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OVERTIME--March 2004 issue
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Dedicated to reflecting the collective wisdom of enlightened workers.

Linda Featheringill
4651 West 41st Street, Down
Cleveland, OH 44109
(216) 661-0794

lfeatheringill@hotmail.com

March 2004
Volume 4, Number 10

Greetings!

The US has finally decided to challenge the Bush Administration’s claims of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The whole thing is a real mess and is rather confusing. I have gathered some points we might think about while we watch this story unfold. Hope you enjoy this issue.
-- Linda Featheringill

WMDs

I. Where are they?

All the senior members of the Bush Administration said that Iraq had large amounts of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Some were more convincing than others. Colin Powell, whom the people in the US hold in high esteem, made his case for the presence of WMDs and we believed he was sincere. Members of the military thought they would face chemical and/or biological agents once they were inside Iraq. We watched film clips of soldiers struggling with gas masks in the desert heat and questioned our own doubts. Perhaps Iraq did pose a real and present danger to the rest of the world.

But now it is clear that those stockpiles of weapons are not anywhere to be found and they were not there at the time of the invasion.

What happened?
[L.F.]

II. Newspeak

[Note: George Orwell’s novel “1984” featured a government that practiced “newspeak,” in which the actual meaning of words did not conform to reality or reason. Government slogans included “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.”]

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.

Let's start with the case of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any pressure - after what happened to Valerie Plame [a CIA agent who was publicly identified because her husband was a critic of the Administration], what would you do in their place? - but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top W.M.D. analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.

And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were willing to provide.

Can all these awkward facts be inked out of the historical record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's handpicked "independent" commission won't investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain - who chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony - it will brush aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren't nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters. (Mentioned as a possible member of the commission is James Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book.)

And if top political figures have their way, there will be further rewriting to come. You may remember that Saddam gave in to U.N. demands that he allow inspectors to roam Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may soon be invalid. Recently Mr. Bush said that war had been justified because Saddam "did not let us in." And this claim was repeated by Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Why on earth didn't [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?
[Paul Krugman, New York Times, February 6, 2004.]

Sometimes you're left zigging when word comes down from headquarters that it's time to zag. Here's a clip from the liner notes of Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror by Laurie Mylroie, chief ideologist and intel maven of the Iraq hawks ...

"Combining important new research with an insider's grasp of Beltway politics, Mylroie describes how the CIA and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction. She reveals how major elements of the case against Iraq -- including information about possible links to al Qaeda and evidence of potential Iraqi involvement in the fall 2001 anthrax attacks -- were prematurely dismissed by these agencies for cynical reasons."

The Agency made them do it? Let's get our stories straight, shall we?
[Joshua Micah Marshall, February 03, 2004 ]

III. How politics can drive intelligence

To unravel our intelligence failures in Iraq, it helps to look back at what was once one of the most secret and scary chapters in U.S.-Soviet relations. An intelligence failure risked nuclear war in the 1980's - but this was a mistake by the K.G.B

In 1981, we now know, the K.G.B. chairman said at a secret conference that President Ronald Reagan was planning to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The Soviets became consumed with the U.S. threat, just as the Bush administration became obsessed with the Iraq threat. The K.G.B. ordered all its offices in NATO countries to seek evidence of Mr. Reagan's plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike, and they code-named the effort RYAN.

Once K.G.B. officers knew what Moscow wanted, they found "evidence" everywhere of Mr. Reagan's secret plans for a nuclear strike - confirming Moscow's worst fears. Then NATO held a nuclear launching exercise in November 1983, playing into the Soviet alarm. The K.G.B. mistakenly reported to Moscow that NATO was on an actual alert. The Soviets put their own forces on alert and braced for a nuclear attack.

It was "one of the worst nuclear scares since the Cuban missile crisis - and Washington didn't even know it until after it was over," James Risen and Milt Bearden write in their terrific book about the spy wars, "The Main Enemy."

The parallels between our Iraq intelligence mess and RYAN are telling. When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.

