Eight Years On

Wirepullers: venerdì saranno passati otto anni dagli attentati dell'11 settembre e cosa sia successo realmente rimane un mistero, almeno per coloro che non credono alla versione ufficiale dei fatti. E' veramente Bin Laden l'architetto dell'attentato più scioccante e spettacolare dei nostri tempi? Come ha fatto a mettere in piedi una macchina di morte così perfetta senza essere scoperto? Chi ha guadagnato qualcosa dall'attentato? L'amministrazione Bush sapeva? Non sapeva? Ha fatto finta di non sapere? Queste domande non avranno mai una risposta ma c'è chi continua a cercare la verità, perchè qualcosa non torna nelle spiegazioni che sono state date fino ad oggi per raccontare l'attentato che ha cambiato il mondo. (2)

A diplomat's perspective on the post-9/11 world.

The 8 a.m. US Airways shuttle from Washington to New York City took off pretty much on time. The mid-September sky was clear, the air still, and most of the flight was perfectly uneventful. My State Department colleague David Pearce and I read the papers and looked over our notes as the plane began its descent toward LaGuardia.

"Look!" somebody said, and a rumble of alarmed voices spread through the cabin. One of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire, and smoke churned over the upper stories like a thunderhead over lower Manhattan. We craned our necks to see through one window, then another as our plane banked and made its approach to the runway. Then, just as we landed, we saw in the distant skyline the second tower erupt in flames. Cell phones rang out, and random, frightened voices tried to make sense of what was happening.

For a diplomat, I have seen a lot of violence in my career. I survived the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut that was, until that day in September 2001, among the most infamous attacks on Americans in the history of terrorism. David is as experienced in the Middle East as anyone we have at State. But you didn't need our expertise to know, when that plane hit the second tower, that this was the work of terrorists.

In the taxi on the way into Manhattan, traffic slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether in the middle of the Queensboro Bridge. As we looked down the East River we could see the burning towers now very clearly. Suddenly they imploded amid enormous clouds of dust and smoke, and the spectacle seemed impossible, almost dreamlike. Our cabdriver, an immigrant from South Asia—a Pakistani, I think—was shattered. And who was not that day?

I was born amid the wheat fields of eastern Washington state, and I live there again now. But for four decades, starting with a backpacking trip at age 21 from Amsterdam to Kabul to Calcutta, then in a State Department career with postings mostly in the greater Middle East, I spent my adult life abroad, as a student and diplomat. By September 11, I knew the world from which those 19 hijackers came almost better than I knew my own country. And what I knew most of all was that the two were bound together—even, perhaps especially, when the connections seemed too ephemeral for most Americans to bother with.

Americans tend to want to identify a problem, fix it, and then move on. Sometimes this works. Often it does not. Of course, imposing ourselves on hostile or chaotic societies is no solution either. The perceived arrogance and ignorance of overbearing powers can create new narratives of humiliation that will feed calls for vengeance centuries from now. What's needed in dealing with this world is a combination of understanding, persistence, and strategic patience to a degree that Americans, traditionally, have found hard to muster.

We have learned much since September 11, 2001, but we are still learning this lesson. As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, with U.S. casualties rising and the Taliban revived, public opinion is turning against what was always, compared with Iraq, our "good war." No one, least of all me, has an easy fix to propose. But over the last eight years I was intimately involved with our country's effort to manage its relationship with the Middle East and South Asia. I know that success only comes from a solid, sustained commitment of resources and attention.

Back in D.C. a few days after the attacks on New York and Washington, I found the boarding pass for that US Airways shuttle among my things. Since then it has traveled with me in a little frame—to Kabul when I reopened the long-shuttered, partially bombed-out American Embassy there; to Islamabad, when I was appointed ambassador in 2004; and then to Baghdad, when Gen. David Petraeus and I got the job of trying to turn the Iraq War around in 2007. The pass was and is a reminder of how fast our world can change, especially when we Americans lose sight of the way other people in other parts of the globe think, and act, and remember.

The next flights I took, a little more than a week after 9/11, were to Paris, then Geneva. The shock of the attacks had pushed Washington to reengage with all sorts of unlikely partners as it prepared for war in Afghanistan, and as the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf, I had been dispatched to deal with emissaries from Tehran.

At the beginning of my career in the early 1970s, I learned Persian and served in provincial Iran. But that was before the Islamic Revolution, and by 2001 the United States had had almost no direct dealings with the Iranian government for more than 20 years. The Geneva talks—under the aegis of a United Nations working group of countries that hosted large numbers of Afghan exiles—were not a secret. Still, we met in the cavernous conference rooms of the U.N. building in Geneva on Saturdays, when nobody else was around. Our conversations about the future of Afghanistan went on for hours and into the night, and occasionally adjourned to hotel suites. We ordered a lot of room service, and sometimes watched the sun rise from behind the Alps.

I was pleasantly surprised by my Iranian counterparts: two out of three had been educated in the States, and during breaks we compared notes on UCLA football. But what was most surprising to me was how eager they were for America, the "Great Satan," to send troops into their backyard. In early October, nearly a month after the attacks on the United States, we were sitting around the table in one of those U.N. conference rooms talking in fairly hypothetical terms about how a post-Taliban Parliament might be structured. One of the Iranian diplomats—very much an action-oriented guy—grew more and more frustrated until finally he stood up and, almost shouting, said that unless we stopped talking about "what might be" and started doing something about the regime currently in place, none of our meandering discussions would make any difference. Then he stomped out of the room. The U.S. bombing campaign, as it happened, started a few days later.

I went to Kabul myself after the Taliban fell, to reopen the U.S. Embassy for the first time since 1989. (Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage gave me the assignment in typically gruff fashion, calling me into his office the day after Christmas and barking, "Crocker, we need you in Afghanistan now.") Three decades of conflict had annihilated whole city blocks in the capital. Afghanistan had always been poor, and even when I hitchhiked across it as a longhaired college kid I'd never seen such miserable—and, still, such generous—people. But now there was no infrastructure left, no economy, no schools. In a remarkable understatement, I thought, half out loud, "My God, we've got quite a job in front of us."

The embassy—almost miraculously—was more or less intact. Some rockets had hit it. A lot of windows had been blown out. A small fire had done some damage, but that was all. For a dozen years the building had been empty, yet our Afghan local staff had never left their jobs. The gardeners continued to garden; the mechanics and the drivers maintained the vehicles; and the staff kept up a continuous presence that prevented the Taliban and others from entering the compound. Several were arrested for being "stooges of the Americans." They could have been killed. But they soldiered on for those dozen years. I think I can say they were deeply happy to see us return.

So were the Iranians, whose diplomats on the ground seemed eager to work with us and with the new Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai. One of the issues we were trying to sort out in those early days was the fate of former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the most brutal and duplicitous of the mujahedin leaders in the 1980s and '90s, when he'd had close ties to the Pakistani intelligence services and, it was widely reported, to the CIA. Hekmatyar was under a kind of luxurious house arrest in north Tehran. Everyone understood that he had ties to Osama bin Laden, and that if he were free he'd do anything he could to take power from Karzai. We talked to the Iranians about what a great and good thing it would be if they moved Hekmatyar from house arrest to real arrest and transferred him to Afghan custody. Of course we wanted them to do something similar with any Qaeda fugitives they'd picked up. All that was on the table.

