As for Iraq, my son in-law's brother just returned safely from his third tour there. He volunteered all three times.
He is very bright (graduated Stanford and Harvard Law), but seems drawn to dangerous situations.
He originally joined the Marines as an ordinary grunt after graduating Harvard, and tried for the SEALs.
They discovered he had a law degree, made him an officer, and put him to work prosecuting penny-ante drug offenses by 19 year old recruits on US bases who were awaiting deployment.
Life in the military is either stark terror or complete and total boredom.
He got tired of prosecuting people for being bored and stupid, so he now leads men on combat patrols.
One of his interesting observations is that there are about as many contractors in Iraq as there are US troops, and we have little to no control over them.
Hopefully, he will stay home for a while now, as he returns to his day job - DEA enforcement agent, awaiting deployment to Columbia or Ecuador...
+++
You can hear humble's radio program for this week on humble's web page:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/RadCombined.html A page of links to humble's fun-filled radio show.
Did you know that Robert Skoglund, The humble Farmer, stands on stages and tells funny stories?
Ask humble to entertain you and your friends with dry stories like these:
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/PortlandA.html
2/22/07 Christian Science Monitor Profile on humble
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0222/p20s01-algn.html?page=1
You can visit humble and Marsha at their Bed & Breakfast on the coast of Maine.
http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/BaB.html
http://www.TheHumbleFarmer.com
You are invited to stop by for supper anytime.
Robert Karl Skoglund
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
207-226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
What Uncle Sam Really Wants by Noam Chomsky
A friend just came back from Central America. She went there with a group of affluent church women hell-bent on fighting lice and hunger.
She and her friends have no idea why children there have lice and are hungry. If you were to let them read press reports of how the U. S. and the far right bought the last election there, their Christian-Republican minds wouldn't allow them to believe it.
Anyone who is really serious about fighting hunger and lice in El Salvador would start by cleaning out the enabling crowd of parasites presently running our own government.
The humble Farmer
++
The Crucifixion of EL SALVADOR
Noam Chomsky
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
+++
For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by our government, a matter of no interest here. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the US government began to be concerned about a couple of things.
One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control . The US was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a growth of what were called "popular organizations"-peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.
In February 1980, the Archbishop of EI Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people's organizations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights" (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).
A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d'Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D'Aubuisson was "leader for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.
Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.
All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero's assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.
On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been instituted in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which at least 600 people were butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterwards. There were church observers, so the information came out immediately, but the mainstream US media didn't think it was worth reporting.
Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people. In Carter's last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.
In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their "valiant service alongside the people against subversion" by the favorite US "moderate," Jose Napoleon Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.
The role of the "moderate" Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and its investigative commission.
The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta-and, of course, the paymaster.
The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these atrocities, had been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military's taste. The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in US newspapers.
In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.
The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They "were not priests or human rights campaigners," Mine wrote, "so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed"-as did his story.
The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly ferocious....We've always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears."
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.
The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence-some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.
In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.
The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)
According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents-tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.
In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, Cesar Vielman Joya Martinez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organizations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)
The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."
The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.
According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.
Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.
By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition.
***
from the book What Uncle Sam Really Wants, published in 1993
She and her friends have no idea why children there have lice and are hungry. If you were to let them read press reports of how the U. S. and the far right bought the last election there, their Christian-Republican minds wouldn't allow them to believe it.
Anyone who is really serious about fighting hunger and lice in El Salvador would start by cleaning out the enabling crowd of parasites presently running our own government.
The humble Farmer
++
The Crucifixion of EL SALVADOR
Noam Chomsky
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_ElSalvador.html
+++
For many years, repression, torture and murder were carried on in El Salvador by dictators installed and supported by our government, a matter of no interest here. The story was virtually never covered. By the late 1970s, however, the US government began to be concerned about a couple of things.
One was that Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was losing control . The US was losing a major base for its exercise of force in the region. A second danger was even more threatening. In El Salvador in the 1970s, there was a growth of what were called "popular organizations"-peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, Church-based Bible study groups that evolved into self-help groups, etc. That raised the threat of democracy.
In February 1980, the Archbishop of EI Salvador, Oscar Romero, sent a letter to President Carter in which he begged him not to send military aid to the junta that ran the country. He said such aid would be used to "sharpen injustice and repression against the people's organizations" which were struggling "for respect for their most basic human rights" (hardly news to Washington, needless to say).
