An Exclusive Interview with Shaytaan

The following interview was conducted with Shaytaan yesterday evening at a Starbucks in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City. Shaytaan has been following much of the dialogue on MWU! and contacted me with the hopes of correcting a few misconceptions.

Interview by Abu Fatoush

Abu Fatoush: Lemme start off by saying that I was surprised to hear from you.

Shaytaan: Most people are.

Fatoush: Why do you think that is?
Shaytaan: I don’t know. [taking a sip of coffee] People tend to take me for granted. They were a bit more serious about me in the past. Nowadays things are more lax. It hurts but I’m used to it.

Fatoush: So do you live in the city?
Shaytaan: [nods yes] I tend to split my time between here, Jerusalem, Rome and Mecca. I also just bought a new place in Rio de Janeiro but that’s mostly a vacation home.

Fatoush: So what made you contact me?
Shaytaan: Well I felt it was time for me to get my side of the story out. I had come across your question about whether I knew what a threesome was and I felt I had to set the record straight.

Fatoush: So you know what a threesome is?
Shaytaan: Of course I know what a threesome is and the idea that I don’t strikes me a tad preposterous.

Fatoush: But that’s what they say.
Shaytaan: That’s because I never took time to have someone write my book, unlike some people I know. So everywhere I go I have to put up with this nonsense. Al-Tirmidhi writes this line “No man sits alone with a (non-mahram) woman, but the Shaytaan is the third among them.” I mean what the [expletive] is that supposed to mean?

Fatoush: Isn’t he talking about lust?
Shaytaan: Hell if I know. All I know is I’m always in the room. I’m Shaytaan. Why would I leave the room? I don’t care who you put in the room, I ain’t leaving. Door open, door closed. Who cares? Who do you think pulled those Iraqis soldiers out and killed them. I like the action. That’s what I’m here for. You think I’m gonna pass up a threesome?

Fatoush: So what do you think the biggest misconception about you is?
Shaytaan: People assume I think like they do. People think they can ward me off with a few rituals like I haven’t been around the past couple thousand years. Khamsas, evil eye charms . . . you think I’m supposed to be phased by that? I was in the Kaaba for two weeks in ’79 before they flushed us out. So believe me, I learn from my mistakes.

Fatoush: You’ve made mistakes?
Shaytaan: Haven’t we all?

Fatoush: So what mistake have you learned from if you don’t mind me asking?
Shaytaan: Well . . . I used to fight it.

Fatoush: Fight what?
Shaytaan: Religion. I used to fight all of them. They each had within them seeds of my own destruction and I would constantly push against it.

Fatoush: And what was the seed?
Shaytaan: Truthfully . . . off the record?

Fatoush: I promise.
Shaytaan: I’ll tell you what it is . . . love. Simple as that. Love is the one thing I can’t beat. No matter how hard I try I can’t conquer it. The problem is . . . I don’t understand it. Never have. It makes no sense to me as a motivation. But what I realized is I needn’t worry because, luckily, most of you have a limited capacity for it anyway. And when that capacity runs out, I get stronger. Take love of family, for instance. Some people mistake their family for their reputation. Pride really. I helped this man kill his cousin last summer. He found out she was seeing this guy in the next village and I told him look, you gotta do something. He gathered up his brothers and they went to the mosque and prayed. I was there. They had so much fear in their heart. They left the mosque and I ran into the guy and I said look, “You know what you have to do. Everybody is gonna say you come from a family of whores. Everything you’ve worked for your whole life is ruined. Cleanse your name.” And luckily he did. Why? Because he had more pride than love. For all intents and purposes his cousin was a piece of [expletive] to him. Sure they had good times together but at the end of the day he would off her for his pride. God . . . God gives you guys way too much credit.

Fatoush: Why do you think that is?
Shaytaan: God loves you. Me, on the other hand, I’m just having fun. God thinks you guys can love one another. But I know better. I’ve seen you guys up close. You guys have way more pride than love. I was in Jeddah at Friday prayers last week. I came out in time to watch a few beheadings. The guy reads this bit about God being merciful and on and on, then does what he has to do. He must have done about twelve before things got a bit boring. Everyone of those people who watched believed that they were doing God’s work. Hell I made the sword. You think God can make a sword to remove a man’s head that cleanly. Ha! God doesn’t have the stomach for it. But I never get any credit. But that’s ok. I know my work and I know it’s damn good. You know how I like to keep score?

Fatoush: How?
Shaytaan: It’s simple . . . refugee camps. That’s it. More camps means I’m winning; less camps mean God’s winning. Although I admit that the camps were a compromise. I was more for all out slaughter but God thought, again underestimating you people, that love could prevail and the camps would be dismantled. God is nothing if not optimistic. I knew the Palestinians weren’t going anywhere. You think the Native Americans have a homeland? What makes you think the Palestinians would be any different?

Fatoush: What about homosexuality?
Shaytaan: What about it?

Fatoush: What are your thoughts on it?
Shaytaan: You mean am I for or against it?

