Science > Physics > *** THE CRIMINALS of 911 FINALLY BUSTED in CANADA ***
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*** THE CRIMINALS of 911 FINALLY BUSTED in CANADA *** |
Michael Keefer is Professor in the School of English and Theatre
Studies at the University of Guelph. His writings include Lunar
Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars, two new editions of
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and essays on Renaissance literature and
philosophy, on literary and textual-critical theory, and on issues in
contemporary history and cultural politics.
Canada's 'War-on-Terror' Immigration Policy
Monday, 18 December 2006, 12:45 pm
Opinion: Michael Keefer
Global Research Feature Article
The Harper Government and Canada's 'War-on-Terror' Immigration Policy
by Michael Keefer
Global Research, December 12, 2006
1=2E Some key terms
Three terms are at play in the situation I wish to analyze. The first
is a new Canadian government whose leader has espoused positions more
right-wing than those of any prime minister in living memory-but is for
the moment constrained to some degree by his party's minority position
in parliament. The second is the unhappy fact that Canada is at war in
Asia: as a result of commitments to the Bush regime's 'War on Terror'
which the Canadian parliament has never been given the opportunity to
vote upon, some 2,300 Canadian troops are currently engaged in
offensive operations in southern Afghanistan-where, as the noisily
simple-minded General Rick Hillier, the current Chief of the Defense
Staff, has declared, their function is not peace-keeping (the primary
traditional role of Canada's military) but bringing the lives of
"detestable murderers and scumbags" to abrupt and violent ends.1
Who, precisely, is so "detestable" as to deserve such an end? By whom,
in whose country, and by what right are such determinations arrived at?
These are not questions that trouble General Hillier's sleep, though
they might well bother more ethically oriented people, as well as those
who believe that in a democracy policy decisions should be made by
elected officials rather than by military officers2-not to mention the
larger collectivity of Canadian taxpayers, who by mid-2006 had ponied
up $1.8 billion to pay for our part of the occupation of Afghanistan.
The third term at play here is immigration policy-which, as I wish to
show through consideration of our governing class's current treatment
of one immigrant minority, Canada's Muslim community, and also one
current aspect of its treatment of that other minority whose members
are neither immigrants nor the descendants of immigrants, but
aboriginal, appears to have been seriously deformed by a determination
to convince the Canadian population of the rightness and necessity of
our participation in George W. Bush's "long war."
ADVERTISEMENT
What might seem an unexpected conjoining of distinct issues of
immigration and indigeneity makes sense, I would argue, both
conceptually and ethically. A recognition of their linkage is evident
in recurrent expressions of sympathy by native elders for the plight of
Algerian and Palestinian refugees further victimized by deportation
orders,3 and likewise in the support announced by the Canadian Islamic
Congress in May 2006 for the Six Nations land reclamation campaign near
Caledonia, Ontario.4 The logic involved is not difficult. From the
longue dur=C5=BDe perspective of indigenous people the rest of
us-settler-colony Canadians-are all immigrants, and the laws and
administrative practices we direct toward Onkwehonweh or First Nations
people and toward more recent arrivals make up a single continuum of
what one might call 'the policy of immigrants about immigration.'
Such a perspective, to the extent that we can rise to it, may help us
avoid the ethical obliquities of much contemporary discourse on
immigration-in which, for example, the descendants of refugees or of
illegal immigrants call for the exclusion of refugees and the hunting
down and deportation of illegal immigrants, or in which people whose
right to the land they occupy may be dubious at best invoke principles
of right to exclude both native people and would-be immigrants from any
share of it.5
2=2E Multiculturalism and the politics of immigration
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's proclamation of multiculturalism as
official government policy in 1971 inaugurated a period in which
immigrant communities in Canada have tended more often than not to give
a preponderance of their votes to candidates of the federal Liberal
Party. There may be some irony to this, since the policy was not fully
enshrined in law until the passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act
by Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government in 1988. But
immigrant communities have not wholly forgotten that the Trudeau
Liberals who inaugurated multiculturalism were likewise responsible for
a shift in immigration policies leading to the abandonment of previous
openly racist admission criteria (and their replacement, one might add,
by criteria of social class).6 The persistence of this memory has no
doubt been assisted by the enduring presence of racist anti-immigration
sentiment in the parties of the right-most distinctly within the Reform
Party, which many Canadians suspect underwent no more than cosmetic
changes when it absorbed the struggling remnants of Mulroney's old
party to form the new (no longer 'progressive' even in name)
Conservative Party.
How has current Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper sought to
manoeuver within a situation in which the votes of immigrant
communities, both European and non-European, are recognized as a
determining factor in many urban ridings across the country, and hence
potentially decisive in his pursuit of a parliamentary majority in the
next election?
He has, in brief, tried to distance himself from his party's (and his
own) sometimes openly disgraceful past record on immigration issues, to
take advantage of the failure of Paul Martin's Liberal government to
abolish an unintelligent and widely resented "Right of Landing Fee" on
new immigrants, and to make use of potentially divisive issues like gay
marriage as a means of appealing to 'social conservative' elements
within immigrant communities. He has at the same time played to
exclusionary and racist tendencies within his most reliable block of
supporters (former Reform Party members and residents of predominantly
white rural communities) by cancelling the previous government's
commitment to a large-scale infrastructure program for native
communities, and by treating refugee claimants and illegal immigrants
with the utmost severity. (The latter tactic carries the risk of
backfiring in such vigorously multicultural cities as Toronto and
Vancouver-but only, Conservative strategists hope, in ridings where the
Tories already run too distant a third to the New Democratic Party and
the Liberals for it to make any difference to their electoral
fortunes.)
Two currently ongoing events permit us to define more closely the
orientation of this government in relation to immigration issues-and
perhaps more generally as well. One is the occupation since February
2006 of contested land at Caledonia, near Hamilton, Ontario, by the
people of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee (a situation that may help to
remind Canadians that a nation which developed out of colonial settler
colonies has large unpaid ethical and material obligations to the
indigenous peoples whose lands we have not ceased to appropriate and
whose cultures we continue to violate). The other is the arrest on June
2, 2006 in Toronto of seventeen Canadian Muslim men and youths on
charges of plotting terrorist atrocities. Both, as it happens, are
plausibly connected to Canada's participation in the Bush regime's
fraudulent and spurious 'War on Terror.'
Analysis of these unfolding events in relation to the faultlines
evident in Stephen Harper's positions on immigration will suggest, I
think, that a government more deeply subservient to the dictates of
American geopolitics than were the Liberals of Jean Chr=C5=BDtien or Paul
Martin is finding it convenient to exacerbate intercommunal hostilities
involving both Onkwehonweh or First Nations people and Canadian
Muslims. But before proceeding to this analysis, I should explain my
reasons for applying what may have seemed disconcertingly strong
adjectives to George W. Bush's 'War on Terror.'
3=2E Faking the 'War on Terror'
The 'War on Terror' is spurious because there is strong evidence that
the events to which it is purportedly a response-the terrorist
atrocities of September 11, 2001-were orchestrated not by Osama bin
Laden (whose partisans or minions served, however, as useful patsies),
but rather by high-placed elements within the United States government.
There are several converging lines of evidence: taken separately, they
cry out for investigation; taken together, they appear seriously
incriminating.7
There have been substantial developments during the past year in the
assessment of material, photographic and testimonial evidence relating
to the collapses of the three towers of the World Trade Center (the
47-storey WTC 7 as well as the 110-storey Twin Towers). These include
scientifically informed analyses which demonstrate the physical
impossibility of the official account of the Twin Towers' collapse,8
analyses of statements by fire department personnel and by survivors
that there were numerous secondary explosions in the buildings in the
interval between the airplane crashes and the collapses,9 video and
photographic evidence that structural steel in the South Tower was
being cut and melted by thermate charges during the final minutes
before the tower's collapse,10 videos and photographs of the collapses
of the towers in which "squibs" (explosive horizontal ejections of dust
and debris) are visible well below the lines of collapse,11 and
laboratory analyses of structural steel from the towers which point to
its having been cut by thermate charges.12
Controlled demolition of course implies foreknowledge of the attacks as
well as a complex pattern of organization-some aspects of which were
made visible by Michael Ruppert, whose book Crossing the Rubicon
revealed that the U.S. air defence system was effectively disabled on
9/11 by a network of air-defence and anti-terrorism exercises which
transferred most of the available interceptor aircraft out of the
northeastern U.S. to Alaska and Alberta, and for a crucial period that
morning left the military air traffic controllers responsible for
deploying the remaining jet fighters unable to determine which of the
many apparently hijacked aircraft appearing on their radar screens were
real, and which blips were merely part of a
response-to-multiple-hijackings exercise.13 The likelihood that al
Qaeda operatives could have organized the demolitions in the World
Trade Center complex (whose security was contracted to Securacom, a
company with close Bush family connections),14 as well as somehow
coordinating airliner hijackings with what amounted to a planned
disabling of the air defence system, is close to nil.
