Scrap Book - Doco - Documentation - Media Snippets

State of Emergency Superseding the US Constitution

2011-11-28T13:38:00.001-08:00

State of Emergency Superseding the US Constitution

Peter Dale Scott

In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra Hearings grilling of Oliver North, the American public got a glimpse of "highly sensitive" emergency planning North had been involved in. Ostensibly North had been handling plans for an emergency response to a nuclear attack (a legitimate concern). But press accounts alleged that the planning was for a more generalized suspension of the constitution at the president's determination.

Oliver North at the Iran-Contra Hearings

As part of its routine Iran-contra coverage, the following exchange was printed in the New York Times without journalistic comment or follow-up:

[Congressman Jack] Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

Both North's attorney and Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of the Committee, responded in a way that showed they were aware of the issue:

Brendan Sullivan [North's counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.¹

Brooks was responding to a story by Alfonzo Chardy in the Miami Herald about Oliver North's involvement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in planning for "Continuity of Government" (COG). According to Chardy, the plans envisaged "suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis."²

Reagan had installed at FEMA a counterinsurgency team that he had already assembled as governor of California. The team was headed by Army Col. Louis Giuffrida, who had attracted Reagan's attention by a paper he had written while at the US Army War College, advocating the forcible warrantless detention of millions of black Americans in concentration camps. Reagan first installed Giuffrida as head of the California National Guard, and called on him "to design Operation Cable Splicer. … martial law plans to legitimize the arrest and detention of anti-Vietnam war activists and other political dissidents."³ These plans were refined with the assistance of British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, who had used massive detention and deportations to deal with the 1950s Communist insurgency in what is now Malaysia.

At the time few people (including myself) attached much importance to the Chardy story about COG. Chardy himself suggested that Reagan's Attorney General, William French Smith, had intervened to stop the COG plan from being presented to the President, and in 1985 Giuffrida was forced out of office for having spent government money to build a private residence. But COG planning not only continued, it expanded.

Seven years later, in 1994, Tim Weiner reported in the New York Times that what he called "The Doomsday Project" – the search for "ways to keep the Government running after a sustained nuclear attack on Washington" – had "less than six months to live."⁴

Weiner's language was technically correct, but also very misleading. In fact COG planning now simply continued with a new target: terrorism. On the basis of Weiner's article, the first two books to discuss COG planning, by James Bamford and James Mann, both reported that COG planning had been abandoned.⁵ Recently Tim Shorrock in 2008 repeated that "the COG program was abandoned during the Clinton administration," and Shirley Anne Warshaw in 2009 wrote that "the Clinton administration… shut down the super-secret Project."⁶ But on this specific point, all these otherwise excellent and well-informed authors were wrong.

What Weiner and these authors did not report was that in the final months of Reagan's presidency the purpose of COG planning had officially changed: it was no longer for arrangements "after a nuclear war," but for any "national security emergency." This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: "any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States."⁷ In this way a totally legitimate program dating back to Eisenhower, of planning extraordinary emergency measures for an America devastated in a nuclear attack, was now converted to confer equivalent secret powers on the White House, for anything it considered an emergency.

This expanded application of COG was apparently envisaged as early as 1984, when, according to Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan,

Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency . . . to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens in case of an unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex 84, called for the suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua.⁸

In other words, extreme measures, designed originally to deal with an externally directed and devastating nuclear attack, were being secretly modified to deal with domestic dissenters: a situation that still pertains today.⁹

The Implementation of COG on 9/11

Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the implementation of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG plans were implemented on that day in 2001, before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on pages 38 and 326.¹⁰ It was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David.¹¹

But the implementation of COG went beyond short-term responses, to the installation of what Professor Shirley Anne Warshaw calls a ninety-day alternative "shadow government" outside Washington.

Cheney jumped into action in his bunker beneath the east Wing to ensure continuity in government. He immediately began to create his shadow government by ordering one hundred mid-level executive officials to move to specially designated underground bunkers and stay there twenty-four hours a day. They would not be rotated out, he informed them, for ninety days, since there was evidence, he hinted, that the terrorist organization al-Qa'ida, which had masterminded the attack, had nuclear weapons. The shadow government, as a result, needed to be ready to take over the government from the bunkers.¹²

These ninety days saw the swift implementation of the key features attributed to COG planning by Gelbspan and Chardy in the 1980s: warrantless detentions, warrantless deportations, and the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The clearest example was the administration's Project Endgame—a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone.¹³ This implemented the central feature of the massive detention exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis Giuffrida and Oliver North in 1984.¹⁴

There was also a flurry of other rapid moves to restructure America's external and domestic structures. Before discussing these, I should acknowledge the obvious: that enhanced measures to deal with terrorism are needed, and for some of them we should be grateful. We should acknowledge also, however, that the most significant achievements against terrorism have been the result of traditional intelligence and police work. As for the War on Terror, the most prominent achievement of Cheney's ninety days, as many experts have asserted, it has created far more terrorists than it has disposed of.

On September 20, 2001, Bush launched the war on terror in a televised address to a joint session of congress, when he said, "Our 'war on terror' begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." Today we now have about 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan to deal with an officially estimated 60 members of Al Qaeda. The predictable result has been an expansion of terrorist activities in Somalia, Yemen, and above all Pakistan.

Bush launches the 'War on Terror' as Rumsfeld looks on

The war on terror was administratively implemented in three National Security Presidential Directives, NSPDs 7, 8, and 9. All three are classified, and the topics of two of them are unknown. The third, NSPD 9 of October 25, 2001, directed the Secretary of Defense to plan military options against both Taliban and al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.¹⁵

The October date is misleading. A version of the directive calling for covert action in Afghanistan had been approved by principals on September 4, 2001, one week before 9/11.¹⁶ An enhanced plan for military action in Afghanistan, had been approved by Bush on September 17; and the same document "directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq."¹⁷

Perhaps the most significant domestic product from Cheney's trimester mirabilis was the Patriot Act of October 25, 2001. Congress was given only one week to pass this 340-page bill, which in the opinion of researchers "was already written and ready to go long before September 11th."¹⁸ In 2007 the Justice Department acknowledged that FBI agents had abused the Patriot Act more than 1000 times.

We should not forget that the Patriot Act was only passed after lethal weapons-grade anthrax letters were mailed to two crucial Democratic Senators – Senators Daschle and Leahy – who had initially questioned the bill. After the anthrax letters, however, they withdrew their initial opposition.¹⁹ Someone – we still do not know who – must have planned those anthrax letters well in advance. We should not forget either that some government experts initially blamed the attacks on Iraq. Much later, referring to Fort Detrick, Salon reporter Glenn Greenwald pointed out that "the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq."²⁰

It is generally agreed that, of the three men in National Command Authority on 9/11, Cheney was the ideologue most committed to restoring the power of a presidency that had been weakened by Watergate.²¹ Cheney had already declared in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his belief that "the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law."²² And as Vice-President Cheney, along with Cheney's assistant David Addington and Cheney's appointee John Yoo, established the legal apparatus for declaring that the President had the prerogative power to "deploy military forces preemptively," and that "the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements against torture 'do not protect members of the al Qaeda organization."²³

By Executive Order 13228 of October 8, 2001, the President established an Office of Homeland Security within the presidential Executive Office. This has engendered in turn the DHS, now the third largest US Cabinet Department, and also a series of Homeland Security Presidential Directives. For example Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 (HSPD-6) of September 16, 2003, created a Terrorism Screening Center (TSC), to "consolidate the Government's approach to terrorism screening."²⁴

Since then we have become inured to repeated stories about nonviolent individuals who are prevented from boarding airplanes, because their names are in TSC computers on the No Fly List and the Terrorist Watch List. Senator Ted Kennedy testified in Congress that he had been repeatedly delayed at airports because a "T Kennedy" was on the No Fly List. Until July 2008, Nelson Mandela was also on the list.

In addition to the No Fly List, with 4000 names in 2009 and 8000 today, some people are prevented from flying because they are on the Terrorist Watch List, a much longer list which contained over one million names as of summer 2010. This is why Walter F. Murphy, a noted professor of constitutional law, was detained in 2007 on his journey to lecture, ironically, about his book Constitutional Democracy. According to Professor Murphy, he was asked by an airline employee,

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that" …."I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.²⁵

In the end these cases were resolved satisfactorily. But you risk permanent deportation if you have an Arabic-sounding name. The ACLU is suing on behalf of Ayman Latif, not just a U.S. citizen but a disabled U.S. Marine veteran, who under Obama has been stranded in Egypt for months, because, on orders from the U.S. Embassy, he has not been able to board a plane to come home.

This is a real hardship case: Latif told NPR that "because I missed my appointments in the U.S. to be evaluated [as a disabled vet], now the VA administration is saying that they're going to cut my benefits from what they are now to zero." On the same program Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary for policy with the Department of Homeland Security, vigorously defended the No Fly List. But when asked if there is "any legal authority by which the United States can say to a citizen who is abroad, you may not return to this country?" Baker replied, "I know of none."²⁶ This did not seem to concern him.

Ayman Latif's case is far from unique. According to the New York Times,

Advocacy groups say they are trying to help Americans stranded in Yemen, Egypt, Colombia and Croatia, among other countries. At least one American, Raymond Earl Knaeble IV, who studied in Yemen and is now in Colombia, was returned to Colombia by the Mexican authorities after he sought to cross the border into the United States, the groups say.²⁷

The Militarization of American Law Enforcement

Another post-9/11 innovation from the Giuffrida-Oliver North COG plans was the militarization of domestic United States law enforcement in 2002, under a new military command, NORTHCOM.²⁸ Through NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with local enforcement in the surveillance and counter-terrorism planning of America, in the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local enforcement to police Iraq. Of course army platoons do not patrol roads and break down the doors of Kansas homes, as they routinely do in Iraq or Afghanistan. But behind the scenes, in so-called fusion centers, the military, the FBI, state police, along with private intelligence corporations like SAIC, maintain and analyze data to identify potential threats to those in power.²⁹

Northcom strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction

These fusion centers "have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population."³⁰ In other words, administrative arrangements have been used to fulfill Giuffrida's plans of circumventing the Posse Comitatus Acts on the statute books, without repealing them.

The Proclamation of Permanent Emergencies

Finally, still in the 90-day "shadow government" period after 9/11, President Bush proclaimed two important emergencies that are still in force today.

1) On September 14, 2001, Bush issued Proclamation 7463 ("Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks") together with Executive Order 13223 ("Ordering the Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces To Active Duty"). As we shall see, the terms of this proclamation were significantly expanded when it was renewed in 2007.

2) "On September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, the President declared a national emergency with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706)."³¹ This gave the president the power to confiscate without trial or warning the property of individuals providing funds to entities, such as charitable foundations, which were judged to be supporting terrorism. The Executive Order initially blocked property of twenty-seven designated terrorists. But the list has become enormous. When I last looked at it, on November 18, 2010, the list included 87 pages just for the letter A.

A lawsuit has been instituted, asserting that the designation of alleged terrorists was arbitrary; and a lower court agreed that the president's designation authority is unconstitutionally vague.³² The case is under appeal.

Cheney and Rumsfeld on the Secret Committee to Plan COG

From its beginning in 1982, two of the key planners on the secret COG planning committee were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the same two men who implemented COG on 9/11.³³ The committee had been established by Reagan under a secret executive order, NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982. Despite what Weiner implied, the committee continued to meet without interruption until the George W. Bush presidency in 2001.³⁴

Thus Cheney and Rumsfeld continued their secret planning during the Clinton presidency; even after both men, both Republicans, were by that time heads of major corporations and not in the government. Andrew Cockburn cites a Pentagon source to support a claim that the Clinton administration had "no idea what was going on."

Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . . There were other changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the "shadow government" had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld found himself in politically congenial company, the players' roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. . . ."You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on."³⁵

Cockburn's account requires some qualification. Richard Clarke, a Clinton Democrat, makes it clear that he participated in the COG games in the 1990s and indeed drafted Clinton's Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67 on "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government."³⁶ But COG planning involved different teams for different purposes. It is quite possible that the Pentagon official was describing the Department of Defense team dealing with retaliation.

It is important to understand that the COG "Doomsday Project" in the 1980s involved more than planning and exercises. It also oversaw "Project 908," the construction of a multibillion dollar infrastructure for an alternative government. The key element of this was an $8 billion communications and logistics program headquartered at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the headquarters for Army Intelligence.³⁷

Despite initial failures in the communications network, it was ready to be put into operation and utilized on September 11, 2001 by Vice-President Cheney.³⁸ Key commands, including the implementation of COG itself, appear to have been made over this highest-classification security network.³⁹ This may explain why a Boeing E-4B Advanced Airborne Command Post or "Doomsday Plane," the mobile communications center for the COG shadow government, was seen around 10 AM in the prohibited air space above the White House.⁴⁰

There is no way to determine how many of the constitutional changes since 9/11 can be traced to COG planning. However we do know that new COG planning measures were still being introduced in 2007, when President Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51/HSPD-20). This Directive set out what FEMA later called "a new vision to ensure the continuity of our Government," and was followed in August by a new National Continuity Policy Implementation Plan.⁴¹

Under pressure from his 911truth constituents, Congressman Peter DeFazio of the Homeland Security Committee twice requested to see these Annexes. When his request was denied, DeFazio made a second request, in a letter signed by the Chair of his committee. The request was denied again.⁴²

COG, The National Emergency, and the National Emergencies Act

I mentioned earlier that the Proclamation of a national emergency, issued by Bush on September 14, 2001, and since renewed annually to this day, changed significantly in 2007. All previous annual renewals had enumerated the emergency measures that were being renewed, for example "the measures taken on September 14, 2001, November 16, 2001, and January 16, 2002." After Bush issued NSPD-51 of 2007, with its "new vision" and its new classified COG Annexes, the next renewal of the Emergency proclamation replaced the previous specific enumerations with a more sweeping general sentence:

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, last extended on September 5, 2006, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2007.⁴³

"The powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency." This language is so vague, it is hard to see how it could not cover the "classified continuity annexes" of NSPD-51 as well. If so, the public proclamation was now proclaiming the continuation of secret powers. (The two renewals of the Emergency by Barack Obama do not repeat this language from 2007, but likewise fail to enumerate just what powers are being extended.)⁴⁴

The National Emergencies Act, one of the post-Watergate reforms that Vice-President Cheney so abhorred, specifies that: "Not later than six months after a national emergency is declared, and not later than the end of each six-month period thereafter that such emergency continues, each House of Congress shall meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated" (50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002).⁴⁵ The law does not permit Congress to review an emergency; it requires Congress to review it.

Yet in nine years Congress has not once met to discuss the State of Emergency declared by George W. Bush in response to 9/11, a State of Emergency that remains in effect today. Appeals to the Congress to meet its responsibilities to review COG have fallen on deaf ears, even during periods when the Congress has been dominated by Democrats.⁴⁶

Former Congressman Dan Hamburg and I appealed publicly in 2009, both to President Obama to terminate the emergency, and to Congress to hold the hearings required of them by statute.⁴⁷ But Obama, without discussion, extended the 9/11 Emergency again on September 10, 2009,⁴⁸ and again a year later.⁴⁹ Meanwhile Congress has continued to ignore its statutory obligations.

One Congressman explained to a constituent that the provisions of the National Emergencies Act have now been rendered inoperative by COG. If true, this would indicate that the constitutional system of checks and balances no longer applies, and also that secret decrees now override public legislation as the law of the land.

With a few notable exceptions, there has thus far been scant interest in the media and the public in the extraordinary facts that Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to

1) help plan successfully for constitutional modifications, when not in government, and

2) implement these same changes themselves when back in power.

The first of these facts gives us a glimpse of an on-going power realm independent of the publicly acknowledged state. In the words of James Mann, "Cheney and Rumsfeld were, in a sense, a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting."⁵⁰ A CNN Special Assignment assessment of the COG planners was even more dramatic: "In the United States of America there is a hidden government about which you know nothing."⁵¹

What is the first step out of this current state of affairs, in which the constitution appears to have been superseded by a higher, if less legitimate authority? I submit that it is to get Congress to do what the law requires, and determine whether our present proclamation of emergency "shall be terminated" (50 U.S.C. 1622, 2002).

As part of this procedure, Congress should find whether secret COG powers, never submitted to Congress or seen by it, are among "the powers and authorities" which Bush in 2007 included in his prolongation of the 2001 emergency and which are maintained today under Obama.

This is not a technical or procedural detail. It is a test of whether the United States is presently governed by its laws and constitution, or whether, as has been alleged, the laws and constitution have now in places been superseded by COG.

Congress should go further to look into the activities of Cheney's ninety days of COG shadow government in 2001, and their relationship to the genesis of the Patriot Act, the ten-year program for detention camps, and the permanent militarization of US domestic law enforcement.

This is a slightly revised, expanded, and developed text of an address to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, November 23, 2010.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan is in press.

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding the US Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 48-1-10, November 29, 2010.

Notes

¹ New York Times, July 14, 1987. We have never heard if there was or was not an executive session, or if the rest of Congress was ever aware of the matter. According to James Bamford, "The existence of the secret government was so closely held that Congress was completely bypassed. Rather than through legislation, it was created by Top Secret presidential fiat. In fact, Congress would have no role in the new wartime administration. 'One of the awkward questions we faced,' said one of the participants, 'was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.'" (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 74); cf. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet [New York: Viking, 2004], 145). But key individuals in Congress were, such as Sen. Inouye of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were certainly aware of something.

² Miami Herald, July 5, 1987. In October 1984 Jack Anderson reported that FEMA's plans would "suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, effectively eliminate private property, abolish free enterprise, and generally clamp Americans in a totalitarian vise."

³ Diana Reynolds, The Rise of the National Security State: FEMA and the NSC, Political Research Associates, Covert Action Information Bulletin, #33 (Winter 1990). "Earlier, Governor Reagan in California had authorized the development of a counterinsurgency plan (known as Cable Splicer) and exercises to deal with such crises, in conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army and the Pentagon (Operation Garden Plot). The cadres developing Cable Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida), were with Reagan's elevation to the presidency transferred into FEMA. As head of FEMA, Giuffrida pursued plans for massive detention of dissidents; these became so extreme that even Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, raised objections" (Scott, The Road to 9/11, 184; citing Gelbspan, Break-ins, 184).

⁴ Tim Weiner, New York Times, April 17, 1994.

⁵ Bamford, A Pretext for War, 74; cf. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138-45.

⁶ Tim Shorrock, Spies for hire: the secret world of intelligence outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)., 78; Shirley Anne Warshaw, The co-presidency of Bush and Cheney (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Politics and Policy, 2009), 162

⁷ The provisions of Executive Order 12656 of Nov. 18, 1988, appear at 53 FR 47491, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 585, link. The Washington Post (March 1, 2002) later claimed, falsely, that Executive Order 12656 dealt only with "a nuclear attack." Earlier there was a similar misrepresentation in the New York Times (November 18, 1991).

⁸ Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; cf. New York Times, November 18, 1991. REX 84 (short for Readiness Exercise 84) turned out to be part of a series of such exercises (now known as Continuity of Operations Exercises) that have continued under FEMA down into the Obama era. See for example the Department of Homeland Press Release, "DHS Conducts Continuity of Operations Exercise," June 17, 2009, link.

⁹ In stressing the alteration of our present political milieu by an extra-governmental group, I do not intend to exonerate Congress. In 1981 Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act. According to a brilliant and prescient essay written by an Air Force Colonel at the National War College, the Act "was specifically intended to force reluctant military commanders to actively collaborate in police work" (Air Force Lt. Col. Charles E. Dunlap, "The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012;" quoted in Harry G. Summers, The new world strategy: a military policy for America's future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 195.

¹⁰ 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 228-29.

¹¹ Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington: Department of Defense, 2007), 132.

¹² Warshaw, The co-presidency of Bush and Cheney, 164-65; cf. Washington Post, March 1, 2002; Scott, Road to 9/11, 237. Warshaw took the characterization of "shadow government" from earlier reports by U.S. News and World Report in 1989, and CNN in 1991 (Warshaw, 162).

¹³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 238, 240-41.

¹⁴ "The exercise anticipated civil disturbances, major demonstrations and strikes that would affect continuity of government and/or resource mobilization. To fight subversive activities, there was authorization for the military to implement government ordered movements of civilian populations at state and regional levels, the arrest of certain unidentified segments of the population, and the imposition of martial rule" (Diana Reynolds, "The Rise of the National Security State: FEMA and the NSC," Political Research Associates, Covert Action Information Bulletin, #33 (Winter 1990).

¹⁵ "NSPD-9: Combating Terrorism," Federation of American Scientists: "On April 1, 2004, the White House released the following characterization of this otherwise classified document: "The NSPD called on the Secretary of Defense to plan for military options 'against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control, air and air defense, ground forces, and logistics.' The NSPD also called for plans 'against al Qaeda and associated terrorist facilities in Afghanistan, including leadership, command-control-communications, training, and logistics facilities.'"

¹⁶ "NSPD-9: Combating Terrorism," citing testimony of Donald Rumsfeld before 9/11 Commission, March 23, 2304. Cf. Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, 237-38; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), 574-76; 9/11 Commission Report, 212-14. A draft of the presidential directive had originally been circulated in June 2001 (9/11 Commission Report, 208). But the directive approved on September 4 was for covert action only (9/11 Commission Report, 213).

¹⁷ James Bamford, A Pretext for War, 287.

¹⁸ Jennifer Van Bergen, "The USA PATRIOT Act Was Planned Before 9/11," Truthout.org, May 20, 2002. Van Bergen notes a parallel with the Patriot Act's predecessor, the Antiterrorism Act of 1996: "James X. Dempsey and David Cole state in their book, 'Terrorism & the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security,' that the most troubling provisions of the pre-USAPA anti-terrorism laws, enacted in 1996 and expanded now by the USAPA, 'were developed long before the bombings [i.e. the Oklahoma bombing of 1995] that triggered their final enactment.'"

¹⁹ Cf. Time, Nov. 26, 2001: "While Daschle, the Senate majority leader, could have been chosen as a representative of all Democrats or of the entire Senate, Leahy is a less obvious choice, most likely targeted for a specific reason. He is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is involved in issues ranging from antitrust action to antiterror legislation" [emphasis added]. See also Anthony York, "Why Daschle and Leahy?" Salon, November 21, 2001.

²⁰ Glenn Greenwald, "Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News," Salon, August 1, 2008.

²¹ Lew Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2006), 28: "Dick Cheney…would spend the rest of his career working to restore the Nixon vision of an all-powerful executive, by undoing the Watergate reforms that came out of the early seventies."

²² Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174; emphasis added.

²³ Lew Dubose and Jake Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, 187-90; citing John Yoo memos of September 25, 2001 ("deploy") and January 2002 ("do not protect").

²⁴ Department of Justice, "Review of the Terrorist Screening Center," link.

²⁵ Naomi Wolf, "Fascist America," Guardian (London), April 24, 2007.

²⁶ "Former U.S. Marine Placed On 'No Fly' List, Sues FBI," NPR, August 5, 2010, link. Even my two-year old grandson and his family were taken aside for special questioning at the airport, because of his middle name, Yusuf.

²⁷ Scott Shane, "American Man in Limbo on No-Fly List," New York Times, June 16, 2010.

²⁸ U.S. Department of Defense, "U.S. Northern Command," link. Cf. John R. Brinkerhoff, PBS, Online Newshour, 9/27/02: "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war." Brinkerhoff had earlier developed the martial law provisions of REX 84 in the Reagan era.

²⁹ Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 344.

³⁰ Julian Assange, "The spy who billed me twice," Wikileaks. The March 2009 Army manual "US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations" contains phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards."

³¹ "Notice-Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism," Daily Compilation Of Presidential Documents" ("Author: Obama, Barack H"), September 16, 2010, link.

³² Humanitarian Law Project v. United States Department of Treasury.

³³ Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 183-87.

³⁴ Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 142 (order); (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), pp. 59, 71, 102-104, and 158-178 (NSDD 55); Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), 88 (2001).

³⁵ Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy (New York: Scribner, 2007), 88.

³⁶ Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 8, 165-75.

³⁷ Shorrock, Spies for hire, 72-75, 292-96. Warshaw and others have referred to the whole COG operation as "Project 908;" but on the basis of available evidence I believe that Project 908 was the construction program only, as opposed to the planning and exercises which also took place. Project 908 attracted the attention of Steve Emerson and other journalists in 1989, when it was revealed that there had been huge cost overruns, double billing for the same work, and eventually destruction of many key contract documents in the course of an Army investigation. The son of the Army general overseeing the project, former Congressman Rick Renzi, was eventually indicted in 2008 on related charges of extortion, fraud, money laundering and other crimes. Steven Emerson, "America's Doomsday Project," U.S. News & World Report, August 7, 1989, 26-31. As of this writing, Rick Renzi's trial, which was scheduled to begin in March 2010, "has been postponed indefinitely" (Arizona Republic, March 16, 2010,

³⁸ See e.g. Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies, 91.

³⁹ See discussion in Scott, Road to 9/11, 223-36. There were reports that when Bush was airborne in Air force One on 9/11, there were connectivity problems forcing the president to use an ordinary cell phone (Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute [NewYork: HarperCollins/Regan Books, 2004], 437). This may help explain why Air Force One eventually flew to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, where the E4-B "Doomsday Planes" are based.

⁴⁰ CNN, September 11, 2007, video. On the CNN show 9/11 Commission Co-chair Lee Hamilton said he had a vague memory of the mystery plane story, but that it was never discussed by the 9/11 Commission. CNN promptly withdrew its 9/11 E-4B story from its website ("CNN Pulls 9/11 E4B 'Doomsday' Plane Video Over White House," digg, September 13, 2007,

⁴¹ Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Continuity Directive 1, link. NSPD-51 also nullified PDD 67, Richard Clarke's COG directive of a decade earlier; and it referred to new "classified Continuity Annexes" which shall "be protected from unauthorized disclosure."

⁴² Dennis Kucinich, David Swanson, Elizabeth De La Vega, The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush ([Port Townsend, Wash.] : Feral House, [2008]), 81; Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Administration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown," CounterPunch, March 31, 2008.

⁴³ "Notice: Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks," Federal Register, September 12, 2007, link, emphasis added.

⁴⁴ "Notice from the President on the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks:….Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States. Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2010. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat. This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress. BARACK OBAMA, THE WHITE HOUSE, September 10, 2010," link.

⁴⁵ This language overruled the specification in President Ford's Executive Order 11921 the same year, that, when a state of emergency was declared by the President, Congress could not review the matter for a period of six months.

⁴⁶ Cf. Peter Dale Scott and Dam Hamburg, "To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!," 911Truth.org, March 24, 2009, link.

⁴⁷ Peter Dale Scott, "To All Readers: Help Force Congress To Observe the Law on National Emergencies!!!" (with Dan Hamburg), http.//www.truth.org, March 24, 2009.

⁴⁸ White House Press Release, September 10, 2009, link. A press briefing by Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs the same day did not mention the extension.

⁴⁹ White House Press Release, September 10, 2010, link.

⁵⁰ James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 145.

⁵¹ CNN Special Assignment, November 17, 1991.

Peter Dale Scott - The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

2011-11-28T13:34:00.001-08:00

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

-- Senator Frank Church (1975)

I would like to discuss four major and badly understood events – the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11. I will analyze these deep events as part of a deeper political process linking them, a process that has helped build up repressive power in America at the expense of democracy.

The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

In recent years I have been talking about a dark force behind these events -- a force which, for want of a better term, I have clumsily called a "deep state," operating both within and outside the public state. Today for the first time I want to identify part of that dark force, a part which has operated for five decades or more at the edge of the public state. This part of the dark force has a name not invented by me: the Doomsday Project, the Pentagon's name for the emergency planning "to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis."¹

My point is a simple and important one: to show that the Doomsday Project of the 1980s, and the earlier emergency planning that developed into it, have played a role in the background of all the deep events I shall discuss.

More significantly, it has been a factor behind all three of the disturbing events that now threaten American democracy. The first of these three is what has been called the conversion of our economy into a plutonomy – with the increasing separation of America into two classes, into the haves and the have-nots, the one percent and the 99 percent. The second is America's increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, which has become more and more routine and predictable, to wage or provoke wars in remote regions of the globe. It is clear that the operations of this American war machine have served the one percent.²

The third – my subject today -- is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history of structural deep events: mysterious events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.

There are any number of analyses of America's current breakdown in terms of income and wealth disparity, also in terms of America's increasing militarization and belligerency. What I shall do today is I think new: to argue that both the income disparity – or what has been called our plutonomy -- and the belligerency have been fostered significantly by deep events.

President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961 warned that "We must guard against the unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex."

We must understand that the income disparity of America's current economy was not the result of market forces working independently of political intervention. In large part it was generated by a systematic and deliberate ongoing political process dating from the anxieties of the very wealthy in the 1960s and 1970s that control of the country was slipping away from them.

This was the time when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memorandum, warned that survival of the free enterprise system depended on "careful long-range planning and implementation" of a well-financed response to threats from the left.³ This warning was answered by a sustained right-wing offensive, coordinated by think tanks and funded lavishly by a small group of family foundations.⁴ We should recall that all this was in response to serious riots in Newark, Detroit, and elsewhere, and that increasing calls for a revolution were coming from the left (in Europe as well as America). I will focus today on the right's response to that challenge, and on the role of deep events in enhancing their response.

What was important about the Powell memorandum was less the document itself than the fact that it was commissioned by the United States Chamber of Commerce, one of the most influential and least discussed lobbying groups in America. And the memorandum was only one of many signs of that developing class war in the 1970s, a larger process working both inside and outside government (including what Irving Kristol called an "intellectual counterrevolution"), which led directly to the so-called "Reagan Revolution."⁵

It is clear that this larger process has been carried on for almost five decades, pumping billions of right-wing dollars into the American political process. What I wish to show today is that deep events have also been integral to this right-wing effort, from the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963 to 9/11. 9/11 resulted in the implementation of "Continuity of Government" (COG) plans (which in the Oliver North Iran Contra Hearings of 1987 were called plans for "the suspension of the U.S. constitution"). These COG plans, building on earlier COG planning, had been carefully developed since 1982 in the so-called Doomsday Project, by a secret group appointed by Reagan. The group was composed of both public and private figures, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

I shall try to show today that in this respect 9/11 was only the culmination of a sequence of deep events reaching back to the Kennedy assassination if not earlier, and that the germs of the Doomsday Project can be detected behind all of them.

More specifically, I shall try to demonstrate about these deep events that

1) prior bureaucratic misbehavior by the CIA and similar agencies helped to make both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 happen;

2) the consequences of each deep event included an increase in top-down repressive power for these same agencies, at the expense of persuasive democratic power;⁶

3) there are symptomatic overlaps in personnel between the perpetrators of each of these deep events and the next;

4) one sees in each event the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic – suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narconomy;

5) in the background of each event (and playing an increasingly important role) one sees the Doomsday Project -- the alternative emergency planning structure with its own communications network, operating as a shadow network outside of regular government channels.

Bureaucratic Misbehavior as a Factor Contributing to both the JFK Assassination and 9/11

Both the JFK assassination and 9/11 were facilitated by the way the CIA and FBI manipulated their files about alleged perpetrators of each event (Lee Harvey Oswald in the case of what I shall call JFK, and the alleged hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the case of 9/11). Part of this facilitation was the decision on October 9, 1963 of an FBI agent, Marvin Gheesling, to remove Oswald from the FBI watch list for surveillance. This was shortly after Oswald's arrest in New Orleans in August and his reported travel to Mexico in September. Obviously these developments should normally have made Oswald a candidate for increased surveillance.⁷

This misbehavior is paradigmatic of the behavior of other agencies, especially the CIA, in both JFK and 9/11. Indeed Gheesling's behavior fits very neatly with the CIA's culpable withholding from the FBI, in the same month of October, information that Oswald had allegedly met in Mexico City with a suspected KGB agent, Valeriy Kostikov.⁸ This also helped ensure that Oswald would not be placed under surveillance. Indeed, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that the CIA's withholding of information was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.⁹

A more ominous provocation in 1963 was that of Army Intelligence, one unit of which in Dallas did not simply withhold information about Lee Harvey Oswald, but manufactured false intelligence that seemed designed to provoke retaliation against Cuba. I call such provocations phase-one stories, efforts to portray Oswald as a Communist conspirator (as opposed to the later phase-two stories, also false, portraying him as a disgruntled loner). A conspicuous example of such phase-one stories is a cable from the Fourth Army Command in Texas, reporting a tip from a Dallas policeman who was also in an Army Intelligence Reserve unit:

Assistant Chief Don Stringfellow, Intelligence Section, Dallas Police Department, notified 112^th INTC [Intelligence] Group, this Headquarters, that information obtained from Oswald revealed he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a card-carrying member of Communist Party."¹⁰

This cable was sent on November 22 directly to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida, the base poised for a possible retaliatory attack against Cuba.¹¹

The cable was not an isolated aberration. It was supported by other false phase-one stories from Dallas about Oswald's alleged rifle, and specifically by concatenated false translations of Marina Oswald's testimony, to suggest that Oswald's rifle in Dallas was one he had owned in Russia.¹²

These last false reports, apparently unrelated, can also be traced to officer Don Stringfellow's 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.¹³ The interpreter who first supplied the false translation of Marina's words, Ilya Mamantov, was selected by a Dallas oilman, Jack Crichton, and Deputy Dallas Police Chief George Lumpkin.¹⁴ Crichton and Lumpkin were also the Chief and the Deputy Chief of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.¹⁵ Crichton was also an extreme right-winger in the community of Dallas oilmen: he was a trustee of the H.L. Hunt Foundation, and a member of the American Friends of the Katanga Freedom Fighters, a group organized to oppose Kennedy's policies in the Congo.