A few weeks later, Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying a mass. The neo-Nazi Roberto d'Aubuisson is generally assumed to be responsible for this assassination (among countless other atrocities). D'Aubuisson was "leader for-life" of the ARENA party, which now governs El Salvador; members of the party, like current Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani, had to take a blood oath of loyalty to him.
Thousands of peasants and urban poor took part in a commemorative mass a decade later, along with many foreign bishops, but the US was notable by its absence. The Salvadoran Church formally proposed Romero for sainthood.
All of this passed with scarcely a mention in the country that funded and trained Romero's assassins. The New York Times, the "newspaper of record," published no editorial on the assassination when it occurred or in the years that followed, and no editorial or news report on the commemoration.
On March 7, 1980, two weeks before the assassination, a state of siege had been instituted in El Salvador, and the war against the population began in force (with continued US support and involvement). The first major attack was a big massacre at the Rio Sumpul, a coordinated military operation of the Honduran and Salvadoran armies in which at least 600 people were butchered. Infants were cut to pieces with machetes, and women were tortured and drowned. Pieces of bodies were found in the river for days afterwards. There were church observers, so the information came out immediately, but the mainstream US media didn't think it was worth reporting.
Peasants were the main victims of this war, along with labor organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working for the interests of the people. In Carter's last year, 1980, the death toll reached about 10,000, rising to about 13,000 for 1981 as the Reaganites took command.
In October 1980, the new archbishop condemned the "war of extermination and genocide against a defenseless civilian population" waged by the security forces. Two months later they were hailed for their "valiant service alongside the people against subversion" by the favorite US "moderate," Jose Napoleon Duarte, as he was appointed civilian president of the junta.
The role of the "moderate" Duarte was to provide a fig leaf for the military rulers and ensure them a continuing flow of US funding after the armed forces had raped and murdered four churchwomen from the US. That had aroused some protest here; slaughtering Salvadorans is one thing, but raping and killing American nuns is a definite PR mistake. The media evaded and downplayed the story, following the lead of the Carter Administration and its investigative commission.
The incoming Reaganites went much further, seeking to justify the atrocity, notably Secretary of State Alexander Haig and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. But it was still deemed worthwhile to have a show trial a few years later, while exculpating the murderous junta-and, of course, the paymaster.
The independent newspapers in El Salvador, which might have reported these atrocities, had been destroyed. Although they were mainstream and pro-business, they were still too undisciplined for the military's taste. The problem was taken care of in 1980-81, when the editor of one was murdered by the security forces; the other fled into exile. As usual, these events were considered too insignificant to merit more than a few words in US newspapers.
In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.
The news wires carried a story by AP correspondent Douglas Grant Mine, reporting how soldiers had entered a working-class neighborhood in the capital city of San Salvador, captured six men, added a 14-year-old boy for good measure, then lined them all up against a wall and shot them. They "were not priests or human rights campaigners," Mine wrote, "so their deaths have gone largely unnoticed"-as did his story.
The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly ferocious....We've always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears."
In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.
The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence-some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.
In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.
The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)
According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents-tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.
In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, Cesar Vielman Joya Martinez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organizations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)
The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."
The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.
According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.
Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.
By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history-and it's got a lot of competition.
***
from the book What Uncle Sam Really Wants, published in 1993
Monday, May 28, 2007
Cousin John Reports in From Duabi
It's been 28 years since I was last in Dubai. There have been a few changes. For example, it was very common to see the odd camel wandering around close to town. Now, he'd be instant road kill if he tried to cross the 12 lane highway that is the main drag through town. Back then it was a 4 lane highway in the middle of nowhere on your way to Abu Dhabi. You had to watch for camels like folks in New Hampshire watch for errant Moose. Now, the entire length is filled with high rise office buildings and hotels.
My drive to the office starts a little west of old Dubai and the Creek on the 12 lane Sheikh Zayed Road. On my left as I head west is Burg Dubai, the tallest building in the world in the largest mall in the world currently under construction. Off in the hazy distance to my right is Burg Al Arab, the sail shaped hotel on the coast that nobody but an oil sheikh can afford to spend a night in. As I continue on, I pass Dubai Internet City where there is typically a traffic jam due to construction in the area. Just past there on the left is the big aluminum colored tube that is Ski Dubai - an indoor ski slope. My journey ends at the Jebel Ali Free Zone, a duty free zone and port. I end up in a typical construction yard office.