Then President Bush gave his first State of the Union address in January 2002, denouncing the Axis of Evil, which he defined as Iraq, North Korea—and Iran. Shortly thereafter, our "Geneva group" met in Kabul. The Iranian looked at me. "What are you guys doing?" he said. I don't know exactly what I answered, something along the lines of, "Look, I'm the guy in Kabul. We need to focus on the concrete issues with which we've been dealing." But I knew my job had just gotten a lot harder. Soon afterward the Iranians not only released Hekmatyar from house arrest, they reinserted him back into Afghanistan. Today his Hezb-i-Islami organization is one of the deadliest insurgent forces in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have taken their highest casualties since 2001.

Now, I'm not saying that American cooperation with the Iranians in Afghanistan wouldn't have broken down anyway at some point. In fact it continued until May 2003. But right from the start we were imposing our own constructs on a region we had barely started to reengage. By early March 2002, three months after the overthrow of the Taliban, it was obvious there were complexities at play in Afghanistan that we hadn't anticipated on the ground, let alone grappled with at a policy level. Operation Anaconda—a joint U.S.-Afghan effort to dislodge a large Taliban-Qaeda concentration in the mountains of Paktia province—turned out to be a much tougher fight than we'd anticipated. We had to use Northern Alliance armor—Tajik armor—which irritated our Pashtun allies in the south. Then we discovered that many ordinary Afghans, rather than fleeing the fighting, were flocking to the area to take up arms against us.

We shouldn't have been surprised. The Afghans had, by God, fought the Soviets. They'd fought the British before that. And now here were the Americans. (And, by the way, the British were with us.) It wasn't reasonable to expect that after a quarter century of conflict and several hundred years' history of battling outsiders, suddenly there was going to be nothing but sweetness and harmony on sun-dappled uplands going forward. Clearly our fight in Afghanistan not only was not over, it was arguably just getting started.

I think many people understand by now that this fundamental mistake—underestimating local rivalries and the intensity of resistance to occupation—was repeated on a grand scale in Iraq. That is not to say that Saddam Hussein did not deserve to be removed. Let's be clear about this, because I think it's something many Americans today, especially American liberals, have failed to recognize. Internally, in Iraq, Saddam was the most murderous, vicious ruler the world has known since the fall of the Nazis, with the possible exception of Pol Pot in Cambodia. He terrorized pretty much everyone in the country, even his inner circle. I was serving in Baghdad back in 1979 when he turned a congress of his Baath Party into a public purge, ordering dozens of his former comrades to leave the room and face immediate execution. Regionally, he invaded two of his neighbors. In the case of Iran, he touched off one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II. He invaded Kuwait and subverted or attempted to subvert the Gulf states as well as Jordan and Syria. And I haven't even talked about weapons of mass destruction, which he undoubtedly wanted and which we genuinely thought he had acquired.

Still, Saddam's removal alone would not magically transform Iraq. After I'd returned to Washington in 2002, and as the war approached, what I feared most were all the unknowns that lay beyond the fighting. I knew from my time in Beirut that we were going to be setting in motion a multitude of forces, with consequences rippling out—20th-order consequences—and I didn't see how we were prepared to deal with them. Or in truth, even with all the preparation in the world, I didn't know that we could deal with them.

Along with many others at the State Department, I supported the interagency studies of the Future of Iraq Project. I thought I'd learned some lessons in Kabul that might be relevant. Toward the end of the year, the Office of Iraqi Affairs, which I supervised, made an effort simply to lay out for policymakers some of the things that might happen if we intervened militarily in Iraq. Sometimes called "The Perfect Storm Memo," it's still a classified document, so I'm not in a position to go through its content in any detail. But in any case it had no operational traction.

Washington turf battles had direct implications on the battlefield. In Baghdad in April 2003, after Saddam fell, few U.S. commanders had a clear picture of the political landscape and its importance to the overall mission. I remember meeting one in particular who had zero interest in anything except getting the kinetics right—deploy, defend, point and shoot. I tried to give him a sense of what the country would look like now for the Iraqis and, indeed, for his forces, if we didn't find a way to address all sorts of economic, social, and political issues. His response (and he was not alone): "This isn't our mission here. The things you are telling me are interesting, but they have nothing to do with me."

At this point, having made the fateful decision to intervene in Iraq, we weren't intervening enough. The end of the dictatorship translated almost immediately into an end to public order. It was as if a door had opened for criminals to run through. Looters ruled the streets, pillaging shops and government buildings, ransacking the National Museum, even tearing apart the country's electrical grid and selling off the metal in the wires as scrap. Iraqis took the chaos to mean the Americans didn't really give a damn about them, weren't able to control events, and had neither a plan nor the resources necessary to control the country.

They weren't entirely wrong. What was the plan to restart a government, for instance? Nobody really knew. For weeks we negotiated to create an Iraqi governing body representative of the country's many different factions, ethnicities, and faiths. It was an all-consuming effort; one in which we got crucial help from the United Nations mission led by Sergio Vieira de Mello, who announced the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council in mid-July. Then a suicide bomber attacked U.N. headquarters at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, killing Sergio and many of his colleagues. The loss was catastrophic. The collapse of the U.N. effort that followed the bombing meant there was no neutral force to shepherd the political process. For the insurgents, it was easy now to frame the conflict as Iraqis vs. Occupiers.

Sometimes, terrorism works, and our adversaries in Iraq understood the dynamics there much better than many of us. They understood and exploited our ignorance. They thought they could rely on our historical lack of staying power. And about that they were almost right.

The Iraqis were not alone in thinking that Americans could not be relied upon. The following year I was sent as ambassador to Islamabad, where an entire generation of politicians and military commanders had been conditioned to believe that the United States was an unreliable ally.

Look at the history. The tribal areas of northwest Pakistan have never been under the control of any authority outside those rugged hills, ever. For a decade we staged our effort against the Soviets out of the North-West Frontier, in the name of Islam. We organized it; the Pakistanis supported it; the Saudis funded it. Then we decided to move on. We went from being the most allied of allies to slapping sanctions on Islamabad after its nuclear tests. As the Pakistanis saw it, we pulled up stakes and left them with the monster we'd helped create. They didn't trust us.

Often we didn't trust them. But it doesn't work very well with the Pakistanis to say, "We'll give you this, if you do that, and if you don't, we'll take it away." Given our record, they tended to read this as the prelude to another U.S. walkout and would hedge their bets. While I was in Islamabad, conventional wisdom in Washington held that President Pervez Musharraf hadn't done enough to rein in either Islamic militants like Lashkar-e-Taiba who were focused on Kashmir, or Qaeda supporters in the tribal areas. The demands from Washington always focused on the immediate and the tactical: "Get that group! Get those leaders!" When we demanded that Musharraf crack down on Lashkar—who were seen as heroic freedom fighters by most Pakistanis—he'd say, "I cannot take them on frontally. It would not only destroy me, it would destroy the nation."

Building confidence is a long process, but sometimes you can take great strides in a short time. In 2005 an earthquake killed more than 70,000 Pakistanis in two minutes. The United States responded immediately with what became the largest and longest airborne relief effort since the Berlin Airlift 60 years ago. Early on, some of us thought it would be a good idea to put big American flag decals on the Chinook helicopters that had been ordered out of Afghanistan into Pakistan to deliver aid. "Are you completely crazy?" said the commander of the helicopter contingent. He'd just come out of a war zone, after all. "Why don't we just save time and paint a big bull's-eye on them?"

