"Honk for Peace" case declares that a schoolteacher's freedom of speech is "the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary"

This article from Common Dreams shows how our schools are little more than brainwashing academies, where teachers aren't even allowed to discuss basic politics -- or, more precisely, where teachers may advertise some political opinions, such as "Support the Troops", but not others, such as "Honk for Peace". No wonder Americans grow up so ignorant about the world around them, when teachers are afraid of losing their jobs for saying the wrong thing. One of the comments on Common Dreams made a good point: "Does anyone know exactly how many teachers were fired for displaying a yellow or red-white-blue ribbon saying 'Support the Troops'? If none, then I think that Deborah Mayers ought to be given all her back pay and the Bloomington School Board and the City of Bloomington be heavily fined for civil rights violations."

‘Honk for Peace’ Case Tests Limits on Free Speech
by Bob Egelko
San Francisco Chronicle
May 14, 2007

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - When one of Deborah Mayer’s elementary school students asked her on the eve of the Iraq war whether she would ever take part in a peace march, the veteran teacher recalls answering, “I honk for peace.”

Soon afterward, Mayer lost her job and her home in Indiana. She was out of work for nearly three years. And when she complained to federal courts that her free-speech rights had been violated, the courts replied, essentially, that as a public school teacher she didn’t have any.

As a federal appeals court in Chicago put it in January, a teacher’s speech is “the commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary.” The Bloomington, Ind., school district had just as much right to fire Mayer, the court said, as it would have if she were a creationist who refused to teach evolution.

The ruling was legally significant. Eight months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in a case involving the Los Angeles district attorney’s office that government employees were not protected by the First Amendment when they faced discipline for speaking at work about controversies related to their jobs. The Chicago appeals court was the first to apply the same rationale to the classroom, an issue that the Supreme Court expressly left unresolved.

But legal analysts said the Mayer ruling was probably less important as a precedent than as a stark reminder that the law provides little protection for schoolteachers who express their beliefs.

As far as the courts are concerned, “public education is inherently a situation where the government is the speaker, and … its employees are the mouthpieces of the government,” said Vikram Amar, a professor at UC’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Whatever academic freedom exists for college teachers is “much, much less” in public schools, he said.

A recent case from a Los Angeles charter school offers more evidence of the limits teachers face in choosing curricula or seeking redress of grievances. The school’s administrators forbade seventh-graders from reading aloud at a February assembly the award-winning poem “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” about a black teenager beaten to death by white men in 1955.

In an online guide to teaching the poem in grades seven and up, publisher Houghton Mifflin recommends telling students that it will be disturbing; administrators said they feared it would be too much for the kindergartners in the audience and then explained that Till’s alleged whistle at a white woman was inappropriate. When social studies teacher Marisol Alba and a colleague signed letters of protest written by students at the largely African American school, both teachers were fired.

The Mayer ruling was disappointing but not surprising, said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. For the last decade, he said, federal courts “have not been receptive to arguments that teachers, both K-12 and higher education, have free-speech rights in the classroom.”

That’s unacceptable, said Mayer, 57, who now teaches seventh-graders in Haines City, Fla. She said she’s scraped up enough money, by selling her car, to appeal her case to the Supreme Court, though she doubts the justices will review it.

“If a teacher can be fired for saying those four little words — ‘I honk for peace’ — who’s going to want to teach?” she asked. “They’re taking away free speech at school. … You might just as well get a big television and set it in front of the children and have them watch, (using) the curriculum the school board has.”

On the other hand, said Francisco Negrón, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, if teachers were free to express their viewpoints in class, school boards would be less able to do their job of determining the curriculum and complying with government demands for accountability.

“Teachers bring their creativity, their energy, their skill in teaching the curriculum, but … a teacher in K-12 is really not at liberty to design a curriculum,” said Negrón, who filed arguments with the court in Mayer’s case supporting the Bloomington school district. “That’s the function of the school board.”

The incident occurred in January 2003, when Mayer was teaching a class of fourth- through sixth-graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. As Mayer recalled it later, the question about peace marches arose during a discussion of an article in the children’s edition of Time magazine, part of the school-approved curriculum, about protests against U.S. preparations for war in Iraq.

When the student asked the question about taking part in demonstrations, Mayer said, she replied that there were peace marches in Bloomington, that she blew her horn whenever she saw a “Honk for Peace” sign, and that people should seek peaceful solutions before going to war.

A student complained to her father, who complained to the principal, who canceled the school’s annual “Peace Month” observance and told Mayer never to discuss the war or her political views in class.

Mayer, who had been hired after the semester started and had received a good job evaluation before the incident, was dismissed at the end of the school year. The school said it was for poor performance, but the appeals court assumed that she had been fired for her comments and said the school had acted legally.

“Teachers hire out their own speech and must provide the service for which employers are willing to pay,” a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Jan. 24. “The Constitution does not entitle teachers to present personal views to captive audiences against the instructions of elected officials.”

Mayer, the court said, was told by her bosses that she could teach about the war “as long as she kept her opinions to herself.” Like the Los Angeles district attorney’s employee whose demotion led to the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling, the appellate panel said, Mayer had no constitutional right to say anything on the job that conflicted with her employer’s policy.

Mayer’s lawyer asked for a rehearing, saying the evidence was clear that the school had no such policy when Mayer answered the student’s question. The court denied reconsideration in March without comment.

Mayer, who had taught for more than 20 years, couldn’t afford to keep her Indiana home after being fired and left the state. She got another teaching job in Florida, but lost it after disclosing her previous dismissal, and didn’t get another position until last fall.

As all parties to Mayer’s case recognize, her statements would have been constitutionally protected and beyond the government’s power to suppress if she had been speaking on a street corner or at a public hearing.

But in the classroom, as in the workplace, courts have upheld limits on speech. In both settings, past rulings have taken into account the institution’s need to function efficiently and keep order, and the rights of co-workers and students not to be subjected to unwanted diatribes.

In 1969, the Supreme Court upheld a high school student’s right to wear a black armband as a silent protest against the Vietnam War and barred schools from stifling student expression unless it was disruptive or interfered with education. The court retreated from that standard somewhat in a 1988 ruling upholding censorship of student newspapers, and will revisit the issue in a pending case involving an Alaskan student who was suspended for unfurling a banner outside the school grounds that read, “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on teachers’ free speech. In lower courts, teachers have won cases by showing they were punished for violating policies that school officials never explained to them beforehand or invented after the fact. A federal appeals court in 2001 ruled in favor of a fifth-grade teacher in Kentucky who was fired for bringing actor Woody Harrelson to her class to discuss the benefits of industrial hemp, an appearance that school officials had approved.

But teachers who were on notice of school policies they transgressed have usually lost their cases. In one Bay Area case, in August 2005, a federal judge in San Jose rejected arguments by Cupertino elementary school teacher Stephen Williams that his principal had violated his freedom of speech by prohibiting him from using outside religious materials in history lessons.

Unless the Supreme Court takes up Mayer’s case, its legal effect is limited to federal courts in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, the three states in the Seventh Circuit. But Amar, the Hastings law professor, and others said the ruling could be influential elsewhere because there are few appellate decisions on the issue, and because the author, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, is a prominent conservative jurist.

“Very few schools are going to be that harsh in muzzling or silencing their teachers,” but the ruling indicates they would be free to do so, Amar said.

Simpson, the National Education Association’s lawyer, said the ruling, though within the legal mainstream, was bad for education because teachers are not “hired to read a script.” The case might interest the Supreme Court, and the NEA will probably file a brief in support of Mayer’s appeal should the justices take the case, he said.

Beverly Tucker, chief counsel of the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association, said she doubts that federal courts in California would take as conservative a position as the court in Mayer’s case. But she expects school districts to cite the ruling in the next case that arises.

