MONEY DOESN'T TALK, IT SWEARS...

Welcome

2007-04-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

Hello. I am no longer posting on this blog. Please go to www.timshorrock.com to keep up on my latest writings and postings on US foreign policy, national security, music and politics. And thanks for stopping by.

-- TS

Backlash over US role in Korean Strike-Breaking

2007-04-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

Note: This article was published in 1999 during the height of the Asian financial crisis.

By Tim Shorrock, IPS, 20 April 1999

WASHINGTON, Apr 20 (IPS)—A strike by thousands of transport and industrial workers in South Korea this week is mainly in protest at mass layoffs that form part of reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But the unions also are angry at the crackdown on the Korean labour movement by the government of former dissident Kim Dae Jung and the arrest, during the past year, of trade union leaders suspected of leading illegal strikes.

Many of those arrests took place at the bankrupt Halla Group where restructuring and down sizing has been organized by Rothschild Inc.—a Wall Street investment bank that, ironically, also is a major custodian of retirement money earned by U.S. workers.

Adding insult to injury, the biggest investor in Rothschild’s Asia Recovery Fund is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Better known as Calpers, that fund is the largest public pension fund in the United States.

It is is run by a 13-member board of trustees that includes four U.S. union officials and therein lies an interesting tale of finance, politics and strange bedfellows.

The latest industrial action in South Korea began Monday when Seoul’s 9,000 subway workers walked off the job. More than 20,000 workers from 35 unions, most of them linked to the militant Korea Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), then staged sympathy strikes in support of the subway workers.

On Tuesday, workers at Daewoo Heavy Industries, one of the country’s largest shipyards, downed tools to protest Daewoo’s decision to sell the yard to Mitsui of Japan as part of its plan to scale down its assets and reduce debt.

The industrial action will culminate in a mass strike scheduled for April 26 and nation-wide mass rallies on May 1.

The campaign is aimed at forcing a change in the overall orientation of the government’s restructuring policy, a KCTU statement said.

The ill-advised policy—perhaps aimed at appeasing the Wall Street neo-liberal zealots—was, last year, responsible for the dismissal of some 400,000 workers and the collapse of the domestic economy as a whole.

That’s where Halla, the largest of South Korea’s chaebol to go bankrupt, enters the story.

When Halla went under, Wilbur Ross, a partner at Rothschild, sensed an opportunity. After going over Halla’s finances, he agreed to extend bridge loans that eventually reached over 1 billion dollars to help the chaebol restructure its assets and debts.

One of Halla’s most prized assets is Mando Machinery, Korea’s largest manufacturer of car parts and a big supplier to General Motors, Ford and other US-based multinationals.

Last summer, Rothschild ran into fierce labor opposition when thousands of workers organized a sit-down strike to protest Mando’s plans to fire one-fourth of the workforce.

Two weeks into the occupation, Ross faxed a letter to Mando’s CEO warning the strike was making his investors nervous. I simply made it obvious to the company that, if the unrest continued, it would make Mando financially non-viable, Ross told IPS.

The threat worked: a few days later, 10,000 riot policemen armed with clubs, pepper fog, tear gas and water cannons stormed Mando’s seven factories and arrested 1,800 workers; later 25 leaders of Mando’s trade union went to prison.

But the lay-off were completed and the remaining Mando workers went back to their jobs.

Rothschild’s parent company, Rothschild Assets Management, handles billions of dollars of investments for several U.S. pension funds, including the Joint Industry Board of the Electrical Industry and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and public retirement funds in Baltimore and the states of Maryland, New Mexico and Vermont.

Last month, the union connection deepened Calpers’ board voted unanimously to invest another 100 million dollars in Rothschild’s Asian fund, raising its stake to 150 million dollars.

The new Asian venture presents valuable investment opportunities to purchase securities at historically low prices, declared Charles P. Valdes, chairman of Calpers’ investment committee. He also is a member of the International Executive Board of the Service Employees International Union, one of the most aggressive unions in the U.S. labor movement.

The investment has made Calpers and—indirectly, thousands of state workers from California to Maryland—partner in an action that left scores of Korean workers in jail and hundreds without jobs.

Adding to the irony is the fact that Calpers, a recognized leader in the world of socially-responsible investing, has won strong praise from the AFL-CIO for using its clout to influence U.S. corporations that have run afoul of U.S. unions.

In this case, Calpers’ labor trustees were caught flat-footed. We didn’t know anything about it, said a union official when asked about the Mando incident. But we’re concerned about this sort of thing and want to get a better handle on it.

A consultant who advises union pension trustees said the Halla story should serve as a wake-up call for unions. People don’t feel comfortable dealing with entities when the right arm is making profits from their pension fund and the left arm is engaged in these kinds of practices, he said.

Rothschild’s Ross rejects those arguments.

The purpose of our fund is to make an investment return for its beneficiaries; it’s not an ideological instrument, he said. Ross defended the layoffs at Mando Machinery, a major supplier to GM and Ford, saying: Korean companies have too many workers.

For unions, Calpers’ investment in Rothschild begs the question of international labour solidarity.

What happened at Mando is repeating itself as Asian workers continue to resist pressure to slash payrolls and throughout Asia, much of the restructuring is being organized by Wall Street banks that, like Rothschild, handle billions of dollars in U.S. pension funds.

Major players in the restructuring process in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan include such financial behemoths as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, GE Capital, J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.

[c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
All rights reserved

Cornyn, George Wallace and Me

2006-07-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

Before it dies on the (internet) vine, I thought I'd post this piece I wrote about the junior Senator from Texas, John Cornyn, who was a classmate of mine at the American School in Japan during the 1960s. This ran in The Texas Observer (Afterword 6/7/02).

Cornyn, George Wallace and Me

BY TIM SHORROCK

I read a couple of weeks ago that John Cornyn had pledged to keep the issue of race out of his upcoming U.S. Senate campaign against African-American Democratic nominee Ron Kirk. That was a relief, because the John Cornyn I knew in high school was a big supporter of George Wallace and seemed oblivious to the dangers of Wallace’s racial demagoguery.

Cornyn a Wallace supporter? Why hasn’t Texas heard about that before? Cornyn and I graduated in 1969 from the American School in Japan, and I guess word of his early dabbling in right-wing politics never reached these shores. Besides, statements like this are not something I’d want to broadcast if I was trying to step into Phil Gramm’s shoes and join George Bush’s team in Washington.

"With the continuing concentration of power in the hands of the inept Democratic and Republican parties, it is time for a change," Cornyn wrote in our student newspaper just before the 1968 presidential election. "Cast your vote for a strong America. Vote for George C. Wallace on November 5."

Before going on, I have to confess: If Cornyn was the conservative in our class, I was the class radical. While he supported Wallace and backed the war in Vietnam, I was for McCarthy and vehemently opposed the war. We were polar opposites politically, but managed to become friends. I’m sure he remembers the time we got trapped in downtown Tokyo during a huge antiwar demonstration that shut down the city’s rail system, and I helped him find his way home.

We came to our politics from very different backgrounds. Cornyn was the son of an Air Force officer who was stationed for two years at the sprawling U.S. air base at Tachikawa. I was one of five children of missionary-educators, and had lived in Tokyo most of my life. My dad was an outspoken critic of the war and was a key organizer of a May 1968 rally near the U.S. Embassy, where 100 American missionaries, college students, and professors called for an end to U.S. bombing and a negotiated peace in Vietnam.

My presence at that march infuriated a lot of my fellow students, who were roughly divided between children of missionaries, business executives, diplomats, and CIA officers. It was a pretty conservative crowd–but slightly left of Cornyn, who had to shrug off laughs, quizzical looks, and worse whenever he stuck up for Wallace. (One of his pro-Wallace speeches was "well presented and convincing, despite the distraction of a few hecklers in the audience," our paper reported).

To be fair, blocking doors to prevent integration wasn’t on Cornyn’s list of reasons to vote for Wallace. But he was big on states’ rights. "With the Supreme Court’s recent rulings and increased federal legislation, the government has become increasingly dictatorial and oppressive while the state and local governments have become more weak," he wrote. Here he is on law and order: "Mr. Wallace is convinced that no innocent man should be punished… [But] many criminals never receive the punishment due them because they have clever lawyers, or the case takes so long to go through the slow court schedules and lengthy appeals cases." On the urban crisis: "The existence of poverty has been fact since the beginning of mankind. Statistics show us that it is not the poor element that riots and rebels, but others who hold complete disrespect for property and the rights of others (socialists?)" And, finally, on Vietnam: "It only seems reasonable that a cure (victory) for this Asian illness is most desirable even if the measures necessary are drastic."

Cornyn didn’t win many converts: The final count in our mock presidential election was Humphrey, 250; Nixon, 225; and Wallace, 22. None of those votes were mine, because I boycotted the election out of disgust with Humphrey’s refusal to break with LBJ over the war. So, in a sense, both Cornyn and I were outsiders. We just came from different sides of the fence.

The last time we saw each other was on graduation day. "Good luck among your fellow left-wingers at Earlham," he wrote in my yearbook, referring to the Quaker college I attended in Indiana. "Just don’t burn down too many buildings and put up too many red flags." Well, I didn’t, but I never abandoned my core beliefs. To his credit, Cornyn stuck to his guns as well. For the good of the country, let’s hope he sticks to Texas, too.

Tim Shorrock is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., where he writes for The Nation and other publications. He lived in Japan from 1952 to 1959 and 1963 to 1969. He can be reached at tshorrock51@hotmail.com.

BOSS NADER - or how I was fired by Ralph Nader for union organizing and lived to tell about it

2006-06-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

This is the best account of how I was fired in 1984 by Ralph Nader for, among other things, organizing a union in one of his shops. I still stand behind what I told the Left Business Observer during the 1996 election, when Nader began his foolish runs for the presidency that, in 2000, helped elect Bush and Cheney. "First, Nader's campaign against me was incredibly vicious. His top aides spread all kinds of rumors about me in Washington and managed to get me pretty well blacklisted from the public interest crowd (which actually was a good thing). They even tried to convince people I was a communist (!!!) out to subvert Nader's organizations. Ralph Nader may look like a democrat, smell like a populist, and sound like a socialist - but deep down he's a frightened, petit bourgeois moralizer without a political compass, more concerned with his image than the movement he claims to lead: in short, an opportunist, a liberal hack. And a scab."

Boss Nader
By John Maggs
National Journal (6/5/2004)
Copyright 2004 The National Journal, Inc.

Ralph Nader isn't anti-business -- he is himself a businessman, a successful entrepreneur who over the decades built an empire of nonprofit corporations that sell things, earn money, pay their bills, and grow. Like many founders, Nader has a great talent for marketing, and he's helped create some well-regarded brands -- Public Citizen and Congress Watch, for example.

Likewise, Nader isn't an enemy of capitalism, but of what he sees as one of capitalism's regrettable byproducts -- the mega-corporation. His campaign for president, like his 40-year career in public life, is based on a belief that big and ever-bigger corporations are destroying what should be a natural balance in our capitalistic society -- the balance between consumer and producer, between citizen and government, and between labor and management.

Labor unions have made it clear that Democrat John Kerry will be getting all their money and effort this year, but the truth is that labor doesn't have a more loyal friend in the race than Nader. Like anyone in government, Kerry has engaged in legislative tradeoffs, and some of Kerry's concessions have occasionally compromised labor's interests. But Nader, unencumbered by the desire to cut deals, has stuck to his guns on even unpopular union crusades.

Nader wasn't focused on labor issues in the 1960s, when union strength was near its height, but he has grown increasingly focused as union membership and influence have dwindled and corporations, in his view, have become much more powerful. Even though union leaders are shunning him, Nader has many union activists in his ranks, and he usually has something to say in his stump speeches about labor-management disputes.

During his presidential run in 2000, Nader laid out his view that union organizing is an important friction point between citizens and mega-corporations: "Employing union-busting consultants and motivated by an anything-goes, anti-union animus, employers regularly confront union-organizing campaigns with threats to close plants; harassment, intimidation, and firings of key union supporters; captive meetings; supervisor one-on-one meetings with fearful employees; threatening literature; use of surveillance technologies; and much more." Nader also said, "Although it is illegal for employers to fire workers for supporting a union, approximately one in 10 union supporters in union-organizing drives are, in fact, fired."

