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June 13, 2003

White House in Denial

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Let me give the White House a hand.

Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday about a column of mine from May 6 regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be "not credible," but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address.

And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm. I have an offer for Mr. Cheney: I'll tell you everything I know about your activities, if you'll tell me all you know.

To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, let me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face — for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false — a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was "quite confident" that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department.

"It was well known throughout the intelligence community that it was a forgery," said Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Center for International Policy.

Still, Mr. Tenet and the intelligence agencies were under intense pressure to come up with evidence against Iraq. Ambiguities were lost, and doubters were discouraged from speaking up.

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said. "None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state."

I don't believe that the president deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to scare Americans into supporting his war. But it does look as if ideologues in the administration deceived themselves about Iraq's nuclear programs — and then deceived the American public as well.

[eggplant43]

Hatfields and McCoys sign truce

PIKEVILLE, Kentucky (AP) --A pen and ink sealed the end of Appalachia's most infamous bloody feud instead of a shotgun and bullets.

Descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families gathered Saturday in Pikeville to sign the truce, making a largely symbolic and official end to a feud that had claimed at least a dozen lives from the two mountain families.

"We ask by God's grace and love that we be forever remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America," says the truce, signed by more than 60 descendants.

Reo Hatfield of Waynesboro, Virginia, came up with the idea as a proclamation of peace.

The broader message it sends to the world, he said, is that when national security is at risk, Americans put their differences aside and stand united. If these two feuding families can come together, anyone can, he said.

"We're not saying you don't have to fight because sometimes you do have to fight," Hatfield said. "But you don't have to fight forever."

The more than a century of feuding between the McCoys of Kentucky and Hatfields of West Virginia is believed to have its origins in a dispute over a pig. A court battle over timber rights escalated the tension in the 1870s, and by 1888, as many as a dozen lives were lost.

Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton and West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise also signed proclamations declaring June 14 Hatfield and McCoy Reconciliation Day.

Ron McCoy, a founder of Hatfield-McCoy Festival, now in its fourth year, said the families haven't decided what to do with the signed proclamations.

"The Hatfields and McCoys symbolize violence and feuding and fighting," he said, "but by signing this, hopefully people will realize that's not the final chapter."



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Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[eggplant43]

Why doesn't the administration have a passion to find out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to prevent disaster in the future? Don't they at least owe us that?


Bush's 9/11 coverup?
Family members of victims of the terror attacks say the White House has smothered every attempt to get to the bottom of the outrageous intelligence failures that took place on its watch.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert



June 18, 2003 | For family members of those who died on Sept. 11, last week brought a rare chance to meet face-to-face with a man who has become a symbol of their dissatisfaction -- FBI director Robert Mueller. The bureau had quietly invited several dozen family members to Washington to hear a presentation on the war on terrorism, but for the small band of husbands, wives and parents who successfully lobbied Congress last year for an independent 9/11 commission to investigate the attacks, it was a chance to ask some of the troubling questions they have about that day.

They weren't simply queries about the national security collapse that occurred on 9/11, and how a hijacked plane, flying hundreds of miles off course, was able to dive-bomb untouched into the Pentagon a full hour after the World Trade Center had already been attacked twice. Or how more than a dozen terrorists were able to enter America illegally and then live here undetected for weeks and months, and why U.S. intelligence sources failed to piece together significant clues that emerged in advance of the attack.

Family advocates also wanted to know why the government -- and specifically the Bush administration -- has been so reluctant to find answers to any of the obvious questions about what went wrong that day, why so little has been fixed, and why virtually nobody has accepted any responsibility for the glaring failures.

While the administration of President George W. Bush is aggressively positioning itself as the world leader in the war on terrorism, some families of the Sept. 11 victims say that the facts increasingly contradict that script. The White House long opposed the formation of a blue-ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.

"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle. Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."

Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."

Thus far, the administration has largely succeeded. Its stonewalling has gotten little news coverage, and there is scant evidence that the public is outraged. The national discussion has moved on -- to Iraq, to that country's still-missing weapons of mass destruction, to Laci Peterson. But there are increasing signs that White House efforts to blunt a full inquiry into the domestic failures that preceded Sept. 11 could emerge as an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign, in which Bush and his handlers hope to exploit 9/11 for maximum political advantage.

Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has raised the profile of his presidential campaign with sharp criticism of Bush for both his administration's intelligence failures before Sept. 11 and its attempt to paper them over since. "The public has the right to know what its government has done and is doing to protect Americans and U.S. interests," Graham told Salon Monday. "Potential embarrassment isn't a good enough reason to keep these government materials secret."

Other Democrats almost certainly will realize that the issue is one way to counter the public's belief that Bush has been an effective leader in the war on terrorism.

Perhaps it was fear of a backlash that provoked Bush's staff to invite the Sept. 11 families to the Mueller seminar. But by the accounts of several people who attended the briefing at FBI headquarters, in a wing named after Bush's father, the mood was often contentious as the FBI chief and Department of Justice prosecutors answered questions for more than two hours. One flash point came during a sharp exchange about what the FBI had -- or had not -- done with several internal memos filed by field agents detailing concerns that al-Qaida operatives may be training at U.S. flight schools. Mueller confirmed that weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, one young FBI agent had seen two such memos but that she did not act on them.

According to family representatives, Mueller defended the agent, saying she did not have the proper training or tools to take action on the information. But when pressed on how such egregious oversight was able to occur, the director grew defensive and then demanded: "What do you want me to do, fire her?"

The remark was meant to be rhetorical, but in unison family members responded audibly: "Yes!"

"We're the most skeptical audience Mueller will ever have, and I think it showed," says Sept. 11 widow Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, died in the twin towers. "We want answers."

Just over a year ago, the families' questions were at least being asked. During May 2002, controversy swirled when CBS News reported that five weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush had been briefed about an active plot by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida operatives to seize civilian aircraft. The revelations stood in stark contrast to White House spin in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks that nobody in the administration or the intelligence community had "specific information" about a possible hijacking plot.

Into that combustible mix came revelations that FBI special agents in Phoenix and Minnesota had warned their superiors about suspected al-Qaida operatives training at U.S. flight schools. For the White House, the "what did Bush know and when did he know it" narrative was its first real political crisis after Sept. 11, the first time the press along with Democrats were asking pointed questions -- and gaining traction by the day. Even the New York Post, usually a reliable White House ally, ran a headline that declared "Bush Knew"; the conservative Weekly Standard warned that "the administration is now in danger of looking as if it has engaged in a cover-up."

But the White House, aided by global circumstances and a distractible news media, conspired to change the subject.

First, a succession of senior administration officials made dire warnings about the certainty of suicide bombers striking inside America. Then, on June 6, 2002, the administration abruptly reversed itself and announced it was backing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, as first proposed by Democrats. And the White House made the historic announcement the same day FBI agent Colleen Rowley testified before Congress about her famous Minneapolis memo, ensuring that the Department of Homeland Security was the next day's top headline.

Then, by last August, the Capitol was abuzz in talk of war with Iraq, and the buzz persisted for the next nine months. "Iraq changed everything with the press," says one victims' advocate whose wife died in Tower 1. "Nobody cares about this after Iraq."

"It was a successful attempt to change the story," notes John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit defense policy group. "From the White House's perspective, no good can come of these [9/11] investigations. So I think their approach has been entirely predictable, and easy to understand."

Adding insult for some family activists was the fact that Bush used the 9/11 attacks as a justification for the war on Iraq. "I sat and listened to the State of the Union speech [last January] when Bush mentioned 9/11 12 or 13 times," recalls Kristin Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed when United Flight 175 slammed into Tower 1. "At the same time, we were having trouble getting funding for the independent commission."

Gabrielle was equally upset: "Bush has never personally met with the [9/11] families to discuss any of this, so for him to use Sept. 11 and its victims to justify his agenda, I myself am disgusted."

In the face of today's public indifference, the victim activists have placed their faith in two investigations they hope will finally answer some key questions. Though the Sept. 11 attacks were arguably one of the decisive moments in U.S. history, both investigations appear mired in a deadly Beltway mixture of bureaucratic morass and political sniping.

The first was a bipartisan joint inquiry conducted by the House and Senate examining intelligence and law-enforcement failures that led up to the Sept. 11 attack. Its relatively narrow scope came about after Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally phoned then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-N.D., in late January 2002, pressuring him to limit the congressional investigation surrounding Sept. 11.

Despite budget restraints and complaints from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that the White House had "slow-walked and stonewalled" the joint inquiry, the panel's 900-page report was completed late last year. Today it remains stuck in national security limbo as the joint inquiry staff negotiates with the White House and its intelligence agencies over what portions can and cannot be released in the public version of the report. The release date has already been pushed back several times as the declassification process drags on into its seventh month. Even the Republican chairman of the joint inquiry, Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, a former CIA operations officer, has expressed deep frustration at the pace of the process.

"It appears the joint intelligence committee did too good of a job," quips Breitweiser. Indeed, last fall the New York Times reported that "the findings of a joint committee have been far more damaging than most officials at either agency expected when the panel's inquiry began [in early 2002]." The report is expected to detail disturbing lapses in counterterrorism at the CIA and FBI, where warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks went unheeded. They're revelations that are sure to be uncomfortable for the administration.

"I understand when you have national security issues, that's fine," says Breitweiser. "But I hope [the delay] is about national security issues and it's not about embarrassment. Because for people to be holding up making this nation safe because they fear embarrassment, I don't have any time for that. We need to fix the egregious errors of 9/11."

Raising concerns about the joint inquiry review process was the revelation that the administration wanted some information that had already been made public during open hearings to be reclassified in the joint inquiry report. Also alarming was the news from this spring when former Rep. and current 9/11 commissioner Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat, tried to read transcripts from the joint inquiry's closed-door hearings. Even though he had actually served on the joint inquiry a year earlier, Department of Justice attorneys refused to let him read the transcripts, insisting that the White House needed five days to decide whether it wanted to exert executive privilege to keep the information under wraps. The White House eventually relented.

"It was upsetting to find out the White House was trying to block the independent commission's access to the joint inquiry information, when we all know the mandate that created the independent commission states clearly that the commission is to use the joint inquiry as a starting-off point," notes Breitweiser, who also voted for Bush in 2000. "So why would they be blocking access to that?"

Today, the negotiating continues over what gets declassified. "We're making some headway. It's a very long, complicated process. But the public deserves to be told as much as we can tell them about what happened on Sept. 11," reports Eleanor Hill, who directed the joint inquiry staff. Asked whether she's happy with the level of cooperation she's receiving from the administration's intelligence community, Hill responded: "I'll reserve judgment on that."

As Breitweiser noted, the joint inquiry report is supposed to serve as a springboard for the independent 9/11 commission, which is charged with taking a much broader view of the terrorist attack -- everything from border security to immigration. (A classified version of the joint inquiry report has already been made available to the commission.)

Known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the panel has been bogged down by delays in obtaining security clearances, setting guidelines for how the group would handle classified material, and selecting members. The White House first proposed Henry Kissinger to chair the panel, which provoked some bitter complaints. Kissinger eventually withdrew after refusing to make public the list of his consulting clients.

"I would've thought it'd be further along by now," says Gabrielle. "The length of time it's taken to get up and running is astonishing."

Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg calls the panel's inquiry "the most important investigation ever done in American history, given its scope." The final report, due next May, will be "the definitive account of what took place on Sept. 11," he says, "how it could happen and what went wrong, as well as what worked and what did not work and what recommendation would we have for the American government and the American people to make it safer."

But the investigation almost never happened at all.

Family advocates complain it was created virtually in spite of the White House; they point to the extraordinary game of hardball the administration practiced right on the eve of last year's midterm elections when it derailed a bipartisan congressional deal to form the commission, citing concerns with its potential scope and subpoena power. Members of both parties who had already scheduled a press conference to announce the panel were stunned by the turn of events. Weeks after the 2002 election, and following a candlelight vigil by 9/11 victim families held in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House, the independent commission was finally formed, more than a year after the terrorists attacked.

"Bush begrudgingly signed [the commission] into law," complains one family advocate. "Since it was created, he's done everything to take the teeth out of it. His fingerprints and Karl Rove's are all over this."

