Cruel and not at all unusual
Topic: media criticism
Has The Onion taken over the Democrat and Chronicle?

We wish. But really: Can you imagine anything sillier than what the D&C editorial writers ran with this Sunday?

“Bush can improve on his candor about the war in Iraq,” the editors deadpan. They allow Bush was “arrogant” six months ago in his manner of self-defense. But now, they say, he’s “doing what he should have done” before, including “acknowledging weaknesses in America's approach since 2003.”

I’m not sure the presidential rhetoric has changed in any meaningful way. To me Bush sounds as arrogant and mendacious as ever, though after a recent political confrontation with war critic Rep. John Murtha, a Vietnam vet who doesn’t merely play tough on TV, the president’s testosterone levels seem lower.

But in any case, it’s absurd to talk of “weaknesses” when the problem is international lawlessness.
Everything Bush and his henchmen – plus quite a few members of the so-called opposition party – have done in Iraq falls within some category of war crime. An illegal war of aggression doesn’t get better with age. It just mutates into an illegal occupation, and eventually – when the killings, oppressions and humiliations become so routine that they don’t even make the back pages in the imperial press – it degrades into a mature colonial relationship.

The D&C editors are clueless about this, of course. But there’s more. Not satisfied with their own silliness, they go on to endorse torture.

By the back door, of course. Like our national leaders, the opinion leaders do their dirty work with plausible deniability.

First, the editors urge Bush to declare “there will be no mistreatment of prisoners or detainees, and [that] he will hold the military and CIA to a standard of behavior that reflects the moral values of this country while weighing the military circumstances at hand.” But in the next breath, they express their fear that, if Bush isn’t “direct and sure” on these points, “Congress could very well pass laws proscribing torture.” That, they say, could make our “intelligence effort” suffer.

What? If American military forces and agencies honestly reject the use of torture, how can the outlawing of torture affect their operations? I guess the editors really are proposing a clandestine relationship between words and actions: Bush speaks firmly against torture, and the operatives keep doing whatever they want.

Wink, wink, nod, nod. And the abuses keep piling up, along with the bodies.

If the D&C wants to urge a more honest approach to torture (and avoid tortured thinking), it might better look at the strange case of the US v. the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Passed by the General Assembly in 1966, the Covenant says “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment…” (article 7).

The US signed the Covenant early on; the Senate ratified it in 1992. But this came with a lot of fine print attached: various weasel-worded qualifications to the text, including one meant to preserve the death penalty, and another to allow continued prosecution of some young offenders as adults.

Reading the fine print, you understand the US objective was to look good while allowing itself, not a bunch of global upstarts, to decide when and where to use strong-arm tactics.

Still, America's name on the Covenant must mean something.

Or it would mean something, if editorial writers spent their time arguing directly and surely against torture – under any circumstances, without qualification. They also might take a page from UN Human Rights commissioner Louise Arbour, who recently made a public appeal for nations, implicitly including the US, to sign and ratify the "Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

And while they’re at it, the high-minded scribblers also could demand the US get the hell out of Iraq.

At the very least, that course of action would make the D&C editorial’s headline – “Honesty as policy” – less Orwellian and Onionesque.

Free the CPT Four, and go in peace
Topic: antiwar
“We must be prepared to risk as much in our work as soldiers do in war.” Whatever the wording, this is an old sentiment among peacemakers, though most of us aren't put to the test.

For Christian Peacemaker Team members, though, the saying reflects daily experience as well as core beliefs. I say this from having seen CPT in action in Occupied Palestine.

My wonderful friend Kathy Kern, based in a Mennonite household in Webster, travels globally on CPT missions (here the word doesn’t have the odor of “crusade”). For a long time she lived with other CPTers in the middle of Hebron. And I do mean the middle: the group rented an upper-floor apartment above the main market street, down a few doors from a small but well-armed “settlement” of far-right Israeli Jews whose stated objective was to take all of the city and region from the 150,000 Palestinians there.

The Hebron settlers were clearly as dangerous as they were fascistic, but Kathy and the team didn’t give in to fear. Their purpose was simply to put themselves between warring factions to calm things down, if possible. Just as important, they bore witness to what was happening to Palestinians in Hebron every day: the full catalogue of oppression and humiliation. And with emails and webpages, op-eds and lectures, they let the whole world know.

Last week four CPT members - Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney, Norman Kember, and Tom Fox - were abducted in Iraq. Their captors probably don’t know how CPT has kept faith with the Iraqi people throughout the war (and through the preceding “cold war” of lethal US sanctions). Or how the group played a decisive role in revealing the crimes at Abu Ghraib, among other places. Or how the Baghdad-based team made it a point to live among the oppressed and help shoulder their burdens. (One photo now circulating of Tom Fox shows him cleaning up debris in the streets of Fallujah after the brutal, practically indiscriminate US military attack on that city.)

