Israeli Rabbis Ban Marriage For Jewish ‘Untouchables’

By Jonathan Cook

07 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org

Tel Aviv: Two immigrants from the former Soviet Union staged a very public wedding in the streets of central Tel Aviv this week to highlight the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jews barred from lawfully marrying in Israel.
Nico Tarosyan and Olga Samosvatov chose to tie the knot in a special ceremony on Tuesday -- watched by family, friends and curious passers-by -- after Orthodox rabbis had denied them the right to wed.
The rabbinate says that Mr Tarosyan cannot prove he is Jewish according to its strict standards and therefore should not marry Ms Samosvatov, who is considered a proper Jew.
Mr Tarosyan, aged 34, who moved to Israel from Moscow in 1995, called his treatment by the rabbis “humiliating”.
“In Russia we were hated because we were Jews and here in Israel we are discriminated against as Russians,” he said.
An underclass of Jews has emerged in Israel since the early 1990s, when more than one million immigrants began pouring into Israel following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Many were entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return, which requires only that they have a single Jewish grandparent. But the authorities -- keen to bolster the number of Jews in Israel’s demographic battle with the Palestinians -- also allowed some to arrive with little documentation or faked papers.
This set the new immigrants on a collision course with Israel’s Orthodox rabbis, who regard themselves as guarding the Jewish people’s ethnic and religious purity, said Ofer Kornfeld, the chairman of Havaya, an organisation that officiates at unrecognised weddings like the one conducted in Tel Aviv this week.
“Civil marriages are not possible in Israel,” he said. “So the rabbis get to decide who can marry and who cannot.”
Israel has passed control of all matters relating to personal status -- births, marriages and divorces, and deaths -- to rabbis belonging to the strictest stream of Judaism, Orthodoxy.
Havaya, said Mr Kornfeld, offered unrecognised, secular and non-Orthodox Jews the chance to marry in a ceremony that retained Jewish rituals while tailor-making the event to their own convictions.
Official figures show that as many as 350,000 Jews are classified by the rabbinate as having “no religion”, and are therefore unable to marry in Israel. Their only option is to wed abroad -- the marriage is then recognised on their return.
These immigrants face major hurdles in seeking to prove their Jewishness to the rabbis’ satisfaction. They must produce evidence that they have a Jewish mother or grandmother in a procedure that can be upsetting to those affected, said Mr Kornfeld.
“Many don’t even try because they know it’s a difficult and humiliating process that can take months or even years to complete and there is no guarantee of success.”
For a man, the rabbis demand that he prove he is circumcised and produce a birth certificate stating that his mother was a Jew, a proof many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have difficulty providing.
“It may help if you can prove that your mother spoke Yiddish or, if she is dead, supply a photo of her gravestone with a Magen [Star of] David,” said Mr Kornfeld.
Mr Tarosyan, a computer engineer, said that, although he failed to impress the rabbis, both his parents were considered Jews in Russia. In Moscow, he said, neighbours had daubed anti-Semitic graffiti on the family’s door.
Ms Samosvatov, 29, who immigrated from Ukraine with her mother when she was 15, said although the couple considered this week’s wedding in Tel Aviv to be the true ceremony, they were saving to travel to Prague later in the year to conduct a recognised wedding.
Mr Kornfeld said they would be following in the path of a growing number of Israelis. “About 6,000 couples wed abroad each year, often in eastern Europe. That’s about a fifth of all marriages.”
It is not only Jews classified as without a religion who are forced to leave the country, he said. Many recognised but secular Jews, who do not wish to submit to an Orthodox ceremony, tie the knot abroad, as do those marrying across religious divisions.
Israel’s Muslim, Christian and Druze citizens -- comprising nearly a fifth of the population -- have their own separate religious authorities who are given exclusive oversight of weddings.
Demands to reform the law have been growing for more than a decade, but every parliamentary bill on civil marriage has been defeated, usually following stiff resistance from the religious parties.
However, a new bill, approved by a ministerial committee last month, seems more likely to become law. It allows for a limited form of civil marriage that applies only to couples where both lack a religious status. Mr Tarosyan and Ms Samosvatov would not qualify as the rabbis consider one of them a Jew.
The religious parties were forced to agree to the Civil Marriage Bill as a condition for entering the government of Benjamin Netanyahu in the spring. The compromise was needed because civil marriage was the key platform of another coalition partner, the far-right Yisreal Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who is now facing corruption charges. The party draws heavy support from the Russian-speaking population.
The liberal Haaretz newspaper welcomed the bill as a “first crack in the religious monopoly” on marriage, but other observers have doubts.
Avirama Golan, writing in the same paper, warned that the law would apply only to a tiny number of couples and would in practice entrench the power of the rabbis, who before approving a wedding would still force couples to submit to lengthy and humiliating investigations to ensure that neither was a Jew.
She added that such couples would be forced into a ghetto, giving “birth to their shunned children who will marry among themselves and be registered separately in the communal records”.
The rabbis’ agreement to the reform, analysts point out, was possible because the bill maintains barriers preventing assimilation between the majority designated as real Jews and those the rabbis consider “without religion”.
Mr Kornfeld said the rabbis’ grip on marriage has continued even though nearly 70 per cent of Israeli Jews defined themselves as secular. Even among the religious, some regard themselves as belonging to the more moderate Reform and Conservative streams of Judaism.
Conversion to Orthodoxy is tightly restricted by the rabbinate, with only a few hundred people approved each year. Those converting are forced to adopt a strictly observant lifestyle for themselves and their children.
A general lack of sympathy for the problems of recent Russian immigrants was reflected in a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute this week. It found that half of all Israelis polled believed that only those born in Israel could be a “true Israeli”. Conversely, only 28 per cent of Russian-speaking immigrants in their 30s saw their future in Israel.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up

By Greg Mitchell

07 August, 2009
Huffington Post

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan 64 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years, all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. I first probed the coverup back in 1983 in Nuclear Times magazine (where I was editor), and developed it further in later articles and in my 1995 book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and in a 2005 documentary Original Child Bomb.

As editor of Nuclear Times in the early 1980s, I met Herbert Sussan, one of the members of the U.S. military film crew, and Erik Barnouw, the famed documentarian who first showed some of the Japanese footage on American TV in 1970. In fact, that newsreel footage might have disappeared forever if the Japanese filmmakers had not hidden one print from the Americans in a ceiling.

The color U.S. military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Md., in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF. I have a VHS copy of all of it today.

When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.

"I always had the sense," McGovern told me, "that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child....They didn't want the general public to know what their weapons had done -- at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn't want the material out because...we were sorry for our sins."

Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.

More recently, McGovern declared that Americans should have seen the damage wrought by the bomb. "The main reason it was classified was...because of the horror, the devastation," he said. Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.

