Things do you should know about:
The "suicide" of PFC Lavena Johnson
To act go to Color of Change.org
On July 13, Minutemen in San Diego protest the 40th National Council of La Raza meeting.
Israeli military shoot at protesters and kill a 9 year old Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank.
Senator John Mccain takes another step towards war with Iran.
Randy Pausch, famous for his "Last Lecture" died on July 25th.
Alaska Senator and longtime political ally of other non-quite American "political communities" is indicted on seven counts of failing to report a combined $250,000 worth of "favors" from Veco Corporation. This is not a big surprise to anyone who knows anything about Ted Stevens, and isn't not a surprise either that he's still gonna run for re-election this year.
A B-52 scheduled for a fly-over of Guam's Liberation Day parade on July 21st, crashes into the sea. It is the seventh incident involving military aircraft on Guam over the past year.
Senator Obama, while visiting troops in Kuwait, drains a 3-pointer and becomes President of the United States.
I haga-hu Sumåhi, esta diesi sais na meses gui', and she's started to learn how to use the computer!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Yes, Dark Knight
I just came home from watching The Dark Knight. I thoroughly enjoyed it.There were parts though that I felt were rushed. Where it seemed that a scene had been stripped to its bare minimum in order to keep things flowing and moving. So characters end up talking to each other in ways which are way too concise and compact, its as if (even if they are good actors) they nonetheless appear like robots speaking one after another. Its always a hurried mixture of surreality and unreality watching this sort of thing, because of the way it unintentionally might reveal that in our own lives, when we speak in ways which are perfectly witty, perfectly timed, is there some sort of matrix at work as well? Editing our lives to create that illusion of discourse moving smoothly along?
Other than this sort of thing, which is understandable, since they were struggling to squeeze as many story elements from as many different Batman storylines as possible, and somehow make all of them fit into 2 1/2 hours.
But this is a small criticism, I was still very much entertained by the film. Gof ya-hu gui'. Pi'ot i bida-na Si Heath Ledger. Ledger surpassed all my expectations in terms of darkness, creepiness and insanity. Without spoiling anything specifically, he was in my opinion a terrifying Joker.
But impressing me in this regard, isn't too difficult. My first memories of Joker aren't very terrifying at all, but come from Caesar Romero's version in the old Batman tv show. Let's face it, surpassing Romero's portrayal of Joker in terms of fright isn't difficult. The scariest thing about that show was probably the tights.
Jack Nicholson's Joker was much more fearsome, and a great character. This Joker was comfortable with violence and teased out the Joker's macabre detachment to people, their existence to him as mere toys to be thrown at each other, to produce momentary enjoyment.Heath Ledger took this even further, and went beyond Nicholson's Joker who despite his veneer of insanity, was so at his core a typical villain in terms of acquisition of power and money and the creation of a sarkar/familia to consolidate and formalize his control. Ledger's portrayal had elements of this, and was brought out through negotiations with and the take over of gangs. But he built upon this, by also portraying the Joker as someone who acted as if his identity lay beyond these basic human drives to build, to defend, to conserve, to procreate, etc.
What this version of the Joker proposed himself as is drive itself. For Joker, all of these other gestures that mark human life are nothing but masks that cover over the violent force of life itself. The curious looks that the Joker constantly has in The Dark Knight are not simply an act, but are part of the position from which he deals with the world around one, at the edge of the human, on the border between humanity and inhumanity.
From this position all the actions of building, conserving, saving, remembering, considering, they all appear like little toys, childs play-things. These are the weaknesses of "normal" people, that he sees as curious or bemusing, but are also levers through which he can manipulate and experiment. That's what The Dark Knight brings out in sometimes obvious ways, the most sublime version of insanity is not someone who is "crazy" in an erratic, useless and unreasoning sense. It is instead this mixture of first: bewilderment and curiosity. The detachment from "normal" life that makes the most simple acts of self-preservation or social interest seem so foreign and unreal. And second: a mampos kalaktos scientific type of reasoning, that sees normal life as a scene for experimentation, for the playing of different basic human social/sustainable drives against each other.
What separates the Joker from other sociopaths with similar cold and cruel logic his willingness to submit his own mortality and life to the play of these "human" experiments. Whereas anyone can display this ability to treat humans as nothing but chess pieces, play-things or objects to be studied or made use of, Joker gives up the self-preservation drive and therefore himself as part of the game. In multiple ways throughout the film, the Joker allows himself, his life, his safety to be caught up in the chaos he has created. Not for heroic reasons, or even out of desperation, but simply because his own life is just one more possible variable for violence and chaos.
The political theory of sovereignty and society that we find in Hobbes' Leviathan, is built upon the premise that humans hold more precious than all else their lives, and that in order to have that thing be set beyond the chaos of everyday life, they will give up their collective freedom. The Joker however rejects this sort of guiding assumption of life and gleefully submits his life and the life of all others in Gotham into chaotic experiments that he creates.
But, by accepting both this position of pure aggression and disruption and suicidal acceptance Ledger's Joker is very adept and capable of pushing what are given to be natural limits, the sainted edges of a current order or even the ideas of order and balance.In the movie this is brought out in relation to Batman, as the Joker tests the limits of Batman, hoping to push him over the edge, to break the sometimes ridiculous moral clauses he sets for himself (no killing), which so long as he clings to, enable him to continue to violent vigilante career. There is of course a paradox here when this sort of superhero/super villain theorizing takes place. Joker and Batman represent two sides of the same coin, both exceptional violent figures which either maintain or disrupt current norms and rules. Yet while on the one hand the Joker wants to keep Batman alive as his balance, as the force that drives him to keep up his campaign of terror, he nonetheless also acts to not kill Batman, but kill the position he occupies. By continually pushing Batman in hopes of getting him to kill, he is also hoping to break the productive deadlock they share.
In the comics, the Joker's role in constantly provoking Batman is far more visceral and has a much longer history. In Batman: The Killing Joke, after crippling Barbara Gordon, kidnapping Gordon himself and forcing him to view naked photos of his bleeding and suffering daughter, the Joker is arrested by Batman. As the Caped Crusader moves in on the Joker, he tells the following joke:
"There were two guys in a lunatic asylum and one night they decide that they don’t like living in an asylum anymore. They decide that they’re going to escape. They get up to the roof, and there just across a narrow gap, they can see the rooftops of the surrounding town, stretching away into the moonlight, stretching away to freedom. The first guy jumps right across with no problems. But the second guy hesitates and doesn’t follow, he’s afraid of falling. The first guy then gets an idea, he says “Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I’ll shine it across the gap between the buildings and you can walk along the beam and join me!” The second guy shakes his head and says, “What do you think I am crazy!? You’d turn it off when I was half-way across!'"Ultimately, given their roles in society, they are two inmates in the same mental asylum, in the same padded room. Interestingly enough, the ways in which they define themselves and are defined might appear to be distant and clearly-defined, but is very close and very fragile. Separated by the smallest of gaps, which can be surpassed with the beam of a flashlight.
Unfortunately, I can't go into this too much because I don't want to spoil the film. But needless to say they are far more similar than we are led to believe, and that is why Batman's refusal to kill is so interesting and yet at the same time so meaningless.
But to take this away from the specific relationship between Batman and the Joker and instead focus on the wider role that Joker plays in terms of pushing the limits of society or revealing its frailties, its fictions and its arbitrary nature, there is one scene from The Dark Knight that I would like to mention.
While speaking to another character in the film trying to convince him to join him in his quest to create chaos in Gotham (guess which one?), the Joker discusses the schemers of life and the schemes of life. The schemers are those people who work actively and exist to prop up the current order. The schemes are those orders, those rules, those norms that give the things around us particular values and meanings and therefore skew our life towards different feelings or normality and exceptionality. The Joker in his "pitch" says that when a gangbanger gets killed or a truck full of soldiers dies, nothing much happens, no one really cares, because those deaths are part of the scheme, they are understood as part of the rules. There is an ebb and flow of violence and value and so it swirls and collects around some bodies and is repulsed from others.But, the Joker continues, go out and threaten a hospital or a school and suddenly people act as if its the end of the world! The first reason for this is because its simply against the rules. The body of a gangbanger is one which society deems as waiting for violence, waiting for the justice of a society to be carried out against it. The soldier, awaits a similar fate, albeit with a different social value assigned upon to its death, but it is still a body which is marked by societies scheme for possible violence.
One way of thinking about these schemes, is the sort of cartography or map of violence and security that each creates. Just as certain bodies are marked for death, others are marked for life, and this goes for institutions and spaces as well. Some are marked as secure, as spaces where death is tamed, put at bay, where chaos it mitigated and decimated. Others are sites where violence can be applied, where chaos is allowed, expected, where there is not supposed to be any stability, security, prosperity. As I'm typing this, Born on the Fourth of July is on tv, and that genre of film, the returning veterans trying to find peace or tying to find a home is an example of how these neat maps, these schemes get skewed. What the returning veterans often does in these sorts of movies and also in life, is bring the violence, insecurity, trauma from one space into another. Both the community that the veteran returns to and the veterans have feelings of being betrayed. They have feelings that the scheme they relied upon isn't living up to its bargain, isn't doing all that it is supposed so, that the rules aren't being followed.
According to the rules, the violence stays over there, it remains on the battlefield, I can honor it and know of it in the abstract, but it does not belong here, it has no place here. This narrative of betrayal is enacted in order to maintain this illusion that this place is fundamentally one of order, peace, life and safety, and that when that which feels like an anathema is present, it must have come from somewhere else. Its presence here must violate some natural principle.That is the reaction that we see throughout the First World in response to any sort of violence or atrocity. A reaction that indicates that this has come from somewhere else, it does not belong here, it cannot happen here! We saw this very clearly after the September 11th attacks, where the response from almost all Americans was an innocent and self-protecting, "How could this happen here!??!?" It was not a reaction that this should not happen anywhere, but rather that the grand scheme of things has marked this country as a space where this should not happen, and it is the most horrific violation that this rule should be broken. Terror has a way of revealing the illusions of a society, by making the institutions or figures which appear as the rocks or the sources of order as weak, helpless, arbitrary or ordinary. The September 11th attacks revealed that the United States was not a castle that sat high above the rest of the world, on a hill, safe in its prosperity, free from all the violence it exports, but that it was just another nation, just another member of the world, a culprit and a victim. But at the same time, terror also has the ability to reinforce the most base and unthinking ideas.
Interestingly enough, it was this dispelling of illusions, this revealing and mocking of the schemes of everyday life that create the illusions of superiority or safety that stuck with me most after leaving the movie theater and pondering what I had seen. I was surprised however, that after witnessing so much violent unveiling of power and unsettling of a society, my first thoughts of another example of this were of a comedy. And not just any comedy, but a British comedy, whose cast is primarily mildly unattractive old British men, Yes, Prime Minister.
Yes, Prime Minister (1986-1988)and its predecessor Yes, Minister (1980-1984) are by far my two favorite British comedies. They follow the career and relish in the hysterical and sad naivete of Jim Thacker, who in the first show is a cabinet minister and in the second show becomes the Prime Minister of Britain. Thacker is someone who foolishly believes that he is in government to make change, to improve lives, to tell the truth, and he is constantly held in check and twisted into ridiculous knots by his staff, most prominently Sir Humphrey. Hacker is a dreamer, an oblivious personality, who cluelessly comes up with grand designs or fantastic ideas to fix the problems of society, which from the perspective of the staff and the bureaucracy are ludicrous and need to be stopped!Sir Humphrey often acts as the all-knowing white knight of the government, as he deftly articulates the way things are, the way things have to be. He stands up for the prevailing "schemes" of life, describing them, defending them, playing that most essential role of any government, to protect the way things currently are. The longest running gag has to be the joke about who really runs the government, who really control and runs the country. Any idea that the Prime Minister of a country is in charge is shattered every few minutes through exchanges like this.
Bernard: But he's the Prime Minister!
Sir Humphrey: Yes indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life, what more does he want?
Bernard: To govern Britain.
Sir Humphrey: Well stop him, Bernard.
In this role however, the comedic and satirical aspects comes into play as that which he reveals as necessary and crucial things to protecting the public, protecting the nation, are articulated not as natural or coherent, but rather empty, illusionary, boasting their own comical insanity. That's the depressing and funny paradox that regularly comes out in the episodes. Humphrey is so invested in protecting the status quo, and does so by constantly talking about it, and enforcing a logic to it, but as he does, he reveals how very fragile it is, how very arbitrary and meaningless it is.
My favorite sections come from talk about defense policy and the military. Although everyone knows that a nation needs some form of "defense" it is interesting how expensive, ridiculous and often times pointless, the shape that defense in the First World has taken, and how wrapped up in certain political and economic schemes that shape is invested in. In the Yes, Prime Minister episodes "The Grand Design" and the "Ministerial Broadcast" they take on this illusionary and convoluted shape of defense policy, in discussing nuclear war and an ambiguous and very expensive defense program called "Triton."
In "The Grand Design" Prime Minister Thacker comes up with a fantastic idea to cancel the expensive Triton project and instead funnel the money into more conventional military programs, and bring back conscription. Sir Humphrey responds with his usual blustering incredulousness at the cluelessness of Thacker, and his imperviousness to reason, precedent and the way things are supposed to be. In discussing why this Grand Design of Thacker's cannot take place, one of the existing defense programs Polaris, in which British submarines carry American missiles.
Sir Humphrey: Polaris is a ramshackle old system, the Soviets might easily develop a multi-layered ballistic missile defence system which could intercept Polaris.
Jim: By when?
Sir Humphrey: Well, in strategic terms, any day now.
Jim: By what year, precisely?
Sir Humphrey: 2020, but that's sooner than you think.
Jim: And are you saying that this nuclear defence system would stop all 192 Polaris missiles.
Sir Humphrey: Well no, not all, virtually all, 97%.
Jim: So that would leave, about five bombs that would get through.
Sir Humphrey: Precisely, a mere five.
Jim: Enough to obliterate Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk ...
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but that's about all!
Jim: I should have thought that was enough to make the Russians stop and think.
Sir Humphrey: But its not fair! With Triton we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe!
Jim: Why would I want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe?
Sir Humphrey: Its a deterrent!
Jim: It's a bluff, I probably wouldn't use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
Jim: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know you probably wouldn't but they can't be certain.
Jim: They probably, certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they're probably certain you know you probably wouldn't they don't certainly know that although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.
Jim: What?
Or in the next episode, "The Ministerial Broadcast," Sir Humphrey, continues this line of unraveling through a discussion of what societal purpose "defense policy" serves.
Sir Humphrey: Bernard, what is the purpose of out defence policy?
Bernard: To defend Britain.
Sir Humphrey: No Bernard, it is to make the people believe that Britain is defended.
Bernard: The Russians?
Sir Humphrey: Not the Russians, the British, the Russians know it's not. Its for all our simple ignorant people shuffling in and out of houses, buses, factories and the cabinet room. The aim of the defense policy is to make them feel secure.
Bernard: But if there's a better way?
Sir Humphrey: Bernard, we have a magic wand, it is called Triton. Nobody understands anything about it, except that it will cost 15 billion pounds which means it must be wonderful. Magic! All we have to do is write a check and then we all can relax. But if people in government start talking about it, you know what will happen?
Bernard: What?
Sir Humphrey: In the end they'll start thinking about it. They will come to realize the problems, the flaws in reasoning, the nation will get worried, agitation, questions, criticism. Change.
Bernard: Change?
Sir Humphrey: Change.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Protect 200,000 of California's State Workers
FROM The Courage Campaign:
Stop Arnold: Sign the petition to protect 200,000 state workers
Tell Governor Schwarzenegger to halt the wage cuts and close the Yacht Tax loophole
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger just announced that he will sign an Executive Order on Monday slashing the wages of over 200,000 state employees to the bare minimum.
Not California's minimum wage of $8 per hour. The federal minimum wage of $6.55. Six dollars and fifty-five cents an hour.
Imagine trying to pay your bills on $6.55 an hour. Now imagine what will happen to thousands of vital service workers forced to live on poverty-level wages. A nauseating irony: many state employees may need to seek aid from the very state services that employ them.
This is absolutely outrageous. And the only way we can stop Arnold is by raising our voices as loud as possible in protest before 9 a.m. on Monday. Please sign our petition to Governor Schwarzenegger. On Monday morning, we'll deliver thousands of your signatures to the Governor's office:
_________________________________________________
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,
Your announcement to cut the salaries of over 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage is unconscionable.
Instead of slashing pay for state employees, you should be fixing California's massive $15 billion budget deficit. Your proposal will make our budget crisis worse while delivering a serious blow to our struggling economy. As the recession deepens, gas prices skyrocket, stores close, and home foreclosures surge, the governor's wage cuts will force many working families over the financial edge.
To add insult to injury, you are slashing workers' wages instead of taking leadership to close the "Yacht Tax" loophole.
You may claim that you will pay state workers retroactively for wages lost during this budget crisis. But that won't pay their rent or prevent their home from being foreclosed upon before a state budget is eventually passed. Instead of closing the yacht tax loophole and so many other loopholes that favor the rich, you are borrowing on the backs of state workers.
We, the undersigned, call on you to stop preparing to push thousands of state employees to the brink of financial disaster and get back to the budget negotiating table.
Sincerely,
The undersigned
______________________________________________
The Courage Campaign is an independent political committee and online organizing network approaching 100,000 members that empowers grassroots and netroots activists to build a progressive California. In 2008, the Courage Campaign will catalyze action to increase California's importance in the race for the White House, hold our elected officials accountable, and block Blackwater's second attempt to build a base of operations on the Mexican border.
Whether it's helping kill the GOP's electoral college initiative "dirty trick," count the infamous "double bubble" votes in Los Angeles, re-brand the California Republican Party as the "Yacht Party," or block Blackwater's first attempt to build a base on our border, the Courage Campaign has waged many successful campaigns.
Our partners include MoveOn.org, CREDO Mobile, Democracy for America, PowerPAC.org, United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), CalPIRG, California Nurses Association, and Common Cause. The Courage Campaign is also a member of Progress Now's national network of statewide advocacy organizations. Our online organizing tools are powered by Blue State Digital.
Stop Arnold: Sign the petition to protect 200,000 state workers
Tell Governor Schwarzenegger to halt the wage cuts and close the Yacht Tax loophole
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger just announced that he will sign an Executive Order on Monday slashing the wages of over 200,000 state employees to the bare minimum.
Not California's minimum wage of $8 per hour. The federal minimum wage of $6.55. Six dollars and fifty-five cents an hour.
Imagine trying to pay your bills on $6.55 an hour. Now imagine what will happen to thousands of vital service workers forced to live on poverty-level wages. A nauseating irony: many state employees may need to seek aid from the very state services that employ them.
This is absolutely outrageous. And the only way we can stop Arnold is by raising our voices as loud as possible in protest before 9 a.m. on Monday. Please sign our petition to Governor Schwarzenegger. On Monday morning, we'll deliver thousands of your signatures to the Governor's office:
_________________________________________________
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger,
Your announcement to cut the salaries of over 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage is unconscionable.
Instead of slashing pay for state employees, you should be fixing California's massive $15 billion budget deficit. Your proposal will make our budget crisis worse while delivering a serious blow to our struggling economy. As the recession deepens, gas prices skyrocket, stores close, and home foreclosures surge, the governor's wage cuts will force many working families over the financial edge.
To add insult to injury, you are slashing workers' wages instead of taking leadership to close the "Yacht Tax" loophole.
You may claim that you will pay state workers retroactively for wages lost during this budget crisis. But that won't pay their rent or prevent their home from being foreclosed upon before a state budget is eventually passed. Instead of closing the yacht tax loophole and so many other loopholes that favor the rich, you are borrowing on the backs of state workers.
We, the undersigned, call on you to stop preparing to push thousands of state employees to the brink of financial disaster and get back to the budget negotiating table.
Sincerely,
The undersigned
______________________________________________
The Courage Campaign is an independent political committee and online organizing network approaching 100,000 members that empowers grassroots and netroots activists to build a progressive California. In 2008, the Courage Campaign will catalyze action to increase California's importance in the race for the White House, hold our elected officials accountable, and block Blackwater's second attempt to build a base of operations on the Mexican border.
Whether it's helping kill the GOP's electoral college initiative "dirty trick," count the infamous "double bubble" votes in Los Angeles, re-brand the California Republican Party as the "Yacht Party," or block Blackwater's first attempt to build a base on our border, the Courage Campaign has waged many successful campaigns.
Our partners include MoveOn.org, CREDO Mobile, Democracy for America, PowerPAC.org, United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), CalPIRG, California Nurses Association, and Common Cause. The Courage Campaign is also a member of Progress Now's national network of statewide advocacy organizations. Our online organizing tools are powered by Blue State Digital.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Hafa na Liberasion #14: US Reoccupation Day
'Liberation or US re-occupation day?'
From the July 4, 2008
Marianas Variety
**********************
On July 21, 2008, the people of Guam will again celebrate our so-called "Liberation Day."
It is sad that our Chamorro leaders back in July 21, 1944, did not know that the American liberators became the re-occupation forces for the next 64 years.
As a result, Guam and the Chamorro people continue to remain under U.S. colonial rule to the present day, without any hope of exercising our human right to self-determination.
Dr. Dirk Ballendorf has stated in a 2004 letter that "?the Marianas was invaded and captured in order to build bases to launch planes to bomb the home islands of Japan. The liberation of the Chamorros was incidental to this main military objective."
The professor went on to say that "Guam, as an unincorporated territory, is a piece of property which, technically, Congress could sell if it desired."
We now celebrate our recapture from Japan and commemorate our colonization every year, every July 21st.
The following excerpts from a letter five years ago by American "liberators" Darrel Doss, Robert Arzenberger, Loran "Pee Wee" Day, Carilisle "Ki" Evans, and Elmer Mapes, stated "we have been honored as liberators, but did we truly liberate Guam? The answer is no. We only partially liberated you. The Congress of the United States could earn the title of true liberators by granting this paradise of the Pacific Commonwealth Status. Congress should also grant the citizens of Guam equal rights and voting privileges that we in the 50 states have enjoyed for years."
These statements, by a distinguished professor at UOG and the liberators themselves, bear witness that we are not truly liberated. So what kind of liberation do the people of Guam celebrate on July 21 every year?
Chamorro leaders and historians are so adamant and proud it seems to display just how unfortunate we are --- free, but subjugated; liberated, but occupied; proud, but second-class citizens; democratic, but colonized.
Maybe our so-called liberation means we are free as long as we remain under the control of the United States, a captured colony ? land and people and that's why our political status, return of stolen Chamorro homelands, war reparation, etc? are all but doomed.
Maybe this kind of liberation means massive military buildup that will not only ruin us, but is certain to change the course of the history of Guam and her Chamorro people forever, our free-doomed!
Celebrating liberation day? It should be "U.S. Re-occupation Day" with no end or true peace in sight! And our leaders and historians said, "Amen!"
Vicente "Fa'et" Garrido
Maga'lahi i Nasion Chamoru
Tamuning
From the July 4, 2008
Marianas Variety
**********************
On July 21, 2008, the people of Guam will again celebrate our so-called "Liberation Day."
It is sad that our Chamorro leaders back in July 21, 1944, did not know that the American liberators became the re-occupation forces for the next 64 years.
