The 'Get Russia' crowd and Blowback

If you missed John Batchelor's discussions with Stratfor's Marko Papic about Russia's moves to re-acquire or solidify influence over its near abroad, you missed a lot. However, John's tour-de-force interview on April 12 with Dr Stephen F. Cohen is a chance to play catch-up.

The Papic interviews, with John's insightful questions driving the discussion, were great; they provided a detailed country by country analysis. (If I recall the interviews were on March 9 and 10 although I don't see the podcasts for them at the show's Archives page.) The Cohen interview, while touching on several countries, focused on Russia's relations with Poland and Kyrgyzstan, START, and the Nord Stream pipeline.

The interview went an entire hour (minus station breaks) and seamlessly worked history lessons into a situation report on Russia's relations with Europe, former Soviet republics, and the United States.

For my money Steve Cohen, a Russian history scholar and professor, is also the best expert on present-day Russian politics and foreign policy. See Steve's latest book, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (June 2009).

And John himself is steeped in Russian and Cold War history and the geopolitics of Russia's relations in the present era. So to have those two talking for an hour about Russian geopolitics is hog heaven for foreign relations/defense wonks. The 'listen now' podcast of the Cohen-Batchelor interview is found here.

You can also download the interview (11 PM-midnight segment). See the Archives page.

I consider John and Steve among my best teachers on Russian-American relations but ironically what I've taken from their discussions over the years on John's show, combined with my own research, has perhaps made me a harsher critic of American policy toward Russia than either man.

I believe that during the post-Cold War era U.S. foreign policy was hijacked by people I refer to as the "Get Russia crowd." I term them a crowd because they're not a cabal or conspiracy, even though they network and have the same goals, which are complete control of Russia's government and while they're trying to bring that about, blocking Russia from any influence in its near abroad.

Who makes up the crowd? Russian Oligarchs -- men who made fortunes from the breakup of Soviet-era state controlled industries -- and their mobster enforcers; several U.S. members of Congress (who have their counterparts in Western Europe); a host of lobbyists for expats who hate Russia because of what they suffered under the Soviet regimes; certain foreign governments and energy companies that are in stiff competition with Russia's energy supplies and/or want control of Russia's energy resources; and foreign financiers who want Russia to revert to the 'Wild West' days of the Yeltsin era -- when they could control big chunks of Russia's economy without having any responsibility toward the Russians.

The crowd also includes some defense hawks who can't deal with the modern era unless they reshape it in the Cold War image; several of these are holdovers from the Cold War, although I see the Cold War Warriors in a different light than the Get Russia crowd. And there are also the blinkered among NATO's American supporters -- those who got so involved in NATO's priorities they overlooked that NATO is now "European Union" spelled backward, and that EU interests can work in opposition to America's best interests. If you put you all those types together the result is toxic.

In my view the Get Russia Crowd has been the most destructive force in U.S. relations and defense. They don't care about America's relationships with its neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, or the war on terror. Although they will lie if confronted with a bald statement of their thinking, their actions have demonstrated that they see the 9/11 attack on America as a trifle next to the serious stuff, such as the urgent necessity to encircle Russia and get rid of Vladimir Putin.

As for Mexico's problems and how this is affecting the USA -- tough beans. These Americans are not here, you understand. They are not focused on America or America's part of the Western Hemisphere. They are focused over there -- 6,000 miles away, in Russia and Eastern Europe.

What galls me is that they wrap themselves in the American flag and call any American who disagrees with them un-American. Yet their view of America's proper priorities has been very costly to the United States -- so costly that even if Washington could get free of that crowd's clutches, Americans could spend the rest of this century recovering from the negative consequences of their machinations.

The worst part of what they did was actually not their brainchild; it started under President Reagan as a Cold War tactic, but during the post-Soviet era the Get Russia crowd took the concept to the most perverse extreme. What they did was fashion American democratic principles into a scam -- an outright scam.

Yet the original idea was reasonably benign if you don't have anything against meddling in other countries in the name of doing good: Congress created a nonprofit organization called the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy around the world. While it's administered as a private organization its funding comes almost entirely from the U.S. government.

So the NED was the first of what's called a gongo -- a "government non-governmental organization." If you tell me that's gibberish, yup, but that's exactly what it is. Now you know why Putin eventually barred foreign ngos (non-governmental organizations) from Russia; by that time it was hard to tell the gongos from the ngos.

The NED provided cash grants, funded primarily through an annual allocation from Congress, to pro-democracy opposition parties in foreign countries that weren't democratic, or were communist, or had authoritarian regimes standing behind a democracy stage show.

The NED's mission statement sounds good on paper but the gongo's usefulness proved to be too much temptation. In 1991 Allen Weinstein, one of NED's founders, told The Washington Post that much of what the NED "does today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA" -- namely staging 'soft' U.S.-backed coups that masquerade as a democratic election.

The NED, and the copycat gongos that sprang up, got much help from a guide compiled by an American named Gene Sharp. Some have accused Sharp of working for the CIA but I would be surprised if that were the case; he strikes me as a sincere man who was always committed to promoting genuine democracy and civil rights through nonviolent means.

But what Sharp did was collect in the pages of one book (The Politics of Nonviolent Action; published 1973) a list of 198 nonviolent tactics that genuine democracy and civil rights activists had used over the years -- what had worked for them.

That was a great idea; the guide is an invaluable tool for democracy and human rights activists. It saves people who have little or no political savvy from having to recreate the wheel, if they want to stand up to a repressive regime and have a chance at living to tell the tale.

The problem with the guide is that just because it's such a handy reference, a no-brainer recipe, so to speak, it made it child's play for those with non-democratic motives to stage a 'soft' coup. Coups based on Sharp's recipe are virtually indistinguishable from a genuine democratic movement.

The result was an electoral version of 'supermoney' -- the counterfeit $100 bills that are such good copies of the real thing, only experts can tell them apart.

Thus, the 'color revolutions' during the post-Soviet era that were financed in great measure by George Soros's 'societies' and overseen by the U.S. Department of State working with gongos and ngos -- several of which were backed by the Get Russia crowd. It was almost impossible to tell the phony revolutions from the real thing unless you were very knowledgeable about the players and tactics involved.

That's why even today the majority of Americans believe that the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a genuine democratic election. The American public got no help from the American NATO-leaning mainstream media in learning the real story. With one exception the mainstream media hailed the Orange Revolution as a giant step for democracy in Ukraine. The exception was John Batchelor; he was the only person in the news media who warned his audience that the Orange Revolution wasn't genuine.

There were eventually a few rays of light in the mainstream media. In September 2008 The Wall Street Journal carried an article about Gene Sharp -- although without mentioning the dark uses to which his work has been put.

And around the time of the campaign for the Ukrainian 2010 presidential election The Washington Post sniffed that 'some said' the Orange Revolution was not genuine -- as close as I think they'll ever come to admitting it was a sham.

The small nods to the truth did not undo the damage the U.S. news media did by remaining mum because, you see, everyone outside the USA learned about the democracy scam. As to how that came about: in my view it happened because Tony Blair's administration, which was a gold-plated member of the Get Russia crowd, got scared that they'd pushed the Kremlin too far.

No one, including those in the West who were machinating against Putin, could have predicted the massacre at the Beslan school in Russia, which took place in September 2004. Most of the victims were children; many of them killed just for fun, for target practice. Coming on top of everything else that was the final straw for Vladimir Putin, who was Russia's President at the time.

Shortly after the massacre he called a press conference for the major European press outlets and international news wire services, during which he excoriated the U.S. and U.K. governments. He held them responsible for the massacre and charged that the U.S. and the British were trying to apply the Carthage Solution to Russia -- the Carthage Solution being a legend that after the sack of Carthage the Roman victors leveled the city, then salted the ground so nothing could grow.

For 3-1/2 hours Putin held forth in the same vein. It was ugly. From my report on the press conference, in addition to his accusation about the Beslan massacre:

He accused the U.S. and the U.K. of colluding in a plot to destabilize Russia by fomenting anti-Russian sentiment in former Soviet republics. He accused the U.S. and U.K. of being behind the breakaway movement in Chechnya. He clearly implied that the U.S. and U.K. were trying to topple his government. And just to make sure he was perfectly understood, Putin came right out and said that the U.S. and the U.K. had launched a covert war against Russia. ...

I add that Putin's remarks got very little coverage in the U.S. media and only in attenuated form. The remarks were widely reported in painstaking detail by the European press and pored over and parsed for many days, to the great enjoyment of the Europeans who love opera and hate the Coalition's invasion of Iraq. They particularly liked the part about Carthage.

After he'd blown off steam it occurred to him that conjuring the image of Russia reduced to a salt flat was not a boost to Russian tourism and trade so eventually he scaled back on his accusations. However, he stuck by the gist, which still amounts to serious claims.

As to whether there was any truth to his claim about British and U.S. government support for the Chechens -- this part of the story is very murky. I am not the expert on this matter but I'd guess that if anything like that went on the support for Chechen's terrorist organizations came from some individuals in the Get Russia Crowd acting on their own, rather than through official channels.

I interject that this is another problem with the crowd: although there are civil servants and politicians among them they're rarely acting in official government capacity. The State Department's 'country desks' are notoriously opaque. So there's little or no transparency about what all these people do to assist 'democracy movements,' which translates to little or no accountability.

In short, the Get Russia crowd took on a life of its own, sort of like the Incredible Blob.

