MUSHARRAF OUT
“ MUSHARRAF OUT / LEAVING FACTIONS / TO VIE FOR
POWER PAKISTANI AVOIDS TRIAL U.S., Long Supportive, Must Now Deal With, Political Disarray By
JANE PERLEZ ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Facing imminent impeachment President Pervez Musharraf
announced his resignation on Monday, after months of belated recognition by
American officials that he had become a waning asset in the campaign against
terrorism. ...”
That’s from the NYT report of its choice
of lead main news story of August.19, yesterday.
“The decision removes from Pakistan’s political stage the leader
who for nearly nine years served as one of the United States’ most important – and
ultimately unreliable – allies. And it now leaves American officials to
deal with a new, elected coalition that has so far proved itself to be unwilling
or unable to confront an expanding Taliban insurgency determined to topple the
government. ...
The question of who will succeed Mr.Musharraf is certain to unleash intense wrangling
between the rival political parties that form the governing coalition and to
add a new layer of turbulence to an already unstable nuclear-armed nation of
165 million people. ...
“Mr. Musharraf’s political demise was nearly inevitable after he
shed his military role last year and since his party was soundly defeated in
parliamentary elections in February.
"Since then, the White House has been grappling
with a new political reality, where the civilian leaders seem to have tenuous
control over Pakistan’s
military and intelligence establishment. ...
“Uncertainty over who is actually in charge in Pakistan has heightened
concerns over the country’s nuclear arsenal, which is today variously estimated
at 50 to 100 weapons. ...
“Mr. Zardari, the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and now
the head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which she led before her assassination,
is known to want the job (as president). ...
“...a colleague of Mr. Sharif’s said the Pakistan Muslim League-N,
the party Mr. Sharif leads, might agree to Mr. Zardari in the post if it was
stripped of its current powers, including the power to dissolve Parliament and
to choose the army chief.”
Comment by World Peace News - a World Government
Report, worldpeacenews.org:
Musharraf’s long-delayed resignation brings on what could turn out to be
a “sea change” in world politics. There are so many loose ends emphasized
that perhaps no one should feel certain about how any specific issues will develop.
The last subheadline above, with the words “Political Disarray”,
will of course command attention on the score of the chance that heads-of-state
and other political leaders will come to agree that a human effort to create
an orderly array of issues should be compiled globally on a priority basis, war
first.
–––– 8.20.08
“ How a Squabble
Became a Showdown”
(and how the Georgia showdown could become a nuclear war that could end our
troubled human history.)
The first part of what follows starts on the NYT’s page one, above the
fold, August 18, in a long article jumped to all of page 8. The second part is
mainly a modest suggestion about how all aware people globally might cooperate
to create a democratically self-governed, decision-making system that, for starters,
should outlaw all war –in the sense that nations now outlaw civil and less
than world wars.
First the NYT coverage, the theme of which is spelled out in the headline and
in a subheadline, “As Georgia and Russia Headed for a Clash, the
U.S. Missed
the Signals.”
“This article was reported by Helene
Cooper, C. J. Chivers and Clifford
J. Levy and written by Ms. Cooper.
“WASHINGTON – Five months ago, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia,
long a darling of this city’s diplomatic dinner party circuit, came to
town to push for America to muscle his tiny country of four million into NATO.
“On Capitol Hill, at the State Department and at the Pentagon, Mr. Saakashvili,
brash and hyperkinetic, urged the West not to appease Russia by rejecting his
country’s NATO ambitions.
“At the White House, President
Bush bantered with the Georgian president about his prowess as a dancer. Laura
Bush, the first lady, took Mr. Saakashvili’s
wife to lunch. Mr. Bush promised him to push hard for Georgia’s acceptance
into NATO. After the meeting, Mr. Saakashvili pronounced his visit ‘one
of the most successful visits during my presidency,’ and said he did not
know of any other leader of a small country with the access to the administration
that he had.
“Three weeks later, Mr.Bush went to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, at the
invitation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. There he received a message
from the Russian: the push to offer Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership was crossing
Russia’s ‘red lines,’ according to an administration official
close to the talks.
“Afterward, Mr. Bush said of Mr. Putin, ‘He’s been very truthful
and to me, that’s the only way you can find common ground.’ It was
one of many moments when the United States seemed to have missed – or gambled
it could manage – the depth of Russia’s anger and the resolve of
the Georgian president to provoke the Russians.
“The story of how a 16-year, low-grade conflict over who should rule two
small, mountainous regions in the Caucasus erupted into the most serious post-cold-war
showdown between the United States and Russia is one of miscalculation, missed
signals and overreaching, according to interviews with diplomats and senior officials
in the United States, the European Union, Russia and Georgia. In many cases,
the officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
“It is also the story of how both Democrats and Republicans have misread
Russia’s determination to dominate its traditional sphere of influence.
...
“...It appeared that the Bush administration misread the depth of Russia’s
fury. A Bush administration official said the Americans understood that Russia
was angry, but believed that they could forestall a worsening of the relationship
by looking for other possibilities for cooperation.
“Ms. Rice offered up an 11-page ‘strategic framework declaration’ examining
areas where the two nations could work together, which was hammered out with
Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, that night in Sochi. The statement
included language describing how they would in the future address the issue of
missile defenses the United States had proposed basing in Eastern Europe. The
United States promised to work toward ‘assuaging’ Russian concerns.
...
More importantly than missing signals, suggests WPN, the writer here, was ignoring
the reputation at the U.N. of the Soviet and Russia spokesperson, Sergey V. Lavrov,
now the Russian foreign minister.
Near the end of its 3 decades as a correspondent at the politically disunited
United Nations, World Peace News - a World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org,
ran into Mr. Lavrov’s rhetorical buzzsaw – at a U.N. session. Fully
aware of its Q&A risk, WPN had put to Mr. Lavrov WPN’s rash question
about The World Government Imperative. In turn, it got more buzz than it had
expected. (See WPN’s backfile for comments about Lavrov’s closed-mind
and harsh rejection of questions going to the notion that peace is possible internationally
as well as nationally.)
Down the decades since 1970, have all the
Russian U.N. spokespeople questioned and otherwise known about by WPN been nearly
as emphatic and absolute a nationalist
as Mr. Lavrov? He’s the only one who impressed WPN as being hopelessly
unwilling to consider hedging national sovereignty in favor of creating peace
of any kind except Russia’s.
A warless world being a first condition of our collective survival in our nuclear
times, here’s a brief and tentative specification of essentials:
Know that nations can’t be expected to produce an adequate program without
careful global preliminaries emphasizing non-nationalistic insights.
The creation of a world political unity will be the topic.
First, obtain agreement of participating nations that irrelevant matters will
not be recognized during posted conference sessions. Agree to avoid international
violence during session times – with all news media invited.
If initial attempts fail, other attempts will follow until a duly created and
firmly supported world political decision-making system exists.
––––
The return of China
By
Keith Suter
It is now fashionable to talk about the “rise” of China. But in fact
China’s current remarkable economic growth means simply that China is “returning” – and
not “rising” - to world importance. About five centuries ago it was
responsible for about one-third of global economic growth. It has had a few bad
periods since then - running into the centuries – but now it is returning
to its old status.
Remains of settlements in the Beijing area can be traced back
about five thousand years. The natural environment was comfortable enough then
to sustain
human and
animal life. The creation of the original city of Ji almost 3,000 years ago
marked the first capital on the site.
Much of present day China expanded out from that site over
the millennia. It was a good location militarily, being situated on a small plain,
with three
sides
closed off with surrounding mountains and expansive rolling plains to the south. It was a strategic hub between north and south China.
As the fortunes of local warlords waxed and waned so the city of
Ji also varied. It acquired various names and political roles.
In 1421, Zhu Di of the Ming Dynasty changed the city’s name to Beijing.
The city therefore can claim not only the status of being located on the site
of one of the world’s oldest capital cities, but even the name is an
old one.
The Ming Dynasty was also responsible for one of the world’s most famous
building complexes: the Forbidden City. Its name comes from the fact that for
most of its existence, commoners were forbidden from entering it.
It was built between 1406 and 1420 and has almost a thousand rooms. It is on
the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage
List as the world’s largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures.
A million people worked on the site. The Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the
Manchu Qing Dynasty in 1644 and the new dynasty retained the Forbidden City
as the seat
of imperial power.
The Qing Dynasty collapsed in October 1911 and China fell into even
more chaos as republican warlords sought to gain control. Japan exploited the
conflicts
in China and invaded in the late 1920s. In the 1930s there were different wars
underway: Nationalists (commanded by Chiang Kai-shek) versus Communists (commanded
by Mao Zedong) and both of these against the Japanese. The Japanese war blended
into World War II. After World War II ended in August 1945, the Nationalists
and Communists prepared for their final show down. The Nationalists were driven
off the mainland to Taiwan in 1949.
On October 1, 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic
of China. He did this in Tiananmen Square (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”),
the vast plaza just in front of the Forbidden City.
A few days earlier, on September 21, Chairman Mao in Beijing used one of the
most important phrases in his career – and in modern China. He said that
the “Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood
up”.
He warned the rest of the world that “The era is which the Chinese people
were regarded as uncivilized is now ended. We shall emerge in the world as a
nation with an advanced culture”.
China still had many crises to overcome, not least those created by him, such
as the failure of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the disastrous
Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. His Communist successors were responsible for
1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. But the Beijing Olympic Games are
part of the overall pledge to show that China has indeed stood up. It is back
in business. The Great Wall of China has become the Great Mall.
–––8.19.08
Beware ego - centrism
“...Recent experimental work by the psychologist
Sven Vanneste and the
legal scholar Ben Depoorter helps explain why. When something you own is
necessary
to the success of a venture, even if its contribution is small, you’ll
tend to ask for an amount close to the full value of the venture. And since everyone
in your position also thinks he deserves a big sum. the venture quickly becomes
unviable. So the next time
we begin handing out ownership rights – whether via patents or copyright
or privatization schemes – we’d better try to weigh all the good
things that won’t happen as a result. Otherwise, we won’t know what
we’ve been missing.