As it turns out, Nader as a nonprofit entrepreneur has had his own experience with union organizing -- from the employer's side. In one case, unhappy workers at Public Citizen were persuaded to drop their drive to hold a vote on affiliating with the United Auto Workers, and an in-house union was created that over the years won important benefits and worker protections for employees. But in another case, labor-management relations weren't so smooth.

Amid a dispute with the staff of one of his flagship publications in 1984 over its editorial content and a bid by staff members to form a union, Nader responded with the same kind of tactics that he has elsewhere condemned: He fired the staff, changed the locks at the office, unsuccessfully tried to have one employee arrested, and hired permanent replacements.

When the fired workers appealed the action to federal authorities, Nader filed a countersuit. Applying a legal tactic that employers commonly use to resist union-organizing efforts, Nader claimed that the fired workers were trying to appropriate his business. Nader spurned efforts by other progressives to mediate the fight, and he refused an offer to settle the litigation by simply signing a declaration that his workers thenceforth would have the right to organize.

"I was shocked by how Ralph acted," said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, who tried to mediate the dispute. "He seemed unable to see how this conflicted with his ideals." Cavanagh, who says he likes and respects Nader and supported his 2000 presidential run, said he was particularly surprised that Nader refused a dialogue on the dispute: "That's not the way progressives are supposed to act."

Accounts differ on what happened in 1984, as do Nader's own accounts between then and now of whether his employees have the same rights as factory workers to organize. As Nader mounts his third run for the White House, his career as a crusader and gadfly is well known, but little has been written about his style as a manager. Even supporters concede that he is a strict taskmaster, with a sometimes obsessive attention to detail. "I think that what happened [with the magazine] said more about Ralph's limitations as a manager rather than any hostility to unions," said one longtime employee of a Nader-affiliated organization. "It is his baby, and he wants to run things his way."

The magazine was Multinational Monitor. The monthly publication still serves as a primary venue for Nader's argument that globalization has allowed big corporations to amass an excess of power. Just before firing the three-person staff in 1984, Nader transferred control of Multinational Monitor to a nonprofit corporation called Essential Information. As with many other organizations that Nader founded and continues to influence, he has no direct role in Essential Information. John Richard, one of Nader's key aides in 1984, helped carry out the firings and continues to serve as the company's chief executive. Richard says that Nader no longer has any connection to Essential Information, but its Web site includes links to other Nader affiliates and to Nader's personal Web page.

Through campaign spokesman Kevin Zeese, Nader declined to comment at length on the 20-year-old conflict. According to what Zeese said that Nader told him, Nader recalls the incident as a professional dispute with the magazine's staff. Nader said the staff had defied his instructions and that the unionization effort was a ploy after the decision had already been made to fire the workers. Zeese said that Nader has always supported the right of his employees to organize.

But that's not what Nader said at the time. In a June 1984 article in The Washington Post, Nader said his employees and others at nonprofit organizations don't have a need to organize. "I don't think there is a role for unions in small nonprofit 'cause' organizations any more than ... within a monastery or within a union" itself, he said. "People shouldn't be in public-interest groups unless they believe in it and are ready to work for it." Early on in his career, Nader said, "I worked weekend after weekend after weekend... Now people come here and say they want to fight polluters and unresponsive agencies, but not after 5 o'clock and not on weekends."

Many employers, especially those who build small companies from the ground up, feel the same way about their businesses. But U.S. labor law is clear -- two or more employees can file a letter with National Labor Relations Board noting their intention to try to form a union, and, in theory, they are immediately protected from firing and other retaliatory actions while the case is pending. In practice, however, years of litigation await workers who pursue these cases, even when management doesn't pursue a countersuit.

In 1984, Tim Shorrock was exactly the kind of crusading journalist that Nader often attracted to his publications. At 33, he was just beginning a career as a reporter that would see him write about foreign affairs, human rights, labor issues, and progressive causes for The Nation and other publications. (Shorrock and I worked for the same publication in the mid-1990s, which is when I first heard his story about working for Nader. I hadn't spoken with him for several years before contacting him for this article.) Shorrock considered the top editing job at Multinational Monitor a great opportunity. With a staff of two others -- Kathleen Selvaggio and Rose-Marie Audette -- Shorrock did everything from writing the stories to supervising the printing.

A son of missionaries, Shorrock had grown up in South Korea and Japan and retained an interest in America's role in South Korea, which had yet to emerge from decades of U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. This interest led him to what proved to be a big story -- the news that federal authorities were investigating whether giant contractor Bechtel had paid bribes to South Korean officials while then-Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were top Bechtel officials. Shorrock says that Nader, who often read the magazine's copy in advance, was unreachable when the magazine's deadline came. Since Nader had also been absent at some deadlines in the past, Shorrock printed the story. Newspapers and television quickly pounced on the news, which portrayed exactly the kind of corporate malfeasance that Nader was targeting, and the attention raised the profile of Multinational Monitor. This was the kind of publicity that was supposed to attract fundraising for Nader's anti-corporate cause.

But Nader wasn't pleased. He was furious. Shorrock said that, at first, Nader seemed to be overreacting to what Shorrock saw as a misunderstanding about the final editing on a story that other news stories later validated. But then, Shorrock said, Nader started complaining that the story unfairly maligned Weinberger, who had been general counsel of Bechtel during the period when investigators were looking into South Korean bribes. In 1985, a U.S. News & World Report story on odd friendships in Washington mentioned Weinberger and Nader. The story said that Nader had recommended to Weinberger a former protege who later ended up as Weinberger's deputy at Defense. Richard says today that Nader was a fearless opponent of the Reagan administration and elsewhere criticized Weinberger along with other Reagan appointees. Richard says that Shorrock willfully defied Nader's instructions to hold the story. Richard produced an August 14, 1984, letter to subscribers that said that management had offered to bargain collectively with workers.

Shorrock said Nader had publicly disavowed the Bechtel story to other reporters and was making it clear that he thought the Monitor's staff had defied his orders and would have to leave. Shorrock had experienced Nader's temper before, and he hoped that the furor would die down. And Nader took no immediate action -- he continued to pay the staff's salaries, and the staff continued to put out the magazine for three months. In June, when Shorrock got word that Nader was planning to transfer the Monitor's control to Richard and Essential Information, he said that he and Selvaggio and Audette decided to seek collective bargaining rights through the National Labor Relations Board. (Audette, an attorney, declined to comment for this article.) Sending a copy of this filing to Nader brought swift action, Shorrock said. The next day, Richard and another Nader aide told the three workers they were fired and gave them until the end of the day to clean out their desks. While locksmiths changed the locks on the office door, Shorrock said, he cleaned out his files, including documents relating to the Bechtel story. Shorrock soon got a call from the District of Columbia police. Nader charged that Shorrock had stolen proprietary information from the Monitor. Shorrock said he was interviewed by an assistant U.S. attorney who told him that there was no basis for the charges, which were not pursued further.

At this point, several figures in the progressive movement tried to intervene to mediate the dispute. One of them, Cavanagh, said that Nader's displeasure clearly seemed to be with the proposal to form a union, not differences of opinion over the handling of the Bechtel story. "That's what I found most disturbing," Cavanagh said. "Ralph really had this feeling that people fighting for progressive causes had no need for unions."

Kathleen Selvaggio, now an international policy adviser at Catholic Relief Services, confirmed the basic details of Shorrock's version of the story and laughed when told that Richard said he had offered to bargain collectively with workers. Richard also said that Selvaggio and Audette were fired because they wouldn't turn over company information. "That was a pretext," Selvaggio said in response to that information. "We had filed the [NLRB] letter a day or two before, and John Richard had made it pretty clear that he was responding to that." Selvaggio says that Nader had transferred the magazine to another company "because he didn't want to get his hands dirty." Richard, she said, had always been straightforward in saying that he was working on behalf of Nader.

Selvaggio, who has spent her adult life working in nonprofits, has elsewhere heard the argument that Nader made in 1984 in opposing unions. "There is a little truth in it, that we all don't do this work to make a lot of money, and it is not like working in factory," she said. But when employers take advantage of employees, she said, "when they try to threaten their jobs, then anyone has a right to try to protect themselves."

Selvaggio echoed the idea that the firing of the staff had a good deal to do with Nader's need to control things. "He really was a micromanager." But at the same time, she said, Nader and others around "didn't want their workers to organize."

Despite her bad memories of the 1984 incident and after a lot of deliberation, Selvaggio says she voted for Nader in 2000. "I was voting in Maryland, which I knew was going to go Democratic," and thus her vote wasn't going to be decisive. "Nader still stands for a lot of things I believe in." At the same time in 1984, a better-known corner of the Nader empire was considering a similar vote on unionization. Public Citizen employees were unhappy with the lack of benefits and with the demands that managers placed on them. There was discussion of a referendum on affiliating with an outside union, according to Paul Levy, who is still an attorney with the group. Echoing Cavanagh and Nader's own arguments in The Post, Levy said the top managers of Public Citizen told the staff in 1984 that they had no need for a union, because the organization was run differently from a business. "They seemed to think that they were immune from labor-management conflict," Levy said. In the end, managers persuaded the staff to form an in-house union that didn't push as hard for pay raises and benefits, Levy said, but seemed to satisfy most workers.

Until recently, that is. Earlier this year, Public Citizen workers narrowly voted to affiliate with the Service Employees International Union. Levy said that employees at some of the faster-growing parts of Public Citizen, including Global Trade Watch, had become unhappy with their managers.

Shorrock and his staff pursued their 1984 complaint with the NLRB, as Nader pursued his countersuit. Shorrock said he and his colleagues offered to drop their case if Nader would drop his and sign a statement that in the future, his employees would have the right to unionize. Nader refused, but one of his top aides ultimately signed it, and the two suits were dropped about two years later, Shorrock said. Richard said that Shorrock was a disgruntled employee who was leaning on labor laws to avoid being fired for just cause. He said that all of the people who work for Essential Information are free to unionize. None have tried to do so, however, since 1984. Zeese said that Nader was too busy with his presidential campaign to respond for this story. Nader has a long public record of support for workers and unions, he said: "I think it is laughable to suggest that Ralph Nader is some kind of union-buster."

Watching What You Say

2006-03-14T16:58:00.000-08:00

My latest piece in The Nation: The universe of companies that are likely collaborators with the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic spying program. Some of the names are familiar (AT&T, Sprint & MCI). But others will surprise you.

Watching What You Say
by TIM SHORROCK

[from the March 20, 2006 issue]

Two months after the New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of American citizens, only three corporations--AT&T, Sprint and MCI--have been identified by the media as cooperating. If the reports in the Times and other newspapers are true, these companies have allowed the NSA to intercept thousands of telephone calls, fax messages and e-mails without warrants from a special oversight court established by Congress under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some companies, according to the same reports, have given the NSA a direct hookup to their huge databases of communications records. The NSA, using the same supercomputers that analyze foreign communications, sifts through this data for key words and phrases that could indicate communication to or from suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers and then tracks those individuals and their ever-widening circle of associates. "This is the US version of Echelon," says Albert Gidari, a prominent telecommunications attorney in Seattle, referring to a massive eavesdropping program run by the NSA and its English-speaking counterparts that created a huge controversy in Europe in the late 1990s.

So far, a handful of Democratic lawmakers--Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Russell Feingold--have attempted to obtain information from companies involved in the domestic surveillance program. But they've largely been rebuffed. Further details about the highly classified program are likely to emerge as the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursues a lawsuit, filed January 31, against AT&T for violating privacy laws by giving the NSA direct access to its telephone records database and Internet transaction logs. On February 16 a federal judge gave the Bush Administration until March 8 to turn over a list of internal documents related to two other lawsuits, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, seeking an injunction to end the program.

Despite the President's rigorous defense of the program, no company has dared to admit its cooperation publicly. Their reticence is understandable: The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation of the government officials who leaked the NSA story to the Times, and many constitutional scholars and a few lawmakers believe the program is both illegal and unconstitutional. And the companies may be embarrassed at being caught--particularly AT&T, which spent millions advertising its global services during the Winter Olympics. "It's a huge betrayal of the public trust, and they know it," says Bruce Schneier, the founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a California consulting firm.

