手縫いにこだわる革の魔術師 奥居次郎(2)革を
| ・ | 米国:「イランによるタリバン支援」説、否定される 米国のチェイニー副大統領に近いとみられる米政府「高官」筋が、タリバンに対してイランが武器支援をしているとの説をメディアに流しているが、即座に否定的な反応が出てきた。(IPSJapan)2007/06/19 |
| ・ | 米国:増え続ける退役軍人ホームレス Veterans for Americaによれば、推定1万人のイラクおよびアフガニスタンの退役軍人がホームレスになったという。(IPSJapan)2007/06/19 |
| ・ | イラク:バグダッドでクルドとシーア派が衝突 先月、バグダッド南西部のアミル地区とバヤア地区を警護するクルド民兵が、シーア派民兵と衝突した。(IPSJapan)2007/06/19 |
| ・ | メキシコ:移住は生物圏保護区への恵みか メキシコ・ケレタロ州シエラ・ゴルダ生物圏保護区の自然資源や生物多様性への環境負荷が、住民半数(約5万人)の米国への移住で低減している。(IPSJapan)2007/06/19 |
| ・ | 米軍基地:チェコの歓迎に対しポーランドは慎重 米国のブッシュ大統領は今週、ミサイル防衛問題を話し合うためにチェコとポーランドを訪問した。米国は、チェコにレーダー基地を、ポーランドに迎撃ミサイル基地を建設しようとしている。(IPSJapan)2007/06/18 |
| ・ | ビルマ首相代理、規律正しい民主主義国を目指すと発言 ビルマのセイン首相代理は今週、軍事政権が任命した国民会議による憲法草案作成の最終作業を7月18日、ラングーンで再開する旨発表。憲法制定後は、規律のとれた民主主義国家建設を目指すと語った。 (IPSJapan)2007/06/18 |
| ・ | ボリビア:レイプでも中絶は禁止か ボリビア憲法制定会議は憲法書き換えまであと2ヶ月となった。左派の与党、社会主義運動(MAS)が134名を占める総勢255名の会議の委員により討論されてきた懸案の中には、中絶の合法化をめぐる生存権の問題がある。(IPSJapan)2007/06/18 |
| ・ | アフリカ:エイズ対策支援の後退は「悲惨」 「我々は、今後数年間少なくとも推定された600億米ドルを提供するというこれらの目標(持続的な方法でHIV/エイズ、マラリア、結核と闘うこと)に向けて努力を継続し、他のドナーにも貢献するよう呼びかける」。(IPSJapan)2007/06/18 |
| ・ | 中国:北京オリンピックを『禁煙オリンピック』に 中国の政府関係者らは、世界第1位の喫煙者人口(3.6億人)を抱える中国で、2008年度の北京オリンピックに向け『禁煙』を徹底していくことを約束した。(IPSJapan)2007/06/17 |
| ・ | ボスニア・ヘルツゴビナ紛争の貯蔵武器をイラクへ ボ スニアとクロアチアの日刊紙は、「米国の圧力によって、ボスニア・ヘルツゴビナ紛争で貯蔵された武器/弾薬をアフガニスタンとイラクへ売却する命令が下さ れ、少なくとも29万丁のライフルが米国内の民間企業に売却された」との元UE軍メンバーの証言を伝えている。(IPSJapan)2007/06/17 |
原油価格の上昇が貿易額急増の主因ではあるものの、米国や中国をはじめとする諸外国からの厳しい競争にもかかわらず、日本の対UAE輸出が堅調な伸びを示しているのは、日本・UAE二国間貿易の増進ととらえることができる。
原油価格の上昇が貿易額急増の主因ではあるものの、米国や中国をはじめとする諸外国からの厳しい競争にもかかわらず、日本の対UAE輸出が堅調な伸びを示しているのは、日本・UAE二国間貿易の増進ととらえることができる。(IPSJapan)2007/06/16
アラブ首長国連邦の有力英字日刊紙は、イスラエル政府当局によるパレスチナ人に対する締付がエスカレートしていることこそが、穏健派のパレスチナ人を強硬派、過激派に追いやっていると報じた。(IPSJapan)2007/06/14
イラン大統領によるアラブ首長国連邦訪問は初めてのことで、これは中東の地政学的情勢の大きな変化を明確に示すものだ。主要英字紙は、この歴史的訪問について論評した。(IPSJapan)2007/06/07
湾岸協力理事会(GCC)のアブドゥル・ラフマン・ビン・ハマド・アール・アッティーヤ事務局長は昨日、「平和目 的のGCC諸国の共通核開発計画案について、アラブ首長国連邦のシェイク・ハリーファ・ビン・ザーイド・アール・ナヒヤーン大統領に、これまでの調査の進 展の概要を伝えた」と述べた。(IPSJapan)2007/05/15
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の有力英字日刊紙は4月28日、民主党主導の米議会とジョージ・ブッシュ大統領のイラク戦争を巡る綱引きが続く中、長期化する暴力の視点からイラクの現状について評論した。(IPSJapan)2007/05/07
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)のシェイハ・ルブナ・アル・カシミ経済相は20日、中国高官と会談し、二国間の経済協力と増大する中国の対UAE投資の見通しについて意見を交換した。(IPSJapan)2007/05/01
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の日刊紙は「イラク難民危機は史上最悪のものになりかねない」と警告した。(IPSJapan)2007/04/27
WAMのアベド総裁とIPSのルベトキン総裁は、4日会談を行い、メディアの発展と両組織の報道交流の推進について話し合った。(IPSJapan)2007/04/16
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の英字日刊紙は、核開発問題をめぐりイランとの軍事的な対決姿勢を示す米国・イスラエル同盟国による秘密活動に関するコメントを発表した。(IPSJapan)2007/04/08
イ ラン大統領のリヤド訪問の成功によって新たに示されたことは、ムスリムが協力すれば、危険な紛争に直面したときであっても、平和的共存に向けた長い道のり を歩むことができるということであった、とアラブ首長国連邦(UAE)のある日刊紙が書いている。(IPSJapan)2007/04/06
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要日刊紙は、3日、アルジャジーラを褒め称え、このカタールのテレビ局が「(中東と湾岸)地域における影響力を示すと共に、再び自由と勇気の見本となる行為を見せた」と報じた。(IPSJapan)2007/03/26
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要日刊紙2紙は本日、北朝鮮に核施設破棄を促した6カ国協議を高く評価し、「外交の重要な勝利」と論評した。(IPSJapan)2007/03/12
イラクを舞台とした米・イラン対立が深まる中で、両者の衝突が起こった場合、深刻な影響を蒙らざるを得ない湾岸諸国の立場を論評したWAM記事を紹介します。(IPSJapan)2007/03/07
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の英字日刊紙は2月2日、パキスタンのムシャラフ大統領が中東和平プロセス実現に向けた外交支援の再活性化を図っていく意思を示したことに関してコメントした。(IPSJapan)2007/02/28
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の英字日刊紙は2月2日、パキスタンのムシャラフ大統領が中東和平プロセス実現に向けた外交支援の再活性化を図っていく意思を示したことに関してコメントした。(IPSJapan)2007/02/22
ア ラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の水・環境大臣であるモハンメド・サイード・アル・キンディ博士は、「世界は、そしてUAEも、エネルギーをより効率的に使い、 化石燃料が環境に与えるマイナスの影響を減らすという課題に直面している」と述べた。(IPSJapan)2007/02/15
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主力英語紙は1月25日、英国公訴局長が発した所謂テロ脅威に対する恐怖に駆られた不適切な反応についての警告に言及する評論を掲載した。(IPSJapan)2007/02/05
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要紙が、イラクにおいて人々が殺され、傷つけられ、家を奪われている状況が日々悪化している中で、もはや実験を行っている余裕はない、と主張した。(IPSJapan)2007/01/31
ド バイを拠とするカリージ・タイムズは1月11日付社説で「パレスチナの人々の窮状にもっとも関心が薄いのは彼らの指導者のようだ。人民が5年以上もの相次 ぐ苦難の中で、ファタハもハマスも、自分たちのプロパガンダを繰り返すばかりで、内部抗争を激化している」と論じた。(IPSJapan) 2007/01/29
アラブ首長国連邦の英字紙は論説の中で、英国のブレア首相の中東和平プロセスについての政策提言に疑問を投げた。(IPSJapan)2007/01/24
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要英字新聞は、世界の列強が盲目的にイスラエルを支持することの愚かさを悟ってもよい時期だと述べた。(IPSJapan)2007/01/19
UAE 大手の日刊紙は、イラク情勢等について、「ブッシュ米大統領はイラクでの戦争に『負けた』。にも関わらず、現実を直視することを避けている。注目すべき点 は、彼がこの事態を収拾させるための助けが必要であることを認めようとしないことだ」と社説で論評した。(IPSJapan)2006/12/23
世界中に広まっているエイズ。貧困国がその矢面に立たされている。エイズ患者の64%がアフリカに住んでおり、アジアにもエイズ患者は多い。(IPSJapan)2006/12/23
アラブ首長国の日刊紙は、論説の中で、世界はイラン、イラクに対するブッシュの次なる行動を注視していると報道。(IPSJapan)2006/12/14
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の日刊紙『ガルフ・ニュース』が、11月10日付の紙面で、今こそイスラエルは米国の 有権者から学ぶべきときであり、オルメルト[イスラエル首相]やリーバーマン[副首相]に背を向けて、公正で平和的な和解を進めるべきだ、とコメントし た。(IPSJapan)2006/12/01
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)は「暴力と戦争の文化」に代わり「平和の文化」の推進を国際社会に呼びかけた。(IPSJapan)2006/11/27
アラブ首長国連邦の英字日刊紙は、「アフリカ諸国は中国を、(アフリカを)暗黒の大陸として大方無視する姿勢を示す欧米とは異なる、頼もしいモデルと見なしている。」と報じた。(IPSJapan)2006/11/20
「フセイン裁判を復讐の場と見るべきではない。イラクの歴史における暴力の章を閉じ、継続可能な民主主義を再建する機会である」と『ガルフ・ニュース』紙は記述する。(IPSJapan)2006/11/18
UAE代表団のアル・マンソウリ氏は、総会第61会期第4委員会を前に、国連パレスチナ難民救済事業機関 (UNRWA)の項目で「国際社会はパレスチナ難民問題の解決に向けた責任を負わねばならない。この問題はパレスチナ問題の一部分であり、中東における平 和的・包括的な和解により解決できる」と述べた。(IPSJapan)2006/11/14
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要英字新聞は今日、欧米におけるイスラム教徒に対する怒りと被害妄想の高まりについて論評し、フランスが最近、アラブ人とイスラム教徒は文明化した欧米の「脅威」だと考え始めていると報じた。(IPSJapan)2006/11/10
米国のイラク侵攻の背景にあるといわれているイスラエル・ロビーの力に対する米国人の懸念が高まっていると、アラブ首長国連邦の英字日刊紙が論評する。(IPSJapan)2006/11/07
アラブ首長国新聞は10月12日、西側指導者およびメディアは、増加するイスラム教徒およびイスラム教に対する攻撃の監視を強化すべきであると述べた。(IPSJapan)2006/10/20
「40年のキャリアを有する外交官として、潘氏は管理能力と道徳的な誠実さを実証してきた。今必要なことは、国連の合理化に真価を発揮すること」との社説。(IPSJapan)2006/10/17
アラブ首長国連邦の英字日刊紙は、「パレスチナのファタハとハマス間の権力闘争は、単にイスラエルに利するのみである」と論じた。(IPSJapan)2006/10/09
イスラエルによるレバノンへの領空封鎖を破るとカタールが決定したことは勇気ある行為であり、イスラエルの攻撃から身を守るレバノンに対する最小限の連帯の意思表明であるとアラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要日刊紙が報じた。(IPSJapan)2006/09/30
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の英字主要紙は「周辺諸国が行動を起こさない限り、イラクは本格的な内戦に陥る可能性がある」と警告した。(IPSJapan)2006/09/29
8月31日に国連安全保障理事会は、12-0で1万7,500人の兵士と3,000人の警察官の動乱地域への派遣 を可決した。けれどもオマル・アル・バシール大統領率いるスーダン政府は、スーダンは国家の主権を脅かすいかなる決議にも合意しないとして提案を退けた ――。(IPSJapan)2006/09/28
アラブ首長国連邦の新聞は社説で「イスラエルの次なる標的はレバノンである」と述べている。(IPSJapan)2006/09/14
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の英字主要紙が8月25日、レバノン情勢に関して社説を掲載した。もし国連平和維持軍がシリア・レバノン国境に展開したならばシリアは同国境を封鎖する、という警告を受けてのものであった。(IPSJapan)2006/09/09
アラブ首長国連邦の新聞は、「レバノン国軍がいかにその任務に取り組むかが注視されるだろう」と社説で論じた。(IPSJapan)2006/08/27
アラブ諸国の外相らはレバノン首都ベイルートで会議を開き、イスラエル軍によるレバノン攻撃の即時停止を呼掛けていた。(IPSJapan)2006/08/20
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)日刊紙は、今や世界に残された道は国連にイスラエルをテロリスト国家と宣言させることしかないと報じた。(IPSJapan)2006/08/11
レバノン情勢の悪化に世界の注目が集まるなか、UAEの日刊紙はガザ地区でのイスラエル軍による無謀な侵略戦争への注目度が低下してきていると報じている。(IPSJapan)2006/08/05
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)は、レバノンとパレスチナの人々に対するイスラエルの断続的な攻撃を終結させるために、国連の安全保障理事会に調停を求めた。(IPSJapan)2006/07/29
UAEの主要日刊紙は「イスラエルがレバノンおよびガザで行っている殺人/破壊行為に対しアラブ諸国が傍観の姿勢を取り、手をこまねいているのを見る程嘆かわしいことはない」と嘆く。(IPSJapan)2006/07/24
中東の経済成長を抑えつける可能性のある政治的緊張の問題が、今年の「アラブ戦略フォーラム」の主要議題になりそうだ。(IPSJapan)2006/07/18
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)アブダビ警察の麻薬取締部は、その万全な警戒態勢と優れた効率性で、近年数件にのぼる麻薬密売計画の阻止に成果を上げている。(IPSJapan)2006/07/14
アラブ首長国連邦 (UAE)の日刊紙は、「国際社会はパレスチナ問題を正義と人権の観点から捉えようとしていない」としてパレスチナ問題への国際社会の無関心を非難した。(IPSJapan)2006/07/02
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)主要日刊紙は、アメリカ・イラン両国がイランの核開発問題について妥協案を探るつもりがあるなら当地域の懸念を考慮に入れるよう両国に求めた。(IPSJapan)2006/06/23
世界中の飢餓と貧困の撲滅に関する意識向上を目的とした自動車ラリーで、120台の古い車がドイツから出発して14カ国を周り、ヨルダンの首都アンマンに到着した。(IPSJapan)2006/06/16
アラブ首長国連邦日刊紙は5月26日、市民に対し社会活動に積極的に参加し人助けに努めるよう呼びかけた。(IPSJapan)2006/06/03
アラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の主要紙が、グアンタナモ刑務所における拷問にいつて、国連の批判と米国の反応」を報じた。(IPSJapan)2006/05/27
アラブ首長国連邦では1975年以降、デング熱の国内感染例は出ていない。(IPSJapan)2006/05/21
アラブ首長国連邦は、人間開発(Human development)に主眼を置き、持続可能な開発を重視、国際社会にも働きかけて続けている。(IPSJapan)2006/05/13
アラブ首長国連邦主要日刊紙は、米軍によるイランの核施設攻撃がなくても湾岸諸国はイランの野望に対処できるとして、国連に外交の道を探るよう求める社説を掲載した(IPSJapan)2006/05/06
アラブ首長国連邦の慈善・人道的活動を行っているザーイド財団は、アフリカの角(北東アフリカ:エチオピア・ソマ リア・エリトリア・ジブチ・ケニアなど)で干ばつへの救援活動として2,600ディルハム(708万ドル)を寄付した。(IPSJapan) 2006/05/02
「2003年以降児童死亡率が30%上昇」とアラブ首長国連邦(UAE)の日刊新聞が伝えた。(IPSJapan)2006/05/01
アラブ首長国連邦の「Khaleej Times」紙は4月13日付記事で、「西側とイスラム社会間の橋渡しをしているトルコの役割を活用すべき」としている。(IPSJapan)2006/04/29
アラブ首長国連邦の主要な英字日刊紙は、イラン核開発問題は外交努力によって解決すべきだ、と主張している。(IPSJapan)2006/04/27
#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
Sources:
Buzzflash.com, July 18, 2005
Title: “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story”
Author: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.
Student Researchers: Lauren Powell, Brett Forest, and Zoe Huffman
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.
Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future of the Internet. More recently referred to as “network neutrality,” the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006.1 And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC’s Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day (June 2006).2
Most coverage of the issue framed it as an argument over regulation—but the term “regulation” in this case is somewhat misleading. Groups advocating for “net neutrality” are not promoting regulation of internet content. What they want is a legal mandate forcing cable companies to allow internet service providers (ISPs) free access to their cable lines (called a “common carriage” agreement). This was the model used for dial-up internet, and it is the way content providers want to keep it. They also want to make sure that cable companies cannot screen or interrupt internet content without a court order.
Those in favor of net neutrality say that lack of government regulation simply means that cable lines will be regulated by the cable companies themselves. ISPs will have to pay a hefty service fee for the right to use cable lines (making internet services more expensive). Those who could pay more would get better access; those who could not pay would be left behind. Cable companies could also decide to filter Internet content at will.
On the other side, cable company supporters say that a great deal of time and money was spent laying cable lines and expanding their speed and quality.3 They claim that allowing ISPs free access would deny cable companies the ability to recoup their investments, and maintain that cable providers should be allowed to charge. Not doing so, they predict, would discourage competition and innovation within the cable industry.
Cable supporters like the AT&T-sponsored Hands Off the Internet website assert that common carriage legislation would lead to higher prices and months of legal wrangling. They maintain that such legislation fixes a problem that doesn’t exist and scoff at concerns that phone and cable companies will use their position to limit access based on fees as groundless. Though cable companies deny plans to block content providers without cause, there are a number of examples of cable-initiated discrimination.
In March 2005, the FCC settled a case against a North Carolina-based telephone company that was blocking the ability of its customers to use voice-over-Internet calling services instead of (the more expensive) phone lines.4 In August 2005, a Canadian cable company blocked access to a site that supported the cable union in a labor dispute.5 In February 2006, Cox Communications denied customers access to the Craig’s List website. Though Cox claims that it was simply a security error, it was discovered that Cox ran a classified service that competes with Craig’s List.6
court decisions
In June of 1999, the Ninth District Court ruled that AT&T would have to open its cable network to ISPs (AT&T v. City of Portland). The court said that Internet transmissions, interactive, two-way exchanges, were telecommunication offerings, not a cable information service (like CNN) that sends data one way. This decision was overturned on appeal a year later.
Recent court decisions have extended the cable company agenda further. On June 27, 2005, The United States Supreme Court ruled that cable corporations like Comcast and Verizon were not required to share their lines with rival ISPs (National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services).7 Cable companies would not have to offer common carriage agreements for cable lines the way that telephone companies have for phone lines.
According to Dr. Elliot Cohen, the decision accepted the FCC assertion that cable modem service is not a two-way telecommunications offering, but a one-way information service, completely overturning the 1999 ruling. Meanwhile, telephone companies charge that such a decision gives an unfair advantage to cable companies and are requesting that they be released from their common carriage requirement as well.
Legislation
On June 8, the House rejected legislation (HR 5273) that would have prevented phone and cable companies from selling preferential treatment on their networks for delivery of video and other data-heavy applications. It also passed the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act (HR 5252), which supporters said would encourage innovation and the construction of more high-speed Internet lines. Internet neutrality advocates say it will allow phone and cable companies to cherry-pick customers in wealthy neighborhoods while eliminating the current requirement demanded by most local governments that cable TV companies serve low-income and minority areas as well. 8
Comment: As of June 2006, the COPE Act is in the Senate. Supporters say the bill supports innovation and freedom of choice. Interet neutrality advocates say that its passage would forever compromise the Internet. Giant cable companies would attain a monopoly on high-speed, cable Internet. They would prevent poorer citizens from broadband access, while monitoring and controlling the content of information that can be accessed.
Notes
1. “Keeping a Democratic Web,” The New York Times, May 2, 2006.
2. Jim Goldman, Larry Kudlow, and Phil Lebeau, “Panelists Michael Powell, Mike Holland, Neil Weinberg, John Augustine and Pablo Perez-Fernandez discuss markets,” Kudlow & Company CNBC, March 6, 2006.
3. http://www.Handsofftheinternet.com.
4. Michael Geist, “Telus breaks Net Providers’ cardinal rule: Telecom company blocks access to site supporting union in labour dispute,” Ottawa Citizen, August 4, 2005.
5. Jonathan Krim, “Renewed Warning of Bandwidth Hoarding,” The Washington Post, November 24, 2005.
6. David A. Utter, “Craigslist Blocked By Cox Interactive,” http://www.Webpronews.com, June 7, 2006.
7. Yuki Noguchi, “Cable Firms Don’t Have to Share Networks, Court Rules,” Washington Post, June 28, 2005.
8. “Last week in Congress / How our representatives voted,” Buffalo News (New York), June 11, 2006.
UPDATE BY ELLIOT D. COHEN, PH.D.
Despite the fact that the Court’s decision in Brand X marks the beginning of the end for a robust, democratic Internet, there has been a virtual MSM blackout in covering it. As a result of this decision, the legal stage has been set for further corporate control. Currently pending in Congress is the “Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006”(HR 5252), fueled by strong telecom corporative lobbies and introduced by Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX). This Act, which fails to adequately protect an open and neutral Internet, includes a “Title II—Enforcement of Broadband Policy Statement” that gives the FCC “exclusive authority to adjudicate any complaint alleging a violation of the broadband policy statement or the principles incorporated therein.” With the passage of this provision, courts will have scant authority to challenge and overturn FCC decisions regarding broadband. Since under current FCC Chair Kevin Martin, the FCC is moving toward still further deregulation of telecom and media companies, the likely consequence is the thickening of the plot to increase corporate control of the Internet. In particular, behemoth telecom corporations like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T want to set up toll booths on the Internet. If these companies get their way, content providers with deep pockets will be afforded optimum bandwidth while the rest of us will be left spinning in cyberspace. No longer will everyone enjoy an equal voice in the freest and most comprehensive democratic forum ever devised by humankind.
As might be expected, none of these new developments are being addressed by the MSM. Among media activist organizations attempting to stop the gutting of the free Internet is The Free Press (http://www.freepress.net/), which now has an aggressive “Save the Internet” campaign.
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
Source:
Global Research.ca, August 5, 2005
Title: “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team”
Author: Jason Leopold
Faculty Evaluator: Catherine Nelson
Student Researchers: Kristine Medeiros and Pla Herr
According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company Halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies.
Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton first became public knowledge in January 2005 when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars gas-drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered to the Cayman Islands. Following the announcement, Halliburton claimed that the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. According to a BBC report, Halliburton, which took thirty to forty million dollars from its Iranian operations in 2003, “was winding down its work due to a poor business environment.”