From The New Yorker, Aug.11-18, p34, by James Surowiecki, concluding an article
headed “THE FINANCIAL PAGE THE PERMISSION PROBLEM.”
––––
Stubborn Consistency nixed
“... Mr. Obama’s flip-flop on public
finance is certainly cynical (and his willingness to justify it as an act
of high principle even more so.)
But polls suggest that Americans are happy with a certain amount of flip-flopping: Mr
Bush has all but destroyed the market in stubborn consistency. And Mr.
Obama’s
hard-edged cynicism also helps to quell one of the biggest doubts about his candidacy – that
he is too naive and soft-minded to hold the most powerful job in the world.”
That’s from The Economist of July 12, p44.
––––
100% approval rate steady
“The latest poll shows your approval rating holding steady at a hundred
percent.”
A brutal tyrant’s clown tells the pleased tyrant the above in quotes, in
a New Yorker desk calender cartoon for today, Aug.18
––––8.18.08
“NEWS ANALYSIS”
Starting at the top of page one of the NYT of August 16:
“ No Cold War,
But Big Chill
“U.S. and Russia Face / New Era of Enmity
"
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
“CRAWFORD, Tex. – ‘The Cold War is over,’ President Bush
declared Friday, but a new era of enmity between the United States and Russia
has emerged nevertheless. It may not be as intense as the nuclear standoff
with the Soviet Union, for now, but it could become as strained.
“Russia’s military offensive into Georgia has shattered, perhaps
irrevocably, the strategy of three successive presidential administrations
to coax Russia into alliance with the West and integration with its institutions.
“From Russia’s point of view, those
efforts were never truly sincere or respectful of its own legitimate security
interests. Those interests, it
is now clear, are at odds with the United States. ...’”
O.K. Of course the plan to establish a listening post into Russia in Poland
is hamfisted and a sure killer of any strategy to create a warless world.
Above all, the question about getting countries
with different histories and interests into a sustainable pact for the creation
of a governed world is far
trickier than the magic words world government might be to some, especially
at a time when world political unity drifts around in the fogs of befuddled
and befuddling leaders.
Still, humanity’s warlike nature is no reason not to put full steam
into the only sure or unsure alternative to what accrues now anew.
–––
A trigger needed for world process
From: “Klaus Schlichtmann” <kschlichtmann@hotmail.com
August 15
...In Kofi Annan’s 2004 Report – (A more secure world: Our shared
responsibility. Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change)– I
found the document to contain the term "collective security" no less
than 107 times. The former UN Secretary General: "The United Nations was
never intended to be a utopian exercise. It was meant to be a collective security
system that worked." (p. 4, online edition)
The fact is of course that so far the system has not been put into effect
by the states who are members of the United Nations. But what exactly does "collective
security" mean? Does anybody have a clear conception? And why has it
not been put into effect? Of course one thing is certain (and everyone knows
it,
though some may want to deny the fact), i.e. that it is meant to enable nation
states to disarm, and replace the existing system, in which each nation has
to fend for itself, with a reliable system under United Nations auspices
If collective security is seen as a step by step plan toward world government,
it becomes obvious why it has not yet been put into practice. It would inevitably
involve lawmakers to delegate powers to the United Nations or agree to limitations
of their national sovereignty in favor of the international organization.
Although bringing about some kind of limited democratic world federal government
in
this way would relieve nation-states of their responsibility to take the
matter of peace and security into their own hands—anyway a costly undertaking
by any account—individual nations are reluctant to take the first step,
arguing that there has to be a consensus first, and not trusting each other
that if one were to take the first step, other nations would follow suit. And why would they?
Even if one assumes that there is a binding commitment under ius
cogens and
erga omnes rules of international law, which all nations have subscribed
to, it is not clear who, i.e. which country, could effectively trigger a
process
involving the ius cogens rule of reciprocal action (which is the same as
the principle of sovereign equality). It seems that the permanent members
are not
qualified; it would have to be a country that is not a permanent member of
the Security Council that renounces war and its military and delegates the
responsibility for its national security "by law" to the Council. (If one of the permanent members were to take action, this would be like delegating
powers to itself—quite an impossible act to consider.)
The problem has historical implications, since the development of the idea
of collective security and its implementation has happened only quite recently.
It was only after the First World War that collective security came to replace
the system of the balance of power in which both sides had to be armed to
the teeth and thereby be able to ensure their security—or so it was
thought. However, collective security did not work in the League of Nations,
because
it lacked real power, and could not prevent World War II.
This was in spite of the fact that at The Hague the major powers had already
been prepared and agreed to take far-reaching measures toward replacing the
institution of war with an international court with binding powers that would
create an obligation to resolve international disputes peacefully, in a civilized
manner. When this was vetoed by some European power—in spite of the Americans
and others trying to push through a majority vote at the Second Hague Peace
Conference in 1907—it was conceived that the planned Third Hague Peace
Conference in 1914 would establish the principle of binding international
jurisdiction by a majority vote. But that was not all. In 1911 the idea of
collective security
had been born in the form of an executive consisting of the combined navies
of the major powers to police the world, which was also to be on the agenda
for the Third Hague Conference. This was something that those who had vetoed
the project of binding international jurisdiction were prepared not to let
happen.
Some – or most – academics might
seem to advocate that world-government, unlike national governments, can’t
exist because world-government's enforceable
laws couldn’t have first (or any) really qualified sponsors.
This is a shame on all people who might seem to
argue that war (and the elimination of our species of life) is our fate.
Maybe it will be. But if so, let us all, before an allout
nuclear war, take note of its rationale.
–––
Not World Governmental Yet
From: “Drew J. Asson <dasson@ globalsolutions.org>
August
15
Support our Global Candidates - Round 1
Over the coming weeks, we're going to tell you
about several candidates who want to address global problems with cooperation
instead of a go-it-alone attitude. These candidates have won our endorsement
through their words and actions and we want to work with them in Congress come
January. In each email, we're going to highlight a Senate challenger, a
House challenger and a House incumbent.
Coming off the Colorado primaries on Tuesday,
we're kicking off this list with Mark Udall, a Global Leader
in the House for ten years, who's running for Senate
in Colorado. He's got a very tough race against a "U.S. out of the
U.N." former Congressman. On the House side, we have a great Northern
California challenger, Dr. Bill Durston, who's running against
incumbent Dan
Lungren (CA-03). Durston gave us a great questionnaire and his background
as a physician and veteran stands strong against the D+ that Rep. Lungren earned
on our Report Card. Closing out this group of three is Rep. Gabrielle
Giffords (AZ-08), a freshman Congresswoman. We supported
her in her first run in
2006 and have never looked back. She sits on the prestigious Foreign Affairs
committee in the House and we'd like to send her back for a second term.
We've set up our own web page to ensure that every dollar
you contribute to these three leaders sends a loud and clear message that Americans
want to work together with friends and allies to meet the most pressing challenges
of our day -- not
turn our backs on the world or press forward with a "my way or the highway" approach.
These candidates want to ensure that the U.S. is not just a superpower, but a
super-partner -- and they need our help.
Citizens for Global Solutions 418 7th St SE Washington DC 20003 Tel:
202-546-3950
Web: globalsolutions.org
––––8.17.08
Knock it off now!
Not unlike bullies
in a schoolyard,
Russia & the
U.S.
square off
to avoid fighting
(and
let all sentient people pray!).
Here’re the facts, as reported yesterday
(August 15) in the NYT (New York Times), page one,
above the fold, far right.:
“U.S. AND POLAND / SET MISSILE DEAL Russia Angered by Pact / on Defensive
Base By TOM SHANKER and NICHOLAS KULISH
“WASHINGTON – The United States and Poland reached a long-stalled
deal on Thursday to place an American missile defense base on Polish territory,
in the strongest reaction so far to Russia’s military operation in Georgia.
...”
What an understandable but absurd shame on the governments
of both countries, ours and theirs, that both stand playing a game of Tit-for-Tat
that must scare
the holy bejabers of all people. The nuclear war both countries could start
for
all people should be terminated – IMMEDIATELY!, as they say in diplomacy.
This comic, terribly sad, terribly lethal, inevitable consequence of the
world’s
anarchy among nations has reached a stage that must signal to informed people
that we must join now in a giant yell to our balancing-power leaders, “ENOUGH
ALREADY!”
–
Here’s what Paul Krugman had to be summarized, page 3, about all this,
often called nationalism. Following that are last words of his op-ed.
“Our great, great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale
international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism. Will the
second great age of globalization share the same fate as the first? PAGE A17”.
“...Shortly before WWI a ...British author, Norman Angell, published a
famous book titled ‘The Great Illusion’ in which he argued that war
had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors
lose far more than they gain. He was right – but wars kept on happening
anyway. ...
“Angell was right to describe the belief that conquest pays as a great
illusion. But the belief that the rationality always prevents war is an equally
great illusion. And today’s high degree of global economic interdependence,
which can be sustained only if all major governments act sensibly, is more fragile
than we imagine.”
–––– 8.16.08
OIL & WAR
(No Plan B)
Excerpts from an NYT news story August 14 and from the lead editorial yesterday,
in this WPN’s opinion, can go to illustrate the peril to all people in
our world of decision-making according to Balance-of-Power conditions as set
forth judgmentally in Europe in 1648 in the Treaty of Westphalia after a long
war.
From the NYT editorial August 14:
“...
Europe and the United States must make clear to Mr. Medvedev – and the
real power player, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin – that more aggression
and lies will not be tolerated. ...Mr. Bush has finally decided to send Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi. In addition to conveying support for Georgia’s
democracy, she must leave no doubt that there can be no military solution to
the dispute with Russia – and that American military planes and ships now
heading for Georgia are to deliver humanitarian supplies...