Corporations have been cooperating with the NSA for half a century. What's different now is that they appear to be helping the NSA deploy its awesome computing and data-mining powers inside the United States in direct contravention of US law, which specifically bans the agency from collecting information from US citizens living inside the United States. "They wouldn't touch US persons before unless they had a FISA warrant," says a former national security official who read NSA intercepts as part of his work for the State Department and the Pentagon.

This is happening at a time when both the military and its spy agencies are more dependent on the private sector than ever before, and an increasing number of companies are involved. In the 1970s, when Congress acted to stop domestic spying programs like Operation Shamrock, in which the NSA monitored overseas telegrams and phone calls, the communications industry was in its infancy. "It was basically Western Union for cables, and AT&T for the telephone," says James Bamford, who revealed the existence of the NSA in his famous book The Puzzle Palace and is a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit. "It's much more complicated now." In fact, today's global telecom market includes dozens of companies that compete with AT&T, Sprint and MCI for telephone and mobile services, as well as scores of Internet service providers like Google, Yahoo! and AOL that offer e-mail, Internet and voice connections to customers around the world. They are served by multinational conglomerates like Apollo, Flag Atlantic and Global Crossing, which own and operate the global system of undersea fiber-optic cables that link the United States to the rest of the world. Any one of them could be among the companies contacted by intelligence officials when President Bush issued his 2002 executive order to obtain surveillance without FISA approval.

Nobody's talking, though. Asked if AT&T, which was recently acquired by SBC Communications, is cooperating with the NSA, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said, "We don't comment on national security matters." He referred me to a recent AT&T letter to Representative Conyers, which stated that AT&T "abides by all applicable laws, regulations and statutes in its operations and, in particular, with respect to requests for assistance from governmental authorities." MCI, which was acquired in January by Verizon, and Sprint, which recently merged with Nextel Communications, declined to comment. Attorney Gidari, who has represented Google, T-Mobile, Nextel and Cingular Wireless (now part of AT&T), believes that "some companies, both telecom and Internet," were asked to participate in the NSA program. But he suggests that only a limited number agreed. "The list of those who said no is much longer than most people think," he says.

The NSA, some analysts say, may have sought the assistance of US telecoms because most of the world's cable operators are controlled by foreign corporations. Apollo, for example, is owned by Britain's Cable & Wireless, while Flag Atlantic is owned by the Reliance Group of India. Much of the international "transit traffic" carried by the cable companies flows through the United States (this is particularly true of communications emanating from South America and moving between Asia and Europe). The NSA could get access to this traffic by sending a submarine team to splice the cables in international waters, as the agency once did to the Soviet Union's undersea military cables. But that is an extremely expensive proposition, and politically dicey to boot--which is where the US telecoms come in. "Cooperation with the telcos doesn't make NSA surveillance possible, but it does make it cheaper," says Schneier, the technology consultant.

According to Alan Mauldin, a senior research analyst with TeleGeography Research in Washington, DC, it would be possible for US intelligence operatives to gain access to transit traffic from anywhere in the country with the cooperation of a US company. "You could be inland, at an important city like New York or Washington, DC, where networks interconnect, and you could have the ability to tap into the whole network for not only that city but between that city and the rest of the world," he says. Foreign-owned cable operators, says Gidari, are also required by US law to maintain security offices manned by US citizens, with background checks and security clearances at the landing sites in Oregon, Florida, New Jersey and other states where fiber-optic cables come ashore.

The government has gone to great lengths to insure law-enforcement access to foreign-owned telecom companies. Take the example of Global Crossing, which owns several undersea cable systems and claims to serve more than 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs. Three years ago, as Global Crossing was emerging from one of the largest bankruptcies in US history, it was purchased by ST Telemedia, which is partly owned by the government of Singapore. As part of the US approval process (which occurred at a time when Global Crossing was being advised by Richard Perle, then-chairman of Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board), the company signed an unprecedented Network Security Agreement with the FBI and the Defense Department. Under the agreement, which is on file with the Federal Communications Commission, Global Crossing pledged that "all domestic communications" would pass through a facility "physically located in the United States, from which Electronic Surveillance can be conducted pursuant to lawful US process." (Global Crossing declined to comment.) Legal experts say the wording is significant in the context of the NSA spying flap, but cautioned not to read too much into it. "These agreements are not uncommon in the industry," says James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They provide assurances that US interests won't suffer damage with foreign ownership."

History proves a good guide to how the NSA would go about winning cooperation from a telecom company. When telephone and telegraph companies began assisting the NSA during the 1940s, only one or two executives were in on the secret. That kind of arrangement continued into the 1970s, and is probably how cooperation with the NSA works today, says Kenneth Bass III, a Justice Department official during the Carter Administration. "Once the CEO approved, all the contacts [with the intelligence agencies] would be worked at a lower level," he says. "The telcos have been participating in surveillance activities for decades--pre-FISA, post-FISA--so it's nothing new to them." Bass, who helped craft the FISA law and worked with the NSA to implement it, adds that he "would not be surprised at all" if cooperating executives received from the Bush Administration "the same sort of briefing, but much more detailed and specific than the FISA court got when [the surveillance] was first approved."

For US intelligence officials looking for allies in the industry, AT&T, MCI and Sprint have a lot to offer. In 2002, when the spying program began, AT&T's CEO was C. Michael Armstrong, the former CEO of Hughes Electronic Corp. At the time, Armstrong was also chairman of the Business Roundtable's Security Task Force, where he was instrumental in creating CEO COM LINK, a secure telecommunications system that allows the chief executives of major US corporations to speak directly to senior members of Bush's Cabinet during national emergencies. Randall Stephenson, a former SBC Communications executive who is now AT&T's chief operating officer, is a member of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a group of executives from the communications and defense industries who advise the President on security issues related to telecom.

Those executives, all of whom hold security clearances, meet at the White House once a year--Vice President Cheney was the speaker at their last meeting--and hold quarterly conference calls with high-ranking officials. (Asked if the NSA surveillance was ever discussed at these sessions, committee spokesman Stephen Barrett said, "We do not participate in intelligence gathering.") AT&T also makes no bones about its national security work. When SBC was preparing to acquire the company last year, the two companies underscored their ties with US intelligence in joint comments to the FCC. "AT&T's support of the intelligence and defense communities includes the performance of various classified contracts," the companies said, pointing out that AT&T "maintains special secure facilities for the performance of classified work and the safeguarding of classified information."

MCI, too, is a major government contractor and was highly valued by Verizon in part because of its work in defense and intelligence. Nicholas Katzenbach, the former US Attorney General who was appointed chairman of MCI's board after the spectacular collapse of its previous owner, WorldCom, reiterated MCI's intelligence connections in a 2003 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We are especially proud," he wrote, "of our role in supporting our national-security agencies' infrastructure, and we are gratified by the many positive comments about our service from officials at the US Department of Defense and other national-security agencies." MCI's general counsel--who would presumably have a say in any decision to cooperate with the NSA--is William Barr. He is a former assistant general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency and served as Attorney General during the Administration of President George H.W. Bush.

Sprint Nextel is top-loaded with executives with long experience in national security and defense. Chairman and CEO Gary Forsee is a member of Bush's telecom council (as is Lawrence Babbio, the vice chairman and president of Verizon). Keith Bane, a company director, recently retired from a twenty-nine-year career with Motorola, which has worked closely with US intelligence for decades. William Conway Jr. and former FCC chairman William Kennard are managing directors of the Carlyle Group, the Washington private equity fund that invests heavily in the military and has extensive contacts in the Bush Administration.

There's another group of companies, largely overlooked, that could also be cooperating with the NSA. These are firms clustered around the Beltway that contract with the agency to provide intelligence analysts, data-mining technologies and equipment used in the NSA's global signals-intelligence operations. The largest of them employ so many former intelligence officials that it's almost impossible to see where the government ends and the private sector begins. Booz Allen Hamilton, the prime contractor for Trailblazer, a huge NSA project updating its surveillance and eavesdropping infrastructure, employs several NSA alumni, including Mike McConnell, its vice president, who retired as NSA director in 1996. (Ralph Shrader, the company's CEO, joined Booz Allen in 1978 after serving in senior positions with Western Union and RCA, both of which cooperated with the NSA on Operation Shamrock.) SI International, a software and systems engineering company with NSA contracts, recently hired Harry Gatanas, the NSA's former director of acquisitions and outsourcing, to oversee its $250-million-a-year business with US intelligence and the Pentagon. Science Applications International Corporation, another big NSA contractor, is run by executives with long histories in military intelligence, including COO Duane Andrews, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence.

Are firms that cooperate with the NSA legally culpable? Bamford, who is not a lawyer but probably knows more about the NSA than any American outside government, says yes. "The FISA law is very clear," he says. "If you don't have a warrant, you're in violation, and the penalty is five years and you can be sued by the aggrieved parties." Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds that US law "not only prohibits unauthorized wiretapping; it also prohibits unauthorized disclosure or use of illegally wiretapped information. As long as you were doing that, you're potentially liable." Schneier, the technology consultant, harbors no doubts either. "Arguing that this is legal is basically saying we're in a police state."

But Gidari, the Seattle telecom attorney, believes that companies would be insulated from legal challenges if they had assurances from the government that the program was within the law. He also says Congress has passed legislation granting immunity to companies operating under "statutory grants of authority" from the government. "It's not a slamdunk, but it is a good-faith defense," he says. Former Justice Department official Bass agrees but says reliance on oral requests from US officials is another matter: "If they didn't get the type of legal assurances the FISA provides for"--such as a written statement from the Attorney General--"there could be some legal exposure." But a full airing of the legal issues raised by the surveillance program may be a long time coming. "The likelihood of any enforcement absent a change in administration is zero," Bass says.

Tim Shorrock (timshorrock@gmail.com), a longtime contributor to The Nation, is writing a book for Simon & Schuster about corporate influence on US foreign policy.

AFL-CIO ELIMINATES INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT

2005-05-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

The AFL-CIO has eliminated its International Affairs Department (IAD), ending a once-powerful office that was created during the early days of the Cold War to fight communist and left-wing influence in the global labor movement.

The decision is part of a broad reorganization taking place at the AFL-CIO in response to a sharp drop in union membership and a challenge to the federation's leadership by a coalition of unions, led by the SEIU, UNITE-HERE and the Teamsters, that is seeking to reverse labor's decline by pouring resources into organizing. According to labor sources, all of the AFL-CIO's international work will now be conducted through the American Center for International Labor Solidarity.

ACILS, better known as the Solidarity Center, receives nearly all of its funding from two government agencies, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Agency for International Development.

By restructuring the IAD out of existence, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who was never very excited about international work in the first place, has ensured that organized labor will no longer have an independent voice in foreign affairs.

On May 4, the Washington Post reported that some of the department’s efforts “will be folded into organizing efforts." Altogether, 167 jobs at the AFL-CIO will be cut, the Post says, and 61 people will "have the chance" to apply for other jobs. "In order to meet this restructuring, resources are being shifted," said Lane Windham, an AFL-CIO spokeswoman.

Barbara Shailor, the current IAD director, will become the new director of the Solidarity Center, labor sources said. She will replace the current director, Harry Kamberis, who was one of Sweeney's worst appointments. Tim Beaty, Shailor's deputy, and Stan Gacek, Shailor's assistant for Latin American affairs, will be laid off, effective September 1.

"The International Affairs Department will be disbanded with pieces of the work going to the organizing department, the President's office and the Solidarity Center," Beaty wrote in an e-mail to colleagues on May 4. "My job is being eliminated and I'm being laid off effective September 1." He added: "We're facing a very difficult set of challenges in the US labor movement so I hope these changes will help us work better for social justice."

Kamberis took over the Solidarity Center in the late 1990s after a long career as a bureaucratic Cold Warrior inside the AFL-CIO. Like many of the men who preceded him at IAD, Kamberis came to his "labor" job directly from a career in the State Department, where he served as a political officer in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Greece. He is the son-in-law of Morris Paladino, a former labor operative in Asia and Latin America who was identified as a CIA agent by Phillip Agee in his book Inside the Company. Many labor insiders and activists have long suspected that Kamberis, who directed AFL-CIO programs in the Philippines and South Korea during the 1980s, worked as an undercover officer for the CIA while he was with the State Department.

