http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-obama-has-to-pay-for-eight-years-of-bushs-delusions-1001092.html
Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush's delusions He will have to get out of Iraq, and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths By Robert Fisk: IndependentUK Saturday, 8 November 2008 American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of "raw" reports from American spies and their "assets" around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia. That this nonsense was disseminated around the world by those tasked to defend the United States in the "war on terror" shows the fantasy environment in which the Bush regime has existed these past eight years. If you can believe that bin Laden drops by a shopping mall on an American military base, then you can believe that everyone you arrest is a "terrorist", that Arabs are "terrorists", that they can be executed, that living "terrorists" must be tortured, that everything a tortured man says can be believed, that it is legitimate to invade sovereign states, to grab the telephone records of everyone in America. As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times a couple of years ago, the Bush administration wanted these records "which contain crucial documentation of calls for a Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Indiana, and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Alabama, to help in the search for Osama bin Laden". There was no stopping Bush when it came to trampling on the US Constitution. All that was new was that he was now applying the same disrespect for liberty in America that he had shown in the rest of the world. But how is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself? John F Kennedy once said that "the United States, as the world knows, will never start a war". After Bush's fear-mongering and Rumsfeld's "shock and awe" and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo and secret renditions, how does Obama pedal his country all the way back to Camelot? Our own dear Gordon Brown's enthusiasm to Hoover up the emails of the British people is another example of how Lord Blair's sick relationship with Bush still infects our own body politic. Only days before the wretched president finally departs from us, new US legislation will ensure that citizens of his lickspittle British ally will no longer be able to visit America without special security clearance. Does Bush have any more surprises for us before 20 January? Indeed, could anything surprise us any more? Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He's got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what - internationally - he will have to do if the "change" he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America's borders. He will have to re-think - and deconstruct - the whole "war on terror". He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America's massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan - why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? - and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush's 2004 acceptance of Israel's claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials - and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan - and Syria. Indeed, there's a growing concern among America's allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control - indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus' original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the "surge" than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission - and morals - had become so warped by Bush's policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was - if not a rogue operation - certainly not sanctioned byWashington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad. But Obama's not going to be able to make the break. He wants to draw down in Iraq in order to concentrate more firepower in Afghanistan. He's not going to take on the lobby in Washington and he's not going to stop further Jewish colonisation of the occupied territories or talk to Israel's enemies. With AIPAC supporter Rahm Emanuel as his new chief of staff - "our man in the White House", as the Israeli daily Maariv called him this week - Obama will toe the line. And of course, there's the terrible thought that bin Laden - when he's not shopping at US military post offices - may be planning another atrocity to welcome the Obama presidency. There is just one little problem, though, and that's the "missing" prisoners. Not the victimswho have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or - with American help - into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do. *** Message Memorial/Celebration Honoring & Remembering the Life of Tony Russo October 14th, 1936 - August 6th, 2008 Saturday, November 15th, 3:00 PM Crescent Heights Methodist Church 1296 N. Fairfax Blvd., West Hollywood 90046 Among those Honoring and Remembering Tony will be Daniel Ellsberg, Lee Boek, Barry Schier & Frank Dorrel Contact Lee Boek: 323 661 0524 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ LA Times Obituary - Friday, August 8th, 2008 Anthony J. Russo, 71; Rand Staffer Helped Leak Pentagon Papers By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer August 8, 2008 Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. He was 71. Russo, who lived in Santa Monica for many years, died Wednesday of natural causes in his native Suffolk, Va., according to a spokesman for the Suffolk Police Department. Russo had been in poor health since he had a heart attack three years ago. In 1971, Russo helped Ellsberg copy a classified government history of the Vietnam War that Ellsberg later supplied to the New York Times and other newspapers. Dubbed the Pentagon Papers after the Times published extensive excerpts and analysis, the secret study provided evidence of lying by government officials, including several presidents, about the scope and purposes of the war. Ellsberg