The first thing you notice about Dubai is how clean it is. There is no trash anywhere. There is plenty of dust, but not much trash. The second thing is the traffic. Everyone has a car and while they may have had great civic planners, they somehow neglected to think about hiring a traffic engineer or putting in public transport. They are just now building an elevated public system along Sheikh Zayed Road but it's a year away. And then there's the heat. It's 110 or better everyday. There are no clouds but the sun is obscured by an LA like smog that is really dust from the desert. We are on the edge of what Saudi Arabia calls "The Empty Quarter".
80% of the population of the United Arab emirates are immigrants. All labor is done by foreigners, mostly Indian, Pakistani and Phillipino. There seems to be a caste system where Pakistanis are at the low end and do all the outside construction work. The Indians run the shops and businesses in the air conditioning and the Phillipinos do the hotel service and entertainment. Most of them, especially the laborers, are housed in squat dormatory buildings that would make Stalin gag.
There's lots of constuction work. This place must be a reinforced concrete engineers dream. They seem to operate on a "build it and they will come" philosophy and are aware that they will need more than oil to survive and hence have built a tax free business haven with first class communications and logistics. And if you have nothing better to do, dredge up the sea floor and build a series of offshore housing developments on artificial islands. For good measure, shape them tolook like palm trees or a map of the globe. If you talk to the man on the street (your taxi driver, for example) he will tell you that he can't understand how they are going to fill all the new offices and apartment buildings. It has to reach saturation sometime, and when it does, the real estate market may collapse faster than a Florida condominium in a hurricane.
On the seamier side of things, Duabi is a destination country for human trafficking. It kind of makes you wonder what the real purpose of all those private islands is since the only way to get to them is by boat or air.
Stay tuned.
John
My drive to the office starts a little west of old Dubai and the Creek on the 12 lane Sheikh Zayed Road. On my left as I head west is Burg Dubai, the tallest building in the world in the largest mall in the world currently under construction. Off in the hazy distance to my right is Burg Al Arab, the sail shaped hotel on the coast that nobody but an oil sheikh can afford to spend a night in. As I continue on, I pass Dubai Internet City where there is typically a traffic jam due to construction in the area. Just past there on the left is the big aluminum colored tube that is Ski Dubai - an indoor ski slope. My journey ends at the Jebel Ali Free Zone, a duty free zone and port. I end up in a typical construction yard office.
The first thing you notice about Dubai is how clean it is. There is no trash anywhere. There is plenty of dust, but not much trash. The second thing is the traffic. Everyone has a car and while they may have had great civic planners, they somehow neglected to think about hiring a traffic engineer or putting in public transport. They are just now building an elevated public system along Sheikh Zayed Road but it's a year away. And then there's the heat. It's 110 or better everyday. There are no clouds but the sun is obscured by an LA like smog that is really dust from the desert. We are on the edge of what Saudi Arabia calls "The Empty Quarter".
80% of the population of the United Arab emirates are immigrants. All labor is done by foreigners, mostly Indian, Pakistani and Phillipino. There seems to be a caste system where Pakistanis are at the low end and do all the outside construction work. The Indians run the shops and businesses in the air conditioning and the Phillipinos do the hotel service and entertainment. Most of them, especially the laborers, are housed in squat dormatory buildings that would make Stalin gag.
There's lots of constuction work. This place must be a reinforced concrete engineers dream. They seem to operate on a "build it and they will come" philosophy and are aware that they will need more than oil to survive and hence have built a tax free business haven with first class communications and logistics. And if you have nothing better to do, dredge up the sea floor and build a series of offshore housing developments on artificial islands. For good measure, shape them tolook like palm trees or a map of the globe. If you talk to the man on the street (your taxi driver, for example) he will tell you that he can't understand how they are going to fill all the new offices and apartment buildings. It has to reach saturation sometime, and when it does, the real estate market may collapse faster than a Florida condominium in a hurricane.
On the seamier side of things, Duabi is a destination country for human trafficking. It kind of makes you wonder what the real purpose of all those private islands is since the only way to get to them is by boat or air.
Stay tuned.
John
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