So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.
[N. Kristof, New York Times, February 7, 2004.]

Let the reader beware

Perhaps we should keep in mind that it is also true that the American CIA and the British MI6 just may not be as smart as they would like us to think they are.
[L.F.]

V. To sum up, in 25 words or less

The much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud.
-- Robert Sheer, Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2004

Crucifixion

Mel Gibson has recently put out a movie about the death of Jesus that is stirring up a lot of emotion and more than a little controversy. I must admit that I have not yet seen the film. The mainstream media have has succeeded in following this uproar but so far has failed to provide a historical perspective for its readers.

The Roman Empire held power through violence and intimidation. Anyone who was considered a threat to the status quo was dealt with brutally. The scriptures report that Jesus was executed along with two thieves. We don’t know what they stole but it probably doesn’t matter. They were crucified because they were troublemakers.

Consider the case of Spartacus, who led a slave rebellion. He and his 10,000 followers made a serious attempt to change the way things were. They were definitely troublemakers. After they were captured by the Roman army, 6,000 or so were crucified.

Historians estimate that the Romans crucified about 100,000 individuals. They also executed people in ways that were even more violent. These were all occupied people, slaves, etc. Citizens of the Empire were executed in ways that were quicker and cleaner.

And regardless of how the relationship is depicted in this film, the High Priest of Jerusalem, along with all other indigenous religious leaders, was under the thumb of Pontius Pilate, rather than the other way around.
[L.F.]

ECOLOGY

The only way we can preserve the earth is to grant every living entity what it needs to thrive and take from it only what it can afford to give.

Pentagon report

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

"Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," concludes the Pentagon analysis. "Once again, warfare would define human life."

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change"should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern", say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network. An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is "plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately" they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United State to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.
[From an article by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris for The Guardian (London), February 22, 2004.]

Early spring in the UK

Spring has advanced in the UK by three weeks in the past 30 years. There were even significant differences between 2001 and 2003. The following numbers indicate the number of days earlier the designated events occurred in 2003:
First snowdrop flowers, 9 days; First hazel flowers, 21 days; Rooks start to nest, 7 days; Frog spawn first seen, 6 days; Song thrush sings, 33 days; Lawn cut the first time, 9 days; Bumblebee first seen, 16 days; Blackbirds start to nest, 9 days; Tadpoles first seen, 12 days; Silver birch bud burst, 9 days.
[Source: Woodland Trust, London.]

Gorillas

The population of rare mountain gorillas in central Africa has increased 17 percent in the past 15 years, despite conflict in the region, poaching, and human incursions into the animals’ habitat. A recent census shows the number of the endangered primates in a mountain range straddling Rwanda, Congo, and Uganda has grown to 380 from 324 in 1989 - the year the last census was conducted.
[West Australian, January 19, 2004. Contributed by Gogglesworth, Australia.]

Herbal medicines

Thousands of species of wild plants are being wiped out by the enthusiasm for herbal medicines, environmentalists say. Up to a fifth of the species upon which the industry relies are being harvested to extinction, a report in New Scientist says.

Alan Hamilton, of the global environment network WWF, says that the market for herbal remedies in the US and Europe has been growing by 10%/year for the past decade. Two-thirds of the 50,000 plants in use are still harvested from the wild and Dr. Hamilton’s research suggests that between 4,000 and 10,000 are endangered.

One species of concern is the tetu lakda, a tree of rainforests in India and Sri Lanka used for anticancer drugs. Others include a saw-wort from India that is used for skin disorders and tendrilled fritillary from Sichuan that is used for respiratory infections.

Because the herbal medicine industry is frequently characterized by fads, with one year’s popular plant being all but ignored the next year, there has been little incentive to sustainability in a particular species.
[The Times (London), January 8, 2004. Contributed by P.E.N., Colchester, England, UK.]

