Lasantha Wickrematunge

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces – and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the last few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print institutions have been burned, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories, and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be the Sunday Leader’s 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood.

Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries.

Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

The Sunday Leader has been a controversial newspaper because we say it like we see it: whether it be a spade, a thief or a murderer, we call it by that name. We do not hide behind euphemism. The investigative articles we print are supported by documentary evidence thanks to the public-spiritedness of citizens who at great risk to themselves pass on this material to us. We have exposed scandal after scandal, and never once in these 15 years has anyone proved us wrong or successfully prosecuted us.

The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. From us you learn the state of your nation, and especially its management by the people you elected to give your children a better future. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.

The Sunday Leader has never sought safety by unquestioningly articulating the majority view. Let’s face it, that is the way to sell newspapers. On the contrary, as our opinion pieces over the years amply demonstrate, we often voice ideas that many people find distasteful. For instance, we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urge government to view Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors; and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.

Many people suspect that the Sunday Leader has a political agenda: it does not. If we appear more critical of the government than of the opposition, it is only because we believe that – excuse cricketing argot – there is no point in bowling to the fielding side. Remember that for the few years of our existence in which the United National party was in office, we proved to be the biggest thorn in its flesh, exposing excess and corruption wherever it occurred.

Indeed, the stream of embarrassing expositions we published may well have served to precipitate the downfall of that government.

Neither should our distaste for the war be interpreted to mean that we support the Tamil Tigers. The LTTE is among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma is for ever called into question by this savagery – much of it unknown to the public because of censorship.

What is more, a military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self-respect. Do not imagine you can placate them by showering “development” and “reconstruction” on them in the postwar era. The wounds of war will scar them for ever, and you will have an even more bitter and hateful diaspora to contend with. A problem amenable to a political solution will thus become a festering wound that will yield strife for all eternity. If I seem angry and frustrated, it is only because most of my compatriots – and all the government – cannot see this writing so plainly on the wall.

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended.

In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

The irony in this is that, unknown to most of the public, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and I have been friends for more than a quarter-century. Indeed, I suspect that I am one of the few people remaining to routinely address him by his first name and use the familiar Sinhala address – oya – when talking to him.

Although I do not attend the meetings he periodically holds for newspaper editors, hardly a month passes when we do not meet, privately or with a few close friends present, late at night at President’s House. There we swap yarns, discuss politics and joke about the good old days. A few remarks to him would therefore be in order here.

Mahinda, when you finally fought your way to the Sri Lanka Freedom party presidential nomination in 2005, nowhere were you welcomed more warmly than in this column. Indeed, we broke with a decade of tradition by referring to you throughout by your first name. So well known were your commitments to human rights and liberal values that we ushered you in like a breath of fresh air.

Then, through an act of folly, you got involved in the Helping Hambantota scandal. It was after a lot of soul-searching that we broke the story, urging you to return the money. By the time you did, several weeks later, a great blow had been struck to your reputation. It is one you are still trying to live down.

You have told me yourself that you were not greedy for the presidency. You did not have to hanker after it: it fell into your lap. You have told me that your sons are your greatest joy, and that you love spending time with them, leaving your brothers to operate the machinery of state. Now, it is clear to all who will see that that machinery has operated so well, my sons and daughter do not have a father.

In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry.

But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life but yours too depends on it.

As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death that your presidency has cast on the freedoms for which you once fought so hard. You will never be allowed to forget that my death took place under your watch. As anguished as I know you will be, I also know that you will have no choice but to protect my killers: you will see to it that the guilty one is never convicted. You have no choice.

As for the readers of the Sunday Leader, what can I say but thank you for supporting our mission. We have espoused unpopular causes, stood up for those too feeble to stand up for themselves, locked horns with the high and mighty so swollen with power that they have forgotten their roots, exposed corruption and the waste of your hard-earned tax rupees, and made sure that whatever the propaganda of the day, you were allowed to hear a contrary view. For this I – and my family – have paid the price that I had long known I would one day have to pay. I am, and have always been, ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death. What am I among so many? It has long been written that my life would be taken, and by whom. All that remained to be written was when.

That the Sunday Leader will continue fighting the good fight, too, is written. For I did not fight this fight alone. Many more of us have to be – and will be – killed before the Leader is laid to rest. I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration for those who survive to step up their efforts. Indeed, I hope that it will help galvanise forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty in our beloved motherland. I also hope it will open the eyes of your president to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish.

