interesting article...and not just because it mirrors some of our own analysis

Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons:
The fallout from US Torture at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad;
Basra; Mosul; Bagram AFB in Afghanistan; Ad Nauseam

by
Stan Goff

(Part V)


[If the "war on terror" were real, it would involve the cessation of American terrorism against everybody else. It would also require a serious examination of anti-American motives, since nobody on Planet Grownup can possibly imagine young people blowing themselves up for some abstract hatred of American "freedom." The Israel-Palestine war-of-attrition would have to be examined (preferably while We the People are wearing our thinking caps, having taken off those super-cool hats that hold two beer cans each). Only a carefully historical reappraisal of thwarted Arab nationalism can return "our enemies" to the one interpretive category in which they can possibly be disarmed: human beings with grievances.

Here Stan Goff encapsulates that enormous story of betrayal, disgrace, and disaster. The metaphor of hubristic monster-building applies just as cogently as it has in previous installations of this long-running FTW series: Jurassic Park. With the failure of multi-polar geostrategic tension, every ancient hatred is astir, goaded by water-scarcity, Peak Oil, an Israeli policy of brutality and a century's diplomacy of lies. Today all the demons are awake, and among the noises which woke them, the riot of American sadism (lately manifest in the torture at Abu Ghraib, Basra, Mosul, Bagram AFB, et cetera) has been the loudest.

Thus Stan Goff: "The key to the whole strategy was establishment of permanent forward staging bases for the projection of US military power into Southwest Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to the rest of the world. What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli itch to expand." -JAH]

SEPTEMBER 22, 2004: 1200 PDT (FTW) -- In the film Jurassic Park, there are four consultants who are brought to the island to write testimonials for investors: a paleontologist, a paleo-botanist, a lawyer, and a chaos theorist. When they have only just arrived, their tour jeeps pull onto a grassy hill and stop. One at a time, their startled heads turn to see a living brontosaur.

The chaotician and the lawyer are sitting together, and the chaotician exclaims, "You crazy son-of-a-bitch, you did it." The lawyer, who until now had been skeptical and preoccupied with issues of liability, gasps sotto voce, "We're gonna make a fortune on this place."

Perhaps he worked for Halliburton.

* * *

The Zionist invasion of Palestine began with the help of wealthy Palestinians: absentee landlords, to be precise. While this can be (and has been) overstated as a way to justify Zionist settlement in Palestine, it was a pragmatic mechanism by which the Zionists gained a geographical foothold.

Palestinian society was organized and stable, in a semi-feudal structure with the effendi (big landowners) owning most of the agricultural land, which was worked by peasant tenants. In the cities there was a vigorous comprador trade, particularly with the Ottoman Empire. Palestinian Jews dwelt in this society without any overwhelming friction between Jew and Arab. As modernity began to encroach, more and more landlords used their fortunes to transform themselves into compradors, and some went abroad. It was this element that began to sell parcels of land, where they no longer lived but to which they held title, to Zionists - many of whom were giving support to the Turks in their genocide against the Armenians to curry their favor.

From this foothold on land purchased from absentee landlords, the Zionists aggressively pursued expansion. According to Ralph Schoenman:

In 1917, there were 56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinian Arabs. In 1922, there were 83,794 Jews and 663,000 Arabs. In 1931, there were 174,616 Jews and 750,000 Arabs…

Poet Ghassan Kanafani writes:

Ownership by Jewish groups of urban and rural land rose from 300,000 dunums in 1929 [67,000 acres] to 1,250,000 dunums in 1930 [280,000 acres]. The purchased land was insignificant from the point of view of mass colonization and of the settlement of the "Jewish problem." But the expropriation of one million dunums - almost one third of the agricultural land - led to a severe impoverishment of Arab peasants and Bedouins.

By 1931, 20,000 peasant families had been evicted by the Zionists. Furthermore, agricultural life in the underdeveloped world, and the Arab world in particular, is not merely a mode of production, but equally a way of social, religious and ritual life. Thus, in addition to the loss of land, Arab rural society was being destroyed by the process of colonization.1

This kind of social uprooting will inevitably lead to strife, but whether that strife leads to reorganization and progress or demoralization and victimization depends on indigenous leadership.

Palestine was controlled by the troops of the British Mandate, but they could not prevent a Palestinian revolt that lasted from 1936-1939. When the revolt overwhelmed the resources of the British, they armed the Zionists.

I want to include a somewhat lengthy excerpt from Schoenman here, because it lays out the class composition of the Palestinian struggle so clearly, and hints at the reasons for the fabled Arab "disunity" that western pundits so enjoy citing:

A Royal Commission was established in 1937, under the direction of Lord Peel, to determine the causes of the 1936 revolt. The Peel Commission concluded that the two primary factors were Palestinian desire for national independence and Palestinian fear of the establishment of a Zionist colony on their land. The Peel Report analyzed a series of other factors with uncommon candor. These were:

1. The spread of the Arab nationalist spirit outside Palestine;
2. Increasing Jewish immigration after 1933;
3. The ability of the Zionists to dominate public opinion in Britain because of the tacit support of the government;
4. Lack of Arab confidence in the good intentions of the British government;
5. Palestinian fear of continued land purchases by Jews from absentee feudal landowners who sold off their landholdings and evicted the Palestinian peasants who had worked the land;
6. The evasiveness of the Mandatory government about its intentions regarding Palestinian sovereignty.