Fatoush: Uh huh.
Shaytaan: . . . Personally I don’t care but I can use it.

Fatoush: Why’s that?
Shaytaan: It gives me an entrance into someone’s thoughts. I can work on them. Next thing they know they’re talking about pride when they think they’re talking about love. When you hear someone say homosexuality is against God all they’re talking about is their own pride.

Fatoush: At not being gay?
Shaytaan: Huh uh. Pride at thinking they’re a better person. Like I’m a better Muslim, Christian, Jew, etc. because I follow “God’s law.” You kiddin’ me? Truth of the matter is all of you guys are [expletive], pardon my French. All God wants is you guys to love one another and treat each other with respect, etc. and etc. You know God’s standard b.s. [Laughing] But you guys can’t do it. How many [expletive] books do you need? I thought about writing one of my own but figured I didn’t need one. Like I said I rely on human nature. You guys can’t just love the homosexuals for who they are. It kills you. You need to place them in a hierarchy. But I’ll tell you what’s funny . . .

Fatoush: What?
Shaytaan: That hierarchy only lets me know who’s closer to me. Like how did I get down here, hellooo. What I love are the people who get caught up in the persecution bit. As if that’s all I have a hand in. Personally, I prefer to work within the system. I really don’t need the persecution angle. Frankly it’s harder to do these days because the love/justice thing begins to kick in. I’m more into just two tiered societies now. That’s where I do my best work.

Fatoush: So what’s ahead for you in 2005?
Shaytaan: More of the same, really. There are few African countries I haven’t finished destroying; the peace process is going as planned so that frees me up; continued relegation of women to second class status. Personally I thought slavery would have a bit more endurance than it did. So now I’ll have to redouble efforts on women’s subjugation. The easy thing there is to get poor women to take care of the rich ones’ kids. It [expletive] their whole intellectual thing. Hence my expansion in Rome and Mecca. Of course racism is always a top priority, dark people on the bottom, light people on top, etc. Although maybe after awhile I might switch that around. So as you can see, I’ve got a full plate . . .

Fatoush: Anything else you’d like to say to MWU!?
Shaytaan: Yes. This Starbucks coffee is delish.

Fatoush: Thank you.
Shaytaan: Not a problem. I can’t wait till Ramadan’s over.

Abu Fatoush is a lawyer slash struggling screenwriter living in New York City with his ipod and a wireless connection.

<< Heel!

The White Stuff

Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer

This is when your lungs get fucked,’ the cook splutters as he unscrews the top of a plastic bottle and carefully pours hydrochloric acid into the brown liquid. Gun tucked in his waistband, he reacts nervously to any sound, even the chickens rooting through the undergrowth. We have been told to run if any shooting starts but are not sure where to. At the bottom of the bowl, the acid and the brown liquid start to turn white. A minute in the microwave, and we have a kilo of cocaine.

We are in the depths of the Peruvian jungle watching coca leaves being converted into one of the most potent commodities on the planet. Using a few leaves, lime, alcohol and acid, cocaine costs about £500 a kilo to make. By the time it reaches the streets of Soho, supplemented with anything from aspirin to powdered glass, it weighs two kilos and is worth around £35,000. A profit of more than £34,000.

For 18 months I have trailed stories about the iconic drug of my lifetime. The journey took me into places I never believed you could get to: the deepest Andes in Peru to see cocaine being made, and the devastation of a culture; to the slums of Rio to see a city at war; and to the estates of Colombian drug barons to witness the unravelling of a state. We were seeking the voices of the men and the women behind its production and explore the effect on their lives of the West’s ‘war on drugs’. The degree to which my producers persuaded these ‘criminals’ to speak direct to camera is testimony to the outrageous confidence of some and the desperation of others.

In 20 years of filming around the world I have never taken cocaine, despite its ever-increasing availability. At the start of the project, I broadly supported the Blair government’s more liberal policy of allowing people to have and to smoke cannabis. I agreed that hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin remained beyond the pale, accepting we had to fight them in every way possible. Though I have a number of friends who seem to be able to enjoy the occasional snort without problems, I have also witnessed the distressing effects of addiction.

This journey has revolutionised my views. I now believe that the tragedy we witnessed in Latin America has little to do with the damage the drugs do to people’s heads. The tragedy is a result of the drugs being illegal. People will do a lot for a £34,000-per-kilo profit.

My journey begins in the spring of 2003 in the impossibly beautiful valley of Monzon in the Peruvian Andes. The road winds alongside a ravine through small dilapidated villages overhung by lush jungle. Gradually the hills turn into mountains rising up from the road, accessible only via a network of small paths. This is ancient Inca land but my Rough Guide to Peru doesn’t even mention the valley. It describes a main road further back as a ‘dangerous route’. The reason becomes obvious: clinging to the precipitous slopes of the mountains: neat rows of lime-green plants, fields of coca. In Peru (unlike Colombia) it is legal to grow a limited amount of coca for ‘personal use’ because for centuries peasants here have chewed the leaf to give them energy or ward off toothache. But these fields are not for personal use.

