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TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
CURRENT UPDATES: November 11, 2005
Dear Friends, To open this edition of the ATRC E-Update, we bring you: "A Special Message from the Arms Trade Resource Center" Tired of the same old line? War, terrorism, war, terrorism. The Arms Trade Resource Center brings hard-hitting research and cutting-edge analysis to the field of peace and security. We have the facts, and we're not afraid to use them. Sober and forward thinking, irreverent and accessible, we provide resources on militarism, nuclearism and the arms trade to activists, advocates, journalists and policy makers. Support progressive alternatives. Donate to the Arms Trade Resource Center. All levels of donations will be greatly accepted, from $5 to $500,000 (we can dream, can't we?). Not only will your donation help us directly, but it will help show our other funders that people value our work. That, in turn, can help us leverage additional support. Please make your checks payable WORLD POLICY INSTITUTE with "Arms Trade Resource Center" in the memo line and send to the following address: Frida Berrigan As a token of our thanks, we'll send you our latest report, answer your burning foreign policy questions, and add to you our mailing list.
Give early and often, and thanks for anything you can do. In this update:
As the Vietnam War dragged on, the government's continued optimism in the face of ongoing bad news was summed up in the phrase "there's light at the end of the tunnel." This implied that the end of the war - and a U.S. victory - was in sight. The Bush administration has shown a similar public face with respect to Iraq. At every important turning point - the establishment of a provisional government, the first elections, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the recent vote ratifying a new constitution - the administration has suggested that these political/military developments would lead to a reduction in violence, progress towards democracy, and faster movement towards the removal of most U.S. occupation forces. For the most part, the experience has been the reverse - more violence, chaos, and insecurity in the wake of each of these events. Not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, but it's not clear that the tunnel has even been built yet. Less than two weeks after the vote on the Iraqi constitution, U.S. forces in Iraq suffered their 2,000th fatality since the beginning of the intervention. The numbers have continued to mount, to 2,056 deaths as of mid-November, along with 15,568 wounded. Put these figures alongside an estimate of 26,000 to 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the start of the war (http://iraqbodycount.net), and it is difficult to share the Bush administration's optimism about the course of the conflict. Nor has the constitutional vote necessarily brought greater political cohesion among Iraq's three most important groups, the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. The Sunni-based insurgency continues apace. Meanwhile, Kurdish political parties have commenced a campaign to move thousands of Kurds into the oil-rich northern region around Kirkuk, in the hopes of ensuring victory in a 2007 referendum on the future of the area. As the Washington Post has noted (Steve Fainu, "Kurds Reclaiming Prized Territory in Northern Iraq," October 30, 2005), the resettling effort is being carried out "outside the framework of Iraq's newly ratified constitution . . . sparking sporadic violence between Kurdish settlers and the Arabs who are a minority there." The costs of the war continue to mount. According to an October report from the Congressional Research Service (Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Base Security Since 9/11, October 3, 2005), the costs of the war in Iraq have reached $255 billion, and are continuing at a rate of at least $6 billion per month. Writing in TomDispatch.com, our colleague Mark Engler notes that not only has the war incurred high budgetary costs, but it is exacting a high price from the majority of U.S. businesses, which are not directly profiting from the "war on terror" (Bush's Bad Business Empire: Making the World Unsafe for Microsoft and Mickey Mouse, available at www.tomdispatch.com). Engler cites sources such as the American Banker, which has quoted a survey indicating that "41 percent of Canadian elites were less likely to purchase American goods because of administration policies, compared to 56 percent in the UK, 61 percent in France, 49 percent in Germany, and 42 percent in Brazil." He also refers to a 2004 story in the Boston Herald that notes that "sixty-two percent of executives surveyed by Opinion Dynamics Corp. . . . said the war is hurting America's global competitiveness." As has been the case from the outset, the burdens of the war have been unequally shared. A new study from the National Priorities Project demonstrates that the military's efforts to fill the ranks in the face of the Iraq fiasco have drawn most heavily from "counties that were poorer than the rest of the nation." In its summary of the report, the project asserts that "As the Iraq war continues and the number of soldiers killed and wounded mounts, this data makes clear that low- and middle-income kids are paying the highest price. It is young people with limited opportunities who are putting their lives on the line." (full report available at www.nationalpriorities.org/militaryrecruitment). In short, while the politics of instituting a formal draft remain uncertain, the "economic draft" is already well under way. Last but not least, wounded soldiers who have returned from Iraq continue to face serious problems getting paid. The Pentagon's pay system is so inept that some wounded soldiers have been declared AWOL and had their pay stopped altogether. Others have been paid "deployment entitlements" they were no longer eligible for, leading them to run up debts that they are hard-pressed to pay back (Winslow Wheeler, "Wounded Soldiers' Pay: A Financial Management Horror Story," www.cdi.org, under the "Straus Military Reform Project).