The national movement consisted of the urban bourgeoisie, feudal landowners, religious leaders and representatives of peasants and workers.

Its demands were:

1. An immediate stop to Zionist immigration;
2. Cessation and prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Arab lands to Zionist colonists;
3. The establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinians would have the controlling voice…

…Ghassan Kanafani described the uprising:

"The real cause of the revolt was the fact that the acute conflict involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Jewish (Western) industrial bourgeois one, had reached its climax ... The process of establishing the roots of colonialism and transforming it from a British mandate into Zionist settler colonialism ... reached its climax in the mid-thirties, and in fact the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement was obliged to adopt a certain form of armed struggle because it was no longer able to exercise its leadership at a time when the conflict had reached decisive proportions.

"The failure of the Mufti and other religious leaders, of feudal land owners and the nascent bourgeoisie to support the peasants and workers to the end, enabled the colonial regime and the Zionists to crush the rebellion after three years of heroic struggle. In this the British were aided decisively by the treachery of the traditional Arab regimes, who were dependent upon their colonial sponsors."

The "disunity" of Arabs has become a western academic and media legend because it fits so comfortably with western racial stereotypes, both of the crafty and clannish Jews and the backbiting, venal Arabs.

It is important to note in this regard that these racial-religious explanations serve to conceal the very real economic and politico-strategic agendas that are behind them. The British, and then the Americans who helped destroy British imperialism then moved to replace it, were concerned first and foremost with the threat of independence (Arab nationalism) in the region. And Palestinian resistance to Jewish immigration was not based on those immigrants' being Jewish, but on the expropriation of land.

That does not preclude the use of anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred against Jews in particular) by enemies of Zionism. It is this wrinkle that makes the Zionist demagogy equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism even more effective. One can point to instances of Arabs and others using blatantly anti-Jewish language. As Maxime Rodinson pointed out in his comprehensive study of Zionism:

Arab propaganda against Zionism also frequently utilizes arguments and images borrowed from European anti-Semitism. That is deeply disagreeable, but it does not justify one in identifying the two phenomena. European anti-Semitism, in the sense of hatred of the Jews in their very essence, considering them as possessed of a fundamentally maleficent nature, was not born of any actions or initiatives on the part of Jews. Whatever its real motives, the reproaches it leveled against the Jews were purely mythical or, if they referred to anything concrete, it was to phenomena and activities connected with the humiliating situation imposed on the Jews for more than a thousand years by European society. The prime responsibility lay with the latter. Arab anti-Zionism, on the contrary, even if it sometimes led to a comprehensive hatred of the Jews, originated in a concrete initiative taken by some Jews, to the detriment of the Arabs, namely, the plan to transform an Arab land into a Jewish state.2

The class contradictions inherent in a struggle of this type were not limited to the Palestinians, but were characteristic of every national liberation struggle against imperial domination. These same class contradictions are evident even in the struggles of internal oppressed nationalities in the United States, from Garveyism to the American Indian Movement.

It is not possible to put Zionism and its relation to US foreign policy into any perspective without relating it to the US struggle against Arab nationalism and the consequences of the destruction of Arab nationalism. Any meaningful sovereignty in the region explicitly threatens US control over more than half the world's energy.

That is precisely why the word "sovereignty" is being so exquisitely mangled by the Bush administration and the hack press right now to describe as "sovereign" a US-appointed government, protected by a US military occupation force.

Israel has been used as a weapon against Arab nationalism, while paradoxically Zionist incursions were one of the catalysts of this nationalism. Islamist political movements were supported by both the US and Israel as a counterbalance to secular nationalist currents.

Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), is a case in point. This year, an Israeli Apache helicopter was used to assassinate Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the wheelchair-bound, paraplegic, spiritual leader of Hamas. But Hamas was registered in Israel by Yassin himself as a legal organization in 1978. That was feasible because Israelis and Americans saw Hamas as a clerical antagonist to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

This same strategy led to the Taliban.

But things sometimes turn into their opposites. History has transformed imperialist tools into anti-imperialists. How did Islamism do this? What has been its trajectory?

At the same time that Hamas was first being organized, in the late 70s, there was a revolution forming in Iran against the US puppet regime of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the face of an economic crisis created in large part by Pahlavi's grandiose schemes at a time of terrible inflation and massive in-migration to the urban centers. Because of the Shah's devastating policies and the extreme repression he used to quell social unrest, and because he was identified with his American sponsors, the Iranian revolution took on an understandably bitter anti-American character. This animosity toward the US was shared by both secular and clerical sectors within the anti-Pahlavi movement. The exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Khomeni, who was well regarded in Iran as a personality who could bridge these sectors, was nurtured by the French to derail the Iranian communists who had been extremely instrumental in the resistance to Pahlavi. When we consolidated his power, he had 6,000 communist activists killed and transformed the Iranian state into a theocracy.

