///Taking the Illusions Out of History-I would like to be able to love my country and justice///

Saturday, April 20, 2002

The Fate of Our Children in the Hands of Agribusiness

It's Time to Turn the Farm Bill Debate Into a Food Fight
04/15/2002 @ 6:10pm
Would someone in Congress please, please, please propose changing the name of the "farm bill" to the "food bill"?

Maybe if the issue at hand had a more dramatic name the media and the American public would take a serious interest in congressional debates that are in the process of defining not just the quality of the food we eat but the future of our rural communities, the environment that surrounds us, and the type of economy our nation chooses to construct.

This week, Congress is putting the finishing touches on a long-term farm bill that has, for the most part, been developed behind closed doors in such complex and interest-driven negotiations that most Americans are unaware of the issues that are in play. Yet, as the disastrous Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 proved, a bad farm bill can devastate a good nation.

When Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott got together to write a farm bill that favored corporate agribusiness at every turn, they undermined working family farmers so badly that the bill quickly became known as "the Freedom to Fail Bill." And farmers did fail, with several states experiencing the most dramatic loss in the number of family farms since the Great Depression era.

The next multiyear farm bill is now being shaped in high-stakes sessions of a powerful House-Senate Farm Bill Conference Committee. The bill that will eventually be sent to President Bush's desk will be a compromise measure between a House plan that has been more influenced by corporate agribusiness demands and Senate legislation that is somewhat more reflective of the goals of working farmers.

Any compromise is likely to be better than the soon-to-be-scrapped "Freedom to Fail" structure. And that's a good thing. Sympathy for working farmers is a legitimate rationale for backing a redirection of federal agricultural policy priorities. But it is far from the only one.

Americans who have never walked a fence line, planted a seed or milked a cow ought to get engaged with the current debate because the issues that it touches on go far beyond the farm gate.

Farm bill debates are the legislative venue for most discussions on food labeling (so that consumers know where and how their meat, grains, cheeses, fruits, vegetables and drinks are produced), importation of potentially unsafe food products, and regulation of genetic modification of food. Farm bill debates are also the place where Congress entertains questions of controlling corporate monopolies, regulating food-processing industries, and development of rural areas that contain some of the poorest and most racially diverse stretches of America.

"There are all these issues of race, class, corporate power -- not to mention the quality of what we eat and drink -- that are decided in the farm bill debate," Merle Hansen, the Nebraska farmer who is president emeritus of the North American Farm Alliance, once explained to me. "Yet, for the most part, Americans don't know that the debate is going on. People need to recognize that the lobbyists for the agribusiness corporations are the ones who like it this way. The less attention there is, the more they can get away with."

The Senate farm bill includes a number of critical anti-corporate and consumer-protection components that need to be safeguarded. Of particular interest are measures to require country-of-origin labeling on agricultural products and provide for far more serious examination of where and how food is produced; programs to aid sustainable agriculture initiatives; and a section proposed by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., to protect the legal right of farmers to challenge unsound practices being forced upon them by agribusiness corporations with which they contract.

The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture has set up a great Web site to help Americans -- even those with no mud on their boots -- leap into the debate. And everyone who eats ought to make the leap because, while they call what is being shaped in Washington a farm bill, this really is the food bill.





accesswater2030@yahoo.com 10:04 PM

More Weapons to Take Away First Amendment Rights

• extra
April 2, 2001 more Web exclusives | sfbg.com
Reality Bites
The Pentagon's people zapper
New electromagnetic weapon for crowd control
By Martin A. Lee
Good-bye nasty tear gas. So long risky rubber bullets. Welcome to the wonderful world of electromagnetic weaponry.

Last month the P.R.-conscious Pentagon proudly unveiled what is supposed to be the perfect nonlethal crowd control device – a high-powered energy beam that can disperse an unruly mob without killing, maiming, or harming anyone.

Military brass are touting it as the biggest breakthrough in war technology since the nuclear bomb.

Known officially as a "Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System," this new weapon is said to be more humane and more effective than other methods of controlling a large crowd or stopping aggressive intruders dead in their tracks.

Here's how it works. A special transmitter fires two-second bursts of focused microwave energy that causes burning sensations on the skin of people up to 700 yards away. But no one gets fried and no telltale burn marks linger on the body because the beam only penetrates just beneath the skin's surface at a depth of 1/64th of an inch. Targets of this concentrated electromagnetic pulse briefly experience intense pain and confusion, prompting them to leave the area in hurry.

"It's safe, absolutely safe. You walk out of the beam and the pain goes away. There are no lasting effects," said Colonel George Fenton, who demonstrated the new gadget last month at the Pentagon's nonlethal weapons center in Quantico, Virginia.

The actual zapper, which looks something like a backyard satellite dish mounted on top of an armored car, is still in the experimental phase. Handheld and aircraft-mounted applications are also on the drawing board.

Thus far, ten years of research and $40 million have been devoted to this project, which critics have likened to a militarized version of a microwave oven. Developed by the Raytheon Corporation and several other Defense Department contractors, it is currently being field-tested on soldiers at the Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico. But it is not expected to be ready for deployment by troops for at least five years.

Zap-happy Pentagon strategists envision using the "Active Denial System" in various operational settings where a small number of American troops or military police might be confronted by a horde of angry civilians. Border patrols, "peacekeeping" missions, urban riots, and domestic disturbances have been flagged as situations in which such a device could prove handy. Best of all, it won't result in bloody television images of people shot and mutilated by conventional arms.

But before you start feeling warm and fuzzy all over at the prospect of a benign alternative to guns and bombs, consider the fact that past attempts by the U.S. military to create so-called nonlethal weapons have resulted in some monumental fiascos.

During the late 1950s Major General William Creasy, chief officer of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, waxed enthusiastic about a new kind of "psychochemical" weapon that would revolutionize combat. He imagined aircraft swooping down over enemy territory, releasing clouds of hallucinogenic "madness gas" that would disorient people and dissolve their will to resist. According to Creasy, a nonlethal incapacitating agent such as LSD could subdue a foe without inflicting permanent injury.

Testifying before Congress, Creasy maintained that psychochemical warfare was not only feasible but tactically advantageous for certain difficult operations, such as dislodging enemy soldiers from a city inhabited by an otherwise friendly population – a busy industrial center, for example, with numerous museums and cultural landmarks. Why blow everything to smithereens with an old-fashioned artillery barrage if you can spike the city's water supply with LSD or disseminate an aerosol hallucinogen? Those under the spell of madness gas would become helplessly giddy, spaced-out, and incapable of fighting back while U.S. troops established themselves on once-forbidden turf. Victory would be a foregone conclusion. Just blow their minds, move in, and take over.

But Creasy's glowing predictions of "war without death" ran into a few technical glitches. For starters, it was impossible to discharge LSD in aerosol form. So the military-industrial surrealists concocted a more potent mind-bending drug known as BZ, which became part of the U.S. Army's chemical warfare arsenal in the early 1960s. Superhallucinogenic BZ gas was employed as a counterinsurgency weapon on a limited basis during the Vietnam war. The army eventually concluded that shifting wind patterns, BZ's tendency to trigger maniacal behavior, and the difficulties of controlling the amount of BZ absorbed during combat undermined its usefulness as a nonlethal incapacitant. An overdose of BZ could be fatal.

This, however, did not stop the CIA from fiddling with several BZ-related substances as part of its ongoing R&D program geared toward behavior modification and mind control techniques. A CIA memo dated September 4, 1970, emphasized the importance BZ-type weapons for crowd control: "Trends in modern police action and warfare indicate the desire to incapacitate reversibly and demoralize, rather than kill, the enemy. . . . With the advent of highly potent natural products, psychotropic and immobilizing drugs, a new era of law enforcement. . . is being ushered in."

U.S. army documents indicate that BZ was seriously considered for domestic riot control purposes. One harebrained scheme involved the use of tiny remote-controlled model airplanes nicknamed "mechanical bees." Mounted with hypodermic syringes, the bees would be aimed at selected protesters during political demonstrations to render them senseless. Another plan called for spraying BZ gas to incapacitate disorderly civilians.

Today's proponents of electromagnetic crowd control techniques invoke essentially the same argument that psychochemical warfare boosters used in the 1950s: Would you rather be zapped – or dosed – by a nonlethal device or shot to death by conventional firepower? The problem with this line of reasoning is that so-called nonlethal weapons often turn out to be deadly. (Pepper spray, which is supposedly nonlethal, has been implicated in more than 100 deaths.)

Moreover U.S. commanders, in the military literature, indicate that incapacitating agents are not meant as a substitute for guns, but as an addition to lethal ordnance.

Despite assurances by military officers, there are serious unresolved questions about the safety of microwave weapons. What happens, for example, if someone falls down while they are trying to run away from the electromagnetic pulse?

Some scientists warn that the much-ballyhooed "Active Denial System," when used at close range, could cook a person's eyeballs. Cataracts and cancer are among the possible long-term negative health effects of this kind of device, according to researchers at the Loma Linda University medical center.

The Pentagon insists that there's nothing to worry about. In over 6,500 tests on 72 individuals, only one exposure went awry, resulting in a nickel-sized burn on a person's back. But findings from a study of the long-term impact of the people zapper have yet to be disclosed publicly, according to a report in the Marine Corps Times, and "the amount of time the weapon must be trained on an individual to cause damage or death" remains classified.

