he has to say," Spataro said. "If he is banned from leaving [Egypt], there's nothing we can do."
In April 2006 Nasr appeared in an Egyptian court for the first time and gave a detailed, two-hour account of his experience. Zayyat said Egyptian officials have refused to give him or Italian prosecutors a transcript of that session. But Zayyat provided The Nation with four pages of handwritten notes he took during his client's testimony. Nasr told the court that shortly after his abduction, US and Italian agents put a black hood over his head and "punched me in the stomach and all over my body." He was driven to Aviano Air Base, a joint US-Italian installation, where he boarded a small plane for a flight that lasted an hour and a half. As Nasr tried to resist, the beatings continued on the plane. "I was bewildered," he told the court. "I didn't understand what was happening around me."
At a US base in Germany, Nasr was led into a "large, cold room." His hands were untied and the hood was taken off. He saw a group of fifteen to twenty men all wearing masks and Special Forces uniforms. The men wrapped his entire head and face with duct tape and cut holes over his nose and mouth so he could breathe. He was stripped of his clothes and dressed in a jumpsuit, and his arms and legs were shackled. He was then hustled onto another plane. By that point, Nasr had stopped resisting--and the beating had ended. "I had given up," he said. "I was resigned to my fate."
After the plane landed at Cairo airport on February 18, 2003, a guard on the tarmac told Nasr, "You have arrived in Egypt, Abu Omar." Still blindfolded and shackled, he was stuffed into another van and driven to the Mukhabarat (secret police) headquarters outside Cairo. Guards removed the duct tape from his head and face, allowing his hair and beard to take their form. He was escorted into a room by an Egyptian security official who told him that "two pashas" wanted to speak with him.
Nasr testified that he recognized one of the men as Egypt's interior minister. The other man appeared to be an American. "Only the Egyptian spoke," Nasr said. "He offered me to become an informant. If I accepted, he said, I would be returned to Italy right away before anyone noticed my disappearance." Nasr refused, and the two men left. That's when the torture began. He testified that he was beaten with wooden sticks, given electric shocks and hung upside down. He was sometimes shackled to an iron rack, nicknamed "the Bride" and zapped with stun guns.
At other times, Nasr testified, he was tied to a wet mattress on the floor. To prevent him from moving, a guard sat on a wooden chair on top of Nasr's shoulders. Another interrogator would then flip a switch, sending jolts of electricity into the mattress coils. For most of his four years in prison, Nasr was kept in solitary confinement. He testified that his cell had no toilet and no lights, and "roaches and rats walked across my body."
Nasr spent the first seven months at the Mukhabarat prison. He was then sent to a State Security prison, where he was regularly tortured during interrogations. Throughout this time, Zayyat was trying to confirm that Nasr was in Egyptian custody. "I was looking for him in the prisons where they keep political detainees. But I found nothing," Zayyat said. "I filed requests for information from the courts. Nothing."
A year after Nasr's abduction, Zayyat finally established his presence in Egypt when several Islamists detained in State Security told the lawyer that they had seen Nasr being moved around the prison. "It took one year to confirm that he was here," Zayyat said, shaking his head. "One year! And I still didn't receive any official word."
In March 2004 Zayyat filed a petition at the appeals court in Cairo seeking Nasr's release. The prosecutors filed a response, in which they sought to detain the cleric for "membership in an illegal organization"--usually a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood or Egypt's two violent Islamist groups, Gama'a Islamiya (Islamic Group) or Islamic Jihad. Prosecutors argued that Nasr was active in the Gama'a, which helped assassinate President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and later waged a bloody seven-year campaign to topple the government. But the court did not find the evidence sufficient, and it ordered Nasr's release. When I asked Zayyat if he had a copy of the court's decision, he laughed, saying, "We don't have those kinds of laws in this country."
In April 2004 State Security agents drove Nasr to his family's home in Alexandria. They told him to keep quiet if he wanted to stay out of prison. But Nasr immediately called his wife and friends in Milan and described his abduction in detail. He did not know that Italian prosecutors had tapped the phones at his home and mosque in Milan as part of their investigation into the CIA plot. Those wiretaps provided Italian investigators with their first full account of Nasr's case. When word got back to Egyptian authorities that Nasr was talking, he was arrested again.
"When they brought me back to State Security, they said, 'We warned you not to talk with anyone, but you violated our deal,'" Nasr testified. "'So now we're going to keep you.'"
During this second imprisonment, Nasr was held under Egypt's emergency laws--imposed by President Hosni Mubarak soon after Sadat's assassination and never rescinded--which allow authorities to hold anyone without charge for thirty days. But the police and intelligence agencies can renew the thirty-day period with little effort, turning it into indefinite detention. Nasr testified that he wasn't tortured as badly during his second stint, but he was again placed in solitary. Despairing and worried that he would never be released, he twice tried to commit suicide.
When Zayyat learned that his client was arrested again, he began filing monthly petitions for his release. "Every time the thirty-day period would expire, I would submit another petition," he said. "It would say, This person is being held without charge, and there's nothing to justify his detention." In the end, it was one of these procedural petitions--and, undoubtedly, the growing international scandal--that won Nasr's release.
On February 22 Nasr appeared unexpectedly at the trial of an Egyptian blogger in Alexandria [see Negar Azimi, "Bloggers Against Torture," February 19]. In front of the TV cameras, he pulled back his sleeves to show evidence of the torture he'd endured: scars on his wrists and ankles. He said there were more scars on his stomach and other parts of his body that he was too embarrassed to show. "I don't want any more trouble with anyone," he said. "My body cannot bear any more prison and torture." When journalists asked him for more details, he walked away, saying he feared going back to prison.
Veiled Intolerance
Richard Wolin
posted March 22, 2007 (April 9, 2007 issue)
thenation.com
Here are some scenes, culled from recent headlines, of a continent--"Eurabia"--seemingly on the brink:
§ A Berlin opera company abruptly cancels the performance of Mozart's Idomeneo--whose anticlerical finale features the bloody, severed heads of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad--for fear of provoking a violent response on the part of Muslims in Germany, who number some 3.3 million. Undoubtedly, in the back of the director's mind was: (1) the global rioting spurred by the Danish cartoon controversy, which featured demeaning images of the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist; (2) the detection last summer of undetonated terrorist bombs aboard the beloved Deutsche Bahn, or German railway system. Ultimately, the decision to cancel Idomeneo was rescinded and the opera was performed in December, without a hitch.
§ In a recent speech, Pope Benedict XVI approvingly quotes a fourteenth- century Byzantine emperor's bellicose claim: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Underlying the Pope's prejudicial characterization of Islam are his fears concerning ongoing negotiations over Turkey's admission to the European Union--an outcome that would result in an influx of some 70 million additional Muslims, thereby, in his view, challenging Europe's "Christian character." To his credit, the Pontiff modified his position on Turkey's admission to the EU during a November visit to Ankara, amid massive anti-Vatican protests.
§ In October Ekin Deligöz, a woman delegate to the German Bundestag, receives death threats for suggesting that Muslim immigrants remove their head scarves in order to "enter the historical present."
§ Robert Redeker, a high school philosophy teacher from Toulouse, publishes an incendiary article in the conservative French daily Le Figaro comparing Islam unfavorably with Christianity and Judaism ("Jesus is a master of love; Muhammad is a master of hatred"). Redeker is denounced by the Al Jazeera television network. Islamic groups post his photo, telephone number and home address on the Internet. Shortly thereafter, he must go into hiding in order to avoid numerous death threats.
§ British House of Commons leader Jack Straw admonishes Muslim women sporting the niqab, or full-face veil, for promoting social separatism. This stance is publicly endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who argued the niqab should be abandoned insofar as it constitutes a "mark of separation" and thus inhibits sociability. More important, Straw's and Blair's criticisms suggest that Britain and other European nations are re-examining their commitment to multiculturalism in the wake of fears concerning the rise of "Islamism": the idea that Islamic precepts should trump the rule of law and Western secularism.
Of course, underlying these European anxieties are the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid (191 deaths), the 2005 London Underground bombings (fifty-five deaths) and the September 11 attacks. The intemperate and overheated reactions to these events, however, indicate that it is increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to have a reasonable and fair-minded discussion about Islam and the West. Instead, in the Western mind, "Islam" has become inextricably associated with "Islamic fundamentalism": the attempt to subject all spheres of life to the theological precepts and strictures of the Koran.
Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of "Europe and Islam" immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany's Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.
The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua non observant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying. In Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, describes a discussion concerning the permutations of immigrant identity in which one woman avows, tongue-in-cheek: "We always mix up categories, so now I can be a française d'origine algérienne musulmane non-pratiquante"--a nonpracticing French Muslim of Algerian descent.
There are also prodigious generational differences among Europe's Muslims. As a rule, Islamism's greatest appeal is among second- or third- generation "immigrants": maladapted youth whom the integration process has failed and who feel desperately torn between two worlds--their parents' country of origin, which many have never seen, and their adoptive European homeland. Sadly, psychologists have shown that, whereas depression is prominent among first-generation immigrants who experience adaptational difficulties, schizophrenia predominates among mal adjusted second-generation migrants. Such youth turn to Islamism in order to resolve what is often a severe and protracted identity crisis. Given the prevailing logic of social exclusion, it is little wonder that Europe's immigrant ghetto communities are concentrated in dismal neighborhoods characterized by high unemployment, poverty and criminality. Under these circumstances, fundamentalist Islam provides "existential meaning," a sense of belonging as well as an astringent critique of Western mores, which are often perceived as "corrupt" and "materialistic"-- a critique that resonates profoundly with the immigrants' own severe adaptational disappointments and failures.
These facts strongly suggest that converts to Islamic fundamentalism are made and not born. In most cases, Islamism is a conscious choice embraced by frustrated second-generation immigrants who feel they are growing up in an ethnic and cultural no man's land. In French Hospitality (1984), Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer based in Paris, accurately describes them as "a generation doomed to cultural orphanhood and ontological fragility." Thus, Islam and Islamism are two different things--a point that "clash of civilization" theorists like Samuel Huntington have failed to register. (In a recent book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Huntington goes so far as to characterize Muslim immigrants as an "indigestible" minority.)
Thus the rise of Islamism in Europe has very little to do with the intrinsic nature of Islam as a religion and everything to do with the failures of integration and Muslim immigrants' sense of de-territorialization. As Olivier Roy comments in his foreword to Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse's Integrating Islam: "All serious studies of the formation of terrorism in Europe show that the process is more likely to be the result of alienation, isolation and generational crisis." This conclusion distinctly belies the claims of scaremongering jeremiads like Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and French author Emmanuel Brenner's The Lost Territories of the Republic, which misleadingly contend that, à la Bernard Lewis, Europe is undergoing a process of "reverse colonization." The implication is that in twenty years' time, Europe as we have known it will cease to exist; it will have instead become "Eurabia."
Official government policy toward Muslim immigrants has also differed vastly from nation to nation. Britain (1 million to 2 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 60 million) and Holland (1 million Muslim immigrants out of a total population of 16 million) have for the most part embraced a flexible, multicultural approach. Instead of assimilating, immigrants have been encouraged to maintain their time-honored, traditional religious and cultural orientations. In many instances, the state has actively nurtured such allegiances, practically, financially and rhetorically. As visitors to these countries well know, nightly newscasts might readily be confused with ad spots for the United Colors of Benetton.
Following the November 2004 murder of filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh--who was fond of referring to Muslims as "goat fuckers"--by a Moroccan Dutchman with Islamist leanings, Dutch patience with multiculturalism, already strained in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, seems to have reached a tipping point. In 1999 immigrants made up 45 percent of Amsterdam's population. Projections suggest that the percentage will increase to 52 percent by 2015. The authors of When Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands deem the Dutch multicultural experiment to be a grand and unequivocal failure. In their view, multiculturalism and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Their argument is a relatively simple one: By encouraging "difference" among ethnic subgroups, multiculturalism ends up turning these groups into targets of resentment and thereby insuring their rejection by the majority culture. As the authors remark in mock astonishment: "No one anticipated that liberal values would be used to legitimize illiberal practices. But so they have. What other reaction could the majority have but to reject Muslim immigrants? What other conclusion could they draw but to oppose cultural pluralism and to press for assimilation?"
Yet behind such claims lies an additional, unsupported insinuation or suspicion: that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible. As others have noted, this perspective, rather than encouraging tolerance and openness among citizens, ends up blaming the victims and pandering to majority prejudice. Moreover, it conveniently overlooks the many highly successful instances of European Muslim integration. In France, for example, it has become fashionable to speak of the rise of a successful and prosperous beurgoisie French slang for second- generation North African immigrants.)
A similar disillusionment with multiculturalism suffused Britain after the July 2005 London Underground attacks. Yet, far from being a one-way street, the spiral of mistrust and suspicion has been mutual. The flip side of heightened European Islamophobia is that Muslim immigrants increasingly feel subject to the hurt and injustices of harassment and discrimination. As a Moroccan immigrant writer recently quipped: "When Samia wants to rent a studio apartment that has been advertised in Paris, she finds upon giving her name that the apartment has been unavailable since September 11." In Murder in Amsterdam, his recent book on the death of Theo van Gogh, Ian Buruma interviews a gifted Muslim law student who, with admirable concision, explains: "Before [September 11], I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim."
France is another case entirely. In keeping with the precepts of "Republicanism," it has followed a rigorously assimilationist approach--a color-blind, one-size-fits-all, "immigrants into Frenchmen" model of citizenship. The Hexagon experienced a foretaste of future difficulties during an October 2001 "friendly" soccer match between the French and Algerian national teams intended to promote interethnic solidarity. The match was staged at the Stade de France in Paris, the scene of France's brilliant 1998 World Cup triumph. Expectations were high. The black-beur-blanc French squad, which prominently featured Africans and Arabs (notably captain Zinedine Zidane), was a walking advertisement for multiculturalism. But with France leading 4 to 1 in the second half, things fell apart. Frustrated beur fans suddenly mobbed the pitch, and the match had to be discontinued.
According to the best available estimates, there are 5 million to 6 million Muslims in France out of a total population of 60 million. French republican ideology is so studiously tone-deaf to considerations of "difference" that the law forbids the statistical tracking of immigrants according to their ethnic or religious backgrounds. Whereas the rigidly assimilationist approach seemed to work well for an earlier generation of predominantly Eastern European immigrants, the balance sheet vis-à-vis North Africans and their descendants has been decidedly mixed. With the November 2005 riots in the cités, or suburban housing projects--events that gave the lie to the fiction that "there are no ghettos in France"--a point of no return was apparently reached. In the aftermath of the 2005 disturbances, French President Jacques Chirac explicitly instructed state-run television networks to begin featuring more persons of color. Even Interior Minister and presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy, who helped stoke the 2005 eruption with his racist characterization of Muslim youth as racaille, or "scum," has come round to embracing some form of affirmative action as both inevitable and indispensable, given the failings of France's traditional "integrationist" model.
The political and ideological challenges of reconciling republicanism with the demands of diversity are well illustrated by Azouz Begag's fine study, Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance. Begag was France's first minister for equal opportunities. He was also the first person of North African descent to occupy Cabinet-level rank. At one point in his narrative, Begag recounts his experiences as an Algerian growing up in Lyon, where he attended the Ecole Sergent-Blandan. It turns out that the school was named for an officer who, during the 1840s, played a prominent role in the French conquest of Begag's native Algeria. As Begag observes:
The day I learned the story of Sergeant Blandan I felt a strange combination of emotions. To think that he and I had been born in the same town, Lyon! To think that he had probably fought and killed some of my poor, defenseless ancestors in one of the tribes in the Sétif region.... To think that, a century later, I went to a school bearing his name and learned to become French there. It was in that same school that I also had my first experiences of racism.
Since, in France, discrimination against North Africans still abounds--"You kicked us out of Algeria in 1962; you're not going to take over here now" is Begag's apt summary of the prevailing anti- Maghrebian mentality--to redress this situation, Begag sees no alternative but to encourage, comme les Américains, some minimal form of multiculturalism. He gazes admiringly across the Atlantic at the "melting pot" model in America, where, unlike in France, the idea of hyphenated identities has gained broad public acceptance. Begag speaks glowingly--and perhaps naïvely--of his experiences as a visiting professor at Cornell University during the 1980s: "I have been fascinated by the pragmatic way in which different ethnic groups have been mixed together in that enormous country. I was struck the most by what I saw on television. Journalists of every color under the sun held front-rank positions in prime-time slots."