"No, no. Trust us on this," I said. "It'll work." And it did. The Chinooks became an emblem of the whole international relief effort. After a couple of months, little toy Chinooks even started appearing in stores with big American flags on the side. (Of course, they were made in China.)

My last assignment for the State Department was to return to Iraq, in March 2007. The problems that had begun to develop in the first weeks after the invasion had become monstrous. Sunnis and Shiites were slaughtering each other with guns and knives and power drills. Roadside bombs were picking off American soldiers by the dozens.

The Middle East is a region that knows it cannot keep determined superpowers out. For hundreds of years, whether the French or British, the Russians or the Americans, they've muscled their way in. But while countries in the region don't have that hard left cross at their disposal to block outsiders, they've got a wicked counterpunch. Once you're in, then they go to work.

I learned this firsthand on April 18, 1983. I was sitting in my fourth-floor office in the Beirut embassy when a tremendous force—I heard no sound—slammed me into the wall. My wife, Christine, whose desk was right outside my office, got a nasty whack in the head when the windows blew in; the Mylar glued to them wrapped all the flying glass into a hard ball. Our injuries were superficial, but a truck bomb had ripped off the whole façade of one wing of the embassy, right up to the seventh floor. As I headed out of our suite of offices, which were at the back, I could see that the CIA station, which was on the same floor in the front, was just gone. I was looking out on open air.

In all, 63 people, including 17 Americans, were killed by that explosion, and less than a year later, after another bomb had destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks, the United States withdrew from Lebanon. Not only the Iranians, whose proxies had launched those attacks, learned from that experience. When I arrived in Baghdad, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias, as well as their backers in Syria and Iran, believed they were on the verge of driving America out of Iraq. We lacked—as they'd seen in Lebanon—strategic patience. But instead of stepping back, we stepped forward, and not just with troops. Christine came with me to Baghdad, and one day in March 2008, when Shiite militias were raining mortars down on the Green Zone, our house was shelled. A staff aide brought me a note during a meeting: "Your house was just rocketed, but wife is okay." Every single window in the upstairs of our Baghdad home had been blown out. Still, she stayed.

Like anything solid, the relationship between Dave Petraeus and me was built over time. We started working together before either of us arrived in Baghdad, when he was still stationed at Fort Leavenworth and I was in Islamabad. We never had what's called unity of command, but we were committed to unity of effort and we worked constantly at it. We understood that no issue in Iraq would be purely military or purely political.

In June 2007, a few months into the surge, the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed. A year before, a similar bombing at the mosque had set off a sectarian bloodbath. I heard the news, instantly thought I needed to talk to Dave—and he was already standing in my office. We agreed we needed to see Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki face to face, immediately. All this happened with a minimum of discussion; it was intuitive. In any event, as we worked with Maliki, we were able to stop the kind of reprisals that had led to such disastrous consequences the year before. History is made up of things that didn't happen, as well as those that did. And the fact that violence did not break out after the second Samarra bombing may well have been the turning point in the surge.

The strategy we followed was all about adapting our tactics to the society as it was, not as we thought maybe it ought to be, and proving to Iraqis that we would not simply give up on them and walk away. But as the United States turns increasing attention to Afghanistan—and talks about sending more troops—it needs to be careful what lessons it draws from Iraq.

In Afghanistan, too, the decision has been made to talk to people who have been fighting against us, and perhaps even to enlist their support. The question is not whether they have been shooting at us; it's whether we can get them to stop shooting. But relentless internal conflict is not endemic in Iraq. In Afghanistan it is. For most Afghans an effective central government isn't even a distant memory. Tribal identity is everything. And Al Qaeda and the Taliban have learned from the mistakes of the insurgencies in Iraq. They have not forced the people to turn against them. They know the hills and valleys of the political terrain as well as they do the killing fields of Helmand province or the caves of Tora Bora. They have learned strategic patience. I can't begin to predict what will unfold in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. But as I leave the field, I take heart from the fact that Dave Petraeus, my comrade from Baghdad who knows all about strategic patience, has oversight of both wars.

Today I find myself very far from those forbidding lands, back among Americans who might imagine that they are distant, maybe irrelevant. But then, above my computer there is a little piece of paper in a frame to remind me of the dangers when you turn your back on the world, thinking you can walk away.

Autore: Ryan Crocker

Fonte: www.newsweek.com

Il movimento per la verità sull'11 settembre in Italia

Wirepullers: venerdì saranno passati otto anni dagli attentati dell'11 settembre e cosa sia successo realmente rimane un mistero, almeno per coloro che non credono alla versione ufficiale dei fatti. E' veramente Bin Laden l'architetto dell'attentato più scioccante e spettacolare dei nostri tempi? Come ha fatto a mettere in piedi una macchina di morte così perfetta senza essere scoperto? Chi ha guadagnato qualcosa dall'attentato? L'amministrazione Bush sapeva? Non sapeva? Ha fatto finta di non sapere? Queste domande non avranno mai una risposta ma c'è chi continua a cercare la verità, perchè qualcosa non torna nelle spiegazioni che sono state date fino ad oggi per raccontare l'attentato che ha cambiato il mondo. (1)

Intervista a Giulietto Chiesa di ReOpen911 (www.reopen911.info)

Chiesa, secondo lei l'11 Settembre - così come i problemi di geopolitica/politica internazionale - interessano i suoi concittadini?
L'informazione sull'11 settembre concerne un'infima minoranza di persone. La maggior parte dell' intelligencija diffusa, i ceti medi, sono completamente assorbiti da altri problemi e non ricordano nulla. La grande massa della popolazione è totalmente all'oscuro. La geopolitica internazionale concerne lo 0,1% della gente informata.

Come è organizzato il movimento italiano per la verità sull'11/9? Ha legami o contatti ou des con le altre associazioni o movimenti per la pace, la giustizia o la libertà dell'informazione?
Devo dire con grande franchezza che non esiste, in realtà, un «movimento italiano per la verità sull'11 settembre. Esiste un vasto movimento, articolato in diverse organizzazioni e associazioni, che si batte, disordinatamente, per la libertà d'informazione. Ma si sente acutamente la mancanza di una visione e di una cultura dei media. Debord è sconosciuto. Mc Luhan è lontano. « Divertirsi da morire » l'hanno letto pochissimi. Quindi la battaglia è impari. Quasi nessuno ha ancora capito l'influenza della televisione sul cambiamento radicale della politica. Nessuno o quasi ha analizzato la mutazione antropologica prodotta con l'arrivo sulla scena dell' «homo videns» .

Con il film « ZERO – Inchiesta sull'11 Settembre », ha lanciato un sasso nello stagno mediatico-politico. Il film è stato visto da diverse centinaia di migliaia d'italiani, attraverso proiezioni e vendite di DVD. Lei ha partecipato a diverse trasmissioni televisive che in tali occasioni hanno battuto i record di audience. Direbbe che in Italia il dibattito sull'11/9 è aperto/possibile/in corso e che la presa di coscienza del popolo italiano sui problemi dell'11/9 abbia fatto passi avanti con questo film?
Sicuramente il film ha dato un impulso enorme alla conoscenza del problema. In Russia almeno 30 milioni di persone lo hanno visto e apprezzato. Questa è una delle ragioni della mia popolarità in Russia. Ma, anche in Europa, la massa di persone che è a conoscenza del problema manca completamente di un punto di riferimento politico che trasformi i suoi sospetti in azione politica.