"If President Bush and the administration are not happy with the independent commission, then it's their own fault because all they had to do was set up a commission on their own," adds Breitweiser. "But they didn't, so it was left to other people to make sure it got done. Undeniably the administration has dragged its feet."

In the past the White House has denied the charge, insisting it's cooperating with the commission. Yet even during hearings, that cooperation has seemed lackluster at best.

Unlike congressional inquiries, the commission's witnesses have not been asked to testify under oath. As a result, federal officials under Bush's command have not always been forthcoming. At their May 23 public hearing in Washington, commissioners were trying to piece together what, if any, defensive measures the government took on the morning of Sept. 11. Specifically, they wanted to know whether the military's North American Aerospace Defense Command, once notified by the Federal Aviation Administration, should have been able to scramble jets in order to intercept some of the hijacked aircraft. Yet 20 months after the attack, 9/11 commissioners still could not get straight answers from NORAD and FAA representatives who testified as to when the FAA notified NORAD about the wayward jets on the morning of 9/11.

Adding to the general confusion that day was baffling testimony by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta. "I don't think we ever thought of an airplane being used as a missile," he told the commissioners. But it was widely reported last year that several government studies had warned of just such a scenario.

For months, the commission was struggling to get by on a minuscule budget of $3 million. That low funding and the yearlong delay in creating the commission stand in stark contrast to previous panels formed to investigate momentous disasters in American history.

For instance, on April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg, killing approximately 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. According to historians, Titanic survivors began disembarking in New York at 10 o'clock on the night of April 18. The next morning at 10:30, a special panel of the Senate Commerce Committee was gaveled into session inside the ornate East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Last year, when Cheney called Daschle to urge him to limit any hearings into 9/11, the V.P. argued it would drain sources away from the war on terrorism. By contrast, just 11 days after Japanese bombers hit the U.S. with a sneak attack killing nearly 3,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating a commission to "ascertain and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941 ... and to provide bases for sound decisions whether any derelictions of duty or errors of judgment on the part of United States Army or Navy personnel contributed to such successes as were achieved by the enemy on the occasion mentioned." It was the first of eight government-led investigations into the Pearl Harbor.

The Warren Commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, was formed just seven days after President Kennedy was assassinated. Last February, after seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board was created 90 minutes after the incident; $50 million was immediately set aside for the probe. And in just four months, the board has already made public significant findings about the crash investigation.

By contrast, nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 9/11 commission only recently opened up its New York City office. The commission's budget has been increased to $14 million, but many experts say that's still far short of the sum needed to do the job right.

Given that perspective, there's a growing sense among some 9/11 advocates that the news media have let them -- and the nation -- down. "I'm very disappointed in the press," says Breitweiser. "I think it's disgusting the independent commission is doing the most important work for this nation and it's not even reported in the New York Times or on the nightly news. I've been scheduled to go on 'Meet the Press' and 'Hardball' so many times and I'm always canceled. Frankly I'd like nothing better than to go head to head with Dick Cheney on 'Meet the Press.' Because somebody needs to ask the questions and I don't understand why nobody is."

Among frustrated family members of Sept. 11 victims, there's a feeling they're losing the battle of time in their struggle to get answers from the Bush administration. "There's a very, very small window to effect changes," says one 9/11 widower, Bill Harvey. "And unfortunately, that window is closing."

[littlemar]

HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT
Women Smokers: Effects Deadlier, Quitting Tougher

By Suzanne Batchelor - WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--New evidence shows gender disparities in the effects of smoking on men and women, with women at possibly higher risk of developing diseases as a result of smoking, but also recovering more lung function than men after quitting.

Women saw greater improvement in lung function after quitting smoking than did men in a study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, of the Washington-Based National Institutes of Health, recently published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Dr. Sherry Marts, physiologist and scientific director of the nonprofit Society for Women's Health Research in Washington, D.C., said in a phone interview the new findings suggest it's never too late to quit and that "finding the biological basis" for this gender difference is the next scientific step.

Women's Death Rate Rising From Lung Cancer

The Canadian Cancer Society reported in April that lung cancer deaths in men had dropped 17 percent since 1988 but women's deaths had increased 46 percent. The Society's director attributed the increased deaths to a 'disease lag' linked to
the years before the 1980s, when more and more women started smoking, according to an April Canadian Press report. The U.S. Surgeon General had issued similar findings in 2001.

"Women began smoking in large numbers in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and so now we're seeing the dramatic increases in those diseases," said Corrine Husten, M.D., chief of epidemiology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, in Atlanta. "Lung cancer death rates
are starting to come down in men, but in women are still going up."

"You have so much lung function and with age there's a gradual, normal decline in lung function. If you smoke, the smoking destroys lung tissue, so you have an accelerated decline," added Husten. Smoking damage may lead to emphysema, chronic bronchitis and lung cancer.

Once addicted to smoking, research indicates that women may be more vulnerable to the diseases it causes.

"In one of the best studies I've seen, when they controlled for the amount of smoke exposure, women seemed more likely to develop lung cancer than men," Marts added.

Of studies listed on the Society for Women's Health Research Web site, one found that nicotine may heighten aggressive moods in men, but calms feelings of stress in women.

Husten added that the new findings highlight the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's message to all female smokers that "it is absolutely critical for smokers to quit and that the earlier one quits, the better."

Quitting Could Be Harder for Women

That may be easier said than done.

"A lot of studies have shown women have a more difficult time quitting smoking," said Marts, citing a study by Dr. Sakire Pogun, published in 2001 in the International Journal of sychophysiology indicating that women experience more severe withdrawal symptoms than men when quitting smoking and that women are
less likely than men to benefit from nicotine-replacement remedies. Marts said other, similar findings have been reported by the American Lung Association on its Web site's fact sheet on women and smoking.

The best advice for women who are having a hard time quitting seems to be for them to understand the serious and physical nature of their addiction, not to try going it alone and to try medications that can help.

"The nicotine patches seem to work a bit better for men. Women seem to be more addicted to the physical habit and sensation of smoke," said Marts. Some studies found that the brain's pleasure centers of women lit up to the smell or taste of cigarette smoke; the men needed the nicotine hit to get that response, she said,
referring to the pleasure center study recently published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Fortunately, Marts said, the medication buproprion seems to benefit women as well as men, according to a study by David Gonzales and others published 2002 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Buproprion is marketed both as the antidepressant Welbutrin and for smoking cessation as Zyban. The drug is approved for both uses by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Husten said quitting usually takes several attempts, and insurance coverage for medication and counseling is often inadequate. "Most people should probably be on some medication because this is an addictive drug. I would say, go get it even if you have to pay for it."

Nicotine-replacement therapies (nicotine gum, patch, lozenge are
over-the-counter; nicotine inhaler and nasal spray are by prescription only) provide a low but steady dose of nicotine, dampening withdrawal symptoms and buying time to create new routines and habits.

"Women want to quit," said Husten. "This is the leading cancer killer of women, the leading preventable cause of death for women, and I would tell women: 'You improve your chances of being successful by getting help.'"

If at first you don't succeed, Huston cautions against taking it as a personal failure. "Addiction of any kind is a brain disease," she said. "Once you're actually addicted to a substance, your brain chemistry changes. To treat a relapse of addiction as a failure of will is self-defeating."

Marts said social and environmental cues--such as meeting friends in a lunchroom, driving the car, the sofa where one smokes--are more crucial in women's addiction, as reported by the study "Smoking and gender," by Centemeri Bolego and others published 2002 in Cardiovascular Research; a study by KA
Perkins and others published 2001 in the journal CNS Drugs (dedicated to the information about the central nervous system); a study by S. Zhu and others published 2000 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and three other studies listed at the Society for Women's Health Research Web site.

Marts offered her mother's quitting as an example of a strong environmental association. After her grandchildren taught Marts' mother to play videogames, Marts' mother often smoked while playing "Hedgehog" alone at home. To quit, Marts said, her mother had to put the Sega video machine in the closet and play
only with the grandkids.

"One-on-one group support is helpful to women, some kind of human support in quitting," added Marts.

Suzanne Batchelor has written also for the national science series "Earth and Sky" and on health and medicine for Medscape, CBS Healthwatch and the Texas Medical Association's "Healthline Texas."

[plschwartz]

Have no idea about asiatimes, the source for this but is a thinking post
Central Asia

US turns to the Taliban
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - Such is the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, compounded by the return to the country of a large number of former Afghan communist refugees, that United States and Pakistani intelligence officials have met with Taliban leaders in an effort to devise a political solution to prevent the country from being further ripped apart.

According to a Pakistani jihadi leader who played a role in setting up the communication, the meeting took place recently between representatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Taliban leaders at the Pakistan Air Force base of Samungli, near Quetta.

The source told Asia Times Online that four conditions were put to the Taliban before any form of reconciliation can take place that could potentially lead to them having a role in the Kabul government, whose present authority is in essence limited to the capital:

Mullah Omar must be removed as supreme leader of the Taliban.
All Pakistani, Arab and other foreign fighters currently engaged in operations against international troops in Afghanistan must be thrown out of the country.
Any US or allied soldiers held captive must be released.
Afghans currently living abroad, notably in the United States and England, must be given a part in the government - through being allowed to contest elections - even though many do not even speak their mother tongue, such as Dari or Pashtu.

Apparently, the Taliban refused the first condition point blank, but showed some flexibility on the other terms. As such, this first preliminary contact made little headway. It is not known whether there will be further meetings, but given the fact that the reason for staging the talks in the first place remains unchanged, more contact can be expected.

The channels for the contact have been set up by Taliban who defected when the government collapsed in Kabul, and fled to Pakistan, where they were sheltered in ISI safe houses. Now these defectors, working with Pakistani jihadis who know how to approach the Taliban leadership, are acting as go-betweens.

The backdrop to the first meeting is an ever-increasing escalation in the guerrilla war being waged against foreign troops in Afghanistan. Small hit-and-run attacks are a daily feature in most parts of the country, while face-to-face skirmishes are common in the former Taliban stronghold around Kandahar in the south.

According to people familiar with Afghan resistance movements, the one that has emerged over the past year and a half since the fall of the Taliban is about four times as strong as the movement that opposed Soviet invaders for nearly a decade starting in 1979.

The key reason for this is that the previous Taliban government - which is dispersed almost intact in the country after capitulating to advancing Northern Alliance forces without a fight - is backed by the most powerful force in Afghanistan: clerics and religious students.

For centuries, these people were the most respected segment of Afghan society, and before 1979 they never participated in politics. On the contrary, their role was one of reconciliation in conflicts. During the Afghan resistance movement against the USSR, things changed, and clerics threw their weight behind the mujahideen struggle, but, with a few exceptions, such as Maulana Yunus Khalis, they were not in command.

With the withdrawal of the Soviets and the emergence of the Taliban in the early 1990s, though, the situation once again changed. The Taliban, taking advantage of the power struggles among bitterly divided militias in Kabul, consolidated themselves into an effective political movement led by clerics and in 1996 seized power in Kabul. A part of their success also lay in the fact that initially Afghans, especially Pashtuns who make up the majority of the country, were reluctant to take up the gun against clerics.

Now, in the renewed guerrilla war against foreign troops, it is the clerics who are calling the shots. For instance, Hafiz Rahim is the most respected cleric in the Kandahar region, and he commands all military operations from the sanctuary of the mountainous terrain.

The US forces have employed maximum air support and advanced technology in an attempt to curtail attacks, but without the help of local Afghan forces they are unable to track down Hafiz Rahim, who to date has targeted US convoys scores of times. The United States has admitted a few deaths, while the Taliban claim they have killed many more than the official numbers state. For funds, the Taliban use money looted from the central bank before they abandoned Kabul, estimated in excess of US$110 million, in addition to money received from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

At the same time, famed warlord Gulbbudin Hekmatyar has joined the resistance after returning from exile in Iran. His Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) is the most organized force in Afghanistan, and its participation has added real muscle to the resistance. Many top slots in the Kabul administration are occupied by former HIA members who, although they were once anti-Taliban, are loyal to the Islamic cause and anti-US. Also, several provincial governors and top officials are former HIA commanders. They are suspect in the eyes of the Americans, but because of their huge political clout it is impossible to remove them.