In 2005, Editor & Publisher (where I am editor) broke the news that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. But suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world. The common view abroad, and among many U.S. historians, is that Russia's entry into the war (long scheduled and carried out on August 8) would have forced a Japanese surrender long before any U.S. invasion took place. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower himself later said it was not necessary to hit Japan "with that awful thing."

The atomic cover-up also reveals what can happen in any country that carries out deadly attacks on civilians in any war (such as Japan's policy in China in World War II) and then keeps images of what occurred from its own people.

The Japanese Newsreel Footage

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the U.S. readied plans for occupying the defeated country -- and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. In early September, just after the Japanese surrender, and as the American occupation began, director Sueo Ito set off for Nagasaki. There his crew filmed the utter destruction near ground zero and scenes in hospitals of the badly burned and those suffering from the lingering effects of radiation.

On Sept. 15, another crew headed for Hiroshima. When the first rushes came back to Toyko, Akira Iwasaki, the chief producer, felt "every frame burned into my brain," he later said.

At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years "the world...knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction."

Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the U.S. General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.

Shooting the U.S. Military Footage

In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern -- who as a member of Hollywood's famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler's "Memphis Belle" -- had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.

As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that "the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions."

McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and "caption" the material, so it would have "scientific value." He took charge of this effort in early January 1946, even as the Japanese feared that, when they were done, they would never see even a scrap of their film again.

At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946 to document the results of the U.S. air campaign in more than 20 Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.

The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. "Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there," Sussan later told me. "We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust...I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud."

Along with the rest of McGovern's crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world.

At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients -- and then took off his white doctor's shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.

After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro Sugata, the first feature film by a then-unknown Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.

The Suppression Begins

While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing and labeling all their black and white footage into a rough cut of just under three hours. At this point, several members of Japanese team took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project.

Director Ito later said: "The four of us agreed to be ready for 10 years of hard labor in the case of being discovered." One incomplete, silent print would reside in a ceiling until the Occupation ended.

The negative of the finished Japanese film, nearly 15,000 feet of footage on 19 reels, was sent off to the U.S. in early May 1946. The Japanese were also ordered to include in this shipment all photographs and related material. The footage would be labeled SECRET and not emerge from the shadows for more than 20 years.

The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the U.S. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage, on dozens of reels in huge footlockers, to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than 30 years.

McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.

Fearful that his film might get "buried," McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. "He was that kind of man, he didn't give a damn what people thought," McGovern told me. "He just wanted the story told."

In an article in his hometown Buffalo Evening News, McGovern said that he hoped that "this epic will be made available to the American public." He planned to call the edited movie Japan in Defeat.

Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn't want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.

In a March 3, 1947 memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified "secret." This was determined "after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is believed that the information contained in the films should be safeguarded until cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission." After the training films were completed, the status would be raised to "Top Secret" pending final classification by the AEC.

The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film "and not let anyone touch it -- and that's the way it stayed," as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top secret area.

"Dan McGovern stayed with the film all the time," Sussan later said. "He told me they could not release the film [because] what it showed was too horrible."

Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage "would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history." A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack "wide public appeal."

McGovern, meanwhile, continued to "babysit" the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California. "It was never out of my control," he said later, but he couldn't make a film out of it any more than Sussan could (but unlike Herb, he at least knew where it was).

The Japanese Footage Emerges

At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. Fearful that it might get lost forever in the military/government bureaucracy, he secretly made a 16 mm print and deposited it in the U.S. Air Force Central Film Depository at Wright-Patterson. There it remained out of sight, and generally out of mind. (The original negative and production materials remain missing, according to Abe Mark Nornes, who teaches at the University of Michigan and has researched the Japanese footage more than anyone.)

The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as "the film of illusion," to no avail. A rare article about what it called this "sensitive" dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been "Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years." Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a "hold" on the Japanese using it -- even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.

Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, few in the U.S. challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its "first-use" nuclear policy: Under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn -- in the sand. The U.S., in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on other occasions.

On Sept. 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film "not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense)."

Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.

From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look. Soon Barnouw realized that, despite its marginal film quality, "enough of the footage was unforgettable in its implications, and historic in its importance, to warrant duplicating all of it," he later wrote.

Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to 16 minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. Barnouw arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press. A throng turned out and sat in respectful silence at its finish. (One can only imagine what impact the color footage with many more human effects would have had.) "Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945" proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.

In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. "Only NBC thought it might use the film," Barnouw later wrote, "if it could find a 'news hook.' We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for." But then an article appeared in Parade magazine, and an editorial in the Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: "Television has brought the sight of war into America's sitting rooms from Vietnam. Surely it can find 16 minutes of prime time to show Americans what the first A-bombs, puny by today's weapons, did to people and property 25 years ago."

This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of dropping the bomb.

"I feel that classifying all of this filmed material was a misuse of the secrecy system since none of it had any military or national security aspect at all," Barnouw told me. "The reason must have been -- that if the public had seen it and Congressmen had seen it -- it would have been much harder to appropriate money for more bombs."

The American Footage Comes Out

About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.

In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by a Tokyo teacher named Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the U.S. military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the U.S. military footage.

Iwakura made a few calls and found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, D.C. verified this. He found eighty reels of film, labeled #342 USAF, with the reels numbered 11000 to 11079. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: "School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged Commercial school demolished School, engineering, demolished.School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effect Tenements, demolished."

The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me at the time, "If no one knows about the film to ask for it, it's as closed as when it was classified."

Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called Prophecy and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.

That fall a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival, called Dark Circle. It's co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, "No wonder the government didn't want us to see it. I think they didn't want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It's one thing to know about that and another thing to see it."

Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s -- or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In late 1982, I met Sussan and Erik Barnouw -- and talked on several occasions with Daniel McGovern, out in Northridge, California. "It would make a fine documentary even today," McGovern said of the color footage. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a movie of the burning of Atlanta?"

After he hauled the footage back to the Pentagon, McGovern said, he was told that under no circumstances would the footage be released for outside use. "They were fearful of it being circulated," McGovern said. He confirmed that the color footage, like the black and white, had been declassified over time, taking it from top secret to "for public release" (but only if the public knew about it and asked for it).

Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. Here McGovern added his considerable voice. "The main reason it was classified was because of the horror, the devastation," he said. "The medical effects were pretty gory. The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don't make people sick."

But who was behind this? "I always had the sense," McGovern answered, "that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force -- it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn't want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody," he declared. "If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war."

Even so, McGovern believed, his footage might have surfaced "if someone had grabbed the ball and run with it but the AEC did not want it released."

As Dark Circle director Chris Beaver had said, "With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity."

Today

In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. (The month-long grant was arranged by the current mayor of Hiroshima, Tad Akiba.) By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?

In the mid-1990s, researching Hiroshima in America, a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and television coverage -- and wide use of excerpts from the McGovern/Sussan footage -- but no strong shift in American attitudes on the use of the bomb.

Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, Original Child Bomb, I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained from McGovern's son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while shooting the official film.