Uno degli ostacoli che impedisce l'emergere di un vero dibattito sull'11/9 è il blocco psicologico legato a questo avvenimento, che soffoca un autentica discussione argomentata. È come se non fosse bene conoscere la verità, perché troppo dolorosa per le nostre democrazie, e in grado di rimettere in causa la fiducia dei popoli verso le autorità e i loro governi. Ritiene che l'Italia, con il suo recente passato e la scoperta di certi scandali di Stato, abbia superato questo blocco e sia pronta a recepire questa verità più facilmente rispetto ad altri paesi?
Sfortunatamente molto deve ancora avvenire prima che questo blocco psicologico sia superato. Faccio un esempio. Nei giorni scorsi ho mostrato Zero, in una proiezione privata, a dieci persone della classe media agiata, intellettuali in senso lato, che ho conosciuto solo in quella occasione. Siamo nel 2009: ebbene nessuno di loro era a conoscenza del problema 11/9. Tutti sono stati molto colpiti, scossi perfino. Ma senza una continuità è impossibile che si produca un cambiamento.

Dopo i riflettori dei media alla fine del 2007 in occasione dell'uscita del vostro film e del vostro libro ZERO, la stampa e la TV italiana parlano ancora, nel 2009, delle teorie alternative sull'11/9?
La novità recente è stata l'apparizione negli Stati Uniti del libro di un giornalista del New Your Time, Philip Shenon (in edizione italiana, per la casa editrice Piemme, «Omissis:Tutto quello che non hanno voluto farci sapere sull11 settembre»), interamente dedicato a una inchiesta sulla famosa Commissione d'inchiesta sull'11 settembre del governo degli Stati Uniti. Le clamorose conclusoni di questa inchiesta sull'inchiesta hanno costretto Carlo Bonini, influente analista de La Repubblica, acerrimo sostenitore delle critiche ai “complottisti” (in particolare contro di me), a scrivere un articolo per «Il Venerdì», in cui riconosce che i risultati della Commissione americana sono stati falsificati sotto il comando di Philip Zelikow. Il giornalista in questione attaccò il film Zero, due anni fa, evidentemente senza nemmeno avere letto una riga delle risultanze di quella Commissione e adesso ammette che le cose sono state falsificate. È interessante notare che la casa editrice Piemme è la stessa che pubblicò il mio volume Zero e il DVD del film. Ricordo questo esempio solo per dire che i semi gettati danno talvolta frutti con grande ritardo. Ma li danno.

Inoltre penso che il fatto stesso che il «New York Times» faccia uscire questo tipo di notizie indica che qualche cosa si sta rompendo all'interno della leadership americana. La diga della menzogna non è senza crepe. La battaglia è in corso.

L'11/9 era 8 anni fa. Certi diranno che si tratta di una vecchia storia e che non serve rimestare il passato, che occorre andare avanti. In cosa la presa di coscienza delle menzogne sull'11/9 può far progredire la nostra democrazia?
Continuo a pensare che, senza la verità sull'11 settembre, il rischio di essere trascinati, noi occidentali, in una gigantesca guerra (nucleare) resterà altissimo. E, naturalmente, non contro al-Qa‘ida, ma contro la Cina, e la Russia.

L'Italia è molto più avanti della Francia in materia di discussione sull'11/9. Nessun film francese affronta la questione, nessun politico ne parla, nessun programma televisivo organizza dei dibattiti né trasmette film che sostengano le tesi alternative, tutte cose che si sono verificate negli ultimi anni in Italia. Nonostante questo, si direbbe che l'impatto di questo dibattito sugli italiani resti ancora debole, che ci sia una certa rassegnazione di fronte ai “grandi avvenimenti”, che i suoi connazionali passino facilmente ad altre cose, a questioni più concrete. Questa impressione è vera?
È vera. L' intelligencija italiana non è molto migliore di quella francese. La politica italiana è talmente sprofondata nel pantano di un capo del governo che passa il suo tempo con le escort, che ogni discussione seria è ormai impossibile.

Il lavoro di informazione sull'11/9 è un lavoro di fondo. Quando era un eurodeputato, ha tentato di sondare i suoi colleghi, che siedono nel Parlamento europeo o italiano. Pensa che nonostante la loro totale silenzio su questa materia, sia riuscito a sensibilizzare qualcuno di loro?
Alcuni adesso sanno. Ma il ricatto è potente. Chi si occupa di queste questioni deve dire addio alla sua carriera politica. La sinistra europea, nella sua quasi totalità ha taciuto e tace. Non hanno visione e, quindi non hanno strategia. Se si vuole stare dentro l'establishment, in queste condizioni, è obbligatorio tacere.

L'Italia fa parte della NATO e ospita sul suo territorio numerose basi militari americane. Il legame strategico con gli Stati Uniti è forte. In queste condizioni, è realistico immaginare che la classe politica italiana si impegni sul terreno dell'11/9 senza che gli Stati Uniti non lo facciano essi stessi?
La casta politica italiana è troppo vigliacca e subalterna per poter alzare la testa. La verità potrà emergere solo dagli Stati Uniti. Emergerà dagli Stati Uniti perché la crisi li sta travolgendo. E un vasto movimento di opinione internazionale sarà la levatrice di questa emersione. Il quadro è difficile, ma io penso che non bisogna arrendersi. Ne va della nostra comune sopravvivenza.

Lei ha partecipato attivamente alla formazione di « Political Leaders for 911 Truth ». Dove si trova questo gruppo di politici e quali sono le vostre prossime sfide?
Ci sono in questo movimento persone di alta qualità e valore morale. Lavoro con loro con grande spirito di fraternità e con visione strategica. Domani avremo bisogno di fare riferimento su un gruppo intellettuale mondiale in grado di fornire all'opinione pubblica, appunto, un quadro strategico, una visione. Il lavoro per la verità sull'11/9 è per me parte di questo più vasto disegno di preparazione ai tempi nuovi, e difficili, che si avvicinano.

In attesa di riottenere – forse – un seggio parlamentare, quali sono i suoi piani riguardanti l'11/9 per i mesi a venire?
In questo momento il compito è moltiplicare e sostenere i gruppi e le associazioni che, in molti paesi si stanno formando. Sia locali che di categoria. L'iniziativa verso gli Attori e Artisti, quella verso il Politici, quella verso i Giornalisti, sono momenti importanti per l'estensione della rete di contatti e per la creazione di lobby d'influenza. In secondo luogo bisogna riassumere tutti i dati nuovi, emersi in questi anni, che confermano e ribadiscono le nostre analisi sull'accaduto. Ci vorrebbe il denaro per fare la seconda puntata di Zero, con tutti gli elementi nuovi che sono emersi nel frattempo.

Fonte: www.giuliettochiesa.it

The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina

Wirepullers: quattro anni fa l'uragano Katrina colpiva la costa orientale degli Stati Uniti, uccidendo quasi 2 mila persone e mettendo letteralmente in ginocchio una città come New Orleans. L'America non dimentica, lasciando intendere che la ferita aperta quell'agosto del 2005 sanguina ancora. Come in occasione dell'11 settembre, il popolo americano ha provato il senso di impotenza che solo un evento di tali proporzioni può trasmettere, denunciando anche limiti organizzativi inattesi. Ma tra celebrazioni e ricordi emerge una verità inquietante, che ha per protagonisti volti noti: quelli della Blackwater. (3)

There was nothing natural about the disaster that befell New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath.

Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren't too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely "natural" disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.

But there's an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state.

It started immediately after the storm and flood hit, when civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill's reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.