Under Sweeney and Shailor, the AFL-CIO reorganized its international operations around the theme of global solidarity. Political intervention was out, international worker rights were in - theoretically. Despite Kamberis’s record during the Cold War (or perhaps because Kamberis himself had seen the writing on the wall), the IAD and the Solidarity Center took some positive actions.

As I reported in 1999 for Dollars & Sense, the “new” AFL-CIO worked closely with independent unions in Mexico (something that would have been unheard of 10 years earlier) and in 1987 convinced the Clinton administration to bring pressure on the South Korean government to recognize the militant, left-wing Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. Until then, the AFL-CIO had worked solely with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, which was organized by the government in the 1960s.

In 2002, however, the AFL-CIO got caught red-handed in an embarrassing episode that resembled its Cold War operations. That April, the New York Times reported that the Solidarity Center had provided large sums of money, through the NED, to the CTV, the Venezuelan labor federation that had worked closely with Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce to plot the overthrow of the populist government of Hugo Chavez. Some on the left immediately revived the old charge of AFL-CIA.

No direct evidence was ever found, however, that the Solidarity Center worked with the CIA or knew beforehand that a military coup was in the works. But it was clear that Sweeney and his people were taking the side of the Bush administration in a nasty foreign policy dispute. What rankled many activists at the time was the inability of the AFL-CIO to explain itself or provide transparent information that would explain what it was up to in Caracas in those months.

(For two excellent accounts of this episode, read the reports by veteran labor journalist Harry Kelber and Socialist Worker staffwriter Lee Sustar. The AFL-CIO responded to the controversy by posting its own explanation on the federation website.

ROOTS IN THE COLD WAR

The IAD has its roots in the immediate period after World War II, when the AFL openly collaborated with the newly organized CIA to break and weaken communist-led unions in France and Italy. Its key operative at that time was Irving Brown, who was also identified as CIA by Agee. Another was Jay Lovestone, who was thrown out of the Communist Party in the 1930s and became a lifelong - and fanatic - anti-communist after that.

Lovestone was appointed IAD director by George Meany in 1964, nine years after the merger of the AFL with the CIO. Working closely with the US government, the IAD organized labor "institutes" in Latin America, Asia and Europe to act as shock troops in the war against communism and socialism. Their modus operandi was to split labor federations that included both communist and socialist-led unions and undermine the left by funding alternative union centers that supported US foreign policy goals. Often, these centers were covers for right-wing political parties; but as long as they were anti-communist, they won AFL-CIO support.

One of the most notorious chapters in IAD history occurred in Chile, where the AFL-CIO collaborated with the Nixon administration to help overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. As I reported in a lengthy report for The Nation two years ago, on September 11, 1973

Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody military coup that ended a brief experiment in democratic socialism and took the lives of Allende and thousands of Chilean workers, students and political activists. Today, many trade unionists remain haunted by the knowledge that their own federation, the AFL-CIO, played a key role in the US campaign, led by the Nixon Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, to destabilize Chile in the years before the coup. From 1971 to 1973, the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), one of four US-government-funded labor institutes created during the cold war, channeled millions of dollars to right-wing unions and political parties opposed to Allende's socialist agenda. That aid helped finance the revolt by Chile's professional class and fanned the flames of social unrest that provided the pretext for Gen. Augusto Pinochet's violent crackdown and the justification for his seventeen-year dictatorship.

According to documents I've unearthed in the AFL-CIO's archives, AIFLD's program in Chile was closely coordinated with the US Embassy and dovetailed with one of the CIA's key aims in Chile: to split the Chilean labor movement and create a trade union base of opposition to Allende, who was viewed as dangerously anti-American and a pawn of the Soviet Union. The campaign's political agenda was summarized in a 1972 cable in the archives from Robert O'Neill, AIFLD's representative in Chile, to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington. Chile, O'Neill proudly told his superiors, had become the site of "the first large-scale middle class movement against government attempts to impose, slowly but surely, a Marxist-Leninist system."

LACK OF TRANSPARENCY

Several years ago, as a result of investigations in the AFL-CIO role in Chile by Fred Hirsch, a San Francisco trade unionist, and Kim Scipes, a Chicago labor writer and educator, local unions and labor councils in California began a movement to “open the books” on the AFL-CIO’s past. But Sweeney and his staff resolutely refused to either shed further light on what the labor federation knows about its activities in Chile, Brazil and other countries, or to apologize for its misdeeds and misrepresentations. As Scipes writes in the latest issue of Monthly Review:

(US) labor leaders have been operating internationally in the name of American workers, their members, while consciously keeping these members in the dark. Most AFL-CIO union members to this day have no idea of what the AFL-CIO has done and continues to do overseas, nor that its actions have been funded overwhelmingly by the U.S. government.

And when the California Federation of Labor managed to hold a single meeting to discuss the past, Scipes writes

AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders basically put on a dog and pony show rather than interact on substantive issues, greatly displeasing rank-and-file participants. They failed to honor the request of the California activists to gather information and report on any and all labor operations currently taking place around the world on a country-by-country basis.

Now, with the abolition of the International Affairs Department and its absorption into the government-funded Solidarity Center, this discussion is likely to come to a complete end.. That is, unless some of the opposition figures in the unions opposed to Sweeney decide to bring it up during their campaign to unseat Sweeney or at the AFL-CIO Convention next July. Its a debate and discussion that's long overdue.

WOLFOWITZ'S SORDID PAST

2005-03-16T08:16:00.000-08:00

So it's official now: Paul Wolfowitz, neocon extraordinaire and one of the principle instigators of the Iraq war, has been named to head the World Bank. From that position, one of the most hawkish members of the Bush administration can wreak economic havoc on countries he left out of his grand plan to transform Iraq and the Middle East into zones of peace, tranquility and advanced American-style capitalism.

Key to his appointment, we're told, is his background in Asia, where he was the top US diplomat during the Reagan administration. According to the Associated Press:

Administration supporters of Wolfowitz said Wednesday he is suited for the World Bank post and pointed to his management experiences at the Pentagon and his diplomatic experience at the State Department. He had served as assistant secretary of State for east Asia during the Philippine transition to democracy. He also serves as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia.

So what is that record? Well, that's something I've delved into in detail for numerous publications when Wolfowitz was first nominated as Deputy Secretary of Defense back in 2001. I had the great privilege to cover Wolfowitz when he presided over Asian policy during the Reagan administration, at a time when the United States, in the name of anti-communism, provided military and economic aid to some of the worst tyrants in Asian history. As I wrote in a lengthy piece in Foreign Policy in Focus,

Wolfowitz’s career is a textbook example of cold war politics that focused for nearly 50 years on the care and feeding of dictators like Suharto, Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. While there were differences in nuance between presidents, these policies remained remarkably consistent from administration to administration. Where Wolfowitz and the Reagan Republicans departed from the Democrats was in their public stance toward these unsavory figures.

Wolfowitz was (Richard) Holbrooke’s immediate successor in the top Asia slot at the State Department, serving there from 1982 to 1986. For the next three years he was U.S. ambassador to Jakarta, and from 1989 to 1993 he was the “principal civilian responsible for strategy, plans, and policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney,” according to his official biography. He has remained tightly linked to Indonesia through his role in the U.S.-Indonesia Society, a private group funded by the largest U.S. investors in Indonesia that, behind the veneer of “cultural exchanges,” pushes for closer ties with Jakarta. Its past members have also included members of Indonesia’s intelligence and military forces... During his tenure in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Wolfowitz played a key role in defining U.S. policy toward South Korea and the Philippines at a time of intense repression and growing opposition to authoritarian rule.

Like Bush's appointment of John Bolton to represent the United States at the UN, naming Wolfowitz to run the World Bank is a jab in the eye of global opinion and an insult to Asian countries like South Korea that became democracies in spite of US support for authoritarian rule. For more on his story, read these pieces I wrote for The Nation ("A Skewed History of Asia") and First of the Month ("Asian Fantasies: Paul Wolfowitz's Makeover in the Times").

THE OTHER AFTERSHOCK

2005-02-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration and the Pentagon are leveraging warmer post-tsunami relations with Indonesia to convince Congress to lift its restrictions on full military ties with the world’s largest Muslim nation. But lawmakers and human rights groups say the Indonesian government must first account for its past abuses in East Timor and end its repressive military tactics in sections of the country seeking independence.

My latest article, published on-line today by In These Times.

BLAME THE PENTAGON, NOT THE CONTRACTORS: A READER RESPONDS

2005-02-02T09:04:00.000-08:00

A US military official who served in Iraq during the US occupation has responded to my story, posted Monday, about the Marine colonel who blamed contractor arrogance in part for igniting the Iraqi insurgency.

"The Colonel would do well to examine the legion failures of senior leadership to first employ an effective post-conflict/occupation/reconstruction strategy," the unidentified official wrote in a note to a military affairs list-serve that posted my article (read the note in its entirety below). "Water, electricity, jobs, and security would have gone a long way in undermining the support base the bad guys now enjoy."

The official makes a good point. But he overlooks the fact that privatization itself was a key element in the policies of the "senior leadership" of the occupation, which was led by L. Paul Bremer. And remember, Bremer was drafted for his position from Marsh Inc., the world's largest insurance company, where he ran a unit that consulted with corporations and governments about counter-terrorism. Still, my respondent is correct to note that the true responsibility for the fiasco in Iraq lies at the feet of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the other civilian leaders at the Pentagon, and with President George W. Bush himself.

Here's the posting (thanks to David Isenberg at the British American Security Information Council for passing this along):

Saying the arrogance of PMC's contributed to the Iraqi rebellion is like saying the pre-fabricated housing outside the Embassy over there offers some degree of protection from indirect fire. Yes, some PMC's have done some boneheaded things (see the Tucker Carlson Esquire article from last year). However, in comparison to the things the occupation did to inflame the insurgency, this is a drop in the bucket. I wasn't at this event, but the Colonel would do well to examine the legion failures of senior leadership to first employ an effective post-conflict/occupation/reconstruction strategy (actually, ignoring same. See Department of State/Tom Warrick's Future of Iraq Project), then recognize that a genuine insurgency was developing, and finally identify methods to effectively counteract this development. Water, electricity, jobs, and security would have gone a long way in undermining the support base the bad guys now enjoy. The first report I sent up through US and UN chains-of-command identifying water and electricity as basic security concerns was on 1 April 2003. Many folks smarter than I identified the same concern and reported on it early. The Iraqis were saying this clearly to us every time we spoke with them. I don't remember water pump and power station repair as part of the Terms of Reference for security companies over there.

WHAT'S UP WITH THE NATION?

2005-02-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've been amazed over the years at the prodigious output of John Nichols, the Madison-based "Washington correspondent" for The Nation, who writes the magazine's "On-line Beat" column. Nichols usually writes about domestic policy and Democrats in Congress, and does a pretty good job of it. But his columns about last weekend's elections in Iraq are puzzling, to say the least.

On Sunday, Nichols posted a column, "Occupation Thwarts Democracy," that jumped the gun on the events that were about to transpire in Iraq. First, he used quotation marks around the word "election," implying they were fixed, and made the false claim that "political parties campaigning in this weekend's so-called 'election' in Iraq did not propose timetables for the withdrawal of US troops from their homeland." Not true; some of the Shiite parties did just that. Later on, he referred again to "this farce of an 'election'."

By yesterday, Nichols had changed his tune. Gone were the quotation marks. "The images of Iraqis crowding polling places for that country's first free election in a half century were both moving and hopeful," he wrote, 24 hours after he had called the election a farce. "The voting, while marred by violence, irregularities and boycotts, went off more smoothly than even the most optimistic members of the Bush administration had dared predict."

Now he was sounding like a commentator on CBS or CNN - in safe territory, back with the mainstream. But why the radical shift in tone and wording between columns? Nichols should really stick to domestic affairs; foreign policy is definitely not his forte.