It is easy to lose the forest for the trees here by focusing overmuch on personalities, but bear in mind that this is the same period when the Carter Administration's CIA had begun to draw the Soviets into the Afghan trap, where the CIA was supporting the anti-communist theocratic militias of the future Taliban, just as they had recently supported Hamas as a counterweight to secular nationalism in Palestine.

Suddenly, Islamists were at the center of a revolution in a key oil state, Iran, and they had captured the US embassy on November 4, 1979, and taken 66 Americans hostage. Thirteen were released, but the other 53 were kept captive until dear departed Ronald Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981.

This precipitated a political crisis for the Carter administration, and Jimmy Carter's fate was sealed with the failure of Operation Rice Bowl in April, 1980, the spectacular failure of Delta Force at its first real mission. Partisans of the future Reagan administration, veterans of the Bay of Pigs and others, were already in motion before the election cutting deals with the Iranians that eventually leaked as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration veterans that followed have been largely put back into play today by Bush II, with Reagan's death-squad supporting Ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, now taking over as the "ambassador" (read: Viceroy) in Iraq.

The Islamists of the Iranian government moved to endorse Islamist Hamas in Palestine as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and there was a tectonic shift in regional forces. Friends were to be declared enemies, and enemies, friends.

Hamas was drawn into an anti-American orbit against their old supporters in the CIA as formerly anti-communist forces were transformed by events into anti-Americans.

Ronald Reagan's emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, was then sent to make friends with an Arab nationalist in order to cajole him into a war with Iran. That nationalist was Saddam Hussein. By 1990, with the Soviet Union crumbling, we would glimpse the new realignment of forces in the world, a world where something would have to replace imperial multilateralism just as imperial multilateralism had replaced colonialism. Then Saddam - not because of his considerable crimes, but precisely because of the Ba'ath Party accomplishments in developing Iraq into a "modern" nation - would be transformed back into our enemy. In fact, during the Iran-Contra hearings, it became apparent, that the US betrayal of friend-Saddam was already being planned by 1985.

Hamas became effective first through the provision of badly needed social services in Gaza. This service provision has been the key to expansion of Hamas influence and prestige among Palestinians. The other event that contributed to their expansion was the decision by the PLO, under extreme pressure, to displace its headquarters from Palestine to Lebanon in the 80s, effectively ceding geographic Palestine to Hamas.

There is one factor, however, that has contributed more than any other to the increased standing of Hamas in recent years. That has been the consistent perfidy and betrayal of the Israeli government in every negotiation with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. With the launching of the Intifada in the 90s, the ranks of Hamas swelled with new fighters, attracted by the unequivocal language of Hamas about an independent Palestinian state and the necessity to wage a protracted armed struggle against Israel.

Said Larry Johnson, a former State Department counter-terrorism advisor, "The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair, then tries to put it out with a hammer."

But the facts are more subtle than that. The Israelis had already heavily infiltrated Hamas when they were supporting it against Arafat. While many of the collaborators inside Hamas have been identified and eliminated, some remain, and this accounts for the brutal efficacy of many Israeli operations against Hamas. Moreover, the right-wing within the Israeli government prefers a strong Hamas vis-à-vis the PLO, because they have no genuine intention of signing treaties worth any more than the treaties signed between the US government and the Indians. Hamas provides a better pretext for the creeping holocaust that will depopulate expanding Israel of those troublesome Arabs.

With Arab nationalism now apparently in tatters, with the Soviet counterbalance consigned to history, a new vision was conceived by the likes of Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Dick Cheney. The "New American Century" of unbridled American power in which a Pax Americana presides over the shrinking world in which, like the Titanic, there are too few lifeboats and hard choices must be made.

The key to the whole strategy was establishment of permanent forward staging bases for the projection of US military power into Southwest Asia - the heart that pumps the black blood to the rest of the world. What was awakened by this plan was the Israeli itch to expand.

In October, 2003, as Ariel Sharon accelerated the slaughter of Palestinians and the destruction of ever more Palestinian homes, Lieutenant General "Jerry" Boykin, with whom I served in Delta in the early 80s, a quietly crazed evangelical religious fanatic, as a token of his deep appreciation of the necessity to win the hearts and minds of the region, was publicly declaring that Muslims did not worship a "real" God.

In the cases of both Sharon and Boykin, wrists were lightly slapped, and business went on as usual - damn the consequences. Some might say that this attests to the intractable stupidity of the Bush administration, which it very well might, but I want to post an alternative hypothesis.

There is seldom a singular cause for political policy. Most decisions are "over-determined," that is, made in the face of a relationship of forces originating in more than one phenomenon. It is very common knowledge that the Republican Party is lashed to a frighteningly large constituency of millenarian theocrats that believes with all its heart that the End Time is nigh, and that for Jesus to come and take them all home with him, Israel has to reclaim all the territory under the crown of David, bulldoze the Dome of the Rock, and rebuild the Temple that the Romans destroyed. This "mainstream" religion, which claims Bishop Boykin as one of its own, is far larger than the much-ballyhooed (even by proto-fascists like Buchanan) "Jewish Lobby."

This does not, however, take into account that Democrats are just as rabid in their support for Zionism as Republicans. When Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney dared to criticize unqualified US support for Israel, it was her own party that torpedoed her seat by running an AIPAC-financed Primary smear campaign that was unparalleled in its audacious mendacity and unbridled nastiness.