To continue with the story, the Get Russia Crowd didn't see the Chechen terrorists as terrorists, in the manner that many Palestinian supporters don't see Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. The crowd claimed the Chechen terrorists were freedom fighters.

Yet I have a hard time featuring that anyone in that crowd, even the most vicious mobsters and most virulent anti-Russians, would have supported the Beslan massacre. Even other Chechen terrorists repudiated the massacre; indeed, what happened at Beslan took away much sympathy for the Chechen separatists' cause.

Putin's feeling, I think, was that the U.S. and British government's sympathy for the Chechen terrorists set the stage for Beslan, even if they didn't directly encourage or support the atrocity.

From all this, you can see why Tony Blair, the Labor party, and the British foreign office might have become alarmed after taking in Putin's presser. It wouldn't do for the British government to be seen as child killers.

About two months after Putin's press conference the (U.K.) Guardian newspaper ratted out the U.S. Department of State.

That's as much saying MI6 snitched on State. The Guardian is a conduit for MI6, in the way The New York Times is a conduit for the CIA and The Washington Post is a conduit for the State Department. Not all the articles, of course, but whenever these agencies want to 'leak' something to the public, they have their favorite press outlets.

In a sensational article for the Guardian titled US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev, Ian Traynor reported on November 26, 2004 that the Orange Revolution had been orchestrated by State with the help of various gongos and ngos and George Soros. Traynor named some names:

[...] Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

[...]

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.[...]

And he detailed a few of the tactics, lifted straight from Gene Sharp's handy guide.

Ian Traynor's report became famous -- except in the United States. The American public is always the last to know about anything that might raise questions in the USA regarding America's continued involvement with NATO.

However, Traynor's report left out several things. The Americans weren't the only ones poking their nose into Ukraine's politics and other former Soviet republics. The British and EU bureaucrats were also mucking around, and to such an extent in Ukraine it was like gridlock. That was another reason the British had become alarmed: Putin's presser was a signal that he was turning the tables.

If NATO continued to drive a wedge between Russia and its former republics, he was prepared to drive a wedge into NATO. By singling out the British when he knew other EU governments were also meddling, he was as much posing a question to the rest of Europe's NATO countries, and notably Germany: Do you want the British vendetta against Russia to interfere with energy shipments from Russia to Western Europe?

Again, it was ugly. Yet even before Traynor's bombshell the machinations of the Get Russia crowd, and the phony color revolutions they backed, had been noted by despotic regimes. The phony Orange Revolution to install an American puppet leader, coming on top of Georgia's phony Rose Revolution to install another American puppet, was by then revealing a clear pattern.

Kyrgyzstan's autocratic president, Askar Akayev, sputtered in 2005 that there would be no color revolution or "tulip revolution" in his country. Not long after he was deposed by a phony revolution, which the Western media waggishly dubbed the Tulip Revolution. In his place the U.S. installed a thuggish puppet, who was deposed just a few days ago. I am not making any of this up.

If Americans ask, 'Why do we have to be the Fall Guy?' That is our designated role as far as the Europeans are concerned -- it's the role we slipped into, in stages. We stayed too long at Europe's ball after the Iron Curtain fell. That was not good for us and not good for the Europeans. We did a great deal of good in Eastern Europe but the phony revolutions threatened the good we did.

What really rips me up is that the best about America, our democratic system and the high value we place on civil rights, was made into a mockery by the phony democratic revolutions -- a mockery that the world's anti-democratic regimes used to their advantage.

Genuine ngos found it even harder to operate in countries with repressive regimes. And the regimes used the excuse of defending against the color revolutions to crack down harder on their citizens. And they presented democracy as an evil enterprise cooked up by the U.S. Department of State.

I warned about this in Not Clockwork Orange Century, one of the earliest essays I wrote for this blog, although my light tone masked how upset I was at the time. I was watching a great tragedy unfold.

In the name of promoting democracy the Get Russia Crowd had sold democracy down the river, and they did so while singing "Star Spangled Banner."

There was no way to stop it, no way to alert the American public to what was happening. The American blogosphere had no interest in the issue; only a handful of blogs -- mine, Anti-war, and two or three others, made any protest about the Orange Revolution.

The irony is that I was a war hawk. I should have been the last person to be shouting in a glass booth along with the Anti-war site. But I was in full agreement with their protests about the phony revolutions.

Well, I'd meant to write something about Poland's tragedy and to make a futile plea that the Get Russia crowd back off and let the Russians and Poles find their own way. Another day perhaps, but right now I'm too upset to do anything more than extend my condolences to the Polish people. I don't like dredging up the past when it comes to the Get Russia crowd's machinations. But at least you know now why I'm so tough on them.

And I suppose this writing is also an answer to readers who ask why I've had little to say about U.S. foreign policy since 2008. The final straw came for me when John McCain, during his presidential campaign, announced on August 12, 2008 that he had told Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili by phone that he knew he spoke for all Americans when he said, "Today, we are all Georgians."

His words were an allusion to a famous statement by Jean-Marie Colombani, a French journalist and editor of France's Le Monde. Colombani wrote in Le Monde on Sept. 12, 2001:

"In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers ... "

That McCain twisted Colombani's words to equate what happened in Georgia with 9/11 was the gravest of insults to the victims of 9/11 and to all Americans. Yet he didn't seem to care.

Saakashvili turned right around and repeated at a large rally what McCain had told him, leading the Georgians to believe that the United States would intervene militarily, in response to the Russian counterstrike against Georgian military forces. Those forces had launched a surprise attack in South Ossetia, slaughtering UN-mandated Russian peacekeepers and many unarmed residents of South Ossetia.

Of course McCain didn't describe it that way when he announced that Americans were all Georgians now:

The impact of Russian actions goes beyond their threat to a democratic Georgia. Russia has used violence against Georgia to send a signal to any country that chooses to associate with the West and aspire to our shared political and economic values.

What shared political and economic values would those be?

McCain knew very well that Saakashvili was an American-installed puppet who turned out to be a thug. A thug who wouldn't tolerate even the appearance of an opposition voice in Georgia. Rupert Murdoch is probably still trying to get his money back from his investment in Georgia's Imedi television station, which Saakashvili's goons smashed up; that was Saakashvili's editorial response to the station's call for a little transparency in his regime.

At the time I'd spent months on this blog fighting Barack Obama's presidential campaign. But while listening to McCain lie about what happened in Georgia, the full implications struck me. Obama was being installed in the White House by the same tactics George Soros used to stage-manage counterfeit revolutions -- the same tactics that John McCain, American war hero, had gone along with.

At that moment I realized Barack Obama's stage-managed election would be poetic justice. It would also be what the CIA calls blowback.

U.S. foreign policy is not meant to run by people who don't have to be accountable to the American electorate. That was the argument for finally reining in the CIA. Decades later we were back at the same place -- only this time with a host of gongos, ngos, members of Congress, political machines, lobbyists, ad agencies, civil servants, and a collection of characters from around the world who were straight out of Mordor.

So what use was it talk seriously about U.S. foreign policy? There is no policy. There's just a maze of machinations against Russia that don't add up to a damn bit of sense. When I fully confronted that, if you recall my foreign policy advice for 2009 was "Run for your lives."

For more blowback, listen to Steve Cohen and John Batchelor discuss what Vladimir Putin has accomplished. He has been very busy since that 2004 press conference. The Get Russia crowd should have left well enough alone.

As for the poor suffering Chechens, I'll discuss that tomorrow.

Koh silent about Obama decision to let Pakistan choose targets for U.S. drones

I want to be clear that the issue under discussion in this post has nothing to do with debates about the effectiveness of drone warfare. (Also called UAV or remote piloted aircraft -- RPA -- warfare.)

Nor do I address the tortured argument that the U.S. must target the Pakistan regime's enemies to prevent Pakistan from becoming a failed state.

And I have nothing to say about the legal and moral questions regarding government-sponsored assassinations. I'm not talking about assassins in the pay of the U.S. pussyfooting around and popping off enemies of the state.

I'm talking about the U.S. putting assassins in the service of Pakistan's monstrous regime, which has a history of war crimes and ongoing human rights abuses; a history of duplicity in its dealings with the White House and Congress; and a history of murdering ISAF troops in Afghanistan and supporting terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, that are fighting ISAF troops.

From a March 26, 2009 report for The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials are drawing up a fresh list of terrorist targets for Predator drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, part of a U.S. review of the drone program, according to officials involved.

Pakistani officials are seeking to broaden the scope of the program to target extremists who have carried out attacks against Pakistanis, a move they say could win domestic support. The Obama administration is weighing the effectiveness of the program against the risk that its unpopularity weakens an important ally.

Underlining the fragility of the situation, the U.S. believes Pakistan's top intelligence agency is directly supporting the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan, even as the U.S. targets those groups, says a person close to the deliberations.

From a October 21, 2009 New Yorker interview:

NEW YORKER: What does Pakistan think of the drones?

JANE MAYER: Originally, the Pakistani people’s reaction to the U.S. drone strikes in their country was incredibly negative. Pakistanis rose up and complained that the program violated their sovereignty. So, to obtain Pakistani support—or at least the support of the Zardari government—the Obama Administration quietly decided last March to allow the Pakistani government to nominate some of its own targets. The U.S. has been and is involved in killing not just Al Qaeda figures, but Pakistani targets—people like Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud who are enemies of the Pakistani state.

NEW YORKER: Are there any safeguards that prevent the U.S. from carrying out political vendettas for top Pakistani officials?