Martin A. Lee (martin@sfbg.com) is the author of Acid Dreams and The Beast Reawakens, a book on neofascism. His column, Reality Bites, appears here every Monday.



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:42 PM

Killers of Our Children and Traitors-Money Laundering

FEATURE STORY | May 6, 2002

Big Tobacco
by MARK SCHAPIRO


Tobacco is one of the most globalized industries on the planet. More cigarettes are traded than any other single product, some trillion "sticks," as they're known in the business, passing international borders each year. As a result, American brands have been propelled into every corner of the world, with just four companies controlling 70 percent of the global market. Marlboro, Kool, Kent: They have become as omnipresent around the world as they are here in the United States. With declining sales in this country, foreign markets have become increasingly critical to the tobacco companies' financial health: The top US tobacco firms now earn more from cigarettes sold abroad than in the United States. How they got there is a tale that leads straight into a global underground of smugglers and money launderers who have played a key role in facilitating the tobacco companies' entry into foreign markets.

A six-month investigation by The Nation, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the PBS newsmagazine show NOW With Bill Moyers (which airs its investigative report on April 19), has unpeeled the many layers of a complex distribution system of a multibillion-dollar trade in smuggled cigarettes. Twenty-five percent of exported cigarettes, according to the World Health Organization, are smuggled. Smuggling has enabled multinational tobacco companies to increase sales volume dramatically by evading local tariffs and competing head to head with domestic producers, thereby helping to establish internationally recognizable brands.

The smuggling has landed the tobacco companies in US court. Lawsuits filed by European and Canadian governments and Colombian state governments against Philip Morris and British American Tobacco (BAT, Brown & Williamson's British-based parent company) have highlighted the companies' alleged links to smugglers and money launderers. Documents released as a result of the historic $200 billion-plus settlement with US state attorneys general in 1998 also provide a glimpse into the way the companies devised advertising and distribution strategies that helped fuel the market for smuggled cigarettes. The companies stand accused of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), of defrauding governments of hundreds of millions in tax revenues and of hiding and ultimately taking the illicit profits back to the United States, which constitutes money laundering.

As the cases were unfolding just one month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the tobacco companies--with support from the White House--fought back in the US Congress, where they took advantage of the nation's distraction to win changes in the USA Patriot Act in a brazen effort to shield themselves from liability. But their headache has not gone away. The cases are still winding through the courts, and the companies' attempts to evade accountability are the focus of growing international outrage.





Underground in Colombia

I went to Colombia, a country infamous for smuggling exports to the United States, to see how the flip side of that equation--smuggling from the United States to Colombia--worked for more than a decade.

The journey from the main tobacco hubs in the United States to Colombia has been a circuitous one, a route designed for ease of smuggling rather than ease of transport. From the modern, state-of-the-art ports of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Miami, huge cranes lift pastel-colored containers loaded with 10,000 kilos of cigarettes apiece onto cargo ships with the routine rhythms of oversized insects. Transiting through the free zones of Panama and Aruba, by the end of their journey at Colombia's La Guajira port of Portette, they might as well have traveled back in time. The bawdy port is what one anthropologist who studied the region calls a "phantom town"--it's not included on maps of the country and has had, until recently, few connections to the official structures of the Colombian government.

The hot, sparsely populated province of La Guajira, which sticks out of Colombia's Caribbean coast like a thumb, is home to one of the country's strongest indigenous tribes, the Way'uu. Last winter, when I visited, torrential rains knocked out the bridge between Santa Marta and Barranquilla, making coastal travel impossible. The road through the Sierra Nevada mountain range between Riohacha--the provincial capital on the coast--and Valledupar, the closest major city in the interior, runs through territory disputed by the ELN guerrilla movement and right-wing paramilitary groups. For parts of the year, the only way into La Guajira is by air or boat.

Colombia's other Caribbean ports, Santa Marta and Barranquilla, host sophisticated trucking and railroad depots right on the docks that are designed to facilitate the movement of large quantities of duty-paid cargo into the Colombian interior. Portette has no such facilities. It is a port designed, quite literally, for smugglers--and it's here that the schooners and creaky old ships from throughout the hemisphere pulled into Colombian waters with their crates of Johnnie Walker and Old Parr, and name-brand sound systems and electronic appliances, bales of textiles and those telltale cartons of Philip Morris's Marlboro and Brown & Williamson's Kool.

From Portette, trucks travel for two hours over a single rutted, mostly dirt, road to the town of Maicao, a dusty outpost of weatherbeaten shop-fronts and mud-splattered stucco buildings. In Maicao, young men are perched on stools along the side of the road amid plastic containers full of gasoline--skimmed from Venezuelan tankers and sold at a tax-free discount. Above them, a sign looms in peeling blue and yellow paint: Welcome to the Commercial Hub of Colombia. Maicao has for decades been the primary transit center in La Guajira for contraband headed for Colombian markets. The sight of brand-name whiskies, stereos, shampoos, car parts and cigarettes provides a jarring contrast to the muddy streets and crumbling kiosks where many of these products are sold.

Maicao's 70,000 inhabitants are divided between the Way'uu and a population of Middle Eastern immigrants--Colombians who emigrated from Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. Historically, the Way'uu and the Turkos--as those with Middle Eastern roots are known--have divided the contraband trade between them. The mostly Muslim Turkos trade in textiles, appliances and other consumer products, leaving the vices of alcohol and cigarettes to the Way'uu.

But the Way'uu do not perceive themselves as criminals in any sense of the word. Since Colombia passed a new Constitution in 1991, decentralizing federal power, the tribe has been in charge of most of La Guajira; the bulk of the state is a reserva indigena, in which they enjoy a limited form of autonomy. From the Way'uu perspective, they are merely traders--their main economic activity for centuries.

"Asi es la vida," says Francisca Sierra, a Way'uu community leader and trader in Maicao, shrugging her shoulders as she explains the tribe's longtime role as renowned smugglers. That history predates even the formation of modern-day Colombia, which revolted against the Spanish in 1814. It was the Way'uu and ranchers in Santander province who helped spark that rebellion, when they refused to pay taxes on cigarettes and coffee imposed by the Spanish--Colombia's own Boston Tea Party. For 300 years, the Way'uu have facilitated the entrance of foreign products into Colombia below the noses of the national authorities.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Way'uu of La Guajira became a critical link in a chain of commercial relationships stretching from the tobacco farms of the southeast United States to corporate boardrooms in Louisville, New York and London, to tax havens like Aruba and Panama, and on into the interior of Colombia. Maicao itself is part of a special free trade zone, but once goods leave that zone, they become contraband. The Way'uu were the ones who unloaded the ships in Portette and then drove the trucks south out of Maicao into the interior, providing Philip Morris and BAT a detour around the tariffs that once made Colombia one of the more restricted markets in Latin America. The Federation of Colombian Departments, representing the country's state governments, estimates that the cigarette contraband cost them more than $500 million in tax revenues over ten years--revenues that would have paid for social projects like education and healthcare, including treatment of the health effects of smoking.

Statistics compiled by Roberto Steiner, an economist and director of the Center for the Study of Economic Development at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, indicate how smuggling served the tobacco companies' long-term interests. The boom in cigarette smuggling into Colombia in the 1990s, according to Steiner, coincided closely with Philip Morris's emergence as the dominant player in Colombia's cigarette market. As the companies sold tax-free cigarettes at prices comparable to those of Colombia's homegrown brands, smokers in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and elsewhere throughout the country became accustomed to "prestigious" imports like Philip Morris's Marlboro, Brown & Williamson's Kool and BAT's Kent. From 1984 to 1993, says Steiner, the number of cigarettes illegally imported into the country quadrupled. Meanwhile, domestic cigarette producers' share of total cigarette sales dropped from an 85 percent market share in 1984 to just 30 percent in 1993. Colombia used to have a thriving domestic tobacco industry, but since 1984 the amount of hectares devoted to tobacco crops has plummeted. As the domestic cigarette industry imploded, many tobacco farmers made the shift to Colombia's far more famous addictive crop, coca.

A comparison of Colombian tobacco imports with US tobacco exports reveals just how many contraband cigarettes were being shipped southward from the United States. According to the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, $21.6 million worth of cigarettes--1.06 billion sticks--were exported from the United States to Colombia in 1996. In that same year, the Colombian Department of National Statistics (DANE), officially recorded $10.7 million worth of cigarettes--just over 800 million sticks--as having been legally imported into the country from the United States. That discrepancy between exports and imports appeared through most of the 1990s.

Internal company documents dating back to 1991, made available as a result of the 1998 states' settlement and introduced as evidence in the Colombian lawsuit, reveal how Philip Morris and BAT were battling for market share during this time--the same period in which the overwhelming bulk of cigarette smuggling to Colombia occurred. The record, for example, of a January 14, 1992, meeting in Miami held by BAT executives representing the company's wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States (Brown & Williamson), Brazil (Souza Cruz) and Venezuela (Bigott), under the heading "Colombian Group Meeting Minutes," shows officials discussing cigarette marketing in Colombia, indicating the per-pack, no-tax price in pesos in 1991, a year in which the company had negligible legal cigarette exports to the country. The minutes noted that the company would begin selling "duty paid"--i.e., legally imported cigarettes on which taxes are paid--in the coming year, 1992.

A document covering roughly the same period from the Philip Morris International division, titled "latin america region Strategic Plan," provides a listing of prices for its "duty-free" customers in La Guajira and Aruba for the years 1991-93. During this time and into the late 1990s, Philip Morris was advertising heavily and maintaining an office in Bogotá, while the company's legal imports amounted to, as Steiner put it, "close to zero."