To coin a phrase, it's the region, it's the region, it's the region. Translated, that means, it's the oil, it's the oil, it's the oil.

The US government does not see Israel primarily as a political asset (or liability, for that matter). It sees it for what it is: a force multiplier. For a few billion a year, Uncle Sam can maintain a lethal modern surrogate military on the very border of the world's biggest oil patch; one that is hostile in its very essence to the brown people who have the audacity to have encamped for these few centuries upon all that gasoline and fertilizer and plastic.

It should surprise no one that US troops have been trained by the Israelis for the occupation of Iraq, including in the fine arts of… ahem… interrogation.

It is not "Muslim paranoia" that invariably associates the occupation of Palestine with the occupation of Iraq. In a very real sense, if you just back up enough to get the whole perspective, this is absolutely accurate. That the Israelis want lebensraum and the water to live on it, and that the Americans want to control the oil to hang onto their doddering empire, does not negate the fact that these agendas are absolutely symbiotic.

US dependency on the Israelis as a mercenary force has only deepened as the grand strategy of Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld has sunk into the quagmire of an increasingly generalized Iraqi, and regional, resistance.

The resistance is fueled by anti-Zionism, and so the Bush administration now finds itself locked inside its own burning automobile, with what might be a lake or might be a mirage in the distance, and their only choice is to stamp down on the accelerator to try and get there in time to prevent their own immolation.

Perhaps the UN can rescue them. It is standing alongside the road. But standing there with it are a billion pissed-off human beings.

End of Part Five

the redickaliss files : part 3

i remember that the assumed "artist" in question of the two doctored photos below , had to briefly leave his caribbean homeland and hide out in canada two or three years ago, after he used photoshop picture editing software to paste the face of jamaica's prime minister --PJ Patterson --onto the body of a very shapely woman in tight jeans seductively reclining upon the floor in front of a fireplace ...

the doctored pic circulated around the internet like wildfire along with rumors about the PM's sexual orientation as it seemed that many were fooled enough to believe the pic authentic and PJ Patterson's supporters were quite "peeved" (to put it rather mildly) with jamaica's self proclaimed howard stern / "media terrorist"...Peeved enough with him that he apparently thought it wise to leave the country for a few weeks until the controversy died down ...

Could he possibly be up to his mischief once again ?

Better watch out dude --cult figure and media icon Oprah Winphrey probably possesses more money and fanatical supporters at her disposal than the prime minister of jamaica ever dreamed he could have...There's probably nowhere on earth where one could escape the wrath of Winphrey ...

wonder if he was responsible for this photoshop altered pic too ? oprah would kick HIS butt if she ever saw this...UMM...whoever the lady is that he pasted oprah's face onto...i must say that "BABY GOT BACK"! ...Baby got some SERIOUS back!  

i can guess which zany jamaican internet personality and self proclaimed "media terrorist" was responsible for this little photoshop project... one crazy guy ! 

de la hoya vrs hopkins 

down and out 

oscar misses a jab and eats a left 

and a good left flush on the mark 

bernard gets a right through oscars defense 

hopkins and de la hoya square off 

recap :de la hoya vrs hopkins

in the past i have not agreed with boxing commentator bert sugar and i have as yet not seen the recent hopkins / de la hoya bout , but it seems that if sugar's commentary is any indication , hopkins at age 39 ,will finally get the recognition he deserves .

hopefully , bernard will successfully defend his title one last time in january , set the all time record at 20 for the most successful middleweight title defenses and then retire from the game with a big payday, financially set for life and his place in the historybooks as one of the greatest middleweights of all time , firmly secure .

as a "senior citizen " myself , i love those rare occasions when the "oldtimers" of sports manage to pull the rabbit out of the hat and best the "kids" ,even though at age 31 , de la hoya is not yet over the proverbial hill , but still is no longer in the spring chicken category either.

by age 33 to 35 most athletes have done what they are going to do in sports and need to be actively completing their detailed preparations for a successful retirement.

so many great champions , either for lack of money, or love of that addictive victory-thrill that fighters grow to crave , have been unable to leave the ring and stay retired .

hopkins cites the great "marvelous marvin hagler" , the "blue collar champion" as his role model in this fight against "olympic golden boy" oscar de la hoya.

back in the 80s, after winning the fight , but being robbed by the judges and losing what must have been an emotionally crushing decision to boxing's then "golden boy" sugar ray leonard , marvelous marvin hagler stuck to his pre-announced game plan and without shame , retired from the "square jungle" a wealthy man , who will for a long time to come , be recognized as one of the very best middleweights to ever have put on a pair of gloves .

we hope that benard hopkins after scoring a dramatic KO over his "golden boy" opponent, follows marvin hagler's footsteps .