II. NATIONAL SECURITY IN THE AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE KATRINA As part of the World Policy Institute's monthly lecture series, Bill Hartung hosted a panel entitled "National Security in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," with Anita Dancs and Miriam Pemberton. Dancs is a Research Director with the National Priorities Project and Pemberton, is a Research Fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, as well as the Peace and Security Editor at Foreign Policy In Focus. Hartung began the evening by framing the issue. The hurricane that struck the southeast in August was perhaps the first time middle-America realized the incompetence of the administration. Polls taken afterwards found that the majority of Americans wanted the money for rebuilding the region to come from the war in Iraq rather than cuts in social programs. After Katrina, Hartung noted, those who work on issues of peace and security found that the media was willing to criticize the administration and cited a Newsweek article in which by editor Fareed Zakaria talked about avian flu as a more serious threat than terrorism. This sort of analysis would have garnered a lot of hate mail a few years ago, but it has become much more mainstream and Zakaria is not exactly a liberal. In fact, he had hoped to be Bush's National Security Advisor. Americans are waking up to the fact that the country is unprepared for the outbreak of epidemics. In the article, titled "A Threat Worse Than Terror," Zakaria talked about the need for a "Manhattan Project" scale undertaking to deal with the threat of epidemics and pandemics. He also lamented the amount of money being spent on countering pandemic threats, writing: "The total funding request for influenza-related research this year is about $119 million. To put this in perspective, we are spending well over $10 billion to research and develop ballistic-missile defenses, which protect us against an unlikely threat (even if they worked). We are spending $4.5 billion a year on R&D-drawings!—for the Pentagon's new joint strike fighter. Do we have our priorities right?" Not bad for a mainstream pundit, hmmm? In a similar vein, Hartung drew our attention to a recent (October 26, 2005) Thomas Friedman column on Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's trip to China to meet with military leaders there. Friedman asserts that sustainable development is "THE economic, environmental and national security issue of our day. NOTHING else even comes close." And it is not just the New York Times or Newsweek articulating these positions, Hartung continued. The epicenter of conservativism, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, opined on Oct 20, 2005: "Some conservatives want to exempt homeland security and Pentagon spending from the budget scalpel. That's a bad idea. The defense budget is up 64% in four years*. If more spending was needed for Iraq or Afghanistan, the White House can ask for it. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has identified billion of dollars of low priority spending that could be excised. A scathing 2003 report by federal auditors concluded that financial problems at the Pentagon are 'pervasive, complex, longstanding and deeply rooted in virtually all of its business operations.'" Hartung points out that in these articles by Zakaria, Friedman and others signal a new environment for analyzing the politics of security and military spending. And with that as introduction, the audience heard from two of the more skilled crafters of alternative approaches to the politics of security. Miriam Pemberton started off by describing the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz approach to security—honed as the Cold War waned—as "it is an uncertain world." And, because we don't know what the threats are, we have to put "strategic depth" (or multiple layers of military superiority) between the United States and any existing or emerging threat. Within this framework, there is never enough money for the task. The attacks of September 11, 2001 gave rise to two competing notions: 1) It became the justification for a global war against a shadowy enemy with no limits on security spending; and 2) it demonstrated the weakness of our "strategic depth" because nothing in our huge military arsenal was able to prevent the attack. Or so the Pentagon claimed. In order to break out of this framework, Pemberton suggested a different approach to security, building on the work of our colleague at MIT Cindy Williams, who offers a three-pronged understanding of security: offensive capability (the military), defense capability (homeland security), and prevention (diplomacy). Even the 9/11 Commission talked about developing a full range of security tools, she noted, including money to address the root causes of terrorism- global poverty and hopelessness. Pemberton asserted that the United States spends seven times more on military tools for security than on non-military tools like homeland security and diplomacy. Furthermore, when spending for the war in Iraq is factored in, the disparity widens to nine times more spending. What would