As a result, Guam and the Chamorro people continue to remain under U.S. colonial rule to the present day, without any hope of exercising our human right to self-determination.
Dr. Dirk Ballendorf has stated in a 2004 letter that "?the Marianas was invaded and captured in order to build bases to launch planes to bomb the home islands of Japan. The liberation of the Chamorros was incidental to this main military objective."
The professor went on to say that "Guam, as an unincorporated territory, is a piece of property which, technically, Congress could sell if it desired."
We now celebrate our recapture from Japan and commemorate our colonization every year, every July 21st.
The following excerpts from a letter five years ago by American "liberators" Darrel Doss, Robert Arzenberger, Loran "Pee Wee" Day, Carilisle "Ki" Evans, and Elmer Mapes, stated "we have been honored as liberators, but did we truly liberate Guam? The answer is no. We only partially liberated you. The Congress of the United States could earn the title of true liberators by granting this paradise of the Pacific Commonwealth Status. Congress should also grant the citizens of Guam equal rights and voting privileges that we in the 50 states have enjoyed for years."
These statements, by a distinguished professor at UOG and the liberators themselves, bear witness that we are not truly liberated. So what kind of liberation do the people of Guam celebrate on July 21 every year?
Chamorro leaders and historians are so adamant and proud it seems to display just how unfortunate we are --- free, but subjugated; liberated, but occupied; proud, but second-class citizens; democratic, but colonized.
Maybe our so-called liberation means we are free as long as we remain under the control of the United States, a captured colony ? land and people and that's why our political status, return of stolen Chamorro homelands, war reparation, etc? are all but doomed.
Maybe this kind of liberation means massive military buildup that will not only ruin us, but is certain to change the course of the history of Guam and her Chamorro people forever, our free-doomed!
Celebrating liberation day? It should be "U.S. Re-occupation Day" with no end or true peace in sight! And our leaders and historians said, "Amen!"
Vicente "Fa'et" Garrido
Maga'lahi i Nasion Chamoru
Tamuning
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
I Tigiri Kontra I Leon
Hunggan, esta hu tungo' na sina Guahu ha', gi entre todu i Chamoru, ni' ya-na umegga' cricket. I'm pretty sure, and people have backed me up on this, that I am the only Chamorro who likes watching and following cricket.Ai adai, hunggan makkat este na tinaiga'chong. Lao esta payun yu' nu este na klasin siniente. Estaba, sina Guahu ha' ya-na umegga' Bollywood lokkue'. Fihu masangan yu' na likidu na Chamoru yu'.
So, not belonging to a "cricket culture" I don't have much access to cricket, and I'm not really sure how to get access to it. I'm not sure what channels I could watch it on, what websites you can see matches for free through. If there is radio stations that I can listen to matches online, I don't know which they are, or how to sign on.
Its a little bit frustrating.
When there are games on that I want to follow, my only real option is to follow them through websites such as Cricinfo. Cricinfo is (probably) the best international cricket website out there. Its full of articles, statistics, info on teams, and my sole salvation as a poor equiped cricket fan, live scores and match commentary.
Lives scores and match commentary, are strictly for those with vibrant yan mitkilot imaginations, or for those like me, like to work on other things with a cricket match being livescored in the taskbar. For those unfamiliar with these terms, different cricket websites offer lives scores which are updated regularly and provide info for who is batting, who is bowling, what the scores are, etc. Match commentary is when someone who is watching the match types up the action for you, so you can follow along.
It can actually be a depressing experience, since you get so little of the filler of the action, and must instead settle for the sublime content of the action, no images, none of that visual excitement, but all things which have to be processed as words and numbers.
Here for instance is a snippet of the match commentary that Cricinfo provided for the March 26-30 Test match in Chennai between India and South Africa. This match was exciting, even in just reading the match commentary, because if featured the fastest (and most blistering) Test triple century ever. Virender Sehwag, hit an almost ti hongge'yon 319 off 304 balls, with his 300 coming off only 278 balls. The next fastest triple century in Tests belongs to Matthew Hayden's innings against Zimbabwe in 2003, which took 84 more balls.While the commentary in Test matches can sometimes drag on, because of their slower pace compared to Twenty20 and ODI matches, but in this regard Sehwag's innings did not disappoint.
51.1
Steyn to Sehwag, FOUR, Steyn bowls the slower ball wide outside off stump, Sehwag spots it and drives the ball through cover to bring up India's 200
51.2
Steyn to Sehwag, FOUR, short and wide outside off stump, Sehwag tries to cut without moving his feet, he edges it through the vacant slip cordon for four more to third man
51.3
Steyn to Sehwag, no run, good length delivery angling into off stump, Sehwag gets behind the line an defends confidently to cover
This is now the highest opening stand for India at the MA Chidambaram Stadium beating Gavaskar's and Srikanth's 200 against Pakistan in 1987.
51.4
Steyn to Sehwag, 1 run, full ball on off stump, Sehwag drives powerfully to mid-off for a single, Smith does the fielding
51.5
Steyn to Jaffer, FOUR, that one swung quite a bit into Jaffer who flicked it in the air past the two fielders at short midwicket, the ball runs through wide mid-on for four
51.6
Steyn to Jaffer, no run, Steyn swings another one into Jaffer from outside off, he defends it towards the off side
End of over 52 (13 runs) - India 210/0
W Jaffer 73* (162b 6x4 1x6)
V Sehwag 131* (150b 20x4 1x6)
DW Steyn 13-1-60-0
PL Harris 13-2-38-0
52.1
Harris to Sehwag, 2 runs, the length is a little shorter on leg stump from Harris, Sehwag moves towards leg and drives off the back foot through cover for two more
52.2
Harris to Sehwag, 1 run, Sehwag charges Harris and drives it straight back to the bowler, along the ground, Harris doesn't stop it cleanly an Sehwag scampers a single
52.3
Harris to Jaffer, no run, tossed up into the right-hander form round the wicket, defended on the front foot to silly point
52.4
Harris to Jaffer, no run, Jaffer leans forward and drives towards mid-on
52.5
Harris to Jaffer, no run, flighted delivery on off stump, Jaffer defends towards cover on the front foot
52.6
Harris to Jaffer, OUT, caught! finally South Africa have the breakthrough! Harris tosses one up outside off stump, Jaffer leans forward and plays a loose drive, the ball takes the outside edge and goes straight to Kallis at first slip who remains alert to take a straightforward catch
W Jaffer c Kallis b Harris 73 (250m 166b 6x4 1x6) SR: 43.97
Jaffer goes for a patient 73, which brings Rahul Dravid to the crease. He would have had the pads on in the dressing room for the longest time.
End of over 53 (3 runs) - India 213/1
PL Harris 14-2-41-1
DW Steyn 13-1-60-0
V Sehwag 134* (152b 20x4 1x6)
53.1
Steyn to Sehwag, FOUR, shot! That was on a good length but the room outside off stump allowed him to wait on the back foot and cut the ball wide of the fielder at third man
Steyn goes round the wicket to Sehwag.
53.2
Steyn to Sehwag, no run, good length delivery on middle and off, Sehwag moves back and plays the ball towards point
53.3
Steyn to Sehwag, no run, a sharp short ball at 140 kmh, Sehwag drops his wrists and lets it pass
53.4
Steyn to Sehwag, 1 run, a fuller ball on off stump, it was a bit slower as well, Sehwag adjusts and opens the face to play it late towards third man
Dravid prepares to face his first ball. Steyn goes over the wicket to him, there's a slip in place too, just one though.
53.5
Steyn to Dravid, no run, excellent first delivery, Steyn swings it into the blockhole, Dravid digs it out on the off side
53.6
Steyn to Dravid, no run, short of a length outside off stump, Dravid waits on the back foot and lets it go
With this triple century, Sehwag became one of only three people who have ever hit two triple centuries in their career. The other two being Brian Lara of the West Indies and Don Bradman of Australia.
Right now, as I type I'm waiting on another potentially explosive match to start, between my two favorite teams Sri Lanka and India. Over the next few weeks, they'll be playing a three test series and five ODIs in Sri Lanka.Right now, the rain is delaying the start of the match, so let me tell you some of the reasons that I'm excited.
First off, this will be the Test debut of Ajantha Mendis, who kahnayi the Indian team last month in the Asia Cup final, when he went 6 for 13, propelling his team to victory.
Muttiah Muralitharan recently made his way to the apex of Test cricket with his passing of Shane Warne to become the record holder for most wickets taken. Both him and Warne are the only two to have reached this summit. Murali has claimed his going to be around for a while longer (he joked he's going to try and reach 1000 wickets before he retires), but people are already discussing that because of Mendis' similar status as a freak-genius for bowling, that Mendis is here to take the reigns. Only time, and how both fare in this Test series will tell.
Another exciting development is the return of Sachin Tendulkar, who has for the past few months been beset with injury and illness, and has played unevenly, poorly at some time and spectacular at others. He was the lead run scorer last year in the 4 Tests for the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, scoring in the 2nd test a 154 not out, and in the last test a 153. In the Commonwealth Bank Series that followed, he was largely absent in the tournament itself, but redeemed himself marvelously in the finals versus Australia, where his 117 not out in the first game helped successful chase down the Australians, and his 91 in the second final helped push India to victory.Sachin Tendulkar is one of my favorite players and so I'm excited to see him back.
One more thing to watch out for it how Sri Lanka fare against India with their most explosive all-rounder, Sanath Jayasuriya. While India's lineup features an array of tried, tested and reliable batsmen, Sri Lanka's lineup with two notable exceptions seems full of competent players who have yet though to carve out their niches. It will be interesting to see which one of Sri Lanka's players are able to step up to the task. I'm also hoping that Kumar Sangakkara, my favorite on the Sri Lankan team is on fire. I remember watching the livescore and reading the commentary for his incredible 192 against Australia last year, which almost saved the match for Sri Lanka. He also set a record last year by making scores of 150 an innings in four consecutive Test matches.
So with plenty of exciting cricket on the horizon, its time again for Fantasy Cricket!!! Pick your best 11 players from the Sri Lankan and Indian teams and get points based on their performances in the matches. If you want to play too, head to this link: Cricinfo - Fantasy CricketTeam Guam this time around is:
TT Samaraweera
DPMD Jayawardene
TM Dilshan
R Dravid
SR Tendulkar
R Dravid
SR Tendulkar
V Sehwag
KC Sangakkara
Harbhajan Singh
KC Sangakkara
Harbhajan Singh
T Thushara
Z Khan
BAW Mendis
Z Khan
BAW Mendis
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Hafa na Liberasion? #13: Seven Crashes
A B-52 crashed on Guam yesterday, and at present two of the six crewmembers are reported dead, while four more are still missing.
The B-52 was flying on its way to take part in the Liberation Day festivities yesterday, by flying over the parade route with two 5-15s and an F-22.
I've spent the past week writing my dissertation and so Liberation Day completely crept up on me this year. Its a well known fact that I am no big fan of Liberation Day, my main reason being the first three words of the title of this post "Hafa na Liberasion?" This is the 11th in a line of posts, featuring my writings and the writings of others that I started last summer to create a space for alternative knowledge and ideas about the whole idea of Guam being liberated, yet continuing to be a colony.
As most people on island take this time of the year to celebrate the United States military and its positive presence on our lives and in our history, I would also like to take this opportunity to remind us of the negative impacts of the military on our island. The United States is celebrated for saving Chamorros in World War II, but little to no discussion takes place about the role their geopolitical machinations and their local lies played in making us a victim in that war. We celebrate the United States as a giver of life, something that creates prosperity and security, yet there is so much evidence that says that links the military presence on island to different terrifying environmental and health problems.
Today, as people solemnly memorialize this crash, it is nonetheless to remember that this is the seventh military aircraft incident that has happened on Guam since August of last year. I wrote a post titled "Six Crashes" in March of this year, providing the information on each of the incidents. For some of these incidents the aircraft were lost, for others just damaged or an accident took place.
B-52 Bomber
July 2008
Crashed 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor
B-1 Bomber
March 2008
Collides with two emergency vehicles during a landing
EA6B-Prowler
Feb. 2008
Crashed two miles northeast of Ritidian
B-2 Bomber
Feb. 2008
Crashed shortly after takeoff at Anderson Air Force Base
Helicopter Sea Combat - 25
September 2007
Crashed during a training mission at Fena
2 F/A - 18 Hornets
August 2007
Collide during Valiant Shield traning, are able to land
F/A 18C Hornet
August 2007
Crashed 400 miles southeast of Guam
In the next six years, the massive military increases to the island will only make incidents such as this, more likely and possibly more dangerous.
Speaking of these sorts of things on Liberation Day is an almost unholy thing, esta hu tungo'. However, it is my hope that the idea that Robert Underwood proposed in his article "Red, Whitewash and Blue: Painting over the Chamorro experience" can someday be true. In his article Underwood argues that when Chamorros head out each Liberation Day and wait by the side of Marine Drive, waving flags, and acting in an almost super-patriotic way, they are not really celebrating the United States military or the United States, but rather themselves and their own survival.
This is a dream, but wishful dream. Anyone who looks at Guam today knows that this is not true. If it was, then what I am proposing we reflect on right now wouldn't be rejected, wouldn't be called anti-american or unpatriotic. It might be difficult, but it would be recognized as something critical that we consider. Liberation Day has become a holiday, a sort of huge orgy of patriotism that ends up continually increasing the presence and the intimacy of the American military in our lives on Guam. It creates the conditions for uncritical thinking, and therefore keeps all conditions status quos, ensures that no one can question the place of the military on Guam.
What Liberation Day should be, is a place where we do actively question the role of the military on Guam, where we do reflect accurately on its history and its impact (both positive and negative) on our island. If that were to take place, it would move us far closer to the spirit and meaning of liberation, instead of where we are at now, which is simply celebrating America, even at the expense of our island's economy, health, infrastructure and security.
******************************************************************
Crash of B-52 bomber off Guam kills at least 2
By JAYMES SONG – 11 minutes ago
HONOLULU (AP) — The Air Force says at least two crew members are dead after the crash of a B-52 bomber off Guam.
Rescue teams are searching a vast area of the Pacific Ocean on Monday for the remaining four airmen.
The Coast Guard says six vessels, three helicopters, two F-15 fighter jets and a B-52 bomber are involved in the search.
The military says the B-52 was en route to a flyover in a parade when it crashed about 9:45 a.m. about 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor. The plane was based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
HONOLULU (AP) — Rescue crews were searching a vast area of floating debris and a sheen of oil Monday for crew members of an Air Force B-52 bomber that crashed off the island of Guam, officials said.
At least two people from the bomber's six-man crew were recovered from the waters, but their condition was not immediately available, the Coast Guard said.
Maj. Stuart Upton, a Pentagon spokesman, said the aircraft was unarmed.
Six vessels, three helicopters, two F-15 fighter jets and a B-52 bomber were involved in the search, which had covered about 70 square miles of ocean, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Elizabeth Buendia.
"We have an active search that's going to go on throughout the night," she said Monday. The Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force and local fire and police departments were involved.
The B-52 bomber based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was en route to conduct a flyover in a parade when it crashed around 9:45 a.m. Monday about 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor, the Air Force said.
The Liberation Day parade celebrates the day when the U.S. military arrived on Guam to retake control of the island from Japan.
The Air Force said a board of officers will investigate the accident.
The accident is the second for the Air Force this year on Guam, a U.S. territory 3,700 miles southwest of Hawaii.
In February, a B-2 crashed at Andersen Air Force Base shortly after takeoff in the first-ever crash of a stealth bomber. Both pilots ejected safely. The military estimated the cost of the loss of the aircraft at $1.4 billion.
The B-52 is a long-range, heavy bomber that can refuel in mid air. Since the 159 foot-long bomber was first placed into service in 1955, it has been used for a wide range of missions from attacks to ocean surveillance. Two B-52s, in two hours, can monitor 140,000 square miles of ocean surface.
According to the Air Force's Web site, the B-52 Stratofortress has been the backbone of the manned strategic bomber force for the United States for more than four decades. It is capable of dropping or launching the widest array of weapons in the U.S. inventory, including cluster bombs and precision guided missiles.
The B-52 was flying on its way to take part in the Liberation Day festivities yesterday, by flying over the parade route with two 5-15s and an F-22.I've spent the past week writing my dissertation and so Liberation Day completely crept up on me this year. Its a well known fact that I am no big fan of Liberation Day, my main reason being the first three words of the title of this post "Hafa na Liberasion?" This is the 11th in a line of posts, featuring my writings and the writings of others that I started last summer to create a space for alternative knowledge and ideas about the whole idea of Guam being liberated, yet continuing to be a colony.
As most people on island take this time of the year to celebrate the United States military and its positive presence on our lives and in our history, I would also like to take this opportunity to remind us of the negative impacts of the military on our island. The United States is celebrated for saving Chamorros in World War II, but little to no discussion takes place about the role their geopolitical machinations and their local lies played in making us a victim in that war. We celebrate the United States as a giver of life, something that creates prosperity and security, yet there is so much evidence that says that links the military presence on island to different terrifying environmental and health problems.
Today, as people solemnly memorialize this crash, it is nonetheless to remember that this is the seventh military aircraft incident that has happened on Guam since August of last year. I wrote a post titled "Six Crashes" in March of this year, providing the information on each of the incidents. For some of these incidents the aircraft were lost, for others just damaged or an accident took place.
B-52 Bomber
July 2008
Crashed 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor
B-1 Bomber
March 2008
Collides with two emergency vehicles during a landing
EA6B-Prowler
Feb. 2008
Crashed two miles northeast of Ritidian
B-2 Bomber
Feb. 2008
Crashed shortly after takeoff at Anderson Air Force Base
Helicopter Sea Combat - 25
September 2007
Crashed during a training mission at Fena
2 F/A - 18 Hornets
August 2007
Collide during Valiant Shield traning, are able to land
F/A 18C Hornet
August 2007
Crashed 400 miles southeast of Guam
In the next six years, the massive military increases to the island will only make incidents such as this, more likely and possibly more dangerous.
Speaking of these sorts of things on Liberation Day is an almost unholy thing, esta hu tungo'. However, it is my hope that the idea that Robert Underwood proposed in his article "Red, Whitewash and Blue: Painting over the Chamorro experience" can someday be true. In his article Underwood argues that when Chamorros head out each Liberation Day and wait by the side of Marine Drive, waving flags, and acting in an almost super-patriotic way, they are not really celebrating the United States military or the United States, but rather themselves and their own survival.
This is a dream, but wishful dream. Anyone who looks at Guam today knows that this is not true. If it was, then what I am proposing we reflect on right now wouldn't be rejected, wouldn't be called anti-american or unpatriotic. It might be difficult, but it would be recognized as something critical that we consider. Liberation Day has become a holiday, a sort of huge orgy of patriotism that ends up continually increasing the presence and the intimacy of the American military in our lives on Guam. It creates the conditions for uncritical thinking, and therefore keeps all conditions status quos, ensures that no one can question the place of the military on Guam.
What Liberation Day should be, is a place where we do actively question the role of the military on Guam, where we do reflect accurately on its history and its impact (both positive and negative) on our island. If that were to take place, it would move us far closer to the spirit and meaning of liberation, instead of where we are at now, which is simply celebrating America, even at the expense of our island's economy, health, infrastructure and security.
******************************************************************Crash of B-52 bomber off Guam kills at least 2
By JAYMES SONG – 11 minutes ago
HONOLULU (AP) — The Air Force says at least two crew members are dead after the crash of a B-52 bomber off Guam.
Rescue teams are searching a vast area of the Pacific Ocean on Monday for the remaining four airmen.
The Coast Guard says six vessels, three helicopters, two F-15 fighter jets and a B-52 bomber are involved in the search.
The military says the B-52 was en route to a flyover in a parade when it crashed about 9:45 a.m. about 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor. The plane was based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
HONOLULU (AP) — Rescue crews were searching a vast area of floating debris and a sheen of oil Monday for crew members of an Air Force B-52 bomber that crashed off the island of Guam, officials said.
At least two people from the bomber's six-man crew were recovered from the waters, but their condition was not immediately available, the Coast Guard said.
Maj. Stuart Upton, a Pentagon spokesman, said the aircraft was unarmed.
Six vessels, three helicopters, two F-15 fighter jets and a B-52 bomber were involved in the search, which had covered about 70 square miles of ocean, said Coast Guard spokeswoman Lt. Elizabeth Buendia.
"We have an active search that's going to go on throughout the night," she said Monday. The Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force and local fire and police departments were involved.
The B-52 bomber based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was en route to conduct a flyover in a parade when it crashed around 9:45 a.m. Monday about 30 miles northwest of Apra Harbor, the Air Force said.
The Liberation Day parade celebrates the day when the U.S. military arrived on Guam to retake control of the island from Japan.
The Air Force said a board of officers will investigate the accident.
The accident is the second for the Air Force this year on Guam, a U.S. territory 3,700 miles southwest of Hawaii.
In February, a B-2 crashed at Andersen Air Force Base shortly after takeoff in the first-ever crash of a stealth bomber. Both pilots ejected safely. The military estimated the cost of the loss of the aircraft at $1.4 billion.
The B-52 is a long-range, heavy bomber that can refuel in mid air. Since the 159 foot-long bomber was first placed into service in 1955, it has been used for a wide range of missions from attacks to ocean surveillance. Two B-52s, in two hours, can monitor 140,000 square miles of ocean surface.
According to the Air Force's Web site, the B-52 Stratofortress has been the backbone of the manned strategic bomber force for the United States for more than four decades. It is capable of dropping or launching the widest array of weapons in the U.S. inventory, including cluster bombs and precision guided missiles.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Hafa na Liberasion? #12: Tumutuge'
I haven't been posting much lately, and I've been out of phone and email contact with most everyone lately since I've been struggling to finish an article that I'm writing about American colonialism, war and Chamorro resistance.
The article is taking longer than I had anticipated and I'm now two days past my deadline.
I won't be writing anything new on this blog for a few days, because right after this I've got my dissertaton to write as well.
Comic Con is next week and I swore to myself that I would only be able to go if I finished drafts of at least two of my chapters before the first day. So far I have one and a half done. If I can just finish this article in the next day or so, I should be fine for the remaining half of my second chapter. I'm thinking about dressing up for the event. With not much time left, I don't think I have many cosplay options. One suggestion ginnen i che'lu-hu Si Jack is Tsume from Wolf's Rain. Hmmmm, hekkua'.
I've been so wrapped up in writing about i tiempon Chapones, gera, yan pinadesin Chamoru that I've almost completely forgotten that Liberation Day is just around the corner. I don't know how everyone else intends to spend Liberation Day, but since I'm in San Diego, with a dissertation to write, I will be spending it writing about the negative impacts of American colonialism, militarism and imperialism on Chamorros.
Just to get the blog fresh, thought I'd post a section from the article I'm working on. I've chosen to share the section on the shifts that take place in Chamorro consciousness because of World War II, where an island full of people who did not think of themselves as Americans and really didn't care about being Americans, are suddenly transformed into an island full of people who could imagine themselves as being nothing other than American!
Hope you find it interesting, I'll post more details later on when, where and if it's getting published.