With this groundswell of support - even if in places it is only passive - and with Kabul's influence restricted to the capital, the Americans and their allies will remain vulnerable targets, let alone be in a position to restore any form of law and order. It is in situations like this, argue most experts on Afghanistan, that traditionally insurrections begin in the Afghan army against foreign administrators.

This is not the end of the problems. More than 2 million Afghan refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, have returned to Afghanistan from countries all over the world, including India, Russia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Zimbabwe and Central Asian countries. Many of them belonged to communist factions during and after the Soviet invasion, while a number of their counterparts remained and now hold positions in Kabul.

At present, Kabul is divided into two main factions. The first is pro-US, which is represented by the US and allied troops and those loyal to President Hamid Karzai. The second is pro-Russian and pro-Iranian, represented by Defense Minister General Qasim Fahim and his Northern Alliance forces. Although the camps are cooperating at present, they are silently building their support bases to make a grab for full power once the present interim administration runs its course, a process that is due to begin in October with a loya jirga (grand council).

In this respect, every returned or returning former "communist comrade" is important, for should the Northern Alliance faction develop sufficient critical mass, it would come as no surprise if its leaders openly forged an alliance with the resistance movement.

(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)


Jun 14, 2003







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Afghanistan: Enduring terrorism
(Jun 12, '03)

Afghanistan: Launchpad for terror (May 3, '03)







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[eggplant43]

The Empire Strikes Back

by ANATOL LIEVEN

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy
by Andrew J. Bacevich


Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
by Walter Russell Mead


Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
by Niall Ferguson


The Decline of American Power
by Immanuel Wallerstein


The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
by Max Boot


Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri


[from the July 7, 2003 issue] The Nation

A few years in Washington, DC, snake-oil capital of the universe, and you begin to think that anything can be packaged as something else. Well, almost anything. Until I read Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I would never have believed that a postmodernist paean to Italian anarcho-syndicalism could be presented by its publishers as a defense of "the idealism of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln," and of the universal validity of the US Constitution.

This wonderful joke is the best thing about Hardt and Negri's book, which otherwise is distinguished by a clarity of language and coherence of thought processes that suggest an Italianate Finnegans Wake. Its history is often quite fanciful. Its portrait of the liberating work practices of the postmodern industrial proletariat would seem to be drawn from the life of a SoHo fashion designer. Its vision of the improving possibilities of bioengineering as far as the mass of humanity is concerned displays an extraordinary naïveté concerning the realities of wealth and power. As for its vision of a modern world "empire," this is not without interest as a portrait of certain aspects of "globalization," but the authors' attempts to define this picture as an "empire," and to distinguish "empire" both from "imperialism" and from contemporary American hegemony are strained, to say the least.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this curious choice of the word "empire" as a name for these patterns of globalization reflects the new modishness of empire as a subject--as witnessed by the number of books now appearing on this theme. Only a few years ago, to use this word to describe the United States would have branded you automatically as a member of the left. Today, it is being taken up by writers across the spectrum, and with unbridled pride by right-wingers like Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal.

But, as Niall Ferguson notes in the conclusion to his vivid and often insightful history of the British Empire, this new open popularity of empire as a self-description in the United States is so far characteristic only of intellectuals. As far as the mass of the American people is concerned, this is still "an empire in denial." And in presenting its imperial plans to the American people, the Bush Administration has been careful to package them as something else: on the one hand, as part of a benevolent strategy of spreading American values of democracy and freedom; on the other, as an essential part of the defense not of an American empire, but of the American nation itself.

This is something that must be stressed if the power and the danger, but also the fragility, of the Bush program are to be understood: The United States under Bush is driving toward empire, but the domestic political fuel being fed into the engine is that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism. This sentiment is for the most part entirely sincere, and all the more dangerous for that. If recent history is any guide, there is probably no more dangerous element in the nationalist mix than a sense of righteous victimhood. Will this fuel continue to be available to the Bush Administration in its drive for empire? Or to put it another way, will the packaging retain its shine? This depends partly on whether the United States comes under further massive attack by Islamist terrorists, but still more on the extent of the sacrifices that ordinary Americans will be called upon to make for the sake of empire.

An unwillingness on the part of the masses to make serious sacrifices for empire is hardly new. As Ferguson points out, until the First World War the British Empire was conquered and run very much on the cheap, and this was true of the other colonial empires as well. The Royal Navy was of course expensive, but then it doubled as the absolutely necessary defense of the British Isles themselves against invasion or blockade. Then as now, given the overwhelming superiority of Western firepower and military organization, enormous territories could be conquered at very low cost and risk. When European empires ran into areas that were truly costly to conquer and hold--the British in Afghanistan, the Italians in Ethiopia--they tended to back off. And in Ferguson's view, the unprecedentedly high rate of casualties among white British troops in the Boer War helped initiate the process of British disillusionment with empire.

This was something of which the general staffs and the conservative establishments of Europe were well aware. Acute students both of Clausewitz and of police reports on the mood of their working classes, they knew the importance of mass support for any serious war, and the limits on how far empire could be used for purposes of mass mobilization. So sensible governments with the ability to do so always used volunteer troops and foreign mercenaries, not conscripts, for colonial wars--the French Foreign Legion, for instance, was created for this explicit purpose.

In his 1983 study The Conquest of Morocco, Douglas Porch offers a fascinating description of the various stratagems used by General Lyautey and the other French imperialists to convince a skeptical French public to support this adventure, which many regarded as a costly distraction from the need to strengthen France's defenses against the real national threat, Germany. These ranged from religious appeals to convert Morocco through civilizational arguments about the need to create a modern Moroccan state, to suggestions that because Germany also had designs on Morocco, it was necessary to combat Germany there as well as in the fields of Lorraine.

In their efforts to rally democratic support as a defense against socialism at home, the capitalist elites in Europe before 1914 similarly relied much less on imperialism than on nationalism. And in 1914, the impulse that drove the European masses to support the war and to immolate themselves in it was nationalism, universally expressed in the belief that the homeland itself was in imminent danger of attack. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have given the Bush Administration a tremendous opportunity in this regard, one they have exploited to the hilt. For that matter, Bush's election campaign vastly played down his followers' imperial ambitions (remember the call for American "modesty"?) while appealing to "folk values" closely associated with what Walter Russell Mead has dubbed "Jacksonian nationalism," against the alien, European-influenced cultural elitism of Gore and the "East Coast elites."

But nationalism is a notoriously wild horse to let loose. At the time of writing, a critical question hanging over the American empire in the Middle East is whether, for the sake of that empire, Bush will be able to confront an Israeli nationalism that members of his own Administration themselves partly share, and that they have also inflamed and exploited for domestic political ends. If he is not willing to take the domestic political risk of confronting this nationalism (which for many Americans has become deeply entwined with their American nationalism), then his imperial project in the Middle East will become much costlier and more dangerous.

Even Mead, who gives a sympathetic portrait of the Jacksonian nationalist tradition in his splendid new book, also worries about the tendency of its adherents to be carried away by furious emotion, and to switch from contemptuous indifference to the outside world to a spirit of annihilatory ruthlessness if they feel that America has been attacked. As he and others have pointed out, democracies may go to war less willingly than autocracies, but when they do so, they have a tendency to fight with fewer restraints and to aim for total rather than partial victory.

The European nationalist death-ride unleashed in 1914 began by destroying the sons of the old European elites, and by 1945 had destroyed their dominance and in many cases their countries as well. They may have started the war; unlike the coolheaded nineteenth-century imperialists in their overseas campaigns, they were unable to stop it even when it became apparent that its course was disastrous to them and their countries. As Dick Diver puts it in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, "This was a love battle--there was a century of middle-class love spent here.... All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love."

Here lies one clue to the difference between the American imperialism of Clinton and that of Bush, a difference that is real but--like the relationships between nationalism, capitalism and imperialism--is also by no means simple. Clinton packaged American imperialism as globalism, and he was also genuinely motivated by a vision of global order in which America would lead rather than merely dictate. Bush is not just packaging imperialism as American nationalism; he and his followers are genuinely motivated by nationalism, in a way that Clinton was not, and, as nationalists, they are absolutely contemptuous of any global order involving any formal check whatsoever on American action.

Within the United States, empire as such still needs to be wrapped up. The United States has a tradition of hostility to empire going back to its own revolution against the British and its foundation as an independent state. This hostility therefore became one element in what Samuel Huntington and others have called "the American creed," or national ideology. But as American historians of many different political stripes have pointed out, the language of imperial expansion also dates back to the earliest years of the American Republic, and was not restricted to the North American continent. In the decades before the Civil War, the South in particular bubbled with demands for the annexation of Cuba and even Mexico. Although such thinking exploded in the run-up to the Spanish-American War of 1898, it had been percolating for some time.

In a fascinating new study, Andrew Bacevich, a distinguished soldier-turned-historian, traces the strong continuities from the 1890s in American thought and action since the end of the cold war, above all, the use of the language of civilizational duty (to the spread of democracy, freedom and good government) as a justification for imperial conquest--though except for historical romantics like Boot, the explicit language of the "white man's burden" has been abandoned, even if its spirit remains. Of course, 1898, like 2003, is special, since it was in that year that the United States began to imitate the nineteenth-century European colonial empires and to establish direct imperial rule over foreign possessions. Elsewhere, the United States has generally either annexed those territories whose small populations it could swamp (Hawaii, northern Mexico) or exerted indirect dominance, as in Central America: neocolonialism avant la lettre.

When it comes to the exertion of such indirect imperial control, it is possible to draw a rather straight line from the Monroe Doctrine to the Bush Doctrine. Thus Walter Russell Mead argues that US strategy since 1945 has progressively extended tougher and tougher versions of the Monroe Doctrine from Latin America to the entire world. In his view, the moves of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his successors to dismantle the British and French colonial empires directly echo Monroe's rejection of European empires and spheres of influence in the Americas, while Bush II's doctrine, like Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserts the universal right of US intervention not only in defense of its own interests but for the sake of the replacement and reordering of "rogue states" and hostile regimes.

Neither Mead nor Bacevich would see much difference in this regard between Bush and Clinton, both of whom, in their view, implemented an American imperial project with deep roots in the very nature of America's state and society. For them, Bush's Iraq is just Clinton's Kosovo or Haiti on a much larger scale and with greatly increased risks. They have a point. Clinton, after all, moved rather quickly to combat Russia's plans to retain a sphere of influence in the territory of the former Soviet Union and was not too scrupulous about the regimes he helped in the process. Clinton preserved NATO as what was then seen as the essential vehicle of US strategic dominance in Europe and, as Bacevich argues, fought the Kosovo war largely in order to justify NATO's continued existence as this vehicle.

This is a view essentially shared by Immanuel Wallerstein and other Marxist historians, though they would of course add that this imperial drive is also implicit in the nature of American capitalism. Is this vision of imperial continuity between the administrations correct? And if so, why the intense nostalgia for the Clinton Administration now felt by so much of the world, especially in Europe? Is this just the lingering after-effect of the old rogue's seductions, a striking case of huge masses of people mistaking form for substance, the packaging for the contents?

Not entirely. In the first place, it must be noted that, to a considerable extent, American power in the world, especially after the disappearance of the only other superpower, has been not only a willed project but also an objective fact, and this is bound to be reflected both in US policies and in the reactions of other countries to the United States. Even if the United States had carried out much deeper cuts in military spending than occurred in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet military would still have left the United States far and away the strongest military power on the planet. Moreover, in seeking to understand the direction of US world policy, it is, of course, critically important to analyze the great abstractions: imperialism, capitalism, nationalism. But in doing so, it is also important not to lose sight of the role of chance events (notably 9/11), of personality and of differing political cultures and ideological currents within America.

