ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Golan elephant and the Lebanese crisis

By Ashraf Fahim
March 31, 2005, Asia Times


At the center of the ongoing crisis surrounding the Syrian presence in Lebanon, a 38-year-old elephant has been loitering almost unnoticed. While the world scrutinizes Syria's promised withdrawal, gawks as the Lebanese opposition and Hezbollah flood the streets of Beirut in their war of demonstrations, and debates whether the Bush administration deserves credit for inspiring the "cedar revolution", little attention has been given to a principal factor binding this Levantine Gordian knot - the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan heights.

Though not as glamorous as the more polarizing Israeli occupations in the West Bank and Gaza, Golan is of immense importance because it is the last tangible redoubt of Syrian-Israeli enmity and the physical embodiment of their 57-year ideological and territorial conflict. With Golan quiet since the armistice agreement of 1974 (established after the 1973 "October" War), Lebanon has long been the proving ground for the Levant's principal antagonists.

History's arc can easily be traced from June 4, 1967, when Israel conquered the strategically valuable Golan plateau from Syria, across the gory horizons of the Lebanese civil war, in which Syrian and Israeli intervention would eventually contribute to the instabilities that produced the Valentine's Day assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and the present imbroglio.

The Lebanese pawn may soon be liberated from the stratagems of the surrounding horsemen, however, stripping the Levantine chess board to its bare essentials: Syria and Israel left glowering at each other across the armistice line that divides the mountainous Golan from the road to Damascus.

The problem for Syria is that even if the new reality ends up spotlighting the Golan occupation, it will come at the cost of its suzerainty over Beirut. Syria's Hezbollah ally in south Lebanon has been an invaluable stick to prod Israel into negotiations, and, along with Syria's troop complement, the Shi'ite militia serves as a buffer to westward Israeli invasion. Thus weakened, Syria's chances of retrieving the entire Golan from hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may then be about as likely as an elephant walking through the eye of a needle.

The apples of Golan
When six trucks laden with Golan apples grown by Syrian Druze farmers passed through the Syrian city of Quneitra this month, it was a minor commercial transaction of immense historical symbolism. The ongoing shipments of 200 tons of Golan apples is the first trade of any kind between Israel and Syria, a momentous step given that Damascus still houses the Central Office of the Arab Boycott of Israel. There is also considerable irony in the fact that the apples are transiting through Quneitra, which vengeful Israeli forces razed before they handed it back to Syria in 1973, an act that did much to reify Syrian enmity toward Israel.

Damascus has insisted the apple trade is a onetime deal only meant to help the beleaguered Golan farmers, who had requested that Syria buy this year's surplus. But the Syrian Ba'ath have made a fetish of the symbolism of petty defiance, and it is unlikely the decision was made lightly. In fact, it is precisely the kind of gesture toward "normalizing" relations with Israel that Syria so doggedly resists, believing it to be the last valuable incentive the Arabs have to barter.

Syrian opposition was critical to the failure of Jordan's proposal at the Arab Summit last week in Algiers to begin "normalization" prior to retrieving occupied land. At the summit, though, Syrian President Bashar Assad did take the unusual step of giving an interview to an Israeli reporter.

Rather than a humanitarian gesture, the case of the Golan apples was likely intended to send a timely, relatively cost-free message to Israel and the US at a time when Syria is desperate to get a buy-in to the roadmap "peace process", and relieve US-led international pressure on a number of issues. Washington has ignored the Syrian-Israeli track of the "peace process" throughout Assad's five-year tenure.

And there is every indication that the administration of US President George W Bush is settling into the dogmatic belief that peace can only be made between democracies - a belief now reinforced by right-wing Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror holds a hypnotic power over Bush. The so-called "democratic peace" thesis has become Bush's guidestar on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It is difficult to see how Bush could resolve the ideological contradiction of demanding root and branch Palestinian democratization, while also pressuring Israel to negotiate with Assad's Allawite dictatorship. Assad has moved at a tortoise's pace on democratic reform, partly as a result of conspicuous US pressure and the threatening US presence in Iraq, but also because real reform would likely mean reforming the Ba'ath regime right out of power.

Assad desperately needs to recover the Golan if he is to revive the Syrian economy and shore up his legitimacy. But with Lebanon making him look fragile, the US and Israel have little interest in gifting him the Golan lifesaver. So reluctant is the US that even when Israel has shown signs of bending to prodigious Syrian peace feelers, the administration has pressured the Sharon government not to respond. A report in The Forward on December 15 cited senior US and Israeli sources and noted, "Washington has refrained from publicly endorsing the resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations, and has quietly told Israeli leaders that this would be a bad time to resume talks with Syria."

