12 years of US cowardice

by Tom Engelhardt 

IT’S true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialise, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the ‘mission accomplished’ debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in our world. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, the Iraq anniversary was memorialised with a lead op-ed by a former adviser to General David Petraeus who, amid the rubble, went in search of all-American ‘silver linings’.Still, in our post-9/11 world, there are so many other anniversaries from hell whose silver linings don’t get noticed. Take this April. It will be the ninth anniversary of the widespread release of the now infamous photos of torture, abuse, and humiliation from Abu Ghraib. In case you’ve forgotten, that was Saddam Hussein’s old prison where the US military taught the fallen Iraqi dictator a trick or two about the destruction of human beings. Shouldn’t there be an anniversary of some note there? I mean, how many cultures have turned dog collars (and the dogs that go with them), thumbs-up signs over dead bodies, and a mockery of the crucified Christ into screensavers?

Or to pick another not-to-be-missed anniversary that, strangely enough, goes uncelebrated here, consider the passage of the USA Patriot Act, that ten-letter acronym for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’? This October 26th will be the 11th anniversary of the hurried congressional vote on that 363-page (essentially unread) document filled with right-wing hobbyhorses and a range of provisions meant to curtail American liberties in the name of keeping us safe from terror. ‘Small government’ Republicans and ‘big government’ Democrats rushed to support it back then. It passed in the Senate in record time by 98-1, with only Russ Feingold in opposition, and in the House by 357-66 — and so began the process of taking the oppressive powers of the American state into a new dimension. It would signal the launch of a world of ever-expanding American surveillance and secrecy (and it would be renewed by the Obama administration at its leisure in 2011). Or what about celebrating the 12th anniversary of Congress’s Authorisation for Use of Military Force, the joint resolution that a panicked and cowed body passed on September 14, 2001? It wasn’t a declaration of war — there was no one to declare war on — but an open-ended grant to the president of the unfettered power to use ‘all necessary and

appropriate force’ in what would become a never-ending (and still expanding) ‘Global War on Terror’.Or how about the 11th anniversary on January 11th — like so many such moments, it passed un-noted — of the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that jewel in the crown of George W Bush’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice, with its indefinite detention of the innocent and the guilty without charges, its hunger strikes, and abuses, and above all its remarkable ability to embed itself in our world and never go away? Given that, on much of the rest of the planet, Guantanamo is now an icon of the post-9/11 American way of life, on a par with Mickey Mouse and the Golden Arches, shouldn’t its anniversary be noted?Or to look ahead, consider a date of genuine consequence: the CIA’s first known assassination by drone, which took place in Yemen in 2002. This November will be the 11th anniversary of that momentous act, which would embed ‘targeted killing’ deep in the American way of war, and transform the president into an assassin-in-chief. It, too, will undoubtedly pass largely unnoticed, even if the global drone assassination campaigns it initiated may never rest in peace.And then, of course, there are the little anniversaries from hell that Americans could care less about — those that have to do with slaughter abroad. If you

wanted to, you could organise these by the military services. As last year ended, for instance, no one marked the 11th anniversary of the first Afghan wedding party to be wiped out by the US Air Force. (In late December 2001, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, eradicated a village of celebrants in eastern Afghanistan; only two of 112 villagers reportedly survived.) Nor in May will anyone here mark the ninth anniversary of an American air strike that took out wedding celebrants in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border, killing more than 40 of them.Nor, this July 12th, to switch to the US Army, should we forget the sixth anniversary of the infamous Apache helicopter attacks on civilians in the streets of Baghdad in which at least 11 adults were killed and two children wounded? All of this was preserved in a military video kept secret until released by WikiLeaks. Or how about the first anniversary of the ‘Kandahar massacre’, which passed on March 11th without any notice at all? As you undoubtedly remember, Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly spent that night in 2012 slaughtering 16 civilians, including nine children, in two Afghan villages and, on being taken into custody, ‘showed no remorse’.When it comes to the Marines, here’s a question: Who, this November 19th, will mark the eighth

