General

Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. "Casualties of Globalism," The Guardian Weekly, August 17-23, 2000, p. 11.

Sivanandan (uses the terminology "globalization" and "globalism" interchangeably) makes the argument that the "political refugee" and the "economic migrant" worker are interchangeable identities in the globalized world. He remarks, "those who are ethnically discriminated against at home become economically marginalize abroad" and shows how the movement from an industrial capitalist system to a global capitalist system is "eroding the distinction…between the economic and the political realm."

Gray, John. "Wild Globalisation," The Guardian Weekly. December 28, 2000-January 3, 2001, p. 9.

"The world's major states cannot agree on policies to deal with global warming," writes Gray and concludes that "climate change and industrialization are indissolubly linked." Gray remarks, "The Kyoto Protocol is itself an inadequate response to the hazards facing the global environment," because the limiting of emissions "would not halt climate change" and because it unfairly favors developed countries over underdeveloped countries. "To think that the rest of the world can go ahead without the Americans is mere folly. It is not only that the US has itself an enormous impact on the global environment. The whole structure of global governance - the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and so on - is an American construction."

CIA's 'Worldwide Attack Matrix' of Specific Targets J'Accuse - Bush's Death Squads
By NewsMakingNews.com
1-31-02

SUMMARY:

NewsMakingNews.com argues that since the CIA has been given an "unprecedented license to kill", it now seems likely that there was U.S. complicity in the murders of a number of individuals who were innocent and unconnected to the event of September 11. Madsen urges human rights commissions and war crime tribunals to take a close look at these cases.

FULL ARTICLE:

Today, The Washington Post ran the fifth segment in its series on what transpired within the Bush Cabinet in the aftermath of September 11. Of particular interest is what CIA Director George Tenent brought to the table at Camp David last September 15. According to the article by Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, when Tenent produced a Top Secret "Worldwide Attack Matrix" that specified targets in 80
countries around the world, he sought unprecedented authority to simply assassinate foreign terrorists directly or though allied intelligence services. The CIA even prepared a "Memorandum of Notification" which would allow the agency to have virtual carte blanche to conduct political assassinations abroad.

This Memorandum trumped previous mechanisms by which the President would authorize intelligence actions (but not assassinations) through individual Presidential Findings. The fail safe mechanisms
established under the administrations of Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton were simply erased at the urging of Tenent. In light of these revelations, what was authorized by the President may have led to the assassinations of a umber of human rights and ethnic leaders not connected in any way with Al Qaeda but did represent bothersome roadblocks to a number of U.S. military and corporate interests.

It now seems likely, given the unprecedented "license to kill" President Bush granted to the CIA, there was U.S. complicity in the murders of the following individuals. Human rights commissions and
war crime tribunals in Belgium and France should take a close look at these likely criminal misadventures:

1. Theys Eluay. Today, the Indonesian army chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, confirmed in Jakarta that West Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay was assassinated by Indonesian Army units after he was kidnapped last November 11. The assassins were members of KOPASSUS, a special operations unit trained by U.S. Special Forces and CIA personnel and was involved in massacres in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation of that country. In 1969, West Papua was formally handed over to Indonesia by the United Nations after a referendum, now widely recognized as rigged, determined that the non-
Indonesian population wanted to be Indonesian. Eluay was a thorn in the side of Freeport McMoran, a Louisiana-based mining company that has pillaged West Papua's natural resources and has been accused by local activists of propping up local Indonesian army and KOPASSUS officers with bribes and favors. Henry Kissinger serves as a Director Emeritus on the board of directors of Freeport and former Louisiana
Senator J. Bennett Johnston, recently identified as a lobbyist for Enron, serves as a full member of the board.

2. Abdullah Syafii. On January 22, 2002, Indonesian army troops assassinated the military commander of the Free Aceh Movement, Abdullah Syafii. The Free Aceh Movement demands independence for Aceh, a region in northwest Sumatra, and is a member of the non-violent Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), an international organization headquartered in the Netherlands. It has also been at loggerheads with ExxonMobil, which has extensive drilling and refining operations in the territory. Aceh's Governor Abdullah Puteh, who is claimed by local activists to be on the payroll of ExxonMobil, had written a letter to Syafii inviting him to attend peace talks with the government. Syafii's lieutenants claim that the letter contained a small microchip that permitted Indonesian KOPASSUS troops to track him down and ambush him. The operation has all the earmarks of the CIA, which can rely on National Security Agency (NSA) satellites to track such microchip transponders.