Israel has joined the chorus preaching Syria compliance with the dictates of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, even as it neglects the council's more numerous resolutions demanding it relinquish the Golan and revoke its 1981 annexation (resolutions 242, 338 and 497). Free from US compulsion, Sharon's office has made it clear that negotiations with Syria are not on the agenda. "Syrian President Bashar Assad still hasn't proven his reliability," said Sharon spokesmen Avi Panzer on March 13. "And so long as this continues, Israel will not start negotiations on the future of the Golan Heights." Panzer cited the hitherto compliant Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a role model for Assad.

There are obvious reasons why Israel is in no hurry give back the resource-rich, strategic Golan plateau. Most Israeli analysts do believe the Golan, even the commanding heights of Mount Hermon, has lost its military significance because of Israel's vast military superiority and advances in the technology of surveillance. But this must be weighed against the Israeli body politic's traditionally obsessive prudence on matters of national security. And the historically discredited Israeli narrative that Syria used to bomb Israeli settlements unprovoked from Golan before 1967 still holds currency among the Israeli public. For them, the Golan is not only a convenient ski resort, a source of decent wine, produce, and one third of their fresh water, but a comforting chunk of territory separating them from legions of unfriendly Damascenes.

Golan is also home to 20,000 illegal Jewish settlers, whose lobbyists wield disproportionate political influence in Israel. Upwards of 130,000 Arabs were driven off the Golan during the 1967 and 1973 wars, leaving a native population of just 17,000 Druze Arabs.

Since peace talks between Israel and Syria broke down in 2000, a consistent majority of Israelis has rejected returning the Golan to Syria. A poll in Maariv in January 2004 revealed that 56% of respondents wouldn't give it back, while 36% would. There are, of course, powerful voices speaking out in favor of negotiations with Syria, especially given Damascus' present vulnerability. They include Israeli President Moshe Katsav and heavyweights in the military and defense establishments, such as former defense minister Moshe Ya'alon. But the man in the middle, Sharon, remains typically unsentimental about the idea.

The lackadaisical, thoroughly ensconced Israelis, ever flush with an embarrassment of military riches, are a stark contrast to the enfeebled Syrians. The military and diplomatic leverage garnered by Hafiz Assad during his 30-year reign has turned to dust in Bashar's hands. That outcome is mostly the result of dramatically unfavorable international conditions, but Bashar possesses little of the preternatural strategic acumen of his late father. And even more important, he is without a superpower benefactor.

Hafiz Assad secured Syria's interests through artful alliance formation, even when they contradicted Syria's pan-Arab orientation (such as its alliance with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s) and through the cultivation of proxies such as Hezbollah and the rejectionist Palestinian groups. Assad curtailed Israeli influence in the Levant by playing kingmaker in Lebanon, and he then helped Hezbollah to bleed Israel during its 18-year occupation. His most impressive sleight of hand, however, was to join the US-led Gulf War coalition against Iraq in 1991, just as his Soviet benefactor imploded, for which Syria was rewarded with a starring role in the US-sponsored "peace process".

Throughout the process, Syria advocated a "comprehensive" peace that would, at the very least, unite Lebanon and Syria in their negotiations with Israel, even as the Palestinian Liberation Organization and then Jordan undermined this strategy by concluding separate peace agreements with Israel.

Destiny has given Bashar times as interesting (in John F Kennedy's Chinese sense) as his father's, but a dramatically weakened strategic environment in which to navigate them. The Syrian economy is a joke, its military is obsolete, and it is hemmed in by US allies. What little strategic depth Assad cultivated by reconciling with Saddam Hussein's Iraq quickly morphed into a hostile US presence on Syria's southeastern border. Assad's recent success in securing military aid from Russia, Syria's solid relations with Turkey, and the reinvigorated alliance with Iran are the few consolations left in an otherwise bare pantry. Even Syria's attempts to reach out to Europe have had only modest success.

The view from Damascus was rather melodramatically portrayed in the March issue of Souria.com's web magazine. The pro-Syrian site's cover graphic featured a map of the Middle East with Syria covered in the Syrian flag and its immediate Arab neighbors, including Lebanon, swathed in an Israeli flag. The accompanying text reads: "It is happening ... faster than anyone has ever expected. Who would have ever expected to find Syria surrounded by so much Zionist hostility. Our only condolence is that we have been there before and we managed to pull through, and with us united and with God on our side we will hopefully prevail again."

Bashar's ability to employ proxies, a key element in the elder Assad's repertoire, has also become hazardous. The cost of sheltering such groups as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has become extraordinarily high in the context of Washington's "war on terror". Israel is increasingly blaming Damascus for acts of Palestinian terrorist groups, and the US has grown indulgent of Tel Aviv's retaliatory strikes on Syrian targets, such as the one on the Ain Saheb camp outside Damascus in October 2003. The issue of the rejectionist Palestinian groups has also been a stumbling block in Syria's relations to Europe.