Or, to put it at its crudest, imperialism, like any other program, can be conducted intelligently or stupidly. One aspect of this is the packaging. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, said the Romans. "Speak softly and carry a big stick," said Teddy Roosevelt, and, doubtless, similar phrases exist in Chinese and Quechua. But this tactical difference may also reflect a deeper difference of strategy. Drawing a diplomatic veil over the extent of other countries' inferiority to yours in terms of power, and presenting your plans in terms of alliances rather than unilateral action, may also reflect a desire to co-opt rather than conquer, and show a more acute awareness of the actual limitations on your own power. The German and Japanese empires of the twentieth century failed not only because they started late and from an inadequate power base but because they conducted their foreign policies with an incredible degree of savage stupidity.

From this point of view, Clinton may well be justifiably seen by future generations as a particularly intelligent and valuable servant of American imperial capitalism, in a way that went beyond diplomatic cleverness. He seems to have understood three things that the Bush Administration has wholly or partly forgotten: that the American economy is utterly intertwined with the world capitalist order, depends on the health of that order and draws immense benefits from that order. This is indeed likely to be seen by future historians as the central tragic irony of the Bush Administration's world policy: that the United States, which of all states today should feel like a satisfied power, is instead behaving like a revolutionary one, kicking to pieces the hill of which it is king.

Clinton's policy, by contrast, was much more that of a stable hegemon. It was rooted in a recognition that the present age, especially since the collapse of Soviet Communism, has offered the American government unprecedented opportunities when it comes to co-opting the elites of other major states and defusing radical hostility to the United States. As noted above, the notion of "democratic peace" is deeply flawed and ambiguous, historically speaking. It is of especially questionable value in today's world, when so many countries are in fact only shell democracies, in which democratic government acts as a cover for oligarchical rule. Moreover, by far the single greatest example of successful capitalist economic development, China, is not a democracy and shows few signs of becoming one.

However, what has happened--first in China and then in Russia--is that the political elites of these countries have become massive property-holders, and this in turn has given them a massive stake in the stability of the international capitalist system, and hence in the avoidance of major war. It may be argued, of course, that this was also true of the European elites of 1914. But unlike their predecessors, the elites of today do not come trailing a heritage of military aristocracy led by military monarchy; and the masses over which they are ruling, like those of the West over the past century, have been largely demilitarized by socioeconomic change and urbanization. So while the notion of a "democratic peace" may be overblown, that of a "capitalist peace" seems valid--as long as the United States does not so infuriate and humiliate the rulers of other major countries as to lead them to forget their own best interests. It may be, however, that their fears in this regard are exaggerated, and that as far as the threat from the United States is concerned they just have to sit it out for ten or twenty years, until a majority of Americans decide that empire is just not worth the cost.

What Clinton--like Eisenhower--also realized is that the expansion of raw, direct American power in the world depends on and is also limited by the need to maintain the health of the US economy, and through this the economic well-being and hence the long-term political support of the majority of the American people. For the US imperial project suffers from three main underlying weaknesses. The first is the new threat to the American mainland from terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. In the short term, this, as I have suggested, can even strengthen US imperialism by adding the fuel of national vengeance; but if, God forbid, terrorists ever gain the ability to strike such heavy blows that they seriously damage the US economy, then American power will also be weakened.

The second weakness is lack of military resources. This may sound absurd, given the fact that America is now spending nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. If one looks at the actual numbers of US troops, however, a rather different picture begins to emerge. For if the United States spends much more than anyone else on its troops, its troops are also much more expensive to maintain than those of most other countries, and more costly than the "scum of the earth" who staffed the colonial armies of the nineteenth century. It does not have very many of them, and a very high proportion of them are now tied down for the foreseeable future patrolling Iraq. It may be, therefore, as many US officials say in private, that the Bush Doctrine was a "doctrine for one case only"--namely Iraq; and that a planned war to invade and occupy Iran or North Korea is inconceivable. That doesn't necessarily mean that such wars won't happen, but that they will be the accidental rather than the deliberate results of Bush Administration policies.

This brings me back to the third weakness: the willingness of American citizens, particularly among the elites, to make sacrifices for the sake of empire. For one thing is gradually becoming clear: Given its immense wealth, the United States can afford a military capable of dominating the earth; or it can afford a stable, secure system of social and medical entitlements for a majority of its aging population; or it can afford massive tax cuts for its wealthiest citizens and no tax raises for the rest. But it cannot afford all three, unless it can indefinitely sustain them through a combination of massive trade deficits and international borrowing. This seems most unlikely, especially in the midst of a global economic downturn.

It is quite true, as the radical imperialists argue, that in the 1950s the United States sustained far higher levels of military spending as a proportion of the budget and GDP, but at that time, the rest of government spending was considerably lower, and the United States was in the midst of an era of very steep economic growth lasting three decades. Unless today's US and world economies can return to such growth--not for years but for decades--then something is sooner or later going to break, and break disastrously, if the Bush Administration continues its present policies. Such a disaster, however, would engulf not only the American empire but the lives and hopes of countless Americans, the stability and growth of the present world economic system, and possibly even the US political order. And this would be the ultimate American tragedy, for it is above all the mixture of economic opportunity and the US Constitution that are the bedrock of America's moral and ideological power in the world today, and will be America's chief legacy to future ages of the world.

It is interesting in the light of all this to revisit the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. The title of his new book, The Decline of American Power, appears curious at first sight. So regularly has Wallerstein predicted the decline of American power over the decades, and so steeply has American power in fact risen, that he has often appeared as the boy who cried wolf. But then, in the fable, the wolf, of course, eventually turned out to be all too real, just a bit late. And even if one finds Wallerstein's model of the world system too schematic and undifferentiated, he is still worth reading for the tremendous breadth of his scholarship and the fecundity of his insights.

Among these is his grasp of the essentially insatiable nature of capitalism--or at least of American capitalism, for one criticism that might be made of Wallerstein is his relative indifference to the importance of different national cultures in capitalism. Anyone who doubts their importance even when it comes to economic policy might want to contrast the two great newspapers of the Western capitalist classes, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and note the horrified incredulity with which FT writers have attacked the Bush Administration's tax cuts, so ardently demanded by the editorial page of the Journal.

For just as US imperialism, emboldened by a strong shot of nationalism, is busy undermining the world political order of which the United States is hegemon, so dominant sections of the US capitalist elite are suicidally gobbling up the fiscal foundations of American economic stability and the American capitalist system. Their pathological hatred of FDR, who did more than any other man in the twentieth century to preserve and extend American capitalism, has been echoed in our own day by their visceral, hysterical loathing of Clinton, who, objectively speaking, also served them very well. This is a truly strange and awful sight, and--pace Niall Ferguson--one that bears little resemblance to the behavior of the old British imperial elites, at least once their empire had been achieved. In their criminal arrogance, these contemporary American projects and attitudes are much more reminiscent of Wilhelmine Germany, and we must hope that they do not receive a condign punishment. For in the words of Arnold Toynbee, "great empires do not die by murder, but suicide."

[pyritechips]

The following is from a CBC Newsworld program called "The Docket":

<b><u>Copyright Confusion</u></b>

Lesly Ellen Harris is a copyright guru who teaches people how to stay on the right side of copyright law. A Canadian lawyer and author, she lives outside Washington DC.

"I think there's both people breaking the law that don't know about it and [people] who think that what they're doing isn't harmful," says Harris. "I'm sure everyone we know, including us break the law occasionally."

Harris says we break the law every time we reproduce content from the Internet, record television programs with our VCRs or play a boom box on a public beach. Even storytime at the library is technically illegal.

But Harris admits storytime at the library is an extreme example: No one is about to arrest a librarian. However, Harris is on a copyright crusade.

"I think it's important to create what I call a copyright culture," says Harris. "People really do need to understand what copyright is all about." That's why she's designed a copyright website for kids.

"Kids are creating more work now than ever," says Harris. "So the time really is right...so when they're learning about protecting their own works, we're teaching them how to legally use the works of other people."

On the website there's a section that links to a cease and desist letter - a warning children can e-mail to anyone illegally using their work.

Harris isn't alone in her copyright crusade. Access Copyright, a Canadian company that protects the works of writers and publishers, is also in the business of educating the public about copyright laws. It offers courses on copyright. Access also monitor schools and copyshops. It hires private investigators to make sure they're not breaking the law

Investigators enter copyshops with copyrighted material in hand. They ask the clerk to make copies - sometimes multiple copies. Investigators are asked to fill out a report. They describe what they see in detail. For instance, are there any signs warning people about copyright? They're also asked to describe in detail what happened - did the clerk make the copies? Why or why not?

Suzanne Conway, a lawyer for Access Copyright, says Access is not the copyright police. But she says the company will take legal action if the same copyshops continue to break the law.

Conway says copyshops aren't the only threat - the Internet also poses a threat to creators. That's why Access Copyright is launching a digital investigation program. It's like having private investigators - online.
Conway says this is a step forward, but she would also like to see tougher copyright laws. "It's time for the Canadian government to bring our copyright laws up to date in the digital arena. [It's time to] deal with the issues that affect creators and publishers of Canadian works on the Internet."

Private investigators busting copyshops and a copyright website for children -
is copyright going too far? Harris doesn't think the campaign has gone far enough. She says it's still in its infancy.


Here's what our panelists had to say:

David Basskin says Canadian artists and creators are being robbed everyday. Basskin is chief legal counsel with the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency. The CMRRA collects money for music publishers -- the people who own the copyright of a song. Basskin says the fact that millions of people are downloading music for free on the Internet, doesn't change the fact that it's usually illegal. Basskin says Canadian copyright laws have to get tougher or artists will no longer be able to create.

Russell McOrmond says Canadians need to get educated about copyright law so they will join the fight to make it less restrictive. McOrmond is an Internet consultant in Ottawa. He says much of copyright law is out of step with the digital age. He says copyright stifles creativity, and downloading music is good for the artist and the music fan.

Allison Outhit says copyright should be enforced, but watchdogs need a bit of a reality check. Outhit says artists must be paid for the use of their work, but trying to get street musicans to pay royalties is a ridiculous pursuit. Outhit herself is a former recording artist and now works at a television and digital media company in Halifax.


YOUR VERDICT

You heard what our panelists had to say - now it's your turn. Do we need tougher copyright laws or does copyright stifle creativity?

More on Copyright

What legislation governs copyright issues?

Copyright legislation is federal. Canada has had an extensive and continually revised Copyright Act since 1985. In 1992, the federal government also brought in the Status of the Artist Act. This Act recognizes "the importance to artists that they be compensated for the use of their works, including the public lending of them."

Copyright is automatic, in that it does not have to be registered and the right begins the moment an original piece of work is created. There is no minimum age for copyright protection. A two-year-old holds the copyright to her fingerpainted page.

What is Access Copyright?

Access Copyright is a non-profit agency set up to license public access to work that is protected by copyright. It was first established in 1988, under the name CanCopy. Individual artists join Access Copyright as members; so do creator groups (such as the League of Canadian Poets or the Canadian Association of Photographers and Illustrators in Communications) and publisher groups (such as the Canadian Newspaper Association or the Canadian Music Publishers Association).

Copyshops, schools, universities, non-profit groups, municipalities and libraries buy licenses from Access -- licenses to photocopy or otherwise duplicate material. Thousands of licenses are issued every year. Access Copyright staff educate license-holders on copyright law and monitor for compliance. For example, in 2000-01, 375 public schools and 28 school boards in Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan were sampled to collect data on copying. Copyshops are also visited and Access will respond to complaints of copyright infringement from members.

In 2001, Access had 4,812 creator members and 444 publisher members. That year, Access distributed $18.5 million to rightsholders for the use of their work.


A Course on Copyright: In November 2002, Access Copyright ran a large advertisement in the Globe and Mail encouraging readers to sign up for an 18-week on-line course on copyright. The course cost $50.00 but was free to educators, members and license-holders. The course filled up quickly; Access has indicated it will re-offer the course.



Copyleft/Open Source

The "open source" movement began in 1984 with computer programmers who believed that patents, copyright and intellectual property laws produced poor quality software. Those who take this position may also use the term "copyleft" and use a reversed copyright symbol (the c within a circle) on published articles.

There is currently an OpenLaw project at Harvard Law School. These lawyers, who specialize in cyberlaw, craft their arguments openly on-line and invite others to join in and patch in improvements or ideas.