MAYER: Well, the problem with this program is that it’s invisible; I would guess there must be all kinds of legal safeguards, and lawyers at the C.I.A. are discussing who we can kill and who we can’t, but none of that is available to the American people. It’s quite a contrast with the armed forces, because the use of lethal force in the military is a transparent process. There are after-action reports, and there’s a very obvious chain of command. We know where the responsibility runs, straight on up to the top of the government. This system keeps checks on abuses of power. There is no such transparency at the C.I.A.

It sounds like a script for a Jason Borne film: Borne discovers the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency secretly assassinates a repressive regime's enemies in hopes this will placate the regime. But the truth in this case is stranger than fiction.

The CIA is carrying out just such a program for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan -- but instead of a rogue unit doing this in secret the agency is acting on the express order of the President of United States. And while the order was never announced by the White House it is not a secret -- or if it was, it was 'leaked.'

And instead of a CIA-brainwashed assassin making the shocking discovery, we have a famous American former war correspondent and foreign correspondent, The Wall Street Journal's first female White House correspondent, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her investigative reports, plopping out the news in the staid New Yorker, in an article about the ethical and legal ramifications of drone warfare.

Jane Mayer, who is now a staff writer for The New Yorker, is also the author of the critically acclaimed The Dark Side (2008), which exhaustively examines the CIA's interrogation program. Her professional reputation is so sterling that she has no trouble getting access to highly placed sources in the U.S. military, civilian government, and well-known experts. So when she writes up an investigative piece on defense matters you may trust that military/intel communities on both sides of the Atlantic take notice.

Yet with all that, and despite The New Yorker giving the drone article a big plug by conducting an interview about it with Mayer -- and expressly mentioning the CIA's "unannounced" assassination program for Pakistan's government -- the impact of the news about the program has been the proverbial sound of a tree crashing in an uninhabited forest. That is, except in Pakistan, where Mayer's article made headlines at Dawn, Pakistan's leading English-language newspaper:

WASHINGTON: The Obama administration quietly decided last March to allow Pakistan to choose some of its own targets for drone attacks, according to the New Yorker, a prestigious US magazine.

Earlier last week, the magazine published a piece on the use of unmanned aircraft to target Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects in Fata ["Federally Administered Tribal Areas"]. On Sunday, its author Jane Mayer gave an online interview to the readers, telling them that the Obama administration agreed to allow Pakistanis to select targets to calm down Islamabad’s protests over the drone attacks.

The change in US policy led to the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in August. [...]

During the past year the drone strikes in Pakistan have come under increasing scrutiny in the United States and in international circles. Both critics and defenders of the armed drone attacks urgently asked President Barack Obama to clarify the legalities pertaining to the use of drones for 'targeted killing' (a sterile term for assassination) in a foreign country.

(The use of the armed drone program in Pakistan and Afghanistan also has its critics in the U.S. military particularly among the COIN faction, which sees the strikes as working against the COIN 'population-centric' approach to counterinsurgency. See Mayers' New Yorker article for details.)

On March 16 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the US departments of defense, justice, and state, in the effort to get more information about the legal justification for the drone strikes and how the targets are chosen. This, after the ACLU had been stonewalled in their attempts to obtain the information through routine channels.

On March 25, partly in response to the controversy about U.S. drone warfare and partly to answer the ACLU lawsuit, the state department's chief legal counsel, Harold Koh, gave a speech defending the practice. The speech, a keynote address to the American Society of International Law, was also explicitly meant to serve as the Obama Administration's reply to critics of the drone program. While noting he wasn't giving a detailed legal opinion Koh observed in part:

[I]t is the considered view of this administration -- and it has certainly been my experience during my time as legal adviser -- that U.S. targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war.”

The speech was greeted with relief by defenders of the drone program. Human rights organizations and legal scholars, notably the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Philip Alston, were more circumspect. (1)

And yet the only critic I could find who mentioned Koh's failure to address the staggering issue of the CIA assassinating people chosen by the Pakistan military was Chris Rogers, a human rights lawyer working for the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, and he did so only in passing and without mentioning Barack Obama's role. Writing on April 2 for the Huffington Post he observed:

[...] Nor did [Koh] indicate whether or how the U.S. assesses civilian casualties and ensures proportionality is respected. But a number of recent reports are cause for concern, such as the addition of Afghan drug lords to target lists and agreements to target individuals nominated by Pakistani officials in order to ensure their continued support for the program.[...]

I thank Mr Rogers for at least raising the issue of a foreign government choosing people that the CIA assassinates. But the "number of recent reports" he linked to was just Jane Mayers' investigative report for the New Yorker! The report, along with the New Yorker's interview with Mayer about it, contains the only specific mention I've found so far in the news media about Obama's "unannounced" decision to allow the Pakistan military to choose targets for CIA drone strikes.

The situation veers perilously close to The Twilight Zone when one considers the date of Mayers' interview and report: October 21 and 26, 2009 respectively. That was more than six months ago! Since then there's been an unprecedented number of drone strikes in Pakistan, even for the Obama administration, which has overseen more strikes in Pakistan during its first year than the Bush administration oversaw during its two terms.

It's not as if the stepped-up strikes have gone unnoticed on the Left. Even Code Pink , ostensibly staunch Obama supporters, lodged protests. But again, with the exception of the Huffington Post featuring Chris Rogers' op-ed, the protests have gone nowhere near the issue of the U.S. allowing Pakistan's regime to choose some of the targets for the CIA drone operators. The question is why the Left has been silent on this issue.

The same question can be directed at the Right. One would think that right wingers, who sit up nights trying to figure ways to impeach Barack Obama, would have seized on the issue. But no. Silence from the Right. Silence from all quarters including the news media.

Six days after Koh's speech the barrage of drone attacks in Pakistan suddenly stopped; the last attack was on March 30 according to Long War Journal. The halt might simply be a temporary suspension for want of targets. Or it could be Obama recalibrating in the face of the growing outcry about drone warfare in Pakistan, or because of tactical advice from Generals Petraeus and McChrystal.

Yet even if the strikes are outright abandoned in Pakistan, there would still be the issue of a U.S. President who was so desperate to placate a foreign government that he turned the CIA into a Renta-Assassin. And with no way of learning for certain whether the targets chosen by the government were actually terrorists. This issue should not go unexamined by the American public.

1) From Jim Lobe's April 2 report for Inter Press Services:

"We are encouraged that the administration has taken the legality surrounding drone strikes seriously," said Jonathan Manes of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "While this was an important and positive first step, a number of controversial questions were left unanswered."

"We still don't know what criteria the government uses to determine that a civilian is acting like a fighter, and can therefore be killed, and... whether there are any geographical limits on where drone strikes can be used to target and kill individuals," he told IPS.

"He didn't really say anything that we took issue with," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who also complained about the lack of details.

"But it still leaves unanswered the question of how far the war paradigm he's talking about extends. Will it extend beyond, say, ungoverned areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen? Because you don't want to leave a legal theory out there that could be exploited by a country like Russia or China to knock off its political enemies on the streets of a foreign city," he added.

[...]

The weapon itself "is one of the least problematic from a civilian-protection standpoint, because drones can hover over their targets and observe whether civilians are present before delivering a payload, and because they carry relatively small and precisely guided munitions," noted Malinowski.

"The question is a legal one: under what circumstances can you use lethal force at all? Our view has always been that it should be limited to zones of active armed conflict where normal arrest operations are not feasible."

A related question involves who may be targeted. While many authorities insist lethal force can be used under the laws of war against those who are actively participating in armed conflict, the U.S. has used defined participation in very broad terms, including membership in - or even financial support of - an armed group.

In his remarks to the American Society for International Law, Koh, who was one of the harshest and most outspoken critics of the Bush administration's legal tactics in its "global war on terror", acknowledged some of these concerns, noting that his speech "is obviously not the occasion for a detailed legal opinion."

"(W)hether a particular individual will be targeted in a particular location will depend upon considerations specific to each case, including those related to the imminence of the threat, the sovereignty of the other states involved, and the willingness and ability of those states to suppress the threat the target poses," he said.

Koh added that Washington will ensure the application of the principles of "distinction" and "proportionality" in the laws of war.

While noting criticism that the use of lethal force against some individuals far removed from the battlefield could amount to an "unlawful extrajudicial killing", he insisted that "a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defence is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force."

"Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise," he said.

Alston, the U.N. rapporteur, was far from satisfied with these assurances, however, calling Koh's statement "evasive".

He "was essentially arguing that 'You've got to trust us. I've looked at this very carefully. I'm very sensitive to these issues. And all is well,'" he told an interviewer on 'Democracy Now' Thursday [April 1].

"The speech did not provide essential information about the drone/targeted killing programme, including the number and rate of civilian casualties, and the internal oversight and controls on targeted killing, especially within the CIA," said Manes of the ACLU, which has filed a lawsuit to acquire that information.

Tom Parker of Amnesty International was more scathing about Koh's position, suggesting that it was one more concession -- along with indefinite detention and special military tribunals for suspected terrorists -- to the framework created by Bush's "global war on terror". [...]

Rio de Janeiro mudslides: Brazilians treat their poor worse than their zoo animals (UPDATED 2X)

See updates Monday April 12 at the end of this post.
**********************
I mentioned in my last post that with Hurricane Katrina in mind I didn't want to overly criticize another country's failure to address situations that guarantee a human disaster when severe weather strikes. But I'm afraid that the revelations from two news reports have put me over the top.