The captors probably, perhaps understandably, are filled with hatred toward the US, and the CPTers could be facing torture or death. Thus people worldwide are demanding that the four be released unharmed – maybe “praying for” is better than “demanding,” given CPT’s special devotion to prayer in its active, nonviolent, in-the-trenches form.

You can add your name to a petition for their release at www.freethecpt.org, and you can find all sorts of relevant information at www.cpt.org.

Worldwide community and organics
Topic: environment
[Note: Liz Henderson, who surely deserves to be called a “journeywoman” farmer-activist, traveled to Chile early this month on a special mission: sharing information on two symbiotic movements, community supported agriculture (cf. our own Genesee Valley Organic CSA) and what the Global South calls “agro-ecological” farming. The text below is Liz’s summary of a talk she gave in Santiago. For more information, go to gvocsa.org; or contact Peacework Farm directly, 2218 Welcher Rd., Newark, NY 14513, 315.331.9029. - Jack]

“Integrating the Community in Organic Agriculture”
Presentation for the Feria Latinoamericana de Agricultura Organica, Santiago, Chile, 11/03/05
by Elizabeth Henderson

Community Supported Agriculture is a connection between a farmer or group of farmers and the people who eat the food that the farmers produce. The essence of the relationship is mutual commitment: the consumers agree to share the bounty and the risks of organic food production. In the United States, over 1000 farms are involved in community supported agriculture, and Teikei, a similar system, is widespread in Japan.

My farm, Peacework Organic Farm, in central New York State, has been doing community supported agriculture for 17 years. Over 300 households are members of the farm, and all of them participate actively either in administering the project or in helping with farm work. Members have also contributed most of the money to purchase the farmland used by Peacework for the Rochester-based Genesee Land Trust, which will lease the land back to the Peacework farmers for a very long term.

Through their involvement with the farm, community supported agriculture members provide their own organic guarantee by seeing for themselves how their food is produced and knowing the farmers. The fair agreement that governs community supported agriculture demonstrates the Basic Principles of Organic Agriculture of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, in particular the Principle of Fairness.

Based on efforts of this kind, the organic movement worldwide can help create a global policy for economic development which favors small scale agriculture; local food sovereignty; and the right of people to grow their own food, save their own seeds and derive the financial benefits that flow from local germplasm. Chilean organic farmers will find their own way of integrating consumers in their farms and making the principles of organic agriculture become a living reality.

It takes more than truth
Topic: antiwar
She doesn’t know when to quit. And unfortunately, she can’t be fired.

Since Mary Anna Towler installed herself as chief foreign affairs commentator for the paper she owns and edits, the insipidity knows no end.

Take the most recent “Urban Journal” entry (City Newspaper, Nov. 23). After needlessly rehashing some very old news from the mainstream press – Bush’s pretexts for invasion and occupation and other material that was in the public domain well before the war started - Towler tells us “the best way, the only way, to support the troops” is “insisting on the truth.”

That’s the kind of talk that makes the neocons shake in their unblemished combat boots. You can imagine the war-room conversations: “Rummy, the liberals are beginning to ASK SERIOUS QUESTIONS about Iraq. I guess we’re toast.”

Only Tom Tomorrow could do that scenario justice - and expose the average liberal's ineptitude.

Here’s a reality check: The White House, with most Congressional Democrats in tow, launched a war of aggression against Iraq. In committing this supreme offense against international law and civilized norms, Bush and his lieutenants became war criminals of the highest order, with the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Americans on their hands. Now they insist on "staying the course," that is, continuing the criminality.

So all we can do is beg for an explanation?

Is it so difficult to demand an immediate withdrawal of US troops? Or to demand prosecution of the war criminals? (Removal from office would be only a start.)

Is it impossible – or too alternative – to help mobilize people against the war? To inspire street protests, boycotts, strikes, monkeywrenching? To support the war resisters and widen the resistance?

Hint: Those are questions I’d love to see on City Newspaper’s letters page. I’m sure the editorial responses would be oddly entertaining.

Back to the Urban Journal: Towler ends her 11/23 column with a list of the war’s effects, here and over there. No arguing with most items on the list, though again there’s nothing you haven’t seen before in the New York Times. But Towler cites these two as negatives: “the exhaustion of our military” (note the promiscuous use of “our”) and “the expansion of terrorism.”

Now, as anyone who takes more than a parochial view will understand, an exhausted imperial army can only be good news for most of the world. In the long run, or maybe not so long, it's also good for the American people.

Yes, it’s tragic that the weakening of US “force projection” capacities has come as a side-effect of carnage and destruction rather than through domestic political change. And there's always the possibility that this weakening of "conventional" forces will move some desperate hand closer to the nuclear button. But let's be grateful this Thanksgiving for what we've got: a depleted military whose potential for future invasions (Iran? North Korea?) is less than it was.