Reaching the one-street town at the end of the valley, I feel we have entered a novel by Gabriel García Márquez. The few people sitting on benches in the shade outside the Hotel Central pass the time of day spitting in the dust. They studiously ignore us, but everybody has clocked there is a gringo in town. Monzon is in the badlands where the police have not had a presence in 10 years. The locals do not like outsiders, who are invariably out to destroy their livelihood. At 10pm, the electricity goes off and the town goes dark. Alone in my hotel room, a mosquito-infested concrete cell, any passing shadow could be a man with a gun.

Given the glamour of cocaine, the most striking thing about the valley is the poverty. An hour’s walk up one of the mountain paths, the Zavalas live beside their fields in a small wooden shack. Coca is their only crop and the family are constantly picking and drying - it produces leaves four times a year. The father, Edgar, is a small taciturn figure in a ragged T-shirt and compulsory moustache. He talks quietly of the government’s eradication campaign and of a fungus that has been sprayed, which is drying out their plants, and sometimes poisoning the locals. The valley is a major target of the campaign, run by the Peruvian anti-drugs police, and financed by the United States as part of their attempt to wipe out drug production in Peru and Colombia.

While most peasants claim they only grow coca leaves and have nothing to do with producing cocaine, Edgar admits that he used to have a small ‘laboratory’ to produce paste, the first stage in converting leaves into cocaine. ‘I no longer have a lab. We cannot grow enough because of the fungus. I stopped when I realised it was all risk and no profit.’ He remembers how in the past everyone simply paid off the anti-drug teams. ‘For years the army was running the drugs out of the valley.’

The recent campaign is hurting. Edgar can no longer afford to keep his teenage son in school. The son works on the farm - though ironically there is talk of him joining the anti-drugs police, which pays well and in dollars. Their 20-year-old daughter is still studying but is willing to do virtually anything to get out of the valley. Her parents watch helplessly as she is drawn into ‘sexy dancing’ and towards prostitution. ‘All the girls who dance get proposals usually from those with power, the drug traffickers, the ones with the guns.’

Edgar chews his coca: ‘The government has not thought through the consequences of this campaign. If things go on as they are, the peasants will be forced into the arms of the guerrillas to protect themselves.’ The guerrillas are the Shining Path, who terrorised Peru in the 1980s, but almost disappeared when their leader was captured 10 years ago. Now there is talk of their return to defend the coca farmers. Edgar should know. He used to be a local guerrilla commander. This is exactly what has happened in Colombia - there the FARC guerrillas have become deeply involved in cocaine, in the guise of defending the peasants.

Certainly the peasants are in radical mood. They organise marches against the government and America, chanting slogans such as ‘Why have the evil gringos polluted our little plants?’ Their leader, Iburcio Morales, says: ‘All our crops, not just coca, are being attacked by this fungus. It makes the crop replacement programme useless.’ He is referring to the second prong of attack on coca: a UN and government-run programme to encourage peasants to replace coca with crops such as rice, bananas, avocado or coffee.

The farmers claim these alternatives are not economical. The West does not want their bananas. ‘In the US and Europe, farmers get subsidies, we get nothing.’ Our consultant from Lima, who works on the UN programme, confirms that the peasants are essentially right: ‘They try out other crops. They get one harvest a year and then they cannot sell the products. It does not add up and they go back to growing coca.’

So the peasants move deeper into the mountains to clear fields for new crops. The laboratories follow. While we are filming, the authorities strike - eight helicopter-gunships packed with heav ily armed special forces launch a mission into the valley. When we ask to fly with them, I am referred to the US embassy in Lima. While insisting this is a Peruvian operation, one of the officers in charge says: ‘The Americans own the helicopters and pay for the missions. They decide such things.’ It seems the peasants have a point when they claim that this whole policy comes, not from Lima, but from ‘the imperialists from the north’. The official in the US embassy refuses our request.

After three days, the Peruvian commanders triumphantly claim to have destroyed more than 70 paste laboratories. But when we go back up the valley, the cook who showed us how to make cocaine, takes it all in his stride: ‘You need so little to set up a lab - a press and a couple of buckets. You can organise one in a couple of hours. People will be paranoid for a few days but they’ll be back. It’s the only way to survive round here.’

Just over a month later he sends us a message saying his partners had made more than a tonne of cocaine. The tonne had been successfully smuggled into Europe. Our cook earned £100,000. And later last spring, as Edgar predicted, the Shining Path guerrillas did re-emerge. For the first time in years they launched a full-scale attack on a town just outside the valley. They drove out the police and raised the red flag, all the while claiming to defend the coca farmers. A cocaine-financed conflict looms - just like in Colombia - and the victims will again be the peasants.

Maria Cristina Chirolla is a compelling woman in her mid-forties - dazzling smile, coiffed hair, dark suit. It’s hard to believe there is a price on her head. We are in her office in the attorney-general’s building in Bogotá, a bomb-proof concrete bunker. Chirolla is the head of the unit fighting money laundering - the estimated £4 billion that Colombia’s drug traffickers make every year in profit.