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemöller. In his youth he was an antisemite and an admirer of Hitler. As nazism took hold of Germany, however, he saw nazism for what it was. It was not just the Jews Hitler sought to extirpate, it was just about anyone with an alternate point of view. Niemöller spoke out, and for his trouble was incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, and very nearly executed. While incarcerated, he wrote a poem that, from the first time I read it in my teenage years, stuck hauntingly in my mind:

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, let it be this: the Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled.

Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

• This is an edited version of an article published in the Sunday Leader editorial column on 11 January. Its author, who co-founded the paper in 1994, was killed three days earlier by unidentified gunmen as he drove to work. He is believed to have written the editorial just days before his death. The full version is at www.thesundayleader.lk

When a renowned British
aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Her body was
never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al
Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals
why it has never been broadcast

Thursday, 7 August 2008

She
stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it
Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded.
I’m not sure if videos like this should ever be seen – or perhaps the
word is endured – but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and
staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to
watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.

The “execution” – the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret
Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine – is
among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel’s
archives.

Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret
has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help
her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. “I beg of you to
help me,” she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then
another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced
into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad
airport. A man’s voice prompts her to keep to a text. “I admit that we
worked with the occupation forces …” she says. It is untrue, of
course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would
never have spied on Iraqis.

Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse,
a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her
from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what
appears to be an apple over the muzzle – a primitive form of silencer? And
then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the
man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan
doesn’t move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a
grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf
concealing his face.

This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry,
almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera
lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies
there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such
terrible things be seen? Margaret’s immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I
had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was
only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera’s studios more
than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.

It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The
Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we
discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western
forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a
proverbial tower of strength, and it was she – and she alone – who managed
to persuade Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into
Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle,
Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the
children died.

“We’ve trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we
see terrible things like this,” Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera’s deputy
chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other
outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station’s
headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they
show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera’s
reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they
happened – in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 – but
plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a
small butcher’s knife and slowly carves his way through the victim’s throat,
the poor man’s shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is
eventually torn from his body.

Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the
release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare
at the camera hopelessly.

Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next
scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A
hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and – along with
other men off-camera – goes from one body to the next, firing again and
again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the
hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the
background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag.
He is singing.

For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. “I
trained Ali Khatib – he was a great reporter,” I am told. “The
war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman
to cover some story and, while he’s approaching an American checkpoint, you
can hear an American soldier on the tape say ‘Stop – you have to go back’.
And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got
married two weeks earlier.”

For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret’s
husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of
courage and mourning. There were terrible times. “I would come home and
sit here and weep,” he told me then. “I would sit here sometimes
and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don’t think insurgents did this.
I don’t think Iraqi people did this … I couldn’t see the video that was
released – not because she’s my wife, but because I can’t bear to see anyone
assassinated.”

So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution,
there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility,
just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret – who once
worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam’s government television
station in Baghdad – even found support among the anti-American insurgents;
they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the
al-Qa’ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in
the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought
tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her
husband’s suspicions were correct, then whose “foreign” hand took
her away?

The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera’s archives, it is difficult to escape
this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al
Jazeera’s Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden’s
tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station’s
Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief,
Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al
Jazeera’s Doha head office. His staff had – for their own protection –
earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State
Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair – on a post-prime-ministerial tour of
the Doha offices – if Bush had really planned to bomb them. “Blair
said something about ‘the need to move on’” one of them told me. “So
we knew it was true.”

If Al Jazeera’s staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have
been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to
have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa
al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.

Stories abound of the day that George Tenet – then America’s CIA chief –
turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera’s
reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked
out.

In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find
that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr
Cheney’s list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would
not discuss it. “Then that is the end of our meeting,” Mr Cheney
announced. “It is,” the Emir apparently replied. And walked out.
The “meeting” had lasted 30 seconds.

But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are
on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could
commit such atrocities. None of them knew.

One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the
mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 – when Saddam still ruled
Baghdad – an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to
Iraqis. The Americans and British “want us to rebel against Saddam,”
the official said. “They think we will be so broken, so shattered by
this suffering that we will do anything – even give our own lives – to get
rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now
they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been
reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no
food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

That official was Margaret Hassan.

Listen here or read the transcript.

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:

A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast

December 24th, 2007

[Quito] I don’t know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an
hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about
his father.

I’m not Barbara Walters. It’s not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, “My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, “He took a little drugs to the States… This
is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states-
in a jail.”