Add to this the destruction of material evidence at the WTC site, the
extreme reluctance of the Bush administration to permit any inquiry
into the events of 9/11, and the well-established fact-mendaciously
denied by senior members of that administration-that foreign
intelligence services, having evidently penetrated different parts of
the 9/11 planning, gave them detailed advance warnings, and a pattern
emerges that cries out for criminal investigation. Searching analyses
of these issues, as well as of many features of the attacks, the
ensuing cover-up, and the underlying geopolitics, have been published
by Michel Chossudovsky and by other researchers,15 and the theologian
and ethicist David Ray Griffin has produced magisterial summations of
the evidence pointing to the Bush administration's implication in the
events of 9/11.16
The 'War on Terror' is fraudulent, then, because its purported and
actual goals are systematically at variance. Only in the most nakedly
Orwellian sense can one claim that a project which began with apparent
false-flag terrorist attacks that killed some three thousand people on
American soil, and has since involved wars of aggression that have
killed and maimed well over 25,000 American soldiers-not to mention
killing scores of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis, and exposing millions of their fellow citizens to the murderous
and ineradicable toxicity of depleted uranium-is in any sense concerned
with enhancing the security of Americans, or of anyone else. The
pretexts used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq have without exception
been exposed as lies and disinformation17-an embarrassing fact that has
not prevented the Bush administration, with the supine or active
collaboration of the corporate media, and, to their shame, the
diplomatic support of western countries including Britain, France,
Germany and Canada, from constructing a parallel set of lies and
deceptions to legitimize an apparently imminent attack upon Iran.18
It is less widely appreciated that the invasion of Afghanistan was
likewise carried out under false pretexts. Planned and threatened
months before 9/11, this act of aggression was carried out for
geopolitical reasons enunciated more than a year earlier by the Project
for the New American Century, a pressure group whose key members have
all held high office in the Bush administration.19 It should be of some
interest to Canadians to know that in September 2001 the United States
rejected offers of the Afghani Taliban regime to deliver Osama bin
Laden to Pakistan for trial there;20 to know that opium production,
which the Taliban had nearly eliminated in the provinces it controlled,
bounced back to a new high once the U.S.-backed warlords of the
Northern Alliance came to power;21 and to learn that the appalling
oppression of Afghan women by reactionary theocrats that the Bush
regime adopted as an ex post facto reason for its invasion appears not
to have significantly diminished under the Karzai regime.22 Canadians
might also be intrigued to discover that in June 2006 a journalist who
wondered about the absence of any mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's FBI
Most Wanted listing was informed by Rex Tomb, the FBI's Chief of
Investigative Publicity, that the reason for this absence "is because
the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."23 This
looks rather like an acknowledgment that the so-called "Bin Laden
confession video" released by the U.S. in December 2001, and widely
represented as justifying the attack on Afghanistan, is in fact not
authentic.24
The 'War on Terror' is also fraudulent because while purporting, as
Bush himself has declared, to confer upon others what Americans "wish
for ourselves-safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the
hope for a better life,"25 his administration has in fact sought
through false-flag terrorism and shameless propaganda and
disinformation to frighten Americans into supporting a resource-war
geopolitics of unconstrained aggression. Concomitants of this endless
warfare include the devolution of what is now called the "homeland" in
the direction of a one-party state,26 a deliberate voiding of the U.S.
Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a parallel extinction of
international human rights law whose visible embodiment is an
archipelago of prisons and torture houses extending from Guantanamo Bay
to Abu Graib and Bagram.27
4=2E Harper on immigration
This, I would contend, is the unhappy context within which we must
consider contemporary Canadian discourses on the subject of
immigration. Let's begin by considering the views of Prime Minister
Stephen Harper on the matter. Harper counts among his formative
influences the writings of the American right-wing intellectual Peter
Brimelow, whose books include Alien Nation: Common Sense About
America's Immigration Disaster(1995).28 As recently as 2001 Harper gave
voice to opinions that seem recognizably connected to Brimelow's
alarmist vision of a country losing its cultural (read racial) identity
in a swamp of ethnic otherness: on January 26th of that year, Harper
declared in an interview with Kevin Michael Grace that
West of Winnipeg, the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people
who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent immigrants from
eastern Canada: people who live in ghettos, and who are not integrated
into western Canadian society.29
Interviewed a year later by the same congenially right-wing journalist,
Harper sought to re-state his views in more acceptable terms. Declaring
himself "pro-immigration on principle," he attacked the refugee
screening process as "a boondoggle" that "threatens national security"
as well as "the integrity of the immigration system":
I've been saying for years that the most important thing is that the
country make its own immigration selection and that this policy be
consistent with Canadians' views. A refugee determination system that
has effectively created a backdoor immigration stream that bypasses
legal channels is unacceptable. And we need to tighten that system. But
[=2E..] I don't want it to be said that I'm anti-immigration. I'm very
supportive of [a] significant [level of] immigration and always have
been.30
This is interestingly coded language. A proportion of the people
recently admitted to Canada under existing refugee determination
processes have been, among francophones, Algerians, Moroccans and
Haitians; and among the larger anglo- or allophone group, Central
Americans, Palestinians, South Asians (especially Sri Lankan Tamils)
and Africans (among them a substantial number of Somalis). The notion,
post-9/11, that such people might threaten "national security" would
seem to be a coded allusion to the fact that many of them are Muslims.
Those Canadians with whose views Harper thinks refugee policy should be
made consistent are presumably people of European origin, of narrowly
Christian or Jewish faith, and of racist predisposition: the fact that
growing numbers of Canadians are none of the above (and might in
addition vote for parties of the centre or centre-left) evidently
dismays him.
A similar coding was apparent in an interim policy document released by
Harper's Conservative Party in 2004, which as a journalist from Now
Magazine commented, "refers darkly to focusing on attracting immigrants
who can best integrate into the 'Canadian fabric' (read mostly white,
mostly Europeans)."31 But at the same time, the Conservatives were
seeking to attract the votes of recent immigrants, declaring on the
party's website that "The Conservative Party will fight for immigrants.
We will work to ensure earlier recognition of foreign credentials and
prior work experience."32
During the Winter 2006 election campaign Harper reached out to
immigrant communities by pledging to immediately cut the $975 Right of
Landing Fee by half, and then to further reduce it "as the fiscal
situation allows," and by claiming that the social values of immigrants
are also those of his party: "Hard working New Canadians bring to
Canada a strong work ethic, a commitment to family life, an
appreciation of higher education, and a respect for law and order....
These are Canadian values, these are Conservative values, and these are
values that we will bring to a new Conservative government."33 Harper
also sought to gain traction from long-standing complaints that foreign
professional qualifications are only grudgingly accepted in Canada by
proposing the creation of a new federal agency to facilitate the
process-a proposal that some commentators found disingenuous, since it
stood in evident contradiction to his otherwise sweeping support for
increasing the provinces' autonomy in their areas of jurisdiction.34
Once in power, Harper began, as he had promised, to deport illegal
workers. Among them, most notoriously, were Portuguese tradesmen doing
skilled labour in the Toronto construction industry, some of whom had
been in Canada for more than a decade and had school-aged
children-people, one might say, with a commitment to precisely those
work-ethic and heterosexual-family values Harper had extolled during
the election campaign. A commentator at the ViveleCanada.ca website
remarked in early April 2006 on the political stupidity of the
deportations:
Harper could have turned the presence of these illegal workers into a
political coup that eroded the Liberal hold over the immigrant vote. It
was Liberal [immigration] policy that so drastically favoured rich over
poor [...]. Saying that policy was so flawed that a general amnesty for
illegal workers was needed as long as they came forward and registered
would have done a lot to increase the Conservative vote in the
immigrant community.35
But the Harper government has consistently refused to implement an
amnesty for illegal workers,36 and two further incidents in April 2006
showed that it was prepared to defy normal civilities in its pursuit of
illegal immigrants. On April 27, a brother and sister were forcibly
removed from Dante Alighieri Academy in Toronto by immigration
officials and taken out to the sidewalk where, as an angry school
official remarked, "there was a van waiting with their parent-their
mother waiting to be deported." On the following day, two girls, aged
seven and fourteen, were removed from St. Jude School in Toronto by
officials who then telephoned their mother, an illegal immigrant from
Costa Rica, "and threatened to take them away if she did not turn up
within half an hour." Toronto School Board trustees and Toronto-area
members of Parliament responded with outrage to these police-state
tactics. Faced with Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi's reasonable demand that
he "instruct his officials that schools are for learning and are off
limits for the purpose of immigration enforcement," Minister of Public
Safety Stockwell Day replied obliquely that the matter would be
reviewed, adding that "This is not a normal process or procedure nor do
we want to see it become that." 37
Day's choice of adjective is telling, given that normal considerations
of political advantage seem not to be in play in these events. It would
appear that a different kind of political calculus is being applied,
one in which intercommunal tensions are being deliberately aroused in
the hope of political gain. But only if we have not been sufficiently
attending to the treatment of Canada's Muslim immigrant communities-and
to the treatment of Canada's non-immigrant communities, its First
Nations peoples-will such developments strike us as wholly new.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was widely reported in the
American press-incorrectly, as it happens-that members of Mohammed
Atta's supposed team of hijackers had entered the U.S. through Canada.
Faced with American calls for the tightening of border crossings (which
would obviously hurt our export economy), the government of Liberal
Prime Minister Jean Chr=C5=BDtien passed anti-terrorism legislation,38
deported numbers of Algerian and Palestinian refugees,39 stepped up the
practice of locking suspected Islamist activists away on so-called
"security certificates," which entitle the state to hold suspects
indefinitely without trial,40 and collaborated in the arrests,
"rendition" to foreign prisons, and torture of Canadian citizens who
had aroused the suspicions of the gum-shoed incompetents of the RCMP
and of CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (principally,
it seems, by being Muslims). In the most notorious such case, Ottawa
engineer Maher Arar was arrested in New York in September 2002 while
returning to Canada from a family holiday in Tunisia, and was flown by
the CIA to Syria, where he was tortured and held in solitary
confinement for ten months. The false information that led to his
arrest was provided to the FBI by the RCMP, which had put Arar and his
wife Dr. Monia Mazigh on an al Qaeda watch-list, and which continued to
slander him even after his release.41
A further regressive move was the implementation, on December 29, 2004,
of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, according to which the
two countries recognize one another as safe third countries for refugee
claimants and oblige refugees to seek protection in the first of the
two countries they enter. As a result, Canada now turns away one-third
of the refugee claimants who arrive at our borders, throwing large
numbers of them upon the mercies of a U.S. asylum system many aspects
of which, as a report published by the Harvard Law School remarks,
"violate international legal standards."42
5=2E "Home-grown terrorists"
On June 2, 2006 the arrests of seventeen Muslim men and youths in
Toronto on terrorism charges made headlines around the world. And yet
any careful reader of the news stories which followed these arrests
could not help but be struck by a number of anomalies. The case was
represented as a major triumph of police and intelligence work, and the
dangers involved were underlined by massive paramilitary theatrics at
the arraignment hearings, including grim-faced snipers-on-rooftops, and
helicopters thumping overhead. But how were we to interpret these
theatrics? Did Canadian intelligence agencies really anticipate that
squads of heavily armed terrorists might descend on the Brampton
courthouse in a desperate Robin-Hood style attempt to free their
captured comrades? Or would it be cynical to think that the state was
trying to panic the Canadian media and the public at large with this
graphic demonstration of how terrified we should all be-if not of the
handcuffed prisoners, then certainly of their shadowy accomplices. The
logic is clear: if the brave and clever men who dress like ninjas,
carry big automatic weapons and work in intelligence are worried, then
the rest of us ought to be gob-smacked with fear.