went on to become an antiwar icon, sought-after lecturer and author, but Russo was relegated to a few lines in history books. His supporting-role status -- "the notion that I had just been a Xeroxer" -- rankled him to the end. Russo was born in Suffolk on Oct. 14, 1936. He studied aerophysics at Virginia Tech in the late 1950s before earning a scholarship to Princeton University, where he shifted his focus to engineering and public affairs. In a foreign relations course during his third year at Princeton, he learned about the Rand Corp.'s work in Vietnam. The tumult of the '60s was underway, and Russo decided to leave school and apply to Rand. At the Santa Monica think tank, Russo was assigned to the Viet Cong Morale and Motivation Project. His research in Vietnam radicalized him. His support of the Viet Cong, the communist army opposed by the United States and South Vietnam government, was controversial and sparked the interest of Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who by 1968 was also working at Rand. Ellsberg, who described Russo as his best friend at Rand, asked his colleague to brief him on the Viet Cong project. "I explained how the so-called enemy, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese, were actually the legitimate parties and how the U.S. presence was illegal, immoral and unwise. I supplied him with reams of documentation," Russo later wrote in a personal account of the period. He was fired from Rand a short time later. During one conversation with Ellsberg, he learned of a secret study commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that chronicled the origins of the war. Ellsberg said that it showed that the U.S. had falsely charged North Vietnam with an act of unprovoked aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin, the basis for President Lyndon B. Johnson's broadening of U.S. involvement in the war in 1964. Russo said that when he heard about the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he urged Ellsberg to "turn that over to the newspapers." Ellsberg was shocked by his friend's subversive suggestion. "This was an extraordinary thing for someone who had until recently held a top-secret clearance to say to anyone, least of all to someone who still had a clearance," Ellsberg said Thursday in a statement distributed by the blog antiwar.com. Russo's and Ellsberg's accounts differ on when the latter conversation occurred. Russo said it happened in late 1968; Ellsberg said that it was in September 1969, after he had read several volumes of the Pentagon Papers that had been stored at Rand. That was when he called Russo and asked for his help. "I asked him if he knew where we could find a Xerox machine," Ellsberg said, "and within an hour he got back to me with the word that his then-girlfriend had a machine in her office we could use." What followed were several weeks of furious copying behind locked doors of the girlfriend's Hollywood advertising agency. The documents were given to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan in March 1971. Publication of the first installments in June sparked an FBI manhunt for Ellsberg and an unprecedented attempt by the Nixon administration to restrain the newspaper from publishing any more of the information Ellsberg had provided. Russo was harassed by police and placed under surveillance. When he was subpoenaed by a grand jury, he refused to testify against Ellsberg and was jailed for 45 days. A few days before Christmas 1971, both men were indicted on charges of conspiracy, theft and espionage. Although Russo's name was listed before Ellsberg's in the court papers filed by the government, everyone called it the Ellsberg trial. This description only added insult to injury, as far as Russo was concerned. He believed that Ellsberg wanted to keep the limelight to himself and saw Russo as "horning in on his thing." The co-defendants were quite unalike in many ways. Russo was large and rumpled, Ellsberg trim and elegant. Russo spoke in the rhetoric of a left-wing rebel, while Ellsberg, a former Marine, was far more measured. Once the trial was underway, they clashed repeatedly on strategy. Russo wanted to radicalize the proceedings with defense witnesses such as activists Tom Hayden and Howard Zinn, but Ellsberg preferred more established figures, such as McGeorge Bundy and Theodore Sorensen, both of whom had worked in the Kennedy administration. Perhaps none of it mattered. The case against them was dismissed May 11, 1973, after the court learned that a covert team had broken into the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for information to discredit the star defendant. The break-in had been committed by operatives from the White House, whose crimes had come at the behest of Nixon and his top aides. Nixon resigned from office Aug. 9, 1974. Russo, who worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department after leaving Rand, returned to work for the county when the trial ended. After his retirement and his mother's death in the early 1990s, he moved back to Suffolk but continued as an activist for peace and other causes. He was married and divorced twice and had no children. Lee Boek, a friend for more than 20 years, said Russo had a contrary streak and "never felt he got the credit he deserved" for his role in publicizing the Pentagon Papers. He risked his life and his jobs. He suffered a lot for it," Boek said, adding that his friend saw himself as "a real patriot of this country, someone who fought for right and justice." On Thursday, Ellsberg sought to give his former colleague and co-defendant his due. "The fact is I will be eternally grateful to Tony for his courage and partnership in what proved to be a useful action," Ellsberg said. "He set an example of willingness to risk everything for his country and for the Vietnam that he loved that very few, unfortunately, have emulated." ### ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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