Surrounded by aides and a press spokesman, she talks about their new policy of seizing the properties and businesses of drug traffickers. With generous aid and advice from the US, they are making real progress in the war on drugs, re-establishing the rule of law… Glazing slightly, I see a familiar face over her desk. ‘Why do you have Kafka on the wall?’ I ask. Chirolla smiles but goes on with her success story.

Half an hour after we leave, my producer Guillermo’s mobile rings. It is Maria Cristina Chirolla inviting herself to dinner. She turns up at our hotel in jogging pants, the make-up gone. ‘I’ll just have a soup, I am on a diet.’ Passionate, committed and frightened - for three hours she overwhelms us with her honesty about the scale of the problem. ‘How can we destroy an industry that generates enough money to enable the drug cartels to have private armies? How do we fight people who can afford the best lawyers and financial advisers? For 25 years, billions of dollars have been laundered back into the legal economy at every level and we can no longer trace the difference.’ She unravels the nightmare that is government in Colombia. You can trust no one. The traffickers have people everywhere from the very top to the very bottom. Their money can bribe almost anyone. And if they cannot buy, they kill - a habit which has turned Colombia into one of the most dangerous places on earth. An assassin can be hired for £60 a hit.

We are filming her when she hears that two men have been caught planning to assassinate her. The hit should have taken place when we were with her, travelling on what was supposed to be a secret mission to raid the property of a trafficker. ‘Everything leaks here,’ she moans. Days later she learns that a terrorist cell has been set up by drug traffickers to target her. The cell is based in an army officer’s club in Bogotá.

Why does she do the job? ‘Because Colombia needs honest people. It is so hypocritical: my country is seen as the world centre of violence and corruption - but the money comes from a demand for drugs in the United States and Europe.’ The price of her honesty is a life of almost constant fear. Once again at the heart of the battle with cocaine is US dollars.

Plan Colombia, the biggest US aid package to any country outside the Middle East, has seen almost $3 billion poured into largely military resources over the past five years. The plan’s initial aim was to destroy the cocaine industry at its source, as in Peru, but now an astute right-of-centre Colombian government has persuaded President Bush to let them use the money in their long-running battle with the left-wing FARC guerrillas, on the grounds that they are involved in the cocaine trade. So the war on drugs is cleverly drawn into the war on terror. But the causes of Colombia’s civil war have nothing to do with drugs. The war has being going on for over half a century, and huge swathes of the country are outside government control. You cannot drive safely between most cities.

Rooted in the revolutionary politics of 50 years ago, the war is still described in terms of left and right. In most of the rest of Latin America such full-scale ideological conflicts died away with the Cold War. In Colombia cocaine money keeps that war alive.

The various factions have taken over from the big cartels - the right-wing paramilitaries even more than the guerrillas. The paramilitaries are the real controllers of the drug trade and getting to meet them involves negotiating permission to enter their territory. After a flight to the north and a long drive through glorious cattle country, we are greeted at a ranch by a local commander, code name Zero 8, accompanied by his pet leopard.

Zero 8 is from an educated landowning family. His brother, I learn later, is a senator in Colombia’s congress. Zero 8 won’t appear on camera but we are free to film the 300 armed troops parading on the football pitch. ‘We provide our 25,000 troops with proper pay and even holiday leave,’ he says proudly. He reminisces about how he joined the paramilitaries to defend his family farm from the guerrillas. The paramilitaries are allies of the government, he argues, rooting out left-wing subversion. I recall the reports of massacres and murders of trade unionists that have been laid at their door.

After dark, their leader turns up, surrounded by Uzi-toting bodyguards. Salvatore Mancuso, wearing a white linen shirt, Rolex, revolver and dangerous smile, is exactly how I imagined a major trafficker. While his subordinates are shy about their involvement with cocaine, Mancuso is not: ‘Seventy per cent of our troops are in territories that we have taken from the guerrillas in which drug trafficking takes place - so 70 per cent of our money comes from our tax on drug trafficking.’ Like Chirolla in the government, Mancuso believes cocaine is a gringo problem visited on Colombians from outside. ‘If they did not demand it, we would not supply it.’

And supply it they do. Back with Maria Cristina Chirolla, we travel in a confiscated fast-boat powered by three 250 horsepower engines. The naval officer in charge describes how ‘this boat packed with cocaine leaves the Colombian coast worth £100 000 and arrives in Mexico worth some £10 million’. He explains how planes hop at tree level across Central America and ‘of course there is the specially made submarine which is working a route up the Pacific coast’. It is made clear that the paramilitaries control these routes north.

Despite this, the government is now in peace talks with the paramilitaries. Last July, the Colombian congress invited Salvatore Mancuso to address them on the subject of the war against subversion. Under government protection, he turned up in his suit to address the Congress on his troops’ achievements. He did not mention drugs. While a wanted drug trafficker addresses the Colombian Congress, and the US administration claims Plan Colombia is a success, a million Colombians are displaced and the price of cocaine on Western streets remains the same. And that price is determined by supply.