“...President Bush wanted to play all sides – flattering Georgia’s
president, Mikheil Saakashvili, as Mr Saakashvili baited Moscow and looking the
other way as Mr. Putin bullied his neighbors. ... Washington and Europe must
press the United Nations Security Council to quickly authorize more peacekeepers.
...”
The NYT uses well more than the top half of its page
10 August 14 for news, photos and a map emphasizing Russia & companies’ BTC
oil pipeline cutting across south Georgia, northern Armenia, and Turkey from
the Caspian Sea to its
West-serving port at Ceyhan – from Baku on the east to its western terminal
bordering on western Syria.
Excerpts here next include headlines, the first and last
three paragraphs, etc.:
Top words
“CLASH IN GEORGIA: Politics
and Energy” head the coverage.
“Conflict Narrows Oil Options For West -
“
Region’s Volatility Limits Pipeline Plans
“By
JAD MOUAWAD
“When the main pipeline that carries oil through Georgia was completed
in 2005, it was hailed as a major success in the United States policy to diversify
its energy supply. Not only did the pipeline transport oil produced in Central
Asia, helping move the West away from its dependence on the Middle East, but
it also accomplished another American goal: it bypassed Russia...
“‘...For the Europeans, the Ukraine gas crisis was like a snooze
alarm,’ said Frank A. Verrastro, the director of the energy and national
security program at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington.
“But Mr. Verrastro, a former senior executive with
Pennzoil, said it would
be very hard now to build a new western pipeline.
“‘We got BTC because there was a confluence of commercial and diplomatic
interests’ he said. ‘But the United States didn’t learn the
right lessons. They thought that all you had to do was lean on these countries
and a new pipeline would happen. But that was an abject failure.’
“He added: ‘There is a shift happening in the marketplace. We need
a Plan B. But we don’t have a Plan B.’”
––––
From: dwfed@dwfed.org
Join the Democratic World Federalists for the International Day of Peace
August
13
What: 10th Annual Run for Peace
When: September 21st, 9:00 a.m.
Where: Berkeley's Cesar Chavez Park
Dear DWF Supporters,
On September 21st people of all faiths, races, and heritages will take time out
of their daily routines or chaotic lives to come together and recognize a common
desire – the desire for Peace. Communities will plant trees, children
will make thousands of pinwheels representing "whirled" peace," musicians
will host concerts, and people in all different countries will come together
in solidarity, spending a moment together in silence.
The Democratic World Federalists will be co-sponsoring the 10th Annual Run for
Peace on September 21st at 9:00 a.m. The run will begin in Berkeley's Cesar
Chavez Park and will travel along the marina. If you are not able to run,
you may walk or even stay in Cesar Chavez Park to enjoy the food, drinks, and
music, as well as mingle with peace and justice advocates working in the Bay
Area.
Last year, the participants of this run collectively raised over $10,000
which was all given to the sponsoring organizations so that they could continue
their work for peace. This year, we are once again asking DWF supporters
to make pledges, both to commemorate such an important global holiday as well
as to provide us with the funds necessary to strengthen our programs and boost
our presence around the world.
The International Day of Peace was established by a United Nations Resolution
in 1981. Let us come together on this day to advance the ideals put forth
by the UN and speak out about the true necessity for peace, a system of global
governance. All that hope for peace should one day be able to play an active
role in achieving it.
For more information or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact
our office. You may also visit the website for Run for Peace, www.run4peace.com. This
site provides you with information about how to fundraise to meet your pledge
and allows you to set up an account through which friends and family can make
online donations. If you cannot attend, you can still give a donation on-line.
We look forward to seeing you!
Sincerely,
Kathleen
Bernock
Program and Administrative Officer
DEMOCRATIC WORLD FEDERALISTS
Working for a Democratic World Federation
55 New Montgomery St. #225, San Francisco, CA 94105-3421
Phone & Fax: 1-415-227-4880
www.dwfed.org
World Peace with Justice through Democratically Enacted & Enforceable World
Law
Mankind's desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government.
-Albert
Einstein
––––8.15.08
Yes.
Questions: Doesn’t the above-the-fold news story by Nina Bernstein in
the Aug.13 bellwether NYT newspaper – and the Quotation of the Day, and,
despite the lousy sense criticized by Thomas L.Friedman in his op-ed’ – illustrate
the notion that our U.S.of A. is getting well over our superdooper, sophomoric
fix on our super state of nationalism?
The 1-column, page one, headline: “Ill and in Pain / Detainee Dies / In
U.S. Hands.“.
The Quotation of the Day: “The tanks should go. I hope they will.” MIKHEIL
SAAKASHVILI, the president of Georgia, after reaching an agreement with Russia
that could end their conflict [A1]”
The op-ed – and the three editorial summaries, as follow here:
THE EDITORIALS
An Endangered Act
The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most environmental
laws or its ambitions to thwart Congress’s will. Now in its waning months,
it is trying to undermine the Endangered Species act. PAGE A20
Mr.Mukasey in Denial
On Tuesday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey described the shameful politicization
of the Justice Department as a “painful” episode in which “the
system failed.” He conveniently made no mention of the role played by members
of President Bush’s inner circle. PAGE 20
Day Laborers and Home Depot
Los Angeles’s proposed ordinance to require more orderly hiring sites for
day
laborers is a small measure that makes a huge amount of sense. PAGE A20
OP-ED
Thomas L. Friedman
On July 30, the Senate voted for the eighth time in the last year on a bill that
would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and
the production tax credits for building wind turbines. But a core of Republican
senators who either don’t want to give Democrats a victory or simply don’t
believe in renewable energy won’t approve the bill. PAGE A21
––––8.14.08
Law can kill
But all our lives need law
because world law is central to a new &
a viable world federation able to outlaw nuclear war.
So?
So above the page-one NYT Science
Times fold of yesterday’s (Aug.12) edition
appears a long “Handle With Care” item with the following, cautious
textbreaker: “‘Geoengineering’ might head off planetary disaster.
But at what cost? And who gets to make the decisions?’”
(World Peace News- a World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org, would have
written that textbreaker to end with this sentence: “And how do all people
get to create an adequate and dependable world political unity?” But let
that pass.)
The second and vital NYT paragraph speculates about what could be done that “might
be useful, even life-saving.
“But it (whatever it might turn out to be) inevitably would produce environmental
effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo.”
But, yet again, even if “inevitably” is probably apt here, so what?
Isn’t it in line for “science” to go ahead – with the
utmost care – not to create the kind of horror that now grows out of the
making of atomic, now called nuclear, bombs? Would we all be better off without
ultimate war weapons? Or is it essential for humanity to understand fully that
now we all are at grave risk of abolishing ourselves and we must, therefor, take
alarm and fix our human condition intelligently?
On its jump page 4, the NYT item gives no pat answers, as follows:
...Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article
in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies
were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common
for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of
our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result,
he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling
21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology – pose
a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful
they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
But in an essay in the journal Nature last year Mary Warnock, a philosopher who
led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s
first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated
scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find
repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which
technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to
have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for
good.”
In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology
studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was
for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty,
ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”
In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers
to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in
expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including
history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science – and
what people value and why they value it.
Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do
we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill
by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There
are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as
important.
“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”
––––8.13.08
“ Pollster Sees Rosier Tomorrow
“
In ‘The Way We’ll be,’ John Zogby, whose polling firm, Zogby
International, has been uncommonly accurate in its predictions, does not press
his luck with political fortune-telling, Janet Maslin writes. He concentrates
on what he sees as tectonic shifts in American attitudes – tomorrow’s
American majority will be less materialistic, more practical and more linked
to the rest of the world – and argues that the importance of these changes
has not been adequately understood. PAGE E6”
“ QUOTATION OF THE DAY
“We need large supplies of humanitarian aid, because we have thousands
of wounded. And weapons. We need weapons. We are not going to surrender.”
“SHOTA UTIASHVILI,
“ a Georgian interior ministry official, on warfare raging in the Caucasus.
[A11]”
NYT, August 11, pA3
–
Big Words
“ William Kristol
“ Will the United States put any real pressure on Russia to stop its war
against Georgia? History suggests there are big risks if it does not. PAGE A17”
World Peace News - a World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org,
says that we of the U.S. will be damned for whatever we do or don’t do about war driven
by self-interested anarchy among each other’s national governments.
So wouldn’t it be smart to do what each and almost
every nation might have done forcefully long before the invention of nuclear
and other dumb
war weaponry
centuries ago?
And what’s that peace thing smart for all nations
to spring into now before we all lose ability to spring into anything anew?
Hey! By now all our beset leaders might know good answers
but feel no dynamic behind even thinking about the possibility of outlawing war
world governmentally.
But what has been done frequently about outlawing civil war is old and unexceptionable
hat.
–––– 8.12.08
What must happen
“In a Changing World, an Ever-Evolving Terrorism
“When the Barbary pirates were in their prime, they were paid homage and
protection money by every major shipping nation. In the 17th and 18th centuries
these northern African corsairs, many of whom traced their ancestry to the Muslims
expelled from Spain, seized privately owned ships, demanding ransom, selling
captives into slavery and compelling conversions to Islam.
“By 1794, after the pirates decided that the United States was worthy of
attention, they had captured 11 American ships and held 119 hostages. As president,
John Adams authorized payment of tribute; by 1800, $2 million had been paid.
When Thomas Jefferson succeeded Adams, he pursued a more successful course of
confrontation. ...”
That’s the beginning of a review of Terror
and Consent, The Wars for the
Twenty-First Century, by Philip Bobbitt, 672 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35, in
the NYT, May 9, pE38, 4-column headline.
The book reviewer is Edward Rothstein. He quotes
the book’s author Bobbitt near the end of the review, as writing:
“‘As long as we continue to think
in twentieth century, nation-state terms, we will not be able to develop doctrines
and capabilities’ appropriate
for new threats.”