In fact, both BAT and Philip Morris were deploying mass advertising and discount marketing, and were providing favorable financing terms to their distributors in the battle for market share, when their sales were almost entirely illegal. Documents from both companies reveal the intense competition and propose measures such as discounts to wholesalers, contests and free gifts to outflank each other. "Plans for 1992," Brown & Williamson minutes from a 1991 meeting state, "are to offer a 5% free goods incentive in Maicao and in the San Andresitos to expand distribution in Bogotá and Medellín." ("San Andresitos" is a colloquial reference to the kiosks that abound in Colombian cities selling smuggled goods; the name came originally from the Colombian island of San Andres, located off the east coast of Nicaragua, which itself has served as a key smuggling center.)

Until recently, few tobacco-industry insiders were willing to talk about the companies' role in smuggling. But in February, Alex Solagnier, a twenty-year veteran with BAT's primary Colombian distributor for cigarettes, an Aruba-based company called ROMAR, went public. Solagnier worked as a marketing and finance manager and finally as the company's chief financial officer, until he was fired after a business dispute with his superior in 1999; his chief responsibility had been selling BAT brands in Colombia. My NOW co-producer Oriana Zill and I were the first American journalists to speak with Solagnier, whom we filmed at his home in Aruba.

Solagnier says that BAT was integrally involved in setting the pricing, organizing distribution routes and marketing of cigarettes to the company's distributors at a time when, he says, "95 percent of it [BAT's cigarettes] was contraband." ROMAR itself, Solagnier explained, was set up with financing from BAT, in partnership with an Aruban businessman, Roy Harms, specifically to sell to the Colombian market when the bulk of BAT imports were smuggled into the country. (After a lengthy legal battle in which Solagnier and Harms traded accusations about financial mismanagement, an Aruban court ordered Harms to pay Solagnier more than $400,000 in severance pay, a figure for which Harms was reimbursed by BAT's London headquarters.)

Solagnier explained that during the years 1994-96, most of BAT's cigarettes were sold by ROMAR in Maicao "on consignment," meaning that while ROMAR handled the distribution, the cigarettes were owned by BAT when they were sold in Maicao. He recalls going on trips with BAT officials to assess the placement of the cigarettes, to determine their credit needs and to assess local demand. After studying the preferences of Colombian smokers, Solagnier says that BAT even designed a special cigarette package for its Belmont brand, which was produced by the company's Venezuelan subsidiary, Bigott, with a hinge lid on a hard-box pack, distinguished from the soft packs sold in Venezuela. BAT was promoting Belmont as competition for Philip Morris products. "They knew that all these cigarettes were being smuggled," he says.

Solagnier also explains that in the early 1990s, BAT and Philip Morris discovered the benefits of selling at least a small portion of their cigarettes legally, with full duties paid. Thus, reference to distinctions between "DP" (Duty Paid) and "DNP" (Duty Not Paid) begin to appear in both companies' internal documents. On April 16, 1992, a fax sent from BAT's British headquarters to its branch office in Venezuela indicated the company's growing sensitivity to attention being paid to contraband. In the memo, the executive asks whether the company could continue "with DP and DNP in parallel and be seen as a clean and ethical company at the same time." [underline in original] "Can we really do all this and continue DNP," he adds.

Translation: The company was interested in whether it would be beneficial to pursue legal imports along with its existing illegal imports. The answer, as shown by company documents and import statistics, was: yes. Both BAT and Philip Morris gradually began increasing the number of legitimately imported cigarettes--while the flood of smuggled cigarettes continued. Solagnier says that this dual system came to be known as the "umbrella"--a system of providing legal cover for advertising and marketing a product the bulk of which continued to be smuggled.

And the advertising was, by the mid-1990s, everywhere. In magazines, at sporting events, on billboards, ads for American cigarettes seemed more abundant than they are here in the United States, where ever-tighter restrictions have been placed on the tobacco companies' ability to advertise. At the same time, the companies launched a particularly cynical ploy--pressuring Colombian government officials to lower taxes on cigarettes as a means of reducing the incentive for smuggling. José Manuel Arias, director of the Colombian Federation of Departments, says that representatives of Philip Morris and BAT lobbied the state and national governments to lower Colombia's relatively hefty taxes on cigarette imports.

Their efforts paid off. According to Dr. Diego Roselli, a professor of pediatrics at Javieriana University in Bogotá and former chairman of the Colombian Council Against Cancer, the country saw a drop in cigarette tariffs from 125 percent to 45 percent in the mid-1990s. But the dramatic tax cut had a negligible impact on smuggling. Cigarettes continued to pour through the smuggling pipeline, selling for a little over a dollar a pack, just a quarter more than cigarettes produced in Colombia. At the same time, the tobacco companies gradually increased the amount of legal imports, where the margins were slimmer, but where they now enjoyed a lower tax rate and still obtained critical cover for advertising and other marketing activities.


Turning Off the Tap

The week in late November when I arrived in La Guajira, trouble was brewing. The government had initiated a crackdown on contraband: The previous weekend, Maicao traders attacked the warehouse of Colombian customs (DIAN) in the town, looting it of all the goods that the DIAN had confiscated in the previous weeks, including cartons of cigarettes. The director of DIAN, Ricardo Ramirez Acuna, would later explain that an "arrangement" had been struck in which the companies agreed to assist the customs service in insuring that their cigarettes traveled through legal channels.

While Colombian officials see this as good news, they also say that it is a strong indication of how deeply the companies have been involved in the smuggling enterprise. When they decided to turn off the tap, off it went.

As a result, however, the Way'uu, long accustomed to being the transport mules of the contraband business, now feel betrayed by Philip Morris. For the first time, they were willing to speak publicly about the longtime relationship they had with Philip Morris during more than a decade of boom times, fueled partly by the cigarette company's nicotine contraband.

"We feel betrayed by Philip Morris because the Way'uu were the ones to bring the Marlboro cigarettes from the Caribbean islands into Colombia," asserts Alvaro Iguaran, a Way'uu lawyer and legal adviser. "Philip Morris sent their cigarettes through Maicao.... The Way'uu's were the ones who distributed the cigarettes and showed them to the rest of the country. Once the market was established, now they leave us and go elsewhere."

With the crackdown on smuggling, unemployment among the Way'uu in La Guajira has jumped 20 percent. "Philip Morris should build us a hospital and some schools," argues Iguaran, who doesn't want to wait for the lawsuit to be resolved. "They should do this on their own, and not just because of this legal case!"

Iguaran's plea is echoed in the comments of Ingrid Betancourt, a former congresswoman and senator running as an independent for president on an anticorruption platform. "Philip Morris pushed enormous quantities of cigarettes through Maicao into all of Latin America," she told me last November in Bogotá. (Betancourt was kidnapped by the FARC guerrillas in February and remains in custody.) "If the Way'uu don't do contraband, they starve.... Philip Morris has poured millions of dollars into a new NGO they created to promote the culture, dances, folklore of Colombia. Fine. But what about the Way'uu?"

Reflecting on BAT and Philip Morris's deal with the Colombian authorities, Alex Solagnier comments: "They know they got caught.... Now they want to cooperate to combat something they initiated and organized. They invented it. And the question is not what they're going to do now, but what did they do to create this problem?"


Drug-Money Laundromat

In addition to cultivating the dependence of the Way'uu, the tobacco companies helped lubricate corrupt political and financial empires in Colombia. "You could say that Philip Morris has been influencing the political parties in La Guajira and Colombia for decades," comments Lucho Gomez, former mayor of Riohacha, the La Guajira state capital. Gomez has been the nemesis of an entrenched political machine run by a former senator from the state, Santo Lopesierra, a veteran political boss notorious for his connection to smugglers and commonly known in Colombia as "the Marlboro Man."

The Colombian newsmagazine Semana reported that representatives of Philip Morris's Colombian distributors, the Aruba-based Mansur family, met with Ernesto Samper during his 1994 presidential campaign and gave him more than $500,000. The Conservative Party of current President Andres Pastrana has ties to the industry too: Among several top officials with links to Philip Morris is the company's longtime lobbyist and attorney, Martha Lucia Ramirez, now minister of foreign trade.

Despite strong opposition from many in the Colombian political and economic elite, in the late 1990s the DIAN conducted an investigation and concluded that the boom in smuggling was tied to vast amounts of cash being generated by drug sales in the United States. The US Drug Enforcement Administration shared the Colombians' concern, as did other US law enforcement agencies. "In our undercover operations," Edward Guillen, chief of financial operations at the DEA's Washington headquarters, told us at NOW, "we started to find that what we initially might have thought were straw corporations...were actually involved in genuine commerce, actually buying goods, be they television sets or cigarettes...and then those goods were ultimately smuggled into Colombia."

Carlos Ronderos was minister of foreign trade from 1994 to 1998, during Samper's presidency. At a time when the US government was launching an offensive against the Colombian government for the smuggling northward of cocaine, Ronderos began pressuring the US government to rein in Philip Morris's southbound smuggling enterprise. Ronderos, interviewed in Bogotá, recalled a meeting in 1998 that he arranged with then-US Ambassador Myles Frechette, the US front man on the drug war: "I told him that you can't ask Colombia to stop the flow of cocaine if you are not willing to stop the flow of cigarettes and other goods used to launder the money from the sale of that cocaine." Frechette, according to Ronderos, rejected his plea, responding that "'it was purely a customs problem for Colombia.' And I felt like saying, 'OK, well drugs are just a customs problem for the United States.'"