anniversary of the slaughter of 24 unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, in the Iraqi village of Haditha for which, after a six-year investigation and military trials, not a single Marine spent a single day in prison? Or to focus for a moment on US Special Forces: will anyone on August 21st memorialise the 90 or so civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children, killed in the Afghan village of Azizabad while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had reportedly been anti-Taliban?And not to leave out the rent-a-gun mercenaries who have been such a fixture of the post-9/11 era of American warfare, this September 16th will be the sixth anniversary of the moment when Blackwater guards for a convoy of US State Department vehicles sprayed Baghdad’s Nisour Square with bullets, evidently without provocation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding many more.All of the above only begins to suggest the plethora of blood-soaked little anniversaries that Americans could observe, if they cared to, from a decade-plus of the former Global War on Terror that now has no name, but goes on no less intensely. Consider them just a few obvious examples of what former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld once called the ‘known knowns’ of our American world.

Impossible anniversariesIN ANNIVERSARY terms, Rumsfeld’s second category — the ‘known unknowns’ — is no less revealing of the universe we now inhabit; that is, our post-9/11 lives have been filled with events or acts whose anniversaries might be notable, if only we knew the date when they occurred. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Sometime in the first part of 2002, President Bush granted the National Security Agency the right to eavesdrop without court approval on people in the United States in the course of its terrorism investigations. This (illegal) programme’s existence was first revealed in 2005, but it remains shrouded in mystery. We don’t know exactly when it began. So no anniversary celebrations there.Nor for the setting up of the ‘Salt Pit’, the CIA ‘black site’ in Afghanistan where Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesman kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia (due to a confusion of names with a suspected terrorist) was held and mistreated, or other similar secret prisons and torture centres in places like Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, and Thailand; nor for the creation of Camp Nama in Iraq, with its ominously named ‘Black Room’, run as an interrogation centre by the Joint Special Operations Command, where the informal motto was: ‘If you

don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.’Or how about the anniversary of the date — possibly as early as 2006 — when Washington launched history’s first known cyber war, a series of unprovoked cyber attacks ordered by George W Bush and later Barack Obama, against Iran’s nuclear programme (and evidently some Middle Eastern banks dealing with that country as well). Given its potential future implications, that would seem to be a moment significant enough to memorialise, if only we knew when to do it.Don’t for a moment think, though, that any little survey of known knowns and known unknowns could cover the totality of America’s unacknowledged anniversaries from hell. After all, there’s Rumsfeld’s third category, the ‘unknown unknowns’. In our advancing world of secrecy, with the National Security Complex and parts of the US military increasingly operating in a post-legal America, shielded from whistleblowers and largely unaccountable to the rest of us or the courts, you can be guaranteed of one thing: there’s a secret history of the post-9/11 era that we simply don’t know about — yet. Call this last category ‘the unknown anniversaries’. We not only don’t know when they began, but even what they are.

A hidden history waiting to be writtenWHEN I was a boy, I loved a CBS TV series called You Are There, ‘anchored’ by Walter Cronkite. It took you into history — whether of Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake, the fall of the Aztec ruler Montezuma, or the end of the US Civil War — and ‘reported’ it as if modern journalists had been on the spot. (For years, I used to joke that the typical moment went like this: ‘General Lee, General Lee, rumour has it you’re about to surrender to Grant at Appomattox!’ ‘No comment.’) The show had a signature tagline delivered in one of those authoritative male voices of the era that still rings in my head. It went: ‘What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... all things are as they were then, and you were there.’If such a show were made about the post-9/11 years, it might have to be called ‘You Weren’t There’. Our days, instead of being filled with ‘those events that alter and illuminate our times’, would be enshrouded in a penumbra of secrecy that could — as with Bradley Manning, CIA agent John Kiriakou, or other whistleblowers — only be broken by those ready to spend years, or even a lifetime in prison. If the National Security Complex and the White House had their way, we Americans would be left to celebrate a heavily cleansed and censored version