But it is the waning Syrian influence in Lebanon that provides Bashar's greatest challenge. Ever since the unilateral Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Hezbollah has needled Israel though the dispute over the Shabaa farms area in south Lebanon, which Syria and the pro-Syrian Lebanese government claim is Lebanese territory, while the UN says it belongs to the Syrian Golan. Either way it doesn't belong to Israel. Syria responded to Israeli strikes on its troops manning a radar station in Lebanon in 2001 through Hezbollah, for example. But as the Syrian umbrella is withdrawn, Hezbollah may begin to feel considerably more exposed than it has in the past.

When the "cedar revolution" has run its course in Lebanon, it is an open question as to whether the new government will tolerate the risks of an escalation in the south. Opposition leaders such as Walid Jumblatt, the mercurial Druze parliamentarian, have indicated that Lebanon will not "jump" before Syria and sign a peace agreement with Israel, preserving at least one component of Syrian grand strategy. But Jumblatt did tell al-Arabiya television on March 15 that Lebanon had no claim to the Shabaa Farms, an unprecedented statement for a Lebanese leader.

Without Shabaa to leverage, it is possible that the armistice agreement that has been so assiduously observed on Golan since 1974 could falter. Syria could be tempted to open a new front, as Foreign Minister Faruk Shara hinted in 2003. "Don't forget there are many Israeli settlements in the Golan," he told the Sunday Telegraph cryptically.

The thief and the elephant
If the Sharon government actually did want to conclude an agreement with Syria, it would find that most of the heavy lifting had been done in the 2000 negotiations. Mutual security guarantees and a framework for "normalization" were in essence agreed, leaving only the question of a final border unresolved. Israel cited the 1923 international boundary between Mandate Palestine and Syria, while Syria relied on the 1948 armistice line that held at the outbreak of war on June 4, 1967. The Syrian map would have given it a crucial toehold on Lake Tiberias. Two previous Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, had promised former US president Bill Clinton that they could live with the June 4, 1967, line, but when it came to the crunch, Ehud Barak backed away from their commitments.

Sharon wouldn't be anywhere near as forthcoming as Barak. Even though Assad has gone the extra rhetorical mile by accepting the Israeli view that talks begin "without preconditions" (Syria had previously insisted they begin "where they left off"), Sharon hasn't taken the bait. Here, Israel's actions in the West Bank, where facts on the ground are predetermining the border, may give some guidance to his future strategy on Golan. Sharon may eventually offer to give some land back, but the Syrians will be wary of an adage once told by Gore Vidal. There had never been, in all the history of anecdote, claimed Vidal, a story of a thief who broke and then kicked the ladder down before he could escape.

Ashraf Fahim is a freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based in New York and London. His writing can be found at www.storminateacup.org.uk

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Editor's comment: We see in this piece from Asia Times that the Israeli intransigence over the Golan Heights will, in all probability, remain as it has since the end of peace negotiations between Syria and Israel in 2000. A major problem is the geopolitics of water.

Turkey has been closely aligned with Israel since 1996, and has had tense relations with Syria in the last several years over presumed Syrian backing of Kurdish militia. It has also been revealed, much to the discomfort of the Turks, that Israel has been training the Kurds in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003.

This is well within the parameters of the Zionist agenda outlined by the neocons to use Turkey and Jordan against the Syrians and also to use the Kurds in their plans for regional hegemony against the Iranians and the Shi'ites.

And then there is Bush's new brain (sorry Karl Rove), who, it seems, has had an impact by reinforcing the fallacies of democracy that are reinforced by the Zionist dominated mass media.

It is of particular historical note what the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini, said in 1952, "We fight Israel not because it is Jewish. We fight it because it has a government in which the law of man replaces the law of God in the name of democracy." This coincides with the views of the founders of the United States, in particular, Fisher Ames, who believed we should have "a constitution rooted in the principles of the Bible," and on the Word of God.

It has already come to pass with the assassination of Rafik Hariri that the Zionists have gained a part of their objective of further isolating the Syrians, and cauing Hezbollah to be exposed more than ever with the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.

Hezbollah will continue to press for the Israeli withdawal from the Shabaa Farms area of south Lebanon, which has been shown in 2002 to have been originally a part of Lebanon by an Israeli researcher who went to Paris and uncovered documents that show there was a mistake made by French officers when they drew the boundary line, and failed to make the necessary correction when they discovered their error.

That the Golan is still in Israeli hands, and the Zionist camp clearly in control with its 20,000 radical settlers in place, bodes ill for a negotiated settlement any time soon. In the meantime, the Zionists will go on with their purges of Palestinians in the West Bank and continue unabated their policies of regional hegemony.