Begag is understandably frustrated with the snail-like pace of upward social mobility among France's North African immigrants, which in his view reveals the bankruptcy of the republican- assimilationist model. As he observes: "I am...disappointed personally by the extraordinary slowness of the system during an entire generation in responding to the urgent demands of young ethnics for proper social recognition." Yet, on the whole, and despite his coveting of cultural diversity à l'Amérique, Begag's remedies and proposals are quite timorous. In his view, measures bearing any resemblance to American-style affirmative action--what the French disparagingly refer to as la discrimination positive--are unacceptable, insofar as they remain irreconcilable with republican values. In Begag's view, French occupational life must come closer to being a genuine meritocracy, thereby harking back to the French revolutionary--and quintessentially republican--battle cry of "careers open to talent."
Begag's "equal opportunities" approach stresses the need to overcome racism and prejudice by insuring that qualified minority applicants gain access to the employment prospects from which, historically, they have been systematically excluded. But in what ways would this "occupational" approach effectively cut through the thick tangle of existing prejudice? And how, exactly, might Begag's "equal opportunities" desideratum be achieved in lieu of more active methods and approaches? On this matter, France's first minister for equal opportunities is strangely reticent: a good indication of just how difficult it remains--even for those with good intentions--to surmount those aspects of the republican tradition that remain irreconcilable with the realities of contemporary cultural diversity.
Three years ago, eyebrows were raised when, following a voluble public debate, France passed a draconian law banning the foulard, or Islamic head scarf, from public schools. The issue first arose during the late 1980s, following a series of Middle East-related terrorist attacks in Paris and the fallout over the Salman Rushdie affair (Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator was stabbed and his Norwegian publisher was brutally assaulted). Among the leading advocates of the ban were French feminists, who were concerned about Islam's repressive effects on girls. Confusing Islam and Islamism--and apparently oblivious to how their rhetoric might sound in some Muslim ears--women's rights advocates confidently decreed that the foulard was a sign of women's submission as well as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism.
But clearly, to sport the foulard in Bobigny, France, means something qualitatively different from wearing it in the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran or contemporary Saudi Arabia. In the French case, it bespeaks a conscious attempt on the part of second-generation "immigrant" girls to reconnect with an otherwise fragmentary religious heritage. In certain instances, it may indeed connote female servility, as Muslim feminist opponents of the foulard have argued. But many Muslim girls view the head scarf as a source of empowerment: a public profession of faith that provides their lives with an indispensable source of meaning and purpose. As John Bowen shows in his excellent book, sociological surveys have confirmed that "young women [choose] to adopt Islamic dress, including the headscarf, as part of efforts to negotiate a sphere of social freedom and authority and to construct an identity as a Muslim, and that the relative weight of these two reasons depended on their age and social situation."
The other major group to vigorously oppose the head scarf was committed republicans: a formidable alliance of socialists and left-leaning intellectuals. In their overwrought view, to allow the foulard in French public schools would represent the "Munich of the Republican school"--an ignominious surrender to the forces of ignorance and superstition. One of the signal achievements of French republicanism was the 1905 law establishing the rudiments of laïcité: delineating firm lines of separation between church and state but also insuring that, unlike in the ancien régime, public education would remain firmly in the hands of state officials. It was only at this point that French secularists definitively won a battle that had begun approximately 110 years earlier, with the July 12, 1790, Civil Constitution of the Clergy--the law that required clerics to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution.
In order to understand the often baffling complexities of the foulard affair, one must appreciate French republicanism's longstanding aversion to the idea of groups or associations trespassing on the sacrosanct terrain of state authority. From an orthodox republican standpoint, laicization's triumph was the result of a bitter and protracted Hundred Years' War against ecclesiastical backwardness. Republicanism's defenders were not about to cede to Muslim immigrants hard-won gains that had been made over the course of a century-long struggle against Catholicism. Nor was it by chance that the conflict over the public face of Islam erupted in that traditional republican bastion, the école, or public school system. For during the heyday of the Third Republic, it was the école that was charged with the herculean task of politically integrating France's culturally and linguistically diverse regions: turning an assortment of unruly provincials (Bretons, Languedocians, Basques and Corsicans) into loyal and committed "citizens of the Republic." French republicans proudly distinguish their étatiste conception of citizenship, which guarantees a neutral public space, from the atomistic Anglo-Saxon model, where the individual is the primary bearer of rights. As political philosopher Blandine Kriegel, head of Chirac's High Council on Integration, confidently asserts: "The public school is part of the public because it is where civic education takes place. And so is public administration. There will never be Sikh civil servants in France!"
Opponents of the head-scarf proscription aptly pointed out that if the overall goal was to facilitate Muslim integration, the ban would be radically counterproductive. For the penalty, expulsion, would merely result in the exclusion of Muslim girls from the public school system, that crucible of republican socialization. Thus, in the eyes of many, the ban seemed to be a classic instance of a cure that was worse than the disease. Fortunately, by the mid-1990s, the conflict over the foulard seemed to have been successfully defused via the tactful negotiation of individual cases at the local level. Why, then, in 2003 did the Chirac government decide to revisit the entire vexed and contentious issue? The decision seems especially baffling in light of the fact that, according to French government statistics, of an estimated 250,000 Muslim schoolgirls, a mere 1,200 wore the foulard with any regularity. Under the circumstances, why not leave well enough alone?
Clearly, one of the reasons had to do with anti-immigrant candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen's stunning showing in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, when, by edging out the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, he acceded to the second round against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. The mainstream political parties--especially Chirac's Union for a Popular Movement, which stood to lose the most--were determined not to leave the hot-button issue of Muslim integration to right-wingers like Le Pen. By resuscitating the foulard affair and flaunting a zero-tolerance approach vis-à-vis Islam, center-right politicians like Chirac and Sarkozy sought to exploit the issue for political gain. But was Islam really the issue, or did it merely happen to be the religious credo of France's largest immigrant group--a prospect that casts the head-scarf controversy in an entirely different light?
In fact, when viewed from a distance, it appears that the foulard affair has much less to do with Muslim integration than questions of French identity--an identity that, in recent years, has found itself markedly under siege. Among convinced republicans, drawing a line in the sand over the head scarf was a way of preserving Frenchness in an era when what it meant to be French had been exposed to a variety of threatening, centrifugal political chal lenges. In recent years France has, with varying degrees of success, attempted to fend off threats to national sovereignty from the European Union (hence the resounding no vote in the May 2005 referendum on the European Constitution) as well as the forces of globalization. Having to stand by helplessly in 2002-03 as America began recklessly funneling troops into the Middle East--a former French sphere of influence--seemed another cruel reminder of a once proud nation-state's geopolitical inconsequence. Moreover, the humiliating military defeats France endured in the era of decolonization--Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Algeria (1954-62)--have left permanent discernible scars on the national psyche. Thus, over the last several decades, the French state has seen its room for maneuver drastically curtailed in the realm of both foreign and domestic affairs.
Advocates of laicization thought that reviving the foulard controversy would allow them to engage in a last-ditch, rear-guard action to preserve the contours of French republicanism. Unfortunately, the thought that success might come at the cost of further alienating several million Muslims crossed their minds only after the fact--if at all.
My Candidate
While I generally despise discussing conventional politics (there was actually an article in the Yale Daily News about why I wasn't voting in 2004), I think I've come to a "place in my life" where I can admit a long-kept secret: I have a raging man crush on the unabashedly adorable John Edwards. Look how handsome he is:
Thanks goes to Rush Limbaugh, for summarizing my crush in such succint terms.
I thought he was by far the most interesting candidate in 2004, at least until John Kerry's overwhelming suckiness ruined their campaign altogether. But guess what? John Edwards is again the most interesting presidential candidate, already leading with the most concrete and generally qualitative platform available: get out of Iraq; reform American energy policy; and raise taxes (on the rich) in order to create a universal health care system. These are issues that most Americans can get behind. In fact, this is the kind of ballsy, issues-based, no-nonsense campaign that most political commentators believed that the Democrats can (or more correctly, were incapable of) no longer run on.
And, perhaps even better, the guy has got serious intangibles.
Energy and Substance
Katrina vanden Heuvel
thenation.com
While too much of the media has focused on first-quarter fundraising battles and the sniping between the Obama and Clinton camps, presidential candidate John Edwards took the opportunity to lay out a bold energy plan that addresses some of the great challenges of our time.
As he said in a speech in Iowa, "Our generation must be the one that says, 'we must halt global warming.' Our generation must be the one that says 'yes' to renewable fuels and ends forever our dependence on foreign oil. And our generation must be the one that builds the new energy economy. It won't be easy, but it is time to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war."
Some key aspects of the Edwards Energy Plan include a cap on greenhouse pollution in 2010 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050 – consistent with the dictates of the latest climate science. He would use an economy-wide, cap-and-trade system and sell a portion of the pollution permits to raise $10 billion a year for a New Energy Economy Fund. The Fund would be used to pursue clean, renewable, and efficient energy technologies and create 1 million jobs in the process – along the lines of what the Apollo Alliance has outlined. One billion dollars a year from would go towards helping US automakers meet higher fuel economy requirements and utilize the latest technologies, including biofuels, hybrid and electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells, and ultra-light materials. Finally, Edwards' plan calls for opening the electricity grid so that small-scale renewable electric generation – by farms, factories, schools, and communities – can compete with large, central power plants. (This is something Academy Award winner and pre-Scalia President-elect, Al Gore, touted in hearings on Capitol Hill today. Great to see Gore pushing the Presidential debate without even being a part of the race).
Edwards might be winning the early frontrunner race when it comes to substance over flash – he has been clear and strong on health care, labor rights and now energy. (And so far, among the frontrunners, Edwards and Obama have been clearest about a plan for ending the War in Iraq – though neither of them matches the clarity and courage of Dennis Kucinich, a presidential candidate who should receive more attention from the blogosphere since it isn't coming from the conventional media.)
With the science of global warming now settled for just about everyone who isn't named Sen. James Inhofe, and the costs of a status quo energy policy perfectly clear, speaking out boldly on how to address these challenges should be a prerequisite for any presidential candidate. Good to see John Edwards doing the right thing here.
Better Health Through Politics
Ron Wyden's smart plan.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007, at 4:06 PM ET
slate.com
America's health-care system runs the gamut from capitalism to socialism, stopping at all points between. At the free-market extreme are 10 million people who buy private insurance without any government help and 48 million people with no insurance at all. At the collectivized end are 5 million military veterans who see government doctors in government hospitals, 32 million retirees covered directly by the federal government under Medicare, and 37 million insured by Medicaid. In the middle are the majority, 153 million workers and their families, who get government-subsidized private insurance through their employers.
A growing consensus recognizes this patchwork as economically disadvantageous and morally intolerable. Viewed as a whole, the American system is inefficient, expensive, and possibly unsustainable, consuming 16 percent of GDP and growing at a rate of 6.4 percent a year. European countries manage to provide universal, high-quality care for half as much per capita. Employer-based coverage is a drag on the economy, tethering workers to jobs they would otherwise leave and harming the competitiveness of American manufacturing by adding to the cost of goods. Health-care spending is a budget-wrecker at every level of government. And for all we spend, 16 percent of the population, including 8 million children, must make do at the system's charitable margins.
But if the status quo is untenable, the Euro alternative remains an impossible sell. Americans place a high premium on personal liberty and individual choice in all matters. A single-payer system, in which government insures everyone directly, diminishes consumer freedom for the sake of greater equity and efficiency. Many resist making that trade-off, even where it would serve their interests. As recently as 2000, Oregon, which is either the most—or the second-most, after Vermont—progressive-minded state in the country, defeated a single-payer initiative by a margin of 4-to-1.
The action at the moment is all in the big space between the status quo and single-payer. President Bush started the conversation in his January State of the Union address, in which he proposed capping the tax deductibility of employer-provided plans and creating a new tax deduction for individuals. By turning the health-care tax deduction into a kind of voucher, Bush would discipline spending and allow more individuals to afford insurance. His proposal didn't deserve the scorn heaped on it by leading Democrats. A paper from the liberal Tax Policy Center calls the president's proposal "in some respects … innovative and a step in the right direction." But Bush is thinking too small. His plan risks undermining the current employer-based system without replacing it, and fails to grapple in a serious way with the problem of the uninsured.
John Edwards recently became the only presidential candidate to get specific on the subject, when he laid out a plan bolder than Bush's that would build on the employer-based system. Edwards would require companies that don't insure their workers to pay into a fund for the uninsured. Following the trend in Massachusetts and California, he would add an individual mandate, a requirement that anyone not covered at work buy insurance in a regulated market. The chief advantages of the Edwards plan are that it achieves universal coverage without disrupting the way most Americans now receive health care, and that it's straightforward about raising taxes to pay for extending coverage to the uninsured. Its chief disadvantages are that it would do little to control costs and that it fails to break the anachronistic connection between employers and insurance.
The road goes on for John and Elizabeth
By Walter Shapiro
salon.com
They were words that no one ever wants to say about the person he loves: "When the cancer goes from the breast and shows in the bone, which it's doing now, it's no longer curable. It is completely treatable."
At a remarkable and emotionally raw Thursday afternoon press conference, there was John Edwards -- husband, father and presidential candidate -- putting the best interpretation on the recurrence of his wife Elizabeth's cancer. "Many people in similar circumstances," he said, "have lived many years undergoing treatment."
In a media environment where counterfeit emotion often seems more convincing than genuine sentiment, this turning-point moment in Elizabeth Edwards' life and perhaps the 2008 campaign was the ultimate in reality TV -- and it had the added virtue of being true. During the opening moments of the press conference, it was difficult to watch Elizabeth Edwards as she seemingly fought to maintain her composure. But then her husband began talking about how "we've been married for 30 years" and a brave smile flickered across her face, soon followed by an actual grin.
Edwards said toward the end of the press conference, "Any time, any place I need to be with Elizabeth, I will be there. Period. It doesn't matter what's happening in the campaign." The former North Carolina senator demonstrated that in Iowa on Tuesday where he delivered a major noontime energy speech and was then slated to meet with state legislators and appear at a house party in Indianola. As I watched Edwards mingle with voters after the speech, I noted that his once-boyish face seemed creased with worry and he seemed distracted, even as he talked earnestly about carbon dioxide emissions and ethanol, Iowa's favorite fuel source.
What few knew then was that Elizabeth had already had a troubling X-ray Monday for a broken rib that raised the possibility of a new cancer and that more tests were slated. Immediately after the energy address, Edwards called his wife's doctor and spoke with her for 15 minutes. According to Rob Tully, a former Iowa state Democratic chairman and major Edwards backer, the candidate then called Elizabeth and asked her directly whether she wanted him there for the follow-up appointment. "She said yes," Tully recalled, "and John immediately turned around, without any hesitation, and said, 'Cancel everything for the rest of the day and tomorrow.'"
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is easy to forget that the candidates are human beings, with the normal run of joys and disappointments, rather than automatons powered solely by ambition. But now we are confronted with the grim realities of the intersection of the personal and the political. Edwards' announcement that he would be plowing ahead with his campaign -- appearances and fundraisers are scheduled for Thursday night and Friday morning in New York -- is as much a tribute to Elizabeth's determination as anything else.
She has always been a fervent believer in his destiny. In late 2002, as Edwards was still wavering on a presidential race, Elizabeth told me in an interview that beating George W. Bush was her transcendent cause. "We have to win," she said. "The nation can't afford for us to lose." I can still hear the passion in her voice as she explained how her husband, then a first-term senator from North Carolina, was the Democrat with the best chance to defeat George W. Bush in 2004.
Elizabeth Edwards has never been a conventional political wife, smiling mechanically from the sidelines, but she also has never seen herself in messianic terms as the second coming of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her directness, her openness and her disarming candor have been one of the campaign's strongest assets. During the 2004 primary season, she virtually single-handedly snagged the endorsement of influential New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D'Allesandro. And as she explains in her 2006 book, "Saving Graces," she was an early convert to the power of the Internet, since she found comfort in online support groups after the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade, in a 1996 auto crash. As a result, this 57-year-old former graduate student in English turned bankruptcy lawyer, who listens to C-SPAN in her car, has become one of the greatest boosters of the bloggers in any 2008 presidential campaign.