************************************
At the start of World War II, we see a Chamorro entangled in American colonialism, but ultimately a sovereign subject, one which does not accept American control over its fate or its identity. As Guam historian Robert Underwood notes, prior to the start of the war, “the Chamorro people were not Americans, did not see themselves as Americans-in-waiting, and probably did not care much about being American.”[1]
Just a few years later in a 1944, an American news article would proclaim that the Chamorros of Guam were most definitely Americans, and exceptional ones at that, as they possessed a “patriotism would put many a US citizens to shame?”[2] How did such a drastic shift take place? All answers point to the brutal experience that Chamorro endured for 32 months under Japanese occupation.[3] During this period, hundreds of Chamorros were killed through massacres, executions, bombings.
Chamorros were forced out of their homes to make way for Japanese soldiers and officers, and could at any moment be the subject of physical beatings or humiliations. An unknown number of Chamorro women were raped, and the entire island was enslaved in order to provide food for the occupying Japanese military. Chamorros were prohibited from speaking English, and were often beaten or executed if the Japanese suspected that they were in anyway assisting the Americans.
The Japanese claimed to have expelled the United States so that they could include Chamorros in the brand new propserous empire comprised of all the Asiatic (and Pacific) peoples. However, as their occupation of Guam become progressively more and more brutal Chamorros saw through this rhetoric very quickly.[4]
The United States military would return to re-occupy Guam in 1944. Their invasion which began on July 21st, would be preceded by a massive bombing campaign which resulted in more Chamorro deaths and whose intention was to destroy every structure on the island. The intentions of the United States in returning to Guam were far from altruistic, and despite what mythology has been created today by both the military and Chamorros, Guam was not retaken to liberate the Chamorro people from Japanese oppression.[5] That was just a fortunate byproduct of a broader military strategy. Given its valuable geographic position the edge of Asia, Guam was considered to be a key base in continuing the military push Westward against the Japanese.
In her article “Psyche Under Siege: Uncle Sam Look What You’ve Done to Us,” Chamorro feminist scholar Laura Souder provides one possible explanation for this drastic shift.[6] She notes that despite the fact that America’s intentions were not altruistic, they did nonetheless space Chamorros from any further massacres, beheadings or forced labor under the Japanese. She contends that given the prominence of reciprocity in Chamorro culture at the time, this liberating gesture by the United States, would be treated just as if it were some other generous social act or form of assistance, and use the concept of chenchule’ to respond. Chenchule’ is a sort of active family/clan memory which recalls different individual and collective acts of generosity, reciprocity, obligation and responsibility.[7] The intentions of the United States are irrelevant. What matters is the massive debt that is incurred when this “invasion of Guam” is incorporated into the worldview of Chamorros.[8]
Thus, even after having their island and way of life destroyed both by Japanese brutality and American indiscriminate bombing, Souder states that Chamorros offered up what they could, “In deeply felt acts of Chamorro reciprocity, our people extended the most valuable of their possessions, albeit the only possessions they had to give- land and their very spirits, to Uncle Sam.”[9]
This theorization is attractive, but can be deceiving. It gives the Chamorro a form of agency in this desperate and disastrous moment of their history. It provides an indigenous explanation for the radical shift in how they understood their relationship to their colonizer, by arguing that the intimacy that emerges from the war, is the choice of Chamorros and not necessarily a victory for American colonialism.[10]
But as this explanation provides a semi-sovereign space for Chamorro, it is deceiving, since the drastic change that takes place in Chamorros, happens precisely because of the loss of that sovereign space. What happens during the trauma of the Japanese occupation is that the hegemonic idea amongst Chamorros that they exist independently of the United States evaporates and is quickly replaced with a new-enhanced version of the pre-war colonial assertion of Chamorro nothingness and lack of value. In war, this idea is taken to its next logical step, namely that if the Chamorro is nothing and America is everything, then the Chamorro cannot survive without the United States.
During World War II, or i tiempon Chapones, Chamorro experiences of forced labor, concentration camps and drunken massacres, all help instigate a comparison of colonialisms, through which the American brand emerges fresh, innocent and freedom-smelling.[11]
The racist and colonial, self-aggrandizing narratives that sought to colonize Chamorros during the pre-war era, were suddenly no longer abstract, silly or hypocritical. As 22,000 Chamorros sought to weather the typhoon of Japanese occupation, they found themselves now actively clinging to the ideas that America was great, was powerful and most importantly was their master, their savior, who would use its great military might to protect them. When American returns and reoccupies the island in 1944, these narratives have gained sudden incredibly consistency. The self-aggrandizing stories of the Naval greatness, and therefore by default the colonial slander of Chamorro backwardness and need for civilizing, all achieved the status of being hegemonic truths. The ideas that the Chamorro is static, incomplete, dependent were no longer a rogue narratives in Guam, which Chamorros refused to engage with, but had now become incredibly intimate ideas, which pierced the very core of how Chamorros perceived themselves. Therefore, the Chamorro which is “liberated” in World War II is no longer the indifferent native whose life is a daily struggle to passively resist and avoid their colonial master. The Chamorro is now that colonial thing which is always dependent, always in need of intervention, and always of course, in need of some sort of liberation.
We can perceive this change in Chamorro identification through an August 10, 1944 letter written by six Chamorros expressing their gratitude to the United States for saving their people from the Japanese. As these Chamorros commend the President of the United States and the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Charles Nimitz for the liberation of their island, they inadvertently articulate the new subordinated subjectivity of Chamorros.
Five of these six signatories were Chamorros who would be considered manakhilo’ in terms of social standing and ginefsaga’.[12] All six had also found comfortable niches in the pre-war colonial regime, whether as judges, administrative officials or educators, and would continue in these privileged roles after the war.[13]
In this letter, they claim to express “on behalf of the people of Guam” the “heartfelt thanks” the Chamorro people feel for the American recapture of Guam by “the strong and invincible forces under [Admiral Nimitz’s] command.[14] Beyond the obvious sweet talking of these colonial subjects before their powerful master, the letter’s tone and sentiment expresses very well the changes that were taking place in public discourse after the war, and how the relationship between the Chamorro and the United States would be understood. In offering their thanks, the authors of this letter refer to the United States as “our common nation,” despite their cognizance that the United States in almost every sense of the word, meaning government, people, media, didn’t feel that way, and in 1944 Chamorros were still colonial subjects who lived at the whim of the United States Navy. The letter goes on to describe how the only thing that maintained the Chamorros’ mental and physical health was the power of American ideas and the American military. According to the letter, “what kept us throughout the thirty two months of Japanese oppression was our determined reliance upon our mother country’s power, sense of justice and national brotherhood.”[15] Although the Chamorro clearly survives World War II, this letter indicates the terms and contractual limits of that life, as it will always appear to be an effect of the United States.[16]
*********************************
[1] Robert Underwood, “Teaching Guam’s History in Guam High Schools,” in Guam History Perspectives, ed. Lee Carter, Rosa Carter, William Wuerch (University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam, 1997), 7.
[2] Crecencis Cespedes, America to the Rescue, 1994, 48.
[3] The most complete account of the Chamorro experience on Guam during World War II is, Tony Palomo, Island in Agony, (Self-published, Hagatna, Guam, 2004).
[4] Statement taking over Guam.
[5] Camacho
[6] Laura Torres Souder, “Psyche Under Siege: Uncle Sam, Look What You’ve Done to Us.” Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? (Suva, Fiji. Marama Publications, 1994), 193-194.
[7] According to Robert Underwood, “Reciprocity is the optimal value in Chamorro culture; you assist and you expect assistance in return; you sacrifice now so that someone will sacrifice for you later; you give chenchule’ now in the full expectation of receiving chenchule’ in your time of need or the need of your loved ones later on.” Uncle Sam, Sam My Dear Old Uncle Sam, Won’t you Please Be Kind to Guam, Thinking Out Loud Lecture Series. University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam. 20 August 2003.
[8] Brandon Cruz, “Debt of renaming road imposes on Guahan.” Pacific Daily News, 10 February 2004.
[9] Souder, 193.
[10] For other interventions which take on the same sort of intervention in terms of revealing agency see, Robert Underwood, “Red, Whitewash and Blue: Painting over the Chamorro Experience,” Pacific Daily News, 17 July 1977, 6-8. and, Vicente M. Diaz, “Deliberating “Liberation Day”: Identity, History, Memory and War in Guam,” Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s). T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama Eds., (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2001).
[11] Tiempon Chapoñes: Literally “the Japanese time.”
[12] Manakhilo’: Elite or rich person; Ginefsaga’: Wealth
[13] Francisco Baza Leon Guerrero, Vicente Camacho, Agueda Johnston, Jose Manibusan, Jose Roberto and one name I can’t read.
[14] Don Farrell, Liberation – 1944, (Micronesian Productions, Tamuning, Guam), 181.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Michael Lujan Bevacqua, The Scene of Liberation, Paper presented at the 14th Biennial Asian Pacific American Student Conference, Oberlin, Ohio, 17 February 2006.
The article is taking longer than I had anticipated and I'm now two days past my deadline.
I won't be writing anything new on this blog for a few days, because right after this I've got my dissertaton to write as well.
Comic Con is next week and I swore to myself that I would only be able to go if I finished drafts of at least two of my chapters before the first day. So far I have one and a half done. If I can just finish this article in the next day or so, I should be fine for the remaining half of my second chapter. I'm thinking about dressing up for the event. With not much time left, I don't think I have many cosplay options. One suggestion ginnen i che'lu-hu Si Jack is Tsume from Wolf's Rain. Hmmmm, hekkua'.
I've been so wrapped up in writing about i tiempon Chapones, gera, yan pinadesin Chamoru that I've almost completely forgotten that Liberation Day is just around the corner. I don't know how everyone else intends to spend Liberation Day, but since I'm in San Diego, with a dissertation to write, I will be spending it writing about the negative impacts of American colonialism, militarism and imperialism on Chamorros.Just to get the blog fresh, thought I'd post a section from the article I'm working on. I've chosen to share the section on the shifts that take place in Chamorro consciousness because of World War II, where an island full of people who did not think of themselves as Americans and really didn't care about being Americans, are suddenly transformed into an island full of people who could imagine themselves as being nothing other than American!
Hope you find it interesting, I'll post more details later on when, where and if it's getting published.
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At the start of World War II, we see a Chamorro entangled in American colonialism, but ultimately a sovereign subject, one which does not accept American control over its fate or its identity. As Guam historian Robert Underwood notes, prior to the start of the war, “the Chamorro people were not Americans, did not see themselves as Americans-in-waiting, and probably did not care much about being American.”[1]
Just a few years later in a 1944, an American news article would proclaim that the Chamorros of Guam were most definitely Americans, and exceptional ones at that, as they possessed a “patriotism would put many a US citizens to shame?”[2] How did such a drastic shift take place? All answers point to the brutal experience that Chamorro endured for 32 months under Japanese occupation.[3] During this period, hundreds of Chamorros were killed through massacres, executions, bombings.
Chamorros were forced out of their homes to make way for Japanese soldiers and officers, and could at any moment be the subject of physical beatings or humiliations. An unknown number of Chamorro women were raped, and the entire island was enslaved in order to provide food for the occupying Japanese military. Chamorros were prohibited from speaking English, and were often beaten or executed if the Japanese suspected that they were in anyway assisting the Americans.
The Japanese claimed to have expelled the United States so that they could include Chamorros in the brand new propserous empire comprised of all the Asiatic (and Pacific) peoples. However, as their occupation of Guam become progressively more and more brutal Chamorros saw through this rhetoric very quickly.[4]
The United States military would return to re-occupy Guam in 1944. Their invasion which began on July 21st, would be preceded by a massive bombing campaign which resulted in more Chamorro deaths and whose intention was to destroy every structure on the island. The intentions of the United States in returning to Guam were far from altruistic, and despite what mythology has been created today by both the military and Chamorros, Guam was not retaken to liberate the Chamorro people from Japanese oppression.[5] That was just a fortunate byproduct of a broader military strategy. Given its valuable geographic position the edge of Asia, Guam was considered to be a key base in continuing the military push Westward against the Japanese.
In her article “Psyche Under Siege: Uncle Sam Look What You’ve Done to Us,” Chamorro feminist scholar Laura Souder provides one possible explanation for this drastic shift.[6] She notes that despite the fact that America’s intentions were not altruistic, they did nonetheless space Chamorros from any further massacres, beheadings or forced labor under the Japanese. She contends that given the prominence of reciprocity in Chamorro culture at the time, this liberating gesture by the United States, would be treated just as if it were some other generous social act or form of assistance, and use the concept of chenchule’ to respond. Chenchule’ is a sort of active family/clan memory which recalls different individual and collective acts of generosity, reciprocity, obligation and responsibility.[7] The intentions of the United States are irrelevant. What matters is the massive debt that is incurred when this “invasion of Guam” is incorporated into the worldview of Chamorros.[8]
Thus, even after having their island and way of life destroyed both by Japanese brutality and American indiscriminate bombing, Souder states that Chamorros offered up what they could, “In deeply felt acts of Chamorro reciprocity, our people extended the most valuable of their possessions, albeit the only possessions they had to give- land and their very spirits, to Uncle Sam.”[9]
This theorization is attractive, but can be deceiving. It gives the Chamorro a form of agency in this desperate and disastrous moment of their history. It provides an indigenous explanation for the radical shift in how they understood their relationship to their colonizer, by arguing that the intimacy that emerges from the war, is the choice of Chamorros and not necessarily a victory for American colonialism.[10]
But as this explanation provides a semi-sovereign space for Chamorro, it is deceiving, since the drastic change that takes place in Chamorros, happens precisely because of the loss of that sovereign space. What happens during the trauma of the Japanese occupation is that the hegemonic idea amongst Chamorros that they exist independently of the United States evaporates and is quickly replaced with a new-enhanced version of the pre-war colonial assertion of Chamorro nothingness and lack of value. In war, this idea is taken to its next logical step, namely that if the Chamorro is nothing and America is everything, then the Chamorro cannot survive without the United States.
During World War II, or i tiempon Chapones, Chamorro experiences of forced labor, concentration camps and drunken massacres, all help instigate a comparison of colonialisms, through which the American brand emerges fresh, innocent and freedom-smelling.[11]
The racist and colonial, self-aggrandizing narratives that sought to colonize Chamorros during the pre-war era, were suddenly no longer abstract, silly or hypocritical. As 22,000 Chamorros sought to weather the typhoon of Japanese occupation, they found themselves now actively clinging to the ideas that America was great, was powerful and most importantly was their master, their savior, who would use its great military might to protect them. When American returns and reoccupies the island in 1944, these narratives have gained sudden incredibly consistency. The self-aggrandizing stories of the Naval greatness, and therefore by default the colonial slander of Chamorro backwardness and need for civilizing, all achieved the status of being hegemonic truths. The ideas that the Chamorro is static, incomplete, dependent were no longer a rogue narratives in Guam, which Chamorros refused to engage with, but had now become incredibly intimate ideas, which pierced the very core of how Chamorros perceived themselves. Therefore, the Chamorro which is “liberated” in World War II is no longer the indifferent native whose life is a daily struggle to passively resist and avoid their colonial master. The Chamorro is now that colonial thing which is always dependent, always in need of intervention, and always of course, in need of some sort of liberation.
We can perceive this change in Chamorro identification through an August 10, 1944 letter written by six Chamorros expressing their gratitude to the United States for saving their people from the Japanese. As these Chamorros commend the President of the United States and the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Charles Nimitz for the liberation of their island, they inadvertently articulate the new subordinated subjectivity of Chamorros.
Five of these six signatories were Chamorros who would be considered manakhilo’ in terms of social standing and ginefsaga’.[12] All six had also found comfortable niches in the pre-war colonial regime, whether as judges, administrative officials or educators, and would continue in these privileged roles after the war.[13]
In this letter, they claim to express “on behalf of the people of Guam” the “heartfelt thanks” the Chamorro people feel for the American recapture of Guam by “the strong and invincible forces under [Admiral Nimitz’s] command.[14] Beyond the obvious sweet talking of these colonial subjects before their powerful master, the letter’s tone and sentiment expresses very well the changes that were taking place in public discourse after the war, and how the relationship between the Chamorro and the United States would be understood. In offering their thanks, the authors of this letter refer to the United States as “our common nation,” despite their cognizance that the United States in almost every sense of the word, meaning government, people, media, didn’t feel that way, and in 1944 Chamorros were still colonial subjects who lived at the whim of the United States Navy. The letter goes on to describe how the only thing that maintained the Chamorros’ mental and physical health was the power of American ideas and the American military. According to the letter, “what kept us throughout the thirty two months of Japanese oppression was our determined reliance upon our mother country’s power, sense of justice and national brotherhood.”[15] Although the Chamorro clearly survives World War II, this letter indicates the terms and contractual limits of that life, as it will always appear to be an effect of the United States.[16]
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[1] Robert Underwood, “Teaching Guam’s History in Guam High Schools,” in Guam History Perspectives, ed. Lee Carter, Rosa Carter, William Wuerch (University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam, 1997), 7.
[2] Crecencis Cespedes, America to the Rescue, 1994, 48.
[3] The most complete account of the Chamorro experience on Guam during World War II is, Tony Palomo, Island in Agony, (Self-published, Hagatna, Guam, 2004).
[4] Statement taking over Guam.
[5] Camacho
[6] Laura Torres Souder, “Psyche Under Siege: Uncle Sam, Look What You’ve Done to Us.” Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? (Suva, Fiji. Marama Publications, 1994), 193-194.
[7] According to Robert Underwood, “Reciprocity is the optimal value in Chamorro culture; you assist and you expect assistance in return; you sacrifice now so that someone will sacrifice for you later; you give chenchule’ now in the full expectation of receiving chenchule’ in your time of need or the need of your loved ones later on.” Uncle Sam, Sam My Dear Old Uncle Sam, Won’t you Please Be Kind to Guam, Thinking Out Loud Lecture Series. University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam. 20 August 2003.
[8] Brandon Cruz, “Debt of renaming road imposes on Guahan.” Pacific Daily News, 10 February 2004.
[9] Souder, 193.
[10] For other interventions which take on the same sort of intervention in terms of revealing agency see, Robert Underwood, “Red, Whitewash and Blue: Painting over the Chamorro Experience,” Pacific Daily News, 17 July 1977, 6-8. and, Vicente M. Diaz, “Deliberating “Liberation Day”: Identity, History, Memory and War in Guam,” Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s). T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama Eds., (Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2001).
[11] Tiempon Chapoñes: Literally “the Japanese time.”
[12] Manakhilo’: Elite or rich person; Ginefsaga’: Wealth
[13] Francisco Baza Leon Guerrero, Vicente Camacho, Agueda Johnston, Jose Manibusan, Jose Roberto and one name I can’t read.
[14] Don Farrell, Liberation – 1944, (Micronesian Productions, Tamuning, Guam), 181.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Michael Lujan Bevacqua, The Scene of Liberation, Paper presented at the 14th Biennial Asian Pacific American Student Conference, Oberlin, Ohio, 17 February 2006.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Ayuda South End Press!
I came across a post on my friend Maile's blog the maile vine, where she posted a request for support recently made by South End Press. I'm posting the entire request letter below for you to check out and learn more about their situation.
This year, the financial woes of Borders bookstores have hit South End Press especially hard. As a way to deal with its own troubles, Borders returned massive amounts of books. This means fewer copies of classics by South End authors like bell hooks, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Vandana Shiva on the shelf for book browsers to happen upon. And as Borders returns came at the same time as end-of- semester returns it also means that for several months South End Press will receive no payments from our trade distributor–our main source of income. It hurts living paycheck to paycheck, especially when the checks don’t come.
Our worry about how to deal with the immediate cash crisis saps time that we would otherwise spend on publishing and promoting new books, and on trying to do our part in building a better world. For more than 30 years, we have found ways to carry on. We are committed to surviving this crisis, but we need your help to ensure that we can keep publishing new titles. The Right has strategically funded its own presses and media; the left must do the same.
This is why we’re inviting you to join the CSP Movement: we can’t afford to confuse independence with isolated individual efforts. South End has remained independent only because of the success of our community interdependence.
The ability of South End Press to sustain democratic movements advancing social and economic justice pivots on a community-based model. So does the fact that we manage our own labor collectively, that we work daily to invert the pernicious hierarchies of the publishing industry, that we try to create the change we hope to see in the broader world. So does the fact that we don’t answer to a corporate marketing and sales department, that while we too are struggling to survive in a capitalist system our mission remains the same: to publish books we believe in, books that bring critical, radical perspectives to bear on issues that matter. None of this would be possible without the support of an entire community of readers, activists, ruminators, and dreamers.
But community starts with people. With you. And with me. Consider this: it costs roughly $30,000 just to produce one new book, even with a lot of donated labor. That’s a big number for most of us, maybe even feels impossible to visualize. But that’s where the power of us, and Community Supported Publishing Movement, comes in: If you join the official CSP program, that’s building toward our goal of 1000 enrolled members by the end of the year. That means that we could produce at least 8 books like the recent groundbreaker The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. And if South End Press were no more, who would be willing to publish the next Exile and Pride: Queerness, Disability and Liberation; Ain’t I a Woman; or Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption? Censorship takes many forms.
South End Press needs many $10, $25, $50, $100, and $500 contributions to put a new book into the world. We have finished manuscripts waiting to be produced, but we might not have the money to print and promote them. Please respond soon, as we are facing our worst times in the coming months. Your membership in the CSP movement will ensure that South End continues advancing our movements for social justice; not because there’s a market for it but because we demand it.
I hope you'll take some time, and some of your money (and or like me credit) and support them. Sen mangge este na inetnon. Gof impottante i che'chon-niha. Put fabot, ayuda siha. Yanggen gaikepble hao, fanmamahan lepblo siha.
South End Press is a very good press, and one I've dreamed about being published by for a long time (na'funhayan i eskuela-mu fine'nina!). As a grad student I often tell myself that I'm so strapped for money that I have to buy the cheapest crap in order to get by. But I'm slowly learning that it would be far better (even if it costs more) to invest my meager monies in important social justice/alternative projects such as South End.
So on the advice of Maile, I purchased a few books from South End, most notably the volume Islands in Captivity, which is drawn from testimony given at the 1993 Peoples' International Tribunal, which was organized primarily to commemorate the centennial of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, but also included evidence of other American crimes. I difunton Angel Leon Guerrero Santos was present at this event and provided testimony as to American colonialism in Guam. I've heard from others about his time there, but never actually read his statement. I'm really looking forward to getting my copy and finally checking it out.
Another book that I was very interested in and ended up purchasing is Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva. As I prepare to move back to Guam for the next year, I am starting to pay more attention to the issues of sustainable agricultural and farming. An July 15th Pacific Daily News article titled "Farmers Face Difficulties," outlines how rising costs of supplies and the inconsistent market for fresh fruits and vegetables on Guam is making farming a more and more difficult vocation. The majority of Guam's fruits and vegetables are imported from off-island, and grocery vendors tend to only purchase local foods while waiting for off-island shipments to arrive. This preference for off-island goods makes it difficult to sustain a local farming economy.
My family has some small plots of land in Talo'fo'fo', and I'm determined to try and plant some small gardens there, as experiments or test runs, in hopes for eventually building a larger communal farming operation there.