He didn't say that, but after Frechette's rebuff, Ronderos went straight to Washington with his complaint. The Washington representative for the Colombian Trade Office, Carlos Acevedo--who is now working as one of the lead attorneys on the Colombian lawsuit--invited US money-laundering experts to review the government's files in Bogotá. In February 1998--at the height of the Clinton Administration's efforts to isolate the Samper government--a five-person team, including specialists in money laundering from the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement unit (FinCen), the IRS and Customs came to Bogotá to investigate the allegations.

Al James, a top FinCen agent at the time in charge of money-laundering investigations and chief organizer of the US inquiry, has fond memories of that trip. "Ronderos was a real gentleman," he commented in a telephone interview. "He opened up everything to us, both the good and the bad stuff. We worked real well together." The joint investigation began to put into high relief a critical aspect of the narcotics trade: the means by which narco-dollars from the United States were channeled into the purchase of US goods such as cigarettes. Those goods were transferred through Caribbean tax havens and ultimately sold to Colombian consumers for pesos as part of a complex money-laundering chain that came to be known as the Black Market Peso Exchange. James became chairman of a multiagency task force known as the Black Market Peso Exchange Working Group. "We began to understand," says James, "that what they were calling contraband smuggling was actually the other side of narcotics money laundering."

During his trip to Bogotá, James met with top Philip Morris executives to express his concerns about money laundering. "I warned them when we were in Colombia," he says. The officials told him that they had nothing to do with the cigarettes once they reached Colombian shores. James had similar meetings with other companies back in the States, informing them of the potential use of their products for drug-money-laundering purposes. Most, he says, responded by taking precautionary measures and instituting tighter surveillance of their sales operations. But not, says James, Philip Morris: "The evidence [of smuggling] started to seem pretty clear to me. Philip Morris had a 'legitimate' sales office in Bogotá. But they were losing millions of dollars if you looked at their legal sales. They spent more on advertising than they were making out of legitimate cigarette sales. They told me they were spending the ad money to sustain the legitimate sales. Bullshit!" Phillip Morris refused to respond to these allegations directly, but in an e-mailed statement declared, "Philip Morris does not condone money laundering; nor do our business practices facilitate it." The company states that it has instituted "know your customer" policies suggested by US law enforcement and has stopped accepting cash or third party check payments, which could be used for laundering drug money.


Taking It to Court

US law enforcement has little leverage over US corporations overseas, and no legal action was taken against the cigarette companies. In May 2000, frustrated by the continuing flow of smuggled cigarettes into the country, twenty-two Colombian states and the city of Bogotá filed a lawsuit against Philip Morris and BAT in New York federal court, alleging various violations of US law, including fraud, smuggling, money laundering and contraventions of the RICO act. The suit accuses the companies of "orchestrating and profiting from" the smuggling of cigarettes on a massive scale. It alleges that the companies were involved in shipping and distributing cigarettes that evaded customs duties and other taxes; that they disguised and moved the ill-gotten profits back to the United States, which constituted money laundering; and that cigarette smuggling was used in the laundering of Colombian drug profits. It was, says José Manuel Arias and other Colombian officials, the publicity from the lawsuit that prompted the cigarette companies to strike the deal with DIAN and stanch the flow of cigarettes passing illegally into Maicao. (Putting further pressure on the companies, last year the Colombian Congress passed a law mandating that their advertising expenditures cannot exceed the amount of their legal imports.)

According to Arias, Philip Morris lobbied every Colombian governor against signing on to the lawsuit, to little avail. But the company's lobbying of the national government did bear fruit: President Pastrana refused to sign on the national government, even though millions of dollars yearly in customs duties were allegedly diverted from the national treasury. (As it happened, back in Washington, Philip Morris emerged as one of the few nonmilitary companies to lobby heavily on behalf of Plan Colombia when it was winding its way through Congress.)

Six months after the Colombian filing, the European Union and ten European governments sued Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds on essentially the same grounds. Last August, after a federal court judge ruled that the EU was an inappropriate body to bring the suit, it was refiled by the ten European countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Italy.

While technically distinct, the Colombian and European cases are being argued in parallel. The cases are the first in which a phalanx of foreign governments are pitted against a trio of corporate powerhouses, and will be a significant test of whether US corporations can be held accountable when they run afoul of US and foreign law in their overseas operations. At a time when the fates of national economies are ever more intertwined, the cases promise to establish important precedents in the realm of international law governing corporations. "We are looking," says attorney Carlos Acevedo, "for the legal system to embrace the challenges of the modern globalized economy, in which production and distribution facilities have been flung far and wide across the globe."

In the long run, the companies could face repercussions from this legal offensive that are even more severe than the historic $200 billion-plus settlement with the US states of four years ago. That legal crusade hinged on the companies' knowledge of the harmful effects of cigarettes. This time, the companies could face not only hundreds of millions in damages but criminal charges for smuggling and money laundering.

Thus far, the plaintiffs have suffered some setbacks. On February 19 a district court judge found in favor of the companies' argument that a common-law precedent dating from the eighteenth century, known as the "revenue rule," prevents US courts from adjudicating disputes over uncollected foreign taxes. On March 25 the Europeans and Colombians announced their intention to appeal that decision. The judge didn't block them from pursuing the case on the money-laundering allegations, which they intend to do in a separate filing. But the plaintiffs' prospects would now be considerably brighter if the tobacco companies had not engineered an audacious reshaping of the USA Patriot Act to prevent them from acquiring a potent new legal tool.


Patriot Games

Roused into action by the terrorist attacks on September 11, Congress rushed to tighten US laws governing money laundering and smuggling and to require transparency among financial institutions in order to strike at the means by which terrorists generate funds through illicit financial enterprises. In the original House version of the Patriot Act, introduced on October 3, and then known as the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act, Section 107(b) expanded the definition of money laundering to include "fraud or any scheme to defraud against a foreign government or foreign government entity, if such conduct would constitute a violation of this title if it were committed in interstate commerce in the United States." The Justice Department had asked for that section to strengthen its hand in pursuing legal prosecutions for money laundering--but the section would also have established the jurisdiction of US courts over precisely the sort of activity of which the tobacco companies now stand accused.

At the time, the tobacco companies were facing legal assaults on several fronts. The government of Canada was preparing to appeal a lower-court decision that threw out its case accusing RJ Reynolds of evading $1 billion in taxes by smuggling cigarettes into Canada. And the Colombian and European RICO cases were on the docket at federal district court in New York. The provision would have provided clear legal standing to the plaintiffs in those lawsuits. But on October 11, with the country still reeling from the attacks one month before, GOP Representative Michael Oxley of Ohio, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, undermined the Justice Department's original request and removed the provision before the committee hearing. He undertook that maneuver at the behest of the White House, according to a Congressional source close to the negotiations.

"The tobacco companies didn't care that in striking that provision they might have opened the American people to greater risk of a terrorist attack and funding terrorist groups that might attack our own people," comments Congressman Henry Waxman, a leading antagonist of the tobacco industry in Congress. "They wanted to make sure that that provision would not have been interpreted to give standing to these foreign countries." Philip Morris does not dispute the latter point, but in a letter insisted the changes were supported by "the business community at large," which has long been concerned with such matters of foreign liability, and vigorously denied that the change would hamper "the government's ability to bring suits to combat terrorism."

According to one Waxman staffer, in Congress the tobacco companies took a "belt and suspender" approach to the Patriot Act in an effort to insulate their international operations from legal challenges in US courts. The "belt"--Section 107(b)--was what Oxley removed from the act. The "suspenders" came late at night on October 16, when Chairman Oxley inserted a provision in the bill after it had been debated and approved by the full committee. Oxley's addendum specifically blocked any expansion of jurisdiction for US courts to hear civil claims for damages from foreign nations seeking compensation for violations by US corporations of foreign tax laws. The measure had the support of the White House and the top Republican leadership, including House majority leader Tom DeLay, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. On the morning of the 17th--an infamous day, as the anthrax scare jumped from the Senate to the House, where members prepared to evacuate--the Financial Anti-Terrorist Act passed overwhelmingly in the House, including the new provision that would get the companies off the hook.

But staff aides to Waxman and Massachusetts Democrat Martin Meehan caught wind of the change. They alerted the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, which concluded in a memo that the only relevance of the provision was to "the...currently pending lawsuits...brought by Canada, the European Union and several Latin American countries...against major U.S. cigarette companies.... And the only future lawsuits likely to be affected would be similar lawsuits directed at the U.S. cigarette companies' involvement with international cigarette smuggling."

When the bill reached the Senate, there was outrage at what Senator Patrick Leahy described as the attempted "carve-out of tobacco companies from RICO liability for foreign excise taxes." Senator Paul Sarbanes, chairman of the Banking Committee, removed the offending passage from the bill. On the day it passed the Senate, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a longtime advocate of tighter money-laundering laws, introduced a statement into the Congressional Record clarifying that the law could be used to pursue the sort of legal challenges now faced by the tobacco companies: "It is the intent of the legislature that our allies will have unimpeded access to our courts and the use of our laws if they are the victims of smuggling, fraud, money laundering or terrorism." On October 26, the Patriot Act was signed by President Bush without Oxley's language.