3. Elie Hobeika. Elie Hobeika was the head of the Lebanese Forces militia, a right-wing Christian army that was allied with Israel during its 1982 occupation of Beirut. Although Hobeika was in charge of the Christian forces that massacred hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps that year, he had irrefutable evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had authorized the mass murder in his role as Israeli Defense Minister. An official Israeli commission of inquiry found Sharon indirectly responsible for the massacres. Hobeika was going to testify against Sharon at an upcoming Belgian war crimes tribunal which has already indicted Sharon for the war crimes. It was that testimony that resulted in Hobeika being silenced by a Mossad car bomb that exploded near his SUV near Beirut. The bomb killed Hobeika and his bodyguards. The CIA, now closely allied with Mossad, is said to have given its approval for the action.

4. Chief Bola Ige. On December 23, 2001, Chief Bola Ige, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Nigeria, was assassinated in the bedroom of his home in Ibadan by unknown gunmen. Ige was a leader of the Yorubas, a largely Christian ethnic group that has championed the cause of southern Nigerian Christian tribes like the Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba that maintain grievances against exploitative Western oil companies that have spoiled their lands with pollution and pocketed most of the oil revenues for themselves and corrupt Nigerian politicians. Ige was the presidential candidate of the pan-Yoruba Alliance for Democracy but lost to the current President Olusegum Obasanjo, a former general who is thought by many Nigerians to be in the hip pocket of western oil companies, including Chevron and ExxonMobil. A lucrative CIA and Pentagon front operation, the private military contractor MPRI, has been training special units of the Nigerian armed forces. These forces have been active in putting down anti-oil industry protests by Igbo, Ogoni, and Yoruba tribal peoples along the Nigerian coast. Michael J. Boskin, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush I is a member of the Exxon Mobil board, while current National Security Adviser Condolleezza Rice served on the board of Chevron. Currently serving on Chevron's Board is Bush I trade representative Carla Hills and former Louisiana Senator Johnston, who also serves on the board of Freeport McMoran.

In all likelihood all of these assassinations were likely known to the CIA and allowed to take place unhindered. The killings all directly benefitted the interests of the US military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so poignantly warned us about some 40 years ago.

I more or less predicted the Indonesian murders a few months ago (just after Tenent received authorization to conduct assassinations of "terrorists") during an interview with Radio Singapore
International. The transcript of that broadcast follows:

CIA assassination missions - a look into the implications of this US Foreign policy, Source: Augustine Anthuvan, Newsline, Radio Singapore International, Broadcast date: 30 October 2001

An interview with Wayne Madsen, a former Intelligence Officer at the National Security Agency

"When Senator Frank Church had a committee in the Senate that found out that the CIA was conducting assassination missions against foreign leaders and they passed very stringent laws against the CIA
to prevent any abuses. And now what we're hearing is that the late Senator Church went too far. Well Senator Church was responding to some very severe abuses of authority by the CIA. And now we're
hearing basically history is being changed on us here and we're hearing that Senator Church went too far in what he did. And I think its very important now to understand that these things are all in context and what people like Senator Frank Church did in the 1970s really still applies today."

If CIA assassination missions are taken beyond the present operations in Afghanistan to other countries where terrorists are known to be operating, what sort of repercussions will this present for country to country relations? A concern I posed to Wayne Madsen.

"Especially in countries in South East Asia, we have a President who is very much in it with the US multi-national companies. What if they decide that West Papua independence movement in Irian Jaya - West Papua - could be a terrorist organization. And they could decide well we're going to target their leadership for assassination because they happen to be against the interests of Freeport McMoran - one of the biggest mining companies in West Papua. Or what if they decide to target their leadership for assassination. I think this is the problem with this type of wide sweeping authorization to assassinate foreign leaders. We may find ourselves assassinating people because they just so happen to be against US interests."

Armed to the teeth: Is Bush's awesome increase in military spending a reasonable response to the aftermath of September 11, or is he creating a force almost too powerful for its own good?

Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy report

Sunday February 10, 2002
The Observer

SUMMARY:

The authors consider the rise in military defense spending in the U.S. post-September 11 and the various interpretations of such actions. "Some analysts say, if it is security that America seeks it is better sought in dialogue with potentially threatening states, rather than in reinforcing the idea already held by many anti-US groups that it is an evil empire bent on world domination." Liberal commentators cite the war rhetoric as being a political tool which could advance the Republican agenda and win Bush a second presidential term and regain Congress. "The war on terrorism," says Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies, "is simply a euphemism for extending US control in the world, whether it is by projecting force through its carriers or building new military bases in central Asia."