A Final Note: Big rewards, in England

In England, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) is the equivalent of Canada's Access Copyright. CLA information contains a section called "Blowing the Whistle". The text reads: "It is illegal to use other people's work by photocopying or scanning from books, journals or periodicals unless you have the permission of the copyright owner. Do you know of a business or organization that makes illegal copies? Tell us about it and you could be in line for a reward of up to L10,000."

[eggplant43]

Indians finally recognized at battlesite

By BECKY BOHRER Associated Press writer
LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Mont. -- The words were angry, ugly. But to Tim Lame Woman, they were truth, and they nagged at him to be spoken whenever he passed the grassy battlefield where Lt. Col. George Custer became a legend.

On a June day in 1988, Lame Woman marched with other members of the American Indian Movement to the monument to the 7th Cavalry atop Last Stand Hill. They placed at its base a crudely engraved plaque honoring the "Indian patriots who fought and defeated the U.S. Cavalry in order to save our women and children from mass murder."

"To me, that was a continued insult, to see Custer idolized and his monument," Lame Woman recalled from his home on the nearby Northern Cheyenne reservation. "We wanted America to recognize our contributions. But nothing was up there, and it hurt."

This Wednesday, the 127th anniversary of Custer's defeat, formal recognition is coming to the Indian warriors who prevailed that hot day, June 25, 1876.

The granite obelisk and white headstones of the cavalry dead now share the battlefield with a sunken stone circle -- a sacred symbol to many tribes -- and an open-air space for tribal ceremonies.

Walls feature "interpretive panels" explaining the roles of the tribes that took part in the battle. And most strikingly, wiry sculptures of three warriors on horseback and a woman on foot beside them stand guard.

The dedication of the new monument Wednesday is a proud moment for Ernie LaPointe, who claims the Sioux leader Sitting Bull as his great-grandfather.

"To me," he said, "it's a long overdue memorial to the victors."

For most Indians, it is an honor. Some even consider it an apology of sorts for whites' treatment of Indians during the early settlement of the West. Others say it simply provides an important historical balance to the 400,000 tourists who visit each year.

But even among Indian tribes, there is not complete satisfaction in the memorial's design -- particularly its inclusion of the Arikara and Crow, who scouted for Custer and were enemies of the Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne.

Battlefield Superintendent Darrell Cook said he expected disagreement, even though tribal representatives helped pick out the design. The memorial, like any art, is subjective, he said.

William C. Hair, a Northern Arapahoe, said the memorial is difficult to interpret and doesn't reflect "the Indian society of yesterday, today and probably tomorrow." Still, he said, he's happy there's finally something recognizing the Indians' role.

"This memorial here is the closest acknowledgment or apology that we'll get from the people of the United States through their government for the atrocities and treatment of the Indians in the early settlement of the American West," he said.

On June 25, 1876, Custer attacked an Indian village along the Little Bighorn River, apparently miscalculating the resistance that he and his men with the 7th Cavalry would encounter. By some estimates, as many as 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fought back.

About 260 men, including Custer and Indian scouts with the cavalry, were killed in the battle. The Indians are estimated to have lost fewer than 100.

Within months of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the military renewed its campaign against the Indians and began forcing them onto reservations.

In 1881, the U.S. government built a granite obelisk to honor the military dead.

Barbara Sutteer, who was named superintendent of the battlefield only a year after the 1988 AIM march there, recalls the firestorm the march set off. It prompted the National Park Service to begin considering the idea of a memorial for the Indians.

In 1991, Congress authorized a memorial to the battle's "Indian participants," in a bill that also changed the battlefield's name from Custer Battlefield National Monument. But it was not until 10 years later that lawmakers finally approved the $2.3 million needed to build the memorial.

"People say it was just done because it was politically correct, but I don't think so," Sutteer said. "It goes back to timing and thinking at the time and the people wanted to see something done."

John Doerner, the battlefield's chief historian, said the Indian memorial is more than just a monument to their participation.

"We often think of it as Custer's last stand. But how many of us think of it as Sitting Bull's last stand, or the Indians' last stand?" Doerner said. "Custer gained an immortality in death that he probably wouldn't have gained in life, if he lived. The irony is, Sitting Bull's people won the battle but they lost the war."

Clifford Long Sioux said he hopes the memorial will mark a turning point in relationships both among tribes and between Indians and whites.

"It's time for healing, and this is part of the healing process, by finally honoring the Indians," he said. "Some people still have somewhat resentful feelings and are angry. Why? We need to start a reconciliation."

Lame Woman said he plans to walk to the ridge top again on Wednesday -- this time, he says, out of reverence, not frustration.

"On Memorial Day, you can take flowers to a loved one's grave to remember them. There's something there," he said. "We finally have something, a place for our children to go and see, and it's long overdue."

[Rollin' Rog]

I liked the article by Andrew Lieven so much, I went out looking for more. This one predates the Iraq war -- long, like the other, but worth the time....

From the London Review of Books.

==============================================


LRB | Vol. 24 No. 19 dated 3 October 2002 | Anatol Lieven
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The Push for War

Anatol Lieven considers what the US Administration hopes to gain


The most surprising thing about the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq is not that it is destructive of international order; or wicked, when we consider the role the US (and Britain) have played, and continue to play, in the Middle East; or opposed by the great majority of the international community; or seemingly contrary to some of the basic needs of the war against terrorism. It is all of these things, but they are of no great concern to the hardline nationalists in the Administration. This group has suffered at least a temporary check as a result of the British insistence on UN involvement, and Saddam Hussein's agreement to weapons inspections. They are, however, still determined on war - and their power within the Administration and in the US security policy world means that they are very likely to get their way. Even the Washington Post has joined the radical rightist media in supporting war.

The most surprising thing about the push for war is that it is so profoundly reckless. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the odds on quick success in destroying the Iraqi regime may be as high as 5/1 or more, given US military superiority, the vile nature of Saddam Hussein's rule, the unreliability of Baghdad's missiles, and the deep divisions in the Arab world. But at first sight, the longer-term gains for the US look pretty limited, whereas the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. A general Middle Eastern conflagration and the collapse of more pro-Western Arab states would lose us the war against terrorism, doom untold thousands of Western civilians to death in coming decades, and plunge the world economy into depression.

These risks are not only to American (and British) lives and interests, but to the political future of the Administration. If the war goes badly wrong, it will be more generally excoriated than any within living memory, and its members will be finished politically - finished for good. If no other fear moved these people, you'd have thought this one would.

This war plan is not like the intervention in Vietnam, which at the start was supported by a consensus of both political parties, the Pentagon, the security establishment and the media. It is true that today - for reasons to which I shall return - the Democrats are mostly sitting on the fence; but a large part of the old Republican security establishment has denounced the idea and the Pentagon has made its deep unhappiness very clear.

The Administration has therefore been warned of the dangers. And while a new attack by al-Qaida during the war would help consolidate anti-Muslim American nationalism, the Administration would also be widely accused of having neglected the hunt for the perpetrators of 11 September in order to pursue an irrelevant vendetta. As far as the Israeli lobby is concerned, a disaster in the Middle East might be the one thing that would at last bring a discussion of its calamitous role into the open in the US.

With the exception of Donald Rumsfeld, who conveniently did his military service in the gap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither Bush nor any of the other prime movers of this war served in the military. Of course, General Colin Powell served in Vietnam, but he is well known to be extremely dubious about attacking Iraq. All the others did everything possible to avoid service. If the war goes wrong, the 'chicken hawk' charge will be used against them with devastating political effect.

Vietnam veterans, both Democrat and Republican, have already started to raise this issue, stirred up in part by the insulting language used by Richard Perle and his school about the caution of the professional military. As a recent letter to the Washington Post put it, 'the men described as chicken hawks avoided military service during the Vietnam War while supporting that war politically. They are not accused of lacking experience and judgment compared to military men. They are accused of hypocrisy and cowardice.' Given the political risks of failure - to themselves, above all - why are they doing this? And, more broadly, what has bred this reckless spirit?

To understand the Administration's motivation, it is necessary to appreciate the breathtaking scope of the domestic and global ambitions which the dominant neo-conservative nationalists hope to further by means of war, and which go way beyond their publicly stated goals. There are of course different groups within this camp: some are more favourable to Israel, others less hostile to China; not all would support the most radical aspects of the programme. However, the basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and worked on by the group of intellectuals close to Dick Cheney and Richard Perle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

This basic goal is shared by Colin Powell and the rest of the security establishment. It was, after all, Powell who, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in 1992 that the US requires sufficient power 'to deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage'. However, the idea of pre-emptive defence, now official doctrine, takes this a leap further, much further than Powell would wish to go. In principle, it can be used to justify the destruction of any other state if it even seems that that state might in future be able to challenge the US. When these ideas were first aired by Paul Wolfowitz and others after the end of the Cold War, they met with general criticism, even from conservatives. Today, thanks to the ascendancy of the radical nationalists in the Administration and the effect of the 11 September attacks on the American psyche, they have a major influence on US policy.

To understand the genesis of this extraordinary ambition, it is also necessary to grasp the moral, cultural and intellectual world of American nationalism in which it has taken shape. This nationalism existed long before last September, but it has been inflamed by those attacks and, equally dangerously, it has become even more entwined with the nationalism of the Israeli Right.

To take the geopolitical goals first. As with National Missile Defense, the publicly expressed motive for war with Iraq functions mainly as a tool to gain the necessary public support for an operation the real goals of which are far wider. The indifference of the US public to serious discussion of foreign or security affairs, and the negligence and ideological rigidity of the US media and policy community make searching debate on such issues extremely difficult, and allow such manipulation to succeed.

The immediate goal is indeed to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There is little real fear, however, that Saddam Hussein will give those weapons to terrorists to use against the United States - though a more genuine fear that he might conceivably do so in the case of Israel. Nor is there any serious prospect that he would use them himself in an unprovoked attack on the US or Israel, because immediate annihilation would follow. The banal propaganda portrayal of Saddam as a crazed and suicidal dictator plays well on the American street, but I don't believe that it is a view shared by the Administration. Rather, their intention is partly to retain an absolute certainty of being able to defend the Gulf against an Iraqi attack, but, more important, to retain for the US and Israel a free hand for intervention in the Middle East as a whole.

From the point of view of Israel, the Israeli lobby and their representatives in the Administration, the apparent benefits of such a free hand are clear enough. For the group around Cheney, the single most important consideration is guaranteed and unrestricted access to cheap oil, controlled as far as possible at its source. To destroy and occupy the existing Iraqi state and dominate the region militarily would remove even the present limited threat from Opec, greatly reduce the chance of a new oil shock, and eliminate the need to woo and invest in Russia as an alternative source of energy.

It would also critically undermine the steps already taken towards the development of alternative sources of energy. So far, these have been pitifully few. All the same, 11 September brought new strength to the security arguments for reducing dependence on imported oil, and as alternative technologies develop, they could become a real threat to the oil lobby - which, like the Israeli lobby, is deeply intertwined with the Bush Administration. War with Iraq can therefore be seen as a satisfactory outcome for both lobbies. Much more important for the future of mankind, it is also part of what is in essence a strategy to use American military force to permit the continued offloading onto the rest of the world of the ecological costs of the existing US economy - without the need for any short-term sacrifices on the part of US capitalism, the US political elite or US voters.

The same goes for the war against al-Qaida and its allies: the plan for the destruction of the existing Iraqi regime is related to this struggle, but not as it has been presented publicly. Links between Baghdad and al-Qaida are unproven and inherently improbable: what the Administration hopes is that by crushing another middle-sized state at minimal military cost, all the other states in the Muslim world will be terrified into full co-operation in tracking down and handing over suspected terrorists, and into forsaking the Palestinian cause. Iran for its part can either be frightened into abandoning both its nuclear programme and its support for the Palestinians, or see its nuclear facilities destroyed by bombardment.

The idea, in other words, is to scare these states not only into helping with the hunt for al-Qaida, but into capitulating to the US and, more important, Israeli agendas in the Middle East. This was brought out in the notorious paper on Saudi Arabia presented by Laurent Murawiec of the Rand Corporation to Richard Perle's Defense Policy Board. Murawiec advocated sending the Saudis an ultimatum demanding not only that their police force co-operate fully with US authorities, but also the suppression of public criticism of the US and Israel within Saudi Arabia - something that would be impossible for any Arab state. Despite this, the demand for the suppression of anti-Israeli publications, broadcasts and activities has been widely echoed in the US media.