*addendum on hopkins' knock out of de la hoya by a "liver punch":

the fact that the highly paid "ring magazine" writer bert sugar , in his recap of hopkins' 9th round KO of de la hoya , had to call on the durable and very likable kickboxer-turned boxer and actor , randall "tex" cobb ,for a description of the liver punch's effects on a fighter and then derisively referred to cobb as a "human punching bag" , is evidence for WHY i have NOT in the past, often agreed with , or even liked bert sugar...

a liver punch is not uncommon in boxing ,or martial arts... back in my college days during a training session , i once took to the liver area , just a light tap of a roundhouse kick from one of my early martial arts instructors .

if delivered properly , a shot there is terribly effective and is one reason why most fighters are taught to fight with their left side forward .

it felt as if all of the power to the legs was completely cut off...you are momentarily paralyzed , your mouth and throat taste bitter like bile , or hot vomit and your whole body hurts like an excruciating hell ... you cannot move.

i did not drop --it was just a quick light tap -to exactly the right place-but it was all i could do to keep from falling down...it felt similar in intensity to the time years later when a "seasoned veteran" sekou was sparring without a protective cup and got nailed full force, below the belt by a front kick --dead in the "groan" as the once popular "archie bunker" tv character used to humorously refer to that rather "sensitive" area on a man.

...your legs give out , they cannot work no matter how hard you try , you are rolling helplessly on the floor , screaming in extreme agony from literally blinding pain , combined with the strong urge to vomit ... arms and legs shaking involuntarily while from the waist down and back up to your face and neck again, you also feel ice-cold as hell...yet you sweat profusely at the same time... it was scored as a TKO because i could not continue...

...the first time i saw something like this was when the great roberto duran while in the twilight of his days as a 130 pound lightweight ,fought a quick ,tough ,pesky , but light-punching villomar fernandez who for 13 rounds ,despite a lack of punching power, gave duran all the trouble that he could handle .

fernandez took the best that duran had to offer and was giving the champ a boxing lesson ...slipping punches without "running" from duran... using skill to make duran miss and then answering with combinations of his own , fernandez was ahead on all cards.

he wasn't just a clever boxer though , several times during the fight , fernandez's chin withstood the best shots that duran's vaunted "manos de piedra/hands of stone" were able to deliver and after almost 13 rounds , he was still in front of duran , taking the fight to him , beating the champ to the punch , but unable to seriously hurt the legendary duran .

villomar had the heart of a hungry lion and was pumped up for victory...

if he could go the 15 round distance ,it looked as if an upset decision would surely be in the making , when suddenly ,during one of their many very lively exchanges , duran caught fernandez along the ropes and landed with a heavy left hand to the liver .

fernandez's legs dropped out from under him as if he had been shot with an elephant gun ...his legs had a complete power blackout and he hit the canvas like a brick .

Writhing in agony , still conscious , but simply unable to rise , fernandez was counted out by the referee .

roberto duran had saved his title and won one of the best match ups that i have ever witnessed between an underdog kid with nothing but tenacity, speed and sharp boxing skills, vrs a great champion in his prime, still possessing legendary boxing skills , tremendous experience and for his 130 pound size , an awesome amount of pure raw punching power .

shortly afterwards duran would move up from lightweight division to win titles in the welterweight , junior middleweight, and middleweight divisions...but would , unfortunately end up financially broke and forced to fight years past his 40th birthday ...always sad to see a great champion go out like that...,

Undisputed: De La Hoya vs. HopkinsRecap by Bert Sugar

Despite all the pre-fight hype by an array of writers wearing their pencils down to the nub comparing Hopkins-De La Hoya with Hagler-Leonard, Hagler-Leonard it wasn't.

For reasons that couldn't stand up to the vaguest examination De La Hoya, acting almost as if some highwayman of the long ago had ordered him to "Stand and Deliver," chose to stand directly in front of Hopkins instead of moving in and out throwing flurries as Leonard had. Maybe it was a psychological holdover from his fight with Felix Trinadad when his machismo had been called into question after he ran the last four rounds and now driven by a fear of being something less than a warrior he elected to take a stand. Or maybe he thought his strategy would throw Hopkins off his gameplan. But whatever it was that made him make his stand, it was as successful as Custer's last one.

There was no tortoise-and-hare story here, just Oscar standing in front of Bernard trading blow-for-blow and jab-for-jab and playing cat-and-cat with the stronger champion throughout the early going. And winning a majority of the opening rounds on the judges' scorecards.

But by the fourth Hopkins, who had looked somewhat tentative and a little offput by Oscar's strategy, unsheathed his jab and began closing the distance between the two--and every now and then throwing a left shoulder into the mix just to remind Oscar that he had made a mistake trying to match him on the inside.

As the fight entered the fateful ninth, Hopkins was ahead on two of the judges' scorecards (79-73 and 78-74), with the third judge having Oscar ahead (77-75). But truth be told, the real number for Oscar was "911."

In boxing, there are certain danger signs to be as strictly observed as railroad crossings. One of them is never-ever be backed into the ropes by Bernard Hopkins. But somehow, someway, Oscar found himself in the ropes with one minute gone in the ninth. And Bernard, following him like a tail to a comet, came forward behind a needle-to-the-lodestone left jab followed by a pluperfect left hook to the body which found Oscar's liver with a divining-rod accuracy.

The effect was not evident immediately. But after a momentary pause, Oscar, in a delayed reaction, succumbed to the law of gravity, his face contorted in pain, his powers barely those of respiration, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. As referee Kenny Bayliss tolled the count over him, Oscar tried mightily to rise, but his legs failed to uphold the functions they had sworn to uphold and by the count of "Ten" was on all fours pounding the canvas in frustration.