Thaindian reports today that rescue workers searching for survivors in Niteroi city's Morro do Bumba shanty town are gagging from nausea -- not from the smell of decomposing bodies but from inhaling methane gas. The slum is built on a garbage heap that of course is decomposing and emitting large amounts of the gas in the process.

And of course the garbage heap is not a stable foundation for structures. From an AFP report yesterday:

At dawn, rescuers pulled four more bodies from the thick mound of dirt and debris in the Niteroi shantytown of Morro do Bumba, bringing the updated death toll to 219, while another 200 people were believed to be buried alive in the slum, itself precariously perched atop a garbage dump.

[...]

Geologist Marcelo Motta, who participated in an investigation of the mudslide, told Globo News television that two cracks in the rocky soil made the [garbage] mound move and pushed down the hill a huge amount of trash saturated with water that had trapped methane gas.[...]

Now for the excuses:

Focus quickly turned on responsibility for the huge death toll and damage. Experts blamed government "complacency" for allowing the country's poorest to build housing haphazardly in areas at risk of natural disasters, such as on the sides of steep hills.

Rio de Janeiro state Governor Sergio Cabral, who briefly visited Morro do Bumba late Friday, laid blame on "all of society."

"I was criticized in some favelas [hillside slums] when I got walls built to prevent them from expanding. In Rocinha, the state compensated 300 families (for relocation). But demagogues criticized us, and sometimes rabble-rousing can be deadly."

Yet since the death toll from the mudslides has embarrassed Brazil on the international stage, I note that Cabral and Rio's mayor suddenly found the courage to stand against the mobs. AFP reports: Cabral has called for "strict measures to withdraw" from areas at risk and asked the Brazilian military to help in rescue efforts. And Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes has adopted a decree to remove "by force," with the help of police, people living in areas at risk.

On April 9 Brazil's planning minister held a conference call with "international reporters" to assure that Brazil's floods wouldn't impact the 2016 Olympics in Rio because the games wouldn't be held in the rainy season. He also outlined steps the government was taking in response to the catastrophe:

[...] Brazilian Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo said funds were being marshaled to repair damages from the flooding in Rio and elsewhere (other Brazilian population centers have also been lashed by floods lately). In the call, Bernardo said 7 billion reais ($3.9 billion) had already been set aside for recovery of flood-stricken areas as part of the government’s pro-economic growth package.

He also said that investments will be made in sanitation, housing and infrastructure so that Rio and other cities will be better prepared for heavy rains in the future.[...]

On Thursday, the government also announced it was dispatching some $100 million in emergency funds as well as a new fleet of ambulances and medical systems to help Rio de Janeiro cope with the impact of the flooding.

The figures Bernardo quotes are a drop in the bucket next to the kind of funds needed to resolve the catastrophe of the shanty towns.

As to any argument that preparation for the Olympics would provide temporary jobs for the residents of the slums -- what was the last nation to show a profit from the summer games? The games have become a vanity event.

I can't imagine that the staff at a Brazilian zoo would allow the animals to live with tons of garbage in their cages. So clearly the people of Brazil value their zoo animals more than they do human life. For that reason the Olympics committee needs to revoke their award of the 2016 games site to Rio de Janeiro. If the committee can't muster that much decency, the Rio Olympics needs to be boycotted.

I don't know how many slums in Brazil are built on landfills. But a big question is whether there's garbage collection for slums that aren't built on landfills. If not, then no one need ask why the slum residents put up with living in those awful conditions, and why they don't seem to be good for work other than menial labor, dancing in samba parades, and doing chores for criminal gangs. Landfills/garbage dumps give off several toxic gases in addition to methane, which is itself toxic, and which are harmful to the human brain and nervous system.

Below is a 2004 study of the gases given off by a landfill in the United States and the health hazards associated with each gas. As you can see by looking down the list several gases cause birth defects, neurological damage, and brain damage. (This says nothing about the damage done to organs such as kidneys and liver.)

So if Brazilian children in the slums are playing in the garbage dumps and/or their domiciles are literally built on top of the dumps, you're looking at a lot of brain damaged children. And I would assume it would be the same for fetuses if pregnant women live on the landfills.

These observations don't even begin to address whether the toxins are in the water supplies used by slum residents.

Operable Unit 2 Landfills
Former Fort Ord, California
Revision C
June 2004

Prepared by Dr. Peter L. deFur
Environmental Stewardship Concepts
1108 Westbriar Dr., Suite F
Richmond VA 23238

Comments prepared for the Fort Ord Administrative record

These comments were prepared at the request of the Fort Ord Environmental Justice Network (FOEJN) to provide technical comment to the Army and summarize the report on landfill gases for the community. FOEJN represents the affected community in the greater Fort Ord area in the clean up of contamination and ordnance related waste.

Summary of the landfill gas probe monitoring program:

Landfills are required by federal law to monitor the amount of methane gas, and some other gases produced by the landfill. Methane is produced as a product of the decomposition of the waste that goes into the landfill. The decomposition processes also consumes oxygen and produces carbon dioxide, heat and other gases in addition to the methane. Methane is both toxic and explosive, and as a gas, can move through soils and other barriers, possibly accumulating in homes, and other buildings.

Therefore, in order to protect against poisoning and explosions, federal law requires that the owners and/or operators of landfills monitor methane and other gases that are produced. Closed landfills have gas vents and some have gas wells installed to allow sampling (and collection) of the gases produced by the decomposition of the waste in the landfill.

Federal (and state) laws set a limit on the amount of methane that may be found in gases at the perimeter of the landfill property – this limit is 5%. The 5% limit is based on the explosive nature of methane – at 5% in air, methane can ignite. Air monitoring at the property boundary must be conducted on a regular basis (usually quarterly) to confirm that methane is less than 5% in the air. If methane is found at levels above 5%, the regulatory authority may (and should) require the responsible party to take measures to control the methane releases. Such control may include active air pumping, burning the gas, installing a set of air collection tubes on the top of the landfill, or some combination of these (and other) measures.

General Comments on the Report:

According to the presentations at the Community Involvement Workshop on July 13, 2004 and the Technical Review Committee on July 14, 2004, the Army has completed additional air sampling of ambient air, and measurement of volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) on these additional samples. Those additional results need to be referenced or summarized in the report on the perimeter probe sampling, as a matter of reference and to provide a more complete picture of the conditions at the landfill.

The Landfill Gas Perimeter Probe Monitoring Report summarizes the results from gas sampling in the vicinity of the landfills. Samples were taken from the landfill probes at depths of 12, 22 or 32 feet, from passive vents and ambient air.

Samples from landfill probes were taken via devices that allowed sampling at specific depths indicated.

The report gives general descriptions of the methods used to obtain the samples from the probes, but is not specific on how the vent samples were obtained. This omission limits the interpretability of the results from the vent samples.

According to Figure 6-2, tables and the other figures, methane levels in the landfill are elevated, exceeding 5% on average in all cells over the past four years. Landfill cell F has the highest methane levels – the average methane was about 40% over the years.

These elevated methane levels were reported in the probe samples at depths, and in the vent samples (see Table 4-2). The report does not indicate what gas these samples represent, whether the samples are gas at the surface where the gas leaves the landfill, or from some depth, or mixed from multiple depths. The description on page 1-2 of the report is consistent with the conclusion that the vents release landfill gas to ambient air.

The risk from methane is thus present throughout the landfill area in the soil and seemingly at the surface. Vent samples are passive vents from the landfill interior and usually produce gas from throughout the depth of the landfill and vent that gas to the ambient air.

The high levels of methane measured in the landfill and at the vents present a potential toxic and explosive hazard. The Army needs to post the entire area thoroughly and indicate that the area inside the landfill perimeter is an explosive hazard and there should be no smoking, fires or trespassing. The area needs to be posted as a danger.

Page 2-3, section 2.1.3.1 concludes that the results of the volatile organic chemical analysis yielded mostly non-detected results. This conclusion is disingenuous because of the large number of samples and the large number of chemicals measured (even if not detected).

The truth is that the text on pages 2-3 to 2-4 and the data in Table 2-1 indicate that 32 different organic chemicals were detected in one or more samples from the 15 sampling probe locations. Six of these chemicals were detected at 10 or more samplings and Freon 114 was found at all locations where it was measured.

The compounds in the landfill gas range in toxic properties from alcohols, to freons (several different kinds), to carcinogenic benzene and the neurotoxic carbon disulfide. These samples were obtained from the probe sampling at depths of 12, 22 or 32 feet. The toxicity of these compounds is complex and varied, the effects are described briefly in the last section of the present report review. The widespread distribution of this range of toxic chemicals is a potential risk that requires further delineation and possibly remediation.

The VOC sampling should be extended to include vent samples and ambient air samples to determine if these chemicals are being released into the ambient air and at concentrations that pose a threat to human health.

If the chemicals occur at depths of 12, 22 and 32 feet in such distribution and concentration, then it is likely that they are escaping into the ambient air at the landfill. Apparently, some portion of this sampling has already been completed and is reported elsewhere. Nonetheless, the air that is vented from the landfill and ambient air at the fenceline needs to be sampled.

Specific Comments on the Report:

Figure 1-5 is not consistent with text and Table 2-1. Either it is labeled incorrectly or the text is not right or there is some other error. The text on page 6-1 (last paragraph, first sentence) and Table 2-1 refer to 15 samples for VOC’s, yet Figure only shows 11 such samplings. These inconsistencies need to be corrected.

The methane levels presented in Table 2-3 with averages given in the text should be plotted graphically and compared with the perimeter probe data that measured methane in the landfill at depth.