'The road to Middle East peace lies through Baghdad' is a line that's peddled by the Bush Administration and the Israeli lobby. It is just possible that some members of the Administration really believe that by destroying Israel's most powerful remaining enemy they will gain such credit with Israelis and the Israeli lobby that they will be able to press compromises on Israel.

But this is certainly not what public statements by members of the Administration - let alone those of its Likud allies in Israel - suggest. Rumsfeld recently described the Jewish settlements as legitimate products of Israeli military victory; the Republican Majority Leader in the House, Dick Armey (a sceptic as regards war with Iraq), has advocated the ethnic cleansing ('transfer') of the Palestinians across the Jordan; and in 1996 Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (now a senior official at the Pentagon) advised Binyamin Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Peace Process and return to military repression of the Palestinians.

It's far more probable, therefore, that most members of the Bush and Sharon Administrations hope that the crushing of Iraq will so demoralise the Palestinians, and so reduce wider Arab support for them, that it will be possible to force them to accept a Bantustan settlement bearing no resemblance to independent statehood and bringing with it no possibility of economic growth and prosperity.

How intelligent men can believe that this will work, given the history of the past fifty years, is astonishing. After all, the Israelis have defeated Arab states five times with no diminution of Palestinian nationalism or Arab sympathy for it. But the dominant groups in the present Administrations in both Washington and Jerusalem are 'realists' to the core, which, as so often, means that they take an extremely unreal view of the rest of the world, and are insensitive to the point of autism when it comes to the character and motivations of others. They are obsessed by power, by the division of the world into friends and enemies (and often, into their own country and the rest of the world) and by the belief that any demonstration of 'weakness' immediately leads to more radical approaches by the 'enemy'.

Sharon and his supporters don't doubt that it was the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon - rather than the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories - which led to the latest Intifada. The 'offensive realists' in Washington are convinced that it was Reagan's harsh stance and acceleration of the arms race against the Soviet Union which brought about that state's collapse. And both are convinced that the continued existence of Saddam Hussein's regime of itself suggests dangerous US weakness and cowardice, thus emboldening enemies of the US and Israel across the Middle East and beyond.

From the point of view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, war with Iraq also has some of the character of a Flucht nach vorn - an 'escape forwards' - on the part of the US Administration. On the one hand, it has become clear that the conflict is integrally linked to everything else that happens in the Middle East, and therefore cannot simply be ignored, as the Bush Administration tried to do during its first year in office. On the other hand, even those members of the American political elite who have some understanding of the situation and a concern for justice are terrified of confronting Israel and the Israeli lobby in the ways which would be necessary to bring any chance of peace.
When the US demands 'democracy' in the Palestinian territories before it will re-engage in the peace process it is in part, and fairly cynically, trying to get out of this trap. However, when it comes to the new rhetoric of 'democratising' the Arab world as a whole, the agenda is much broader and more worrying; and because the rhetoric is attractive to many liberals we must examine this agenda very carefully.

Belief in the spread of democracy through American power isn't usually consciously insincere. On the contrary, it is inseparable from American national messianism and the wider 'American creed'. However, this same messianism has also proved immensely useful in destroying or crippling rivals of the United States, the Soviet Union being the outstanding example.

The planned war against Iraq is not after all intended only to remove Saddam Hussein, but to destroy the structure of the Sunni-dominated Arab nationalist Iraqi state as it has existed since that country's inception. The 'democracy' which replaces it will presumably resemble that of Afghanistan - a ramshackle coalition of ethnic groups and warlords, utterly dependent on US military power and utterly subservient to US (and Israeli) wishes.
Similarly, if after Saddam's regime is destroyed, Saudi Arabia fails to bow to US wishes and is attacked in its turn, then - to judge by the thoughts circulating in Washington think-tanks - the goal would be not just to remove the Saudi regime and eliminate Wahabism as a state ideology: it would be to destroy and partition the Saudi state. The Gulf oilfields would be put under US military occupation, and the region run by some client emir; Mecca and the Hejaz might well be returned to the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan, its rulers before the conquest by Ibn Saud in 1924; or, to put it differently, the British imperial programme of 1919 would be resurrected (though, if the Hashemites have any sense, they would reject what would without question be a long-term death sentence).

Beyond lies China. When the Bush Administration came to power, its major security focus was not the Middle East. There, its initial policy was benign neglect ('benign' at any rate in the case of Israel). The greatest fears of right-wing nationalist gurus such as Robert Kagan concerned the future emergence of China as a superpower rival - fears lent a certain credibility by China's sheer size and the growth of its economy. As declared in the famous strategy document drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz in the last year of the first Bush Administration - and effectively proclaimed official policy by Bush Jr in his West Point speech in June - the guiding purpose of US strategy after the end of the Cold War should be to prevent the emergence of any 'peer competitor'anywhere in the world.

What radical US nationalists have in mind is either to 'contain' China by overwhelming military force and the creation of a ring of American allies; or, in the case of the real radicals, to destroy the Chinese Communist state as the Soviet Union was destroyed. As with the Soviet Union, this would presumably involve breaking up China by 'liberating' Tibet and other areas, and under the guise of 'democracy', crippling the central Chinese Administration and its capacity to develop either its economy or its Army.
To judge by the right-wing nationalist media in the US, this hostility to China has survived 11 September, although in a mitigated form. If the US can demonstrate overwhelming military superiority in the Middle East, there will certainly be groups in the Republican Party who will be emboldened to push for a much tougher line on China. Above all, of course, they support formal independence for Taiwan.

Another US military victory will certainly help to persuade these groups that for the moment the US has nothing to fear from the Chinese Navy or Air Force, and that in the event of a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the island can be defended with relative impunity. Meanwhile, a drastic humiliation of China over Taiwan might well be seen as a key stepping-stone to the overthrow of Communism and the crippling of the Chinese state system.

At present these are only long-term ambitions - or dreams. They are certainly not shared even by a majority of the Administration, and are unlikely to be implemented in any systematic way. On the other hand, it's worth bearing in mind that the dominant groups in this Administration have now openly abandoned the underlying strategy and philosophy of the Clinton Administration, which was to integrate the other major states of the world in a rule-based liberal capitalist order, thereby reducing the threat of rivalry between them.

This tendency is not dead. In fact, it is strongly represented by Colin Powell, and by lesser figures such as Richard Haass. But their more powerful nationalist rivals are in the meantime publicly committed to preventing by every possible means the emergence of any serious rival or combination of rivals to the US, anywhere in the world, and to opposing not just any rival would-be world hegemon, but even the ability of other states to play the role of great power within their own regions.

Under the guise of National Missile Defense, the Administration - or elements within it - even dreams of extending US military hegemony beyond the bounds of the Earth itself (an ambition clearly indicated in the official paper on Defense Planning Guidance for the 2004-09 Fiscal Years, issued this year by Rumsfeld's office). And while this web of ambition is megalomaniac, it is not simply fantasy. Given America's overwhelming superiority, it might well work for decades until a mixture of terrorism and the unbearable social, political and environmental costs of US economic domination put paid to the present order of the world.

As things stand, the American people would never knowingly support such a programme - nor for that matter would the US military. Even after 11 September, this is not by historical standards a militarist country; and whatever the increasingly open imperialism of the nationalist think-tank class, neither the military nor the mass of the population wishes to see itself as imperialist. The fear of casualties and of long-term overseas military entanglements remains intense. And all opinion polls suggest that the majority of the American public, insofar as it considers these issues at all, is far more interested than this Administration in co-operation with allies.

Besides, if the US economy continues to stagnate or falls sharply, the Republicans will most probably not even be in power after 2004. As more companies collapse, the Administration's links to corrupt business oligarchies will become more and more controversial. Further economic decline combined with bloated military spending would sooner or later bring on the full consequences of the stripping of the public finances caused by this Administration's military spending and its tax cuts for the rich. At that point, the financial basis of Social Security would come into question, and the Republican vote among the 'middle classes' could shatter.

It is only to a minimal degree within the power of any US administration to stimulate economic growth. And even if growth resumes, the transformation of the economy is almost certain to continue. This will mean the incomes of the 'middle classes' (which in American terminology includes the working proletariat) will continue to decline and the gap between them and the plutocracy will continue to increase. High military spending can correct this trend to some extent, but because of the changed nature of weaponry, to a much lesser extent than was the case in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries. All other things being equal, this should result in a considerable shift of the electorate to the left.
But all other things are not equal. Two strategies in particular would give the Republicans the chance not only of winning in 2004, but of repeating Roosevelt's success for the Democrats in the 1930s and becoming the natural party of government for the foreseeable future. The first is the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism. The second, which is specifically American, is to take the Jewish vote away from its traditional home in the Democratic Party, by demonstrating categorical Republican commitment not just to Israel's defence but to its regional ambitions.

This is connected both to the rightward shift in Israel, and to the increasingly close links between the Republicans and Likud, through figures like Perle and Feith. It marks a radical change from the old Republican Party of Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush père, which was far more independent of Israel than the Democrats. Of key importance here has been the growing alliance between the Christian Right - closely linked to the old White South - and the Israeli lobby, or at least its hardline Likud elements.
When this alliance began to take shape some years back, it seemed a most improbable combination. After all, the Christian Right and the White South were once havens of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. On the other hand, the Old Testament aspects of fundamentalist Christianity had created certain sympathies for Judaism and Israel from as far back as the US's 17th-century origins.

For Christian fundamentalists today the influence of millenarian thought is equally important in shaping support for Israel: the existence of the Israeli state is seen as a necessary prelude to the arrival of the Antichrist, the Apocalypse and the rule of Christ and His Saints. But above all, perhaps, this coming together of the fundamentalist Right and hardline Zionism is natural, because they share many hatreds. The Christian Right has always hated the United Nations, partly on straight nationalist grounds, but also because of bizarre fears of world government by the Antichrist. They have hated Europeans on religious grounds as decadent atheists, on class grounds as associates of the hated 'East Coast elites', and on nationalist grounds as critics of unconstrained American power. Both sides share an instinctive love of military force. Both see themselves as historical victims. This may seem strange in the case of the American Rightists, but it isn't if one considers both the White South's history of defeat, and the Christian Right's sense since the 1960s of defeat and embattlement by the forces of irreligion and cultural change.
Finally, and most dangerously, both are conditioned to see themselves as defenders of 'civilisation' against 'savages' - a distinction always perceived on the Christian Right as in the main racially defined. It is no longer possible in America to speak openly in these terms of American blacks, Asians and Latinos - but since 11 September at least, it has been entirely possible to do so about Arabs and Muslims.

Even in the 2000 elections, the Republicans were able to take a large part of the white working-class vote away from Gore by appealing to cultural populism - and especially to those opposed to gun control and environmental protection. Despite the real class identity and cultural interests of the Republican elite, they seem able to convince many workers that they are natural allies against the culturally alien and supercilious 'East Coast elites' represented as supporting Gore.

These populist values are closely linked to the traditional values of hardline nationalism. They are what the historian Walter Russell Mead and others have called 'Jacksonian' values, after President Andrew Jackson's populist nationalism of the 1830s. As Mead has indicated, 11 September has immensely increased the value of this line to Republicans.

If on top of this the Republicans can permanently woo the Jewish vote away from the Democrats - a process which purely class interests would suggest and which has been progressing slowly but steadily since Reagan's day - there is a good chance of their crippling the Democrats for a generation or more. Deprived of much of their financial support and their intellectual backbone, the Democrats could be reduced to a coalition of the declining unionised white working class, blacks and Latinos. And not only do these groups on the whole dislike and distrust each other, but the more the Democrats are seen as minority dominated, the more whites will tend to flee to the Republicans.

Already, the anti-semitism of some black leaders in the Democratic Party has contributed to driving many Jews towards the Republicans; and thanks to their allegiance to Israel, the liberal Jewish intelligentsia has moved a long way from their previous internationalism. This shift is highly visible in previously liberal and relatively internationalist journals such as the New Republic and Atlantic Monthly, and maybe even in the New Yorker. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that as a result the internationalist position in the Democratic Party and the US as a whole has been eviscerated.