We have to keep in mind that some of the Joint Chiefs were furious that the 1962 Missile Crisis had not led to an invasion of Cuba, and that, under new JCS Chairman Maxwell Taylor, the Joint Chiefs, in May 1963, still believed "that US military intervention in Cuba is necessary."¹⁶ This was six months after Kennedy, to resolve the Missile Crisis in October 1962, had given explicit (albeit highly qualified) assurances to Khrushchev, that the United States would not invade Cuba.¹⁷ This did not stop the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the JCS Directorate of Plans and Policy) from producing a menu of "fabricated provocations to justify military intervention."¹⁸ (One proposed example of "fabricated provocations" envisioned "using MIG type aircraft flown by US pilots to … attack surface shipping or to attack US military.")¹⁹

The deceptions about Oswald coming from Dallas were immediately post-assassination; thus they do not by themselves establish that the assassination itself was a provocation-deception plot. They do however reveal enough about the anti-Castro mindset of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit in Dallas to confirm that it was remarkably similar to that of the J-5 the preceding May – the mindset that produced a menu of "fabricated provocations" to attack Cuba. (According to Crichton there were "about a hundred men in [the 488^th Reserve unit] and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.")²⁰

It can hardly be accidental that we see this bureaucratic misbehavior from the FBI, CIA, and military, the three agencies with which Kennedy had had serious disagreements in his truncated presidency.²¹ Later in this paper I shall link Dallas oilman Jack Crichton to the 1963 emergency planning that became the Doomsday Project.

Analogous Bureaucratic Misbehavior in the Case of 9/11

Before 9/11 the CIA, in 2000-2001, again flagrantly withheld crucial evidence from the FBI: evidence that, if shared, would have led the FBI to surveil two of the alleged hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaz al-Hazmi. This sustained withholding of evidence provoked an FBI agent to predict accurately in August, 2001, that "someday someone will die."²² After 9/11 another FBI agent said of the CIA: "They [CIA] didn't want the bureau meddling in their business—that's why they didn't tell the FBI.... And that's why September 11 happened. That is why it happened. . . . They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands"²³ The CIA's withholding of relevant evidence before 9/11 (which it was required by its own rules to supply) was matched in this case by the NSA.²⁴

Without these withholdings, in other words, neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have developed in the manner in which they did. As I wrote in American War Machine, it would appear that

Oswald (and later al-Mihdhar) had at some prior point been selected as

designated subjects for an operation. This would not initially have been for the commission of a crime against the American polity: on the contrary, steps were probably taken to prepare Oswald in connection with an operation against Cuba and al-Mihdhar [I suspect] for an operation against al-Qaeda. But as [exploitable] legends began to accumulate about both figures, it became possible for some witting people to subvert the sanctioned operation into a plan for murder that would later be covered up. At this point Oswald (and by analogy al-Mihdhar) was no longer just a designated subject but also now a designated culprit.²⁵

Kevin Fenton, in his exhaustive book Disconnecting the Dots, has since reached the same conclusion with respect to 9/11: "that, by the summer of 2001, the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward."²⁶He has also identified the person chiefly responsible for the misbehavior: CIA officer Richard Blee, Chief of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit. Blee, while Clinton was still president, had been one of a faction inside CIA pressing for a more belligerent CIA involvement in Afghanistan, in conjunction with the Afghan Northern Alliance.²⁷ This then happened immediately after 9/11, and Blee himself was promoted, to become the new Chief of Station in Kabul.²⁸

How CIA and NSA Withholding of Evidence in the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident, Contributed to War with North Vietnam

I will spare you the details of this withholding, which can be found in my American War Machine, pp. 200-02. But Tonkin Gulf is similar to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, in that manipulation of evidence helped lead America – in this case very swiftly – into war.

Historians such as Fredrik Logevall have agreed with the assessment of former undersecretary of state George Ball that the US destroyer mission in the Tonkin Gulf, which resulted in the Tonkin Gulf incidents, "was primarily for provocation."²⁹ The planning for this provocative mission came from the J-5 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same unit that in 1963 had reported concerning Cuba that, "the engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible."³⁰

The NSA and CIA suppression of the truth on August 4 was in the context of an existing high-level (but controversial) determination to attack North Vietnam. In this respect the Tonkin Gulf incident is remarkably similar to the suppression of the truth by CIA and NSA leading up to 9/11, when there was again a high-level (but controversial) determination to go to war.

Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events

All of the deep events discussed above have contributed to the cumulative increase of Washington's repressive powers. It is clear for example that the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of

the Warren Commission's controversial recommendations that the Secret Service's domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.³¹

This pattern would repeat itself four years later with the assassination of

Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby's shooting and his

death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute— drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) — that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.³²

This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.³³

The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called "Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups."³⁴

In this way the extra secret powers conferred after the RFK assassination contributed to the disastrous turmoil in Chicago that effectively destroyed the old Democratic Party representing the labor unions: The three Democratic presidents elected since then have all been significantly more conservative.

Turning to Watergate and Iran-Contra, both of these events were on one level setbacks to the repressive powers exercised by Richard Nixon and the Reagan White House, not expansions of them. On the surface level this is true: both events resulted in legislative reforms that would appear to contradict my thesis of expanding repression.

We need to distinguish here, however, between the two years of the Watergate crisis, and the initial Watergate break-in. The Watergate crisis saw a president forced into resignation by a number of forces, involving both liberals and conservatives. But the key figures in the initial Watergate break-in itself – Hunt, McCord, G. Gordon Liddy, and their Cuban allies -- were all far to the right of Nixon and Kissinger. And the end result of their machinations was not finalized until the so-called Halloween Massacre in 1975, when Kissinger was ousted as National Security Adviser and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was notified he would be dropped from the 1976 Republican ticket. This major shake-up was engineered by two other right-wingers: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Gerald Ford White House.³⁵

That day in 1975 saw the permanent defeat of the so-called Rockefeller or liberal faction within the Republican Party. It was replaced by the conservative Goldwater-Casey faction that would soon capture the nomination and the presidency for Ronald Reagan.³⁶ This little-noticed palace coup, along with other related intrigues in the mid-1970s, helped achieve the conversion of America from a welfare capitalist economy, with gradual reductions in income and wealth disparity, into a financialized plutonomy where these trends were reversed.³⁷

Again in Iran-Contra we see a deeper accumulation of repressive power under the surface of liberal reforms. At the time not only the press but even academics like myself celebrated the termination of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the victory there of the Contadora peace process. Not generally noticed at the time was the fact that, while Oliver North was removed from his role in the Doomsday Project, that project's plans for surveillance, detention, and the militarization of the United States continued to grow after his departure.³⁸

Also not noticed was the fact that the US Congress, while curtailing aid to one small drug-financed CIA proxy army, was simultaneously increasing US support to a much larger coalition of drug-financed proxy armies in Afghanistan.³⁹ While Iran-Contra exposed the $32 million which Saudi Arabia, at the urging of CIA Director William Casey, had supplied to the Contras, not a word was whispered about the $500 million or more that the Saudis, again at the urging of Casey, had supplied in the same period to the Afghan mujahedin.⁴⁰ In this sense the drama of Iran-Contra in Congress can be thought of as a misdirection play, directing public attention away from America's much more intensive engagement in Afghanistan – a covert policy that has since evolved into America's longest war.

We should expand our consciousness of Iran-Contra to think of it as Iran-Afghan-Contra. And if we do, we must acknowledge that in this complex and misunderstood deep event the CIA in Afghanistan exercised again the paramilitary capacity that Stansfield Turner had tried to terminate when he was CIA Director under Jimmy Carter. This was a victory in short for the faction of men like Richard Blee, the protector of al-Mihdhar as well as the advocate in 2000 for enhanced CIA paramilitary activity in Afghanistan.⁴¹

Personnel Overlaps Between the Successive Deep Events

I will never forget the New York Times front-page story on June 18, 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in. There were photographs of the Watergate burglars, including one of Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini, whom I had already written about two years earlier in my unpublished book manuscript, "The Dallas Conspiracy" about the JFK assassination.

Sturgis was no nonentity: a former contract employee of the CIA, he was also well connected to the mob-linked former casino owners in Havana.⁴² My early writings on the Kennedy case focused on the connections between Frank Sturgis and an anti-Castro Cuban training camp near New Orleans in which Oswald had shown an interest; also in Sturgis' involvement in false "phase-one" stories portraying Oswald as part of a Communist Cuban conspiracy.⁴³

In spreading these "phase-one" stories in 1963, Sturgis was joined by a number of Cubans who were part of the CIA-supported army in Central America of Manuel Artime. Artime's base in Costa Rica was closed down in 1965, allegedly because of its involvement in drug trafficking.⁴⁴ In the 1980s some of these Cuban exiles later became involved in drug-financed support activities for the Contras.⁴⁵

The political mentor of Artime's MRR movement was future Watergate plotter Howard Hunt; and Artime in 1972 would pay for the bail of the Cuban Watergate burglars. The drug money-launderer Ramón Milián Rodríguez has claimed to have delivered $200,000 in cash from Artime to pay off some of the Cuban Watergate burglars; later, in support of the Contras, he managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.⁴⁶

It is alleged that Hunt and McCord had both been involved with Artime's invasion plans in 1963.⁴⁷ It was I believe no accident that the organization of Hunt's protégé Artime became enmired in drug trafficking. Hunt, I have argued elsewhere, had been handling a U.S. drug connection since his 1950 post in Mexico City as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) chief.⁴⁸

But McCord not only had a past in the anti-Castro activities of 1963, he was also part of the nation's emergency planning network that would later figure so prominently in the background of Iran-Contra and 9/11. McCord was a member of a small Air Force Reserve unit in Washington attached to the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP); assigned "to draw up lists of radicals and to develop contingency plans for censorship of the news media and U.S. mail in time of war."⁴⁹ His unit was part of the Wartime Information Security Program (WISP), which had responsibility for activating "contingency plans for imposing censorship on the press, the mails and all telecommunications (including government communications) [and] preventive detention of civilian 'security risks,' who would be placed in military 'camps.'"⁵⁰ In other words, these were the plans that became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, the Continuity of Government planning on which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together for twenty years before 9/11.

A Common Denominator for Structural Deep Events: Project Doomsday and COG

McCord's participation in an emergency planning system dealing with telecommunications suggests a common denominator in the backgrounds of almost all the deep events we are considering. Oliver North, the Reagan-Bush OEP point man on Iran-Contra planning, was also involved in such planning; and he had access to the nation's top secret Doomsday communications network. North's network, known as Flashboard, "excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints…[and] had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, … by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."⁵¹

Flashboard was used by North and his superiors for extremely sensitive operations which had to be concealed from other dubious or hostile parts of the Washington bureaucracy. These operations included the illegal shipments of arms to Iran, but also other activities, some still not known, perhaps even against Olof Palme's Sweden.⁵² Flashboard, America's emergency network in the 1980s, was the name in 1984-86 of the full-fledged Continuity of Government (COG) emergency network which was secretly planned for twenty years, at a cost of billions, by a team including Cheney and Rumsfeld. On 9/11 the same network was activated anew by the two men who had planned it for so many years.⁵³

But this Doomsday planning can be traced back to 1963, when Jack Crichton, head of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit of Dallas, was part of it in his capacity as chief of intelligence for Dallas Civil Defense, which worked out of an underground Emergency Operating Center. As Russ Baker reports, "Because it was intended for 'continuity of government' operations during an attack, [the Center] was fully equipped with communications equipment."⁵⁴ A speech given at the dedication of the Center in 1961 supplies further details:

This Emergency Operating Center [in Dallas] is part of the National Plan to link Federal, State and local government agencies in a communications network from which rescue operations can be directed in time of local or National emergency. It is a vital part of the National, State, and local Operational Survival Plan.⁵⁵

Crichton, in other words, was also part of what became known in the 1980s as the Doomsday Project, like James McCord, Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney after him. But in 1988 its aim was significantly enlarged: no longer to prepare for an atomic attack, but now to plan for the effective suspension of the American constitution in the face of any emergency.⁵⁶ This change in 1988 allowed COG to be implemented in 2001. By this time the Doomsday Project had developed into what the Washington Post called "a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing 'continuity of operations plans.'"⁵⁷

It is clear that the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP, known from 1961-1968 as the Office of Emergency Planning) supplies a common denominator for key personnel in virtually all of the structural events discussed here. This is a long way from establishing that the OEP itself (in addition to the individuals discussed here) was involved in generating any of these events. But I believe that the alternative communications network housed first in the OEP (later part of Project 908) played a significant role in at least three of them: the JFK assassination, Iran-Contra, and 9/11.

This is easiest to show in the case of 9/11, where it is conceded that the Continuity of Government (COG) plans of the Doomsday Project were implemented by Cheney on 9/11, apparently before the last of the four hijacked planes had crashed.⁵⁸ The 9/11 Commission could not locate records of the key decisions taken by Cheney on that day, suggesting that they may have taken place on the "secure phone " in the tunnel leading to the presidential bunker – with such a high classification that the 9/11 Commission was never supplied the phone records.⁵⁹ Presumably this was a COG phone.

It is not clear whether the "secure phone" in the White House tunnel belonged to the Secret Service or (as one might expect) was part of the secure network of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). If the latter, we'd have a striking link between 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The WHCA boasts on its Web site that the agency was "a key player in documenting the assassination of President Kennedy."⁶⁰ However it is not clear for whom this documentation was conducted, for the WHCA logs and transcripts were in fact withheld from the Warren Commission.⁶¹

The Secret Service had installed a WHCA portable radio in the lead car of the presidential motorcade.⁶² This in turn was in contact by police radio with the pilot car ahead of it, carrying DPD Deputy Chief Lumpkin of the 488^th Army Intelligence Reserve unit.⁶³ Records of the WHCA communications from the motorcade never reached the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations, or the Assassination Records Review Board.⁶⁴ Thus we cannot tell if they would explain some of the anomalies on the two channels of the Dallas Police Department. They might for example have thrown light upon the unsourced call on the Dallas Police tapes for a suspect who had exactly the false height and weight recorded for Oswald in his FBI and CIA files.⁶⁵

Today in 2011 we are still living under the State of Emergency proclaimed after 9/11 by President Bush. At least some COG provisions are still in effect, and were even augmented by Bush through Presidential Directive 51 of May 2007. Commenting on PD-51, the Washington Post reported at that time,

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers [including Cheney] to rotate secretly to [COG] locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation's survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans."⁶⁶

Presumably this "shadow government" finalized such long-standing COG projects as warrantless surveillance, in part through the Patriot Act, whose controversial provisions were already being implemented by Cheney and others well before the Bill reached Congress on October 12.⁶⁷ Other COG projects implemented included the militarization of domestic surveillance under NORTHCOM, and the Department of Homeland Security's Project Endgame—a ten-year plan to expand detention camps at a cost of $400 million in fiscal year 2007 alone.⁶⁸

I have, therefore, a recommendation for the Occupy movement, rightfully incensed as it is with the plutonomic excesses of Wall Street over the last three decades. It is to call for an end to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 2001, under which since 2008 a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team has been stationed permanently in the United States, in part to be ready "to help with civil unrest and crowd control."⁶⁹

Democracy-lovers must work to prevent the political crisis now developing in America from being resolved by military intervention.

Let me say in conclusion that for a half century American politics have been constrained and deformed by the unresolved matter of the Kennedy assassination. According to a memo of November 25 1963, from Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, it was important then to persuade the public that "Oswald was the assassin," and that "he did not have confederates."⁷⁰ Obviously this priority became even more important after these questionable propositions were endorsed by the Warren Report, the U.S. establishment, and the mainstream press. It has remained an embarrassing priority ever since for all succeeding administrations, including the present one. There is for example an official in Obama's State Department (Todd Leventhal), whose official job, until recently, included defense of the lone nut theory against so-called "conspiracy theorists"⁷¹

If Oswald was not a lone assassin, then it should not surprise us that there is continuity between those who falsified reports about Oswald in 1963, and those who distorted American politics in subsequent deep events beginning with Watergate. Since the deep event of 1963 the legitimacy of America's political system has become vested in a lie -- a lie which subsequent deep events have helped to protect.⁷²

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here http://www.peterdalescott.net/q.html

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, 'The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 47 No 2, November 21, 2011.

Articles on related subjects

• Peter Dale Scott, Norway's Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites

• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents

• C. Douglas Lummis, The United States and Terror on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America's recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods

• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System

• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?

• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States

Site R, Raven Rock Complex - Many of the facility's activities are classified, and distribution of most unclassified information about the facility is discouraged by the government. Colloquially, the facility is known as an "underground Pentagon"
E-4, EC-135, and E-6 are all airborne command centers.Air Force One is the term for any USAF plane the President of the United States travels on. However, the term normally refers to a Boeing VC-25A the President normally uses. While the VC-25A is equipped with numerous systems to ensure its survival, in an emergency, it would be recommended that he use the National Airborne Operations Center, a Boeing E-4 specially built to serve as a survivable mobile command post.
The E-6A was renamed Mercury in Autumn 1991 by request of the US Navy.[2] Sixteen were delivered up to 1992.

Notes

¹ Tim Weiner, "The Pentagon's Secret Stash," Mother Jones Magazine Mar-Apr 1992, 26.

² J.A. Myerson "War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy," Truthout, November 14, 2001, link. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 6, etc.

³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 29, 98.

⁴ Scott, Road to 9/11, 22, 97.

⁵ Scott, Road to 9/11, 21, 51-52; Kristol as quoted in Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History," Harper's Magazine, September 2004, 36.

⁶ E.g. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 204-05.

⁷ Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy, 354.

⁸ Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33; Scott, The War Conspiracy, 387; Scott, American War Machine, 152.

⁹ Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City, MO:

Andrews, McMeel, and Parker, 1987), 268, quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

¹⁰ Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; HSCA Critics Conference of 17 September 1977, 181, link. Stringfellow worked under Jack Revill in the Vice Squad of the DPD Special Services Bureau. As such he reported regularly to the FBI on such close Jack Ruby associates as James Herbert Dolan, a "known hoodlum and strong-arm man" on the FBI's Top Criminal list for Dallas (Robert M. Barrett, FBI Report of February 2, 1963, NARA#124-90038-10026, 12 [Stringfellow]; cf. NARA#124-10212-10012, 4 [hoodlum], NARA#124-10195-10305, 9 [Top Criminal]). Cf. 14 WH 601-02 Ruby and Dolan]. Robert Barrett, who received Stringfellow's reports to the FBI, had Ruby's friend Dolan under close surveillance; he also took part in Oswald's arrest at the Texas Theater, and claimed to have seen DPD Officer Westbrook with Oswald's wallet at the site of the Tippit killing [Dale K. Myers, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit (Milford, MI: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), 287-90]).

¹¹ It was sent for information to Washington, which received it three days later (Scott, Deep Politics, 275; Scott, Deep Politics II, 80, 129n; Scott, War Conspiracy, 382).

¹² Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383. (Marina's actual words, before mistranslation, were quite innocuous: "I cannot describe it [the gun] because a rifle to me like all rifles" (Warren Commission Exhibit 1778, 23 WH 383; discussion in Scott, Deep Politics, 168-72).

¹³ Stringfellow himself was the source of one other piece of false intelligence on November 22: that Oswald had confessed to the murders of both the president and Officer Tippit (Dallas FBI File DL 89-43-2381C; Paul L. Hoch, "The Final Investigation? The HSCA and Army Intelligence," The Third Decade, 1, 5 [July 1985], 3),

¹⁴ 9 WH 106; Scott, Deep Politics, 275-76; Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 119-22.

¹⁵ Rodney P. Carlisle and Dominic J. Monetta, Brandy: Our Man in Acapulco (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1999), 128.

¹⁶ Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12. Cf. pp. 15-16: "The United States should intervene militarily in Cuba and could (a) engineer provocative incidents ostensibly perpetrated by the Castro regime to serve as the cause of invasion…"

¹⁷ Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 568; James A. Nathan, The Cuban missile crisis revisited, 283; Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 9.

^[18 Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1 May 1963, NARA #202-10002-10018, 12.

¹⁹ "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," NARA #202-10002-10018, 20. I see nothing in this document indicating that the President should be notified that these "fabricated provocations" were false. On the contrary, the document called for "compartmentation of participants" to insure that the true facts were not leaked ("Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," NARA #202-10002-10018, 19).

²⁰ Quoted in Baker, Family of Secrets, 122. One of these, DPD Detective John Adamcik, was a member of the party which retrieved a blanket said to have contained Oswald's rifle; and which the Warren Commission used to link Oswald to the famous Mannlicher Carcano. Adamcik was later present at Mamantov's interview of Marina about the rifle, and corroborated Mamantov's account of it to the Warren Commission. There is reason to believe that Mamantov's translation of Marina's testimony was inaccurate (Scott, Deep Politics, 268-70, 276).

²¹ See James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).

²² 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352–54 (FBI agent).

²³ James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004, 224. For a fuller account of the CIA's withholding before 9/11, see Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots; Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski, "Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA's 9/11 Story," Salon, October 14, 2011, link.

²⁴ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 7-12, 142-47, etc.

²⁵ Scott, American War Machine, 203.

²⁶ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 371, cf. 95. Quite independently, Richard Clarke, the former White House Counterterrorism Chief on 9/11, has charged that "There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information" (Rory O'Connor and Ray Nowosielski, "Insiders Voice Doubts about CIA's 9/11 Story," Salon, October 14, 2011).

²⁷ Coll, 467-69.

²⁸ Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots, 107-08.

²⁹ James Bamford, Body of Secrets, 201. Cf. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200, citing John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 51.

³⁰ "Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II)," Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, JCS 2304/189, NARA #202-10002-10018, link.

³¹ Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280.

³² Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L.

Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random

House, 1976), 443–46.

³³ Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that "the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King" (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728).

³⁴ George O'Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in

Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278–79.

³⁵ Scott, Road to 9/11, 52-53.

³⁶ Scott, Road to 9/11, 53-54.

³⁷ Scott, Road to 9/11, 50-64.

³⁸ Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards without North," Social Justice (Summer 1989). Revised as "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011.

³⁹ Scott, Road to 9/11, 132.

⁴⁰ Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 13 (Contras); Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 93-102 (mujahedin).

⁴¹ Richard Coll, Ghost Wars, 457-59, 534-36,

⁴² According to testimony from CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, only "Hunt and McCord had ever been CIA full-time employees. The others [including Sturgis] were contract employees for a short duration or a longer duration" (Watergate Hearings, 3427). Cf. Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 45 (casino owners).

⁴³ Peter Dale Scott, "From Dallas to Watergate," Ramparts, December 1973; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 356, 363.

⁴⁴ Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 20.

⁴⁵ Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 25-32, etc.

⁴⁶ Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (London: Verso, 1998), 308-09; Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 368 (Frigorificos).

⁴⁷ Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 96-97.

⁴⁸ Scott, American War Machine, 51-54. Hunt helped put together what became the drug-linked World Anti-Communist League. Artime's Costa Rica base was on land whose owners were part of the local WACL chapter (Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 87, 220).

⁴⁹ Woodward and Bernstein, All the President's Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 23

⁵⁰ Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York: Random House, 1984), 16, citing Department of Defense Directive 5230.7, June 25, 1965, amended May 21, 1971.

⁵¹ Peter Dale Scott, "North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning," Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Northwards Without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power." Social Justice (San Francisco), XVI, 2 (Summer 1989), 1-30; Peter Dale Scott, "The Terrorism Task Force." Covert Action Information Bulletin, 33 (Winter 1990), 12-15.

⁵² Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140-41, 242 (Iran, etc.); Ola Tunander, The secret war against Sweden: US and British submarine deception in the 1980s, 309 (Sweden).

⁵³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

⁵⁴ Russ Baker, Family of Secrets, 121.

⁵⁵ "Statement by Col. John W. Mayo, Chairman of City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission at the Dedication of the Emergency Operating Center at Fair Park," May 24, 1961, link.

Six linear inches of Civil Defense Administrative Files are preserved in the Dallas Municipal Archives; a Finding Guide is viewable online here. I hope an interested researcher may wish to consult them.

⁵⁶ Scott, Road to 9/11, 183-87.

⁵⁷ Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

⁵⁸ 9/11 Report, 38, 326, 555n9; Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 224.

⁵⁹ Scott, Road to 9/11, 226-30. A footnote in the 9/11 Report (555n9) says:

"The 9/11 crisis tested the U.S. government's plans and capabilities to ensure the continuity of constitutional government and the continuity of government operations. We did not investigate this topic, except as needed to understand the activities and communications of key officials on 9/11. The Chair, Vice Chair, and senior staff were briefed on the general nature and implementation of these continuity plans."

The other footnotes confirm that no information from COG files was used to document the 9/11 report. At a minimum these files might resolve the mystery of the missing phone call which simultaneously authorized COG, and (in consequence) determined that Bush should continue to stay out of Washington. I suspect that they might tell us a great deal more.

⁶⁰ "White House Communications Agency," Signal Corps Regimental History, link.

⁶¹ The Warren Commission staff knew of the WHCA presence in Dallas from the Secret Service (17 WH 598, 619, 630, etc.).

⁶² Statement of Secret Service official Winston Lawson, 17 WH 630 (WHCA radio).

⁶³ Pamela McElwain-Brown, "The Presidential Lincoln Continental SS-100-X," Dealey Plaza Echo, Volume 3, Issue 2, 23, link (police radio); Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 272-75 (Lumpkin).

⁶⁴ In the 1990s the WHCA supplied statements to the ARRB concerning communications between Dallas and Washington on November 22 (NARA #172-10001-10002 to NARA #172-10000-10008). The Assassination Records Review Board also attempted to obtain from the WHCA the unedited original tapes of conversations from Air Force One on the return trip from Dallas, November 22, 1963. (Edited and condensed versions of these tapes had been available since the 1970s from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.) The attempt was unsuccessful: "The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes." See Assassinations Records Review Board: Final Report, chapter 6, Part 1, 116, link. In November 2011 AP reported that Gen. Chester Clifton's personal copy of the Air Force One recordings was being put up for sale, with an asking price of $500,000 (AP, November 15, 2011, link).

⁶⁵ See Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 347-48, 385-87.

⁶⁶ Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

⁶⁷ Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 348: "One of the first efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country's defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on [sic] October 2001." Cf. "The Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001,″ link; "Questions and Answers about Beginning of Domestic Spying Program; link.

⁶⁸ Scott, Road to 9/11, 236-45; Peter Dale Scott, "Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society," November 28, 2010, http:/1/japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3448.

⁶⁹ "Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1," Army Times, September 30, 2008, link. As part of the Army's emergency plan GARDEN PLOT in the 1960s, there were until 1971 two brigades (4,800 troops) on permanent standby to quell unrest.

⁷⁰ "Memorandum for Mr. Moyers" of November 25, 1963, FBI 62-109060, Section 18, p. 29, link. Cf. Nicholas Katzenbach, Some of It Was Fun (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 131-36.

⁷¹ Leventhal's official title is (or was) "Chief of the Counter-Misinformation Team, U.S. Department of State" (link). In 2010 the U.S. State Department "launched an official bid to shoot down conspiracy theories….The "Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation" page… insists that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F Kennedy alone, and that the Pentagon was not hit by a cruise missile on 9/11" Daily Record [Scotland], August 2, 2010, (link). The site still exists here, ("Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored.") The site still attacks 9/11 theories, but a page on the Kennedy assassination has been suspended (link). Cf. Robin Ramsay, "Government vs Conspiracy Theorists: The official war on "sick think," Fortean Times, April 2010, link; "The State Department vs 'Sick Think'

The JFK assassination, 9/11, and the Tory MP spiked with LSD," Fortean Times, July 2010, link; William Kelly, "Todd Leventhal: The Minister of Diz at Dealey Plaza," CTKA, 2010, link.

⁷² For Nixon's sensitivity concerning the Kennedy assassination, and the way this induced him into some of the intrigues known collectively as Watergate, see e.g. Scott, Hoch, and Stetler, The Assassinations, 374-78; Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up (Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993), 33, 64-66.

As author Michael Lind has observed, there have for a long time been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government. One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain "order."

To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as "persuasion through arguments" versus "coercion by force." Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία)."

Hannah Arendt

Writing amid the protests and riots of the 1960s, Arendt feared that traditional authority was at risk, threatened (in her eyes) by the contemporary "loss of tradition and of religion." A half century later, I would argue that a far greater danger to social equilibrium comes now from those on the right who invoke authority in the name of tradition and religion. With America's huge expansion into the enterprise of covertly dominating and exploiting the rest of the world, the open processes of persuasion, which have been America's traditional ideal for handling domestic affairs, have increasingly tilted towards top-down violence.

This tilt towards violent or repressive power is defended rhetorically as a means to preserve social stability, but in fact it threatens it. As Kevin Phillips and others have demonstrated, empires built on violent or repressive power tend to rise and then fall, often with surprising rapidity. Underlying the discussion in this essay is the thesis that repressive power is unstable, creating dialectical forces both within and outside its system. Externally, repressive power helps create its own enemies, as happened with Britain (in India), France (in Indochina) and the Netherlands (in Indonesia).

The Socio-dynamics of Repressive Power in Large-scale Societies

But more dangerous and destabilizing has been the conversion of those empires themselves, into hubristic mechanisms of war. The fall of Periclean Athens, which inspired Thucydides' reflections, is a case in point. Thucydides described how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America's follies in Vietnam and Iraq. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly in the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy. Paul Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Chalmers Johnson have described the recreation of this process in the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires. Its recurrence again in recent American history corroborates that there is a self-propelling dynamic of power that becomes repressive.

We are conditioned to think that the open institutions of American governance could not possibly provide a milieu for plots like 9/11 against public order. But since World War Two covert U.S. agencies like the CIA have helped create an alternative world where power is exercised with minimal oversight, often at odds with public agencies' proclaimed policy objectives of law and order, and often in conjunction with lawless and even criminal foreign and domestic elements.

The expansion of this covert world has occurred principally in Asia. There covert U.S. decisions were made to build up drug-financed armies in Burma, Thailand, and Laos, in a series of aggressive actions that by the 1960s involved America in a hot Indochina War. This war, like the related wars that ensued later in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was initiated by America for a mix of geostrategic and economic reasons, above all the desire to establish a dominant U.S. presence an important region of petroleum reserves.

Air America at Sam Thong, Laos, 1961

The country most deeply affected by the succession of Asian Wars has been America itself. Its expansive forces, backed by powerful interest groups, are now out of control, as our managers, like other empire managers before them, have "come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain – in our case, nowhere on earth – in which their presence is not crucial."⁷

To illustrate this, loss of control, let us look for a moment at a milieu which I believe to have been an important factor in all of America's major domestic deep events: the CIA's ongoing interactions with the global drug connection.

Unaccountable Power: The CIA and the Return of the Global Drug Connection

Since World War Two the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence -- first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan.⁸ With America's expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends.

In 2004 Time and USA Today ran major stories about two of the chief Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that Khan in particular "has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe."⁹ Later it was revealed that both traffickers were simultaneously CIA assets, and that Khan in particular was "paid a large amount of cash by the United States," even while he was reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish smuggling networks.¹⁰

There is no longer anything surprising in the news that large U.S. payments were made to a drug trafficker who was himself funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The arrangement is no more bizarre than the CIA's performance during the U.S. "war on drugs" in Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA first set up an anti-drug unit in Venezuela, and then helped its chief, Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami International Airport.¹¹

It would be easy to conclude from these reports that the CIA and Pentagon intentionally use drugs to help finance the enemy networks that justify their overseas operations. Yet I doubt that such a cynical Machiavellian objective is ever consciously voiced by those responsible in Washington.

More likely, it is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. repressive style of conducting covert operations. Great emphasis is put on recruiting covert assets; and in unstable areas with weak governance, drug traffickers with their own ample funds and repressive networks are the most obvious candidates for recruitment by the CIA. The traffickers in turn are happy to become U.S. assets, because this status affords them at least a temporary immunity from U.S. prosecution.¹²

In a nutshell: I am describing a development that is not so much intentional, as a consequence of repressive dynamics. A related example would be the CIA's recurring use of double agents, again for the reason just suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, the chief planner was a double agent, Ali Mohammed, who surveyed the Embassy and reported to Osama bin Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI had ordered the Canadian RCMP to release him from detention.¹³ In the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008, the scene was initially surveyed for the attackers by a DEA double agent, David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom "U.S. authorities sent … to work for them in Pakistan…despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups."¹⁴

David Headley in court

The central point is that expansion beyond a nation's borders engenders a pattern of repressive power with predictable results -- results that transcend the conscious intentions of anyone within that repressive power system. Newly formed and ill-supervised agencies spawn contradictory policies abroad, the net effect of which is usually both expansive and deleterious – not just to the targeted nation but also to America.

This is especially true of covert agencies, whose practice of secrecy means that controversial policies proliferate without either coordination or review. Asia in particular has been since 1945 the chief area where the CIA has ignored or overridden the policy directives of the State Department. As I document in American War Machine, CIA interventions in Asia, especially those that escalated into the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars, fostered an ongoing global CIA drug connection, or what I have called elsewhere a dark quadrant of unaccountable power.

This drug connection, richly endowed with huge resources and its own resources of illegal violence, has a major stake in both American interventions and above all unwinnable wars to aggravate the conditions of regional lawlessness that are needed for drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect sense that the global drug connection has, as I believe, been an ongoing factor in the creation of an overseas American empire that most U.S. citizens never asked for. More specifically, the dark quadrant has contributed to all the major deep events – including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, that have helped militarize America and overshadow its public institutions.

'Occupy' crackdowns coordinated by DHS (The Reich-security office) RHS - ReichsSicherheitsHauptamt

2011-11-25T23:57:00.001-08:00

Rick Ellis --- Minneapolis Top News Examiner --- November 15, 2011

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

The FBI has so far failed to respond to requests for an official response, and of the 14 local police agencies contacted in the past 24 hours, all have declined to respond to questions on this issue.

But in a recent interview with the BBC," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned she was on a conference call just before the recent wave of crackdowns began.

"I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them."

At the time this story was updated, Mayor Quan's office had declined to discuss her comments.

UPDATE: Friday, 3:30 p.m. CT I spoke with someone today from the Justice Department about this story, which you can find here. The Huffington Post's Simon McCormack also just posted a story, including a brief statement from the FBI.

UPDATE: Thursday, 11:30 a.m. CT Two civil rights legal groups have filed a comprehensive Freedom of Information request for any and all communications between federal law enforcement agencies and local police that are related to the "Occupy" protests.