O.K. Right. All people have new threats. So we all
should change our thinking
to fit 21st century terms. So what’s bigger now in fighting terrorism than
the overriding fact of nuclear weapons on the ready-for-use globally?
Isn’t the first fact staring at us human beans that the use of nukes triggered
by the first dummy nation-state guilty could start the end of everything in our
human-bean, nation-state muddle-puddle? Not a single human bean among us should
want our human dominance over everything to end plop! Right? So let’s everyone
apprise everyone else of our first need to create a world political unity that
could outlaw war, no-kidding around the mulberry-or-any-other bush.
–––– 8.11.08
The China Olympics
comes about happily!
“One World, one Dream!”
In fact, yesterday’s page-one lighted globe of
a 6-column banner, with
the words ”China in a New Light, “ at the top, with NYT Chang W.
Lee’s half-page photo arrived with this splendid world-governmental photo’s
allusion:
“
A giant lighted globe with performers atop it was one highlight of Friday night’s
opening ceremony of the Beijing Games, whose theme is One World, One Dream.”
––––
From: John Roberts jrmundialist@btinternet.com
On the road to world government
August 8
Hi !
Thanks for your last (WPN) issue. The following was
provoked by one or two things in it.
WCL589 (Meaning,over the years, essay #589)
In 1945 the shocks of war and above all, the initial use of an atom bomb, led
to much heart-searching. Many people, aided by pioneers like HGWells , Edith
Wynner and others, committed themselves to the sole road to peace - a united
world. Edith and Georgia Lloyd compiled a classic work "Choose your road
to world government", which offered alternatives for the route. Regrettably,
some of those who made a choice also decided that there was only one route and
refused to recognize the validity of alternatives.
A few are still peddling the same nostrum, some either
a constitutional convention a' l'americainer, a fully-fledged global constitution
or only the reform of
the United Nations. Nothing else would do. In 1945 the slogan "world government
is the only answer" was
understandable: I used to repeat it. But in the 21st century we should have
realised that is insufficient. We have to reassess where we are, why we still
do not have
world government, what progress, if any, has been achieved and what still has
to be done.
In some ways we are further from a united world than
in 1945 but in most ways we are much nearer. The infra-structure that hardly
existed then has been very greatly supplemented since. Among the most notable landmarks and developments I list the ten following:
1. The founding of the United Nations imperfect and delusory as it has often
been.
2. The international tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo and the trials
of Axis war leaders.
3. The huge consequent advances in international law, notably the attrition
of national sovereignty, despite fundamental flaws in enforcement .
4. The adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and subsequent binding legal conventions.
5. The establishment of the European Court of Human Rights and its effective
working for over 50 years.
6. The adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1977 reforming rules for treatment
of prisoners.
7. The establishment of the International Criminal Court at the Hague and the
first trials of war criminals there.
8. The experience of European Union, as a first model of a working proto-federation
of nation-states
9. Growth of global civil society, with organizations such as Amnesty International,
Greenpeace, etc.
10. A world citizen movement and contemporary growth of huge numbers of still
unavowed world citizens, with extensive study of global political needs.
In these circumstances it is preposterous that anyone can still discuss routes
to world government as if we were still immured in 1945.
–
So, John, friend and colleague, isn’t it preposterous to warn that any
sentient, East or West, North or South, isn’t aware of the difficulties
of the “ten notable landmarks,” as they qualify any route to world
government? Whom do we seek to warn on the point of mental retardation? Surely
those like us in London and New York, touters of the cogent Wynner-Lloyd treatise
of post WWII, aren’t guilty as intimated.
Isn’t our specific advice
to base any proposed “route” to world
government on a careful understanding of the routes that our more than 200
national governments already
try and have tried? Of course we are all still stuck in a deadly anarchy among
nations. But isn’t that not because we don’t
get the facts of our human default and damnable complacency but, quite the reverse,
because we don’t want to bother with the immense difficulties of what
we often correctly take as our own peril? In fine, we of the thinking classes
are
too mentally fat, dumb, happy and busy-busy to be bothered?
–––– 8.10.08
Nice is not good enough?
“‘The Summit is a nice event, but will the union find an independent
life?’ a senior diplomat from a southern country said. ‘Sarkozy’s
original idea was bold, but there’s not much of it left.”’
That’s the last paragraph of an NYT news item, “Sarkozy Helps to
Bring Syria Out of Isolation”, 3-column, pA10, July 14.
The complete WPN purpose in dredging up the lines in
quotes above is to grab at an illustration of what is widely regarded as the
mandated but futile diplomatic
approach to give sustainable life to an appropriate worldwide diplomacy.
So what might be thought of as creating a useful role
for diplomacy at a time when world diplomatic efforts fail routinely and across
the global diplomatic
board?
How about a massive all-people effort to create a viable
context for the diplomacy required to create a governed
world that could and
would lead to the structuring
of a viable world system for decision-making?
In this connection, let us consider Einstein’s
last written words:
“..Not one statesman in a position of responsibility
has dared to pursue the only course that holds out any promise of peace, the
course of supranational
security, since for a statesman to follow such a course would be tantamount to
political suicide. Political passions, once they have been fanned into flame,
exact their victims...”
–––– 8.9.08
The yammer was on
What yammer? We of the world’s human-bean public know nothing about a yammer
put on by us – before, after or during the Cold War – on the issue,
say, of the idiocy of a WWIII with “
ultimate” war weaponry! We have no memory of such a collective absurdity.
Of course not. Memory does languish concerning a massive change in human thinking
concerning our collective forgetting about the Doctor Strangelove addiction to
the all-out use of nuclear
weaponry in a new world war. Ever since donnybrooks on the Cold War idiocy of
the war v. peace thing, people named as heads-of-state, etc., in the world business
of our 200-or-so free-and-equal-national-sovereignties even mention publicly
the loud public yammer about the inevitably dumb use of nukes in all-out war.
OK. So the Cold War yammer against mentioning the
idiocy in publicly reported “news” has had the good effect of concentrating
our collective human intelligence on the strategies and tactical child’s
play of balance-of-power proxy wars with conventional weaponry. That’s
supposed to ease our angst?
Like it or not, it does ease our angst to the extent of our increased comfort
in happying on back to sports, movies, economics, jobs, health, education and
other plights and legitimate imperatives. Of course our current collective mindsets
still most often regard serious debates about the creation of a sanely governed
world as off any screen of our need to deal with problems pushing us to the abyss
of unsustainability. It takes an obtuse human these days of instant everything
to disregard how our comforts, drives and felt needs can splay the way of our
survival as human beans.
–––– 8.8.08
Ideals drive us?
No. Not red-bloody likely any more. We human beans are driven by our imperatives
to deal with our environments. First they push us this way. Then our environments
raise gollies with us but never for not having formed a world political structure
up to providing security for every one of us as equal members of a world community
able to grab at the willies of not continuing on into the abyss that now yappers
between our drives and the messy facts of our tiny lives. Because, all human
beans together, we blink anew at our alternative of joining in highly coordinated
action for a sanely governed world OR our last hurrah in you know what in the
kind of stuff that we and our itsy media shove at us bundled daily like odd or
almost funny amusements.
–––– 8.7.08
GATHERING OF EAGLES
CLASH AGAINST VfP # 21
The following, addressed to Veterans for Peace
Chapter 34 in New York City, was posted as an e-mail August 1, from Frank
Stearns, vfp034nyc@yahoo.com,
as
follows:
Chapter 21 needs our support
Dear VFP 021 Members and Friends
Once again the Gathering of Eagles were present at
our Wednesday night vigil in Teaneck, N.J. There
were a couple more of them this time who were a bit more aggressive with their
anti American rhetoric. We handled them correctly
and the Teaneck, New Jersey Police assigned to a small spot on our side of
the street, which we all viewed as a victory for our side. Nevertheless,
they seem to be getting more aggressive and I believe that as the election
gets
closer, this pattern will continue to grow. They know the republican
goose is cooked and they’re going to try everything they can to change
that fact.
There is something you can do! You can challenge these right wing thugs just
by being there and supporting our vigil or any other vigil where the G.O.E.
appears.
What is the time and place of the Teaneck Vigil? Teaneck Road and Liberty street
in Teaneck, N.J. in front of the Teaneck Armory. EVERY Wednesday 4:30 pm to
6:00 pm, rain or shine.
Is public transportation available? Yes, public transportation is available.
Just go to www.njtransit for more information.
The above is signed by
Ken Dalton,President
Alan Reilly-Gene Glazer Chapter-21
Veterans for Peace, New Jersey
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Starting up at the end of 1970, World Peace News- a
World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org, was
followed much later by the founding of Veterans for Peace. (See
back issues of the tabloid.)
VfP boomed but it never did take up on WPN’s
emphasis on the creation of world peace requiring what the creation of any
government requires, the
creation of a world government that could and would create a governed world
under duly ratified and enforceable world law. That’s not irrelevant
to the asserted need to create world peace. Regardless, it strikes WPN as vital
for all peace people to consider the effect of the ritual Gathering of Eagles
in Teaneck, New Jersey.
This is not to question the wisdom of everyone’s freedom to talk and
gather freely, of course. But when demonization of one group by another seems
to be hinted, society’s welfare should kick in along with a lawful concern
of citizens at large.
––––
From: jackloel@yahoo.com
August
5
Crisis Looms as Corporations Seize Control of Commodities
By
Barbara L. Minton
03/08/08 “NaturalNews” - The global food crisis
won’t go away
any time soon. Capitalism has the average consumer by the belly. Amid
growing signs of famine and outrage, the entire chain of commodities and resources
of
the world are now being cornered by giant corporations. Farmland, water,
fertilizer, seed, energy, and most of the basic necessities of life are falling
under corporate control, providing increased wealth and power to the ruling elite
while the rest
of humanity struggles.