While the "suspenders" in the tobacco industry's offensive were gone, however, the "belt" remained--a narrowed definition of money laundering that denied future and current plaintiffs against the tobacco industry an important legal instrument. "What was left out," says an infuriated Waxman aide, "was far more important than what was not put in." As Richard Daynard, director of the Tobacco Litigation Center at Northeastern University, says, "The bill as originally drafted would have made the tobacco companies a lot more vulnerable to the [money laundering] charges."

As in Colombia, those who argued on behalf of the tobacco industry were also major recipients of the industry's largesse: A report by the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids reveals that Republicans received 82 percent of the more than $18 million that the tobacco industry has poured into political campaigns since 1997. Oxley himself has received $34,300 from the tobacco industry since 1999, both for his political campaigns and his PAC, Leadership 2000, and he held a party at the 2000 Republican convention that was paid for partly by Philip Morris.


The Globalization of Smuggling

With an annual turnover of some $400 billion, tobacco is one of the world's largest industries. Across the globe, there are stories similar to that of the Way'uu and Philip Morris: "mules" who have helped put four tobacco companies in control of 70 percent of the world market. Smuggling insulates the companies from national controls to limit cigarette consumption--which the World Health Organization warns will cause another 10 million deaths by 2030. Wherever smuggling occurs, the pattern, says Luk Joossens, a consultant to the International Union Against Cancer and member of the Belgian delegation to the WHO, is the same: "If you have high tariffs or a state [tobacco] monopoly, they smuggle to get into the market, weaken the state monopolies, and lead the market into the hands of the multinationals."

Smuggling has also become a big-time criminal activity. The European Union's Anti-Fraud Office, which has investigated cigarette smuggling in conjunction with the national police forces of Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere, claims that organized crime is increasingly a major player in what has become a multibillion-dollar business. In Montenegro last December, the Parliament held a series of explosive hearings on allegations raised by a Croatian newsweekly, Nacional, that Montenegro's President, Milo Djukanovic, has ties to cigarette smugglers linked to the Italian Mafia. In August the Iranian health ministry released statistics indicating that up to two-thirds of all cigarettes in the country had been smuggled. As part of its legal complaint, the European Union introduced evidence in February indicating that the profits from smuggling have gone to finance terrorist groups in Iraq and elsewhere. Here in the United States, four Arab immigrants confessed in early March to sending the profits from cigarette smuggling back to Hezbollah contacts in Lebanon; another fourteen people will be going on trial in Charlotte, North Carolina, this spring on the same charges, which now, according to the FBI, include "aiding and abetting a terrorist organization."

The World Health Organization has come to see smuggling as a major public health issue, asserting that it incapacitates one of government's best weapons for lowering tobacco consumption: high taxes. The WHO puts forth a simple calculation: More smuggling equals cheaper cigarettes equals more smokers, which means more smoking-related illnesses and deaths. According to the World Bank, if the price of cigarettes were to increase just 10 percent--which could be mandated through taxation--an estimated 40 million people would quit smoking worldwide.

At a meeting in Geneva March 18-23, representatives from WHO's 191 member states began finalizing plans for a Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which would become the first international public health treaty. Proposals include measures to combat smuggling by requiring that tobacco companies mark each cigarette pack with a clear electronic code identifying its origins and destination; licensing all parties involved in cigarette distribution; and eliminating duty-free sales, which is a primary means of skimming off tax-free cigarettes into national markets.

The tobacco industry has been fighting those provisions, as well as others proposed by the WHO. Representative Waxman charges that the Bush Administration's delegation has been trying to weaken the organization's effort to limit tobacco consumption and contraband. In a letter to President Bush last November, Waxman accused his negotiators of embracing ten out of eleven changes to the convention proposed by Philip Morris, which had expressed opposition to the strongest of the anti-smuggling measures as well as controls on cigarette advertising, and even a proposal insuring that health warning labels appear in the language of the country of destination. A follow-up meeting on the issues raised in Geneva will be held in New York in July under the aegis of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The tobacco companies refused repeatedly to be interviewed for this article. A spokesman for BAT, David Betteridge in London, said that the company would not comment on anything relating to smuggling, due to an ongoing investigation by the British Department of Trade and Industry. In December the company stated publicly that it would "apply even more stringent criteria" to its international distribution system to counter smuggling, and shortly thereafter BAT issued a statement that it was revising its projected earnings downward for the coming year. Philip Morris's director for public communication, John Sorrells, e-mailed me a statement on March 22, which reads, in part, that "Philip Morris does not condone, facilitate or support the smuggling of cigarettes and cooperates with governments in their efforts to prevent an illegal trade in the products we manufacture. We have taken significant steps, both internally and in cooperation with foreign governments, to prevent the smuggling of our products." The company also indicated that it now agrees with several measures proposed by the World Health Organization and foreign governments "to prevent cigarette smuggling," including "licensing of distribution chains" and "marking of duty-free products" intended to make it easier to track contraband cigarettes.

Clearly, the companies are uneasy about the lawsuits still winding their way through the US court system. At a court hearing on the case last January, Philip Morris's attorney, Irvin Nathan of Arnold & Porter, expressed the company's dismay. "We are a public corporation," Nathan stated to the court. "It is unfair to us to have to be engaged in discussions about terrorism and money laundering. To have to put that in our disclosure documents is misleading to our shareholders."

As for the Way'uu, Alvaro Iguaran says: "The biggest social debt Philip Morris has is with us, the Way'uu. We showed Colombia and Venezuela that Marlboros existed...they used us because we opened their markets. And after their markets were opened, they didn't need us anymore. They owe us a lot of money."


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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 6:54 PM

Delayed Justice for War Criminal!!! See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Garzon may make Kissinger think twice before travelling
By Flora Botsford in Madrid BBC website

The Spanish judge, Balthazar Garzon, has asked Interpol for information about a scheduled visit to London by the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, next week.

Mr Kissinger is a new target for the man known in Spain as Super Judge, as he continues his personal crusade against what he describes as international terrorism.


Kissinger: Witness, but maybe also suspect

Specifically, Judge Garzon wants to investigate what Mr Kissinger and the US Government knew about a plot in the 1970s, known as Operation Condor.

In this operation six former Latin American dictatorships - Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay - agreed to assassinate each other's political opponents.

They secretly planned a co-ordinated effort to kidnap and kill hundreds of exiled men and women.

Approach to UK

Judge Garzon cites Mr Kissinger as a witness in his case against the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. p>

He has asked the London office of Interpol to confirm whether Mr Kissinger plans to visit Britain next week as scheduled.

If the answer is yes, Judge Garzon intends to ask the British authorities for permission to interview him.

No formal charges

A French judge has made a similar request, although neither France nor Spain has laid formal charges against Mr Kissinger.

It is probably fair to say that Judge Garzon's case against General Pinochet, even if it was not successful, has changed the course of legal history.

As one human rights campaigner in the US said, Mr Kissinger is now one of many officials around the world who have to think twice before they travel.

With a trial of General Pinochet himself increasingly unlikely even in Chile, victims are now pressing claims against Mr Kissinger and US officials who supported military dictatorships in Latin America in the early 1970s.
See
13 Sep 00 | Europe
Judge Garzon: Spain's most famous investigator
10 Dec 01 | Europe
Spanish 'superjudge' targets terror
17 Jan 00 | Europe
Call for more Pinochet tests
01 Sep 00 | Americas
Argentine charged with genocide
19 Apr 01 | Europe
Spanish judge moves against Berlusconi
Yugoslav general 'ready to surrender'
US steel tarrifs row escalates
Milan crash pilot 'a desperate man'
Russia escapes Chechen blame
Bosnia ethnic rights reforms imposed






accesswater2030@yahoo.com 5:18 PM

Destroying Our Rights by Making Up New Laws to Persecute and Prosecute Terrorism

April 21, 2002
U.S. Weighing New Doctrine For Tribunals
By NEIL A. LEWIS
ASHINGTON, April 20 — Uncertain about how they will be able to prosecute many of the nearly 300 prisoners detained at a naval base in Cuba, Bush administration officials are considering a new legal doctrine that would allow prisoners to be brought before military tribunals without specific evidence that they engaged in war crimes.

The new approach would make it an offense to have been a senior member or officer of a Qaeda unit that was involved in any of the regular crimes of war, like mistreatment of civilians.

One administration official said the effort came out of increasing uneasiness that the interrogations of the prisoners, who were taken from Afghanistan to the naval base at Guántanamo Bay, had not yielded enough information to charge very many with traditional war crimes.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the questioning was going slowly and the prisoners were largely uncooperative. No one, the official said, has confessed to any atrocity or violation of the laws of war. Nor, the official added, have the interrogators had much success in getting prisoners to provide information that could be used against other captives.

Another official said the new approach would allow military prosecutors to charge some captives even without evidence from witnesses or documents that they committed war crimes.

"It could be enough to show that they were part of a group and furthered its aims," this official said.

"They would be shown," the official said, "to be a part of a group that did things like killing civilians and noncombatants, attacked targets with no military value or took or killed hostages" — the traditional roster of war crimes. "Also engaging in torture," the official said.


Officials said the legal mechanism for charging someone with being a member of a Qaeda unit involved in crimes was not complete but would probably be detailed in a document to guide military prosecutors.

Administration lawyers have already begun work on the issue, officials said, and expect that their efforts will produce the document, which would be formally issued by the Defense Department.