This message appears to have got through quite widely-not least to an
American versifier on the Buzzflash website who proposed ironically
that his compatriots should stop worrying about building a fence along
their southern border to stop Mexican immigration, given what seemed
more urgent problems to the north:
Putting up a Mexican fence
May not be the best defense.
Let's build one near Toronto
And get it finished pronto.43
No-one, presumably, had told him about the existence of Lake Ontario.
Snipers and helicopters notwithstanding, there turned out to be a
bizarre disjunction between the material resources the arrested group
(if it was a group) possessed, and what the Toronto police claimed were
their goals: blowing up the Houses of Parliament, the CN Tower, the
headquarters of CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and
the CBC, and beheading Stephen Harper. For the arsenals of weaponry
revealed by the arresting officers were distinctly unimpressive. In
addition to five pairs of boots, they consisted of "six flashlights,
one walkie-talkie, one voltmeter, eight D-cell batteries, a cell phone,
a circuit board, a computer hard drive, one barbecue grill, a set of
barbecue tongs, a wooden door with 21 bullet marks and a 9 mm hand
gun."44
Oh yes-and centrally displayed, a bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer,
as evidence that the group had intended to emulate Timothy McVeigh's
feat of destroying the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with an
ammonium nitrate fuel oil (ANFO) truck bomb.45 Not that any of the
accused had actually been in possession of that or any other bag of
ammonium nitrate fertilizer-much less fuel oil, or an appropriately
configured truck in which to mix the two, or a detonating device-in the
absence of which ammonium nitrate makes plants grow, but won't blow
anything up, not even the headquarters of CSIS. Yet one or possibly
more of the accused had been lured by a police agent into making a
purchase order of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate, and had
accepted delivery of some quantity of a harmless substitute chemical,
at which point the police swooped.
Most media outlets found nothing worthy of comment either in the
entrapment of the accused or in the extreme sketchiness of the accused
terrorists' equipment. But the motif of decapitation, which was
headlined in many accounts of the arrests,46 ought to have prompted a
pause for critical reflection. This motif evokes the most lurid misdeed
of the arch-terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi-who for several years
(until, that is, a narrative of his extinction seemed more useful than
stories of how he ran the Iraqi resistance more or less single-handedly
on behalf of al Qaeda) was represented by the Pentagon's fabulists as a
demonic Scarlet Pimpernel: that "demmed elusive" one-legged Jordanian
was here, there, and everywhere.47
In the spring of 2004, a fortnight after revelations about the torture
and murder of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graib were headlined throughout
the American media, Zarqawi very conveniently videotaped himself
beheading an American captive, Nicholas Berg. It would be an
understatement to call this videotape problematic. Berg, who had been
arrested by American forces, was acknowledged as having been in their
custody shortly before his death; in the videotape he is wearing
American orange prison overalls, while a plastic chair in the
background closely resembles chairs that appear in Abu Graib torture
photographs. Cries of anguish were dubbed onto the tape, but Berg was
clearly already dead when he was beheaded. Zarqawi, his executioner,
whom the CIA described as having an artificial leg, is vigorously
bipedal, and speaks Arabic without his known Jordanian accent. In
brief, the video appears to be a black-operations product, and Berg a
victim of the same people who ordered the Abu Graib atrocities.
The reason for the Zarqawi video's manufacture seems obvious. It
abruptly reversed the valences of news about torture and executions,
making an American the hapless victim and a brutal terrorist the
perpetrator. And it allowed media pundits to argue that whatever the
lapses of a few 'bad apples' on their side, their adversaries were
wholly barbaric. Meanwhile, damning evidence of the responsibility of
Bush, Rumsfeld and other senior officials for systematic torture in the
American gulag could be flushed down the memory hole.
In the case of the Toronto 17, the beheading motif strengthened
associations with al Qaeda by linking the accused with Zarqawi-even
though, behind the headlines, it appeared that beheading Stephen Harper
was not a crime any of them had actually proposed to carry out, but
rather something an imaginative police officer had speculated in a
synopsis of accusations one of them would be likely to want to do.48
The outlines of an interpretive framework-or framing narrative, if you
like-were thus in place. Like McVeigh, whose method and object of
attacks they are accused of wanting to imitate, the Toronto 17 are
constructed for us as 'home-grown terrorists'; but the association with
Zarqawi's most sensational supposed crime makes them at the same time
barbaric outsiders, with spiritual loyalties to the Islamist terrorist
international for which his name is a metonymy. The links to both key
aspects of this framework, we can observe, are provided by the police:
the first through entrapment, and the second through mere supposition.
Only some time after the arrests did the elaborateness of the
entrapment scheme become apparent. Early reports made much of an
alleged "training camp" session the group conducted in Washago, Ontario
in December 2005-one of the leaders of which, Mubin Shaikh, turned out
to have been a CSIS mole, who has received $77,000 for his services and
claims to be owed a further $300,000.49 Shaikh seems to have taken some
trouble to establish his 'cover' role, agitating so noisily for the
acceptance of sharia courts in Canada that fellow Muslims urged him to
desist. Yet as multicultural chair of Liberal MP Alan Tonks' York
South-Weston riding association, he let the mask slip: according to the
association's website, this "Traveller, philosopher, theologian ... is
not your ordinary Torontonian. At first look, one might think they've
encountered an extremist but on second take, you realize you've been
had!"50 It would appear that whatever technical expertise the Toronto
17 possessed was also provided by the government: a second mole, an
agricultural engineer, "provided evidence to authorities that the
conspirators had material they thought could be used to make bombs."51
Most journalists who covered the story found nothing out of the
ordinary in the fact that after their arrests the men and youths were
subjected to sleep deprivation torture-confined in brightly illuminated
isolation cells and woken every half-hour-by authorities obviously
desperate for evidence.52 Nor were they able to remember that three
years previously another large group of Toronto Muslims had been
arrested on suspicion of plotting similarly lurid acts of
terrorism-which had turned out to be no more than products of the
active imaginations of RCMP and CSIS agents, Toronto police detectives,
and Immigration Canada officials. In that case, an investigation called
Project Thread (and re-named "Project Threadbare" by skeptics) led to
twenty-four men being arrested as members of an al Qaeda sleeper cell
with plans to destroy the CN Tower, blow up the Pickering nuclear power
plant, and set off a radioactive dirty bomb. The allegations were
eventually dropped, and no charges were laid. And yet the men were held
in maximum security detention for months, no statements of exoneration
were issued, and seventeen of them were deported, in a manner marked by
flagrant illegalities, to countries where the mere suspicion of
terrorist affiliations could have very dangerous consequences.53
There may then be good reason to suspect that the Toronto 17 are
"terrorists" in much the same sense as were the father and son in Lodi,
California who, after being set up by a lavishly paid agent
provocateur, were talked by FBI interrogators into confessing they had
attended an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan (or perhaps Afghanistan or
Kashmir) which they located variously on a mountaintop and in an
underground chamber where a thousand jihadis from around the world
practised pole-vaulting.54 Or perhaps they could be compared to the
infamous "Miami Seven," members of an oddly un-secretive "Sons of
David" cult who are accused of having conspired with al Qaeda to
conduct terror attacks "even bigger than September 11" against targets
like Chicago's Sears Tower: the men, who had no visible means of
carrying out such attacks, actually committed nothing worse than the
thought-crime of swearing allegiance to al Qaeda-an oath that was
administered by their FBI agent provocateur.55
One begins to notice how regularly these much-hyped terror threats
dissolve into mist and confusion. The vaunted "UK poison cell" whose
members planned to murder thousands of Londoners with ricin turned out
not to be a terrorist conspiracy after all.56 The "red mercury plot"
ended with another embarrassing but largely unpublicized acquittal: the
'terrorists', as John Lettice writes, "had been accused of an imaginary
plot to produce an imaginary radioactive 'dirty' bomb using an
imaginary substance."57 The deployment of 250 London policemen to shut
down an equally imaginary chemical bomb factory in Forest Gate resulted
only in the near-murder of a man who, though otherwise innocent, was
indeed both Muslim and bearded.58 No less asinine was the huge
international stir in August 2006 over a purported "liquid bomb plot":
most of the alleged plane bombers possessed no passports and only one
had an airline ticket, and the bombs that someone in Pakistan had been
tortured into saying they planned to make in aircraft toilets are a
technical absurdity.59
Even in cases in which large-scale terrorist atrocities have been
perpetrated, there are serious doubts about the official accounts of
what occurred. The London bombings of July 7, 2005, for example, are
said to have been carried out by suicide bombers-a story that is
contradicted by the testimony of survivors that the explosions blew the
floors of the underground carriages upward from below.60 If the bombs
were not carried onto the carriages, but detonated from beneath, then
the purported Islamist fanatics said to have been responsible for these
appalling crimes cannot have been the actual mass murderers.