(To assess the effect of a liver punch, we called on that "Human Punching Bag," Randall "Tex" Cobb who said that a liver punch thrown in a sparring session with Greg Page was the only punch that had ever hurt him. According to Cobb, "Page hit me in the liver and I just stood there, frozen, mouth open. (Trainer) Georgie Benton called out "Time' and asked if I was 'okay.' All I could say was 'aaaaargh' and he called 'Time In.' ")

The "Liver Punch"--which will now go down with the "Solar Plexus Punch" thrown by Bob Fitzsimmons to win the heavyweight crown from Jim Corbett back in 1897 as one of the most devastating punches in history--may be debated for years to come. But what is not debatable is Bernard Hopkins'greatness. And as the discussion went on far into the night like a smokey party no one seemed to have the energy to leave the question was: where does Bernard Hopkins, that credentialed courier of old age at 39-going-on-Social Security with that old gray fist, stand in the pantheon of middleweight greats?

For, pruned of potential escape clauses, there is no doubt that Hopkins, a man who assaults both ears and opponents, deserve to be considered one of the all-time all-timers in the middleweight class. How else to assess the greatness of a man who has now successfully defended his middleweight title a record 19 times, made both Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinadad one with the canvas and laid waste to the middleweight landscape and the record books at the same time?

If you want to get in on the discussion about both the "Liver Punch" and the "Greatness"--with a cap "G"--of Bernard Hopkins, just tune in to the exclusive delayed broadcast of the fight Saturday, September 25th on HBO. Maybe then you'll come away with an appreciation of both the punch and the man who delivered it, Bernard Hopkins.

Bert Randolph Sugar is the former editor of Ring, Boxing Illustrated and Fight Game magazines and the author of the recently-released book, "Bert Sugar On Boxing."

bernard hopkins 

pound for pound the best around...

Hopkins' fight extends beyond ring

LAS VEGAS — Bernard Hopkins, the 39-year-old boxing rebel without pause, not only continues to defy age but conventional fistic logic.
All fighters are dumb, right?

And this: In the brutal slaughterhouse of sports that is boxing, what keeps his body so taut, the mind so motivated, his attitude so edgy?

"When you look back, that's when you get caught," said Hopkins, sounding more like Satchel Paige than Marvelous Marvin Hagler. "That's why I'm still running."

A man who loses his freedom, for any reason, is never the same man. How can he be? Now it is virtually impossible to find a shred of nobility in a person who is convicted of robbery, but I think we can all appreciate anyone who has gone to prison and later emerged a better person for the experience.

Instead of running from Bernard Hopkins, he confronted the man looking at him from a cracked mirror.

When the undisputed middleweight king momentarily froze Oscar De La Hoya with one excruciatingly well-placed punch to his liver Saturday night, he struck a blow for what can happen when a man exhibits discipline, courage and, perhaps most important, self-respect. He looked like a winner in more ways than one after the fight, wearing a snazzy chalk-striped suit and serving as a positive example for young fighters in a threadbare game, if only they would take the time to try to slip on his direct, outspoken style instead of being sacrificial lambs.

"This fight was for vindication outside the ring — what I stood up for, what I got sued for, what I got talked about for," Hopkins said. "This is vindication for those who said I wouldn't last doing it my way."

Now the end may be near, and Hopkins close to facing his final curtain, but he has clearly stated his case for which he is certain. The record shows that he took the blows and did it his way. That's why he entered the ring to the strains of Frank Sinatra's My Way. The Rat Pack would've loved Hopkins as a pugilist because he is old school, but Frankie, Sammy and Dean also would've loathed him because he is so anti-establishment, the undisputed champion of disputes.

Of course, real power is knowledge, and that is why boxing's powerbrokers are leery of guys like Bernard Hopkins. He understands the sport's decentralized, often corrupt system, and he has railed and fought against it (not always so perfectly, we might add, and sometimes to his financial detriment).

"I cannot be soft; I cannot be a wimp," said the man who made a record 19th successful middleweight title defense. "I cannot be a guy who lets people walk all over him. I cannot be a guy who does not have a fighting spirit. The will to win is one thing, but what about the will to not buckle under the system?"

So he has taken the time to educate himself about the business of boxing, about pay-per-view TV, foreign sales, rebroadcast rights and sponsorships. Promoters don't care for fighters who are self-educated. It tends to get in the way of unrestrained profiteering.

"The good 'ol boy network has been around for years," said Hopkins, who is not contractually obligated to any promoter. "They don't want to see things change; they don't want to see you in front of the bus.

"They don't want you to say, 'Why do you (as a promoter) have to take $8 million and I get $2 million and I'm the one who could wind up with brain damage?' Their attitude is, 'You're from the penitentiary, you're from the inner city, you should be glad to get $2 million.' I say that's wrong and that's ignorant."

Soon, Hopkins goes to arbitration with Don King over money owed, just another day in his long, bitter struggle against the sport's monopolists. It is nothing compared to what he faced during a five-year incarceration. "Pressure, what pressure? Fighting promoters and managers for what I believe in compared to a guy fighting a guy who tries to rape and exploit you? Living with killers? I survived that with flying colors.