of our own recent history in which the anniversaries that should really matter would be squirreled away in the files of the state apparatus. There can be no question that a hidden history of our American moment is still waiting to be uncovered and written.And yet, despite the best efforts of the last two administrations, secrecy has its limits. We should already know more than enough to be horrified by the state of our American world. It should disturb us deeply that a government of, by, and for the war-makers, intelligence operatives, bureaucrats, privatising mercenary corporations, surveillers, torturers, and assassins is thriving in Washington. As for the people — that’s us — in these last years, we largely weren’t there, even as the very idea of a government of, by, and for us bit the dust, and our leaders felt increasingly unconstrained when committing acts of shame in our name.So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our ‘safety’, and in a state of anger and paralysing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.The brave thing, of course, would have been to gamble just a little of our safety — as we do any day when we get into a car — for the kind of world

whose anniversaries we would actually be proud to mark on a calendar and celebrate.Among the many truths in that still-to-be-written secret history of our American world would be this: we the people have no idea just how, in these years, we’ve hurt ourselves.TomDispatch.com, March 28. Tom Engelhardt runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.

GANGES BARRAGE

Site should be close to Gorai off-take

by M Inamul Haque 

Figure 1: Four sites proposed so far, Figure 2: Site 5 as proposed by the authorTHE Ganges originates from the Himalayas, and flows southeast through the plains of north India towards Bangladesh. Before crossing the border, it leaves a right hand branch named Bhagirathi, which passes through India to fall in the Bay of Bengal. The Farakka Barrage is located a few kilometres upstream, from where a substantial quantity of water is diverted to the Bhagirathi during dry months. This reduction of flow in the Ganges has led to catastrophic damage to the environment in its

dependant areas inside Bangladesh. Experts had anticipated adverse effects of the Farakka Barrage before its commissioning in the 1950s. Several meetings between the officials of Pakistan and Indian governments were held but could not produce any solution. Demand for a barrage inside Bangladesh has emerged since then. Before completion of the Farakka Barrage, an interim agreement was concluded on April 18, 1975 between the heads of governments of India and Bangladesh. This agreement ensured a minimum of 44,000 cusecs of water to Bangladesh at the period of diversions. The second agreement, known as the first Ganges Water Sharing Treaty and signed on November 5, 1977, ensured a minimum of 34,500 cusecs of water for five years. After its expiry, two memorandums of understanding were signed in 1982 and 1985. There was no sharing agreement from 1989 to 1996. In 1996, the second water-sharing treaty was signed, which is valid for 30 years and provides a minimum of 27,633 cusecs of water to Bangladesh during diversions.The Ganges Barrage is planned to be placed somewhere between the Hardinge Bridge and Rajbari on the Ganges, and shall divert part of its flow through the Gorai. Tippetts Abbett McCarthy Stratton, a consultancy firm from New York,

proposed this barrage in 1963 at a location three kilometres downstream of the Gorai off-take. The barrage site was changed in 1981, at a location four kilometres downstream of the Pakshey railway (Hardinge) bridge, with the possibility to reduce its river training cost. But later in 1986, considering possible backwater effects up to Indian territory, the site was again shifted, to a far downstream point near Habashpur, Rajbari. In 2001, a study on the Ganges dependant area did arrive for a fourth location for the barrage site, near Thakurbari (Shelidah) of Kushtia.Bangladesh constructed the Teesta Barrage in the 1980s to irrigate a large part of the northern region. With this experience we can construct the Ganges Barrage from our own manpower, skill and technology. Four sites have been proposed so far but all the sites have weaknesses on the aspects of construction, operation and maintenance, and benefits to arrive. I shall discuss them below with a proposal for a fifth site near the Gorai off-take. We must know that the major aim of the barrage is 1) to divert water to the Gorai to fight salinity in the south-western region, and 2) to feed the GK project area for gravity irrigation.