Prof. Detlev Vagts of the Harvard Law School, an authority on the law of war, said the government appeared to be trying to build a military version of the civilian charge of conspiracy.

In the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the Allies declared the Nazi special police, the SS, a criminal organization. But Professor Vagts said that, in the end, no one was ever charged simply on the basis of membership in the SS.

People were usually prosecuted for war crimes on testimony by witnesses or, in the case of senior officials, on the extensive records the Nazi authorities kept. No equivalent documentation exists in Afghanistan.

The unease about what to do with the prisoners is occurring after the administration, notably the Defense Department, spent considerable effort drafting regulations for the military tribunals. A government lawyer said White House officials were becoming increasingly concerned that the tribunals, authorized despite great criticism, might not be put to much use.

That seems unlikely now, officials said, with the capture in Pakistan last month of Abu Zubaydah, believed to be the director of operations for Al Qaeda and thus the highest-ranking official of that organization in United States custody. Mr. Zubaydah, Justice Department officials have said, is a near-ideal candidate for a tribunal trial.

One official said the major unanswered question was whether the military would seek the death penalty for Mr. Zubaydah, an issue to be deferred until he is interrogated and his cooperation is evaluated.

Officials said the administration's new doctrine was being fashioned to create an offense different from what lawyers call a status crime. The Supreme Court has rejected status crimes, in which it is an offense merely to be a member of a group, like the Communist Party.

The new doctrine, lawyers said, is an effort to comply with rulings that require not only membership in a group but also some identifiable connection to its aims. In this case, the new guidance would probably require a finding that a prisoner was not only a member of Al Qaeda but also that he furthered its aims.

Although the Defense Department's regulations do not provide for review of tribunal verdicts by civilian courts, lawyers for people convicted by the tribunals are certain to ask federal courts to intervene. That is probably one reason the new guidance appears to consider Supreme Court precedents in similar cases.

After World War II, for example, the court upheld a conviction by a military tribunal of a Japanese commander whose troops committed atrocities in Manila while he was elsewhere in the Philippines.



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 3:07 PM

England's Dirty Little Secrets

Accelerated History?
Whitehall & the Press since 1945


Peter Hennessy's James Cameron Lecture 2000 Posted 22nd November 2000 It's a pleasure and an honour to be here. An honour because of the specialness of James Cameron. I only saw him in action once - at a Labour Party Conference in the early 1970s during my very first year as a journalist. I think it was at a fringe meeting in Blackpool - in that remote fastness, the Norbreck Hydro Hotel. I'm pretty sure the theme was an international one. But all I can remember about it is James Cameron's presence such was his aura to a rookie like me. The pleasure comes from two sources: the sight of old and new colleagues from journalism and academic life before me; and, secondly, this evening's occasion being an element in the new partnership between City University and Queen Mary made gloriously manifest last month by the arrival of the first cohort of students taking our pioneering, joint undergraduate degree in Journalism and Contemporary History. My theme this evening links those worlds - open government, Whitehall, the Press and history. I do hope James Cameron would approve. I like to think so because he could very funny in his columns about what he memorably called the ' Defenders of the Face ' among those set in authority above his. He knew very well that the highest unofficial classification level in the Whitehall lexicon was and remains ' Politically Embarrassing.' When pondering a new piece, historians begin by reaching for the founding file in the archive; journalists start by hunting for the first good story from behind the scenes. May I open with an episode that satisfies the joint cravings which flow from the streams of my professional life ? Come with me to Mr Attlee's No.10 Downing Street and the Cabinet Office in the spring of 1946 and let us reconstruct the first really serious Whitehall leak inquiry of the post-war years. What ghastly breach of security had triggered it ? Two related pieces in The Times of 25 March 1946 on the future on the iron and steel industry. The paper's 'City Notes' of that day, rather than the news story filed by its Parliamentary Correspondent ( anonymous as all Times people were until 1966 ), gives the flavour of the item and the special offence it caused within Government circles. The intro itself has a wonderful period flavour:

' The question whether the iron and steel industry is to be nationalised or not came up to the Cabinet for discussion for the first time on Thursday. It may thus be an appropriate moment to review the progress of this controversial question.'

Quite so. John Wilmot, the Minister of Supply, had drawn up a paper on the pros and cons which, said The Times, 'reported generally in favour of nationalisation. This report came before the special Cabinet economic sub-committee presided over by Mr Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council...Mr Morrison's committee, presumably finding itself in some uncertainty, neither endorsed nor rejected Mr Wilmot's report. The whole question was, it is understood, passed up to the Cabinet itself for decision without prejudice and without recommendation.' The secret and sacred world of the Cabinet committee system had been breached. Sir Norman Brook, the formidable Secretary of the Cabinet, swung into action and he set off from Whitehall to Printing House Square in Blackfriars to confront the Editor of The Times personally with this affront to the interests of the state and good ( ie private ) government. As Brook reported later to the Prime Minister, Clem Attlee:

' Mr Barrington Ward was in Germany when the article was published and I went to see him on 1st April, the first day after his return to London. I told him that I had come on my own initiative and not at the suggestion of Ministers: that I had not come to ask from whom the information had been obtained: but I had thought it wrong to let this article pass without letting him know that we, as officials serving the Cabinet, thought that the publication in the Press of such details of Cabinet organisation ( the membership of particular committees, which Ministers had attended a particular meeting, etc ) were a hindrance to the efficient discharge of public business.'

And how did the Editor of The Times react ? Did he run through his head the words penned in 1852 by John Thaddeus Delane, his fabled predecessor in the Editor's chair, which declared that: 'The duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian - to seek out the truth, above all things, and to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it.' No, he did not. Far from politely telling the Cabinet Secretary to push off, Barrington Ward, as Brook put it,

' appreciated my point, and agreed that " there were things which were necessary to the news and things that were not." Would I leave it to him to look into the matter ? I said that, having made my comment, I was quite content to leave it at that.'

Days of innocence and deference. Whitehall, however, did not leave the matter there. The Lord Chancellor, no less, conducted a leak inquiry at the Cabinet's request. Lord Jowett found 'strong grounds for believing that the "Times" article...was based on information derived, either directly or indirectly, from officials in the Ministry of Supply who were familiar with the course of the Ministerial discussions on the subject. But the relations between Ministry of Supply and the Iron and Steel Federation are necessarily so close that it is not surprising that some information reached the Press.' As a result, the Lord Chancellor advised the Prime Minister there should be no recourse to a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The file ends with a brisk, Attlee-style Cabinet paper on 'Leakage of Information' stating that the Lord Chancellor would investigate on his behalf 'all future cases on apparent leakage of official information regarding matters under discussion by the Cabinet or its Committees.' Thanks to John Major's decision in 1992 both to publish the terms of reference and the membership of ministerial Cabinet committees and the ministerial rulebook, Questions of Procedure for Ministers, it is difficult to appreciate fully nowadays the lengths to which ministers and officials went to preserve their 'secret garden' of a Cabinet system in the early post-war years. Just listen to this passage from the first, Attleean consolidated version of Questions of Procedure:

' The underlying principle is, of course, that the method adopted by Ministers for discussion among themselves of questions of policy is essentially a domestic matter, and is of no concern of Parliament or the public.'

Note that 'of course.' These truths were held to be self-evident. And that form of words survived as late as the 1966 version of QPM. Even when I began operating as a Whitehall correspondent in the mid-1970s, the principle of complete privacy of process ( let alone content ) continued to be asserted. Jim Callaghan's 1976 edition of QPM, for example, declared that: 'the method adopted by Ministers for discussing among themselves questions of policy is essentially a domestic matter and such discussion will be hampered if the process by which it is carried on are laid bare.' Jim Callaghan, who I always respected and came to like very much, authorised more than one leak inquiry into my activities when I blew a scattering of his Cabinet committees and ministerial groups. They were normally conducted by a very decent, old-fashioned chap, the late Basil Lock, the Cabinet Office's Security man. He was a former airman who had run RAF Coastal Command. I had his photograph above my desk in The Times building in order, as it were, that he could keep an eye on what I was doing. He never caught one of my helpers. I would usually be leaked the result of his leak inquiries. I grew rather fond of him at a distance. And if for some reason he was not assigned to one of my leak inquiries, I used to make discreet inquires after his health. We have come a long way in 25 years. As I sat down to write this lecture I had before me a copy of the January 2000 edition of the Cabinet Office's Guide to Department's on 'Cabinet Committee Business' - now a quite open document which lists all of Mr Blair's ministerial Cabinet committees and gives you the contact name and number of the Cabinet Office official who services them. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Bruce Page and I used to work ourselves to the bone to extract and publish stuff like this. It would be misleading to suggest that the British press, even its more investigative arms, had pushed hard or consistently throughout the post-war period against what Jimmy Margach of The Sunday Times once called 'the walls of Whitehall's forbidden city.' With a few brave exceptions, the late 1940s and the 1950s saw a depressing spread of the disease of lobbyitis which took root in Westminster in the 1880s when political journalists first organised themselves into a group of lobby correspondents. Francis Williams, the former Editor of the Daily Herald who went into No.10 with Attlee as his Press Secretary, was eloquently and critically accurate about this in his long-forgotten book, 'Parliament, Press and the Public,' which was published in 1946. Williams had worked in the Ministry of Information during World War II and watched with dismay as the lobby contagion spread to other groups of specialist journalists. By the end of the war, he wrote, it was:

' normal practice for some of the big Departments to hold regular background and news conferences with the Press. At these conferences information is sometimes given by the Minister, sometimes by the Public Relations Officer and sometimes by other senior officials of the Ministry. In a number of cases only correspondents belonging to a recognised group, with its own officials and rules, are now invited to these conferences...It is easy to see the advantages of such a system to a Department.'