"Bernard Hopkins has been one fight from greatness and one fight from being retired. It's a political war with me, that's why I have to (keep) winning. It has to do with my political history (in boxing), like Bill Russell, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali. I'm not saying I'm those guys, but nobody's going to put their arm around Bernard Hopkins."

If the lords of the fight racket won't, we should. Hopkins is the kind of fighter boxing needs. A dedicated practitioner of his craft, he is a proud man who has not only defied the calendar but the seemingly insurmountable odds he confronted the day they slammed that cell door behind him.
***

iraq worse than vietnam...

After apparently learning nothing from its own Vietnam debacle , and having learned nothing from the demise of the old soviet union -- a demise none too seceretly aided and abetted with vigorous enthusiasm by billions of dollars worth of , US technology , training ,organizational people-management skills and knowhow, along side tons of military hardware also supplied the mujahids by the west during the decade-long human-meatgrinder that was the Afghan /Soviet war ...the US Dinosaur has foolishly stumbled deep into the sticky mire of the tar pit that is iraq and created now an even worse situation for itself there ,than it did in vietnam...but with at least one critical difference --the US economy is much weaker in this era of information , cooked books ,severe consumer gouging by energy companies , federally stimulated construction of low and moderate income housing lagging far behind demand and at woefully weak levels --perhaps most ominously of all is the omen delivered by an economy reliant upon drug money laundering -the prison industrial complex , the gaming industries along with stock market gambling represented by hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stock derivatives-- paper speculation on nothing more than bubbles of air . also forboding for the US economically is the increasing failure of key social infrastructure --especially the public school systems and the growing , undereducated ,poorly motivated , debt-enslaved underclass workforce it provides the economy to draw labor from .

at least in the vietnam era america still relied upon a physical economy that primarily manufactured tangible goods for sale at home and abroad...now we have sent much of that economy overseas in search of child labor ,penny-wages and no worker benefits

...Economically , the expenditure and loss in vietnam of $225 billion dollars caused serious long term harm to the US economy -- through subsequent recessions and inflations it caused serious decline in the standard of living of the American middle classes .

Economically the war in afghanistan broke the old soviet union causing serious neglect of necessary production ,communication and transportation infrastructure and continuous downard plummetings in basic living standards of the soviet consumer and downward plummetings in the ability of the national economy to meet its citizen's needs .

the US is spending about 4 billion a month on iraq ...some 200 billion already... Of course , the dollar of the early vietnam era could buy about 20 candy bars ...while today's dollar can barely get about two .


the iraqi resistance appears sophisticated enough to have adpoted the strategy of depriving the US occupiers and the puppet interim government of much needed influx of funds by targeting that nation's oil infrastructure --cleverly denying the US economy the petro-profits it was counting on not only for constructing the neo-con's vision of a "USer"-friendly iraq , but to also bolster a seriously ailing US economy...

...leaves one to ponder in the long term
future if a decade long debacle of an american loss in iraq could be one of the straws that finally broke the much looted US taxpayer's back ...






Far graver than Vietnam

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 16, 2004


The Guardian


'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

just how dumb and gullible is the US government ?

Spy probe scans neo-cons' Israel ties

By Jim Lobe

SEATTLE - The growing scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much broader set of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration between prominent US neo-conservatives and Israel dating back some 30 years.

According to knowledgeable sources, who asked to not be identified, the FBI has been intensively reviewing a series of past counter-intelligence probes that were started against several high-profile neo-cons, but which were never followed up with prosecutions, to the great frustration of counter-intelligence officers, in some cases.

Some of these past investigations involve top current officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose office appears to be the focus of the most recently disclosed inquiry; and Richard Perle, who resigned as Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman last year.

All three were the subject of a lengthy investigative story by Stephen Green, published by Counterpunch in February. Green is the author of two books on US-Israeli relations, including Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, which relies heavily on interviews with former Pentagon and counter-intelligence officials.

At the same time, another Pentagon office concerned with the transfer of sensitive military and dual-use technologies has been examining the acquisition, modification and sales of key hi-tech military equipment by Israel obtained from the US, in some cases with the help of prominent neo-conservatives who were then serving in the government.

Some of that equipment has been sold by Israel - which in the past 20 years has become a top exporter of the world's most sophisticated hi-tech information and weapons technology - or by Israeli middlemen, to Russia, China and other potential US strategic rivals. Some of it has also found its way onto the black market, where terrorist groups - possibly including al-Qaeda - obtained bootlegged copies, according to these sources.

Of particular interest in that connection are derivatives of a powerful case-management software called Promis that was produced by Inslaw, Inc in the early 1980s and acquired by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, which then sold its own versions to other foreign intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.

But these versions were modified with a "trap door" that permitted the seller to spy on the buyers' own intelligence files, according to a number of published reports.

A modified version of the software, which is used to monitor and track files on a multitude of databases, is believed to have been acquired by al-Qaeda on the black market in the late 1990s, possibly facilitating the group's global banking and money-laundering schemes, according to a Washington Times story of June 2001.