Jewish community lines up to blunt message of anti-Zionist author

By Caitlin Cleary
March 15, 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh's Jewish community turned out in force last night for Norman G. Finkelstein's lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. People lined up by the dozen more than an hour before the speech began, anxious to claim a seat in McConomy Auditorium.

Alyssa Cwanger, Post-Gazette Norman Finkelstein speaks at Carnegie Mellon University.

Normally, this is not Finkelstein's crowd. The scholar and author of books like the international best-seller "The Holocaust Industry" and the forthcoming "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History," Finkelstein argues that American Jewry has "played the Holocaust card," exploiting the suffering of Jews as a political tool to generate sympathy for Israeli policy and further the aims of Zionism.

Finkelstein also spoke of human rights abuses Israel has inflicted on Arabs.

Many in the crowd spoke of betrayal and outrage that Finkelstein, whose parents both survived the ghettos and concentration camps of Europe, would draw analogies between Nazi and Israeli policies. So why wait in line to hear the man speak for two hours?

It was part of a carefully planned effort by the United Jewish Federation to minimize the impact of Finkelstein's appearance by quietly filling the seats of the lecture hall with Jews already inured to his "ridiculous and vile distortions," said Jeffrey Cohan, spokesman for the UJF.

Given several weeks' notice of Finkelstein's appearance, the UJF, which represents all Jewish organizations in the Pittsburgh area, deployed a "rapid response team" to e-mail more than 400 people, asking them to show up, and early. Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh conceived of the seat-filling strategy; the United Jewish Federation helped to execute it.

Cohan characterized Finkelstein's support in the Jewish community as "minuscule" and "very extreme fringe."

Ken Boas is one of those supporters. Boas teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh, and came to hear Finkelstein speak about his support of the Palestinian struggle and Israel's "abhorrent and criminal policies" against Palestinians.

"The sense is that if you're Jewish, you need to be supportive of Israel and the Zionist position," Boas said. "It makes it very difficult for Jews to dissent without being branded as anti-Semitic or self-hating."

"Just so you know, Ken is wrong," said David Shtulman, executive director of the American Jewish Committee's Pittsburgh chapter, standing next to Boas. "All one has to do is take a look at Israeli newspapers [to know that Jews can dissent]. There are those that argue Israeli policies are too harsh and help produce suicide bombers -- that's a legitimate point of debate. But to use terms like 'Nazi' policies, 'ethnic cleansing,' that goes beyond the pale. One has to wonder if his point is simply to demonize."

The atmosphere was tense. CMU administrator Indira Nair spoke first, laying out the rules: no questions, no loud remarks, "no noises that your mothers wouldn't approve of." Finkelstein began his remarks with apologies to those who had come "hoping for a circus."

"I'm not going to be providing one," he said.

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Editor's comment: The thought police continue to engage in repression of free speech, here in the form of Jewish gangsters who are active promoters of the brain washing of students and teachers in the Pittsburgh area, by and through the funding provided by the UJF of Pittsburgh to the Holocaust Center of Greater Pittsburgh.

This is ample proof that Finkelstein is correct in his book, that American Jewry does indeed play the "Holocaust card." They actively promote the lie of the "six million," even though the true numbers are now shown conclusively to be much less, and that there is no evidence of genocide.

Apparently these Jews in Pittsburgh are completely ignorant of the Zionist connections and collaboration with the Nazis, but still they cling stubbornly to their false beliefs.

The fact that Zionism is a great danger to Jews, as well as the rest of the world, seems to be lost on these robots who are convinced that their own brain washing is the truth.

Finkelstein exposes the fraud for the entire world to see. And this seems, once again, to expose the true motives of the global parasites of the Zionist elite.

Norman G. Finkelstein (in cartoon)

DUMP FREE TRADE
State Legislatures Strike Back Against Trade Deals

By Mark Anderson
March 21, 2005, American Free Press

United States trade policies and the resulting steep job and revenue losses, and the erosion of national sovereignty, are wreaking so much havoc around the country that state officials are more motivated than ever to put their protests in writing.

The Indiana state Senate on Feb. 22 voted 25-24 in favor of Senate Concurrent Resolution 16, calling on the U.S. Congress to declare a general moratorium on all trade deals.

This close full-Senate vote followed a 9-0 vote by the Senate Committee on Commerce and Transportation to send SCR 16 to the entire Indiana Senate. The resolution is pending before the 100-member state House.

Meanwhile, similar resolutions have been taken up by the Utah and New Jersey state legislatures.

Indiana’s resolution is more general in its rebuttal of U.S. trade policies, while Utah’s and New Jersey’s are more specific. Only Utah’s has passed both legislative chambers.