However, Halliburton has a long history of doing business in Iran, starting as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company. Leopold quotes a February 2001 report published in the Wall Street Journal, “Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., works behind an unmarked door on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. A brochure declares that the company was registered in 1975 in the Cayman Islands, is based in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai and is “non-American.” But like the sign over the receptionist’s head, the brochure bears the company’s name and red emblem, and offers services from Halliburton units around the world.” Moreover mail sent to the company’s offices in Tehran and the Cayman Islands is forwarded directly to its Dallas headquarters.
In an attempt to curtail Halliburton and other U.S. companies from engaging in business dealings with rogue nations such as Libya, Iran, and Syria, an amendment was approved in the Senate on July 26, 2005. The amendment, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins R-Maine, would penalize companies that continue to skirt U.S. law by setting up offshore subsidiaries as a way to legally conduct and avoid U.S. sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
A letter, drafted by trade groups representing corporate executives, vehemently objected to the amendment, saying it would lead to further hatred and perhaps incite terrorist attacks on the U.S. and “greatly strain relations with the United States primary trading partners.” The letter warned that, “Foreign governments view U.S. efforts to dictate their foreign and commercial policy as violations of sovereignty often leading them to adopt retaliatory measures more at odds with U.S. goals.”
Collins supports the legislation, stating, “It prevents U.S. corporations from creating a shell company somewhere else in order to do business with rogue, terror-sponsoring nations such as Syria and Iran. The bottom line is that if a U.S. company is evading sanctions to do business with one of these countries, they are helping to prop up countries that support terrorism—most often aimed against America.
UPDATE BY JASON LEOPOLD
During a trip to the Middle East in March 1996, Vice President Dick Cheney told a group of mostly U.S. businessmen that Congress should ease sanctions in Iran and Libya to foster better relationships, a statement that, in hindsight, is completely hypocritical considering the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
“Let me make a generalized statement about a trend I see in the U.S. Congress that I find disturbing, that applies not only with respect to the Iranian situation but a number of others as well,” Cheney said. “I think we Americans sometimes make mistakes . . . There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we are going to use our economic clout to get everybody else to live the way we would like.”
Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton Corporation at the time he uttered those words. It was Cheney who directed Halliburton toward aggressive business dealings with Iran—in violation of U.S. law—in the mid-1990s, which continued through 2005 and is the reason Iran has the capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium.
It was Halliburton’s secret sale of centrifuges to Iran that helped get the uranium enrichment program off the ground, according to a three-year investigation that includes interviews conducted with more than a dozen current and former Halliburton employees.
If the U.S. ends up engaged in a war with Iran in the future, Cheney and Halliburton will bear the brunt of the blame.
But this shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who has been following Halliburton’s business activities over the past decade. The company has a long, documented history of violating U.S. sanctions and conducting business with so-called rogue nations.
No, what’s disturbing about these facts is how little attention it has received from the mainstream media. But the public record speaks for itself, as do the thousands of pages of documents obtained by various federal agencies that show how Halliburton’s business dealings in Iran helped fund terrorist activities there—including the country’s nuclear enrichment program.
When I asked Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, a couple of years ago if Halliburton would stop doing business with Iran because of concerns that the company helped fund terrorism she said, “No.” “We believe that decisions as to the nature of such governments and their actions are better made by governmental authorities and international entities such as the United Nations as opposed to individual persons or companies,” Hall said. “Putting politics aside, we and our affiliates operate in countries to the extent it is legally permissible, where our customers are active as they expect us to provide oilfield services support to their international operations. “We do not always agree with policies or actions of governments in every place that we do business and make no excuses for their behaviors. Due to the long-term nature of our business and the inevitability of political and social change, it is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy.”
Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of U.S. sanctions.
An executive order signed by former President Bill Clinton in March 1995 prohibits “new investments (in Iran) by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets.” It also bars U.S. companies from performing services “that would benefit the Iranian oil industry” and provide Iran with the financial means to engage in terrorist activity.
When Bush and Cheney came into office in 2001, their administration decided it would not punish foreign oil and gas companies that invest in those countries. The sanctions imposed on countries like Iran and Libya before Bush became president were blasted by Cheney, who gave frequent speeches on the need for U.S. companies to compete with their foreign competitors, despite claims that those countries may have ties to terrorism.
“I think we’d be better off if we, in fact, backed off those sanctions (on Iran), didn’t try to impose secondary boycotts on companies . . . trying to do business over there . . . and instead started to rebuild those relationships,” Cheney said during a 1998 business trip to Sydney, Australia, according to Australia’s Illawarra Mercury newspaper.
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
Source:
Mother Jones, March /April, 2006
Title: The Fate of the Ocean
Author: Julia Whitty
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel
Student Researcher: Charlene Jones
Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.
According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world’s largest communal life source.
In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.
One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.
Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore drilling.
Along with mercury, the Mississippi delivers nitrogen (often from fertilizers). Nitrogen stimulates plant and bacterial growth in the water that consume oxygen, creating a condition known as hypoxia, or dead zones. Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life. A sizable portion of the Gulf of Mexico has become a dead zone—the largest such area in the U.S. and the second largest on the planet, measuring nearly 8,000 square miles in 2001. It is no coincidence that almost all of the nearly 150 (and counting) dead zones on earth lay at the mouths of rivers. Nearly fifty fester off U.S. coasts. While most are caused by river-borne nitrogen, fossil fuel-burning plants help create this condition, as does phosphorous from human sewage and nitrogen emissions from auto exhaust.
Meanwhile, since its peak in 2000, the global wild fish harvest has begun a sharp decline despite progress in seagoing technologies and intensified fishing. So-called efficiencies in fishing have stimulated unprecedented decimation of sealife. Long-lining, in which a single boat sets line across sixty or more miles of ocean, each baited with up to 10,000 hooks, captures at least 25 percent unwanted catch. With an estimated 2 billion hooks set each year, as much as 88 billion pounds of life a year is thrown back to the ocean either dead or dying. Additionally, trawlers drag nets across every square inch of the continental shelves every two years. Fishing the sea floor like a bulldozer, they level an area 150 times larger than all forest clearcuts each year and destroy seafloor ecosystems. Aquaculture is no better, since three pounds of wild fish are caught to feed every pound of farmed salmon. A 2003 study out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia concluded, based on data dating from the 1950s, that in the wake of decades of such onslaught only 10 percent of all large fish (tuna, swordfish) and ground fish (cod, hake, flounder) are left anywhere in the ocean.
Other sea nurseries are also threatened. Fifteen percent of seagrass beds have disappeared in the last ten years, depriving juvenile fish, manatees, and sea turtles of critical habitats. Kelp beds are also dying at alarming rates.
While at no time in history has science taught more about how the earth’s life-support systems work, the maelstrom of human assault on the seas continues. If human failure in governance of the world’s largest public domain is not reversed quickly, the ocean will soon and surely reach a point of no return.
Comment:
After release of the Pew Oceans Commission report, U.S. media, most notably The Washington Post and National Public Radio in 2003 and 2004, covered several stories regarding impending threats to the ocean, recommendations for protection, and President Bush’s response. However, media treatment of the collective acceleration of ocean damage and cross-pollination of harm was left to Julia Whitty in her lengthy feature. In April of 2006, Time Magazine presented an in-depth article about earth at “the tipping point,” describing the planet as an overworked organism fighting the consequences of global climate change on shore and sea. In her Mother Jones article, Whitty presented a look at global illness by directly examining the ocean as earth’s circulatory, respiratory, and reproductive system.
Following up on “The Last Days of the Ocean,” Mother Jones has produced “Ocean Voyager,” an innovative web-based adventure that includes videos, audio interviews with key players, webcams, and links to informative web pages created by more than twenty organizations. The site is a tour of various ocean trouble spots around the world, which highlights solutions and suggests actions that can be taken to help make a difference.
UPDATE BY JULIA WHITTY
This story is awash with new developments. Scientists are currently publishing at an unprecedented rate their observations—not just predictions—on the rapid changes underway on our ocean planet. First and foremost, the year 2005 turned out to be the warmest year on record. This reinforces other data showing the earth has grown hotter in the past 400 years, and possibly in the past 2,000 years. A study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research found ocean temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic in 2005 nearly two degrees Fahrenheit above normal; this turned out to be the predominant catalyst for the monstrous 2005 hurricane season—the most violent season ever seen.
The news from the polar ice is no better. A joint NASA/University of Kansas study in Science (02/06) reveals that Greenland’s glaciers are surging towards the sea and melting more than twice as fast as ten years ago. This further endangers the critical balance of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which holds our climate stable. Meanwhile, in March, the British Antarctic Survey announced their findings that the “global warming signature” of the Antarctic is three times larger than what we’re seeing elsewhere on Earth—the first proof of broadscale climate change across the southern continent.
Since “The Fate of the Ocean” went to press in Mother Jones magazine, evidence of the politicization of science in the global climate wars has also emerged. In January 2006 NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, accused the agency of trying to censor his work. Four months later, Hansen’s accusations were echoed by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as by a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, who claimed their work on global climate change was being censored by their departments, as part of a policy of intimidation by the anti-science Bush administration.
Problems for the ocean’s wildlife are escalating too. In 2005, biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service found polar bears drowned in the waters off Alaska, apparent victims of the disappearing ice. In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center researchers found polar bears killing and eating each other in areas where sea ice failed to form that year, leaving the bears bereft of food. In response, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources revised their Red List for polar bears—upgrading them from “conservation dependent” to “vulnerable.” In February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would begin reviewing whether polar bears need protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Since my report, the leaders of two influential commissions—the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy—gave Congress, the Bush administration, and our nation’s governors a “D+” grade for not moving quickly enough to address their recommendations for restoring health to our nation’s oceans.
Most of these stories remain out of view, sunk with cement boots in the backwaters of scientific journals. The media remains unable to discern good science from bad, and gives equal credence to both, when they give any at all. The story of our declining ocean world, and our own future, develops beyond the ken of the public, who forge ahead without altering behavior or goals, and unimpeded by foresight.
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
Sources:
The New Standard, December 2005
Title: “New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness”
Author: Brendan Coyne
OneWorld.net, March, 2006
Title: “US Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire “
Author: Abid Aslam
Faculty Evaluator: Myrna Goodman
Student Researcher: Arlene Ward and Brett Forest
The number of hungry and homeless people in U.S. cities continued to grow in 2005, despite claims of an improved economy. Increased demand for vital services rose as needs of the most destitute went unmet, according to the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors Report, which has documented increasing need since its 1982 inception.
The study measures instances of emergency food and housing assistance in twenty-four U.S. cities and utilizes supplemental information from the U.S. Census and Department of Labor. More than three-quarters of cities surveyed reported increases in demand for food and housing, especially among families. Food aid requests expanded by 12 percent in 2005, while aid center and food bank resources grew by only 7 percent. Service providers estimated 18 percent of requests went unattended. Housing followed a similar trend, as a majority of cities reported an increase in demand for emergency shelter, often going unmet due to lack of resources.
As urban hunger and homelessness increases in America, the Bush administration is planning to eliminate a U.S. survey widely used to improve federal and state programs for low-income and retired Americans, reports Abid Aslam.
President Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal 2007, which begins October 2006, includes a Commerce Department plan to eliminate the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The proposal marks at least the third White House attempt in as many years to do away with federal data collection on politically prickly economic issues.
Founded in 1984, the Census Bureau survey follows American families for a number of years and monitors their use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and other health, social service, and education programs.
Some 415 economists and social scientists signed a letter and sent it to Congress, shortly after the February release of Bush’s federal budget proposal, urging that the survey be fully funded as it “is the only large-scale survey explicitly designed to analyze the impact of a wide variety of government programs on the well being of American families.”