According to one source, Pentagon investigators believe it possible that al-Qaeda used the software to spy on various US agencies that could have detected or foiled the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The FBI is reportedly also involved in the Pentagon's investigation, which is overseen by Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for International Technology Security John A "Jack" Shaw, with the explicit support of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The latest incident is based on allegations that a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) career officer, Larry Franklin - who was assigned in 2001 to work in a special office dealing with Iraq and Iran under Feith - provided highly classified information, including a draft on US policy towards Iran, to two staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of Washington's most powerful lobby groups. One or both of the recipients allegedly passed the material to the Israeli Embassy.

Franklin has not commented on the allegation, and Israel and AIPAC have strongly denied any involvement and say they are cooperating fully with FBI investigators.

The office in which Franklin has worked since 2001 is dominated by staunch neo-conservatives, including Feith himself. Headed by William Luti, a retired navy officer who worked for DPB member Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House of Representatives, it played a central role in building the case for war in Iraq.

Part of the office's strategy included working closely with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by now-disgraced exile Ahmad Chalabi, and the DPB members in developing and selectively leaking intelligence analyses that supported the now-discredited thesis that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda.

Feith's office enjoyed especially close links with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis Libby, to whom it "stovepiped" its analyses without having them vetted by professional intelligence analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the DIA, or the State Department Bureau for Intelligence of Research (INR).

Since the Iraq war, Feith's office has also lobbied hard within the US government for a confrontational posture vis-a-vis Iran and Syria, including actions aimed at destabilizing both governments - policies which, in addition to the ousting of Saddam, have been strongly and publicly urged by prominent, hardline neo-conservatives, such as Perle, Feith and Perle's associate at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen, among others.

Despite his status as a career officer, Franklin, who is an Iran specialist, is considered both personally and ideologically close to several other prominent neo-conservatives, who have also acted in various consultancy roles at the Pentagon, including Ledeen and Harold Rhode, who once described himself as Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz's chief adviser on Islam.

In December 2001, Rhode and Franklin met in Europe with a shadowy Iranian arms dealer, Manichur Ghorbanifar, who, along with Ledeen, played a central role in the arms-for-hostages deal involving the Reagan administration, Israel and Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as the "Iran-Contra Affair".

Ledeen set up the more recent meetings that apparently triggered the FBI to launch its investigation, which has intensified in recent months amid reports that Chalabi's INC, which has long been championed by the neo-conservatives, has been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran.

Feith has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel's Likud Party, and his former law partner Marc Zell has served as a spokesman in Israel for the Jewish settler movement on the occupied West Bank. He, Perle and several other like-minded hardliners participated in a task force that called for then-Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to work for the installation of a friendly government in Baghdad as a means of permanently altering the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel's favor, permitting it to abandon the Oslo peace process, which Feith had publicly opposed .

(this blogger's emphasis)

Previously, Feith served as a Middle East analyst in the National Security Council in the administration of former president Ronald Reagan (1981-89), but was summarily removed from that position in March 1982 because he had been the object of a FBI inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, according to Green's account.

But Perle, who was then serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, which, among other responsibilities, had an important say in approving or denying licenses to export sensitive military or dual-use technology abroad, hired Feith as his "special counsel" and later as his deputy, where he served until 1986, when he left for his law practice with Zell, who had by then moved to Israel.

Also serving under Perle during these years was Stephen Bryen, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the subject of a major FBI investigation in the late 1970s for offering classified documents to an Israeli intelligence officer in the presence of AIPAC's director, according to Green's account, which is backed up by some 500 pages of investigation documents released under a Freedom of Information request some 15 years ago.

Although political appointees decided against prosecution, Bryen was reportedly asked to leave the committee and, until his appointment by Perle in 1981, served as head of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a group dedicated to promoting strategic ties between the US and Israel and one in which Perle, Feith and Ledeen have long been active.

In his position as Perle's deputy, Bryen created the Defense Technology Security Administration, which enforced regulations regarding technology transfer to foreign countries.

During his tenure, according to one source with personal knowledge of Bryen's work, "The US shut down transfers to Western Europe and Japan [which were depicted as too ready to sell them to Moscow] and opened up a back door to Israel." This is a pattern that became embarrassingly evident after Perle left office and the current deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, took over in 1987. Soon, Armitage was raising serious questions about Bryen's approval of sensitive exports to Israel without appropriate vetting by other agencies.

"It is in the interest of the US and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them," Feith wrote in "Commentary" in 1992. "Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."

Perle, Ledeen, and Wolfowitz have also been the subject of FBI inquiries, according to Green's account. In 1970, one year after he was hired by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle discussing classified information with an embassy official, while Wolfowitz was investigated in 1978 for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of a US weapons system to an Arab government to an Israeli official via an AIPAC staffer.

In 1992, when he was serving as under secretary of defense for policy, Pentagon officials looking into the unauthorized export of classified technology to China found that Wolfowitz's office was promoting Israel's export of advanced air-to-air missiles to Beijing in violation of a written agreement with Washington on arms re-sales.

The FBI and the Pentagon are reportedly taking a new look at all of these incidents and others, in the words of a New York Times story on Sunday, to "get a better understanding of the relationships among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel".

It would be a mistake to see Franklin as the chief target of the current investigation, according to sources, but rather he should be viewed as one piece of a much broader puzzle.

(Inter Press Service)