Williams touched on the ever-present temptation to collude and the price of such collusion:

' Such a system also means that the newspaper correspondents concerned give up much of their independence. Some of them tend to depend so largely on official sources for information and to develop such obligations to the officials with whom they work, that they become mouthpieces of authority, taking their "line" from the Minister...'

There is nothing new in 'spin.' There were, Williams concluded, people of ability and independent judgement among the press corps who took their own line. But 'their presence does not alter the general principle that anything which ties newspapers too closely to official sources of news, or sets up obligations which may conflict with a newspaper's primary responsibility to the public, is a bad system and ought not to exist.' Amen to all of that. The lobby is now both a much diminished and a more transparent phenomenon, but the Williams' critique still has bite in terms of the turn-of-the-century version of a dependency culture in which the spinners and the spun currently operate. No.10 press people in any generation rarely relish the awkward squad who rub up against the cosy and the collusive. Just listen to this brief provided for Attlee's successor in No.10, Winston Churchill, in the autumn of 1954. At issue was the question of which minister should be the regular briefer of the lobby correspondents, Lord Swinton or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rab Butler. Such things were way beneath the ken of the Prime Minister who preferred to deal with the Press Lords directly rather than dally with any jobbing journalist. As a result, an idiot's brief on lobby practice had to be prepared for the grand old man by Fife Clark, Director-General of the Central Office of Information into which the Ministry of Information had mutated at the end of the war. Swinton, Fife Clark told Churchill, had been the Lobby correspondents' 'friend and advocate for two and a half years and the Lobby are very grateful to him, just as they have become very fond of him personally. Their gratitude has been expressed not once but many times in the secrecy of the Lobby Room.' This is more masonry than journalism. 'Three years ago,' Clark continued, 'Ministers were not so sure that they could "trust the lobby." Now they know they can.' There was, however, a minority among the ranks of the Lobby correspondents who sullied this cloying scene. It was, wrote Clark, 'headed by Derek Marks and Robert Carvel of the Daily Express, but it is fair to say that this group is dissident on most issues and it would not be easy for any Minister to provide them, week in week out, storm or calm, with all the news they think they ought to have.' There you have it - the expectation of a master/mendicant relationship which only the rough trade on the Beaverbrook press cut up about. Not the slightest trace of Delane's dictum there let alone more modern notions of a right to know. In fact, it took another half-generation before Whitehall began to address the possibility that there might be a case for substantially greater press and public access to official information. The declassified records suggest that it needed the 1968 Fulton Report on the Civil Service, and the glancing blow it struck in the twentieth of its 22 recommendations suggesting a further inquiry was needed into 'ways and means of getting rid of unnecessary secrecy both in policy-making and administration,' to provide the momentum for an examination of the virtues and the perils of a deliberately created increase in openness. The first post-Fulton stab at an openness policy has been generally overlooked during the thirty or so years since, partly because it resulted in a truly feeble White Paper, 'Information and the Public Interest,' published in June 1969. This concluded lamely that 'There would be the greatest difficulty in defining satisfactorily what categories of information should qualify for...special protection and what should not,' adding the breathtakingly complacent gloss that the public and Parliament should not be worried about the Official Secrets Acts as they did not 'inhibit the authorised release of information in any way.' 'Information and the Public Interest' swiftly became overshadowed by the intellectually robust and impressively coherent Franks Report on Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act commissioned by the Heath Government in 1971, which was published in 1972 and eventually formed the basis of the narrower, more defensible Official Secrets Act of 1989. Harold Wilson's No.10 file which traces the road from Fulton to the mouse of a White Paper a year later, was declassified this January. It turned out to be a revealing little gem on what, following Robinson and Gallagher's terminology, might be called the 'official mind' of official secrecy. Wilson to his credit combined in a bizarre fashion an opener's temperament with a paranoia about leaks to which the Public Record Office files frequently and vividly attest. Yet but for his personal insistence, it is most unlikely that the 50-Year Rule would have been reduced to 30 by the Public Records Act, 1967. In this sense, Wilson could be called the political patron of the boom in contemporary British history which has resounded with increasing resonance since the 30-Year Rule came into force in 1972, not least thanks to the press attention new batches of files now routinely attract when made available at the Public Record Office in Kew. Initially post-Fulton, Wilson 'had doubted whether there would be much of a demand for a review of the [ Official Secret ] Acts' but he had been struck by a speech delivered by Ted Heath, then Leader of the Opposition, at the Granada press awards in January 1969 ( during which Heath pledged that once elected his Government would review existing official secrets legislation as 'politicians should make it possible for the media to improve the level of political discussion by reducing and eliminating the obstacles that stand in their way.') Never one to be outbid by the competition, Wilson declared in a speech a week or so later during a dinner in the Savoy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Sunday Express that the following the Fulton recommendation,

'the whole question of the release of official information, including the Official Secrets Act, should now be under consideration.'

All sorts of grand people were considered for the chairmanship of a committee of inquiry into secrecy. Wilson suggested the former Labour minister, Bert Bowden ( by this stage ennobled as Lord Aylestone ) but his Principal Private Secretary, Michael Halls, cautioned against this as since Aylestone had left politics to run ITV 'he might well come out with far too liberally minded a report - almost Swedish,' declared Halls as if such a thing was both inconceivable and deeply shocking in a British context. The senior Civil Service, not just Halls, were, in fact, truly alarmed by the possibilities an inquiry might open up. The two great figures of the late 1960s Whitehall - the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, and the Head of the Home Civil Service, Sir William Armstrong - weighed in with a beautifully-crafted brief for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet perfectly designed to make ministerial flesh creep, which moved from one classic fallback position to the next: Just listen to this:

' The Prime Minister may wish to draw the Cabinet's attention to the broad categories of information which are likely to be at issue in this enquiry. The first category consists of factual and statistical information; the chief limitations on the release of more information of this sort are how far there is a real public demand for it and how far Civil Service numbers can be increased to cope with the work of preparing it for publication.'

Fallback number one: nobody really wants it and it'll cost a lot of money if we do it. There's more.

' There is likely to be much greater public interest in the second broad category of influence - the stuff of which policy decisions are made.'

Tricky this. There's evidence here of public demand. Don't worry. Fallback number two takes care of this one. We're satisfying that already: 'By the Green Paper approach, the Government have [sic] extended the process of public consultation...and this process is likely to continue.' Now the coup de grace. Fallback three is deployed - go directly for Ministers' neuroses:

' Many policy decisions, however, are based not only on an assessment of measurable factors but also on a number of subjective judgements on questions such as the influence of other commitments and the reactions of various interests at home and abroad. The publication of a full analysis of the considerations involved in a policy decision may not be practicable or expedient in every case. For example, would Ministers wished to publish such analysis in advance of the decision to go ahead with the development of the Concorde project: or would they now wish to commit themselves to do so in advance of a decision whether to put Concorde into full production.'

This cascade of fallbackery has a malign beauty about it. It's an art form. As always with the best Whitehall breeds, a way out is suggested. And it turned on what James Cameron called the defence of the face:

' An outside enquiry may well produce general recommendations which, if accepted, could restrict the Government's freedom in the process of decision making. Since, however, it seems necessary to meet the public demand for such an enquiry, it is desirable to frame its terms of reference in such a way as to minimise, so far as is possible, the risk of embarrassment.'