Original Child Bomb went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Americans who saw were finally able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

Greg Mitchell is the editor of E&P. His latest book is "Why Obama Won." His email is: gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com

Our Suicide Bombers

By John Feffer

07 August, 2009
TomDispatch.com

"In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action"

The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith clasps a live grenade to his chest and throws himself at the enemy in a final burst of heroic sacrifice.

Wait a second: surely that wasn't a suicide bombing. Will Smith wasn't reciting suras from the Koran. He wasn't sporting one of those rising sun headbands that the Japanese kamikaze wore for their suicide missions. He wasn't playing a religious fanatic or a political extremist. Will Smith was the hero of the film. So how could he be a suicide bomber? After all, he's one of us, isn't he?

As it happens, we have our suicide bombers too. "We" are the powerful, developed countries, the ones with an overriding concern for individual liberties and individual lives. "We" form a moral archipelago that encompasses the United States, Europe, Israel, present-day Japan, and occasionally Russia. Whether in real war stories or inspiring vignettes served up in fiction and movies, our lore is full of heroes who sacrifice themselves for motherland, democracy, or simply their band of brothers. Admittedly, these men weren't expecting 72 virgins in paradise and they didn't make film records of their last moments, but our suicidal heroes generally have received just as much praise and recognition as "their" martyrs.

The scholarly work on suicide bombers is large and growing. Most of these studies focus on why those other people do such terrible things, sometimes against their own compatriots but mainly against us. According to the popular view, Shiite or Tamil or Chechen suicide martyrs have a fundamentally different attitude toward life and death.

If, however, we have our own rich tradition of suicide bombers -- and our own unfortunate tendency to kill civilians in our military campaigns -- how different can these attitudes really be?

Western Jihad

In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in action.

It was September 4, 1804. The United States was at war with the Barbary pirates along the North African coast. The U.S. Navy was desperate to penetrate the enemy defenses. Commodore Edward Preble, who headed up the Third Mediterranean Squadron, chose an unusual stratagem: sending a booby-trapped U.S.S. Intrepid into the bay at Tripoli, one of the Barbary states of the Ottoman empire, to blow up as many of the enemy's ships as possible. U.S. sailors packed 10,000 pounds of gunpowder into the boat along with 150 shells.

When Lieutenant Richard Sommers, who commanded the vessel, addressed his crew on the eve of the mission, a midshipman recorded his words:

"'No man need accompany him, who had not come to the resolution to blow himself up, rather than be captured; and that such was fully his own determination!' Three cheers was the only reply. The gallant crew rose, as a single man, with the resolution yielding up their lives, sooner than surrender to their enemies: while each stepped forth, and begged as a favor, that he might be permitted to apply the match!"

The crew of the boat then guided the Intrepid into the bay at night. So as not to be captured and lose so much valuable gunpowder to the enemy, they chose to blow themselves up with the boat. The explosion didn't do much damage -- at most, one Tripolitan ship went down -- but the crew was killed just as surely as the two men who plowed a ship piled high with explosives into the U.S.S. Cole in the Gulf of Aden nearly 200 years later.

Despite the failure of the mission, Preble received much praise for his strategies. "A few brave men have been sacrificed, but they could not have fallen in a better cause," opined a British navy commander. The Pope went further: "The American commander, with a small force and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages!"

Preble chose his tactic because his American forces were outgunned. It was a Hail Mary attempt to level the playing field. The bravery of his men and the reaction of his supporters could be easily transposed to the present day, when "fanatics" fighting against similar odds beg to sacrifice themselves for the cause of Islam and garner the praise of at least some of their religious leaders.

The blowing up of the Intrepid was not the only act of suicidal heroism in U.S. military history. We routinely celebrate the brave sacrifices of soldiers who knowingly give up their lives in order to save their unit or achieve a larger military mission. We commemorate the sacrifice of the defenders of the Alamo, who could have, after all, slunk away to save themselves and fight another day. The poetry of the Civil War is rich in the language of sacrifice. In Phoebe Cary's poem "Ready" from 1861, a black sailor, "no slavish soul had he," volunteers for certain death to push a boat to safety.

The heroic sacrifices of the twentieth century are, of course, commemorated in film. Today, you can buy several videos devoted to the "suicide missions" of American soldiers.

Our World War II propaganda films -- er, wartime entertainments -- often featured brave soldiers facing certain death. In Flying Tigers (1942), for example, pilot Woody Jason anticipates the Japanese kamikaze by several years by flying a plane into a bridge to prevent a cargo train from reaching the enemy. In Bataan (1943), Robert Taylor leads a crew of 13 men in what they know will be the suicidal defense of a critical position against the Japanese. With remarkable sangfroid, the soldiers keep up the fight as they are picked off one by one until only Taylor is left. The film ends with him manning a machine gun against wave upon wave of oncoming Japanese.

Our warrior culture continues to celebrate the heroism of these larger-than-life figures from World War II by taking real-life stories and turning them into Hollywood-style entertainments. For his series of "war stories" on Fox News, for instance, Oliver North narrates an episode on the Doolittle raid, an all-volunteer mission to bomb Tokyo shortly after Pearl Harbor. Since the bombers didn't have enough fuel to return to their bases, the 80 pilots committed to what they expected to be a suicide mission. Most of them survived, miraculously, but they had been prepared for the ultimate sacrifice -- and that is how they are billed today. "These are the men who restored the confidence of a shaken nation and changed the course of the Second World War," the promotional material for the episode rather grandly reports. Tokyo had the same hopes for its kamikaze pilots a few years later.

Why Suicide Missions?

America did not, of course, dream up suicide missions. They form a rich vein in the Western tradition. In the Bible, Samson sacrificed himself in bringing down the temple on the Philistine leadership, killing more through his death than he did during his life. The Spartans, at Thermopylae, faced down the Persians, knowing that the doomed effort would nevertheless delay the invading army long enough to give the Athenians time to prepare Greek defenses. In the first century AD in the Roman province of Judea, Jewish Zealots and Sicarians ("dagger men") launched suicide missions, mostly against Jewish moderates, to provoke an uprising against Roman rule.

Later, suicide missions played a key role in European history. "Books written in the post-9/11 period tend to place suicide bombings only in the context of Eastern history and limit them to the exotic rebels against modernism," writes Niccolo Caldararo in an essay on suicide bombers. "A study of the late 19th century and early 20th would provide a spate of examples of suicide bombers and assassins in the heart of Europe." These included various European nationalists, Russian anarchists, and other early practitioners of terrorism.

Given the plethora of suicide missions in the Western tradition, it should be difficult to argue that the tactic is unique to Islam or to fundamentalists. Yet some scholars enjoy constructing a restrictive genealogy for such missions that connects the Assassin sect (which went after the great sultan Saladin in the Levant in the twelfth century) to Muslim suicide guerrillas of the Philippines (first against the Spanish and then, in the early twentieth century, against Americans). They take this genealogy all the way up to more recent suicide campaigns by Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic rebels in the Russian province of Chechnya. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who used suicide bombers in a profligate fashion, are ordinarily the only major non-Muslim outlier included in this series.