Health Effects of Compounds Released in Fort Ord Landfill Gas

Acetone: Can cause irritation to the eyes, throat, and lungs. Inhalation can also induce headache, nausea, vomiting, increased pulse rate, adverse effects on the blood, shortening of the menstrual cycle, light headedness, and confusion. Exposure to higher levels has also been known to cause coma. Health effects from long-term exposures are known mostly from animal studies. Kidney, liver, and nerve damage, increased birth defects, and lowered ability to reproduce (males only) occurred in animals exposed long-term.

Acrylonitrile: Exposure to this compound can cause difficulty breathing, fluid accumulation in the lungs, weakness and paralysis. Exposure to the skin can cause blistering and a rash. Decreased fertility rates and birth defects have been observed in animals exposed to acrylonitrile. This compound is also considered to be a probable carcinogen. Children seem to be more prone to suffering form these effects.

Benzene: Benzene primarily targets the blood in humans. It attacks the bone marrow and can cause a decrease in red blood cell count leading to anemia. Benzene also can increase bleeding and greatly suppresses the immune system. The EPA considers benzene to be a known carcinogen.

Bromodichloromethane: Animal studies indicate that the liver, kidney, and central nervous system are affected by exposure to bromodichloromethane. The effects of high doses on the central nervous system include sleepiness and incoordination. Longer exposure to lower doses causes damage to the liver and kidneys. There is some evidence from animal studies that bromodichloromethane may cause birth defects at doses high enough to make the mother sick. DHHS considers bromodichloromethane to be a carcinogen.

Bromoform: Can cause damage to the liver and kidneys. Possibly causes birth defects, but this has not been thoroughly researched. The EPA lists bromoform as a probable human carcinogen.

Bromomethane: Exposure to high levels can cause difficulty breathing, muscle tremors, seizures, kidney and nerve damage, and possible death. Lower levels can also cause kidney and liver damage, and possibly damage to the nervous system. Birth defects have been noted after high levels of exposure in animals. Bromomethane has been shown to be genotoxic, but data is inconclusive as to whether or not it causes cancer.

1,3-Butadiene: Long term exposure to this compound has been documented to cause birth defects (primarily low birth weight), as well as degeneration of the reproductive organs. The EPA has found this compound to be a definitive human carcinogen.

Carbon Disulfide: Long term exposure to carbon disulfide has caused headaches, exhaustion, trouble sleeping, and changes in the nervous system. Animal studies have shown that it can alter the normal functions of the brain, liver, and heart. Birth defects have also been reported. This compound has not been tested for carcinogenicity.

Carbon Tetrachloride: Can cause damage to the liver, kidney, and central nervous system. Birth defects have been noted in animal studies, as well as cancer. The EPA lists carbon tetrachloride as a probable human carcinogen.

Chlorobenzene: The liver, kidneys, and nervous system are all affected by this compound. Tremors and restlessness have been noted at lower levels, and high levels can cause unconsciousness or death. Long term exposure can also cause liver and kidney damage.

Chloroethane: High levels of exposure can lead to feelings of intoxication as well as eye irritation, nausea, and vomiting. It is used as a numbing agent for surgery, and some patients have experienced allergic reactions. Long term exposure has caused cancer in animals.

Chloroform: Long term exposure to chloroform can cause damage to the liver and kidneys. Animal studies have shown that this compound can cause birth defects and damage to the reproductive organs. Chloroform is considered to be a human carcinogen.

Chloromethane: Exposures to high levels, even for short periods of time can cause serious damage to the nervous system, leading to convulsions and even death. Lower levels can still cause staggering, blurred vision, dizziness, fatigue, personality changes, tremors, confusion, nausea, or vomiting. These symptoms can persist for months or even years. Beyond damaging the nervous system, chloromethane can also damage the liver and kidneys. Animal studies have shown that it can cause slower growth and brain damage in young individuals. Those same studies have shown that birth defects are possible after exposure, as well as damage to reproductive organs (particularly in males) that induce sterilization. The EPA classifies chloromethane as a possible human carcinogen.

α-Chlorotoluene: There is little data on this compound. One study has shown decrease in body weight to be a potential side effect, along with an increase in heart and testes weight. No studies have been performed to determine carcinogenicity.

Cyclohexane: Studies have shown a decrease in auditory response in animals exposed to the compound. Little other data has been collected on this compound.

Dibromochloromethene: This compound has been found to cause liver damage and is listed as a possible human carcinogen by the EPA.

1,2-Dibromoethane: This compound has been widely shown to cause a variety of reproductive problems ranging from lower fertility rates to damaged sperm. Birth defects have also been recorded in animals, as well as other developmental problems including changes in the brain of young rats whose male parents had been exposed. Liver and kidney damage is also possible with low levels of exposure. 1,2-dibromoethane has been determined to be a carcinogen.

Dichlorobenzene: Causes damage to liver, and kidneys. 1,2 and 1,3-dichlorobenzene are not known to be carcinogens, however 1,4-dichlorbenzene is considered a probable carcinogen.

Dichloroethene: Exposure to dichloroethene can cause decreases in liver and lung weight, and high exposure levels can significantly lower birth weights and some neurological effects. An MRL of 1 mg/kg/day has been established for oral exposure to this compound. It should be noted that dichloroethene can break down into vinyl chloride, a much more toxic compound.

1,2-Dichloropropane: Experiments examining exposure in animals have found that long term exposure leads to weight loss, mild damage to the respiratory tract, liver, spleen, and blood. Degeneration of the testes has also been observed. Studies examining the potential of this compound as a carcinogen have not been completed.

1,3-Dichloropropene: Long term exposure can cause damage to nose and lung tissues. Exposure to this compound can also cause individuals to be more sensitive to its effects in the future. Animal studies have shown that individuals whose skin had been exposed to dichloropropene suffered from hair loss, rash, as well as bleeding from the lungs and stomach. DHHS has concluded that this compound may reasonably be considered to be a carcinogen.

1,4-Dioxane: The EPA rates this compound as a probable human carcinogen.

Ethyl Benzene: There is little data on this compound. Animal studies have shown exposure can cause eye irritation, affects on the nervous system, and damage to the liver and kidneys. There is limited data that ethyl benzene may cause cancer but this is inconclusive.

Freon Compounds: There is little information on the toxicological effects of these compounds. High levels can cause liver damage, while lower levels can cause abnormalities in the kidneys.

Heptane: No data on this compound beyond the fact that the EPA does not classify it as a human carcinogen.

Methyl Ethyl Ketone: Methyl ethyl ketone, also known as 2-butanone, can cause respiratory irritation in addition to renal and hepatic congestion. The compound also affects the CNS, decreasing mobility and causing tremors. Developmental effects such as birth defects and lower birth weight have also been reported.

4-Methyl-2-pentanone: Irritant to the respiratory tract. Can cause headache, nausea, shortness of breath, and vomiting. Animal studies show that this compound can also damage the liver and kidneys.

Styrene: Long term exposure has caused brain, liver and kidney damage in animals, as well as irritation to the respiratory tract. Other animal studies have shown reproductive and developmental effects after short term exposure to high levels. This compound is considered to be possibly carcinogenic by IARC.

1,1,2,2-Tetrachloroethane: High levels can cause difficulty breathing, heart and liver damage, neurological effects, and possibly death. Lower levels can cause blood abnormalities, drops in blood pressure, and possibly reproductive problems. It is possible that this compound causes cancer but experiments investigating this were inconclusive.

Tetrachloroethene: Long term exposure can cause damage to the liver, kidney, and central nervous system. Animal studies have shown that this compound causes cancer. The use of alcoholic beverages enhances these effects.

Tetrahydrofuran: Can cause coughing and shortness of breath. Long term exposure can cause liver or kidney damage, and may also affect the lungs.

1,2,4-Trichlorobenzene: Can cause irritation to the respiratory tract as well as coughing, drowsiness, narcosis, uncoordination, liver damage, headache, increased heart rate and blood pressure, as well as tremors. Chronic exposure can cause damage to the liver, kidneys, and skin. Possible carcinogen.

1,1,1-Trichloroethane: Can cause light headedness and dizziness at low levels. Higher levels can cause unconsciousness, drops in blood pressure, and even death. Experiments in animals have found that long term exposure can cause damage to the lungs and liver as well as neurological effects. Exposure during pregnancy has caused birth defects and other developmental problems in experiments with rats.

1,1,2-Trichloroethane: High levels can cause liver and kidney damage as well as mild neurological effects such as drowsiness and nervousness. Adverse effects on the stomach, kidneys, blood, and liver have also been seen in experiments in animals. Those same experiments have shown that this configuration of trichloroethane can also cause cancer.

1,2,4-Trimethlybenzene: High levels can cause damage to the respiratory system as well as the nervous system. Animal studies have shown that exposure can cause damage to reproductive systems and exposure during pregnancy can cause birth defects.

1,3,5-Trimethylbenzene: Little data is known on the health effects of this particular compound. Known to cause irritation to the respiratory tract, depression of the central nervous system, and effect the liver and blood.

Trichloroethene: Inhalation can cause irritation of the respiratory tract and neurological effects such as dizziness, confusion, and headache. Liver and kidney damage is also possible. If the exposure is long term, these symptoms may become chronic. TCE is also listed as a probable carcinogen.