Site 1: Hatash HaripurTHIS site is about three kilometres downstream of

the Gorai off-take. The barrage location was to the north on char land, as the Ganges was flowing through a southern channel close to the mainland. The Gorai diversion barrage site was also at the same place. This site was good for construction point of view. But for maintenance, the Gorai link channel from the barrage point to original riverbed downstream would be hazardous. Moreover, this site would be too far away to supply irrigation water to the GK project canals. 

Site 2: Bheramara BahircharTHIS site was proposed in 1981, about four kilometres downstream of the Pakshey railway bridge. The barrage location was again on the northern side on char land, as the Ganges was flowing through the southern channel close to Bahirchar. This site was good from the construction point of view. But to divert water to the Gorai would need a 15-kilometre long link canal from upstream of the barrage to the Gorai off-take. Moreover, it would need another barrage at the original off-take of Gorai, like the Bhagirathi off-take at Jangipur. However, this site would benefit the GK project by providing irrigation water directly to its canals by gravity. This site was shifted in 1986 on the ground that, backwater afflux of the barrage may reach the

Indian Territory. This was nonsense, as the location of this site was 40 kilometres away from the international border. This barrage would store water only to the bank-full level maximum. In winter, this would never make any afflux to affect the Indian territories. The Teesta Barrage is only eight kilometres away from the border, where no such problem arises. At the time of monsoon and floods, the barrage gates shall remain open, thus backwater effects are not possible. 

Site 3: Habashpur, PangsaTHIS site proposed by Halcrow Consultants in 1986 (Development Design Consultants in 2012) is about 30 kilometres downstream of the Gorai off-take. The barrage location was on the right side over the char land, as the Ganges was flowing through a northern channel close to the mainland at Satbaria. This site is good for construction point of view, but for being located far downstream, diversion to the Gorai shall be difficult, as its off-take shall need de-silting every year. Moreover, this site would be too far away to supply irrigation to the GK project areas. A nonsense argument is often used that if the barrage is located further downstream, it can cover furthermore areas to its upstream. Some people argue for a barrage at Mawa on the Padma to cover even much larger areas. One should realise that a

barrage is made for diversion of water, primarily. If storing water to bank-full level is possible, it is a secondary advantage. But the storage volume cannot be huge, and changes a little by shifting the location. At floods, the barrage gates should remain open to allow the river to flow in full capacity, so no question of storage. And from a barrage, power generation is not possible because of its low fall; so if planned, it shall be a waste of money. This site shall neither be able to preserve river water during monsoon, because a barrage is never built as a high dam for storage, nor shall it be able to irrigate greater Kushtia, Jessore, Khulna, Pabna and Rajshahi, (only greater Faridpur), as it shall be located far downstream near Rajbari. 

Site 4: Thakurbari, ShelaidahTHIS site is from the study of Options for Ganges Dependant Areas June, 2002. It is located about 10 kilometres downstream of the Gorai off-take. In the borehole plan, the barrage location is over the main-flow riverbed. But it should be placed on the char land, if traditional method for construction is followed. The Gorai off-take barrage should be placed at its mouth, not adjacent to the Ganges main barrage. By the storage level, a regular discharge from the Gorai barrage shall be possible,

and shall keep the riverbed free from silting. A Ganges Barrage at this site shall need protection work of 10 kilometres from the southern bank of the barrage to the Gorai Barrage northern bank. More protection works shall be needed for the northern bank of the Ganges Barrage, and for the southern bank of Gorai Barrage. If the Gorai Barrage is placed adjacent to the Ganges Barrage, a new riverbed has to be dug up to link the Gorai riverbed downstream. As this site is located far from the GK project areas, it would be difficult to supply irrigation there.

Site 5: Talbaria, KushtiaANALYSING the pros and cons of the sites proposed so far, this author proposes a site 5 for the Ganges Barrage. This site is about six kilometres downstream of Dadapur of Pabna and three kilometres downstream of Talbaria, Kushtia on the left bank char land of the Ganges. The Talbaria hard point on the right and the Dadapur hard point on the left become a nodal point of the Ganges. By fixing the barrage site between them, it makes outflanking not possible beyond those two points. It may be mentioned that the Farakka Barrage is constructed along the right bank of the Ganges, where progressive erosion through the char lands on the left bank is posing a threat of outflanking. 