Australian heat wave

At least 29 people have died in three days as Australia's heatwave concentrated its fiercest heat and humidity on Brisbane over the weekend. Hundreds more were taken to hospital in the Queensland capital, suffering from dehydration and heatstroke. The city's official temperature gauges peaked at 41.7C (107F) yesterday lunchtime, but in some suburbs the mercury reached 44.4C (112F). The conditions were made far worse by humidity rates as high as 70 per cent. At night there was little escape with the low temperatures just before dawn refusing to drop below 27C (81F).

Emergency services said the weather was posing a "most significant medical emergency". They said between Friday afternoon and Sunday night, police were called to 29 sudden deaths, all believed to be related to the heatwave.

Three elderly men remained in a critical condition in hospital tonight suffering from severe heat exhaustion. Ambulance workers also had to be treated after they showed symptoms of dehydration.

Jim Higgins, Queensland's Ambulance Service commissioner, reported that emergency callouts on Sunday were 53 per cent higher than normal for the time of year. Crews were so stretched that in about 20 cases firemen were sent to administer first aid until paramedics could get there. Mr. Higgins would not speculate on how many people died directly from heat-related causes, but conceded: "Very clearly, the heat has an impact on people and there are underlying medical conditions that will be exacerbated by very significant heat."

The weekend before, there were seven deaths thought to be heat-related.

This is late summer in Australia when temperatures usually begin to cool down, but the February record books have been broken again and again in the past two weeks. Many highs were 14C above average for the time of year.

Forecasters from the local weather bureau said Brisbane hit a new February high when the temperature reached 39.9C (104F), the previous record set 80 years ago. The nearby Gold Coast broke its all-time record on Saturday when it reached 40.5C (105F).

Hotels in Brisbane reported that many locals were booking rooms because they did not have air conditioning in their homes. Despite Brisbane's sub-tropical climate very few residents have air-conditioning. Those who have the devices were also hit over the weekend as the massive demand for power, and isolated violent storms triggered by the heat, caused power cuts plunging whole neighbourhoods into hot, humid darkness. [From an article by Matthew Brace for The Times
(London), February 23, 2004.]

Late summertime temperatures above 115F (46C) in South Australia’s agricultural areas literally cooked fruit on the trees and vegetable crops on the ground. Fresh Stone Fruit Growers Association chairman Dino Cerrachi said that up to 30% of some stone fruit crops will be lost due to heat damage. Adelaide registered its hottest day in 65 years, with a reading of 112F (44C).
[Steve Newman, Earthweek: A diary of the planet, February 20, 2004.]

This and That

51st State ["Colonial Rebellion" - is that what the British call the Revolutionary War of 1776?]

The English people need to "see the big picture" and not focus on one issue, Prime Minister Tony Blair said in his New Year Message on December 31st. He added that continuing and unflinching support for President George W. Bush is particularly necessary now if Great Britain is ever to become the 51st US state.

Speaking before the House of Commons, Blair admitted that British involvement in the Middle East quagmire was unpopular, but insisted "what you must concede is that in order to be granted US statehood, we must be willing to defer our opinions and support the President on issues like this. For the greater good," he went on, "you must all swallow your pride, as I have, and someday, like I have, you too will be able to say, ‘I am an American.’"

"But what if we don’t effing want to?" shouted one North Eastern MP, to the shock of Labour front benchers. "Oh, don’t be silly," Blair replied.

Blair’s emotional speech, the first time his government has officially declared its statehood intentions, came as a surprise to most Americans, who thought the UK already was the 51st state. But it caused an uproar in the Commons, particularly among liberal members of the Labour Party, who feared that under the American political system, they would have to join the Democratic Party.

Blair, however, insisted the advantages of becoming another star on the US flag are too great to ignore. "As Americans, we will finally be able to lift the yoke of cross-Atlantic condescension," he said. "We will finally be able to say we won the Colonial Rebellion. We will be able to once again look in the mirror and say, ‘We are still a superpower.’ And we will be able to declare that we ‘saved our own damned arses’ during World War II."
< BR> England would in time be renamed Britannia to blend in with other US states that end in "a." With over 50 million people, it would immediately become the most populous state. Early plans also call for Scotland and Wales to be spun off as the 52nd and 53rd states, but Northern Ireland’s status remains uncertain.