Uniting our suicide attackers and theirs, however, are the reasons behind the missions. Three salient common factors stand out. First, suicidal attacks, including suicide bombings, are a "weapon of the weak," designed to level the playing field. Second, they are usually used against an occupying force. And third, they are cheap and often brutally effective.

We commonly associate suicide missions with terrorists. But states and their armies, when outnumbered, will also launch such missions against their enemies, as Preble did against Tripoli or the Japanese attempted near the end of World War II. To make up for its technological disadvantages, the Iranian regime sent waves of young volunteers, some unarmed and some reportedly as young as nine years old, against the then-U.S.-backed Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Non-state actors are even more prone to launch suicide missions against occupying forces. Remove the occupying force, as Robert Pape argues in his groundbreaking book on suicide bombers, Dying to Win, and the suicide missions disappear. It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that we, the occupiers (the United States, Russia, Israel), through our actions, have played a significant part in fomenting the very suicide missions that we now find so alien and incomprehensible in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

The archetypal modern suicide bomber first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s, a response to Israel's invasion and occupation of the country. "The Shiite suicide bomber," writes Mike Davis in his book on the history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, "was largely a Frankenstein monster of [Israeli Defense Minister] Ariel Sharon's deliberate creation." Not only did U.S. and Israeli occupation policies create the conditions that gave birth to these missions, but the United States even trained some of the perpetrators. The U.S. funded Pakistan's intelligence service to run a veritable insurgency training school that processed 35,000 foreign Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charlie Wilson's War, the book and movie that celebrated U.S. assistance to the mujihadeen, could be subtitled: Suicide Bombers We Have Known and Funded.

Finally, the technique "works." Suicide bombers kill 12 times more people per incident than conventional terrorism, national security specialist Mohammed Hafez points out. The U.S. military has often publicized the "precision" of its airborne weaponry, of its "smart" bombs and missiles. But in truth, suicide bombers are the "smartest" bombers because they can zero in on their target in a way no missile can -- from close up -- and so make last-minute corrections for accuracy. In addition, by blasting themselves to smithereens, suicide bombers can't give away any information about their organization or its methods after the act, thus preserving the security of the group. You can't argue with success, however bloodstained it might be. Only when the tactic itself becomes less effective or counterproductive, does it recede into the background, as seems to be the case today among armed Palestinian groups.

Individual motives for becoming a suicide bomber or attacker have, when studied, proved to be surprisingly diverse. We tend to ascribe heroism to our soldiers when, against the odds, they sacrifice themselves for us, while we assume a glassy-eyed fanaticism on the part of those who go up against us. But close studies of suicide bombers suggest that they are generally not crazy, nor -- another popular explanation -- just acting out of abysmal poverty or economic desperation (though, as in the case of the sole surviving Mumbai suicide attacker put on trial in India recently, this seems to have been the motivation). "Not only do they generally not have economic problems, but most of the suicide bombers also do not have an emotional disturbance that prevents them from differentiating between reality and imagination," writes Anat Berko in her careful analysis of the topic, The Path to Paradise. Despite suggestions from Iraqi and U.S. officials that suicide bombers in Iraq have been coerced into participating in their missions, scholars have yet to record such cases.

Perhaps, however, this reflects a narrow understanding of coercion. After all, our soldiers are indoctrinated into a culture of heroic sacrifice just as are the suicide bombers of Hamas. The indoctrination doesn't always work: scores of U.S. soldiers go AWOL or join the peace movement just as some suicide bombers give up at the last minute. But the basic-training techniques of instilling the instinct to kill, the readiness to follow orders, and a willingness to sacrifice one's life are part of the warrior ethic everywhere.

Suicide missions are, then, a military technique that armies use when outmatched and that guerrilla movements use, especially in occupied countries, to achieve specific objectives. Those who volunteer for such missions, whether in Iraq today or on board the Intrepid in 1804, are usually placing a larger goal -- liberty, national self-determination, ethnic or religious survival -- above their own lives.

But wait: surely I'm not equating soldiers going on suicide missions against other soldiers with terrorists who blow up civilians in a public place. Indeed, these are two distinct categories. And yet much has happened in the history of modern warfare -- in which civilians have increasingly become the victims of combat -- to blur these distinctions.

Terror and Civilians

The conventional picture of today's suicide bomber is a young man or woman, usually of Arab extraction, who makes a video proclamation of faith, straps on a vest of high explosives, and detonates him or herself in a crowded pizzeria, bus, marketplace, mosque, or church. But we must expand this picture. The September 11th hijackers targeted high-profile locations, including a military target, the Pentagon. Hezbollah's suicidal truck driver destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a female Tamil suicide bomber, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Suicide bombers, in other words, have targeted civilians, military installations, non-military sites of great significance, and political leaders. In suicide attacks, Hezbollah, Tamil Tiger, and Chechen suicide bombers have generally focused on military and police targets: 88%, 71%, and 61% of the time, respectively. Hamas, on the other hand, has largely targeted civilians (74% of the time). Sometimes, in response to public opinion, such movements will shift focus -- and targets. After a 1996 attack killed 91 civilians and created a serious image problem, the Tamil Tigers deliberately began chosing military, police, and government targets for their suicide attacks. "We don't go after kids in Pizza Hut," one Tiger leader told researcher Mia Bloom, referring to a Hamas attack on a Sbarro outlet in Jerusalem that killed 15 civilians in 2001.

We have been conditioned into thinking of suicide bombers as targeting civilians and so putting themselves beyond the established conventions of war. As it happens, however, the nature of war has changed in our time. In the twentieth century, armies began to target civilians as a way of destroying the will of the population, and so bringing down the leadership of the enemy country. Japanese atrocities in China in the 1930s, the Nazi air war against Britain in World War II, Allied fire bombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. carpet bombing in Cambodia and Laos, and the targeted assassinations of the Phoenix program during the Vietnam War, Russian depredations in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the tremendous civilian casualties during the Iraq War: all this has made the idea of conventional armies clashing in an area far from civilian life a quaint legacy of the past.

Terrorist attacks against civilians, particularly September 11th, prompted military historian Caleb Carr to back the Bush administration's declaration of a war against terror. "War can only be answered with war," he wrote in his best-selling The Lessons of Terror. "And it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive." This more imaginative, decisive, and humane style of war has, in fact, consisted of stepped-up aerial bombing, beefed-up Special Forces (to, in part, carry out targeted assassinations globally), and recently, the widespread use of unmanned aerial drones like the Predator and the Reaper, both in the American arsenal and in 24/7 use today over the Pakistani tribal borderlands. "Predators can become a modern army's answer to the suicide bomber," Carr wrote.