Yet in the stiff-upper-lip annals of presidential campaigns, there have been few more wrenching examples of stoicism under fire than how she handled the discovery that she had breast cancer in the closing days of the 2004 race. Rather than calling off her campaign appearances, she snuck in a visit to her hometown doctor during a stop in Raleigh and scheduled the biopsy for the day after the election in Boston, the site of the planned Democratic celebration. She writes in "Saving Graces" about the moment when the realities of cancer and political defeat came together: "As I walked to my room, I wiped away my tears. There would be plenty of times in the days and months to come when I would need John; now it was his time to need me, and I couldn't be in tears."
Even though she was pronounced cancer-free after a grueling bout of treatment in 2005, she never has exuded the false bravado that the disease had been permanently vanquished. Rather, her view has been that what comes her and her husband's way can be handled, because after the death of a child, life has no terrors. In an interview with More magazine last August (conducted by my wife, Meryl Gordon), Elizabeth said flatly, "I'm convinced that I'm going to beat cancer. If I have to beat it twice, I have to beat it twice."
Living with cancer is one of those clichés that has been stripped of its emotional force by constant repetition. But Elizabeth Edwards has matter-of-factly defined it as continuing to go on with your life, especially as she put it Thursday, "I don't look sickly, I don't feel sickly." As she implied with those words and by the example of her resilience, you can live with cancer just as easily in the White House as anywhere else.
Thanks goes to Rush Limbaugh, for summarizing my crush in such succint terms.
I thought he was by far the most interesting candidate in 2004, at least until John Kerry's overwhelming suckiness ruined their campaign altogether. But guess what? John Edwards is again the most interesting presidential candidate, already leading with the most concrete and generally qualitative platform available: get out of Iraq; reform American energy policy; and raise taxes (on the rich) in order to create a universal health care system. These are issues that most Americans can get behind. In fact, this is the kind of ballsy, issues-based, no-nonsense campaign that most political commentators believed that the Democrats can (or more correctly, were incapable of) no longer run on.
And, perhaps even better, the guy has got serious intangibles.
Energy and Substance
Katrina vanden Heuvel
thenation.com
While too much of the media has focused on first-quarter fundraising battles and the sniping between the Obama and Clinton camps, presidential candidate John Edwards took the opportunity to lay out a bold energy plan that addresses some of the great challenges of our time.
As he said in a speech in Iowa, "Our generation must be the one that says, 'we must halt global warming.' Our generation must be the one that says 'yes' to renewable fuels and ends forever our dependence on foreign oil. And our generation must be the one that builds the new energy economy. It won't be easy, but it is time to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war."
Some key aspects of the Edwards Energy Plan include a cap on greenhouse pollution in 2010 and an 80 percent reduction by 2050 – consistent with the dictates of the latest climate science. He would use an economy-wide, cap-and-trade system and sell a portion of the pollution permits to raise $10 billion a year for a New Energy Economy Fund. The Fund would be used to pursue clean, renewable, and efficient energy technologies and create 1 million jobs in the process – along the lines of what the Apollo Alliance has outlined. One billion dollars a year from would go towards helping US automakers meet higher fuel economy requirements and utilize the latest technologies, including biofuels, hybrid and electric cars, hydrogen fuel cells, and ultra-light materials. Finally, Edwards' plan calls for opening the electricity grid so that small-scale renewable electric generation – by farms, factories, schools, and communities – can compete with large, central power plants. (This is something Academy Award winner and pre-Scalia President-elect, Al Gore, touted in hearings on Capitol Hill today. Great to see Gore pushing the Presidential debate without even being a part of the race).
Edwards might be winning the early frontrunner race when it comes to substance over flash – he has been clear and strong on health care, labor rights and now energy. (And so far, among the frontrunners, Edwards and Obama have been clearest about a plan for ending the War in Iraq – though neither of them matches the clarity and courage of Dennis Kucinich, a presidential candidate who should receive more attention from the blogosphere since it isn't coming from the conventional media.)
With the science of global warming now settled for just about everyone who isn't named Sen. James Inhofe, and the costs of a status quo energy policy perfectly clear, speaking out boldly on how to address these challenges should be a prerequisite for any presidential candidate. Good to see John Edwards doing the right thing here.
Better Health Through Politics
Ron Wyden's smart plan.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007, at 4:06 PM ET
slate.com
America's health-care system runs the gamut from capitalism to socialism, stopping at all points between. At the free-market extreme are 10 million people who buy private insurance without any government help and 48 million people with no insurance at all. At the collectivized end are 5 million military veterans who see government doctors in government hospitals, 32 million retirees covered directly by the federal government under Medicare, and 37 million insured by Medicaid. In the middle are the majority, 153 million workers and their families, who get government-subsidized private insurance through their employers.
A growing consensus recognizes this patchwork as economically disadvantageous and morally intolerable. Viewed as a whole, the American system is inefficient, expensive, and possibly unsustainable, consuming 16 percent of GDP and growing at a rate of 6.4 percent a year. European countries manage to provide universal, high-quality care for half as much per capita. Employer-based coverage is a drag on the economy, tethering workers to jobs they would otherwise leave and harming the competitiveness of American manufacturing by adding to the cost of goods. Health-care spending is a budget-wrecker at every level of government. And for all we spend, 16 percent of the population, including 8 million children, must make do at the system's charitable margins.
But if the status quo is untenable, the Euro alternative remains an impossible sell. Americans place a high premium on personal liberty and individual choice in all matters. A single-payer system, in which government insures everyone directly, diminishes consumer freedom for the sake of greater equity and efficiency. Many resist making that trade-off, even where it would serve their interests. As recently as 2000, Oregon, which is either the most—or the second-most, after Vermont—progressive-minded state in the country, defeated a single-payer initiative by a margin of 4-to-1.
The action at the moment is all in the big space between the status quo and single-payer. President Bush started the conversation in his January State of the Union address, in which he proposed capping the tax deductibility of employer-provided plans and creating a new tax deduction for individuals. By turning the health-care tax deduction into a kind of voucher, Bush would discipline spending and allow more individuals to afford insurance. His proposal didn't deserve the scorn heaped on it by leading Democrats. A paper from the liberal Tax Policy Center calls the president's proposal "in some respects … innovative and a step in the right direction." But Bush is thinking too small. His plan risks undermining the current employer-based system without replacing it, and fails to grapple in a serious way with the problem of the uninsured.
John Edwards recently became the only presidential candidate to get specific on the subject, when he laid out a plan bolder than Bush's that would build on the employer-based system. Edwards would require companies that don't insure their workers to pay into a fund for the uninsured. Following the trend in Massachusetts and California, he would add an individual mandate, a requirement that anyone not covered at work buy insurance in a regulated market. The chief advantages of the Edwards plan are that it achieves universal coverage without disrupting the way most Americans now receive health care, and that it's straightforward about raising taxes to pay for extending coverage to the uninsured. Its chief disadvantages are that it would do little to control costs and that it fails to break the anachronistic connection between employers and insurance.
The road goes on for John and Elizabeth
By Walter Shapiro
salon.com
They were words that no one ever wants to say about the person he loves: "When the cancer goes from the breast and shows in the bone, which it's doing now, it's no longer curable. It is completely treatable."
At a remarkable and emotionally raw Thursday afternoon press conference, there was John Edwards -- husband, father and presidential candidate -- putting the best interpretation on the recurrence of his wife Elizabeth's cancer. "Many people in similar circumstances," he said, "have lived many years undergoing treatment."
In a media environment where counterfeit emotion often seems more convincing than genuine sentiment, this turning-point moment in Elizabeth Edwards' life and perhaps the 2008 campaign was the ultimate in reality TV -- and it had the added virtue of being true. During the opening moments of the press conference, it was difficult to watch Elizabeth Edwards as she seemingly fought to maintain her composure. But then her husband began talking about how "we've been married for 30 years" and a brave smile flickered across her face, soon followed by an actual grin.
Edwards said toward the end of the press conference, "Any time, any place I need to be with Elizabeth, I will be there. Period. It doesn't matter what's happening in the campaign." The former North Carolina senator demonstrated that in Iowa on Tuesday where he delivered a major noontime energy speech and was then slated to meet with state legislators and appear at a house party in Indianola. As I watched Edwards mingle with voters after the speech, I noted that his once-boyish face seemed creased with worry and he seemed distracted, even as he talked earnestly about carbon dioxide emissions and ethanol, Iowa's favorite fuel source.
What few knew then was that Elizabeth had already had a troubling X-ray Monday for a broken rib that raised the possibility of a new cancer and that more tests were slated. Immediately after the energy address, Edwards called his wife's doctor and spoke with her for 15 minutes. According to Rob Tully, a former Iowa state Democratic chairman and major Edwards backer, the candidate then called Elizabeth and asked her directly whether she wanted him there for the follow-up appointment. "She said yes," Tully recalled, "and John immediately turned around, without any hesitation, and said, 'Cancel everything for the rest of the day and tomorrow.'"
In the heat of a presidential campaign, it is easy to forget that the candidates are human beings, with the normal run of joys and disappointments, rather than automatons powered solely by ambition. But now we are confronted with the grim realities of the intersection of the personal and the political. Edwards' announcement that he would be plowing ahead with his campaign -- appearances and fundraisers are scheduled for Thursday night and Friday morning in New York -- is as much a tribute to Elizabeth's determination as anything else.
She has always been a fervent believer in his destiny. In late 2002, as Edwards was still wavering on a presidential race, Elizabeth told me in an interview that beating George W. Bush was her transcendent cause. "We have to win," she said. "The nation can't afford for us to lose." I can still hear the passion in her voice as she explained how her husband, then a first-term senator from North Carolina, was the Democrat with the best chance to defeat George W. Bush in 2004.
Elizabeth Edwards has never been a conventional political wife, smiling mechanically from the sidelines, but she also has never seen herself in messianic terms as the second coming of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her directness, her openness and her disarming candor have been one of the campaign's strongest assets. During the 2004 primary season, she virtually single-handedly snagged the endorsement of influential New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D'Allesandro. And as she explains in her 2006 book, "Saving Graces," she was an early convert to the power of the Internet, since she found comfort in online support groups after the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade, in a 1996 auto crash. As a result, this 57-year-old former graduate student in English turned bankruptcy lawyer, who listens to C-SPAN in her car, has become one of the greatest boosters of the bloggers in any 2008 presidential campaign.
Yet in the stiff-upper-lip annals of presidential campaigns, there have been few more wrenching examples of stoicism under fire than how she handled the discovery that she had breast cancer in the closing days of the 2004 race. Rather than calling off her campaign appearances, she snuck in a visit to her hometown doctor during a stop in Raleigh and scheduled the biopsy for the day after the election in Boston, the site of the planned Democratic celebration. She writes in "Saving Graces" about the moment when the realities of cancer and political defeat came together: "As I walked to my room, I wiped away my tears. There would be plenty of times in the days and months to come when I would need John; now it was his time to need me, and I couldn't be in tears."
Even though she was pronounced cancer-free after a grueling bout of treatment in 2005, she never has exuded the false bravado that the disease had been permanently vanquished. Rather, her view has been that what comes her and her husband's way can be handled, because after the death of a child, life has no terrors. In an interview with More magazine last August (conducted by my wife, Meryl Gordon), Elizabeth said flatly, "I'm convinced that I'm going to beat cancer. If I have to beat it twice, I have to beat it twice."
Living with cancer is one of those clichés that has been stripped of its emotional force by constant repetition. But Elizabeth Edwards has matter-of-factly defined it as continuing to go on with your life, especially as she put it Thursday, "I don't look sickly, I don't feel sickly." As she implied with those words and by the example of her resilience, you can live with cancer just as easily in the White House as anywhere else.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
John Bolton
Anybody who went to Yale with me will certainly appreciate the "special place" that John Bolton holds within my heart. Nonetheless, Bolton's awesome-ness, by which I mean gigantic brass balls, doesn't emerge until the second video, when Jon Stewart actually starts pointing out how absurd most of his points actually are.
Enjoy.
Enjoy.
Theses on the Philosophy of History
My students and I are reading this essay for Theory of Knowledge. I had a section of this class yesterday, but didn't think it went very well. The problems were apparent before class began: this is a difficult text, requiring a lot of explanation; the major themes of the essay (finding a new way to write history), are certainly foreign; and my personality has a tendency to dominate any and all academic conversations - especially those involving younger students. Hopefully I'll be a little more aware of these issues today, because I really want to hear some input from my students, and actually lead them on through a conversation on this piece.
But it's hard to for me to hide my excitement about this text. This is actually the last bit of writing that Benjamin completed before committing suicide in Spain (other than a manuscript that has never been recovered). Its brilliance cannot be overstated. Benjamin, caught in a moment where his entire race is being systematically exterminated in Germany, beautifully addresses the problems with historical narrative and the political consequences of a narrative of power. Throughout, the question of who will write a history for the lost Jewish people smacks the reader in the face. But even while he capably dismantles several major myths of the Western world, most notably our obsession with technological progress, Benjamin's hope for a future not plagued by the atrocities of the past is admirable. It's a vision that all of us should strive to uphold.
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Walter Benjamin, 1939
I
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
II
'One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,' writes Lotze, 'is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.' Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.
III
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
IV
Seek for food and clothing first, then
the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.
- Hegel, 1807
The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.
V
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. 'The truth will not run away from us': in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)
VI
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
VII
Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.
- Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: 'Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.'* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
* 'Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.'
VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back. If I stayed living time,
I would have little luck.
Gerherd Scholem,
'Gruss vom Angelus'
A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
X
The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians' stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their 'mass basis', and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
XI
The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as 'the source of all wealth and all culture.' Smelling a rat, Marx countered that '…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power' must of necessity become 'the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…' However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: 'The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.' This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, 'exists gratis,' is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.
* The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his 'Critique of the Gotha Program'
XII
We need history, but not the way a spoiled
loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
- Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
* Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.
XIII
Every day our cause becomes clearer
and people get smarter.
- Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie
Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men's ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
XIV
Origin is the goal.
- Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
* Benjamin says 'Jetztzeit' and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans.
XV
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:
Who would have believed it!
we are told that new Joshuas are at the foot of every tower,
as though irritated with
time itself, fired at the dials
in order to stop the day.
XVI
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
XVII
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
* The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.
XVIII
'In relation to the history of organic life on earth,' writes a modem biologist, 'the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.' The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
A
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
B
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter
But it's hard to for me to hide my excitement about this text. This is actually the last bit of writing that Benjamin completed before committing suicide in Spain (other than a manuscript that has never been recovered). Its brilliance cannot be overstated. Benjamin, caught in a moment where his entire race is being systematically exterminated in Germany, beautifully addresses the problems with historical narrative and the political consequences of a narrative of power. Throughout, the question of who will write a history for the lost Jewish people smacks the reader in the face. But even while he capably dismantles several major myths of the Western world, most notably our obsession with technological progress, Benjamin's hope for a future not plagued by the atrocities of the past is admirable. It's a vision that all of us should strive to uphold.
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Walter Benjamin, 1939
I
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
II
'One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,' writes Lotze, 'is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.' Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.
III
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.
IV
Seek for food and clothing first, then
the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.
- Hegel, 1807
The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.
V
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. 'The truth will not run away from us': in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)
VI
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
VII
Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.
- Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: 'Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.'* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
* 'Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.'
VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back. If I stayed living time,
I would have little luck.
Gerherd Scholem,
'Gruss vom Angelus'
A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
X
The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians' stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their 'mass basis', and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
XI
The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as 'the source of all wealth and all culture.' Smelling a rat, Marx countered that '…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power' must of necessity become 'the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…' However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: 'The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.' This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, 'exists gratis,' is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.
* The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his 'Critique of the Gotha Program'
XII
We need history, but not the way a spoiled
loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
- Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
* Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.
XIII
Every day our cause becomes clearer
and people get smarter.
- Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie
Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men's ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
XIV
Origin is the goal.
- Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
* Benjamin says 'Jetztzeit' and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans.
XV
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:
Who would have believed it!
we are told that new Joshuas are at the foot of every tower,
as though irritated with
time itself, fired at the dials
in order to stop the day.