Commodity scarcity in India was recently reflected in
the need to distribute
fertilizer from the police station in Hingoli. Now police have to control
the
lines that form outside of dealer outlets, because the dealers won’t open
for business otherwise. Without this intervention there would be no fertilizer
for the planting that must take place before the rain comes. In Akola and
Nanded,
police involvement is also needed. Agriculture officers have fled their
work
places to escape angry farmers. In Karnataka, a farmer was shot dead during
protests,
while farmers stormed meetings and set up road blocks in other districts.
Despite the success of the genetically engineered Bt
cotton crops, the trend in India is now back to soy beans because they cost less
to grow and need less
fertilizer than cotton. ...
...And then there’s oil. To produce chemical
fertilizer you must make use
of fossil fuel. So rising oil prices and rising food prices are joined
at the hip. The behavior of corporations in the oil business has been so egregious
that
there is talk of a windfall profits tax here and abroad.
No, the food crisis will not go away anytime soon. North
Korea, Burma and Western Sudan are currently feeling a real threat of starvation
while western governments manipulated by corporations continue to promote the
diversion of food into biofuels to further exacerbate the upward movement in
food prices. Almost all U.S. corn production between 2004 and 2007 has
gone into the production of ethanol. European production of ethanol has
more than tripled during the same period. This has led to a fall off in grains
relative to overall demand which is not a market phenomenon but is the direct
result of the government sponsored, corporate backed
programs. This comes at the expense of people looking for something to
eat, particularly
the world’s poor who are now effectively priced out of the food market.
Barbara is a school psychologist, a published author
in the area of personal
finance, a breast cancer survivor using “alternative’ treatments,
a born existentialist, and a student of nature and all things natural.
Natural News Network.
Above are the opening and close of an email Aug.
5.
–––8.6.08
New drive unfolds
...In the 4/08 issue of WPN I especially noted the article “World Citizens
Galore” (p.3), reminding us that the first declared world citizen might
have been Socrates. Barack Obama, I also noted recently, has been speaking of
people everywhere as “citizens of the world.”
I have been attempting to respond in some meaningful manner to a few recent,
urgent problems, e.g. increasing shortages of and high prices for food. As is
well known, these shortages and higher prices have been affecting people in the
Majority World (formerly referred to as the Third World) the most, because they
are already living so precariously, on the edge of the abyss of starvation and
death. A second world problem that has been of great concern is the state of
our oceans. Not only are the oceans warming, and coral reefs dying for various
reasons, but there are actually Sargasso sea like dead spots where little lives
except for jellyfish, algae and other primitive creatures. These dead spots are
off the coast of various countries and are caused primarily by pollution. In
addition, stocks of fish worldwide are declining precipitously due to pollution
and over fishing.
In writing letters attempting to respond to these concerns, I have recently felt
inspired to sign my name not only as Gregory Alexander, citizen of the USA, but
as Gregory Alexander, World Citizen. (I know this has been done and is being
done by others). And in doing so, and signing my letters as a world citizen,
I’ve realized that I’m not acting alone, but with the implicit support
of other world citizens. So I’ve felt inspired to create a new organization
called the World Citizens Action Alliance. This organization would be a membership
organization but with no hierarchy: completely egalitarian. There would be no
membership dues. Simply, a web site that I would maintain (I’m in the process
of creating it with the help of my sons) and, in due course, a blog written by
me with suggestions for action, helpful information, etc., and a membership list
of world citizens (freely available on the web) site) committed to take action.
The goals of the Alliance would be:
1) Increased pressure toward creating a democratic federal
world government in as timely a manner as possible, esp. through the writing
and ratification of
a World Constitution.
2) Increased action in resolving world problems not from
the standpoint of national sovereignty but from the supranational view of an
interdependent world.
3) Implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to secure those
rights, many of which are being trampled on today, and which prominently include
the right to the “the realization...{of} international cooperation,” adequate
standards of living and medical care. These strongly imply rights to a
healthy
and non-polluted environment.
4) Use of the membership base, available to all members,
as supports for their
advocacy of the above.
Requirements for membership would be simple:
* Identification of self as a world citizen
* Willingness to take a minimum of 3 actions a year in support of that added
identity. Examples would include active membership in a host of NGO’s and
charitable organizations, world-government organizations, letter writing advocacy,
and fundraising for such endeavors, etc. Members could use the membership
base, which I am volunteering to keep track of through e-mail, in any of these
efforts.
* Communication to me via e-mail of willingness to join
the alliance.
Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone
is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms
set forth in this declaration can be fully realized.” Personally,
I believe that only a democratic federal world government will be able to help
us realize
these rights and freedoms. The World Citizens Action Alliance would be
a step
toward the manifestation of these necessities for global survival.
Gregory Alexander
World Citizen
gregworldcitizen@yahoo.com
40 Marion Ave.
Stony Brook,N.Y. 11790
(631) 689-3022
Bravo. World Peace News - a World Government
Report, worldpeacenews.org,
has
supported the creation globally of such world-government advocacies. We plan
to continue along that vital line. Plans and understandings outlined above strike
WPN as unexceptionable, except for a passing, tangental caveat, not at all applicable
to Alexander’s and his fine family’s splendid world-advocacy purposes.
In recent world events, the words world citizens and world peace have been
rudely, incorrectly and distractingly used to ride piggyback on the usual sense
of the
noble words.
Words used in the letter above clearly imply that the
existence of a living world citizen premises the coming existence of a world
government for a world citizen
to become a citizen of.
That basic, simple fact wouldn’t be of much account had it not been connected
to the frequent advocacy effort to avoid the many civic burdens of the letter’s
counter advocacy. The toxic advocacy still dominant, for instance, entails the
non-governmental principles of the League’s covenant and the U.N. Charter’s
non-governmental principle at issue mainly. Those principles remain basic. They
reject the without-which-nothing of a governed world democracy. The hard reality
for all people these days is that peace still requires the appropriate existence
of an honestly ratified government able to outlaw war. World peace requires world
government. Anything less up front and clearly emphasized reveals advocacy
as
poorly unrefrigerated sausage.
So it is a great comfort for WPN to express support of Greg Alexander’s
new advocacy outline. Let there be full-speed-ahead for the creation of a world
peaceful in enforceable world law responsible to all people as world citizens – specifics
to be worked out in honestly reported conference of appointed diplomats representing
in bloc all nations.
What if their work is voted down? Try again, and again,
and again. Keep trying until a duly ratified world constitution
is duly ratified – and set in motion.
–––– 8.5.08
A lone Pidge in an unGoverned World
--Original Message-----
From: Des [mailto: budgie_butts@yahoo.com]
August 1
To: planefun@cox.net
Question about your site
Hello. My name is Des. I saw you had a section on Thomas Liggett
and that he's the author of the book Pigeon Fly Home. I found out this is
the book the Disney movie the Pigeon that Worked a Miracle is based on. That
movie made an impact on my life as a kid and I hope I can track down the book
and read
it.
Do you think you could put me in contact with Mr. Liggett and tell him
that his
story means a lot to me. I always wanted to raise birds and have been fascinated
by flight. I now have my own little flock of pigeons and even one named
Pidge.
I call all of them pidgies. I'd love to know more and if he worked
any with Disney on the movie. Thanks for your time.
Des
H/Sgt Adam (Lewis), of the U.S. Marine Corps, aviation, Santa Barbara (at Goleta)
CA , picked up on Des’s question and responded to it, August 2, and
also
informed Tom Liggett at worldpeacenews.org, email: worldpeacenews@earthlink.net.
Liggett was the author of very earthy Pigeon Fly Home, 1958, Holiday House.
H/Sgt. Adam’s letter to the book author, Capt.
Liggett,
USMCR (ret.), follows
here. With the written approval of the book’s editor, David Greenhood,
now deceased, the author switched writing and flying Yellow Perils, F4Us, SBDs,
etc., during all of WWII, to publishing World Peace News, founded in 1970. The
H/Sgt Adam letter:
“Hi Tom, I hope all is well with you and Sue. (It
is.) And I suppose you
have Tom Roberts’ book on Alex Raymond? I like the way he wrote about Alex’s
( take on VMF 512 out of Goleta, etc.) (WPN has thanked and again is happy to
thank Roberts and H/ Sgt Adam for the lifts they have given to marine aviation
in WWII in many parts of the south and middle-western Pacific.) The message (from
Des) came to me Friday. It’s from ‘Des’ and it’s about
Pigeon Fly Home. I’m sure he would be thrilled to get a word or two from
you... (He will and this from WPN is it in all hearty thanks – to all these
guys picking up on Pigeon Fly Home and its tie-in with World Peace News - a World
Government Report, worldpeacenews.org. It gives me a feeling of togetherness
with the legions of people worldwide who get the connection between life on earth
as it is and might still become.)
That above is the start of my friendly response to H/Sgt Adams for advice to
write a word or two to Des among the other good guys I have had the pleasure
of hearing about.
It was a painful truth for me for me when Disney kindly invited me to see their
rushes of The Pigeon That Worked ... In the book the racing pigeon Coffee dies
at the beak and claws of an attacking hawk. Making the film of the flight hazards
faced by the racing pigeons dealt with death as the inevitable end of life. Use
life with that in mind in order to polish your own reputation of yourself. That
advice is not meant to be sad or despairing of the gritty facts. Disney film-makers
told me that filming the difficult fight and death scenes cost filmmakers the
lives of about 20 lead pigeons in aerial fight scenes at odds with hungry hawks,
etc.
––––8.4.08
“The Next Step for World Trade
“The breakdown of the Doha round
of trade negotiations over a clash between the United States and China and
India about farm protections
underscores how these new economic giants are changing the balance of power. PAGE A14”
That’s the NYT summary #1 of its editorial news-summary roundup as
it appears
on page A3, August 2.
