The objectives of the war were and remain to transform the country into a US client state in the Middle East and turn over its energy resources to US-based oil conglomerates. To achieve its ends Washington is prepared to offer minor concessions to factions of the Iraqi ruling class, but it will not accept any demands that conflict with its geopolitical and economic ambitions in the region.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/iraq-f05.shtml


Last November, US Marine Colonel Gareth Brandl claimed that the sacking of Fallujah was necessary because Satan lived in the town of 300,000. “The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy. But the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him,” BBC embedded reporter Paul Wood quoted Brandl as saying on the outskirts of Fallujah.

With its lies about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist connections exposed, the Bush administration is increasingly relying on the same racist and backward attitudes that have always been used to justify the colonial oppression of another people.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/gene-f07.shtml


The Fourth Nuremberg principle holds that all persons are obliged, if there is any possibility to do so, to defy government and military orders that violate international law. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees holds that a deserter can be deemed a refugee if the “type of military action” from which he desists has been condemned by the international community as against elementary humanitarian principles.

Yet the Canadian government has intervened to prevent Hinzman from arguing that fear of legal retribution for having refused to shoot and kill others in an aggressive war is grounds for political asylum.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/cana-f10.shtml


The US occupation dictated the rules of the election, and has already imposed a state structure that leaves key levers of power in US hands. US “advisors,” who take their orders from the fortified US embassy complex in Baghdad, have been installed in every government ministry, exercising effective control over all aspects of policy. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) imposed under Washington’s former colonial proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, remains the law of the land, and can be changed only by a two-thirds vote of the new national assembly, together with the unanimous support of the three-member presidency that this assembly will choose.

This setup, requiring a two-thirds majority for any significant decision, is designed to allow Washington the greatest possible leverage in exerting its control. It means that a minority—such as the forces around US puppets like Iyad Allawi—will be in a position to block any legislation not to the liking of their American patrons. [...]

The struggle for a genuinely democratic solution requires the unification of the working class across sectarian lines and across the artificial borders drawn by European colonialism, in a united struggle to expel imperialism and establish control over the vast oil wealth, so as to eradicate conditions of poverty and oppression. The first step in this struggle is the demand for the complete and unconditional withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops from Iraq. Such is the basis of the principled attitude taken by the World Socialist Web Site to the January 30 election.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/iraq-f04.shtml


The day after the vote, the administration of US President Lyndon Johnson hailed the election as a “major step forward,” declaring that the South Vietnamese people had expressed their democratic will and “deserve our support.”

Substituting the word “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” the same news stories, editorials and speeches could have been dusted off this past week and reused virtually unchanged.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/viet-f05.shtml


As I.F. Stone explained many years ago, the culture of Washington is so much built around the party circuit and concepts of “access” that most big-league reporters end up being chums with the people whose feet they should be holding to the fire. (It's hard to look under rocks if you're standing on them sipping cocktails.)

Of course, Stone was talking about the press as it was in the early 1970s. Things have gotten much worse now. Back then you didn't have a network like Fox that is simply a PR organ for the administration, and many newspapers still were not media conglomerates more worried about their licensed TV holdings and their good relations with the Federal Communications Commission than with digging up the news.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52524/index.php


The report discloses that the Federal Aviation Administration, despite being focused on risks of hijackings overseas, warned airports in the spring of 2001 that if "the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable."
www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021005A.shtml


Far more plausible than the administration’s claim that the attacks came as a complete surprise is that some form of stand-down was imposed on the intelligence and security services, knowing that a terrorist attack within the United States was imminent. The Bush White House wanted to use such an incident as the pretext for the long-planned campaign of military action in the Middle East that has unfolded over the last four years. (It is, of course, not necessary to suppose that those who permitted the attack knew exactly what its scale would be, nor the colossal cost in human lives.)
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/faa-f11.shtml


9/11 Basic Questions + WRH 9/11 Index + Questions for Michael Moore
www.whatreallyhappened.com/9-11BasicQuestions.html


The emergence of the National Guard, in its present form, began at the end of the nineteenth century when mass struggles by the working class—particularly the 1877 railway strikes—took on insurrectionary proportions. Business interests and state governments responded with the building of fortress-like armories in major cities and an expansion of the state militias, which were renamed the National Guard.