FULL ARTICLE:

There is a United States special forces dog-handler who meets journalists, diplomats and aid workers off the UN flight to Kabul. His job is to search luggage and ensure the security of US troops in Afghanistan. He is short, gingery and aggressive. His skills at persuasion are limited to shouting at the milling crowd: "Stand back! Stand back! My dog will bite!" Last week that phrase had become the defining motto and operating credo for the military and foreign policy of the Bush administration. Already President George W. Bush has put Iran, Iraq and North Korea on notice as terrorist-sponsoring nations at the centre of an
international 'axis of evil', despite the CIA's recent evidence that none of them was in the business of threatening the United States at present.

Last Monday, to back that explicit threat, he announced an increase in US military spending of 15 per cent, the biggest in 20 years, more than double the military spending in all of the European Union. The rise will be $36 billion (£26.5bn) this year, $48 billion next year and $120 billion over the next five years, rising to a staggering two trillion over the next five years. Even this is not enough for General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They want
the US defence budget to increase at an even faster rate.

What all this means is clear. Troubled by the 11 September attacks and buoyed by the ease of the war against Afghanistan, Bush's message to the 'evil doers' of the world is that he has a dog; that it is very big,
getting bigger, and certainly it will bite. The puzzle about the latest rise in defence spending is that America at the beginning of the 21st century is already not so much a superpower as a behemoth on the world stage. Economically dominant, it enjoys military and cultural power unrivalled since the days of the
Roman emperors, as the American author Robert D. Kaplan reminds us in his new book, Warrior Politics.

Typically, it has been left to the French, traditionally suspicious of US global hegemony, to find the best words to describe it. Gigantisme militaire they call it, in a phrase that describes both the scale of America's ambitions and also a pathological condition: an organism grown so large it is sick. The question the rest of the world is asking itself is: Who is the enemy America is arming itself so against? And why? 'Ostensibly,' says one European diplomat, 'this is about security. But quite how a massive increase in defence spending is supposed to prevent another terrorist attack remains unclear. Instead
this seems to be about repairing the bruised American psyche after 11 September. America's powerlessness in the face of this attack requires big gestures and reassurances, even if they are counter-productive and meaningless.' Indeed, some analysts say, if it is security that America seeks it is better sought in dialogue with potentially threatening states, rather than in reinforcing the idea already held by many anti-US groups that it is an evil empire bent on world domination.

Cynics have identified more overtly self-serving strands in the Republican obsession with America's defence. The 'war' rhetoric, as some US liberal commentators have pointed out, serves a purely domestic Republican agenda in the post-11 September mood of national paranoia: to win Bush a second presidential term and, in the shorter term, regain Congress. The reality - even before the latest proposed increases in military spending - is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back. The requirement that US armed forces be able to fight two fully fledged wars with two
separate adversaries simultaneously may recently have been dropped, but only because it would be hard pushed to find two such equal foes to fight.

A single US nuclear-powered carrier group - which forms around the USS Enterprise, for example, with a flight deck almost a mile in length and a superstructure 20 storeys high - concentrates more military power in one naval group than most states can manage with all their armed forces. America has seven of these battle groups. It is not just the scale and power of these weapons systems. The reach of US arms, too, is awesome. When the USS Kitty Hawk was sent with its accompanying warships from Yokohama to the Gulf for the war against Afghanistan, it covered 6,000 miles in just 12 days to be transformed into a vast floating forward attack station for thousands of US special forces. Its B-52 bombers can fly and refuel across the world armed with cruise missiles that can be fired hundreds of miles away from hostile skies, the missiles themselves directed to their targets by satellites in orbit.

And America's supremacy in bombs, planes, satellites, tanks and real-time intelligence have made the prospect of US casualties remote, except in the event of cock-up or disaster. And, significantly, as the world's only economic hyper-power, it can afford this level of militarisation. But against all this even the manufacturers of America's arms - like the aviation giant Lockheed-Martin - have been struggling for a decade or so to define the threat its top-shelf jets will be battling in the skies, being forced in one memorable presentation to show the European Eurofighter as a potential adversary.