UPDATE: Thursday, 10:15 a.m. CT. I was finally able to get an official response from the Dept. of Homeland Security, although it didn' address many of my questions. I was also able to speak with several high-ranking DHS officials on background and deep background, which helped answer a few logistical questions (for instance, the role of the department's Federal Protective Service).

Oakland Government Fascists Chemical Warfare

Oakland Teargas orgy of anti-democratic violence by Police and the USA warfare state.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 12:45 p.m. CT. Speaking of Homeland Security, the department's Federal Protective Service (which is tasked with protecting federal buildings) has been spotted at a couple of 'Occupy' crackdowns, including one in Portland.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 11:15 a.m. CT. Here are a couple of relevant links that are related to this story.

Filmmaker Michael Moore was on "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" last night talking about this very issue. Click here to see the video.

The Associated Press has published a great piece on another set of conference calls about strategy, these organized by the Police Executive Research Forum.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 10:10 am CT. I'm working on at least one new story for today, but I wanted to try and clear up a couple of questions I've gotten since this original story posted yesterday.

I have a hunch that Mayor Quan might have been referring to a conference call between a number of U.S. mayors in her interview, not one with law enforcement officials. But that's just a hunch on my part, since her office has so far declined to offer any explanation of her comments to me.

My original source for the story (who still works at the Justice Dept.) stands behind the original story and we're working to flesh it out in more detail today. I also have some other aspects of the story I'm working on as well.

I'll post a link to my next story here or if you want to be automatically notified, subscribe to my feed here.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at rellisfall@gmail.com.

Dorli Rainey, 84 year-old woman who was pepper-sprayed by Seattle police pigs.

NAOMI WOLFE writes:

The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

click to enlarge - Anti Teargas Anti pepper spray remedy - not lemon juice or vinegar

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

NEW BEST JFK BOOK (catholic but full of anti-CIA goodness)

2011-11-21T00:43:00.000-08:00

also check http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2008/10/jfk-assassination-late-confession.html

JFK He was dead as soon as he said he was going to dismantle the millitary industrial machine, November 19, 2011

Those who question the truth of this book don't know how the CIA operates. The CIA is a secret organization. Except for the appointment of a few at the top, it is not a partisan organization. When a new president takes office, he appoints his choice to the director position who, in turn, appoints a few to the top jobs. The buck stops there. A newly appointed director does not clean house. As a matter-of-fact, according to its charter imposed upon it by Congress, a newly appointed director can't clean house lest he imperil the security of the nation. Actually, he wouldn't know where to begin.

No one, including its leadership, has any idea how many employees are in the CIA and where they are and what they are doing. Myriads of agent groups spread strategically over the globe. In a split second, the top agent of any one of the subversive units can dispatch a code and preempt most any threat to the United States. A sitting president rarely knows of their existence, let alone of their activities. This is the authority of Congress and a matter of national security. The number is usually placed between twenty and forty thousand, but, as a matter-of-fact, no one knows

============================================

This is nothing earth shattering, but I think quite interesting...

A good friend of mine signed up about 10 years ago for a bus ride across the South that either was for Peace or against the Death Penalty, I can't remember.

Anyway, he told me that this minister in Birmingham Alabama signed up to house some of the folks on the bus ride when they passed through Birmingham.

My friend said that he was selected to stay at this minister's house and when he came through the front door, he couldn't believe what he saw!

There were sticky post-it notes all over the walls of every room in the house!

The author, it turned out, was writing a book about the JFK Assassination, and this was the only way he could keep the whole, convoluted thing organized!

There was an Oswald room, and a Cuba room, and an FBI room, a CIA room, plus many more -- all covered with post-it notes all over the walls!

When I read the bio of Jim Douglass, I realized that this was the same guy... and this was the book!

Even without this backstory, my feeling about the book is that it is a tremendous contribution to understanding the anti-democratic strains in American society, a huge gift to this and the next generation.

And if I ever write a book... I'm getting out the sticky notes!

============================================

I was seven when JFK was assassinated and remember it well. For the next 45+ years I paid little attention to conspiracy theories, finding them far-fetched. But the missing piece for me was always that major element in any murder: motive. Why would anyone risk the high stakes of assassinating a president without a compelling motive? It was easier for me to believe the reigning version of one lone gunman, whose motive was buried in an unbalanced mind.

But JFK and the Unspeakable finally provides that compelling reason why: JFK crossed the military establishment at almost every turn in his presidency and became increasingly bent at making peace. And it's not just the billions of dollars at stake in the economics of applying the military solution to every problem involving violence, but it's the ideology of the military leadership themselves whose egos are tied to a deeply-held belief that only violence can defeat violence. When someone like the evolving JFK begins to turn them down at every turn with a differing vision for peace, they desperately turn to that myopic solution: violence. It's that ancient human entrenchment in violence as the only solution to violence that Douglass names as the Unspeakable -- in this instance of history, making a victim of the most powerful person in the world, the sitting U.S. President.

Here's a partial list detailed by Douglass in which JFK opposed his military advisers. JFK: called their bluff in the Bay of Pigs, refusing to send the military aid necessary for a successful insurgence; worked a peaceful compromise solution in Laos (in anticipation of his favored strategy for Vietnam); turned down any talk of a winnable first-strike nuclear war with the Soviets (yes! there are now transcripts that his advisers actually argued for this!); followed up his refusal to attack the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis with active peace-making behind the scenes with Khrushchev; used the model of correspondence with Khrushchev to begin similar overtures with Castro; hammered out the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev and then ardently lobbied the American people in order to get it passed in Congress; began laying out a plan of complete withdrawal from Vietnam in favor of a political solution akin to Laos. With such an extensive list, doesn't the motive begin to become clear?

The other fascinating subplot is the story of Lee Harvey Oswald. Douglass compiles considerable evidence that Oswald left his highly classified radar post in the military to participate in a 1959 classified CIA plot to infiltrate the Soviet Union with spies whose cover was pretending to be disaffected U.S. citizens. Oswald was a bust at being a spy, and so was quietly brought back to the states with no repercussions for his so-called treason. Instead, his subsequent jobs and activities were always supported by people with CIA ties. Apparently, the CIA keeps tabs on its former spies and tries to keep them happy in their civilian life. But when the plot to kill Kennedy began to be hatched, Oswald made the ideal patsy to set-up. They used his former spy-cover, as a disaffected American who supported the Soviets, against him. Again, Douglass' cataloging of evidence is impressive.

With the motive established, and the subplot of the creation of a patsy laid out, Douglass weaves in much of the other previously cited evidence for shooters in the grassy knoll and a subsequent cover-up (did you realize, for example, that Kennedy-fired CIA Director Allen Dulles -- precisely one of the military establishment whom Kennedy crossed -- was appointed to and served on the Warren Commission?) to finally produce an overall narrative of conspiracy that makes sense.

The incredible aspect of this book, however, is the hope in which it's written. If the Unspeakable is the evil of nations like ours always and only relying on violence to solve problems involving violence, then the beginning to another vision for making peace is to speak the Unspeakable -- and to uncover its hidden crimes. Will the Unspeakable be spoken loudly enough by enough people? I urge you to read this book and consider Douglass' evidence that we might as a people, following our assassinated President, begin to speak the word of a different path to peace.

============================================

We are all jurors in an ongoing trial to find the truth of John Kennedy's murder. Most of us have fallen asleep; some left the chamber, and others don't even care anymore. But a few, a very small few, have been paying attention for the last 45 years as arguments for the prosecution of Lee Harvey Oswald, headed up by government lawyers and their lackeys have been constantly countered by a volunteer and unpaid defense team for the truth made up of laymen, clergymen, historians, teachers, researchers, republicans, democrats, non-affiliates of all ages shapes and sizes.

It has been a bewildering experience to have been patted on the head and told to go to sleep by the Warren Commission only to be rudely awakened by a garrulous DA from Louisiana, followed then by a government report which said, well, there might have been two, but go on back to sleep. Dazed and confused we began to leave the room but were called back in by Oliver Stone who told us to take a look at his evidence of Oswald's innocence. We were intrigued, but an impish Gerald Posner convinced Dick Cavett and other icons of American mainstream media that Stone's myth was just that and the case was indeed closed: Oswald did it. But Stone had garnered enough interest to cause Congress to form the ARRB- under George Bush Sr, no less.

It took Bill Clinton half his presidency to get the thing going, but we watched with bated breath as the Assassinations Records Review Board began pulling from the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet bits and pieces of information that left gaping holes in the official story. Most of us didn't believe it anyway, but a few, a small few did notice that there seemed to have been two brains pulled from John Kennedy's head during the so-called autopsy. In fact so many moles began popping up it was difficult for the gatekeepers to bop them in the head fast enough. Distracted as we were by 911 and the war on terror, and the revelation that our government has the capacity to pull off an Operation Northwoods, as the ARRB found ou, we continued to keep half an eyeball on the story, those of us who were paying attention.

But then just as we were ready to reach a verdict of no true bill, Peter Jennings pops in to save the day for the prosecution. Disregarding all prior logic, evidence and common sense he lulled us back to comfortable numbness as he proved through computer generation, laser beams and some small degree of witch-craft that yes, indeed that was some magic bullet. Nevertheless, while almost dozing off again we heard rumblings of another defense witness about to enter the courtroom. He was David Talbot, an almost Main stream media type who was arguing that John and Robert Kennedy were possibly victims of powerful forces in our own government who wanted and needed them gone. But before he could present his full case a boisterous and bellicose advocate of Governmental Righteousness threw on to the floor, almost breaking it, an objection, claiming his stake in the case with a tome of such immense size and weight that no one, at first, dared to read it or question its obvious Buglisosian authority.

When it was finally opened, the muse of Arlen Spector saundered forth speaking in only a language that he could understand. Talk shows raved about Vince's masterpiece; gatekeepers swooned, and the prosecution let out a huge and foul-smelling sigh of relief as they said, There! That ought to put this damn thing to rest finally! Everyone began to pack up and leave, most never having read briefs by Scott, Gerald McKnight, Larry Hancock, etc., defense advocates who had built their arguments on the works of Vince Salandria, Marrs, Howard Roffman, Sheim, Weisberg, etc., and the thousands of pages of released and obscure documents. But just as the courtroom almost emptied, looking like a Senate Chamber with a wobbling old man named Byrd trying to make a point, in comes a Jesuit priest.

I'm no Catholic, I thought, as I was getting up to leave with the two or three other jurors who had sat through the whole case so far, trying to pay attention, but this guy seems to know his stuff. He's talking about everything we have already heard but putting it all into context. His summation is actually making sense- reason, logic, truth, honesty, footnotes, primary source interviews, follow-up questions, giving the benefit of the doubt to all sides. I sat back down. As James Douglass presented his case, scales fell from my eyes. Oswald was innocent. I look around. Is anybody there?

David Neal Kitty Hawk, NC

In James W. Douglass' outstanding new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable," the author explains the title in his introduction. Coined by spiritual writer Thomas Merton, The Unspeakable refers to "an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe." Regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Unspeakable succeeded due to deniability by the nation's citizens of the horrifying truth of the event and to plausible deniability by the government agencies responsible for the murder. (Vincent Bugliosi's recent fictional paperweight is a perfect example of the plausible deniability that allows the Unspeakable to thrive.)

Many excellent books have proven that the assassination of JFK was the result of a conspiracy. Douglass verifies the certainty of the conspiracy and, as the subtitle of the book states, explains "Why He Died and Why It Matters." He scrutinizes the historical facts surrounding the assassination, from the creation of the CIA to the gradual obliteration of the freedoms upon which this nation was founded.

This book is primarily the story of John F. Kennedy who changes from a Cold Warrior to an altruistic leader willing to risk his life to ensure that the world's children will not become victims of a nuclear catastrophe. Equal time is spent on JFK's presidency as on the assassination but one of the many rewards of this book is the author's capacity to show the relationship between his policies and his death. And the book is a tragedy because it gradually becomes obvious that each step he makes toward peace steadily increases the hatred of his enemies who will eventually betray him.

It is also the story of the designated patsy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Moved around the country like a pawn by government agencies (as was the second "Oswald"), he was being set up as the scapegoat. Enter some despicable characters, including David Atlee Philips, James Hosty and, of course, Michael and Ruth Paine. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union was being set up as the evil empire behind the assassination, along with its satellite Cuba.

Douglass credibly illustrates the origin of the Crime of the Century. During President Truman's administration, the CIA was empowered to be a paramilitary organization with unlimited powers. Truman's successor, President Eisenhower, fell out of favor with the CIA when he planned a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. This was cancelled after a U.S. spy plane crashed in Russia. Eisenhower had reportedly ordered such flights cancelled and had his suspicions about who had ruined his peace plan. He subsequently issued his warning about the "military industrial complex" in his farewell address. But he didn't defy "this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." He left that task to his successor, JFK.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was planned by the CIA to regain control of the island and to re-open the casinos for organized crime. President Kennedy refused to provide air support for the Cuban brigade because he knew that he had been lied to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the CIA; the invasion had been designed to fail without U.S. support but they hadn't told this to JFK who refused to fall into their trap. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK once again enraged the CIA and the Joint Chiefs by resisting their tremendous pressure on him to take military action which would have led to nuclear war.

Following that crisis, JFK became intent on ending the Cold War by establishing a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. However, many CIA and Pentagon personnel believed that it was better to be "dead than red" and that it was preferable to destroy civilization rather than let the Communists rule. They also knew that war generated billions of dollars into the arms industry. As a result, they would repeatedly subvert the President's policies and isolate him within his own government. Enter some more despicable characters: Richard Bissell, Charles Cabell, Henry Cabot Lodge, Lyman Lemnitzer, Curtis LeMay and perhaps the most contemptible of all, Allen Dulles. Ironically, JFK learned to trust Khrushchev more than people within his own government.

At American University on June 10, 1963, JFK spoke about his desire for world peace. He communicated his resolve to form a new relationship with Khrushchev. He spoke about the necessity of a pursuit toward disarmament. He related his intentions to establish a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He acknowledged his country's past faults and recognized the Russian people as wanting peace as much as the American people. "And we are all mortal," he stated. Though this extremely important speech was ignored in the United States, it was disseminated throughout the Soviet Union, per order of Khrushchev, who was prepared to respond favorably to JFK's peace initiative. The speech also certified JFK's death warrant. With so many powerful enemies opposing his policies and hating him, JFK didn't have a chance as he was being maneuvered into the crossfire in Dallas.

President Kennedy was aware of the power of his enemies and he knew the dangers facing him. But he persevered and mandated that all U.S. personnel would be withdrawn from Vietnam; he was determined to never send in combat troops even if this meant defeat. He also refused to intervene militarily in Laos. He exchanged private letters with Khrushchev, which infuriated the CIA, and secretly initiated plans to attain rapproachement with Cuba, which further incensed the Agency. Cuba's Fidel Castro, whom the CIA hated as intensely as it hated Kennedy, was equally eager to begin an American-Cuba dialogue. In fact, Castro was meeting with a JFK representative when the President was murdered. JFK died a martyr and the forces of evil that killed him also killed his vision of peace.

Lyndon Johnson, the CIA's ally, assumed the presidency. He cancelled talks with Khrushchev and refused Castro's pleas to continue the dialogue. He reversed JFK's withdrawal plan from Vietnam as well as his plan to neutralize Laos. The military industrial complex took control of the country. The policy of plausible deniability led the way to assassinations of foreign leaders, the overthrowing of foreign governments and horrors committed all over the globe. If JFK had not been murdered, we would not have had the prolongation of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the purported War on Terror and the steady moral deterioration of America. Interestingly, one month after JFK's assassination, President Truman wrote an article for The Washington Post cautioning about the threat of the CIA taking over America.

The author meticulously examines the evidence and draws conclusions which ring with unassailable truth: (1) The CIA coordinated and implemented he assassination of President Kennedy, an act of treason which destroyed democracy in the U.S. (2) The Warren Commission was created to propagate lies to conceal the truth from the American people. (3)There has been a continued cover-up by successive administrations and their stooges in the mass media. (4)The murder of JFK is directly related to the current domination of the American people by powerful oppressors within a shadow government that will continue to insist that only sustained war can keep the country safe from its enemies, never admitting that they themselves are the supreme evil.

This is an exceptional book that will be used by future historians to determine the truth about the assassination and how it changed America. And it will also be used to honor John F. Kennedy as a courageous president who believed in doing God's work on earth. In doing so, he came into conflict with the Unspeakable and his life was extinguished.

Review

With penetrating insight and unswerving integrity, Doublass probes the fundamental truths about JFK's assassination . . . By far the most important book yet written on the subject --Gaeton Fonzi, former Staff Investigator, US House Select Committee on Assassinations

JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE is an exceptional achievement. Douglass has made the strongest case so far in the JFK assissiation literature as to the Who and the Why of Dallas. --Gerald McKnight, author, BREACH OF TRUST: HOW THE WARREN COMMISSION FAILED THE NATION AND WHY

Douglas presents, brilliantly, an unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy--at odds with his initial Cold War stance--that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners amont the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. --Daniel Ellsberg, author, SECRETS: A MEMOIR OF VIETNAM AND THE PENTAGON PAPERS

About the Author

James W. Dougleass is a longtime peace activist and writer. He and his wife Shelley are co-founders of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, WA, and Mary's House, A Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Birmingham, AL.

book download link pdf file

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0d32af3d6d5925d5a0f6c23a29b13131136759a3&dn=JFK+and+the+Unspeakable+-+Why+He+Died+and+Why+It+Matters+%28Malest&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

If you have the link to the audiobook mp3 download please leave it in the comments

Clinton TIME MAGAZINE Graeber - Money + Comments

2011-11-18T00:54:00.000-08:00

Clinton bombed civilians in Serbia - war criminal

Could you briefly talk about some ways to create jobs that we're not using now and why banks and corporations are sitting on so much cash?

Well, the banks have about $2.2 trillion in cash uncommitted to loans. And they need to hold somewhere between $160 billion and $200 billion of that because they have their own mortgages that are still uncertain. But they could loan in theory, at conservative ratios of 10-to-1, $20 trillion. Obviously, if that happened, the recession would be over in 15 seconds.

http://swampland.time.com/2011/11/09/qa-bill-clintons-vision-for-a-smart-government-and-a-strong-economy/?xid=gonewsedit

What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber

Friday, August 26, 2011

Philip Pilkington: Let's begin. Most economists claim that money was invented to replace the barter system. But you've found something quite different, am I correct?

David Graeber: Yes there's a standard story we're all taught, a 'once upon a time' — it's a fairy tale.

It really deserves no other introduction: according to this theory all transactions were by barter. "Tell you what, I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow." Or three arrow-heads for that beaver pelt or what-have-you. This created inconveniences, because maybe your neighbor doesn't need chickens right now, so you have to invent money.

The story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it's the founding myth of economics. Now, I'm an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: "I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow," we'd have found one or two by now. After all people have been looking since 1776, when the Wealth of Nations first came out. But if you think about it for just a second, it's hardly surprising that we haven't found anything.

Think about what they're saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. So, if your neighbor doesn't have what you want right now, no big deal. Obviously what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor's cow, you'd say, "wow, nice cow" and he'd say "you like it? Take it!" – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don't even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women's councils.

So the real question is not how does barter generate some sort of medium of exchange, that then becomes money, but rather, how does that broad sense of 'I owe you one' turn into a precise system of measurement – that is: money as a unit of account?

By the time the curtain goes up on the historical record in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3200 BC, it's already happened. There's an elaborate system of money of account and complex credit systems. (Money as medium of exchange or as a standardized circulating units of gold, silver, bronze or whatever, only comes much later.)

So really, rather than the standard story – first there's barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find "I'll give you twenty chickens for that cow" type of barter systems, it's usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

PP: You say that by the time historical records start to be written in the Mesopotamia around 3200 BC a complex financial architecture is already in place. At the same time is society divided into classes of debtors and creditors? If not then when does this occur? And do you see this as the most fundamental class division in human history?

DG: Well historically, there seem to have been two possibilities.

One is what you found in Egypt: a strong centralized state and administration extracting taxes from everyone else. For most of Egyptian history they never developed the habit of lending money at interest. Presumably, they didn't have to.

Mesopotamia was different because the state emerged unevenly and incompletely. At first there were giant bureaucratic temples, then also palace complexes, but they weren't exactly governments and they didn't extract direct taxes – these were considered appropriate only for conquered populations. Rather they were huge industrial complexes with their own land, flocks and factories. This is where money begins as a unit of account; it's used for allocating resources within these complexes.

Interest-bearing loans, in turn, probably originated in deals between the administrators and merchants who carried, say, the woollen goods produced in temple factories (which in the very earliest period were at least partly charitable enterprises, homes for orphans, refugees or disabled people for instance) and traded them to faraway lands for metal, timber, or lapis lazuli. The first markets form on the fringes of these complexes and appear to operate largely on credit, using the temples' units of account. But this gave the merchants and temple administrators and other well-off types the opportunity to make consumer loans to farmers, and then, if say the harvest was bad, everybody would start falling into debt-traps.

This was the great social evil of antiquity – families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage. Often people would start abandoning the cities entirely, joining semi-nomadic bands, threatening to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely. Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or 'washing of the tablets,' they'd cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for 'freedom' in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means 'return to mother,' since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

PP: You have noted in the book that debt is a moral concept long before it becomes an economic concept. You've also noted that it is a very ambivalent moral concept insofar as it can be both positive and negative. Could you please talk about this a little? Which aspect is more prominent?

DG: Well it tends to pivot radically back and forth.

One could tell the history like this: eventually the Egyptian approach (taxes) and Mesopotamian approach (usury) fuse together, people have to borrow to pay their taxes and debt becomes institutionalized.

Taxes are also key to creating the first markets that operate on cash, since coinage seems to be invented or at least widely popularized to pay soldiers – more or less simultaneously in China, India, and the Mediterranean, where governments find the easiest way to provision the troops is to issue them standard-issue bits of gold or silver and then demand everyone else in the kingdom give them one of those coins back again. Thus we find that the language of debt and the language of morality start to merge.

In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, 'debt,' 'guilt,' and 'sin' are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It's as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it's the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren't real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.

How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an 'I owe you one' – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they're a cheapskate, and mock them, but you're unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that's when you start saying, "traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they're not of the finest quality, this means war!"

Money, in the sense of exact equivalents, seems to emerge from situations like that, but also, war and plunder, the disposal of loot, slavery. In early Medieval Ireland, for example, slave-girls were the highest denomination of currency. And you could specify the exact value of everything in a typical house even though very few of those items were available for sale anywhere because they were used to pay fines or damages if someone broke them.

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. "You owe me, but I'll cut you a break for now…" Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their debtors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, "wait a minute, who owes what to who here?" And of course for thousands of years, that's what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers' language, you're admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing. That's the situation the religious thinkers were stuck with, so they started with the language of debt, and then they tried to turn it around and make it into something else.

PP: You'd be forgiven for thinking this was all very Nietzschean. In his 'On the Genealogy of Morals' the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that all morality was founded upon the extraction of debt under the threat of violence. The sense of obligation instilled in the debtor was, for Nietzsche, the origin of civilisation itself. You've been studying how morality and debt intertwine in great detail. How does Nietzsche's argument look after over 100 years? And which do you see as primal: morality or debt?

DG: Well, to be honest, I've never been sure if Nietzsche was really serious in that passage or whether the whole argument is a way of annoying his bourgeois audience; a way of pointing out that if you start from existing bourgeois premises about human nature you logically end up in just the place that would make most of that audience most uncomfortable.
In fact, Nietzsche begins his argument from exactly the same place as Adam Smith: human beings are rational. But rational here means calculation, exchange and hence, trucking and bartering; buying and selling is then the first expression of human thought and is prior to any sort of social relations.

But then he reveals exactly why Adam Smith had to pretend that Neolithic villagers would be making transactions through the spot trade. Because if we have no prior moral relations with each other, and morality just emerges from exchange, then ongoing social relations between two people will only exist if the exchange is incomplete – if someone hasn't paid up.

But in that case, one of the parties is a criminal, a deadbeat and justice would have to begin with the vindictive punishment of such deadbeats. Thus he says all those law codes where it says 'twenty heifers for a gouged-out eye' – really, originally, it was the other way around. If you owe someone twenty heifers and don't pay they gouge out your eye. Morality begins with Shylock's pound of flesh.
Needless to say there's zero evidence for any of this – Nietzsche just completely made it up. The question is whether even he believed it. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I prefer to think he didn't.

Anyway it only makes sense if you assume those premises; that all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts. This flies in the face of everything we actually know or experience of human life. But once you start thinking that the market is the model for all human behavior, that's where you end up with.

If however you ditch the whole myth of barter, and start with a community where people do have prior moral relations, and then ask, how do those moral relations come to be framed as 'debts' – that is, as something precisely quantified, impersonal, and therefore, transferrable – well, that's an entirely different question. In that case, yes, you do have to start with the role of violence.

PP: Interesting. Perhaps this is a good place to ask you about how you conceive your work on debt in relation to the great French anthropologist Marcel Mauss' classic work on gift exchange.

DG: Oh, in my own way I think of myself as working very much in the Maussian tradition. Mauss was one of the first anthropologists to ask: well, all right, if not barter, then what? What do people who don't use money actually do when things change hands? Anthropologists had documented an endless variety of such economic systems, but hadn't really worked out common principles. What Mauss noticed was that in almost all of them, everyone pretended as if they were just giving one another gifts and then they fervently denied they expected anything back. But in actual fact everyone understood there were implicit rules and recipients would feel compelled to make some sort of return.

What fascinated Mauss was that this seemed to be universally true, even today. If I take a free-market economist out to dinner he'll feel like he should return the favor and take me out to dinner later. He might even think that he is something of chump if he doesn't and this even if his theory tells him he just got something for nothing and should be happy about it. Why is that? What is this force that compels me to want to return a gift?

This is an important argument, and it shows there is always a certain morality underlying what we call economic life. But it strikes me that if you focus too much on just that one aspect of Mauss' argument you end up reducing everything to exchange again, with the proviso that some people are pretending they aren't doing that.

Mauss didn't really think of everything in terms of exchange; this becomes clear if you read his other writings besides 'The Gift'. Mauss insisted there were lots of different principles at play besides reciprocity in any society – including our own.

For example, take hierarchy. Gifts given to inferiors or superiors don't have to be repaid at all. If another professor takes our economist out to dinner, sure, he'll feel that he should reciprocate; but if an eager grad student does, he'll probably figure just accepting the invitation is favor enough; and if George Soros buys him dinner, then great, he did get something for nothing after all. In explicitly unequal relations, if you give somebody something, far from doing you a favor back, they're more likely to expect you to do it again.

Or take communistic relations – and I define this, following Mauss actually, as any ones where people interact on the basis of 'from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs'. In these relations people do not rely on reciprocity, for example, when trying to solve a problem, even inside a capitalist firm. (As I always say, if somebody working for Exxon says, "hand me the screwdriver," the other guy doesn't say, "yeah and what do I get for it?") Communism is in a way the basis of all social relations – in that if the need is great enough (I'm drowning) or the cost small enough (can I have a light?) everyone will be expected to act that way.

Anyway that's one thing I got from Mauss. There are always going to be lots of different sorts of principles at play simultaneously in any social or economic system – which is why we can never really boil these things down to a science. Economics tries to, but it does it by ignoring everything except exchange.

PP: Let's move onto economic theory then. Economics has some pretty specific theories about what money is. There's the mainstream approach that we discussed briefly above; this is the commodity theory of money in which specific commodities come to serve as a medium of exchange to replace crude barter economies. But there's also alternative theories that are becoming increasingly popular at the moment. One is the Circuitist theory of money in which all money is seen as a debt incurred by some economic agent. The other – which actually integrates the Circuitist approach – is the Chartalist theory of money in which all money is seen as a medium of exchange issued by the Sovereign and backed by the enforcement of tax claims. Maybe you could say something about these theories?

DG: One of my inspirations for 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' was Keith Hart's essay 'Two Sides of the Coin'. In that essay Hart points out that not only do different schools of economics have different theories on the nature of money, but there is also reason to believe that both are right. Money has, for most of its history, been a strange hybrid entity that takes on aspects of both commodity (object) and credit (social relation.) What I think I've managed to add to that is the historical realization that while money has always been both, it swings back and forth – there are periods where credit is primary, and everyone adopts more or less Chartalist theories of money and others where cash tends to predominate and commodity theories of money instead come to the fore. We tend to forget that in, say, the Middle Ages, from France to China, Chartalism was just common sense: money was just a social convention; in practice, it was whatever the king was willing to accept in taxes.

PP: You say that history swings between periods of commodity money and periods of virtual money. Do you not think that we've reached a point in history where due to technological and cultural evolution we may have seen the end of commodity money forever?

DG: Well, the cycles are getting a bit tighter as time goes by. But I think we'll still have to wait at least 400 years to really find out. It is possible that this era is coming to an end but what I'm more concerned with now is the period of transition.

The last time we saw a broad shift from commodity money to credit money it wasn't a very pretty sight. To name a few we had the fall of the Roman Empire, the Kali Age in India and the breakdown of the Han dynasty… There was a lot of death, catastrophe and mayhem. The final outcome was in many ways profoundly libratory for the bulk of those who lived through it – chattel slavery, for example, was largely eliminated from the great civilizations. This was a remarkable historical achievement. The decline of cities actually meant most people worked far less. But still, one does rather hope the dislocation won't be quite so epic in its scale this time around. Especially since the actual means of destruction are so much greater this time around.

PP: Which do you see as playing a more important role in human history: money or debt?

DG: Well, it depends on your definitions. If you define money in the broadest sense, as any unit of account whereby you can say 10 of these are worth 7 of those, then you can't have debt without money. Debt is just a promise that can be quantified by means of money (and therefore, becomes impersonal, and therefore, transferable.) But if you are asking which has been the more important form of money, credit or coin, then probably I would have to say credit.

PP: Let's move on to some of the real world problems facing the world today. We know that in many Western countries over the past few years households have been running up enormous debts, from credit card debts to mortgages (the latter of which were one of the root causes of the recent financial crisis). Some economists are saying that economic growth since the Clinton era was essentially run on an unsustainable inflating of household debt. From an historical perspective what do you make of this phenomenon?

DG: From an historical perspective, it's pretty ominous. One could go further than the Clinton era, actually – a case could be made that we are seeing now is the same crisis we were facing in the 70s; it's just that we managed to fend it off for 30 or 35 years through all these elaborate credit arrangements (and of course, the super-exploitation of the global South, through the 'Third World Debt Crisis'.)

As I said Eurasian history, taken in its broadest contours, shifts back and forth between periods dominated by virtual credit money and those dominated by actual coin and bullion. The credit systems of the ancient Near East give way to the great slave-holding empires of the Classical world in Europe, India, and China, which used coinage to pay their troops. In the Middle Ages the empires go and so does the coinage – the gold and silver is mostly locked up in temples and monasteries – and the world reverts to credit. Then after 1492 or so you have the return world empires again; and gold and silver currency together with slavery, for that matter.

What's been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we've been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That's why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He'd probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

PP: You mention that the IMF and S&P are institutions that are mainly geared toward extracting debts for creditors. This seems to have become the case in the European monetary union too. What do you make of the situation in Europe at the moment?

DG: Well, I think this is a prime example of why existing arrangements are clearly untenable. Obviously the 'whole debt' cannot be paid. But even when some French banks offered voluntary write-downs for Greece, the others insisted they would treat it as if it were a default anyway. The UK takes the even weirder position that this is true even of debts the government owes to banks that have been nationalized – that is, technically, that they owe to themselves! If that means that disabled pensioners are no longer able to use public transit or youth centers have to be closed down, well that's simply the 'reality of the situation,' as they put it.

These 'realities' are being increasingly revealed to simply be ones of power. Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That's one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the 'Third World debt crisis' – what got called, rather weirdly, the 'anti-globalization movement'. This movement called for genuine democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF, World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).

When thousands of people begin assembling in squares in Greece and Spain calling for real democracy what they are effectively saying is: "Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and renegotiated." I find this extraordinarily hopeful.

PP: Broadly speaking how do you see the present debt/financial crisis unravelling? Without asking you to peer into the proverbial crystal-ball – because that's a silly thing to ask of anyone – how do you see the future unfolding; in the sense of how do you take your bearings right now?

DG: For the long-term future, I'm pretty optimistic. We might have been doing things backwards for the last 40 years, but in terms of 500-year cycles, well, 40 years is nothing. Eventually there will have to be recognition that in a phase of virtual money, safeguards have to be put in place – and not just ones to protect creditors. How many disasters it will take to get there? I can't say.

But in the meantime there is another question to be asked: once we do these reforms, will the results be something that could even be called 'capitalism'?

David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' which is available from Amazon.

Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.

COMMENTS

David Graeber says: August 26, 2011 at 3:59 pm

I personally feel betrayed that we are not in outer space, not to mention the distinct lack of flying cars, anti-gravity sleds, teleportation devices, androids that can do my laundry, longevity drugs, or virtually everything else I was promised as a child would be around by now. I mean, kids who grew up reading Jules Verne in 1900 got almost all the stuff he predicted. We never got any of what we were supposed to get! But that's kind of a different rant.

David Graeber says:

The Caliphate is a fascinating anomaly. In the Middle Ages, almost all really significant empires were founded by nomads (Arabs, Mongols, Turks) and were differently organized than in Antiquity, not being based on peasant troop levies paid in coin. The Caliphate did take on some of the qualities of ancient empires – for instance, dirhams and dinars were by far the strongest metal currency of the period – and that was, significantly, the area of Eurasia that went least far in abolishing slavery (though Islamic law placed significant limits on the institution.) However, rather than the Classical military-coinage-slavery complex, where armies paid in coin reduced huge numbers of people to slavery, and those slaves became the main force of production, the Caliphate developed differently. Slaves were rarely used as factors of production (particularly after the Zanj revolt), but mainly as forms of display and, even more importantly, as soldiers in their own right. The habit of using slave armies under the Caliphate and its successor states is others virtually historically unprecedented – in most times and places, slaves are the very last people you'd allow near weapons, for obvious reasons – and had the effect of causing the military-coinage-slavery complex that did exist to form something of a bubble insulated from civil society, and particularly what we'd call 'the market' – since commercial relations are regulated largely by religious courts independent of the government and in fact the religious scholars who run them tend to avoid any entanglement in affairs of government entirely. The result was among other things the world's first anti-government free-market populism. It's a complicated story, described at greater length in the book, but suffice it to say that while it bore a superficial resemblance to ancient empires the fundamental dynamic was very different.