“If I were a public school teacher, I would live in fear that some innocuous remark made in the classroom in response to a question from a pupil would lead to me being terminated” under such a ruling, Tucker said.

As for Mayer, she isn’t sure what rankles her most — the impact on her life, the stigma of being branded a rogue teacher, or the court’s assertion that a teacher’s speech is a commodity purchased by the government.

“My free speech,” she said, “is not for sale at any price.”

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com

Michael Moore responds to American government investigation of his trip to Cuba

Alternet is carrying Michael Moore's letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, responding to the investigation that has been launched into Moore's trip to Cuba, an investigation that coincidentally occurs two weeks before the film's premiere at Cannes Film Festival and one month before it opens in America. As usual, Moore pulls no punches:

I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes. Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors. From holding secret meetings for the energy industry to re-writing science findings to cooking the books on intelligence to the firing of U.S. Attorneys, this Administration has shown time and time again that it will abuse its power and authority.

The entire letter:

Michael Moore Responds to Treasury Secretary's Investigation Threat
By Michael Moore
AlterNet
May 12, 2007

Open Letter from Michael Moore to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

Secretary Henry Paulson

Department of the Treasury

Secretary Paulson,

I am contacting you in light of the document sent to me dated May 2, 2007, which was received May 7, 2007 indicating that an investigation has been opened up with regards to a trip I took to Cuba with a group of Americans that included some 9/11 heroes in March 2007 related to the filming of my next documentary, on the American Healthcare system. SiCKO, which will be seen in theaters this summer, will expose the health care industry's greed and control over America's political processes.

I believe that the decision to conduct this investigation represents the latest example of the Bush Administration abusing the federal government for raw, crass, political purposes. Over the last seven years of the Bush Presidency, we have seen the abuse of government to promote a political agenda designed to benefit the conservative base of the Republican Party, special interests and major financial contributors. From holding secret meetings for the energy industry to re-writing science findings to cooking the books on intelligence to the firing of U.S. Attorneys, this Administration has shown time and time again that it will abuse its power and authority.

There are a number of specific facts that have led me to conclude that politics could very well be driving this Bush Administration investigation of me and my film.

First, the Bush Administration has been aware of this matter for months (since October 2006) and never took any action until less than two weeks before SiCKO is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and a little more than a month before it is scheduled to open in the United States.

Second, the health care and insurance industry, which is exposed in the movie and has expressed concerns about the impact of the movie on their industries, is a major corporate underwriter of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, having contributed over $13 million to the Bush presidential campaign in 2004 and more than $180 million to Republican candidates over the last two campaign cycles.

It is well documented that the industry is very concerned about the impact of SiCKO. They have threatened their employees if they talk to me. They have set up special internal crises lines should I show up at their headquarters. Employees have been warned about the consequences of participating in SiCKO. Despite this, some employees, at great risk to themselves, have gone on camera to tell the American people the truth about the health care industry. I can understand why that industry's main recipient of its contributions -- President Bush -- would want to harass, intimidate and potentially prevent this film from having its widest possible audience.

And, third, this investigation is being opened in the wake of misleading attacks on the purpose of the Cuba trip from a possible leading Republican candidate for president, Fred Thompson, a major conservative newspaper, The New York Post, and various right wing blogs.

For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community. These heroic first responders have been left to fend for themselves, without coverage and without care. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me -- I have tried to help the very people they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow man, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide.

I demand that the Bush Administration immediately end this investigation and spend its time and resources trying to support some of the real heroes of 9/11.

Sincerely,

Michael Moore

Michael Moore is an Academy award-winning filmmaker and author of "Dude, Where's My Country?"

48,000 mercenaries employed by America in Iraq operate outside any law

More on war profiteering and lawlessness on the part of our government and military in Iraq, from The Nation.

Published on Saturday, May 12, 2007 by The Nation
Outsourcing the War
by Jeremy Scahill

To see a video of this testimony: click here.

Jeremy Scahill, bestselling author and investigative reporter for The Nation, testified May 10 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on the impact of private military contractors on the conduct of the Iraq War. This is the full text of his remarks:

My name is Jeremy Scahill. I have submitted my full remarks and request they be entered into the record. I am an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine and the author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I have spent the better part of the past two and a half years researching privatized warfare. I have interviewed scores of sources, filed many Freedom of Information Act requests, obtained government contracts and private company documents of firms operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

As this Committee is well aware, we are now in the midst of the most privatized war in the history of our country. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is one that has greatly accelerated since the launch of the “global war on terror” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans are under the impression that the US currently has about 145,000 active duty troops on the ground in Iraq. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that there are at least 126,000 private personnel deployed alongside the official armed forces. These private forces effectively double the size of the occupation force, largely without the knowledge of the US taxpayers that foot the bill.

But despite the similarity in size of these respective forces in Iraq, there are key differences with the way our government approaches the active-duty military and these private war contractors. For instance, we know that nearly 3,400 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq and more than 25,000 wounded. We do not know the exact number of private contractors killed or wounded. Through the US Department of Labor, we have been able to determine that at least 770 contractors had been killed in Iraq as of December 2006 along with at least 7,700 wounded. These casualties are not included in the official death count and help to mask the human costs of the war. More disturbing is what this means for our democracy: at a time when the administration seems unwilling to subject its war strategy to oversight by the Congress, we face the widespread use of private forces seemingly accountable to no effective system of oversight or law.

While tens of thousands of these contractors provide logistical support, thousands are heavily armed private soldiers roaming Iraq. We do know that there are some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq alone.

These forces work for US companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp as well as companies from across the globe. Some contractors make in a month what many active-duty soldiers make in a year. Indeed, there are private contractors in Iraq making more money than the Secretary of Defense and more than the commanding generals. The testimony about private contractors that I hear most often from active duty soldiers falls into two categories: resentment and envy.

They ask what message their country is sending them. While many soldiers lack basic protective equipment–facts well-known to this committee–they are in a war zone where they see the private soldiers whiz by in better vehicles, with better armor, better weapons, wearing the corporate logo instead of the American flag and pulling in much more money. They ask: Are our lives worth less?

Of course, there are many cases where war contractors have hoarded the profits at the top and money has not filtered down to the individual contractors on the ground or the armor to protect them.

The second reaction is that the active-duty soldiers see the “rock star” private contractors and they want to be like them. So we have a phenomenon of soldiers leaving active duty to join the private sector.

There is slang in Iraq now for this jump. It is called “Going Blackwater.” To put it bluntly, these private forces create a system where national duty is outbid by profits. And yet these forces are being used for mission-critical activities. Indeed, in January Gen. David Petraeus admitted that on his last tour in Iraq, he himself was protected not by the active-duty military but by private “contract security.”

Just as there is a double standard in pay, there is a double standard in the application of the law. Soldiers who commit crimes or acts of misconduct are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There have been some 64 courts martial on murder-related charges in Iraq alone. Compare that to the lack of prosecution of contractors. Despite the fact that tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have streamed in and out of Iraq since March of 2003, only two private contractors have faced any criminal prosecution. Two. One was a KBR employee alleged to have stabbed a co-worker, the other pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. In four years, there have been no prosecutions for crimes against Iraqis and not a single known prosecution of an armed contractor.

That either means we have tens of thousands of Boy Scouts working as armed contractors or something is fundamentally wrong with the system. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division became so outraged by contractor unaccountability that he began tracking contractor violence in Baghdad. In just two months he documented twelve cases of contractors shooting at civilians, resulting in six deaths and three injuries. That is just two months and one general.