Heather Boushey, economist at the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Economic and Policy Research told Abid Aslam, “We need to know what the effects of these programs are on American families . . . SIPP is designed to do just that.” Boushey added that the survey has proved invaluable in tracking the effects of changes in government programs. So much so that the 1996 welfare reform law specifically mentioned the survey as the best means to evaluate the law’s effectiveness.
Supporters of the survey elimination say the program costs too much at $40 million per year. They would kill it in September and eventually replace it with a scaled-down version that would run to $9.2 million in development costs during the coming fiscal year. Actual data collection would begin in 2009.
Defenders of the survey counter that the cost is justified as SIPP “provides a constant stream of in-depth data that enables government, academic, and independent researchers to evaluate the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of several hundred billion dollars in spending on social programs,” including homeless shelters and emergency food aid.
UPDATE BY ABID ASLAM
As of the end of May 2006, hundreds of economists and social scientists remain engaged in a bid to save the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Ideologically diverse users describe the survey as pioneering and say it has helped to improve the uptake and performance of, and to gauge the effects on American families of changes in public provisions ranging from Medicaid to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and school lunch programs.
A few journalists took notice because users of the data, including the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which spearheaded the effort to save SIPP, chose to make some noise.By most accounts, the matter was a simple fight over money: the administration was out to cut any hint of flesh from bureaucratic budgets (perhaps to feed its foreign policy pursuits) but users of the survey wanted the money spent on SIPP because, in their view, the program is valuable and no feasible alternative exists or has been proposed.
That debate remains to be resolved. Lobbyists expect more legislative action in June and among them, CEPR remains available to provide updates.But is it just an isolated budget fight? This is the third time in as many years that the Bush administration has tried—and in the previous two cases, failed under pressure from users and advocates—to strip funding for awkward research. In 2003, it had tried to kill the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Mass Layoff Statistics report, which detailed where workplaces with more than fifty employees closed and what kinds of workers were affected. In 2004 and 2005, it had attempted to drop questions on the hiring and firing of women from employment data collected by the BLS. Hardly big-ticket items on the federal budget, the mass layoffs reports provided federal and state social service agencies with data crucial for planning even as it chronicled job losses and the so-called “jobless recovery.” The women’s questionnaire uncovered employment discrimination.
In other words, SIPP and the BLS programs are politically prickly. They highlight that, regardless of what some politicians and executives might say, economic and social problems persist and involve real people whose real needs remain to be met. This calls to mind the old line about there being three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. To be convincing, they must be broadly consistent. If the numbers don’t support the narrative, something simply must give. With the livelihoods, life chances, and rights of millions of citizens at stake, these are more than stories about arcane budget wrangles.
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
Sources:
The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005
Title: “The World’s Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow”
Earth First! Journal, August 2005
Title: “High-Tech Genocide”
Author: Sprocket
Z Magazine, March 1, 2006
Title: “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo”
Authors: Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski
Faculty Evaluator: Thom Lough
Student Researchers: Deyango Harris and Daniel Turner
The world’s most neglected emergency, according to the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, is the ongoing tragedy of the Congo, where six to seven million have died since 1996 as a consequence of invasions and wars sponsored by western powers trying to gain control of the region’s mineral wealth. At stake is control of natural resources that are sought by U.S. corporations—diamonds, tin, copper, gold, and more significantly, coltan and niobium, two minerals necessary for production of cell phones and other high-tech electronics; and cobalt, an element essential to nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries.
Columbo-tantalite, i.e. coltan, is found in three-billion-year-old soils like those in the Rift Valley region of Africa. The tantalum extracted from the coltan ore is used to make tantalum capacitors, tiny components that are essential in managing the flow of current in electronic devices. Eighty percent of the world’s coltan reserves are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Niobium is another high-tech mineral with a similar story.
Sprocket reports that the high-tech boom of the 1990s caused the price of coltan to skyrocket to nearly $300 per pound. In 1996 U.S.-sponsored Rwandan and Ugandan forces entered eastern DRC. By 1998 they seized control and moved into strategic mining areas. The Rwandan Army was soon making $20 million or more a month from coltan mining. Though the price of coltan has fallen, Rwanda maintains its monopoly on coltan and the coltan trade in DRC. Reports of rampant human rights abuses pour out of this mining region.
Coltan makes its way out of the mines to trading posts where foreign traders buy the mineral and ship it abroad, mostly through Rwanda. Firms with the capability turn coltan into the coveted tantalum powder, and then sell the magic powder to Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Sony, and other manufacturers for use in cell phones and other products.
Keith Harmon Snow emphasizes that any analysis of the geopolitics in the Congo, and the reasons for why the Congolese people have suffered a virtually unending war since 1996, requires an understanding of the organized crime perpetrated through multinational businesses. The tragedy of the Congo conflict has been instituted by invested corporations, their proxy armies, and the supra-governmental bodies that support them.
The process is tied to major multinational corporations at all levels. These include U.S.-based Cabot Corp. and OM Group; HC Starck of Germany; and Nigncxia of China—corporations that have been linked by a United Nations Panel of Experts to the atrocities in DRC. Extortion, rape, massacres, and bribery are all part of the criminal networks set up and maintained by huge multinational companies. Yet as mining in the Congo by western companies proceeds at an unprecedented rate—some $6 million in raw cobalt alone exiting DRC daily—multinational mining companies rarely get mentioned in human rights reports.
Sprocket notes that Sam Bodman, CEO of Cabot during the coltan boom, was appointed in December 2004 to serve as President Bush’s Secretary of Energy. Under Bodman’s leadership from 1987 to 2000, Cabot was one of the U.S.’s largest polluters, accounting for 60,000 tons of airborne toxic emissions annually. Snow adds that Sony’s current Executive Vice President and General Counsel Nicole Seligman was a former legal adviser for Bill Clinton. Many who held positions of power in the Clinton administration moved into high positions with Sony.
The article “Behind the Numbers,” coauthored by Snow and David Barouski, details a web of U.S. corruption and conflicts of interest between mining corporations such as Barrick Gold (see Story #21) and the U.S. government under George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as U.S. arms dealers such as Simax; U.S. defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Northrop Grumman, GE, Boeing, Raytheon, and Bechtel; “humanitarian” organizations such as CARE, funded by Lockheed Martin, and International Rescue Committee, whose Board of Overseers includes Henry Kissinger; “Conservation” interests that provide the vanguard for western penetration into Central Africa; and of course, PR firms and news outlets such as the New York Times.
Sprocket closes his article by noting that it’s not surprising this information isn’t included in the literature and manuals that come with your cell phones, pagers, computers, or diamond jewelry. Perhaps, he suggests, mobile phones should be outfitted with stickers that read: “Warning! This device was created with raw materials from central Africa. These materials are rare, nonrenewable, were sold to fund a bloody war of occupation, and have caused the virtual elimination of endangered species. Have a nice day.” People need to realize, he says, that there is a direct link between the gadgets that make our lives more convenient and sophisticated—and the reality of the violence, turmoil, and destruction that plague our world.
UPDATE BY SPROCKET
There are large fortunes to be made in the manufacturing of high-tech electronics and in selling convenience and entertainment to American consumers, but at what cost?
Conflicts in Africa are often shrouded with misinformation, while U.S. and other western interests are routinely downplayed or omitted by the corporate media. The June 5, 2006, cover story of Time, entitled “Congo: The Hidden Toll of the World’s Deadliest War,” was no exception. Although the article briefly mentioned coltan and its use in cell phones and other electronic devices, no mention was made of the pivotal role this and other raw materials found in the region play in the conflict. The story painted the ongoing war as a pitiable and horrible tragedy, avoiding the corporations and foreign governments that have created the framework for the violence and those which have strong financial and political interests in the conflict’s outcome.
In an article written by Johann Hari and published by The Hamilton Spectator on May 13, 2006, the corporate media took a step toward addressing the true reason for the tremendous body count that continues to pile up in the Democratic Republic of Congo: “The only change over the decades has been the resources snatched for Western consumption—rubber under the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and casterite today.”
Most disturbing is that in the corporate media, the effect of this conflict on nonhuman life is totally overlooked. Even with a high-profile endangered species like the Eastern lowland gorilla hanging in the balance, almost driven to extinction through poaching and habitat loss by displaced villagers and warring factions, the environmental angle of the story is rarely considered.
The next step in understanding the exploitation and violence wrought upon the inhabitants of central Africa, fueled by the hunger for high-tech toys in the U.S., is to expose corporations like Sony and Motorola. These corporations don’t want protest movements tarnishing their reputations. Nor do they want to call attention to all of the gorillas coltan kills, and the guerrillas it feeds.
It is time for our culture to start seeing more value in living beings, whether gorillas or humans, than in our disposable high-tech gadgets such as cell phones. It is time to steal back a more compassionate existence from the corporate plutocracy that creates destructive markets and from the media system that has manufactured our consent.
It is not just a question of giving up cell phones (though that would be a great start). We must question the appropriation of our planet in the form of a resource to be consumed, rather than as a home and community to be lived in.
“High-Tech Genocide” and other articles about cell phone technology are available by contacting the author: .
UPDATE BY KEITH HARMON SNOW
War for the control of the Democratic Republic of Congo—what should be the richest country in the world—began in Uganda in the 1980s, when now Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni shot his way to power with the backing of Buckingham Palace, the White House, and Tel Aviv behind him.
Paul Kagame, now president of Rwanda, served as Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence. Kagame later trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—backed by Roger Winter, the U.S. Committee on Refugees, and the others above—invaded Rwanda. The RPF destabilized and then secured Rwanda. This coup d’etat is today misunderstood as the “Rwanda Genocide.” What played out in Rwanda in 1994 is now playing out in Darfur, Sudan; regime change is the goal, “genocide” is the tool of propaganda used to manipulate and disinform.
In 1996, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, with the Pentagon behind them, launched their covert war against Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and his western backers. A decade later, there are 6 or 7 million dead, at the very least, and the war in Congo (Zaire) continues.
If you are reading the mainstream newspapers or listening to National Public Radio, you are contributing to your own mental illness, no matter how astute you believe yourself to be at “balancing” or “deciphering” the code.
News reports in Time Magazine (“The Deadliest War In The World,” June 6, 2006) and on CNN (“Rape, Brutality Ignored to Aid Congo Peace,” May 26, 2006) that appeared at the time of this writing are being interpreted by conscious people to be truth-telling at last. However, these are perfect examples filled with hidden deceptions and manipulations.
For accuracy and truth on Central Africa, look to people like Robin Philpot (Imperialism Dies Hard), Wayne Madsen (Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993–1999), Amos Wilson (The Falsification of Consciousness), Charles Onana (The Secrets of the Rwanda Genocide—Investigation on the Mysteries of a President), Antoine Lokongo (www.congopanorama.info), Phil Taylor (www.taylor-report.com), Christopher Black (“Racism, Murder and Lies in Rwanda”). World War 4 Report has published my reports, but they are inconsistent in their attention to accuracy, and would as quickly adopt the propaganda, and have done so at times.
It is possible to collect little fragments of truth here and there—never counting on the mainstream system for this—but one must beware the deceptions and bias. In this vein, the elite business journal Africa Confidential is often very revealing. Some facts can be gleaned from www.DigitalCongo.net and Africa Research Bulletin.
Professor David Gibb’s book The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Case of the Congo Crises is an excellent backgrounder that identifies players still active today (especially Maurice Tempelsman and his diamonds interests connected to the Democratic Party). Ditto King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hocshchild, but—exemplifying the expedience of “interests”—remember that Hocshchild never tells you, the reader, that his father ran a mining company in Congo. Almost ALL reportage is expedient; one needs take care their propensity to be deceived.
Professor Ruth Mayer’s book Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization is a particularly poignant articulation of the means by which the “media” system distorts and manipulates all things African. And, never forget www.AllThingsPass.com.