6=2E The Caledonia standoff: sisters of Antigone
The spectre of Islamist terrorism so successfully invoked by
governments and the corporate media in the English-speaking world is
perhaps especially alarming because of the spatiotemporal dislocations
it implies. People who typically feel no distinct connection with or
responsibility for conflicts in faraway places-even those stirred up or
initiated by their own governments-find the more or less tranquil
continuity of their lives threatened by the possibility that their
familiar civic landscapes could be suddenly transformed into scenes of
ruin and carnage. This experiential dislocation, involving a fear that
safely distant horrors might unpredictably translate themselves into
one's own most intimate space, is compounded by the thought that the
appalling transposition would be carried out by people who are our
fellow citizens-but also, in secret, deadly enemies. What the
venomously de-historicized ideology of the "war on terror" suggests is
that religious and ethnic otherness must be, in the special case of
Muslims, an ineradicable stain: immigrants of this kind, even if they
have appeared, while retaining marks of otherness in their cultural and
religious practices, to be moving towards social integration in the
host country, are fatally susceptible to reversions into the radical
otherness of their distant ancestral homelands-which are understood as
places marked, in George W. Bush's memorable inanity, by a perverse
inclination to "hate us for our freedoms."
A precisely inverse pattern of spatiotemporal dislocation is set in
motion-no doubt less violently, but with a cumulative force that should
not be underestimated-by the conflicts arising out of First Nations
land claims. The issues are typically intensely localized-involving, in
the case of the Caledonia dispute, little more than three hundred acres
of land. But they carry a powerful historical charge, and much wider
spatial-and ethical-implications. The persistence of the Six Nations
Haudenosaunee in asserting their title to the lands of the so-called
Haldimand Tract-the land six miles on either side of the Grand River
from its mouth to its source which was formally granted to them in 1784
in recognition of the fact that their alliance with the British during
the American War of Independence had cost them their ancestral lands in
New York State-serves as a standing rebuke to the fact that over the
past two centuries "this territory was steadily whittled away by
encroaching white settlers and squatters, and by deliberate land
confiscations by federal and provincial governments"-to the point that
"the Six Nations reserve near Caledonia now encompasses a mere 5% of
the 950,000 acres originally granted to them."61 There is little doubt
about the flagrant illegality of most of the processes through which
the Haudenosaunee were divested of their land: a people with whom the
Crown had made formal treaties of alliance, and who in the War of 1812
had been instrumental in frustrating the American conquest of Canada,
had an alien system of governance imposed on them by force, and were
denied recourse to any form of legal redress when they sought to resist
this imposition and the dispossession that accompanied and motivated
it.
The Six Nations are not seeking to reclaim the land now occupied by the
cities of Kitchener-Waterloo and Cambridge, Ontario, and many smaller
communities, or to expel white Ontarians from their farms and houses in
the Grand River watershed. But on February 28, 2006, after the
developer Henco began construction of a housing estate on
misappropriated farmland adjoining their reserve, they decided to
repossess the so-called Douglas Creek estate. The ensuing standoff over
this apparently local issue62 brings into focus some of the
foundational inequities of Canada's settler-culture legal regime. The
problem is again one of an incomplete assimilation-though in this case
what it exposes is the enduring hypocrisy and racism of the immigrant
culture, as well as the slow violence of a perverted legality that it
has inflicted upon its one-time allies.
If the paranoid distorting lens of the "war on terror" projects
monstrosity onto an imperfectly assimilated Muslim immigrant minority,
the mirror that the Caledonia standoff holds up to the would-be
assimilationist immigrant majority shows with pitiless clarity where
the actual monstrosity resides. If the Haudenosaunee would only consent
to the complete assimilation that the settler culture has attempted to
force upon them, ever since it acquired the power to do so-a consent
which would mean disappearing, as a collectivity, from history-then
this mirror might be removed and the unflattering image it returns to
us might be dissipated. (Is this perhaps why Canadian governments have
sought to impose on the Onkwehonweh a system of private and individual,
rather than collective and national, title to land? The theft of the
Haldimand Tract lands is an undoubted wrong to the Six Nations, but
what claim for justice and recompense could any individual native
person make in response to that wrong?)
The Harper government has seemed willing to let the Caledonia situation
drift toward intercommunal violence. Its only visible action on the
subject-beyond grudgingly indicating in November 2006 a willingness to
talk with the Ontario government about possibly paying some share of
the 40-million dollar cost of policing the stand-off-has been to
intervene at the United Nations to block the passage of a Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.63 In contrast, the Ontario Liberal
government of Dalton McGuinty attempted in mid-June to defuse the
crisis by purchasing the contested land from the developer and
declaring its intention to hold it in trust.64 This, of course, does
not amount to a resolution of the matter.
As Six Nations elder Hazel Hill declared in an eloquent message she
sent to the local newspapers in Grand River and Caledonia in April
2006, what is at issue is not merely a question of land ownership, or a
jurisdictional dispute, but a conflict between two laws, one that has
served oppression and another higher law:
It's not about militancy but about believing in who we are as a people,
standing together as one, in accordance with the Kaienerekowah for we
have been under the thumb of the oppressors for far too long
It's not about disrespecting the OPP and the laws of Canada, but more
importantly about respecting our own law, the only true law in
Creation, the Universal Law given to us by the Peacemaker and
Gigonsaseh and upholding our responsibilities as individuals in
accordance with that law
It's not about claiming the land, because we know that we hold title to
it
It's not about an occupation, but about asserting our jurisdiction
We have been accused of inciting a war, and yet who are the ones with
the guns, threatening to come in and remove our women and children. To
arrest and make criminals out of us. Who are the ones who have
helicopters flying overhead, and an abundance of police presence....65
Part of this declaration's power comes from the claim, formulated by
Six Nation women elders Katinies and Kahentinetha in relation to
another issue involving environmental degradation in the Haldimand
Tract, that the Canadian Constitution itself concedes a place for the
Six Nations' Kaianereh'ko:wa or Great Law: "According to Section 109 of
the British North America Act 1867, indigenous peoples' 'prior
interests' supersede that of Canada and its provinces. According to
Section 132 Indian title can only be surrendered through a treaty made
with the sovereign constitutional people of the nation with a clear
question and a clear majority. This never happened."66
Between these two systems of law there is also a radical disjunction, a
diff=C5=BDrend.67 For as Katinies and Kahentinetha also write, "According
to Wampum 44 of our law, the Kaianereh'ko:wa/Great Law, the Women are
the 'progenitors of the soil' of the Rotinonhsonnion:we. We are the
Caretakers of the land, water and air of Turtle Island. As the
trustees, we are obligated to preserve and protect the land's integrity
for the future generation."68 Concepts of this kind are only beginning,
very hesitantly, and in a manner not wholly free from hypocrisy, to
enter the constitutional discourses of the Canadian confederation.
Yet unexpectedly, perhaps, one discovers within the central traditions
brought to this country by the immigrants themselves something very
much like the radical disjunction that these women elders identify. The
voices of Hazel Hill, and of Katinies and Kahentinetha Horn, are the
voice of Antigone, who in Sophocles' great tragedy proclaims to Creon,
the ruler of Thebes, that his civic law-his proclamation against the
burial of Polynices, the son of Oedipus who had died in leading an
assault upon his own city-itself violated another greater law. As
Antigone tells Creon, in response to his ruling that Polynice's corpse
is to be left for dogs and birds to devour,
It wasn't Zeus, not in the least
who made this proclamation-not to me.
Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods
beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men.
Nor did I think your edict had such force
that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods,
the great unwritten, unshakable traditions.
They are alive, not just today or yesterday:
they live forever, from the first of time....69
Another kind of sister of Antigone can be recognized in Dr. Monia
Mazigh, the wife of Maher Arar whose tenacious campaigning on behalf of
her husband was largely responsible for the growing public pressure
that led to his release from "the coffin-sized dungeon"70 in which he
had effectively been buried alive in a Syrian military prison. In
Sophocles' play, Antigone has already given due burial rites to
Eteocles, the brother who died defending the city. She then refuses to
accept the tyrannical judgment of Creon that her other brother
Polynices, who made war upon the city, must be denied human burial and
relegated to the category of carrion-which is the category as well of
what Giorgio Agamben, borrowing the term from Roman law, has called
homo sacer: those who can make no claim upon the law because they are
denied recognition as being fully human.71 Creon punishes Antigone's
defiant act of giving due rites to the unburied dead by committing a
further symmetrical violation of the great law to which she appealed:
he condemns her to be entombed alive. Antigone escapes from this
condition of living death by committing suicide-an act promptly
imitated both by her lover, Creon's son Haemon, and then by Creon's
wife Eurydice. One might say that Monia Mazigh redistributed the terms
of this myth: defying arbitrary descriptions of her husband and herself
as enemies of the state, and rejecting the legitimacy of their
relegation to the status of homo sacer, she succeeded, like a more
steadfast Orpheus with another Eurydice, in rescuing her husband from
the living entombment he had endured for ten months.
What these aboriginal or immigrant sisters of Antigone are telling us
is, at the very least, that we have been guided by a radically
deficient sense of justice in our applications of law. They are also
telling us, I believe, that insofar as our system of law contains
elements that contradict the constitutive principles of
justice-elements that permit us, for example, to legitimize past acts
of land seizure as faits accomplis, or to cast aside civil rights on
the grounds of a pretended emergency-then that system must be reformed.
The patterns of events out of which their voices have arisen should
also alert us to problems having to do with our sovereignty as people
who claim to make, and re-shape, our own legal and political regime.
For one of the more alarming features of the Arar case was the
revelation that the RCMP routinely shares its raw data (suspicions,
paid slander, malicious gossip, the lot) with American secret police
agencies;72 and one of the more disturbing events during the Caledonia
stand-off was the capture by Six Nations activists of American Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents carrying out surveillance, with
the full collaboration of the OPP, within Canada, and on Six Nations
land.73
Judith Butler has suggested that the limit for which Antigone stands is
"the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public
sphere as its scandalous future."74 What Butler is proposing, Slavoj
Zizek writes, is that "Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order
not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint
aiming at its radical rearticulation." She may be "publicly assuming an
uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the
public space," yet she is not doing so "a priori, but only with regard
to the way this space is structured now, in historically contingent and
specific conditions."75
Isn't it time we began changing these contingencies?