They have not been prosecuted under the UCMJ, under US civilian law or under Iraqi law. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” That should be chilling to everyone who believes that warfare, above all government functions, must be subject to transparency, accountability and the rule of law.

These are forces operating in the name of the United States of America. Iraqis do not see contractors as separate from soldiers–understandably, they see them all as “the occupation.” Contractor misconduct is viewed as American misconduct.

While there is currently a debate in Congress about how to hold these private forces accountable, the political will to act remains shockingly absent.

Given the vast size of this private force, spread across the most dangerous war zone in the world, it is not at all clear how effective oversight would work. We already know that auditors cannot visit many reconstruction sites because of security concerns. Journalists are locked in the Green Zone. The army is stretched to the max. So what entity then is supposed to have the capacity or ability to oversee the men who have been brought to Iraq to go where no one else will?

Members of Congress tell me they have been stonewalled in their attempts to gain detailed information about the activities of these companies. I think it is a disturbing commentary that I have received phone calls from several Congress members asking me for government documents on war contractors and not the other way around.

In the current discussion in the Congress on this issue, what is seldom discussed is how this system, the privatization of war, has both encouraged and enabled the growth and creation of companies who have benefited and stand to gain even more from an escalation of the war.

In closing, while I think this Congress needs to take urgent action on issues of oversight, accountability and transparency of these private forces operating with our tax dollars and in the name of the United States, there is a deeper issue that often gets overlooked. This war contracting system has intimately linked corporate profits to an escalation of war and conflict. These companies have no incentive to decrease their footprint in the war zone and every incentive to increase it.

As the country debates current and future Iraq policy, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that often act in the name and on the payroll of the people of this country. Thank you for your time. I am prepared to answer any questions.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Three US Newspapers Reverse 100-Year-Old Stand on Death Penalty

Inter Press Service reports that two of the ten largest newspapers in America -- the Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News -- plus a smaller one, Pennsylvania's Carlisle Sentinel, have reversed their positions on the death penalty "following a series of investigative articles highlighting the flaws in the death penalty system".

Three US Newspapers Reverse 100-Year-Old Stand on Death Penalty
by Eli Clifton
Inter Press Service
May 11, 2007

WASHINGTON - Three established U.S. newspapers, two of them among the 10 largest in the country, in three different states have in the past weeks abandoned their century-old support of the death penalty and become passionate advocates of a ban on state-sponsored killing.

The newspapers — the Chicago Tribune in Illinois, the smaller Sentinel in Pennsylvania and the Dallas Morning News in Texas — announced their change of heart in strongly-argued editorials following a series of investigative articles highlighting the flaws in the death penalty system in their states and country.

“I think in a word it’s the issue of innocence that has brought about these editorials,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told IPS. “The weight of evidence in death penalty cases as seen and confirmed in DNA testing has made the death penalty too risky.”

The Chicago Tribune said its “groundbreaking” reporting suggested that innocent people had been convicted and executed. Two cases in Texas were cited. Also over the last 30 years more than 130 people had been released from death row in the U.S. after evidence was presented that undermined the cases against them. In that time, Illinois had executed 12 people and freed 18 from death row.

“The evidence of mistakes, the evidence of arbitrary decisions, the sobering knowledge that governments can’t provide certainty that the innocent will not be put to death — all that prompts this call for an end to capital punishment. It is time to stop killing people in the people’s name,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, reversing its pro-capital punishment position held since 1869.

Pennsylvania’s Sentinel newspaper, founded in 1861, also came out editorially against capital punishment after its reporters highlighted the “ineffectiveness” of the death penalty system in the state.

“The death penalty is useless,” the newspaper wrote in its Apr. 3 editorial.

The state’s lengthy appeals process created an almost indefinite stay of execution. This meant the numbers on Pennsylvania’s death row were steadily increasing. There were now 221 on death row, the fourth largest number of any state in the country. This was a huge expense for the taxpayers, the newspaper wrote.

“We are left with a grueling process that in the end only guarantees more suffering for the victims’ families and society at large as faith in the justice system erodes,” the editorial said. The majority of public opinion in the U.S. now favoured prison without parole rather than capital punishment — either out of “frustration with the system or revulsion at the punishment”.

“The pendulum is swinging away from Pennsylvania’s position on a law it cannot even execute,” the editorial concluded.

The issue of race was also playing a major role in the fall in public support for the death penalty, particularly in Pennsylvania, Brian Evans of Amnesty USA told IPS. “There is a lot of doubt about the death penalty especially in Pennsylvania because of the disproportionate racial mix of those on death row,” he said.

In Texas, the Dallas Morning News reversed its century-old support for the death penalty in an editorial on Apr. 15, citing mounting evidence that the state had wrongly convicted a number of people in capital trials and probably executed at least one innocent man.

Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for the murder of a petrol station attendant, although there was no forensic evidence linking him to the crime. Later, another man boasted to relatives that De Luna had been convicted for a murder he had committed.

In a second disturbing case cited by the newspaper for its change of mind over the death penalty, Ernest Ray Willis was convicted of the murder of two women in 1987. A federal judge later found prosecutors had administered anti-psychotic drugs to Willis during his trial to give him a “glazed over” appearance and show he was “cold-hearted”. Prosecutors had also suppressed evidence and provided no physical proof or eyewitnesses. Questions were also raised about the competence of the court-appointed defense lawyers.

The sentence was overturned. Another death row inmate also confessed to the killings. Willis was released after 17 years on death row.

“This board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder,” the Dallas Morning News wrote.

“We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant convicted of murder. That is why we believe the state of Texas should abandon the death penalty — because we cannot reconcile the fact that it is both imperfect and irreversible.”

The number of death sentences handed down in the U.S. has been steadily decreasing as public opinion in support of capital punishment has been falling. Some 315 death sentences were handed down in 1995, 128 in 2005 and 102 last year.

In the last five years, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute juveniles and the mentally retarded. Thirteen of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia currently do not have the death penalty.

War profiteering in Iraq

Below is the testimony of documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald to the U.S. House of Representatives about war profiteering in Iraq, as reported by Alternet. Some parts are truly astonishing, like this:

He saw Halliburton advertising a job for truck drivers in Iraq and he signed up. When Shane started telling me that empty trucks were being driven across dangerous stretches of desert, I assumed he was mistaken. Why would they do that? Then he explained that Halliburton got paid for the number of trips they took, regardless of whether they were carrying anything. These unnecessary trips where putting the lives of truckers at risk, exposing drivers and co-workers to attack. This was the result of cost-plus, no-bid contracts.

And this:

Another young Halliburton worker named James Logsdon told me about the burn pits. Burn pits are large dumps near military stations where they would burn equipment, trucks, trash, etc. If they ordered the wrong item, they'd throw it in the burn pit. If a tire blew on a piece of equipment, they'd throw the whole thing into the burn pit. The burn pits had so much equipment, they even gave them a nickname -- "Home Depot."

The trucker said he would get us some photos. And I naively asked, how big are they, the size of a backyard swimming pool? He laughed, and referred to one that he had seen that was 15 football fields large, and burned around the clock! It infuriated him to have to burn stuff rather then give it to the Iraqis or to the military. Yet Halliburton was being rewarded each time they billed the government for a new truck or new piece of equipment. With a cost- plus contract, the contractors receive a percentage of the money they spend. As Shane told me, "It's a legal way of stealing from the government or the taxpayers' money."

It's farcical to hear Republicans complain about the cost of school lunch programs and such things when their party (and their Vice President's company) is looting the Treasury with such abandon.

The Madness of the War Profiteering in Iraq
By Robert Greenwald
AlterNet
May 10, 2007

The following is Robert Greenwald's testimony to the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Defense about war profiteering.