Carr's argument is revealing. As the U.S. military and Washington see it, the ideal use of Predator or Reaper drones, armed as they are with Hellfire missiles, is to pick off terrorist leaders; in other words, a mirror image of what that Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (who picked off the Indian prime minister) did somewhat more cost effectively. According to Carr, such a strategy with our robot planes is an effective and legitimate military tactic. In reality, though, such drone attacks regularly result in significant civilian casualties, usually referred to as "collateral damage." According to researcher Daniel Byman, the drones kill 10 civilians for every suspected militant. As Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com writes, "In Pakistan, a war of machine assassins is visibly provoking terror (and terrorism), as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country."

So, the dichotomy between a "just war," or even simply a war of any sort, and the unjust, brutal targeting of civilians by terrorists has long been blurring, thanks to the constant civilian casualties that now result from conventional war-fighting and the narrow military targets of many terrorist organizations.

Moral Relativism?

We have our suicide bombers -- we call them heroes. We have our culture of indoctrination -- we call it basic training. We kill civilians -- we call it collateral damage.

Is this, then, the moral relativism that so outrages conservatives? Of course not. I've been drawing these comparisons not to excuse the actions of suicide bombers, but to point out the hypocrisy of our black-and-white depictions of our noble efforts and their barbarous acts, of our worthy goals and their despicable ends. We -- the inhabitants of an archipelago of supposedly enlightened warfare -- have been indoctrinated to view the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a legitimate military target and September 11th as a heinous crime against humanity. We have been trained to see acts like the attack in Tripoli as American heroism and the U.S.S. Cole attack as rank barbarism. Explosive vests are a sign of extremism; Predator missiles, of advanced sensibility.

It would be far better if we opened our eyes when it came to our own world and looked at what we were actually doing. Yes, "they" sometimes have dismaying cults of sacrifice and martyrdom, but we do too. And who is to say that ending occupation is any less noble than making the world free for democracy? Will Smith, in I Am Legend, was willing to sacrifice himself to end the occupation of vampires. We should realize that our soldiers in the countries we now occupy may look no less menacing and unintelligible than those obviously malevolent, science-fiction creatures. And the presence of our occupying soldiers sometimes inspires similar, Will Smith-like acts of desperation and, dare I say it, courage.

The fact is: Were we to end our occupation policies, we would go a long way toward eliminating "their" suicide bombers. But when and how will we end our own cult of martyrdom?

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. Kathryn Zickuhr contributed research assistance to this article.

Copyright 2009 John Feffer

To Investigate CIA You Must Target Cheney

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by The Nation

Vice President, High-Level Wrongdoing Must Be Focus of Inquiries

by John Nichols

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the chief critic of executive excess and wrongdoing in the Senate during recent Republican and Democratic administrations, wants Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a prosecutor to investigate the CIA's harsh interrogation program.

But Feingold wants Holder to do it right.

The chair of the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee is concerned that the appointment of a prosecutor by Holder -- which now seems increasingly likely -- come with a charge by the attorney general "to focus on holding accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program."

In a letter to Holder, Feingold, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote:

Dear Attorney General Holder:

Recent news stories indicate that you have reviewed the highly classified 2004 CIA Inspector General report on the CIA's interrogation program, and that as a result you are considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate individuals who may have gone beyond the legal authorization for that program provided by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice. I write to encourage you to do so, but also to urge you to focus on holding accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program. While allegations that individuals may have even gone beyond what was justified by those now-public OLC memos are extremely disturbing, we should not lose sight of the fact that the program itself –- as authorized –- was illegal, not to mention immoral and unwise.

As I said in a letter to President Obama in April, the OLC documents make clear that the details of this program were authorized at the highest levels of government, which is where the need for accountability is most acute. Those who developed, authorized and provided legal justification for the interrogations should be held responsible.

I understand this is a difficult decision for you, and I want to assure you that you will have my full support if you take this important step in furtherance of the rule of law.

This is an essential message, and an essential step in the process.

Official Washington does not like accountability.

Holder will be under pressure to organize a narrow inquiry that focuses on the misdeeds of underlings.

But this investigation needs to go where the real wrongdoing took place.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was a principle proponent of harsh interrogation during the Bush-Cheney years, and has since emerged as the primary defender of the initiative.

When asked about the use of torture tactics late last year, Cheney told ABC News, "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

That is an invitation -- from Cheney himself -- to, as Feingold suggests, investigate the extent to which illegal activity was "authorized at the highest levels of government" and to "(hold) accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program."

Americans should tell the Attorney General to accept this invitation, and the Credo Action project of Working Assets is offering them an opportunity to do just that with a new campaign to "Tell Eric Holder to Start His Torture Investigation with Dick Cheney."

© 2009 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Hope, Caught Up in a Sea of Obstruction

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by The Boston Globe

by Neal Gabler

Here's the situation: President Obama maneuvered a stimulus package through Congress that, after being reduced to attract additional senators, has proven insufficient to stimulate the economy. Now, given the political calculus, it would be nearly impossible for him to introduce an additional boost. He also proposed a regulatory scheme for Wall Street that was so riddled with compromises and concessions that it was unlikely to prevent another economic meltdown. And he has pushed a national healthcare plan that is almost certain to be eviscerated, and that even in its disemboweled form may not pass Congress.

Obviously, we face daunting problems, but we nevertheless continue to operate with a kind of hopefulness that we will meet the challenges and triumph. Historically, we have reason to feel this way. In the last 70 years , this country faced down the Great Depression, Nazism, and Jim Crow. The system, however balky and tardy it may have been, has always worked.

But today, beneath the optimistic rhetoric, lurks another possibility that no politician and few pundits want to admit: that the system is no longer up to the task and that the factors that once brought relief are no longer operable. There is the real possibility that this time we will not win but rather founder the way Japan has done since its economic catastrophe. There is the possibility that this time it is hopeless.

How has it come to pass that the most powerful (and most self-confident) nation in the world now seems helpless? The short answer is that political action is a function of political will - the public's more than the politicians' - and that ours has been steadily sapped. Rahm Emanuel, the president's chief of staff, has said that crisis creates opportunity, but he is only partly right. Crisis creates pain. It is the pain that creates the opportunity.

The New Deal, that great spasm of political initiative, arose out of a national agony: 25 percent of Americans were unemployed, and with absolutely no safety net to catch them. There is plenty of agony now, but it is not as deep nor as wide, in part because of the programs of the New Deal, including unemployment insurance. President Roosevelt had the advantage of an angry citizenry who wanted him to do anything to rescue them. Obama has the disadvantage of a passive citizenry that, frankly, may never hurt enough to demand what might finally cure what ails them.

Obama is also the victim of a much different and more complex political system than the one FDR faced - a system with far more interests to broker among. The number of lobbyists in Washington, a good indicator of how many interests must be served and how vested those interests are in maintaining the status quo, has more than doubled since 2000. There are now roughly 40,000, 2,000 more since last November alone. In the last year nearly 2,500 began lobbying on the single issue of climate change. By a political Newton's Law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, which means that there are thousands of thrusts and parries on any major piece of legislation - a sure prescription for inaction or for tepid action.