Also hoping to correct the record and reveal the truth, the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes of Africa (www.veritasrwandaforum.org), based in Spain, and co-founded by Nobel Prize nominee Juan Carrero Seraleegui, is involved in a groundbreaking lawsuit charging massive crimes against humanity and acts of genocide were committed by the now government of Rwanda.
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
Source:
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility website
Titles: “Whistleblowers Get Help from Bush Administration,” December 5, 2005
“Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins,” October 18,2005
“Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections,” September 22, 2005
Author: Jeff Ruch
Faculty Evaluator: Barbara Bloom
Student Researchers: Caitlyn Peele and Sara-Joy Christienson
Special Counsel Scott Bloch, appointed by President Bush in 2004, is overseeing the virtual elimination of federal whistleblower rights in the U.S. government.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the agency that is supposed to protect federal employees who blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse is dismissing hundreds of cases while advancing almost none. According to the Annual Report for 2004 (which was not released until the end of first quarter fiscal year 2006) less than 1.5 percent of whistleblower claims were referred for investigation while more than 1000 reports were closed before they were even opened. Only eight claims were found to be substantiated, and one of those included the theft of a desk, while another included attendance violations. Favorable outcomes have declined 24 percent overall, and this is all in the first year that the new special counsel, Scott Bloch, has been in office.
Bloch, who has received numerous complaints since he took office, defends his first thirteen months in office by pointing to a decline in backlogged cases. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Executive Director Jeff Ruch says, “. . . backlogs and delays are bad, but they are not as bad as simply dumping the cases altogether.” According to figures released by Bloch in February of 2005 more than 470 claims of retaliation were dismissed, and not once had he affirmatively represented a whistleblower. In fact, in order to speed dismissals, Bloch instituted a rule forbidding his staff from contacting a whistleblower if their disclosure was deemed incomplete or ambiguous. Instead, the OSC would dismiss the matter. As a result, hundreds of whistleblowers never had a chance to justify their cases. Ruch notes that these numbers are limited to only the backlogged cases and do not include new ones.
On March 3, 2005, OSC staff members joined by a coalition of whistleblower protection and civil rights organizations filed a complaint against Bloch. His own employees accused him of violating the very rules he is supposed to be enforcing. The complaint specifies instances of illegal gag orders, cronyism, invidious discrimination, and retaliation by forcing the resignation of one-fifth of the OSC headquarters legal and investigative staff. The complaint was filed with the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, which took no action on the case for seven months. PEER was one of the groups who co-filed the complaint against Bloch and Ruch wants to know, “Who watches the watchdogs?”
This is the third probe into Bloch’s operation in less than two years in office. Both the Government Accountability Office and a U.S. Senate subcommittee have ongoing investigations into mass dismissals of whistleblower cases, crony hires, and Bloch’s targeting of gay employees for removal while refusing to investigate cases involving discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The Department of Labor has also gotten on board in a behind-the-scenes maneuver to cancel whistleblower protections. If it succeeds, the Labor Department will dismiss claims by federal workers who report violations under the Clean Air Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. General Counsel for PEER, Richard Condit says, “Federal workers in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency function as the public’s eyes and ears . . . the Labor Department is moving to shut down one of the few legal avenues left to whistleblowers.” The Labor Department is trying to invoke the ancient doctrine of sovereign immunity, which says that the government cannot be sued without its consent. The Secretary of Labor’s Administrative Review Board recently invited the EPA to raise a sovereign immunity defense in a case where a woman was trying to enforce earlier victories. Government Accountability Project General Counsel Joanne Royce sums up major concerns: “We do not want public servants wondering whether they will lose their jobs for acting against pollution violations of politically well-connected interests.”
UPDATE BY JEFF RUCH
With the decline in oversight by the U.S. Congress and the uneven quality of investigative journalism, outlets such as the U.S. Office of Special Counsel become even more important channels for governmental transparency. Unfortunately, under the Bush-appointed Special Counsel, this supposed haven for whistleblowers has become a beacon of false hope for thousands.
Each year, hundreds of civil servants who witness problems ranging from threats to public safety to waste of tax funds find that their reports of wrongdoing are stonewalled by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Consequently, these firsthand accounts of malfeasance are not investigated and almost uniformly never reach the public’s attention.
The importance of this state of affairs is that the actual workings of federal agencies are becoming more shrouded in secrecy and disinformation. Americans are less informed about their government and less able to be in connection with the people who actually work for them—the public servants.
In a recent development, employees within the OSC have filed a whistleblower complaint about the Special Counsel, the person who is supposed to be the chief whistleblower defender. After several months delay, the Bush White House assigned this complaint to the Inspector General for the Office of Personnel Management for review. This supposedly independent investigation has just begun in earnest, nearly one year after the complaint was filed.
Also, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in May 2006 blasting the Bush-appointed Special Counsel for ignoring competitive bidding rules in handing out consultant contracts. GAO also recommended creating an independent channel whereby Office of Special Counsel employees can blow the whistle on further abuses by the Special Counsel.
In another recent development, PEER’s lawsuit against the Special Counsel to force release of documents concerning crony hires has produced more, heavily redacted documents showing that these sole source consultants apparently did no identifiable work. Ironically, the PEER suit was filed under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that the Special Counsel is also charged with policing.
And in a new annual report to Congress, OSC (stung by criticism about declining performance) has, for the first time, stopped disclosing the number of whistleblower cases where it obtained a favorable outcome. Consequently, it is impossible to tell if anyone is actually being helped by the agency.
PEER’s web page on the Office of Special Counsel has posted all developments since this story and also allows a reader to trace the story’s genesis.
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
Sources:
American Civil Liberties Website, October
One year after media reports that Aso Mining used 300 Allied prisoners of war for forced labor in 1945, Foreign Minister Aso Taro is refusing to confirm that POWs dug coal for his family's company—and even challenging reporters to produce evidence.
That is not hard to do. Records produced by both Aso Mining and the Japanese government clearly show that POWs toiled at the Aso Yoshikuma mine in Fukuoka Prefecture.
But the Foreign Ministry's provocative stance raises questions about Japan's commitment to historical reconciliation even with current Western allies. It also highlights the growing tendency of the Japanese state to contest criticism of the nation's wartime past, as the government moves to revise the no-war clause of Japan's constitution and promote patriotic education.
Last year's flurry of media coverage reflected the nationalities of the World War II prisoners involved: 197 Australian, 101 British and two Dutch.
Newspaper stories in The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were supplemented by newscasts by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. British readers were informed by The Guardian, The Observer, The Times and The Telegraph. Survivors of forced labor at the Aso Yoshikuma coal mine were tracked down and interviewed.
An 87-year-old Australian sent a personal letter to Foreign Minister Aso, according to The Japan Times. The former POW received no reply to his request for an apology and compensation for his unpaid work for Aso Mining Co.
Japanese-language media have treated the existence of the Aso Yoshikuma labor camp, formally known as Fukuoka POW Branch Camp 26, as a virtual taboo. Aso Taro has avoided all public comment on the matter.
But when a New York Times reporter mentioned forced labor at Aso Mining in an article last November, the Foreign Ministry issued a startling public rebuttal. According to the website of the Consulate-General of Japan in New York:
"The Government of Japan is not in a position to comment on employment forms and conditions of a private company, Aso Mining, at that time. However, our government has not received any information the company has used forced laborers. It is totally unreasonable to make this kind of judgmental description without presenting any evidence."
This attitude was criticized by Linda Goetz Holmes, a Pacific War historian and author of a book on POW forced labor called Unjust Enrichment. Proof that Aso Mining exploited prisoner labor originated with the Japanese government in the immediate postwar period, she noted.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is continuing the disturbing Japanese government trend of being unwilling to search its own archives for the corroborating evidence of POW slave labor," Holmes said. "Instead, it is challenging others to produce such records."
On Aug. 19, 1945, the imperial Japanese government's Committee to Negotiate Surrender delivered to U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur, by hand in Manila, a list of prison camps in Japan and the names of private companies using Allied POWs. The Fukuoka section of the document shows the Camp 26 workforce was assigned to Aso's Yoshikuma colliery. This POW camp list can be found today in the MacArthur Memorial Archives in Virginia (Record Group 4, Box 23).
"If copies of that document exist in the MacArthur Memorial Archives, they surely exist in Japanese archives as well," said Holmes, who served as a history adviser to the Japanese Imperial Records Interagency Working Group (IWG). Affiliated with the U.S. National Archives, the IWG recently concluded its work and issued a 1,700-page guide called Researching Japanese War Crimes.
Throughout the postwar period Japanese corporations have engaged in "multi-pronged denials" of forced labor, according to Holmes. She said companies tore down and bulldozed over all traces of POW barracks "as fast as they were able," and then falsely told American inspectors they had destroyed all records at the direction of the Japanese government.
"In fact," Holmes said, "each company retained complete lists and often photographs of each POW, along with information such as his country of origin and serial number."
1946 ASO REPORT
But in the aftermath of the nation's unconditional surrender, the Japanese government and industry were in no position to completely stonewall the victorious Allies. Occupation authorities soon ordered the Japanese government to formally document the massive forced labor enterprise, and the worst atrocities against POWs would be vigorously prosecuted at war crimes tribunals.
Japanese authorities, in turn, directed each company involved to prepare written responses to a set list of questions about POW working and living conditions. Individual company reports were submitted to the Japanese government, which compiled them and later submitted a comprehensive "master report" to American military investigators in Tokyo.
(Also in 1945-46, Japan's Foreign Ministry similarly directed companies to submit extensive records concerning forced labor in Japan by Chinese nationals, many of them undeclared prisoners of war. War crimes against Chinese forced laborers were for the most part not prosecuted, however. The Japanese government suppressed the so-called Foreign Ministry Report and lied to the Diet about its existence, which was finally confirmed in 1993. Tokyo today describes the Chinese labor program as "half-forced.")
On Jan. 24, 1946, Aso Mining submitted a 16-page report detailing conditions at Yoshikuma to the Japanese government's POW Information Bureau, using company stationery and attaching an English translation.
This Aso company report claims the Westerners were fed, clothed and housed better than Aso's Japanese workers and Korean labor conscripts. On paper at least, POWs received a "main food" of 715 grams per day (compared to 570 grams or less for other workers) and were "satisfied with the completeness of the mess provisions."
Aso Mining also wrote that 150 of the healthiest Camp 26 prisoners were utilized in the third sector of the Yoshikuma mine. The remainder performed farm work and camp tasks like cooking and digging bomb shelters. The POWs were said to have been the best farmers, but only half as efficient as Japanese or Koreans in the coal pits.
The Aso report includes the company's Feb. 22, 1945, letter to the Japan War Ministry requesting use of 300 Allied prisoners for one year. Camp 26 opened on May 10, fulfilling the Aso request. The company provided an itemized list of camp construction expenses totaling 211,426 yen.
These key records produced by Aso Mining in January 1946 can be viewed in Maryland at the U.S. National Archives (Record Group 331, Box 927).
The U.S. National Archives also retain the comprehensive Camp Management Report, submitted to American war crimes investigators by the Japan POW Information Bureau on June 7, 1946. It further confirms the "Aso Mining Industry Company" utilized the Camp 26 prisoners in the adjacent Yoshikuma coal mine.
First-Hand Witness
Arthur Gigger, now 86 and living in South Australia, recalled 12-hour shifts and "pretty primitive conditions" deep in the Aso mine. He arrived at Camp 26 after American firebombing destroyed the Kobe shipyard where he had worked since late 1942. He became a POW when Singapore fell to Japanese forces.
"The food was certainly meager, but clothing was our biggest problem," Gigger said. "We were down to absolute tatters by the end of the war. I don't think we'd have seen it through another winter." The Aso-compiled records, however, say the prisoners' clothing was of superior quality.