The Guard has served as a state-based force during peacetime. It has been called out in response to strikes, ghetto rebellions and the mass antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s. It has also been used for domestic disaster relief operations such as fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. During wartime, the Guard can be retained at any time by presidential order to supplement regular army troops in military operations. [...]

Additionally, the Bush administration has tried to boost its retention rate by increasing money for housing and education allowances. However, these efforts have failed to produce a rise in recruitment. With the continued decline in forces, there is increasing discussion about a possible reintroduction of the draft.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/guar-f11.shtml


"You said you weren't going to make proposals, but you already made the biggest proposal- giving Senn over to the Navy," he said to applause. Horan, wearing a peace sign lapel, attempted to calm down the tight room. A parent asked "Speaking of the future, and how much more money has the Pentagon promised you after the $2.1 million? That's all you're selling out for?"
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52461/index.php


14) How many foreigners were arrested in the US under suspicion of terrorism since September 11, 2001? [...] 14) 5000
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52425/index.php


Since Lynne Stewart's April 2002 indictment, the National Lawyers Guild has assisted Lynne Stewart in launching a broad-based, national education campaign about the impact that her indictment would have on the Sixth Amendment right to an attorney. The government is hoping that lawyers will now think twice before representing clients with unpopular views or related to unpopular causes. Members of the Guild, through its nationwide network of chapters, have also faulted the prosecution of Ms. Stewart based upon violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The National Lawyers Guild condemned the government's November 2003 federal superceding indictment as a continued attempt to undermine the attorney-client privilege by essentially reinstating the same charges that Judge John Koeltl dismissed as unconstitutionally vague four months earlier.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52565/index.php


23) What foundations of the Iraqi economic system did president Bush leave intact after the conquest of the country? [...] 23) the prohibition of unions and the prohibition of wage negotiations
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52425/index.php


The Solidarity Collective has developed these tactics in 5-6 strikes of the most exploited immigrant and young French workers in the Paris region and the tactics often work. The collective is made up of a Paris-wide network of militants who see the need to go beyond workplace-organizing; the decisive elements in winning such strikes are 30-40 people from outside the workplace who give, or try to give the strikers the forces they need for all the aspects of waging a strike that gets into trouble, above all through isolation. At the same time it's not "Leninist" in that no one is there to recruit people to an organization. The Collective aims to put the strikers in charge of their own struggle in a way that neither a union nor a typical leftist group does. It has as its sole aims the victory of the strike and the deepening of the “flying picket” network available for the next battle.

What kind of reservations can be articulated about the kind of roving tactics of the strike support group? They obviously don't solve "all" problems, and the Collective itself recognizes that its ability to turn away customers at the door made for the special vulnerability of the locales in which they were successful. The Collective is the first to recognize that far greater numbers would be necessary to stop a plant closing or to paralyze a military machine.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52420/index.php


Central to their plans is the subordination of the schools to the needs of the big business. This requires that teachers be transformed from educators into assembly-line-style workers, transferring lessons developed by private contractors and publishers to students who are to be molded like interchangeable parts. Students, many coming to school with social and family problems arising from pervasive poverty, do not always fit neatly into this lockstep teaching model.

The attempt to enforce this mode of learning through high-stakes testing, accompanied by lucrative payments to the companies that develop and administer these tests, only intensifies difficulties for students and teachers. Finally, in the manner of Henry Ford’s factory model, discontent must be suppressed with stronger police methods.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/nyc-f10.shtml


At a Jan. 29 press conference organized by the People's Organization for Progress (POP), a human and civil rights organization, Moore's family told a different story. Elizabeth Moore, the victim's mother, said the police forced her son‚s car into the snow bank. She said her son and his friend were unarmed while the police approached their car with weapons drawn. Moore‚s father, Allen Snow, Jr., said his son "didn't like violence. He ran from it."