Then there is the new media ecology. Yes, Roosevelt had his enemies in the press - almost all of which was arrayed against him. But he did not have a 24/7 cable antagonist dedicated to his presidential demise or hundreds of Internet bomb-throwers as Obama does, and he did not have a press whose baseline was skepticism about any possible government initiative. It is not the right-wing media that inhibit change; it is the mainstream media with their own attachment to the status quo, their own loaded questions about dramatic new policies and their predilection to identify potential missteps rather than to extol potential boldness. On healthcare, for example, the press has yet to ask one simple and critical question: Why can France have vastly superior care at half the cost per person of ours?

But finally, and most importantly, our own political institutions have been steadily and deliberately hogtied or even dismantled so that they cannot effectively do very much. In truth, the system was never very good at meeting crises; it was designed for incrementalism, not daring leaps. Our Founding Fathers, worrying about demagogues and runaway democratic effusions, created a number of institutions and rules, from the aristocratic Senate, which was devised to put the brakes on what they feared might be the careening of the more democratic House, to the entire system of checks and balances. The object was to prevent change, not facilitate it.

What those Fathers could not have anticipated was a political party dedicated to total obstructionism - dedicated to making certain that the government would fiddle while the nation burned. For this we have the Republicans to blame for their actions and the Democrats to blame for their inaction. As comedian Bill Maher recently put it, "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.''

Americans forget that after four years of Herbert Hoover's dithering during the Great Depression members of his party almost unanimously opposed FDR's economic stimulus, and that in the procedural run-up to Social Security, they held ranks against it, too. Twelve of the 19 Republican senators voted to have Social Security scrapped. Old age security, they argued, would spoil Americans.

Flash-forward 30 years, and the party was back to its shenanigans, opposing Medicare. Exactly half the Republicans in the House voted against it while Senate Republicans voted 17-13 to stop it. Only overwhelming Democratic majorities in 1935 and 1965 led to Social Security and Medicare - and this at a time when the GOP had a moderate wing. The conclusion: in times of dire need the system only works when there is a huge one-party majority and a popular, muscular president of the same party to keep the legislators in line.

Things have only gotten worse - much worse - since then. It is not only the 30-year Republican drumbeat that government is the problem, a cliche that has helped drain political will; or the tax cuts that, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman candidly admitted, were largely enacted to starve government and render it ineffective; or the incompetency of George W. Bush's appointees that was intended to discredit government. It is the Republican lurch rightward that has purged those few moderates and gamed the filibuster so that any piece of legislation is now held hostage to 40 votes. This generates cries for bipartisanship, neglecting the fact that there is one party adamantly opposed to any change whatsoever.

How obstructionist is the GOP? From 1927 to 1962, cloture - the vote to end a filibuster - was invoked only 11 times! In 2007 alone, with Republicans trying to derail initiatives in the Democratic Congress as disparate as an increased minimum wage, a climate change bill, campaign finance reform, and an energy bill, there were 62 cloture votes. When you consider that conservative Democrats are being hammered by Republicans as well as by lobbying interests who provide them with campaign contributions, you can readily see that not even the Democrats' 60 votes in the Senate are sufficient to move legislation even if there is a public outcry for action. According to polls, roughly 70 percent of Americans want a public option in healthcare. With that kind of support, the fact that it is even being debated is testament to how decrepit our system has become.

And so we are now a nation with great professions of faith that we will succeed but little real confidence that we will, a nation that focuses more on what can go wrong than on what can go right, a nation that can't seem to get action. We are a timid nation with small dreams and even smaller plans - a nation that seems to have lost its capacity to do big things. We all know the nation is broken, but we may no longer have the will or the institutions to fix it.

© 2009 The Boston Globe

Neal Gabler is the author most recently of "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.''

First Steps Taken to Implement Preventive Detention, Military Commissions

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by Salon.com

by Glenn Greenwald

A task force appointed by President Obama to issue recommendations on how to close Guantanamo announced yesterday it will miss its deadline and instead needs a six-month extension, potentially jeopardizing Obama's promise to close Guantanamo within a year.  The announcement was made in a briefing given by four leading Obama officials, where the condition of the briefing was that none of the officials could be named (why not?) and all media outlets agreed to this condition (why?). 

Though the Task Force's final recommendations were delayed, it did release an interim report (.pdf) which -- true to Obama's prior pledges -- envisions an optional, three-tiered "system of justice" for imprisoning accused Terrorists, to be determined by the Obama administration in each case:  (1) real trials in real courts for some; (2) military commissions for others; and (3) indefinite detention with no charges for the rest.  This memo is the first step towards institutionalizing both a new scheme of preventive detention and Obama's version of military commissions.

From this interim report, it's more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions -- there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture -- is an absolute myth.  That's clear for multiple reasons:

First, the Task Force is formulating detention policy not only for detainees already at Guantanamo, but also for future, not-yet-abducted detainees as well.  From the first paragraph of the memo (click image to enlarge):

The memo goes on to state that they are examining "what the rules and boundaries should be for any future detentions under the law of war."  The anonymous Obama officials emphasized in the briefing that "the goal . . .  is to build a 'durable and effective' framework for dealing with the detainees at Guantánamo and future detainees captured in the fight against terrorists."

Nobody is talking about confining the power of preventive detention or military commissions to current Guantanamo detainees who were tortured.  The opposite is true:  this is to be a permanent, institutionalized detention scheme with the power vested in the President going forward to imprison people with no charges.  Claiming this is necessary because of what Bush did to the 230 remaining Guantanamo detainees is a total nonsequitur.  If, as Obama defenders claim, that is really the justification, why will these powers apply well beyond that?  And relatedly, as I've asked dozens of times with no answer:  how can Obama's military commissions be a solution to the problem of torture-obtained evidence when, according to Obama, those commissions -- exactly like federal courts -- also allegedly won't allow evidence obtained by torture?

Second, as a result of breathtakingly broad criminal laws in the U.S. defining "material support for terrorism," there are few things easier than obtaining a criminal conviction in federal court against people accused of being Terrorists.  Even if the only thing someone has done is joined a group decreed to be a Terrorist organization, without even engaging in (or even planning) any violent acts, federal prosecutors are well-armed to convict them.  In May, the DOJ obtained a conviction in a federal court of a Somalian-Canadian on "material support" charges for doing little more than expressing loyalty to Al Qaeda.  Two other Americans of Somalian descent were just indicted on the same charge as a result of their alleged membership in a "militant Islamic group," Shabaab.  The FBI website even boasts:

Since the 1990s, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has investigated and successfully prosecuted a wide range of international and domestic terrorism cases—including the bombings of the World Trade Center and U.S. Embassies in East Africa in the 1990s. More recent cases include those against individuals who provided material support to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as against international arms trafficker Monzer al Kassar and the Somalian pirate charged in the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama.