So why the need for more and better military power? Even military analysts are baffled. 'The rise in US military spending,' says Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, 'ought to be compared to the decision in the First World War to order up more cavalry when the first wave had been mown down by machine-guns. 'The US has no competitor in high-tech military equipment. And what it is spending its money on is mostly irrelevant against the knives used to carry out 11 September. The bombing of Afghanistan has created the illusion of victory.' Professor Paul Kennedy at Yale University calculates that the US now spends more each year than the next nine largest national defence budgets combined.

Indeed America is responsible for about 40 per cent of the world's military spending. The new defence expenditure will be paid for by a freshly dug deficit and cuts to every other federal spending programme - including social security, Medicare and urban renewal - apart from tax breaks loaded heavily in favour of the upper-income brackets. Amid all this, military might has emerged as the central tenet of America's new power, the defining feature of the Bush administration. Already it is causing alarm, even among America's closest allies in Nato, where Lord Robertson, the usually unflappable secretary-general, has been moved to warn some members that unless the declining European defence expenditure is reversed then Europe - and the Europeans in Nato - are in danger of becoming military pygmies. It is not a prospect likely to worry the military hawks in the Bush administration, who favour unilateralism over alliance.

Indeed the Nato alliance, built to counter the rival superpower conflict of the Cold War, is already almost redundant, some diplomats claim. 'Will the Americans ever fight a war through Nato again?' asks Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister. 'It's doubtful. The United States reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peace keeping'. And the Afghan war has not only put the US in sole command of the world, but fundamentally reshaped the architecture of international alliances. Central Asia is splattered with new American fortresses; the Pacific and Indian oceans are patrolled by aircraft carriers and accompanying fleets of awesome size.

As a consequence, a new matrix of alliances exists of states beholden to the US in exchange for a blank cheque as regards their own internal human rights abuses - China, Pakistan, India and Russia and the former Soviet states. And even among them are flashpoints in Kashmir, Chechnya and Tibet. The writer and academic David Rieff, recently returned from central Asia, said at a seminar in New York on Thursday night: 'Even for someone who's not against the use of American power, it's hard to believe that the people running the country can limit their ambitions for an empire at its high water mark. 'They're not doing the intelligent thing, which would be to forge multilateral institutions that are favourable to us.

What's the point of attacking Saddam, which will only entrench the root causes of the problems we're facing? Or Iran just when they're ready to deal?' Crucially, the new culture of US military hegemony
is not a continuation of the might the US enjoyed under Bill Clinton or any other administration. It is new, and in military terms it began the day that the man at the apex of this awesome edifice took office, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. With him, Rumsfeld brought a tight group of political appointees who did not inherit the Pentagon in order to pursue business as usual. One of them, a deputy under-secretary, describes the group to The Observer as 'a coherent team of firm believers in unilateral, American military power'. And the aim of this power? 'The war on terrorism,' says Professor Paul Rogers,
of Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies, 'is simply a euphemism for extending US control in the world, whether it is by projecting force through its carriers or building new military bases in central Asia.'

Oil interests pulling US further into Colombia

AP. 4 February 2002. US Officials Consider Colombia Policy.

WASHINGTON and BOGOTA -- The Bush administration is planning to provide $98 million the Colombian military to help that country's armed forces protect an oil pipeline that has been a frequent target of guerrilla attacks, officials said Monday.

The attacks put the pipeline out of service for 266 days last year and caused significant damage to the Colombian economy and to the American oil companies that use it. The funds are part of the administration's proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts next October.

Until now, U.S. funds designated for the Colombian military have been earmarked for efforts to curb the flow of narcotics. Curt Struble, a deputy assistant secretary, denied that the $98 million request constitutes a policy shift, noting that American assistance to Colombia goes beyond the counter-narcotics effort. Struble added that that the funding request "is entirely consistent with existing policy."

The new money, he said, will be used for equipment and training to protect the pipeline, which was attacked 166 times last year. Meanwhile, President Bush's top Latin America specialists flew into Colombia on Monday as Washington considered expanding military aid to the war-wracked nation.

The delegation, led by Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, was to meet with President Andres Pastrana and Defense Minister Gustavo Bell during the three-day visit, the U.S. Embassy said. Besides Grossman, the delegation includes Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich; the State Department's top anti-drug official, Rand Beers, and the acting head of U.S. military operations in Latin America, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer.

The visit comes as Colombian rebels have increased attacks on Colombia's infrastructure. Several towns have suffered power cuts after the country's biggest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, dynamited dozens of electrical
towers last month. The rebels also bombed a major oil pipeline and a reservoir that provides water to the capital.