Lawrence Hamm, chairman of POP, told the press conference, "We don't want to see another whitewash. We want someone outside the Essex County prosecutor‚s office to investigate." Both the victim's family and Hamm called for the immediate dismissal of Ruane and Popolizio from the police force, since this was their second involvement in a fatal shooting. Hamm also called for the creation of an independent civilian review board to hear complaints against the police.
www.fightbacknews.org/2005/01/newarkcops.htm


70 ANTICHRIST SPIES DEPLOYED IN MINDANAO CIVILIAN EXTERMINATIONS
newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/818992.shtml


Israel's settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) violate numerous United Nations Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), drafted immediately after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, demands "the withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces from the territories occupied" in the war.
www.poica.org/casestudies/Jayyus%2011-01-2005/casestudies.htm


The IRA has withdrawn its offer to complete the decommissioning process.
In a statement, the organisation said it had taken the offer to put its weapons beyond use off the table.
The IRA, which denies claims it was behind the £26.5m Belfast bank raid, said the British and Irish governments had "tried its patience to the limit".
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4231237.stm


Charles: We had Haitians come from Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Haiti, in order to share knowledge and talk about the present situation, especially the increasing violations of human rights taking place in Haiti, the arbitrary arrests, the killings at the order of the de facto government of Gerard Latortue. This was talked about by all of our speakers that came from Haiti, and also Mr. Thomas Griffin was with us, an investigator and immigration lawyer who went to Haiti and produced a 61 page report with extensive information and pictures.

We also talked about the issue of Canada, the United States and France, who are currently trying to place Haiti under UN Trusteeship for 25 to 40 years, which is something that the popular classes, which is 80% of the Haitian population, do not want. We know that Haiti got its independence in 1804, and people have worked very hard and fought to maintain it, and – since we finished commemorating our 200th anniversary of our independence – it’s imperative for the Haitian people to mobilize and stand up to the United States, France and Canada, and let them know that we will not accept re-colonization.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52454/index.php


Falun Gong is a traditional exercise and meditation practice that has been viciously persecuted in China since 1999. The practice had more followers than the communist party and it is widely believed that then-president Jiang Zemin saw it as a threat to his power or to the atheistic ideology of the state.

After international pressure won his early release, Zhang joined forces with 22 other artists to give artistic expression to the terror and suffering many face in China. The artists created more than 40 pieces that depict not only the suppression of Falun Gong but also the peaceful defiance of those who practice it and the spiritual depths of their journey. The works convey both the beauty of the practice and the horror of the persecution. One of the artists is still illegally imprisoned in China and his work is now his only voice.
newswire.indymedia.org/en/newswire/2005/02/819004.shtml


In addition, Forman did not appeal to Americans' religiosity. "This God was supposed to be just," he wrote of his early thinking about religion, "yet we black people had to pray and pray and hope that justice would come to us one day. This seemed too slow to me. The myth of whites getting their just deserts in hell while we finally got rewarded in heaven was responsible for much of the apathy of black people, I thought."

And later: "When a people who are poor, suffering with disease and sickness, accept the fact that God has ordained for them to be this way - then they will never do anything about their human condition. In other words, the belief in a supreme being or God weakens the will of a people to change conditions themselves."
www.blackcommentator.com/122/122_james_forman.html
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52373/index.php


This is not a solution in any case. On January 12, 2005, the creditor lands in the Paris Club discussed “debt reduction”. Absurdly little came out of this. They offered a moratorium. The debt service due this year may be paid later. The problem is only shifted to the future.