David Graeber says:

You really haven't got very far in the book!

Another version of the same story appears on page 50-51, where I note that while Chartalist and State theories of money were rejected in theory in turn-of-the-century Europe, they were adopted in practice across the colonial world:

"I have already mentioned that one of the first things that the French general Gallieni, conqueror of Madagascar, did when the conquest of the island was complete in 1901 was to impose a head tax. Not only was this tax quite high, it was also only payable in newly issued Malagasy francs. In other words, Gallieni did indeed print money and then demand that everyone in the country give some of that money back to him.

"Most striking of all, though, was language he used to describe this tax. It was referred to as the "impôt moralisateur," the "educational" or "moralizing tax." In other words, it was designed—to adopt the language of the day—to teach the natives the value of work. Since the "educational tax" came due shortly after harvest time, the easiest way for farmers to pay it was to sell a portion of their rice crop to the Chinese or Indian merchants who soon installed themselves in small towns across the country. However, harvest was when the market price of rice was, for obvious reasons, at its lowest; if one sold too much of one's crop, that meant one would not have enough left to feed one's family for the entire year, and thus be forced to buy one's own rice back, on credit, from those same merchants later in the year when prices were much higher. As a result, farmers quickly fell hope- lessly into debt (the merchants doubling as loan sharks). The easiest ways to pay back the debt was either to find some kind of cash crop to sell—to start growing coffee, or pineapples—or else to send one's children off to work for wages in the city, or on one of the plantations that French colonists were establishing across the island. The whole project might seem no more than a cynical scheme to squeeze cheap labor out of the peasantry, and it was that, but it was also something more. The colonial government was were also quite explicit (at least in their own internal policy documents), about the need to make sure that peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries—parasols, lipstick, cookies—available at the Chinese shops. It was crucial that they develop new tastes, habits, and expectations; that they lay the foundations of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France.

"Most people are not stupid, and most Malagasy understood ex- actly what their conquerors were trying to do to them. Some were determined to resist. More than sixty years after the invasion, a French anthropologist, Gerard Althabe, was able to observe villages on the east coast of the island whose inhabitants would dutifully show up at the coffee plantations to earn the money for their poll tax, and then, having paid it, studiously ignore the wares for sale at the local shops and instead turn over any remaining money to lineage elders, who would then use it to buy cattle for sacrifice to their ancestors.19 Many were quite open in saying that they saw themselves as resisting a trap.."

David Graeber says:

Another teaser quote from the book:

Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta)—a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed"166—was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 ad, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries—as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds.

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine, inci- dentally. I borrowed it from the great Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz, who pointed out that all this was happening right around the same time that Thomas Aquinas was developing the notion that angels were really just the personification of Platonic Ideas.168 "According to the teachings of Aquinas," he notes, "every angel represented a species."

"Little wonder then that finally the personified collectives of the jurists, which were juristically immortal species, displayed all the features otherwise attributed to angels . . . The jurists themselves recognized that there was some similarity between their abstractions and the angelic beings. In this respect, it may be said that the political and legal world of thought of the later Middle Ages began to be populated by immaterial angelic bod- ies, large and small: they were invisible, ageless, sempiternal, immortal, and sometimes even ubiquitous; and they were en- dowed with a corpus intellectuale or mysticum [an intellectual or mystical body] which could stand any comparison with the "spiritual bodies" of the celestial beings."

All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assum- ing that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic crea- tures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it. They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages—as well as the most enduring.

They have, of course, changed a great deal over time. Medieval cor- porations owned property, and they often engaged in complex financial arrangements, but in no case were they profit-seeking enterprises in the modern sense. The ones that came closest were, perhaps unsurpris- ingly, monastic orders—above all, the Cistercians—whose monaster- ies became something like the Chinese Buddhist ones, surrounded by mills and smithies, practicing rationalized commercial agriculture with a workforce of "lay brothers" who were effectively wage laborers, spinning and exporting wool. Some even talk about "monastic capitalism."

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade. An excellent case in point was the Society of Merchant Adventurers, charted by King Henry IV in London in 1407, who, despite the romantic-sounding name, were mainly in the business of buying up British woolens and selling them in the Flanders fairs. They were not a modern joint-stock company, but a rather old-fashioned Medieval merchant guild, but they provided a structure whereby older, more substantial merchants could simply provide loans to younger ones, and they managed to secure enough of an exclusive control over the woolen trade that substantial profits were pretty much guaranteed.172 When such companies began to engage in armed ventures overseas, though, a new era of human history might be said to have begun.

EmilianoZ says:

"For example, take hierarchy. Gifts given to inferiors or superiors don't have to be repaid at all. If another professor takes our economist out to dinner, sure, he'll feel that he should reciprocate; but if an eager grad student does, he'll probably figure just accepting the invitation is favor enough; and if George Soros buys him dinner, then great, he did get something for nothing after all. In explicitly unequal relations, if you give somebody something, far from doing you a favor back, they're more likely to expect you to do it again."

Was that sarcastic?

A few months later the eager grad will ask a letter of recommendation from the professor and the professor will take the dinner into account.

If Soros buys a professor dinner he expects an academic article supporting his worldview from that professor.

David Graeber says:

I don't think that's necessarily true at all. The graduate student might just want to be able to say "I had dinner with Milton Friedman!" and George Soros certainly does not expect an academic article out of every time he buys someone dinner – mainly he just wants recognition as the sort of person who would be liberal with his money, or, maybe more accurately, not the sort of person who's stingy with it. Now, sure, you can dress that up as an "exchange" if you want, but only insofar as you can dress anything up as an exchange if you're absolutely determined, as is a regular practice in intro economics classes ("what about people who throw themselves on grenades to save others?" "well, they're maximizing their feelings of being a good person for those few moments before they blow up…") – but that tells you nothing other than that we've decided we want to view everything as an exchange and created utterly unfalsifiable circular models that basically say "if someone does something, it's usually for a reason, and I can take whatever reason that is and define it as a good they are getting in exchange for doing it." That's an ideological exercise that tells you absolutely nothing either about people's actual motivations (why they feel like a good person for sacrificing themselves, why Soros wouldn't want to be seen as stingy) or about the actual logic of the transaction itself.

This is incidentally the reason Soros himself abandoned Austrian-style economistic theories of human behavior. As a student of Popper, he knew a circular argument when he saw one, and was aware that if you see such an illogical argument made consistently by powerful people and not being challenged, you are in the presence of a dangerous ideology.

Take for example the Medieval habit of demanding "writs of non-prejudice." As Marc Bloch notes, in feudal Europe, if you give a gift to a superior, it is considered a precedent, and rather than ever being reciprocated, it is added to the web of custom and you are expected to do it again the next year. If the king runs out of wine and demands some monks send an emergency contribution, if they comply, the same will be expected every following year. The only way to head this off is to have the superior sign a document saying they will not expect it in the future. It's easy to see how this principle of precedence underlies the real logic of most explicitly hierarchical relations. If you give money to a beggar, he's not going to reciprocate either, but he might well expect you to do it again. Etc etc.

David Graeber says:

You know there actually are, um, hunter/gatherer bands in existence, and the economic life of many, many have been carefully observed.

There's nothing to stop you from making up a story if you're absolutely determined to. I could also make up a story and say that money was brought by space aliens 25,000 years ago and that would be hard to disprove too. Of course, in either case, the paleolithic barterers inventing money, or the space aliens bringing it through an interdimensional wormhole, you'd still have to explain how just about all known human societies – including all known hunter/gatherers – somehow abandoned or forgot about the resulting money system over the course of the next 10 or 20 thousand years except some guys in Mesopotamia who were using it instead for keeping temple accounts, and scattered groups of non-hunter/gatherers in places like New Guinea or Africa who decided to stop using money to buy and sell material objects but start using instead to arrange marriages and mediate blood-feuds.

Karl Bucher incidentally did come up with the theory that money would emerge from inter-group barter, and Marx seemed to be of the same opinion. The problem is when you would have sufficiently regular and systematic interaction between such groups that money could emerge and be promulgated, and why, if such regular and systematic interactions did occur, there would still be a need to restrict things to the spot trade. It is of course correct that sharing comes before credit, but there are systems of exchange that can be observed in many societies without money or markets – just, they are not usually systems of exchange of material goods. It's kind of a long story but a lot of it is covered in the book.

readerOfTeaLeaves says:

Good question.

Think of it this way: in a tribe, or clan, there are multiple kinship connections. Let's say a woman, call her Anna, has 4 brothers and 3 sisters. Let's say that in her clan you cannot marry into your mothers family.

Of her 4 brothers, let's assume are married. Further assume that 2 of them are married to 2nd cousins. The other 2 are married to women of a neighboring clan.

Suppose one of the sisters-in-law came to the marriage with pots and pans. Suppose another sister-in-law came to her marriage with a supply of sewing and medicinal items. Sister-in-law 3 came to her marriage with a supply of cloth and art supplies. You get the idea.

Dinner must be cooked, outfits must be sewn, fevers must be treated, and ceremonial ornamentation must be created throughout the year by all of the women who are related by marriage to Anna.

It is lunacy to assume that the 1st sister-in-law is going to *barter* the pots and pans used for dinner in some kind of precise economic exchange that will obtain for her a fever medicine. When dinner needs to be cooked, it needs to be cooked well. One or more of the sisters will cook it on Monday, maybe another sister cooks on Tuesdays. Etc. But the pots are shared, because these women are connected by moral actions to each other; at some level, the survival of each rests on the survival of the group.

The notion that within kinship groups someone barters their pots and pans every single day is nuts. If you need to cook dinner, you borrow the pots and pans. If someone needs to treat a fever, unless you have no sense of self-interest, you give them the medicine.
Why?
Because fevers are contagious…
The faster their fever is treated the less risk you yourself-or your children-will become sick. It is in your interests to make sure that all members of your family are well and healthy. Anything other than that is self-defeating lunacy.

But fevers and medicines are an extreme example. However, I have seen more trivial items borrowed village-wide.

On a practical note, I have observed in more than one location in Alaska villages where one kid will ride a bike up to school. Another kid seeing the bike sitting at the school door will get on it and ride the few blocks through the village down to his house. Another cousin will spot the bike, get on it and ride it to the school again. These villages are pretty small and the bike rides take about 3 min. to get from one into the other. If you ask, "hey you kids, whose bike is this?" You will get blank looks of confusion. I remember a darling kid looking up at me like I was nuts. He sized me up as a dumb whitey for asking such a nonsense question. He shrugged and looked at me and said, "it's just THE bike."

Whoever needed THE bike when it was not in use, used it.
You can see how these kids are at risk of being charged with theft in Anchorage… But failure to share and borrow is viewed as a moral flaw. Moral action is doing whatever helps the group.

Nobody *bartered* time on the bike. The bike was constantly being borrowed. When people are connected in community ties, borrowing is the norm from what I have seen and experienced.

One of the points DG makes but I believe is both brilliant, and needs much more discussion, is his point that **Adam Smith had to pretend that Neolithic villagers made transactions through this spot trade. Adam Smith assumed that people had no moral relations with each other, that morality only emerged out of the concept of exchange.**This was a core error.

One of the great, even momentous tragedies of our time is the appalling assumption that the relationships among human beings can be reduced merely to exchange value. This makes for a meaningless and pallid world. It explains a great deal about why we seem to be observing so much turmoil in political and economic realms; these exchanges lack meaning, far too often. That leads to looting, by banks and rioters. It's lack of social cohesion; relationships are too weak to sustain the rigors of ethical conduct.

Had I not seen your comment I would not have had to think this through in order to respond. So I thank you very much. I hope that my response makes some sense.

Again, for me one of the key concepts in this wonderful post is the way that DG keys in on Adam Smith's complete misunderstanding of actual human communities and the way that human interactions are based on borrowing and contributing as one is able. Adam Smith was writing in 1776. It was about that time that early convict ships were being sent to Australia, and at that time there was no such discipline as anthropology. In the 1800s, aboriginals were hunted with guns as sport. The complex kinship networks and marvelously inventive marriage rules of tribes and clans were unknown to him. The reciprocity that makes tribal life possible is, at least in my observation, based on borrowing.

If you think about it, if all those sisters-in-law had to haggle and barter specific amounts of value every single time they needed to cook a meal or sew a skirt, they'd all go nuts. Borrowing and contributing what one has is more simple and efficient as long as the group norms are honored. For that to happen, there are inherent moral relationships built upon the family relationships within the community.

When Adam Smith missed the significance of orrowing and reciprocity — and substituted notions of exchange among Neolithic villagers — he enabled economic theory to run wild on the assumption moral behavior is not an economic factor. Posts like this one may help us come to our senses again.

Writing and money too complicated; this comment is already scandalously long…8^\

David Graeber says:

Well ReaderofTeaLeaves' post might have been long but he did really get the point I was driving at, and illustrated it beautifully

rps says:

I'm dumbfounded by the discussion of anthropologic economics with the omission of the underlying lynchpin; womens labor. Women's labor (other than the one sentence reference to Native American Women's Council) is not calculated even today in the economic models unless there's monetary compensation for services rendered.

Graber discusses barter, exchange, gifts, reciprocation, debt, coinage, morality's interconnectedness to debt whilst ignoring the elephant in the room, womens' cooperative structures. Frankly, manmade economic systems rest upon the shoulders of women's free labor. In the current economic structure, the value of free labor is dismissed. Therein lies the fallacy of economic models. Male economic doctrines ignore the single most important structure that is the platform of all economies; womens' labor.

How do women compensate for services rendered that are not computed in the debt/credit monetary GNP? Are there economic expectations amongst women and if so what are they? How do women barter their invested time and labor? If I help my neighbor, give birth, provide childcare, take care of extended family, daily nourishment to others, household maintenance, do repairs, and a multitude of services to family and community, what is the expectations and/or compensation? Is it monetary and/or reciprocation? Women's labor is dismissed due to the fact that many labor out of love, compassion, kindness, caring, and necessity. They understand the big picture, without these daily acts that are not monetarily compensated in man world economics, civilizations would be extinct. Cooperativism is the female economic model. What keeps society's healthy are women, they are the lynchpin of all civilization's existence.

David Graeber says:

This is true of the interview, and I'm sorry for that, but I don't think it's true of the book. The argument that all other social relations are based on a bedrock of "communism" is especially about the role of women's labor, and I start moving from the economic to the anthropological/historical literature precisely by demonstrating the way that kinship, care-giving, sexual politics, and everything else that involves women is pushed about of the economic literature to make it seem like the essence of economic life is a bunch of guys swapping a bunch of material objects. In fact I start from the fact that in Medieval Ireland, female slaves _were_ the highest denominations money, and by asking how is it possible that so many (male) scholars just make note of this but don't think it's in any way interesting or significant. The analysis of the emergence of markets in Mesopotamia and also Greece focus on the fact that a shift from what I call "human economies" and commercial economies invariably leads to a crisis of debt peonage primarily effecting women, where again, units of women's labor are the main chits being moved around, and that Biblical patriarchy – here following Gerda Lerner – seems to emerge, ironically enough, as a form of male popular resistance to such predatory lending practices. But it's a long argument. I'm sorry none of this ended up in the interview.

rps says:

"Maybe women thereby evolved to avoid "debt."

Women's evolution was/is based upon the primary directive; survival. Warring tribes brought with them death and destruction motivated by theft of resources. As well as the obliteration of tribes whose values and belief structures challenged others way of life. To survive the slaughter, women acquiesced their inherent rights of human equality. Female autonomy spiraled downward into human ownership and slavery. Women became property of the invaders as they witnessed the slaughter of their families and tribe. Thus the subjugation and oppression of women of the warring cultures. Today we witness around the world the domination of women as acceptable "cultural" practices.

Secondly, Women's evolution exists due to the known known; to safeguard the survival of the offspring. Women and enlightened men understand the profound significance of Sharing of resources and Cooperativism. These two pivotal points are the anchors in the perpetuation of the species and stable societal systems are the byproduct. Many a time, the expectations in the exchange is appreciation of the simple act of sharing, ensuring the perpetuation of the common good onto the next generation.

Today's economic upheaval is intertwined with unwarranted risk; gambling in our economic systems, and wars purchased on the country's credit card. The false belief structures of reward equated in monetary acquisition is the accepted exchange for services and labor rendered. Immense monetary and resource acquisition is the holy grail of hoarders that penalizes every level of human existence. Sharing and redistribution is our salvation.

David Graeber says:

I'm not entirely sure what I think of an evolutionary perspective, but leaving that aside, I like the general direction. In most societies women are especially involved in those relations that cannot be reduced to debts. But the irony – and historical tragedy – of this is that (and the book contains detailed case studies here, notably the matrilineal Lele) is that it has made it easier for men to render women into units of account and exchange whereby debts can be measured and paid. It would be very interesting to see this angle developed further.

rps says:

To understanding the complexities of debt/credit in prehistory, past as recorded by the victors, and present cultures, it's necessary to delve into when, why, and how women have been priced as monetary units. The practice of bride price had been the custom in the USA well into the 20th century. Even today the cost of the wedding falls upon the bride's family, a tradition that hasn't disappeared. Maybe abbreviated, but still exists. However, in many cultures the bride price is today, the accepted custom. A longstanding tradition in many past and present cultures is the prerequisite bride dowry/trousseau also known as the bride price. The bride's parents must provide the groom some form of monetary compensation to marry the daughter. It can be dependent on the culture of whether its cash, property, livestock or a combination thereof as well as the "virginity." Virginity was/is deemed in many cultures as part of the monetary unit. If she's been "deflowered" her value is less and the dowry must compensate. Whereas, the price settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage is a property transaction.

The flip side of the coin of the female dowry is that the groom must pay the bride's family an agreed price. Again, the bride is a property transaction agreed upon by groom and the patriarch.

Many cultures refer to the dowry as a custom. In truth, the bride is a monetary unit. I lean toward the origins of women treated as monetary units from the invasions of barbaric tribes sweeping down and the obliteration of the tribes for ownership of the resources. Women's autonomy was denied as she became captured property/monetary unit. Virginity was calculated as a monetary value. Thus denying the women ownership of her physical sexuality. Double standards are accepted but not questioned as it reveals the truth of how women were/are a commodity in the patriarchal construct.

Another aspect of the deflowered virgin in cultures is the family's recourse to end her existence due to the perceived shame upon the family. And then there's the unwed pregnancies. I remember even in the 60′s in the USA, the stigma of an illegitimate birth was a familial catastrophic event tagged with cultural shame. The child's a bastard due to patriarchal dominance script. The prescribed male surname is a necessary attachment for legitimacy. Thus the woman's maiden name was (is) deemed unworthy and she incurred the wrath of family, community, and religion. The father's surname was the only validated proof of legitimacy to live within the societal norm of the community.

Consider the origin of the groom asking the father's permission to marry his daughter. Or the father handing over his daughter to the groom at the ceremony. Today it appears as a quaint and innocuous tradition. The reality is women were the property of the father/patriarch. The exchange of ownership; who gives this woman?, or hand over to the groom was a property transaction. Women in many societies have regained the ownership of themselves but not in all world cultures. Today women are allowed to choose not to marry, live together with no contract, and/or the potential bride can set a transaction price if considering marriage; the engagement ring. The groom seals the deal with a wedding band; she's married. Another version even today of ownership. Perhaps we've evolved toward partnership marriages as both are accepted equals in the relationship. However, dominate and subordinate marital paradigms exists in many of today's marriages.

David Graeber says:

Debt plays a critical roles in this. One of the central arguments in the book has to do with bridewealth. The classic anthropological argument is this is not "brideprice", a man or his family is not buying a bride, because they cannot resell her, only, at best, return her for a refund to her own natal family. This is true enough in what I call "human economies" (ones in which currency is used mainly to rearrange social relations, rather than to buy things), but with the rise of commercial economies, and particularly money-lending this changed – because if a male debtor defaulted, his wife and children could be taken away, as peons if not as slaves. The existence of slavery made things even more resemble a sale pure and simple, and in Nuzi, for example, the traditional bridewealth was exactly the same as the price of a female slave.

Gerda Lerner's argument is that the obsession with premarital virginity, the invention of veils and sequestration of women – all of which are not at all in evidence in the very earliest Sumerian periods, when women in fact could be doctors, scribes, administrators, even sometimes rulers of city states – has to do with the effects of commercial markets that suddenly made a distinction between "good girls" (respectable married types) and "bad girls" (slaves and prostitutes) seem critical. It's all much complicated by the existence of sexual rituals – sometimes termed "sacred prostitution" though that seems an inappropriate term – in many Sumerian cities. At first their practitioners were highly honored people, brides of the god. Eventually, actual sex-work, red light districts inhabited both by women and boys, seemed to form around the fringes of the temples, and the people who ended up working there were mostly debt peons. The whole image of "Babylon" as the place of both high finance, and place of whores – that you find in the Bible, Herodotus, through all the patriarchal religions – seems to go back to a popular reaction to this; basically, poor indebted fathers who fled the cities in fear of their daughters being taken away and joining semi-nomadic pastoral bands such as existed on the fringes of urban space – bands that would indeed periodically come sweeping back into the cities again. Thus the conventional narrative, that it was waves of patriarchal Semites from the desert who overwhelmed Sumerian civilization and undermined the status of women is not entirely wrong, it's just they managed to do so because thousands of refugees fleeing debt traps joined them, and the added this violent antipathy to women's freedoms – in the guise of protecting "their" women from the dangers of debt peonage, "immorality", etc – into the mix.

Lerner notes telling that the first reference to veils we have is a Middle Assyrian law that says respectable women have to go veiled, slaves and prostitutes are not allowed to wear veils, and all the penalties are not on the respectable women that don't but on the slaves and prostitutes that do.

Athenian women were also expected to wear veils outside the house. Most people don't realize this since it so flies in the face of our stereotypes.

David Graeber says:

Yes, the Mesopotamian bullae are a great mystery, there's all sorts of theories about them, but they were clearly credit instruments of some kind. The question is how far they circulated. I hadn't heard the theory that writing itself derived from their use. Fascinating.

Apikoros says:

Dr. Graeber,

I am very late to this conversation but I am quite curious….

You state in the post, "In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, 'debt,' 'guilt,' and 'sin' are actually the same word." I cannot think of a word in Hebrew or Aramaic that has the same root for all three concepts, but I know that, at least as far as "sin" is concerned, both languages have a rich vocabulary :-) Could you let me know which root word you were thinking of when you wrote that?

David Graeber says:

You know, I definitely have plenty of evidence for the Aramaic and Sanskrit, but Hebrew… I left my notes in the UK, but I remember it was slightly more tenuous. The Aramaic word hoba (sorry can't do diacritics on this thing) is used regularly for both debt and sin, and that's the origin of the usage in the Lord's Prayer ("forgive us our debts" – translated "trespasses" in the Anglican verson). It is derived from the Hebrew hobah, which is mostly used just for debt, but I'm pretty sure is used in the OT for guilt or sin on certain occasions – though admittedly not nearly so much, and mainly in the later texts. But this is as far as I can go with what I have on hand right now. It's possible in the Hebrew case "same word" might be overstated, since some would say using hobah for guilt or sin is just metaphorical, and anyway, came fairly late in the day.

Apikoros says:

Thank you. I asked my Rabbi this same question last night and he also suggested the hebrew "chiyuv" as the word you were referring to. He pointed me to this post (which you may find interesting):

http://ralphriver.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-sin-in-aramaic-commercial-term.html

I found your post interesting because I remembered reading (somewhere, a long time ago) that cuneiform writing was originally developed to mark the outside of clay "envelopes" containing counter pieces that recorded commercial transactions so that the "envelope" did not have to be broken to count the tokens contained therein each time it changed hands. With time, the tokens were deleted, the envelope became a slab and the cuneiform marks became the record of the transaction.

David Graeber says:

Thanks for checking that!

Merijn Knibbe says:

This is the longest thread I've ever followed to the end….

and I still might have two points to add to the arguments above.

1. On markets and prices and human behavior. A number of economist indeed try to explain all human behavior in terms of rational behavior on 'explicit' markets (used cars) as well as 'implicit markets' (marriage, crime, education), without however ever giving a clear definition of the concept 'market'(you don't believe me? Search in the textbooks for such a definition!). One of the defining qualities of explicit, real world markets is however that prices (or at least the way the eventual price will be set) are agreed upon before a transaction is concluded, explicitely (buying a house) or implicitely (buying groceries in a supermarket). And though 'shadow' prices can be calculated for some of the 'implicit' markets of these economists (i.e. monetary income foregone by students spending time on their education (or pretending to do so…)). Such a 'shadow price' is not known in advance (which of course disables all attempts at rational calculation) – and the 'implicit markets' of (neo-classical) economists turn out not to be markets at all. Rational behavior in real markets is already questionable, but in what's called 'implicit markets' it's fundamentally impossible.

2. On credit. Economists have difficulties with recognizing 'credit' as a kind of money. Weird. Every conpany selling something 'on credit' is in fact creating money, as is born out by the fact that the debts owned to the company often can be sold to specialized banks. Once a monetary system exists, every individual or company can create purhcasing power, by accepting a 'You Owe Me' denominated in the unit of account from a customer. And it's not too long ago that such systems were the main kind of monetary exchange systems, in the villages and cities of at least Europe – the tally stick system. When one studies nienteenth and eighteenth and seventeenth century accounts and probate inventories, he or she cannot but be surprised by the amount and level of debts characteristic of the economies of these centuries.

David Graeber says:

Thanks for the contribution – the first point was very illuminating.
As for the second: I suspect you'll really like the book. Did you know, for instance, that the word for "symbol" in both English and Chinese ultimately traces back to words for tally sticks?

Minnie Klein says:

A methodological note. I don't accept the premise that any society formation that existed at any time in prehistory must have been discovered by now, because I don't accept that our scant historical records, plus anthropology's descriptions of stone-age societies from the very recent past, exhaust the possible or even likely forms of human society. (Analogously, astronomers do not claim that the possible space of cosmological formations is exhausted by what is observed through telescopes.) I believe that agnosticism is a wiser attitude to take towards the prehistoric progenitors of our own civilization, and that reasonable speculation should not be restricted by what anthropology deems feasible.

David Graeber says:

Actually I would agree – we know that democratically organized autonomous city states existed in the late Iron Age, and not just in Greece but India, and elsewhere, but we don't really have anthropological evidence of those in later periods.

However, there is an incredibly wide variety of cases from anthropology – there are literally thousands of different sorts of money that have been documented put to an incredibly wide variety of usages. There are an endless variety of system of exchange. If despite this you find everything _but_ the hypothetical imaginary explanation you came up with in your armchair, then saying "so what, I bet in precisely the period we don't know about, they did exactly that" – I call that special pleading.

JUDY WOOD in Bologna 22 oct 2011

2011-11-10T02:36:00.001-08:00

ITALIANO guardare più avanti

ITALIANO guardare più avanti

"Where Did The Towers Go?" –

Dr Judy Wood in the UK/Italy – Oct 2011
Andrew Johnson, Nov 2011
In August 2011, I was contacted by Franco Soldani who lives near Bologna, Italy
and he invited me to speak at a conference they were planning in September 2011.
Due to existing commitments, I advised him that October would be better. Franco
had also invited Dr Wood to speak at the same conference and so, some weeks
later, we agreed a date of 22nd October for the conference – which took place

in Bologna. Italy.

Saturday, 22 October 2011, 9:00am - 7:30pm by adj Hits : 345

From September 11th to the War in Libya
Ten years of Criminal Abuse of the World
A day of discussion in Bologna, Saturday 22 October,
from 9 am to 19.30 "Centro Giorgio Costa", via Azzo Gardino 48
(area Porta Lame, near Cinema Lumière)

Program 09.00 - 09.30 Introduction by Faremondo
09.30 - 10.30 Dr Judy Wood - Where did the Towers go?
10.30 - 11.00 Q&A session about Dr. Wood's presentation (lead by Franco Soldani)
11.00 - 11.15 Coffee break
11:15 - 12:15 The "Official 911 Truth Movement" - A critical view from the
Inside - Andrew Johnson
12.15 - 12.45 Q&A session about Andrew Johnson's – Presentation (lead by Emanuele Montagna)
12.45 - 13.15 Round table (Faremondo-Wood-Johnson-Sensini-Gamannossi)
13.15 - 14.30 Lunch break
14.30 - 15.30 Paolo Sensini, Libya 2001, or…
15.30 - 16.00 Q&A session about Paolo Sensini's presentation (led by Franco Soldani)
16.00 - 17.00 Tiziana Gamannossi, Western Media war crimes on Libya: an eyewitness account
17.00 - 17.30 Q&A on Tiziana Gamannossi contribution (lead by Emanuele Montagna)
17.30 - 18.00 Small break
18.00 - 19.00 Closing round table with contributions from guests and those present (lead by Emanuele Montagna and Franco Soldani)
Copies of Dr Judy Wood's book, Andrew Johnson's book and Paolo Sensini's books will be available.
Some material and documentation, provided by Faremondo and our guests, will be available as well.
Free admission. The conference hall is located in the Centro Costa's 1st floor. On the ground floor there is a Bar, and outside there is a spacious courtyard. Contact: Franco Soldani - francosoldani at libero.it

Dall'11 settembre all'invasione della Libia: una escalation decennale di abominevoli devastazioni del mondo

By Edoardo Capuano - Posted on 19 ottobre 2011

Clicca per ingrandireGiornata di discussione a Bologna, sabato 22 ottobre dalle 9 alle 19.30, presso il Centro Giorgio Costa, via Azzo Gardino 48, zona Porta Lame, vicino al Cinema Lumière

I nostri ospiti e interlocutori

Judy Wood, statunitense, già professoressa di ingegneria meccanica e scienza dei materiali all'università di Clemson (Carolina del Sud), è autrice del libro Where did the towers go?. Da diversi anni i suoi studi basati sulle evidenze e la sua voce fuori dal coro gettano una luce differente sugli eventi dell'11 settembre, in particolare sulle modalità con cui sono state dissolte in aria le torri e altri edifici del WTC di New York.

Andrew Johnson, dal 2004 critico della mitologia ufficiale sull'11 settembre e membro della prima ora degli Scholars for 911 Truth, insegna presso la Open University dello Yorkshire, in Inghilterra, ed è autore del libro 911. Finding the Truth.

Tiziana Gamannossi, imprenditrice in Libia e fondatrice della Fact Finding Commission, dall'inizio dell'aggressione Nato svolge opera di demistificazione e denuncia degli orrori di guerra perpetrati da criminali politici, mercenari in divisa e Megamedia occidentali.

Paolo Sensini, storico e studioso del pensiero politico del Novecento, è stato in Libia con la Fact Finding Commission ed è autore del libro Libia 2011, di imminente uscita presso Jaca Book.

toasted cars (page5)	Where is the building? (page6)	conclusions (page7)

Traccia per la discussione

Il decennio inaugurato dagli eventi dell'11 settembre 2001 fa emergere con sempre maggiore chiarezza una verità che il Potere, in tutte le sue agenzie e ramificazioni, non può confessare: per poter far durare questo suo mondo senza speranza … … esso deve produrre - su scala planetaria e con inganno sempre più apertamente criminale - catastrofi, devastazioni sociali, economiche e ambientali, desertificazione culturale, terrore e guerre. Questa è la verità nella civiltà del capitale che si rivolta contro gli esseri viventi e gli ecosistemi: la civiltà che per "andare avanti" deve distruggere le basi stesse degli equilibri planetari e delle umane misure.

Perché questo accade? Non semplicemente e non soltanto per via dell'indole "demoniaca" e nichilista dei suoi alfieri ed interpreti: se i dominanti globali sono i criminali che vediamo (da ultimo con l'aggressione alla Libia) è perché essi servono nel modo più appropriato la logica del modo di produzione fondato sul capitale (finanziario e industriale in un insieme oggi inestricabile). Essi sono quindi attori di quell'intimo connubio tra "scienza moderna" e capitale che come un interno motore nascosto ha prodotto livello su livello la realtà contemporanea.

Nella fase che volgarmente si chiama globalizzazione la cifra della dis-simulazione e dell'inganno criminale è quella che meglio risponde alle "esigenze" autoriproduttive di questo mondo. Ecco perché, dall'11 settembre all'aggressione alla Libia, Machiavelli, Orwell e la stessa "società dello spettacolo" sono stati superati grandemente dalle mosse e dai mezzi messi in campo dagli attuali dominanti: si producono scenari virtuali che vengono fatti interagire con ciò che virtuale non è per fabbricare nuove realtà in cui risultino totalmente cancellate le vecchie coordinate: scenari che anzi contengono mappe il cui fine è impedire l'orientamento e una qualsiasi consapevolezza della situazione.

Le devastazioni sulla superficie geo-politica, economica, culturale e mediatica ci dicono che non è più tempo di ripetere l'identico dei vecchi schemi dell'opposizione, dell'antagonismo e della defunta dialettica tra sinistra e destra. Occorre invece seminare consapevolezza della portata senza precedenti dell'inganno e della guerra condotta contro tutti i popoli del pianeta.


Index	Erin (erin1)	Effects (erin3)	Coils (erin4)	nhc&JFK (erin9)

Per fare questo muoveremo dalla demolizione della mitologia ufficiale dell'ultimo decennio fissata anzitutto nel dogma ufficiale sugli eventi dell'11 settembre. Una volta scoperchiato l'inganno e raccolte le evidenze inaggirabili di un inside job in cui i perpetratori - ci spiega Judy Wood - sembrano aver impiegato anche distruttive tecnologie militari "a energia diretta", risaliremo il decennio in mezzo a: guerre e devastazioni (Afghanistan, Irak, Palestina e tante altre); "crisi finanziaria" per l'ulteriore saccheggio delle risorse e dei popoli; eutanasia di ogni sovranità residuale degli stati nazionali e avvio di fatto del "governo mondiale" sul cadavere del diritto internazionale, col concorso cruciale del mainstream mediatico fino alla trasformazione in contractors di ideologi e icone della fu sinistra (antagonista, marxista, pacifista, ecologista o in qualsiasi altro modo connotata).