We are crouching in a house in the slum of Santa Marta in Rio. Just below is the beautiful city, its beaches full of beautiful people. Inside the house, a group of adolescent boys have covered their heads in balaclavas. They are stuffing little plastic bags with white powder from a metal tray, all the while lovingly describing their ‘pieces’, which run from a magnum to rocket launchers and home-made bombs. Their leader, barely out of his teens, makes clear: ‘Without the white stuff there is no crime. This is where the real money is. We are the parallel power.’ There is no question of the power these crazy young men wield over the thousands who live in Rio’s slums. One man recalls how, aged 11, he was drawn into the gangs because his single mother could not afford sandals for her kids and went through rubbish bins for food. He is determined his own sons will get an education and not join the gangs.

As the packing goes on, the young boys begin snorting and waving guns: ‘We buy them from the police.’ Once again the money from cocaine has completely rotted the system. We end up filming a police raid - guns firing in every direction. Packs of cocaine are seized. Three weeks later, we hear the policeman in charge of the raid has been arrested - for selling drugs back to the gangs.

Just as with Colombia’s civil war, all the social problems cannot be laid at the door of cocaine. But the white stuff feeds huge amounts of criminal money into the conflict. The picture, though not on the same scale, is much the same on British and American inner-city streets. When we read about the rise of gun crime, the phrase ‘drugs-related’ is rarely far away as rivals battle for a piece of that £34,000-per-kilo profit.

This journey has left me thinking the politically unthinkable. With an election looming, the Blair government has made the war on drugs a populist law-and-order priority, once again conflating the taking of drugs with the crime and violence that surrounds them. But it is the war itself that is the problem. The politicians rightly warn that demand will go up if it is legalised. Not good but not the nightmare they summon up. Neither cocaine or heroin is a cancer. In quantities it destroys your nose and is bad for your brain, but it very rarely kills - unlike that other addictive plant we can use legally: tobacco. Nor is it a direct cause of violence, like alcohol.

Let’s be honest. People try drugs, whether in the form of alcohol or pills, because they are fun. Tens of thousands of UK citizens regularly consume cocaine; hundreds of thousands more use other illegal drugs, completely discrediting the law. In his book Cocaine, Dominic Streatfield quotes the monetarist Milton Friedman: ‘I do not think you can eradicate demand. The lesson we have failed to learn is that prohibition never works. It makes things worse not better.’

Streatfield quotes the extraordinary statistics involved in fighting cocaine and drugs. Here are a couple: over the past 15 years, the US has spent £150 billion trying to stop its people getting hold of drugs. In Britain and the US almost 20 per cent of the prison population is inside for drugs offences. So what is left? We can muddle on or we can legalise cocaine - and indeed all drugs.

This won’t solve the social ills of poverty or inequality here or in Latin America but it would remove vast sums of money from the criminal world. We should allow the farmers to grow coca and sell it for decent prices direct to government-controlled factories which can produce a high-quality product. And then it should be sold over the counter from registered chemists such as Boots to anyone over 18 at a reasonable, taxed price that does not encourage a black market. At least then we will know it is pure. Then we must attack demand by using some of the millions saved to invest in education drives that are honest. Look how effective a generation of anti-smoking education has been in bringing the public behind stringent restrictions on smoking in public, but not an outright ban.

Yes, more people will try these drugs and there will be tragedies. But 30 years of the war on drugs have achieved almost nothing except to make a few people fantastically rich, to arm our inner cities, to criminalise a generation of users, and to leave tens of thousands of Latin Americans dead. As our cocaine maker in Peru happily told us: ‘People want our cocaine because it is good and, for a while at least, makes them happy.’

· Angus Macqueen has directed many award-winning documentaries including The Death of Yugoslavia, Gulag, Dancing for Dollars and The Last Peasants. Cocaine starts on Channel 4 next Sunday and continues 20 and 23 January

<< Heel!

"The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: ‘Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied.’ In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching with 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: ‘If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,’ says a bullish lieutenant. ‘It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.’”

Kind of a shame, killing the people you’re trying to democratize, but after awhile, says the same lieutenant, “It gets to the point where you can’t wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody...”

With characteristic dry English understatement, The Economist’s embedded reporter (Economist pieces are unbylined) notes, “[W]hen America’s well-drilled and well-fed fighters attempt subtler tasks than killing people, problems arise.” Their contempt for Iraqis is undisguised and dramatically expressed: a soldier, confronted by “jeering schoolchildren,” fires canisters of buckshot from his grenade-launcher at them, and marines busting down doors in Ramadi scream at trembling middle-aged women: “Bitch, where’s the guns?” Small wonder, ventures the correspondent, that “many Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of insurgents.”

The last grafs of the report recount a big whoopy-do operation in the smugglers’ haven of Baij involving a convoy of 1000 troops supported by Apache attack helicopters targeting three houses that had been linked to Zarquawi’s terrorist band, according to a local informant.

There was no one in the houses except women and children. Rather than return to base empty, they pay homage to the last reel of Casablanca and round up the usual suspects.