He continued. “I’d never talked about my father before.”

Apparently he hadn’t. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa’s dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when
his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador
was the original “banana republic” – and the price of bananas had hit
the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the
entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

“My mother told us he was working in the States.”

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador.
Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed
suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by
paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he
took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking
framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and
her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

“We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of
very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these
children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this
Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the
streets. He’d won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador,
the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called – who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George
Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun
don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He
ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at
financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging
Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not
going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first,
interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I’d met two years ago with his
predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told
me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, “We cannot pay
this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can
we pay?” Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and
Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He
was sure they would understand. They didn’t. They cut off Ecuador at
the knees.

But Ecuador didn’t fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics
Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela’s president and
obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for
the Ecuadoran refugees in America – to give them loans to return to
Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other
dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental
Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn’t done.

I’d returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest – by canoe to a
Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of
childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of
open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of
Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan’s chief. His three year old
son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in
something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that
the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it’s not just any company he was challenging. Chevron’s largest
oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of
Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi’s corporation, demanding the oil company
clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12
billion. Correa won’t comment on the suit itself, a private legal
action. But if there’s a verdict in favor of Ecuador’s citizens, Correa
told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their
slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year.
Correa is not deterred.

He told me he would create an international tribunal to collect, if
necessary. In retaliation, he could hold up payments to US companies
who sue Ecuador in US courts.

This is hard core. No one – NO ONE – has made such a threat to Bush and Big Oil and lived to carry it out.

And, in an office tower looking down on Quito, the lawyers for Chevron were not amused. I met with them.

“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world?
How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”
Rodrigo Perez, Texaco’s top lawyer in Ecuador was chuckling over the
legal difficulties the Indians would have in proving their case that
Chevron-Texaco caused their kids’ deaths. “If there is somebody with
cancer there, [the Cofan parents] must prove [the deaths were] caused
by crude or by petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that
it is OUR crude – which is absolutely impossible.” He laughed again.
You have to see this on film to believe it.

The oil company lawyer added, “No one has ever proved scientifically
the connection between cancer and crude oil.” Really? You could swim in
the stuff and you’d be just fine.

The Cofan had heard this before. When Chevron’s Texaco unit came to
their land the the oil men said they could rub the crude oil on their
arms and it would cure their ailments. Now Condi’s men had told me that
crude oil doesn’t cause cancer. But maybe they are right. I’m no
expert. So I called one. Robert F Kennedy Jr., professor of
Environmental Law at Pace University, told me that elements of crude
oil production – benzene, toluene, and xylene, “are well-known
carcinogens.” Kennedy told me he’s seen Chevron-Texaco’s ugly open pits
in the Amazon and said that this toxic dumping would mean jail time in
the USA.

But it wasn’t as much what the Chevron-Texaco lawyers said that
shook me. It was the way they said it. Childhood cancer answered with a
chuckle. The Chevron lawyer, a wealthy guy, Jaime Varela, with a blond
bouffant hairdo, in the kind of yellow chinos you’d see on country club
links, was beside himself with delight at the impossibility of the
legal hurdles the Cofan would face. Especially this one: Chevron had
pulled all its assets out of Ecuador. The Indians could win, but they
wouldn’t get a dime. “What about the chairs in this office?” I asked.
Couldn’t the Cofan at least get those? “No,” they laughed, the chairs
were held in the name of the law firm.

Well, now they might not be laughing. Correa’s threat to use the
power of his Presidency to protect the Indians, should they win, is a
shocker. No one could have expected that. And Correa, no fool, knows
that confronting Chevron means confronting the full power of the Bush
Administration. But to this President, it’s all about justice,
fairness. “You [Americans] wouldn’t do this to your own people,” he
told me. Oh yes we would, I was thinking to myself, remembering Alaska’s Natives.

Correa’s not unique. He’s the latest of a new breed in Latin
America. Lula, President of Brazil, Evo Morales, the first Indian ever
elected President of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. All “Leftists,”
as the press tells us. But all have something else in common: they are
dark-skinned working-class or poor kids who found themselves leaders of
nations of dark-skinned people who had forever been ruled by an elite
of bouffant blonds.

When I was in Venezuela, the leaders of the old order liked to refer to Chavez as, “the monkey.” Chavez told me proudly, “I am negro e indio”
- Black and Indian, like most Venezuelans. Chavez, as a kid rising in
the ranks of the blond-controlled armed forces, undoubtedly had to
endure many jeers of “monkey.” Now, all over Latin America, the
“monkeys” are in charge.