"When asked what authority they were operating under,'' Scahill reported, "one guy said, 'We're on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.' Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, 'He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.' The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.''

The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as "securing neighborhoods," as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting "the insurgency in the city." Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force, told the paper, "This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control."

Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), "New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers." The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Times noted, that order didn't "apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles." Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from "black gangbangers" near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men "unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. 'After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.'"

Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or "insurgents." African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.
In July, the local television station WDSU released a home video, taken shortly after the storm hit, of a local man, Paul Gleason, who bragged to two police officers about shooting looters in the Algiers section of New Orleans.

"Did you have any problems with looters," [sic] asked an officer.

"Not anymore," said Gleason.

"Not anymore?"

"They're all dead," said Gleason.

The officer asked, "What happened?"

"We shot them," said Gleason.

"How many did you shoot?

"Thirty-eight."

"Thirty-eight people? What did you do with the bodies?"

"We gave them to the Coast Guard," said Gleason.

Gleason told his story with a cup of red wine in one hand and riding a tractor from Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World.

Although the government's aid efforts were in chaos, those involved in the self-generated community rescue and relief efforts were often seen as a threat. Even so, Common Ground, founded in the days after Katrina hit, eventually managed to serve more than half a million people, operating feeding stations, opening free health and legal clinics, and later rebuilding homes and planting trees. But they "never got a dime" from the federal government, says Rahim. The feds did, however, recruit one of Common Ground's founders, Brandon Darby, as an informant, later using him to infiltrate groups planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
And while the government couldn't seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a temporary jail in New Orleans. Burl Cain, the warden of the notorious Angola Prison, a former slave plantation that's now home to 5,000 inmates, was rushed down to the city to oversee "Camp Greyhound" in the city's bus terminal. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the jail "was constructed by inmates from Angola and Dixon state prisons and was outfitted with everything a stranded law enforcer could want, including top-of-the-line recreational vehicles to live in and electrical power, courtesy of a yellow Amtrak locomotive. There are computers to check suspects' backgrounds and a mug shot station—complete with heights marked in black on the wall that serves as the backdrop."

In the virtual martial law imposed in New Orleans after Katrina, the war on the poor sometimes even spilled over into the war on terror. In his latest book Zeitoun, published in July, Dave Eggers tells the story of a local Syrian immigrant who stayed in New Orleans to protect his properties and ended up organizing makeshift relief efforts and rescuing people in a canoe. He continued right up until he was arrested by a group of unidentified, heavily armed men in uniform, thrown into Camp Greyhound, and questioned as a suspected terrorist. In an interview with Salon, Eggers said:

Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing "Katrina time" after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.

Through all the time that the federal and local governments, in concert with wealthy New Orleanians, were pitching their battle, there was virtually no one fighting on the other side. Reviewing the "available evidence" a month after Katrina, the New York Times concluded that "the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations." The reports of residents firing at National Guard helicopters, of tourists being robbed and raped on Bourbon Street, and of murderous rampages in the Superdome—all turned out to be false.

Since then it has become increasingly clear that the truth of what happened in New Orleans—vigilantism and racially tinged violence, a military response that supplanted a humanitarian one—is equally sinister.

Autore: James Ridgeway

Fonte: www.motherjones.com

The New Normal

Wirepullers: quattro anni fa l'uragano Katrina colpiva la costa orientale degli Stati Uniti, uccidendo quasi 2 mila persone e mettendo letteralmente in ginocchio una città come New Orleans. L'America non dimentica, lasciando intendere che la ferita aperta quell'agosto del 2005 sanguina ancora. Come in occasione dell'11 settembre, il popolo americano ha provato il senso di impotenza che solo un evento di tali proporzioni può trasmettere, denunciando anche limiti organizzativi inattesi. Ma tra celebrazioni e ricordi emerge una verità inquietante, che ha per protagonisti volti noti: quelli della Blackwater. (2)

Governments at all levels responded slowly to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The people of the Gulf Coast took up the slack but haven't absolved government of its responsibilities.

Walking along the Algiers levees facing downtown New Orleans, Malik Rahim stops at a huge dent in the pavement that he thinks came from a crashed barge during Hurricane Katrina.
"See there," points out Rahim, a Black Panther with grayed locks who has been a community activist since the 1970s. "That's not going to hold water back if we have another major storm." Rahim, a founder of Common Ground Relief, a collective of volunteers formed after Katrina to revitalize New Orleans, sees the levee damage as an opportunity to put local people to work on repairs. People from the neighborhood come regularly to Rahim's house, which is less than a mile away. All of them are African Americans looking for work, which Rahim seems to have readily available in the form of gutting and rehabbing abandoned houses. Common Ground has relied purely on donations and foundation grants and has accepted no money from the government.
"Look at these guys," Rahim says. "You don't see one of them drinking or doing drugs. But they all got one thing in common: They're unemployed."

Many of the hundreds of community- and faith-based organizations that have opened since Katrina have, in fact, done so without significant government help. Instead, throughout the Gulf Coast region, philanthropies and corporate and individual charities have supplied funding and resources.

Call it the "think hopefully, act locally" model. These groups have restored and provided supportive, affordable housing while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) fumbles funding for these needs. The new organizations also have provided specialized help for the homeless, those with special needs, and the burgeoning Asian and Hispanic populations. Many have also taken up work that's outside their normal mission, like wetlands and coastal restoration. Philanthropy has enabled them to do that.

The New York Regional Association of Grantmakers reports that 145 philanthropies from New York alone awarded over $325 million to 950 nonprofits in 38 states that are doing Gulf Coast recovery work. Of those, 612 are based in Gulf Coast cities. Foundations have made their rules more flexible in order to provide more relief and resources as Congress and insurance companies remain slow with assistance.

The new flow of private resources, of course, is dwarfed by the public money -- but the federal funds were released initially with no deliberate speed. As of Feb. 29 last year, of the $6.6 billion FEMA allocated to Louisiana for infrastructure, Orleans Parish had received less than $800 million, which was about 35 percent of the $2.1 billion targeted for them. New advocacy and philanthropic activism have filled funding gaps while trying to hold government more accountable.

Before Katrina, FEMA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would call a compromised levee adequate, and there would be enough despondency in the communities to suppress second-guessing. Now, such a determination isn't made without community members asking questions, seeking alternative expert opinions, and using tools from their community organizations to declare for themselves what is adequate. This is what's been referred to along the Gulf Coast as "the new normal."

Recovery has been a sore issue for much of the Gulf Coast: In Mobile County, whole neighborhoods remain pummeled while $24 million of Alabama's Katrina recovery Community Development Block Grant funds will go toward building a sewage plant. The $10 million initially awarded for housing covered only 200 of over 1,000 houses needing work. In Gulfport, $600 million of the money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that was supposed to go toward rebuilding houses in Mississippi has been redirected by Gov. Haley Barbour for an expansion of the Port of Gulfport.

However, in New Orleans, recovery has been a better study in democracy. The money has been slow to arrive, but civic engagement has helped produce real benefits for communities -- as determined by them.

Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans accommodated this engagement mostly due to political necessity. To get re-elected in 2006 he needed residents' support. On Sept. 30, 2005, he announced the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOB), which worked with residents (including the displaced) to develop a master recovery plan. The city needed this neighborhood manpower since its own staff and resources were being depleted -- less than a week later, Nagin was announcing 3,000 layoffs due to unfulfilled requests to the state and federal government for funds.