The Democrats are well aware of this threat to their electorate. The Party as a whole has always been strongly committed to Israel. On Iraq and the war against terrorism, its approach seems to be to avoid at all costs seeming 'unpatriotic'. If they can avoid being hammered by the Republicans on the charge of 'weakness' and lack of patriotism, then they can still hope to win the 2004 elections on the basis of economic discontent. The consequence, however, is that the Party has become largely invisible in the debate about Iraq; the Democrats are merely increasing their reputation for passionless feebleness; whereas the Republican nationalists are full of passionate intensity - the passion which in November 2000 helped them pressure the courts over the Florida vote and in effect steal the election.

It is this passion which gives the nationalist Right so much of its strength; and in setting out the hopes and plans of the groupings which dominate the Bush Administration, I don't want to give the impression that everything is simply a matter of conscious and cynical manipulation in their own narrow interests. Schematic approaches of this kind have bedevilled all too much of the reporting of nationalism and national conflict. This is odd and depressing, because in recent decades the historiography of pre-1914 German nationalism - to take only one example - has seen an approach based on ideas of class manipulation give way to an infinitely more subtle analysis which emphasises the role of socio-economic and cultural change, unconscious identifications, and interpenetrating political influences from above and below.
To understand the radical nationalist Right in the US, and the dominant forces in the Bush Administration, it is necessary first of all to understand their absolute and absolutely sincere identification of themselves with the United States, to the point where the presence of any other group in government is seen as a usurpation, as profoundly and inherently illegitimate and 'un-American'. As far as the hardline elements of the US security establishment and military industrial complex are concerned, they are the product of the Cold War, and were shaped by that struggle and the paranoia and fanaticism it bred. In typical fashion for security elites, they also became conditioned over the decades to see themselves not just as tougher, braver, wiser and more knowledgeable than their ignorant, innocent compatriots, but as the only force standing between their country and destruction.
The Cold War led to the creation of governmental, economic and intellectual structures in the US which require for their survival a belief in the existence of powerful national enemies - not just terrorists, but enemy states. As a result, in their analyses and propaganda they instinctively generate the necessary image of an enemy. Once again, however, it would be unwise to see this as a conscious process. For the Cold War also continued, fostered and legitimised a very old discourse of nationalist hatred in the US, ostensibly directed against the Communists and their allies but usually with a very strong colouring of ethnic chauvinism.
On the other hand, the roots of the hysteria of the Right go far beyond nationalism and national security. Their pathological hatred for the Clinton Administration cannot adequately be explained in terms of national security or even in rational political or economic terms, for after a very brief period of semi-radicalism (almost entirely limited to the failed attempt at health reform), Clinton devoted himself in a Blairite way to adopting large parts of the Republican socio-economic agenda. Rather, Clinton, his wife, his personal style, his personal background and some of his closest followers were all seen as culturally and therefore nationally alien, mainly because associated with the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

The modern incarnation of this spirit can indeed be seen above all as a reaction to the double defeat of the Right in the Vietnam War - a defeat which, they may hope, victory in Iraq and a new wave of conservative nationalism at home could cancel out once and for all. In Vietnam, unprecedented military defeat coincided with the appearance of a modern culture which traditionalist Americans found alien, immoral and hateful beyond description. As was widely remarked at the time of Newt Gingrich's attempted 'Republican Revolution' of the mid-1990s, one way of looking at the hardline Republicans - especially from the Religious Right - is to see them as motivated by a classical nationalist desire for a return to a Golden Age, in their case the pre-Vietnam days of the 1950s.

None of these fantasies is characteristic of the American people as a whole. But the intense solipsism of that people, its general ignorance of the world beyond America's shores, coupled with the effects of 11 September, have left tremendous political spaces in which groups possessed by the fantasies and ambitions sketched out here can seek their objectives. Or to put it another way: the great majority of the American people are not nearly as militarist, imperialist or aggressive as their German equivalents in 1914; but most German people in 1914 would at least have been able to find France on a map.

The younger intelligentsia meanwhile has also been stripped of any real knowledge of the outside world by academic neglect of history and regional studies in favour of disciplines which are often no more than a crass projection of American assumptions and prejudices (Rational Choice Theory is the worst example). This has reduced still further their capacity for serious analysis of their own country and its actions. Together with the defection of its strongest internationalist elements, this leaves the intelligentsia vulnerable to the appeal of nationalist messianism dressed up in the supposedly benevolent clothing of 'democratisation'.
Twice now in the past decade, the overwhelming military and economic dominance of the US has given it the chance to lead the rest of the world by example and consensus. It could have adopted (and to a very limited degree under Clinton did adopt) a strategy in which this dominance would be softened and legitimised by economic and ecological generosity and responsibility, by geopolitical restraint, and by 'a decent respect to the opinion of mankind', as the US Declaration of Independence has it. The first occasion was the collapse of the Soviet superpower enemy and of Communism as an ideology. The second was the threat displayed by al-Qaida. Both chances have been lost - the first in part, the second it seems conclusively. What we see now is the tragedy of a great country, with noble impulses, successful institutions, magnificent historical achievements and immense energies, which has become a menace to itself and to mankind.

Anatol Lieven, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC, is the author of Chechnya and Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.

From the LRB letters page: [ 17 October 2002 ] Jonathan Sinclair-Wilson [ 31 October 2002 ] Andrew Glencross, Derick Schilling, Peter Reavy [ 14 November 2002 ] Duncan Hunter, Sanford Gabin.

[eggplant43]

What we see now is the tragedy of a great country, with noble impulses, successful institutions, magnificent historical achievements and immense energies, which has become a menace to itself and to mankind.

A powerful article. Thanks for posting it.

[plschwartz]

Thanks Rog:
Very insightful and prescient article.
Here is the scariest part:
How intelligent men can believe that this will work, given the history of the past fifty years, is astonishing. After all, the Israelis have defeated Arab states five times with no diminution of Palestinian nationalism or Arab sympathy for it. But the dominant groups in the present Administrations in both Washington and Jerusalem are 'realists' to the core, which, as so often, means that they take an extremely unreal view of the rest of the world, and are insensitive to the point of autism when it comes to the character and motivations of others. They are obsessed by power, by the division of the world into friends and enemies (and often, into their own country and the rest of the world) and by the belief that any demonstration of 'weakness' immediately leads to more radical approaches by the 'enemy'

I do truly believe that Rumsfield saw himself being greeting in Baghdad the way we were greeting in Paris in 1944, and he would be in the lead tank. Iraqi women would drop their veils and play the tambourine as he passed. I fear he has the same idea about Iran.

The fact that they think now that opposition to US occupation is only by ex Saddamists rather then a variety of Iraqi patriots is another self delusion. The goal of the opposition is to raise the specter of another Vietnam, to bog us down with steady daily losses.
I further believe that following Leivens logic, the best way to thwart the Rumsfield plan is to deny the US a firm source of oil so that it can then take on Iran and/or Arabia. It will be interesting to see if the military can stop attacks on oil pipelines and other installations.
We are currently trying desperately to get other nations as India to supply occupation forces. They are demurring, and the cost will be high.

[plschwartz]

Take two PhDs, a library card and some notebooks and leave for two years ...

It's one of the burning questions of the moment: how easy would it be for a country with no nuclear expertise to build an A-bomb? Forty years ago in a top-secret project, the US military set about finding out. Oliver Burkeman talks to the men who solved the nuclear puzzle in just 30 months

Tuesday June 24, 2003
The Guardian

Dave Dobson's past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway - not since the relevant US government intelligence documents were declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and once he had discovered his vocation - teaching physics at Beloit College, in Wisconsin - he felt no need to drop dark hints about his earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

Today his experiences in 1964 - the year he was enlisted into a covert Pentagon operation known as the Nth Country Project - suddenly seem as terrifyingly relevant as ever. The question the project was designed to answer was a simple one: could a couple of non-experts, with brains but no access to classified research, crack the "nuclear secret"? In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, panic had seeped into the arms debate. Only Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union had the bomb; the US military desperately hoped that if the instructions for building it could be kept secret, proliferation - to a fifth country, a sixth country, an "Nth country", hence the project's name - could be averted. Today, the fear is back: with al-Qaida resurgent, North Korea out of control, and nuclear rumours emanating from any number of "rogue states", we cling, at least, to the belief that not just anyone could figure out how to make an atom bomb. The trouble is that, 40 years ago, anyone did.

The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research.

"It's a very strange story," says Selden, then a lowly 28-year-old soldier drafted into the army and wondering how to put his talents to use, when he received a message that Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the grumpy commanding figure in the US atomic programme, wanted to see him. "I went to DC and we spent an evening together. But he began to question me in great detail about the physics of making a nuclear weapon, and I didn't know anything. As the evening wore on, I knew less and less. I went away very, very discouraged. Two days later a call comes through: they want you to come to Livermore."

Livermore was the Livermore Radiation Laboratory, a fabled army facility in California, and the place where Dave Dobson, in a similarly surreal fashion, was initiated into the project. The institution's head offered him a job. The work would be "interesting", he promised, but he couldn't say more until Dobson had the required security clearance. And he couldn't get the clearance unless he accepted the job. He only learned afterwards what he was expected to do. "My first thought," he says today, with characteristic understatement, "was, 'Oh, my. That sounds like a bit of a challenge.'"

They would be working in a murky limbo between the world of military secrets and the public domain. They would have an office at Livermore, but no access to its warrens of restricted offices and corridors; they would be banned from consulting classified research but, on the other hand, anything they produced - diagrams in sketchbooks, notes on the backs of envelopes - would be automatically top secret. And since the bomb that they were designing wouldn't, of course, actually be built and detonated, they would have to follow an arcane, precisely choreographed ritual for having their work tested as they went along. They were to explain at length, on paper, what part of their developing design they wanted to test, and they would pass it, through an assigned lab worker, into Livermore's restricted world. Days later, the results would come back - though whether as the result of real tests or hypothetical calculations, they would never know.

"The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield," read the "operating rules", unearthed by the nuclear historian Dan Stober in a recent study of the project published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences. "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations."

Dobson's knowledge of nuclear bombs was rudimentary, to say the least. "I just had the idea that [to make a bomb] you had to quickly put a bunch of fissile material together somehow," he recalls. The two men were assigned to one of Livermore's less desirable office spaces, in a converted army barracks near the facility's perimeter. Bob Selden found a book on the Manhattan Project that culminated in America's development of the bomb. "It gave us a road map," Dobson says. "But we knew there would be important ideas they'd deliberately left out because they were secret. This was one of the things that produced a little bit of paranoia in us. Were we being led down the garden path?"

They faced one key decision, Dobson says: whether to design a gun-style bomb, like the one dropped on Hiroshima, that used a sawn-off howitzer to crash two pieces of fissile material together, or a more complex implosion bomb, like that dropped on Nagasaki. By now they were beginning to enjoy the challenge, so they went for the harder, more impressive option. "The gun device needed a large amount of material, and didn't make a very big bang," Dobson says. "The other one was more bang, less material."

Dobson and Selden had decided to assume that their fictional Nth Country had already obtained the requisite plutonium - a huge assump tion, since it would be, almost certainly, the hardest part - but there was plenty more to consider. "Obtaining the fissile material is really the major problem - that drives the whole project," says Selden. "But the process of designing the weapon - I'm always careful to point out that many people overstate how easy it is. You really have to do it right, and there are thousands of ways to do it wrong. You can't just guess."

As Stober's study noted, the two amateurs were ironically aided by information published as part of President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, which spread word of the benefits of non-military nuclear power around the world. And Atoms for Peace was only the most prominent example of a fad for everything nuclear that propelled a huge amount of technical detail into the public domain.

Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."