In Indiana, the text of SCR 16 states in its opening paragraph: “A concurrent resolution urging the Congress of the United States to place a moratorium on new free trade agreements, to review current free trade agreements and policies of the United States, to investigate and review participation of the United States with international trade organizations, and to ensure that the agreements, policies and participation are in the best interests of the citizens of Indiana and the United States.”

So Indiana’s wording, like that of Utah, suggests these protests are not necessarily ironclad — there is room left for “review” to “ensure” such trade agreements are in the “best interests” of the citizenry.

Still, SCR 16, which is relatively brief, drives home the point that Indiana lost “approximately 102,000 manufacturing jobs” between January 2000 and January 2004, and that “manufacturing results in three to seven jobs created for each manufacturing job.”

The resolution adds that “. . . free trade agreements and policies of the United States with other nations have severely affected United States manufacturing industries and the workers the industries employ.”

SCR 16, in an apparent reference to the World Trade Organization that the United States government helped create and joined in 1994, notes that “ . . . participation by the United States in international trade organizations may imperil the success of United States manufacturing.”

SCR 16 also states “ . . . foreign nations such as China have engaged in a wide range of unfair trading practices, including the manipulation of currency, subsidization of industries and the dumping of below-cost subsidized products into the United States market.”

Indiana’s resolution summarizes that “. . . U.S. manufacturers cannot compete with foreign companies who pay a fraction of the salaries paid to U.S. manufacturing employees, provide no health benefits to their workers, do not have to comply with safety and environmental regulations, pay no pensions and receive government subsidies. . . .”

Indiana state Sen. Timothy Lanane, a Democrat from Anderson, played a key role in authoring SCR 16. In a press release from his office, Lanane said that testimony he heard in committee meetings indicated that current trade policies also allow foreign interests to “violate U.S. patent protections.”

Sen. Allie Craycraft (D-Selma) co-authored SCR 16, which is to be sent to President Bush and congressional leaders.

UTAH AGAINST FTAA
Both chambers of the Utah legislature passed a resolution that more specifically calls on the U.S. government to say “no” to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, which would expand the highly controversial 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement — now covering Canada, the U.S. and Mexico — throughout the Western Hemisphere.

S.R. 1 initially was OK’d on Jan. 25 by Utah’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. Passed 21-7 by the full state Senate on Feb. 7, the resolution “urges the United States Congress to oppose any agreement for the United States to enter into a Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

On Feb. 18, the Utah House passed H.R. 9, a similar resolution, by a 61-8 vote.

There may be equivocation in the Senate version. It states that the Utah Senate “urges that the United States not enter into the FTAA until the nation has had more experience and greater understanding of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization.”

S.R. 1 also:

• Refers to the U.S. as a “world leader in pushing for free trade, which is a hallmark of our capitalistic society. . .”

• Says “free trade only thrives when there is a level playing field of government regulations between trading partners . . .”

• Says manufacturing jobs “have plunged from 19.3 million in 1980 to only about 14.6 million today, in large part because of these types of trade issues . . .”

• “. . . The United States consistently bows to the wishes of the WTO, only proving the words of Texas Rep. Ron Paul to be prophetic: ‘The most important reason why we should get [out of the WTO] is to maintain our nation’s sovereignty. We should never deliver to any international governing body the authority to dictate what our laws should be.’”

• “. . . Both the WTO and NAFTA, through the use of trade tribunals, now claim the sovereign authority to overrule decisions of American courts and make awards to foreign businesses for violations of trade agreements.”

In New Jersey, an anti-FTAA measure, A.C.R. 210, reportedly was introduced in the state Assembly in October of 2004 with a couple of co-sponsors.

It passed the Assembly’s Labor Committee and reportedly is awaiting action by the speaker of the Assembly to schedule it for a floor vote.

The Business Roundtable, an elite lobbying group for transnational interests, recently released a white paper calling 2005 the most important year since 1963 for passing more trade deals.

The Roundtable is a staunch supporter of NAFTA, the 1994 GATT-WTO agreement and is fighting hard for passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the FTAA this year.

Amid claims by the Roundtable that established and proposed trade deals promise “open markets” for U.S.
exports and more “economic growth,” the state of Indiana and its neighbor, Michigan, have been among the hardest hit in terms of job losses. Indeed, much of the nation is reeling from massive industrial and high-tech job losses.

Opponents of these transnational trade deals insist that NAFTA, GATT-WTO, CAFTA and FTAA proposals not only ensure that America’s best jobs and its tax base will be among the nation’s top exports, but also that national borders would be diluted or erased under the FTAA, which would economically and politically merge the Western Hemisphere into a European Union-style super state with a resulting unregulated migration of people from one nation to another in this “age of terrorism,” creating a very perilous situation.