Let’s be careful about the term “terrorism,” too. Mary Anna Towler tumbles into the rat-hole – using the T word as shorthand for whatever the insurgents are doing, and by omission excusing or morally elevating whatever US forces do. But in reality, terrorism is terrorism. And all military forces, regular and irregular, resort to it.

You might even say the US military doesn’t “resort” to it and maybe never did – No, the Pentagon’s preferred first line of offense is a hefty grab-bag of terror tactics, from aerial bombardment to white-phosphorus “shake and bake” attacks to the machine-gunning of vehicles that “ignore signals to stop.”

Most important in this regard, we have to remember that the Pentagon and White House never heed mere political signals to stop. The policymakers are men and women of action (not the kind who take to the field themselves, of course, but chickenhawks who have others do their dirty work). Counteraction is the only thing they understand.

That’s why a hands-on anti-war mobilization is essential now. And why a polite request for information – including for the “truth” we knew long before Day One – is pathetically beside the point.


UPDATE, 12/16: Towler now writes that "it's time to start leaving Iraq," a conclusion she says has taken her "a while to reach." A while, indeed. The war's almost three years old.

How interesting. She's telling us essentially that up till now she believed we must stay - that the US must keep on fighting an illegal, murderous war and maintaining a destructive neo-colonial occupation. That's tantamount to saying the war was justified all along, and additional evidence that there's little functional difference between mainline hawks and doves.

One more point on the "it's time to start leaving" column. After much padding with material from an NPR interview with former NSA bigwig William Odom (hasn't everyone already heard this stuff on the radio?) Towler predictably turns to the New Yorker and some recent comments by reporter Sy Hersh. She draws a fatalistic dual conclusion: first, that we "won't be leaving Iraq" as long as Bush is in office; and second, that any withdrawal of ground troops will be balanced with an increase in US air power and thus an escalation in indiscriminate violence.

Well, yes, either or both will happen if we accept Bush's authority. But we've got other options. Protest. Resistance. Radical education and independent communication. Presidential power is massive, but mass action can neutralize it. There are many examples of this, past and present - as the late, great alternative newsweeklies used to remind us.

You can't get there from here
Topic: environment
All of a sudden, the PR on the fast ferry has gone into slow-pitch mode. This might have something to do with newly-released September ridership figures, which hit local businesspeople – especially those invested in northernmost Charlotte – like a faceful of cold water. Just under 26,000 were taken for a ride that month.

That comes to about 300 per trip, down from 400 in August but up in comparison to July, says the Democrat and Chronicle. Remember that the ship’s capacity is 774 passengers, not to mention the vehicular payload.

So the policy question is moving quickly from how much public subsidy will be required to a more serious one: will the ferry service survive?

I hope sanity will prevail. That won’t necessarily mean pulling the plug on the ferry; it makes sense to use the direct water route to Toronto. But what’s needed is a much smaller boat, one that carries only people and human-powered vehicles. Such a boat would consume far less diesel fuel, produce far less air pollution, leave a gentler wake, and actually get drivers off the road. This less-is-more service could also serve other Lake Ontario ports – maybe stops in Orleans County or Niagara, etc. True, this would still be a ferry in search of subsidies. But it would justify public investment by delivering a few social benefits.

Still, all routes considered, rail is the way to go. (See my earlier enviro/transport blog posts.)

A word about bus service. Now, I know that even political lefties prefer to tackle this subject only in the abstract; it’s taken for granted that buses are for “marginal” populations. But until the day of light rail dawns here again, the RTS system practically defines public transportation in Rochester.

Well, defining is one thing, but getting decent subsidies is quite another. Never mind the $230 million Renaissance Square, the Big Mac of bus terminals. The bus system is chronically underfunded, and its negatives – above all, insufficient service on major and minor routes and lack of amenities at stops – are ever with us.

Once in a while I take the RTS back and forth to Newark, Wayne County. It’s convenient – especially with the bike racks that are mounted on all RTS buses – and the vehicles are pleasant and well-maintained. It’s great to watch the countryside through the seasons, and as rail-and-bus commuters everywhere know, the trip is a time for reading or meditation or napping, not a two-fisted, steering-wheel-gripping slalom through rush hour. The price is right, too: only a bit more than three bucks for a 30-mile trip.

But just a couple months ago, RTS cut its Route 92 service to Newark in half. There are now only two round-trips daily, one early morning and one early evening – and none on weekends. I’m sure RTS officials would rather have kept the old schedule, but I know the underlying (and unspoken) societal excuse for keeping the service to a minimum: “In an era of finite resources, we must make hard choices,” and similar bullshit.

There’s some pseudo-philosophy at work, too. Just as it’s axiomatic that only poor people ride the bus, so it is expected that poor people will adjust their lives and schedules to the bus company’s needs, not vice versa.