*************
Michael Keefer is Professor in the School of English and Theatre
Studies at the University of Guelph. His writings include Lunar
Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars, two new editions of
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and essays on Renaissance literature and
philosophy, on literary and textual-critical theory, and on issues in
contemporary history and cultural politics.
Notes
1 On 29 August 2005, Janet M. Eaton and Janis Alton, Co-Chairs of
the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, complained to Prime Minister
Paul Martin of General Hillier's "swaggering, offensive and
militaristic language": "To refer to the [Afghan] enemy as he did as
'detestable murderers and scumbags' who detest our freedoms, society
and liberties and to then aver that the job of the Canadian Forces is
'to be able to kill people' is at odds with our sensibilities and
cultural sensitivities as Canadians, with our core public policy values
and with our foreign policy tradition." See "Voice of Women on General
Hillier's Abusive Language," Canadian Action Party (10 September 2005),
http://www.canadianactionparty.ca/MainPages/News.asp?Type=3DTRUE&ID=3D531&L=
anguage=3DEnglish
.. For an acerbic comment on the new aggressive reorientation of
Canada's military presence in Afghanistan, see the editorial "We're
from Canada. We're here to kill you," Canadian Spectator (11 February
2006),
http://canadianspectator.ca/stuff/We're%20here%20to%20kill%20you.html.
2 A recent Reuters article gives evidence of an apparent transfer
of policy-making power from civilian authorities to Hillier and his
subordinates in National Defence Headquarters. Canada's commitment of
troops to Afghanistan was scheduled to end by early 2007. But after
"senior Canadian military officials" declared in March 2006 that "the
NATO mission would have to last at least a decade," Foreign Minister
Peter MacKay "conceded the schedule for the return of the troops was
now unclear. 'The (military commanders) ... have indicated this is
going to be a longer term commitment than was perhaps originally
intended as far as the troop deployment,' MacKay said." See David
Ljunggren, "Canada troops could stay longer in Afghanistan," Reuters (6
March 2006), http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06282602.htm.
3 This sympathy is no doubt linked to acknowledgments by
Onkwehonweh or First Nations elders of historical continuities between
Western European crusades against Muslim powers and subsequent projects
of transatlantic conquest and settlement. See, for example, Leroy
Little Bear's remarks in the Ipperwash Public Inquiry: Indigenous
Knowledge Forum, pp. 29-30 (14 October 2004),
http://www.ipperwashinquiry.ca/policy_part/meetings/pdf/
Indigenous_Knowledge_Forum_Oct.14.2004.pdf ; and Doreen Silversmith,
"Message from the Onkwehonweh [Six Nations] to the United Nations," 1
May 2006, available at Autonomy & Solidarity (5 May 2006),
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/2051.
4 "Islamic Congress Supports Six Nations Land Reclamation,"
DailyMuslims.com (19 May 2006),
http://www.muslimsweekly.com/index2.php?option=3Dcom_content&task=3Dview&id=
=3D1963&itemid=3D343&pop=3D1&page=3D0
.. This press release recognized a parallel between a situation "in
which aboriginal peoples are systematically being denied their
birthright," and the theft of Palestinians' land "by the Israeli
occupying power that denies them justice through unilateral
expropriations and by refusing to negotiate in good faith...."
5 I am myself descended on my father's side from refugees: the
widow and the elder son of a New Jersey farmer who had died defending
Long Island from the army of George Washington. I am not sure by what
right George III's colonial administration gave them title in 1790 to
Anishinaabe land in what became the town of Thorold in the Niagara
peninsula.
6 Despite residual elements of racism in the process, applicants
for landed immigrant status under multiculturalism have been assessed
primarily on the basis of their ability to make immediate contributions
to the Canadian economy. During the 1980s it became possible for
wealthy foreigners to purchase citizenship by investing $250,000 or
more in a business that would employ Canadians. Class had previously
been part of immigration criteria-sometimes in an inverse sense, as
when at certain times in the first half of the twentieth century
applicants from central and eastern Europe were accepted only if they
could show calloused hands that would identify them as manual
labourers.
7 The following account of this evidence overlaps at some points
with my recent essay "Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How
Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence,"
available at Scholars for 9/11 Truth (4 November 2006),
http://www.st911.org, and forthcoming in Cold Type (December 2006),
http://www.coldtype.net.
8 See for example "MIT Professor [Jeff King] Breaks Down WTC
Controlled Demolitions," Google Video (17 March 2006),
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3D1822764959599063248 ; Judy
Wood, "A Refutation of the Official Collapse Theory," (March 2006),
http://janedoe0911.tripod.com/BilliardBalls.html; as well as articles
by Frank Legge, Gordon Ross, and Kevin Ryan in the first two issues of
the Journal of 9/11 Studies (June and August 2006), and Steven E.
Jones, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely
Collapse?" Journal of 9/11 Studies 3 (September 2006): 1-48,
http://www.st911.org.
9 See David Ray Griffin, "Explosive Testimony: Revelations about
the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories," 911 Truth.org (18 January
2006), http://www.911truth.org/artice.php?story=3D20060118104223192 ; and
Graeme MacQueen, "118 Witnesses: The Firefighters' Testimony to
Explosions in the Twin Towers," Journal of 9/11 Studies 2 (August
2006): 47-106.
10 See "Shot from street level of South Tower collapsing," Camera
Planet, 2 min. 49 sec., posted 24 February 2003,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3D-2991254740145858863&q=3Dcamerapl=
anet+9%2F11
; and also photographs reproduced by Jones in "Why Indeed....?"
11 Squibs are visible in photographs of the collapses reproduced by
Eric Hufschmidt, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th
Attack (Goleta, California: Endpoint Software, 2002); see also Dylan
Avery, Dir., Loose Change (2006), available at http://www.st911.org;
Dustin Mugford, Dir., September 11 Revisited: Were Explosives Used to
Bring Down the Buildings? http://www.911revisited.com (2006), available
at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3D4194796183168750014 ; and In
the Wake Productions, 911 Mysteries: Part I, Demolitions (2006),
http://www.911weknow.com/911-mysteries-movie.html.
12 See J. R. Barnett, R. R. Biederman, and R. D. Sisson, Jr., "An
Initial Microstructural Analysis of A36 Steel from WTC Building 7,"
Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society 53/12:18 (2001);
cited by Jones, "Why Indeed...." Jones's own laboratory analysis of
steel samples from the Twin Towers is forthcoming.
13 Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon (Gabriola Island, BC:
New Society Publishers, 2004), pp. 308-436. See also Nafeez Mossadeq
Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005),
pp. 267-91, 304-16.
14 Securacom's CEO from 1999 to January 2002 was Wirt D. Walker
III, a cousin of President Bush-whose younger brother Marvin P. Bush
was also a principal in the company from 1993 to 2000. See David Ray
Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor (2nd ed.; Northampton, Mass.: Olive
Branch Press, 2004), p. 180.
15 Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind
September 11 (Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2002), The
Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (2nd ed.; Shanty Bay,
Ontario: Global Outlook, 2003), America's "War on Terrorism" (Pincourt,
Quebec: Global Research, 2005). See also Paul Thompson, The Terror
Timeline (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The
War on Truth; Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA
(2nd ed.; Joshua Tree, California: Tree of Life Books, 2006); and Paul
Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (New York: Elsevier,
2006).
16 Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor is cited in note 14; see also The
9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, Mass.:
Olive Branch Press, 2005), and Christian Faith and the Truth Behind
9/11 (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).
17 See Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism"; Milan
Rai, War Plan Iraq (London and New York: Verso, 2002); Nafeez Mossadeq
Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society
Publishers, 2003); Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies (New York: Nation
Books, 2004); Naomi Klein and others, No War: America's Real Business
in Iraq (London: Gibson Square Books, 2005); William R. Clark,
Petrodollar Warfare (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers,
2005).
18 See Seymour M. Hersh, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon can
now do in secret," The New Yorker (24-31 January 2005),
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact , and "The Iran
Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the
bomb?" The New Yorker (17 April 2006),
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_fact ; Michael
Keefer, "Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding
the Planned Attack on Iran," Centre for Research on Globalization (10
February 2006),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=3DviewArticle&code=3DKEE2006=
0210&articleid=3D1936
; and Jorge Hirsch, "Nuclear Strike on Iran is Still on the Agenda,"
Antiwar.com (16 October 2006), http://antiwar.com/Hirsch/.
19 See Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth,
trans. Lisa Rounds et al. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation
Books, 2002).
20 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, "How Bush Was Offered
Bin Laden and Blew It: Give Him an 'F' in the War on Terror,"
Counterpunch (1 November 2004),
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11012004.html.
21 See Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terror", pp. 224-36.
22 See "On the Situation of Afghan Women," Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA),
http://www.rawa.org/wom-view.htm ; and Marc Herold, "Afghanistan as an
empty space: The perfect Neo-Colonial state of the 21st century, part
one," Cursor.org, http://www.cursor.org/stories/emptyspace.html .
23 Ed Haas, "FBI says, 'No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to
9/11," Muckraker Report (6 June 2006),
http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html#_ftn1 . For the spin machine's
wholly inadequate response to this embarrassment, see Dan Eggen, "Bin
Laden, Most Wanted for Embassy Bombings?" The Washington Post (28
August 2006),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR200608270=
0687.html
..
24 For a judicious analysis of the myth-making surrounding Osama
bin Laden, see R. T. Naylor, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth, and
Misinformation in the War on Terror (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006).
25 George W. Bush, Speech at West Point Military Academy (1 June
2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/; quoted by
Pierre Guerlain, "New Warriors Among American Foreign Policy
Theorists," in Dana D. Nelson, ed., Ambushed: The Costs of
Machtpolitik, special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1
(Winter 2006), pp. 113-14. The Bush administration's claims to be
promoting democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere are demolished by
Noam Chomsky in Failed States(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp.