Balance of power or not and Doha round or not, the next step for all people in
all the 200-or-so politically disunited United Nations might well go to the creation
by enforceable world law of a duly created and appropriately governed world.
This huge and different next step, fully unlike world diplomatic make-do as conducted
now, would have to be taken on the extreme pain for all of humanity’s current
failure to put the governed-world-political imperative first. Why? Because
without a ratified system of law, order and justice in the world nothing,
nothing
meaning
drift of all nations into nuclear WWIII as what comes next.
––––8.3.08
A happy world-government word:
Hear Umano on line
“These numbers grow. We welcomed visitor #20,000 to our site last night. That person came from we don’t know where. He or she joined those who have
doubled our visitor numbers. We’ve played our six compositions more than
8700 times since we uploaded them nearly five months ago. Now we average more
than 400 new visitors a day.
Many of us have traveled the world. We’ve often been the most critical
of society. Therefore we have an obligation to suggest positive solutions. We
offer our views in that spirit. The Umano Foundation and the Umano Orchestra
pay tribute to Umano (pen name of Italian judge Gaetano Meale, 1856-1927), the
source of our humanitarian inspiration. He was far ahead of his time.
Our music is free. Enjoy it.
Thom & Lorry Gambino
The Umano Foundation
The Umano Orchestra
myspace.com/umanoorchestra
–––8.2.08
Afraid to speak up?
“‘I want to tell a better story,’ Laurie Anderson said about
her new work, ‘Homeland,’ which was performed at the Lincoln Center
Festival last week.”
That’s the first line in a review by Edward Rothstein, page one, NYT, E1,
July 29.
The Festival’s director, Nigel Redden, is quoted as sharing “a concern
with Ms.Anderson. In Mr. Redden’s words, both see ‘what war can do
to the soul of a country.’ For it turns out that the taboo of which Ms.
Anderson speaks is the taboo against criticizing the war waged by the current
Bush administration.”
The 5-column title of the review is : “Behold in the Mirror the Brutal
Face of War and Militarism”. The Festival reviewer takes exception: “But
if any such taboos exist, surely they are at least as evident in the breach as
in the observance.”
Are they? Are they not?
It seems here to World Peace News - a World Government
Report, worldpeacenews.org, a lot of important thinking is left for
the show-goer,
as well as for the review-reader,
to puzzle out for ourselves.
Read the review.
Anyway, it seems here, that the most important thing
for everyone seriously concerned had better be to get together with our other
global selves and figure out a sure
political, duly-created structure able and willing to abolish war before it abolishes
us.
–––– 8.1.08
“Low-Road Express Well, that certainly didn’t take long. On July
3, news reports said Senator John McCain, worried that he might lose the election
before it truly started, opened his doors to disciples of Karl Rove from the
2004 campaign and the Bush White House. Less than a month later, the results
are on full display. The candidate who started out talking about high-minded,
civil debate has wholeheartedly adopted Mr. Rove’s low-minded and uncivil
playbook.
“In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has been waving the flag of fear. (Senator
Barack Obama wants to ‘lose’ in Iraq), and issuing attacks that are
sophomoric (suggesting that Mr Obama is a socialist) and false (the presumptive
Democratic nominee turned his back on wounded soldiers).
“Mr. McCain used to pride himself on being above this ugly brand of politics,
which killed his own 2000 presidential bid. But he clearly tossed his inhibitions
aside earlier this month when he put day-to-day management of his campaign in
the hands of one acolyte of Mr. Rove and gave top positions to two others. ...”
The excepted opening words above
from the lead NYT editorial yesterday, July 30, are posted here as a comment
on
what
could become a main topic for decades
in the world movement for a governed world in which war would be outlawed.
––––
Turkey and Europe, a Union of Civilizations?
By
Jan Mortier
The future relationship between Turkey and the European Union has been one of
the most controversial themes in the modern history of the European peace system.
The potential admission of Turkey and its eighty million Muslim people to our
union of five hundred million raises a number of fundamental questions as to
the very nature and purpose of the great European work, its future composition,
functionality, character, direction and destiny.
Since the early 1960s we have envisaged the potential of the inclusion of Turkey
in to the European Union and in 2005 member states started negotiations with
Turkey to that effect, even though these negotiations may take ten to fifteen
years due to the required reforms to bring Turkey to a level acceptable width,
'100%' to the Copenhagen Criteria, by addressing its social problems and by evolving
its legislation. When Turkey does eventually meet the Copenhagen Criteria, the
EU member states will be faced with an unavoidable historic choice: to either
allow Turkey to join the Union or to turn it away. A decision either way will
be irrevocable. Possible Turkish accession to the European Union must be set in the context
of the recent failures to obtain democratic legitimacy for the EU institutional
and directional reforms. The rejections of the referendums on the Constitutional
Treaty was an expression by the peoples of Europe of their concern at the disconnect
between the will of the policymakers and the will of the people. This disconnect
in part, had a lot to do with the question of Turkish admission. European public
opinion is worried about the entrance of the Turks, about a low-wage job market
and about disproportionate job flexibility. Policymakers have a great responsibility
in making sure that whatever decision is eventually taken on Turkey’s EU
status, that it is one that is based on the needs, interests and security of
the Union’s five hundred million citizens as paramount. ...
Conclusion: A Union of Two Civilizations of Global Consequence?
If we look at the European Union as a functional project, the aim of which,
is to promote stability and peace and remove the clouded spectacles of inter-civilizational
distinctions along the lines of religion and race and accept people as equal
worth the world over, then observing the reverse outcome of the so called ‘clash
of civilizations’, a permanent union between the Western and Islamic
civilizations through Turkish accession to the European Union would be: potentially
all Muslims
the world over looking to the example of a prosperous and peaceful democratic
Muslim state that has been welcomed and accepted into the bosom of the most
advanced and enlightened working peace system in the world, the European Union.
The advantages of a decision to welcome Turkey would be avoiding giving the
impression that Europe is a white Christian fortress, demonstrating that a
real multicultural
civilization exists within our Union, which is founded on common political
values. Having a Turkey that accepts these political points – a Turkey which is
secular but also democratic – would be an advantage for us.
We must never forget that borders – no matter how mechanised and technically
controlled they may be – become permeable. Hiding behind them to enjoy
in solitude the comfort and security from others is not a good position. Sooner
or later Europe will have to make up its mind and use part of its wealth for
building and sustaining areas of steady peace beyond its borders. Only in this
way will Europa succeed in developing herself further and steadily in the future.
One might argue that it is in our interest to answer Turkish expectations, to
deny to the Islamists the wood for their fire of hate, and to transform Turkey
into a beacon for democratic and liberal values by transcending the mindset that
chooses to perceive religious borders and clashes of civilizations. It would
prove to the Islamists that they are not right, that democratic values are universal
and can transcend religious difference.
The implications for such an epoch-altering historical
event are clear; this union of civilizations would chart a new course for world
history and would alter
the mindset of the Ummah that so far sees the West as the enemy. The
thought would be seeded in billions of Muslim minds that perhaps they too can
one day
live in peace as we do in the West as they look to a European Union that includes
Turkey, a West that includes Islam not as a minority population but as a member
state, as the example of the possibility for the benevolence of governance
and the unassailable virtue of Europa who extends the hand of peace and promise
of
prosperity to those who join with her in her historic world destiny in the
pursuit of peace.
The author of the excerpt (http://www.paxeuropa.eu) above,
Jan Mortier, jan-at-civitatis.org,
is the founder of Civitatis International. Civitatist “is a global
governance think-tank that was founded in 2002 by young researchers at a council
of Europe
sponsored
human rights conference. Composed of research associates based at their
own institutions around the world, academics, legal professionals and those
working
in the field
on humanitarian missions, Civitatis provides constructive solutions to global
problems through its independent research and consultancy. Civitatis
works at meetings of foreign ministers, former heads of state and government,
heads
of
financial institutions and international institutions.”
––––7.31.08
“AFTER 7 YEARS, / TALKS COLLAPSE / ON WORLD TRADE A
RICH-POOR DEADLOCK U.S., India and China / Clash
on Protections / for Some Farmers”.
Those are the 1-column NYT headlines, page-one-top-left, July 30, Wednesday.
What else dumb might anyone think in a world haggling
over fealty to the dummy-doodle of allegiance to anarchy among the equally-sovereign
200 nations of our itsy
world political disunity?
–––– 7.30.08
A new era for dictators?
By Keith Suter
This week’s arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader,
is another indicator that life is slowly getting more difficult for dictators. Having spent 13 years on the run, he will now be transferred to the United Nations
war crimes trial in The Hague.
Dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe does not want to stand down, fearing that
he too could then be put on trial for his crimes. He will cling onto power for
as long as possible.
Idi Amin (1924-2003) evaded justice. As a military officer
he took over Uganda
in 1971 and he remained in power for eight years. The International Commission
of Jurists reported that at least 80,000 and may be as many as 300,000 people
were killed. He also sent many of the hard-working Ugandans of Indian descent
into exile. In October 1978 he invaded Tanzania, with which he had a border dispute. Ugandan exiles volunteered to assist Tanzania.
At this time, Libya’s Colonel Kaddafi was encouraging instability among
the pro-western countries in Africa and he supported the erratic Amin. As the
war turned against him, so Amin fled to Libya. The new Ugandan rulers wanted
to put him on trial for his crimes and so he could not return to Uganda.
Amin, a Muslim, was offered refuge in Saudi Arabia providing he did not get involved
in any more public activities. Saudi Arabia, which regards itself as the world’s
most important Islamic state, feared that Amin was bringing the religion into
disrepute. The lonely and isolated Amin died in Saudi Arabia and he is buried
there.
Another dictator who was helped into exile was Ferdinand Marcos (1917-1989). He became president of the Philippines in 1965 and seemed to do well at the beginning.