When I was a young boy on Guam and my family lived in Talo'fo'fo' we had a small pineapple farm on this property. Depending on how much time I have on my hands (and with my dissertation still waiting to be written, probably not much), this might not be an option, but I would still like to eventually build something on the property. Before I was born, my great grandfather Tun Emo' (Kabesa) farmed on the land and on other parcels outside of the village. I have heard so many stories about my great grandfather and his love for the land, and so I would like to in someway carry on that tradition. I'm hoping that this book will give me some insight before moving forward with this.I also purchased When the Prisoners Ran Walpole, just out of curiousity. My male' Nicole Santos gave me several years ago, a copy of Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. Prior to reading that book I hadn't heard about the prison abolitionist movement, and never really considered that there were alternatives to the modern system of punishment and incarceration. Every once in a while I enjoy reading up on this, and so this book sounded very interesting in that regard.
One other reason that I'm supporting South End Press is a selfish and self-serving one. I have a chapter in a book that they will hopefully publish sometime in the next year. In 2004 I was fortuante enough to be invited to attend and present at the Sovereignty Matters conference at Columbia University. Later, my paper "Everything You Wanted to Know About Guam, But Were Afraid to Ask Zizek" was accepted to be published in a volume comprised of papers presented at the conference, titled Sovereign Acts.
According to the editor Frances Negron Muntaner, who was also the main organizer for the 2004 conference, the volume was supposed to be published this August, but it doesn't look like that will happen. I'm really hoping it does get published soon, since it will be an important companion to an existing text which was derived from a conference with the exact same name. Last year the volume Sovereignty Matters: Location of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination was published. It featured for those concerned with Guam and Chamorro issues, an article by Chamorro sociologist Michael Perez titled "Chamorro Resistance and Prospects for Sovereignty in Guam." The piece is a good history of the recent anti-colonial movements that have taken place on Guam, especially at the international level, meaning dealing with the United Nations.
I think that my piece in the Sovereign Acts volume will be a good addition to that historical discussion the piece starts. My paper is much more theoretical and relocates sovereignty in different spheres, away from the more abstract, mainstream versions. I've pasted below, an excerpt from the article:
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Very few people know this but we are currently living in the 2nd decade of United Nation’s efforts to officially eradicate colonialism.[1] While colonialism is something which is often invoked as a metaphor, a faded, worn and dirty, dirty lens through which the world today is politicized, implying that either something which was banished has returned and must be sent back to the abyss, or that it has evolved into a more hybrid, and dangerous creature, it is important to remember that it still exists.[2]
Those who seek to articulate oppression or injustice use “colonization” to make clear the inequality of a relationship, the extension of such violence and exploitation to a structural level, and also draw a clear genealogical connection to the brutal imagery of previous ages of domination.[3] On the other end of the spectrum, we find the assertion of a Tony Blair aide in 2003, that precisely what the world needs now, is colonialism.[4] The decolonized and developing world is failing to meet the promise of the international fraternity it was allowed to join, and so for those seeking to wield the sword of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, they are infected with a hearty longing for colonialism.[5]For those then who continue to swim in colonialism proper, which is a group comprised primarily of small island non-nations, such as Guam, American Samoa and Puerto Rico, their lot is an comfortable, curious and yet maddening one all at once. In a world which has “gotten over” colonialism, but where the “failures” of decolonization seem to create epidemics of imperialistic nostalgia amongst both the formerly colonizer and colonized, ambiguous political status of Guam has been called by Guam scholar Robert Underwood, a comfortable one, but as Guam nonetheless floats atop a sea of banal political inclusions and exclusions, colonial nonetheless.[6] If we were to redefine colonialism to match the nature of a colony such as Guam today, we would quickly abandon discussions marked by terms such as oppression and subjugation and instead trot out terms such as, patriotism, liberation, dependency, banality, ambiguity and strategic military necessity. People on Guam are eligible for some Federal programs like welfare and food stamps, but are not able to vote for President. They can join the United States military, travel freely with a United States passport, and are US citizens whose political protections and rights are not derived from the United States Constitution, but an act of Congress. They do not pay Federal income taxes, and instead of full Senators or Representatives, receive a single non-voting Delegate to the United States Congress.
This ambiguity however isn’t duplicated in strategic military terms, as Guam is clearly one of the most crucial global sites for the projection of American military power, and has been since it was first taken in 1898. Listed by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the six most important US bases in the world, and often referred to by military commanders as things like the “tip of America’s spear” or “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” Guam has been crucial in conflicts from World War II, Korea, Vietnam in securing American economic and strategic interests throughout the Pacific and Asia.[7] At present in light of recent defense compact renegotiations in Asia, Guam is poised to receive the military presence which will be transferred out of bases in South Korea and Japan.[8] By 2014, the estimated total population increase to Guam, combining military personnel, dependents and support staff, will be 55,000, accompanied by a barrage of bombers, unmanned surveillance vehicles, Stryker tanks, and nuclear submarines.[9] The current population of Guam is only 168,000, and 1/3 of its 212 square miles is already controlled by the United States military.
HUGUA – between two deadlocks…
As I Chamorro from Guam, I see my island and its indigenous people trapped in a ghostly place, wedged between two menacing deadlocks. The first is referred to by Slavoj Zizek as “the liberal democratic deadlock,” the second I have often referred to in my work as the decolonial deadlock.”[10] Both of these deadlock insist that no other arrangement of the social or political order is possible or advisable, and therefore in the fear of the world, the island or society regressing into a previous evolutionary form, resist any and all radical or fundamental change.
HUGUA – between two deadlocks…
As I Chamorro from Guam, I see my island and its indigenous people trapped in a ghostly place, wedged between two menacing deadlocks. The first is referred to by Slavoj Zizek as “the liberal democratic deadlock,” the second I have often referred to in my work as the decolonial deadlock.”[10] Both of these deadlock insist that no other arrangement of the social or political order is possible or advisable, and therefore in the fear of the world, the island or society regressing into a previous evolutionary form, resist any and all radical or fundamental change.
For the liberal democratic deadlock, we find it best exemplified through the amateurish Hegelian reading of Francis Fukuyama which led him to proclaim the world had reached “the end of History.” [11] The Cold War for Fukuyama represented the last moment of “History” where equal opposites or even comparable antagonists faced off to decide the fate of the world or its course. With the United States the victor, the form of government and society it represents has won as well, there will be no more real changes in the world order, a victor has been declared, and all will either bend and assimilate to its will, or will be broken or obliterated.[12]
The decolonial deadlock is an overall resistance or reticence in Guam today, towards any need or even discussion of Guam’s decolonization. It is an either passive or active hegemonic formation, which circles around the idea that the best possible political and social configuration in Guam has been reached through its colonial relationship to the United States and nothing more need be done. The sort of sinthome or discursive mantra that props up this miasma, is the idea that the Chamorro is impossible, and can only exist as a loyal and dependent appendage of the United States. For Chamorros who accept this premise for life, then there is nothing more horrifying, to be forcefully resisted than decolonization, because of the threat it poses in weakening the influence and interests of the United States in Guam.
In this essay I am interested in exploring this ghostly place of Guam moving from democracy, to leprosy, to family, to tano’, and lastly to resistance, paying particular attention along the way to issues of culture and sovereignty.[13] In terms of culture I want to address both the colonizing and decolonizing realities and potentialities in Chamorro culture. The way it can on one hand constrict and constrain Chamorros by becoming a marker of their pathology and their corrupting influence which inevitably taints the “happy ending” the liberal democratic deadlock promises Guam. In another way however, culture is a political and mobilizing force, especially in the way it cannot help but embody, in passive or active conflict with the stories of necessary American greatness in Guam, an alternative vision, narrative or understanding of the world. My ultimate intent in this essay is to articulate Chamorro culture in Guam as a necessary catalyst for decolonization or assertions/expressions of Chamorro sovereignty, and the means through which the decolonial deadlock there might be broken.
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[1] The United Nations, Press Release Reference Paper No. 44, 2 July 2005.
[2] The term “coloniality” has been created in order to address the ways in which imperialist and colonial power remains, despite the spectacle of transferred sovereignty, which characterized the “decolonizing” of the majority of the world’s population over the past century. As I will explain in slightly more detail later in this paper, there is something important and critically useful about maintaining a distinction between those who are still entangled in “colonialism” and those who were in different ways pushed or allowed into “coloniality.” Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, (Princeton, Pinceton, 2000).
[3] This was made clear to me recently during a conversation with one of my friends about a proposal she was submitting for the 2007 US Social Forum regarding Guam and its status as a colony of the United States. While putting her proposal together, she had come across an existing proposal for the forum titled “U.S. Colonialisms.” She contacted the organizer to see what the content of their presentations would be and if it would be possible to join them. Interestingly enough, none of the communities covered by this panel were from the current “colonies” of the United States, but were instead US minority communities which were using the metaphor of “colonialism” to articulate their victimization. After suggesting that Guam would be an important addition to this panel, my friend was rebuffed through the curious argument that “Look, Puerto Rico is a colony, and we haven’t asked Puerto Ricans to be a part of this. Why should we ask Guam?” Tiffany Lacsado, Telephone Communication, 12 May 2007.
[4] Robert Cooper, “The post-modern state,” The Observer, 7 April 2002. Daniel Vernet, “Postmodern Imperialism” Le Monde, 24 April 2003.
[5] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University, 2001).
[6] Robert Underwood, The Status of Having No Status. Speech presented at the annual College of Arts and Sciences Research Conference. University of Guam, Mangilao, Guam, April 26, 1999.
[7] Daniel Widome, “The List: The Six Most Important U.S. Military Bases,” Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3460, May 2006. Christian Caryl, “America’s Unsinkable Fleet: Why the US Military is Pouring Forces into a Remote West Pacific Island,” Newsweek International, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17202830/site/newsweek/ 26 February 2007.
[8] Gene Park, “7,000 Marines, Pentagon announces shift to Guam,” The Pacific Daily News, 30 October 2005. Clint Ridgell, “What to do with 8,000 Marines?” KUAM, http://www.kuam.com/news/17674.aspx, 2 May 2006.
[9] Elenoa Baselala, “Marines Relocation Angers the Indigenous: They Say It Could Mean the End of Their Race,” Island Business, May 2007.
[10] Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, (London, Verso, 2004). Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Everything You Wanted to Know About Guam But Were Afraid to Ask Zizek, (M.A. Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2007).
[11] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York, Free Press, 1992).
[12] Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (London, Verso, 2003).
[13] Tano’: The Chamorro word for land.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Gapotulu
Sumåhi at 2 months
Sumåhi at 4 months
Sumåhi at 7 months
Sumåhi at 9 months
Sumåhi at 11 months
Sumåhi at 12 months
Sumåhi at 14 months
Sumåhi at 15 months
Sumåhi at 4 months
Sumåhi at 7 months
Sumåhi at 9 months
Sumåhi at 11 months
Sumåhi at 12 months
Sumåhi at 14 months
Sumåhi at 15 months
Sunday, July 13, 2008
No War With Iran
Two more soldiers from Guam killed this week, while fighting in Afghanistan. A Chamorro working as a private contractor was killed last month in Iraq. The total for the entire Micronesian region (Guam, CNMI, FSM, RMI and Palau) is now up to 28 killed in the total War on Terror. Scary statistics that should make even the most "patriotic" resident of the region think twice about out this war and our participation in it.
Looking at this death toll, and all the media coverage about how young people in these islands are just dying and desperate to sign up and serve, I am reminded of one of the final lines from Michael Moores' film Fahrenheit 911:
"I've always been amazed that the very people forced to live in the worst parts of town, go to the worst schools, and who have it the hardest are always the first to step up, to defend us. They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is remarkably their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
I don't think this is such a radical position, yet it has become one since 911 and the beginning of this War on Terror. People who professed to be supporting the troops, simply followed whatever dinagi or bolabola the President and his cronies trotted out for them. They assumed that being patriotic and supporting the troops was waving a flag and doing whatever the president said, and invading whatever country he said was "evil."
The United States appears to be on the verge of starting another war, yet another front in this War on Terror, now with Iran. For the sake of Guam's soldiers which are being killed at one of the highest rates amongst all ethnicities, I hope that the time of blind patriotism and war-mongering is over. I hope that we can soon enter a period where dissent and critical thinking are perceived to be just as important as shuting up and waving a flag. I hope that as the drum beats for war are being banged again, we have learned the lesson that are the final lines of Fahrenheit 911, an exchange between Michael Moore and Bush, over one of his most classic bushisms.
BUSH: There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says: Fool me once... shame on...shame on you...if fooled, you can't get fooled again.
MOORE: For once, we agreed.
July 19-21 - No War With Iran. Click for more info.
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Published on Sunday, June 29, 2008 by The New Yorker
Preparing the Battlefield:
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees-the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership-Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections-were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”-the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world-”have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace-it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)
The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.
“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”-between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not-”but now it’s a shade of mush.”
“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.
Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes-would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that-notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”
One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”
Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”-area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.
“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi-who was overthrown in 1979-was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians-to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation-a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country-like France and Germany-and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers-in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts-and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.-a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”
The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”-the Defense Intelligence Agency-”are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions-a beheading, in one case-were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags-basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations-judicial, strategic, and political-are different in Iran.”
He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.
The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians-if they have good will.”
The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.
It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.
Copyright © 2008 CondéNet.
Looking at this death toll, and all the media coverage about how young people in these islands are just dying and desperate to sign up and serve, I am reminded of one of the final lines from Michael Moores' film Fahrenheit 911:
"I've always been amazed that the very people forced to live in the worst parts of town, go to the worst schools, and who have it the hardest are always the first to step up, to defend us. They serve so that we don't have to. They offer to give up their lives so that we can be free. It is remarkably their gift to us. And all they ask for in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. Will they ever trust us again?"
I don't think this is such a radical position, yet it has become one since 911 and the beginning of this War on Terror. People who professed to be supporting the troops, simply followed whatever dinagi or bolabola the President and his cronies trotted out for them. They assumed that being patriotic and supporting the troops was waving a flag and doing whatever the president said, and invading whatever country he said was "evil."
The United States appears to be on the verge of starting another war, yet another front in this War on Terror, now with Iran. For the sake of Guam's soldiers which are being killed at one of the highest rates amongst all ethnicities, I hope that the time of blind patriotism and war-mongering is over. I hope that we can soon enter a period where dissent and critical thinking are perceived to be just as important as shuting up and waving a flag. I hope that as the drum beats for war are being banged again, we have learned the lesson that are the final lines of Fahrenheit 911, an exchange between Michael Moore and Bush, over one of his most classic bushisms.
BUSH: There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says: Fool me once... shame on...shame on you...if fooled, you can't get fooled again.
MOORE: For once, we agreed.
July 19-21 - No War With Iran. Click for more info.*******************************
Published on Sunday, June 29, 2008 by The New Yorker
Preparing the Battlefield:
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh
Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.
Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees-the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.
“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.
Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership-Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections-were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.
The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”-the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world-”have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”
The Democratic leadership’s agreement to commit hundreds of millions of dollars for more secret operations in Iran was remarkable, given the general concerns of officials like Gates, Fallon, and many others. “The oversight process has not kept pace-it’s been coöpted” by the Administration, the person familiar with the contents of the Finding said. “The process is broken, and this is dangerous stuff we’re authorizing.”
Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)
The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.
“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”-between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not-”but now it’s a shade of mush.”
“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. “This drove the military people up the wall,” he said. As far as the C.I.A. was concerned, the former senior intelligence official said, “the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support.” The Finding sent to Congress was a compromise, providing legal cover for the C.I.A. while referring to the use of lethal force in ambiguous terms.
The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.
The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.
Members of Congress have expressed skepticism in the past about the information provided by the White House. On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”
Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”
None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes-would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that-notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)
A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”
One irony of Admiral Fallon’s departure is that he was, in many areas, in agreement with President Bush on the threat posed by Iran. They had a good working relationship, Fallon told me, and, when he ran CENTCOM, were in regular communication. On March 4th, a week before his resignation, Fallon testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that he was “encouraged” about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regarding the role played by Iran’s leaders, he said, “They’ve been absolutely unhelpful, very damaging, and I absolutely don’t condone any of their activities. And I have yet to see anything since I’ve been in this job in the way of a public action by Iran that’s been at all helpful in this region.”
Fallon made it clear in our conversations that he considered it inappropriate to comment publicly about the President, the Vice-President, or Special Operations. But he said he had heard that people in the White House had been “struggling” with his views on Iran. “When I arrived at CENTCOM, the Iranians were funding every entity inside Iraq. It was in their interest to get us out, and so they decided to kill as many Americans as they could. And why not? They didn’t know who’d come out ahead, but they wanted us out. I decided that I couldn’t resolve the situation in Iraq without the neighborhood. To get this problem in Iraq solved, we had to somehow involve Iran and Syria. I had to work the neighborhood.”
Fallon told me that his focus had been not on the Iranian nuclear issue, or on regime change there, but on “putting out the fires in Iraq.” There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option, Fallon said, he believed that “it would happen only if the Iranians did something stupid.”
Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”-area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”
The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.
“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”
Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”
The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”
In recent months, according to the Iranian media, there has been a surge in violence in Iran; it is impossible at this early stage, however, to credit JSOC or C.I.A. activities, or to assess their impact on the Iranian leadership. The Iranian press reports are being carefully monitored by retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has taught strategy at the National War College and now conducts war games centered on Iran for the federal government, think tanks, and universities. The Iranian press “is very open in describing the killings going on inside the country,” Gardiner said. It is, he said, “a controlled press, which makes it more important that it publishes these things. We begin to see inside the government.” He added, “Hardly a day goes by now we don’t see a clash somewhere. There were three or four incidents over a recent weekend, and the Iranians are even naming the Revolutionary Guard officers who have been killed.”
Earlier this year, a militant Ahwazi group claimed to have assassinated a Revolutionary Guard colonel, and the Iranian government acknowledged that an explosion in a cultural center in Shiraz, in the southern part of the country, which killed at least twelve people and injured more than two hundred, had been a terrorist act and not, as it earlier insisted, an accident. It could not be learned whether there has been American involvement in any specific incident in Iran, but, according to Gardiner, the Iranians have begun publicly blaming the U.S., Great Britain, and, more recently, the C.I.A. for some incidents. The agency was involved in a coup in Iran in 1953, and its support for the unpopular regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi-who was overthrown in 1979-was condemned for years by the ruling mullahs in Tehran, to great effect. “This is the ultimate for the Iranians-to blame the C.I.A.,” Gardiner said. “This is new, and it’s an escalation-a ratcheting up of tensions. It rallies support for the regime and shows the people that there is a continuing threat from the ‘Great Satan.’ ” In Gardiner’s view, the violence, rather than weakening Iran’s religious government, may generate support for it.
Many of the activities may be being carried out by dissidents in Iran, and not by Americans in the field. One problem with “passing money” (to use the term of the person familiar with the Finding) in a covert setting is that it is hard to control where the money goes and whom it benefits. Nonetheless, the former senior intelligence official said, “We’ve got exposure, because of the transfer of our weapons and our communications gear. The Iranians will be able to make the argument that the opposition was inspired by the Americans. How many times have we tried this without asking the right questions? Is the risk worth it?” One possible consequence of these operations would be a violent Iranian crackdown on one of the dissident groups, which could give the Bush Administration a reason to intervene.
A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country-like France and Germany-and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”
The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers-in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.
One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.
The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.
The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts-and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”
The Kurdish party, PJAK, which has also been reported to be covertly supported by the United States, has been operating against Iran from bases in northern Iraq for at least three years. (Iran, like Iraq and Turkey, has a Kurdish minority, and PJAK and other groups have sought self-rule in territory that is now part of each of those countries.) In recent weeks, according to Sam Gardiner, the military strategist, there has been a marked increase in the number of PJAK armed engagements with Iranians and terrorist attacks on Iranian targets. In early June, the news agency Fars reported that a dozen PJAK members and four Iranian border guards were killed in a clash near the Iraq border; a similar attack in May killed three Revolutionary Guards and nine PJAK fighters. PJAK has also subjected Turkey, a member of NATO, to repeated terrorist attacks, and reports of American support for the group have been a source of friction between the two governments.
Gardiner also mentioned a trip that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, made to Tehran in June. After his return, Maliki announced that his government would ban any contact between foreigners and the M.E.K.-a slap at the U.S.’s dealings with the group. Maliki declared that Iraq was not willing to be a staging ground for covert operations against other countries. This was a sign, Gardiner said, of “Maliki’s increasingly choosing the interests of Iraq over the interests of the United States.” In terms of U.S. allegations of Iranian involvement in the killing of American soldiers, he said, “Maliki was unwilling to play the blame-Iran game.” Gardiner added that Pakistan had just agreed to turn over a Jundallah leader to the Iranian government. America’s covert operations, he said, “seem to be harming relations with the governments of both Iraq and Pakistan and could well be strengthening the connection between Tehran and Baghdad.”
The White House’s reliance on questionable operatives, and on plans involving possible lethal action inside Iran, has created anger as well as anxiety within the Special Operations and intelligence communities. JSOC’s operations in Iran are believed to be modelled on a program that has, with some success, used surrogates to target the Taliban leadership in the tribal territories of Waziristan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But the situations in Waziristan and Iran are not comparable.
In Waziristan, “the program works because it’s small and smart guys are running it,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s being executed by professionals. The N.S.A., the C.I.A., and the D.I.A.”-the Defense Intelligence Agency-”are right in there with the Special Forces and Pakistani intelligence, and they’re dealing with serious bad guys.” He added, “We have to be really careful in calling in the missiles. We have to hit certain houses at certain times. The people on the ground are watching through binoculars a few hundred yards away and calling specific locations, in latitude and longitude. We keep the Predator loitering until the targets go into a house, and we have to make sure our guys are far enough away so they don’t get hit.” One of the most prominent victims of the program, the former official said, was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Taliban commander, who was killed on January 31st, reportedly in a missile strike that also killed eleven other people.
A dispatch published on March 26th by the Washington Post reported on the increasing number of successful strikes against Taliban and other insurgent units in Pakistan’s tribal areas. A follow-up article noted that, in response, the Taliban had killed “dozens of people” suspected of providing information to the United States and its allies on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders. Many of the victims were thought to be American spies, and their executions-a beheading, in one case-were videotaped and distributed by DVD as a warning to others.
It is not simple to replicate the program in Iran. “Everybody’s arguing about the high-value-target list,” the former senior intelligence official said. “The Special Ops guys are pissed off because Cheney’s office set up priorities for categories of targets, and now he’s getting impatient and applying pressure for results. But it takes a long time to get the right guys in place.”
The Pentagon consultant told me, “We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags-basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all, but the legal issues surrounding extrajudicial killings in Waziristan are less of a problem because Al Qaeda and the Taliban cross the border into Afghanistan and back again, often with U.S. and NATO forces in hot pursuit. The situation is not nearly as clear in the Iranian case. All the considerations-judicial, strategic, and political-are different in Iran.”
He added, “There is huge opposition inside the intelligence community to the idea of waging a covert war inside Iran, and using Baluchis and Ahwazis as surrogates. The leaders of our Special Operations community all have remarkable physical courage, but they are less likely to voice their opposition to policy. Iran is not Waziristan.”