Thank you for inviting me to testify today. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you what I have learned in the course of making the documentary film, "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers." Along with my colleagues at Brave New Films, I spent a year researching the experiences of soldiers, truck drivers and families affected by the presence of private military contractors in Iraq. They shared with us their harrowing experiences of how military privatization and war profiteering have affected their lives, and in some cases taken the life of a loved one.

It is their personal stories that compel me to testify today. I am not a lawyer or a financial specialist or a government expert, but I can tell you from my extensive first-hand experience with these folks that something is seriously wrong. We are hurting our country and the many patriots who serve in the military. Our taxpayer dollars are being spent, abused, mis-used, and wasted on profiteers. It is a true tragedy, and it is costing the lives of Americans and Iraqis.

Please let me introduce you to a few of these people and their stories.

Imagine someone with the exact same job as you, working next to you, but getting paid three times as much as you! We heard this story over and over again from the soldiers we interviewed. And in the case of US Army SPC David Mann, a radio repair technician who served in Iraq, he was even required to train KBR contractors to replace him. In "Iraq For Sale," David shared his frustration:

"When I could be actively becoming a better soldier and becoming more proficient in my job, instead I'm going to sit up on guard duty and wait around while KBR contractors are doing the job that I had to train them to do."

US Army specialist Anthony Lagouranis also spoke of the effects of the private contractors on the military:

"It certainly affected retention because I don't know why any military person would re-enlist to do the same job when they could get out of the military and make six times the money -- I really don't understand why they were outsourced. I mean, it seems like this is a military job and the military should be doing it. Especially because the more civilians you have out there, the more military people you need to guard them. So we're spreading us thin."

"Iraq For Sale" was seen by hundreds of thousands of people around the country, and I cannot tell you the number of soldiers who saw it and thanked us for exposing the toll that contracting and profiteering are taking on our armed forces and on the war in Iraq.

I was also appalled to learn of the amount of waste by contractors in Iraq.

I remember clearly my interview with Stewart Scott, a former Halliburton employee. With pain and rage in his voice, he said how dare Halliburton put its people up at five-star hotels, while the soldiers, who he was there to help, were sleeping on the ground. I did not believe in him at first, but then he began naming the hotels and the locations. It was all true.

I also spoke with Shane Ratliff, a truck driver from Ruby, South Carolina.

He saw Halliburton advertising a job for truck drivers in Iraq and he signed up. When Shane started telling me that empty trucks were being driven across dangerous stretches of desert, I assumed he was mistaken. Why would they do that? Then he explained that Halliburton got paid for the number of trips they took, regardless of whether they were carrying anything. These unnecessary trips where putting the lives of truckers at risk, exposing drivers and co-workers to attack. This was the result of cost-plus, no-bid contracts.

Another young Halliburton worker named James Logsdon told me about the burn pits. Burn pits are large dumps near military stations where they would burn equipment, trucks, trash, etc. If they ordered the wrong item, they'd throw it in the burn pit. If a tire blew on a piece of equipment, they'd throw the whole thing into the burn pit. The burn pits had so much equipment, they even gave them a nickname -- "Home Depot."

The trucker said he would get us some photos. And I naively asked, how big are they, the size of a backyard swimming pool? He laughed, and referred to one that he had seen that was 15 football fields large, and burned around the clock! It infuriated him to have to burn stuff rather then give it to the Iraqis or to the military. Yet Halliburton was being rewarded each time they billed the government for a new truck or new piece of equipment. With a cost- plus contract, the contractors receive a percentage of the money they spend. As Shane told me, "It's a legal way of stealing from the government or the taxpayers' money."

These costs eat up the money that could be used for other supplies.

Sgt. Phillip Slocum wrote to us and said, "In previous experiences I went off to war with extra everything, and then some. This time however, Uncle Sam sent me off with one pair of desert boots, two uniforms, and body armor that didn't fit."

Cost-plus and no-bid contracts are hopelessly undermining our efforts and costing the taxpayers billions. They do not operate within a free-market system and have no competition, but instead create a Stalinist system of rewarding cronies. In a letter from Sgt. Jon Lacore talking about the enormous amount of waste, he said, "I just can't believe that no one at all is going to jail for this or even being fired or forced to resign."

In my research, I was also shocked to discover the role of contractors in the tragedy of Abu Ghraib. Its images are seared into the minds of people throughout the world, yet few realize the role of CACI and its interrogators. As our team dug deeper and deeper into the numerous contracts, CACI and JP London kept appearing over and over. The Taguba report, the Fay report, and the Human Rights Watch report "By The Numbers" all made clear that CACI had played a significant role in the torture. As Pratap Chatterjee, head of CorpWatch has stated, CACI was using "information technology contracts through the department of Interior. So either somebody was in a big hurry or they did this deliberately so nobody would ever be able to track this ... CACI does a lot of work directly with OSD, Office of the Secretary of Defense."

And even after the investigations, there were no consequences; in fact, CACI continued to receive more and more contracts with no oversight. Later, CACI and JP London were even hired to process cases of fraud and incompetence by contractors! I kid you not -- CACI, a corporation that had profited enormously from the war and whose CEO JP London personally made $22,249,453 from his stock and salary in 2004 -- was being hired to oversee other contractors! This is a madhouse run amuck. And we need your help to fix this.

We know corporations are designed to create significant returns for its shareholders. Do we really believe they can and should be fighting for hearts and minds? Do we really think that the corporations with their legal commitment to profitability are to be given the responsibility for some of our country's most critical decisions and actions? Do we want corporations representing us in the battles for our country?

Robert Greenwald is the director/producer of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," as well as many other films. He is a board member of the Independent Media Institute, AlterNet's parent organization.

Michael Moore investigated for traveling to Cuba

Looks like it's not such a free country after all. The BBC reports that Michael Moore is being investigated by the American government for traveling to Cuba without "a specific licence". Sort of reminds me of all those stories about the "evil empire" Soviet Union restricting its citizens' travel. Guess America was pretty much the same all along.

US probes director Moore on Cuba
BBC
10 May 2007

Award-winning film-maker Michael Moore is being investigated by US authorities for a possible violation of the trade embargo against Cuba, he has announced.

Mr Moore took a group of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba in March to film part of his new documentary about healthcare provision in the US.

The US Treasury has sent him a letter asking him to explain himself.

Mr Moore is a long-time critic of the Bush administration and has campaigned against the war in Iraq.

The US imposed an economic embargo on Cuba more than 40 years ago in a bid to isolate Fidel Castro's communist government.

Ailing workers

Mr Moore made the trip to Cuba to film part of Sicko, an examination of America's health care industry which, according to the film's producer, Meghan O'Hara, will "expose the corporations that place profit before care and the politicians who care only about money".

His spokeswoman, Lisa Cohen, told the French news agency AFP that he took around 10 ailing New York rescue workers with him for medical treatment.

The group were suffering from conditions thought linked to their work clearing up debris from the site of the World Trade Center bombings on 11 September 2001.

In a letter dated 2 May, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control gave Mr Moore 20 working days to provide more details of his visit, including who went with him and why.

"This office has no record that a specific licence was issued authorising you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," it said.

Sicko is due to open at the Cannes Film Festival next week.

Mr Moore won an Oscar in 2002 for the documentary Bowling for Columbine, a critique of US gun culture in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School.

He followed that up with Fahrenheit 9/11, an examination of the White House's decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 11 September attacks.

Warrett Buffett funds Sudanese genocide

I thought this piece from Marketwatch was unusual in the world of business reporting, which usually pays no attention whatsoever to the social and political effects of investing. It's also unusual in its fearlessness in taking on God himself in the business world, Warren Buffett.