Programma
9.00-9.30 Introduzione a cura di Faremondo
9.30-10.30 Judy Wood, Dove sono andate a finire le torri?
10.30-11.00 Dibattito sull'intervento di Judy Wood (modera Franco Soldani)
11.15-12.15 Andrew Johnson, Uno sguardo critico dall'interno sul movimento ufficiale per la verità sull'11 settembre
12.15-12.45 Dibattito sull'intervento di Andrew Johnson (modera Emanuele Montagna)
12.45-13.15 Tavola rotonda (Faremondo-Wood-Johnson-Sensini-Gamannossi)
13.15-14.30 Pausa per il pranzo
14.30-15.30 Paolo Sensini, Libia 2011 ovvero... se non vai verso la democrazia la democrazia arriverà su di te (in occasione dell'uscita del suo libro presso Jaca Book)
15.30-16.00 Dibattito sull'intervento di Paolo Sensini (modera Franco Soldani)
16.00-17.00 Tiziana Gamannossi, intervento sui crimini di guerra dei Megamedia occidentali visti dall'interno della Libia
17.00-17.30 Dibattito sull'intervento di Tiziana Gamannossi (modera Emanuele Montagna)
18.00-19.30 Tavola rotonda finale con interventi dei presenti e degli ospiti (moderano Emanuele Montagna e Franco Soldani)

All'entrata saranno disponibili copie dei libri di Judy Wood, Andrew Johnson e Paolo Sensini, oltre a diversi materiali di documentazione portati dagli ospiti e da Faremondo. L'ingresso è libero. La sala in cui si svolgerà la giornata si trova al primo piano del centro. Al piano terra si trova il bar-osteria e all'esterno un ampio cortile.

Personalmente ho letto le affermazioni della Woods solo col filtro di chi la denigra, e questo porta sicuramente a valutazioni di parte, quindi questa è un ottima occasione per valutare direttamente se la teoria della Woods ha un fondamento oppure no.
Purtroppo il processo di affermazione e il processo di smentita hanno due pesi ben diversi: un conto è fare una critica puntuale e dimostrabile dei documenti ufficiali (come fa LC), e un altro è proporre una propria teoria alternativa e assumersi interamente l'onere della prova, quindi tanto di cappello a chi si espone in questo senso.
L'importante è non mettere delle pregiudiziali sugli argomenti che si possono o che non si possono trattare: così come si è parlato di teoria no-plane, di teoria ologrammi, di mini-nuke, allo stesso modo si può parlare anche di armi ad energia diretta, speriamo scientificamente e speriamo con prove inequivocabili.

Non conosco il gruppo faremondo e non so nulla dei relatori, le parole della "traccia per la discussione" pero' mi sono piaciute per due motivi:

per primo si ricorda che l'11/9 è l'inizio di una catena di eventi che aggiungo io mi sembra di durata undecennale e che quindi vedrà nel prossimo anno l'evento o gli eventi culminanti e penso proprio che ne vedremo delle belle.

Poi si diagnostica molto bene la sintomatologia alla quale tutti siamo esposti dopochè un evento virtuale (io direi proprio onirico) va a sovrapporsi alla realtà, portandoci tutti su di un territorio falsato dove capire origini e finalità dei fenomeni diventa molto faticoso.

E mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la dritta via era smarrita...

http://www.luogocomune.net/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3859&com_id=200205&com_rootid=200205&

ornato un'oretta fa dall'incontro! la mattina non c'ero e quindi non ho sentito l'esposizione della Woods (c'era pero' Sertes che ho conosciuto dal vivo , magari vi dà lui qualche considerazione), ma ho ascoltato l'intervento di Johnson e poi di Sensini sulla Libia. cmq il filmato sarà messo in internet.

Johnson ha parlato principalmente della teoria no-plane e dei contrasti con Steven Jones e Gage che secondo lui sono alla guida dei principali movimenti per la verità sul 9/11 per indirizzare la ricerca della verità verso la teoria demolizione controllata (con termite) e gettare discredito sulla teoria delle armi ad energia diretta dew.
Personalmente, parlando da completo ignorante nel campo dell'ipotesi noplane, alcune cose mi hanno fatto storcere il naso (per esempio, il paragone di un aereo con un proiettile, dicendo che quest'ultimo se centrasse una colonna di acciaio rimbalzerebbe indietro, checc'entra mi chiedo io), pero' soprattutto alcune considerazioni sulla possibilità che anche l' A&E for 9/11 e lo Scholars for 9/11 truth siano "indirizzati" mi son piaciute. Son convinto che le "elite" siano intelligenti da capire che molte persone non credano alla versione ufficiale quindi non ci vedo nulla di strano se si cerchi di fare disinformazione anche tra le file degli scettici diciamo.
Johnson attribuisce questa disinformazione al voler insabbiare la tecnologia che sta dietro alle dew mi pare.

E' stato un grandissimo contributo quello di Judy Wood e varrebbe la pena che il suo libro fosse tradotto in italiano. Se qualcuno ha delle idee per quanto riguarda l'editore più adeguato o disponibile a rischiare l'avventura della pubblicazione, può scrivere a redazionef@faremondo.org
Delizioso anche Andrew Johnson, che non dice affatto delle banalità, ed anche il suo libro varrebbe la pena di esser pubblicato: più ce ne sono, di libri disponibili sull'11 settebre, e più si potrà parlare di tutte le ipotesi in campo, che, quanto meno, sono frutto di anni di lavoro, di sofferenze, di studi.

AUDIO mp3 download (italian and english)

http://www.checktheevidence.com/audio/911/Bologna%20-%20Introduction.mp3
http://www.checktheevidence.com/audio/911/Bologna%20-%20Where%20Did%20The%20Towers%20Go%20-%20Part%201.mp3
http://www.checktheevidence.com/audio/911/Bologna%20-%20Where%20Did%20The%20Towers%20Go%20-%20Part%202.mp3
http://www.checktheevidence.com/audio/911/Bologna%20-%20911%20Finding%20The%20Truth%20-%20Part%201.mp3
http://www.checktheevidence.com/audio/911/Bologna%20-%20911%20Finding%20The%20Truth%20-%20Part%202.mp3

some professors have joined 99% OCCUPY movement

2011-11-08T01:21:00.001-08:00

8 November 2011
Temple University USA 1801 N Broad St Philadelphia

a protester of the Occupy Philly movement stand outside City Hall.

Last week, some faculty members signed a statement of solidarity to declare support for occupiers and their demands.

The voices of the Occupy movement have been heard throughout the world, and Temple has not fallen deaf to the spreading dialogue. Students took up signs and brought their voices to the Bell Tower two weeks ago, both in support and in protest of the movement. Now, some professors have joined the conversation by signing a statement of solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"Along with the demonstrators we are demanding an end to the extreme inequalities that structure our society," the statement read. It continued to list in greater detail the problems facing the 99 percent, including diminishing access to education, high unemployment, low worker's wages and other threats to social and economic justice.

"For me, the movement is important because it has started to change the questions being asked about our government and economic systems," history professor and signee Kathleen Biddick said.

Biddick said that she admires the movement because it is bringing issues and people who have long been ignored by the established press to light.

"They are questioning the strategies of the mainstream media," she said.

According to Biddick, the media is deeply entangled into the corporate and elite world. She said that it spreads collective fantasies of the American dream and takes part in the same collective avoidance of the big problems facing the country that politicians are engaging in.

For example, in the New York Times, the phrase "corporate greed" occurred in 29 different articles from Oct. 4 to Nov. 1. However only five other articles mentioned the phrase in the nine months preceding the birth of the Occupy movement, which, according to Biddick, indicates that the movement is succeeding in bringing new issues to the attention of the media.

"I like the way that [occupiers] are doing it," she added. "It is not by sound bytes. I realize that this might hurt them in the mainstream though because they want sound bytes."

Political science professor and fellow signee Dan Chomsky agreed that this lack of a unified-and-sound-byte-friendly message could eventually hurt the movement.

"The protesters need to promote specific issues that the American people will readily adopt," Chomsky said. "Now, they have resisted this in the hopes of democratic participation, which is admirable, but to have real significance they will have to make decisions and offer proposals."

Chomsky said he has hope that the movement will be able to achieve this because it has already touched a very salient nerve in the public.

"The political climate is favorable to them," Chomsky said. "An enormous amount of the population is dissatisfied [with the government]."

According to an October Gallup poll, 13 percent of Americans are currently satisfied with the state of nation. This approval rating is one of the lowest on record, with the majority of people citing unemployment, the economy and dissatisfaction with the government as their main reasons for this malcontent.

Even though the protesters have brought to light issues that large portions of the population agree with, changing the status quo will be difficult. Similar to professor Biddick, Chomsky said he realizes that the main problem facing the movement is the reason that the protesters have been forced to take to the streets, as opposed to the polls or political fundraisers.

"They are there because their voices weren't being heard in the first place through the traditional political process," Chomsky said. "It is hard to have the perseverance to force society to pay attention. They need to be out in the streets."

In signing the letter of solidarity psychology professor Sherri Grasmuck said she recognizes the movement's significance in giving a voice to those who are traditionally silenced.

"It is sad that these people are completely without hope that the standard solutions to problems are going to help them," Grasmuck said of the occupiers who decided they have a better chance of being heard by camping in public spaces than by voting.

According to Grasmuck, one of the biggest reasons the critiques put forth by the Occupy movement have been ignored for so long is that they "raise fundamental critiques of the status quo."

One of these critiques is the growing divide between classes, a topic both the media and politicians have been wary to touch, Grasmuck said.

"Talking about economic class has become a taboo in this country," Grasmuck said.

The ideal of the American dream and the great American middle class has been espoused for so long that the truth is often ignored. This has led many Americans to falsely believe they are middle class.

For example, a Gallup poll released last April reported that 7 percent of people who earned $250,000 or more each year believed they paid too little in taxes. However, of those same people, 30 percent claimed that upper-income earners paid too little in taxes.

What those people might not have realized is that by making $250,000 a year, they represent the top 20 percent of income-earning Americans. This lack of awareness about class is just one of the long ignored issues that Occupiers have pushed to the top of the agenda.

One of the major criticisms to emerge from the signing of the letter of solidarity by a few professors is that it reveals their partisan liberal nature and contributes to the trend of increased liberalization of universities.

According to General Social Survey data collected from 1996 to 2008, professors are more likely than any other profession to identify as liberal.

However, Professor Steven Newman said he does not see it as a partisan issue, but rather as an opportunity for him to support his students whose voices have long been ignored.

"It's a mistake to think that faculty shouldn't speak out when they see something that is affecting their students and the mission of the university," Newman said. "I think that there is a mistaken set of priorities in this country about how wealth is spent and for whom and in whose interests."

Newman recognizes that budget cuts to public education combined with the increasing costs of attending a four year university are hurting his students and in signing the letter only hopes to support them. He also explains that he, "can walk and chew gum at the same time," and would never let his political views influence his teaching.

In signing the letter of solidarity, professors said they aim to support those voices and issues that have long been ignored in this country, writing that, "only by identifying the complex interconnections between repressive economic, social and political regimes can social and economic justice prevail in this country and around the globe."

author Amy Stansbury can be reached at amy.stansbury@temple.edu.

Meanwhile, USA is deeply complicit in crimes, like the illegal 44 year brutal military occupation.

Some humanitarian boats are trying to break the siege, but USrael military fascism continues.

Freedom Waves to Gaza
Palestine Office @PALWaves
7 November 2011
UPDATE ON FREEDOM WAVES POLITICAL PRISONERS

[RAMALLAH] Of the 27 human rights defenders captured during Israel's illegal takeover of the Freedom Waves to Gaza vessels on Friday, 4 November, 20 remain in Givon prison and the whereabouts of one is unknown.

Israeli officials have been claiming that all 27 people aboard the MV Tahrir and MV Saoirse have been released or are awaiting deportation. This is not true. Freedom Waves can confirm that six people have been released or deported. These are Majd Kayyal (Palestinian from Haifa), Lina Attalah (Journalist from Egypt), Casey James (Journalist from the US), Aimane Zoubir (Journalist from Morocco), Captain George Klontzas (Greece) and Captain Zacharias Stylianakis.
The whereabouts of British journalist, Hassan Ghani of PressTV is unknown. On Saturday prison authorities told lawyers that Hassan was not at the prison, yet we know that he has not yet been released. Freedom Waves organizers demand that the Israeli authorities reveal where Hassan Ghani is being held and that he be allowed access to a lawyer.

The Israeli authorities have tried to pressure the human rights defenders that remain in Israeli prison to sign a voluntary deportation agreement (waiver of right to see a judge) in order to be immediately deported. The activists refuse to sign, not because they want to come before an Israeli judge, but rather because the wavier states that they came to Israel voluntarily and entered the country illegally, which are patently untrue in light of the fact that Israeli naval ships violently seized the Tahrir and Saoirse, and forcibly transported them and all on board to Ashdod. Israeli authorities have ignored requests by the group's lawyer to deport the activists immediately without having to sign this form that contains falsities meant to absolve Israel of responsibility for illegal abduction of foreign nationals in international waters.

Because they have refused to sign the waiver, according to Israeli law, they will be detained for 72 hours and then brought before an immigration judge, who will rubberstamp the deportation order. After this mock legal process, deportation will commence. For the first 24 hours of their abduction, none of the activists, crew, or journalists, were allowed to call a lawyer or family members. On Sunday, a few were able to make one one-minute phone call.

NOTE: Various accounts from prisoners have come out contradicting Israel's claim of a peaceful takeover of the boats. Some activists were tasered and beaten, and at least one of the captains abused during interrogation. For accounts that we have been able to obtain, please see: www.tahrir.ca and www.irishtogaza.org
For more information, please call:
+970-592-346-895 or +970-598-336-215 www.witnessgaza.com

THE RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE JEWS

2011-11-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

Reprinted from TIME AND TIDE October 1945

THE RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE JEWS

By Walter Zander

IT IS SIGNIFICANT that the emancipation of the Jews on
the continent of Europe has been mainly brought about
at times of religious decline. This is equally true of
the French and the Russian revolutions. In Russia, the
Orthodox Church had allied itself so much with the
Tsarist régime that it became nearly identified with
the forces of reaction and oppression; and the demand
of political and social equality for all was left to
the secular powers. Accordingly the anti- religious
measures of the revolution in the beginning were
directed chiefly against the established Church, whilst
other groups, such as Roman Catholics, Baptists and
Jews were not equally affected. When later on, however,
the conflict between State and religion sharpened, it
extended equally to all confessional groups, and
Christians and Jews alike suffered the same fate.

THE GREAT MAJORITY of Russian Jews had been by no
means friendly to the Communists. Many of them belonged
to the class of middlemen, shopkeepers and agents,
which was to be eliminated by the Revolution. A large
number of them were Zionists, and therefore more
interested in the establishment of a Jewish National
Home in Palestine than in a Revolution in Russia.
Moreover the religiously orthodox elements were
deterred by the official atheism. But gradually
opposition vanished. The comradeship, created by the
social Revolution, exerted a profound attraction on all
Soviet nations, and Gentiles and Jews united for the
establishment of the new society. This. new society was
based not so much on a common past, but on the common
aim which was to be realized in the future. Church and
Synagogue played no leading part in this development,
but the revolutionary forces themselves - in spite of
their proclaimed atheism - were largely nourished by
ancient messianic and prophetic longings; and there was
a sincere desire to create a universal communion in
which there would be "neither Jew nor Greek". This
development, combined with the social and economic
transformation of the country, worked towards
dissolution of the Jewish community.

During the last years before the war, however, new
trends became apparent. Russian history came to be
recognized again as an unbroken entity. Great men of
Russia's past - not only artists, writers and
musicians, but statesmen, Tsars and even Saints - Peter
the Great and Alexander Nevsky, were reinstated as
heroes of the Russian nation; and the Soviet State
began to sink its roots into the old traditions of the
people. The war brought this development to a climax
throughout the Union. Hitler's invasion and his march
on Moscow revived the memories of Napoleonic days.
Russia became again the "Holy Motherland" which had
survived innumerable storms. The Mongols, Tartars,
Swedes and French, had come and disappeared again. Seen
from this perspective, the onslaught of the Nazis
became only one of many links in a great chain; and,
ultimately, all these assaults had led to greater glory
and renascence of "Eternal Russia".

In this connection the rise of the Church was of
paramount importance. As early as 1934, a change of
policy towards religion had become apparent.
Anti-religious mock- processions were forbidden, the
children of the clergy were re-admitted to the higher
schools and priests themselves were re-franchised. But
there were other more dramatic changes. When in 1936
the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow produced The Knights by
Borodine, in which a modern librettist had ridiculed
Russia's Christianization by Prince Vladimir, further
performances were suppressed by the Government.*

* See N.S. Timasheff, Religion in Soviet Russia,
London. 1943.

The derision of an event sacred to Russian history had
become incompatible with the spirit of the new time.
The Central Art Committee issued a statement that
Christianity had been one of the main factors of
Russia's civilization, and the Journal of the Militant
Atheist League declared: "The Christianization of
Russia by Prince Vladimir certainly was a progressive
act. Christianity struggled against slavery and blood
feuds, it favoured the advance of culture and laid the
foundation of Russian art and literature". Christianity
was thus recognized as a historic event equally
beneficial to the world and to Russia; and when in the
war the Orthodox Church identified itself with the
struggle of the people, the new recognition of the
Church found its visible expression in the solemn
re-election of a Patriarch of Moscow and all-Russia.
This recognition by the State is, however, only one
side of the development, and it can well be assumed
that the change of the Government's attitude is in
itself a recognition of the inherent strength of the
Christian Community in the country. History shows that
hitherto Christianity has survived all periods of
attack. How should that be different in Russia whose
whole history for a thousand years has been imbued by
religion! Even the leader of the godless movement
estimated in 1937 that, in spite of all anti-religious
activities, in the towns about one-third and on the
land about two-thirds of the adults were still
believers. It would be by no means surprising if now -
a generation after the establishment of the atheistic
society - the trend was moving in the opposite
direction, and if among the younger generation an
increasing number should be attracted again by the
daring adventures of spiritual experience.

THE EFFECT OF these developments on the Jewish
situation must be profound. Already the general revival
of national and traditional forces in the years before
the war had its parallel within the Jewish sphere. The
Yiddish Theatre in Moscow turned to the production of
historic plays with subjects taken from ancient Jewish
past; and the Jews began again to speak in public of
their "age of civilization". The catastrophe which the
Nazis brought upon the Jewish world has increased the
Jewish consciousness everywhere and particularly in the
east of Europe where most of the horrors have been
committed. The national and spiritual development in
the Soviet Union - with its tendency towards historical
tradition - is likely to intensify the consciousness of
their own destiny among the Jews. It will, therefore,
counteract the trend to dissolution which in the first
years of the revolution seemed overpowering. The
knowledge of the rebirth of Jewish life in Palestine
will, furthermore, strengthen this development.

The rise of national and religious forces is bound to
affect the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. For
years their common ground had been the secular society
of the future. Now increasing stress is laid on the
past. The history of Jews and Russians is, however, not
identical, and both groups have different backgrounds
and experiences. It will need, therefore, a creative
statesmanship to avoid their drifting apart.

Faced by a rising Christianity, the Jews have
apparently the choice between three ways Those who are
nearest to Russian life may become Christians, and thus
integrate with the great civilization in which they
live. Others may remain or become atheists, detached
from their own religious roots without being joined to
the spiritual foundations of the surrounding world. A
last group, however, will rally round those who,
through all the vicissitudes of the last decades, have
maintained the light of traditional Judaism; and
although it is not easy to regain a lost tradition,
this group will represent the core of Jewish strength.

THE INFLUENCE OF the Eastern Church is not limited to
Russia. Since in the 15th century, Constantinople fell
to the Turks, Russia has considered herself the heir of
the Byzantine Empire and the Tsar was conceived as the
protector of the Christians and their Holy Places
against the Moslem world. This was expressed in many
wars against the Turks; and the question of the Holy
Places played even a part at the outbreak of the
Crimean war. To the Russians the "Eastern question" was
by no means limited to the acquisition of a great
harbour and the access to the seas. "it is not even the
union and re-awakening of the Slav peoples," wrote
Dostoevski in 1877. "Our task lies infinitely deeper.
We Russians are indispensable for Christendom in its
entity in the East and for the future of Orthodoxy on
earth and its union. In one word this fateful Eastern
question contains nearly the whole of our destiny. It
contains all our tasks, above all our only way into the
future of world history."

When after the Franco-Prussian war European history
began to centre round the German danger, such thoughts
receded into the background. But a constant stream of
Russian Christian pilgrims kept the light burning.
Whoever has seen these Russian pilgrims in Jerusalem,
wrote Laurence Oliphant, a British consular official in
1880, knows which spiritual forces are here involved.
Thirty years later, Stephen Graham described how a
thousand Russian peasants, after endless wanderings,
went to Jerusalem to pray at the Holy Places and to
bathe in the Jordan. "They feel", he added, "that when
they have been in Jerusalem the serious occupations of
their life are all ended". The revolution interrupted
this development. But in January 1945 the Patriarchs of
Antiochia and Alexandria and Archbishop Athenegor of
Jerusalem were received with great honours in Moscow
where they took part in the election of the new
Patriarch of Moscow and all-Russia. A few months later
the newly elected Patriarch went to Palestine himself
and took repossession of all sanctuaries which Russia
had ever had in the Holy Land. It appears certain that
with the war at an end, the Russian Christian pilgrims
will return, and the rise of Eastern Christianity can
deeply influence the Middle East.

Of all changes within the Soviet Union the religious
reawakening is likely to have the greatest
significance. It is the culmination of the national
revival. Christianity, as manifested in the particular
form of Eastern Orthodoxy, has given to the Russian
people that sense of mission and destiny in which every
nation must believe if it wants to survive. For
centuries Russia has seen the ultimate purpose of her
existence in the Christian salvation of the world, a
salvation of which in her opinion neither Rome nor the
Protestant Churches were capable. It is in this sphere
that the Jewish problem in the Soviet Union will
ultimately have to be faced.

A WAY OUT OF THE MONETARY CHAOS 1937

2011-11-06T14:33:00.001-08:00

Published in English translation as an appendix in E.
Milhaud, ORGANISED COMPENSATORY TRADING Williams and
Norgate Ltd, London, 1937

A WAY OUT OF THE MONETARY CHAOS.

By Dr Walter Zander

The subjoined study is the outcome of a lecture
delivered by the author on 8 March 1935 before the
National Institute of Geneva (Institut National
Genevois).

The devaluation of the belga, which supervened in
April 1935, is taken account of here. On the other
hand, the May 1935 crisis of the French franc took
place after this study had gone to press. It forms an
additional link in the lengthening chain of monetary
difficulties and offers one more illustration of the
dangers to which every monetary system, even when
supported by an enormous gold reserve, is exposed
under the rule of a forced rate for the notes of
central banks. The proposals so far made known for
ending the French monetary crisis do not suggest
anything beyond what is implicit in the views
generally current to-day.

Berlin, 2 June 1935.

Dr. Walter ZANDER.

1. The Monetary Chaos.

The States participating to-day in the world economy
may roughly be said to be divided into two groups. One
of these has abandoned the gold standard and has thus
removed the foundations of its currency. The other has
introduced foreign exchange legislation and has
thereby abolished the freedom of settlement
operations. The first group includes more particularly
England, the sterling bloc countries, the United
States, and Japan; the second group, Austria, Germany,
Russia and the great majority of the remaining
countries. Placed between these two groups, is the
steadily disintegrating gold bloc. Italy left it for
all intents only recently and yesterday as it were
Belgium followed suit. If we bear in mind that since
the War France and Poland had already devaluated their
currencies to a fraction of their pre- war parity,
virtually Holland and Switzerland alone may be said to
uphold the pre-war monetary system. However, even in
these two small countries, which represent but a tiny
fraction of the world economy, certain restrictions
concerning the convertibility of banknotes and the
gold market have been introduced, and the general
uncertainty as to the future of currencies exerts a
baleful influence in these countries also.

2. Disadvantages of Devaluation.

Whether the abandonment of the gold standard is
advantageous to an economy, is decidedly problematic.
In most cases the object aimed at has not been
attained. So far as devaluation is intended to
stimulate exports, we should not forget that for most
countries the magnitude of their export :trade
compared to that of their total trade is comparatively
insignificant. This alone renders it questionable to
embark, for the sake of the export trade, on measures
which modify the basis of a national economy as a
whole. Moreover, such measures, if successful, may be
imitated by any other country, thus nullifying their
favourable effect. Accordingly, the abandonment of the
gold standard has led to "a race for the worst
currency", in which the most powerful States are
participating. It is obvious that in the long run such
measures for the stimulation of the export trade are
bound to prove worthless.

Moreover, devaluation does not only affect the export
trade of a country. On the contrary, it touches every
branch of an economy. This holds most especially of
imports, since these must become dearer to the precise
extent that exports become cheaper. So far as
exporting, like in Germany for example, presupposes
the importing of raw materials, a portion of the
anticipated gain is thus necessarily lost. But, in
general, import restrictions, so popular to-day in
many countries, lead eventually to a decline in
exports, for the simple reason that in the last resort
exports can only be paid with imports.

Furthermore, money debts abroad are augmented by a
devaluation of the currency.

However, what is of crucial importance is the fact
that an abandonment of the gold standard involves the
devaluation of the entire savings of a country,
particularly as invested in savings banks, State
loans, bonds, and mortgages. If the effect of a
general adjustment of prices to the fall in the value
of money is not visible at first or is deferred by
artificial devices, eventually prices always rise when
a currency has

been devaluated.

Thus while the intended advantage for the export trade
is emphatically dubious and at best only of passing
importance, the loss in savings and capital is certain
and lasting.

But even if the reason for abandoning the gold
standard, as in the case of the United States, is the
desire to devaluate capital savings, - that is, if it
is intended thereby to adjust the claims of creditors
to fallen prices and to the shrunken turnover of the
debtors - the success is nevertheless more than
doubtful. For what is decisive for the value of a
claim is not so much its magnitude as the business
turnover of the debtor. Everything depends therefore
on increasing trade and

this is nowise assured by attacking the rights of
creditors, to say nothing of the moral and economic
disorganisation which this creates.

The heavy depletions on the capital market, the
abrogation of the rights of creditors, the menace to
State credit, and the decline in the standard of
living, represent drawbacks which ultimately outweigh
the transitory advantages.

3. Disadvantages of Foreign Exchange Legislation.

The injuriousness of foreign exchange legislation is
even more patent. Everybody agrees, and the President
of the Reichsbank, Dr. Schacht, has repeatedly
expressed himself to this effect, that foreign
exchange legislation constitutes a great evil, even
though in most quarters such legislation is considered
inevitable.

Foreign exchange legislation places obstacles in the
way of settlement operations. These obstacles, in
turn, hamper trade. But every decline in trading leads
necessarily to a decline in well-being, as the latter,
in our age of the division of labour, depends on
commerce. Everything therefore that obstructs trading
tends to intensify want and unemployment.

4. Inadequacy of Compensation and Clearing Agreements.

All attempts to surmount the difficulties involved in
foreign exchange legislation have hitherto proved
abortive. This is especially true of the different
forms of compensatory trading and is evident as
regards its earlier developments. It could happen
then, for instance, that an instrument manufacturer
had to accept in exchange coffee and was thus
compelled to become a produce dealer. In principle,
later developments left matters unchanged. It is the
very essence of a compensatory transaction that there
is properly speaking no money payment involved and
that the goods themselves have to fulfil this
function. That is, every such transaction represents a
barter operation.

Whilst it is agreed that movements of goods (in the
broadest sense) underly all settlements, nevertheless
as much as fifteen centuries ago the Roman Emperor
Justinian explained in his Corpus Juris why barter
operations are necessarily inferior to monetary
transactions. And yet the distinguishing mark of the
present-day international compensatory trade is the
abandonment of the monetary system and the falling
back on barter. It is evident that a form of economy
which the Corpus Juris deemed obsolete, must be
unequal to the task of conducting efficiently the
exchange of goods in our highly developed age. A
serious effort should therefore be made to re-instate
the system of monetary settlements in international
transactions. Similarly with so-called clearing
agreements between countries. These have now become
very common, but they cannot remove the difficulties
arising from foreign exchange legislation, for apart
from the fact that in most cases, as between Germany
and Switzerland, they have led to a considerable
dislocation of trade, they are necessarily confined to
transactions between two countries, while the
realities of life demand freedom of movement in every
direction and rebel against bilateral arrangements.
They lack therefore the necessary fungibility and the
attempts to supersede the monetary system in this way
have hence failed. The League of Nations Committee for
inquiring into international clearing agreements has
accordingly drawn attention recently to their
disadvantages and recommended their abolition.

5. Need for Stable Standards of Value and for Removing
Restrictions' to Settlement Operations.

Shrinkage of international and of intra-national
trade, want and unemployment, heavy investment losses,
and a general uncertainty and loss of confidence,
characterise the present situation in most countries.
It is imperative to create once more reliable and
stable standards of value and to secure the removal of
the impediments to settlement operations between
countries. The solution of these closely related
problems has become a question of life and death for
our social order.

6. Falsifying the Gold Standard through Banknotes
being Legal Tender.

Whatever the monetary system of a country, it is
essential that the measure of value should be clearly
and unequivocally determined. Thus where there is a
gold currency, a silver currency, or an index
currency, the value should be measured by gold,
silver, and the index respectively. This basis of
measuring economic values, and therefore of any
monetary system, is destroyed when in the case of a
gold or silver currency the notes of the bank of issue
are made legal tender, for this compels everybody to
accept these notes in payment regardless of their real
value. Compulsory acceptance renders it even
impossible to measure the notes by the unit of value
and thus to ascertain their value within the country.
Indeed, it establishes a legal fiction on the basis of
which note and unit of value are identical. For this
reason, the names of the units of value - e.g., the
terms dollar, mark, pound - become ambiguous in that
they mean now a fixed weight of gold and then the note
of a bank of issue. Accordingly, the measure of value,
on the unambiguity of which everything depends, comes
to have two definitions. This renders impossible any
real measurement and thus the whole monetary system is
falsified.

This falsification is generally hidden from the
public so long as the central bank is legally obliged
to redeem its notes. This, however, only masks the
reality, since convertibility introduces in the
measurement of value an alien element. Indeed, the
fact that convertibility becomes a decisive factor,
shows how the whole problem has assumed a different
complexion.

Where convertibility is suspended, we have only a
pure paper currency, this despite strenuous
legislative and administrative efforts to keep the
value of the paper at a certain definite level, for
what counts now is no longer the value of the gold,
but the question whether the note of the central bank,
measured by gold, changes its value. In fact, the
system that has been in general use since the
beginning of the World War, including the so-called
gold standard or nominal gold currencies, may be
described as paper currency.

7. Compulsory Acceptance a Relative Novelty.

Although the compulsory acceptance of banknotes
appears to-day so natural that most people cannot
imagine a means of payment not having that character,
this system has in reality only come into general use
in recent times. Here are two illustrations

Par. 2 of the German Bank Law of 1875, provided :

Payments statutorily required to be made in money
need
not be accepted when tendered in banknotes and
the constituent States cannot enact such an obligation
for the State treasuries.

This provision was only replaced by its converse in
1909. Article 3 of the Act of 1 June 1909 decreed :

The notes of the Reichsbank are legal tender.

The course of development was similar in Switzerland.
Here article 39 of the Federal Constitution of 1874
prohibited once for all the compulsory acceptance of
banknotes. However, already in 1891 the Constitution
was amended and they became legal tender in 1914.

8. Compulsory Acceptance establishes the Dependence of
the Currency on the Central Bank.

The statutory obligation to accept the notes of the
central bank in settlement operations involves not
only the falsification of the basis of the currency.
It also makes the fate of the currency dependent on
that of the central bank and frequently on that of the
banking system generally. If for any reason the
central bank can no longer redeem its notes or
maintain their parity - that is, if the market rate of
the bonds it issues falls - then, owing to the legal
equivalence between the notes of this bank and the
legal standard of value, the calculation of values
generally will be prejudicially affected. Thus it -was
in the main the situation of the Bank of England,
which led in 1931 to the abandonment of the gold
standard and, similarly, it was the National Bank of
Belgium that suggested in 1935 the devaluation of the
currency.

Almost a century ago Lord Overstone grasped this
interdependence when he said that if he ruined his
private bank, he would be ruined, but that if the Bank
of England committed a gross blunder, the Bank could
save itself, but the whole of the community might have
to suffer grievously.

9. Compulsory Acceptance a Condition of every
Inflation.

Moreover, compulsory acceptance for banknotes forms
the legal and conceptual basis of every inflation, In
the absence of such an obligation, bank crashes, with
all their dire consequences, may occur, but never an
inflation, for the destruction of the standard of
value and the falsifying of all monetary relations,
which are the mark of every inflation, can never
result from the collapse of a single bank. This
confusion is only possible when a legal equivalence
has been established between the notes of this bank
and the standard of value. It was compulsory
acceptance that brought forth the ominous slogan of
the German inflation period : "One mark is as good as
another" ("Mark gleicht Mark"). History has not known
an inflation not due to the legal obligation to
accept.

10. The Gold Standard as Gold for account.

If, then, the pre-conditions of an inflation are to
be eliminated and a reliable :and stable currency is
to be assured, if more especially the gold standard is
to be restored, the falsification introduced in recent
decades must be eradicated and the earlier separation
between standard of value and means of payment must be
re-established. A compulsory exchange rate excludes a
stable and safe currency. No wonder the distinguished
German historian Niebuhr stigmatised compulsory
acceptance as "a legislative provision both ridiculous
and abominable" (Nachgelassene Schriften
nichtphilologischen Inhalts, 1842, p. 485 ff.)