A Gallup poll taken last November, before the N.I.E. was made public, found that seventy-three per cent of those surveyed thought that the United States should use economic action and diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program, while only eighteen per cent favored direct military action. Republicans were twice as likely as Democrats to endorse a military strike. Weariness with the war in Iraq has undoubtedly affected the public’s tolerance for an attack on Iran. This mood could change quickly, however. The potential for escalation became clear in early January, when five Iranian patrol boats, believed to be under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, made a series of aggressive moves toward three Navy warships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Initial reports of the incident made public by the Pentagon press office said that the Iranians had transmitted threats, over ship-to-ship radio, to “explode” the American ships. At a White House news conference, the President, on the day he left for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, called the incident “provocative” and “dangerous,” and there was, very briefly, a sense of crisis and of outrage at Iran. “TWO MINUTES FROM WAR” was the headline in one British newspaper.
The crisis was quickly defused by Vice-Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. naval forces in the region. No warning shots were fired, the Admiral told the Pentagon press corps on January 7th, via teleconference from his headquarters, in Bahrain. “Yes, it’s more serious than we have seen, but, to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their Navy regularly,” Cosgriff said. “I didn’t get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats.”
Admiral Cosgriff’s caution was well founded: within a week, the Pentagon acknowledged that it could not positively identify the Iranian boats as the source of the ominous radio transmission, and press reports suggested that it had instead come from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
In June, President Bush went on a farewell tour of Europe. He had tea with Queen Elizabeth II and dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, the President and First Lady of France. The serious business was conducted out of sight, and involved a series of meetings on a new diplomatic effort to persuade the Iranians to halt their uranium-enrichment program. (Iran argues that its enrichment program is for civilian purposes and is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.) Secretary of State Rice had been involved with developing a new package of incentives. But the Administration’s essential negotiating position seemed unchanged: talks could not take place until Iran halted the program. The Iranians have repeatedly and categorically rejected that precondition, leaving the diplomatic situation in a stalemate; they have not yet formally responded to the new incentives.
The continuing impasse alarms many observers. Joschka Fischer, the former German Foreign Minister, recently wrote in a syndicated column that it may not “be possible to freeze the Iranian nuclear program for the duration of the negotiations to avoid a military confrontation before they are completed. Should this newest attempt fail, things will soon get serious. Deadly serious.” When I spoke to him last week, Fischer, who has extensive contacts in the diplomatic community, said that the latest European approach includes a new element: the willingness of the U.S. and the Europeans to accept something less than a complete cessation of enrichment as an intermediate step. “The proposal says that the Iranians must stop manufacturing new centrifuges and the other side will stop all further sanction activities in the U.N. Security Council,” Fischer said, although Iran would still have to freeze its enrichment activities when formal negotiations begin. “This could be acceptable to the Iranians-if they have good will.”
The big question, Fischer added, is in Washington. “I think the Americans are deeply divided on the issue of what to do about Iran,” he said. “Some officials are concerned about the fallout from a military attack and others think an attack is unavoidable. I know the Europeans, but I have no idea where the Americans will end up on this issue.”
There is another complication: American Presidential politics. Barack Obama has said that, if elected, he would begin talks with Iran with no “self-defeating” preconditions (although only after diplomatic groundwork had been laid). That position has been vigorously criticized by John McCain. The Washington Post recently quoted Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign’s national-security director, as stating that McCain supports the White House’s position, and that the program be suspended before talks begin. What Obama is proposing, Scheunemann said, “is unilateral cowboy summitry.”
Scheunemann, who is known as a neoconservative, is also the McCain campaign’s most important channel of communication with the White House. He is a friend of David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. I have heard differing accounts of Scheunemann’s influence with McCain; though some close to the McCain campaign talk about him as a possible national-security adviser, others say he is someone who isn’t taken seriously while “telling Cheney and others what they want to hear,” as a senior McCain adviser put it.
It is not known whether McCain, who is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been formally briefed on the operations in Iran. At the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, in June, Obama repeated his plea for “tough and principled diplomacy.” But he also said, along with McCain, that he would keep the threat of military action against Iran on the table.
Copyright © 2008 CondéNet.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
...job loss, failing schools, prohibitively expensive health care, pensions at risk...
Everytime I see film of that infamous green background speech that John McCain gave a few weeks ago, I cringe. Ko'lo'lo'na annai ha chalekin maisa gui'! Especially when he laughs at himself.
He reminds me of an old man who isn't quite old enough yet to not care about other people's discomfort and be oblivious to whether or not they are paying attention, and so still nervously tries to provoke people to respond to what he is saying, to pay attention to him. That little smile that he gives makes me feel sad, but also sends a shiver up my spine.
Last month, in an effort to spice up the faltering campaign of John McCain, Stephen Colbert threw down another gauntlet to net-savy audience, by challenging them to take a short segment from that infamous speech, and twist it until John McCain was exciting!
Some of the entries have been uploaded to Youtube and so I'm posting them below. I have to admit, that even though watching the actual video of the speech makes me cringe, to hear that sound byte repeated over and over in these clips, just makes it even more hysterical.
Na'magof hao.
*********************************
He reminds me of an old man who isn't quite old enough yet to not care about other people's discomfort and be oblivious to whether or not they are paying attention, and so still nervously tries to provoke people to respond to what he is saying, to pay attention to him. That little smile that he gives makes me feel sad, but also sends a shiver up my spine.
Last month, in an effort to spice up the faltering campaign of John McCain, Stephen Colbert threw down another gauntlet to net-savy audience, by challenging them to take a short segment from that infamous speech, and twist it until John McCain was exciting!
Some of the entries have been uploaded to Youtube and so I'm posting them below. I have to admit, that even though watching the actual video of the speech makes me cringe, to hear that sound byte repeated over and over in these clips, just makes it even more hysterical.
Na'magof hao.
*********************************
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Film Interns Needed
Umesgon este na dos gi as Alex Munoz:
*****************************
SUMMER INTERN NEEDED
For Community Outreach and Community Relations regarding the upcoming GUAM Feature Film " I FUETSAN I TAO TAO ".
Job description
- Manage successful community outreach campaign.
- manage all correspondence with Community Leaders and Elders
- create and distribute Bi Monthly news letters
- Recruit and generate community support for film project
- Communications Liason with Political and Community Leaders on GUAM regarding PROJECT WORKFORCE.
-Post and stream sizzle spots for film
- Manage I FUETSAN I TAO TAO my space site.
Contact : Alex Munoz @ Alexcmunoz@gmail.com
*************************************
FYI Films, a program that teaches filmmaking to youth in the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles, is looking for undergraduate and graduate student interns this summer to aid in various short and long-term projects. This is an exciting opportunity to learn about the nonprofit media arts community and filmmaking.
The time commitment is 10-15 hours per week, flexible schedule. This is an unpaid internship.
Job description:
Production assistance
Preparing press materials
Updating website
Recruiting and organizing volunteers
General clerical tasks
Maintaining database
We are seeking enthusiastic, motivated applicants
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter to Gena at gtmoto@gmail.com
You may visit the website for more information on FYI Films: http://www.fyifilms.org
*************************
In other Guam film news, one of the documentaries that I've worked for over the years, is slowly winding down and will hopefully be completed sometime this year. Its tentatively titled Tano Y Chamorro or "Land of the Chamorros" and is directed by Puerto Rican scholar and filmmaker Frances Negron Muntaner.
Here's some video I took while we were filming in December of last year. I'll be posting more on this and some other films I've worked on soon.
Lastly, the makers of the locally made film Shiro's Head have released the film's long-awaited trailer and promise (that if all goes well) the film will be screened on island sometime before the end of the year.
Head to their website to see the trailer and learn more about the film.
Shiro's Head: The Legend
*****************************
SUMMER INTERN NEEDED
For Community Outreach and Community Relations regarding the upcoming GUAM Feature Film " I FUETSAN I TAO TAO ".
Job description
- Manage successful community outreach campaign.
- manage all correspondence with Community Leaders and Elders
- create and distribute Bi Monthly news letters
- Recruit and generate community support for film project
- Communications Liason with Political and Community Leaders on GUAM regarding PROJECT WORKFORCE.
-Post and stream sizzle spots for film
- Manage I FUETSAN I TAO TAO my space site.
Contact : Alex Munoz @ Alexcmunoz@gmail.com
*************************************
FYI Films, a program that teaches filmmaking to youth in the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles, is looking for undergraduate and graduate student interns this summer to aid in various short and long-term projects. This is an exciting opportunity to learn about the nonprofit media arts community and filmmaking.
The time commitment is 10-15 hours per week, flexible schedule. This is an unpaid internship.
Job description:
Production assistance
Preparing press materials
Updating website
Recruiting and organizing volunteers
General clerical tasks
Maintaining database
We are seeking enthusiastic, motivated applicants
To apply, please send a resume and cover letter to Gena at gtmoto@gmail.com
You may visit the website for more information on FYI Films: http://www.fyifilms.org
*************************
In other Guam film news, one of the documentaries that I've worked for over the years, is slowly winding down and will hopefully be completed sometime this year. Its tentatively titled Tano Y Chamorro or "Land of the Chamorros" and is directed by Puerto Rican scholar and filmmaker Frances Negron Muntaner.
Here's some video I took while we were filming in December of last year. I'll be posting more on this and some other films I've worked on soon.
Lastly, the makers of the locally made film Shiro's Head have released the film's long-awaited trailer and promise (that if all goes well) the film will be screened on island sometime before the end of the year.
Head to their website to see the trailer and learn more about the film.
Shiro's Head: The Legend
Monday, July 07, 2008
Racial Fantasies
The supporters of Democratic Senator and Presidential hopeful Barack Obama had a bit of a scare the other day, as the media reported that his plane, headed for Charlotte, North Carolina, had been forced to make an emergency landing in St. Louis, Missouri.Here's the article from The Guardian:
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's campaign plane made an unscheduled landing in St Louis, Missouri, today after experiencing a control problem in the skies over the mid-western US.
The plane's pilot told passengers the trouble involved the "controllability of the pitch". Pitch is the position of the nose up or down relative to the wings.
The aircraft was en route from Obama's hometown of Chicago to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Obama was scheduled to give a speech on the economy.
Midwest Airlines said the problem developed because an emergency slide located in the tail cone of the MD-80 airplane deployed in flight but never threatened the safety of the flight.
The plane landed safely, and a mechanic boarded the plane for an inspection. The Illinois senator remained onboard for a while and read a newspaper.
Obama telephoned Charlotte to apologise for the trip's postponement and summarise his speech.
Upon takeoff from Chicago, passengers had felt the plane dip briefly, causing a stomach-rolling sensation like being on a roller coaster, but the unexpected movement didn't alarm the frequent fliers on board.
Obama told reporters he was never worried about the safety of the plane.
"Anytime a pilot says something's not working the way it's supposed to, then you make sure you tighten your seat belt," he said. "Everything seemed under control. The pilots knew what they were doing."
Obama, in his message to his supporters, was quick to joke that the media was certainly going to make an issue of this, but not to worry. For a while, as the item was tossed into the 24 hour news blood stream as breaking news and fodder for news scrawls, this was the case. As the words "emergency landing" and "Obama" appeared on CNN and MSNBC, I'm sure that there were plenty of Obama supporters in gyms across America, whose hearts skipped a beat.
I'm being a little bit silly here, since the incident turned out to be nothing to worry about, except that Obama's change train was diverted from one potential swing state to another. But, on the other hand, given the way people of so many different generations are reacting to Obama and his candidacy, and seeing it as something new and transformative, the fear that many have of Obama's life being in danger could be legitimate. Since the airline malfunction, comments from the liberal blogs I've scanned already show that while people are thankful nothing bad happened, they are still fearful that Obama might be a target for the corrupt and the powerful. This is been a persistent fear amongst his supporters for months.
Comparisons to Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy have both been common, due to Obama's race, his politics, and the demographics that he draws his core support from. But as the race has dragged on, and Obama moved from being an insurgent Democratic candidate, to the presumptive Democratic nominee, the fates that were plotted for both MLK and RFK have begun to haunt Obama and his most faithful and loyal supporters.
When Senator Hillary Clinton made one of her many infamous comments regarding RFK and his 1968 campaign for President that was cut short by his assassination, she inadvertently pushed into the mainstream, the concerns that many Democrats have had for more than a year about the safety of Obama. These worries all derive from the aura of Obama as an outsider, not a typical member of your Washington elite or entrenched political/economic classes.
This non-normativity isn't really rooted in his political positions, since he is pretty much mainstream in this regard. Is Obama that politically threatening? No. He is not advocating any radical changes, just another carefully blended brew of lefty and righty talking points, to try to create a political platform which would try to keep together as much of those whom his campaign considers to be their existing coalition, and also attrach enough Republican or independent votes to push them over the top.
Where then does his appeal and his freshness come from? Its instead tied primarily to the intersections he represents, the identities he is shouldered with because of his heritage, his life experiences and physical features. In his introduction for Senator Obama during the APIA Vote Presidential Townhall in May, California Congressman Xavier Becerra, touched on some of these characteristics that give Obama his positional freshness, if not his political one:
"And I am very proud today to tell you that there is a man running for the highest office of this land, the highest office on this world, to take us to a different place. A different place from where we've ever been. Because we have never had someone who can serve us so well. When was the last time you heard of a candidate for president of the United States who could say that he has history growing up in Hawai'i. Has history and understanding, growing up in Indonesia. Whose family includes someone who is half-Indonesia, his sister. Who sometimes can tell you about growing up without a father in his home. Who can tell you what it was like to be called one thing by one race and one thing by another."
From this perspective Obama does represent a huge shift. He is not just another rich white guy, who came from a perfect American home and had plenty of perfect American opportunities. He is not part of that fallacy of American normativity. Since he comes from modest means and a broken home, he does have a much more actual American story than most Presidents. But as a person of color, he also knows the pain of being an American who must constantly endure the racism of American race relations, where those with different names, skin colors, phenotypes or religions can always be treated like outsiders and always be told in both polite and impolite ways to "go home" or back to where they came from. Obama, as a Presidential candidate still isn't exempt from this. Despite being born in the United States and being a US citizen, there are still very strong rumors working their ways through "hard working" communities that argue that he isn't an US citizen and was in fact born in Kenya.
But, Obama's story has its own value to the United States, in that he represents a collection of differences which can be narrativized into yet another fantastic American success story. So although Obama can still be treated as a foriegner and mistrusted as a Muslim or a radical Black Panther Party spy, he can also be accepted as something "uniquely" American (this is a point he himself endorses). America is after all the only place where a skinny kid with big ears and funny name could run for President and possibly win. While he is threatening as something different than the usual heterosexual, rich white male leader and symbol of America, he also represents a more multi-cultural America and an America in a potentially post-American world. Obama is the sort of international and the national blended smoothly together. He has the face of a cosmopolitian, international world, but speaks only in the language of American exceptionalism, supremacy and greatness. In this way, although Senator Obama is still the most radical liberal member of the US Senate, he is nonetheless still something that could be celebrated and elevated, even in Sean Hannity's America.
Speaking of that horrifyingly scary place, that is Sean Hannity's America, so who then, does Obama still represent a threat to? Most prominently, racists, or more accurately white supremacists, those who explicitly claim America as a white nation, who see its character and spirit as being white, and who see those who are non-white as subordinate races, marginal supporting figures in the great story of America. For this group, the idea of a black man being elected President, is just another way that their great nation is being colonized by minorities and multi-cultural, political correct nonsense who will ruin this great nation. If there was some way of squeezing affirmative action into this equation they would eagerly snatch it up and run with it. The fantasy of white people losing jobs and losing their way to black people because of the spectre of affirmative action has gained incredible traction (even Obama gave it credence in his famous speech on race). So its very possible that there is already talk amongst certain groups that this year's election will be the country's first "affirmative action Presidency."
Do these people represent though, a mortal danger to Obama? Would some racist go far enough to try to take him out because of what he'll do in terms of weakening America and defiling what white men have worked to hard to build (with racialized labor and ethnically cleansed native lands)? Perhaps.
Obama told reporters he was never worried about the safety of the plane.
"Anytime a pilot says something's not working the way it's supposed to, then you make sure you tighten your seat belt," he said. "Everything seemed under control. The pilots knew what they were doing."
Obama, in his message to his supporters, was quick to joke that the media was certainly going to make an issue of this, but not to worry. For a while, as the item was tossed into the 24 hour news blood stream as breaking news and fodder for news scrawls, this was the case. As the words "emergency landing" and "Obama" appeared on CNN and MSNBC, I'm sure that there were plenty of Obama supporters in gyms across America, whose hearts skipped a beat.
I'm being a little bit silly here, since the incident turned out to be nothing to worry about, except that Obama's change train was diverted from one potential swing state to another. But, on the other hand, given the way people of so many different generations are reacting to Obama and his candidacy, and seeing it as something new and transformative, the fear that many have of Obama's life being in danger could be legitimate. Since the airline malfunction, comments from the liberal blogs I've scanned already show that while people are thankful nothing bad happened, they are still fearful that Obama might be a target for the corrupt and the powerful. This is been a persistent fear amongst his supporters for months.
Comparisons to Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy have both been common, due to Obama's race, his politics, and the demographics that he draws his core support from. But as the race has dragged on, and Obama moved from being an insurgent Democratic candidate, to the presumptive Democratic nominee, the fates that were plotted for both MLK and RFK have begun to haunt Obama and his most faithful and loyal supporters.When Senator Hillary Clinton made one of her many infamous comments regarding RFK and his 1968 campaign for President that was cut short by his assassination, she inadvertently pushed into the mainstream, the concerns that many Democrats have had for more than a year about the safety of Obama. These worries all derive from the aura of Obama as an outsider, not a typical member of your Washington elite or entrenched political/economic classes.
This non-normativity isn't really rooted in his political positions, since he is pretty much mainstream in this regard. Is Obama that politically threatening? No. He is not advocating any radical changes, just another carefully blended brew of lefty and righty talking points, to try to create a political platform which would try to keep together as much of those whom his campaign considers to be their existing coalition, and also attrach enough Republican or independent votes to push them over the top.
Where then does his appeal and his freshness come from? Its instead tied primarily to the intersections he represents, the identities he is shouldered with because of his heritage, his life experiences and physical features. In his introduction for Senator Obama during the APIA Vote Presidential Townhall in May, California Congressman Xavier Becerra, touched on some of these characteristics that give Obama his positional freshness, if not his political one:
"And I am very proud today to tell you that there is a man running for the highest office of this land, the highest office on this world, to take us to a different place. A different place from where we've ever been. Because we have never had someone who can serve us so well. When was the last time you heard of a candidate for president of the United States who could say that he has history growing up in Hawai'i. Has history and understanding, growing up in Indonesia. Whose family includes someone who is half-Indonesia, his sister. Who sometimes can tell you about growing up without a father in his home. Who can tell you what it was like to be called one thing by one race and one thing by another."
From this perspective Obama does represent a huge shift. He is not just another rich white guy, who came from a perfect American home and had plenty of perfect American opportunities. He is not part of that fallacy of American normativity. Since he comes from modest means and a broken home, he does have a much more actual American story than most Presidents. But as a person of color, he also knows the pain of being an American who must constantly endure the racism of American race relations, where those with different names, skin colors, phenotypes or religions can always be treated like outsiders and always be told in both polite and impolite ways to "go home" or back to where they came from. Obama, as a Presidential candidate still isn't exempt from this. Despite being born in the United States and being a US citizen, there are still very strong rumors working their ways through "hard working" communities that argue that he isn't an US citizen and was in fact born in Kenya.
But, Obama's story has its own value to the United States, in that he represents a collection of differences which can be narrativized into yet another fantastic American success story. So although Obama can still be treated as a foriegner and mistrusted as a Muslim or a radical Black Panther Party spy, he can also be accepted as something "uniquely" American (this is a point he himself endorses). America is after all the only place where a skinny kid with big ears and funny name could run for President and possibly win. While he is threatening as something different than the usual heterosexual, rich white male leader and symbol of America, he also represents a more multi-cultural America and an America in a potentially post-American world. Obama is the sort of international and the national blended smoothly together. He has the face of a cosmopolitian, international world, but speaks only in the language of American exceptionalism, supremacy and greatness. In this way, although Senator Obama is still the most radical liberal member of the US Senate, he is nonetheless still something that could be celebrated and elevated, even in Sean Hannity's America.Speaking of that horrifyingly scary place, that is Sean Hannity's America, so who then, does Obama still represent a threat to? Most prominently, racists, or more accurately white supremacists, those who explicitly claim America as a white nation, who see its character and spirit as being white, and who see those who are non-white as subordinate races, marginal supporting figures in the great story of America. For this group, the idea of a black man being elected President, is just another way that their great nation is being colonized by minorities and multi-cultural, political correct nonsense who will ruin this great nation. If there was some way of squeezing affirmative action into this equation they would eagerly snatch it up and run with it. The fantasy of white people losing jobs and losing their way to black people because of the spectre of affirmative action has gained incredible traction (even Obama gave it credence in his famous speech on race). So its very possible that there is already talk amongst certain groups that this year's election will be the country's first "affirmative action Presidency."
Do these people represent though, a mortal danger to Obama? Would some racist go far enough to try to take him out because of what he'll do in terms of weakening America and defiling what white men have worked to hard to build (with racialized labor and ethnically cleansed native lands)? Perhaps. Elections, especially national and large scale elections are decided by low information voters. People who don't know very much, who don't do much of their own research or really take the issues involved seriously. And so for low information racists, or people who aren't really thinking or aware of the sort of structure of their privilege or their hatred, Obama is a very clear and present danger to them. For all the reasons listed already, he is the enemy.
He is the result of a huge fissure in the natural order of races and civilizations. He represents the elevation and valorization of all the evil characteristics that black people in the United States have been shouldered with for centuries. So for these low info racists, to elect Barack Obama means to celebrate and make authentically "American" all the ridiculous stereotypes and cultural pathologies that constrict the lives of African Americans, and keep ever fresh and vibrant beliefs in white supremacy and exceptionalism.
A few weeks ago on Alan Colmes' radio show, I had the honor of hearing one of these voters explain in very simple and plain terms, why he would not vote for Barack Obama. His well reasoned argument, was that black people are lazy.
Colmes, who is much more matatnga on the radio than on TV, took this caller to task for this racism. He also should of reminded him about how much vacation time Bush takes even while he's supposedly the most powerful man in the world, or how notoriously lazy while in office Ronald Reagan was. But that's the point isn't it? That's how racism works. After a natural disaster, when desperate white people break into stores they are looking for food. When black people do it, they are looting.
From these groups, who don't really understand racism, but simply enjoy it and seek to defend it in very crude and silly ways, the threat is very real.
For other, more subtle types of racists. Those who know more about how it works and where their privilege comes from, Obama is not really a threat. On the surface he might appear to be, but in a much deeper discursive sense, he could actually be a gift, a boon from racist heaven. He is potentially the sort of figure which could enhance their ability to be racist, given them the sorts of public talking points which could take their enjoyment of exceptional and glorious whiteness and disparaging of color and blackness to higher levels.
This might appear to some to be a sort of paradox, since so many people are supporting Obama or believe in him for the opposite reason, because he will represent the taking of the country into a more racially harmonious and just place. Perhaps. There is a slight chance that this could happen, but unlikely since few people and the American people are not exception are predisposed to dealing with the skeletons in their closet in very productive and meaningful ways, and so the election of a black President doesn't really change much, except at the surface.