Buffett: Give peace a chance, when I'm gone
Commentary: Help is not on the way to Darfur, Berkshire shareholders say
By David Weidner
MarketWatch
May 10, 2007

Here's hoping that Warren Buffett isn't with us as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. for much longer, or at least that he has a change of heart. The world will be better off. Nearly a year after Buffett pledged to give $37 billion of his personal wealth to charity, the 76-year-old and his shareholder flock at Berkshire shot down a series of do-gooder proposals that would have required the company to spare some profits in the name of social responsibility, and maybe saving a few lives.

Buffett and his followers believe it doesn't matter how you make your money, as long as you give it away when you're dead. Embrace businesses such as PetroChina Co. Ltd. -- which arguably is aiding the genocide in Darfur by investing in the Sudanese government's oil explorations -- or risk that extra penny a share in profit. St. Warren is like a poker player who has won all of the chips, but hands you one or two to keep playing just so he can take them from you again.

PetroChina connection

Last year, I criticized the attention paid to Buffett for his pledge that his estate would hand over most of his wealth when he died. The billionaire gave a generous gift, but giving and sacrifice are different qualities often confused by observers in the media (this columnist included).

Today, little seems to have changed. At the urging of management, shareholders last weekend voted down resolutions to require more disclosure of the company's political contributions and also to reverse the actions of a Berkshire subsidiary, PacifiCorp, believed to be endangering salmon populations and lowering water quality in the Northwest.

But it was a resolution calling for Berkshire to sell a $3.3 billion stake in Beijing-based PetroChina that caused the biggest uproar. The PetroChina subsidiary in Sudan pays the government for the right to produce oil there. Those payments, human-rights advocates say, support the Sudanese government and its military efforts.
Shareholder Judith Porter stood before 27,000 investors at the company's annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., and told Buffett that dumping the Berkshire stake "will send a signal to China and to the Sudan that there are costs for continuing this destruction," according to reports.

Buffett defended the investment by arguing that it's the Chinese government that's condoning the actions in Darfur. Furthermore, he said, even if Berkshire divested or Buffett complained, it wouldn't matter. "PetroChina in no way tells the Chinese government what to do," Buffett was quoted as saying. "We have no disagreement with what PetroChina is doing." He could see "no effect whatsoever in Berkshire Hathaway trying to tell the Chinese government how to conduct their business."

Hey, if you could make a few bucks dealing with someone you know is helping hide a serial killer, why say anything? It probably wouldn't help, right? Before all you Buffett fans write me to complain, know this: When it comes to investing, it's one thing to follow an unrivaled businessman and investor. When it comes to moral decisions, Warren Buffett should not be your choice. This isn't to say that he does not have a better track record than his peers in American business, but to say that Buffett is in business for himself and his shareholders. Everyone else can wait until he's dead.

Majority of Iraqi parliament calls for US withdrawal from Iraq

Alternet reports that a majority of the Iraqi parliament has "signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal". The article is also very instructive in its delineation of "nationalists" and "separatists" in Iraq. It seems that the parliament is dominated by "nationalists", who want to keep Iraq together as a single country, and who oppose the wholesale giveaway of Iraqi oil contracts to American and British oil corporations and the construction of permanent American military bases in Iraq. America and Britain, apparently following the classic strategy of "divide and conquer", support "separatists", who want to break up the country into three separate countries along ethnic lines, and who also are eager, coincidentally, to hand control of Iraqi oil fields over to American and British oil corporations, and to allow the construction of permanent American military bases in Iraq. It's interesting how the rationale for this war has undergone so many changes: from WMD, to democracy, to security, to what now? America found no WMD, it's ignoring the elected Iraqi parliament, and it seems to be mainly focused on oil and control over the country for its own purposes through whatever means are most convenient. This is what 655,000+ Iraqis have died for.

Majority of Iraqi Lawmakers Now Reject Occupation
By Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland
AlterNet
May 9, 2007


On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

...

The major schism in Iraqi politics is not between Sunni and Shia or supporters of the Iraqi government and "anti-government forces," nor is it a clash of "moderates" against "radicals"; the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed, so far, by the United States and Britain.

The continuing occupation of Iraq and the allocation of Iraq's resources -- especially its massive oil and natural gas deposits -- are the defining issues that now separate an increasingly restless bloc of nationalists in the Iraqi parliament from the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists.

By "separatists," we mean groups who oppose a unified Iraq with a strong central government; key figures like Maliki of the Dawa party, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq ("SCIRI"), Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Sunni Islamic Party, President Jalal Talabani -- a Kurd -- and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, favor partitioning Iraq into three autonomous regions with strong local governments and a weak central administration in Baghdad. (The partition plan is also favored by several congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.)

Iraq's separatists also oppose setting a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation, preferring the addition of more American troops to secure their regime. They favor privatizing Iraq's oil and gas and decentralizing petroleum operations and revenue distribution.

But public opinion is squarely with Iraq's nationalists. According to a poll by the University of Maryland's Project on International Public Policy Attitudes, majorities of all three of Iraq's major ethno-sectarian groups support a unified Iraq with a strong central government.

...

While sectarian fighting at the neighborhood and community level has made life unlivable for millions of Iraqis, Iraqi nationalism -- portrayed as a fiction by supporters of the invasion -- supercedes sectarian loyalties at the political level. A group of secular, Sunni and Shia nationalists have long voted together on key issues, but so far have failed to join forces under a single banner.

That may be changing. Reached by phone last week, nationalist leader Saleh Al-Mutlaq, of the National Dialogue Front, said, "We're doing our best to form this united front and announce it within the next few weeks." The faction would have sufficient votes to block any measure proposed by the Maliki government. Asked about the Americans' reaction to the growing power of the nationalists, Mutlaq said, "We're trying our best to reach out to the U.S. side, but to no avail."

That appears to be a trend. Iraqi nationalists have attempted again and again to forge relationships with members of Congress, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House but have found little interest in dialogue and no support. Instead, key nationalists like al-Sadr have been branded as "extremists," "thugs" and "criminals."

That's a tragic missed opportunity; the nationalists are likely Iraq's best hope for real and lasting reconciliation among the country's warring factions. They are the only significant political force focused on rebuilding a sovereign, united and independent Iraq without sectarian and ethnic tensions or foreign meddling -- from either the West or Iran. Hassan Al-Shammari, the head of Al-Fadhila bloc in the Iraqi parliament, said this week, "We have a peace plan, and we're trying to work with other nationalist Iraqis to end the U.S. and Iranian interventions, but we're under daily attacks and there's huge pressure to destroy our peace mission."

A sovereign and unified Iraq, free of sectarian violence, is what George Bush and Tony Blair claim they want most. The most likely reason that the United States and Britain have rebuffed those Iraqi nationalists who share those goals is that the nationalists oppose permanent basing rights and the privatization of Iraq's oil sector. The administration, along with their allies in Big Oil, has pressed the Iraqi government to adopt an oil law that would give foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than they enjoy in other major oil producing countries and would lock in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades.

Al-Shammari said this week: "We're afraid the U.S. will make us pass this new oil law through intimidation and threatening. We don't want it to pass, and we know it'll make things worse, but we're afraid to rise up and block it, because we don't want to be bombed and arrested the next day." In the Basrah province, where his Al-Fadhila party dominates the local government, Al-Shammari's fellow nationalists have been attacked repeatedly by separatists for weeks, while British troops in the area remained in their barracks.

...

The United States, in pushing for more aggressive moves against Iraqi nationalists and the passage of a final oil law, is playing a dangerous game. Iraqi nationalists reached in Baghdad this week say they are beginning to lose hope of achieving anything through the political process because both the Iraqi government and the occupation authorities are systematically bypassing the Iraqi parliament where they're in the majority. If they end up quitting the political process entirely, that will leave little choice but to oppose the occupation by violent means.

Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle.

Boy King Bush

This article from Znet goes over well-worn ground, but I think it makes the case that our country's system of government has become almost indistinguishable from a monarchy under Bush.

Boy King Bush
by Paul Street
ZNet
May 09, 2007

George W. Bush sure looked uncomfortable spending a day with the Queen of England. I find this ironic. It is richly appropriate that he be intimately linked in the public eye for at least one day to the English monarchy.

The core founding United States document The Declaration of Independence (DOI) was written in fierce defiance of the English crown, the British Empire, and the institution of absolute monarchy.

But the U.S. President Bush has been defying key DOI postulates in ways that the original “royal brute” (as Thomas Jefferson described the King George of 1776) would approve. He has invoked a modern version of the Divine Right of Kings by claiming to be above the law in enacting such policies as the wiretapping of U.S. citizens, extraordinary rendition, the denial of habeas corpus to “enemy combatants” and the torture of alleged terrorists and occupation resisters.

Boy-king George has only half-jokingly referred to the nation’s billionaires as his real “base” and to thinking it would be easier to rule through dictatorship than via “democracy,” which he falsely claims to promote within and beyond Iraq. He is a longstanding close friend of the monarchical rulers of the totalitarian and arch-reactionary state of Saudi Arabia. His administration sponsored and supported a military coup against the democratically elected president of Venezuela in April of 2002.

And while he just cringed through a royal day culminating in a nauseating and hyper-classist white-tie dinner that cost U.S. taxpayers untold tens if not hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars, more United States troops died in an illegal war that Bush strategized with top British officials while hiding his plans from the American people. People trying to deal with the aftermath of a devastating Kansas tornado were denied assistance from state National Guard units still diverted to Bush’s arch-criminal oil occupation of Mesopotamia.

In the leaked Downing Street Memo of 23 July 2002, it was revealed by top British military intelligence officials that English authorities learned something remarkable from Bush and his team. “Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the British discovered. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action,” the Memo reads, “justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The cooked intelligence claims used to trick the American people into supporting the pre-ordained invasion of Iraq were being manufactured in advance by U.S. authorities. British rulers were let in on this terrible reality.

Things got positively weird between Team Bush and the rulers of England five months later. In a two-hour meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair that took place in the White House office on January 31, 2003, Bush discussed several ways to provoke a confrontation. One of the methods he proposed was to paint a U.S. surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of anti-aircraft fire that could be used to justify an invasion.

Formed in opposition to British rule and institutions, the DOI made history by saying that the consent of the governed was the only legitimate basis for a government and that the people had the right to replace an authoritarian government with more popular forms of rule. This is the well known right of revolution.

Just less than two hundred and twenty one years later, the rulers of the British state knew more about Bush’s foreign policy plans than “the Decider’s” own U.S. subjects as he prepared to undertake the thoroughly immoral and illegal invasion of petroleum-rich Iraq. Nearly two hundred and thirty one years later, after at least one stolen Bush election, the majority of those subjects oppose their authoritarian president’s recently escalated criminal war but lack confidence in their ability to do anything to stop it. After committing numerous offenses worthy of impeachment, removal, incarceration and worse, the messianic- militarist Bush continues to tell reporters and the public that his decisions on Iraq will be informed by his generals and “commanders on the ground” – unelected military authorities – and not by merely elected “politicians in Washington.” He exhibits special reverence for the title “Commander-in-Chief,” also suggesting a belief that military rule has supplanted civilian rule in his authoritarian mind.

Paul Street is a frequent ZNet contributor and the author of many articles, studies, speeches, chapters and books. He can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com.

"Looking from the side" at war with Iran

John Pilger asks when we will stop "looking from the side" while our leaders manufacture yet another war, this time with Iran.

IRAN MAY BE THE GREATEST CRISIS OF MODERN TIMES
By John Pilger
April 12, 2007

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick and some were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'."

It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war" edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence - until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets . . . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."

And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of "news" in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is an agenda to maintain division and instability. In other words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran.

One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland - that is the real news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute "warning". They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next "enemy".

Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: "The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims "unpeople". Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.

Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" - and Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).

Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.

In the second example, only the degree of suffering is different. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as "flawed". They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as "robust" and "close to best practice", and other government officials had secretly approved the "tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones". The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million - carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.

"This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference."

Such is the scale of the crime and of our "looking from the side". According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters' "damning verdict" on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority who have "lost faith" in their government.

No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks - claims now regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.

As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on "day one" of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.

Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian programme to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to "go anywhere". The recent UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.

Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as "Operation Cyclone". In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never before. When home-grown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.

In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of the "rules" of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government. Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments against those responsible for "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history" - Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.

These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks - again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused "elements of the Iranian regime" of "backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq". He offered no evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue looking from the side?

John Pilger's new film "The War on Democracy" will be previewed at the National Film Theatre in London on 11 May. www.bfi.org.uk/nft

www.johnpilger.com

The separation wall of Israel

I just watched the documentary Mur ("wall"), about the separation wall being built in Israel to divide Jews from Arabs. It's a good movie about a very sad, bitter story. I don't understand how the Zionist Jews can be so selfish and nationalistic and subject the Arabs to some of the same treatment they themselves were subjected to under the Nazis. They seem completely self-absorbed and incapable of empathy with others' situations. And their cruelty and military domination of the Arabs is funded by billions of dollars in aid from America every year. Conservatives love to remember Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech, calling for the Berlin Wall to be torn down, but how is this any different? If anything, it's worse. The racism and mistreatment in Israel is no better than the apartheid of South Africa, either. And America is building more such walls, dividing neighbor from neighbor along ethnic lines, in downtown Baghdad. It's farcical to describe America as a spreader of freedom and democracy, when our main ally in the region is Israel, ruthless, brutal, and callous to its neighbors, and our actions are no better.

Here is a documentary on the subject of the wall from Alternate Focus, via YouTube, on the same topic. It's not as good as Mur, but it should be educational if you don't know anything about the wall.


This other documentary about Israel/Palestine from (WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT) YouTube, called "The Killing Zone", is really painful to watch. It's filmed entirely in the Palestinian territories and shows what life is like under the Israeli occupation, with missile and machine gun attacks on civilian neighborhoods, houses being bulldozed, protesters being shot, journalists being shot, and masked men vowing revenge for the murders of civilians. The level of brutality on the part of the Israeli Army is astounding. Once again, it reminds me of the Nazis. (WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT)

(WARNING - GRAPHIC CONTENT)

Study shows depleted uranium causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer

This article from the Guardian points out the obvious, that depleted uranium can cause cancer and is very dangerous, but often these days such obvious truths are completely buried and unknown.

Deadly Dust: Study Suggests Cancer Risk from Depleted Uranium
by James Randerson
The Guardian/UK
May 8, 2007

Depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density - twice that of lead - makes it useful for armor and armor piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defense was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. “These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

Once they are lodged in the lung even low levels of radioactivity would damage DNA in cells close by. “The real question is whether the level of exposure is sufficient to cause health effects. The answer to that question is still unclear,” he said, adding that there has as yet been little research on the effects of DU on civilians in combat zones. “Funding for DU studies is very sparse and so defining the disadvantages is hard,” he added.

From the Wikipedia entry on depleted uranium:

An external radiation dose from Depleted Uranium is about 60% of that from Natural Uranium with the same mass...Its use in ammunition is controversial because of its release into the environment. Besides its residual radioactivity, U-238 is a heavy metal whose compounds are known from laboratory studies to be toxic to mammals, especially to the reproductive system and fetus development, causing reduced fertility, miscarriages and fetus malformations.