My initial impression of the election was positive. I started watching CNN around midnight on Sunday night, and was surprised to see so many people turning out. I, too, was moved by the sight of thousands of Iraqis lining up to vote. I remembered the first time I ever voted, back in California in the 1970s, and empathized with the solemnity and joy that many Iraqis expressed in their interviews. This event seemed to say: we Iraqis, despite Bush's occupation and his initial opposition to open elections like this, want our country back.

The best commentary I read was from Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, as reported by a columnist with a newspaper in Washington State:

"I am just appalled by the cheerleading tone of U.S. news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday," wrote Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan.

Although he called the elections "a political earthquake" and "a historical first step," Cole said the popular election was forced on a president who "opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to (Ahmad) Chalabi within six months. Then (American administrator Paul) Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on Nov. 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The United States and United Kingdom had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group."

Religious leaders and the United Nations demanded free elections. Their protests were followed by street demonstrations.

Then, according to Cole, "Bush caved" -- but postponed the Iraqi elections until after the U.S. election was decided.

(One of the best places to keep track of events in Iraq and what they mean is Cole's daily blog, "Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion.")

Elsewhere in the media, I was sickened to see Geraldo Rivera on Fox suck up to the US military and Ahmed Chalabi ("And how are you, my good friend?") and portray the election as a triumph for George Bush. It was equally appalling this morning when right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham greeted Christopher Hitchins as a long-lost friend and gave Hitchins lots of air time to bash the left and praise Bush as a great liberator. Get a grip, Hitchins.

But overall, I think the elections are a hopeful sign and something that we in the left and antiwar movement should embrace - while keeping our eyes wide open about the problems that were so evident. Another Nation writer, Marc Cooper, posted an excellent column on his blog that sums out how I feel:

Those of who opposed this war and who want to see the U.S. troops withdrawn as soon as possible should unequivocally encourage the tenuous political process now underway in Iraq. We should stand for more and better elections, not fewer. We should be encouraging the writing of a fair constitution, an inclusion of the Sunnis into the process in order to reduce the violence, and a bolstering of civil society (as a safeguard against fundamentalism). If we merely write off yesterday's vote as only potemkin or charade elections we take ourselves out of any serious debate and we degrade the legitimate aspirations of the Iraqi people. Indeed, the more one opposes the war and its pretexts, the more we should support the stabilization of a successful, pluralistic Iraqi state.

Well said, Marc. We need more sensible thinking like that, and less of the knee-jerk reactions that appear all too often in the left press.

CONTRACTOR'S ARROGANCE CONTRIBUTED TO IRAQI REBELLION, MARINE COLONEL SAYS

2005-01-31T10:46:00.000-08:00

The arrogant tactics of the private military company that escorted top US officials around Iraq are partly to blame for the rebellion against the US occupation that has taken scores of American and thousands of Iraqi lives, according to a Marine colonel who helped train Iraqi troops in the initial stage of the war.

"They made enemies everywhere," Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, an expert on guerrilla warfare and a senior fellow at the National Defense University told a conference on military contracting last week. He was referring to the tactics used by Blackwater USA, the North Carolina company that was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator who was dispatched by the Bush administration to run Iraq in 2003.

A few minutes earlier, Chris Taylor, Blackwater's vice president for strategic initiatives, had boasted about the protective cordon his company provided to Bremer. Under a "turnkey security package" with the CPA, Bremer was accompanied by 36 "personnel protection specialists," two K-9 dog teams and three MD-530 helicopters built by Boeing Corporation.

"The fact that he (Bremer) is home with his family is the only measure of success," said Taylor. "He survived and that's good." Blackwater provides the same kind of protection today to US ambassador John Negroponte, who succeeded Bremer when the formal occupation (theoretically) ended on June 30, 2004.

But Hammes, who was in charge of training and equipping the fledgling Iraqi army that Bremer hastily recruited after his disastrous decision to disband the army once loyal to Saddam Hussein, said the Blackwater team acted more like storm troopers.

"The problem is, his guys are trying to protect the ambassador. But I would ride around with Iraqis in an Iraqi truck, and they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. But they (Blackwater's security) were doing their job, doing what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it. And they were making enemies on every single pass out of of town." The "first rule" of an insurgency, said Hammes, is "you don't make any more enemies."And Blackwater clearly failed in that mission.

Hammes told his story to make a point: that there is an an inherent conflict of interest between contractors, who are in Iraq to make money, and the military itself, which is there to attempt to win a war. And because that war has now become a classic guerrilla war, with both sides competing for the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people, anything that the United States does to anger and alienate the population becomes a weapon - one that the fighters have managed to exploit (this may explain, in part, the apparent decision by many of the Iraqi fighters not to disrupt the voting yesterday).

In his response to Hammes, Taylor dug himself into a deeper hole. He agreed that "there's an aggressive nature" to Blackwater's tactics in moving US officials from point A to point B. But "you're paying us for our judgement," he said. If someone suggests that these tactics are having "an adverse affect in our operations in Baghdad," Blackwater will take that into consideration. "We'll try to work something out while still being able to provide the service under the contract we've provided." Exactly.

Hammes pushed on. It all "depends on the integrity of the company," he replied. He then offered up a scenario of a situation where a contractor might be called into, say Liberia. "If my job as a contractor is to keep the peace, suppose I'm really successful and there is peace. My contract ends, right? So suppose I stir up a little on the side?"

That was too much for Taylor. "Oh, come on," he responded. But his only assurance that something like that couldn't happen was his company's patriotism. "All of us are absolutely in support of security and peace and freedom and democracy all over the world," he said. "Its from that part of the heart that our people come to work." That's why he "hates the M word." The term mercenary is a "misnomer, inappropriate and certainly inaccurate," he insisted.

Right. What other word could be used to explain Blackwater's latest mission, in oil-rich Azerbaijan, which Taylor also discussed. Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic led by an autocratic government that routinely jails journalists and dissidents and "torture, police abuse, and excessive use of force by security forces are widespread," according to Human Rights Watch.

Like Iraq, Azerbaijan has lots of oil, and has attracted significant investment from Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, BP, Unocal, Halliburton and other multinational oil and oil-services companies. According to Taylor, Blackwater has contracted with Azerbaijan's government to support its "Maritime Commando Enhancement Program." Under this contract, Blackwater - which was founded by former Navy SEALs - "is creating a SEAL team for Azerbaijan to help with its oil interests and monitor what's happening in the Caspian Sea in the wee hours of the night."

Taylor admitted this is "politically sensitive," but argued that if a company like his "wants respect as a business and a solid reputation as actually affecting the strategic balance in any area of the world, then it must be part of the give and take. We like to think we do that on a daily basis."

But "give and take" with whom? Well, go to the website of the United-States Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce and click on "officers" and you'll quickly see who Blackwater serves. James Baker III. Henry Kissinger. Brent Scowcroft. Etc. And down there at the bottom of the page are two of the chamber's former members - Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage. These men are the power behind the throne in Azerbaijan; it's impossible to imagine that government hiring Blackwater without a nod from one if these principals.

So what are the lessons in all of this? One, Blackwater's project in Azerbaijan is clear evidence that contractors have crossed the line from pure mercenaries to strategic partners with the military-industrial complex. Two, Colonel Hammes' warning about Blackwater's impact on the war in Iraq has implications far beyond the Middle East. And three, the antiwar movement needs to focus as much on privatization as it does on the imperial policies of President Bush and his neo-con supporters.

Note: Last Friday's conference was organized by the George Washington University Law School with support from the International Peace Operations Association, which represents, Blackwater, MPRI and other major contractors.

AS ACEH TERROR GROWS, BUSH AND CONDI SIDE WITH THE GENERALS

2005-01-27T21:12:00.000-08:00

The news out of Indonesia and Washington continues to be grim. On a day that the Washington Post ran an insightful piece on the climate of fear in Aceh province engendered by Indonesia's corrupt and brutal army, our newly installed Secretary of State was preparing to ask Congress to grant to Indonesia's rulers the full normalization of military ties they have sought for the last 10 years.

The State Department is telling human rights groups that it will recommend the release of $600,000 in International Military Education and Training Funds (IMET) that Congress blocked last year, pending a ruling that the Indonesian government and its armed forces are cooperating with the FBI's investigation into the killing of two Americans in Timika, West Papua, on August 31, 2002. One source told me that the "formal certification for IMET" was actually placed on Condoleezza Rice's desk today. Her ruling is expected anytime.

The Post's reporting underscores why normalization is such a bad idea. The article, by the excellent Alan Sipress, reports that the dazed victims of the tsunami in Aceh are literally begging for foreign military forces to stay because they fear that, left alone, the Indonesian military (known as the TNI) will revert back to their scorched-earth campaign to eradicate the independence movement and terrorize the local population.

In more than two dozen interviews in Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province, residents unanimously said that foreign forces should remain for at least several years. Acehnese, from homeless rice farmers to professors and local officials, said the troops should help with reconstruction and serve as a check on Indonesian security forces, widely feared in the province because of their heavy-handed campaign against separatist rebels, known as the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). The rebels have been fighting for autonomy for decades....The government's battle with (GAM) has left the local population cowed, fearing interrogation, detention or even summary execution by one side or the other for voicing offending views.

Sipress interviewed Ali, "a scruffy Acehnese truck driver turned tsunami refugee."

As Ali and his wife shared their impatience over Indonesian relief efforts, they kept watch through the opening of the tent, lowering their voices whenever Indonesian army trucks, crowded with soldiers in green camouflage uniforms cradling automatic rifles, rumbled past. U.S. Navy Sea Hawk helicopters roared overhead every few minutes, heading down the west coast to deliver aid. "If it's possible, the foreign troops should stay here 50 years," Ali continued, almost pleading. He and other refugees said they feared being identified by the army and requested that they not be photographed or further identified. "If the international troops don't stay here for a long time, there will be corruption, and none of the assistance will get into our hands."

Unfortunately, reporting of this kind may be about to end. According to a report distributed today by Reporters Without Borders, there are "signs of growing Indonesian army intolerance towards the foreign news media, in which at least five journalists have been briefly detained or asked to leave Aceh and new rules have restricted press work."

The organization is also asking Indonesian authorities to "explain why they expelled US freelance journalist William Nessen from Jakarta on 24 January, a day after arresting him as he left Aceh province. The authorities have so far just said he violated a territorial ban imposed on him in August 2003 after his first arrest in Aceh. At that time, he was sentenced to 40 days in prison for violating the immigration laws and was banned from Indonesia for a year. But that ban expired in August 2004." The report also stated:

A photojournalist and regular contributor to The San Francisco Chronicle and The Sydney Morning Herald, Nessen is the only foreign reporter to have covered the Indonesian army’s May 2003 offensive against the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan
Aceh Merdeka or GAM) from the rebel side. Nessen told Reporters Without Borders he entered Indonesia and Aceh legally on 2 January, and was arrested by immigration officials as he left Aceh on 23 January, apparently at the request of military intelligence. He was interrogated about his activities in Aceh and, before he was expelled, the order banning him from Indonesian territory was extended to August 2005.
Previously, on 7 January, Martin Chulov and Renee Nowytager of The Australian were threatened and asked to leave the area by Indonesian soldiers who had just come under fire from GAM rebels. "Your duty is to observe the disaster and not the war between the army and the GAM," an officer told them.
Michael Lev, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, and his Indonesian fixer, Handewi Pramesti, were arrested on 29 December by soldiers in Meulaboh (Aceh) and held for 28 hours.

(The information from Reporters Without Borders was kindly forwarded to me by fellow blogger Doug Ireland, who you can find at http://direland.typepad.com)

And now, back to Condi, that IMET money and the Timika murders.

Privately, Rice has already told Congress she wants the IMET money to flow again. Earlier this week, she responded in writing to several questions on Indonesia posed by Senator Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (too bad these questions weren't asked in the public session last week). Biden made clear that he was skeptical about John Ashcroft's announcement last year that a Papuan suspect has been indicted in the Timika case. "In the meantime," he wrote, "the suspect remains at large, well documented ties between him and the army (TNI) remain unexplored in official accounts of the case, and there appears to be no effort under way to advance the investigation." He asked Rice if she believed that the FBI had exonerated the TNI and how she planned to persuade Indonesia to cooperate more in the case.