102-65.
26 See Michael Keefer, "The Strange Death of American Democracy:
Endgame in Ohio," Centre for Research on Globalization (24 January
2006), http://globalresearch.com.ca/articles/KEE501A.html .
27 See Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, "Crude Wars," Nikhil
Singh, "The Afterlife of Fascism," and Thomas L. Dumm, "George W. Bush
and the F-Word," in Dana D. Nelson, ed., Ambushed: The Costs of
Machtpolitik, pp. 19-35, 71-93, and 153-60. Key collections of
documents relating to torture include Mark Danner, ed., Torture and
Truth: America, Abu Graib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York
Review of Books, 2004); and Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel,
eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Graib, intro. Anthony Lewis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Onnesha
Roychaudhuri, "Tracking the Torture Taxis," The ColdType Reader 9
(November 2006),
http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.06/Essays.06/1106.Reader9.pdf.
28 Brimelow is himself an immigrant: born and raised in England, he
worked as a journalist in Canada during the 1970s and moved to New York
in 1980. His combative Afterword to the second edition of Alien Nation
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1996) is available at his website VDARE.com
(named after Virginia Dare, "the first English child born in the New
World"), http://www.vdare.com/pb/041206_afterword_an.htm. v
29 "The Devil in Stephen Harper," Now Magazine, vol. 23, No. 40
(3-9 June 2004),
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2004-06-03/news_insight.php. Kevin
Michael Grace also quotes the statement in a later article, "Canadian
Conservative Leader No Immigration 'Extremist.' Too Bad," VDARE.com (29
May 2004), http://www.vdare.com/misc/grace_conservative_leader.htm.
30 "Stephen Harper: The Report Interview" [with Kevin Michael
Grace], Report (6 January 2002),
http://web.archive.org/web/20021126055715/http:/report.ca/webonly/wo020106g=
ra.html.
31 "The Devil in Stephen Harper."
32 Quoted by Grace, "Canadian Conservative Leader No Immigration
'Extremist.'"
33 Press release, Conservative Party of Canada, 4 January 2006,
http://www.conservative.ca/EN/1738/37785.
34 See "Reality Check: Harper's Immigration Proposals," Canadian
Press (4 January 2006),
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060103/
ELXN_immigration_check_060104/20060104?s_name=3Delection2006&no_ads=3D.
35 'Reverend Blair', "Deep Immigration," ViveleCanada.ca (5 April
2006), http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/php/20060404235243777/print.
36 See Maria Jimenez, "Ottawa rules out amnesty for 200,000 illegal
workers, The Globe and Mail (27 October 2006), reproduced online by
CERIUM (Centre d'Etudes Internationales de l'Universite de Montreal),
http://cerium.ca/spip.php?page=3Dimpression&id_article=3D3459.
37 "T.O sisters used as deportation bait in hiding," CTV.ca News (2
May 2006), http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/
20060501/Deportation_bait060501?s_name=3D&no_ads=3D.
38 See Kent Roach, September 11: Consequences for Canada (Montr=C5=BDal
and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003).
39 See Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees,
http://refugees.resist.ca/refugees/about.htm; No One Is Illegal
Collective et al., "Bring Mohamed Cherfi Home!" Zmag.org (20 March
2004), available at Solidarity with Mohamed Cherfi,
http://www.mohamedcherfi.org/article.php3?id_article=3D29; and
"Non-Status Algerians on Trial: Update," Ontario Coalition Against
Poverty (March 2005), http://ocap.ca/node/858. v
40 Three such prisoners, who have been held since June 2000, August
2001, and October 2001 respectively, began a hunger strike in May 2006;
see "Ontario: Secret Trial Detainees on Hunger Strike for Two Full
Weeks," Infoshop News (5 June 2006),
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/artiucle.php?story=3D20060605114435478.
41 See the Hon. Dennis R. O'Connor, Report of the Events Relating
to Maher Arar: Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian
Officials in Relation to Maher Arar (Ottawa: Public Works and
Government Services Canada, 2006),
http://www.ararcommission.ca/eng/AR_English.pdf. n See also "Documents
suggest Canadian involvement in Arar interrogation," CBC News (22 April
2005),
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/04/21/arar050421.html;
Jeff Sallot, "How Canada failed citizen Maher Arar," The Globe and Mail
(19 September 2006), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20060919.warar0919/BNStory/National/home; and "Maher Arar:
Timeline," CBC News (19 September 2006),
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/.
42 Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, Bordering on
Failure: The U.S.-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement Fifteen Months
After Implementation (Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, March
2006), pp. 4, 23, http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/hrp/clinic/
documents/Harvard_STCA_Reports.pdf
43 Tony Peyser, "17 Canadian Terror Suspects Arrested,"
Buzzflash.com (5 June 2006),
http://www.buzzflash.com/peyser/0606/pey06156.html.
44 Marjaleena Repo, "Canada: A Galloping Police State?" Centre for
Research on Globalization (19 June 2006),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index/php?context=3DviewArticle&code=3DREP2006=
0619&articleid=3D2668.
45 The terrorist atrocity of April 1995 for which McVeigh was
convicted and executed killed 169 people, 19 of them children. In May
1995 retired Brigadier General Benton K. Partin, a USAF explosives
expert, distributed to the members of Congress a report, "Bomb Damage
Analysis of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building," in which he concluded
that it was destroyed not by McVeigh's truck bomb, but principally by
"explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting
columns within the building." There is other evidence that the attack
involved state operatives and state foreknowledge: see David Hoffman,
The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Venice,
California: Feral House, 1998); Partin's report is reprinted at pp.
461-74.
46 See for example "Canada man 'planned to behead PM'," BBC News (7
June 2006), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5054198.stm.
47 For an illuminating analysis of the Zarqawi phenomenon, see
Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism", pp. 171-97; and his
articles "Who is behind 'Al Qaeda in Iraq'? Pentagon acknowledges
fabricating a 'Zarqawi Legend'," Centre for Research on Globalization
(18 April 2006),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=3DviewArticle&code=3DCHO2006=
0418&articleid=3D2275
; and "Who was Abu Musab al Zarqawi?" Centre for Research on
Globalization (8 June 2006),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=3DviewArticle&code=3DCHO2006=
0608&articleid=3D2604.
48 See John Chuckman, "Terror in Toronto or Tempest in a Teapot:
Canada's Chatroom Jihadis," Counterpunch (10-11 June 2006),
http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman06102006.html; and Bruce
Campion-Smith and Michelle Shephard, "Plan to 'behead' PM: Brampton
court hears of plot to storm Parliament Hill and take politicians
hostage," Toronto Star (7 June 2006), available at
http://www.yayacanada.com/toronto_torstar_chand_military.html. (The
Yayacanada.com website lists parallels to the Toronto 17 entrapment:
see "The Toronto 'Terrorist' Arrests: A rundown of related news
reports,"
http://www.yayacanada.com/toronto_terrorist_arrests_03-06-06.html. )
49 Michelle Shephard, "Informer wanted to protect Canada," Toronto
Star (14 July 2006),
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=3Dthestar/Layout/Ar=
ticle_Type1&call_pageid=3D971358637
177&c=3DArticle&cid=3D1152827412841 ; and Sonya Fateh, Greg McArthur, and
Scott Roberts, "The Making of a Terror Mole," The Globe and Mail (14
July 2006), A1, available at "The Infamous Mubin Shaikh Revealed as
Mole in Terrorism Plot," SAFspace (14 July 2006),
http://www.safiyyah.ca/wordpress/?p=3D275.
50 Quoted by Shephard, "Informer wanted to protect Canada."
51 "2nd mole played key role in bomb plot probe," CBC News (13
October 2006),
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/10/13/second-person.html.
52 Repo, "Canada: A Galloping Police State?"
53 See "Project Threadbare: One Year Anniversary of PreDawn Raid,"
Autonomy & Solidarity (6 August 2004),
http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/794?PHPSESSID=3D30.
54 Alexander Cockburn, "The War on Terror on the Lodi Front,"
Counterpunch (1 May 2006),
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05012006.html. See also Veena Dubai
and Sunaina Maira, "'Witch-hunt' in Lodi, California," Not in Our Name
(23 June 2005),
http://www.notinourname.net/detentions/lodi-23jun05.htm.
55 One of the men also took a photograph of the Miami FBI
headquarters-using a camera supplied to him by the FBI agent. See Bill
Van Auken, "Miami 'terror' arrests-a government provocation," World
Socialist Web Site (24 June 2006),
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24.shtml; and Tony Karon,
"The Miami Seven: How Serious Was the Threat?" Time (23 June 2006),
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1207412,00.html.
56 See George Smith, Ph.D., "UK Terror Trial Finds No Terror,"
National Security Notes: GlobalSecurity.org (11 April 2005),
http://www.globalsecurity.org/nsn/nsn-050411.htm.
57 John Lettice, "Amazing terror weapons: the imaginary suitcase
nuke," The Register (31 July 2006),
http://www.theregister.com/2006/07/31/red_mercury_trial/.
58 John Lettice, "Homebrew chemical terror bombs, hype or horror?"
The Register (4 June 2006), http://www.the
register.com/2006/06/04/chemical_bioterror_analysis/, and "Drowning in
data-complexity's threat to terror investigations," The Register (6
July 2006),
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/06/_90_days_terror_law_analysis/.
59 Thomas C. Greene, "Mass murder in the skies: Was the plot
feasible?" The Register (17 August 2006),
http://www.theregister.com/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/; Craig
Murray, "The UK Terror Plot: What's Really Going On?" Counterpunch (17
August 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org/murray08172006.html ; James
Petras, "The Liquid Bomb Hoax: The Larger Implications," Centre for
Research on Globalization (25 August 2006),
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=3DviewArticle&code=3DPET2006=
0825&articleid=3D3069.