But he became addicted to power and he stayed on beyond his elected term. In
1972 he declared martial law. His time in power was marked by corruption and
economic stagnation.
He was removed by the 1986 People Power revolution headed by Corazon Aquino (her
husband had been assassinated by Marcos’ agents). The United States by
this time was no longer so supportive of Marcos and acted as the broker between
him and the angry people in the streets. He was flown to the US territory of
Hawaii in 1986 and he died there in 1989. Legal actions continue to try to recover
some of the government funds that went missing in the Marcos era.
It may now be coming harder for a dictator to evade justice. The international
community has created various international and national war crimes systems to
investigate rulers.
Saddam Hussein was tried – and executed - by a national Iraqi tribunal. This sent shock waves through the Arab world. He was the first Arab dictator
ever to be put on trial in a proper court. Many Arab leaders must be wondering
if this could also happen to them.
Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006) was wanted by the UN’s international tribunal
for Former Yugoslavia. He evaded capture but eventually a new government in Serbia
decided in 2001 that it would improve its international status by handing him
over to the tribunal. He died while still on trial.
Much the same seems to have happened to Radovan Karadzic. The international community
was evidently unwilling to forget events like the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica
and so the new government in Serbia decided that it should hand him over as a
way of improving its own relations with the international community.
We should not over-estimate the impact of recent events but it seems that a new
era is emerging for corrupt and brutal dictators.
–––7.29.08
From: "Global Symposium, Lucknow, India" <symposium@wmgd.net>
July 26
INVITING CIVIL SOCIETY, MEDIA, CORPORATE REPRESENTATIVES, UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS,
EDUCATORS and CHILDREN from the World Over
to the
9th International Conference of Chief Justices of the World Global Symposium:
Awakening Planetary Consciousness
December 12-15, 2008, Lucknow, India.
Awakening Planetary Consciousness will occur as in years passed in parallel to
the 9th International Conference of Chief Justices of the World. The details
of this conference are available
at the website http://wmgd.net/symposium. The symposium has developed a movement
through a global partnership with civil society and educational organizations
to establish sustainable development, world unity and world peace. The Conference
is organized by the World Movement for Global Democracy (WMGD), an initiative
of City Montessori School, Lucknow, India. Jagdish Gandhi, president of the World
Movement, is the Convener of the Conference. Reports of four Global
Symposiums (2004, 2005, 2006 & 2007) are available at www.wmgd.net/symposium.
The purpose of this International gathering is to strengthen cooperation among
the civil society to unite efforts in world interest and to act and achieve our
common goals by:
1) Laying a foundation of a nuclear-free, democratic, sustainable, just and peaceful
world order by bringing together inter governmental agencies, global leaders,
civil society organizations, corporate representatives, media and children and
2) Creating a widespread awareness about issues like scarcity of safe
drinking water, reform of governmental and corporate structures, more equitable
distribution of resources, development of renewable energy programs and encourage
dialogue to replace international conflict for achieving a breakthrough by creating
a sustainable future.
The themes of Global Symposium are as follows: 1. Structure of Global Democracy, Reform
of International Institutions and World Peace, 2. World Religions, Spirituality
and Culture, 3. Education, Human Rights, Grass root Movements and Role
of Civil Society and 4. Sustainable Development
There is no registration or participation fee. All delegates from abroad will
be provided with complimentary boarding and lodging (accommodation and meals)
facilities at our guest house along with transport within Lucknow city (Local
Transport). All delegates are expected to manage their own travel expenses.
At this point we are provisioning for nearly 300 participants. Participants’ invitations
will be on a first come/ first processed basis, so the sooner we receive nominations,
the earlier we can process them.
Please contact the Global Symposium Secretariat via email at symposium@wmgd.net or
call us at 0091 522 2637219.
––––
Effort to help promote world “peace” through effort to promote world “unity” can
be seen to make partial advocacy sense, World Peace News - a World Government
Report, worldpeacenews.org, always asserts. But for
the advocate not to be clear
that such effort without emphasis on the world’s first need to create an
appropriately governed world, a world government, might raise passing questions
about what might be implied by any such overriding advocacy avoiding note of
governmental specifics.
Of course the anatomy of the fear of the use of the words world government to
mean a governed world creating a ratified and sensible body of enforceable world
law is fairly evident too. TL
–––– 7.28.08
“ 4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images
“ Covering Iraq Combat Puts Journalists and Military at
Odds
“By MICHAEL KAMBER and TIM ARANGO
“BAGHDAD - The case of a freelance photographer in Iraq who was barred
from covering the Marines after he posted photos on the Internet of several of
them dead has underscored what some journalists say is a growing effort by the
American military to control graphic images from the war. ...”
That above is the start of an NYT, 3-column news story, July 26. The story comes
out of events touching on differences of outlooks of journalists and the military.
Having been a marine F4U pilot, a squadron staff member, stationed at Goleta
on the West Coast, near Santa Barbara, during WWII and a journalist ever since
that war’s end, we think we’ve experienced shards of both types’ official
tiffs, and feel comfortable in asserting that the NYT placed its journalism/military
news story appropriately above the fold and toward the center.
––––
SHERWOOD ROSS ASSOCIATES
Media Consultants
YOU SHOULD REVIEW THIS BOOK!!
Eric Larsen is a novelist. He won the Chicago Tribune’s first Heartland
Prize for best novel of the year about the Midwest. Most recently he has
written A Nation Gone Blind. He grew up in the Midwest (in Minnesota),
got his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Midwest’s famed University of Iowa Writers
Workshop, and was a Professor of English at John Jay College in New York City
for 35 years.
In an email, written prior to his book review about a four-volume work by another
native Midwesterner who absorbed the region’s views as a youngster, Larsen
called the work “a generally wonderful and marvelous book.” He
also allowed himself to exaggerate because of enthusiasm: he said the author’s “recall
of detail is worthy of Proust” and “his richness of narrative is
worthy of Cervantes.” But, he said, “Exaggeration aside, I
found the book a real treasure.”
The book he was speaking of is "Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam,” a
four-volume, slightly fictionalized memoir by a law school dean, Lawrence R.
Velvel. In an email subsequent to his review, Larsen said the “whole
book really is a major contribution to a very American literature, right down
even to its wonderful way of straining against genre and the limits of genre.” Larsen
added his “wish [that] all four volumes were in the hands of every reader
in the nation, and, even more important, of every editor, both the news AND literary
types.” (Emphasis in original.)
Then, in an Amazon blog, Professor Larsen stated what he called “an imperative:
Get hold of and read this book,” which has “many, many, many ...
great stories about law, the practice of law, and the sheer deceitfulness and
dishonesty not only of the institution of law as it has come to be a great foundation
stone of Establishment America, but great stories -- and true ones --. about
how DISHONESTY has become the very weft and woof of the whole of ESTABLISHMENT
America.” (Emphases in original.)
In his review itself (which is appended), Larsen once again was not shy about
praising Alabaster Cities. “Some books still matter -- even greatly,” the
review begins, “although generally they’re not the ones you’ll
have heard about.” For the ones you will have heard about are generally
only those that are the product “of the culture of fraud and prefab lies,
of the ‘official’ and ‘acceptable’ culture” which
permeates “the entirety of mainstream publishing.” Larsen’s
own, quite differing measure of “what makes a book a good one “‘is
short and simple: It’s the truth-measure.”
Truth is what he finds in Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam. Velvel’s “subject
through all four volumes of this memoir is the simple and consistent truth that
honesty in America is a big disadvantage, in fact, a crippling disadvantage,
to a person’s profession, career, success, stature, income and life achievement.” (Emphases
in original.)
Velvel, continues Larsen, says Lincoln’s life and views best illustrate
the American Dream that “you can rise as high as talent plus hard work
can carry you, “and that you must help your fellow man. But “‘in
the last half of the 20th century,’” quotes Larsen, Velvel believes
that Lincoln’s version of the American Dream has become ‘“largely
fictive, largely fantasy. What Lincoln so aptly called the ‘race
of life’ did not necessarily go - - perhaps did not go at all - - to the
talented and hard working; still less did it go to the talented and hard working
who acted to help others as well as themselves, or who thought that in the long
run right can make right. It went instead . . . to the purely greedy and
to those who were always and only looking out for number one, to the incompetent,
the venal and the evil who would play the game the company way . . ., to the
thoroughly dishonest and the fraudulent, to the immodest, the celebrified and
the self celebrified, to those who, in government or business, did not stickle
at doing evil.’”
That is “the entire story in outline,” says Larsen - - “the
decline of the American nation from Lincoln to Cheney, with the steepest slide
from social morality into fraud and depravity taking place from 1950 onward.
. . . I’d say it’s pressing, vitally important, essential that
this story be told.” Yet “it is nonetheless one of the stories
most thoroughly and rigorously suppressed by the media and by publishing - -
by the Cheney-powers and the corpro-gov powers, powers that are . . . [controlled
by] the ‘purely greedy,’ those . . . always and only looking out
for number one,’ ‘the incompetent, the venal and the evil.’ No
wonder they don’t want the story told.” (Emphases in original.) But
Velvel “goes ahead and tells” the story “lock, stock and barrel,” says
Larsen -- he “records and laments the moral-intellectual decline of an
entire nation.”
Larsen goes on to say that the reason the book’s major protagonist ran
into difficulties in law firms in Washington, D.C. was that “The firms
and their management knew unequivocally that [the protagonist] not only was hardworking,
capable and insightful, but they also knew that he was honest ... The firm
. . . couldn’t possibly trust him later on to do what they expected
of all their associates and partners, to bend rules, cut corners, make secret
deals or, in short, to do the wrong thing in the interest of the firm. In
short [he] was honest. . . . Raised in Chicago by socialist - leaning Jewish
parents who themselves valued honesty and truth as the highest values, [he] .
. . was the carrier of his family’s intellectual and moral legacy.” (Emphases
in original.)