This is beyond parody. You could not make it up without risk of being accused of exaggeration. In the event, there was no enquiry, no embarrassing report. The Inner Cabinet ruled it out. That inside job - the puny White Paper - was its surrogate. In 1969, the internal debate was all about the loss of control - and it still is as 31 years later, an emasculated and wrongly-named Freedom of Information Bill goes through its last Parliamentary stages. Wrongly named ? How can that be ? Because FOI and open government are two different things. As Robert Hazell told the House of Commons Public Administrations Committee last year: 'The Government still does not fully understand the difference between open government and freedom of information. Open government means the Government publishing information largely for its own purposes: information that the Government thinks we need to know or might like to know. Freedom of information requires the Government to disclose information which we decide for ourselves we want to know. The distinction has never been better put. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, does not understand this distinction but that's not altogether surprising as he doesn't believe in open government for the Cabinet let alone for the public. But the Home Secretary, Jack Straw does understand the Hazell distinction. For he has admitted privately to the view that 'Freedom of information is for oppositions not for governments,' adding that,' open government is for governments.' So, as a journalist-turned-historian on an awards evening, to which post-war premiers would I grant an openness, if not a freedom of information, prize ? Third place goes to Ted Heath for commissioning the Franks report which showed that the limits to official secrecy could be both narrowed and liberalised. Had he been re-elected in 1974, I am pretty confident he would have legislated in a reformist direction. I have always suspected Mrs Thatcher allowed the 1989 legislation to proceed because, with a streamlined secrets law, juries might, when faced with future Clive Pontings be more readily persuaded to convict. Second place goes to Harold Wilson for the Public Records Act of 1967 and the 30-Year Rule. Think how diminished we historians would be if last January we had eagerly awaited the opening of the 1949 papers rather than those for 1969. First prize - by a clear margin - goes to John Major. Why ? We have already seen how in 1992 he declassified both the ministerial rulebook and the bone structure of the Cabinet committee system. In addition he placed the first properly institutionalised openness regime on a codified, if not a statutory basis in 1993-94 with ( again for the first time ) someone outside the Whitehall loop having a say in disputed disclosure cases in the person of the Parliamentary Ombudsman. Major also had a sense of delayed open government. He backed his public service minister, William Waldegrave, in his drive to re-review and release, if possible, once highly sensitive documents which had been retained beyond the 30-Year norm. As a result of the so-called 'Waldegrave Initiative,' nearly 100,000 files have been released, many of them cold-war related enabling contemporary historians to reconstruct for the first time the secret cold war-state which was grafted on to the existing one for the late 1940s. There is a symbiotic link between past, present and future here - a need for what the Chief Executive of BP, Sir John Browne, has called, 'accelerated history' - that is a proper freedom of information regime with ministers only able to keep policy advice and material under wraps within a carefully circumscribed inner ring of genuinely sensitive matters. Without such a regime, as Sir John Hoskyns pointed out nearly 20 years ago, 'there is no learning-curve' in the government, the press or the country at large. Ted Heath put it splendidly at the Granada Awards Lunch in 1969. 'An open society,' he said, 'is one in which the people, through the Press and television, can have ready access to the information on which they can judge policies and policy makers...The result of unnecessary secrecy is that it exalts the "informed circle", the off-the-record comment and leak. The manipulation of news takes the place of news-gathering.' How familiar that sounds a generation later. If you believe, as Philip Graham did and I do, that the prime function of quality newspapers is to provide 'the first rough draft of history' such matters as public records and freedom of information policies are central to the two professions in which I have spent my adult working life. Whether the current quality press in Britain even aspires to Philip Graham's gold standard is a different question and the subject for quite another lecture. Policy Officer: Andrew Holden 020 8880 6084/ 07799018943 andrew@charter88.org.uk
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Privatization of Violence - Covert Imperialism of Corporations

AMERICA LOSES MILITARY IN BATTLE OF INTRIGUE
MERCENARIES - THE NEW WAVE
Since the end of the so-called Cold War, the traditional East-West military alliances have lost their common purpose resulting in a revolution in military affairs that is redefining military doctrine, structure and armaments. Change is the only constant in this increasingly fluid environment that is producing a number of alarming new trends--one of which is the privatization of military expertise.

After the Cold War the U.S. began to reduce the size of its armed forces. A large number of military personnel-- from enlisted men to top brass--found themselves back in civilian life. Concurrently, small regional conflicts began to multiply at a rapid pace. With the end of superpower rivalries and little U.S. domestic support for involvement in these conflicts, a new market was created for private military consulting. Former generals, admirals and special forces personnel banded together to form private consulting firms, offering their expertise to foreign governments--for a price.

GUNS FOR HIRE
The largest of these firms is Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), a Virginia based corporation that was founded in 1987 by retired Army General Vernon Lewis. MPRI earns about $12 million a year and maintains a data base with the names of 2,000 retired military personnel. Their brochure boasts that they provide "The World's Greatest Corporate Military Expertise." Some of the company's officers and their credentials are as follows:

Lewis, President, was an artilleryman with three combat tours in two wars.
Stiner, a member of the board of directors, used to lead the Joint Special Operations command and personally helped capture the Achille Lauro hijackers in 1985.
Thurman, also a board member, headed the U.S. Southern Command during the Panama invasion and helped develop the modern warfare doctrine.
Kroesen, board chairman, used to command all U.S. forces in Europe.
Vuono, vice-president and general manager, oversaw both the Gulf War and the Panama invasion as army chief of staff.
Hardisty, another board member, served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and headed the U.S. Pacific Command. He also serves on the CIA's military advisory panel.
Trefry, executive vice-president, served as a military assistant to the White House under President Bush.
Soyster, operations chief, is former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
It would not be stretching the truth to say that MPRI houses a collection of some of the most brilliant military tacticians in the world today. This collective brainpower, along with its inherent connections with U.S. and foreign governments, is not a collection of retirees looking for something to do but, rather, represents a major change in the way the Insiders direct the outcome of conflicts around the globe.

U.S. MERCENARY CONNECTION
Military Professional Resources, Inc., as well as other firms, must first get a license from the U.S. State Department before they can be contracted by a foreign government for military consultation. Sometimes they respond at the behest of the State Department as they did in April of 1995 when fighting in the Balkans was at one of its most intense periods. MPRI dispatched a team to Croatia headed by a number of retired generals. They claim to have helped the Croatians "avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations" and "offered advice about the role of the army in a democratic society." Just a few months into their lessons on "democratic values", the Croatian military launched a series of offensives against Serbian forces. The most important was dubbed "Operation Lightning Storm", launched against the Krajina region in which Serbian villages were sacked and burned, hundreds of civilians were killed and 170,000 were left homeless. The operation was a textbook illustration of western military doctrine. "The Croatians did a good job of coordinating armor, artillery and infantry", says Roger Charles, a retired marine lieutenant colonel and military researcher. "That's not something you learn while being instructed about democratic values."

While receiving consultation from MPRI, the bumbling Croatian military was transformed into a modern fighting force that surprised their foes and observers alike with quick choreographed movements of artillery, armor and infantry to flank the Serbs. The entire operation bore the stamp of the minds that created and implemented "Operation Desert Storm." Since American opinion had also been sufficiently choreographed by the national media against the Serbs, the Croatian offensive and MPRI involvement has provoked little or no protest. In fact, the use of private contractors to turn the course of war without endangering the lives of American soldiers may be commended for its shrewdness by some.

PRIVATE WARFARE - THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
Croatia has just signed another contract with Military Professional Resources, Inc. After the Dayton accord was signed, a Pentagon official urged the Bosnian government to hire MPRI to train its military forces. In early 1996 Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke told Congress that the training of Bosnian forces by MPRI "can begin as soon as the contracts are worked out" --that's contracts, plural, because the $400 million program is being paid for largely by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia. The State Department has issued a license for MPRI to implement a full-scale training program for the police and military in Angola, a deal said to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These and other contracts are just the beginning of a new era of military outsourcing involving MPRI and other contractors providing similar services. The Defense Intelligence Agency recently hosted "The Privatization of National Security Functions in Sub-Saharan Africa", a closed door symposium for contractors such as MPRI. One attendee was quoted as saying, "There was a consensus among government officials and the companies that this sort of activity is going to greatly increase during the next few years."

PRIVATIZATION - THE END OF CITIZEN CONTROL
The implications of this trend are concealed under a shroud of convenience. Contracting removes operations from congressional and public scrutiny. It provides the U.S. administration with "plausible deniability" of overseas entanglements and allows the continued downsizing of the military establishment without losing its ability to influence and control large overseas operations. Government bureaucrats would not have to disclose information regarding contracted operations on the grounds that it is "proprietary information"--an excuse that is especially useful when supporting brutal regimes. The public would not be aware of the major operations ordered by the executive branch because there would be no major deployment of American troops and funding could come from client states, even if it is paid with American aid dollars. All that would be needed is a license from the State Department.

Americans are not aware of the ongoing transformation of their military institution. While privatization is widely touted as "reform", it is the means being used to remove military expertise and technology from the domain of public accountability. America's military industrial complex was once made up of arms makers, military brass and supportive politicians in Washington. Arms makers and military tacticians are consolidating their cooperation while edging out the increasingly irrelevant elected representative. The democratic process, so long subverted and corrupted by the large money interests, is now discarded as hindrance to their plans. The executive branch, owned lock, stock and barrel by these interests, rubber-stamps their internationalist agenda. The State Department licenses and promotes corporate mercenaries while suppressing activities of other private armies such as Executive Outcomes of South Africa, a company providing the same services without the sanction of the international ruling elite.

MODERN MILITARY - NO MORE DEFENSE
Historically, the military institution has played an important part in the preservation of the nation state. During war, national emergency or political upheaval, the military has been called upon to protect national interests. In America the officers corps has been filled, generally, by individuals who have demonstrated intelligence, character and dedication to American values. In the past, such an institution could be counted on to maintain those values in an emergency, to support constitutional government, to submit to civilian control and to perform its mission with a disinterested fidelity. Such an institution would present an obstacle to a dictatorship.

Adolf Hitler recognized the threat presented by his Prussian generals in the final days of the Wiemar Republic. The generals could have blocked his plans and defended the Republic and constitution, and they almost did. Even when Hitler attempted to implicate some of them in sex scandals and expose them to public shame, they did not bend. But, eventually, they allowed themselves to be threatened, bribed and cajoled into supporting the Third Reich, and their failure to meet their defining test resulted in the destruction of their nation as well as Europe.

America's generals have also passed the threshold of no return. Bludgeoned by scandal, fearing for their careers, enticed by lucrative positions in the new private military complex, their eyes fixed on their own futures, they have failed to meet their defining test and the Republic is lost. America has lost an institution that could have been her helper in the crisis to come. In the hands of the international elite it is now an institution that will be instrumental in her destruction.

Sources:

Privatizing War - How Affairs of State are Outsourced to Corporations Beyond Public Control; The Nation magazine 8-4-97.
Retired Generals Sell Expertise Overseas; Associated Press 11-23-95.
Private US Companies Train Armies Around the World; US News and World Report 2-8-97.
Generals For Hire; Time Magazine 1-15-96.
Written 8/6/97





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