To convict accused Terrorists in court, they need not engage in any violent acts; any involvement with Al Qaeda or other Terrorist groups will suffice.  The Task Force's interim report released yesterday itself recognized that the Federal Government is already equipped with extremely broad powers to obtain convictions of Terrorists in federal court:

If we can't even prove in a real court that someone has such minimal involvement with a Terrorist group, then should we be imprisoning them indefinitely?  And if the only evidence we have against them was obtained by torture -- evidence which, one should recall, Democrats and progressives insist is unreliable -- then should we really seek to imprison them indefinitely based on such evidence?

Manifestly, this isn't about anything other than institutionalizing what has clearly emerged as the central premise of the Obama Justice System:  picking and choosing what level of due process each individual accused Terrorist is accorded, to be determined exclusively by what process ensures that the state will always win. If they know they'll convict you in a real court proceeding, they'll give you one; if they think they might lose there, they'll put you in a military commission; if they're still not sure they will win, they'll just indefinitely imprison you without any charges [a document accompanying the interim report (.pdf) states:  "if the prosecution team concludes that prosecution is not feasible in any forum, it may recommend that the case be returned to the Executive Order 13492 Review for other appropriate disposition"].  It's Kafkaesque show trials in their most perverse form:  the outcome is pre-determined (guilty and imprisoned) and only the process changes.  That's especially true since, even where a miscalculation causes someone to be tried but then acquitted, the power to detain them could still be asserted.

Just look at this intrinsically absurd declaration from the Memo:

For "enemy terrorists" who "have violated our criminal laws," the Obama administration will give people trials "where feasible"  -- meaning where it's definite that the Government will win.  If everyone the President wants to imprison is going to end up in a cage no matter what -- remember:  we're not going to release anyone the President decrees dangerous under any circumstances -- then, other than creating a mirage of due process, what's the point of giving some of them trials?  By definition, it's just all for show.  I quoted this once before, but it's so apropos; this approach is exactly what is hauntingly described as the Queen's justice in Chapter 12 of Alice in Wonderland:

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

"No, no!” said the Queen. "Sentence first -- verdict afterward."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.

"I won’t!" said Alice.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

The Queen's pronouncement -- "Sentence first -- verdict afterward" -- is a fine expression of Obama's approach here:  these prisoners are decreed to be Dangerous and Guilty and are sentenced to prolonged, indefinite imprisonment and must not be released; now let's tailor a process for each of them to ensure that this verdict is produced.  It's far better to dispense with the ludicrous facade, simply imprison everyone the President wants with no charges, and let the world and the citizenry see what we're really doing.

Third, equally false is the Task Force's claim that Obama's military commissions are nothing more than a continuation of longstanding military tradition and, worse, that Obama's commissions resolve the objections long raised by Democrats to Bush's military commissions.  Here's what the Task Force asserts in order to make it seem like Obama's military commissions are perfectly normal and consistent with past Democratic objections:

These claims are demonstrably false.  While it's true that the Bush/Cheney military commissions were initiated with no Congressional authorization, the commissions were eventually authorized by Congress when it passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with the opposition of most Democrats, including then-Sen. Obama.  As I documented at length here, Democratic objections to Bush's military commissions -- including from key Obama officials -- were not dependent upon any specific procedures, but were opposed to the entire idea of military commissions themselves.  If anyone has any doubts about that, just go read the excerpts I posted there from progressives, Democrats and leading newspapers objecting to military commissions themselves, not to the specific Bush/Cheney incarnation of them.  What happened to all of that?

The principal argument that was made in the Bush era was that military commissions may be appropriate for standard wars between uniformed armies, but not for the abduction of accused Terrorists far away from battlefields, which -- in terms of the potential both for error and abuse -- far more resemble the apprehension of accused criminals.  A November, 2001 New York Times Editorial said the "plan to use secret military tribunals to try terrorists is a dangerous idea" because "by ruling that terrorists fall outside the norms of civilian and military justice . . . . Mr. Bush has essentially discarded the rulebook of American justice painstakingly assembled over the course of more than two centuries."  The NYT argued: "American civilian courts have proved themselves perfectly capable of handling terrorist cases."  During the 2004 campaign, Obama's current Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal vowed that "a John Kerry administration would scrap the military commissions now being used at Guantanamo Bay and replace them with a system patterned on military courts-martial" and he concluded:

The danger with these commissions comes not only in their threat to our Constitution, and our standing in the world as a beacon of fairness, but also in their challenge to the perception of military justice. Our nation—whomever the next president may turn out to be—should admit it made a mistake and return to using our powerful and fair system of courts martial—a system that would generate swifter convictions of terrorists. As our nation's great Chief Justice John Marshall put it in 1803, ours is a "government of laws, and not of men."

Obama State Department counsel Harold Hongju Koh wrote in 2003 that creating military commissions and/or using a new tribunal "are wrong because both rest on the same faulty assumption: that our own federal courts cannot give full, fair and swift justice in such a case," and argued: "No country with a well functioning judicial system should hide its justice behind military commissions." Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy condemned all military commissions, arguing:  "it sends a terrible message to the world that, when confronted with a serious challenge, we lack confidence in the very institutions we are fighting for- beginning with a justice system that is the envy of the world."  And current Obama State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said that, in the past, military commissions had "been used to try spies that we find behind enemy lines" where "you can't ship them to national court, so you provide a kind of rough battlefield justice in a commission," but with the "War on Terror":  "That's not this situation. It's not remotely like it."

In fact, the entire 2004 campaign the Democrats ran was based on the argument that Terrorism should be treated far more like a law enforcement problem than a "war."  John Kerry famously said:  "The war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law-enforcement operation."  After a series of Terrorist plots were disrupted using normal law-enforcement means, even George Will wrote a column declaring that Kerry was right about this.  That the extant system of American justice was perfectly adequate to try accused Terrorists -- and that whole new systems of "justice" need not be created in the name of so-called "war powers" -- was long a central plank of Democratic and progressive objections to the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism.  

What happened to all of that?  As of January 20, 2009, it seems to have disappeared in a cloud of obfuscating smoke, replaced by chest-beating "war"-rhetoric used to justify the creation of whole new "systems of justice" and, worse, locking people up with no trial. Like all new powers vested in the President, once this system is institutionalized, it will be virtually impossible ever to abolish it, or even to prevent its continued expansion.

UPDATE:  I was on The Young Turks last night and was interviewed by Cenk Uygur regarding the media's role in investigations and towards the government generally and the Chuck Todd interview specifically.  It was roughly 15 minutes long; those interested can listen to it here.