"Northern Ireland is a place of deep-seated hatreds and senseless violence, so I don’t know if it would qualify as a state," said one source close to President Bush. "It might qualify as an American high school, though."

US diplomatic sources, meanwhile, said inclusion was not yet a certainty and explained that the British must make several concessions before being granted statehood. They would have to: a) drop the Geordie and Scouse accents; b) rename all airports after US presidents and film stars; and c) disband the Royal Family, "not because America doesn’t recognize nobility, but because they’re just a bunch of weirdos."

The future governor of Britannia, the current British prime minister, however, insisted any cultural compromises would be worth it if the new state gained long-sought representation in Washington, DC. "For too long we have been governed by America without having a vote in America," said Blair. "As citizens of the US, we will finally make our voices heard."
[Socialist View, January-February 2004.]

Nine eleven, revisited

As regards the article in Overtime of December 2003, titled "Nine-Eleven," it reminds me of the movie I saw last year, called "11-09-01," in which various film directors from various countries were asked to make a film of about 20 minutes length about September 11, 2001. Mike Leigh, the director from England, was voted the best one, and I thought so too.

In his film, he had a Chilean man writing a letter to the people of the USA expressing his sympathy for what happened on that day, because on September 11, 1973, the democratically elected Allende was shot and murdered and the city bombed by people working for the Americans. So when I see and hear people talking about 9-11, I always think about 1973.
[A.C., New Zealand.]

From a review of Michael Moore’s book, Dude, Where’s My Country?

Sadly, Moore fails to see that Dubya’s [President Bush’s] lies and corruption are not causes of the problem but symptoms, brought about by the same factors that result in wars and poverty and inequality. No matter who is in nominal charge of capitalism, whether in the US or anywhere else, it will remain the same rapacious animal, attacking ordinary people both at home and abroad. This will only finish when workers get rid, not just of Dubya, but of the whole gang of politicians, of capitalist parasites, and indeed of the capitalist system itself. We must hope that some of the many who will read this book will draw more radical conclusions than its author.
[Paul Bennett, Socialist Standard, January 2004.]

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. According to an Alliance Capital Management study, between 1995 and 2002, 22 million factory jobs disappeared worldwide. The Japanese lost 16%, Brazil 20%. Even China lost 15 %. All of this when global industrial output has risen more than 30%.
[From an editorial by Mortimer Zuckerman for US News & World Report, February 9, 2004. Contributed by S. B., Maine, USA.]

Henry Kissinger

A newly declassified document reveals that the US then secretary of state Henry Kissinger told Argentina’s foreign minister during the "dirty war" against leftists, "our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed."

The transcript of the meeting between Dr. Kissinger and Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti in New York on October 7, 1976 is the first documentary evidence that the Gerald Ford administration approved of the military junta’s harsh tactics, which led to the deaths or "disappearance" of about 0,000 people in eight years.

The document is also certain to further complicate the Kissinger legacy, which has been questioned in recent years as evidence emerged on his connection to human rights violations in Chile, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

Dr. Kissinger and several top deputies have repeatedly denied condoning human rights abuses in Argentina.

Information was requested last year by the families of the junta’s victims and human rights groups. A transcript of the 1976 Kissinger-Guzzetti meeting was declassified recently.

Dr. Kissinger reassured Adm. Guzzetti in the seven-page transcript, marked SECRET: "I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war."
[The West Australian, December 6, 2003. Contributed by Gogglesworth, Australia.]

North Korea

There is a cell in Nongpo prison where they take the women whose babies are to be killed. As in the other cells, the women are packed so tightly they can only crouch, squeezing together, for sleep. There is no room to lie down, so when one of the women goes into labour, the others stand up to make space. They watch, but are not allowed to help, as the baby is born. One woman designated by the guards takes the baby and lies it face down on the floor. Then the women sit again, including the bleeding mother, and the baby is left to die. If it cries for too long, more than a day or two, a guard smothers it.