And they are unlocking the economic cages.

Maybe the mood will drift north. Far above the equator, a nation is
ruled by a blond oil company executive. He never made much in oil – but
every time he lost his money or his investors’ money, his daddy,
another oil man, would give him another oil well. And when, as a rich
young man out of Philips Andover Academy, the wayward youth tooted a
little blow off the bar, daddy took care of that too. Maybe young
George got his powder from some guy up from Ecuador.

I know this is an incredibly simple story. Indians in white hats
with their dead kids and oil millionaires in black hats laughing at
kiddy cancer and playing musical chairs with oil assets.

But maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe in this world there really is Good and Evil.

Maybe Santa will sort it out for us, tell us who’s been good and
who’s been bad. Maybe Lawyer Yellow Pants will wake up on Christmas Eve
staring at the ghost of Christmas Future and promise to get the oil
sludge out of the Cofan’s drinking water.

Or maybe we’ll have to figure it out ourselves. When I met Chief
Emergildo, I was reminded of an evening years back, when I was way the
hell in the middle of nowhere in the Prince William Sound, Alaska, in
the Chugach Native village of Chenega. I was investigating the damage
done by Exxon’s oil. There was oil sludge all over Chenega’s beaches.
It was March 1991, and I was in the home of village elder Paul Kompkoff
on the island’s shore, watching CNN. We stared in silence as “smart”
bombs exploded in Baghdad and Basra.

Then Paul said to me, in that slow, quiet way he had, “Well, I guess we’re all Natives now.”

Well, maybe we are. But we don’t have to be, do we?

Maybe we can take some guidance from this tiny nation at the center
of the earth. I listened back through my talk with President Correa.
And I can assure his daughter that she didn’t have to worry that her
dad would forget about “the poor children who are cold” on the streets
of Quito.

Because the Professor Doctor is still one of them.

*****

Watch the Palast investigation, Rumble in the Jungle: Big Oil and Little Indians, on BBC Television Newsnight, now on-line via www.GregPalast.com – and Thursday’s US broadcast of Democracy Now.

For a copy of Palast’s prior reports from Venezuela for BBC and Democracy Now, get “The Assassination of Hugo Chavez,” on DVD, filmed by award-winning videographer Richard Rowley.

Powered by ScribeFire.

START

The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a GPS.

Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my GPS. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”

After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My GPS goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants – silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.

I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section – a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”

Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind – one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook – I’ll be there, too.

I am one with the external mind. Om.

Powered by ScribeFire.

11/01/07 “Asia Times
” — – The George W Bush administration would not flinch to betray its allies in Iraqi Kurdistan if that entailed a US “win” in the Iraq quagmire. And it would not flinch to leave its Turkish North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies in the wilderness as well – if that entailed further destabilization of Iran. Way beyond the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) vs Turkey skirmish, one of these two double-crossing scenarios will inevitably take place. Washington simply cannot have its kebab and eat it too.

The Bush administration’s double standards are as glaring as meteor impacts. When, in the summer of 2006, Israel used the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah to unleash a pre-programmed devastating war on Lebanon, destroying great swathes of the country, the Bush administration immediately gave the Israelis the green light. When 12 Turkish soldiers are killed and eight captured by PKK guerrillas based in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration urges Ankara to take it easy.

The “war on terror” is definitely not an equal-opportunity business. That has prompted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek to mischievously remark, regarding Turkey, “It’s as if an intruder has gatecrashed the closed circle of ‘we’, the domain of those who hold the de facto monopoly on military humanitarianism.”

The US and Israeli establishment regards Hezbollah as a group of evil super-terrorists. But the PKK consists of just “minor” terrorists, and very useful ones at that, since the US Central Intelligence Agency is covertly financing and arming the PJAK (Party for Free Life in Kurdistan), the Iranian arm of the PKK, whose mission is to “liberate” parts of northwest Iran.

Not accidentally, the new PKK overdrive coincides with US – and also Israeli – covert support for the PJAK. Israel has not only invested a lot in scores of business ventures in Iraqi Kurdistan, it has also extensively trained Kurdish peshmerga special commandos, who could easily share their knowledge with their PKK cousins.