Gigger disputed other aspects of Aso Mining's description of life at Camp 26. While the company reported that prisoners could "take a rest in the recreation room," Gigger insisted "there was no such thing."
The company report also claims that, shortly after Japan's surrender, prisoners thanked Aso officials for their kind treatment by giving them gifts. "That's all bull," Gigger said with a laugh. "Absolute rubbish."
Despite its often self-exculpatory nature, such evidence of forced labor at Aso Mining exists in the national archives of other Allied countries—and in Japan. Produced by American Occupation staff based on Japanese company reports, a copy of the "Roster of Deceased Allied POWs in Japan Proper" resides at the National Diet Library in Tokyo.
The roster records the names of the two Australian soldiers who died at Aso Yoshikuma: John Watson and Leslie Edgar George Wilkie. It is accessible online at the website of the POW Research Network Japan, run by Japanese citizens working to clarify the historical record. The remains of Watson and Wilkie are interred at the Commonwealth War Cemetery near Yokohama.
Another U.S. government document in the National Diet Library is Report No. 174, issued by the Investigation Division of GHQ's Legal Section on Feb. 1, 1946.
This report summarizes a two-day U.S. Army inspection of the Camp 26 site, referring to the statement of an Aso company official as "Exhibit One." The document also lists the names and ranks of Japanese Army personnel who guarded the POWs when they were not in Aso Mining's custody. All camp records were burned in late September 1945, it notes.
While there were no charges of war crimes involving Camp 26, the paper trail for prisoner labor at Yoshikuma is clearly extensive. A 1982 book published by Japan's National Defense Academy also states that the camp's prisoners worked for Aso Mining.
Yet at the peak of overseas media coverage of the Aso-POW connection last July, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson appeared to dispute wartime events. The ministry official lashed out during a press conference at "malicious news reports that contained statements contrary to facts and nevertheless have aroused a lot of debate precisely because they were very farfetched."
Contemporary Context
Japan's prime minister, Abe Shinzo, provoked international controversy more recently by doubting the evidence of government or military coercion in Japan's wartime system of military sexual slavery. A non-binding resolution debated by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007 calls on the Japanese government to "formally acknowledge and apologize for" the comfort women system—and to refute revisionists who deny the historical reality.
That could include Foreign Minister Aso, who last February described the congressional resolution as "not based on objective facts." Aso, 66, finished second to Abe in last year's contest for prime minister and still aspires to the nation's top post.
Founded in 1872, the family firm had ceased mining and was known as Aso Cement when Aso Taro headed it in the 1970s. It is called Aso Group today and is run by Aso's younger brother. Few traces of the Yoshikuma mine remain, although the Aso Iizuka Golf Club is located near the former site.
Dozens of compensation lawsuits were filed over the past decade against Japanese corporations that profited from forced labor during WWII. All have now failed. Courts in Japan, the United States and elsewhere have held that the San Francisco Peace Treaty and other postwar accords waived the rights of victims to seek legal redress.
Hundreds of thousands of Nazi-era forced laborers and their heirs, by contrast, have received billions of dollars in compensation from the German and Austrian governments and corporate sectors since 2000. Formal apologies and educational initiatives were major components of those reparations programs.
Whereas Japan often appears stuck at the stage of historical truth telling, German President Johannes Rau displayed his nation's commitment to reconciliation with individual war victims when the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future was established by the German parliament in July 2000.
"I know that for many it is not really money that matters," Rau said. "What they want is for their suffering to be recognized as suffering and for the injustice done to them to be named injustice. I pay tribute to all those who were subjected to slave labor under German rule and, in the name of the German people, beg forgiveness. We will not forget their suffering."
"Remembrance Preserved: Third Reich Slave and Forced Labor from Poland 1939-1945" is the name of a historical exhibition that opened in May 2007 at a preserved labor camp barracks in Berlin. The exhibit will be moved to other German cities this fall, having already toured 30 cities in Poland. Researchers are now being allowed full access to Germany's millions of archival records on WWII forced labor in Europe.
The Japanese government should "take immediate action to bring about an honorable closure to the history of Japan's wartime forced labor," according to Kinue Tokudome, director of US-Japan Dialogue on POWs. The California-based non-profit organization promotes reconciliation on a humanitarian basis.
"As Japan's top diplomat and because of his family background, Foreign Minister Aso should be more sensitive to this issue and more willing to resolve it," Tokudome said. "No conscientious politician would just wait to receive the information that his family coal mine enslaved POWs and Asian civilians."
In the late 1990s the Australian government paid $25,000 in compensation to Arthur Gigger and other Australian prisoners of the Japanese. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and even the Isle of Man have similarly used domestic funds to compensate former POWs held by Japan. The United States has not, due to adamant opposition from the executive branch.
Gigger, long active in ex-POW groups in Australia and retired from a customs service career, said he has no animosity toward Japan. But he called on the Foreign Ministry to stop denying the reality of forced labor at Aso Mining.
"I know it happened," Gigger said. "I was there."
William Underwood is a faculty member at Kurume Institute of Technology and a Japan Focus coordinator. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Kyushu University on forced labor in wartime Japan. He can be reached at . This is an expanded version of an article published in the Japan Times on May 29, 2007. Posted at Japan Focus on May 28, 2007.
Extracts from documents are available at http://japanfocus.org/products/topdf/2432
Previous Japan Focus articles about forced labor at Aso Mining:
Family Skeletons: Japan's Foreign Minister and Forced Labor by Koreans and Allied POWs, by Christopher Reed
Japan Foreign Minister's Visit to POW Remembrance Service Backfires, by Matsubara Hiroshi
Previous Japan Focus articles by William Underwood about forced labor in Japan:
Chinese Forced Labor, the Japanese Government and the Prospects for Redress
Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress
NHK's Finest Hour: Japan's Official Record of Chinese Forced Labor
Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (1): Reparations for Korean Forced Labor in Japan
Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (2): Seeking Redress for Korean Forced Labor
by David McNeill Japan Focus
Tokyo—Ko Bunyu's comic book Introduction to China is not for the fainthearted. In 300 graphic pages, it claims that the Chinese are incapable of democracy, practice cannibalism, and have the world's leading sex economy. In one sequence, famous political figures say the country is the source of most of Asia's contagious diseases. In another, illustrated with naked, spread-eagled women, China is said to have exported 600,000 "AIDS-infested" prostitutes.
Mr. Ko spends much of the quieter moments in the comic book developing an unusual historical narrative: that China, not Japan, was the aggressor in the Pacific war.
"The only good thing to come out of that country is its food," says Mr. Ko, a semiretired professor here at Takushoku University, where he teaches comparative culture.
The Taiwanese-born author is one of the more toxic figures in a burgeoning Japanese revisionist movement that encompasses academe, popular culture, and much of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The project that unites them is, in effect, a revisionist revolution: an attempt to overturn much of the well-documented historical record that is the foundation for accepted wisdom about what took place during imperial Japan's sweep across Asia in the 1930s and 40s.
If these academic revisionists have their way, the Nanjing massacre of 1937, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese soldiers, and other notorious incidents from that era will vanish from Japanese history books and consciousness, along with accounts that it was Japan that started a war of aggression in Asia. Tensions over the massacre are bound to sharpen as its 70th anniversary, in mid-December, draws near.
Disputed history, sex, and politics have long been grist for the mill of Japan's small army of comic-book artists, who regularly use the format, known as manga, to tackle taboo subjects or whitewash Japanese war crimes. Introduction to China goes a step further and blames the most brutal of these crimes, the Nanjing massacre, on the Chinese themselves.
"It is absolutely clear that Nanjing is a fabrication," says Fujioka Nobukatsu, who, like Mr. Ko, teaches at Takushoku. Mr. Fujioka dismisses the extensive oral and documentary evidence of atrocities after Nanjing fell to the Japanese army in December 1937.
"The Chinese figure of 300,000 civilian deaths is nonsense," says Mr. Fujioka. "There was no massacre of civilians or illegal killings. Perhaps 15,000 Chinese soldiers died." In using the highest Chinese claims of deaths to discredit reports of the massacre, Fujioka and other neonationalists ignore the careful documentation compiled by Japanese and other historians, More important, they ignore the systematic repression in the course of a Japanese invasion and war that took a toll in lives of well over ten million Chinese.
Mr. Fujioka, 63, an education professor who also teaches cultural anthropology, has never written a serious academic history of Japanese war crimes, although he did help write a 1999 book on Chinese propaganda and Nanjing. Like many of the most vocal Japanese revisionists, he relies mainly on such popular forums as general-interest magazines and newspapers to air his views.
He recently won an award as columnist of the year from the right-leaning Sankei Shimbun, a Tokyo newspaper; previous winners include Ishihara Shintaro, the city's nationalist governor.
Mr. Ko is not a historian, either, but a prolific writer of populist books, sometimes publishing four or five a year, with titles that seem designed to provoke. Recent additions include The Ugly Chinaman and South Korea Was Built by the Japanese.
Into the Mainstream
People with such views have hovered on the fringes of Japanese academe for years. But over the past decade they have gained popularity with the general public. Twelve of the 18 members of Japan's current cabinet belong to a political forum that backs many of Mr. Fujioka's views and wants to "rethink" Japan's history education. The Society for History Textbook Reform, an organization he helped set up in 1997, has sold about 800,000 copies of a revisionist high-school history book, although protests have kept it out of all but a handful of schools. Before coming to power, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo was one of the society's better-known supporters.
Much of the most sophisticated research on the atrocities committed by Japanese troops during World War II, including the Nanjing massacre and the use of Chinese women as sex slaves—so-called comfort women—occurs in Japanese academe, although only a tiny fraction appears in English. But observers say that peculiarities of Japanese academic publishing, especially the comparative lack of peer review, have skewed the debate.
Many professors publish in in-house journals that Nakano Koichi, a political scientist at Sophia University, says too often produce junk. "They often publish whatever is produced in the faculty, and they are not reviewed from outside, so the distinction between genuinely academic work and popular work is very thin," he says. "Some academics make a career out of publishing in general publications rather than academic journals as Americans would understand them."
While the details and the number of deaths continue to be debated, most historians agree that the Nanjing massacre—also known as the "Rape of Nanjing"—was an atrocity, in which 80,000 or more Chinese civilians and surrendered soldiers were killed (the International Military Tribunal on the Far East in 1946 considered credible a figure of 200,000) and tens of thousands of women raped following the Japanese capture of the city. Despite compelling documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence, Japanese revisionists continue to reject charges that war crimes and atrocities occurred there.
The country's undigested war history continues to poison one of the world's most important bilateral relationships. Recent anti-Japanese riots in China have forced Beijing and Tokyo to set up a joint education panel to narrow major differences of interpretation over wartime events. Some on the Japanese side argue that Nanjing has become so politicized—particularly the often-cited figure of 300,000 deaths—that measured academic discussion has become almost impossible.
"It is very difficult indeed," says Kitaoka Shinichi, a law professor at Tokyo University who is part of the Japanese delegation to the panel. "But we have to find some way of narrowing the gap between us."
Mr. Fujioka opposes such discussions, arguing that Japanese academics have nothing to gain by talking to their Chinese counterparts. "There is no point in talks," he says. "The Chinese government has decided there was a massacre—so what good can come out of them?"
At least half a dozen movies on the Nanjing massacre are in the pipeline, including one sponsored by the Beijing government and based on Iris Chang's 1997 nonfiction best seller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
In response the Japanese director Mizushima Satoru says he will draw on the revisionist work of Higashinakano Shudo, a professor of intellectual history at Asia University, in Tokyo, to argue that the rape of Nanjing is a hoax. The movie has the support of a group of 12 lawmakers and a panel of academics.