a more balanced approach to security look like? she asked. The answer is in the "A Unified Security Budget for the United States," a joint effort of the Center for Defense Information and Foreign Policy in Focus which outlines a way to balance the security budget without worsening U.S. fiscal crisis. The report identifies $53.1 billion in cuts from the fiscal year 2006 military budget and explains why each of them can be made with no sacrifice to security. At the same time, the Unified Security Budget identifies $40.5 billion in additional spending on nonmilitary tools and explains the role of each in building a more secure world. U.S. nonmilitary security-related programs include things like State Department diplomatic operations, international broadcasting and communication, nonproliferation programs to secure dangerous nuclear materials abroad, economic development aid, and funding for regional organizations and the UN, including their peacekeeping operations. Brilliant. Sober. Factual. Do-able. The full report, which the ATRC E-Update has featured in the past, is online at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0505usb.html Pemberton asserted that Hurricane Katrina offers us an opportunity to change the topic of the national conversation. While she was careful to note that terrorism remains a threat, she pointed out that "fighting the terrorists over there" instead of "here," is not a solution, that the U.S. military footprint was a trigger for 9/11 and that even the CIA says that the Iraq war is a cause not a cure of terror threats. With 35% of Louisiana's and 40% of Mississippi's National Guard and Reserves in Iraq, Katrina shows the strains the war is having in our lives. It also shows that government incompetence in dealing with hurricanes suggests government incompetence in dealing with terrorism. In fact, the reach of Hurricane Katrina reveals the limits of fortress America and points to the need for global solutions to global problems like severe climate change. Dancs, the Research Director of the National Priorities Project, spoke about the disconnect between political reality and political rhetoric, noting that "national security" is being used to justify and excuse polices and advance agendas that have nothing to do with ensuring national security and (in some instances) even degrading it. For example, workers' rights were undermined in the name of national security After 9/11, the proposal that airport baggage screeners become part of the national government was tabled by an administration reluctant to enlarge the public sector. Eventually baggage screeners were brought on to the public payroll, but their union rights were left behind. A similar dynamic can be seen in the Department of Homeland Security, observed Dancs. Establishing this Department required the largest reorganization of government in 50 years, and in the process 175,000 civil service workers lost their whistleblower and anti-discrimination protections, and five divisions of the Justice Department lost their union rights. How does stripping workers of their rights improve national security? Constant attention to national security also serves to distract the public from other important issues like the heath care crisis, food insecurity, the loss of good paying jobs and the fact that the number of people living in poverty has increased every year for the past four years. It also distracts people from gross inequities like the massive tax cuts that benefit only the super-rich. Explain the national security significance of that! What can we say about national priorities post-Katrina?, asked Dancs. We see the magnitude of government incompetence and reluctance to address poverty. Right after Katrina struck, Congress called for more cuts in social spending on top of a budget resolution for $35 billion in cuts (mostly to programs for poor families). But an outraged public stepped in and put a stop to the cuts. The federal government responded better to Hurricane Wilma and Beta, and President Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act (waived in the aftermath of Katrina, this federal law stipulates that federal contractors have to pay workers the prevailing wage). Dancs asserts that the America people are ready to talk about different strategies and embrace a broader conception of national security that includes access to health care, improved education, and jobs with a living wage, to name just a few. The National Priorities Project, where Dancs works, generates the best work on the trade-offs that the American public are forced to make when the United States military eclipses everything else. One of their newest resources is a fact sheet entitled "Katrina and the Iraq War Demonstrate Misguided Federal Priorities." http://www.nationalpriorities.org/auxiliary/maps_files/KatrinaIraq/US.pdf If you need more than Frida's almost verbatim synthesis of Pemberton and Dancs' presentations; you are in luck. The whole event was webcast and is available on line at the following address: You will need to download Real Player ( http://www.real.com/) to view the
web-cast. You can download the free version from that site.