The new PKK offensive coincides with a PKK flush with new mortars, anti-tank weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and even anti-aircraft missiles. And most of all, the PKK drive coincides with the mysteriously vanished scores of light weapons the Pentagon sent to Iraq with no serial numbers to identify 97% of them.

The person responsible for this still unsolved mystery is none other than the counterinsurgency messiah and top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus. The suspicion that the Pentagon never wanted these weapons to be traced in the first place cannot be easily dismissed. Either that or the PKK has been very active lately in the black market for light weapons.

The Turkish-Israeli plan
US corporate media totally ignore the US/Israeli coddling of the PJAK – and by extension the PKK. The larger context is lost. No one bothers to ask how come the Bush administration seems to be such a huge fan of a greater Kurdistan.

As much as the PJAK – and the PKK – use American largesse for greater Kurdistan ends, the Bush administration uses especially the PJAK for its wider “war on terror” target: the destabilization of Iran. Turkish-US relations in this case are no more than a casualty of war. Now the Turks are up not only against Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), but also the US and the European Union in Brussels. And in addition, the PKK denies it has attacked Turkey out of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkey has angrily reacted to the US Senate proposal for “soft” partition of Iraq. This is the famous US “Plan B” for Iraq – more an “A” than a “B” because it was floated years ago. And the authors are Israel and … the Turks themselves.

The plan has been extensively documented, among others, by the Center for Research at the Kurdish Library in New York. According to its “Kurdish Life” newsletter, “Back in 1990, Turkey’s then prime minister Turgut Ozal made a deal with the US and Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Masterminded by an Israel obsessed with breaking up the ‘sea of Arabs’ in the Middle East, the plan has proceeded apace ever since, influencing and directing virtually all of Washington’s political and military tactics in Iraq. And yet even today it remains nobody’s business.”

The Israeli mastermind was Leslie Gelb, a relatively moderate Zionist. The plan duly featured in the Turkish press at the time. It proposed a federal Iraq, with a Kurdistan, a section of Kirkuk and Mosul for the Turkomans; and the rest, in fact most of the country, for “the Arabs”, Sunni and Shi’ite alike.

To get their autonomous mini-state, the Iraqi Kurds just had to guarantee to smash the PKK. As for Turkish Kurds, the Turkish prime minister’s spokesman said at the time that since “two-thirds of Turkey’s Kurds are scattered through the country” and the rest “fully integrated into Turkish society”, they would have no business dreaming about autonomy.

Barzani and Jalal Talabani, Iraqi Kurdish leaders, rival warlords and wily opportunists, duly fulfilled their part of the deal – especially in October 1992 during a joint offensive with the Turkish army against the PKK. They may have sold out the PKK 15 years ago, but that won’t happen again; at least that’s what the two have vocally promised. For their part, the PJAK-PKK have been tremendously helpful for the Bush administration agenda of “destabilizing” Iran.

The Kurdish Life newsletter argues that the cause of Turkey’s current woes is not the US or the Iraqi Kurds. It’s a self-inflicted wound, all spelled out in Ozal’s plan. “With his untimely death in 1993, the plan was revised, with an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to include Kirkuk, and more, and the remainder of Iraq to be divided between Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs. The Republicans of the Bush administration cemented it into the Iraqi constitution under the rubric ‘federation’.”

That’s no less than the “soft” partition the US Senate recently voted for. That’s the future Washington wants for Iraqi Kurdistan. And that’s the scheme the US – and Israel – don’t want their ally Turkey to spoil by attacking the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan. No wonder the Turkish leadership – not to mention Turkish public opinion – is fuming.

Chronicle of an invasion foretold
To compound this misery, the much-touted Turkish invasion has been in the making for months. As early as March, Bush administration officials were promising the Turks that US special forces would dislodge the PKK from the Qandil mountains. Nothing happened.

In April, Barzani was threatening “to take responsibility for our response” if the Turks interfered with a referendum on the integration of oil-rich Kirkuk into Kurdistan. Also in April, the US prohibited Turkish cross-border raids, according to the Turkish daily Sabah. The massing of Turkish soldiers at the Iraqi border started in May.

Then in June, Turkish General Yasar Buyukanit virtually spelled out in public what this was all about, “There is not only the PKK in northern Iraq. There is Massoud Barzani as well. Turkey cannot afford an independent Kurdish state headed by Barzani on its southern border.” Barzani – who for Turkish popular media is the country’s public enemy number one – answered back with a startling concept; he said that if Turkey invaded, “We would deal with it as an Iraqi issue.”