From Wikipedia: "Graph showing the rate per 1,000 births of congenital malformations observed at Basra University Hospital, Iraq, as reported by I. Al-Sadoon, et al., writing in the Medical Journal of Basrah University."

America continues to use depleted uranium in anti-armor rounds, poisoning civilians and soldiers alike and polluting Iraq with radioactive dust for centuries. From Wikipedia:

When a DU penetrator reaches the interior of an armored vehicle, it catches fire, often igniting ammunition and fuel, killing the crew, and possibly causing the vehicle to explode.

Such incendiary devices create a fine aerosol dust of radioactive uranium that is toxic by its properties as a heavy metal (similar to mercury poisoning) and as a radioactive substance, and which can easily be inhaled by anyone in the area. Use of such rounds in civilian neighborhoods has been documented.

Third American aircraft carrier battle group nearing Persian Gulf

According to this article from Tom Dispatch, the US already has two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf, and a third is about to arrive, putting the US "in an optimal position to strike Iran with a punishing array of bombs and missiles should the President decide to carry out his oft-repeated threat to eliminate Iran's nuclear program through military action."

Warships, Warships Everywhere, and Many a Bomb to Drop
Persian Gulf Update
By Michael T. Klare

Looking down from the captain's deck some six stories high, the flight deck of the USS Nimitz is an impressive sight indeed: 80 sleek warplanes armed with bombs and missiles are poised for takeoff at any minute, day or night. The sight of these planes coming and going from that 1,100-foot-long flight deck is almost beyond description. I can attest to this, having sailed on the Nimitz 25 years ago as a reporter for Mother Jones magazine.

Today, the Nimitz is rapidly approaching the Persian Gulf, where it will join two other U.S. aircraft carriers and the French carrier Charles De Gaulle in the largest concentration of naval firepower in the region since the launching of the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years ago.

Why this concentration now? Officially, the Nimitz is on its way to the Gulf to replace the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is due to return to the United States for crew leave and ship maintenance after months on station. But the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which exercises command authority over all U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf area, refuses to say when the Eisenhower will actually depart -- or even when the Nimitz will arrive.

For a time, at least, the United States will have three carrier battle groups in the region. The USS John C. Stennis is the third. Each carrier is accompanied by a small flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support vessels, many equipped with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (TLAMs). Minimally, this gives modern meaning to the classic imperial term "gunboat diplomacy," which makes it all the stranger that the deployment of the Nimitz is covered in our media, if at all, as the most minor of news stories. And when the Nimitz sailed off into the Pacific last month on its way to the Gulf, it simply disappeared off media radar screens like some classic "lost patrol."

Rest assured, unlike us, the Iranians have noticed. After all, with the arrival of the Nimitz battle group, the Bush administration will be -- for an unknown period of time -- in an optimal position to strike Iran with a punishing array of bombs and missiles should the President decide to carry out his oft-repeated threat to eliminate Iran's nuclear program through military action. "All options," as the administration loves to say, remain ominously "on the table."

Meanwhile, negotiations to resolve the impasse with Iran over its pursuit of uranium-enrichment technology -- a possible first step to the manufacture of nuclear weapons -- continue at the United Nations in New York and in various European capitals. So far, the Iranians have refused to give any ground, claiming that their activities are intended for peaceful uses only and so are permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which it is a signatory. The United States has made vague promises of improved relations if and when Iran terminates its nuclear program, but the full burden of making initial concessions falls on Tehran.

Just this weekend, a conference in Egypt, called by Iraqi officials to explore regional approaches to stability in the region (with Iranian officials expected to be in attendance), was being viewed in Washington as yet another opportunity to pressure Tehran to be more submissive to the West's demands on a wide range of issues, including Iranian support for Shiite militias in Iraq.

President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these "diplomatic" endeavors -- as he describes them -- succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.

And so, knowing that his "diplomatic" efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has "tried everything"; that "his patience has run out"; and that he can "no longer risk the security of the American people" by "indulging in further fruitless negotiations," thereby allowing the Iranians "to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making," and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz -- and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well -- will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum.

France elects right-wing president

This BBC article does a fairly good job of summing up the French presidential election.

The new face of France under Sarkozy
By Caroline Wyatt
BBC News, Paris

On Sunday night, it was a jubilant Nicolas Sarkozy who performed France's traditional presidential victory parade - around the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysees, to popping champagne corks and the raucous cheers of his staunch supporters.

There is a feeling in Paris tonight that France, as Mr Sarkozy said in his victory speech, has turned "a new page of our history".

"In the republic that I want to serve," he said, "there cannot be rights without obligations. All must have their opportunity, but they must earn it by work, by personal commitment, by belief."

No-one is quite sure what will come next, but there is a sense of relief at a decision finally made, even if it is mingled with a fear of the future under its new leader, who has promised change and reform.

France's new president is a man best known for his energy and his will to power: a human dynamo, who left his opponents trailing and exhausted in his wake.

The Socialist Segolene Royal worked hard to beat him, but without the real backing of her own party and without a clear manifesto for France, she failed.

The 52-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy scandalised the Paris elite a few years ago when he admitted to constantly thinking about becoming French president, "not only when I am shaving in the morning".

'American neo-con'

Yet he was never part of that elite. He is the son of a Hungarian immigrant, who abandoned the young Sarkozy and his two brothers when they were young. According to several biographers, this left him with a burning desire to prove himself through sheer hard work and merit.

Nor did Mr Sarkozy attend the traditional elite school, ENA, but studied instead as a lawyer.

He went almost immediately into politics at the age of 22, becoming mayor of the upmarket Paris suburb of Neuilly at just 28 with the aid of the UMP's predecessor, the RPR - the party of President Jacques Chirac, who took the young Nicolas under his wing.

Today, Mr Sarkozy's enemies on the left mockingly call him an American neo-con, who just happens to have a French passport, or deride him as a short, power-hungry man with a Napoleon complex.

His supporters, however, claim with fervour that he is the only man who can save France from its economic and social ills.

What is clear is that the former interior minister - known for his tough stance on crime and illegal immigration - is a deeply divisive figure for the French, thanks partly to his un-ministerial language in 2005.

At the time, he re-assured a woman on one housing estate that he would hose the "scum" or "racaille" from the streets, and helped set France alight during the riots.

'Danger to democracy'

But French voters have decided that his brand of tough leadership is exactly what France needs to reform this ailing nation after 12 long years under Jacques Chirac, who later became Mr Sarkozy's implacable enemy.

In the long battle between the two, Mr Sarkozy finally won his gamble, taking both Mr Chirac's UMP party and now the presidency from his former backer.

During the campaign, the Socialists tried to scare the French planning to vote for Mr Sarkozy, by warning that he was a danger to democracy and an aggressive politician who could not be trusted to keep his cool as president.

It was a tactic that clearly backfired.

Christine Lagarde, France's imperturbable and elegant trade minister, insists that image is a political fabrication.

"He's a man of action, who wants to get things done, who is driven," she says.

"France has many politicians with a lot of good ideas, but very few with the passion to act on them. He has real passion. It's what some people refer to as brutality, but he's a very passionate individual who is engaged in finding better solutions for this country."

Mr Sarkozy's former campaign manager, Franck Tapiro has known him for 22 years and says the new president's talents will change the face of France.

"He's a courageous man who has the guts to act and fulfil his promises. He believes that politics can change lives," he enthuses. "He is very dynamic, and for him life is about movement. He's the locomotive and always one step ahead - you just have to follow him."

However, Mr Tapiro acknowledges: "You either love him or you hate him. There is nothing in between."

Merit

In his recent head-to-head debate against Ms Royal, Mr Sarkozy very clearly set out his priorities and vision for France.