The offer was not meant seriously. The larger countries refused this moratorium. Thailand and India immediately refused because they feared being punished by the private capital markets. Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Seychellen seemed to accept the offer. On January 13, 2005, German finance minister Hans Eichel (SPD) met with the Indonesian foreign minister and the same day the Indonesian government refused the offer. Indonesia must pay Germany 442 million Euro this year.

That marvelous offer follows the motto: We offer you deferment of payment but woe to you if you accept it…

This is a very subtle form of hypocrisy. For several decades, many countries have been heavily indebted, not only the countries now afflicted by the flood catastrophe. Between 1980 and 2003, $1.8 trillion in interests alone flowed from the South to the North. Nevertheless the heavy debts of developing countries more than tripled in this time period. A few years ago there was a HIPC initiative (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) that should have cancelled the debts for the poorest countries. This only happened to a small extent under the conditions of the International Monetary Fund for introducing neoliberal structures.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52335/index.php


The merit of this position is that at least it doesn’t place any confidence in the Indian imperialists to solve the internal problems of the country. It seeks a solution to the problem within the forces operating in Nepal. The call for a general strike is the key demand here. The problem with the Nepalese Maoists is that in the past they have called strikes and then called them off, as if the working class were a tap of water that you can turn on and off at your whim. Because of that there is no guarantee it will always respond. The working class must be placed at the head of the nation. It must be the leadership, not an auxiliary to the guerrillas. The guerrillas should be an auxiliary to the struggles of the working class in the cities, not the other way round.

Indeed, a general strike is what is needed to stop the king. But a general strike also poses the question of power. If the king is stopped by a general strike, then it poses the power of the working class in a very stark way. If the working class is so powerful, then why should it limit itself to a bourgeois constituent assembly? Why can’t it build its own organs of power, workers’ councils, or soviets? Not posing this perspective actually weakens the movement. For many workers will think “why should we struggle, simply to pass power from one corrupt wing of the ruling class to another?”
www.marxist.com/Asia/nepal_royal_coup.htm


At the same time, Germany and every other European government pursue their own imperialist goals, which they seek to conceal from the mass of the population with the same outpourings and appeals on behalf of democracy and liberty which are so characteristic of the current US government. Under these conditions the conflicts between the great powers are intensifying in a form that recalls the darkest days before the beginning of the First World War.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/euro-f07.shtml


The bourgeoisie has much to _lose_ by unleashing
fascism. I advanced three arguments in my essay
above. I repeat them here:

Such a desperate course of action by the bourgeoisie would:
(a) instantly politicize tens of millions of people,
(b) destablize the entire system of bourgeois rule and
(c) destroy illusions in the bourgeois political system
. that the bourgeoisie has carefully crafted and
. painstakingly cultivated over many decades. [...]

If the Christian fundamentalists even thought about
slipping their leash -- they would be disciplined
and humiliated. The general who recently talked
about how much fun it is to kill people, for example,
was told to shut up. The bourgeoisie as a whole
(and in particular the section which specializes
in political deception -- the liberals) understands
that a ounce of political deception can be more
effective (and cheaper) than a ton of force -- and
that the fascist-minded who talk too loud must
have their mouths washed out with soap lest they
give the game away.
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52421/index.php


So the ultimate point of the building the left is to give liberalism a backbone? When it counted in 2004, the majority of left intellectuals and activists either echoed the Democratic campaign or fell silent on huge points of difference between Kerry and the independent left.

Are the Democrats an obstacle to which progressives must build an alternative? Or can the Democrats be “reclaimed” for progressive politics? If the left doesn’t get these questions right, we risk repeating the debacle of 2004 on an even greater scale in the future.
www.socialistworker.org
chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/52532/index.php


PBS decided last week not to distribute an episode of “Postcards From Buster,” a children’s program with animated and live-action characters, to its 349 stations because the show included lesbian couples. The cancellation was announced the same day that PBS received a bullying letter from newly installed federal Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, whose department partly funds “Buster,” denouncing the program.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/pbs-f04.shtml


The 36 Democratic “no” votes came as something of a surprise. Before his confirmation hearings, Gonzales was expected to breeze through the Senate. It was only after he repeatedly stonewalled questions on his role in the production of the “torture memos” and systematically evaded questions on whether torture is legal under certain conditions that Democrats felt obliged to vote against his nomination. [...]