So what kind of Kurdish “sovereignty” is this? Iraqi Kurds detest, and ignore, the Baghdad government like the plague, and prize their independence; but as soon as they’re threatened, they instantly seek refuge under Baghdad’s (clipped) wings.

Kurdistan and its mountainous 75,000 square kilometers is not really Iraq. Baghdad is an entity far, far away. Iraqi Kurdistan has its own constitution, parliament, anthem, legal code, language, currency and media – and most of all the well-trained peshmerga army. A democracy it is not – because virtually everything is subordinated to the two warlords turned politicians, Barzani and Talabani.

The KRG has paid the price for Kurdistan as a “model” of a functioning Iraq by collaborating no-holds-barred with the US since the early 1990s. In June, Barzani confirmed that the PKK is an Iraqi problem, “A Turkish invasion would be first of all an attack on Iraqi sovereignty, and then an attack on the Kurds.” Following Barzani’s logic, since Iraq is under occupation, the Turks would be actually invading a colonial possession of the US. Thus it should be Petraeus to confront the Turks about what they’re up to. Washington in a way has proved its point: Iraqi Kurdistan is a fragile entity that only exists because it always depended on American protection.

Turkey and Iran, united
Kurdistan’s pull in Washington is guaranteed thanks largely to Qubad Talabani, son of President Jalal Talabani, also known in Kurdistan as “Uncle Jalal”. While dad sells Kurdistan as an indisputable success story, son lobbies furiously, to the extent that Frank Lavin, US under secretary of commerce for international trade, recently went to Kurdistan to promote it as a gateway for US businesses in Iraq.

But to believe that Ankara will tolerate an oil-rich, water-rich Kurdish mini-state on its southeast border, creating a magnet for Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iran and Syria, is to believe in miracles. Not only Turkey and Iran are vehemently against it, but also Saudi Arabia (the House of Saud believing that a Kurdistan counterpart – Shi’iteistan in southern Iraq – would be subservient to Iran). What the Bush administration’s games have achieved so far is to unite Turkey and Iran on the issue.

Turkey regards the Kurds just like China regards Tibetans and Uighurs; they are part of a unitary Turkish state and have no right to autonomy. If Washington condemns China for its repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, it should behave the same way regarding Turkey. Not only will this not happen, but now the Americans need the Turks more than the Turks need the Americans.

A true measure of White House and neo-conservative desperation to facilitate the relentless surge towards war on Iran is whether it would be willing to plunge Iraqi Kurdistan into war, compromise the Turkish-Iraq corridor (through wich flows 70% of US supplies to Iraq) and future US Big Oil investments in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Barzani keeps insisting he and Washington are in sync, both wanting a peaceful solution for this royal mess; but he always points out “we are a nation” which will not accept Turkish threats.

US plans for Iraqi Kurdistan, stretching back to that 1990 Israeli-devised Turkish plan, are in jeopardy. And once again all because of the enemy within.

Washington played the ethnic card in Afghanistan, pitting Tajiks against Pashtuns; the result, apart from a never-ending war in Afghanistan, was that Pashtuns on both sides of the border united and are now destabilizing even further the US ally, Pakistan.

Washington played the Kurd card to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and as a beachhead for its control of the country after the invasion. Not only Iraq turned into a quagmire, Washington helped to plunge Kurdistan into the line of (Turkish) fire.

There’s no evidence these lessons have been learned. No matter what happens in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration will still insist on the ethnic card to precipitate regime change in Iran.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.

Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for 26 years and is grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him, can torture and “disappear” dissidents—such as the Egyptian journalist Reda Hilal, who vanished four years ago—without American censure because he does the dirty work for us on those we “disappear.” The extraordinary-rendition program, which sees the United States kidnap and detain terrorist suspects in secret prisons around the world, fits neatly with the Egyptian regime’s contempt for due process. Those rounded up by American or Egyptian security agents are never granted legal rights. The abductors are often hooded or masked. If the captors are American the suspects are spirited onto a Gulfstream V jet registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing of Portland, Ore., and whisked to Egypt or perhaps Morocco or Jordan. When these suspects arrive in Cairo they vanish into black holes as swiftly as dissident Egyptians. It is the same dirty and seamless process.

We have nothing to say to Mubarak. He is us. The general intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-Mazra prison in Cairo allegedly holds many of our own detained and “disappeared.” The more savage the torture techniques of the Mubarak regime the faster the prisoners we smuggle into Egypt from Afghanistan and Iraq are broken down. The screams of Egyptians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans mingle in these prison cells to condemn us all.