The re-introduction of the gold standard in Germany
in October 1923, after the inflation, offers an
impressive and instructive illustration. The notes of
the Reichsbank, which were legal tender, had
completely collapsed and their value could only be
stated in astronomical fractions. At long last it was
decided to introduce calculating in gold value. First,
taxes were thus calculated. Then a new institute of
issue, the Rentenbank was founded, whose accountancy
basis was to be gold units. There was, and this cannot
be too strongly insisted on, no legal obligation for
the public to accept the new notes in payment, and
these notes have to this day never been legal tender,
They have therefore never been identified with the
unit of value which was then the gold mark The system,
which lasted from the passing of the inflation in the
autumn of 1923 until the introduction of the new Bank
Act in the summer of 1924 (which Act formed part of
the series of Dawes Acts), was therefore a pure system
of calculating in gold units which was not falsified
by any compulsory acceptance.

A similar example, although confined to one domain
only, is offered by China which recently adopted a
gold unit for its customs charges. By a decree of the
Minister of Finance of 15 January 1930, counting in
silver in the department of maritime customs, the most
important for the Chinese budget, was replaced by
counting in gold. The basis for these calculations in
gold is a weight of 60,1866 centigrammes of fine gold
and represents the customs gold unit. This, customs
unit is exclusively a calculating unit and the decree
specifically provides that the payment of duties may,
as before, be made in local means of payment, that is
in silver dollars and in banknotes. Of course, these
are only accepted in payment at the current exchange
irate, this being measured by the customs gold unit.

In conformity with the foregoing illustrations, it is
therefore suggested here to introduce generally
(whilst abrogating the statutory obligation to accept
the notes of a central bank) calculating in gold value
and thus to re- establish the conditions existing
until 19,09 in Germany and until 1914 in Switzerland.

11. Is the Inconvertibility of Notes incompatible with
the abrogation of Compulsory Acceptance ?

It ,might be objected that before the War compulsory
acceptance could be dispensed with because then,
unlike now, the notes could at any time be converted
into gold. The objection does not hold, for
convertibility is not of decisive importance, as will
transpire from what follows.

12. Convertibility as a Basis of Value for Paper Means
of Payment.

It is generally believed that the value of banknotes
resides in their being convertible into metallic
currency, banknotes being considered in the main a
substitute for gold or silver. Already Adam Smith, in
a famous passage in his Wealth of Nations (bk.2,
ch.2), declared that all paper money represented only
gold or silver. Similarly, the Bullion Report of the
British Parliament of 1810, which was very strongly
influenced by Ricardo, expressed itself to the same
effect. Probably not a single theory in the whole
domain of political economy has evoked such universal
assent.

It is therefore natural that this view should have
been incorporated in legislative enactments. Since
paper money is regarded as a substitute for gold or
silver, it must be at any time convertible into these.
Banknotes and convertibility are therefore
interdependent conceptions and hence all bank acts the
world over contain definite provisions concerning
convertibility, metallic cover, and the ratio of the
notes issued 'to the current gold reserve. Indeed,
every monetary claim is hence regarded as being in the
last resort a claim for payment in gold, although
there is no necessary connection between this and a
gold standard, for a gold standard primarily
presupposes, apart from calculating in gold, that a
creditor cannot refuse acceptance of a payment in
gold, i.e., that there is a general obligation to
accept gold, but by no means the right of a creditor
to insist, in any and all circumstances, directly
or-indirectly, on being paid in gold.

Firmly based, on the one hand, as seems the general

conviction that convertibility is necessary (and
practically everywhere the ratio of the gold cover is
deemed to be of the utmost importance), there is, on
the other, no doubt that to- day most banknotes have
become legally, or at least actually, inconvertible,
without thereby losing all their value. In fact, for
some notes there exist to-day no provisions of
redemption, and yet they possess value. Accordingly,
there must be, apart from convertibility, another
basis for the value of paper means of payment.

13. State Fiat as Basis of Value for Paper Means of
Payment ?

All eyes are turned towards the State to see whether,
by
its fiat, it is able to confer value on valueless
paper. It becomes, however, quickly manifest that the
power of the State is strictly limited in this sphere.
All large-scale monetary devaluations known to history
have referred to means of payment the value of which
rested on a State fiat. This holds, for example, of
the notes which the Scotchman John Law issued, in
France at the beginning of the eighteenth century and
even more so of the assignats of the French
Revolution. In both instances acceptance was at first
not compulsory. But presently the obligation to accept
them was decreed and soon reinforced by penalties. On
11 April 1793 the French Government prohibited the use
of all metallic money on pains of six years in chains,
and in September of the same year the decrying - that
is, the verbal discrediting of the assignats - became
punishable with death and the confiscation of
property.

These drastic measures proved, however, unavailing.
The
exchange value of the assignats declined
steadily. At the close of 1793 it was only 22 % and in
1795 it had fallen to under 1%.

Not so dramatic, but not less impressive and
instructive,

were the experiences during the two great American

monetary devaluations on the occasion of the war of

liberation and of the civil wars. There, too, the fiat
of the

State was unable to prevent devaluation.

But by far the greatest financial catastrophe of
modern times was the German post-war inflation. It is
common knowledge that the legal obligation to accept
the banknotes of the Reichsbank could not prevent
their complete collapse and it is most significant
that the notes of the Rentenbank, which succeeded in
stopping the inflation, have never been legal tender.

Nor was it different in the case of the Austrian and
was Russian inflations. Nowhere, in fact, has the
power of the its State been able to prevent
devaluation.

But this was not only the fate of weak States crushed
by defeat. France and Italy, both victors in the World
War, had to suffer heavy devaluations which
annihilated more than four-fifth of the value of their
currency.

It cannot be therefore the State's fiat which confers
value on inconvertible paper money.

14. Confidence as a Basis of Value for Paper Means of
Payments ?

Not even confidence and national enthusiasm,
revolutionary determination and religious belief, can
accomplish this in the long run. One example may
suffice. When during the French Revolution in April
1793 the above- mentioned currency law was
promulgated, the whole population of Metz assembled on
the Place de la Légalité, took a solemn oath, in the
presence of the garrison, the National Guard, and the
administrative and the judiciary staff, not to draw
any distinction between the face value of the paper
money and silver. Similarly, from Toulon, where
analogous ceremonies took place, the Government
received a report stating that. the population would
carry out the law with the religious respect (
"respect religieux") due to it. at However, after a
few days the workmen at the arsenal of Toulon
petitioned that they might have their wages paid in
silver, for, they declared, "try as we may, we cannot
live otherwise". (See Marion, Histoire financière de
la France, vol. 3, p. 47, Paris, 1921.)

Even the powers of the soul cannot, therefore,
permanently confer value on paper money.

15. Acceptance by Fiscal Offices as Basis of Value
for Paper Money. The value of inconvertible paper
means of payment has a different basis, clearly
revealed, in the history of German finance. Thus
during the nineteenth century several German States
issued paper money the value of which did not lie in

its convertibility, but in that the State agreed to
accept at its pay offices the notes it issued at their face value,
regardless of their rate of exchange. German financial science
called this the taxation foundation ("Steuerfundation" ).

This acceptance by the State should not be confused
with the current. obligation to accept, for under-the
regime of compulsory acceptance the taxation,offices,
following the universal custom, accept notes at their
actual and not at their nominal value. Thus the notes
of the Bank of England are worth no more at the
English fiscal offices than anywhere else. The State
accepts them at their paper value and not at the value
of the gold pound. Compulsory acceptance and taxation
foundation are therefore fundamentally different. The
basis of value of this paper money lay in that it
accepted at the fiscal offices of the issuing
authority at nominal value and, accordingly, this
obligation to accept was the important element in the
wording of the warrants. Thus the Saxon fiscal notes
simply read : -

In conformity with the edict of 1 October 1818, this
will
be accepted at the Royal fiscal offices,

and the Prussian money orders of 1835 and 1856
contain, besides the value of the order, only the
statement

Of full value in all payments.

Similarly in most other countries. It is true that in
many cases, as in Baden, Austria, and Wurttemberg,
there was, in addition to the obligation to accept by
the fiscal offices -that is, to the fiscal
foundation-a more or less widely current obligation to
redeem the warrants. However, here also the fiscal
foundation was of prime importance and redemption
constituted only a kind of supplementary guarantee.
This is already expressed in the order of the two
undertakings on the notes. Thus we read on the Baden
paper money of 1849:

Paper money of the Grand-Duke of Baden, which all

Baden fiscal offices accept in payments at its full
nominal value i.e., as equivalent to the gross silver
money struck at the country's standard of coinage-and
is exchangeable at sight for gross silver coins at the
redemption office Carlsruhe.

Likewise, in the Reich Act concerning the issue of
Reich fiscal office notes of 3,0 April 1874, § 5, we
read :

Federal fiscal notes are accepted at their nominal
value in payments made to all fiscal offices of the
Reich and all constituent States. They are redeemable
at any time on demand for cash by the Reich's Central
Fiscal Office on the Reich's account.

In both cases therefore the fiscal foundation comes
first. It covers all fiscal offices, whilst the notes
can only be redeemed at one fiscal office.

The Wurttemberg Act of 1 July 1849 makes this
relation still plainer. Article 2, par. 1, provides:

This paper money is accepted at its nominal value in
payment at all fiscal offices of the State, as also at
the tax collecting offices. These offices are
instructed to redeem on demand this money, so far as
the available funds permit , and in amounts not under
twenty gulden at a time.

Here the claim to redeem notes is conditional on
means being available. According to the clear wording
of the Act, the notes are in principle only covered by
the fiscal foundation.

Later, this principle was further developed in the
Rentenbank notes of 1923. Here no provision at all was
made for direct redemption. Apart from utilising them
in connection with public pay offices, the holder had
only a claim to convert them into annuity bonds, which
fact has played no important part in practice. Lastly,
in recent years the fiscal foundation has been most
conspicuously exemplified in the fiscal warrants of
1932, although these are not intended to be means of
payment proper. They cannot be, either directly or
indirectly, converted into ready money. Nor can they
be exchanged for securities. No redemption fund exists
nor repayments or amortisation. Their value is
entirely due to their being accepted by the fiscal
offices at the indicated value, regardless of their
exchange rate.

From the Saxon pay office notes to the fiscal
warrants of the Reich, the same principle of a fiscal
foundation is evident.

16. Commercial Bills as Basis of Value for Banknotes.

The principle of the commercial bill for the Scottish
banknotes corresponds to that of the fiscal foundation
for State paper money. Whilst English banknotes have
their origin in the receipts given by the London
goldsmiths for gold deposited with them (which means
that redemption is of their essence), the Scottish
notes have a different history. In the latter case,
the banks gave in exchange for commercial bills round
sums in notes of small denominations, expressing
themselves at the same time ready to accept the notes
they had thus issued, in payment at their face value
for the commercial bills they had discounted. Thus the
basis of the value of the English notes was the gold
deposited, whereas the value of the Scottish notes was
based on goods sold as expressed in commercial bills.

It is true that the Scottish banknotes were also
redeemable in precious metal, very much as was
frequently the case with the State paper money, but
redemption played an indifferent part in practice. By
means of a so-called option clause the banks
frequently reserved to themselves the right

of postponing the redemption of the notes several
months after they had been presented. Thus they could
wait until the commercial bills had matured. When, on
the withdrawal of the bills, the notes flowed back,
they disappeared from circulation and the question of
their redemption did not arise. So far as the bill
debtors redeemed their debts in coin or other means of
payment and not in -the notes of the bank, the bank,
without drawing on its reserves, acquired thereby the
necessary means of redeeming any floating notes.

Ultimately, in any case, the value of these notes lay
in their being accepted by the bank that had issued
them.

17. Fiscal Foundation and Commercial Bill as Forms of
Clearing.

The fiscal foundation for State paper money and the
principle of the commercial bill for banknotes are
therefore basically related. In both instances
acceptance by the issuer at their nominal value,
regardless of the exchange rate of the paper, is
decisive. The significance of this acceptance (or
reflux) is manifest. If, for example, the State pays
an official with such a warrant, if the official
passes this warrant on to his baker in payment for
bread, and if, lastly, the baker liquidates his tax
debt with it, the baker clears his debt to the State
with the warrant that the official had passed on to
him. In the last resort we have here a clearing
process, i.e., a balancing of mutual obligations. And
these settlements, unlike in barter or in modern
international compensatory transactions, are not made
without resorting to money. On the contrary, the
exchange is operated by means of a clearing process
cancelling the mutual claims through our monetary
system.

An inconvertible paper means of payment assumes
therefore a reflux. It represents, in fact, a clearing
certificate and derives its value from the exchange of
economic services. This indicates consequently the
limit to issues of unredeemable notes. Since the value
of freely quoted money, as for instance of the Reich
pay notes of 1874 .or of the Rentenbank notes, is
determined by supply and demand, no more notes may be
issued than there is a demand for, that is, than must
flow back to the issuing centre. Thus in the case of
State paper money, the aggregate sum to be issued must
depend on the aggregate tax claims due or all but due.
Within this limit issues are always justifiable. If,
however, this limit is exceeded by circulating paper
money representing tax claims in the distant future,
depreciation will inevitably follow, even if the State
should promise to accept the notes at their face value
in the future.

Similarly with banknotes. In principle, only
short-term obligations should be admitted as cover.
The nearer the due date of the bill, the greater is
the demand for means of payment in order to redeem it
and the more assured is the value of the banknotes
issued in connection with the bill. The more distant
the due date and the less assured the payment, the
more in jeopardy are the notes having such a basis.
Rightly, therefore, many bank acts, among them that of
Germany, expressly provide that only sound commercial
bills falling due within three months at most may be
discounted by banks of issue, Indeed, experience
teaches that long-dated financial bills have hurled
whole monetary systems into the abyss.

18. Redemption or Clearing,.

There exist, accordingly, two entirely independent
and wholly different foundations whereon the value of
paper means of payment may be based : redeemability in
precious metal and clearing. There is no third
possibility.

Thus all paper means of payment in every country may
be to-day actually resolved into these two elements of
value. Insofar as notes can be really exchanged for
gold, their value may be attributed to this. So far,
however, as there is no redemption and there is an
inadequate metallic cover, only clearing can confer
value on the notes, and this either by clearing
against commercial bills or against fiscal claims.
Moreover, in order to extend the facilities for
clearing and thus to increase their value, many
countries, at a time when banknotes were not legal
tender, introduced in addition a tax foundation for
the banknotes, statutorily obliging public pay offices
to accept them. (See, e.g., the Federal Act concerning
the Swiss National Bank of 6 October 1905, article
23.)

The difference between the two elements of value,
convertibility and clearing, which latter means here
the clearing of taxes due, is well exemplified in the
Bank of England. Here, since the Peel's Act, the note
circulation is divided into a so-called fiduciary and
non-fiduciary issue. The latter must have a 100% gold
cover. It reflects the pure idea of convertibility.
The fiduciary issue however, which at present amounts
to 260 million pounds, is based exclusively, on "an
eternal debt of the English State". It is not covered
by any redemption fund. It rather embodies the idea of
a fiscal foundation.

How, then, are these two elements of value related ?
Although in the public mind the idea of convertibility
predominates, what is actually of decisive importance
for the prosperity of a country is clearing.

The idea of convertibility makes the quantity of
means of payment basically dependent on the gold
reserve available at any time. This is an entirely
impracticable principle. All attacks on the gold
standard, directed against this principle, which more
especially combat the creditor's right to claim from
his debtor directly or indirectly gold, are to that
extent justified, For there is never a possibility of
meeting all liabilities by gold payments. This holds
both of international obligations and of domestic
payments. It was therefore of

momentous importance and evinced profound insight,
when Milhaud in his great work, A Gold Truce, called
for a universal gold truce.

Whether a country possesses a gold reserve, depends
always more or less on chance. Accordingly, the amount
of the means of payment in circulation should never,
not even under the most orthodox. gold standard
system, be determined by the size of the gold
.reserve. The economic life of a country would have
otherwise to shrink regularly with the shrinkage of
its gold reserve. In reality, the exchange of goods
remains a necessity and possible, even if there is no
gold reserve at all. On the other hand, as the cases
of France and the United States to-day show, not even
the largest gold reserve of a central bank can save a
people from widespread unemployment and poverty,
whilst a monetary system intelligently based on mutual
clearing, can provide a people with work and wealth,
even in the absence of any store of gold.

19. Examples of Clearing Money.

The diverse possibilities of issuing inconvertible
means of payment based on the idea of clearing can
only be adumbrated here.

In the first place, we may mention the inconvertible
and freely quoted State paper money described above.
In most countries to-day this is to be found in a more
or less disguised form. Besides States, local
authorities may also issue clearing notes for the
imposts they are entitled to raise. Thus in the
nineteenth century Hanover city issued notes which
promoted most effectively the town's prosperity.

In the economic sphere, railways enter primarily into
account as centres for the issue of special railway
clearing notes. In Germany there is the noteworthy
case of the Leipzig-Dresden Railway founded by
Friedrich List. This Railway issued in the thirties of
the last century railway money to the amount of
500.000 thalers and this money, to the general
satisfaction, freely circulated until the
establishment of the Reich. After the World War, the
German Federal Railway also repeatedly issued its own
means of payment, most of which exhibited the
character of goods warrants, i.e., they were based on
the principle of clearing. Naturally, other
undertakings, for whose goods or services there is a
general and constant demand, would also benefit by
such facilities.

The clearing principle is most particularly useful in
international settlements. Thus leading firms might
issue purchasing certificates. For instance,
certificates accepted at their face value by the I. G.
Farben Company or by Siemens, could be disposed of in
London, Cape Town, and generally. To make the
certificates more widely acceptable, whole groups of
undertakings concerned with agriculture, export, or
the tourist traffic, might agree to issue purchasing
certificates jointly. Issues might also be undertaken
by special foreign trade banks, whose clients would
bind themselves to accept the certificates in payments
up to a certain amount. Lastly, work provision banks
might similarly be established to combat unemployment
within countries. For particulars on this subject, the
reader is referred to the valuable works of Milhaud
and Beckerath published in 1933 and 1934.

The central banks existing at present in most
countries ought not to oppose the issue of such means
of payment. In this connection we need not examine
here whether these banks have fulfilled the hopes
placed in them or have not rather aggravated all
financial catastrophes, such as inflations and
deflations. In any case, so long as private enterprise
exists at all, mutual clearing cannot be monopolised
by a single central undertaking. The idea of a
monopoly is most closely associated with the idea of
convertibility. The issue of clearing warrants, which
neither affect the store of gold nor are able, since
they are freely quoted, to modify the average price,
cannot in principle be restricted to central banks. 1t
ought rather, within the limits drawn by the State, to
be allowed to develop freely.

20. Abrogation of Foreign Exchange Legislation.

Once it is recognised that the value of inconvertible
paper money depends on the likelihood of the issuer
clearing it, the way is open to abolish obligatory
acceptance and to re- establish the gold standard.
This, in turn, would facilitate the abrogation of
foreign exchange legislation, for this, too, is based
in the last resort on the idea of convertibility and
of obligatory acceptance.

In every country foreign exchange legislation is in
the main identical. The endless number of laws,
regulations, and principles may be reduced to the
following three aims

(a) Retention of gold;

(b) Retention of foreign means of payment (foreign

exchange proper) ; and

(c) Restriction of payments abroad.

Compared with these, all other provisions are of
secondary importance. And these three aims may be
reduced to one, namely the seizure of gold. The
retention of foreign means of payment and the
restriction of payments abroad are only means towards
attaining that one object. The foreign means of
payment are seized because they are regarded as
substitutes for gold and because it is anticipated
that by their redemption or, at least, by their being
sold on the international market, gold might be
obtained in exchange. Inversely, payments abroad are
restricted as far as possible because it is feared
that through the efflux of means of payment the gold
reserve might be drained and the maintenance of the
parity be thereby endangered. The idea that gold is
not only the standard of value but ultimately the sale
and supreme means of payment lies therefore at the
root of this type of legislation. Hence the efflux of
gold and the associated threat to the redemption fund
have been invariably the direct cause of the enacting
of foreign exchange legislation.

Here also the obligation to accept the notes of the
central bank plays a. special part. Thus whilst the
State may leave to their fate the freely quoted notes
of a private bank, without the monetary unit being
affected by the bank's exchange losses, the statutory
obligation to accept the notes of the central bank
implies that they are identified with the country's
standard of value. A loss in exchange in the case of
the latter involves therefore a modification in the
monetary basis itself. Accordingly, the State is
compelled to maintain the parity of the notes of the
central bank so long as it is bent on saving its
standard of value from fluctuations.

The identification of the monetary unit with the
notes of the central bank has, lastly, created another
source of danger which has repeatedly acted as a
decisive factor in the introduction of foreign
exchange legislation, namely its close association
with certain large-scale banks at home. Thus the
collapse of the Kreditanstalt in Austria and the
Darmstadt Bank in Germany instigated the introduction
of foreign exchange legislation in those countries. Of
itself there existed no direct connection between
these banks and the monetary standard, and the example
of Sweden, which did not rush to the aid of the
collapsed Krueger undertakings, shows that in such
emergencies other methods may be applied than those
chosen by Austria and Germany. However, where through
the obligation to accept the notes of a given bank a
statutory bridge has been built between the banking
system and the national currency, the temptation will
always exist to shift the difficulties of the banks
onto the shoulders of the currency.

All these problems assume a very different complexion
if we take inconvertible means of payment to be what
they really are, namely means of clearing in relation
to an issuer. A fundamentally inconvertible note, the
value of which lies in the issuer accepting it and
which therefore really involves no claim to payment in
gold but a claim to the services of the issuer, can
never lead to a reduction in the gold reserve. A State
paper money based on such principles could be freely
allowed to go abroad without this prejudicially
affecting the currency. It could never entail
liabilities in precious metal. On the contrary, it
would necessarily lead to goods being exported and may
be accordingly even followed by an influx of gold or
foreign exchange. What matters is that the means of
payment shall not be legal tender; in other words,
that it must be accepted by the issuer at its face
value. With this condition satisfied and the
above-mentioned limit to issues being respected, even
the heaviest losses on foreign bourses would involve
no danger, for the lower the market rate falls, the
greater the temptation, would be to acquire the
warrants, inasmuch as the issuer has to redeem them -
at their nominal value, the loss being thus converted
into a gain. Everybody therefore who has to meet his
obligation with these warrants, - in our example, the
taxpayer - will try to benefit by such falls and
thereby produce a steady demand which has the
peculiarity of rising as the market rate falls. This
necessary demand provides the floating power that
imparts value to inconvertible paper money. Such a
means of payment need not dread the throwing open of
frontiers. In the words of a Swiss writer, it will,
"like a carrier pigeon", return always to its point of
departure and necessarily lead to a demand for home
products abroad, in this way furthering the export
trade.

Since such a clearing warrant has by definition a
free market rate and is therefore not linked to the
currency unit, the latter cannot be affected by any
fluctuations in the value of the former.

For clearing warrants of the type described, foreign
exchange legislation ceases to have any meaning, for
any stipulations relating to convertible money would
lose their point. In all countries, therefore, sound
clearing warrants should be freed from their fetters,
since they were only imposed on them on account of the
unsound ones, and thus at last bestow on the present
the freedom of movement denied them to-day because of
the past. That is, foreign exchange legislation should
be abrogated at least for sound warrants. Given this
first step and the basis for a new economic structure
is laid. Further progress will be thereby facilitated,
for in most countries the inconvertible notes could be
without difficulty converted into State paper money,
thus investing the present state of things in this
matter with its proper form. Should, however, one or
another central bank have transgressed the limits that
would apply to a fiscal foundation, it will not be
difficult to remedy this, without fettering a
country's general economic life by foreign exchange
legislation.

Nor can it be objected that the national economy
requires foreign exchange and can therefore not be
satisfied with clearing transactions, for, to begin
with, we should remember that probably in all
countries depending on foreign exchange, the supply of
the latter has shrunk despite the most stringent
legislation and that therefore the object aimed at has
not been fully attained. But a more important point is
that both commercial and financial debts, according to
firmly and universally established views, can only be
liquidated by the goods or services of the debtor, and
it is just these that are offered by clearing
warrants. It must be therefore possible to start again
payment operations on this basis. So far as the
importing of raw materials is in question, this is not
challenged. A clearing warrant, unhampered by foreign
exchange legislation and made out in gold units, is a
fully utilisable means of payment so long as there is
a demand on the world market for the goods and
services of the issuing country. If this condition is
not satisfied, then foreign exchange legislation also
would be of no avail. If an exchange of goods is
actually impracticable, - that is, if the country no
longer plays a part in the world economy, - no debt
can possibly be liquidated. This holds equally of
commercial and financial debts. No one can expect that
a country possessing no gold, should pay in gold.
Every creditor should therefore recognise that a
debtor can only offer a lien on his goods and
services.

Years ago the Economic Committee of the League of
Nations expressed the same idea when it said that
creditor countries must either agree that debtor
countries may directly or indirectly redeem their
obligations in goods or services or they must be
resigned to not receiving any payments. The. clearing
warrants described here indicate the way in which even
heavy liabilities may be in time honestly liquidated,
to the common advantage of creditors and debtors.

Once the banknotes that had become inconvertible have
been superseded by clearing warrants, the free gold
market can be at last re-established. So soon as gold
has been divested of the property ascribed to it of.
being the exclusive means of payment and representing
the core of money claims, it becomes again a commodity
like any other, Its free movement no longer causes
alarm and may therefore the better fulfil the function
of a standard of value. And this completes the circle
of our proposals, for the free gold market which here
appears as the result of -clearing, at the same time
presupposes it, since the various means of payment can
only be reliably valued when gold may be freely moved.

It follows, lastly, that under the system above
outlined there would be no objection to gold coins
being minted for private firms and this not, as seems
to be the intention at present in France, as a form of
note cover, but for immediate circulation with a view
to measuring by them at any time the value of all
other means of payment.

21. Summary.

Accordingly, we propose

1. The introduction of unambiguously determined gold

units of account as a monetary basis, e.g.

1 mark = 1/2790 kg. fine gold.
1 franc = y kg. fine
gold. 1 £ = z kg. fine gold.

2. The transformation of the whole monetary system on
the
basis of a gold unit of account.

3. The abolition of the statutory obligation of
acceptance for
the notes of the central banks.

4. The removal of the monopoly of the central banks
and its
replacement by general regulations concerning
the issue of means of payment.

5. The abrogation of foreign exchange legislation and
the
re-establishment of a free gold market.

6. The unrestricted right to mint gold coins.

22. The Practical Realisation of the Proposals.

a) Through international agreements.

Everybody is agreed that something should be done to
remove the monetary chaos and the obstacles to
settlement operations. Here also hope is commonly
centred in international conferences. However, the
value of such conferences for the solution of economic
problems is not great. Think in this connection of the
World Economic Conference of 1933. This was eagerly
looked forward to by all peoples and yet,
notwithstanding careful preparation, produced
virtually no practical results.

However, even if within the near future a monetary
conference could be arranged to meet and if, moreover,
full agreement could be reached among the
participating States, the effect would be at best to
re-establish the parity between the monetary units and
to impose an unconditional obligation on the parties
not to modify deliberately this parity nor to change
it without the consent of the other contracting
parties. But that would only dispose of a
comparatively small part of the present difficulties,
for only most rarely - as in the United States
recently - has the abandonment of the gold standard
been an arbitrary act. In by far the majority of
instances, the gold standard was most reluctantly
dropped. Heavy calls on credit institutes, excessive
claims on the central bank, a rising efflux of gold,
and, finally, the threatening impossibility, despite
all efforts, of maintaining the parity of the
banknotes, were for the most part the really decisive
factors in the abandonment of the gold standard. For
such cases an international agreement on monetary
parities would offer no solution.

So long as the principle of central banks is retained
and their notes, being made legal tender, are
identified with the standard of value, no
international agreement will be able to prevent the
recurrence of present-day conditions , for under this
system the collapse of a single leading bank, to say
nothing of the collapse of the State finances, may
render impossible the maintenance of parity. However,
even if, to meet such cases, the several countries
concluded a convention providing that the gold
reserves of the diverse central banks should be
automatically mobilised to save the currency of a
country in need, a scarcely credible sup- position,
even this would be insufficient in hard cases, for the
magnitude of the monetary obligations maturing at any
given moment would probably always exceed the quantity
of available gold.

It also remains a moot point how the problem of
foreign exchange legislation could be settled at such
a conference, seeing that the granting of loans,
useful as these would be to those immediately
concerned, in no way solves the problem. And yet
without this, even a fresh determination of parities
would prove unsatisfactory. On the contrary, the
object should be to rebuild on a sound basis the
entire system of international payment arrangements,

b) Through intra-State legislation.

From what precedes follows the possibility that each
several State, having made up its mind, may, by
abolishing the obligation to accept and recognising
the reflux principle, re-establish for itself the gold
standard and rescind its foreign exchange legislation.
This may seem fantastic. But the reader should
remember the German inflation period. Then, too, an
escape without external assistance appeared
impossible. "The hole in the West", speculation on
foreign bourses, and similar obstacles, which Germans
could not control, were quite generally regarded as
the causes of the depreciation of the mark.
Eventually, when things were at their worst, when in
some parts of the Reich serious disorders had broken
out, and when external help was out of the question,
the country succeeded, by its own efforts, without the
aid of any foreign Government, without an
international conference or convention, to stabilise
the mark, to safeguard it against all foreign
speculation, and even after a few months to abrogate
the foreign exchange legislation then in force.
To-day, as at that time, the free resolve of any
country may determine the fate of its currency. The
country that first finds the way out, that removes
insecurity, and at the same time re-establishes the
freedom of monetary operations, will march well ahead
of the other countries. It may even be assumed that a
mighty stream of capital for long-term investment will
pour into it from all sides.

c) Through private initiative.

Even if, however, no State were for the moment ready
to proceed along this line, there remains the
possibility of finding a way out of the monetary chaos
through private initiative or at least to prepare the
way for this. When in the eighteenth century the
national monetary units, because of alleged State
needs, continually fluctuated and when it was
therefore impossible to rely on the value of
currencies for a measurable time even, Hamburg
merchants, more particularly, discovered a way out. By
founding the famous Hamburger Girobank, they,
following the centuries' old Chinese Tael system, made
themselves independent of the debased State coinage by
adopting as the basis of all their

accounts an unminted definite weight of silver in the
place of State money. This weight, called Mark Banko,
constituted an unchangeable unit of calculation,.
which came to be of the greatest service economically
for the whole of Northern Europe.

There can be no doubt that the application of the
same principle, with gold instead of silver as the
basis naturally, might exercise a similarly
far-reaching influence to-day. Just imagine that
before the devaluation of the Belgian franc, a Belgian
undertaking of good repute had declared itself ready
to take up a long-term loan at its actual gold value,
regardless of the exchange rate of the franc. The
crowd of would-be investors would probably have broken
through all barriers.

In this connection the proposed private calculation
in gold should on no account be linked with the
national monetary system. Accordingly, I do not
suggest here the appending of gold clauses (gold
dollar, gold pound, or gold franc) to a country's
currency unit, for experience teaches that such
clauses - which hold permanently before the statutory
means of payment its ideal as in a mirror - only
rarely survive the fate of the national currency. Thus
in Belgium, when the franc was devaluated, the gold
clauses were revoked and only contracts in foreign
currencies were left untouched. Private calculation in
gold, like the erstwhile Mark Banko system, should be
independent of the national currency. It should be
therefore based on a separate unit, for which a simple
calculation in grammes of fine gold suggests itself
here. This, would also serve as a basis for an
international calculating unit, which has. been widely
desiderated for many decades.

All that would be demanded of the State is not to
prohibit calculating in gold. The State could never
suffer through this, for even if a Government should
deem it expedient to devaluate the national currency,
as was frequently the case already in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, there can be no ground for
imposing a devaluated currency unit on those who had
freely agreed to use for their economic transactions
among themselves another and constant value basis.
Investors in all countries would joyfully welcome such
a solution and there are not a few undertakings which,
under these conditions, would be decidedly ready to
place long- term loans at moderate interest rates.
Once it is demonstrated, however, that the monetary
chaos, which seems to most men the work of an
inscrutable fate, may be overcome, the profoundly
beneficent effects of this for the peoples of the
world will not fail to become apparent.

(Translated by G.Spiller, London.)

A CALL TO JEWS - a pamphlet from 1947

2011-11-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

LONDON VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD 1948

Is this the Way?

A CALL TO JEWS

by WALTER ZANDER

" I have read your paper twice
& I was time & again both moved
& inspired by the courage, the straight
forwardness & the accuracy of your
arguments."

Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin.

"I have been profoundly moved by
reading your pamphlet : to its courage
& insight there is little that I would
like to add."

Rev. J. W Parkes, D.D.

This pamphlet is about Palestine

And they will confess their iniquities....

Leviticus xxvi. 40.

Abstain from accusing others even in your
most secret thoughts : accusations only
destroy our peace of mind, they serve no
purpose at all.

MACARIUS, Starets of Optimo.

Introduction

HE DECISION OF THE United Nations to recommend the
Testablishment of a Jewish state by the partition of Palestine
has been the recognition of Jewish nationhood by the supreme
forum of world opinion. Accordingly, it has been hailed by the
Jewish national movement as an achievement of paramount
significance and celebrated with rejoicing. At the same time, it
is obvious that this decision is not the fulfilment but the
beginning of the task which is fraught with tremendous diffi-
culties. Whatever may have been in the past the aims and
opinions of the various groups within the Jewish National
Movement, a supreme united effort is required to overcome the
present dangers and to turn the historic opportunity ultimately
into a true fulfilment of the ancient and most cherished Jewish
hopes.

The task of rebuilding a State out of the dis-integrated parts
of the Jewish people - with their different experiences - would
have been difficult enough even under conditions of peace and
general approval. For it is a formidable problem to bridge a gap
of two thousand years in the national history of a people. But all
these difficulties have been multiplied by the fact that the
decision of the United Nations could only be brought about
against a determined and powerful opposition; and it would be
disastrous to underrate the strength and significance of this
resistance.