Larson ends his review by saying that anyone who has lived through the disasters
of the last eight years “will immediately understand, first, the extraordinary
importance of Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam, and, second, will understand how
and why it may be that so prescient, revelatory, and impassioned a book has been
held by and large under the radar of a general reading public. It’s
too meaningful. It’s too relevant. It’s too dangerous
. . . .”
Larsen agrees with Velvel’s quoted view that “‘dishonesty,
in all its degrees and in its various forms, has reached such a level that to
call ourselves a civilized society is perhaps to have changed the meaning of
civilized in a significant way and to a significant extent.’” But
Larson “‘thrill[s] at the knowing. . . that there are some . . .
who see the nation as it is, who value it as it ought to be, and whose lives
remain dedicated in whatever ways possible, to opposing the omnipresent moral
ruin and decay and to replacing it with uncontaminated soil that can nourish
new and salutary growth.” (Emphases in original.)
In the first two volumes of Alabaster Cities, the plots which carry forward the
views to which Larsen resonated so strongly deal with the protagonists’ college
and law school days at Michigan and Harvard, with federal court battles against
undeclared wars in the Viet Nam era, and with the practice of law in Washington
in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The plots of
the last two volumes are concerned with a brutal battle against the political
and legal establishments to create a law school for the working class, minorities
and other people who get the short end of the stick in American life and generally
are not allowed entry into the professions. Larsen says of the plot lines
that “It’s no stretch to say that Alabaster Cities is an American
non-fiction novel, that it gathers together great American themes - - of money,
class, privilege, immigration, education - - and that it carries them to an irresistibly
dramatic, and dramatically American, end. (Emphases in original.)
Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam, as Larsen says, has been kept under the radar by
the government and the establishment. They don’t want the public
to hear about it or to consider what it has to say. They don’t want
its deep criticism of what happened in the last 50 years, of how it happened
and why, to become a major part of the public discourse. For Alabaster
Cities details the bad habits of mind and culture which have come to prevail
in all areas of American life since 1960 - - the habits of mind and culture of
those in power in every walk of life. And it details these matters, as
Larsen says, in the context of true stories in an “American non-fiction
novel” filled with “difficulties, dead-ends, double-crossings, back-stabbings,
financial reverses - - until [the main protagonist] at last becomes a co-founder” of
a law school for the non-affluent in New England. Larsen wishes the book,
with its philosophies and stories, were in the hands of every reader and editor. A
book like Alabaster Cities Gleam should be written about by reviewers so that
the public will know of it, instead of it being ignored and thereby suppressed
defacto by reviewers. We hope that you will either review it yourself or
commission a review of it. You can obtain a copy of the book from Amazon
or by sending an email to Jeff Demers at demers@mslaw.edu. Or contact Sherwood
Ross, Media Consultant to Massachusetts School of Law at Andover at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
Sherwood Ross Associates, 102 S.W. 6th Ave., Miami, FL 33130 (305) 205-8281
–––
WPN doesn’t know anything much about all of what’s immediately above,
but, as indicated by its appearance here, it’s thought to have some truth
in some vital honesty.
But it alludes to such vast, troubling and many-sided
matters that it deals with
what World Peace News - a World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org, just
can’t begin to essay here.
We try to limit what we do as WPN to the theme that taking up on the most extreme
reality of the public to which we belong, we need to begin to focus on outlawing
war lest it make whatever else we do virtually and variously irrelevant.
–––– 7.27.08
From: Sherwood Ross, sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
Should our U.S. President Bush Be Prosecuted for Murder
by 140 Federal And State Legal Authorities?
July 17
SOME 140 FEDERAL AND STATE ATTORNEYS COULD PROSECUTE BUSH FOR MURDER
By Sherwood Ross
President Bush “beyond all reasonable doubt” is responsible for all
the murders of American troops killed in Iraq and could be prosecuted by any
of 140 Federal and State legal authorities, famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi
says.
Bugliosi said the president is guilty of “the most serious crime ever committed
in American history…knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war
in Iraq under false pretenses,” killing 4,000 GIs, seriously wounding 30,000
more, and killing 100,000 Iraqis in the process.
While a federal prosecution by the U.S. Attorney General in Washington, or any
of the 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country “would be the easiest procedure,” Bugliosi
says, any of the 50 State attorneys-general also “could bring a murder
charge against Bush for any soldiers from that state…who lost their lives
fighting Bush’s war.”
Writing in “The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder”(Vanguard
Press), Bugliosi says Bush’s lies to the public constituted “overt
acts” and their broadcast nationally via the media are a basis for prosecution
in every state. Charges could include murder as well as conspiracy to commit
murder, the veteran prosecutor said.
In his career in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Bugliosi
successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials, including 21 murder
trials without a single loss, according to a biographical sketch in the book.
His most famous trial, the Charles Manson murder case, became the basis of his
classic, “Helter Skelter,” said to be “the biggest selling
true-crime book in publishing history.”
“Bush and his gang of criminals were constantly telling Americans that
Hussein constituted an imminent threat to the security of this country, but they
kept the truth from the American people that their CIA was telling them the exact
opposite, that Hussein and Iraq were not an imminent threat to this country,” Bugliosi
writes.
In his speech of October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Bush said “The Iraqi dictator
must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons
and diseases and gasses and atomic weapons…” even though a CIA report
dated October 1 gave Bush notice that “the CIA did not consider Hussein
an imminent threat to this nation,” Bugliosi pointed out.
As Bush did not act in self-defense, he did so with “a criminal state of
mind,” with “criminal intent,” Bugliosi says, thus, “every
killing of an American soldier that took place during Bush’s war was an ‘unlawful
killing’ and murder.”
Bugliosi explains that a person is guilty of a crime under the theory of aiding
and abetting if he instigates an act that leads to a crime. Bush’s invasion
brought into existence the Iraqi opposition and his action caused Iraqis to kill
American soldiers…” Besides, unless Bush intended to have a war without
casualties, “which is nonsensical on its face,” Bugliosi says, “he
did, in fact, specifically intend to have American soldiers killed.”
“In my opinion,” Bugliosi continues, “there certainly is more
than enough evidence against Bush to justify bringing him to trial and letting
an American jury decide whether or not he is guilty of murder, and if so, what
the appropriate punishment should be.” Based on the evidence the
author spreads out over 344 pages, he feels convinced “a competent prosecutor
could convict Bush of murder.”
Bugliosi points out that he convicted Charles Manson of the seven Tate-La Bianca
murders even though Manson did not participate in any of the killings, nor was
he present at the time. He was able to secure Manson’s conviction,
he noted, because of the “vicarious liability rule of conspiracy, which
provides that each member of a conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes
committed by his coconspirators or innocent agents of the conspirators to further
the object of the conspiracy.”
Among the Iraq war conspirators Bugliosi identified are Vice President Dick Cheney
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Bugliosi said he knew less about former
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s culpability but that a prosecutor could
make that determination by obtaining documents and grand jury testimony from
key people. The same procedure could also be followed in the case of former White
House advisor Karl Rove, the attorney wrote.
Bugliosi charged Bush “is a grotesque anomaly and aberration. No president
has ever done what he did and it is not likely this nation will see a president
do what Bush did for centuries to come, if ever. At least we know that in the
previous three centuries there was no one like this monstrous individual.”
“I would be more than happy, if requested,” Bugliosi continued, “to
consult with any prosecutor who decides to prosecute Bush in the preparation
of additional cross-examination questions for him to face on the witness stand.”
“
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based publicist and columnist. He formerly reported
for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and has contributed to national
magazines. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com”
World Peace News - a World Government Report, worldpeacenews.org,
(which has many doubts and reservations about questions posed) thinks that the
matter as
it exists in the world now is very moot but meriting some passing thought. As
far as the “hard” news of our time today is concerned, our immediate
reflex is for us to consider this sliver of a comment as expressed in the NYT
July 25, pA19 in a 5-column article “Obama, in Berlin, Calls for Renewal
of Ties With Allies”:
“‘No doubt, there will be differences in the future, but the burdens
of global citizenship continue to bind us together,’ Mr. Obama said.”
–––7.26.2008
The great silence ends
Obama came first
Barack Obama, statesman, political candidate, to be president
of the United States, spoke global political ideals and won enthusiastic
support from an immense crowd in Berlin the evening of July 24.
Others in Germany and Europe were similarly expressive; and also, no doubt,
large numbers of people in nations around the world must have experienced
an emotional
lift during the relatively short, strong speech. Mr. Obama first off seemed
to suggest approval of the words “citizen of the world.” There
can be little doubt that this savvy person keenly realizes that a real world
citizen
will need a real world government to be a real citizen of. And that would create
benefits of many sorts for all people. For world governmentalists at
least, he nailed down his message by alluding to the need for the creation
of a rule of
world law.
Mr. Obama made this message plain during his talk. Thus he was the first statesman/politician
during our times to give world government advocacy a “ride,” loudly
applauded worldwide by large political gatherings of people.
––––
(SEEK FREEDOM TO PROTEST AGAINST WORK OF GOVERNMENT) The
two lines of words under the 4-column NYT photo are of two people, the bereaved
father
and a bereaved
aunt of children killed in an earthquake. They held up in view a picture – at
the top of page one, July 24 – of a parent’s school-student daughter. A nephew/student of the other, died in a collapsed school building during the
earthquake. The aunt held in view a copy of a government petition against doing
what the two protesters were doing as they advocated that the petition not
be signed by them or anyone. The NYT news photo underline is: “Yu
Tingyun, left, lost his daughter, Yang, in the May earthquake in southwest
China, and
Huang Lianfen, right, lost a nephew. Ms. Huang holds an agreement that Chinese
officials want parents to sign, saying they will not hold protests about collapsed
schools.”
––––
No More “Comfort Capsules” for the top brass? The following
two items are from the news summary on page 3, July 24. “Defense Secretary Robert
Gates is right to demand full accountability from the