In OGDA study, the Ganges Barrage is designed for 1,850-metre total span, 78 spillways, each of 18m width radial gates. The cost is estimated to be Tk 39,000 million at Thakurbari, compared to Tk 39,600 million at Pangsa. The Gorai off-take structure shall cost an extra Tk 8,000 million. At the proposed site 5, some structural measures shall have to be redesigned. In my estimate the cost at site 5 shall be less compared to others, as it shall need less bank protection works. A major advantage of site 5 is that the barrage shall be able to supply water to the GK project and Faridpur areas easily by gravity flow. The abandoned railway land from Mirpur to Talbaria can be raised to become the off-take main canal to this project. After this, the pump house at Bheramara can be used to supply irrigation water to GK project phase-III in Daulatpur and Meherpur.M Inamul Haque is chairman of the Institute of Water and Environment. minamul@gmail.com

Johnston and nuclear holocaust

by Nehal Adil 

NORTH Korea has threatened that it could target US nuclear bases in the Pacific, including Guam and Hawaii. Many people may laugh at the North

Korean threat but it is serious nonetheless; North Korea could very well have the location of the US nuclear arms by the Swedish hacking. After all, Julian Assange surprised the world by leaking US State Department documents that exposed secret contacts between Arab rulers and Washington. Many thought that the WikiLeaks were orchestrated by the US State Department to destabilise the Arab world. In the shadowy world of cat and mouse game nothing is impossible. According to Swedish author and Pacific specialist Anders Mathlein, half of US nuclear and chemical weapons past and present are stored around Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. Even a conventional attack on Johnston could spark off a nuclear holocaust between the eastern and western hemisphere.I remember passing over the islands across Hawaii on my way to the United States from Seoul in a Korean Airlines plane in the 1970s. The cold war was at its peak. The war in Vietnam was raging. Thailand had been turned into a US war base. But the islands down Hawaii looked so peaceful and beautiful. Why the US should base its arms in the peaceful islands. The aim was that potential enemy wouldn’t strike US populated areas but devastate the sparsely inhabited islands of the Pacific as it was done in Bikini by the US and in Maurora by

France.North Korea, which is called a hermit kingdom because of its isolationist policy, has enormous technological capability. Its launching of satellites and nuclear weapons testing amply prove it. North Korea has also, according to some reports, close re-action nuclear weapons that no other country possesses. It is also reported to have underwater rockets that no missile defence system could deter.As such any sane human cannot ignore the North Korean capability. Unlike South Korea, North Korea is not an occupied country. No foreign troops are stationed there. Its relations with China and Russia are based on sovereign equality. The US cannot pressure China and Russia to impose its will on the Koreans.It is a dangerous situation but the utmost question is why the United States should push such a small country against the wall that may lead to catastrophic consequences. Could there not be peaceful solution as the five plus one talks that have taken place over the past decade?North Korea does not seem to feel secure. The United States has used such talks as a camouflage to attack Iraq and hang Saddam Hussein. It is using the same tactics against Iran. They used the same negotiation technique against the mighty Soviet Union.

North Korea, according to observers, wants to find its own answer to the present hegemonic global order. It wants to achieve, according to these observers, what the Soviet Union failed to do.It does not have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the US, although the US can destroy it hundred times over. An attack on Johnston Island and Guam could cripple the US nuclear power in the Pacific and smash Obama’s dream of American Pacific century, Despite provoking the so-called Arab Spring, Obama could not land anywhere in the Middle East, except Israel and its occupied territories Ramallah, and Jordan, the old Anglo-Saxon crony whose founder Sharif Hussein had provoked the great Arab Revolt, a century ago and ousted Turkey. Obama’s greatest success was to make the Israeli prime minister to apologise to the Turkish prime minister in his presence.Many consider that Obama wants to rule the world with the knowledge and simplicity of a secondary school student. It is a dangerous situation.His foreign secretary John Kerry appears to be more naïve. America destroyed Iraq, hurt its national pride, and now wants it to join the war against Iran.In the east, we see the same scenario. Americans