Toluene: Toluene affects a wide variety of systems, from respiratory to reproductive. Exposure can cause lung irritation, pulmonary lesions, damage to the tracheal epithelium, and decreased levels of blood lymphocytes. A wide variety of neurological effects have also been reported such as headache, dizziness, memory loss, narcosis, increased dopamine and norepinephrine levels, hearing loss, and depression of cognitive and motor skills. The kidneys are also targeted, resulting in increased kidney weight, necrosis of tubules, and renal cysts. A wide variety of developmental effects have been documented as well such as low birth weight, higher instance of birth defects, and a decrease in fetal hippocampus weight.

Vinyl Acetate: Has depressed the immune system of animals in experimental studies.

Vinyl Chloride: Vinyl Chloride is well documented to be a carcinogen. Other documented effects include hepatic cysts, decreased blood clotting time, testicular necrosis, cellular alteration within the liver, and increases in heart and kidney weights.

Xylenes: Xylenes primarily affect the central nervous system. Long term exposure can cause headaches, lack of coordination, dizziness, confusion, and changes in balance. High levels may also cause damage to the liver and kidneys. Animals studies have shown that exposure during pregnancy increased infant mortality rates and caused developmental problems in the offspring. The mothers of these offspring also encountered a greater number of health problems as a result of exposure.

“This document has been funded partly or wholly through the use of U.S EPA Technical Assistance Grant Funds. Its contents do not necessarily reflect the policies, actions or positions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Fort Ord Environmental Justice Network Inc. does not speak for nor represent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”

Mention of any trade name or commercial product or company does not constitute endorsement by any individual or party that prepared or sponsored this report.

**************************
UPDATE April 12
Today RBO blog, which crossposted this entry, received an interesting comment on the post, which I share with readers here along with my reply:

"Pundita makes all good points. There is no reason any human being should be living on top of garbage heaps regardless of their income. But, I lived & worked in Rio for 2 years for an NGO. Our task was to help the City of Rio stop using their current trash dump (Gramacho) which the city wanted closed for fear the rains would eventually sink it into the Guayabera Bay (it will someday). The Mayor wanted a new waste management dump built out west with advanced waste to energy technology & recycyling.

The move was met with so much resistance, it never happened. Who put up the resistance? Activists representing the people who made a living off of collecting trash from the dump. They even had official credentials to allow them to do this. Eventually, the Mayor backed down quietly conceding defeat from the trash “mafia.”

So the current Governor is correct in assigning blame – it’s all of society in Rio (Rich & Poor). The citizens point the blame at elected officials and the elected officals point the blame at the citizens. They are both pointing in the right direction! Que pena!
Rio Rob"

Dear Rio Rob:
Thank you for your very informative comments. “Eyes on the ground” are so important when one is trying to understand complex situations in another country.

I wonder if your NGO’s contacts in the mayor’s office had read the kind of report that Peter L. deFur prepared on the two landfills at former Fort Ord and which I republished in my post. The report shows in detailed fashion that landfills/ garbage dumps are extremely toxic and a big danger to human health.

I also wonder if the trash pickers are illiterate and part of a low ‘caste’ or class that is shunned by other Brazilians. Such situations are often the case in ‘developing’ countries with jobs that are considered unclean.

In any event Brazil is aspiring to be a regional power; the situations with open trash dumps in Rio and shanty towns built on garbage dumps are inexcusable.

The mayor’s office should undertake a very vigorous campaign to educate the populace about the toxicity of the garbage dumps — and develop job training/literacy programs for the trash pickers to wean them away from their traditional means of earning a living.

I think the international community can be a help in this by pointing the ‘finger of shame’ at Brazil. That is why I was so harsh in my language. With the Olympic games on the horizon this is a good time for outsiders, including NGOs, to prod the administrations in Rio state to deal with problems they have not tried hard enough to address.

Touristas also share some blame in this — a situation I’ve seen in other developing countries. They tend to look the other way.

UPDATE 11:30 AM
Rio Rob, I did a little checking on the internet about Gramacho. If this December 9, 2009 article at Zimbio website is to be believed, Gramacho is closing in 2012. What I found very surprising from the article is that the trash sorters only number 1,300. That is a very small number of people to have stopped the landfill from shutting given the environmental disaster it posed.

I'm wondering if there isn't more to the story. It would be interesting to learn which company got the contract to build a waste management plant in Gramacho's place if it is indeed closing. Money talks, nobody walks; maybe the company that got the contract just greased more palms.

Here's the text of the article:

"Latin America's Largest Landfill Set to Close in 2012

Referred to as the largest open-air landfill in Latin America, the waste disposal site of Jardim Gramacho processes up to 9,000 pounds of trash daily from Rio de Janeiro. The landfill provides a livelihood for over 1000 trash pickers who make an average daily wage of $20 separating the trash from paper, cans and plastics that are then sold as recyclables. Gramacho opened in 1978 and is said to have reached its trash capacity years ago. The landfill is currently set to close in 2012 to avert an environmental disaster but jeopardizing the work of the 1,300 trash pickers left who have few other employment options."

Brazil's 'Katrina' - corruption, government mismanagement might have played role in high death toll from mudslides in Rio and Niteroi slums

So right now the message is the same for citizens of every nation: What use is to yell, "The damn government!" while you're being swept out to sea?

I'll start by correcting my statement in yesterday's post that the torrential rains that fell on Rio de Janeiro starting Monday were "record." I took that from an AP report. From other reports (BBC, AFP) the rains were the heaviest in about a half century, which I suppose could still make them "record" but not to be confused with "unprecedented."

The same reports from the BBC (Monday-Tuesday) and AFP (today) carry quotes that suggest corruption and government mismanagement/neglect could have played a major role in the still-unfolding catastrophe in Rio de Janeiro state.

As an American who watched in horror in 2005 while Hurricane Katrina exposed the corruption and neglect at all levels of U.S. government that led to a high death toll in New Orleans, I'm not eager to cast stones at Brazil's government. However, information is emerging to suggest the Rio tragedy finds echoes and correspondences with the one that struck New Orleans. Consider (emphasis throughout mine):

BBC, April 5-6:

"The situation is chaos," Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo da Costa Paes said in a statement on Tuesday. [...] Mr Paes said the preparedness for heavy rainfall in Brazil's second-largest city -- which will host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games -- was "less than zero."

In the same report, observations from BBC Correspondent Paulo Cabral in Rio de Janeiro:

The rain is not so intense but the risk of new landslides remains high, as the soil of the hillsides is extremely wet. Most of those who died were people in the hillside slums where waves of mud came down destroying everything in their way.

The topography in Rio exacerbates these types of problems. It's one of the most beautiful cities in the world because of the mountains in the middle of the town, but it can get nasty when it rains.

Ten years ago a census found 12,000 people lived in high-risk areas, but there have been new developments since then so the number is probably much higher.

AFP, April 9:

[...] Niteroi [a municipality neighboring the city of Rio] is the hardest hit with at least 107 dead, compared to 55 in Rio, according to the civil defense authorities.

Civil Defense officials said that at least 161 people had also been injured in the weather chaos of the past four days, and the state of Rio reported that 14,000 people have been forced to move due to the heavy rain.

How many people really were swept away in Morro do Bumba [shanty town] is unknown.

Firefighter chief Colonel Pedro Machado told AFP earlier Thursday that "based on the testimony of witnesses, some 200 people were buried under the rubble."

Nevertheless, the commander of the 12th military police battalion in Niteroi, Rui Franca, said, "It is impossible to make a rational estimate of the number of people buried because there is no relief map of the area."

[...]

An angry mob in the neighborhood near Rio's iconic Christ the Redeemer smashed one of the trains that takes tourists up to the gigantic statue, upset over the death of three locals, the Agencia O Dia reported.

The crowd said the company that owns the tourist trains was responsible for diverting a sewage canal towards the shanty town four years ago that channeled much of the flood water over the past days. The company director rejected the charges.

[...]

The head of the Niteroi public services, Jose Mocarzel, said the Morro do Bumba shantytown had been built up over the past 25 years on an old landfill site and was particularly at risk.

A strong odor of methane lingered among the trash-strewn streets. [...]

This is not the first time this year that Rio de Janeiro state has been hit with heavy rains, severe flooding, and landslides. From an AFP report dated January 29:

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Two months of heavy rains have killed 64 people in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo and flooded several areas in its huge city of the same name, officials and media reported Thursday.

The near-constant precipitation has filled to capacity two of the six dams supplying the city, requiring the release of millions of gallons (litres) of water, according to Sao Paulo's sanitation authority.

[...]

Many of the fatalities were the result of mudslides or building collapses, according to the state civil defense service.

The deaths in Sao Paulo state added to scores of others in the neighboring state of Rio de Janeiro in late December and early January, including 28 killed on New Year's Day when a luxury beachside hotel was hit by a landslide.

So it's not as if federal, state and city officials didn't have warning that additional flooding would precipitate killer mudslides. While the weather events in January and this week can be considered unusual, from Paulo Cabral's report the authorities are well aware of the risks during heavy or prolonged rains in a state where large urban populations are perched on landfills and hillsides.

The Associated Press report I quoted from yesterday mentioned the issue of the government forcibly relocating residents of shanty towns who were most at risk from the mudslides. Clearly the issue is not new:

[...] when heavy rain falls on slopes crowded with poorly built shacks, nature itself can deal out death.

Almeira and other slum residents say they have nowhere else to go if they want jobs in Rio's richer areas.

"The government wants to forcefully remove the residents living in danger, and that is understandable," said Leandro Ribeiro, another slum resident. "But where are we supposed to go? Some people have been living here for 30 years. This is their home."