But this shift in the surface is something that racists can work well with. There are two basic ways in which the election of Barack Obama would actually be a dream come true for racists in the United States, or people who want to continute to cling to their fantasies of black pathology.
1. If Barack Obama does become president, he will basically have to bat 1000. He will have to be flawless, perfect. He cannot make any mistakes. Because, in another instance of how racism works, while everything mistake that a white man makes does not end up staining all white men, a black man in the position of the presidency will end up stigmatizing all black people. His mistakes will end up marking all other African Americans.
We can see this happening in the CNMI with the election there of the islands' first Carolinain governor Benigno Fitial. As the governor becomes more and more unpopular, his "failures" or mistakes end up being transferred to all Carolinians, and become a sort of racial talking point for future gubernatorial prospects. The way this tends to appear in conversation is that for Chamorros, they will never take a chance with electing a Carolinian again. For Carolinians, there is a fear that Fitial is screwing things up and that he'll give us all a bad name with his failures, thus ensuring we never get this opportunity again.
Should Obama be elected, and end up not being perfect, then he will basically become in the minds and speech of those who are motivated by a need to perpetuate white supremacy in the United States, a quick and easy point through which one could say "I told you so."
2. Should Obama be elected president he will become another historic milestone through which structural and subtle forms of racism can be excused or dismissed. By becoming the first black/African American president, Obama provides another easy sort of talking point through which those who critique the prevailing system of power and privilege in America through a racial lens can be silenced or dismissed. For those who say that African Americans have it so hard or that they are treated unfairly in this country, how did Barack Obama become president? Through this sort of political achievement, where a black man can be elected president, the still very legitimate claims about racism and discrimination in this country can be de-legitimized in some very pathetic, yet common-sense ways. Attempts to reveal or change the racist under-currents to American society become far more difficult. If you think that discussing productively racism in the United States is tough now, it will be almost impossible when Obama is president.
By a black man occupying this highest symbolic and political office, racism moves even further from being seen as a structural problem and therefore beyond the scope of any large institutional change. Programs designed to help African Americans can be gleefully argued against due to this success. Now that African Americans have "made it," any claims to structural inequality can be left aside, and things such as educational, economic and health disparities or poverties can be attributed to the same old pathologies and stereotypes, but now "the system" because of the way it allowed and supported Obama as president can be absolved of any culpability in holding black people back. In the discourse of those invested in white supremacy (both overt and covert) this means that there can be no more excuses, and that nothing is holding black people back anymore save for their individual and cultural pathologies and problems.
So for those who want to continue to be incredibly racist, but just not in open or overt ways, Barack Obama is hardly something to fear. He just might make your enjoyment easier and possibly more satisfying. The next time someone complains to you about discrimination in the workplace, in the job market, in the economy, at the hospital, even in the line at the DMV, just eagerly remind that whistleblower that a person of color is president now, and so that their argument is therefore puru ha' take'.
For these two points, I'm not referring to organized white supremacists groups, but individuals and more organic communities who are attached and draw much of their political identities from white supremacist ideologies. For organized white supremacists groups, there has already been some small murmurrings of the value for white racists if Obama was elected. The rationale behind this guarded and measured support is that Obama might be the catalyst that unifies white people, and makes them recognize their embattled and victimized position in today's multi-cultural and politically correct America.
Well known racist David Duke, in his essay "A Black Flag for White America," sums it up well with this statement, analogizing Obama with an ominous sore on the white body:
“Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. … Obama is the pain that let’s [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let the American people know that there is a real cancer eating away at the heart of our country and Republican aspirin will not only not cure it, but only masks the pain and makes you think you don’t need radical surgery. … My bet is that whether Obama wins or loses in November, millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it.”
Is my analysis endorsing this reasoning? Is this sort of new unbridled white racial enjoyment something that I want? Absolutely not. But I am fairly certain that this will happen because of the way Obama has risen to prominence and the sort of careful way in which he is supposed to represent a more equal and open America, yet those very things he is supposed to represent a resolution or a healing of, still cannot be mentioned or dealt with!
My pessimism on this point is derived from that fact that Americans and the media, and Obama himself go to incredible lengths to not reveal the role of racism in everyday life. And by racism I do not mean racist individuals, which is the way you can still talk about it publicly (and not be treated as a lunatic), but racism which is embedded in all the systems of life, from politics, the media, the economy, health care and the criminal justice system. The reason that Obama is not every racist's nightmare is because if he is elected, he will not be elected as a figure to force America to confront its racist past and present. He is not one of those "black leaders" who make white people so very uncomfortable.
He will be elected as a sort of racial shortcut, a way in which America can simply gloss over its racism, and pretend that the problem has been solved or that there is nothing more to deal with here. In Senator Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia, he spoke of the racial elephant in the room of America, but took not steps to actually forcing a change, he simply mentioned it, and didn't give it any sort of critical or potentially transformative angle, just mentioned it.
I'm sure many expected him to go further, but why would he? He is not here to do that difficult work of restorative justice and racial transformation. He has a set of experiences and a particular history which make give us the impression that he would have a sort of critical ethnic consciousness and desire to change in very radical ways the way Americans see race and are racially invested and motivated. But of course, it would be impossible to get elected president if your platform was such. Instead Obama will most likely be ushered into office on a wave of people who want something done about the race problem in the United States, just as long as they aren't implicated in it, or have to give anything up in the process. And thus, Obama will be elected president, and while he will color the face of the nation slightly differently, he will leave unscathed and largely untouched the racial fantasies and logics that run this nation. It is because of this that, he is hardly the nightmare of invested racists in the United States, and while the story covering the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of Barack Obama for president was a joke, its not to difficult to believe.
He is the result of a huge fissure in the natural order of races and civilizations. He represents the elevation and valorization of all the evil characteristics that black people in the United States have been shouldered with for centuries. So for these low info racists, to elect Barack Obama means to celebrate and make authentically "American" all the ridiculous stereotypes and cultural pathologies that constrict the lives of African Americans, and keep ever fresh and vibrant beliefs in white supremacy and exceptionalism.
A few weeks ago on Alan Colmes' radio show, I had the honor of hearing one of these voters explain in very simple and plain terms, why he would not vote for Barack Obama. His well reasoned argument, was that black people are lazy.
Colmes, who is much more matatnga on the radio than on TV, took this caller to task for this racism. He also should of reminded him about how much vacation time Bush takes even while he's supposedly the most powerful man in the world, or how notoriously lazy while in office Ronald Reagan was. But that's the point isn't it? That's how racism works. After a natural disaster, when desperate white people break into stores they are looking for food. When black people do it, they are looting.
From these groups, who don't really understand racism, but simply enjoy it and seek to defend it in very crude and silly ways, the threat is very real.
For other, more subtle types of racists. Those who know more about how it works and where their privilege comes from, Obama is not really a threat. On the surface he might appear to be, but in a much deeper discursive sense, he could actually be a gift, a boon from racist heaven. He is potentially the sort of figure which could enhance their ability to be racist, given them the sorts of public talking points which could take their enjoyment of exceptional and glorious whiteness and disparaging of color and blackness to higher levels.This might appear to some to be a sort of paradox, since so many people are supporting Obama or believe in him for the opposite reason, because he will represent the taking of the country into a more racially harmonious and just place. Perhaps. There is a slight chance that this could happen, but unlikely since few people and the American people are not exception are predisposed to dealing with the skeletons in their closet in very productive and meaningful ways, and so the election of a black President doesn't really change much, except at the surface.
But this shift in the surface is something that racists can work well with. There are two basic ways in which the election of Barack Obama would actually be a dream come true for racists in the United States, or people who want to continute to cling to their fantasies of black pathology.
1. If Barack Obama does become president, he will basically have to bat 1000. He will have to be flawless, perfect. He cannot make any mistakes. Because, in another instance of how racism works, while everything mistake that a white man makes does not end up staining all white men, a black man in the position of the presidency will end up stigmatizing all black people. His mistakes will end up marking all other African Americans.
We can see this happening in the CNMI with the election there of the islands' first Carolinain governor Benigno Fitial. As the governor becomes more and more unpopular, his "failures" or mistakes end up being transferred to all Carolinians, and become a sort of racial talking point for future gubernatorial prospects. The way this tends to appear in conversation is that for Chamorros, they will never take a chance with electing a Carolinian again. For Carolinians, there is a fear that Fitial is screwing things up and that he'll give us all a bad name with his failures, thus ensuring we never get this opportunity again.
Should Obama be elected, and end up not being perfect, then he will basically become in the minds and speech of those who are motivated by a need to perpetuate white supremacy in the United States, a quick and easy point through which one could say "I told you so."2. Should Obama be elected president he will become another historic milestone through which structural and subtle forms of racism can be excused or dismissed. By becoming the first black/African American president, Obama provides another easy sort of talking point through which those who critique the prevailing system of power and privilege in America through a racial lens can be silenced or dismissed. For those who say that African Americans have it so hard or that they are treated unfairly in this country, how did Barack Obama become president? Through this sort of political achievement, where a black man can be elected president, the still very legitimate claims about racism and discrimination in this country can be de-legitimized in some very pathetic, yet common-sense ways. Attempts to reveal or change the racist under-currents to American society become far more difficult. If you think that discussing productively racism in the United States is tough now, it will be almost impossible when Obama is president.
By a black man occupying this highest symbolic and political office, racism moves even further from being seen as a structural problem and therefore beyond the scope of any large institutional change. Programs designed to help African Americans can be gleefully argued against due to this success. Now that African Americans have "made it," any claims to structural inequality can be left aside, and things such as educational, economic and health disparities or poverties can be attributed to the same old pathologies and stereotypes, but now "the system" because of the way it allowed and supported Obama as president can be absolved of any culpability in holding black people back. In the discourse of those invested in white supremacy (both overt and covert) this means that there can be no more excuses, and that nothing is holding black people back anymore save for their individual and cultural pathologies and problems.
So for those who want to continue to be incredibly racist, but just not in open or overt ways, Barack Obama is hardly something to fear. He just might make your enjoyment easier and possibly more satisfying. The next time someone complains to you about discrimination in the workplace, in the job market, in the economy, at the hospital, even in the line at the DMV, just eagerly remind that whistleblower that a person of color is president now, and so that their argument is therefore puru ha' take'.
For these two points, I'm not referring to organized white supremacists groups, but individuals and more organic communities who are attached and draw much of their political identities from white supremacist ideologies. For organized white supremacists groups, there has already been some small murmurrings of the value for white racists if Obama was elected. The rationale behind this guarded and measured support is that Obama might be the catalyst that unifies white people, and makes them recognize their embattled and victimized position in today's multi-cultural and politically correct America.
Well known racist David Duke, in his essay "A Black Flag for White America," sums it up well with this statement, analogizing Obama with an ominous sore on the white body:
“Obama is like that new big dark spot on your arm that finally sends you to the doctor for some real medicine. … Obama is the pain that let’s [sic] your body know that something is dreadfully wrong. Obama will let the American people know that there is a real cancer eating away at the heart of our country and Republican aspirin will not only not cure it, but only masks the pain and makes you think you don’t need radical surgery. … My bet is that whether Obama wins or loses in November, millions of European Americans will inevitably react with new awareness of their heritage and the need for them to defend and advance it.”
Is my analysis endorsing this reasoning? Is this sort of new unbridled white racial enjoyment something that I want? Absolutely not. But I am fairly certain that this will happen because of the way Obama has risen to prominence and the sort of careful way in which he is supposed to represent a more equal and open America, yet those very things he is supposed to represent a resolution or a healing of, still cannot be mentioned or dealt with!
My pessimism on this point is derived from that fact that Americans and the media, and Obama himself go to incredible lengths to not reveal the role of racism in everyday life. And by racism I do not mean racist individuals, which is the way you can still talk about it publicly (and not be treated as a lunatic), but racism which is embedded in all the systems of life, from politics, the media, the economy, health care and the criminal justice system. The reason that Obama is not every racist's nightmare is because if he is elected, he will not be elected as a figure to force America to confront its racist past and present. He is not one of those "black leaders" who make white people so very uncomfortable.He will be elected as a sort of racial shortcut, a way in which America can simply gloss over its racism, and pretend that the problem has been solved or that there is nothing more to deal with here. In Senator Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia, he spoke of the racial elephant in the room of America, but took not steps to actually forcing a change, he simply mentioned it, and didn't give it any sort of critical or potentially transformative angle, just mentioned it.
I'm sure many expected him to go further, but why would he? He is not here to do that difficult work of restorative justice and racial transformation. He has a set of experiences and a particular history which make give us the impression that he would have a sort of critical ethnic consciousness and desire to change in very radical ways the way Americans see race and are racially invested and motivated. But of course, it would be impossible to get elected president if your platform was such. Instead Obama will most likely be ushered into office on a wave of people who want something done about the race problem in the United States, just as long as they aren't implicated in it, or have to give anything up in the process. And thus, Obama will be elected president, and while he will color the face of the nation slightly differently, he will leave unscathed and largely untouched the racial fantasies and logics that run this nation. It is because of this that, he is hardly the nightmare of invested racists in the United States, and while the story covering the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of Barack Obama for president was a joke, its not to difficult to believe.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Ireland and Baghdad
Bringing Ireland to Baghdad: How the Resistance Will Eventually Kick the Americans Out
By Gary Brecher, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008.
One thing the United States doesn't get about guerrilla warfare: It's not over until the guerrillas win.
It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.
The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol Pot. And of course, in both of these cases the troops who arrived were hated alien types: British paratroopers in Belfast, American "crusaders" in Baghdad. A few trigger-happy troops firing on local crowds and boom! Gratitude season was over, and the insurgency was in da house. In both places, the local rebel groups were ready: The IRA in Belfast dated back to 1916, and Sadr City had the same tradition of organizing neighborhood defensive gangs.
The trouble is, when po' folks organize, they have this fatal addiction to big, fancy titles and military fol-der-ol. It's easy to understand: It helps stomped-on people feel braver, have a little pride. So these groups always go for show, a lot of pomp and uniforms, and a traditional military organizational chart. Pretty soon the guy next door is a colonel, the clerk in the corner store is a four-star general, and they're strutting around in homemade uniforms feeling ready to take on Genghis Khan. Good for morale, but fatal to real urban guerrilla war. There are two reasons for that. First, these amateur armies get slaughtered when they go up against professional troops; and second, the traditional open organizational chart makes it very easy for the occupiers to identify everyone who's anyone in the insurgency. When an organization starts out fighting mobs from the enemy tribe, that's fine. So when the IRA tried to fight the British Army head to head in the 1970s, it got stomped; so did Sadr's militia when it went up against U.S. troops in April 2004.
See, when you start a guerrilla movement you can be absolutely sure that some of your members are spies. If you use your imagination a little, really try to imagine what it's like in an insurgent neighborhood, you'll soon see why.
Imagine you're a Sadr City homeboy, cheering the local "brigade" of the Mahdi Army. They march down the street, and everybody feels proud. They're guys you grew up with, know and like. So far so good. Then you get word that U.S. troops, or Iraqi troops, or somebody even scarier, have thrown your little brother in the back of a Humvee. People who get taken like that don't come back, or they come back really messed up. If that isn't scary enough, the troops can crush your family "legally"; after a few hours in an interrogation center, your little brother will sign anything, and next thing you know the Humvees are back to arrest your whole family.
Suddenly you're ready to name names, if they'll just let him out. And you know the names, because you know exactly who's who in the local "Mahdi Army," thanks to all that foolhardy paramilitary organization and open parading. And the guerrillas know you know, and they understand what kind of pressure you're under, which gives them a nasty choice: Kill you, threaten you or risk letting you trade your brother's life for theirs. If they kill you, the neighborhood turns against them; and besides, these guys aren't monsters, no matter what the TV tells you. If you lived in Sadr City, and if you had an ounce of guts, you'd join the Mahdi Army too. They're ordinary people, just like suicide bombers are ordinary people. You'll never understand them if you fall for thinking that they're all monster lunatics.
But the guerrillas have a nasty choice to make when they hear that your brother has been picked up by the army: If they let you live, you'll give them up, and they'll die slowly, under torture. And before they die they're going to name names too -- everybody does, under torture, no matter what the movies say -- bigger names, weapons caches, guerrilla agents inside the occupation government, the really big stuff.
That's basically what happened to the IRA in the 1970s. The IRA had done a good job fighting off Protestant mobs who tried to burn Catholics out of their neighborhood; for that sort of job, their large-unit organization into "Belfast Brigade" and "Derry Brigade" worked well enough. But after the British Army's best units occupied the province in 1969, they were up against "the professionals," as the army liked to call itself. And when you're fighting a first-world army with unlimited funds, manpower, technology and spy services, that sort of wide-open style is hopeless. Rounding up the IRA was as simple as photocopying its organizational charts: "Let's see, today we'll grab so-and-so, the local commander, and tomorrow his next-in-command, then a spot of tea." And if they didn't feel like arresting somebody themselves, they'd just hand his dossier, with photo, to one of the Protestant hit squads that were in bed with the intel services.
It was a wipeout. Within a few years, the IRA's best people ended up dead or in prison because they'd tried to straddle an impossible divide between guerrilla warfare and populist politics. They had plenty of time, sitting in internment camps like Long Kesh, to think over their mistakes, and it was in those cells that the brains of the outfit, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, came up with the exact same move that Sadr's making now.
Like Sadr just did, the IRA divided the "movement" into two parts. One would be a much smaller, more professional urban guerrilla armed wing divided into cells, not "brigades." Each cell would have maybe a half-dozen members, and if possible the members would be from different parts of Northern Ireland, so they wouldn't be obviously connected. Only the leader of the cell would know all the members, and that leader would only have contact with one guy from the main organization. That meant, to put it bluntly, that even under torture he couldn't tell enough to destroy the whole guerrilla movement.
Not only was this a safer way to fight, it was actually more effective than bigger paramilitary units in urban guerrilla fighting. The IRA had already found out the hard way that big, amateur "brigades" couldn't defend their neighborhoods against professional military attacks in the summer of 1972, during "Operation Motorman," when the British Army used Centurion tanks and other heavy equipment to smash through the pathetic barricades around "Free Derry" and the other "No-Go Zones" the IRA had tried to set up. Trivia point: As far as I know, this is still the only time MBTs have been used in military action within the U.K.
Sadr's "Mahdi Army" learned the same hard lesson when it tried to barricade Sadr City against the U.S. Army. The first blow came in April 2004, when Sadr ordered his amateur troops into the streets to fight the U.S. occupiers. They died like a Stallone comedy. Sheer massacre. That was lesson number one: Urban combat should be left to a few trained people, not amateurs with guns.
Then, after the surge, when we finally started applying commonsense counterinsurgency tactics, came hard lesson number two, the same one the IRA had learned: If you're running an open "army," it's very easy for the occupier to know who to snatch. In the past few months, U.S.-Iraqi forces have smashed their way into Sadr City and grabbed most of the Mahdi Army leadership.
That's the situation Sadr is facing, and it's incredibly similar to the one the IRA faced back in the days of disco, with one big, big difference: The level of violence in Iraq is, oh, about a zillion times higher than it was in Northern Ireland. In more than 30 years of "war" up there, only about 3,100 people died. Nobody knows how high the toll's running in Iraq, but you can add a couple of zeros to that 3,100 and not be too far off. U.S. troop losses alone are already higher than the total number of dead in 30 years of Northern Ireland fighting, after only five years of war.
So Sadr has had a big slap in the face, and he's got to go into relaunch mode. Luckily for him, he has outside help in the brains department, with advisers from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the very best guerrilla movement in the world right now, and Iranian intelligence, the MVPs of this whole war. I'd take that lineup over hick boneheads like Cheney any day.
Sadr's answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He's going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There'll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there'll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.")
After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.
My guess is that Sadr is planning to make exactly that kind of move: dividing his forces into a big-tent, peaceful political party for the ordinary Shia civilian and forming a cell-based, small, deniable, professional urban guerrilla force with his best fighters.
Some of the recent hits on U.S. targets in Baghdad show that the Shia are shifting from open rebellion to smart, well-planned hits on the targets that hurt the occupier most: U.S. troops and civilian staff in Baghdad.
On June 24, two weeks after Sadr announced his reorganization, "Shiite extremists" in Sadr City carried out one of the most effective bombings of the war, blasting a district council meeting and killing two U.S. soldiers, two State Department officials and six Iraqis who'd been working with the Americans. That's exactly the kind of operation Sadr's new force wants to specialize in: fast, secret, aimed at the Americans, with no civilian casualties. Compare that attack to the standard Sunni car-bomber who blows up a whole street full of kids to get a couple of cops, and you can see that somebody in Sadr City is playing smarter than the average Iraqi insurgent. You can't do something that slick with the sort of amateur, open paramilitary group Sadr used to have. That's Hezbollah-style professionals at work.
Meanwhile, on the political front, Sadr is setting up the new political wing to "liberate minds," meaning "control the new Shia Baghdad." You see, what the U.S. press isn't telling us, but I know from my top-secret military moles in Iraq, is that there are no more Sunni districts in Baghdad. Baghdad is becoming a Shia city fast. Formerly Sunni districts like Karkh are now majority-Shia. There are a few holdout Sunni neighborhoods ("nahias") and little slices of neighborhoods ("malhallas.")
But they're crumbling, too. Baghdad is a Shia city and getting Shia-er by the day. So Sadr is in position to be mayor and warlord at the same time. Lord, he must laugh his Orson Welles beard off when he reads these ignorant U.S. military "analysts" saying he's renouncing violence.
By Gary Brecher, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008.
One thing the United States doesn't get about guerrilla warfare: It's not over until the guerrillas win.
It's very easy to see what's up in Iraq right now -- if you're willing to face it. The trouble is, most "experts" aren't willing. That has been the pattern right from the beginning. We didn't want to admit there even was an insurgency, and even now, nobody misses a chance to declare that "the surge worked," as if that translates to "we win, it's over, let's go home."
Fact number one about guerrilla wars: They're not over until the guerrillas win. Mao set out the guerrilla's viewpoint 80 years ago: "The enemy wants to fight a short war, but we simply will not let him." The longer the guerrillas stay in the game, the sicker the occupying army gets. Sooner or later, they'll go home -- because they can. It's that simple, and it works. So anyone who tells you it's over is just plain ignorant. That's one thing you can rule out instantly.
But people keep saying it. The most recent and ridiculous take is that "Moqtada al Sadr is renouncing violence." Talk about naive! What led these geniuses to that conclusion is that on June 13, Moqtada al Sadr, leader of the biggest and toughest Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, sent out a big announcement: "From now on, the resistance will be exclusively conducted by only one group. ... The weapons will be held exclusively by this group." In other words, he's switching from a big, sloppy, amateur force to a select group of professional guerrillas.
Also, there'll be a non-military role for the civilian supporter, working on local politics to "liberate the minds from domination and globalization."