Here's what Rice said: "The arrest and prosecution of Anthonius Wamang, who was indicted by the FBI (sic: it was a grand jury) for the murder of two American citizens, is one of our top priorities.Although the investigation is not complete, the FBI has uncovered no evidence indicating TNI involvement in the Timika murders. We know President Yudhoyono understands the importance of this matter to the United States and trust that the Government of Indonesia will take the appropriate actions to achieve justice in this case."

Biden then asked her if she would still support IMET "if If the case remains stalled-with no suspect in jail, no investigation actively probing alleged ties to TNI, no plans for any movement in the future."

Rice's response was predictable: "IMET for Indonesia is in the US interest," she said. By training Indonesian officers, the United States will "strengthen the professionalism of military officers, especially with respect to the norms of democratic civil-military relations such as transparency, civilian supremacy, public accountability, and respect for human rights."

Patsy Spier, who lost her husband in the Timika attack and was herself seriously wounded, sent out an e-mail today stating her disagreement with Rice's assessment of Indonesia's desire to "achieve justice" in the case. Six and a half months after Ashcroft identified Wamang as the chief suspect, said Spier, Wamang "has not been apprehended, and the Indonesian authorities have not issued an indictment from Indonesia for his arrest."

Spier said she was personally informed by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage last February that, for the United States, cooperation meant seeing the case through to "its exhaustion." In other words, said Spier, "This is an ongoing case, which means that this case is not exhausted."

In another development in the case, Spier said that the Indonesian police - who first made the charge that the army may have been involved in the attack - has responded to repeated invitations by the FBI to come to Washington to study the FBI's evidence in the case. This is the first communication between US and Indonesian authorities on the case in six months. Spier concluded:

What message will the USG be sending to this new Indonesian government if we certify those symbolic funds when the man who is indicted by a US grand jury has not been apprehended, the INP have not issued an Indonesian indictment for his arrest, the other participants of the ambush have not been indicted in this ongoing case, and the INP are just now communicating with our FBI after seven month?

Sadly, the message will be that Bush's ideology of freedom and democracy only applies to our enemies, not our friends. Indonesia has been very very good for American corporations and arms merchants over the years, and Bush and Condi are not about to ruin a good thing.

THOUGHTS ON THE INAUGURATION

2005-01-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

These are strange, cold days. For the last 36 hours I've watched Johnny Carson throw an axe at a woodsman's crotch, play joyously with funny animals, and wonder wistfully about sneaking a peek behind Dolly Parton's dress - over and over and over. But the mix of sad news and comedic memories from the 1960s is a welcome change from the Bush and Cheney follies of January 20th, and its aftermath: a Washington Post story by Bradley Graham that Donald Rumsfeld has formed a secret intelligence war squad inside the Pentagon that is circumventing the CIA and skirting the spirit of the intelligence "reform" bill that passed Congress in December. Meanwhile, from DC to Boston it's all snow and ice and freezing bones, for me two flat tires in three days. My true welcome to 2005, I guess. But as a result, blog-posting has become secondary to keeping warm and out of trouble. So, to make up, here's an update on last Thursday's protests:

There was a good turnout for the main demonstration in DC, from Malcolm X Park down to Pennsylvania Avenue, where it ended amidst chaos and lots of Republicans. Later I watched Fox News' Brit Hume say there were "only 500 or 1,000" protesters, an absurd figure for a march that spanned eight to 10 blocks and then merged with the remnants of ANSWER's rally just south of the Treasury Building. On the way down, the crowd carried some 50 flag-draped "caskets" - it was an effective statement and looked dramatic from any angle.

After running up against the metal fence that cops had erected around the "special zone" north and south of the White House (the first time I have ever seen such a tactic in 23 years here), I walked over to Lafayette Park, where Christian peace groups were chanting and singing around a die-in of about 10 protesters, laying splayed about like they'd all been shot or hit by shrapnel. This was about two blocks down from the AFL-CIO, at 16th & H. Right there, less than 10 feet from the antiwar circle, was one of the entrances to the Bush mall, and suddenly the area was awash with dapper men in long coats and women in furs and boots: rich, happy Republicans, just back from the swearing-in. "Guess its nap time for liberals," one of the Republians chuckled as he and his family happily gave up their constitutional rights to be frisked and searched before they could pay homage to the war president. Others walked deliberately by, slowing shaking their heads in mock disbelief. At one point, I saw Jerry Falwell walk by, big fat strides, cheeks blowing in the wind. Jesus, how much longer do we have to put up with him?

Next, I headed down to my old haunts near the National Press Club building at 14th & F, where I worked for most of the 1990s and still held a club membership. Inside, about 25 Democrats sat uneasily around televisions celebrating the "alternative inauguaration." That looked boring, so I ducked back into the street. By this time, a heavy contingent of anarchists had arrived, dressed in black from head to toe. Four of them stood on a barricade with a huge sign reading BUSH KILLS. Down by the street there was another group holding a huge sign that couldn't be missed by the parade. BUSH IS A MOTHER-FUCKER. As the block filled with more protesters (mixing still with Republicans streaming into the checkpoints from nearby hotels) a large squad of riot police, heavily armed and suited up, suddenly appeared. They staged a few maneuvers, staring fiercely ahead, and then jogged down to Ground Zero, where the prez was about to go by. The heckling of Republicans suddenly got more fierce. Calls of animal killer, how many did it take? etc. got answered by retorts of fuck you and get a job.

I met up with a friend and we walked down to get as close to the parade as possible. It was rowdy down there. Three units of the tactical squad were out on the street. Suddenly, parts of the fence started going down - anarchists had loosened their bolts and pushed them down. The crowd surged forward, resulting in a long, swirling stream of pepper fog sprayed by the cops, drenching the people right by the fence. I was way back and missed the gas, but all around me kids were crying out, ripping off their jackets to get the sting off. My water bottle came in handy at that point. One kid next to me was writhing in pain for a few minutes, but soon he was talking excitedly on his cell phone. "Its a police state, man, I got hit. Fascists. Fascists." But he's grinning, loving it. One of his friends ran up and took his picture. It reminded me of that scene from the Elliot Gould movie about the '60s, when he tells his girlfriend how sexy she is after the cops break up a demonstration at Berkeley.

Over the next 20 minutes, the clashes continued, and more gas was released. But it was easily controlled and eventually turned into a big snowball fight, with protesters trying to hit the cops and the Republican spectators, and the spectators taking aim from behind the cops and coming right back. After dodging a couple of incomings I slipped out for home, thinking that this is the most security I've ever seen for a presidential event - yet also pondering that these young anarchists really need to see real fascism at work before using the word for the USA. We're under very tight control, no doubt, yet we're a long way from the 1980s death squads of El Salvador or the prison hell that was once South Korea.

So it was with some gratitude that I received that night the latest edition of William Blum's Anti-Empire Report, with these thoughts about our present condition. It made me rethink my skepticism, but I still come out with this thought: we're a police state, yes; but fascism? No.

Freedom means knowing how big your cage is

On January 20, 1969, during the inaugural parade for Richard Nixon, I stood in a crowd of onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue and when Nixon's limousine passed by I threw an apple at the car. It bounced off the car behind the one carrying Tricky Dick (who now seems like a liberal compared to the likes of George W., Bill Clinton and John Kerry; seriously). No law enforcement authority rushed into the crowd looking for the perpetrator. Imagine if I had repeated my act at today's inauguration. Everyone within a ten-foot radius of me would be thrown to the ground, handcuffed, if not hogtied, and hauled away to some local version of Guantanamo as a helicopter hovered just above.
I trust that the Statute of Limitations applies to such confessions. I trust also that the Justice Department accords more respect to the Statute of Limitations than it does to the Geneva Conventions.

I tell this story not to defend my action -– which was not exactly
politically sophisticated -– but to try to illustrate how times have changed, and why I believe that the United States has now become a police state. Not the worst police state in history to be sure; not even the worst police state in the world today; but a police state nonetheless.

The War on Drugs made America a virtual police state; the War on Terror has removed the virtual. From expelling a 10-year-old girl for bringing a pair of scissors to school to the death of habeas corpus as a cherished, inviolable principle, with a thousand false and fateful steps in between, American society is fast becoming a giant airport. We live surrounded by a hundred levels of authority -- military and civilian, federal, state, city, and corporate, uniformed and plainclothesed.

Men don't become enforcers of authority because they have a burning passion to advance the cause of justice. And what the enforcers desire in the areas of "security" or "crime", they get: PATRIOT Acts, Homeland Security, preemptive mass arrests, who they want to arrest, how they want to arrest them, where they want to take them, how long they want to keep them, their phone conversations, their computer, their tax return, their census information, their body cavities ... the enforcers get what they want, just like in a police state. Is there anything the Bush administration or its ideological comrades at lower levels might do to infringe upon human rights or civil liberties which would truly surprise and shock those of you who follow the news carefully? What's that? They might appoint the legal architect of torture policy as Attorney General?

"War on drugs" ... "war on terror"-- such terms tell the enforcers that they're warriors fighting a war, and in a war, you use the tactics of war, anything goes. "This, of course, is not really a war at all," says Washington journalist Sam Smith, "but a new status quo that has been declared, one in which violence and paranoia and strip searches are not just part of a sacrifice one must make for a better future. They ARE the future."

To receive the Anti-Empire Report, send an e-mail to BBlum6@aol.com.

AMERICAN VICTIM OF INDONESIAN VIOLENCE SPEAKS OUT

2005-01-17T21:23:00.000-08:00

A story of murder, media manipulation and cover-up

WASHINGTON - Patsy Spier, one of the survivors of a 2002 military-style ambush on a group of contract teachers in the Indonesian province of Papua, spoke out today about the attempts by the Bush administration to resume full military ties with Indonesia before the government in Jakarta accounts for military crimes in East Timor and fully cooperates with a US investigation into the Papua killings.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and its allies in the Bush administration may try to circumvent US restrictions on Indonesian military aid by starting their own “parallel” training and arms supply operations using funds that would be outside of congressional control. That’s what the administration has been telling House and Senate members concerned about the situation in Indonesia, according to human rights groups who stay in close touch with Congress about Indonesia.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pentagon does a parallel program,” Spier told me in an exclusive interview. “But we can’t allow the tsunami to cause us to forget what happened in Indonesia in the past.”

Spier has been visiting Washington to speak with members of Congress and the Bush administration about Indonesia’s handling of the Papua ambush, in which her husband Rick Spier was shot to death by assailants widely believed to be linked to the Indonesian military, better known as TNI.

Spier’s one-woman campaign to bring justice to the Papua victims has made her a legendary figure on Capitol Hill, where she has convinced several leading Republicans to buck the administration on its Indonesia policy. I reported about Spier’s campaign in an article in Mother Jones last year.

FULL-COURT PRESS BY THE ADMINISTRATION

Spier was responding to reports in the New York Times and Washington Post concerning the visit to Indonesia last weekend by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In a full-court press in the US and Indonesian media, Wolfowitz and senior US and Indonesian officials sought to use their recent cooperation in tsunami-devastated Aceh to press for a full resumption of bilateral military ties. Wolfowitz, reported the Times, argued during his visit that “congressional restrictions on American training and arms sales should be re-evaluated in light of what the Indonesian military is doing to refashion itself into a more professional an accountable force.”

As he has many times before, Wolfowitz also offered up the shibbeloth that “cutting off contact with Indonesian officers only makes the problem” – presumably he was talking about human rights violations – “worse.” That’s an argument the Bush administration has been making since coming into office, and has been repeated by the Pentagon ad nauseum since 1991, when Indonesian troops opened fire on peaceful demonstrations in East Timor, killing scores of people and almost killing two of our best journalists, Amy Goodman and Allen Nairn.

“We had military-to-military relations up to the Santa Cruz massacre,” said Spier. “It didn’t change anything.”