On Jan. 11, 2006, Nagin unveiled reports from BNOB's urban planning committee all urging massive citizen involvement. On Jan. 17, the commission presented a working plan toward recovery, which divided the city into 13 neighborhood planning districts, each of which were to submit its own recommendations by May. Meanwhile, President George W. Bush created the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding with about $66 billion in working capital from Congress.

The state's Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) handled allocation and disbursement of those funds, most of which went to insurance payments and short-term emergency assistance. The LRA's Road Home program received $2.8 billion of the funds. By the office's own admission, it erred in having overly centralized control. By November of that year, 77,000 home-owners had applied for LRA assistance, but only 28 checks had been distributed.

Concurrently, there were rampant resident complaints about house demolitions, which seemed to come randomly and unbeknownst to the owners, often with little advanced warning. The city also could not move ahead with its recovery plans until FEMA released flood-zone maps showing where rebuilding could take place.

The city was able to start moving forward, though, when it produced its Unified New Orleans Plan, bankrolled in large part by the Rockefeller Foundation, an extension and implementation of the plans that came out of the BNOB recovery plan. It was hailed as one of the largest democratic exercises in the country for allowing thousands of everyday citizens citywide to supply tremendous input through public meetings and votes on the city's future.

In December, Edward Blakely, a veteran planner of major urban-recovery projects, was announced as the "recovery czar" for New Orleans, but arrived stirring controversy. In April 2007, he was quoted in The New York Times referring to New Orleans residents as "buffoons." He also boasted he would soon have cranes covering the skyline, but no such visual emerged even well after a year into his tenure.

The first clear and consistent signs of restoration came in 2008. By November, over 600 public works and infrastructure projects in New Orleans were near shovel-ready status, with many actually completed. According to a Brookings Institution report, by July 2008, money had been awarded to almost 115,000 homeowners, although the average amount issued dropped to $58,688 from $72,669 in July 2007. And $411 million in Community Development Block Grant and FEMA funds were finally approved by the City Council to assist people on the ground doing the rebuilding. Much of this progress was made possible by the residents' own influence and urging.

Gulf coast groups had been organizing and agitating the government into action before Katrina. When 2004's Hurricane Ivan exposed flaws in the city's evacuation plans, UNITY of Greater New Orleans, an advocacy group for low-income and homeless families, was in meetings with the city helping to draft contingency measures for the next big storm.

No documented plans existed then for evacuating the estimated 130,000 people without cars, in hospitals and hospices, or otherwise unable to evacuate. After a worst-case-scenario simulation was presented to Mayor Ray Nagin and his staff in 2004 -- a digital Category 3 hurricane named Pam -- UNITY executive director Martha Kegel proposed contracting with school boards, Greyhound, and charter companies for use of their buses during an evacuation. Nagin's staff verbally agreed. But no contracts were drafted and nothing was implemented.

When Katrina arrived, three days into the crisis Nagin couldn't even locate the keys to the Regional Transit Authority buses, as reported in Douglas Brinkley's book The Great Deluge. While in the upstate shelter to which she was evacuated, Kegel remembers seeing school buses filled with Plaquemines parish residents pulling up, led by the parish president Benny Rousselle. She found out later that no scripted plan was in place. "They had no contracts with the schools or anything," Kegel says. "They just did what they had to do to get out of there."

One exceptional display of leadership came from Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, head of the Joint Task Force Katrina that was created when FEMA proved ineffective. He arrived in New Orleans the Thursday after Katrina struck with thousands of troops and little tolerance for nonsense. With 25,000 people cloistered in the Louisiana Superdome and another 50,000 spread around the drowned city on rooftops, Honoré came when numerous rumors were circulating about flood victims "looting," raping, and killing. Many armed soldiers from the Special Weapons And Tactics police force and the private-contracted security force Blackwater -- who were supposed to be there on rescue missions -- had their guns pointed at citizens.

But contrary to the lawlessness that was reported, Honoré, commanding general of the Army's 1st Division, determined the area "a zero-threat environment." He shouted at soldiers to lower their weapons and appeared as one clear reminder that the armed forces were there to protect, not police, the people.

In the months after Katrina, recovery money came slowly, if at all. Homeowners were denied claims by insurance companies that faulted "deferred maintenance" -- repairs allegedly needed before the hurricanes -- or that said homes suffered from wind damage, which isn't covered by flood insurance.

A Brookings Institution report published in March 2006 states that the Army Corps of Engineers still hadn't razed any severely damaged houses in New Orleans. FEMA had determined that roughly 50,000 houses suffered major damage, but as of March 2006, they had issued just 16,000 building permits. A report from the National Academy of Sciences published in September of that year states that the "emergency post-disaster period" for Katrina "appears to be longer in duration than that of any other studied disaster."

When people finally began returning home, many African American renters encountered Jim Crow?like racial discrimination. On Web sites like katrinahousing.org and nolahousing.com, postings read: "not racist, but white only," "to make things more understandable for our younger child we would like to house white children," and "we live in a redneck country here, especially in my neighborhood, and blacks are frowned on."

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center filed an administrative complaint against the Web sites for violating the Fair Housing Act. It was just the beginning of dozens of legal complaints that would pile up in Katrina's aftermath. The Jeremiah Group, a coalition of faith-based organizations throughout New Orleans that had been doing activism around housing since 1993, felt a surge in capacity.

"We have always been able to pull people together," says Jacqueline Jones, the Jeremiah Group's lead organizer. After Katrina "did it escalate? Yes. The numbers of active and core members have increased tremendously."

"Just before the storm, we were having huge fights with the city over affordable housing," says James Perry, executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center. "There was this huge drive about getting people who would be affected by this to show up at City Council meetings to talk about this and advocate on their own behalf."

After Katrina, "They started showing up at every meeting and workshop and were telling their elected officials what they needed and how they needed it."

This new aggressive civic participation fortified Perry and urged state legislators to finally activate the Louisiana Housing Trust Fund, which was enacted in 2003 to create housing for low- to moderate-income families. It had no money until after Katrina when Perry's army convinced the legislature to deposit $25 million into the account. The new civic activism scored again when UNITY, after three years of campaigning, convinced Congress last summer to allocate $73 million for 3,000 rental units from the state's Road Home program, most of which will go to the homeless and disabled.

One fight that community groups lost was the struggle to save the "big four" low-income housing projects: St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, Lafitte, and B.W. Cooper. Of these, only Lafitte will get one-for-one replacements of the razed units. In St. Bernard, 466 units will replace the 1,300 that existed before it. However, Jim Kelly, a major developer on the Lafitte project, said in a Times-Picayune article that it was the citizens who deserved the credit.

"Now, you can't keep residents from getting in front of microphones and arguing better than or as good as any lawyer I know," says Tracie Washington, who formed the Louisiana Justice Institute after Katrina and labored to keep the housing projects open. "They've learned how to fight for themselves."

It was one thing that so many community-based organizations were forming and accomplishing so much, but without synchronization they were doomed to meet the same tangled fate as the governments they were challenging. Without coordination among the groups, the threat of cluttered and scattered agendas could have added up to rivalry and stalemate. To avoid this, the new activists began coalescing.
Timolynn Sams, an AmeriCorps worker, became the director of the Neighborhood Partnership Network, which links the city's 73 neighborhoods to one another and also with the city government. The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, formed the week after Katrina, has proved an effective connector for the network and other neighborhood-based associations, as well as an intermediary for funds making their way from national foundations.

