The Matrix Runs on Windows

Yes Men launch fake New York Times

Anti-corporate prankers The Yes Men have launched a fake edition of the New York Times announcing the end of the Iraq war. More than one million free copies of the 14-page "special edition" newspaper - dated 4 July 2009 - were distributed, mainly in New York and Los Angeles. The paper bore a motto on its front page that read, "all the news we hope to print".

The Yes Men have also produced an accompanying website at www.nytimes-se.com mimicking the look of The New York Times's real site.

A PDF version can be downloaded from here.

Close Guantánamo

The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a campaign calling on President-elect Barack Obama to close the Guantánamo Bay prison and end the military commissions on Day One of his presidency. The ACLU calls on Obama to sign executive orders banning the use of torture and abuse and ending the practice of extraordinary rendition.

"We welcome the end to a Bush administration that is leaving behind a disastrous legacy of civil liberties violations, abuse of power and executive overreaching, yet there is no room for complacency," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "We are hopeful that President Obama will honor the U.S. Constitution and passionately promote all the rights for which it stands."


The ACLU has also launched a new campaign website at www.closegitmo.com

Everyman Goes To Washington

Some first thoughts on an Obama presidency

Finally, America has taken a bold step forward and finally elected… a Hawaiian-American as President...

Only kidding. None but the most hardened cynics will have absorbed the symbolism of Barack Obama’s election or witnessed the extraordinary oratory of the new President-elect during his victory speech in Chicago and not been moved (even if his oft-repeated campaign slogan always makes me smile and think of the children’s cartoon character Bob the Builder. Can we fix it? Yes we can!)

That symbolism represents more than the election of America’s first black President, important though this is within living memory of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, or even that after eight years of the idiocracy of George W Bush we have an articulate, cerebral leader of the United States. The burden of expectation on Obama’s shoulders is also, I think, wrapped up in a deep-seated folk story of American individualism. the template for which are the characters of Frank Capra’s films of the 1930s, like James Stewart in ‘Mr Smith Goes To Washington’ or Spencer Tracey in the more cynical post-war ‘State Of The Union’. They represent the abiding myth of the idealist, honest and untainted by the corruption of Washington politics, men who invoke the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (the most mythologised of US Presidents) and who triumph over adversity and temptation without abandoning their principles. Most Capra films, made in a time of crisis in America, in the midst of the Depression and the uncertainty of a impending war, embody the same unfulfilled yearning for change that has driven the huge popular movement behind Obama.

Many Americans (and onlookers around the word) now evidently believe, after disappointment after continued disappointment, that they have found their ‘Mr Smith’, an Everyman politician who can finally turn what was once just a heart-warming fiction into reality. Unfortunately, the final reel of those old black and white films never showed what happened next. They never told us what happens when the heroic idealist finally attains power and has to deal with the Washington venality he once railed against, but that remains untouched and continues to wield enormous influence. This is Obama’s dilemma: he promised ‘change we can believe in’, but said little about how he would make it happen, or even what ‘change’ might eventually look like.

The very early signs have been far from promising. There has been much talk of unity and bi-partisanship, the same pledge made by Clinton – and surprisingly, in the light of events, by George W Bush. This is hardly a break with the past and neither is the inclusion of so many former Clinton strategists and advisors in Obama’s transitional team and amongst the names of those favourite to become members of his cabinet.

For instance, the appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as White House chief-of-staff – the son of a member of the Zionist terror group Irgun, a civilian volunteer in the Israel Defence Forces during the Gulf War in 1991 and a supporter of both the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the war in Iraq – hardly points to a change we can believe in of US policy in Palestine. Neither does the inclusion amongst Obama’s advisors of President Carter’s hawkish former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, seem like a new dawn in foreign policy. It has been proposed that three Bush appointees will remain in office under Obama, whilst a frontrunner for the post of Treasury Secretary is Larry Summers, a proponent of the financial deregulation of Wall Street that has helped fuel the economic crisis facing America. This already begins to look like the status quo we can believe in.