“...they detained 70 men from districts indentified by their informant as ‘bad.’ In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver, and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: ‘One, two, three, jihaaad!’ A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: ‘When we do this,’ he said. ‘We lose.’”

There’s a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore routine, one of their woolgathering dialogues, where Dud asks Pete, “So would you say you’ve learned from your mistakes?” and Pete replies: “Oh yes, I’m certain I could repeat them exactly.”

That seems to have been the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq. Take the mistakes of Vietnam and repeat them exactly.

And at that you can’t say they haven’t succeeded.

<< Heel!

Editors,

In Clifford May’s December 31, 2004 column, “Is America a Shrinking Superpower?” he makes the following stunning statement regarding Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi:

While under Saddam’s protection, al-Zarqawi commuted between Baghdad and the terrorist training camp of the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Islam.

I challenge both May and the editors of the San Diego Union-Tribune to produce a single shred of verified evidence that shows Saddam “protected” al-Zarqawi.

Note: The fact that al-Zarqawi may have visited Baghdad prior to the fall of Saddam does not constitute “protection” any more than the fact that Mohammad Atta took flying lessons in Florida meant he was “protected” by Jeb Bush.

Sincerely,
topdog

PS: May’s column describes him as the President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). According to Disinfopedia.org, the origins of this group are as follows:

In early 2001, a tightly knit group of billionaire philanthropists conceived of a plan to win American sympathy for Israel’s response to the Palestinian intifada. They believed that the Palestinian cause was finding too much support within crucial segments of the American public, particularly within the media and on college campuses, so they set up an organization, Emet: An Educational Initiative, Inc., to offer Israel the kind of PR that the Israeli government seemed unable to provide itself.

At first, Emet floundered, without an executive director or a well-defined mission. But that changed after Sept. 11, and Emet changed too, into what is now the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The name is different, but the goal of influencing America’s opinion-forming classes remains.

What makes all of this possible is the support the foundation receives from its billionaire backers. Its nearly $3 million annual budget comes from 27 major donors, most of whom are members of “the Study Group"--also sometimes called the “Mega Group” because of their sizeable contributions--a semi-formal organization of major Jewish philanthropists who meet twice a year to discuss joint projects.

— Daniel McCarthy, American Conservative Magazine

In essence, the San Diego Union-Tribune is publishing a column by someone who is arguably working for a pro-Israel lobby. I have no problem with the Union-Tribune publishing opinion. I do have a problem with the fact that you neglect to clearly identify the author’s bias. Instead, you allow Clifford May to hide behind a warm-and-fuzzy name like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Many would call that propaganda, or at the very least, disingenuous.

Witness your double-standard. The San Diego Union-Tribune killed a thoughtful column by James Goldsborough on the voting preferences of American Jews, but apparently had no problem with the disinformation of Clifford May, nor with printing a post-9/11 diatribe by Joseph Perkins suggesting that “Afghanistan be bombed back into the Stone Age.”

I have a question for Mr. Perkins, one which the San Diego Union-Tribune editors obviously refused to ask:

Mr. Perkins, just how many Afghans voted to have Osama bin Laden set up in their country? How many?

And yet you would kill them all for the decision of so few?

Mister Perkins, please go away. Please go far far away from this world and contemplate your words. Despite schoolyard lymrics about sticks and stones, words do hurt. And they do kill. Think about it.

And for those at the San Diego Union-Tribune who killed the Goldsborough column while printing the Clifford May disinformation, I say the same. Go away. And do some thinking.

I cancelled my subscription to your paper after you killed James Goldborough’s column. Following that, you had the audacity to write and ask me to continue to let you know what I think about the issues. Huh?

Here’s your answer: GET BACK TO JOURNALISM—LOSE THE PROPAGANDA

I sign this one: A NEUTRAL OBSERVER.

Because spin can cycle in both directions.

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The unluckiest people in the path of history’s deadliest tsunami were those on Sumatra, in Indonesia’s Aceh province—and the luckiest were the executives of ExxonMobil.

The stupidest single person in the wake of the wake was George W. Bush, who missed a once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime chance to win over the hearts of a billion Muslims. Why didn’t he jump into action right away? All he had to do was say some words. But he kept on picking up sticks at his ranch, instead of doing his real job. There’s never been a more lazy-ass president.

The storm didn’t force the world’s largest oil company to lift a finger, either. Australia’s ABC News reported this morning that the death toll in Aceh alone could top 80,000. But the tsunami left untouched the very northern tip of Aceh, site of ExxonMobil’s Arun natural-gas field. The industry news service Schlumberger put things in the right perspective in its Monday story “ExxonMobil: Indonesia Quake Caused ‘Minor’ Ops Disruption”:

Despite the horrific toll in human suffering, analysts and government officials are breathing a sigh of relief that Indonesia has been spared the economic impact of serious earthquake-related damage to the liquid natural gas facilities in the quake-stricken province.

Indonesia, the only Asian member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the world’s largest LNG exporter and relies heavily on petroleum revenues to support its sputtering economy, which has seen growth falling behind that of its regional neighbors in recent years.