XVI
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called 'Once upon a time' in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
XVII
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
* The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.
XVIII
'In relation to the history of organic life on earth,' writes a modem biologist, 'the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.' The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
A
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
B
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter
Sunday, March 18, 2007
More Military Contracting
I think the author is a terrible writer, and that his political stance is far too overt in the article. Nonetheless, this is at least a reasonable stab at documenting another facet of the "privatization" on the US Government and its services, something that scares the living shit out of me.
The second article continues on this thread, focusing more on issues of contract billing and overbilling.
Bush's Shadow Army
by Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
posted March 15, 2007 (web only)
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.
"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates. In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers. "People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon," says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat, who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors after Falluja. "I'm probably like most Congress members in kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest in it" after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company's newfound recognition. The day after the ambush, it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair, John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators--Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the government's most valuable international security contracts, worth more than $300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract. "Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater's] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new lobbyist Chris Bertelli. "There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking is an industry standard. That's something we definitely want to be engaged in." By May Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the "war on terror" within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the war-contractor industry--former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system, Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it, among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record. Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater's contention that it is essentially above the law. Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's war-fighting capacity: "Nothing could be more destructive of the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers. In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case, paving the way for the state trial--where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award--to proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja. "Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. "Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators."
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel, Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied against his company by the families and asked several times for the committee to go into closed session. "The men who went on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee, adding that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save $1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles. "Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission. Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush. "For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn't even respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested. In fact, it denied that private security contractors did any work at all under the [Pentagon's contracting program]. We now know that isn't true." Waxman's struggle to follow the money on this one contract involving powerful war contractors like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called Regency under a contract with the world's largest food services company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this. Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other subcontractors were "adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing that the contract's provenance would remain obscure, that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR. In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors' using private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services? But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue. It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got nowhere--the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. "That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater. "Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."
"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.
"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there's currently an investigation," Howell replied. "We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."
Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces that have emerged as major players in the wars of the post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan, Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism, providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for what they called "war profiteering." It is part of what Democrats describe as a multi-pronged approach. "I think there's a critical mass of us now who are working on it," says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state. In January Price introduced legislation that would expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater's work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department. Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting could be a test case of sorts under his legislation. "I will be following this and I'll be calling for a full investigation," he said.
But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach: Price's office consulted with the private military lobby as it crafted the legislation, which has the industry's strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has been for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when US civilian law could potentially have been applied to contractor crimes, it wasn't," observed P.W. Singer, a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors are already strapped for resources in their home districts--how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors? How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a dangerous war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price. "I'm not saying that it would be a simple matter." He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put the whole contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."
This past fall, taking a different tack--much to the dismay of the industry--Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted language into the 2007 Defense Authorization, which Bush signed into law, that places contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), commonly known as the court martial system. Graham implemented the change with no public debate and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress, but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality. Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and other support services. While the argument could be made that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change could result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this, the military has enough trouble policing its own massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides, many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices of the State Department and other civilian agencies, not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain" contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are "operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as contractors." He said his legislation would "re-establish control over these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's, international or US laws that have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. "We're talking about billions and billions of dollars--some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm's length from the American people what this war is all about."
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government's Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror" that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared "the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to something the Administration has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance on private military contractors has gone largely undebated and underreported.
"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say 'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight--it just takes money and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued contractors for alleged abuses in Iraq. "To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire."
With talk of a Civilian Reserve Corps and Blackwater promoting the idea of a privatized "contractor brigade" to work with the military, war critics in Congress are homing in on what they see as a sustained, undeclared escalation through the use of private forces. "'Surge' implies a bump that has a beginning and an end," says Schakowsky. "Having a third or a quarter of [the forces] present on the ground not even part of the debate is a very dangerous thing in our democracy, because war is the most critical thing that we do."
Indeed, contractor deaths are not counted in the total US death count, and their crimes and violations go undocumented and unpunished, further masking the true costs of the war. "When you're bringing in contractors whom the law doesn't apply to, the Geneva Conventions, common notions of morality, everything's thrown out the window," says Kucinich. "And what it means is that these private contractors are really an arm of the Administration and its policies."
Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private forces in so-called "black bag," "false flag" or covert operations in Iraq. "What's the difference between covert activities and so-called overt activities which you have no information about? There's no difference," he says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply limited to oversight and transparency. "It's the privatization of war," he says. The Administration is "linking private war contractor profits with warmaking. So we're giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits, and those opportunities are more war. And that's why the role of private contractors should be sharply limited by Congress."
KBR's $400 Million Iraq Question
Jeremy Scahill & Garrett Ordower
The Nation
posted March 12, 2007 (web only)
There's a $400 million question facing the Pentagon's largest contractor, KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary responsible for more than 50,000 personnel in Iraq and billions in government contracts: Will the mammoth corporation be forced to repay the government nearly half a billion dollars because it hired private security forces in Iraq, including Blackwater USA, when the Army itself was supposed to be providing it with protection?
It's a scandal that has been brewing for more than two years, kept alive largely through the efforts of Representative Henry Waxman. The California Democrat has been on a warpath against Halliburton and KBR almost since the Bush Administration took power in 2000. But it was actually an incident involving the private military company Blackwater USA that sparked the current controversy, which could result in the hefty KBR repayment to the government.
It began with one of the most iconic incidents of the Iraq War: the March 31, 2004, ambush of four Blackwater contractors in the Sunni city of Falluja. The men were burned, dragged through the streets and strung from a bridge. For many in Congress--and the broader population--it was the first they had heard of private soldiers operating in the war zone. Finding out who exactly they were working for in Falluja that day would take nearly three years.
As Waxman investigated the circumstances surrounding the ambush, one fact in particular bothered him: The contract the Blackwater men were working under indicated that they were ultimately servicing KBR. For its part, KBR initially denied this, and Waxman became increasingly frustrated that for eighteen months he could not get the military, KBR or any of the companies involved to explain whom taxpayers were ultimately paying for the Blackwater security services, and how much.
That question was finally answered in early February, when Waxman convened a heated hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to investigate the Falluja incident: The contract was indeed traceable to KBR.
This was a complete about-face. Tina Ballard, the Army's head contracting officer, had assured the same committee six months earlier that Blackwater had not been hired under a KBR subcontract.
But during the February hearing, Ballard said that "after extensive research" it turned out her earlier statements had been wrong. Further, she said that if KBR "knowingly or unknowingly incurred costs for private security subcontractors...the US Army will take appropriate steps under the contract terms to recoup any funds paid for those services." At the end of the hearing, Ballard announced that the Army would dock KBR $20 million now that it was clear that--under several layers of subcontracts--Blackwater had in fact been hired.
But this is not just a matter of secretive markups, tacked on through the subcontracting maze and passed on to the taxpayers. KBR may have knowingly violated military policy, which effectively bans its contractors from engaging any security other than official US forces.
Under the terms of KBR's master contract, the Army is specifically tasked with providing force protection for KBR's thousands of employees. Since 2002 KBR has held what is known as the LOGCAP III contract, which stands for Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Under that contract it provides support services for the Army ranging from serving meals to delivering fuel, washing laundry and delivering mail, duties that used to be handled by the Army itself.
An official military document called LOGCAP 101 explains that "contractors and their employees are not combatants, but civilians accompanying the force. This status must not be jeopardized by the ways in which they provide contracted support. The government has a duty to provide them with Force Protection for this reason." Indeed, in a July 2006 letter to Waxman, then-Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey (who recently resigned in the wake of the Walter Reed scandal) asserted, "Under the provisions of the LOGCAP contract, the US military provides all armed forces protection from KBR unless otherwise directed."
At the February hearing George Seagle, director of security for KBR's government and infrastructure division, admitted that "KBR uses private security on our non-LOGCAP work and, in certain circumstances, our LOGCAP subcontractors did, as well." The theory seemed to be that while KBR, under its LOGCAP contract, could not directly hire private security, its subcontractors could do whatever they wanted.
Here's the problem: The line Seagle floated to Congress is contradicted by KBR's own internal communications dating back nearly three years, when KBR officials appeared to be not only aware of the general prohibition against hiring private security under LOGCAP but also aware that if any of KBR's subcontractors used private forces, that was tantamount to KBR using them.
In a June 2004 e-mail, KBR's lead administrator for the LOGCAP contract, James Ray, told other company officials, "Our contract states that the government provides us with force protection.... We should not attempt to effect a material change in our contract with the government by hiring a company that we know uses armed escorts. That company is an agent of KBR and if anything happens KBR is in the pot with them. Even with lipstick, a pig is a pig. This decision is something to address squarely.... I do not recommend proceeding with this option without senior management's approval."
Despite that e-mail, the lipstick apparently was still on the pig three years later, as KBR's Seagle seemed to assert that KBR's subcontractors were entitled to hire private security. Not so, says the Army. Not only that, but the military has now begun an extensive audit of KBR's and its subcontractors' relationships with private security in Iraq.
The situation could be so serious for KBR that, as the company officially informed its investors a month after the Waxman hearing, it might be forced to return up to $400 million in payments stemming from alleged subcontracted private security services in Iraq.
Many disturbing questions linger: If the Army was responsible for providing security for KBR's 50,000 employees, why didn't it do so? Is the command and control in Iraq in such disarray that $400 million in private security services that should have been provided by the Army was not, and no one noticed? Did no one realize that tens of thousands of private soldiers were performing the Army's security duties?
Apparently not--at least officially.
Republican Representative Tom Davis, the committee's ranking member, asked Tina Ballard, "Does the Army have enough personnel on the ground to support military convoys for the LOGCAP subcontractors? Do you know the answer to that?"
"I don't have the answer to that, sir," Ballard replied.
As the hearing progressed, both KBR and Army officials professed ignorance as to how security was--or was not--being provided to the 50,000 people working under KBR. Much to the amazement of legislators, not only did they not know, they seemed to not want to know.
Republican Representative Chris Shays asked Seagle whether one of KBR's subcontractors would have to "eat that cost" of providing its own security.
"LOGCAP contracts state that the military will provide our force protection," Seagle replied.
"And you don't think it's being provided adequately, and you choose to get security, contract out security--you're allowed to do that, but then you have to pay the cost?" Shays asked.
"We haven't asked any subcontractors to contract for security," Seagle said. According to the Army, KBR never asked it for protection either. Ballard told the committee the military has "in writing from KBR that [neither] they, nor any of their subs, ever requested in writing for this security."
When Seagle said that he didn't know whether one of his subcontractors had negotiated with Blackwater for security, Shays shot back, "OK, I understand you don't know, but it's not comforting because what it's like is, you can be Pontius Pilate and wash your hands of it. In other words, you contract with someone else, they get the job done and it's their responsibility and not your responsibility. That's what you're saying."
Seagle continued to insist that he had no idea who his subcontractors employ, frustrating Shays. "I'm going to just tell you what I think," Shays told him. "I think you should know. I think the system should somehow require it. I think there should be some responsibility to it.... I just can't believe that if I were doing a contract for a building and I was subcontracting, that I would be oblivious to who my subcontractors were dealing with."
Shays then turned his attention to Ballard and said, "I'm surprised that you can't give us an idea of the number of contracts and the number of contracts in-theater. Is that because you just tired out from the first and then from then on, you don't feel you have an interest or a responsibility to know who they subcontracted? In other words, once you put out that contract, whoever is subcontracted is not your interest or responsibility?"
Ballard stumbled in her response, mentioning a "quality surveillance plan" for contractors before Shays cut her off. "I don't know what that means," he said. "I honestly don't."
In the bigger picture, $400 million is a drop in the bucket to KBR--the company has raked in more than $17 billion from Iraq-related work since 2003. But what remains unanswered is why alarm bells weren't sounded about tens of thousands of civilians running around Iraq, servicing the military, apparently without protection? And why, if KBR was supposed to be provided with security, did it not request it, since it would have avoided having to pay private companies? Did KBR and an overstretched Army essentially collude in a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding security in Iraq?
KBR and the Army are apparently still negotiating whether the company will be stripped of the $400 million it is estimated that its subcontractors spent on private security. KBR says the Army has informed the company it will dock KBR "unless [KBR] can provide timely information sufficient to show that such action is not necessary to protect the government's interest. We are working with the Army to provide the additional information they have requested."
It took nearly two years for the Army and KBR to provide Waxman with details of the contract that resulted in it being docked $20 million for using Blackwater's security services. KBR has sixty days before the Army begins suspending payments. It will be interesting to see if its ability to answer questions drastically improves. That is the $400 million question.
The second article continues on this thread, focusing more on issues of contract billing and overbilling.
Bush's Shadow Army
by Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
posted March 15, 2007 (web only)
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting--many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation--Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.
"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said. "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757--American Airlines Flight 77--smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war--laid out just a day before--on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America's global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare--the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq--an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors--constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors--conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission and they're falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company's success represents the realization of the life's work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law--entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military's court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince--the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince's private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world's largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day--at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the "war on terror"--something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates. In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers. "People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon," says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat, who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors after Falluja. "I'm probably like most Congress members in kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest in it" after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company's newfound recognition. The day after the ambush, it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair, John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators--Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the government's most valuable international security contracts, worth more than $300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract. "Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater's] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new lobbyist Chris Bertelli. "There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking is an industry standard. That's something we definitely want to be engaged in." By May Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the "war on terror" within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the war-contractor industry--former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system, Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it, among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record. Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater's contention that it is essentially above the law. Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's war-fighting capacity: "Nothing could be more destructive of the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers. In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case, paving the way for the state trial--where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award--to proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja. "Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. "Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators."
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel, Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied against his company by the families and asked several times for the committee to go into closed session. "The men who went on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee, adding that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save $1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles. "Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission. Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush. "For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn't even respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested. In fact, it denied that private security contractors did any work at all under the [Pentagon's contracting program]. We now know that isn't true." Waxman's struggle to follow the money on this one contract involving powerful war contractors like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called Regency under a contract with the world's largest food services company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this. Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other subcontractors were "adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing that the contract's provenance would remain obscure, that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR. In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors' using private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services? But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue. It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got nowhere--the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. "That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater. "Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."
"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.
"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there's currently an investigation," Howell replied. "We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."
Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces that have emerged as major players in the wars of the post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan, Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism, providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for what they called "war profiteering." It is part of what Democrats describe as a multi-pronged approach. "I think there's a critical mass of us now who are working on it," says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state. In January Price introduced legislation that would expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater's work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department. Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting could be a test case of sorts under his legislation. "I will be following this and I'll be calling for a full investigation," he said.
But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach: Price's office consulted with the private military lobby as it crafted the legislation, which has the industry's strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has been for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when US civilian law could potentially have been applied to contractor crimes, it wasn't," observed P.W. Singer, a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors are already strapped for resources in their home districts--how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors? How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a dangerous war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price. "I'm not saying that it would be a simple matter." He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put the whole contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."
This past fall, taking a different tack--much to the dismay of the industry--Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted language into the 2007 Defense Authorization, which Bush signed into law, that places contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), commonly known as the court martial system. Graham implemented the change with no public debate and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress, but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality. Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and other support services. While the argument could be made that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change could result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this, the military has enough trouble policing its own massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides, many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices of the State Department and other civilian agencies, not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain" contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are "operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as contractors." He said his legislation would "re-establish control over these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's, international or US laws that have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. "We're talking about billions and billions of dollars--some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm's length from the American people what this war is all about."
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government's Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror" that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared "the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to something the Administration has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance on private military contractors has gone largely undebated and underreported.
"The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say 'mercenaries' makes wars easier to begin and to fight--it just takes money and not the citizenry," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued contractors for alleged abuses in Iraq. "To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire."
With talk of a Civilian Reserve Corps and Blackwater promoting the idea of a privatized "contractor brigade" to work with the military, war critics in Congress are homing in on what they see as a sustained, undeclared escalation through the use of private forces. "'Surge' implies a bump that has a beginning and an end," says Schakowsky. "Having a third or a quarter of [the forces] present on the ground not even part of the debate is a very dangerous thing in our democracy, because war is the most critical thing that we do."
