LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Now lets take the bastards to the International Court for Crimes against Humanity. Having lost his battle in court to allow for secret denetion and torture Bush is trying to get torture allowed through the backdoor. Seeking quote unquote clarification of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention for being to vague, after fifty years, and trying to add a provision in his bill that would allow CIA agents not to be charged with violations post 9/11, this is a real slap in the face.

Now it is time to add this to the long list of reasons for Impeachment. Certainly all the violations of the laws of Amercian and the acts which it is a signatory to is far more serious than moral turpitude that the Republicans used against Clinton.

After the November elections watch the Impeach Bush campaign begin in earnest.

Rebuff for Bush on terror trials in a Senate test

The Senate Armed Services Committee defied President George W. Bush on Thursday, with four Republicans joining Democrats in approving a plan for the trial and interrogation of terrorism suspects that the White House has rejected as unacceptable. The White House had said their legislation would leave the United States no option but to shut down a CIA program to interrogate high-level terrorism suspects. Bush traveled to Capitol Hill with Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday morning. The administration also released a brief letter in which the top lawyers for the military branches said they found no legal objection to the White House proposal to redefine a key provision of the Geneva Conventions. But Colin Powell, Bush's former secretary of state, sided with the senators, saying in a letter that the president's plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would encourage the world to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," and "put our own troops at risk." Powell's statement amounted to a rare public breach with the White House he served, but reflected his strong opposition while in office to the administration's assertions, beginning shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the war against Al Qaeda should not be bound by the Geneva Conventions. The White House made clear that it would fight on despite the Republican rebellion, with Bush saying he would "resist any bill" that did not provide a legal basis for the CIA to continue to employ what he has called "alternative interrogation practices" for terrorism suspects. The main dispute between the White House and the Senate Republicans revolves around a provision known as Common Article 3, which prohibits inhumane treatment of combatants seized in wartime. General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, has argued that the article's prohibition against "outrages upon personal dignity" must be clarified so that troops and CIA personnel know what is permissible in the interrogation of terrorism suspects. But Senators Warner, McCain and Graham say the Bush proposal would send a signal that the United States has abandoned its commitment to human rights, and invite other nations to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions as they see fit, eliminating protections for American troops seized in future conflicts. The senators also dismissed the letter from the military lawyers, saying they had questions about whether it amounted to an authentic endorsement of the White House proposal. They said they put more weight on extensive public testimony in which the lawyers raised doubts about the Bush plan. Some military officials briefed on the military lawyers' position also disputed the notion that the lawyers had reversed course. They said the lawyers agreed to sign a letter at a meeting on Wednesday after discussing the language over several hours. The lawyers would agree only to say that they could not find anything illegal about the specific issue of amending Common Article 3, the defense officials said, but still do not endorse several points in the administration's approach. The senators say their bill will protect the CIA by refining the war crimes act, which criminalizes violations of Common Article 3, to specifically enumerate what violations constitute war crimes. "What General Hayden wants us to do is immunize him not from liability but from criticism," McCain said after the vote, "because if one of his techniques is made public and he gets criticized, then he can say, 'Well, Congress told me to do it.' He's trying to protect his reputation at the risk of America's reputation." The other chief dispute concerns the evidence admitted at trial. The Bush plan would allow hearsay and evidence obtained by coercion if it is considered reliable, while the Senate proposal would exclude any testimony obtained by "cruel inhuman, or degrading treatment." The White House would bar the suspect from seeing classified evidence shown to the jury weighing his case; the senators say that this amounts to a secret trial, and that the suspect must be allowed to see anything the jury sees. They offered a compromise under which a judge would substitute a declassified summary of the evidence. The committee vote was 15 to 9, with all Democrats joining the four Republicans. The measure now goes to the Senate floor, where Senators Warner, Graham and McCain believe they have a majority made up of Democrats and as many as a half-dozen other Republicans. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned the administration against taking on McCain, a former prisoner of war. "They're trying to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions," Levin said, "but the best expert on that is somebody who has very personal experience with those who violate Geneva, and that's Senator McCain." The situation in the House is very different, with that chamber on track to approve the measure backed by the White House. "We'll do what the president wants," said Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The White House and Republicans on either side of the issue maneuvered furiously for advantage all day. As the Senate Armed Services Committee met to vote on its alternative to the president's legislation, an anonymous Republican invoked a Senate rule to stop it from meeting, forcing Warner to go to the Senate floor to ask that the hold be lifted. He then praised the Democrats for being "totally cooperative" on the issue, a pointed rebuke to members of his own party who have been pushing the White House view. And he prevailed upon Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, to persuade the senator calling for the hold to lift it. The White House must now decide whether to press its allies in the Senate to amend the bill on the floor, or to step back and wait until the bill passes and the House and Senate work out differences in conference. The bill may face amendment in any case. Some Democrats object to a provision that would block detainees from challenging their detention in court. More than two dozen retired federal judges sent a letter to Congress arguing that such a provision would lead to unlawful permanent detention, and defy Supreme Court precedent. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
See

CIA

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bush, impeach, US, Cheney, Colin, Powell, torture, CIA, ICC, Hague, Geneva, Covnetion,

I had blogged last year about an interesting article on the creation of the new market state, not a national state perse but a privatized state capable of meeting the needs of global capitalism. That state could be a return to a city state, such as Sinagpore, or it could be a wholly privatized state where-in the citizens were contracted out for services. In effect citizenship was not unlike something out of Heinleins Starship Troopers rather than Rothbards libertarian contract state.