The Equity and Inclusion Campaign was conceived by the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and formed in June 2007 to see if the swiftly growing accumulation of nonprofits across the Gulf Coast could collaborate and approach Congress as one regional dependent, rather than as a pack of siblings. With regional equity as the guiding principle, organizations from Mississippi and Alabama could finally get the attention they deserved when sold as a package with Louisiana.

When Gustav and Ike hit the Gulf during the 2008 hurricane season, they tested the resolves of not only the Equity and Inclusion Campaign coalition members but also those of the local and federal governments. Mostly, they passed. UNITY, a member of the campaign, worked with the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness for the City Assisted Evacuation Plan. UNITY's staff was in the streets helping police evacuate the homeless and people of special needs and making sure they got to the front of the line when the evacuation buses came. Campaign members from states not affected were in constant communication with members in Louisiana who were, ensuring they had transportation, bedding and kitchenware for the shelters, volunteers, food, and water.

In helping often-overlooked populations, the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice was instrumental in persuading Immigration and Customs Enforcement to suspend their checkpoints so that immigrants could evacuate free of fear. It was like the "lower your weapons" command of Gen. Honoré, who now serves on the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation board.

"Nonprofits make a big difference in these people's lives," Honoré says. "But overall, the responsibility of storm recovery should be on the state government in collaboration with FEMA and the federal government in order to have a more active process and to try [to] do it quicker."
Perhaps lack of government responsibility was the reason Gustav was not a total success. While many agree things went well, there were reports of poor, if not inhumane treatment of those sheltered after the evacuation. The sheltering was the responsibility of the state's Department of Social Services. The department's director, Ann Williamson, resigned after Gustav with apologies. In the old normal, having just this one flaw, however major, in a disaster would probably have been good enough. However, Martha Kegel is already working with the state to ensure that next time, the sheltering runs better.

The funding for much of this new civic engagement came from major foundations such as Ford, Kellogg, McKnight, Annie E. Casey, Gates, and Blue Moon, with much of it funneled through the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, the Greater New Orleans Foundation, and the Orleans Recovery Foundation. They've even provided supplemental funding for government.

When the city's recovery-management office needed additional staff, the Orleans Recovery Foundation provided funding for a director of disaster-mitigation planning, which was filled by Earthea Nance, a professor who took a leave of absence from Virginia Tech to volunteer in New Orleans. "I came here for the same reason someone who wants to be a star goes to Hollywood, or someone interested in politics goes to D.C.," Nance says.

If you are someone whose focus is on planning, environmental mitigation, and engineering, then going to New Orleans is "an opportunity of a lifetime," Nance adds. She now works in the recovery office updating the city's hazard-mitigation plan and synchronizing it with the city's master plan.

But while philanthropy has come to the rescue and fostered the growth of both civic and local government action, the new movement hardly absolves the federal government of its duty to help its citizens recover. Even with all that the community-based organizations have done, there are still tremendous gaps that may be beyond their capacity. Despite President Bush's claim on the Larry King Live show that he led a "pretty darn quick" response, there remains a stalemate between what the state and city say they need for repairs and what FEMA says it will consider for reimbursement -- a $1.4 billion gap, according to the state.

"The levees broke -- that was a federal failure," Perry says. "If federal government makes a mistake, they should be held responsible for cleaning it up. They are funded and charged [with] dealing with these kinds of issues, and they have a certain guarantee of funding and ability to do that. But with us and volunteers, there is no guarantee we will be able to continue to respond like this." However, just the fact that Gulf Coast organizations have been able to respond, especially as the wounded themselves, is the triumph of a region that's been written off as poor, colored, and likely not worth saving. Says Nance, "A major part of this recovery has been the recovery of civil society."

Autore: Brentin Mock

Fonte: www.prospect.org

New Orleans’ New Winds of Change

Wirepullers: quattro anni fa l'uragano Katrina colpiva la costa orientale degli Stati Uniti, uccidendo quasi 2 mila persone e mettendo letteralmente in ginocchio una città come New Orleans. L'America non dimentica, lasciando intendere che la ferita aperta quell'agosto del 2005 sanguina ancora. Come in occasione dell'11 settembre, il popolo americano ha provato il senso di impotenza che solo un evento di tali proporzioni può trasmettere, denunciando anche limiti organizzativi inattesi. Ma tra celebrazioni e ricordi emerge una verità inquietante, che ha per protagonisti volti noti: quelli della Blackwater. (1)

The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina falls this weekend.
Usually, a fourth anniversary is not a landmark. But this one is notable for the many leadership transitions afoot.

First, the election of President Obama has heightened hopes for a new federal direction in the Gulf Coast. Thus far, he has been low-key, even skipping out on a visit to the area this anniversary—for the first time in three years—instead pointing to his administration’s accomplishments to improve the business of recovery, such as accelerating infrastructure repairs.

But to fully break from the past, more needs to be done–especially to make sure that the recession does not rollback the recovery gains made to date. While federal investments in public infrastructure repairs have helped buoy the New Orleans economy, the recession has dampened the housing market, stalling efforts to replace or repair the tens of thousands of homes destroyed by the storm. Further, more work is needed to boost incomes and opportunity in the region, convert a massive inventory of blighted properties into marketable use, and strengthen the safety and sustainability of the region through comprehensive coastal restoration and protection.
At the core, Obama and his team must show that the $40 billion-plus in taxpayer dollars spent on long-term Gulf Coast recovery is not being wasted to simply return New Orleans back to its old normal.

Indeed, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was beset with challenges facing many older cities. It had the second highest concentration of poverty among the 50 largest American cities. It possessed a weak economy, with shrinking high-paying industries and expanding low-wage, hospitality jobs. Also, the metro area was growing in unsustainable ways, with the city losing jobs and residents as development shifted outward into suburban parishes and onto precious wetlands.

The opportunity is that the federal recovery dollars already flowing to schools, housing, health care facilities, and roads and transit can be accompanied by an overhaul of policies and systems underlying them so that New Orleanians, and our nation, get better outcomes and performance. It is not enough to simply get the money out the door quickly. Our aim should be for a city and region that is more inclusive, economically robust, and environmentally sustainable than before the storm.

No doubt, some bold innovations are underway, such as the total revamping of the public school system and the installation of a first-ever inspector general to remove the cloud of corruption and distrust that hangs over locally-elected officials.

But, these efforts must be the norm, not the exception. To that end, in the next twelve months, the administration must go beyond “disaster recovery” and work with state, local, and private sector allies to facilitate some transformative initiatives to boldly put the city on the path to reinvention. The pressure is on for Obama (and New Orleanians) to demonstrate that, at the five-year crossroad, New Orleans is not trending toward the status quo.

Specifically, the administration should not treat New Orleans as that special disaster case, but as a priority city where it can test a number of its signature initiatives. From modernizing the nation’s infrastructure to boosting green industries to linking school reform with the transformation of distressed neighborhoods—and the launch of a new urban and metropolitan agenda—Obama can apply his desire for bottoms-up solutions to a city and region that is teeming with renewed assets, a committed citizenry, and strong philanthropic support.

But this is an upward battle if Obama does not have a good local partner.

Fortunately, Mayor Nagin’s term is coming to an end. Nagin has been a disaster (excuse the pun) and his recovery czar resigned earlier this summer with little fanfare and few accomplishments. With a primary coming up next February and a run-off election in March, New Orleans will have an opportunity to choose a leader with vision and experience who can hold up his or her end of the bargain in a federal-state-local partnership to deliver on the promise of recovery.