Mr. Higashinakano, who declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Fujioka are the leading figures in what has been called the maboroshii-ha, or illusion school, of Nanjing research, which rejects all allegations of war crimes in the taking of the city. Mr. Higashinakano says 30,000 published photos of events from the massacre are faked. The two professors' work is opposed by many academics in Japan and even by some within the revisionist school, who say that while there are doubts about the casualty figures, their research lacks credibility.
"There are a lot of crazy people on both sides who collect around the Nanjing debate," says Hata Ikuhiko, a history professor at Nihon University who wrote the seminal 1986 book Nankin Jiken (The Nanjing Incident), one of the few serious revisionist publications on the event.
Hata argues that roughly 40,000 Chinese died in the taking of the city, although he disputes that the term "massacre" can be applied to the simultaneous killing of captured soldiers and says wartime Chinese propaganda inflated the casualty figures.
Mr. Hata points out that many of the most active revisionist war-crimes scholars are not historians. Still, he thinks, there is room for them in the intellectual bazaar.
"They're often ridiculous, but the level of understanding by ordinary Japanese people about this issue is very high," he says. "I trust public opinion when it comes to judging for themselves." He says the illusion-school faction is a hakeguchi—an outlet for frustrations in Japan after years of what are seen as inflated claims about Japanese war crimes.
No Debate
Harsher critics of the illusion school say its members do not belong in any serious scholarly discussion. "These academics are not interested in a debate," says Mr. Nakano, of Sophia University. "What they do is to smear and undermine existing research. They cast doubt rather than illuminate."
Mr. Nakano says that while the revisionists have helped popularize a once-taboo discussion, their pulp publications, with huge readerships, are "pushing the trained historians out of the public debate about war crimes."
Unlike Germany, which criminalized the denial of gross crimes of genocide, in Japan, denials of well-documented atrocities have repeatedly come from leading politicians. Mr. Abe, the prime minister, recently sparked outrage in Asia and the United States when he said there was no evidence that Japan's wartime government or military had enslaved thousands of comfort women, despite overwhelming documentation and a 1993 admission by Tokyo that it had.
Few universities have taken action against revisionist academics. Once tenured, professors are difficult to remove from Japanese faculties, which in any case are seldom openly confrontational.
Mr. Ko says he is well liked by Takushoku University administrators, although he adds that he has been attacked by student protesters. A spokesperson for Takushoku, which has hundreds of Chinese students and a campus song with the words, "I will not discriminate by color of race or border of place," says the university does not wish to comment.
Most observers say trying to silence the deniers would play into their hands, allowing them to argue that their right to free speech has been denied.
"Freedom of expression in Japan is one of the most important differences with China," says Mr. Hata, the history professor at Nihon. "We have no need for laws to regulate what Mr. Higashinakano and others say."
The revisionists, then, are free to keep sharpening their rhetorical blades, whatever the consequences. What started out as an apparent effort to play down a dark period in Japanese history has become an exercise in outright denial.
"Some of the older [revisionist] academics may be overwhelmed by what is happening," says Mr. Nakano, of Sophia University. "They may have created a monster that is out of control."
The debate over the Nanjing Massacre is examined by David Askew at New Research on the Nanjing Incident.
See also Takashi Yoshida, The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours of History and Memory in Japan, China, and the U.S.
Find a partial list of manga books by Ko Bunyu.
David McNeill writes regularly for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the London Independent and other publications. He is a coordinator of Japan Focus. This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 27, 2007.
Three months before he became Prime Minister, in July 2006 Abe Shinzo published his political manifesto, under the title Utsukushii kuni e (Towards a beautiful country). It is well known that Abe's sense of beauty involves a denial of the darkest aspects of wartime history and insistence on compulsory love of country, and that he is committed to revision of the country's basic institutions accordingly. But the fundamental changes in the country's military posture, and especially in its relationship with the United States, have received less attention. Here we consider evidence of a new domestic role for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) as enforcer of unpopular policies, and the implications of a new law to facilitate US military reorganization. Okinawa is at the center of both.
On 11 May 2007, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's Bungo minesweeper set sail from the naval port of Yokosuka for Okinawa, under orders from Prime Minister Abe to assist in a "preliminary" survey of the ocean floor of Oura Bay, where his government plans to construct a state-of-the-art base for the American marines. Under cover of darkness, divers from the Bungo carried out their seabed survey and the ship then withdrew. The operation took only a few days, and neither the media nor the local and national groups opposing the base caught sight of the Bungo or its divers.
Insignificant, one might say, yet it would be a mistake to dismiss it as such for the event reveals much about the character of Abe's Japan. In 2005 and 2006, the US and Japanese governments drew up a major agreement on the reorganization of US forces in Japan.[1] It was a complex deal, but the bottom line was integrating the forces of the two countries, especially their intelligence and command functions, and transforming Japan's "Self-Defense Forces," whose justification had hitherto rested on their role in the defense of Japan "against direct or indirect aggression" into a junior partner role of the US in the global war on terror, as the "Great Britain of East Asia." Japan was to meet the cost of the reorganization, including six and a half billion dollars just for re-locating 8,000 marines and their families to Guam (even building houses and recreational facilities there for them) and an unspecified sum for the construction of the new base in Okinawa (for which estimates range in the ten billion dollar plus range), quite apart from the institutionally entrenched subsidies that have been going on for over thirty years, and will continue.
Despite Japan's "pacifist" constitution, which Prime Minister Abe is moving aggressively to consign to the dustbin of history, Japan is the world's No 3 or No 4 military power. In naval terms it is probably No 2, its Maritime Self Defense Force having 45,842 sailors, 152 major vessels including four Aegis destroyers (cost about three to four billion dollars each), 54 convoy ships (conventional destroyers), 16 submarines, and multiple anti-submarine, reconnaissance, supply, rescue and minesweeping vessels (such as the Bungo)—pretty much everything but aircraft carriers. For over a decade, the Japanese government has worked to soften Japanese public opinion about its steady military expansion program by stretching the constitution to the limits, sending the SDF to participate, first in UN peace-peeking operations, and then in US-led, "Coalition of the Willing," operations in the Indian Ocean and Iraq. But that has not been enough to satisfy the Pentagon, which now clearly wants Japan to remove the remaining constitutional and legal shackles from this formidable force so that it can be fully incorporated under US command throughout the "Arc of Instability."
A raft of legislation—ultimately intended to include revision of the constitution—became necessary to implement the various new Japanese commitments. As the Bungo sailed, the Diet was considering a bill "to facilitate the implementation of plans to realign US forces in Japan" (Beigun saihen tokusoho), which it passed a few days later, on 23 May. [2]
The 23 May law is designed to step up the pressure on local governments by financially rewarding those who submit to the paramount will of the national government and accept the primacy of defense and US considerations over civil and democratic ones, while punishing those who give priority to local democratic opinion and processes. Cooperative local governments are to be given substantial sums, in tranches at the various stages of specific projects—consent, survey, construction, completion. It was designed with Okinawa particularly in mind, but other localities too now face a panoply of financial and other interventions.
The Oura Bay/Cape Henoko base whose construction the Abe government is so anxious to advance that it sent in the SDF has long been a running sore in the US-Japan relationship.[3] In 1996 such a base, at first called a "heliport" was proposed as part of the deal between the Hashimoto and Clinton administrations to allow the return to Japan of the Futenma marine base in central Okinawa. Futenma sits incongruously and threateningly in the middle of the bustling town of Ginowan. Henoko—the chosen replacement site, was a sleepy fishing hamlet, long coveted by the Pentagon as part of its plan to rationalize and concentrate its forces in the north of the island.
In 1997, however, the people of Nago City (the administrative unit that included the base site) intervened. In a historic referendum held under great political and financial pressure from Tokyo, the majority withheld consent from any base construction plan. Tokyo, refusing to consider any alternative, tried everything to break the city's will: refusal of cooperation with the then prefectural Governor (who in 1998 decided to abide by the will of the Nago people rather than do the wishes of Tokyo), political arm-twisting, lavish handouts (bribery), and psychological warfare (a campaign to persuade Okinawans that their role in the defense of the rest of Japan should be something to be proud of). It achieved some success in cultivating an obedient, base-oriented mentality on the part of local government officials, and managed to sway the outcomes of a string of local elections, but the resistance remained strong. For much of 2004 and 2005 all attempts to conduct the necessary preliminary environmental survey of the base site (a few hundred meters from the current one) were defeated by a coalition of local and national environmental and anti-base groups, which camped around the clock at the site and surrounded and blocked the survey workers in canoes and small craft. In September 2005, Prime Minister Koizumi withdrew the plan. The new site was chosen in part because it would allow construction to be done from within an existing US base, Camp Schwab, a few hundred meters away from the one that Koizumi had abandoned. It consisted of a much expanded, dual runway, v-shaped structure that would span Cape Henoko and extend into the sea at both ends. Centering it on the base would make the site virtually inaccessible to protesters.
Nobody in Okinawa was consulted, and the decision sparked outrage across Okinawan society, from the Governor down. Surveys recorded unprecedented (85 per cent) levels of opposition to the project [4]. By sending in the SDF in May 2007 to help conduct the survey, Abe signaled his contempt for such Okinawan sentiment and his readiness to use force if necessary to deliver what the Pentagon (and Abe) wanted.
There was an especially bitter irony in the fact of the first dispatch of the forces of the newly (2006) upgraded Ministry of Defense against Okinawans. Okinawan understanding of "national defense" is forever marked by the experience of 1945, when tens of thousands died as the Imperial Japanese Army prolonged a futile resistance to the allied forces in the attempt to stave off as long as possible the attack on mainland Japan. Having been major victims then of Japanese militarism, Okinawans since then have had foisted on them the militarism that mainland "peace constitution" Japan on the whole avoided, first from 1945 to 1972 as a direct US military colony and then, from 1972, as administratively a part of Japan but one that was uniquely war-oriented and militarized.
By covertly deploying Japan's military to Oura Bay, Abe was signaling a shift in the postwar state, something he is determined to consolidate by major constitutional revision, drastically diminishing local powers and extending the central authority of the state, giving priority to state over citizen, US over Japanese, military over civilian rights, and dismissing unheard the claims of the internationally protected species, including the dugong and the sea-turtles, that now thrive in the bay waters. When it came to a Japanese promise to the government of the United States, all stops would be pulled out to ensure compliance. While Prime Minister Hashimoto in 1998 promised that "the heliport [as the massive structure was then described] will not be build without local consent," and Prime Minister Koizumi chose to abandon the project in 2005 rather than resort to force to implement it, Abe was not to be deterred. He would cross a line on Okinawa at which previous Japanese conservative administrations had stopped.
The SDF dispatch was thus unprecedented. The Japanese force whose sole constitutional justification was for the defense of Japan "against direct or indirect threat" was deployed instead to intimidate and impose the government's will on a local community. The SDF dispatch was illegal (in breach of the purposes specified under the Self-Defense Law), and rode roughshod over Okinawan sentiment,[5] and was in breach of the constitution's guarantees of local self-government autonomy. Even the conservative Okinawan Governor, Nakaima Hirokazu, whose candidacy in 2006 had been strongly supported by the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the national government, is on record as opposing the base construction plan (albeit "in its present form") and spoke of the Bungo dispatch as "likely to stir in Okinawan minds memories of living under [American] bayonets."[6] Military affairs critic, Maeda Tetsuo, remarked that if the SDF could be used on this occasion with impunity then they would be able henceforth to be used in any way the government of the day chose.[7]
The SDF dispatch also appeared to contravene the law relating to environmental impact assessment. The Cape Henoko/Oura Bay "preliminary survey" did not constitute the "Environmental Impact Study" required by law. It had no claim to be a serious or independent scientific survey since the government was firmly committed in advance and at the highest diplomatic level to delivery of this base to the Pentagon. Independent scientific opinion could therefore have no role to play, let alone local or international environmental groups. The company entrusted with the task well knew how important a positive evaluation was, and could be relied on not to disappoint or shock its employer; the outcome could not be in doubt.