60 For two separate accounts, see Mark Honigsbaum, "'Someone help
me ... Please help me'," audio report linked at Owen Bowcott and Mark
Honigsbaum, "Stories of screaming, despair and courage," The Guardian
(9 July 2005),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1524554,00.html , and also
available at http://www.prisonplanet.com/audio/guardian_journalist.mp3;
and the testimony of Bruce Lait in "'I was in tube bomb carriage-and
survived'," Cambridge Evening News (11 July 2005),
http://www.cambridge-news-co.uk/news/region_wide/2005/07/11/83e33146-09af-4=
421b2f41779a82926f91pf.
61 Tom Keefer, "The Six Nations Land Reclamation: Overview and
Context," Upping the Anti: a journal of theory and action 3 (November
2006): 136; available at http://auto_sol.tao.ca.
62 For detailed accounts of the sequence of events, which included
an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) assault on April 20 that was
humiliatingly repelled, and an ensuing closure of Highway 6 until May
24, see Documents Regarding the Struggle at Six Nations (Toronto: AK
Press, July 2006), available at
http://www2.akpress.org/2006/items/documentsregardingthestruggle; the
Six Nations Caledonia Resource Page, Autonomy & Solidarity,
http://auto_sol.tao.ca (which contains an important archive of
articles, pamphlets, and video interviews); and "Caledonia land
dispute," Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonia_land_dispute.
63 See Joseph Quesnel, "Canada tries to buy African states at UN to
delay UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights," First Perspective: National
Aboriginal News (17 November 2006),
http://www.firstperspective.ca/fp_combo_template.php?path=3D20061117africa;
and Quesnel, "UN delays Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples," First Perspective (29 November 2006),
http://www.firstperspective.ca/fp_combo_template.php?path=3D20061129un.
64 "Ontario buys site of disputed Caledonia claim," CBC News (16
June 2006),
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/06/16/caledonia-bought.html.
65 "MNN 'Ongwehonwe Women's Manifesto' at Six Nations," introduced
by Kahentinetha Horn, MNN Mohawk Nation News (12 April 2006),
http://www.gatheringplacefirstnationscanews.ca/PressReleases/
sixnations/060412_01sixnationsmanifesto.htm?selected=3D77.
66 "Demand from Women Title Holders of the Rotinohnsonnion:we/Six
Nations to Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc. of Barrie Ontario to Cease
and Desist the Building of a Natural Gas Pipeline Under the Pine River
in Hornings Mills on the Haldimand Tract," Mohawk Nation News (15
September 2006),
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/news/print.php?lang=3Den&layout=3Dmnn&newsn=
r=3D300.
67 See Jean-Fran=EF=BF=BDois Lyotard, Le diff=C5=BDrend (Paris: Les =C6=
=92ditions
du Minuit, 1983).
68 "Demand from Women Title Holders."
69 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 450-57; quoted from Sophocles: The
Three Theban Plays, trans Robert Fagles, intro. by Bernard Knox (1982;
rpt. London: Penguin, 1984), p. 82.
70 Doug Struck, "Canadian Was Falsely Accused, Panel Says," The
Washington Post (19 September 2006), available at Information Clearing
House, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15021.htm.
71 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998).
72 See O'Connor, Report of the Events Relating to Maher Arar, part
III, chapter 7, pp. 101-27.
73 For contrasting accounts of this episode, see "U.S. agents
swarmed in Caledonia dispute: police," CTV.ca (11 June 2006),
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/
20060610/caledonia_conflict_060611/20060611?hub=3DCanada; and
Kahentinetha Horn, "What's Wendigo Psychosis?" MNN Mohawk Nation News
(9 June 2006), available at First Perspective (11 June 2006),
http://www.firstperspective.ca/fp_template.php?path=3D20060611caledonia1.
74 Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000), p. 40; quoted by Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of
the Real (London: Verso, 2002), p. 98.
75 Zizek, p. 99.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of
the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00244.htm
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| User: "" |
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| Title: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
28 Dec 2006 05:21:52 PM |
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Never managed to understand why some of these bastards name themselves
after predatory or cunning animals like wolf, fox etc. or shocking
Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman, and then after gold and
silver, Goldstein, Larry Silverstein, who made billions of the 911
controlled demolition and death of 3000+ humans.
visit: www.nkusa.org, www.st911.org, www.counterpunch.org
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-efron24dec24,0,2105545.story
Wolfowitz owes us an explanation
By Sonni Efron, Sonni Efron is an editor on the opinion pages of The
Times.
December 24, 2006
ACCOUNTABILITY is one of those ideals, like justice or the triumph of
right over might, that are wonderful in principle but usually
disappointing in practice.
This is nowhere more true than in Washington, where one of the most
powerful men in President Bush's inner circle, a man who helped
conceive, plan and execute the Iraq war, has managed to escape scrutiny
for steering his country into one of the greatest strategic
catastrophes of his generation.
I am referring, although nobody else does, to Paul Wolfowitz. Remember
Wolfowitz, best known to readers of this and other newspapers as the
"chief architect of the Iraq war"? Before the war, he was hailed by
many as one of the great foreign policy intellectuals of our time. He
was a leading defense strategist, a former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia
and the former dean of the School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins
University, a man whose views on democracy and the Middle East were
taken seriously by both his admirers and his critics. In 2001,
Wolfowitz, then 58, was named deputy secretary of Defense, serving as
top aide to Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Yet today, as the policies he put in place come crashing down,
Wolfowitz is nowhere to be found - at least not at the Pentagon. In
fact, he left in 2005 to become president of the World Bank, where he
has been busy trying to save Africa. In seeking refuge at the World
Bank, Wolfowitz has followed in the footsteps of Robert McNamara,
President Johnson's Vietnam War-era Defense secretary. McNamara was the
"architect" of the Vietnam War in his own time, but he bailed out of
the Pentagon to run the World Bank in 1968 as the U.S. body count
mounted.
What is particularly disturbing is that Wolfowitz is visibly delighting
in his role as one of the world's highest-profile (publicly funded)
philanthropists - while saying barely a word about the catastrophe in
Iraq. In the few comments he has been badgered into making about the
war since he left the Pentagon, he has defended the conduct of the U.S.
and expressed the belief that Iraqis will struggle their way to
freedom.
He has insisted that the subject of Iraq rarely comes up in his new
job, where people would rather hear his plans for Africa. How
convenient to be required to read proposals for breaking the poverty
cycle instead of the morning casualty reports that blight each daybreak
at the Pentagon.
I invited Wolfowitz to comment, telling us his views on Iraq or the
problem of democracy in the radicalized Middle East. He declined, but
e-mailed this response: "I'm not a U.S. official any more and
unfortunately not a private citizen either. I work for 184 countries
that expect me to do the job at the World Bank. I would like nothing
better than to be able to get involved in this debate [over Iraq]. I
would particularly like to be able to clear the record of some of the
garbage about myself personally, but if I start doing that, the people
I work for would say, 'You are not doing your job, you are getting
mixed up in something that is a distraction from the message that we
would like you to deliver.' I have spoken to heads of 11 African
countries, I have spoken to ordinary people, I have spoken to civil
society groups; none of them care about my role in Iraq, they care
about what I do in the World Bank."
Is that a reasonable answer? It's true that the bank's international
board probably would prefer that Wolfowitz stick to saving Africa. But
is that an excuse for him to keep silent while his country is agonizing
over how Iraq went so wrong?
Earlier this month, Wolfowitz was heckled during a speech in Atlanta.
One protester called him a war criminal. That's silly. But it is true
that the brilliant and idealistic advisor, in large part through the
force of his ideas, played a big part in selling the war to his bosses,
and eventually to the American people.
To his credit, Wolfowitz had argued for years that the U.S. policy of
cooperating with repressive regimes in the Middle East was a grave
mistake, that democracy and freedom were not American values but
universal aspirations. His principled opposition to tyranny in any form
won him many admirers - as well as the respect of people who
disagreed with him on some issues but believed his ideas posed a moral
challenge that could not be ignored.
Wolfowitz also believed the U.S. had erred in allowing Saddam Hussein
to stay in power after the dictator ravaged Kuwait in 1990. And he
continued to advocate for Hussein's overthrow. Sept. 11 revived his
aging arguments. According to Bob Woodward, when Bush's senior advisors
assembled at Camp David just days after the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz was
the only one who advocated military action against Iraq as a first
response.
In Woodward's book, Wolfowitz is shown criticizing some aspects of
Rumsfeld's conduct of the war. Yet some of the most fundamental
misjudgments of Iraq appear to have been his as well. He testified to
Congress, for instance, that U.S. troops were more likely to be treated
as liberators than occupiers, and that Iraq's own wealth would likely
suffice to pay for most of its reconstruction. He dismissed warnings
that ethnic strife could erupt in a democratic or chaotic Iraq, saying
that most of the violence in Iraq had always been by the Hussein regime
against various ethnic groups. And his promotion of the now-discredited
Ahmad Chalabi has never been explained.
In February 2003, on the eve of the invasion, before the House Budget
Committee, he heaped scorn on "the notion that it will take several
hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq,"
saying that the number was "wildly off the mark."
Of course, plenty of other smart people also got Iraq wrong, so why
single out Wolfowitz? Because from Bush on down, the politicians are
being held accountable. Iraq has destroyed the Bush legacy. Generals
have seen their military wounded. The war has tarnished Colin Powell's
once-shining reputation, destroyed Rumsfeld's and killed any shot
Condoleezza Rice might have had at the White House. But Wolfowitz has
failed up, into one of the world's most prestigious jobs. "I'll have a
chance sometime to talk about Iraq," Wolfowitz said in his e-mail last
week. "But it's a distraction and a harmful distraction from what I'm
trying to accomplish for Africa and the developing world."
Still, as a man whose reputation for intellectual honesty helped land
him the World Bank job, the cerebral Wolfowitz owes the American people
not only an explanation but also his best forensic analysis of mistakes
made and how not to repeat them. Does he believe democracy can be
promoted in any real sense when the Middle East is on fire? Under his
stewardship, the World Bank is stepping up lending in Iraq, so these
questions are not entirely academic.