Agonisingly, though, at the moment they believed they had triumphed, Dobson and Selden were kept in the dark about whether they had succeeded. Instead, for two weeks, the army put them on the lecture circuit, touring them around the upper echelons of Washington, presenting them for cross-questioning at defence and scientific agencies. Their questioners, people with the highest levels of security clearance, were instructed not to ask questions that would reveal secret information. They fell into two camps, Selden says: "One had been holding on to the hope that designing a bomb would be very difficult. The other argued that it was essentially trivial - that a high-school science student could do it in their garage." If the two physics postdocs had pulled it off, their result, it seemed, would fall somewhere between the two - "a straightforward technical problem, but one that involves some rather sophisticated physics".

Finally, after a valedictory presentation at Livermore attended by a grumpy General Edward Teller, they were pulled aside by a senior researcher, Jim Frank. "Jim said, 'I bet you guys want to know how it turned out,'" Dobson recalls. "We said yes. And he told us that if it had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang." How impressive, they wanted to know. "On the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima," Frank replied.

"It's kind of a depressing thing to know, that it could be that easy," Dobson says. "On the other hand, it's far better to know the truth." And the truth today, he is certain, is that terrorists - with a bit of luck and, crucially, access to the right materials - could easily build a nuclear bomb. "Back in the 50s, there were two schools of thought - that the ideas could be kept secret, and that the material could be locked up. Now? Well, hopefully the materials can still be locked up, but we all have our doubts about that." Obtaining sufficiently enriched fissile material could be difficult but, when it comes to creating the bomb, "It turns out it's not overwhelmingly difficult. There are some subtleties that are not trivial ... but an awful lot has been published. If you were a grad student today, and you reviewed the literature, a lot of pieces would fall into place."

It was, relatively speaking, easy - so easy that both Selden and Dobson seem to have emerged from the Nth Country Experiment deeply troubled by their own capacities. Selden stayed in the military, on a career that sent him from Livermore to the army's other major research base, at Los Alamos, and is still a member of the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; he has been closely involved in planning how the US might respond to a nuclear terrorist incident. Dobson, meanwhile, felt so uncomfortable that he left the sector entirely. "It was one thing to work on a project which was hopefully going to illuminate the decision makers so they could see that weapons were easily designed," he says. "It was a rather different thing to go in and say, 'OK, for example, let's make a thermonuclear device that's only four inches in diameter.' That's an acceleration of the arms race, and I didn't really want to do that."

Einstein was famously said to have commented that if he had only known that his theories would lead to the development of the atom bomb, he would have been a locksmith. Dave Dobson, having designed one, got a job as a teacher.
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[Rollin' Rog]

Just a little further comment on the Lieven analysis. I think some in the adminstration have seen a little farther down the road than others, but none has really been candid with the American people about the nature of the long term commitments required to fulfill their policies.

The key thing here, is that unlike, say, the "containment" doctrine which defined the cold war, there is no real bi-partisan consensus on the methods and policies being pursued by the Bush people. This means that the necessary continuity for any realistic strategy cannot be maintained through changes of administration. Without that consensus, what becomes of the real purpose of the policy? Whose interests can it be designed to serve? As Lieven pointed out, even from an economic standpoint it does not serve well the business interests of the larger U.S. economic community.

The only people who really benefit, do so in short term scenarios -- the oil interests, the military/econonic power base, and of course, Israel.

From a 'rational' standpoint, the major justification, combating terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction does represent a legitmate motivation -- but the real question is, can these fears be managed, long term, by these means -- and are there no other alternatives? No one has a coherent answer. We are too absorbed creating polarities, not breaking them down, and that does not contribute to our safety.

[eggplant43]

Pill said to cut strokes, heart attacks by 80%
'Polypill' still being fine tuned and 'there will be a lot of debate,' head of study team says

Sharon Kirkey

CanWest News Service


Friday, June 27, 2003

OTTAWA -- In what is being described as one of the "boldest claims" ever for a new medical intervention, British researchers say they've come up with the formula for a single, daily pill that would reduce heart attacks and strokes by more than 80 per cent.

Dubbed the "Polypill," the drug would be a cocktail of six different compounds -- Aspirin, a cholesterol drug, three blood pressure lowering medications given at half the usual dose and folic acid.

In an article to be published Saturday in the British Medical Journal, the researchers suggest that, if the pill proves safe and effective in tests on patients, it could one day be routinely prescribed to everyone 55 and older, regardless of whether they even have symptoms or risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

The researchers claim that Polypill, if widely prescribed, "would have a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the Western world than any other single intervention."

"It is bold. I think initially there will be a lot of debate," lead author Nicholas Wald, of the University of London, said in an interview. "Some people will say, 'Goodness, I don't want to give one pill for everyone, and I don't want to give it unless the risk factors are high.' That would be the conventional approach.

"Other people are going to say, 'Well, that conventional approach isn't right, and I like the concept of this simple pill.' "

The Polypill doesn't exist yet, but it is under development. The researchers are still fine-tuning the drug by choosing the best blood pressure lowering drugs that will go into it. "We plan to get this produced and then do the first stage of the clinical trials on the Polypill," said Wald, a professor of environmental and preventive medicine.

The drug is at least two years away from reaching the market, but already is causing a stir in medical circles.

"I think this is going to be very provocative," said Dr. Andrew Pipe, director of the Prevention and Rehabilitation Centre at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute who likened the Polypill to a "fluoridation of water approach" to cardiac disease. "Great benefit could result from minimal intervention."

But he worries it could "cement in the minds of the public the idea that pills will solve all our problems" and people would ignore other risk factors, such as smoking and physical inactivity.

In addition, the heart drugs aren't benign. Aspirin can cause bleeding or gastric ulcerations, "so there are some people for whom Aspirin would not be appropriate," Pipe warned.

Heart disease and stroke are the leading killers of Canadians, accounting for nearly 79,000 deaths in Canada in 1999.

But Wald says current strategies to prevent heart attacks and strokes aren't adequate because they focus on treating individual risk factors in isolation

"In other words, people were tending to identify people with high blood pressure, with high cholesterol, and if the blood pressure is high, they went on treatment, if the cholesterol was high, that was treated.

"What this (new concept) is doing is identifying people who are at risk of heart attacks and strokes, either because they've already had an event or because of their age, and then using all the medical preventive strategies available."

Wald and his colleague, Malcolm Law, culled through more than 750 clinical trials involving 400,000 patients to find the best combination of heart drugs and vitamins that would reduce, with the fewest side effects, the four main reversible risk factors for cardiovascular disease: high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, elevated levels of homocysteine (an amino acid linked to hardening of the arteries) and "platelet function." If platelets in the blood become too sticky or clumpy, they can reduce blood flow to the heart.

They used the data to identify candidate agents, quantify their effects on reducing risk factors and disease and then estimate the combined effects of using the drugs all together.

They came up with a formulation they estimate would prevent 88 percent of heart attacks and 80 per cent of strokes.

© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun

[plschwartz]

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The conscience of America
By Patti Waldmeir
Published: June 27 2003 19:51 | Last Updated: June 27 2003 19:51

The most powerful woman in America has had a very busy week. And at the end of it, there can be little doubt: Sandra Day O'Connor dominates the US Supreme Court, and from that vantage point, she shapes America. This has long been true - but never before has it been so obvious.
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Over the past week, the iron grandmother of US law has resurrected the endangered practice of affirmative action; overturned a death sentence; championed the rights of sex criminals; and defended the practice of sodomy.

It has been an extraordinary week, for her and for the Supreme Court, a week that violated all the stereotypes. The supposedly conservative court issued some profoundly liberal rulings; and the supposedly cautious Justice O'Connor engaged in an extravagant bout of social engineering. It was a bad week for the conventional wisdom.

And next week could be even more extraordinary. With the court term over, it could bring news that America's first female justice will also become the first woman chief justice of the US (if the current incumbent vacates his post, as has long unreliably been rumoured). Equally, it could bring news that Justice O'Connor herself has resigned. Or more likely, it will bring no news at all.

Those who know are not saying, and those who say do not know. But despite the fact vacuum, the end of term has brought speculation about resignation to a climax. With it has come a new public focus on this most inscrutable of institutions and the deceptively prosaic figure who so often controls it.

With her clichés and slightly quavering tone, Justice O'Connor, 73, hardly seems like a figure of historic proportions. As Davy Crockett, the frontier hero, once said to Daniel Webster, the US statesman: "I had heard that you were a very great man, but I don't think so. I heard your speech and understood every word you said."

Justice O'Connor quotes this passage in her recent book, The Majesty of the Law. But it might equally apply to her. Lawyers appearing before the Supreme Court must feel a lot like Crockett: they can understand every word she says - but that does not mean they can answer her questions.

Justice O'Connor almost always asks the first question - often interrupting counsel before they have finished their first sentence. She speaks slowly, and with the slightest hint of grandmotherly tremor: but she pierces the heart of the issue. Every lawyer knows she is the one they must persuade. But as the court's most unpredictable member, she is also the toughest to conquer. She does not have the acerbic wit of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the savage brilliance of Antonin Scalia, the easy expansiveness of Stephen Breyer, or the passionate commitment of John Paul Stevens on the left and Clarence Thomas on the right. But if she is not the court's most impressive member, she is surely its most powerful.

In all the closest decisions of the past term, Justice O'Connor has cast the deciding vote: sometimes with the liberals, sometimes with the conservatives, always in the majority. Whether she becomes chief justice, or just remains the power behind the throne, she could hardly be more pivotal. "She has only one vote. It just happens to be the one that matters," says Thomas Goldstein, an expert analyst of the court's opinions.

Justice O'Connor cast her vote to potentially historic effect on Monday, when the court issued its biggest decisions on race relations for a generation, upholding affirmative action.

She wrote the main defence of racial preferences and has been roundly criticised for her reasoning, even by many of those who welcome the result. While strongly defending the principle of affirmative action, she voted to uphold the University of Michigan law school's brand of racial preferences, while striking down the same university's diversity-boosting plan for its undergraduate school. Her opinions have since been criticised for lacking not just principle, but also logic and constitutional foundation.

But as Walter Dellinger, former acting US solicitor-general, says: "On an issue like this, the most logical answers are not necessarily the right ones." In the end, it comes down to a judgment call - and Justice O'Connor was not afraid to make one. Ever the pragmatist, this former politician, stay-at-home mother and shop-front lawyer chose the path of most utility.

It was a remarkable ruling and so was the fact that, the next day, she publicly commented on it. In a lengthy newspaper interview (a rare act for any justice) she reflected on the rationale of Justice Lewis Powell, her mentor on the court, and author of the landmark Bakke ruling on affirmative action, on which she based the decision.

Powell probably cared "more about the ultimate fairness of the resolution [of a particular problem] than is typical in deciding these abstract principles of law", she said. "We often recognise that the abstract issues with which we deal do have real-life consequences and may matter deeply to people. That's why you try to do the best you can. But you can't decide it on the basis of, 'Oh, gosh, a lot of people are going to be affected.'"

But many of her critics would say that, in the affirmative action decision, she did exactly that: she ruled on the basis of impact. Heavily lobbied in favour of affirmative action by institutions from business to the military, Justice O'Connor listened and obeyed. Like the ruling this week on sodomy, this looks like a case of ruling by opinion poll. That, however, may reflect a misperception of the Supreme Court: while it is popularly viewed as very conservative, in fact "it conforms far more closely to public opinion than the stereotypes suggest," says Cass Sunstein, constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago.

O'Connor's pragmatic, down-home jurisprudence reflects her frontier upbringing. Born in 1930, she spent her early years on the family ranch in south-eastern Arizona. Her first home had no electricity or running water. She grew up branding steer, riding horses and learning to fix whatever was broken.

In 1952, she graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School, two places behind William Rehnquist.

When President Ronald Reagan needed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 1981, he turned to Sandra Day O'Connor as the right woman at the right time. Because of that, Justice O'Connor has long been viewed as an accident of history.

But Mr Dellinger says she was less an accident of history than its conqueror. On graduating, she was unable to get a job above legal secretary in her male-dominated profession, so she became a local government lawyer. Later, as a young mother, she went door to door (with push-chair) for the Republican party, eventually going on to become a state senator.

She has had an enormous impact on American life. As Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional law professor, has written, "we are all living in Sandra Day O'Connor's America". And whether she stays or goes, that could be true for some time to come.