No crying is allowed, by the mother or the other women. If any explanation is given, the guard says: "You should not have gone to China. This will teach you to have sex with Chinese men, to have Chinese babies."

Often, the regime of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's so-called Dear Leader, is treated as a comic opera. Television news pictures are of his extraordinary parades, where military hardware and ballroom-dancing couples in immaculate formation pay tribute to Kim and his late father, President Kim il-Sung. Now, as its nuclear weapons programme is once again on the table, it is treated more seriously, as a potential negotiating partner.

Yet out of sight is a network of jails and labour camps containing hundreds of thousands of starving, dying people. Their offence may have been to allow a photograph of one of the Kims to get dusty. In many cases, they simply have the wrong relatives.

But Nongpo is a new type of prison. According to reports from North Korean refugees, it is a detention centre for escapers who have been caught in China and repatriated.

It is one of half a dozen such facilities and they specialise in short but particularly brutal punishment regimes. After being beaten and starved, prisoners are sent to work in fields and brick factories for 14 hours a day, until they collapse. Since the late 1990s these prisons have refused to tolerate "foreign" babies.

A report published before Christmas by David Hawk, a former United Nations official, recorded infanticide at one other detention centre, Onsong, and forced abortions at all these places and at Chongjin detention centre.
[Richard Spencer, The Telegraph (London), January 17, 2004. Contributed by Gogglesworth.]

There are also persistent reports of the entire extended families of political prisoners being killed in gas chambers, as well as various forms of experimentation being done on the prisoners. The history of the human race, filled as it is with occasions of mass murder and genocide, should inspire the world community to thoroughly investigate these latest allegations.
[L.F.]

This last month has been marked by news of the death of a supporter of Overtime, as well as the death of an animal companion of mine. I have awaken to the realization that perhaps we should express our gratitude sooner rather than later, to "bring roses to the living."

So this is a Thank You card - a personal expression of my gratitude to all of you who support Overtime with gifts of money, newspaper and magazine articles, and original commentary. It is also a special thank you to those of you who pass each issue along to other readers.
-- Linda Featheringill

The consequences of passing out information that is not accurate

The truth is that at this point no one can be sure whether the Iraq war, in its over-all effect, will turn out in the end to have helped or hindered the larger campaign against Islamist terrorism. What seems fairly clear is that Iraq’s biological, chemical, and, especially, nuclear weapons did not exist. Public and congressional support for the war, as well as the scattered international support it enjoyed, was therefore purchased falsely and, to a degree no yet known, dishonestly.

There has been a serious breach of trust, which cannot fail to have damaging results.

"For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America," the President said in his speech.

For a moment one couldn’t be sure one had heard him right. Was he speaking ironically? America’s word - the present Administration’s anyway - has in fact been cast into the deepest doubt, and that is one of the reasons its diplomacy has not been effective.

Bush was actually talking about Libya’s promise, post-Iraq, to abandon its (not very scary) nuclear ambitions, and what he actually meant, of course, is that no one now doubts America’s will to make war. But that is not true, either. Iraq has stretched the Pentagon’s legions thin. The misinformation that the Administration promulgated, from whatever admixture of intelligence failure and deliberate distortion, means that it will no longer be possible to rally domestic or international support for military adventures in the absence of a clear and independently verifiable casus belli.

Washington’s word won’t do.
[Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker, February 2, 2004.]

One more thought

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the UK, may yet lose his job because he was such an avid supporter of the Bush Administration’s plans to invade Iraq. If that happens, no head of state in the world will be eager to line up on the US side in the future.
[L.F.]

Next month: We’d love to know what you think. These are our usual classifications:

-- Open - questions, comments, tirades, etc.
-- RSVP. React to previous statements.
-- The ecology.
-- Clippings from newspapers, etc.

On the Web:

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Finances at the end of February 2004:

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Contributions: S. Brooks 7.40, J. Christian 20.00, W. Russell 5.00, N. Wilgus, 5.00, and O.U.E. 40.00.

And, to Everyone, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Linda Featheringill.