Indeed, contractor deaths are not counted in the total US death count, and their crimes and violations go undocumented and unpunished, further masking the true costs of the war. "When you're bringing in contractors whom the law doesn't apply to, the Geneva Conventions, common notions of morality, everything's thrown out the window," says Kucinich. "And what it means is that these private contractors are really an arm of the Administration and its policies."
Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private forces in so-called "black bag," "false flag" or covert operations in Iraq. "What's the difference between covert activities and so-called overt activities which you have no information about? There's no difference," he says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply limited to oversight and transparency. "It's the privatization of war," he says. The Administration is "linking private war contractor profits with warmaking. So we're giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits, and those opportunities are more war. And that's why the role of private contractors should be sharply limited by Congress."
KBR's $400 Million Iraq Question
Jeremy Scahill & Garrett Ordower
The Nation
posted March 12, 2007 (web only)
There's a $400 million question facing the Pentagon's largest contractor, KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary responsible for more than 50,000 personnel in Iraq and billions in government contracts: Will the mammoth corporation be forced to repay the government nearly half a billion dollars because it hired private security forces in Iraq, including Blackwater USA, when the Army itself was supposed to be providing it with protection?
It's a scandal that has been brewing for more than two years, kept alive largely through the efforts of Representative Henry Waxman. The California Democrat has been on a warpath against Halliburton and KBR almost since the Bush Administration took power in 2000. But it was actually an incident involving the private military company Blackwater USA that sparked the current controversy, which could result in the hefty KBR repayment to the government.
It began with one of the most iconic incidents of the Iraq War: the March 31, 2004, ambush of four Blackwater contractors in the Sunni city of Falluja. The men were burned, dragged through the streets and strung from a bridge. For many in Congress--and the broader population--it was the first they had heard of private soldiers operating in the war zone. Finding out who exactly they were working for in Falluja that day would take nearly three years.
As Waxman investigated the circumstances surrounding the ambush, one fact in particular bothered him: The contract the Blackwater men were working under indicated that they were ultimately servicing KBR. For its part, KBR initially denied this, and Waxman became increasingly frustrated that for eighteen months he could not get the military, KBR or any of the companies involved to explain whom taxpayers were ultimately paying for the Blackwater security services, and how much.
That question was finally answered in early February, when Waxman convened a heated hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to investigate the Falluja incident: The contract was indeed traceable to KBR.
This was a complete about-face. Tina Ballard, the Army's head contracting officer, had assured the same committee six months earlier that Blackwater had not been hired under a KBR subcontract.
But during the February hearing, Ballard said that "after extensive research" it turned out her earlier statements had been wrong. Further, she said that if KBR "knowingly or unknowingly incurred costs for private security subcontractors...the US Army will take appropriate steps under the contract terms to recoup any funds paid for those services." At the end of the hearing, Ballard announced that the Army would dock KBR $20 million now that it was clear that--under several layers of subcontracts--Blackwater had in fact been hired.
But this is not just a matter of secretive markups, tacked on through the subcontracting maze and passed on to the taxpayers. KBR may have knowingly violated military policy, which effectively bans its contractors from engaging any security other than official US forces.
Under the terms of KBR's master contract, the Army is specifically tasked with providing force protection for KBR's thousands of employees. Since 2002 KBR has held what is known as the LOGCAP III contract, which stands for Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Under that contract it provides support services for the Army ranging from serving meals to delivering fuel, washing laundry and delivering mail, duties that used to be handled by the Army itself.
An official military document called LOGCAP 101 explains that "contractors and their employees are not combatants, but civilians accompanying the force. This status must not be jeopardized by the ways in which they provide contracted support. The government has a duty to provide them with Force Protection for this reason." Indeed, in a July 2006 letter to Waxman, then-Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey (who recently resigned in the wake of the Walter Reed scandal) asserted, "Under the provisions of the LOGCAP contract, the US military provides all armed forces protection from KBR unless otherwise directed."
At the February hearing George Seagle, director of security for KBR's government and infrastructure division, admitted that "KBR uses private security on our non-LOGCAP work and, in certain circumstances, our LOGCAP subcontractors did, as well." The theory seemed to be that while KBR, under its LOGCAP contract, could not directly hire private security, its subcontractors could do whatever they wanted.
Here's the problem: The line Seagle floated to Congress is contradicted by KBR's own internal communications dating back nearly three years, when KBR officials appeared to be not only aware of the general prohibition against hiring private security under LOGCAP but also aware that if any of KBR's subcontractors used private forces, that was tantamount to KBR using them.
In a June 2004 e-mail, KBR's lead administrator for the LOGCAP contract, James Ray, told other company officials, "Our contract states that the government provides us with force protection.... We should not attempt to effect a material change in our contract with the government by hiring a company that we know uses armed escorts. That company is an agent of KBR and if anything happens KBR is in the pot with them. Even with lipstick, a pig is a pig. This decision is something to address squarely.... I do not recommend proceeding with this option without senior management's approval."
Despite that e-mail, the lipstick apparently was still on the pig three years later, as KBR's Seagle seemed to assert that KBR's subcontractors were entitled to hire private security. Not so, says the Army. Not only that, but the military has now begun an extensive audit of KBR's and its subcontractors' relationships with private security in Iraq.
The situation could be so serious for KBR that, as the company officially informed its investors a month after the Waxman hearing, it might be forced to return up to $400 million in payments stemming from alleged subcontracted private security services in Iraq.
Many disturbing questions linger: If the Army was responsible for providing security for KBR's 50,000 employees, why didn't it do so? Is the command and control in Iraq in such disarray that $400 million in private security services that should have been provided by the Army was not, and no one noticed? Did no one realize that tens of thousands of private soldiers were performing the Army's security duties?
Apparently not--at least officially.
Republican Representative Tom Davis, the committee's ranking member, asked Tina Ballard, "Does the Army have enough personnel on the ground to support military convoys for the LOGCAP subcontractors? Do you know the answer to that?"
"I don't have the answer to that, sir," Ballard replied.
As the hearing progressed, both KBR and Army officials professed ignorance as to how security was--or was not--being provided to the 50,000 people working under KBR. Much to the amazement of legislators, not only did they not know, they seemed to not want to know.
Republican Representative Chris Shays asked Seagle whether one of KBR's subcontractors would have to "eat that cost" of providing its own security.
"LOGCAP contracts state that the military will provide our force protection," Seagle replied.
"And you don't think it's being provided adequately, and you choose to get security, contract out security--you're allowed to do that, but then you have to pay the cost?" Shays asked.
"We haven't asked any subcontractors to contract for security," Seagle said. According to the Army, KBR never asked it for protection either. Ballard told the committee the military has "in writing from KBR that [neither] they, nor any of their subs, ever requested in writing for this security."
When Seagle said that he didn't know whether one of his subcontractors had negotiated with Blackwater for security, Shays shot back, "OK, I understand you don't know, but it's not comforting because what it's like is, you can be Pontius Pilate and wash your hands of it. In other words, you contract with someone else, they get the job done and it's their responsibility and not your responsibility. That's what you're saying."
Seagle continued to insist that he had no idea who his subcontractors employ, frustrating Shays. "I'm going to just tell you what I think," Shays told him. "I think you should know. I think the system should somehow require it. I think there should be some responsibility to it.... I just can't believe that if I were doing a contract for a building and I was subcontracting, that I would be oblivious to who my subcontractors were dealing with."
Shays then turned his attention to Ballard and said, "I'm surprised that you can't give us an idea of the number of contracts and the number of contracts in-theater. Is that because you just tired out from the first and then from then on, you don't feel you have an interest or a responsibility to know who they subcontracted? In other words, once you put out that contract, whoever is subcontracted is not your interest or responsibility?"
Ballard stumbled in her response, mentioning a "quality surveillance plan" for contractors before Shays cut her off. "I don't know what that means," he said. "I honestly don't."
In the bigger picture, $400 million is a drop in the bucket to KBR--the company has raked in more than $17 billion from Iraq-related work since 2003. But what remains unanswered is why alarm bells weren't sounded about tens of thousands of civilians running around Iraq, servicing the military, apparently without protection? And why, if KBR was supposed to be provided with security, did it not request it, since it would have avoided having to pay private companies? Did KBR and an overstretched Army essentially collude in a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding security in Iraq?
KBR and the Army are apparently still negotiating whether the company will be stripped of the $400 million it is estimated that its subcontractors spent on private security. KBR says the Army has informed the company it will dock KBR "unless [KBR] can provide timely information sufficient to show that such action is not necessary to protect the government's interest. We are working with the Army to provide the additional information they have requested."
It took nearly two years for the Army and KBR to provide Waxman with details of the contract that resulted in it being docked $20 million for using Blackwater's security services. KBR has sixty days before the Army begins suspending payments. It will be interesting to see if its ability to answer questions drastically improves. That is the $400 million question.
Monday, March 12, 2007
I Hate the Town You're From
In the middle of a state that scares me,
Filled with people that scare me even more,
Who all have hideous yellow teeth.
It smells terrible,
Like rotten squash,
Near a refinery that's impossible not to notice.
Just today – driving my car into the ground,
I've seen a state prison for the first time,
Tasted my first cup of truck stop coffee,
And lost count of the trailers, and trucks, and desperation.
You live in a neighborhood that doesn't belong there,
Trees gently hanging over rooftops,
The first trees I've seen since I left Utah,
On top of brick houses more than a hundred years old,
Aging slaps in the face to the rows of suburban tracts surrounding them.
Your house is a barn, in front of another,
Smoke from the fireplace quietly sneaking from an iron chimney,
Small plots of wildflowers soldiering around the porch.
I step inside,
To the people you love, and who love you in return.
Always finishing a dinner that you just cooked.
Strange food that smells like your hands, like scallions.
There's always so much laughter,
The little sister you can't help but tease,
The father you can't help to argue with,
And the mother you unabashedly adore.
Mama's boy.
They treat me like one of their own,
People who I've barely known an hour.
Trusting you enough to share your opinion of me.
I'll never know these people,
Who clearly know more about me than I care to imagine,
Embracing me as a prodigal daughter.
And tonight I'll sleep in peace,
Wrapped in your arms,
Rain drops gently rapping against the window near your bed.
Alone with you, near the family you can't tear yourself from,
In the one house in Wyoming,
I'd ever want to see again.
Filled with people that scare me even more,
Who all have hideous yellow teeth.
It smells terrible,
Like rotten squash,
Near a refinery that's impossible not to notice.
Just today – driving my car into the ground,
I've seen a state prison for the first time,
Tasted my first cup of truck stop coffee,
And lost count of the trailers, and trucks, and desperation.
You live in a neighborhood that doesn't belong there,
Trees gently hanging over rooftops,
The first trees I've seen since I left Utah,
On top of brick houses more than a hundred years old,
Aging slaps in the face to the rows of suburban tracts surrounding them.
Your house is a barn, in front of another,
Smoke from the fireplace quietly sneaking from an iron chimney,
Small plots of wildflowers soldiering around the porch.
I step inside,
To the people you love, and who love you in return.
Always finishing a dinner that you just cooked.
Strange food that smells like your hands, like scallions.
There's always so much laughter,
The little sister you can't help but tease,
The father you can't help to argue with,
And the mother you unabashedly adore.
Mama's boy.
They treat me like one of their own,
People who I've barely known an hour.
Trusting you enough to share your opinion of me.
I'll never know these people,
Who clearly know more about me than I care to imagine,
Embracing me as a prodigal daughter.
And tonight I'll sleep in peace,
Wrapped in your arms,
Rain drops gently rapping against the window near your bed.
Alone with you, near the family you can't tear yourself from,
In the one house in Wyoming,
I'd ever want to see again.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
This Is Getting Ugly
Unfortunately, the statements over the last few months will remain "gaffes" as long as actual power is at stakes (see an earlier post). Nonetheless, we're starting to finally (5 years too late! Yippee) getting to the actual truths about Iraq. Funnily enough, several towns in Vermont have started petitions to impeach the president - which is just too little too late (maybe we shouldn't have allowed ourselves to be fucked over for 6 years straight, before thinking about impeaching him).
The Four Unspeakable Truths
What politicians won't admit about Iraq.
By Jacob Weisberg
Slate Magazine
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 3:33 PM ET
When it comes to Iraq, there are two kinds of presidential candidates. The disciplined ones, like Hillary Clinton, carefully avoid acknowledging reality. The more candid, like John McCain and Barack Obama, sometimes blurt out the truth, but quickly apologize.
For many presidential aspirants, the first unspeakable truth is simply that the war was a mistake. This issue came to a head recently with Hillary Clinton's obstinate refusal to acknowledge that voting to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq was the wrong thing to do. Though fellow Democrats John Edwards and Christopher Dodd have managed to say they erred in voting for the 2002 war resolution, Clinton is joined by Joe Biden and a full roster of Republicans in her inability to disgorge the M-word. Perhaps most absurdly, Chuck Hagel has called Bush's 21,500-troop "surge" the biggest blunder since Vietnam without ever saying that the war itself was the big blunder and that he favored it.
Reasons for refusing to admit that the war itself was a mistake are surprisingly similar across party lines. It is seldom easy to admit you were wrong—so let me repeat what I first acknowledged in Slate in January 2004, that I am sorry to have given even qualified support to the war. But what is awkward for columnists is nearly impossible for self-justifying politicians, who resist acknowledging error at a glandular level. Specific political calculations help to explain their individual decisions. Hillary, for instance, worries that confessing her failure will make it easier for hawks to savage her if she gets the nomination. But at bottom, the impulse is always the same. Politicians are stubborn, afraid of looking weak, and fearful that any admission of error will be cast as flip-flopping and inconsistency.
A second truth universally unacknowledged is that American soldiers being killed, grotesquely maimed, and then treated like whining freeloaders at Walter Reed Hospital are victims as much as "heroes." John Kerry was the first to violate this taboo when he was still a potential candidate last year. Kerry appeared to tell a group of California college students that it sucks to go and fight in Iraq. A variety of conservative goons instantly denounced Kerry for disrespecting the troops. An advanced sufferer of Senatorial Infallibility Syndrome, Kerry resisted retracting his comment for a while, but eventually regretted what he called a "botched joke" about President Bush.
Lost in the debate about whether Kerry meant what came out of his mouth was the fact that what he said was largely true. Americans who attend college and have good employment options after graduation are unlikely to sign up for free tours of the Sunni Triangle. People join the military for a variety of reasons, of course, but since the Iraq war turned ugly, the all-volunteer Army has been lowering educational standards, raising enlistment bonuses, and looking past criminal records. The lack of better choices is a larger and larger factor in the choice of military service. Our troops in Iraq may not see themselves as cannon fodder or victims of presidential misjudgments, but that doesn't mean they're not.
Reality No. 3, closely related to No. 2 and following directly from No. 1, is that the American lives lost in Iraq have been lives wasted. Barack Obama crossed this boundary on his first trip to Iowa as an announced candidate when he declared at a rally, "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." With lightning speed, Obama said he had misspoken and apologized to military families.
John McCain used the same proscribed term when he announced his candidacy on Late Night With David Letterman last week. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives." This was a strange admission, given McCain's advocacy of a surge bigger than Bush's. In any case, McCain followed Obama by promptly regretting his choice of words. (The patriotically correct term for losing parts of your body in a pointless war in Mesopotamia is, of course, "sacrifice.") These episodes all followed Kinsley's law of gaffes. The mistake Kerry, Obama, and McCain made was telling the truth before retreating to the approved banality and euphemism.
A fourth and final near-certainty, which is in some ways the hardest for politicians to admit, is that America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war. The United States is the strongest nation in the history of the world and does not think of itself as coming in second in two-way contests. When it does so, it is slow to accept that it has been beaten. American political and military leaders were reluctant to acknowledge or utter that they had miscalculated and wasted tens of thousands of lives in Vietnam, many of them after failure and withdrawal were assured. Even today, American politicians tend not to describe Vietnam as a straightforward defeat. Something similar is happening in Iraq, where the most that leaders typically say is that we "risk" losing and must not do so.
Democrats avoid the truth about the tragedy in Iraq for fear of being labeled unpatriotic or unsupportive of the troops. Republicans avoid it for fear of being blamed for the disaster or losing defense and patriotism as cards to play against Democrats. Politicians on both sides believe that acknowledging the unpleasant truth will weaken them and undermine those still attempting to persevere on our behalf. But nations and individuals do not grow weaker by confronting the truth. They grow weaker by avoiding it and coming to believe their own evasions.