The glass-half-full school of thought took Sadr's announcement to mean that he's getting out of the violence business, trying to marginalize the "special groups," which is U.S. Army talk for hardcore Shia militias, and move his party to the good ol' middle of the road. See, that's classic misreading of Iraqi reality as if it were U.S. politics. It's like we keep trying to pretend that Iraq under occupation is just a dusty version of Iowa. Sorry, but a country under enemy occupation doesn't think or act like Des Moines. If you want a good analogy to what Sadr is actually doing, it's easy to find one, but you can't look at American politics. You need to go to research other countries occupied by enemy armies, where urban insurgencies started off like Sadr's Mahdi Army did -- as neighborhood defense groups protecting the locals against mobs from across the ethnic divide. And when you start thinking on those lines, there's a really close, clear parallel between what Sadr is doing now and another insurgency that shifted from neighborhood-gang/paramilitary organization to small armed cells, with civilian support channeled into an above-ground political wing: the IRA back in the 1970s.
The basic parallels between Shia Iraqis and the IRA are clear enough: They're both minorities that got stomped on by the dominant tribe -- in Northern Ireland, Protestant mobs used to burn and stomp at will when they were in the mood; and in Shia Iraq, Sunni goons went on regular murder runs in Shia neighborhoods. So both places, Catholic Belfast and Shia Baghdad, got used to defending their own neighborhoods because nobody else was going to defend them. Then they were "saved" by foreign troops from countries that had always been their biggest enemy: The Ulster Catholics were occupied by the British Army, and Shia Iraq by the Americans. Of course, it was all supposed to be gratitude and happiness, the way the occupiers saw it. They expected the slum people to be grateful. Well, there haven't been too many people in history who've been glad to be occupied by foreign troops. Even when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to root out the Khmer Rouge, a lot of Khmer were more angry at the foreigners than pleased to be rid of Pol Pot. And of course, in both of these cases the troops who arrived were hated alien types: British paratroopers in Belfast, American "crusaders" in Baghdad. A few trigger-happy troops firing on local crowds and boom! Gratitude season was over, and the insurgency was in da house. In both places, the local rebel groups were ready: The IRA in Belfast dated back to 1916, and Sadr City had the same tradition of organizing neighborhood defensive gangs.
The trouble is, when po' folks organize, they have this fatal addiction to big, fancy titles and military fol-der-ol. It's easy to understand: It helps stomped-on people feel braver, have a little pride. So these groups always go for show, a lot of pomp and uniforms, and a traditional military organizational chart. Pretty soon the guy next door is a colonel, the clerk in the corner store is a four-star general, and they're strutting around in homemade uniforms feeling ready to take on Genghis Khan. Good for morale, but fatal to real urban guerrilla war. There are two reasons for that. First, these amateur armies get slaughtered when they go up against professional troops; and second, the traditional open organizational chart makes it very easy for the occupiers to identify everyone who's anyone in the insurgency. When an organization starts out fighting mobs from the enemy tribe, that's fine. So when the IRA tried to fight the British Army head to head in the 1970s, it got stomped; so did Sadr's militia when it went up against U.S. troops in April 2004.
See, when you start a guerrilla movement you can be absolutely sure that some of your members are spies. If you use your imagination a little, really try to imagine what it's like in an insurgent neighborhood, you'll soon see why.
Imagine you're a Sadr City homeboy, cheering the local "brigade" of the Mahdi Army. They march down the street, and everybody feels proud. They're guys you grew up with, know and like. So far so good. Then you get word that U.S. troops, or Iraqi troops, or somebody even scarier, have thrown your little brother in the back of a Humvee. People who get taken like that don't come back, or they come back really messed up. If that isn't scary enough, the troops can crush your family "legally"; after a few hours in an interrogation center, your little brother will sign anything, and next thing you know the Humvees are back to arrest your whole family.
Suddenly you're ready to name names, if they'll just let him out. And you know the names, because you know exactly who's who in the local "Mahdi Army," thanks to all that foolhardy paramilitary organization and open parading. And the guerrillas know you know, and they understand what kind of pressure you're under, which gives them a nasty choice: Kill you, threaten you or risk letting you trade your brother's life for theirs. If they kill you, the neighborhood turns against them; and besides, these guys aren't monsters, no matter what the TV tells you. If you lived in Sadr City, and if you had an ounce of guts, you'd join the Mahdi Army too. They're ordinary people, just like suicide bombers are ordinary people. You'll never understand them if you fall for thinking that they're all monster lunatics.
But the guerrillas have a nasty choice to make when they hear that your brother has been picked up by the army: If they let you live, you'll give them up, and they'll die slowly, under torture. And before they die they're going to name names too -- everybody does, under torture, no matter what the movies say -- bigger names, weapons caches, guerrilla agents inside the occupation government, the really big stuff.
That's basically what happened to the IRA in the 1970s. The IRA had done a good job fighting off Protestant mobs who tried to burn Catholics out of their neighborhood; for that sort of job, their large-unit organization into "Belfast Brigade" and "Derry Brigade" worked well enough. But after the British Army's best units occupied the province in 1969, they were up against "the professionals," as the army liked to call itself. And when you're fighting a first-world army with unlimited funds, manpower, technology and spy services, that sort of wide-open style is hopeless. Rounding up the IRA was as simple as photocopying its organizational charts: "Let's see, today we'll grab so-and-so, the local commander, and tomorrow his next-in-command, then a spot of tea." And if they didn't feel like arresting somebody themselves, they'd just hand his dossier, with photo, to one of the Protestant hit squads that were in bed with the intel services.
It was a wipeout. Within a few years, the IRA's best people ended up dead or in prison because they'd tried to straddle an impossible divide between guerrilla warfare and populist politics. They had plenty of time, sitting in internment camps like Long Kesh, to think over their mistakes, and it was in those cells that the brains of the outfit, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, came up with the exact same move that Sadr's making now.
Like Sadr just did, the IRA divided the "movement" into two parts. One would be a much smaller, more professional urban guerrilla armed wing divided into cells, not "brigades." Each cell would have maybe a half-dozen members, and if possible the members would be from different parts of Northern Ireland, so they wouldn't be obviously connected. Only the leader of the cell would know all the members, and that leader would only have contact with one guy from the main organization. That meant, to put it bluntly, that even under torture he couldn't tell enough to destroy the whole guerrilla movement.
Not only was this a safer way to fight, it was actually more effective than bigger paramilitary units in urban guerrilla fighting. The IRA had already found out the hard way that big, amateur "brigades" couldn't defend their neighborhoods against professional military attacks in the summer of 1972, during "Operation Motorman," when the British Army used Centurion tanks and other heavy equipment to smash through the pathetic barricades around "Free Derry" and the other "No-Go Zones" the IRA had tried to set up. Trivia point: As far as I know, this is still the only time MBTs have been used in military action within the U.K.
Sadr's "Mahdi Army" learned the same hard lesson when it tried to barricade Sadr City against the U.S. Army. The first blow came in April 2004, when Sadr ordered his amateur troops into the streets to fight the U.S. occupiers. They died like a Stallone comedy. Sheer massacre. That was lesson number one: Urban combat should be left to a few trained people, not amateurs with guns.
Then, after the surge, when we finally started applying commonsense counterinsurgency tactics, came hard lesson number two, the same one the IRA had learned: If you're running an open "army," it's very easy for the occupier to know who to snatch. In the past few months, U.S.-Iraqi forces have smashed their way into Sadr City and grabbed most of the Mahdi Army leadership.
That's the situation Sadr is facing, and it's incredibly similar to the one the IRA faced back in the days of disco, with one big, big difference: The level of violence in Iraq is, oh, about a zillion times higher than it was in Northern Ireland. In more than 30 years of "war" up there, only about 3,100 people died. Nobody knows how high the toll's running in Iraq, but you can add a couple of zeros to that 3,100 and not be too far off. U.S. troop losses alone are already higher than the total number of dead in 30 years of Northern Ireland fighting, after only five years of war.
So Sadr has had a big slap in the face, and he's got to go into relaunch mode. Luckily for him, he has outside help in the brains department, with advisers from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the very best guerrilla movement in the world right now, and Iranian intelligence, the MVPs of this whole war. I'd take that lineup over hick boneheads like Cheney any day.
Sadr's answer was clear, from that announcement he made in mid-June: He's going to divide the movement into two parts, just like the IRA did. There'll be a big-tent political party for the ordinary civilian supporter, backed by a small, well-trained urban guerrilla movement. And there'll be a firewall between the two groups, so Sadr can deny any armed operation that gets messy, just like Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein used to do when an IRA attack went wrong. The IRA provides Sadr with a perfect blueprint on how to do it. (It even had a slogan to describe its new tactics, saying it would win "with an Armalite in one hand and a ballot in the other.")
After its reorganization, the IRA fought much smarter, pushing its political party, Sinn Fein, and working to set up top-secret guerrilla cells in London to hurt the Brits where they lived and take the war away from the Northern Ireland slums. Over the long term, it worked: After it blasted London a couple of times, it cut a deal just in time to be out of the terrorism business before 9/11. As of now, not a single IRA fighter is in prison and Sinn Fein is the fastest-growing party in Ireland.
My guess is that Sadr is planning to make exactly that kind of move: dividing his forces into a big-tent, peaceful political party for the ordinary Shia civilian and forming a cell-based, small, deniable, professional urban guerrilla force with his best fighters.
Some of the recent hits on U.S. targets in Baghdad show that the Shia are shifting from open rebellion to smart, well-planned hits on the targets that hurt the occupier most: U.S. troops and civilian staff in Baghdad.
On June 24, two weeks after Sadr announced his reorganization, "Shiite extremists" in Sadr City carried out one of the most effective bombings of the war, blasting a district council meeting and killing two U.S. soldiers, two State Department officials and six Iraqis who'd been working with the Americans. That's exactly the kind of operation Sadr's new force wants to specialize in: fast, secret, aimed at the Americans, with no civilian casualties. Compare that attack to the standard Sunni car-bomber who blows up a whole street full of kids to get a couple of cops, and you can see that somebody in Sadr City is playing smarter than the average Iraqi insurgent. You can't do something that slick with the sort of amateur, open paramilitary group Sadr used to have. That's Hezbollah-style professionals at work.
Meanwhile, on the political front, Sadr is setting up the new political wing to "liberate minds," meaning "control the new Shia Baghdad." You see, what the U.S. press isn't telling us, but I know from my top-secret military moles in Iraq, is that there are no more Sunni districts in Baghdad. Baghdad is becoming a Shia city fast. Formerly Sunni districts like Karkh are now majority-Shia. There are a few holdout Sunni neighborhoods ("nahias") and little slices of neighborhoods ("malhallas.")
But they're crumbling, too. Baghdad is a Shia city and getting Shia-er by the day. So Sadr is in position to be mayor and warlord at the same time. Lord, he must laugh his Orson Welles beard off when he reads these ignorant U.S. military "analysts" saying he's renouncing violence.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Guam and the Banality of American Colonialism: Covering the 2008 Democratic Primaries
Here's a piece I recently wrote for the Asian American Journalists Association on the media coverage of the Guam primary a few months back. The one featured on their Fresh View website is a shorter version, I'm posting the entire piece below.
Debi di bai hu hentra Si Sinot Antonio Salas, ni' kumombida yu' para bai tugiyi i inetnon-na.
*****************************************************
2008 Democratic Primaries: Guam and the Banality of American Colonialism
By Michael Lujan Bevacqua
The unincorporated United States territory of Guam, an island accustomed to being left off the radar of the American media, has been showered with press coverage over the past few months, due to its participation in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential nominating process on May 3rd.
For a small island of 170,000 residents, which is located 4,000 miles west of Hawai’i on the edge of Asia in the Western Pacific, and is often treated like a foreign country or a bastard stepchild of the United States, this combination of participating in America’s great democracy and the huge spike in national media recognition was exhilarating. This status of being an unincorporated territory is often discussed metaphorically as Guam being “foreign in a domestic sense,” or an ambiguous political appendage of the United States, which in terms of the Federal Government, the US military, the American media, and even everyday Americans, can casually be counted as American in one moment, as something else, something foreign the next.
Despite this curious political status of Guam being central to its relationship to the United States, this increased level of media coverage was almost completely silent on what the island’s political status represents in terms of providing a critique of America’s claims to be a bastion of democracy.
**
During the run up to this primary season this year, the American media fell hard for the myth that Senator Hillary Clinton’s nomination was inevitable and that the nominating process would be over by the first week of February. The primary schedule itself is helps create this sort of expectation, since it is set up to ensure that by the time roughly half of the contests have taken place, a nominee should already be chosen. By (the first) Super Tuesday however, it was very clear that this race would not be over anytime soon, and suddenly the United States, the legions of political pundits and reporters, the Democratic party, found themselves overwhelmed with more than half a dozen remaining primaries to contest. Suddenly, the votes of millions who were not really supposed to count, could conceivably count. States and primaries at the end of the calendar, which would usually be ignored if a nominee was selected early, were receiving huge amounts of coverage and treated as darlings by the campaigns of the two remaining candidates.
But amidst the counting of all these votes which were not supposed to count, there was also new attention given to a set of votes which were suddenly valuable, but were assumed to not count in a different, sort of exceptional way, namely the votes of Democrats in the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico. As the struggle over delegates and votes worn on, even the delegates prizes of these two territories was battled over. In the case of Puerto Rico this could be understood, as the delegate total there was 66, and in the waning days of the race, this territorial prize outshined the totals of states such as Montana and West Virginia. In the case of Guam, however the delegate total was minute, with only 4 pledged delegates and 5 super-delegates at stake.
With every delegate crucial at that stage of the race, Guam was thrown onto the American political radar and received a flurry of newspaper and cable news coverage, as well as attention from the candidates themselves, who each conducted several interviews to Guam media over the phone or via satellite. In the primary held on May 3rd, a little over 4,500 Guam Democrats voted, and Senator Barack Obama won the contest by just seven votes.
**
Media both in Guam and in the United States focused on this aspect of participation, this idea of Guam at last being included in the glories of American democracy. On Guam, the media discussed this issue primarily through expressions by island residents of gratitude for the privilege of being included, of getting to vote, or getting to help make history this year by nominating an African American or a woman for President. In the national media, the creating of any story on Guam and its primary was overshadowed by the fact that despite the island being a territory of the United States for 110 years, it was still something which few Americans really knew anything about. These news pieces became simplistic introductions to the island, which provided small snippets of its history and its contemporary existence, focusing primarily on its strategic military importance, today as the “tip of America’s spear” in the Pacific and its role as an American battleground against the Japanese during World War II.
Although these pieces were dedicated to informing the American public about what Guam is, they were nonetheless rife with inaccurate information. Most notably, a CNN news-piece created in the days prior to the Guam primary featured video footage from the wrong island in their portrayal of life on Guam.
**
Amidst all this new coverage dedicated to explaining the “what” of Guam, there was a huge almost overwhelming silence over an even more obvious question, the “why?” of Guam. Namely, since Guam is not a state, why does America have it? Why is it attached to the United States? Why is it a territory? What does being an unincorporated territory of the United States mean?
For instance, it was peculiar that in the middle of all this discussion about how the votes and delegates from Guam will be counted, and how similar the island is with other states that were voting, there was little to no substantive discussion about what types of votes and delegates Guam actually has, namely it along with American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and the Democrats abroad have half delegate votes. Guam in its primary actually selected eight pledged delegates, but each only counts as half a vote. To put this in perspective, the penalty which was eventually levied against the Democrats of Michigan and Florida, whereby their delegate votes were reduced to half votes, is the normal arrangement for how Guam gets to participate.
**
But even as these half votes were being celebrated for being counted, there was also a persistent strain in media reports around Guam and Puerto Rico, that in actuality their votes don’t really count and shouldn’t count because of the political status of these islands and their residents. Residents of Guam and Puerto Rico are US citizens, but so long as they remain in their islands, their rights and privileges as citizens are limited to non-existent, especially in terms of political representation at the Federal level. Although the territories of the United States each hold Democratic primaries, they have no formal role in the general election, their votes are not counted and they have no electoral college votes. Just as they have no vote for President of the United States, they also have no voting power in the United States Congress, save for a sole non-voting delegate from each territory in the House of Representatives.
When Hillary Clinton added her anticipated primary victory in Puerto Rico to the slate of reasons why she should remain in the race, there were slight murmurs of disapproval and uncertainty in the press. Chris Matthews on his show Hardball made repeated statements calling into question the legitimacy of Puerto Rico participating in the primary process since they can’t participate in the vote that really counts. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas from the website Dailykos made similar statements, questioning whether or not it was appropriate to count these votes, for these people to have their say, since they and their voices cannot actually be counted.
These concerns over counting votes that don’t really count, and the issue of Guam receiving only half votes for its delegates is directly related to the issue which media in the United States almost completely ignored, save for the invoking of banal phrases such as “unincorporated territory,” namely Guam’s subordinate status in relation to the United States. This term “unincorporated territory” is in reality a euphemism for harsher labels such as “colony,” and notwithstanding the ignorance of the American people, the past century of Guam and United States relations can provide a model was modern colonialism. The lack of attention to the question of “why the US has Guam?” is due to the inability of the media in the United States, as well as most Americans and nearly all politicians, to recognize the United States as a colonial power.
The lack of current political representations and rights is only the most recent example of this colonial relationship. Guam’s history is rich with other examples, most notably is 43 period prior to World War II, where it was literally run as a military colony by the United States Navy and the massive legal and illegal takings of land from the island’s indigenous people the Chamorros, after World War II in order to militarize the island. The impacts of this history can still be found on the island today, whether in terms of record breaking recruitment statistics amongst the island’s youth for military service, the drastic poisoning of the island’s environment, or the fact that in an island which is roughly 200 squares miles in size, 33 percent of it belongs to the United States Navy and Air Force.
Today, despite the silence on this matter, Guam remains one of the more than a dozen territories remaining in the world which are officially recognized as colonies or “non-self-governing territories” by the United Nations. Under the United Nation’s resolution 1541, the United States is mandated to assist the island in undergoing a process of decolonization which will at minimum, provide a self-determination plebiscite for the island’s indigenous people. The three options which can be considered for this vote are statehood, free association and independence. The Federal Government however has rejected this mandate and decried any attempt to resolve the issue of Guam’s political status through the international community and the United Nations as interference and an infringement upon its domestic affairs.
While the majority of the island’s residents are uncertain about what the next political status for their island should be, and divided over whether any status change is possible or even desirable, the island has slowly over time developed a strong and determined decolonization movement. As part of this movement, for the past two decades Chamorros have made annual pilgrimages to the United Nations in New York to testify as to the state of affairs on Guam, and also call upon the United States to recognize and see through its obligation to decolonize the island. During the testimonies given to the Fourth Committee at the United Nations in 2006, one speaker noted that the representative of the United States who was present in the room while they testified, would not even look at them, not even acknowledge that they were there.
**
This metaphor of refusing to acknowledge the obvious, refusing to admit to a presence which is right beside you in the room, is also apt in describing the media coverage, or lack there of on the issue of Guam’s political status and its potential decolonization.
During the 2008 primary season, where history has indeed been made with the nomination of Senator Obama for President, there is an exuberant willingness amongst the American media to celebrate all the wonders of American democracy and the promise of American greatness that was being actualized. Yet, at the same time there is an almost banal refusal to admit to or even report on, in the cases of Guam and Puerto Rico and the other territories of the American Insular Empire, what these islands attest to in terms of the limits of that democracy and gaps in that “glorious” promise.
By Michael Lujan Bevacqua
The unincorporated United States territory of Guam, an island accustomed to being left off the radar of the American media, has been showered with press coverage over the past few months, due to its participation in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential nominating process on May 3rd.
For a small island of 170,000 residents, which is located 4,000 miles west of Hawai’i on the edge of Asia in the Western Pacific, and is often treated like a foreign country or a bastard stepchild of the United States, this combination of participating in America’s great democracy and the huge spike in national media recognition was exhilarating. This status of being an unincorporated territory is often discussed metaphorically as Guam being “foreign in a domestic sense,” or an ambiguous political appendage of the United States, which in terms of the Federal Government, the US military, the American media, and even everyday Americans, can casually be counted as American in one moment, as something else, something foreign the next.Despite this curious political status of Guam being central to its relationship to the United States, this increased level of media coverage was almost completely silent on what the island’s political status represents in terms of providing a critique of America’s claims to be a bastion of democracy.
**
During the run up to this primary season this year, the American media fell hard for the myth that Senator Hillary Clinton’s nomination was inevitable and that the nominating process would be over by the first week of February. The primary schedule itself is helps create this sort of expectation, since it is set up to ensure that by the time roughly half of the contests have taken place, a nominee should already be chosen. By (the first) Super Tuesday however, it was very clear that this race would not be over anytime soon, and suddenly the United States, the legions of political pundits and reporters, the Democratic party, found themselves overwhelmed with more than half a dozen remaining primaries to contest. Suddenly, the votes of millions who were not really supposed to count, could conceivably count. States and primaries at the end of the calendar, which would usually be ignored if a nominee was selected early, were receiving huge amounts of coverage and treated as darlings by the campaigns of the two remaining candidates.
But amidst the counting of all these votes which were not supposed to count, there was also new attention given to a set of votes which were suddenly valuable, but were assumed to not count in a different, sort of exceptional way, namely the votes of Democrats in the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico. As the struggle over delegates and votes worn on, even the delegates prizes of these two territories was battled over. In the case of Puerto Rico this could be understood, as the delegate total there was 66, and in the waning days of the race, this territorial prize outshined the totals of states such as Montana and West Virginia. In the case of Guam, however the delegate total was minute, with only 4 pledged delegates and 5 super-delegates at stake.With every delegate crucial at that stage of the race, Guam was thrown onto the American political radar and received a flurry of newspaper and cable news coverage, as well as attention from the candidates themselves, who each conducted several interviews to Guam media over the phone or via satellite. In the primary held on May 3rd, a little over 4,500 Guam Democrats voted, and Senator Barack Obama won the contest by just seven votes.
**
Media both in Guam and in the United States focused on this aspect of participation, this idea of Guam at last being included in the glories of American democracy. On Guam, the media discussed this issue primarily through expressions by island residents of gratitude for the privilege of being included, of getting to vote, or getting to help make history this year by nominating an African American or a woman for President. In the national media, the creating of any story on Guam and its primary was overshadowed by the fact that despite the island being a territory of the United States for 110 years, it was still something which few Americans really knew anything about. These news pieces became simplistic introductions to the island, which provided small snippets of its history and its contemporary existence, focusing primarily on its strategic military importance, today as the “tip of America’s spear” in the Pacific and its role as an American battleground against the Japanese during World War II.Although these pieces were dedicated to informing the American public about what Guam is, they were nonetheless rife with inaccurate information. Most notably, a CNN news-piece created in the days prior to the Guam primary featured video footage from the wrong island in their portrayal of life on Guam.
**
Amidst all this new coverage dedicated to explaining the “what” of Guam, there was a huge almost overwhelming silence over an even more obvious question, the “why?” of Guam. Namely, since Guam is not a state, why does America have it? Why is it attached to the United States? Why is it a territory? What does being an unincorporated territory of the United States mean?
For instance, it was peculiar that in the middle of all this discussion about how the votes and delegates from Guam will be counted, and how similar the island is with other states that were voting, there was little to no substantive discussion about what types of votes and delegates Guam actually has, namely it along with American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and the Democrats abroad have half delegate votes. Guam in its primary actually selected eight pledged delegates, but each only counts as half a vote. To put this in perspective, the penalty which was eventually levied against the Democrats of Michigan and Florida, whereby their delegate votes were reduced to half votes, is the normal arrangement for how Guam gets to participate.