Obama supporters will of course argue that the President-elect needs these Washington insiders to make things happen, that even an idealist needs ‘realists’. It’s the first compromise of the ‘change we can believe in’ and it won’t, I suspect, be the last. But some things will change, we know: Guantanamo will finally close, there will be a more liberal approach to environmental issues and Americans may finally achieve universal health care. Will there be more? A transformational change in the way government conducts itself? Action on the poverty that blights the lives of millions of Americans? The diminution of the corrupting influence of big business?

It doesn’t seem likely and rather worryingly, it depends in part upon the Democrats in Congress, the power-brokers that Obama relies upon, those who were so utterly ineffective in opposing Bush and who for the whole of my lifetime have incessantly complained that they’ve never had the chance to make the changes they have always wanted. Well, this time they’ll have no-one but themselves to blame if they screw up on delivering their part of the deal.

But much also depends on the ability of the movement that helped elect Obama to keep up the pressure on their Everyman politician and make sure he doesn’t forget who won him the Presidency. The legions of Obama voters will also have no-one to blame if they forget that the myth of the triumphant idealist who single-handedly sweeps away Washington corruption is just that – a myth.

If the only change we can ever really believe in is the product of collective action, of movements that currently are as energised as they have been for years, then there is a battle at the heart of the new Obama presidency. It's a battle between the Democratic party machine and its own supporters.

For that reason, if no other, it should be an interesting four years.

Postscript 1: On intelligence and the CIA, "the early transition effort is winning praise from moderate Democrats" according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which claims that "President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies."

Eh, no we can't...

Postscript 2: According to the Huffington Post, Obama has informed party officials that he wants Senator Joe Lieberman, who campaigned for McCain and Palin, to continue caucusing with the Democrats, despite opposition from the overwhelming majority of Democrat supporters.

Eh, no we can't...

US President Able to String Together Sentence

What a change from Dubya. So what's next? More soon...

UFFC Procession 2008

Photos from Saturday's United Families and Friends Campaign Remembrance Procession in Whitehall.

The Bush Era Closes

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

And the judgement of history looks likely to be harsh. Meanwhile, thanks to The Onion, we can still laugh...

Good Riddance: Joerg Haider dead in car crash

A Response to Nick Cohen

"De Menezes – the Left’s new excuse to beat up the police" - a response to Nick Cohen

The following is a response to the journalist Nick Cohen's article in yesterday's Evening Standard.

I’m sure there was a time when the journalist Nick Cohen understood that to describe oneself as broadly part of ‘the Left’, or even a liberal, requires at least some understanding of the unequal relationship between the power of the state and its people. The history of the modern state – from the framing of America’s constitution to the development of international human rights law – has been founded on limiting the repressive power of governments over their citizens. But faced with a theocratic rejection of universal human rights by proponents of a radical form of Islam, itself a dismissal of the Enlightenment ideals that first challenged absolute power, Cohen has worked himself into such a fury that he chooses to reject them too.

Cohen’s argument are so thread-bare and confused, but so prevalent amongst those who denigrate the search for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes, that it’s worth refuting them point by point.

He says that “when the police kill an innocent man in a dictatorship, no one dares protest”, which may come as a surprise to those who protested against the death of Steve Biko in apartheid South Africa, but in general it’s true: dictatorships have a tendency to “shoot first and ask questions later”, often justifying their actions on the basis of national security and condemning and persecuting citizens who protest as ‘terrorist sympathisers’. Presumably Cohen believes that Brazil is not a dictatorship, for he acknowledges that in cities like Rio, “there are protests aplenty about police violence but they have scant effect on men who are little more than murderers in uniform.” But the subtext of his argument is clear enough: because the Rio police kill three people every day, we shouldn’t make such a fuss about the killing of one man in London.

Exactly how many people need to die at the hands of the police in a liberal democracy before it becomes ‘a national scandal’ is less clear. Perhaps there’s a mathematical formula or some graphs that Cohen knows about and we don’t. Or perhaps (and here Cohen’s logic becomes even more confused) every death is a disgrace, for “we don't always realise it but we are lucky to live in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously.”