It's Not Just Walter Reed
Still more ways Bush is screwing returning vets.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate Magazine
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 6:52 PM ET
The scandals and shortfalls in the military's health-care system stem from the same sensibility that produced the scandals and shortfalls in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is the Bush administration's sensibility of denial—its willful disinclination to face war's true cost (in all senses of the word) and its readiness to use bookkeeping tricks to perpetuate the deception.
"I am concerned that our soldiers and their families are not getting the treatment that they deserve," President George W. Bush said today, in announcing the creation of yet another blue-ribbon commission, this one "on the care of returning wounded warriors."
No doubt he is concerned. The real scandal is that he's felt no reason to be concerned until the recent spate of news stories revealed plenty of reasons that he should be. The bureaucracies in charge of the returning wounded have been shuffling through the motions as if nothing extraordinary was happening—and the politicians who are ultimately responsible have made it clear, by not telling anybody otherwise, that they prefer things that way. They are all acting as if there isn't a war going on.
Consider the following facts from the fiscal year 2008 budget proposal, which the White House submitted to Congress just last month.
The Pentagon's Defense Health Program—which includes the Tricare health-insurance plan, used by 9.1 million veterans and involving 65 inpatient clinics, 414 medical and dental clinics, and 257 veterans centers—has actually had its budget cut the past two years. In fiscal year 2006, the program's budget for medical care went up from $15.9 billion to $21.2 billion. But since then, it's gone down slightly—to $20.8 billion in FY 2007 and a proposed $20.7 billion in FY 2008.
These numbers understate the magnitude of the cuts. To keep up with inflation in the cost of goods and payroll, the Defense Department actually had to cut medical-care programs by $1.6 and $1.4 billion in FY07 and FY08, respectively.
Money is similarly tight at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA's budget for medical care has risen in the past few years—from $28.8 billion in FY 2006 to $29.3 billion in FY 2007 to a request for $34.2 billion in FY 2008—but this hasn't been enough. In each of the past four years, according to a March 1 report by the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, the VA has systematically underestimated the number of veterans applying for benefits in the coming fiscal year. The result is a shortfall of $2.8 billion in the FY08 budget, just to cover the current level of medical services.
The administration is trying to make up for some of this by raising deductibles on prescription drugs (from $8 to $15) and by imposing an annual enrollment fee (ranging from $250 to $750)—in short, by shifting costs to the veterans themselves. (Even so, these charges would make up only $450 million, or about one-sixth of the shortfall.)
Another instance of ignoring the wars: Despite a vast increase in the number of returning soldiers coming to the VA's veterans centers, the budget for these centers has remained flat. Similarly, despite a vast increase in the number of soldiers filing disability claims, the VA budget includes no money for additional claims processors. To justify the lack of money for trained processors, the VA's budgeteers assume that the number of new claims—and the backload of past claims—will drop in 2008. This is patently ridiculous: Elsewhere in the budget (see page 1-2), they state, "[W]e project that VA's patient caseload will peak in 2010" (emphasis added). In other words, they predict a rising caseload for another three years—but cut the money for the caseload this coming year.
An even grander sleight of hand comes in the section of the budget dealing with the "out-years"—FY 2009-12. The VA's budgeteers are projecting no increases in spending for medical care during that entire four-year period. They can't possibly believe this. (Again, they note elsewhere that the caseload won't peak until the middle of this period.) They are engaging in the political game of making the future appear less grim—and the president's budget more balanced, the need for tax hikes or cuts elsewhere less compelling—than is really the case.
This is a familiar game in peacetime. But it's a damaging, deceptive game in wartime—for the soldiers who fight the war and for the citizens who are called upon to support and fund it.
The Four Unspeakable Truths
What politicians won't admit about Iraq.
By Jacob Weisberg
Slate Magazine
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 3:33 PM ET
When it comes to Iraq, there are two kinds of presidential candidates. The disciplined ones, like Hillary Clinton, carefully avoid acknowledging reality. The more candid, like John McCain and Barack Obama, sometimes blurt out the truth, but quickly apologize.
For many presidential aspirants, the first unspeakable truth is simply that the war was a mistake. This issue came to a head recently with Hillary Clinton's obstinate refusal to acknowledge that voting to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq was the wrong thing to do. Though fellow Democrats John Edwards and Christopher Dodd have managed to say they erred in voting for the 2002 war resolution, Clinton is joined by Joe Biden and a full roster of Republicans in her inability to disgorge the M-word. Perhaps most absurdly, Chuck Hagel has called Bush's 21,500-troop "surge" the biggest blunder since Vietnam without ever saying that the war itself was the big blunder and that he favored it.
Reasons for refusing to admit that the war itself was a mistake are surprisingly similar across party lines. It is seldom easy to admit you were wrong—so let me repeat what I first acknowledged in Slate in January 2004, that I am sorry to have given even qualified support to the war. But what is awkward for columnists is nearly impossible for self-justifying politicians, who resist acknowledging error at a glandular level. Specific political calculations help to explain their individual decisions. Hillary, for instance, worries that confessing her failure will make it easier for hawks to savage her if she gets the nomination. But at bottom, the impulse is always the same. Politicians are stubborn, afraid of looking weak, and fearful that any admission of error will be cast as flip-flopping and inconsistency.
A second truth universally unacknowledged is that American soldiers being killed, grotesquely maimed, and then treated like whining freeloaders at Walter Reed Hospital are victims as much as "heroes." John Kerry was the first to violate this taboo when he was still a potential candidate last year. Kerry appeared to tell a group of California college students that it sucks to go and fight in Iraq. A variety of conservative goons instantly denounced Kerry for disrespecting the troops. An advanced sufferer of Senatorial Infallibility Syndrome, Kerry resisted retracting his comment for a while, but eventually regretted what he called a "botched joke" about President Bush.
Lost in the debate about whether Kerry meant what came out of his mouth was the fact that what he said was largely true. Americans who attend college and have good employment options after graduation are unlikely to sign up for free tours of the Sunni Triangle. People join the military for a variety of reasons, of course, but since the Iraq war turned ugly, the all-volunteer Army has been lowering educational standards, raising enlistment bonuses, and looking past criminal records. The lack of better choices is a larger and larger factor in the choice of military service. Our troops in Iraq may not see themselves as cannon fodder or victims of presidential misjudgments, but that doesn't mean they're not.
Reality No. 3, closely related to No. 2 and following directly from No. 1, is that the American lives lost in Iraq have been lives wasted. Barack Obama crossed this boundary on his first trip to Iowa as an announced candidate when he declared at a rally, "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted." With lightning speed, Obama said he had misspoken and apologized to military families.
John McCain used the same proscribed term when he announced his candidacy on Late Night With David Letterman last week. "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives." This was a strange admission, given McCain's advocacy of a surge bigger than Bush's. In any case, McCain followed Obama by promptly regretting his choice of words. (The patriotically correct term for losing parts of your body in a pointless war in Mesopotamia is, of course, "sacrifice.") These episodes all followed Kinsley's law of gaffes. The mistake Kerry, Obama, and McCain made was telling the truth before retreating to the approved banality and euphemism.
A fourth and final near-certainty, which is in some ways the hardest for politicians to admit, is that America is losing or has already lost the Iraq war. The United States is the strongest nation in the history of the world and does not think of itself as coming in second in two-way contests. When it does so, it is slow to accept that it has been beaten. American political and military leaders were reluctant to acknowledge or utter that they had miscalculated and wasted tens of thousands of lives in Vietnam, many of them after failure and withdrawal were assured. Even today, American politicians tend not to describe Vietnam as a straightforward defeat. Something similar is happening in Iraq, where the most that leaders typically say is that we "risk" losing and must not do so.
Democrats avoid the truth about the tragedy in Iraq for fear of being labeled unpatriotic or unsupportive of the troops. Republicans avoid it for fear of being blamed for the disaster or losing defense and patriotism as cards to play against Democrats. Politicians on both sides believe that acknowledging the unpleasant truth will weaken them and undermine those still attempting to persevere on our behalf. But nations and individuals do not grow weaker by confronting the truth. They grow weaker by avoiding it and coming to believe their own evasions.
It's Not Just Walter Reed
Still more ways Bush is screwing returning vets.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate Magazine
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 6:52 PM ET
The scandals and shortfalls in the military's health-care system stem from the same sensibility that produced the scandals and shortfalls in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is the Bush administration's sensibility of denial—its willful disinclination to face war's true cost (in all senses of the word) and its readiness to use bookkeeping tricks to perpetuate the deception.
"I am concerned that our soldiers and their families are not getting the treatment that they deserve," President George W. Bush said today, in announcing the creation of yet another blue-ribbon commission, this one "on the care of returning wounded warriors."
No doubt he is concerned. The real scandal is that he's felt no reason to be concerned until the recent spate of news stories revealed plenty of reasons that he should be. The bureaucracies in charge of the returning wounded have been shuffling through the motions as if nothing extraordinary was happening—and the politicians who are ultimately responsible have made it clear, by not telling anybody otherwise, that they prefer things that way. They are all acting as if there isn't a war going on.
Consider the following facts from the fiscal year 2008 budget proposal, which the White House submitted to Congress just last month.
The Pentagon's Defense Health Program—which includes the Tricare health-insurance plan, used by 9.1 million veterans and involving 65 inpatient clinics, 414 medical and dental clinics, and 257 veterans centers—has actually had its budget cut the past two years. In fiscal year 2006, the program's budget for medical care went up from $15.9 billion to $21.2 billion. But since then, it's gone down slightly—to $20.8 billion in FY 2007 and a proposed $20.7 billion in FY 2008.
These numbers understate the magnitude of the cuts. To keep up with inflation in the cost of goods and payroll, the Defense Department actually had to cut medical-care programs by $1.6 and $1.4 billion in FY07 and FY08, respectively.
Money is similarly tight at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA's budget for medical care has risen in the past few years—from $28.8 billion in FY 2006 to $29.3 billion in FY 2007 to a request for $34.2 billion in FY 2008—but this hasn't been enough. In each of the past four years, according to a March 1 report by the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, the VA has systematically underestimated the number of veterans applying for benefits in the coming fiscal year. The result is a shortfall of $2.8 billion in the FY08 budget, just to cover the current level of medical services.
The administration is trying to make up for some of this by raising deductibles on prescription drugs (from $8 to $15) and by imposing an annual enrollment fee (ranging from $250 to $750)—in short, by shifting costs to the veterans themselves. (Even so, these charges would make up only $450 million, or about one-sixth of the shortfall.)
Another instance of ignoring the wars: Despite a vast increase in the number of returning soldiers coming to the VA's veterans centers, the budget for these centers has remained flat. Similarly, despite a vast increase in the number of soldiers filing disability claims, the VA budget includes no money for additional claims processors. To justify the lack of money for trained processors, the VA's budgeteers assume that the number of new claims—and the backload of past claims—will drop in 2008. This is patently ridiculous: Elsewhere in the budget (see page 1-2), they state, "[W]e project that VA's patient caseload will peak in 2010" (emphasis added). In other words, they predict a rising caseload for another three years—but cut the money for the caseload this coming year.
An even grander sleight of hand comes in the section of the budget dealing with the "out-years"—FY 2009-12. The VA's budgeteers are projecting no increases in spending for medical care during that entire four-year period. They can't possibly believe this. (Again, they note elsewhere that the caseload won't peak until the middle of this period.) They are engaging in the political game of making the future appear less grim—and the president's budget more balanced, the need for tax hikes or cuts elsewhere less compelling—than is really the case.
This is a familiar game in peacetime. But it's a damaging, deceptive game in wartime—for the soldiers who fight the war and for the citizens who are called upon to support and fund it.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Can We Call Mulligan?
The article mentions Rajiv Chandrasekaran's amazing book Imperial Life in the Emerald City - an absolute must read, where much more of this type of mindless incompetence is detailed. Otherwise, bask in the stupidity of unprepared people given way too much authority for their own good.
Just how did the U.S. government lose so much cash in Iraq?
Fistful of Dollars
by Jeremy Kahn
Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.06.07
In the latest James Bond thriller, Casino Royale, 007's mission is to stop an amoral money man for international terrorist organizations from winning a high-stakes poker game. Bond is assisted in this effort by a dashing British agent, Vesper Lynd, played by the beguiling Eva Green. And, in a modern twist on the old Ian Fleming formula, Lynd does not work for Her Majesty's Secret Service, but rather for the Chancellor of the Exchequer--she's a Treasury agent.
John B. Taylor, the Stanford economist who served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs throughout President Bush's first term, wants everyone to know that U.S. Treasury officials play just as important--and sometimes just as daring--a role as Lynd in the real-life war against terrorism. Taylor has a new book out, Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World, that seems intended to ensure that Treasury's--or, perhaps more accurately, Taylor's--contribution to America's current war effort is not overlooked.
To drive home the point, Taylor placed an op-ed in last week's New York Times defending Treasury against California Representative Henry Waxman, who, in a hearing last month, criticized the Bush administration's decision to fly large shipments of cash into Iraq immediately after the invasion. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" Waxman demanded. Taylor didn't see anything wrong with his mind; he called the cash transfers "one of the most successful and carefully planned operations of the war."
Taylor's right that Iraq really needed that cash after the invasion--and also that the conversion from old Iraqi dinars to a new currency, which he also lauded in the op-ed, went off without a hitch. But Taylor's narrative overstates the success of Treasury's efforts in Iraq, ignores Waxman's basic point--which was about oversight in the reconstruction effort--and, through omission, seeks to whitewash the Treasury's culpability in many of the policy failures that have hampered U.S. efforts in Iraq since 2003.
The story of Treasury's cash shipments is one I know well. In May 2003, Fortune magazine sent me to Iraq to chronicle efforts to get the economy back on track. I traveled in convoys that moved millions in Iraqi dinars--crammed into burlap sacks and placed in armored personnel carriers--around Baghdad. I watched vast quantities of U.S. dollars--much of it newly minted and flown from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and New York in plastic-wrapped bricks--being airlifted to Kirkuk and Mosul to pay the salaries of Iraqi government employees. (I even stood on a stack of $23 million at the airport.) And I spent a good amount of time hanging out with the civilians and soldiers who were responsible for reopening Iraq's banks and figuring out how to stave off economic collapse.
April and May 2003 were chaotic months in Iraq. Most banks were shuttered; some had been looted. Saddam's son Qusay had stolen $1 billion from Iraq's Central Bank just before U.S. troops arrived. Many government ministries had also been looted and, in Iraq's socialized economy, large segments of the population were not showing up for work--except on pay day. At the same time, there was a legitimate fear of civil unrest if government workers and pensioners were not paid. So flying money in from the United States was a sensible stopgap. Besides, as Taylor points out, most of the money initially sent to Iraq belonged to the Iraqis in the first place--it had been frozen in U.S. banks since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Later, when U.S. troops recovered most of the money Qusay had stolen, this, too, was used in reconstruction efforts.
Taylor argues that these shipments of cash had been carefully planned. (He cites a presentation then-Treasury Secretary John Snow made to President Bush and the National Security Council in March 2003.) But, while the concept may have been, the mechanics certainly were not. Like much of the postwar planning, administration officials assumed the pieces would magically fall into place once Baghdad was liberated. From what I saw--and from interviews with Treasury staff--the actual movement of money around the country was a completely ad hoc operation. The troops, armored cars, and helicopters needed to protect cash as it was shuttled from place to place were pressed into service at the last minute. It was just lucky that officials unearthed servicemen with accounting backgrounds to assist in the operation--none had been assigned in advance of the invasion. Meanwhile, many Treasury experts with highly technical skills in economic planning and budgeting were forced to become glorified Brinks employees--spending much of their time merely moving cash around the country.
Taylor claims that "Treasury officials who watched over the payment process in Baghdad in those first few weeks reported a culture of good record keeping." I watched salaries being disbursed to Iraqis on a number of occasions--from banks, at a ministry building, and, at least once, from the back of a truck. While Iraqis needed certain papers to get paid and salaries were usually handed out by ministry supervisors (who, presumably, knew who their own employees were), in practice the payment system was often disorderly, and Taylor overstates the extent to which harried Treasury advisers were able to police the process. It was well-known, even in the spring of 2003, that Iraqi ministries were full of ghost employees who did no real work for the ministry, drew multiple salaries, or existed only on paper. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, rooting out such ghost employees was not a high priority. But it never became one, either. The special inspector general for Iraq would later cite payments to these ghost employees as a significant waste of resources.
More importantly, by talking only about "those first few weeks," Taylor simply ignores the inspector general's later report concluding that "the [Coalition Provisional Authority] did not establish or implement sufficient managerial, financial, and contractual controls to ensure [Development Fund for Iraq] funds were used in a transparent manner." The system of importing dollars to pay salaries and reconstruction projects in cash--which made sense in the first few months after the invasion--was never replaced with a system that would have provided better oversight. A non-cash economy was never established. The inspector general found that "the CPA disbursed over $8.8 billion ... without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for." And the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (which Waxman chairs) uncovered some illuminating anecdotes:
In addition to these audit reports, officials in Baghdad have provided first-hand accounts of lax physical controls. One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills. One contractor received a $2 million payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack. They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division's vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.
Just before the CPA handed over sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, it flew billions of dollars into the country--including one shipment of $2.4 billion that was the largest in the history of the Federal Reserve. Where did this money go? Many of the Iraqis picked by the CPA to lead ministries after the handover proved corrupt. In one case, an Iraqi official appears to have stolen more than half a billion dollars earmarked for fighting the insurgency.
This isn't entirely the Treasury's fault--the Pentagon and the CPA also share blame. But the Treasury could have sent more people to Iraq, raised more objections in Washington to the way the CPA was being run, helped Iraq move away from a cash-based system of payments, and made sure American and Iraqi money was not being misused. It is this larger point--about accountability and oversight--that Waxman was making when he asked "who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash to a war zone?" and which Taylor artfully dodges in his op-ed.
Finally, missing from Taylor's account is the role that free-market ideologues representing Treasury played within the CPA. As is well-documented in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's stinging account of the U.S. occupation, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the Treasury and the USAID had planned in the months before the invasion to privatize many state-owned companies, to create a world-class stock exchange, and to implement a comprehensive income-tax system. The man Treasury hired to carry out this mission was Peter McPherson, a former Reagan official and the president of Michigan State University, who took a summer sabbatical to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. McPherson, who I interviewed in Iraq, was committed to dispensing economic shock therapy--he wanted Iraq's industries privatized within weeks, even if this meant selling off valuable assets at rock bottom prices to foreign investors. Nor did he seem to care that such a policy might violate the international laws governing occupation.
As I reported in Fortune, McPherson's insistence on immediate privatization created serious tension among the Treasury experts in Iraq. Some of these advisers knew from previous experience (working with formerly socialist states in Eastern Europe) that shock therapy could prove disastrous. They believed McPherson's privatization drive was a distraction from more pressing priorities, such as making sure government workers were being paid. And they felt the decision was best left to the Iraqis themselves.
Treasury officials back in Washington did nothing to rein McPherson in. And, when McPherson realized privatization was impractical under the circumstances, he tried to shrink the size of Iraqi government in a back-door maneuver: He eliminated government subsidies to state-owned industries by canceling all existing intra-governmental debt. This had disastrous consequences, leaving key factories without enough money to replace dilapidated, damaged, or looted infrastructure, while less important ones wound up with valuable assets at no cost (which, in some cases, were then sold off by corrupt company officials, who pocketed the profit). McPherson's decision kept a number of state factories idled, leaving thousands of Iraqis out of work. This, in turn, may have helped feed the growing insurgency.
What about those other Treasury priorities--the stock exchange and the tax code? Well, McPherson drew up a plan to shift Iraq to a flat tax, but it was never implemented. (Most Iraqis never paid taxes any way.) And the stock exchange project eventually fell to a 24-year-old Yale grad with no financial background. He was hired and sent to Iraq by the Pentagon, but, if the Treasury had any serious objections, it never made them known. After months spent reworking Iraq's securities laws and tinkering with a plan to bring state-of-the-art computerized trading to Baghdad, the 24-year-old went home and the Iraqis reopened the stock exchange using the same chalk boards and paper trading chits they had always used. They could have done so months earlier had the administration not been so fixated on creating a world-class exchange.
Of course, none of this came up in Taylor's op-ed. Perhaps that's because he'd rather have us believe in the dashing 007 image of Treasury officials. But another cinematic take on the treasury official's role in counterterrorism is a better fit: In Steven Spielberg's Munich, about the Israeli effort to hunt down and assassinate those involved in the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympians, Avner must meet with an old Mossad bookkeeper before he is sent off on his secret mission, financed with millions from the Israeli Treasury. The bookkeeper has a simple admonishment for the young Avner--one that the Treasury would do well to remember the next time the United States invades and occupies a foreign country: Just bring me receipts.
Just how did the U.S. government lose so much cash in Iraq?
Fistful of Dollars
by Jeremy Kahn
Only at TNR Online | Post date 03.06.07
In the latest James Bond thriller, Casino Royale, 007's mission is to stop an amoral money man for international terrorist organizations from winning a high-stakes poker game. Bond is assisted in this effort by a dashing British agent, Vesper Lynd, played by the beguiling Eva Green. And, in a modern twist on the old Ian Fleming formula, Lynd does not work for Her Majesty's Secret Service, but rather for the Chancellor of the Exchequer--she's a Treasury agent.
John B. Taylor, the Stanford economist who served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs throughout President Bush's first term, wants everyone to know that U.S. Treasury officials play just as important--and sometimes just as daring--a role as Lynd in the real-life war against terrorism. Taylor has a new book out, Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World, that seems intended to ensure that Treasury's--or, perhaps more accurately, Taylor's--contribution to America's current war effort is not overlooked.
To drive home the point, Taylor placed an op-ed in last week's New York Times defending Treasury against California Representative Henry Waxman, who, in a hearing last month, criticized the Bush administration's decision to fly large shipments of cash into Iraq immediately after the invasion. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" Waxman demanded. Taylor didn't see anything wrong with his mind; he called the cash transfers "one of the most successful and carefully planned operations of the war."
Taylor's right that Iraq really needed that cash after the invasion--and also that the conversion from old Iraqi dinars to a new currency, which he also lauded in the op-ed, went off without a hitch. But Taylor's narrative overstates the success of Treasury's efforts in Iraq, ignores Waxman's basic point--which was about oversight in the reconstruction effort--and, through omission, seeks to whitewash the Treasury's culpability in many of the policy failures that have hampered U.S. efforts in Iraq since 2003.
The story of Treasury's cash shipments is one I know well. In May 2003, Fortune magazine sent me to Iraq to chronicle efforts to get the economy back on track. I traveled in convoys that moved millions in Iraqi dinars--crammed into burlap sacks and placed in armored personnel carriers--around Baghdad. I watched vast quantities of U.S. dollars--much of it newly minted and flown from the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and New York in plastic-wrapped bricks--being airlifted to Kirkuk and Mosul to pay the salaries of Iraqi government employees. (I even stood on a stack of $23 million at the airport.) And I spent a good amount of time hanging out with the civilians and soldiers who were responsible for reopening Iraq's banks and figuring out how to stave off economic collapse.
April and May 2003 were chaotic months in Iraq. Most banks were shuttered; some had been looted. Saddam's son Qusay had stolen $1 billion from Iraq's Central Bank just before U.S. troops arrived. Many government ministries had also been looted and, in Iraq's socialized economy, large segments of the population were not showing up for work--except on pay day. At the same time, there was a legitimate fear of civil unrest if government workers and pensioners were not paid. So flying money in from the United States was a sensible stopgap. Besides, as Taylor points out, most of the money initially sent to Iraq belonged to the Iraqis in the first place--it had been frozen in U.S. banks since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Later, when U.S. troops recovered most of the money Qusay had stolen, this, too, was used in reconstruction efforts.
Taylor argues that these shipments of cash had been carefully planned. (He cites a presentation then-Treasury Secretary John Snow made to President Bush and the National Security Council in March 2003.) But, while the concept may have been, the mechanics certainly were not. Like much of the postwar planning, administration officials assumed the pieces would magically fall into place once Baghdad was liberated. From what I saw--and from interviews with Treasury staff--the actual movement of money around the country was a completely ad hoc operation. The troops, armored cars, and helicopters needed to protect cash as it was shuttled from place to place were pressed into service at the last minute. It was just lucky that officials unearthed servicemen with accounting backgrounds to assist in the operation--none had been assigned in advance of the invasion. Meanwhile, many Treasury experts with highly technical skills in economic planning and budgeting were forced to become glorified Brinks employees--spending much of their time merely moving cash around the country.
Taylor claims that "Treasury officials who watched over the payment process in Baghdad in those first few weeks reported a culture of good record keeping." I watched salaries being disbursed to Iraqis on a number of occasions--from banks, at a ministry building, and, at least once, from the back of a truck. While Iraqis needed certain papers to get paid and salaries were usually handed out by ministry supervisors (who, presumably, knew who their own employees were), in practice the payment system was often disorderly, and Taylor overstates the extent to which harried Treasury advisers were able to police the process. It was well-known, even in the spring of 2003, that Iraqi ministries were full of ghost employees who did no real work for the ministry, drew multiple salaries, or existed only on paper. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, rooting out such ghost employees was not a high priority. But it never became one, either. The special inspector general for Iraq would later cite payments to these ghost employees as a significant waste of resources.
More importantly, by talking only about "those first few weeks," Taylor simply ignores the inspector general's later report concluding that "the [Coalition Provisional Authority] did not establish or implement sufficient managerial, financial, and contractual controls to ensure [Development Fund for Iraq] funds were used in a transparent manner." The system of importing dollars to pay salaries and reconstruction projects in cash--which made sense in the first few months after the invasion--was never replaced with a system that would have provided better oversight. A non-cash economy was never established. The inspector general found that "the CPA disbursed over $8.8 billion ... without assurance the monies were properly used or accounted for." And the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (which Waxman chairs) uncovered some illuminating anecdotes:
In addition to these audit reports, officials in Baghdad have provided first-hand accounts of lax physical controls. One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills. One contractor received a $2 million payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack. They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division's vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75 million in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.
Just before the CPA handed over sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, it flew billions of dollars into the country--including one shipment of $2.4 billion that was the largest in the history of the Federal Reserve. Where did this money go? Many of the Iraqis picked by the CPA to lead ministries after the handover proved corrupt. In one case, an Iraqi official appears to have stolen more than half a billion dollars earmarked for fighting the insurgency.
This isn't entirely the Treasury's fault--the Pentagon and the CPA also share blame. But the Treasury could have sent more people to Iraq, raised more objections in Washington to the way the CPA was being run, helped Iraq move away from a cash-based system of payments, and made sure American and Iraqi money was not being misused. It is this larger point--about accountability and oversight--that Waxman was making when he asked "who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash to a war zone?" and which Taylor artfully dodges in his op-ed.
Finally, missing from Taylor's account is the role that free-market ideologues representing Treasury played within the CPA. As is well-documented in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's stinging account of the U.S. occupation, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, the Treasury and the USAID had planned in the months before the invasion to privatize many state-owned companies, to create a world-class stock exchange, and to implement a comprehensive income-tax system. The man Treasury hired to carry out this mission was Peter McPherson, a former Reagan official and the president of Michigan State University, who took a summer sabbatical to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. McPherson, who I interviewed in Iraq, was committed to dispensing economic shock therapy--he wanted Iraq's industries privatized within weeks, even if this meant selling off valuable assets at rock bottom prices to foreign investors. Nor did he seem to care that such a policy might violate the international laws governing occupation.
As I reported in Fortune, McPherson's insistence on immediate privatization created serious tension among the Treasury experts in Iraq. Some of these advisers knew from previous experience (working with formerly socialist states in Eastern Europe) that shock therapy could prove disastrous. They believed McPherson's privatization drive was a distraction from more pressing priorities, such as making sure government workers were being paid. And they felt the decision was best left to the Iraqis themselves.
Treasury officials back in Washington did nothing to rein McPherson in. And, when McPherson realized privatization was impractical under the circumstances, he tried to shrink the size of Iraqi government in a back-door maneuver: He eliminated government subsidies to state-owned industries by canceling all existing intra-governmental debt. This had disastrous consequences, leaving key factories without enough money to replace dilapidated, damaged, or looted infrastructure, while less important ones wound up with valuable assets at no cost (which, in some cases, were then sold off by corrupt company officials, who pocketed the profit). McPherson's decision kept a number of state factories idled, leaving thousands of Iraqis out of work. This, in turn, may have helped feed the growing insurgency.
What about those other Treasury priorities--the stock exchange and the tax code? Well, McPherson drew up a plan to shift Iraq to a flat tax, but it was never implemented. (Most Iraqis never paid taxes any way.) And the stock exchange project eventually fell to a 24-year-old Yale grad with no financial background. He was hired and sent to Iraq by the Pentagon, but, if the Treasury had any serious objections, it never made them known. After months spent reworking Iraq's securities laws and tinkering with a plan to bring state-of-the-art computerized trading to Baghdad, the 24-year-old went home and the Iraqis reopened the stock exchange using the same chalk boards and paper trading chits they had always used. They could have done so months earlier had the administration not been so fixated on creating a world-class exchange.
Of course, none of this came up in Taylor's op-ed. Perhaps that's because he'd rather have us believe in the dashing 007 image of Treasury officials. But another cinematic take on the treasury official's role in counterterrorism is a better fit: In Steven Spielberg's Munich, about the Israeli effort to hunt down and assassinate those involved in the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympians, Avner must meet with an old Mossad bookkeeper before he is sent off on his secret mission, financed with millions from the Israeli Treasury. The bookkeeper has a simple admonishment for the young Avner--one that the Treasury would do well to remember the next time the United States invades and occupies a foreign country: Just bring me receipts.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Can we admit that it's real yet?
Strangely enough, Cizik's position on most of the "Evangelical" issues that he mentions have more than a little tinge of Judaism to them; i.e. the world is inherently imperfect and it is our responsibillity to improve upon it. I've always loved this idea, but of course, I'm a liberal, tree-hugging, sodomite, making my opinion relatively useless in this issue, amount to nothing more than "warm and fuzzy" sentiments.
Of course, the real beauty of Focus on the Family's fucked up logic doesn't appear until they get the chance to speak for themselves (as they do in the NYT article). A Foucault-ian (as I definitely pretend to be from time to time), would have an absolute fit over the stated goal of Evangelicalism. "[The great moral issues of our time] a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote 'the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.'" Every single one of these ideas is derrived from the need to control sexuality in one way or another. In other words, the "great moral issue" for evangelical christians is the continued genealogy of the church - or, in other words, the maintenance of its own existence, since by and large religion is (in Richard Dawkins' view) an "accident of birth." A large body of statistical evidence demonstrates how your membership in a church is the result of your parents' membership, which would explain the implicit need for a church to dominate the sexual nature of its members. Tragically, it is this need to reproduce that has progressively overwhelmed any other sort of Christian ideals (what happened to peace, happiness, and love no matter who you are) in modern Evangelicalism, that leading to an appalling (or as some would happen to say, hilariously absurd) obsession with the concept of "salvation." (See here)
Evangelical Angers Peers With Call for Action on Global Warming
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; Page A04
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.
In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.
Cizik has been a leader in efforts to broaden evangelicals' political agenda beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. He says Christians have a biblical imperative to protect the environment, which he calls "creation care."
"I speak with a voice that is authentically evangelical on all the issues, from religious freedom around the world, to compassion for the poor, ending oppression in Darfur -- and yes, creation care is one of those issues," Cizik said yesterday.
The NAE's board is scheduled to meet next week in Minnesota. Its former president, the Rev. Ted Haggard, resigned in November after a scandal involving sex and drugs.
His successor, the Rev. Leith Anderson, defended Cizik as "a great asset." He also said that the Dobson letter was released to the news media before it was received by the board. "I guess that says it all," he said.
Evangelical's Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2007
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement's agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
"We have observed," the letter says, "that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.
They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik "cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals," then he should be encouraged to resign.
Mr. Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association's chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, "We're talking about somebody here who's been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected."
"I'm behind him," said Mr. Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute.
Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement's agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries.
He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound "conversion" on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in "The Great Warming," a documentary on climate change.
Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Mr. Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January.
Mr. Haggard, then the president, and Mr. Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Mr. Cizik.
In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose.
"We're saying what is being done here," Mr. Perkins said, "is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders."
Of course, the real beauty of Focus on the Family's fucked up logic doesn't appear until they get the chance to speak for themselves (as they do in the NYT article). A Foucault-ian (as I definitely pretend to be from time to time), would have an absolute fit over the stated goal of Evangelicalism. "[The great moral issues of our time] a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote 'the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.'" Every single one of these ideas is derrived from the need to control sexuality in one way or another. In other words, the "great moral issue" for evangelical christians is the continued genealogy of the church - or, in other words, the maintenance of its own existence, since by and large religion is (in Richard Dawkins' view) an "accident of birth." A large body of statistical evidence demonstrates how your membership in a church is the result of your parents' membership, which would explain the implicit need for a church to dominate the sexual nature of its members. Tragically, it is this need to reproduce that has progressively overwhelmed any other sort of Christian ideals (what happened to peace, happiness, and love no matter who you are) in modern Evangelicalism, that leading to an appalling (or as some would happen to say, hilariously absurd) obsession with the concept of "salvation." (See here)
Evangelical Angers Peers With Call for Action on Global Warming
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; Page A04
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.
In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.
Cizik has been a leader in efforts to broaden evangelicals' political agenda beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. He says Christians have a biblical imperative to protect the environment, which he calls "creation care."
"I speak with a voice that is authentically evangelical on all the issues, from religious freedom around the world, to compassion for the poor, ending oppression in Darfur -- and yes, creation care is one of those issues," Cizik said yesterday.
The NAE's board is scheduled to meet next week in Minnesota. Its former president, the Rev. Ted Haggard, resigned in November after a scandal involving sex and drugs.
His successor, the Rev. Leith Anderson, defended Cizik as "a great asset." He also said that the Dobson letter was released to the news media before it was received by the board. "I guess that says it all," he said.
Evangelical's Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2007
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement's agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
"We have observed," the letter says, "that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.
They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik "cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals," then he should be encouraged to resign.
Mr. Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association's chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, "We're talking about somebody here who's been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected."
"I'm behind him," said Mr. Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute.
Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement's agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries.
He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound "conversion" on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in "The Great Warming," a documentary on climate change.
Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Mr. Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January.
Mr. Haggard, then the president, and Mr. Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Mr. Cizik.
In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose.
"We're saying what is being done here," Mr. Perkins said, "is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders."
Requiem
Clive James' brief biographies of the great intellectuals of the 20th century have been a compulsory read for me over the last couple of weeks. His brief discussion of Nadezhda Mandelstam is not only lovely and illuminating, it led me to look up Anna Akhmatova's stunning Requiem. If, as James argues, Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope is even more insightful, I'm in for a treat when I finally pick that book up.
Enjoy.
[The format for the poem is a cycle, essentially a series of smaller poems published together in order to assemble a "whole" piece. Each poem includes the dates of its original production at the bottom of each poem. For more on Akhmatovoa, and the issues surrounding the production and release of Requiem, check here. There are a couple of footnotes in the poem as well, which appear at the bottom of this post.]
Requiem
Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]
DEDICATION
Mountains fall before this grief,
A mighty river stops its flow,
But prison doors stay firmly bolted
Shutting off the convict burrows
And an anguish close to death.
Fresh winds softly blow for someone,
Gentle sunsets warm them through; we don't know this,
We are everywhere the same, listening
To the scrape and turn of hateful keys
And the heavy tread of marching soldiers.
Waking early, as if for early mass,
Walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,
We'd meet - the dead, lifeless; the sun,
Lower every day; the Neva, mistier:
But hope still sings forever in the distance.
The verdict. Immediately a flood of tears,
Followed by a total isolation,
As if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or,
Thumped, she lies there brutally laid out,
But she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone.
Where are you, my unwilling friends,
Captives of my two satanic years?
What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?
What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?
I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell.
[March 1940]
INTRODUCTION
[PRELUDE]
It happened like this when only the dead
Were smiling, glad of their release,
That Leningrad hung around its prisons
Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece.
Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang
Short songs of farewell
To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering,
As they, in regiments, walked along -
Stars of death stood over us
As innocent Russia squirmed
Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres
Of the black marias.
I
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . .
The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat
On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy (1)
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
[1935. Autumn. Moscow]
II
Silent flows the river Don
A yellow moon looks quietly on
Swanking about, with cap askew
It sees through the window a shadow of you
Gravely ill, all alone
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.
III
It isn't me, someone else is suffering. I couldn't.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth,
Then let the torches be removed. . .
Night.
IV
Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling,
The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo (2)
If only you could have foreseen
What life would do with you -
That you would stand, parcel in hand,
Beneath the Crosses (3), three hundredth in line,
Burning the new year's ice
With your hot tears.
Back and forth the prison poplar sways
With not a sound - how many innocent
Blameless lives are being taken away. . .
[1938]
V
For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever -
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]
VI
Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
How, my son, into your prison
White nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
Eyes that focus like a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.
[1939. Spring]
VII
THE VERDICT
The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .
But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.
[22 June 1939. Summer. Fontannyi Dom (4)]
VIII
TO DEATH
You will come anyway - so why not now?
I wait for you; things have become too hard.
I have turned out the lights and opened the door
For you, so simple and so wonderful.
Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in
Like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me
Like a practised bandit with a heavy weapon.
Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,
Or, with a simple tale prepared by you
(And known by all to the point of nausea), take me
Before the commander of the blue caps and let me glimpse
The house administrator's terrified white face.
I don't care anymore. The river Yenisey
Swirls on. The Pole star blazes.
The blue sparks of those much-loved eyes
Close over and cover the final horror.
[19 August 1939. Fontannyi Dom]
IX
Madness with its wings
Has covered half my soul
It feeds me fiery wine
And lures me into the abyss.
That's when I understood
While listening to my alien delirium
That I must hand the victory
To it.
However much I nag
However much I beg
It will not let me take
One single thing away:
Not my son's frightening eyes -
A suffering set in stone,
Or prison visiting hours
Or days that end in storms
Nor the sweet coolness of a hand
The anxious shade of lime trees
Nor the light distant sound
Of final comforting words.
[14 May 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
X
CRUCIFIXION
Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.
1.
A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!'
But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .'
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]
2.
Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]
EPILOGUE
1.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.
2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,
'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.
[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
FOOTNOTES
1 An elite guard which rose up in rebellion against Peter the Great in 1698. Most were either executed or exiled.
2 The imperial summer residence outside St. Petersburg where Ahmatova spent her early years.
3 A prison complex in central Leningrad near the Finland Station, called The Crosses because of the shape of two of the buildings.
4 The Leningrad house in which Ahmatova lived.
Enjoy.
[The format for the poem is a cycle, essentially a series of smaller poems published together in order to assemble a "whole" piece. Each poem includes the dates of its original production at the bottom of each poem. For more on Akhmatovoa, and the issues surrounding the production and release of Requiem, check here. There are a couple of footnotes in the poem as well, which appear at the bottom of this post.]
Requiem
Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]
DEDICATION
Mountains fall before this grief,
A mighty river stops its flow,
But prison doors stay firmly bolted
Shutting off the convict burrows
And an anguish close to death.
Fresh winds softly blow for someone,
Gentle sunsets warm them through; we don't know this,
We are everywhere the same, listening
To the scrape and turn of hateful keys
And the heavy tread of marching soldiers.
Waking early, as if for early mass,
Walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,
We'd meet - the dead, lifeless; the sun,
Lower every day; the Neva, mistier:
But hope still sings forever in the distance.
The verdict. Immediately a flood of tears,
Followed by a total isolation,
As if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or,
Thumped, she lies there brutally laid out,
But she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone.
Where are you, my unwilling friends,
Captives of my two satanic years?
What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?
What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?
I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell.
[March 1940]
INTRODUCTION
[PRELUDE]
It happened like this when only the dead
Were smiling, glad of their release,
That Leningrad hung around its prisons
Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece.
Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang
Short songs of farewell
To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering,
As they, in regiments, walked along -
Stars of death stood over us
As innocent Russia squirmed
Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres
Of the black marias.
I
You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God. . .
The cold of an icon was on your lips, a death-cold sweat
On your brow - I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy (1)
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
[1935. Autumn. Moscow]
II
Silent flows the river Don
A yellow moon looks quietly on
Swanking about, with cap askew
It sees through the window a shadow of you
Gravely ill, all alone
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.
III
It isn't me, someone else is suffering. I couldn't.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth,
Then let the torches be removed. . .
Night.
IV
Giggling, poking fun, everyone's darling,
The carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo (2)
If only you could have foreseen
What life would do with you -
That you would stand, parcel in hand,
Beneath the Crosses (3), three hundredth in line,
Burning the new year's ice
With your hot tears.
Back and forth the prison poplar sways
With not a sound - how many innocent
Blameless lives are being taken away. . .
[1938]
V
For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I've thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever -
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]
VI
Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
How, my son, into your prison
White nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
Eyes that focus like a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.
[1939. Spring]
VII
THE VERDICT
The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.
I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .
But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.
[22 June 1939. Summer. Fontannyi Dom (4)]
VIII
TO DEATH
You will come anyway - so why not now?
I wait for you; things have become too hard.
I have turned out the lights and opened the door
For you, so simple and so wonderful.
Assume whatever shape you wish. Burst in
Like a shell of noxious gas. Creep up on me
Like a practised bandit with a heavy weapon.
Poison me, if you want, with a typhoid exhalation,
Or, with a simple tale prepared by you
(And known by all to the point of nausea), take me
Before the commander of the blue caps and let me glimpse
The house administrator's terrified white face.
I don't care anymore. The river Yenisey
Swirls on. The Pole star blazes.
The blue sparks of those much-loved eyes
Close over and cover the final horror.
[19 August 1939. Fontannyi Dom]
IX
Madness with its wings
Has covered half my soul
It feeds me fiery wine
And lures me into the abyss.
That's when I understood
While listening to my alien delirium
That I must hand the victory
To it.
However much I nag
However much I beg
It will not let me take
One single thing away:
Not my son's frightening eyes -
A suffering set in stone,
Or prison visiting hours
Or days that end in storms
Nor the sweet coolness of a hand
The anxious shade of lime trees
Nor the light distant sound
Of final comforting words.
[14 May 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
X
CRUCIFIXION
Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.
1.
A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, 'Why hast thou forsaken me!'
But to his mother, 'Weep not for me. . .'
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]
2.
Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]
EPILOGUE
1.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.
2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,
'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.
[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]
FOOTNOTES
1 An elite guard which rose up in rebellion against Peter the Great in 1698. Most were either executed or exiled.
2 The imperial summer residence outside St. Petersburg where Ahmatova spent her early years.
3 A prison complex in central Leningrad near the Finland Station, called The Crosses because of the shape of two of the buildings.
4 The Leningrad house in which Ahmatova lived.
Describing Belief
Strangely enough, Cizik's position on most of the "Evangelical" issues that he mentions have more than a little tinge of Judaism to them; i.e. the world is inherently imperfect and it is our responsibillity to improve upon it. I've always loved this idea, but of course, I'm a liberal, tree-hugging, sodomite, making my opinion relatively useless in this issue, amount to nothing more than "warm and fuzzy" sentiments.
Of course, the real beauty of Focus on the Family's fucked up logic doesn't appear until they get the chance to speak for themselves (as they do in the NYT article). A Foucault-ian (as I definitely pretend to be from time to time), would have an absolute fit over the stated goal of Evangelicalism. "[The great moral issues of our time] a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote 'the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.'" Every single one of these ideas is derrived from the need to control sexuality in one way or another. In other words, the "great moral issue" for evangelical christians is the continued genealogy of the church - or, in other words, the maintenance of its own existence, since by and large religion is (in Richard Dawkins' view) an "accident of birth." A large body of statistical evidence demonstrates how your membership in a church is the result of your parents' membership, which would explain the implicit need for a church to dominate the sexual nature of its members. Tragically, it is this need to reproduce that has progressively overwhelmed any other sort of Christian ideals (what happened to peace, happiness, and love no matter who you are) in modern Evangelicalism, that leading to an appalling (or as some would happen to say, hilariously absurd) obsession with the concept of "salvation." (See here)
Evangelical Angers Peers With Call for Action on Global Warming
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; Page A04
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.
In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.
Cizik has been a leader in efforts to broaden evangelicals' political agenda beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. He says Christians have a biblical imperative to protect the environment, which he calls "creation care."
"I speak with a voice that is authentically evangelical on all the issues, from religious freedom around the world, to compassion for the poor, ending oppression in Darfur -- and yes, creation care is one of those issues," Cizik said yesterday.
The NAE's board is scheduled to meet next week in Minnesota. Its former president, the Rev. Ted Haggard, resigned in November after a scandal involving sex and drugs.
His successor, the Rev. Leith Anderson, defended Cizik as "a great asset." He also said that the Dobson letter was released to the news media before it was received by the board. "I guess that says it all," he said.
Evangelical's Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2007
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement's agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
"We have observed," the letter says, "that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.
They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik "cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals," then he should be encouraged to resign.
Mr. Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association's chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, "We're talking about somebody here who's been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected."
"I'm behind him," said Mr. Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute.
Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement's agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries.
He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound "conversion" on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in "The Great Warming," a documentary on climate change.
Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Mr. Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January.
Mr. Haggard, then the president, and Mr. Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Mr. Cizik.
In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose.
"We're saying what is being done here," Mr. Perkins said, "is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders."
Of course, the real beauty of Focus on the Family's fucked up logic doesn't appear until they get the chance to speak for themselves (as they do in the NYT article). A Foucault-ian (as I definitely pretend to be from time to time), would have an absolute fit over the stated goal of Evangelicalism. "[The great moral issues of our time] a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote 'the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children.'" Every single one of these ideas is derrived from the need to control sexuality in one way or another. In other words, the "great moral issue" for evangelical christians is the continued genealogy of the church - or, in other words, the maintenance of its own existence, since by and large religion is (in Richard Dawkins' view) an "accident of birth." A large body of statistical evidence demonstrates how your membership in a church is the result of your parents' membership, which would explain the implicit need for a church to dominate the sexual nature of its members. Tragically, it is this need to reproduce that has progressively overwhelmed any other sort of Christian ideals (what happened to peace, happiness, and love no matter who you are) in modern Evangelicalism, that leading to an appalling (or as some would happen to say, hilariously absurd) obsession with the concept of "salvation." (See here)
Evangelical Angers Peers With Call for Action on Global Warming
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; Page A04
Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson and other conservative Christian leaders are calling for the National Association of Evangelicals to silence or fire an official who has urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously.
In a letter this week to the board of the NAE, which claims 30 million members, Dobson and his two dozen co-signers said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the NAE's vice president for government relations, has waged a "relentless campaign" that is "dividing and demoralizing" evangelicals.
Cizik has been a leader in efforts to broaden evangelicals' political agenda beyond abortion and same-sex marriage. He says Christians have a biblical imperative to protect the environment, which he calls "creation care."
"I speak with a voice that is authentically evangelical on all the issues, from religious freedom around the world, to compassion for the poor, ending oppression in Darfur -- and yes, creation care is one of those issues," Cizik said yesterday.
The NAE's board is scheduled to meet next week in Minnesota. Its former president, the Rev. Ted Haggard, resigned in November after a scandal involving sex and drugs.
His successor, the Rev. Leith Anderson, defended Cizik as "a great asset." He also said that the Dobson letter was released to the news media before it was received by the board. "I guess that says it all," he said.
Evangelical's Focus on Climate Draws Fire of Christian Right
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: March 3, 2007
Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.
The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.
The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement's agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.
"We have observed," the letter says, "that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."
Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.
They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Mr. Cizik "cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals," then he should be encouraged to resign.
Mr. Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association's chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, "We're talking about somebody here who's been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected."
"I'm behind him," said Mr. Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute.
Mr. Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement's agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries.
He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound "conversion" on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in "The Great Warming," a documentary on climate change.
Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Mr. Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January.
Mr. Haggard, then the president, and Mr. Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Mr. Cizik.
In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose.
"We're saying what is being done here," Mr. Perkins said, "is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders."
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