In the General Assembly of the United Nations thirty-three
nations voted for and thirteen nations against the establishment
of a Jewish state. This was considerably more than the formally
required two-thirds majority. Even if one counts, instead of the
governments, the represented populations themselves, there
remains a majority in favour of partition, although this majority
is not very large. The thirty-three states in favour of the Jewish
state have a total population of about 560 million, against 480
million of those who voted against it. But if one considers that
the eleven nations who did not vote at all represent no less than
625 million people, it appears that out of the total populations
represented in the General Assembly only 33.6 per cent. voted
for partition, whilst 37.5 per cent. abstained and 28.9 per cent.
opposed it: and the proportion of those in favour becomes
probably even smaller if it is taken into account that more than
400 million people (including the peoples of North Africa,
Burma, Manchuria, Indonesia and Japan) were not represented
at all.

Infinitely more important, however, is the composition of the
character of the two groups. The neighbours of the new Jewish
state, without any exception - reaching from Egypt to Iraq and
beyond to India, and from Greece and Turkey to Saudi Arabia -
were united in their opposition, whilst most of those who
declared themselves for the Jewish state are far removed from
the scene of action. Many of them have only a small real interest
in the matter themselves, and some of them could be induced to
change their opinion from one day to the other, whilst the Arabs
and their supporters feel strongly in the matter, and most of
them consider the issue as their own.

But even more significant than the political issue is the fact
that many of those who opposed partition are sincerely
convinced that the legal and moral right is on their side and that
the establishment of the Jewish state under the existing
conditions is a breach of law and a violation of the established
principles of national freedom and personality.

For many years it has been our custom to put the blame for
every new difficulty and every new setback to our cause on the
shoulders of others; and we have made great efforts to convince
the world and ourselves that not-we, but outside forces were
responsible for every resistance to our aims. "Arab absentee -
landlords" or "Moslem religious fanatics," "Fascist and Nazi
agents," and in recent years "British imperialists and anti-
Semites"-all in turn were made responsible for our misfortunes.
But great as the influence of all these groups was at their time,
it is impossible to be satisfied with the belief that these outside
forces were alone responsible for the course of events.

In 1889, when modern Zionism was just emerging, Ahad
Ha'am, one of the greatest and most impartial Jewish thinkers
of that time, wrote his famous essay, "This is not the Way" In
this he raised his warning voice against certain features of the
young movement, maintained that the return to Zion must be
preceded by a "revival of the heart," and foretold that otherwise
the whole movement might end in disaster. In the face of Jewish
progress and achievement, these words must often have
appeared as the nightmare of a dreamer. But in view of the deep
anxieties which we have to face at present, the opposition to our
movement, the bloodshed in which we are involved, the crimes
committed by our own brethren, the deep cleavages among our
own ranks, and the uncertainty of the Jewish situation in the
world - with anti Jewish riots even in Britain - in view of all
these dark signs, the words of the great thinker receive a new
and poignant meaning.

As long as our political fate was mainly determined by other
peoples, it was understandable that we were inclined to see the
cause for our situation in the actions of others. But since we
have taken again into our own hands the shaping of our political
history, full responsibility rests now upon us, and this will
require the greatest moral courage. We must ask fearlessly to
what extent we ourselves have contributed to the present
situation. Was our attitude perhaps such, as Ahad Ha'am
assumed, that sooner or later it had to lead to the present
conflicts? To raise such questions in no way exculpates from
their mistakes other nations which are involved in the
Palestinian issue. But there will be no lasting improvement of
the situation until each party becomes aware of its own faults in
the matter. We have to face the fact that our relations with those
two peoples whose friendship should be our main concern - the
Arabs and the British - have sadly broken down. Moreover, our
whole movement is threatened from within by dissension,
violence and moral confusion. Clarity was never more
important than in this hour of danger and hope, and constructive
criticism of our own work is needed for the sake of the very
survival and the establishment of a truly independent and free
community. It is on the basis of these considerations that the
following lines are written.

Failure with the Arabs

The cardinal problem of the Palestinian issue can be summed
up in the single sentence that we Jews had to build our National
Home in a country in which another people is living. From this
root all other difficulties have ultimately sprung, and although
many outside influences - economic, political and religious -
have affected the issue, the Jewish-Arab problem has remained
the core of the matter. The solution of this problem was,
therefore, the paramount task. But, instead of concentrating on
this task all our efforts and creative energies, we have treated
the Arab question, when it was remembered at all, as if it were
of secondary importance.

This attitude goes back to the very beginning of the Jewish
national movement. As early as 1891, Ahad Ha'am in his
article, "The Truth from Palestine"warned us to give the Arab
question the most careful consideration:

"We abroad are accustomed to believe that the Arabs are all savages
who are living on the level of animals, and who do not understand
what is happening here around them. This, however, is a great
mistake. The Arab, like all Semites, possesses a sharp intelligence
and great cunning. The Arabs, and particularly the urban
population, see through our activity in the country and its purpose,
but they keep silent, since for the time being they do not fear any
danger for their future. When, however, the life of our people in
Palestine will have developed to such an extent that the indigenous
population will feel threatened, then they will not easily give way
any longer."

Again:

"How careful must we be in dealing with an alien people in whose
midst we want to settle. How essential is it to practise kindness and
esteem towards them. . . . For if ever the Arab could consider the
action of his rivals to be oppression or the robbing of his rights
then, even if he keeps silent and waits for his time to come, the rage
will remain alive in his heart."

In words which are too painful to repeat to-day, he
complained how gravely our brethren failed in this elementary
duty. Through nearly three decades he repeated his warnings,
and in 1920-surveying his life's work-he summed up his
criticism in the bitter words that "since the beginning of the
Palestinian colonisation we have always considered the Arab people
as non-existent."

The following years saw no fundamental change of this
attitude. Instead of giving the highest priority to the Arab case,
we gave it to our relations with Great Britain. Instead of
concentrating our attention on the people who have been living
in the country for more than a thousand years, we put our trust
in those who happened to be their rulers for one generation.
Accordingly, the centre of our political activities was London
and not Jerusalem, and we succumbed to the superficial and
portentous mistake that the fate of the country would be
determined in the long run, not by the people itself, but by the
ephemeral influence of the Mandatory Power. England,
therefore, was paramount in our mind, and we exaggerated her
importance for our future, both in the days of hope and in those
of despair. It was the same fundamental attitude which made our
early Palestinian settlers see in Britain the saviour from their
plight and caused in our days the unfortunate "illegal
immigrants" to write on the funnels of their ships: "Our enemy
is England."

But not only did we fail to give the Arab problem first
priority; we also deceived ourselves about the seriousness of
Arab opposition. The years between the wars saw many
outbreaks of Arab armed resistance against Jewish immigration,
from the disturbances of 1920 and 1921 to the riots of 1929 and
the revolt of 1936-9. The intensity increased with every new
clash. But, unperturbed, we tried to persuade ourselves that the
resistance of the Arabs was not real, but artificially
manufactured. Every time we found another excuse to explain
away the true meaning of the event. Every time we offered
small remedies for a great disease, and utterly failed to face the
reality of Arab resistance. In a world where from Algiers to Java
the nations are yearning for independence, we made ourselves
believe that in Palestine alone the indigenous population had no
interest in national self-determination and self-government.
And this in spite of the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have not
only to face a static foreign rule, as had the Indians or Syrians,
but a most dynamic change of their situation by the continuous
flood of Jewish immigration into the country.

Failing to give the Arab problem its proper place and to
recognise the seriousness of Arab opposition, we equally
omitted to give adequate consideration to the question of how
the two peoples could in fact live together within the Jewish
commonwealth. Very little thought was given to this task, and
the Anglo-American Committee of 1946 could, therefore, sum
up the situation as follows:

"It is not unfair to say that the Jewish community in Palestine has
never, as a community, faced the problem of co-operation with the
Arabs. It is significant that in the Jewish Agency's proposal for a
Jewish state, the problem of handling a million and a quarter Arabs,
is dealt with in the vaguest generalities."

Of course, we never aimed at harming the Arab in his
economic or social position in the country. We paid for every yard
of the land which we occupy, and we paid dearly. We took great
care that no landless Arab population would be created; nor did
we exploit Arab labour. We are, in fact, blamed for not using it
enough. All impartial observers agree that the standard of living
in the country has risen for all-but we failed as a community to
grasp the elementary significance of the political issue.

This strange development sprang largely from the fact that
the Jewish national movement entered Palestine in the train of
the victors of the First World War. Jewish longing for the return
to Palestine was, of course, ancient and sacred. But it did not
take the shape of a political movement before the rise of modern
nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The
World War 1914-18, which brought the first realisation of
Zionist hopes, ended with the victory of the West. Russia had
collapsed; China was powerless; Japan stood aloof; and when
Germany was conquered, it was the Western democracies which
dominated the scene.

This domination, visibly expressed in the great assemblies of
Paris and Versailles, was not limited to the military sphere. The
ideals of the French Revolution, liberalism, progress and
democracy had been the banner under which the war had been
fought. They had profoundly influenced the minds of the
leading statesmen, and upon these ideals the new world was to
be formed. The West stood at its zenith. But it had not yet
accustomed itself to apply the ideals of democracy to the East,
and very little thought was given at the time to the national
independence of the Asiatic and African peoples. The
superiority of the West, based on its achievements in nearly all
spheres of life, appeared to be overwhelming; and if it did not
justify the right to rule, it seemed at least to give the right of
political, moral and even spiritual leadership.

The consent of the peoples of the Middle East to the new
order under these conditions seemed hardly to be required. Two
years before the Balfour Declaration, France and Britain, in a
secret agreement, had divided between themselves their mutual
spheres of influence throughout the Arab world without asking
the consent of the indigenous populations; and although certain
modifications had taken place in the days of Versailles, there
was no fundamental change in the Western attitude.

One attempt, however, was made at that time to ascertain the
will of the people. But the result was not encouraging for the
Western Powers. Early in 1919 the victors had agreed that in
Syria, Iraq and Palestine, where Western mandatory
governments were to be established, the will of the local
populations should be consulted before the mandatory was
chosen. But soon afterwards France as well as Britain became
reluctant to send out such an inter-Allied commission for this
purpose, and it seemed advisable to both governments not to
probe too deeply into the whole matter. President Wilson,
however, anxious to ascertain the true position, sent out a purely
American commission, which unofficially toured the country
and, in due course, submitted the so-called King-Crane Report.

According to this report, the Arabs wanted complete
independence immediately, though, if a temporary supervision
was unavoidable, their first choice was the United States, their
second Britain. Against a French mandate, they declared
themselves with all possible determination. Regarding the
Balfour Declaration, the commission expressed the opinion that
its carrying out would lead to serious difficulties, and
recommended therefore a substantial reduction of the Zionist
programme. The Report did not attract much attention at the
time; and the opposition of the local populations to the
settlement was ignored for the time being. In all these
developments Palestine played a comparatively small part. It
shared the fate of the much bigger countries of the Middle East,
and if the Powers did not consider Arab consent essential for the
establishment of French rule in Syria and the British mandate in
Iraq, it is natural that the Jews, whose claim to the Holy Land
was infinitely stronger, did not insist on Arab consent for the
establishment of the mandate over Palestine. In January, 1919,
Dr. Weizmann had tried to secure Feisal's consent by a famous
agreement but this became abortive because the Arabs did not
obtain from the Powers that independence which they had made
a condition of the treaty with the Jews. Thus the whole order in
the Middle East was based by the Western Powers on the
assumption that the consent of the local populations could be
ultimately dispensed with.

But soon afterwards the Western Powers had to realise the
instability of the edifice which had been erected. French rule in
Syria and the Lebanon came to an end. Iraq and Transjordan
were declared independent states. Britain agreed to negotiate
the evacuation of Egypt. The right of Arab self-government was
recognised by all, at least in theory. Most important, the
superiority of the West, in view of its failures and of the rising
of the Eastern communities, remained no longer unchallenged.
But whilst all other nations adapted themselves more or less to
the demands of the new times, at least in the political sphere, we
Jews alone refused any change. We alone still clung to a period
which has passed. We alone still maintained that, as far as
Palestine was concerned, Arab opposition to the establishment
of the Jewish National Home could be ignored; and it must have
appeared to the Arabs as though we were the only survivors of
the world of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. It is a sad paradox
that, by the force of circumstances, we were denying to the Arab
in our own case those principles of democracy and self-
determination for which we are fighting everywhere else so
stubbornly; and, instead of taking up the challenge of such a
situation, trying to find a bold and constructive way out, we
have continued to behave as if the colonial era of the nineteenth
century was still unchanged.

It was this - our Jewish unwillingness to face the realities of
the situation - which has made opposition throughout the Arab
world so adamant.Whilst thirty years ago the Arabs were
divided among themselves and, as the Weizmann-Feisal
agreement shows, inclined, at least under certain conditions, to
reconcile themselves with the Jewish National Home, to-day
they are united in their determined opposition against its
development, if not its very existence; and for a long time both
nations have been preparing for a full-scale military conflict.

Opposition against the Jewish National Home has grown
solid and undivided from Morocco to the Indian border. But it
is not restricted to the Arab world. Most of the Asiatic and
African peoples have formed a most unfortunate conception of
the Jewish National Home. To them Jewish immigration into
Palestine, against the will of the Arabs, appears to be one more
of the violations of the rights of a native population with which
they are so painfully familiar. In this respect, the attitude of
India is a striking example. Not only the Moslem League and
Pakistan, but the Congress Party and India identified themselves
with the Arab case as well. As far back as 1938, under the tragic
impression of the first pogroms in Germany, Mr. Gandhi wrote:

"My sympathies are with the Jews... but my sympathy does not
blind me to the requirements of justice. Palestine belongs to the
Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English,
and I have no doubt that the Jews are going about it in the
wrong way."

In 1946, he repeated the same thought:

"The Jews have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves
in Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the
aid of naked terrorism"

And in 1947 Pandit Nehru, at the first Pan-Asiatic
Conference held in New Delhi, proclaimed that Palestine, in the
opinion of India, is an Arab country. There is no doubt that these
words expressed the feeling of most African and Asiatic
peoples, and although we never intended to treat the Arabs as a
colonial people, in their eyes we are linked up with the
imperialist Powers on whom we have so largely relied. The
votes on the Palestine question in the General Assembly were
an exact reflection of this fact, and all peoples whoever in the
past, directly or indirectly, were the objects of colonial policy
were in opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state.

Under this aspect, the so-called minority report of the U.N.O.
Committee, presented by India, Iran and Yugoslavia, which
advocated the establishment of a Federation and Jewish
immigration according to the economic capacity of the country
over a period of three years, would have had invaluable
advantages. It would have broken the iron front against the
Jewish National Home which reaches from Morocco to
Indonesia, and a determined concentration on the report might
at least have led to an interim solution during which the pressure
of the general political atmosphere could have been reduced.

To justify our claims, we have put forward strong and most
impressive reasons. We have pleaded, with all the power which
deepest conviction can give, the need of our homelessness. We
have pleaded all the miseries of persecution, the millions of our
dead, the despair in the camps of displaced persons, the burning
longing and hope of those who, in unseaworthy vessels, cross
the seas in their quest for home, and have not forgotten the less
spectacular but very subtle pains of exile. We have compared
our need with the vast possessions of the Arab nations, and have
proclaimed our right to survive as a people and to restore once
more our national life in the land which our forefathers have
made a sanctuary to the world.

With all this we have aroused sympathy, but have not
convinced the Arab peoples that the country is ours. Even Mr.
Gandhi, a saintly man, maintained that his "sympathy does not
make him blind to the requirements of justice." What could we
expect under these conditions from the Arabs? They regard
themselves as the possessors of the country for more than a
thousand years, and if that is true, even the most heart-breaking
need of the Jewish people does not deprive them of this fact and
all the rights arising from it. To what example can we point to
show that the possessing nations of the world share voluntarily
their possessions with the needy? As long as the vast, thinly
populated areas of the globe are not open to all for free
immigration, how can the Arabs be blamed for refusing such an
obligation to us? And even the ancient and sacred connection of
our people with the country, which for us is a powerful reality,
will not induce the Arab to give up his right.

To him our return without his consent remains a forced
invasion. Correspondingly, many of our people long ago gave
up all hope for a peaceful solution, and prepared themselves 'for
conquest and defence of the country. If war in fact were the
issue, I feel, it has to be admitted that rarely in human history
have conquerors been driven by greater need than the Jews.
Great countries, even continents, were conquered for a much
less reason. The issue, however, is not war, but must be peace.
And if we search through all that we have written and said
through all these years to prove our case, we shall find that we
have said everything to stress our need, but that we have
omitted one thing which might have changed the whole
relationship with the Arab: Never in the thirty years' argument
have we admitted that our return, justified as it appears to us,
inevitably requires from the Arab a sacrifice of the first
magnitude - the sacrifice of giving up his right to rule himself.
So much have we been involved in the problems of our own
case that we have not even realised the position of our
neighbour and what we were asking from him. Of course, we
frequently pointed out the benefits which he derived from our
coming: the rising standard of living, the improvement in the
health service, and perhaps even social progress. But all this
could make things only worse and was bound to insult the Arab
if at the same time we did not stress equally the loss and
sacrifice which our coming must have meant to him. The
decisive point for him was not the profit he might make, but the
harm and the wounds which he felt he received from our hands;
and-paradoxical as it seems - a frank discussion of these wounds
(and how to heal them) would have been infinitely more
profitable than all talk of alleged advantages. Paramount in the
Arab's consciousness was the violation of his right - in fact, of
his whole national personality - and as long as we ignored this,
his main concern, we were preaching to deaf ears. And even if
we had preached with the tongues of angels - which, indeed, we
did not - we could not have changed this fact.

The failure to address ourselves to the main point in the
whole issue was not only a signal psychological blunder: it was
much more than that. It sprang ultimately from lack of
confidence and faith in our own cause. It was a belief which was
afraid to face the full reality of the issue.

Nobody, of course, can prove that a wiser attitude would
have led to a constructive solution of the problem. But it is safe
to say that the method which we adopted has not only failed, but
was bound to lead to the present deadlock. It was exactly that
attitude of which Ahad Ha'am had warned us: the attitude of the
cheap and easy way, the short-cut to Utopia which, by ignoring
the main issue, made the difficulties almost unsurmountable.

There have been in the past many attempts by noble idealists
on the Jewish side to establish friendly relations and co-
operation with the Arabs. The Ihud group under Dr. Judah
Magnes, the venerable President of the Hebrew University, has
been leading in these efforts. For the sake of peace, they
proclaimed their willingness to restrict Jewish immigration to
parity with the Arab population, and to satisfy themselves with
a bi-national state in which the government of the country
should be conducted jointly by the two peoples. On this basis
they have offered time and again their friendship to the Arabs.
But the more sceptical elements among the Jews could rightly
point to the fact that these attempts, laudable as they were, have
remained without success. They felt that under these conditions
it was quite useless to reduce their claim, and that ultimately
everything will depend in any case on force. "Show us," they
challenged the idealists, "one single Arab group which has been
willing to accept our friendship"; and no such group could be
produced. But the reason of this failure was not necessarily the
"hopeless obstinacy of the Arabs" (which does not leave any
other way out than the sword), but also may have been a lack of
realism on the side of the Jews. For what is required here is not
the establishment of peace between two quarrelling parties
among whom right and wrong may be equally divided. Our
problem is how, if at all, the Arab can be compensated for the
sacrifice which we ask from him. Even our idealists, moderate
as their demands are, have failed to set themselves this question.
To the Arab, even our reduced claims remain infringements of
his rights. Even a restricted immigration remains to him an
immigration which he opposes, and even a bi-national
government one in which he does not rule alone. More than
moderation is required to solve this problem.

To find a compensation for the Arab's sacrifice was at all
times the key to the matter. To this task all our faculties and
thoughts ought to have been turned. This, and not the
advertisement of our achievements, was the question to ponder
on in our meetings, study groups and prayer-houses, both in
Palestine and in the world abroad; not by enumerating
complacently the more or less incidental advantages which
accrue to the Arab as a result of Jewish colonisation, but by
deliberate and sincere intention to do something for him,
equivalent to what we ask him to grant to us. The needs and
desires of human life are so manifold, and the requirements of
the Arab peoples - eager to take their full share among modern
nations - are so multifarious that, given the will and imagination
on our side, there was a strong chance of finding a workable
solution. Nobody can say what concrete suggestions might have
grown out of these deliberations. There is no precedent for such
a case. But the general principles might well be outlined.

In the material sphere it might have been possible to connect
our compensation to the Arab step by step with the progress of
the immigration itself. Thus the establishment of new Jewish
settlements would have been much easier for the Arab to accept
if it had brought at the same time new tractors or new school
buildings to the neighbouring Arab villages; and although
difficulties and objections would by no means have been
lacking, such procedure would at least have created a
considerable interest among those who are most concerned, and
the general application of this principle would have brought a
direct and immediate benefit to him.

But there are other spheres of co-operation with the Arabs
which are of infinitely greater importance. The sacrifice which
we have asked from the Arabs is political. It can not therefore
be compensated in the material or educational sphere alone, but
must be redeemed in the political field itself. There, indeed,
great possibilities existed. The Arabs had started their fight for
independence from Western control almost alone, without
friends or help. If we had been associated from the beginning
with their movement for national independence, had sincerely
allied ourselves with their demands and used our influence in
the world to strengthen their case, instead of grudging every
success if not opposing it, such help would have been of the
utmost value to the Arabs. Our experience and position as
mediators between East and West could have given us a great
opportunity, and the Arabs might have found in us an ally in
their case and learned to see in Israel a brother. The political
alliance on the other side would have increased the possibility
for material co-operation, and both combined might have
attracted the help of all those who are interested in the
development of the countries of the Middle East. As Mr. Gandhi
said : "There are hundreds of ways to deal with the Arabs if the
Jews will only discard the help of the bayonet." These
opportunities were lost.

Our failure to recognise the real situation has made a
settlement with the Arabs nearly impossible. We ourselves have
made the position of the moderate Arab untenable and that of
the Mufti almost unassailable. What on earth did we expect a
moderate Arab to do if we showed so little imagination
regarding the difficulties of his situation? We have frequently
complained that the refusal of the British Government to
increase the number of immigrants has driven a large proportion
of the Jewish youth into the arms of terrorism. How much more
is it true to say that our refusal to recognise the Arabs' sacrifice
has brought about the united and determined opposition of the
whole Arab world against the Jewish National Home.

Fifty years ago Ahad Ha'am warned us to show to the Arab,
not only kindness, but esteem; and this shy and awkward man
was a greater realist than most of his noisy and self-assured
opponents. If we had followed his advice, Arab chivalry might
have given us an unexpected, positive response. But we have
failed, and this failure is not the result of intellectual
shortcomings. It springs from a lack of moral courage.

Failure with the British

The second field which was to be of the utmost importance
for the fate of the Jewish National Home was that of our
relations with Great Britain. This period is now coming to an
end. But what has developed between us during these years will
remain alive for a long time to come. Great Britain was the
country which enabled us to lay the foundations of our work.
More than that, for many years Britain represented to us the
whole Western world as far as it was benevolent to our cause.
To-day these relations are almost destroyed, and we Jews have
convinced ourselves that this was Britain's fault. Nobody will
deny that Britain has greatly contributed to the deadlock by
mingling the trust of the Mandate with imperial interests, by the
exaggerated and broken promises of the Labour Party, by lack
of vision and timely decision; but unless we realise to what
extent the collapse of our relations was brought about by our
own fundamental shortcomings we shall remain unable ever to
restore the broken links and in addition shall endanger our
relations with any people who may become our friends or allies
in the future.

The thirty-year-long history of Jewish-British relations since
the Balfour Declaration suffered from the very beginning from
a fateful ambiguity, for which, I feel, a large share of the
responsibility rests with us.

Everybody knows now that from the openings of the
negotiations on the Jewish National Home in 1917 we Jews
aimed at the establishment of a Jewish state, and the draft which
Dr. Weizmann and our other negotiators submitted to the British
Government in July of that year accordingly requested the "re-
establishment of Palestine as the Jewish National Home." It is
equally well known that the British Government, after careful
deliberations and negotiations which lasted for more than three
months, refused to undertake this obligation. Instead they
offered in the Balfour Declaration something essentially
different - namely, "the establishment of a Jewish National
Home in Palestine." Whatever the interpretation of this
"National Home" was to be, it is beyond all doubt that it was
meant to be less than we had asked for. This was perfectly clear
to all concerned; and although the possibility of a future Jewish
state was by no means excluded in fact, it was repeatedly
mentioned in platform speeches of British statesmen at that time
- it is equally certain that the British Government did not
undertake any obligation in this respect. This was made
abundantly clear when Mr. Churchill in 1922, in the first White
Paper on Palestinian policy, declared:

"Phrases have been used, such as: Palestine will
become as Jewish as England is English. His Majesty's
Government have no such aim in mind."

But in spite of these facts, we
continued to act as if our original draft had
not been refused, but accepted; and from this ambiguity
sprang untold confusion and even misery.

Again Ahad Ha'am, who had partaken in the negotiations,
alone among our leaders had the vision and the courage to draw
the attention of the Jewish people to this discrepancy between
our hopes and their fulfilment. In 1920, in the Foreword to the
third edition of his essays, he dealt with the question in great
seriousness:

"I do not believe that many words are required to explain the
difference between the two formulations. If the British Government
had accepted the text which we had suggested, the promise could
have been so interpreted that the country, as it is to-day, was to be
returned to the Jewish people on the strength of its historical right;
that the Jewish people may rebuild the ruins, rule in future in the
land and conduct its affairs according to its will without heeding the
consent or the opposition of the present inhabitants. But the British
Government, as explained explicitly in the Declaration, did not
want to promise anything which might injure the present
inhabitants of Palestine. For this reason they changed the Zionist
formula and restricted its contents.

"The initiated realised immediately the significance of this change.
But some thought that it was just a variation of style without any
particular intention, and they tried therefore later several times,
when in the negotiations with the Government occasion arose, to
translate the promise into their own text as if nothing had been
changed. But every time they found in the reply of the Government
a repetition of the formula which is contained in the Declaration
itself. This showed that we have not to deal here with a phrase
which might be expressed in different ways, but that the promise is
limited in reality by this formula: thus far and no farther."

Furthermore

"When the British Government promised to promote the
establishment of a National Home for the Jewish people in
Palestine and not, as it had been suggested, 'the re-establishment of
Palestine as the Jewish National Home,' this promise had a twofold
purpose: (1) the recognition of the historical right of the Jewish
people to establish for itself in Palestine a National Home, in which
the British Government promised to assist; (2) the refusal to abolish
the right of the present inhabitants and to make the Jewish people
the absolute ruler in the country."

In an almost prophetic manner, he summed up his
apprehensions:

"This and nothing more the leaders and writers should have told the
people, lest it would see in its imagination more than exists in
reality and later fall into despair and lose all confidence in our
whole cause."

But such words were most unwelcome at the time, and no
attention was paid to them in the general atmosphere of
jubilation. They were never mentioned, and - in spite of the
masses of paper which we Jews poured out on the subject of the
Balfour Declaration - the essay from which the above
quotations are taken has not up to the present day been
published in English and is unknown to the large majority of the
Jewish people. Twenty-six years later, Dr. Weizmann, in his last
speech as President of the World Zionist Organisation,
reminded the people of these warnings:

"I remember how angry we were with the late Ahad Ha'am when,
in the honeymoon of the political triumph which surrounded the
Balfour Declaration, he wrote an article that in the Balfour
Declaration they were promised a National Home in Palestine, and
not Palestine as a Jewish National Home. And there is a vast
difference between one interpretation and the other."

But when these warnings were repeated, Jewish-British
relations had already deteriorated almost beyond repair.

Although, therefore, the Balfour Declaration was much less
favourable than we had expected, it was a mighty step towards
the realisation of our hopes, and very much depended on the
wisdom of our further action. If we had told our people at the
time that what we had reached was only the first objective and
that it was up to us to secure further stages by continued efforts
and adequate negotiations with all concerned, its attention
would have been directed towards the right aim and very much
might have been achieved. Such a policy would have been the
more appropriate since the Balfour Declaration in any case gave
us sufficient time to lay the new foundations for Jewish life in
the Holy Land and nurse it through its first essential stages. But
here, as in the Arab case, we chose again the "cheap and easy
way" of an ostrich policy and pretended that the problem which
we had to solve did not exist.

"Do we not all know," wrote Ahad Ha'am, "how the Declaration
was commented upon at its publication, and what boastful
exaggerations many party men and writers from then till this day
tried to read into it? The Jewish people heard it and believed that
the end of the Galuth had come in reality, and that Palestine after a
short space of time would be a Jewish state. The Arabs, whom,
since the beginning of the Palestinian colonisation, we have always
considered as non-existent, heard it also, and they believed that the
Jews had come in order to expel them from their soil and to deal
with them at their pleasure. All this was bound to lead to frictions
and embitterment on both sides and is largely responsible for that
position which was revealed in all its ugliness by the events in
Jerusalem during the recent Passover days."

The ugly events to which Ahad Ha'am alluded were the Arab
riots of April, 1920, and an unbroken chain links these first
disturbances with the appalling toll of murder and destruction
which since then have fallen on the Holy Land.

During the first years of the Mandate the question of the
British obligation did not become acute. The size of the Jewish
population in the country was so small that the claim for a
Jewish state had no practical value, and as late as 1932 Dr.
Weizmann himself publicly disowned such a demand. In fact,
during the first ten years of the Mandate interest in our cause
was so small that we were not able to develop the National
Home even to the limits which the legal position gave us at the-
time. But with the approaching catastrophe on the European
continent the situation changed. Masses of immigrants pressed
towards the country and paid little attention to what appeared to
them to be formal objections. Legal considerations in the face
of death seemed a mere travesty of justice. The National Home,
whatever it had meant in the learned discussions of lawyers and
diplomats twenty years before, to the haunted masses in their
despair was the only reality which could save them from
destruction. They had no doubt that, whatever the
circumstances might be, it was Britain's duty to open the
country to all who wanted, and were able to enter. The more the
catastrophe progressed the more passionate grew this
conviction. After all, had not Britain, instead of France, secured
the Mandate over the Holy Land, with its invaluable strategic
position, the harbour of Haifa and the pipeline from Iraq, only
for the purpose of building up the Jewish National Home? And
was not the Mandate the only justification for their presence in
the country? If she hesitated to fulfil her duty in the face of so
much human misery, what else could be the reason but "the
most shameless malice"? It was in full accordance with such
lines of thought that Dr. Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Palestine, in his
Easter broadcast in 1947, saw fit to describe the misfortunes of
Britain, in obvious analogy to the Pharaonic plagues, as
heavenly punishment for her maltreatment of the Jews.

Meanwhile, the main issue was almost forgotten, and
nothing happened which could solve the Jewish-Arab problem.
On the contrary, these relations steadily decayed. In 1936, the
increased influx of immigrants led to the outbreak of the great
Arab revolt which lasted for almost three years, until at last it
was crushed by the British. At that time we did not yet consider
the British as invaders and did not object to an application of
British armed force in Palestine, to mass-imprisonment,
collective punishment, destruction of whole villages, and
execution of Arab patriots. The numerous police fortresses all
over the country, which to-day appear to us as instruments of
national oppression, were then erected to protect the Jews and
were welcomed by the Jewish population. In those days Jews
and British were still friends and Wingate's genius stirred the
hearts and roused the love of Jewish youth.

In May, 1939, under the impression of the Arab revolt, the
British Government issued the ill-famed White Paper by which
Jewish immigration - after a further admission of another
75,000 - was in future to be dependent on Arab consent. Soon
afterwards the Second World War broke out, and Arab
resistance came to an end. But the breathing-space did not bring
any rapprochement; the gulf grew wider. Whilst the Mufti went
to Berlin and there joined Hitler, the Zionist movement - in the
Biltmore Programme - raised the claim for unrestricted control
of immigration and officially demanded the establishment of
Palestine as a Jewish state. This was the return to the original
request of July, 1917. It was a deliberate step beyond the
Balfour Declaration, and certainly more than either Britain or
the League of Nations had ever promised. But in the face of the
mass destruction of Jewish life on the Continent and the
amazing successes of Jewish colonisation in Palestine itself, the
claim appeared justified to the majority among us. Arab consent
to the new and far-reaching demand seemed to be even less
required now than thirty years before. The Nazis had linked up
their propaganda with that of the Arab national movement; and
whilst the Jews had been most eager to fight on the Allied side,
the Arabs had been, to say the least, reluctant. Rashid Ali had
even raised arms against Britain, and the Mufti himself had
identified his cause with that of the Nazis. Were not, under these
conditions, all previous hesitations to admit Jewish immigration
into the Holy Land, and above all the hated White Paper,
exposed and branded as appeasement? Could one not hope that
they would end once and for all when victory was won? This
was the cause for which the Jewish leaders pledged their word.
There seemed, indeed, a chance that the attitude of the Arabs in
the war might justify that of the Jews in peace, and that all our
mistakes of the past would be blotted out by the glory of victory.

But victory was bound to bring a grievous disappointment. In
spite of all the links which had been forged between many
influential Arabs and the Nazis, in spite of all the active help
which the Mufti and his friends had given to the Germans, the
Arab national movement emerged from the war stronger than
ever, and resistance against Jewish mass immigration remained
as adamant as it had been before. Indeed, the assumption that
this resistance would collapse together with Germany was as
erroneous as would have been the belief that the national
movement of India, Egypt or Indonesia would end with the Axis
downfall; and to-day the position of the Arab peoples is stronger
than at any time since their subjugation by the Turks.

Not even the notorious White Paper disappeared. True, its
worst part - the complete stopping of Jewish immigration,
which certainly was incompatible with the idea of the Mandate,
never came into force. For the British Government continued to
admit at least a quota of 1,500 immigrants per month. But the
other restrictions, particularly those concerning the acquisition
of land, remained. Moreover, neither the Labour Government
nor Mr. Churchill, neither the Anglo-American Committee nor
any member of the United Nations, has ever suggested the
restoration of free Jewish immigration into the whole of
Palestine which was our demand when the White Paper was
issued, and which remained our official demand until the
decision of the United Nations.