What Cohen fails to acknowledge is that the level of anger about the killing of an innocent individual by the state has particular national characteristics and a death becomes a scandal precisely because of its impact on others. In the UK, routine arming o the police is generally resisted by the public – even the police themselves oppose it. It’s not true, however, that deaths in police custody are exceptionally rare, for in truth, whilst deceitfully playing the numbers-game in comparing Britain with Brazil may encourage Cohen to feel lucky, we don’t live in a country that takes breaches of its rules as seriously as it should. Since 1993, there have been 674 recorded deaths in police custody. Forty six people have been shot dead by police since 1990. There have been fifteen inquest verdicts of ‘unlawful killing’ by police officers – and no convictions by the courts.

Most bereaved families would argue that these deaths (never mind the many deaths in other countries) have been largely ignored. It's the idea that, suddenly, anyone who has brown skin or looks like a Muslim or happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is at an increased risk of being gunned down by those charged with protecting the public, and that this might actually be acceptable at a time when people already face the terrifying threat of morbidly zealous fanatics with rucksack bombs, that is precisely the reason why Jean Charles de Menezes’ death has particularly horrified so many when other deaths have not.

Cohen prefers to see other motives, but the example he chooses in order to make a sweeping generalisation about the “partisans in the vicious arguments over London's policing” is frankly bizarre. His anecdote about a radio producer, asking for a comment that the Met is as much a threat to the lives of Londoners as radical Islam, says more about the nature of Cohen’s own profession and its eagerness to sensationalise and simplify, traits that Cohen is himself a master of and that are described in forensic detail in fellow Guardian journalist Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News. Nevertheless, with all the obsession of a conspiracy theorist, Cohen sees this as evidence, where no evidence exists, that thousands have a “psychological need to deny the horrors of the world” for daring to protest (something no-one in a dictatorship has the courage to do, but clearly no-one anywhere, in Cohen's view, should ever consider).

Finally, Cohen then psychologically projects his own prejudices onto “the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes” by suggesting that we would be the first to denounce the police if a terrorist detonated a bomb on the London Underground. Somehow, I imagine that no-one would be issuing louder denunciations than Nick Cohen himself in such circumstances. The rest of us would probably recognise that fault for a bombing would lie squarely with the bombers, that sometimes it is impossible to stop those who are really determined to murder, but that questions about the quality of police intelligence, how it is acted upon and what steps were taken to stop a suspect from entering a Tube station are legitimate tests of the accountability of public servants – just as they are in the case of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s Founding Fathers, a scientist and a giant of the Enlightenment that theocracy stands opposed to, said that “those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I wonder what he would have made of someone who says, “I don't want to defend the Met's mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later.”

Franklin also advised that that we should ”use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly." More in hope than expectation, I'd suggest that at some point soon, Nick Cohen would do well to follow this wisest of counsel.

Ten Films That Help Take Sides

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)
An in-depth look at the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed in 2002.

Battle for Haditha (2007)
Nick Broomfield's docu-drama investigating the massacre of 24 men, women and children in Haditha in Iraq by U.S. Marines in retaliation for the death of a colleague killed by a roadside bomb.

No End in Sight (2007)
Documentary about the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and why the insurgency and demands for US withdrawal quickly became popular amongst the majority of Iraqis.

Taking Liberties (2007)
Flawed but interesting account of the attacks on civil liberties under New Labour.

USA vs Al-Arian (2007)
Portrait of the trauma facing Arab-American family as draconian terrorism charges are levelled against Abdullah Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida accused of membership of Islamic Jihad.

The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
Part drama, part documentary, The Road to Guantánamo focuses on the Tipton Three, a trio of British Muslims who were held in Guantanamo Bay for two years until they were released without charge.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" (2006)
Spike Lee's damining examination of the U.S. government's role and its response to Hurricane Katrina.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Brilliant account of the fall of Enron, the seventh largest company in the US, whose top executives walked away with over one billion dollars, leaving investors and employees with nothing. The film explains how Wall Street analysts, financial regulators, the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen and the company's lawyers allowed Enron to post fictitious profits and engage in corrupt business practices. These included deliberately engineering electricity blackouts in California and creating the conditions for the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Death in Gaza (2004)
Harrowing documentary that portrays the horror of living under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the resulting death of its director, James Miller.

Control Room (2004)
Documentary about the Arab television network Al-Jazeera's coverage of the U.S.-led Iraqi war