**
But even as these half votes were being celebrated for being counted, there was also a persistent strain in media reports around Guam and Puerto Rico, that in actuality their votes don’t really count and shouldn’t count because of the political status of these islands and their residents. Residents of Guam and Puerto Rico are US citizens, but so long as they remain in their islands, their rights and privileges as citizens are limited to non-existent, especially in terms of political representation at the Federal level. Although the territories of the United States each hold Democratic primaries, they have no formal role in the general election, their votes are not counted and they have no electoral college votes. Just as they have no vote for President of the United States, they also have no voting power in the United States Congress, save for a sole non-voting delegate from each territory in the House of Representatives.
When Hillary Clinton added her anticipated primary victory in Puerto Rico to the slate of reasons why she should remain in the race, there were slight murmurs of disapproval and uncertainty in the press. Chris Matthews on his show Hardball made repeated statements calling into question the legitimacy of Puerto Rico participating in the primary process since they can’t participate in the vote that really counts. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas from the website Dailykos made similar statements, questioning whether or not it was appropriate to count these votes, for these people to have their say, since they and their voices cannot actually be counted.
These concerns over counting votes that don’t really count, and the issue of Guam receiving only half votes for its delegates is directly related to the issue which media in the United States almost completely ignored, save for the invoking of banal phrases such as “unincorporated territory,” namely Guam’s subordinate status in relation to the United States. This term “unincorporated territory” is in reality a euphemism for harsher labels such as “colony,” and notwithstanding the ignorance of the American people, the past century of Guam and United States relations can provide a model was modern colonialism. The lack of attention to the question of “why the US has Guam?” is due to the inability of the media in the United States, as well as most Americans and nearly all politicians, to recognize the United States as a colonial power.The lack of current political representations and rights is only the most recent example of this colonial relationship. Guam’s history is rich with other examples, most notably is 43 period prior to World War II, where it was literally run as a military colony by the United States Navy and the massive legal and illegal takings of land from the island’s indigenous people the Chamorros, after World War II in order to militarize the island. The impacts of this history can still be found on the island today, whether in terms of record breaking recruitment statistics amongst the island’s youth for military service, the drastic poisoning of the island’s environment, or the fact that in an island which is roughly 200 squares miles in size, 33 percent of it belongs to the United States Navy and Air Force.
Today, despite the silence on this matter, Guam remains one of the more than a dozen territories remaining in the world which are officially recognized as colonies or “non-self-governing territories” by the United Nations. Under the United Nation’s resolution 1541, the United States is mandated to assist the island in undergoing a process of decolonization which will at minimum, provide a self-determination plebiscite for the island’s indigenous people. The three options which can be considered for this vote are statehood, free association and independence. The Federal Government however has rejected this mandate and decried any attempt to resolve the issue of Guam’s political status through the international community and the United Nations as interference and an infringement upon its domestic affairs.While the majority of the island’s residents are uncertain about what the next political status for their island should be, and divided over whether any status change is possible or even desirable, the island has slowly over time developed a strong and determined decolonization movement. As part of this movement, for the past two decades Chamorros have made annual pilgrimages to the United Nations in New York to testify as to the state of affairs on Guam, and also call upon the United States to recognize and see through its obligation to decolonize the island. During the testimonies given to the Fourth Committee at the United Nations in 2006, one speaker noted that the representative of the United States who was present in the room while they testified, would not even look at them, not even acknowledge that they were there.
**
This metaphor of refusing to acknowledge the obvious, refusing to admit to a presence which is right beside you in the room, is also apt in describing the media coverage, or lack there of on the issue of Guam’s political status and its potential decolonization.
During the 2008 primary season, where history has indeed been made with the nomination of Senator Obama for President, there is an exuberant willingness amongst the American media to celebrate all the wonders of American democracy and the promise of American greatness that was being actualized. Yet, at the same time there is an almost banal refusal to admit to or even report on, in the cases of Guam and Puerto Rico and the other territories of the American Insular Empire, what these islands attest to in terms of the limits of that democracy and gaps in that “glorious” promise.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Clark Kontra McCain
No time to post anything today, got plenty of things to do, but let me sate you with some other peoples' thoughts on the whole Wesley Clark and John McCain dance of death over Presidential qualifications.
******************************
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by The Huffington Post
Gen. Clark and That POW Thing McCain Hates Talking About
by Paul Waldman
The knives sure are out for retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
In case you missed it: Interviewed by CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday’s Face the Nation, Clark said that for all the national security experience John McCain claims, he never held a position of command during wartime. “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war,” Clark said. “He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility.” Clark then continued, “But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’ He hasn’t made those calls, Bob.”
Then came this:
SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean –CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.
From the response of McCain’s defenders in the press, you’d think Clark had claimed that John McCain was never really in Vietnam at all. CNN’s Rick Sanchez described it with an incredulous expression as “dissing, some might say Swiftboating, John McCain’s military record.” ABC’s Rick Klein accused Clark of “calling into question, in surprisingly sharp language, Sen. John McCain’s military record.” Over at the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib and Sara Murray were aghast: “The one certainty of the 2008 campaign, it might have seemed, was that Sen. John McCain would be acknowledged all around as a war hero for his service in Vietnam — but apparently not.”
Of course, they were just wrong: Clark didn’t call McCain’s record into question; he didn’t say McCain wasn’t a hero, and he sure as hell didn’t “Swiftboat” McCain. Not only was he responding directly to Schieffer’s question, using Schieffer’s words, but he explicitly honored McCain’s service. Those key pieces of context were left out of the reports that all three networks broadcast the next day, as well as many of the reports in newspapers and on television that followed. In The New York Times, Jeff Zeleny not only removed the context, but he simply repeated the McCain campaign’s outrageously disingenuous charge that Clark was “impugning Mr. McCain’s heroism.”
But to understand why the press is reacting with such outrage, you have to understand what they’ve been saying about McCain for the last decade.
There’s a myth out there that the McCain campaign and the media have cooperated to create. It says that John McCain is reluctant to exploit his Vietnam POW story for political advantage, so modest and full of integrity is he. We’ve seen this repeated again and again, not just by McCain and his supporters but by reporters who ought to know better.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
From the first time he ran for Congress in 1982 up to the present day, McCain has made his POW story the centerpiece of his entire political career. The key moment of that 1982 campaign was when he responded to his opponent’s (absolutely true) accusation that McCain was a carpetbagger by saying, “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” At every point since, it has been the deft use of this tool that has brought McCain renewed attention or won him a key victory.
McCain has every right to talk about Vietnam all he wants — it’s his story, and no serious person has ever disputed the details. But don’t tell us he’s reluctant to use it, because he isn’t. He talks about it to voters, he talks about it to contributors, he talks about it to reporters, he talks about it with seriousness, he jokes about it, and his campaign makes every attempt it can to remind people of what happened to him in Vietnam.
As I said, there’s nothing wrong with that. But what happened with Gen. Clark reveals the McCain Rules, as he and the press would have us understand them. Here’s how things are supposed to work: It’s fine for the McCain campaign to run ads touting his time as a POW, create web videos touting his time as a POW, have him mention his time as a POW in speeches, and have him bring it up in debates (remember “I was tied up at the time”?). In other words, it’s fine to have John McCain’s entire presidential run be presented through the filter of his POW experience. Should, however, someone even ask the question of whether the fact that McCain was a POW really qualifies him to be president, that would be a deeply offensive affront to all that is right and good, and must not be tolerated. Talk about having it both ways.
Let’s keep in mind that no one seems to have argued with Clark on the merits of his claim. No one responded by saying, “General Clark is wrong — in fact, McCain’s POW experience does qualify him to be president.” I suppose one could make that argument, but I haven’t seen anyone actually make it. Instead, what they have said is that Clark was out of bounds to even raise the issue. To even assert that McCain’s Vietnam experience isn’t in and of itself a qualification for the Oval Office is such an unforgivable transgression that its merits don’t need to be addressed.
There is, however, one person who wouldn’t disagree with Clark’s statement that being a POW doesn’t qualify you for the presidency. When asked by the National Journal in 2003, “Do you think that military service inherently makes somebody better equipped to be commander-in-chief?” this politician answered, “Absolutely not. History shows that some of our greatest leaders have had little or no military experience. … I have advised [a presidential candidate] that I’d be very careful about how much you talk about that, because you don’t want it to sound self-serving.” The person who said that was John McCain, and the presidential candidate he was talking about was John Kerry.
For years, we’ve watched as reporters have dropped the fact that McCain was a POW into their stories, apropos of nothing, as if it were merely part of his name… John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, visited a farm to discuss the dairy industry. I kid, but it seems that any criticism of McCain’s character is greeted with “But he was a POW!” When Howard Dean called McCain an “opportunist” back in April, Chris Wallace of Fox News indignantly asked Sen. John Kerry, “Do you think John McCain was an opportunist when he refused to take early release from a North Vietnamese prison camp?” Just last week, The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that though McCain has flip-flopped on immigration, taxes, and a host of other issues, it’s really OK, because “we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over.”
So when Gen. Clark, or anyone else, says that the fact that McCain suffered as a POW forty years ago is really neither here nor there when it comes to what the next president will be faced with, it’s no surprise that McCain’s fanboys in the media react with such high dudgeon. After all, to suggest that the POW story is only one piece of McCain’s biography, and not the be-all-end-all on which the next president should be chosen, is as much an indictment of the press as it is of McCain.
Paul Waldman of Media Matters Action Network is the author or coauthor of four books on politics and media, including his most recent work, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, coauthored with David Brock.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
**********************************************
Well, if your appetite for cuteness aren't satisfied by these videos, I guess I can understand. Ti nina'malulok yu' lokkue'. With a deluge of white white haired faces such as Bob Schieffer (not cute), John McCain (NOT CUTE) and Wesley Clark (moderately cute), I'm definitely feeling wanting too.
But thankfully my daughter Sumahi is here to intercede and help us all out. Check out this latest video of hers, which is almost too cute for words!
******************************
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by The Huffington Post
Gen. Clark and That POW Thing McCain Hates Talking About
by Paul Waldman
The knives sure are out for retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
In case you missed it: Interviewed by CBS’ Bob Schieffer on Sunday’s Face the Nation, Clark said that for all the national security experience John McCain claims, he never held a position of command during wartime. “I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war,” Clark said. “He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility.” Clark then continued, “But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?’ He hasn’t made those calls, Bob.”
Then came this:
SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean –CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.
From the response of McCain’s defenders in the press, you’d think Clark had claimed that John McCain was never really in Vietnam at all. CNN’s Rick Sanchez described it with an incredulous expression as “dissing, some might say Swiftboating, John McCain’s military record.” ABC’s Rick Klein accused Clark of “calling into question, in surprisingly sharp language, Sen. John McCain’s military record.” Over at the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib and Sara Murray were aghast: “The one certainty of the 2008 campaign, it might have seemed, was that Sen. John McCain would be acknowledged all around as a war hero for his service in Vietnam — but apparently not.”
Of course, they were just wrong: Clark didn’t call McCain’s record into question; he didn’t say McCain wasn’t a hero, and he sure as hell didn’t “Swiftboat” McCain. Not only was he responding directly to Schieffer’s question, using Schieffer’s words, but he explicitly honored McCain’s service. Those key pieces of context were left out of the reports that all three networks broadcast the next day, as well as many of the reports in newspapers and on television that followed. In The New York Times, Jeff Zeleny not only removed the context, but he simply repeated the McCain campaign’s outrageously disingenuous charge that Clark was “impugning Mr. McCain’s heroism.”
But to understand why the press is reacting with such outrage, you have to understand what they’ve been saying about McCain for the last decade.
There’s a myth out there that the McCain campaign and the media have cooperated to create. It says that John McCain is reluctant to exploit his Vietnam POW story for political advantage, so modest and full of integrity is he. We’ve seen this repeated again and again, not just by McCain and his supporters but by reporters who ought to know better.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
From the first time he ran for Congress in 1982 up to the present day, McCain has made his POW story the centerpiece of his entire political career. The key moment of that 1982 campaign was when he responded to his opponent’s (absolutely true) accusation that McCain was a carpetbagger by saying, “As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” At every point since, it has been the deft use of this tool that has brought McCain renewed attention or won him a key victory.
McCain has every right to talk about Vietnam all he wants — it’s his story, and no serious person has ever disputed the details. But don’t tell us he’s reluctant to use it, because he isn’t. He talks about it to voters, he talks about it to contributors, he talks about it to reporters, he talks about it with seriousness, he jokes about it, and his campaign makes every attempt it can to remind people of what happened to him in Vietnam.
As I said, there’s nothing wrong with that. But what happened with Gen. Clark reveals the McCain Rules, as he and the press would have us understand them. Here’s how things are supposed to work: It’s fine for the McCain campaign to run ads touting his time as a POW, create web videos touting his time as a POW, have him mention his time as a POW in speeches, and have him bring it up in debates (remember “I was tied up at the time”?). In other words, it’s fine to have John McCain’s entire presidential run be presented through the filter of his POW experience. Should, however, someone even ask the question of whether the fact that McCain was a POW really qualifies him to be president, that would be a deeply offensive affront to all that is right and good, and must not be tolerated. Talk about having it both ways.
Let’s keep in mind that no one seems to have argued with Clark on the merits of his claim. No one responded by saying, “General Clark is wrong — in fact, McCain’s POW experience does qualify him to be president.” I suppose one could make that argument, but I haven’t seen anyone actually make it. Instead, what they have said is that Clark was out of bounds to even raise the issue. To even assert that McCain’s Vietnam experience isn’t in and of itself a qualification for the Oval Office is such an unforgivable transgression that its merits don’t need to be addressed.
There is, however, one person who wouldn’t disagree with Clark’s statement that being a POW doesn’t qualify you for the presidency. When asked by the National Journal in 2003, “Do you think that military service inherently makes somebody better equipped to be commander-in-chief?” this politician answered, “Absolutely not. History shows that some of our greatest leaders have had little or no military experience. … I have advised [a presidential candidate] that I’d be very careful about how much you talk about that, because you don’t want it to sound self-serving.” The person who said that was John McCain, and the presidential candidate he was talking about was John Kerry.
For years, we’ve watched as reporters have dropped the fact that McCain was a POW into their stories, apropos of nothing, as if it were merely part of his name… John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, visited a farm to discuss the dairy industry. I kid, but it seems that any criticism of McCain’s character is greeted with “But he was a POW!” When Howard Dean called McCain an “opportunist” back in April, Chris Wallace of Fox News indignantly asked Sen. John Kerry, “Do you think John McCain was an opportunist when he refused to take early release from a North Vietnamese prison camp?” Just last week, The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote that though McCain has flip-flopped on immigration, taxes, and a host of other issues, it’s really OK, because “we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over.”
So when Gen. Clark, or anyone else, says that the fact that McCain suffered as a POW forty years ago is really neither here nor there when it comes to what the next president will be faced with, it’s no surprise that McCain’s fanboys in the media react with such high dudgeon. After all, to suggest that the POW story is only one piece of McCain’s biography, and not the be-all-end-all on which the next president should be chosen, is as much an indictment of the press as it is of McCain.
Paul Waldman of Media Matters Action Network is the author or coauthor of four books on politics and media, including his most recent work, Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, coauthored with David Brock.
Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
**********************************************
Well, if your appetite for cuteness aren't satisfied by these videos, I guess I can understand. Ti nina'malulok yu' lokkue'. With a deluge of white white haired faces such as Bob Schieffer (not cute), John McCain (NOT CUTE) and Wesley Clark (moderately cute), I'm definitely feeling wanting too.
But thankfully my daughter Sumahi is here to intercede and help us all out. Check out this latest video of hers, which is almost too cute for words!
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Nihi Ta Fanchat Gi Fino' Chamoru Put Hindi Movies #10
Rashne: Put fin, mafatto hao!
Miget: Ei adai, mungga taiguenao! Esta un tungo' na fihu gof åpmam i mubin Bollywood.
Rashne: Hafa un egga' pa'go?
Miget: Sarkar Raj.
Rashne: Hafa enao?
Miget: Este i mina'dos na Sarkar. Buente dos años tatte na tiempo, ma fa'tinas i fine'nina.
Rashne: Ah, hunggan hu hasso. Para ayu ma dalalaki i estorian The Godfather, no?
Miget: Hunggan, lao manmanusa familian Hindu, enlugat di un familian Italiånu. Ya ma pega i estoria giya Mumbai enlugat di New York City.
Rashne: Ya gi i mina'dos kao ma fa'kopia The Godfather Part II?
Miget: Gi i tinituhun i kachido pine'lo-ku na hunggan. Lao gi i finakpo' siguru yu' na ahe'. Siña na i direktot Si Ram Gopal Varma, ha kekekfa'baba hit. Ya gi un banda ha na'hahasso hit na kopia ha', ya ensigidas gi i otro banda, kulang nuebu!
Rashne: Pues hafa i diferesia? Hafa ma tulaika?
Miget: Kao siguru hao na ya-mu na bei na'tungo' hao?
Rashne: Hu'u nai, siempre ni' ngai'an na bei egga' este.
Miget: Pues, gi The Godfather Part II gi i finakpo', la'la'la' ha' i bilåku Si Michael Corleone. Hunggan mapos triste gui', sa' pinino' i che'lu-ña as Guiya, ya yinite' gui' ni' i asagua-ña. Gi i ettimo na "scene" Guiya ha', ya maisa gui' gi i hinasso-ña yan i triniste-ña gi halom ilu-ña. Tåya' guinaiya gi i atadok-ña siha, ya tåya' abok gi eriya-ña.
Rashne: Ya put hafa Sarkar Raj?
Miget: Well, gi The Godfather Part II, taya' "estorian guinaiya." Lao gi Sarkar Raj, guaha. Umasodda' Si Shankar Nagre (i bilåku) yan Si Anita Rajan, ya ti åpmam na tiempo, umaguaiya. Annai umapacha i dos gi i fine'nina na biåhi, pine'lo-ku, "ei adai, todu tiempo taiguini i kachidon Bollywood! Puru ha' finakpo' minagof!" Lao bei sangåni hao, mampos nina'manman yu' ni' i matai-ña Si Shankar!
Rashne: Mapuno' i bulåku?
Miget: Hunggan! Ayu na fine'nina pinacha' mismo i ettimo!
Rashne: Pues tåya' finakpo' minagof gi Sarkar Raj?
Miget: Dipende nai. Matai Si Shankar, lao manmatai lokkue' todu i enimigu-ña siha.
Rashne: Ya i palao'an? Ayu na Anita Rajan? Kao matai gui' gi i finakpo'?
Miget: Oh, hunggan. Annai mapuno' Si Shankar, fine'nina hinasso-ku na "ai siempre tåya' mina'tres na mubi." Lao gi i finakpo' Sarkar Raj, ma na'klaru na siña guaha mina'tres.
Rashne: Taimanu?
Miget: Sa' achokka' taigue Si Shankar. Gaigaige ha' Si Anita. Ya gi i ettimo na "scene" kulang Guiya tumatahgue Si Shankar gi i familia!
Rashne: Ti nina'manghang ni ayu.
Miget: Sa' hafa?
Rashne: Put fin ma rekoknisa i fuestsan famalao'an! Hami i latte gi i gima'! Fihu ma na'atok i pussion-måmi gi i familia, pi'ot gi este na klasin "Mafia/Sarkar" na mubi. Kulang puru ha' paluma.
Miget: Ai adai.
Rashne: Nangga ha', esta ki i mina'tres na mubin Sarkar. Siempre este na palao'an i mas fotte na Sarkar!
Miget: Ei adai, mungga taiguenao! Esta un tungo' na fihu gof åpmam i mubin Bollywood.
Rashne: Hafa un egga' pa'go?
Miget: Sarkar Raj.
Rashne: Hafa enao?
Miget: Este i mina'dos na Sarkar. Buente dos años tatte na tiempo, ma fa'tinas i fine'nina.
Rashne: Ah, hunggan hu hasso. Para ayu ma dalalaki i estorian The Godfather, no?
Miget: Hunggan, lao manmanusa familian Hindu, enlugat di un familian Italiånu. Ya ma pega i estoria giya Mumbai enlugat di New York City.
Rashne: Ya gi i mina'dos kao ma fa'kopia The Godfather Part II?
Miget: Gi i tinituhun i kachido pine'lo-ku na hunggan. Lao gi i finakpo' siguru yu' na ahe'. Siña na i direktot Si Ram Gopal Varma, ha kekekfa'baba hit. Ya gi un banda ha na'hahasso hit na kopia ha', ya ensigidas gi i otro banda, kulang nuebu!
Rashne: Pues hafa i diferesia? Hafa ma tulaika?
Miget: Kao siguru hao na ya-mu na bei na'tungo' hao?
Rashne: Hu'u nai, siempre ni' ngai'an na bei egga' este.
Miget: Pues, gi The Godfather Part II gi i finakpo', la'la'la' ha' i bilåku Si Michael Corleone. Hunggan mapos triste gui', sa' pinino' i che'lu-ña as Guiya, ya yinite' gui' ni' i asagua-ña. Gi i ettimo na "scene" Guiya ha', ya maisa gui' gi i hinasso-ña yan i triniste-ña gi halom ilu-ña. Tåya' guinaiya gi i atadok-ña siha, ya tåya' abok gi eriya-ña.
Rashne: Ya put hafa Sarkar Raj?
Miget: Well, gi The Godfather Part II, taya' "estorian guinaiya." Lao gi Sarkar Raj, guaha. Umasodda' Si Shankar Nagre (i bilåku) yan Si Anita Rajan, ya ti åpmam na tiempo, umaguaiya. Annai umapacha i dos gi i fine'nina na biåhi, pine'lo-ku, "ei adai, todu tiempo taiguini i kachidon Bollywood! Puru ha' finakpo' minagof!" Lao bei sangåni hao, mampos nina'manman yu' ni' i matai-ña Si Shankar!
Rashne: Mapuno' i bulåku?
Miget: Hunggan! Ayu na fine'nina pinacha' mismo i ettimo!
Rashne: Pues tåya' finakpo' minagof gi Sarkar Raj?
Miget: Dipende nai. Matai Si Shankar, lao manmatai lokkue' todu i enimigu-ña siha.
Rashne: Ya i palao'an? Ayu na Anita Rajan? Kao matai gui' gi i finakpo'?
Miget: Oh, hunggan. Annai mapuno' Si Shankar, fine'nina hinasso-ku na "ai siempre tåya' mina'tres na mubi." Lao gi i finakpo' Sarkar Raj, ma na'klaru na siña guaha mina'tres.
Rashne: Taimanu?
Miget: Sa' achokka' taigue Si Shankar. Gaigaige ha' Si Anita. Ya gi i ettimo na "scene" kulang Guiya tumatahgue Si Shankar gi i familia!
Rashne: Ti nina'manghang ni ayu.
Miget: Sa' hafa?
Rashne: Put fin ma rekoknisa i fuestsan famalao'an! Hami i latte gi i gima'! Fihu ma na'atok i pussion-måmi gi i familia, pi'ot gi este na klasin "Mafia/Sarkar" na mubi. Kulang puru ha' paluma.
Miget: Ai adai.
Rashne: Nangga ha', esta ki i mina'tres na mubin Sarkar. Siempre este na palao'an i mas fotte na Sarkar!
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