If Wolfowitz still believes that the decision to go to war was correct
and that more reconstruction money can still save Iraq, then this is a
critical time to explain why. If he believes he erred, he should help
us understand how it happened and why - and he should apologize, as a
private citizen. A World Bank job - or any other important post -
should not shield him from accountability.
.
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| User: "Squidward Tentacles" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
28 Dec 2006 07:08:03 PM |
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IMHO
what an *****!
<st911@rock.com> wrote in message
news:1167348112.092976.75790@h40g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Never managed to understand why some of these bastards name themselves
after predatory or cunning animals like wolf, fox etc. or shocking
Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman, and then after gold and
silver, Goldstein, Larry Silverstein, who made billions of the 911
.
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| User: "hanson" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
28 Dec 2006 11:01:24 PM |
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<st911@rock.com> wrote in message
news:1167348112.092976.75790@h40g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
"Squidward Tentacles" <at@bikini.bottom.bb> cranked himself over
st911 in his message news:en1ppj$erm$1@aioe.org... & says:
IMHO, what an *****!
[hanson]
ahahahaha... AHAHAHAHA...your poetic handle sounds like
"Shitwad Testicles" at bikini bottom @ an american israeli.org"
yet your brilliant 1-liner is unclear whether you adore or cuss
his *****. ....ahahaha... ahahaha.... ahahahaha...
...... But really, Paul Wolfowitz was referred to by the newshound
Wolf Blitzer as the architect of Gulf War II, which was/is a very
predatory enterprise. Then like a predation animal, Paul W
left the scene as soon as Saddam was captured (and revenge
was done for Israel) and he became the pres of the World Bank.
== Cunning isn't it! == ... & AFA 9/11 in which NO Israeli deaths
were reported, Larry Silverstein managed to get the rebuilding
contract for the WTC, == Cunning I'd say! ==
Does your anger or your envy cloud your reasoning and logic?
Thanks for the laughs... ahahaha.... ahahahanson
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-efron24dec24,0,2105545.story
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| User: "Squidward Tentacles" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 09:44:38 AM |
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"hanson" <hanson@quick.net> wrote in message
news:Ei1lh.2690$511.1255@trnddc06...
Does your anger or your envy cloud your reasoning and logic?
Thanks for the laughs... ahahaha.... ahahahanson
you must be a marrano!
.
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| User: "hanson" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 10:08:17 AM |
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"Shitwad Testicles" at bikini bottom @ an american israeli.org"
aka "Squidward Tentacles" <at@bikini.bottom.bb> wrote in
his message news:en3d57$ui9$1@aioe.org...
"hanson" <hanson@quick.net> wrote in message
news:Ei1lh.2690$511.1255@trnddc06...
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/msg/7b0e5f6285e29087
Does your anger or your envy cloud your reasoning and logic?
Thanks for the laughs... ahahaha.... ahahahanson
[Shitwad]
you must be a marrano!
[hanson]
ahahahaha... Caramba! You mean me being a
Judío Escondido, a closet Yid?... ahahahaha...
AHAHAHAHA... ahahaha... AHAHAHAHAHA...
So, is it your anger or your envy that clouds your
reasoning and logic?... ahahaha... ahahahahaha..
Happy New Year to you, and thanks for the laughs!
ahahaha... ahahanson
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 12:02:54 AM |
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Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
IMHO, what an *****!
No doubt about it. He'd be a contender for biggest ***** of 2006,
unfortunately he lacks the creativity to put it over the top.
It's been boring for quite some time.
.
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| User: "Mackie" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 01:39:02 AM |
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Just listen to these dirty uncircumcized pieces of rotting goyischer
***** lint trying to come on as though they had a brain--and this is
what passes for "thought" within the goy scientific community?
No wonder they think the waters of the earth came via a whole bunch of
comets. And these people have the nerve to laugh at Velikovsky?
Ha!
Thank God Israel has its ICBM nuclear arsenal with which to deal with
the likes of such rabid snarling dogs--and don't think they won't get
'em out. Just keep pushing, Goy-Face.
Heh!
<huangxienchen@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1167372178.110488.224870@73g2000cwn.googlegroups.com...
Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
IMHO, what an *****!
No doubt about it. He'd be a contender for biggest ***** of 2006,
unfortunately he lacks the creativity to put it over the top.
It's been boring for quite some time.
.
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| User: "werty" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 10:35:00 PM |
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Mackie wrote:
Thank God Israel has its ICBM nuclear arsenal with which to deal with
the likes of such rabid snarling dogs--and don't think they won't get
'em out. Just keep pushing, Goy-Face.
Pls explain how Isreal could use those nukes ......
Nukes stopped world wars ......
When the victims get Nukes ,
1) the USA will quickly back
out of middle east and
2) the economy of the US will go
into a depression for no place to sell Non-nuke terrorists weapons
tanks F-16's and such .
3) The world will then be able to tax our exports much
higher .
4) , we will try to improve pdts , to hold market share ..
5) they wont buy even on better quality , for the politics .
6) USA will lose 200 million jobs ....
7) end of the US Govt , free at last free at last , thank God , free
at last !!
Free to work and own a home , free to have a bank acct
free to acuse a thief ... .14th amendment. ....
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| User: "Squidward Tentacles" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 09:52:31 AM |
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marrano, mmmmmkey!!!
"Mackie" <mackiemesser@zoomshare.com> wrote in message
news:1167377942.761879.3730@i12g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Just listen to these dirty uncircumcized pieces of rotting goyischer
***** lint trying to come on as though they had a brain--and this is
what passes for "thought" within the goy scientific community?
No wonder they think the waters of the earth came via a whole bunch of
comets. And these people have the nerve to laugh at Velikovsky?
Ha!
Thank God Israel has its ICBM nuclear arsenal with which to deal with
the likes of such rabid snarling dogs--and don't think they won't get
'em out. Just keep pushing, Goy-Face.
Heh!
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 12:02:58 AM |
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Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
IMHO, what an *****!
No doubt about it. He'd be a contender for biggest ***** of 2006,
unfortunately he lacks the creativity to put it over the top.
It's been boring for quite some time.
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| User: "Fred Kasner" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
29 Dec 2006 05:20:04 PM |
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hanson wrote:
<st911@rock.com> wrote in message
news:1167348112.092976.75790@h40g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
"Squidward Tentacles" <at@bikini.bottom.bb> cranked himself over
st911 in his message news:en1ppj$erm$1@aioe.org... & says:
IMHO, what an *****!
[hanson]
ahahahaha... AHAHAHAHA...your poetic handle sounds like
"Shitwad Testicles" at bikini bottom @ an american israeli.org"
yet your brilliant 1-liner is unclear whether you adore or cuss
his *****. ....ahahaha... ahahaha.... ahahahaha...
..... But really, Paul Wolfowitz was referred to by the newshound
Wolf Blitzer as the architect of Gulf War II, which was/is a very
predatory enterprise. Then like a predation animal, Paul W
left the scene as soon as Saddam was captured (and revenge
was done for Israel) and he became the pres of the World Bank.
== Cunning isn't it! == ... & AFA 9/11 in which NO Israeli deaths
were reported, Larry Silverstein managed to get the rebuilding
contract for the WTC, == Cunning I'd say! ==
Does your anger or your envy cloud your reasoning and logic?
Thanks for the laughs... ahahaha.... ahahahanson
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-efron24dec24,0,2105545.story
Silverstein did not acquire the rebuilding contract. He was responsible
for the building long before 911. He had to pay the Port Authority the
rent even if the building no longer stood. His big problem was to get
the full value from the insurance company that ensured the buildings.
They only wanted to pay for one attack rather than the destruction of
three buildings.
FK
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| User: "Tom Potter" |
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| Title: Re: *** Wolfowitz owes us an explanation *** |
09 Jan 2007 09:48:31 AM |
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"Fred Kasner" <fkasner@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:Dohlh.13621$Gw4.9765@newssvr23.news.prodigy.net...
hanson wrote:
<st911@rock.com> wrote in message
news:1167348112.092976.75790@h40g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Never managed to understand why some of these bastards
name themselves after predatory or cunning animals like wolf,
fox etc. or shocking Blitz Paul Wolfowitz, Wolf Blitzer, Abe Foxman
and then after gold and silver, Goldstein, who made billions of 911
"Squidward Tentacles" <at@bikini.bottom.bb> cranked himself over
st911 in his message news:en1ppj$erm$1@aioe.org... & says:
IMHO, what an *****!
[hanson]
ahahahaha... AHAHAHAHA...your poetic handle sounds like
"Shitwad Testicles" at bikini bottom @ an american israeli.org"
yet your brilliant 1-liner is unclear whether you adore or cuss
his *****. ....ahahaha... ahahaha.... ahahahaha...
..... But really, Paul Wolfowitz was referred to by the newshound
Wolf Blitzer as the architect of Gulf War II, which was/is a very
predatory enterprise. Then like a predation animal, Paul W
left the scene as soon as Saddam was captured (and revenge
was done for Israel) and he became the pres of the World Bank.
== Cunning isn't it! == ... & AFA 9/11 in which NO Israeli deaths
were reported, Larry Silverstein managed to get the rebuilding
contract for the WTC, == Cunning I'd say! ==
Does your anger or your envy cloud your reasoning and logic?
Thanks for the laughs... ahahaha.... ahahahanson
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-efron24dec24,0,2105545.story
Silverstein did not acquire the rebuilding contract. He was responsible
for the building long before 911. He had to pay the Port Authority the
rent even if the building no longer stood. His big problem was to get the
full value from the insurance company that ensured the buildings. They
only wanted to pay for one attack rather than the destruction of three
buildings.
FK
It is interesting to see that "Fred Kasner"
does not comprehend discounted rate of return.
Silverstein got about $5,000,000,000.00 in insurance money,
and he has to pay | | | | | |