The oil bidness in Aceh is where the murder, rape, and torture come in. In way, the people of Aceh who did survive are lucky: The killings have stopped, many of the killers probably swept away as if Travis Bickle’s daydream had come true.

Even before the tsunami, Aceh was hell on earth. This is how the International Labor Rights Fund explains it:

In the past decade alone, ExxonMobil has extracted some $40 billion from its operations in Aceh, Indonesia, leaving in its wake a legacy of death, destruction, and environmental damage.

There have been credible reports dating back several years that Exxon Mobil Corporation, along with its predecessor companies, Mobil Oil Corporation and Mobil Oil Indonesia, hired military units of the Indonesian national army to provide “security” for their gas extraction and liquification project in Aceh, Indonesia. Members of these military units regularly have perpetrated ongoing and severe human rights abuses against local villagers, including murder, rape, torture, destruction of property, and other acts of terror.

ExxonMobil apparently has taken no action to stop this violence, and instead, reportedly has continued to finance the military and to provide company equipment and facilities that have been used by the Indonesian military to perpetrate and literally cover up (in the form of mass graves) these criminal acts.

The ILRF has sued ExxonMobil over the tortures and murders, but the company vigorous denies involvement. What’s darkly hilarious about this is that the U.S. State Department has encouraged D.C. federal judge Louis Oberdorfer to throw out the case, warning in 2002 that the lawsuit “would impact adversely on the interests of the United States,” meaning our financial interests, as well as compromise our “war on terrorism.” See, the lawsuit gets in the way with our close relationship with Indonesia’s military—whose butts our own Paul Wolfowitz has long kissed. And of course, the suit is directed at ExxonMobil, a huge contributor to Bush.

The problem is this: As many people have pointed out, the State Department itself has catalogued and condemned the murders, tortures, and rapes in Aceh. The State Department’s lengthy 2003 human-rights report on Indonesia focuses mainly on Aceh. Here are some excerpts:

• Human rights abuses were most apparent in Aceh province, the scene of a long-running separatist revolt.

• Physical torture cases included random beatings and acts involving the hair, nails, teeth, and genitals. Heat, suffocation, electricity, and suspension were also used. Psychological torture cases reportedly included food and sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, being forced to witness torture, and being forced to participate in torture.

• The [Government’s] security forces committed numerous extrajudicial killings that were not politically motivated. The government largely failed to hold soldiers and police accountable for such killings and other serious human rights abuses, particularly in Aceh.

• The Government made no progress in establishing accountability in a number of extrajudicial killings in Aceh in 2002, including the June killings of two farmers on Kayee Ciret Mountain and the August killings of three women in the north Aceh village of Kandang. . . . The Government reported no progress in prosecuting those responsible for acts of torture committed in Aceh in 2002, including the beating and burning of civilian Rizki Muhammad.

• During the year, hundreds of disappearances occurred, most frequently in Aceh province, and large numbers of persons who disappeared over the past 20 years, mainly in conflict areas, remained unaccounted for at year’s end.

• According to [human-rights group] Kontras, at least 17 verified cases of torture or beatings involving women or children were recorded in Aceh during the [Government’s] military operation, which began on May 19 and continued through year’s end. According to a November press report, a TNI [Indonesian Army] military commander in Aceh, Brigadier General Bambang Darmono, declared that beating suspected rebels was acceptable: “For example, my soldier slugs a suspect across the face. That’s no problem, as long as he is able to function after the questioning. [But] if it’s gross torture, which causes someone to be incapacitated . . . that’s a no-no."

It goes on like this for page after bloody page—from our own State Department, no less.

Of course, the New York-based Human Rights Watch has been trying to wake up the world to Aceh’s nightmare, doing real digging by interviewing victims and so on. HRW notes in its September 2004 report:

These are systemic failures, not just the acts of rogue soldiers and police or untrained, poorly resourced judges and prosecutors. The stories of torture are chilling and sadly similar to accounts of abuses committed by Indonesian security forces in Aceh in the past and in other parts of the country.

But here’s what it gets really sticky for the U.S., thanks to the Bush regime. When the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up last April, so did officials of the countries we’ve long scolded for human-rights abuses. Indonesia condemned the Abu Ghraib abuses—and brutally. HRW tells it like this:

Major Farid Ma’ruf, a spokesman for Kopassus, the Indonesian military’s notorious special forces unit, said, “It is ironic that torture and sexual abuse were committed by the military of a country that always claims to be the world’s human rights guardian. The treatment of Iraqi prisoners was clearly inhumane because the military should have strict standards on how to properly interrogate detainees."

He should know. HRW interviewed numerous people who say they were tortured at the hands of Kopassus forces.  But after Abu Ghraib, our moral authority is shot. (As if we had the right to claim it in the first place.) Last May, when the State Department released its human-rights report, Indonesian officials went ballistic. HRW tells it this way:

In response to the . . . report on human rights, which highlighted a variety of abuses in Indonesia, Marty Natalegawa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, shot back: “The U.S. government does not have the moral authority to assess or act as a judge of other countries, including Indonesia, on human rights, especially after the abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison."