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

by Philip Bobbitt

" A new form of the State — the market state – is emerging from this relationship in much the same way that earlier forms since the 15th century have emerged, as a consequence of the sixth great epochal war in modern history.

The “market-state” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state. Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen. The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy.

A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries-with equally profound strategic consequences. "

In reality Privatization of the State has created a different model of Bobbits Market State. One we saw this summer in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The former a national state the latter the creation of an asymetrical mini-state within a larger failed state. Those who refer to Hezbollah as an adjunct of Iran as if it were a poltical or military body under Irans control fail to understand this new state that is coming into being in the era of privatization and globalization. As the national States kowtow to the neo-conservative agendas of the World Bank and IMF that is reducing State owned enterprizes and increasing foreign capitals investment, they also begin to move away from providing services. Reductions in taxes and a incetives for privatization leaves the State incapable of dealing with infrastructure whether it is roads or schools, hospitals or welfare, policing or post offices.

Where the State fails new forms of governance, mini-states appear picking up the slack. While the greater State becomes more market orientated, the old state capitalist functions, welfare, construction, policing, etc. become the preview of the mini-state. In the early days of capitalism this was known as the pirate states. Areas given over to the freebooters on the high seas such as Madagascar, Jamaica, etc.

The return of these pirate states in the era of globalization shows the bankruptcy of the IMF/WB neo-con agenda. This is no less true in Bolivia today, the greatest failure of the IMF policy of privatization which has left poor provinces and one rich autonomous zone. The former now run the central government on the basis of the impoverished cocaine growers.

Drugs and narcotics, which allow for easy capitalization, are the source of monies for many of these new mini-states. In the United States in California after Proposition 13 which removed the State's tax base, the reduction in state services saw an increase in gang culture, as Real Estate brokers made money in the suburban developments and large commercial developments, leaving the heart of the cities to the poor. Here new mini-states were created by gang culture as Mike Davis has noted.

The disenfranchised who are left behind by the privatization of the capitalist state become subjects of the franchisee's of these new mini-states. Not citizens but prisoners in their neighbourhoods. Only an anarchist revolution which returns power into the hands of the masses to create and maintain their communities can counteract the continuing development of both the larger Market State and its mini-state franchises.



The New Middle Ages
John Rapley
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006

Summary: The Middle Ages ended when the rise of capitalism on a national scale led to powerful states with sovereignty over particular territories and populations. Now that capitalism is operating globally, those states are eroding and a new medievalism is emerging, marked by multiple and overlapping sovereignties and identities -- particularly in the developing world, where states were never strong in the first place.

GANGSTERS' PARADISE

You enter the ghetto through a warren of decrepit alleys crowded with locals seeking refuge from the hot night air of their cramped homes. Suspicious stares alert you that you have entered Kingston's gangland. But if the local don -- or "area leader," in the polite lexicon of official Jamaica -- has granted you permission to enter, you are safe. Here, news travels like dye in water.

The local gang maintains its own system of law and order, complete with a holding cell fashioned from an old chicken coop and a street-corner court. It "taxes" local businesses in return for protecting them, punishing those who refuse to pay with attacks on property and people. It provides a rudimentary welfare safety net by helping locals with school fees, lunch money, and employment -- a function that the Jamaican government used to perform. But over the last couple of decades, keen to reduce spending, it has scaled back many of its operations, leaving a vacuum. As one kind of authority has withdrawn, another has advanced.

Jamaica's gangs -- each a fluid but cohesive organization with a clearly demarcated territory -- fund their activities partly through their participation in one of the industries in the vanguard of globalization: the transshipment of illegal drugs. Although at first glance the gangs seem to be at odds with the government, the local police frequently cooperate with the dons, whose ruthlessly efficient rule can make the cops' jobs easier. The result is a tenuous quid pro quo: if the dons keep order, the police turn a blind eye to the drug trade. Besides, direct assaults on the gangs are often futile. Even when the police capture dons or their gunmen, convictions are next to impossible to obtain because potential witnesses remain silent out of loyalty or fear. Just as the rise of the modern state generated conventional symbols of loyalty -- flags, anthems, national heroes -- so does gangland culture reflect the new power structure. The dons patronize deejays who celebrate them in song, and huge crowds turn out for the gang leaders' funerals, waving flags that symbolize their rule.

Kingston's gang-controlled neighborhoods are just one result of a growing worldwide phenomenon: the rise of private "statelets" that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state. Large sections of Colombia have gone this way, as have some of Mexico's borderlands and vast stretches of the Andes and the adjoining rain forest. Countries such as Afghanistan and Somalia are more or less governed by warlords, and Pakistan's borderlands submit to Islamabad only when the state's armed forces force them to. Private militias have carved up whole swaths of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea, and at one point militias ruled the Solomon Islands. And the list is growing.

Policy debates and the academic literature on international relations have been preoccupied lately by discussions of so-called failed states. Not all cases in which private actors have assumed statelike functions, however, involve chaos or failure.

Also See:

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Free Trade; Hong Kong & Somalia

The Spectacle of War on Terror

Calgary Fraud Funds Dubai Boom

The Soviet Union Capitalism's Bulwark

Are Income Trusts Money Laundering

Plutocrats Rule

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
privatization, private-states, pirates, piracy, gangs, asymetricalstate, governance, government, drugs, Jamaica, gangs, Hezbollah, Bobbit, warlords, Somalia, Lebanaon, Bolivia, USA, LA