In his written answers to questions, Gonzales indicated that there were situations when torture is legal.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/gonz-f05.shtml


Prime Minister Howard and Attorney General Philip Ruddock, while publicly acknowledging that he cannot be charged or prosecuted with any crime, continue to insist that he is an Al Qaeda supporter and dangerous. Along with other basic democratic rights repudiated as part of the “war on terror”, the Howard government has replaced the presumption of innocence with a new category—free but permanently under suspicion. [...]

In a carefully-worded comment in the Sydney Morning Herald on February 1, senior Sydney barristers Ian Barker and Robert Toner accused Ruddock of failing his duty to “resist abuse of liberties bestowed by law”. Although Habib’s release after three years without charge had “thrown the Australian Government into a tail-spin,” they said, nothing suggested that the attorney general “has the slightest problems with events at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib.”
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/habi-f07.shtml


More indicative of the social crisis, however, is the complete absence from either political party or the state’s media pundits of any serious, rational discussion of the real, objective conditions that, among other things, have compelled people from nearly 4,000 households to seek housing assistance in Salem alone.

What has raced to the top of the agenda for Oregon’s big business politicians, at least for the moment, is the vital need to shield themselves from occasional outbursts of rage by the broader public.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/oreg-f10.shtml


The weak growth in January jobs permitted the Bush administration to escape becoming the first since Herbert Hoover to show a net job loss over its four years in office. This is due to a growth in government employment; the total of private sector jobs is down by more than 700,000 since Bush took office.

The current economic recovery remains the worst since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data at the end of the Great Depression. A negligible 62,000 jobs have been added since March 2001. If the historical norm had held, the present so-called recovery should have generated 7.5 million more jobs than have materialized.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/jobs-f08.shtml


On February 1, in his first speech since being confirmed as the administration’s new secretary of health and human services, Michael Leavitt described the administration’s planned assault on Medicaid. The new wave of cuts will have a severe impact on many of the 50 million elderly, children, poor and disabled people who depend on Medicaid to pay for needed health care.
wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/medi-f08.shtml


Can you imagine a social program that is: (a) very successful in its mission of providing a dignified retirement to millions of people; (b) fiscally sound; and c) wildly popular?

Fanatics of laissez-faire capitalism can't. For them, this is the equivalent of a speed greater than that of light for a physicist. It is a result that is theoretically precluded, impossible. It contradicts core beliefs and an entire view of the world. Such a thing cannot exist.

And, what if such a thing does exist? It must be destroyed. Now! For the success and continued existence of social security is a perennial demonstration that institutional arrangements that are not seamlessly free market can work well and even efficiently to serve human needs. For the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation and GOP ultra-conservatives everywhere, social security is a malignancy in situ from which, if not extirpated once and for all, the cancer of income redistribution and the welfare state could once again spread under the right conditions.
www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021005M.shtml


Common to all these lives was Nihilism, which while popularly described as a “belief in nothing” is more accurately described as the absence of belief or faith. Whereas atheism was an absence of belief in gods, Nihilism was an absence of faith in anything, including society itself. The twin horrors of World War 1 and the Spanish Flu created a climate in which nothing seemed to be worthy of trust, either spiritually or governmentally. Those who had seen the horrors first hand could not bring themselves to plan or work for the future. “Future” was something that could not be relied upon.

A new nihilism is starting to appear in the United States. Like the Lost Generation, this malaise proceeds from multiple sources.
www.whatreallyhappened.com/nihilism.html

Photoillustrations by Chris Kaihatsu
community.webshots.com/user/ckaihatsu/