© 2009 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

US Military Presence Continues To Imperil Lives of Afghan Women

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Lucinda Marshall

I have a vintage 1960’s poster on my wall that says, “War is not good for children and other living things.”  Those sentiments were true then, have always been true and and are certainly still true today.  As the Feminist Peace Network website has noted  since it  began in 2001, military actions of all kinds also perpetrate specific forms of violence against women, including:

• Mass rape, military sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced “marriages” and forced pregnancies.
• Multiple rapes and gang rape (with multiple perpetrators) and the rape of young girls.
• Sexual assault associated with violent physical assault.
• Resurgence of female genital mutilation, within the community under attack, as a way to reinforce cultural identity.
• Women forced to offer sex for survival, or in exchange for food, shelter, or “protection.”

But the devastation experienced by women during conflict goes beyond that. War today is not fought on some obscure battlefield.  It is fought in cities and towns where people live. When hospitals and homes and fields and schools are destroyed, there is no place for women to obtain medical care, or a warm shelter to call home, food to put on the table or a way to educate themselves or their children. As the human rights organization Madre notes, the impact of U.S. military action in Afghanistan has had  truly horrific implications for Afghan women:

The US and NATO did manage to oust the Taliban in 2001. Afghan women then gained some relief from a regime that publicly beat and executed women, and denied them education, healthcare, employment, participation in public life and any recourse from widespread domestic abuse. But that relief was short-lived. Today, a resurgent Taliban controls most of Afghanistan’s southern provinces and is encroaching on Kabul, the capital. In 2007, the number of US/NATO troops was increased by 45 percent. During that surge, more civilians were killed than in the previous four years combined. Each year that the occupation drags on, more Afghan civilians are killed. In 2008 alone, more than 2100 civilians were killed, a 40 percent jump over 2007.

The Bush Administration justified the invasion of Afghanistan by pointing to the Taliban’s systematic abuse of women. But subsequent US policies in Afghanistan did not uphold women’s human rights. As a result: 1.    One in every three women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence 2.    70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages 3.    Every 30 minutes, a woman dies in childbirth 4.    87 percent of women are illiterate 5.    70 percent of girls have no access to education 6.    44 years is the average life expectancy rate for women

Madre also notes that, “According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban.” All of which makes it baffling and quite discouraging that  the Feminist Majority’s Eleanor Smeal would state  that FMF supports the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan:

Though we’d prefer that all U.S. funding be spent on development aid, we cannot in good conscience advocate the immediate military pullout that some are suggesting. The 2009 UN Humanitarian Action Plan noted that in 2008, “Approximately 40% of the country, including much of the South, remains inaccessible for most humanitarian organizations.” Last year, 92 aid workers were abducted and 36 were killed, double the number from 2007. In recent public opinion polls, Afghans put security in their top three concerns right after food. Without stabilizing the country, there can be no significant redevelopment effort.

Smeal feels that,

If the U.S. were to pull out of Afghanistan, the United States would be once again breaking our promise to the Afghan people, and the country would likely fall under Taliban control.

This statement is naive at best.  Our promises to the Afghan people were never more than window dressing to make our actions more palatable both here and in Afghanistan.  Our mission there has never been for the sake of Afghanis, it is to further our own perceived interests and to fight that ever elusive enemy called “terrorism”. Smeal also expresses gratitude for what she terms “substantial U.S. funding for women and girls programs in Afghanistan — $367 million to date.”  Is she kidding?  That is a mere drop in the war funding bucket. As Tom Hayden points out,

it’s still hard to believe that they (FMF) think Afghan women can be liberated by an invading, bombing, imprisoning American army. It’s hard to believe that Predators, drones, Special Forces, detention camps and foreign occupiers are solutions to Taliban fundamentalism. Even the US-supported Kabul government showed its real character this year by passing a law requiring women to obey their husbands in sexual matters, in violation of the country’s own constitution and international norms. A top United Nations official this month told a Kabul audience “that violence against women is not being challenged or condemned.” This was eight years following the Bonn Agreement which included human rights at its core. In northern areas under Western occupation, the UN report found that in 39 percent of rapes “that perpetrators were directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation.”

At the end of the day, militarism is not about upholding human rights,  it is about asserting control and the cost of that is always  the loss of life and  liberty for those who have the misfortune to be in the line of fire.  The U.S. is not waging war in Afghanistan for the benefit of Afghanis and their welfare is purely incidental to that mission.  As  FPN noted in April, the AP reported that President Obama has stated that,

(W)hile improving conditions in Afghanistan is a commendable goal, people need to remember that the primary reason that U.S. troops are fighting there is to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

Our continued military presence will not benefit the Afghan people, only make their lives more precarious, and is doomed to failure as Sonali Kolhatkar makes clear.

The likelihood of American success in Afghanistan is at best dim and, at worst, heading inevitably toward a lose-lose situation. Given the impossibility of surgically identifying and killing a moving and elusive target, there are only two possible outcomes: killing a lot of civilians, or pushing the insurgency to the rest of the country, or both. After the Iraq debacle, are Americans ready for yet another unpopular occupation, protracted war and thousands of U.S. casualties?

However we do need to re-frame what is indeed a human rights disaster for women in Afghanistan and ask what is to be done.  Hayden offers this,

Ending a military occupation through a negotiated settlement among countries in the region, and parties in Afghanistan, is the only way out of this latest adventure in The Long War. Making any future economic or diplomatic assistance contingent upon women’s rights to health care, child care, education and dignity should be among the terms for a US and NATO withdrawal. In all seriousness, top US officials in a future Kabul embassy could be feminists linked to Afghan women’s groups. Hillary Clinton knows how to be relentless if she chooses. The struggle will be long and bitter, won in civil society, not on battlefields. Even if all the Taliban are killed, Afghanistan will be a deeply patriarchal Muslim country where change will emerge from outside and inside pressures.

It is also important to note that women in the U.S. military are also grievously harmed.  There is an epidemic of sexual assault and rape within the ranks which has been the subject of countless hearings and reports and recent hearings and reports also shed light on the difficulties being faced by women veterans. Those harms are a result of the culture of impunity that is a de facto part of military ethos and are not resolvable within the mindset that issues can be resolved by the usurpation of power. Moreover, they are intimately linked to the harms experienced by those that we fight against.  We are naive to think that they can be addressed separately or as problems that can be resolved without addressing their root cause.

And finally, it needs to be said that while we prioritize our spending on military destruction, funding for services that protect women’s lives are woefully lacking.  There is not funding for shelters in our own country or for fighting maternal mortality (which kills more than 500,000 every year), an entirely solvable problem that would require far less money than we  spend saving ourselves from ‘terrorism’.

Smeal’s statement is damaging and unfortunate. It displays a woeful lack of understanding of American politics, militarism and global realities. For a major feminist organization not to understand the truly damaging impact that militarism has on women’s lives is unacceptable and does not represent the truly feminist thinking, nor should it be taken to speak for the feminist body politic.

Lucinda Marshall is the Director of the Feminist Peace Network, feministpeacenetwork.org