With all these stars aligning, let’s not squander this post-disaster moment to remake a great American city.

Autore: Amy Liu
Fonte: www.tnr.com

Is Blackwater Too Big to Fail?

Wirepullers: le guerre in Iraq e Afghanistan hanno gettato due paesi nel caos, ucciso centinaia di migliaia di civili innocenti, fatto inorridire il mondo intero. Ma per qualcuno sono state una vera manna dal cielo. Tra questi, la compagnia militare privata Blackwater, ingaggiata dal governo americano per occuparsi della sicurezza nei due teatri di guerra. L'agenzia, di proprietà di Erik Prince, un fervente cristiano e erede multimilionario di un ricca famiglia, recluterebbe in realtà mercenari senza scrupoli, da utilizzare in operazioni militari, delle quali lo stesso congresso americano sarebbe stato lasciato all'oscuro. Un vero e proprio braccio armato della CIA, sempre meno impegnata in operazioni di intelligence e sempre più militarizzata. Omicidio e tortura vanno in outsourcing. (4)

Erik Prince's security enterprise has a division for pretty much everything. Need planes or choppers? See Aviation Worldwide or Presidential Airways. A compliment of Colombian mercs? Greystone at your service. For-hire spooks? Total Intelligence Solutions—emphasis on total—is standing by. And for the super-double-secret covert work—the kind that the CIA keeps even Congress in the dark about—Prince has a division for that too. According to the New York Times, it's called Blackwater Select.

Building on its scoop that the company played a role in the CIA's abandoned program to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives, the Times reports today that this secret division also plays a part in the agency's predator drone program.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.

You'd think that after repeated controversies Prince's government clients would tire of the enduring PR nightmare and cut their ties. But they won't, because they can't. By many, the company is viewed as indispensable. This didn't happen by accident. It's long been Prince's business model. "Make yourself indispensable to the client, and you'll always have work," Prince is quoted as saying in Suzanne Simons' new book, Master of War.

Certainly the company didn't rise up from its modest origins to become a contracting behemoth without a lot of help. That is, if the company is indispensable, that's largely because we made it that way. The more jobs the government contracts out to Blackwater (and other industry players), the more the government loses the internal capacity to do them itself. Think of it this way: Blackwater operators were originally trained by the government to carry out the drone work. If the government decides it wants to assume this role again one day, will its personnel need to be trained by Blackwater?

It's not just about outsourcing—it's the kind of jobs that are being outsourced to Blackwater that raise questions. Writing in Time, ex-CIA officer Robert Baer points out:
It's one thing, albeit often misguided, for the agency to outsource certain tasks to contractors. It's quite another to involve a company like Blackwater in even the planning and training of targeted killings, akin to the CIA going to the mafia to draw up a plan to kill Castro.

I suspect that if the agreements are ever really looked into — rather than a formal contract, the CIA reportedly brokered individual deals with top company brass — we will find out that Blackwater's assassination work was more about bilking the U.S. taxpayer than it was killing Osama bin Laden or other al-Qaeda leaders. More than a few senior CIA officers retired from the CIA and went to work at Blackwater, the controversial private security shop now known as Xe Services. Not only did those officers presumably take their CIA Rolodexes with them out the door, but many probably didn't choose to leave until they had a lucrative new contract lined up. But more to the point, Blackwater stood no better chance of placing operatives in Pakistan's tribal areas, where the al-Qaeda leadership was hiding in 2004, than the CIA or the U.S. military did.

Still, whether by virtue of Blackwater's revolving door relationship with the CIA, or the agency's own manpower shortages, the company has now been entrusted with some of the intelligence community's most senstive work. Thanks to the Times, we now know more details about Blackwater's CIA work, but this likely represents a fraction of the covert contracts (or handshake agreements, as the case may be) the company and its affiliates have undertaken for the agency. Add in the many non-secret jobs these companies perform for the government, and it becomes hard to imagine the Obama administration extricating itself from its inherited relationship with Prince's companies even if it wanted to. In some ways, Prince's operation is the military world version of AIG—too big to fail.

Autore: Daniel Schulman

Fonte: www.motherjones.com

Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions

Wirepullers: le guerre in Iraq e Afghanistan hanno gettato due paesi nel caos, ucciso centinaia di migliaia di civili innocenti, fatto inorridire il mondo intero. Ma per qualcuno sono state una vera manna dal cielo. Tra questi, la compagnia militare privata Blackwater, ingaggiata dal governo americano per occuparsi della sicurezza nei due teatri di guerra. L'agenzia, di proprietà di Erik Prince, un fervente cristiano e erede multimilionario di un ricca famiglia, recluterebbe in realtà mercenari senza scrupoli, da utilizzare in operazioni militari, delle quali lo stesso congresso americano sarebbe stato lasciato all'oscuro. Un vero e proprio braccio armato della CIA, sempre meno impegnata in operazioni di intelligence e sempre più militarizzata. Omicidio e tortura vanno in outsourcing. (3)

A long-awaited report on post-9/11 interrogation tactics will reveal harrowing new details about treatment of suspected terrorists.

A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

The report also says, according to the sources, that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general's report alludes to more than one mock execution.

Before leaving office, Bush administration officials confirmed that Nashiri was one of three CIA detainees subjected to waterboarding. They also acknowledged that Nashiri was one of two Al Qaeda detainees whose detentions and interrogations were documented at length in CIA videotapes. But senior officials of the agency's undercover operations branch, the National Clandestine Service, ordered that the tapes be destroyed, an action that has been under investigation for more than a year by a federal prosecutor.

The new revelations are contained in a lengthy report on the CIA interrogation program completed by the agency's inspector general in May 2004, around the time that the initial, most intense phase of the CIA effort began to wind down. The purpose of the report was to examine how the CIA program had been conducted, and whether Justice Department guidelines governing the use of harsh "enhanced" interrogation techniques had been followed. According to the sources, the inspector general criticizes some agency interrogators for exceeding official guidelines in the use of extreme tactics on detainees.

Mock executions were not authorized in Justice Department memoranda that outlined the legal parameters that Bush administration lawyers believed should govern the use of "enhanced" interrogations. The Justice Department memoranda, once highly classified, were released earlier this year by the Obama administration in the face of strenuous objections from the CIA and former Bush White House officials.

The inspector general's report, commissioned by then CIA director George Tenet, was sent to the Justice Department and congressional intelligence committee leaders shortly after it was written. But it was not shown to all members of the intelligence committees until September 2006, around the time that President Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA detention-and-interrogation program and instructed the agency, which had been holding detainees in a network of secret overseas prisons, to transfer them to the U.S. military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Top Bush CIA officials, including Tenet's successors as CIA director, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, strongly lobbied for the IG report to be kept secret from the public. They argued that its release would damage America's reputation around the world, could damage CIA morale, and would tip off terrorists regarding American interrogation tactics. "Justice has had the complete document since 2004, and their career prosecutors have reviewed it carefully for legal accountability," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "That's already been done."

The inspector general's report is expected to fuel political debates over whether the tough interrogation methods used during the Bush administration actually worked. According to another source who has seen the document, the report says that the agency's interrogation program did produce usable intelligence.

At the same time the administration releases the inspector general's report, it is also expected to release other CIA documents that assert the agency collected valuable intelligence through the interrogation program. For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case. The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads.

Autori: Mark Hosenball e Michael Isikoff

Fonte: www.newsweek.com