"France's moral crisis has a name. It is a crisis of work," he told the 20 million French voters watching.

"I want the workers to be respected. I want to protect the French from seeing their jobs going abroad. I don't believe in living on social welfare. I don't believe everyone is the same. I believe in merit, I believe in effort and reward for that effort and I believe in social mobility. But above all, I believe in hard work."

With that almost Thatcherite rhetoric, Mr Sarkozy has made putting France back to work top of his agenda.

The 74-year-old President Chirac leaves behind him a stagnating economy, unemployment at 9%, and even higher among the young, with some 25% of the under-24s out of work.

So Mr Sarkozy has promised to make the 35-hour working week a minimum rather than a maximum, calling it one of France's most poisonous legacies. He also wants to encourage wealth creation and bring down the number of French bureaucrats.

Foreign policy

He is a clear admirer of the Anglo-Saxon work ethic and of the US. On Europe, Mr Sarkozy is in favour of a mini-Constitutional Treaty to be ratified by the French Parliament, rather than risk another referendum. And like most French, he doesn't want Turkey in the EU.

As for key alliances, he said in an interview with Paris Match that his first visit would be to Berlin, then Brussels, America and Africa. He didn't mention Britain.

Mr Sarkozy was, though, the only candidate to campaign for the French vote in London, seeking to woo the young back to France, and winning 40% of the vote there in the first round.

So would his foreign policy differ all that much from Jacques Chirac's? Government spokesman and minister Jean-Francois Cope believes not.

"There will be a large continuity on many questions, such as Iraq," he says. "And that is true for other big issues where France is involved. Then I would say it's a question of generation, of sensibility. Of course they will be different - Mr Sarkozy is 52, part of a younger generation of politicians."

Change

Yet, as leader of one of Europe's most stubborn and unpredictable nations, will Mr Sarkozy really be able to institute the reforms he has promised if the trade unions and others take to the streets in protest?

Political analyst Gerard Grunberg of Sciences-Po University in Paris wonders if he will be able to fulfil the promises made during the election campaign.

"He's a very good politician on TV - part of a new generation of media leaders, like Tony Blair was 10 years ago," he says. "He was able to convince the French that he incarnated movement and change. At the same time, he promised he would protect people, so they felt secure.

"The French people are contradictory about that - we don't want change because we are really frightened by the future. But another part of us acknowledges that maybe we will have to change."

Nicolas Sarkozy will certainly need to try to unite this fractious, divided and uncertain nation, which fears it has lost its dominant role on the world stage.

However, the new French president remains a divisive figure. As interior minister, he took a hard line on uncontrolled immigration and talked frequently during the campaign of the need to instil French values via a Ministry of National Identity.

This made some in the multi-ethnic French suburbs feel uncomfortable and excluded - although many of immigrant origin agree vehemently with his idea of advancement on merit, rather than family ties or the elite background demanded by many leading French employers.

Unlike many French politicians, Mr Sarkozy has long been a straight-talker, even if it did get him into trouble during the riots - and may again in the future.

However, as president, he is well aware that his job is to unite the nation and act as the almost regal head of state the French expect from their leadership in the Elysee Palace, as well as kick-starting the reforms he has long promised.

Above all, Mr Sarkozy is determined to lead a nation that is able to entice back and put to use all the talent and the energy that France has lost over the past 12 years of stagnation.

All you ever wanted to know about investing

This Dilbert archive has this strip that explains the details of stock investing so that even a child could understand it.

White & Nerdy

Weird Al pretty much sums it up.

U.S. Balks at New UN Climate Report

Forbes has this Associated Press story about the US and China wanting to water down a UN report on what can be done to slow down global warming. Key excerpt: "The upcoming third report will look at technologies and policies that could help head off damaging climate change, and at what cost, and discuss feasible goals for setting a ceiling on greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere. The week is shaping up as a test between the Europeans, who want a relatively low ceiling and speedy action, and the Bush administration, whose comments on the draft summary indicate it wants a document envisioning higher ceilings and a longer view on action."

U.S. Balks at New Climate Report
By MICHAEL CASEY
Associated Press
04.30.07

The United States and China want to amend a major report by U.N.-sponsored climate researchers to play down its conclusion that quick, affordable action can limit the worst effects of global warming, according to documents reviewed Monday by The Associated Press.

The critiques, among hundreds of government comments on the draft document, are the prelude to what is expected to be a contentious weeklong meeting as scientists and national delegations wrangle over final wording in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be issued Friday.

Two previous IPCC reports this year painted a dire picture of a future in which unabated greenhouse gas emissions could drive global temperatures up as much as 11 degrees by 2100, and said animal and plant life was already affected by warmer and rising seas, spreading drought and other effects.

The upcoming third report will look at technologies and policies that could help head off damaging climate change, and at what cost, and discuss feasible goals for setting a ceiling on greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere.

The week is shaping up as a test between the Europeans, who want a relatively low ceiling and speedy action, and the Bush administration, whose comments on the draft summary indicate it wants a document envisioning higher ceilings and a longer view on action.

The IPCC assessment, the first in six years, will provide fresh background for ongoing international negotiations over a climate regime to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

The 1997 Kyoto pact requires 35 European and other nations to reduce industrial, transportation and agricultural emissions of carbon dioxide and other warming gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Scientists believe emissions must be cut 50 percent or more within decades to avert drastic climate change.

President Bush rejected Kyoto's mandatory cuts, contending they would hobble the U.S. economy. China and other poor developing countries were exempted.

The draft of the third report, obtained by the AP, says greenhouse emissions can be cut below current levels if the world takes such steps as shifting away from coal and other fossil fuels, investing in energy efficiency and working to halt deforestation, which eliminates carbon "sinks."

The report, prepared and reviewed by hundreds of researchers, says that by quickly embracing an ideal basket of technological options - both already available and being developed - the world can stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to around 450 parts per million, slightly higher than the current 435 ppm.

Some scientists believe a 450-ppm ceiling might limit the global temperature rise to 3.6 degrees - 2 degrees Celsius - above the world's preindustrial temperatures, a level that might avoid the worst damage. Some economists believe, however, that a 450-ppm ceiling is unrealistic, and 550 ppm is more achievable.

Comments on the draft by Germany and the European Union seek to highlight a scenario with a 445-535-ppm range and the 2-degree-Celsius ceiling. The Europeans emphasize a passage on action in the next "two or three decades," while a U.S. comment seeks to replace that with a reference to "the end of the century" and to a scenario of 500-550 ppm concentrations. That might produce temperatures 5 to 6 degrees above preindustrial levels.

The U.S. wants clauses inserted saying the cost of available technologies to reduce emissions and stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations "could be unacceptably high" and calling for a greater emphasis on "advanced technologies," many of which are aimed at extending the use of coal.

The United States and China also criticized the draft's economic projections, which conclude that stabilizing gases to establish the 2-degree-Celsius ceiling would cost less than 3 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) over two decades - compared with 3-percent yearly growth currently. China complained the number of studies supporting that optimistic forecast is "relatively small."

The damage from unabated climate change, meanwhile, might cost the global economy between 5 percent and 20 percent of GDP every year, according to a British government report last year.

In its defense, the United States said it is working to promote energy efficiency, vehicle fuel efficiency and clean-coal technology while sustaining economic growth.

"Our goal throughout the IPCC process is for the reports to best reflect the latest state of knowledge on addressing global climate change so that these reports are useful to the policy community and are supported by scientific and economic data," Harlan Watson, U.S. delegation head, said by e-mail.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the climate change panel, said "every country" would have a chance to express its views and "ultimately it's a balanced assessment of the science that will prevail."

More than 200 delegates chosen by 119 countries will examine the IPCC's report this week and recommend changes before it is finalized.