RESOURCES: A Threat Worse Than Terror: The Government Can't Even Give Intelligent Advice to Its Citizens, NEWSWEEK, October 31, 2005, Fareed Zakaria Living Hand to Mouth, NEW YORK TIMES, October 26, 2005.,Thomas Friedman III. TORTURE: THE AMERICAN WAY? In Panama, on November 7th, President Bush was asked: "Mr. President, there has been a bit of an international outcry over reports of secret U.S. prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects. Will you let the Red Cross have access to them? And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?" The President responded, "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. "Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. "We do not torture." "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans, and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law. And that's why you're seeing members of my administration go and brief the Congress. We want to work together in this matter." "We -- all of us have an obligation, and it's a solemn obligation and a solemn responsibility. And I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've -- they've got more work to do, and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful." President Bush says that the United States does not torture, but should be allowed to torture. The White House insists that the Central Intelligence Agency should be exempted from proposed ban on abusive treatment of suspected Al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists. In a 90 to 9 vote, of November 4th, the Senate supported Senator McCain's amendment to the military spending bill that would ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from his scandal-induced deep freeze to argue that the ban would tie the president's hands and curtail the "maximum flexibility" needed to carry out the Global War on Terrorism. The exemption Cheney is trying to insert is a model of circuitous language, saying in part "the amendment shall not apply with respect to clandestine counter terrorism operations carried out abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the U.S., or that are carried out by an element of the U.S. government other than the Defense Department and that are consistent with the Constitution and the laws of the U.S. and the treaties to which the U.S. is a party, if the president determines that such operations are vital the protection of the U.S. or its citizens from terrorist attacks." What does that mean? It sounds like Cheney is saying torture is okay if it is carried out by the CIA or any other agency that is not the Pentagon, if it is perpetrated against suspected terrorists who are not Americans, or if the President says its okay. The White House has threatened to veto any bill that includes the McCain provision despite the fact many military leaders, including two former Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell and Retired General John Shalikashvili, support the amendment. One letter, signed by 28 distinguished retired military leaders and sent October 3, 2005, reads in part: "The abuse of prisoners hurts America's cause in the war on terror, endangers U.S. service members who might be captured by the enemy, and is anathema to the values Americans have held dear for generations. The United States should have one standard for interrogating enemy prisoners that is effective, lawful, and humane. The amendments proposed by Senator McCain would achieve these goals while preserving our nation's ability to fight the war on terror. They reflect the experience and highest traditions of the United States military. We urge the Congress to support this effort." The list of signers reads like a who's who of the U.S. military. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) has drafted another amendment to create an independent commission to review accusations of prisoner abuse by American forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere. The White House has also threatened to veto this bill. Later, on November 10th, a slightly schizophrenic Senate voted against the rights of detainees to the American justice system. In a 49-42 vote, senators added the provision by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to bar foreign terror suspects in Guantanamo from filing lawsuits in American courts to challenge their detentions, despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that granted such access. Under the provision, Guantanamo Bay detainees would not be able to file petitions known as writs of habeas corpus, which are used to fight unlawful detentions, in that or any other U.S. court. But, they are allowed to appeal their status as an "enemy combatant" once in the Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. So, the United States can't employ cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, but the detainees- only a few of whom have been charged with any crime despite being held for years—do not have rights under the Justice system. The House will look at these provisions and the whole defense budget bill in the coming weeks. In other torture news, the American Civil Liberties Union released a disturbing cache of documents on Monday October 24th. Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, these pages expose the deaths of detainees while in U.S. custody at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU posted the pages on their website, and they make for harrowing reading. Included are 44 autopsy and death reports of detainees, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions and that many died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and "OGA" (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term commonly used to refer to the CIA, according to the ACLU. "There is no question that U.S. interrogations have resulted in deaths," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "High-ranking officials who knew about the torture and sat on their hands and those who created and endorsed these policies must be held accountable. America must stop putting its head in the sand and deal with the torture scandal that has rocked our military." To date, more than 77,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia. RESOURCES ACTION TORTURE: Cruel, Inhuman, Degrades Us All Amnesty International say: Stop. Investigate. Prosecute. Join the Campaign at http://web.amnesty.org/pages/stoptorture-index-eng Center for Constitutional Rights
DESPERATION IN GUANTANAMO On November 2nd, DemocracyNow! interviewed Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer representing Jumah al-Dossari, a Bahraini man being held at Guantanamo. The lawyer describes his client as a "32-year-old divorced father of a ten-year-old daughter. He is generally a very affable person, very personable," and he has not been charged with any crime. In fact, the only thing the United States government has said is that al-Dossari was "present at Tora Bora." In a stunning and heartbreaking interview, Colangelo-Bryan describes witnessing his client attempt suicide during a recent visit. The interview is hard to listen to and drives home how horrible detention is and the hopelessness and desperation it generates. THROUGH THE WALLS: The Guantanamo Detainees, their Families and Counsel Through the medium of photography, lawyers for the detainees provide insight into the identity and circumstance of those incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, as well as their loved ones and counsel. This incredible website aims to "show the other side of the shocking images from Abu Ghraib and shows a hopeful, nurturing dimension of human nature in an environment of political conflict. GUANTANAMO DIARY WNYC, New York City's public radio station, did a sound documentary follows the efforts of two lawyers representing 11 Yemeni men accused of terrorist activities and being held at Guantanamo. In part one; listeners follow the lawyers as close as they could to the prison itself. Part two takes listeners on a trip to Yemen to meet the families of the detainees: http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/52983 THE TORTURE QUESTION: Frontline Through interviews with policy makers, government interrogators and their subjects, this documentary examines the United States' use of torture-- "a policy born out of fear and anger." Savvy web-sters can download the whole documentary to their desktops at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/view/ But the rest of us must order the video or DVD at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/etc/tapes.html |