For the US and Japanese governments, the attractiveness of this site stemmed from the assumption that local opposition could be bought off and/or crushed and from the physical proximity and therefore usefulness for the projection of force against North Korea and/or China. Neither paid serious attention to the dugong and turtles, or to the implications for the environment as a whole of building massive military installations in such a location. For both, this was a project already ten years delayed because of the stubborn opposition of Okinawan (and some mainland) citizens. This time, they reckoned, the deal would be implemented whatever the cost.
While the government thus defied the law, and treated Okinawans with contempt, the opposition movement continued, as it had done since 1996, to rely on democratic and legal means. Despite all the pressure, no opinion survey has ever found any majority accepting the Tokyo position. Despite the exhaustion of a decade of sustained struggle in defense of the constitutional principles of democracy and pacifism, the movement continues to come up with innovative strategies. One major action (still continuing) was launched in 2003 in a San Francisco court against the US Defense Secretary and Department of Defense seeking an order to halt the project on environmental grounds. In similar vein, a coalition of environmental groups in 2007 launched an international campaign calling for public hearings as part of a serious and transparent environmental impact assessment.[8]
The special measures law and the covert SDF action were necessary, in the view of the Abe government, because of the widespread opposition on the part of local governments and people, not only in Okinawa but also elsewhere to the military reorganization More than twenty local administrative authorities throughout Japan refuse to cooperate in the reorganization despite the blandishments and the pressures. The new law would multiply the pressures on such regions.
Nago City, the administrative district in which the new base site was included, was one such. When it opposed the decision of the two governments in 2005-6, it was told that in consequence the budgetary tax allocation for the city might be zero.[9] Tax allocations had hitherto been distributed on an impartial basis according to general principles and such sanction would, in effect, make local administration impossible; it would be tantamount to imposition of a blockade. Faced with that threat, and even before the new law came into operation, the Henoko District Administrative Committee withdrew its 1999 resolution against the "heliport" construction plan [10] and the Nago City authorities, by agreeing to the "preliminary" survey, were deemed to have given consent to the project within the terms of the law and thus to be entitled to the first installment of the designated subsidy.[11] Having thus tasted the fruits "of the subsidy for the obedient", it would be more difficult in future for it to withhold cooperation.
As for Iwakuni City in Yamaguchi prefecture, when it was told that, under the "reorganization," it had to host 59 carrier-borne US fighters to be transferred from the naval air facility in Atsugi, mayor Ihara Katsunosuke, following the Nago City 1997 precedent, in March 2006 conducted a plebiscite. He found a solid local majority (89 per cent of those voting, 51 per cent of eligible voters) saying "No", and shortly afterwards was also returned to office. The national government's response to the rebuff followed in December 2006 (i.e., even before the passage of the new law): it cut off funds promised for the building of new municipal offices [12]. As Ihara put it, the choice was: submit and gain 500 billion yen, or oppose and be plunged into bankruptcy.[13] In March 2007, the Iwakuni Assembly buckled to the pressure and passed a resolution asking him to take "practical and effective measures."[14] Following the passage of the May law, Ihara's position continues to erode under intense Tokyo pressure. Like Okinawa, Iwakuni is required to pay a heavy price to be made "beautiful."
The situation is similar in Yokosuka (in Kanagawa prefecture). Reluctant "homeport" for 34 years to a US aircraft carrier, the mayor and assembly were shocked when told that under the "reorganization" from 2008 the existing carrier would be replaced by a nuclear one. Under heavy pressure, persuaded that defense matters had to be the exclusive preserve of the national government and local sentiment should play no part, the Yokosuka mayor agreed—despite a unanimous declaration of opposition by the municipal assembly. For their part, however, the mayors of the cities of Zama and Sagamihara (both also in Kanagawa prefecture), declared their determination to resist reorganization, in the case of the mayor of Zama even if a cruise missile was sent against him and in the case of the mayor of Sagamihara even if he was run over by a tank).[15]
Reliance on money and force under the May 2007 law was a recipe for dividing local communities, entrenching an opportunist and/or dependent mentality on the part of local officials, and reinforcing the priority of military over civilian, US over national priorities. As the Tokyo shimbun put it on 24 May, the threat of force was intended to deter local resistance. Such threats were only effective when accompanied by a readiness actually to use force. In that context, the dispatch of the Bungo was ominous.
Okinawan people have other reasons to be angry with the Abe government. It has been known for decades that the government of Japan lied about the agreement for the "reversion" of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, and that the "reversion" was really a "purchase," the government of Japan paying the US substantially more, around 685 million dollars, for the "return" of facilities (which under the agreement actually remained under US control) than it had paid in 1965 to South Korea as compensation for four and half decades of Japanese colonialism, plus untold millions in subsequent subsidies.[16] It lied too by referring to the deal as one for Okinawa to be placed on a kaku-nuki hondo-nami (without nuclear weapons and on a par with the rest of Japan) basis when secret clauses of the agreement made clear that it would be neither. Despite the mounting evidence on this over recent decades, from US archival sources and from Japanese officials who played a central part in the process, the Japanese government sticks to its formal position of denial. Most recently, it was revealed that not only did the Japanese government pay the four million dollar component that was ear-marked to compensate local Okinawan landowners (which the US government was obliged by the agreement to pay), but that it put pressure on the US to delay the payment—evidently in fear the truth might out—with the result that only one quarter of the designated sum ever reached its supposed Okinawan beneficiaries.[17]
The Tokyo government's stance on war and war memory is also especially sensitive to Okinawans. The Abe government is comprised almost entirely of those who deny Japan's war responsibility and call for a "proud" version of Japanese history and a compulsory patriotism to be taught in the schools. Not only have they been successful in eliminating reference to comfort women from the nation's school texts, but in the 2006 text screening process reference to the "compulsory suicide" of Okinawans was also deleted. No memory of the catastrophe of 1945 is more sacred to Okinawans than that of their forbears being ordered to kill themselves so as not to inconvenience the Imperial Japanese Army's war.[18] Unsurprisingly, 81 per cent of Okinawans opposed this directive.[19] Since then, one after another, local governments across Okinawa have passed resolutions of protest and demands for the withdrawal of the order.[20]
Okinawa reveals in concentrated form the contours of the Abe state that are less visible from Tokyo or Osaka. The Abe project, including proving loyalty to Washington, depends on purging Okinawans of their pacifism and overcoming their commitment to preservation of their environment and co-existence with endangered species; ultimately, it may even require purging their war memories too.
Okinawan bitterness at the Abe government continues to build. Okinawan elites may be swayed by promises of subsidies or deterred by threats, but the Abe sense of beauty is widely seen as a bizarre 21st century attempt to return to the fantasies of the emperor-worshiping militaristic past. Most Okinawans watch in fascinated horror as the Abe government's calls for beauty contrast ever more starkly with the reality of its sinking into a morass of corruption scandals and bizarre statements (women as baby-producing machines, human rights as a non-Japanese ideology best kept within limits, and "Comfort Women" as volunteer prostitutes providing the wartime Japanese forces a service akin to present-day university cafeterias). They are not inclined to see much beauty in this or in the reorganization of Japan to serve US security concerns. They sense that they are prime targets for the May reorganization law.
Furthermore, they understand that the economic benefits of obedience to Tokyo and dependence in the past have been more illusory than real, and expect little change under the "incentive" system of the new law. Tellingly, those contending for office in Okinawa have never presented themselves as proponents of militarization. Instead, both the previous and the present Governors, Inamine Keiichi elected in 1998 and Nakaima Hirokazu elected in 2006, adopted a pose of studied ambiguity on the bases while campaigning instead on their promise to use their superior national government connections to lift Okinawa out of poverty. Yet the poverty remains, Okinawa's economy remains stubbornly flat—joblessness at about double the national average and per capita income half that of Tokyo. Abe's "beautiful country" policies enforce a dependence that prolongs and deepens it.
Notes
[1] For details, Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, New York and London, Verso, 2007, chapter 4 (published June 2007).
[2] For a short account: "Diet passes 'incentive' bill to realign US forces," Asahi shimbun, 24 May 2007; Editorial: US military alignment," Asahi shimbun, 25 May 2007.
[3] The following account draws from chapter 7 of Client State.
[4] Details in Client State.
[5] Protest statement by representative Okinawan intellectuals and public figures to Prime Minister Abe and Defense Minister Kyuma, 24 May 2007, courtesy Sato Manabu of Okinawa International University. See reports in Okinawa Times and Ryukyu shimpo, 25 August 2007.
[6] "Beigun saihenho—kane to atsuryoku dake de wa," Tokyo shimbun, 24 May 2007.
[7] Nishi Nihon shimbun, 19 May 2007.
[8] Launched in May 2007 by Save the Dugong Campaign Center and Citizens Assessment Nago, with support of WWF (World Wildlife Fund)-Japan, Nature Conservation Society of Japan, Save the Dugong Foundation, and the "Ten Districts Association" of Eastern Nago. (Information from Hideki Yoshikawa, Nago City. For an earlier analysis, see Yoshikawa's January 2007 Japan Focus essay "Internationalizing the Okinawan struggle.")
[9] "Beigun saihenho seiritsu—chiiki no jiritsushin mushibamu," editorial, Okinawa Times, 24 May 2007.
[10] "Hantai ketsugi o bankai– Henoko ku hyosei-i 'kensetsu nara yobo jitsugen o," Ryukyu shimpo, 16 May 2007.
[11] "Nago-shi wa ukire bun—saihen kofukin," Okinawa Times, 25 May 2007.
[12] Voters might have assumed, when voting in the March 2006 plebiscite, that they would not get any future, defense-related subsidies; that was their choice. But probably none suspected that Tokyo would go so far as to renege on an existing commitment, unrelated to base issues but stemming from the huge expansion in the size of the city under an administrative reorganization.
[13] Quoted in Imai Hajime, "Abe seiken ga Iwakuni shimin ni kaeshita 'utsukushii kotae'," Shukan Kinyobi, 23 March 2007, pp. 56-58.
[14]Realignment of US forces should be sped up," Yomiuri shimbun, 24 May 2007.
[15] "Hondo no Beigun saihen," Asahi shimbun, 19-22 February 2007.
[16] The official figure is 320 million, but Gabe Masaaki of the University of the Ryukyus concludes from his painstaking research that the real figure was 685 million. See my discussion in Client State, p. 158.
[17] Kyodo, "Sordid details of Okinawan reversion deal revealed—Japan asked US to delay compensation for landowners," Japan Times, 16 May 2007, posted on Japan Focus, 17 May 2007.
[18] For a recent assessment of the evidence on this tragic story, "Shudan jiketsu 'gun kyosei' o shusei," Asahi shimbun, 31 March 2007 (and other articles in same issue of Asahi). In the worst cases, on and around the Kerama Islands in late March 1945, close to 500 people are thought to have died. Detailed testimony is detailed in the official histories of Okinawa prefecture and of Tokashiki village (on Kerama).
[19] "Monkasho no Okinawa 'shudan jiketsu' gun kanyo massho o yurusanai," Shukan Kinyobi, 20 April 2007. Also "Kataritsugareta Okinawa-sen," Okinawa Times, 13 May 2007.
[20] Okinawa Times, 29 May 2007.
Gavan McCormack is an emeritus professor of Australian National University, a coordinator of Japan Focus, and author of the just published Client State: Japan in the American Embrace (New York and London: Verso). He wrote this article for Japan Focus.
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