The massacre at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili was the impetus behind a congressional ban on US training of Indonesian officers under the State Department’s International Military Education and Training (IMET) program. The ban, which also includes restrictions on US arms sales to Jakarta, was extended in 2000 after militias trained by the TNI rampaged through East Timor on the eve of its historic independence vote, killing hundreds of people and wrecking the city. The Bush administration tried to lift the ban after the 9/11 attacks, citing Indonesia’s cooperation in the war on terror, but Congress refused to go along. The ban is now contingent on full Indonesian cooperation in the FBI investigation into the Papua incident.

So far, that cooperation has been a joke. The shootings took place on a private road deep in the mountains of West Papua, where Freeport McMoran, the New Orleans mining giant, operates the world’s largest copper and gold mine. The road and the surrounding property is guarded by the TNI and local police, who are paid some $10 million a year by Freeport, which has had a long and extremely close relationship with the Indonesian military since the late 1960s. Immediately after the incident, the Indonesian military blamed the attack on the separatist Free Papua Organization (OPM), which has been fighting for independence for decades. But the local police dismissed that claim, and pointed the finger at the army.

US intelligence officials were also skeptical of the TNI’s story. A few weeks after the shooting, the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald both filed extraordinary reports based on intelligence intercepts obtained by sources “close to the US Embassy in Jakarta.” On these intercepts, the papers reported, General Endriantono Sutarto, the commander-in-chief of the TNI, was heard discussing with other generals a military operation against Freeport shortly before the ambush.

THE WASHINGTON POST GETS SUED

The generals’ conversations, the Post reported, made it clear that the attack was “aimed at discrediting” the OPM as a terrorist group. One American source even told the Morning Herald that the attack was the work of Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces well-known for their brutality. (In a bizarre coda to this story, Sutarto threatened to sue the Post for printing the allegations, but withdrew after the Post placed an ad in a Jakarta paper apologizing for the story. According to sources I’ve spoken to, the Post couldn’t corroborate the story about the intercepts because it didn’t have a paper trail; all the paper had was a verbal report from its source. Still, by never printing a word in its own editions about Sutarto’s actions and its apology, the Post participated in a cover-up of sorts).

After all of this, Attorney General John Ashcroft went before reporters last July to announce that, lo and behold, a “Papuan seperatist” (sic – it was misspelled in the press release) had been indicted by a US grand jury in connection with the deadly attack in Papua province in August 2002. “The US government is committed to tracking down and prosecuting terrorists who prey on innocent Americans in Indonesia and around the world,” said Ashcroft. The suspect, Anthonious Wamang, was an “operational commander” of the military wing of the OPM, Ashcroft said.

According to three prominent Papuan human rights groups, Wamang was a well-known sandlewood vendor with close ties with the Kopassus, which runs much of the timber industry in Papua. Ashcroft’s statement, the groups said, “gives a green light to the (TNI) to go after Papuan dissidents (since the TNI classifies all opponents of their presence in Papua as "separatists"), in spite of the fact that suppressed evidence suggests that the military was behind the ambush. And indeed since the Ashcroft statement our three organizations in Papua have been subjected to a new round of threats and intimidation by the military.”

(See “US Accused of Covering Up Freeport Killings,” http://www.laksamana.net/vnews.cfm?ncat=35&news_id=7350)

WHO ORDERED THE KILLING?

Spier, who has been briefed on the case by FBI Director Robert Mueller, said she has “no doubt” that the FBI – which collected its own forensic evidence in Indonesia – had enough evidence on its own to bring the case to a US grand jury. Wamang might very well be one of the shooters. “But who ordered it, and who supplied the guns and the ammunition?” She noted that the Justice Department’s press release on the indictment claims that US and Indonesian authorities “are attempting to identify additional participants in the murders.” This is an ongoing investigation, she stressed.

Spier said she has been told the FBI has offered to return to Indonesia to help apprehend these “additional participants” and assist in issuing indictments. But “Indonesia hasn’t responded.” This case “should remind us why the training funds were held up in the first place,” she added. “They’ve got to be willing to bring to justice those people who committed crimes and are still in service,” for crimes committed in Aceh, Papua and East Timor. “They must acknowledge what they did was wrong.”

Spier is right. Even though Indonesian military officers no longer hold automatic seats in Parliament – a fact that Adm. Fargo pointed out to the Times – there has been no justice in Indonesia. In contrast to Serbia, where numerous war criminals have been brought before an international court, Indonesia has made a mockery of the concept of global justice. As Human Right Watch pointed out in a recent letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Indonesian military and police officers implicated in human rights violations have frequently been promoted rather than prosecuted. We urge you to review these promotions and to initiate transparent and credible prosecutions of officers with histories of human rights abuses. Cases meriting priority attention include: Retired General Hendropriyono, named National Intelligence Chief under President Megawati despite serious allegations that he was responsible for atrocities in Lampung in 1989 and played a role in funding militias responsible for killings of civilians in East Timor; Major-General Sjafrie Syamsoeddin, named to the key post of military spokesman in 2002 despite evidence that while serving as Jakarta military commander in May 1998, troops under his command committed serious abuses when up to a thousand people were killed in days of demonstrations and rioting; and Major-General Mahidin Simbolon, promoted in 2001 to Regional Commander for Papua despite a notorious record in East Timor of helping create and directing militias responsible for multiple attacks on civilians.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/11/10/indone9656.htm

The East Timor Action Network lobbies on, and keeps close tabs on US-Indonesian military ties (http://www.etan.org/news/2004/11appr.htm). It recently posted a letter to Powell from Senator Russell Feingold, who pointed out that, in August 2004:

An Indonesian appeals court overturned the convictions of four officers charged with crimes against humanity in East Timor by the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Indonesia. This latest decision means that all 15 defendants from the Indonesian military and police forces have been cleared of responsibility in the violence surrounding East Timor's referendum in 1999. Only the convictions of two East Timorese have been upheld.

Furthermore, in May 2004, the Security Council adopted resolution 1543, which stated that the UN-established Serious Crimes Unit and the Special Panels courts in East Timor "should complete all investigations by November 2004 and should conclude all trials and other activities as soon as possible and no later than 20 May 2005." With the winding down of the Serious Crimes Unit and the Special Panels courts and the failure of the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Indonesia to hold the perpetrators of violence accountable, I am concerned about the prospects for justice for the East Timorese.

http://etan.org/et2004/october/04-12/06feingold.htm

It's up to the Secretary of State to determine if the Indonesian government has “cooperated” in the Papua case and is thus eligible for full military ties. With Condoleezza Rice about to take the helm, it’s not hard to see where this is going. If she certifies Indonesia for IMET training, however, many skeptics in Congress are almost certain to call hearings. To avoid that spectacle, the administration may try the “parallel program” plan that ETAN and other groups are warning about. Watch this space.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON PAPUA: http://westpapua.ouvaton.org/?q=node/view/69&PHPSESSID=03ca4144bafa44827b53a807356e1a01

ACEH: CORPORATIONS (AND RICHARD HOLBROOKE) TO THE RESCUE

2005-01-13T01:52:00.000-08:00

US corporations that have funded and lobbied for strong US ties to the Indonesian military (TNI) since the days of Suharto are now making plans to play a major role in Aceh’s reconstruction. The man leading the corporate relief effort, in Indonesia and more widely in Asia, will be Richard Holbrooke, who left behind a sordid record in the region when he served during the Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific.

Holbrooke, now a top executive with Perseus LLC, a private equity fund, is chairman of the Asia Society, a New York-based club funded by Asian-based corporations and former high-ranking diplomats. Last Friday, January 7, Holbrooke presided over a teleconference call with members of the Asia Society and the United States Indonesia Society (USINDO), a Washington group funded by the largest US investors in Indonesia. According to USINDO, which is sending out daily e-mails to its corporate members about the situation, the primary focus of the meeting was to prepare for the “phase II recovery” that will follow the immediate post-tsunami relief efforts. In addition, the Asia Society “is endeavoring to serve as a clearing-house for private sector and NGO initiatives aimed at the reconstruction effort, reconstitution of infrastructure in the disaster areas, and keeping awareness of the longer term challenges before the public.” One of those initiatives is likely to be a “private sector summit” in Washington this April to “generate long-term assistance” to Aceh. USINDO said it will play a leading role in these efforts.

Holbrooke will speak about tsunami aid today in Washington with Jan Egeland, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordination.

To be sure, Aceh needs all the assistance it can get right now, and quibbling about its source may sound unseemly when the need is so great. But with the corporate-friendly TNI reasserting its control over Aceh, as reported yesterday, long-term development is likely to become a cover for even deeper corporate penetration into Aceh. Moreover, with Bush’s “rebuilding Iraq” project collapsing in the face of the massive insurgency, many of the same companies that made big bucks off the war in Iraq – the Halliburtons and Bechtels of the world – could see in Aceh another opportunity to contract their way to even greater wealth. Why worry about human rights when there’s so much to rebuild?

Let me answer that question by taking a closer look at Richard Holbrooke and the US Indonesia Society (I’ll leave the Asia Society alone for now).

Holbrooke was the country’s top diplomat in Asia in the late 1970s, just after President Suharto launched his vicious invasion of East Timor and during a time of considerable tumult in the Philippines and South Korea. During his term, the United States became the primary supplier of military hardware to Suharto as he suppressed the Timorese resistance and then starved the people into submission. Holbrooke’s role in Indonesia was summarized in a 1999 article in Z Magazine by Sunil Sharma.

In that article (http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/sunil.htm), Sharma notes that, after Indonesia’s invasion, the United States imposed an arms ban on Indonesia, from December 1975 to June 1976 (Carter was elected that November). But the ban was a secret – “so secret that the Indonesians were unaware of it. The fraud was later exposed by Cornell University professor Benedict Anderson in his testimony before Congress in February 1978. Anderson cited a report, "confirmed from the Department of Defense printout", showing that there never was an arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban the US initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesian.” Here’s what Anderson said:

If we are curious as to why the Indonesians never felt the force of the U.S. government’s "anguish," the answer is quite simple. In flat contradiction to express statements by (US officials) and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, at least four separate offers of military equipment were made to the Indonesian government during the January-June 1976 "administrative suspension." This equipment consisted mainly of supplies and parts for OV-10 Broncos, Vietnam War era planes designed for counterinsurgency operations against adversaries without effective anti-aircraft weapons, and wholly useless for defending Indonesia from a foreign enemy. The policy of supplying the Indonesian regime with Broncos, as well as other counterinsurgency-related equipment has continued without substantial change from the Ford through the present Carter administrations.

Sharma reported that by late 1977, well into Holbrooke’s term, “the Indonesians literally began to run out of weapons in its campaign to destroy the Timorese.” The Carter Administration even “stepped in and increased military aid and weapons sales to the Indonesians, which resulted in Indonesia’s stepped up campaigns of 1978 to 1980 when the level of killing reached genocidal levels.” Holbrooke was later asked by Australian reporters about those atrocities. He responded icily:

I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today . . . [Asked about how many Timorese were killed in the past] . . . we are never going to know anyway.

So much for respect for human rights.

And what about USINDO? Behind a thin veneer of cultural exchange, it has been a cover for private, informal lobbying by US companies eager to keep US aid flowing to the Indonesian military despite its long history of repressing its own people. It was chaired during the 1990s by Paul Wolfowitz, who was US ambassador to Indonesia during the 1980s after taking Holbrooke’s job at State following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. At the time Wolfowitz was affiliated with USINDO, several representatives of Indonesia’s intelligence and military forces also sat on USINDO’s board (if you’re still with me, you might want to read a piece I wrote just before Wolfowitz came to office that described the similarities between “Wolfowitz of Arabia” and Holbrooke - http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2001/0102wolfowitz.html)

Here is how I described USINDO in a front-page article in the Journal of Commerce in 1996:

The society does no lobbying. But it is funded by major U.S. oil, mining, financial services and pharmaceutical companies with strong economic and political connections to Indonesia. "Our long-range goal is a better understanding of the U.S.-Indonesian relationship," said Edward Masters, the society's president and U.S. ambassador to Jakarta during the Carter administration. It was founded in 1994, when "all you heard about was problems over East Timor and labor rights," he said.
The companies represented by the society share a deep interest in maintaining smooth ties with the (then) Suharto government in Jakarta. They include Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), the lead contractor in a $40 billion natural gas project in Sumatra; Freeport-McMoRan Inc., which owns the world’s largest gold mine on the island of Irian Jaya; and General Electric Co., which heads a $2.2 billion consortium building a huge coal-fired power plant in East Java. (I’ll post the entire article here tomorrow).