We know little about what goes on in the black holes the CIA has set up in Egypt. But snapshots leak out. Ibn-al Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by U.S. forces in late 2001, was an al-Qaida camp commander. He was taken to a prison in Cairo where he was repeatedly tortured by Egyptian officials. The Egyptian interrogators told the CIA that he had confirmed a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The tidbit, used by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his United Nations speech, turned out to be false. Victims usually will say anything to make severe torture stop. Al-Libi was eventually returned to Afghanistan, although he has again disappeared.
Mamduh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen of Australia, was apprehended in October 2001 in Pakistan, where, his family says, he was touring religious schools. A Pentagon spokesman claimed that Habib spent most of his time in Afghanistan and was “either supporting hostile forces or on the battlefield fighting illegally against the U.S.”

Habib was released a few days after The Washington Post published an article on his case. He said he was first interrogated and brutalized for three weeks in Islamabad. His interrogators spoke English with American accents. He was then bustled into a jumpsuit, his eyes were covered with opaque goggles and he was flown on a small jet to Egypt. There he was held and interrogated for six months, according to Joseph Margulies, a lawyer affiliated with the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School, which is representing Habib,.

Habib claims he was beaten frequently with blunt instruments, including an object that he likened to an “electric prod.” He was told that if he did not confess to belonging to al-Qaida he would be anally raped by specially trained dogs. Habib said he was returned to U.S. custody after his stint in an Egyptian prison and flown to Bagram air base, in Afghanistan, and then to Guantanamo Bay, where he was kept until his release.

Al-Libi and Habib are but two cases. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands more. These accounts of American-sponsored torture in Egyptian prisons are not new. They hardly make news. But the close cooperation between Egyptian and American security officials represents a frightening melding of despotisms, an international cabal of state-sponsored brutality and abuse. It does away with the concept of law and human rights. It mocks international protocols and treaties. It permits the despotic states we support, such as Egypt, to veer away from democratic structures and propagate, with our assistance, a more ruthless tyranny and brutality. It enrages and finally empowers those who oppose us to engage in the same behavior. It is dividing the world into competing spheres of intolerance. In this new world order there is nothing left to appeal to other than the mercy of someone standing over you with an electric prod.

Mubarak has in the past few weeks decided to shut down the last remnants of opposition. He has sent in riot police to arrest dozens of striking labor leaders, rounded up more than a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition group, and tossed seven journalists into prison. The charges against the journalists range from misquoting Egypt’s justice minister to spreading rumors about the health of Mubarak to defaming his designated heir, Gamal. The detainees, as usual, complain of torture and beatings. And persistent rumors of death squads, bolstered by the “disappearance” of some of the regime’s most outspoken critics, have turned Egypt into a state that has mastered the art of internal and external extraordinary rendition.

The few lonely Egyptian voices and institutions that dared to speak out against the mounting repression have been silenced, including the Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid, which was shut down by the government last month. The government also recently arrested two political activists—Mohammed al-Dereini and Ahmed Mohammed Sobh, both members of Egypt’s tiny Shiite minority—after the men publicized testimonies from prisoners detailing torture in the Egyptian prison system. Egypt’s most prominent dissident, the sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, is in exile, too frightened to go home and repeat his own brutal experience in an Egyptian prison.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights has confirmed more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including 167 deaths—three of which took place this year—that the group “strongly suspects were the result of torture and mistreatment.” There are now 80,000 political prisoners held in Egyptian prisons. The annual budget for internal security was $1.5 billion in 2006, more than the entire national budget for health care, and the security police forces comprise 1.4 million members, nearly four times the number of the Egyptian army.

The United States has subsidized Egypt’s armed forces with over $38 billion in aid. Egypt receives about $2 billion annually—$1.3 billion in foreign military financing and about $815 million in economic and support fund assistance—making it the second largest regular recipient of conventional U.S. military and economic aid, after Israel.

We have nothing left to say to the Mubarak regime. The torture practiced in Egypt is the torture we employ for our own ends. The cries that rise up from these fetid cells in Egypt condemn not only the Mubarak dictatorship but the moral rot that has beset the American state.

We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens’ expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the lies we tell to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, if we do not remove from power our flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, the despotism we empower abroad will become the despotism we soon experience at home.

Chris Hedges is former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran, and how a callous war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions.