Looks as though the FBI has snagged some would-be terrorists – a group of Muslims originally from Bosnia, Jordan, and elsewhere allegedly crazy enough to want to attack a military installation in the U.S. Strange choice – kind of like planning to rob a police station, but never mind. A triumphal week in the never-ending, absolute total war against terrorism, right? Well… not entirely. This was also the week that Luis Posada Carriles was allowed to walk, his immigration-related charges having been thrown out by a federal judge. But this septuagenarian is not just somebody’s elderly uncle who entered the country illegally to visit a sick relative. A former C.I.A. operative, Posada is one of the alleged masterminds of the 1976 bombing of a civilian airliner that resulted in the deaths of all 73 people on board. He was jailed in connection with this charge by the Venezuelan government – not the current one, mind you, but a very pro-U.S. administration – based on an international investigation carried out by several Caribbean nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Cuba. (Check out this story on DemocracyNow! as well as related documents on the National Security Archive web site.)

Trivia question: Who was head of the C.I.A. back in the mid-seventies? George Bush the elder. Funny story – while president, the elder Bush pardoned Posada’s co-conspirator in the airliner bombing, anti-Castro fanatic Orlando Bosch, who now lives like a war hero in Miami. But this is not just another Bush story; this policy runs deep. Despite all the high-octane rhetoric, the United States has long been a fairly congenial retirement destination for aging terrorists. Posada is hardly the first, or even the most heinous, bad though he is. Aside from him and Bosch, there’ve been people like Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, leader of the Haitian paramilitary group FRAPH and another C.I.A. asset, who was living a fairly comfortable existence until being picked up in connection with a mortgage fraud scheme, to which he has pled guilty. (Kill and rape hundreds, perhaps thousands, in cold blood and you walk. But don’t defraud the consumer!) Plenty of Latin American and Southeast Asian killers have been welcomed into our neighborhoods and universities, stopping just briefly to rinse the blood off their hands as they enter. And what the hell do you call Oliver North if not a terror leader, organizing and supplying the Contra army of murderous thugs during the 1980s (an enterprise to which Posada also contributed his grisly talents) as they attacked co-op farms, clinics, and anything else they were certain was undefended.

So… some terrorists get thrown into dark cells in client states; others go to a hero’s welcome in Miami or get their own T.V. show on Fox. It’s all about targeting. If they kill people who don’t count, there are no consequences… and there are often rewards, in fact. If they threaten our friends or ourselves, it’s a whole different story. Buy letting Posada walk, we’re saying it’s okay to blow up planes if the civilians on board happen to live in a country we have some dispute with. What the hell kind of “War on Terror” is that? I mean, doesn’t our government’s very definition of terrorism incorporate violence against innocents to achieve some political end? If Posada, Bosch, and their like are deemed not worthy of prosecution, doesn’t that serve to legitimize Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center? I don’t know about you, but that disgusts the living hell out of me. Those of you who’ve been reading this column for a long time know that I am no fan of U.S. policy towards Cuba, but even if I supported the embargo, I’m sure I could distinguish between those committed to peaceful democratization of the island and those willing to blow ordinary people to bits to express their opposition to Castro.

Let Posada walk? To borrow a Steven Colbert phrase, that’s the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

luv u,

jp

Glad to see that Naomi Klein is back on the job – last week’s column in the Nation about the World Bank and Wolfowitz was a welcome antidote to the conventional wisdom that gets peddled in the mainstream media and on NPR. The World Bank in particular and the “international community” in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as “anti-poverty”). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years ago, and subsequent change of course. (There’s a success story!) Advocates of the system point with pride at Russia, where millions have lost their pensions and billions of dollars in public assets were ladled out to friends of the late Boris Yeltsin.

Look upon this and lament, fellow Americans. You – yes, you – and I are, at best, one misstep away from penury… and the same “market forces” that have been unleashed upon most of the rest of humanity are now growling at our door as well. Just glance at our national priorities and you can see the game that’s being played. We’re spending borrowed money on military technology and a criminal war to export not democracy but neoliberal economics to Iraq. That massive increase in our national debt will, if allowed to go unchecked, force the downsizing of public services and the eventual piratization (er, I mean, privatization) of such public institutions as Social Security. That’s the intention, it would appear – kind of a win-win for the masters of neoliberal economics. Not only do we help them scuttle the Iraqi state, but in so doing dig a hole under our own public sector, as well.

What’s their latest target? That country in the horn of Africa that we’ve helped out so much through the years (note: irony) – Somalia, now the subject of a massive U.S. supported occupation by neighboring Ethiopia, reported on by Salim Lone of the Kenyan Daily Nation, on Democracy Now! This is the war you never hear about – the war that the major news media can’t find space to report; that the United Nations has virtually ignored, except to attempt to round up a “coalition of the willing” to help prop up the puppet government Ethiopia has installed there by force of arms. Yes, the stated reasoning behind this mess is terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, but there’s little evidence to back up that reasoning, and there appear to be more concrete motivations – the U.S./Ethiopian-backed regime is congenial to the return of western oil companies, which have been out of the country since 1991. Somalia also has a strategic location U.S. planners have coveted since the Carter administration, when Iran stopped being a client state and we started pumping money into the corrupt regime of former Somali president Mohamed Siad Barre.

Look out, Mogadishu. More help is on the way.

luv u,

jp

Look out, folks – here comes the straight talk express, charging down the track straight toward you. For what seems like the twelfth time in as many months, John McCain has launched (or re-launched) his presidential bid, trying to trade on any of his former selves that the public will buy – Mister Independent, Mister Inevitable, Mister Iraq Victory, etc. Pick your favorite McCain… or collect all three! At this stage, the Arizona senator’s flagging campaign appears to be centered on his dogged support for the Iraq project, albeit a “better managed” variant of that catastrophe. The calculation is a simple one – McCain supports the troop increase because he believes it’s right, even though it’s unpopular; a position that is supposed to lend him an aura of integrity and moral authority. Everyone else is playing politics with the war, but not McCain. That’s his card, and he’s playing it for all it’s worth, equating troop withdrawals with “surrender” and any war funding conditions with abandonment of our troops (mainstream G.O.P. positions, in essence).

Okay – so here’s my question. How is McCain’s position any less “political” than anyone else’s? He’s just betting on “war futures” like all those who voted for this policy in the first place. If in nine months Iraq is even marginally more quiet, McCain can claim vindication. If things go even more septic and Congress forces even a partial withdrawal of the additional “surge” forces, he will be able to claim that the continuing disaster is the result of not following his sage counsel. And if the American project in Iraq ultimately succeeds (i.e. if a government congenial to U.S. influence and permanent military bases ever takes hold), it will be good news for McCain, though decidedly not for the U.S. troops and Iraqis who will have died in the meantime, not to mention the millions of Iraqis who will have had their national sovereignty compromised by a foreign power, and the millions of Americans who have been made demonstrably less safe because of this stupid war. In other words, no one benefits from “victory” except politicians like McCain.

McCain talks as though he has the right to speak for everyone in uniform. Frankly, I don’t see why. He is not the only person who suffered during the Vietnam War, not by a long shot. Plenty of Americans had a rougher time of it than McCain, and something like 58,000 never came back at all. That’s to say nothing of what the Vietnamese and other southeast Asians endured during that war. From what I’ve seen, I doubt very many of those incarcerated by the Saigon regime or the U.S. military / C.I.A. during those years are now trotting around the countryside angling for votes. (Most are in unmarked graves or sleeping with the fishes, as they say.) Just this week I ran across an article about how the enormous tonnage of high explosives we dropped on Cambodia in 1965 – 1973 was in fact a gross underestimate – a number now revised upwards to more than 2,756,941 tons. Needless to say, that relentless campaign of terror bombing did not lead to peace and prosperity, nor was it intended to. The same may be said of the conflict in Iraq.

War clearly has its uses. For some.

luv u,

jp