Yes, that’s what the Bush regime has wrought. So yesterday, when Dubya finally put on a fittingly somber suit to pose as a businesslike world figure, what did he do to repair our image? He treated the English language the way Chuck Graner treated prisoners.

Bush, taking a break from Operation Pick Up Sticks and Ride My Little Bicycle, on the phone from Crawford to Sri Lanka yesterday, in the kind of photo op he should have posed for early Monday morning. He appears to be digging into his pocket for some spare change. (White House photo)

Bush often transforms from prop to malaprop, but he really slashed syntaxes yesterday when, defensive as usual, he inarticulated the U.S.’s position on disaster aid:

"No, we’re a very generous, kindhearted nation.

You know, the—what you’re beginning to see is a typical response from America. First of all, we provide immediate cash relief, to the tune of about $35 billion."

Well, it was a typical response from Bush, anyway. We spend $35 billion every five months on the Iraq Debacle. Put another way, $35 billion equals two years of Wall Street bonuses.

He meant to say $35 million. Put another way, $35 million equals what two Wall Street execs got in bonuses last year.

Whoever types up the official White House transcripts probably has a macro for “[sic]”

The smirking Bush crowed about the U.S.’s generosity, blasting his critics as “very misguided and ill-informed.” He’s misinformed, as my colleague Jarrett Murphy pointed out Monday: Per capita, the U.S. is not the most generous.

At least the tsunami halted the murder, rape, and torture in Aceh. Latest reports say at least 500 Indonesian military officers on Aceh are reported missing. Guess it’s their turn.

Posted by Harkavy at 03:31 PM, December 30, 2004

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A State of Chaos

George Bush has purged the last of his father’s senior advisers, handing over control to his neocon allies

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Guardian

The transition to President Bush’s second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father’s closest associate and friend, as chairman of the foreign intelligence advisory board. The elder Bush’s national security adviser was the last remnant of traditional Republican realism permitted to exist within the administration.

At the same time the vice president, Dick Cheney, has imposed his authority over secretary of state designate Condoleezza Rice, in order to blackball Arnold Kanter, former under secretary of state to James Baker and partner in the Scowcroft Group, as a candidate for deputy secretary of state.

“Words like ‘incoherent’ come to mind,” one top state department official told me about Rice’s effort to organise her office. She is unable to assert herself against Cheney, her wobbliness a sign that the state department will mostly be sidelined as a power centre for the next four years.

Rice may have wanted to appoint as a deputy her old friend Robert Blackwill, whom she had put in charge of Iraq at the NSC. But Blackwill, a mercurial personality, allegedly assaulted a female US foreign service officer in Kuwait, and was forced to resign in November. Secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, presented the evidence against Blackwill to Rice. “Condi only dismissed him after Powell and Armitage threatened to go public,” a state department source said.

Meanwhile, key senior state department professionals, such as Marc Grossman, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, have abruptly resigned. According to colleagues who have chosen to remain (at least for now), they foresee the damage that will be done as Rice is charged with whipping the state department into line with the White House and Pentagon neocons. Rice has pleaded with Armitage to stay on, but “he colourfully said he would not”, a state department official told me. Rice’s radio silence when her former mentor, Scowcroft, was defenestrated was taken by the state department professionals as a sign of things to come.

Bush has long resented his father’s alter ego. Scowcroft privately rebuked him for his Iraq follies more than a year ago - an incident that has not previously been reported. Bush “did not receive it well”, said a friend of Scowcroft.

In A World Transformed, the elder Bush’s 1998 memoir, co-authored with Scowcroft, they explained why Baghdad was not seized in the first Gulf war: “Had we gone the invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.” In the run-up to the Iraq war, Scowcroft again warned of the danger. Bush’s conservative biographers Peter and Rachel Schweizer, quoted the president as responding: “Scowcroft has become a pain in the ass in his old age.” And they wrote: “Although he never went public with them, the president’s own father shared many of Scowcroft’s concerns.”

The rejection of Kanter is a compound rejection of Scowcroft and of James Baker - the tough, results-oriented operator who as White House chief of staff saved the Reagan presidency from its ideologues, managed the elder Bush’s campaign in 1988, and was summoned in 2000 to rescue Junior in Florida. In his 1995 memoir, Baker observed that the administration’s “overriding strategic concern in the [first] Gulf war was to avoid what we often referred to as the Lebanonisation of Iraq, which we believed would create a geopolitical nightmare.”

In private, Baker is scathing about the current occupant of the White House. Now the one indispensable creator of the Bush family political fortunes is repudiated.

Republican elders who warned of endless war are purged. Those who advised Bush that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that with a light military force the operation would be a “cakewalk”, and that capturing Baghdad was “mission accomplished”, are rewarded.

The outgoing secretary of state, fighting his last battle, is leaking stories to the Washington Post about how his advice went unheeded. Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about “victory”. Since the election, 203 US soldiers have been killed and 1,674 wounded.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

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