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Editor's comment: We need jobs and the only way to do it is to force the corporations to bring back factories. This can only be done by repudiating ALL free trade agreements.

These are the most destructive of national sovereignty and has driven this country into the poor house of deficit spending thru government price supports and other assorted agricultural programs that have only served to drive out the family farm and force migration of rural populations into the large metropolitan centers.

We could have had a balanced budget if only we hd chosen to pay parity to the raw material producers. This is The Nature of Wealth. This link is to an online book. And here is a short excerpt that is very pertinent.

America's balanced economy was struck down in cold blood during 1953. During that year, the United States enjoyed $330 billion of National Income. If raw materials had been fed into the economy at the same relative values that had existed during the 1946-1950 baseline, National Income would have exceeded $355 billion instead of growing to only $330 billion. This income shortage that began in 1953 has now multiplied 1000 fold. It now grows each and every year. In 1997, political pundits on the right and the left claimed victory over national deficits while Americans borrowed $2.16 to produce each $1.00 increase in (GDP), gross domestic product. America continues to borrow prosperity in a futile effort to compensate for a chronic shortage of debt free national income.

Today the annual shortage of National Income has grown to almost $1.5 trillion, and the accumulated shortage equals America's total public and private debt, proving that massive debt expansion is a public policy gone awry, not an economic necessity. America's accumulated loss of income now totals over $20 trillion. This economic plague has undercut the wage structure and the overall profitability of the American economy. It forces debt-based consumer expenditures. Worst of all, a society burdened by too much debt inevitably stacks up inventories of surplus goods and surplus people.

It all boils down to the unwillingness of the corporations to pay for the creation of wealth, and these same corporations have, since before the Congressional hearings of the 1920s, imported cheap raw materials to the detriment of the American producers. This profit mongering is the basis of the arguments in favor of free trade.

There is a book on this subject from Acres USA, UNFORGIVEN The American Economic System SOLD for Debt and War. In it you will find the reasons that "all wealth comes from the soil."

$7 Million Civil Rights Suit
Filed Against Missouri Judge
Chrisitian Man Asked to Have
Jesus Christ as his Counsel

BY DENISE HENDERSON VAUGHN
Quill Correspondent (West Plains)
March 23, 2005

Richard John Adams, 50, Branson, has filed a civil lawsuit (in the US 8th Circuit, Western District of Missouri) against Judge John Hutcherson of Clay County who is hearing a criminal case in which Adams is the defendant. Adams is seeking $7 million, plus punitive damages.

Adams, in talking with The Quill Tuesday, contends in the lawsuit that the judge has deprived him of his right to liberty, his right to an impartial judge, his rights to due process and a speedy trial, and his right to counsel. Adams said he does not have an attorney representing him in the case.

At one time in the approximate two years the criminal case has been before the courts, Adams asked that "Jesus Christ" be his co-counselor, a request the court denied.

The case before Hutcherson involves two charges of tampering with a judicial officer. Adams' trial is set for April 4 at Camdenton. If found guilty, he could get up to seven years in prison on each charge. The charges came after prosecutors said Adams made inappropriate comments to Associate Circuit Judge John Jacobs of Ozark County during a Howell County traffic ticket case in July 2002, heard in Ozark County on a change of venue.

Hutcherson is presiding over the case after being appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court. Missouri Assistant Attorney General Ted Bruce is serving as prosecutor.

"This is all because judges don't like to be put in check when they have done wrong," Adams told The Quill Tuesday.

Adams said he "put Jacobs on notice" that he intended to sue Jacobs for violating his rights.

He has been deprived of counsel, he added. Attorney Steve Privette, Willow Springs, withdrew from the case because Adams could not pay for his services. Adams said he wants counsel, and has sought but has not found a replacement. "Because the case involves a judge, they don't want to take it, because it might negatively affect their cases in the future," he said.

Adams said he received an e-mail from Hutcherson informing him that he will not be allowed to ask questions of prospective jurors; rather, the judge will ask the questions. One proposed question, Adams said, asks jurors if they will hold it against him that he chooses to represent himself. "That's deceptive," he said. "I don't choose to represent myself. I want counsel."

Because he has been unable to get counsel, and due to his lack of legal training, Adams said, he plans to bring stacks of law books into the courtroom to serve as reference while he represents himself. He acknowledges his efforts to refer to the books may slow down proceedings.

He's filing motions asking to have the case dismissed, he said.

Adam's case has been delayed repeatedly. "I have never asked for a continuance, since 2002," he said. A prosecutor or a judge was responsible for every delay, he said. "If this case was a slam-dunk, I would already be in prison. Why have there been three amended informations filed, a change of prosecutors, and so many different judges?"