Mayor Eduardo Paes said he was taking a tougher stand on forced relocations. He announced that 1,500 families were going to be removed from their homes on Pleasure Hill [shanty town] and in Rocinha, one of Latin America's largest slums.

"I don't want to spend next summer sleepless, worrying if the rains are going to kill somebody," he told reporters, without saying when the relocations would occur.

The situation reminds me of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which housed many low-income residents of the city, and was a known death trap in the event the levees didn't hold against hurricane flooding. The levees were breached because of Katrina and so a lot of people were drowned.

There were many things that could have been done to avert the tragedy in the Lower Ninth Ward; not one of them was done or even attempted. Corruption, complacency, and incompetence ruled. Ditto, I suspect, for the tragedy in Rio de Janeiro state.

I'm still not willing to speculate at this point that the many instances of extreme weather so far this year in many parts of the world represent a trend that can't be explained by El Niño. However, many of the weather events have been labeled "historic" or "record" in that nothing similar had occurred for anywhere from a quarter century to a century. El Niño occurs every five to seven years.

What is certain is that more and more people are densely packed into areas that are very vulnerable to extreme weather and seismic events. When you combine that factor with complacency, a cycle of violent weather, strapped government budgets, the usual run of corruption and neglect characterizing many municipal administrations, that's convergence.

So right now the message is the same for citizens of every nation: What use is to yell, "The damn government!" while you're being swept out to sea?

This realm is not Eden. That means if you insist in making your home in the jaws of death, whether the death be fire, flood, winds, or mud, you better practice evacuation drills. Hear?

Rio in chaos from record rains; mudslides bury scores of people alive, death toll rising, many still missing.

UPDATE April 9, 11:25 AM EDT

My post today is titled Brazil's 'Katrina' - corruption, government mismanagement might have played role in high death toll from mudslides in Rio and Niteroi slums
***********************
Of the 147 people confirmed dead from Rio's heaviest rains on record, at least 18 died in the shantytown of Pleasure Hill. The sun is out now in Rio, but more rain is expected this weekend.....

Rio de Janeiro and environs have never seen rain like this before. The rain fell in torrents without interruption from Monday afternoon through Wednesday morning, setting off huge mudslides that covered shanty towns built into steep hillsides and bringing life to a virtual standstill in the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, "the second largest city of Brazil and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, 6th largest in the Americas and the main tourist destination in the Southern Hemisphere," according to Wikipedia.

Just the city proper has 6,093,000 residents, making it the world's 31st most populous city; if you added the population for Rio's metro area (14,387,000), it would qualify as one of the world's megacities (population 10 million plus)

The Associated Press reported two hours ago (about 12:30 AM EDT) that 145 are confirmed dead (Updated toll at 3:00 AM is 147 dead):

[...] Trees and power lines were knocked down, enormous craters were seen in the streets, wastewater flowed down to the city's white sand beaches and it was nearly impossible to get anywhere in the city of 6 million people.

In [neighboring] Rochina, officials said 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain had fallen so far this month — three times the amount normally expected for all of April. Similar figures were seen across Rio's metropolitan area.

The Rio state Civil Defense department said at least 11,000 people were forced from their homes by punishing rain that filled streets with raging torrents and ground Brazil's second-biggest city to a halt the previous day.[...]

And in this city that crushes the very poor up against the very rich, gangs took advantage of the chaos, robbing motorists stranded in their cars. As to where the slum residents will go now that the mudslides have turned the hillsides into death traps, the AP report continues:

Late Wednesday, an official with the state's Civil Defense department said a huge mudslide smashed into a slum in Rio's neighboring city of Niteroi, burying up to 40 homes. It was not immediately clear how many people were missing, but it was likely to be in the dozens.

Because of the continuing rains, steep hillsides and loose earth, officials said there had been few successful rescues. One man, Carlos Eduardo Silva dos Santos, 24, was pulled alive from under a concrete wall in western Rio. Firefighters said they had no count on how many people had been rescued.

The death toll could easily rise. An official with Rio's fire department said at least 60 people were missing Wednesday afternoon — before the latest mudslide in Niteroi. [...]

Nearly all the deaths occurred in landslides that engulfed the slums, yet another reminder that life in one of the world's most famous playgrounds is much different for the poor than it is for the rich.

Residents of the slums often endure dangers such as the frequent shootouts between police and heavily armed drug gangs, and when heavy rain falls on slopes crowded with poorly built shacks, nature itself can deal out death.

Almeira and other slum residents say they have nowhere else to go if they want jobs in Rio's richer areas.

"The government wants to forcefully remove the residents living in danger, and that is understandable," said Leandro Ribeiro, another slum resident. "But where are we supposed to go? Some people have been living here for 30 years. This is their home."

Mayor Eduardo Paes said he was taking a tougher stand on forced relocations. He announced that 1,500 families were going to be removed from their homes on Pleasure Hill and in Rochina, one of Latin America's largest slums.

"I don't want to spend next summer sleepless, worrying if the rains are going to kill somebody," he told reporters, without saying when the relocations would occur.[...]

Steve Diamond on David Remnick's confirmation of William Ayers role in Obama's rise to power

On April 4 the New York Post's Ginger Adams Otis yawned her way through a review of David Remnick's exhaustively researched 585 page biography of Barack Obama (published yesterday). She observed that there's nothing startling in the few new details Remnick marshals. Ms Otis is not quite correct. Contained in Remnick's biography is a ticking time bomb.

In 2008 The New York Times got away with quashing law professor Steve Diamond's warning about the true relationship between William Ayers and Barack Obama. I'd like to see The Times try to quash David Remnick, one of the mandarins in the Liberal Media Establishment, although he might say I heap too much praise on him.

However, my greatest concern is that while the Right Wing Media Establishment will surely seize on Remnick's comments about the Obama-Ayers relationship, they will do as they did in 2008. What they did was divert public attention from the most crucial issue connected with the relationship by focusing on Ayers's past as a terrorist. His present is that he is an influential educator pushing social justice teachings and race-based education theories in American public schools.

Fox News Cable viewers who think they know the meaning of social justice teachings after hearing Glenn Beck's explanations -- sorry to say but he is behind the curve of Ayers and other educators pushing social justice curriculums in the public school system.

Glenn is describing a 1960s version of social justice concepts. The new, improved version, which has actually been around for several years, is so weird that when I first learned about it I figured it couldn't mean what it seemed to mean. My next stage of denial was, "They can't be serious."

They're completely serious about using every single subject taught in public schools, including math and science, as the means to indoctrinate students in the most radical authoritarian Leftist agenda.

For details on this version of social justice teachings, Google "Sol Stern social justice teachings." Steve Diamond and I have both written about the issue as have several others. But I think Sol's explanations are the clearest and most comprehensive introduction for the general reader.

By the way, keep your wits about you when hearing defenses of the teachings because today's social justice crowd is slicker than a Ponzi scheme operator when it comes to fielding criticism. As Steve Diamond noted about them in 2008, Ayers and his fellow “authoritarian” Leftists in the teaching profession hide behind the generally understood concept of social justice: “ ... a meaningless [term] because the minute you challenge advocates of this approach they sound like Mom and Apple Pie liberals.”

And realize that Steve is a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist, albeit one who's grounded in the view that the American labor union movement can be the savior of American democracy. I am not knowledgeable enough about union matters to debate Steve on this but from all I've seen, American big labor (as with American big business) is now so tangled up with the state it would take a revolution to detangle them.

And yet Steve's latest book, From 'Che' to China: Labor and Authoritarianism in the New Global Economy, is very clear on the dangers of labor being involved with the state.

The book alerts the general public that SEIU (and, if I recall, some other American Big Labor unions) have gotten in bed with China's authoritarian government; this, on the excuse they're trying to be helpful to their dear downtrodden brothers and sisters in China. What a bunch of phonies.

Where was I? My point is that when a real Leftist gets scared of social justice teachings, that's a sign there is a very serious problem with social justice curriculums in American public schools.

And, while Steve doesn't address this issue in his post, there is also a very serious problem with the teachers unions because they've allowed social justice curriculums to be rammed down their throats. Yet today many teachers risk being blackballed if they don't go along with the social justice program. They need strong support from parents if they're going to stand up to the Ayers crowd and the crowd's buddies in government.

All right; now that I've had my say I'll turn the podium over to Steve. He writes at his King Harvest blog today:

New Yorker’s Remnick Confirms Ayers Role in Obama Rise to Power

In his just-published biography The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, David Remnick of The New Yorker magazine confirmed the role of Bill Ayers in the appointment of Barack Obama to the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

The CAC was a foundation conceived by Ayers and then, with others, designed and led by him, relying on a large initial grant from Walter Annenberg that was then matched by additional donations to implement educational reforms in the city’s troubled schools.

Remnick writes in his book that “Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board.”

He gives no exact details or source. His account confirms the Ayers role, which was explained at King Harvest (in its previous incarnation as Global Labor) on April 22, 2008 in a post titled Who ‘Sent’ Obama?

It is probably only a coincidence, but the Remnick chapter that includes the revelation about Ayers is titled, Somebody Nobody Sent. The odd grammar is actually a reference to an old Chicago political story that was the inspiration for my 2008 post.

The New York Times, on the other hand, had reported during the presidential campaign that “Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment” to the board.

This led to the impression that Ayers was not a key figure in Obama’s rise to political prominence in Chicago.

In several interviews with The New York Times I explained patiently to reporter Scott Shane that only Ayers had the legal authority to appoint board members to the founding board of the Challenge. The explanation was ignored by The Times. See my response to The Times here.