nuclear bombed Japan and, according to conspiracy theorists, created Fukushima to destroy an economic competitor. General Motors had taken over Toyota again after Fukushima. The realistic solution should be to stop pushing North Korea against the wall. That realistic path was taken by Obama regarding the Burmese junta when he visited Yangon. That should be repeated in case of PyongYang. That will help usher democracy in that unfortunate country.

Europe and the Iraq War

‘Special relationship’ with America is rather like being handcuffed in a car driven by a drunk. If I had my way, we would choose neither Washington nor Brussels. Since the main issue in British politics is over that choice, I tend increasingly to regard Brussels as the lesser of two evils. The European Union has committed no atrocities comparable to those of the Anglo-American alliance, writes Sean Gabb

IT WAS the Iraq War that prompted me into public dissent from the orthodox rightist line on the European Union. I have never accepted that membership of the EU is an attack by the foreigners on our free institutions, and that leaving it would

give us a reasonably accountable government with low taxes and the common law. The truth appears to be that we are utterly corrupt as a nation, and British membership is more a symptom of what we have become than its cause. I don’t see the hand of Europe in the transformation of the police into cowardly thugs, or the universal degradation of our politics and culture. Even very bad things like the European Arrest Warrant are not applied in other European Union countries with the same wooden stupidity as in Britain. In Germany, for instance, it is still not legal for citizens or even residents to be extradited for trial elsewhere.The main disadvantage of being in the European Union is that it enables our own ruling class to govern by decree. British ministers and civil servants push for certain things behind closed doors in Brussels, and then tell us, when we complain about the resulting laws rammed through parliament, that it is all the fault of those beastly Europeans. As a prime example of this, see the history of the rise and progress of the money laundering laws.Of course, this is to be deplored, and a decent government — assuming we ever get one — would leave at once: its rules would prevent or delay policies of radical reform. Until that day comes, however, British membership gives us certain

offsetting advantages. These are:1.    Oppression has to be co-ordinated between several dozen governments, not all of them run by certifiable lunatics. See, for example, the block so far on minimum pricing for alcohol. Or see the compelled harmonisation of our porn laws with those of more sensible countries. Without that brake on action, I have little doubt we would by now have bar codes tattooed on our foreheads and on the spot castration for suspected child molesters.2.    The supremacy of European Union law, and our associated importation of the European Convention on Human Rights into our domestic law, has empowered our courts to stage a slow-motion coup against the absolute legislative sovereignty of parliament. This was just about acceptable when the country was run by a committee of hereditary landlords. It became an unmitigated evil once parliament was filled up with scoundrels. I was one of the very few people on the right to welcome the judgement in Thoburn v Sunderland City Council. I thoroughly approve of the transformation of judicial review from a yapping at parliament’s heels into an increasingly powerful weapon of control over legislation. It would be nice to go back to something like the 18th century constitution. Since that is not possible, the new constitution emerging round us is an improvement on what we had until recently.

The connection between this and the Iraq War is that the second of these forced me to think more clearly about the nature of our ‘special relationship’ with America. No advantages come from this. It is, indeed, rather like being handcuffed in a car driven by a drunk. If I had my way, we would choose neither Washington nor Brussels. Since the main issue in British politics is over that choice, I tend increasingly to regard Brussels as the lesser of two evils. The European Union has committed no atrocities comparable to those of the Anglo-American alliance. On the contrary, left to themselves, the European elites seem to be mostly interested in making regulations on things like the size of vacuum cleaner bags. Doubtless, these tend to privilege big French or German companies. But they never result in blowing the arms and legs off brown children. Even after ten years, what was done in Iraq continues to fill me with outrage and shame.Dr Sean Gabb is the director of the Libertarian Alliance