Hutcherson is the fourth judge to preside over the case since it left Jacobs' court. The judge saga began in February 2003 when Adams stood before 44th Circuit Judge John Moody in a hearing to take up pending motions. At that time, Moody scheduled a jury trial for March 19, 2003. A short time later Moody recused himself from the case.

On March 19, 2003, Mo. Supreme Court-appointed Judge William Mauer was in the courtroom, but the trial was not held that day. Adams requested the date be changed to allow attorney Privette to join him in court. Mauer approved the request. Privette later asked to be taken off the case.

On Nov. 10, 2003, before appointed Judge Daniel Darnold, Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges. Feb. 18, Darnold sat as judge for Adams' pretrial hearing. Darnold later removed himself from the case because he was appointed Vernon County presiding commissioner in Nevada, Mo., and while holding that office he could not preside over court cases.

More from The Quill:

BY ALLISON SKINNER
Quill Staff Writer (West Plains)
December 8, 2004

The man who says Jesus is his chief counsel in the courtroom has filed a motion asking that the judge presiding in his case be evaluated by a psychiatrist or psychologist to determine if he “suffers from a mental disease or defect,” according to court records.

Richard John Adams, 50, Branson, charged with two counts of tampering with a judicial officer, is to be back in court Jan. 31 for the setting of a new jury trial date at the Camden County Courthouse in Camdenton.

The charges came when prosecutors say Adams made inappropriate comments to Judge John Jacobs during a Howell County traffic ticket case in July 2002, heard in Ozark County on a change of venue. If found guilty, Adams could serve up to seven years in prison on each charge.

Adams has claimed it is a “frivolous” lawsuit, and that the state has no evidence to support the charges.

Judge John Hutcherson of Clay County moved the case out of Ozark County on a change of venue, requested by Adams. Hutcherson has been appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court, and Assistant Missouri Attorney General Ted Bruce is serving as the prosecutor. Adams is representing himself, but told the court during a motions hearing that he is looking for stand-by counsel.

Today, Adams told The Quill he did request a change of venue, but had asked the case be heard in Taney County to ease his travel expenses. Camdenton will be a much greater distance for him to travel than Ozark or Taney County, he added.

Adams believes Hutcherson no longer has jurisdiction over the case because Adams, jointly with the change of venue request, asked for a change of judge.

”Missouri higher courts have ruled that upon the filing of disqualification of judge, said judge has no power to act except to set down the case for another judge, and any purported order made by said judge after the filing of such disqualification is void,” Adams said in court papers filed in Ozark County. “I, the accused, hereby move the court to take mandatory judicial notice of the fact that the conduct and actions of Mr. John R. Hutcherson in this case is self evident of his lack of competence and/or disrespect and willful disregard of the law, and I move the court to sanction Mr. Hutcherson for such contempt, and fine and/or imprison him. But, in all fairness to Hutcherson, before doing so, I move the court for an order to direct the Director of the Department of Health to examine Mr. Hutcherson by a psychiatrist or psychologist to determine whether Mr. Hutcherson suffers from a mental disease or defect; as to whether Mr. Hutcherson, as a result of a mental disease or defect, lacks the mental capacity to understand Missouri law and to determine his capacity to withstand a hearing or trial for his refusal to carry out and perform his duties under the Missouri law.”

Adams believes Hutcherson is either incompetent or has joined other state officials, he calls “actors,” in acts of “abuse of process” against him for exercising his rights.

”These state actors thought they were messing with “Joe six-pack” who doesn’t know he has rights,” Adams said today. “I’m not a ‘Joe six-pack.’ I am a proud American citizen who not only knows his rights, but (is) exercising them. I will not allow my public servants to take away my rights without a fight.

”The problem with our legal system today is that we the people have been asleep while the bar associations were busy filling the offices of our government with bar attorneys,” Adams told The Quill today. “’Attorn’ means to turn over. We the people have turned over our government to a private band of criminals who are running our country into the pits of hell. Is it any wonder why the 1983 Oxford Law Dictionary defines the term ‘devil’ as a member of the bar? Wake up people, the writing is on the wall.”

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Editor's comment: Richard Adams has a 300 mile round trip to make on April 4th for his next court date. Please help with any cash donations you may be able to manage since he has filed in forma pauperis being unable to afford to pay filing fees. He works part time only for minimum wage and has three children, one an infant. Do this for our Christian brother. Here is his mailing information.

Richard Adams, c/o P.O. Box 291, Hollister, Missouri 65673

If you would like to contact Richard by email, please send me a PM and request his email from me.

The New Gladio In Action?
Coup d'État in Disguise:
Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template

by Jonathan Mowat, Global Research
9 February 2005

Ukrainian Post Modern Coup completes testing of New Template

The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine have completed the field-testing of the "Post Modern Coup". Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country." One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers. And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to "fool and brainwash" young intelligentsia in his own country, banned the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004 article entitled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup:

"With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes.