The appointment to the board was a major step up in the career of the young lawyer Obama, who had recently returned to Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law School. A few months after his spring 1995 appointment to the CAC board Obama would be invited to the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn as part of the launch of his first political campaign to win the seat of departing state senator Alice Palmer.

The Times also reported that the Hyde Park meeting was the first time Obama met Ayers and Dohrn then later changed that story -- without explanation or apology to its readers -- when it found that Ayers had lunch with Obama to discuss the CAC earlier that year.

Because of Ayers and Dohrn’s well-known past as members of the violent authoritarian cult known as the Weather Underground in the early 1970s, supporters of Obama went to great lengths to distance him from any links to Ayers and Dohrn -- despite the fact that the relationship was known in Hyde Park and wider Chicago political circles.

The CAC was set up by Ayers to push his peculiar “social justice” agenda in the Chicago school system including support for a controversial school reform measure known as “Local School Councils” or LSC’s.

The LSC’s were set up in the late 80s, with the support then of both Ayers and Obama, to use parents as a battering ram against teachers and principals, in the wake of a controversial teachers’ strike.

Mainstream civil rights groups like Operation PUSH opposed the reform because of its anti-teacher and anti-union animus. Hundreds of principals were pushed out of their positions over the next several years until the state legislature stepped back in and re-centralized control of hiring. For more background see my post here.

Ayers would never have helped engineer the Obama appointment if he were not dead certain that Obama would lead the CAC in the direction he wanted it to go. During its seven year existence the foundation was in a pitched battle with the Daley Administration, which wanted to centralize school management and even tried to convince the Annenberg Foundation to not fund the Ayers proposal.

All that clearly implies that Ayers and Obama had a close, long-term relationship. While no mainstream media outlet has reported that as of yet, King Harvest was told that a senior Obama campaign activist and long time Democratic Party supporter confirmed that the relationship went back to the 1980s.

While Ayers and Dohrn have moved away from their violent past, neither has ever formally apologized for the violence and destruction they were part of, and Ayers at least leaves open the possibility that he would engage in violence again. While the physical damage the Weather Underground inflicted was relatively minor, the political damage was severe. For many decades the reputation of the tiny terrorist group has tainted the entire Left.

Ayers and Dorhn are now part of a larger milieu made up of supporters of multiculturalism and identity politics, which now dominates what many think of as the Left despite the milieu’s inherent inability to build a wider democratic movement for progressive social change.

Figures like Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Chris Edley, Goodwin Liu and Linda Darling-Hammond all are a part of the identity politics milieu and are, or have been, close advisors of Obama. Several have had links to Ayers and Dohrn professionally or politically over many years.

A consistent thread in the political world view of Ayers and Dohrn, over many decades, can be found in their hostility to the democratic labor movement. Thus, they were openly hostile to unions in the 1970s and Ayers’ approach to education reform has often put him at odds with unionized teachers.

His approach seems to have rubbed off on the new President, who recently backed the wholesale dismissal of the entire teaching staff of a Rhode Island public school and who has backed reform efforts that hark back to the anti-teacher politics of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Chicago’s Local School Councils.

Now that Remnick has confirmed the crucial professional link between Ayers and Obama at a turning point in the latter’s career, a lot about the President’s background and politics begins to make more sense.

Moscow terror bombings, Georgia, and America's campaign of mass murder in Pakistan

I'm going to make a rare exception and publicly criticize another blogger; that's because I want to quote from his April 1 essay, which a colleague sent me. Rick Moran of The American Thinker wrote that Vladimir Putin's "bloody, inhuman crackdown on separatists in the Caucasus" gave Doku Umarov, the Chechen who confessed yesterday to being the mastermind of the Moscow metro terrorist bombings, "an excuse to carry out his jihad against the west."

Mr Moran quoted Umarov's accusation that Putin was also a terrorist because he ordered murders of civilians. Mr Moran then observed:

In fact, the terrorist is right; Obama and the State Department have soft pedaled Putin's crimes against civilians, hoping not to sidetrack the START treaty. Chechen civilians are paying the price while the world turns the other way so as not to offend Putin and his puppet president Medvedev.

Mr Moran might want to reshuffle his priorities. Right now citizens of the United States of America are aiding the mass murder in Pakistan being carried out by the CIA at the express order of President Barack Obama.

I'm not talking about the UAV drone strikes that have resulted in civilian 'collateral damage,' although the majority of deaths from those strikes in Pakistan have been just that. Many of the UAV strikes have targeted the wrong house or gathering because of faulty intelligence or coordinates, which has added up to many scores or hundreds of civilians killed (the number depending on which estimates are cited) who're not involved with terrorist groups.

I'm talking about premeditated murder, not accidents. So this is going beyond the U.S.-assisted genocide in East Pakistan in 1971; there Washington only provided Pakistan's military with weapons, money, and encouragement to carry out the systematic murder and torture of thousands of civilians. In the present situation the USA is actually pulling the trigger:

Last March [2009], the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target.

“A lot of the targets are nominated by the Pakistanis -- it’s part of the bargain of getting Pakistani coöperation,” says Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who has served as an adviser to the Obama Administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

If Mr Moran wants to argue that there's no evidence that the CIA is murdering the Pakistan government's enemies for them, the testimony of history is against him. So it would be up to him to demonstrate when the Pakistan government abandoned their strategy of committing atrocities against civilian populations they find bothersome -- both in Pakistan and India. Reference the 2007 Lal Masjid massacre of hundreds of female students.

Even a cursory reading of the Pakistan military's recent past actions would alert the Obama administration that if President Obama signed an authorization giving Pakistan's government a say in CIA UAV targets, he was committing a crime against humanity, which should be an impeachable offense.

That President Obama did all this simply to placate Pakistan's military, which fought against British-American forces during the invasion of Afghanistan 2001, and has directed the majority of 'Taliban' attacks against ISAF forces in post-invasion Afghanistan, is an outrage so vast it can't be fully conveyed in words.

To top it off the Obama administration has given into pressure from Pakistan's government and directed the Pentagon to sell them surveillance UAV's -- 12, to be exact. The drones are not armed, even though Pakistan is pushing for armed drones. But give Pakistan's military a year or two and they'll figure out how to arm the surveillance drones.

Again, with history as the guide and with no sign of a change in their behavior, you don't want to think about what they plan to do with those drones once they've armed them. Not since the United States allowed a defeated Saddam Hussein to arm helicopters after the Gulf War has there been such a blatant move on our part to abet genocide.

Yet to attempt to place all the blame for this on the Obama administration, or the CIA or the Pentagon, would be sophistry. Americans are not serfs and we do not live in a police state; therefore, every American of voting age who pays taxes shares in the blame.

If Mr Moran wants to say he didn't know, that he wasn't aware of the situations I outlined -- then he might want to spend less time focused on the sins of Vladimir Putin and more time focused on American affairs, including America's client states and in particular Pakistan.

That returns me to yesterday's discussion on this blog about the claim that terrorist networks from the Caucasus have been taking refuge in Georgia's capital city of Tbilisi.

Because Georgia's secret police apparatus is very active, and because doings in the city are under close surveillance by U.S. and British intelligence, not to mention Russian intelligence, the claim is bad news for the USA. It implies that Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is an American-British installed puppet, and the Obama administration, are aware that terror networks are using Tbilisi for a staging area for attacks against Russian civilians.

Yesterday Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, accused Georgia of backing terrorism in the North Caucasus and said that it could be involved in the Moscow Metro terrorist bombings. He came out with the accusation before Umarov confessed his part in the subway bombings and the double terrorist attacks in Dagestan on Wednesday. However, Patrushev's accusation transcends any one terrorist incident:

Mr Patrushev, the former director of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, singled out Georgia and its pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili after being asked in an interview about possible foreign involvement in the terror attack.

“All theories have to be checked. For example, there is Georgia and the leader of that state, Saakashvili, whose behavior is unpredictable,” Mr Patrushev told the Kommersant newspaper.

“He has already unleashed war once. It is possible that he may unleash it again. We have had information that individual members of Georgian special forces support contacts with terrorist organizations in the Russian North Caucasus. We must check this also in relation to the acts of terror in Moscow.” [...]

Now why must Americans concern themselves with this accusation?

Firstly because Georgia is an American client state, and it's another one of those ghastly client states like Pakistan. Secondly, because Georgia's special forces, which Patrushev pointedly mentioned, received training in the latest techniques from the U.S. military. They could have also received training from Israeli military and for all I know from the British as well. But there is no question that Georgia's military and their various branches received extensive training from U.S. forces. That's why something like a third of their military signed up for a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted the crack training the U.S. forces provided.

This is an old story and a very ugly one. During the Cold War the OSS, then the CIA, created a veritable cottage industry out of giving special training to fiends -- or bumpkins who transformed into fiends once they got hold of U.S. training -- and weapons provided by the U.S.

I don't want to hear, 'The Maoists and Soviets did it too.' The way is forward, not back. You can go down the list of the insurgencies that CIA aided or created during the Cold War and the police states the US propped up or created and see that in case after case, the military and intelligence training came back to bite the United States -- and often to bite entire regions of the world.

The cottage industry created a kind of Rube Goldberg machine, whereby peoples with little or no concept of the rule of law used their crack American training to propagate atrocities, which spawned counter-atrocities, which spawned ever more repressive regimes that spawned yet more counter-atrocities, and so it went and here we are today, trying to find Tbilisi on the map.