Masters is now the co-chairman of USINDO. Sharma’s article in Z-Net contains a masterful description of how Masters responded to the horrors that occurred in East Timor during Indonesia’s reign of terror:

In September 1978, US Ambassador to Indonesia Edward Masters went to East Timor accompanied by an entourage of Indonesian diplomats. While there, Masters visited refugee camps -- really concentration camps -- that the Timorese had been herded into by the Indonesians and then subjected to a forced starvation policy. According to one US reporter who was there, Masters "came away so shocked by the conditions of the refugees that they immediately contacted the governor of East Timor . . . to explore the possibilities for providing foreign humanitarian assistance." However, it would not be until a full nine months had passed that Masters (in June 1979) would urge the US to provide humanitarian assistance. The timing of Masters’ silence coincided with Indonesia being bolstered by a huge shipment of US military aid and weapons described above.

Sharma quotes again from Ben Anderson’s testimony before Congress in 1980:

In other words, for nine long months, from September 1978 to June 1979, while "in ever increasing numbers the starving and the ailing, wearing rags at best, drifted onto the coastal plain" (according to the New York Times) Ambassador Masters deliberately refrained, even within the walls of the State Department, from proposing humanitarian aid to East Timor. Until the generals in Jakarta gave him the green light, Mr. Masters did nothing to help the East Timorese, although Mr. Holbrooke insists that "the welfare of the Timorese people is the major objective of our policy towards East Timor.”

A recent issue of USINDO’s newsletter lists several new members, including Newmont Mining, which recently admitted to releasing mercury into the environment at one of its Indonesian gold mines but denied any health impact – see http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6745792/). One of its most influential members is Freeport McMoran, which operates the world’s largest copper mine in Papua, Indonesia, and has paid the TNI millions of dollars to guard its property. As I reported last year in Mother Jones, even the murder of two Freeport employees, allegedly at the hands of the military, hasn’t kept Freeport from deepening its ties with the TNI. http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2004/03/02_402a.html

Companies like Freeport have two purposes in Indonesia: exploiting Indonesian resources and labor, and maintaining smooth relations with the TNI and the government so they can continue that exploitation. Their sudden concern for the welfare of the people of Aceh has money written all over it.

FOOTNOTE:

All of this comes on the heels of announcements from two major corporations of their donations to tsunami relief. USINDO member Exxon Mobil, which operates a huge oil and gas facility on Aceh that is guarded by the TNI, said last week it will donate $5 million. And on January 11, the California oil giant Unocal said it will provide an additional $3 million. Unocal, readers will remember, agreed last month to settle a lawsuit brought by the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of 15 Burmese villagers who claim Unocal was responsible for forced labor, rapes and a murder committed by soldiers along the route of a natural gas pipeline built by Unocal with assistance from Halliburton.

The Fund is now involved in a similar suit against Exxon Mobil concerning its Aceh operations (see news of the lawsuits at http://www.laborrights.org/). In a remarkable study published in 1999 by the Inventory of Conflict and Environment Group at American University, researcher Jeremy Schanck explained how the oil giant, despite its “good deeds,” is so disliked by the people of Aceh:

Exxon Mobil has built mosques, schools, hospitals in Aceh,
and has also contributed to several local charities. However, these good deeds
were significantly undermined in November 1998 when a mass grave containing
Acehnese rebels was discovered within the grounds of the PT Arun liquefied
natural gas (LNG) refinery site. Exxon Mobil, Pertamina (The Indonesian national
oil company), and a Japanese firm jointly own PT Arun. The discovery of the
grave not only incensed the Acehnese, but also focused intense scrutiny on the
Exxon Mobil's operations by international human rights watchdogs. (Read the
study here: http://www.american.edu/TED/ice/aceh.htm)

As the real Mother Jones told us: “Let’s pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

DOWN IN MISSISSIPPI

2005-01-07T18:05:00.000-08:00

Today we learned that justice may finally be reached in a case dating back to 1964 – the death squad killing in Mississippi of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Much credit goes to the State of Mississippi for finally making an arrest in one of the worst crimes of the civil rights era. But let us also pay tribute to a great local newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, that broke the story that led to the indictment of the leader of the death squad, Edgar Ray Killen. As the paper reported today,

In 1999, the attorney general's office reopened the case after The
Clarion-Ledger published excerpts from a secret interview given by Sam Bowers, a
one-time Imperial Wizard who headed the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the
nation's most violent white supremacist organization in the 1960s. The paper
obtained a copy of the interview, which was for an oral history that was not to
be published before Bowers' death.

Read the Clarion-Ledger’s coverage and its special report, “44 days that changed Mississippi,” here:
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050107/NEWS01/50107015

And lest we forget, there’s been some great songs about those terrible days in the South, and one of the best is J.B. Lenoir’s "Down in Mississippi." J.B. Lenoir was a gifted southern bluesman who made his career in Chicago and died tragically after a car wreck in 1967. You can’t help but be moved by these words:

They have a hunting season on the rabbit
If you shoot him, boy, you go to jail
But the season is always open on men
Don't nobody need no bail
Down in Mississippi
Down in Mississippi where I come from
Down in Mississippi where I belong...

Listen to a few bars of the song by clicking the link on the title, above (when you get there, click the Real Player link on Cut #2).

You can buy one of his J.B. Lenoir's finest recordings (which contains the amazing “Vietnam Blues,” “Korea Blues,” and “Eisenhower Blues”) at this link:
http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1044108/a/Vietnam+Blues.htm

And you can read some of his lyrics here:
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/2541/bljlenoi.htm

Jim Dickinson, the great Memphis producer, piano and guitar player and blues artist, has also cut some amazing versions of J.B. Lenoir’s song, and the best one is available on this live recording:
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,271077,00.html

Dickinson’s sons, who make up half of the North Mississippi All Stars, recently released their own live version of the song, with their father singing, on their live album “Hill Country Revue,” available here:
http://stores.musictoday.com/store/product.asp?dept%5Fid=1232&pf%5Fid=NMCD08&band%5Fid=473&sfid=2

Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, presente!

SO WHO WAS THAT WHITE-HAIRED SENATOR WITH GONZALEZ?

2005-01-07T08:11:00.000-08:00

Why, it was John Cornyn, the newest senator from Texas, who was attorney general of Texas when Bush was governor. He not only got to introduce the next AG, he threw out all kinds of softball questions and then tried his damndest to sidestep the issue of torture. That was a little too much, even for the Houston Chronicle, which editorialized today:

Cornyn was wrong to argue that Gonzales should not be asked any questions about his views on torture and prisoners' rights. Cornyn was also mistaken to assume in advance that any senator's question that would put Gonzales on the spot would be wrongly put and unjustly rake him over the coals.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2981395

Since his election in 2002, Cornyn has done little else but defend his former boss and rail about the war on terror. The Gonzalez hearings are a warm-up for what's to come in 2005: Cornyn is likely to be the staunchest defender of any of Bush's future judicial nominees. That should yield broader press coverage. When it comes, some enterprising reporter is likely to find the article (click the link in the title) I wrote about Cornyn for the Texas Observer a few years ago, based on my experience with the Texas AG when we went to high school together in Tokyo, Japan. Back then, Cornyn was a die-hard supporter of George Wallace. Here's my lede:

I read a couple of weeks ago that John Cornyn had pledged to keep the issue of race out of his upcoming U.S. Senate campaign against African-American Democratic nominee Ron Kirk. That was a relief, because the John Cornyn I knew in high school was a big supporter of George Wallace and seemed oblivious to the dangers of Wallace’s racial demagoguery.

When I wrote that, Cornyn was in a very tight race. So when the Texas Observer ran the piece, a few newspapers began investigating. They talked to all kinds of people - my old headmaster, former school mates, etc. Cornyn's press people (led by Dan Quayle's former press secretary) managed to convince the media that his dalliance with Wallace was a "school project" and didn't reflect his real views. But that wasn't the way I remembered it. I was for McCarthy (Eugene, that is), and my feelings were for real. I don't think either of us changed very much in the 35+ years since.

CONTRACTING OUT INTELLIGENCE or The Spy Who Billed Me.

2005-01-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

My latest article, in Mother Jones. Lots of money being made in the spy business these days.

ACEH, INDONESIA - The horror began long before the tsunami

2005-01-05T17:22:00.000-08:00

In the Washington Post today, Ellen Nakashima reports that "Indonesian separatist rebels" charge that the Indonesian military “launched at least three attacks on them since the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami, and that at least two rebels had been killed as they attempted to assist people affected by the calamity.” It’s about time for the mainstream press to pick up this story, first reported by Amy Goodman and Allen Nairn on Democracy Now! on Monday http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/03/1446230

For the past 18 months, Aceh has been under martial law, and all media have been banned. People who have been there, like Nairn, report a situation much like El Salvador in the 1980s – death squads, torture, fear and terror. The record of the Indonesian military, known as the TNI, is abysmal – remember East Timor? And the millions of communists and leftists murdered after the 1965 military coup, which was supported by the CIA?

Despite these horrors, the Bush administration has been trying (unsuccessfully) to lift congressional bans on US-Indonesian military cooperation. Now, military hardliners are trying to use the tsunami disaster as an excuse to do away with this ban once again. On Monday, Dana Dillon, a fellow with the Heritage Foundation, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the disaster “affords the opportunity for the TNI to demonstrate that democratic reform has transformed it from a state-sponsored mafia into a professional military dedicated to the security of Indonesia.” Fat chance. But be on the lookout for a major change in policy, all under the guise of humanitarianism.

For more information, check these links:

Tapol, the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign
http://tapol.gn.apc.org/

East Timor Action Network
http://etan.org/

US LAWMAKERS VISITING PYONGYANG (Korea Times)

2005-01-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

This is an important development. Rep. Curt Weldon, although a Republican and a hawk, has been trying for years to convince the Bush administration to speak directly to North Korea and negotiate an end to the nuclear "crisis" on the Korean peninsula. As part of a deal, Weldon has proposed the construction of an oil pipeline from the Pacific region of Russia through North and South Korea. This would allow the DPRK to earn cash and incorporate parts of its economy into the regional economy of wider East Asia. We'll see if these hawkish Republicans have any influence on Bush, who apparently wants North Korea to just go away.

Press Release: U.S. Groups Urge Indonesian Government to Put People over Politics

2005-01-05T13:12:00.000-08:00

REMEMBER KWANGJU

2005-01-05T11:53:00.000-08:00

2005 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Kwanjgu Uprising in South Korea in 1980. The uprising, triggered by the proclamation of martial law and the massacre of several hundred pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets of Kwangju, marked a turning point in Korean history and in the relations between the United States and South Korea. To many Koreans, the US response to the uprising - silence and then the embrace of the dictators responsible - showed the true face of American policy towards their country. That was shocking in part because the American leaders at that time, including President Jimmy Carter and his Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Richard Holbrooke, were publicly committed to the support of democracy. When it came to choosing between democracy and US security interests, however, the choice was easy.

To understand the current circumstances on the Korean peninsula, its important to remember what happened 25 years ago. In 1996 I obtained more than 3,000 pages of declassified documents on US policy in Korea at that time under the Freedom of Information Act. To read about the true story of what happened in Kwangju and afterwards, please go to this website, http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/kwangju3.htm, where my original articles (which appeared in Korea's Sisa Journal and the US Journal of Commerce) are stored, along with long excerpts from the documents themselves. In Korea, justice was finally served: the military strongmen responsible for the Kwangju massacre - Chun Doo Hwan and Noh Tae Woo - were tried and convicted for murder and treason. With the exception of former US ambassador Donald Gregg, no American official has accepted responsibility for the long US support to military dictators in South Korea.

For further reading, check out Lee Jay Lee's diary of the events in Kwangju. Its an amazing tale, told by someone who played a direct role in the uprising and was imprisoned for several years afterwards - and then, after democratization, became an economic official first for the provincial government in South Cholla and later for the national government of Kim Dae Jung. Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, is available from Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1883191033/104-9189887-7674322?v=glance