The battle against the White Paper became for us the battle
for the National Home and, to the Jewish mind, the White Paper
became the source of all our troubles. "The White Paper,"
declared Dr. Weizmann in the opening address at the last Zionist
Congress, "is directly responsible for the present troubled
situation in Palestine," and in this he certainly expressed the
opinion of the overwhelming majority of his audience.

For us Jews the White Paper became indissolubly linked
with the impossibility for innumerable innocent people in
deadly peril of reaching the haven of safety. But did this White
Paper really fall upon us one day unexpectedly like a
thunderbolt from a blue sky? Was it not foreshadowed for years
by a long series of unmistakable signs of bloodshed and riot?
Was this document really the root of our trouble? Was it not
only a very imperfect, heavy-handed, clumsy attempt to deal
with a situation which in itself had become unbearable? Has the
origin of this situation ever been anything else but the simple
inescapable fact that we had to build our National Home in a
country where another people is living, and that we lacked the
imagination and the wisdom to master such a problem? And,
lastly, is not this White Paper precisely one of those events
which Ahad Ha'am had in his mind when he warned us that our
right in the country is restricted by the formula, "Thus far and
no farther," and that the day would come when the people will
awaken from their dream and "will fall into despair"?

That something of that kind would happen one day was to be
foreseen. The White Paper was the point at which the dyke
broke. But that it would break somewhere some day had long
become unavoidable. It was impossible to pretend indefinitely
that our right to enter the country was unlimited; that it was
Britain's duty to enforce the admission of every Jew for whom
we could provide a living, until at last we reached the majority
in the country. It was impossible to demand that Britain by this
method should do just what she had refused to do from the
beginning - that is, to establish a Jewish state against the will of
the Arab, and thereby run the risk of violence and even war. But
so blind were we to the reality of the situation that when in 1937
Britain had accepted the Peel plan of partition - which once and
for all would have abolished the need and even possibility for
any White Paper - we Jews, who should have jumped at this
solution, did not consider the plan as good enough.

It sometimes could appear from our utterances as if the
White Paper was nothing but the work of sheer arbitrary British
malice without which the doors of Palestine would have been
wide open to us. But Arab opposition against handing over the
country to us was certainly not less during the war than before,
and did not decrease by the acceptance of the Biltmore
Programme. Can we really maintain under these conditions that
it would have been possible to force into Palestine - at a time
when the war was in the balance or seemed even lost-all the tens
or hundreds of thousands who might have escaped from the
Continent and of whom we now dream? The riots which have
shaken Palestine since the decision of the United Nations to
recommend partition give the answer to this question. To blame
the White Paper as the root of all our troubles was therefore just
another attempt of escapism. It was a new attempt to evade
again that problem which Ahad Ha'am unveiled to us so clearly
and which, since then, by iron necessity, has grown to terrible
proportions.

Under easier conditions it would perhaps have been possible
at the end of the war to make a new start. There was even a
moment when the Arab mind, which had been deeply impressed
by the year-long successes of Fascists and Nazis, was thrown
into confusion by their downfall. A new approach then might
have found a certain readiness to respond. But no such attempt
was made, and the gulf between the parties grew still wider.

The plan of the British Government, according to which
96,000 immigrants were to be admitted over a period of two
years, and the decision on further immigration to be left to the
High Commissioner - a scheme which would have given
widespread relief to the refugees and plentiful constructive
work to the people in Palestine themselves - was equally
rejected by Jews and Arabs. We now embarked on a course
which put the blame for our situation exclusively on others, and
accordingly led to a campaign of ruthless vilification against
Great Britain. Our failure to find a solution of the Arab problem
increased the bitterness of our attitude - as if we wanted to
compensate our shortcomings on one side by our claims on the
other. The hopelessness of the general situation further threw its
shadows over the picture, and it seems sometimes as if our
capacity to see the reality of the situation in its right perspective
has, as the result of so much sorrow, been partially darkened.

Suddenly our propagandists discovered that Great Britain
had imperialist interests and poured forth their moral
indignation upon such depravity. They forgot that these same
imperialist interests had not been repellent to them as long as
they seemed to be in harmony with the development of the
Jewish National Home. Soon the campaign spread overseas. For
many years Jewish writers and orators had hardly been able to
do enough in praising the humanity, unselfishness and wisdom
of British statesmanship. But now we were told of British
treachery and were invited to look beyond the ocean for "bigger
and better" editions of the same qualities. Important groups of
American Zionists began to pour out a powerful propaganda
against England. They linked up with all other anti-British
forces, and exerted not inconsiderable influence on American
policy. But their presentation of the case was so one-sided and
exaggerated, and so neglectful of the reality of the Arab case,
that this influence is bound to be of very short duration; and it
may even come back one day like a boomerang on American
Jewry and deeply affect what has remained of the Jewish
position in the Western world. In fact, these Zionist groups in
America repeated in a cruder and coarser form all those
fundamental mistakes which had previously been made over
here. To them the shortcomings of Great Britain appeared as
"malicious crimes." They replaced the methods of political
discussion by "big salesmanship with streamline advertising"
and in some cases Jewish publicity there even descended to the
level of the late Julius Streicher. But the idea that we Jews
ourselves have to bear a grave responsibility for the present
situation and that it is our duty to recompense the Arab for the
sacrifice which we ask from him was hardly ever mentioned.

Under these conditions of increasing bitterness and hostility,
the outbreak of violence on the Jewish side and the growth of
terrorism were an almost natural development. But the
fundamental basis of the whole anti-British terror was the
grotesque though sincere belief of the terrorists that Arab
opposition to the establishment of a Jewish State in reality did
not exist. This was expressed in amazing clarity as late as June,
1947, when the Commander of the Irgun Zwai Leumi, in his
interview with the Chairman of the U.N.O. Committee,
declared that "Irgun does not believe in such a phenomenon as
independent Arab opposition," and added: "All Arab opposition is
instigated by the British themselves." If this assumption was really
true, all the hesitations of Britain in the past to open the gates of
Palestine to an unlimited flood of Jewish immigration were in
fact the result of criminal malice and even deliberate
participation in Hitler's plan of Jewish extermination, and every
new act of Britain, short of handing over the country to us Jews,
appeared as a new piece in the mosaic pattern of British
hostility. Essentially - though not so radical - this became
indeed the general attitude of large parts of the Jewish people in
Palestine and particularly in the United States. For if, in the
words of Ahad Ha'am, we considered the Arab people as non-
existent, it was only logical that we denied the possibility of any
serious Arab opposition. The simple statement that Arab
opposition against Jewish mass immigration was not only
natural but real should have been the most trivial of all
commonplaces. But under the existing conditions it was
fervently denied by masses of the Jewish people and thus took
on for them almost the character of a revolutionary thesis.

Every national movement sooner or later has to face the issue
of violence; and this issue is always the supreme test for the
sense of reality and the moral courage of its leaders. But rarely
in modern history was leadership less determined in face of
such danger than our own.

To oppose the movement was difficult from the beginning,
since we had accustomed ourselves to put all blame for our
situation on the British. Official Zionist reaction to the outbreak
of violence was therefore hesitant and undecided and lacked
completely constructive leadership. At first our leaders
dissociated themselves from the movement by denouncing the
terrorists as "criminals or lunatics"; and since the assassination
of Lord Moyne this condemnation was repeated with great
monotony at every single act of violence. Such an
interpretation, however, was profoundly inadequate. For the
terrorists were never lunatics or criminals in the ordinary sense
of the word, but passionate, sincere, although misguided
patriots who, after innumerable disappointments, had despaired
of any solution by peace and persuasion, who, after centuries of
Jewish persecution had risen to take up arms in their own cause
and were resolved to sacrifice everything, including their lives,
for what they believed to be the redemption of the people. To
turn their devotion and sacrifice to constructive aims would
have required great powers of imagination and infinitely more
than negative protestations.

To make things worse, Zionist leadership took the line that
the terrorist activities - deplorable as they were - were at least
understandable in view of the Palestine policy of the British
Government, and implied thereby that the ultimate political
responsibility rested, not with us, but with the British. This,
however, was in fact the abdication of Zionist leadership. For if
events were indeed determined on one side by the British and on
the other by the terrorists as their opponents, the official leaders
of Zionism reduced themselves to the humiliating role of an
impotent go-between. Instead of taking upon themselves the full
responsibility for all that was done, which incidentally would
have been in accordance with Jewish religious teaching, they
tried to shift the responsibility to others. This attempt
necessarily destroyed the foundations of their authority, for
there can be no authority which shirks responsibility. Moreover,
the whole discussion took place, as it were, on two different
planes: the terrorists threw in their lives, the leaders made
pronunciamentos . But worst of all, in many decisive issues our
attitude was ambiguous; and at least in the beginning much was
privately condoned and even promoted which was publicly
condemned. The whole campaign of violence and bloodshed
developed, as Dr. Magnes said, in an atmosphere which
countenanced the terror. The minds of many were divided
between fear and hope; fear that the application of force might
harm, and hope that it might ultimately further the national
cause. About the moral issues themselves, there was widespread
indecision and confusion.

There has been one example in our time of a different way to
meet a similar emergency, and this stands out as a shining light
of moral integrity and singleness of heart. When in the earlier
years of the Indian movement for independence, Mr. Gandhi
once was faced by the outbreak of violence against the police
among his followers, he did not put the blame on the British
Government, although his case would have been very strong
indeed, nor did he limit himself to declamations. He took the
full responsibility upon himself. He accepted the challenge
which the rioters had thrown at him, and offered his own life
against theirs. He called off the demonstration which he had
ordered, and threatened to fast unto death unless the riots
stopped. Nobody, including his opponents, could doubt the
sincerity of his determination, and in one stroke he recaptured
all authority and power of leadership which the hot-headed
rioters had tried to snatch from him.

If only one among us had challenged the terrorists in time to
turn their weapons against him before any more innocent blood
was shed, he might have changed the whole course of events.
He would have deprived his opponents in the twinkling of an
eye of the immeasurable advantage which they enjoy as long as
they alone were ready to give their lives. He would have given
a powerful inspiration far beyond the Jewish community itself,
and might have restored the unity and dignity of the Jewish
National Movement.

Some of this spirit of self-sacrifice was revealed in the
movement of "illegal immigration"; and in spite of the violence
and propaganda with which it was connected, the devotion of
the Jewish people to this central cause has made a profound
impression which may have greatly contributed to the decision
of the United Nations. When the 4,500 passengers of the Exodus
persevered through endless weeks on the high seas, refusing in
spite of their miserable conditions all invitations and pressure to
land in France, and even preferred an enforced disembarkment
in Germany to a voluntary landing anywhere else than in
Palestine, they revealed to an astonished world the
indestructible connection between the Jewish people and the
Holy Land.

By an unfortunate combination of circumstances and
shortcomings, the relations between Jews and British have
deteriorated beyond anything which could be imagined when
thirty years ago both set out upon their joint undertaking.
Sympathy with the National Home, once strong and sincere in
this country, has practically vanished. Great forces have become
strongly anti-Zionist and even anti-Jewish. The Jewish position
in Great Britain is profoundly shaken. Many Jews all over the
world have become for the first time in their history enemies of
Britain, and bitterness and disappointment have tragically
destroyed a wealth of human relationships.

Both sides have contributed gravely to the disaster. But
however much the British have failed on their side, they have
never promised us what we had asked them to give the Jewish
state. Justice demands that this fact be fully recognised by all.

Through the different fields of our policy there has been
running like a thread, as a characteristic element, the refusal to
accept our share of guilt for the ever-increasing crisis. We have
blamed everybody but ourselves; and very few among us Jews
have indeed accepted before God and-man the full share of our
responsibility for what has been done. Self-righteousness leads
to isolation and despair about the alleged injustice of the world.
But recognition of guilt releases the greatest creative forces and
builds communities.

The Next Task

The hope that the situation in Palestine would ease, and Jews
and Arabs would settle their differences as soon as the end of
the Mandate and the withdrawal of the British were certain, has
proved to be another sad illusion. The decision of the United
Nations has been followed by an outbreak of violent riots, and
as the year 1947 is drawing to its close the intensity of the
conflict appears to increase. More and more it has become
evident that outside forces have not been the decisive causes of
the conflict. The conflict is springing from the unsolved
problem of Jewish-Arab relationship, and although we Jews
have tried for decades to minimise or evade the real issue, we
have now, in this belated hour, to face it in all its implications.

In addition, the Jewish National Home is threatened for the
first time in its history by the dangers of isolation. For nearly
thirty years it formed practically a part of the British Empire,
and, in spite of the recent tensions with the Mandatory Power,
the National Home was safe under British protection. This is
now to change, and the Mandate is to end, not because its
purpose has been fulfilled and the young community has grown
beyond the need for any further help, but because the
continuation of the work has led to insurmountable difficulties.

But worst of all is the danger from within. The dragon's seed
of political and moral terrorism and the abdication of Zionist
leadership are bearing frightful fruit. Not only does terrorism,
with its far-reaching aims and influence on the Palestinian
scene, give the Arabs an excuse for claiming that even a small
Jewish state may become a springboard for further expansion;
the terrorist movement - after having been tolerated during
critical years in the past - is beginning to dominate the scene;
and those whom Zionist leadership used to describe as
"criminals" or "lunatics" are determining for all the course of
events. Demonstration of violent force and a spirit of ruthless
retaliation are becoming the essential elements in their struggle
and carry with them the seeds of ultimate self-destruction.

The main task, as in all periods of the whole movement,
remains the solution of the Jewish-Arab problem. It is obvious
that ultimately peace with our neighbours is required if the
Jewish state is to survive. At present we are trying to achieve
this peace by force and to build up in feverish haste the military
strength which is to guarantee our security. But under no
conditions can force be enough. The very establishment of the
Jewish state by force, with hundreds of thousands of hostile
Arabs within its borders and millions around it, creates a hot-
bed of continued underground warfare, sabotage, boycott and
massacre, let alone the grave dangers facing the Jewish
communities everywhere in the Arab world. Initial successes
for us Jews may even ultimately share the fate of Napoleon's
and Hitler's campaigns against Russia. At best, military
successes will bring only temporary respite; and until we
succeed to secure the goodwill of the Arabs a dark and
portentous shadow remains over the National Home.

Since all acts are the results of an inner attitude, the first
precondition for the achievement of this aim must be the full
realisation that the establishment of the Jewish state requires
from the Arabs a sacrifice of the first order. It is irrelevant in this
connection that the Arabs did not rule themselves politically for
many centuries (although during the last years of the Ottoman
Empire they enjoyed a certain autonomy). Decisive is the fact
that the Arabs, like all other peoples, have the right of self-
determination and at least a potential sovereignty, and that what
we ask from them is surrender of this right. Only if we are aware
of this fact, do the pre-conditions of any peaceful solution exist.

It is obvious that this situation creates a particular
responsibility and obligation on our side. The spirit of mutual
retaliation and vengeance - aiming at subduing the opponent by
fear - is not only utterly senseless, but, as far as we Jews are
concerned, fundamentally wrong. The Arabs react as probably
every normal and primitive people would react when they feel
threatened by a mass immigration of another people into the
country which they have considered their own for many
centuries. We Jews should have a deeper insight and should be
able to see both sides of the problem. It is we who aim at a
change of the existing conditions, and it is therefore our duty to
find a solution. The initiative for this task must remain with us.

The spirit of responsibility must express itself first and
foremost in our relations to the Arab population within the
Jewish state. It is of the utmost importance that the constitution
of the new state is framed with vision and in the spirit of
tolerance. Everything must be done to assure the Arabs that
required. The shortcomings of more than one generation cannot
be made good within a few months. Many attempts will fail,
such as an offer of medical help during the recent cholera
epidemic in Egypt, and the way will be long and thorny. But the
recognition that a debt is owed by us Jews to the Arabs for the
sacrifice which our restoration must mean to them will enable
us to persevere until at last we may succeed to win - as Mr.
Gandhi said - the Arab's heart.

Such efforts may help to break the isolation which surrounds
the Jewish state, and if we can convince India and Pakistan that
we do not aim at conquest and can secure their sympathy and
mediation much will have been achieved. The more the centre
of activities shifts from the capitals of the West to Jerusalem,
Cairo, Karachi and Delhi, the easier will it be to integrate the
Jewish National Home into the Eastern world in which it is
situated and with which its fate is linked. The restoration of our
relations with Great Britain is only slightly less important, but it
will be easier to achieve. For the conflict never affected
similarly vital issues. But here, too, the realisation that we
ourselves are sharing the guilt for the deterioration of our
mutual relations will be an essential precondition for a new
beginning.

The simultaneous failure in the two main fields of our
relations with the outside world was not the result of tactical
mistakes, but sprang from fundamental shortcomings. It was
ultimately due to a lack of moral courage to face the realities of
our situation. If we are to succeed in the future, a complete
change of this attitude is required. We must establish again
"complete and unconditional truthfulness" both towards
ourselves in our approach to the problems which surround us
and in our relations to our neighbours. This truthfulness alone
can create those conditions without which no stable relationship
can be built.

In the last analysis, our situation springs from spiritual
causes and may even be connected with the foundations of our
religious position. The isolation of the Jewish people in the
realm of politics may be a reflection of their unique position in
the religious sphere. Israel's spiritual existence is based on its
election among the nations. Whilst Christianity aims at the
conquest of the globe and rejoices in its expansion, Israel is
deeply concerned in its own preservation; and although our
fathers have developed very lofty religious principles about the
relation to the non-Jewish world, the present generation has not
solved for itself the problem of spiritual communion with its
neighbours. But without such a basis it is difficult to establish
stable relations even in the political field.

On the other hand, these limitations are only of a temporary
character. The conviction that our religious position is not yet
final is a powerful driving force in our life. There is a deep
longing in the Jewish heart for the establishment of an ultimate
oneness of mankind, and the pious pray thrice daily to hasten
the day "when He will be One and His Name be One."
Throughout the ages the Jewish mind was imbued with a
burning Messianic expectation, and was always ready for the
imminent transformation of human history. The eyes of the
Jews are turned towards the future, and Israel can be fully
understood only on the eschatological plane. As Dostoevski
said, in spite of their forty-century-old history, the final word
about the Jews has not yet been spoken. Our history is not yet
completed and a last and decisive event is still to come.
Essentially, the Palestinian crisis is not political, but spiritual.
To deal with the Jewish question without regarding the things of
the spirit is to ignore the very essence of the issue. Through
thousands of years Jewish life has seen the ultimate reality in
the spirit and has found its deepest expression in religion. The
restoration to the Holy Land must have its final meaning in our
religious destiny. It must be more than the renascence of
Hebrew as a living language and the birth of a new literature
and art, more than the revival of an ancient and venerable
national civilisation, and even more than the creation of a new
society. The return to Palestine is the pre-condition of a new era
in our religious development - an era in which the present
spiritual frustration will end and Israel will find its redemption.

The fate of the Jews is once again in the balance. If we fail
in Palestine, it will be a catastrophe of the first magnitude; for
the hope of return for vast numbers has taken the character of a
religious belief. But if we succeed, and find there the salvation
of Israel's soul - in spirit and in truth - then even two thousand
years of wandering, with all their sorrows and tears, have not
been too high a price for such fulfilment.

GERRARDS CROSS. December 30th, 1947

Ergenekon and Occupy Wall Street CLEAN UP AND JAIL

2011-11-01T08:52:00.001-07:00

"Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street -- financial institutions generally -- has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called "a precariat" -- seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity -- not only too big to fail, but also "too big to jail."

"The courageous and honourable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course." -Noam Chomsky 2011

They hang the man and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common,
Yet let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose

- 17th century English protest rhyme

Americans who do not enjoy European style universal welfare are coming to the realization that despite their optimistic 'can do' attitude, they are no longer able to realize their much cherished American Dream. Hence, while Greed and Being Rich, the motivating force of capitalism, are openly and unashamedly celebrated in China, and elsewhere in the emerging economies, it Is now under popular attack in the USA because Greed is no longer a solution, but a problem.

The 99%movement in the USA is a manifestation of this new mood. The mission: To develop a political agenda based on the economic interests of 99% of Americans – especially where they conflict with the top 1% – which owns 34% of the wealth. This movement, which started only on the 17 September this year with call for occupy Wall Street, is going viral, spreading to over 80 cities. It is capturing the imagination of the Americans, and even Obama has acknowledge that "people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.."

From Boston by a Mark Provost

In the last several days in early October 2011, occupations have spread from Wall Street to more than 70 cities across America.

I drove from New Hampshire on Friday afternoon and arrived in Beantown to kickoff Occupy Boston. Dewey Square, the site of the occupation in the heart of the financial district, was easy to find thanks to police and media helicopters hovering overhead.

But rush hour traffic and Boston's circuitous one-way streets channeled me far from the site - and into an expensive garage.

I asked a well-dressed young man exiting work for directions to the park. He didn't know the location, and I didn't tell him why I was going (fearing he may intentionally misdirect me). Unfortunately, my cover was blown when "Brian" innocently asked a coworker for the whereabouts.

The coworker smiled and pointed me in the right direction, but not before he offered his opinion about the protest, "I am a capitalist. I work for an investment bank … but I don't agree with American-style capitalism." Without pause, he refined his thoughts, "I am a socialist."

One of Singapore's most renowned dissidents, TAN WAH PIOW was a student leader during the 1970s. In 1976, he refused to fulfil his military service and went into self-exile in London, from where he led an active opposition to the Singapore government through the FUEMSSO (Federation of the United Kingdom and Ireland, Malaysia and Singapore Student Organisation). He lost his Singapore citizenship in 1987.

CONSIDER THE CONNECTION

CLEAN UP THE SECRET STATE TERROR NETWORKS,
AT THE SAME TIME AS BANKERS AND PROFITEERS.
(You may find some of the same elites!)

Mani Pulite and Ergenekon: Contrasting pictures in Turkey and Italy

There are valuable experiences Turkey ought to take from the Italian experience of the "Mani Pulite" (Clean Hands) initiative of the early 1990s.

The Italian experiment teaches us that it is imperative to pursue dismantling gangs, illicit groups, criminal networks and the terrorist organization called Ergenekon all the way to the end. If the job is left unfinished or stops halfway through, as happened in Italy, we will eventually end up with a fractured political system, unable to formulate urgently needed policies to address our challenges. Polarized public opinion, dysfunctional security forces and a heavily tainted justice system would linger on for many years to come.

One might argue that Turkey's Ergenekon probe resembles more the Operation Gladio inquiry conducted by Magistrate Felice Casson in 1990 and offers a different kind of lesson in exposing state-sponsored secret terrorist networks. I tend to agree with that argument. Perhaps I would be able to discuss similarities and differences between the Gladio and Ergenekon cases in detail in another column. But here I believe the "Clean Hands" case offers unique insights into pitfalls in judicial proceedings that we in Turkey should carefully avoid to finalize the Ergenekon trials successfully.

When Antonio Di Pietro, the former Milan magistrate, launched the Clean Hands investigation in 1992, he initially became a national hero for exposing widespread corruption that had long endured among the politicians and business world with the involvement of all kinds of clandestine networks. Over 2,500 people, including 120 deputies and senators of the Italian parliament, 12 current or former ministers, four ex-prime ministers, businessmen and others from all walks of life were investigated by prosecutors during the course of the investigation.

In Turkey's landmark Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases we are nowhere near that number yet. But the cases brought the dirty dealings within the state to light for the first time, unveiling a vicious terrorist network known as Ergenekon, whose leadership would do anything, including killing civilians and non-Muslim minority leaders, to protect its interests. They even plotted to overthrow the government by enlisting top generals to their cause, hoping to trigger a military coup with the support of journalists, academics, jurists and others who were on Ergenekon's payroll.

There is a similarity between the Ergenekon and Clean Hands investigations, in the sense that both cases were associated with a single name. The Clean Hands operation was in fact conducted by a group of magistrates in Milan headed by Francesco Saverio Borrelli. Di Pietro was just a member of this group who became the dominant figure. In the Ergenekon case, specially authorized prosecutor Zekeriya Öz became a leading figure even though he was only one in a group of prosecutors who were assigned by the chief prosecutor in I.stanbul to examine the case.

When Di Pietro launched his political party later on, it dealt a heavy blow to the credibility of Clean Hands, as the public was led to believe that he had political motivations all along. A propaganda campaign fiercely launched by politicians and their extensions in the media to discredit Di Pietro tainted the Clean Hands investigation. In the Turkish case, we do not see any indication that Öz will be getting involved in politics anytime soon. In fact, Turkey's Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) did the case a favor by taking him off of it after four years on the assignment, effectively preventing the case from becoming synonymous with his name. His work did not go unrewarded, however, as the HSYK promoted Öz to another position. The remaining prosecutors and newcomers assigned to the case are actively presenting the government's case in ongoing trials.

The second difference between the Turkish and Italian experiences is that when Clean Hands started, magistrates opened a wide front against any and all political figureheads involved in the corruption network. It was a kind of all-out war across political parties. When politicians realized that the operation would land them in jail, be they in the governing or opposition parties, they collaborated closely to stop the investigations and launched a campaign to discredit prosecutors. They succeeded in doing so in three years when 27 criminal charges were raised against Di Petro in 1995. Though he was eventually acquitted of all charges, the negative campaigning was successful in stopping the investigations.

In the Ergenekon case, Turkish prosecutors are investigating the terrorist network whose ultimate aim is to overthrow the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government, which has been elected to office in three consecutive elections since 2002. Therefore, unlike Italian magistrates, Turkish prosecutors enjoyed strong backing from the government and the largest political party in Turkey, which won 50 percent of the vote in a landslide victory in the June 12 elections of this year. The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the third-largest party in Turkey, maintained a neutral position to the case overall, while implicitly supporting the governing party in its bid to get rid of clandestine networks nestled in the state organs for decades.

That left only the main opposition party Republican Peoples' Party (CHP) as a defender of suspects arrested and being tried in Ergenekon and other cases. But the party leadership's close association with suspects accused of serious crimes and an overwhelming body of convincing evidence submitted to the court have hurt the CHP more than ever. The party suffered in the last national election, failing to win over 30 percent of the vote, a psychological threshold the new leadership put forward as a benchmark for success. Realizing that the attack on prosecutors does not bring any votes, the CHP seems to have eased on the rhetoric of accusations leveled against prosecutors. As such, prosecutors in Turkey enjoyed what Italian magistrates lacked in their pursuit of justice -- political cover.

The third difference is that Di Pietro and others were systematically attacked by major media outlets acting as proxies for political heavyweights in the country, and magistrates were therefore portrayed negatively. The reason was obvious, of course, as the investigation reached even the media magnate leader of the center-right alliance, Silvio Berlusconi, who later became the prime minister. In one of his interviews, Di Pietro was critical of the media in Italy, saying: "Our media is notoriously successful at warping the truth. Those under investigation were falsely represented as victims and the judges as assassins, but no innocent person was imprisoned."

In Turkey, however, thanks to a diversification of media outlets and pluralism in recent years, prosecutors have found more than enough support to continue their operations to dismantle gangs. In fact, the small independent and liberal Taraf daily, a newcomer in the media market, published many leaked documents of the coup plots, eventually leading to official investigations into "untouchable" generals. Other big media groups such as Zaman, Sabah, Star and Yeni S,afak lent huge support to these investigations, while only a few remaining media groups continue to attack prosecutors.

Looking back at the Italian case, the stakes for Turkey are quite high. If Turkey fails to conclude these landmark trials and allows the suspects to go back to the community without paying the price, we will be confronted with a highly fractured and polarized political system, just like that in Italy. No one would dare launch similar investigations against powerful generals and others. We would go back to square one just like the Italians did under Berlusconi, where corruption is once again rampant. When that happens in Turkey, we will suffocate under the constant pressure of internal political problems. We may have to kiss our role as major regional player goodbye.

The good thing is that policymakers in Turkey have come to an understanding that the country simply cannot afford to lose in this game. They seem to have a strong resolve to see the Turkish version of the Clean Hands investigation through to the end.




The main figure in a scandalous 1996 car crash that for the first time brought evidence to light showing links between the state and illegal formations was killed by Ergenekon, a clandestine terrorist organization charged with plotting to overthrow the government, and not in the crash, according to new evidence made public on Monday. Dossiers of evidence from the second indictment in the trial of suspected members of Ergenekon were handed to defense attorneys on Monday evening.

According to a witness whose testimony is included in the new dossiers, Abdullah Çatlı, an ultranationalist criminal who was thought to have died in the 1996 Susurluk car crash, which exposed links between the Turkish state, the criminal underworld and Turkish security forces, was killed by Ergenekon. The Susurluk incident revealed that Çatlı, a leader of the ultranationalist Grey Wolves group, worked for the state.

Hüseyin Kocadağ, a former police chief; Sedat Bucak, a southeastern tribal leader whose men were armed by the state to fight separatist violence; and Çatlı, an internationally wanted mafia boss, were involved in an accident near the small township of Susurluk while riding in the same car. Kocadağ, Çatlı and his girlfriend, a former model, were allegedly killed in the accident. No arrests of major figures were made as a result of the ensuing investigation, which had actually exposed, for the first time in modern Turkish history, a gang with links to the state. Retired Brig. Gen. Veli Küçük, who is currently in jail as an Ergenekon suspect, was detained but later released during the Susurluk investigation.

The dossiers contain the testimony of a secret witness, referred to as Kıskaç (Pincer), who told the prosecution on Nov. 30, 2008, that a senior gendarmerie master sergeant he identified as Hakan, who worked for JİTEM -- an illegal organization founded inside the gendarmerie accused of hundreds of atrocities against civilians in the Southeast -- revealed to him that Çatlı had not died in the accident. Kıskaç said Hakan had told him: "Abdullah Çatlı's arm was broken in the accident. We killed him by bludgeoning him to death." JİTEM is believed to be the most important armed branch of Ergenekon.

Kıskaç, who asked Hakan why Bucak had not been killed by JİTEM's men, received the reply: "This man has 14,000 armed men; he has control over a route from Antep to Silopi. We don't want to lose this route." Hakan also said the accident had been arranged by JİTEM and that Osman Gürbüz, another Ergenekon suspect, had followed the Mercedes Çatlı and the others were in.

"They told me to work for them. They said they'd guarantee me immunity. JİTEM was a unit established to fight terrorism, but they are dealing with every kind of business but terrorism, including extortion and assassinations," Kıskaç told the prosecution.

There are 248 dossiers containing evidence backing up the allegations brought by the prosecution against the suspects in the Ergenekon trial. The new documents reveal that retired Gen. Şener Eruygur, who was arrested but then released pending trial after suffering a severe fall and sustaining cerebral injuries, ordered his assistants to clean up any incriminating documents that might be found in his office during police raids. The dossiers include transcripts of a phone conversation between Eruygur and a woman named Nermin, apparently Eruygur's secretary. In response to the woman's questions regarding certain documents, Eruygur says: "Tear them apart; throw them away." The dossiers reveal that Eruygur hid a large number of confidential documents crucial to the organization's coup plots in his office.

Allegations put forward by a newsweekly accusing former military commanders of plotting a coup d'état have also made their way into the second indictment of the Ergenekon trial. The allegations leveled in the summer of 2007 by the Nokta newsweekly -- which claimed that in 2004 now-retired Adm. Özden Örnek and the four force commanders at the time had made plans to stage military coups to be named Ayışığı (Moonlight) and Sarıkız (Blonde Girl) -- will be brought before a court for the first time. The new dossiers include excerpts from Örnek's diary as well as personal notes of Ergenekon suspect and Cumhuriyet daily columnist Mustafa Balbay. Gen. Eruygur is accused of being the mastermind behind Moonlight and Blonde Girl, as well as two other coup plans the group called Yakamoz (Sea Sparkle) and Eldiven (Glove).

The documents also reveal that the group gathered intelligence and compiled lists of information about Justice and Development Party (AK Party) politicians. In these lists, some AK Party members are tagged with labels such as "Kurdish-Arab hybrid" and "Kurdish rebel Sheik Said's grandson." Next to one of these figures, a statement reads, "He is a leader in the mobilization of Kurdish population movements."

The organization also compiled detailed information on the politicians closest to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, including Mücahid Arslan, Hüseyin Besli, Cüneyt Zapsu, Egemen Bağış and Ömer Çelik. In addition to biographies and detailed information on these politicians, Eruygur's team also categorized AK Party politicians into two groups -- supporters of Erdoğan and supporters of Abdullah Gül.

The new dossiers also include evidence that generals planned to ban civilian political activity for at least two decades.

The second indictment accuses Eruygur of "establishing or leading an armed terrorist organization, recording private information of various individuals illegally, attempting to overthrow the government, influencing the judiciary, inciting people to armed revolt and attempting to destroy the Turkish Parliament." The prosecution demands three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole and an additional 142 to 246 years in jail without the possibility of parole.

Other evidence included in the dossiers reveals that the generals' coup-plotting group within the military, named the Republican Work Group (CÇG), actively supported Turkish Cypriot politician Rauf Denktaş.

Dink murder suspect and Dalan

The dossiers also include concrete evidence showing that Professor Ercüment Ovalı, who was arrested last year on suspicion of possible links to the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, had frequent meetings with fugitive Ergenekon suspect and former İstanbul Mayor Bedrettin Dalan. This information was obtained from a phone conversation between Ergenekon suspect Kemal Aydın and Ovalı.

'I found Eruygur collapsed on the floor'

Retired Gen. Eruygur suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on Sept. 17, 2008, at Kandıra Prison, where he was jailed at the time. The new documents also include Ergenekon suspect and retired Gen. Hurşit Tolon's testimony to the prosecution about Eruygur's fall in prison, in which he sustained a head injury. In his testimony, Tolon is quoted as saying: "In the morning, I opened my eyes to a loud noise. I heard a noise between a snore and a grumble. The grumbling wasn't too far away. I got up, thinking I had fallen asleep in the wrong place. When I reached the stairs, I saw that he was lying on his back right at the spot where the stairs turned 90 degrees to the right, with his legs open like a V. I could see that he was breathing. I ran down the stairs. I tried to get him up, but he didn't come to. I started banging on the door so a security officer would come. One came within a minute or two."