Funded and organized by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organizations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's
elections"

Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly, what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein.

The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogsites) and cell phones (including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible "Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like -- a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s.

"With the crushing ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3, 2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian leaders to civic groups."

She might have mentioned the videogames that helped create the deranged mind-set of these "civic groups." The repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through their aptly named blogsite, "Le Sabot Post-Moderne,"
(www.postmodernclog.com) is indicative of the technical and sociological components involved.

A Civilian Revolution in Military Affairs

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly deploy small groups, suggests we are seeing is a civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and communications.

Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones, constitute the doctrine's civilian application. This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places (for example the RAND) for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the "neo-conservatives" in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent) and non lethal (non violent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a fundamental element in both violent and non violent forms of warfare. This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the theoreticians of the post modern coup, for example, Dr. Peter Ackerman, the author of "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict" (Praeger 1994). Writing in the "National Catholic Reporter" on April 26, 2002, Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power: The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq - thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts in Washington D.C, of which former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall is President. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington D.C., which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 "to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports, through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

"Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious hysteria"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in post modern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next Thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations," in the group's "Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British Military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in Human Relations in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture" at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations," and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass media." (Perlmutter on the origin of the concept of globalization: see quote.)

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups - the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate) impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and later on Chairman of NDI), in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country...This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if covert, intervention by international institutions and governments threatening the targeted regime, and using well placed operatives within the targeted regime's military and intelligence services to ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these traditional elements, of course, no post modern coup could ever work. Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnavel and conspiracy in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

Gladio and James Bond get a youth group

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshoot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "non violence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US Army officer with 30 years of experience in South East Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001 interview with film producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators - especially in Myanmar, where he had been stationed as military attaché - and seeing the potential of Sharp's alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey "was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attaché in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organized the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group....He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June, 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr. Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a forward by George Kennan, the famous "Mr. X" 1940's architect of the Cold War who was also a founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society ungovernable by would be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples of the Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovakian resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9. In his forward, Kennan praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional, purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO country languages. See the link to the Italian translation of the book (Verso un'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were, ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and non military means. The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light (immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the US Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the name 'civilian based defense' to Sharp," John M. Mecartney, Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute, reports in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985, Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the US Army, was giving seminars at Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War.("Transforming Struggle")

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory board in those years. Following his
posting as the head of US Army intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that General Atkeson, who also advised CSIS on "international security." served as "national intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports, "was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.

And dope too?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrghyzstan, now at the top of the hit list, is another opium conduit. And George Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s, when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia, when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created with US and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the US ambassador whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

The Serbian virus

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11, 2000 by Michael Dobbs, entitled. "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's catchphrase.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert analyzed and popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary-series and book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict," together with retired US Air Force officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.

Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone who... had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in Tiananmen, where the army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work — and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, freely adapting sections of it into a Serbian-language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual." Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the Budapest Hilton in March 2000.

Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to authority, and also how to subvert the regime's "pillars of support," including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement and alienate the international community, from which material and financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it:

"Stay nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

No lack of opportunities for employment

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe, notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April 2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the US overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website, reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following developments in Belarus since early this year, it is clear that Zubr was developed or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model. Also, [Albert Einstein's report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is available in English on the Zubr website at www.zubr-belarus.com Of course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else, simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However the successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases, which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other countries.

And with funding provided by Freedom House and the US government, Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, in Budapest, to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth movement, Ian Trainor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004 article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organized the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.

An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004, entitled "Serbia's export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:

"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor, the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging daily protests -- carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies -- with "training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus. In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training," group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was flying high on white flags again -- this time in Georgia, when protesters stormed the parliament in
an action that led to the toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was following the strategies of Otpor.

James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's deportation, in an October 14, 2004 release which reported that he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's "unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline Box

• Otpor! founded in Belgrade, Serbia in October 1998. Coup overthrows President Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000. Subsequently forms Center for Nonviolent Resistence to spread !!! revolutions. • Clinton Administration's Community of Democracies launched in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000. • Zubr! founded in Minsk, Belarus, on January 14, 2001. Election-Coup efforts fail in September 9, 2001. • Mjaft! founded in Tirana, Albania, on March 15, 2003. • Kmara! founded in Tblisi, Georgia in April 2003. "Rose revolution" overthrows President Eduard Shevardnadze on November 23, 2003. • Pora! founded in Kiev, Ukraine in June 2004. "Orange revolution" installs Victor Yushchenko into power on December 26, 2004. • Kmara! overthrows Abashidze of Ajaria (western Georgian secessionist province) May 5, 2004.

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Editor's comment: Stay tuned. More to come.

Posted by: Jim / 10:38 AM