FILMS: The Hurt Locker—Part of a deplorable trend

By Joanne Laurier (Reprinted for the Oscars, 2010)

10 August 2009

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, screenplay by Mark Boal [print_link]

The Hurt Locker is introduced by the words of former war correspondent Christopher Hedges: “the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

Thus is established one of the central themes of the new movie by Kathryn Bigelow, the director of such murky and violence-laden works as Blue Steel (1989), Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995). She persists in her belief that “violence in a cinematic context can be, if handled in a certain way, very seductive” in The Hurt Locker.

Set in Iraq in 2004, the film is structured around the 38 days of deployment left for an Army bomb deactivation, or Explosive Ordnance Disposal, squad. After the previous team leader (Guy Pearce) is blown up, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives to take his place at Camp Victory, formerly known as Camp Liberty. (The question arises as to whether the character, a soldier custom-made for the US war drive, is named after one of the founders of American pragmatism.)

The team also includes Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), a clear-eyed survivalist, and the jittery Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who wants nothing more than to get out of Iraq (“Pretty much, if you’re in Iraq, you’re dead”).

Daily life for the trio involves detecting and defusing improvised explosive devices or IEDs. James is a reckless hotshot who gets the job done, usually by putting everyone else at risk. Sanborn, who takes the safety of his men seriously, initially tags James as a “redneck piece of trailer trash.” Eldridge requires therapy to deal with his fear of being killed. The latter two are counting the days until they are decommissioned. On the other hand, James, although he has a wife and child, lives for the adrenaline spike provided by war.

The Iraqi characters, such as they are, function largely as prop devices. Unpleasantly, in one extended sequence, the presence of insurgents allows the filmmakers to examine the psychology of soldiers on the verge of a kill. This is passed off as “realism.”

The storyline is fairly meager. The movie devotes itself to showcasing a few action-packed days in the life of a bomb tech. James is the ultimate fighting machine. He is contrasted to Sanborn and Eldridge, whose vacillations are depicted as understandable. Nonetheless, for the task at hand, Bigelow finds it reasonable to suggest that they are insufficiently committed to “being all they can be.”

In between the edgy, at times violent, scenes of the team maneuvering in Iraq’s devastated streets and buildings are the conventional interludes of male bonding via violent, drunken, macho horseplay in the barracks.

Sensitive moments are rare, and awkwardly scripted. In one contrived sequence, the camp psychiatrist, Colonel John Cambridge (Christian Camargo), learns the hard way that talk is cheap when it comes to combat.

When James finally goes home to his family, the odds are crudely stacked by the filmmakers against his adapting to domesticity. The implications of the ending, of which Bigelow is probably not fully conscious, are very nasty. She seems to be celebrating a dedicated, fearless military caste, permanently on call. Has she thought about the consequences in the twentieth century of the activities of such forces?

The Hurt Locker was written by Mark Boal, an embedded journalist in Iraq in 2004 with Playboy magazine. According to Bigelow, he was very much the driving force behind the film’s production. In interviews, she also credits Hedges’ book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, as the movie’s inspiration. Perhaps the filmmakers chose Hedges because of an anti-war reputation that stemmed from a past run-in with the establishment.

Bigelow basking in recognition. Behind the killer good looks and insider connections (she was once married to James Cameron), lies an artist indifferent to historical context.

“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers, historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”

One is obliged to say, speak for yourself! But Hedges apparently also speaks for the filmmakers, and his conceptions have contributed to the creation of the James character as the definitive warrior. Not burdened with doubts, fears or personal attachments, he is “the twenty-first century soldier,” as Bigelow puts it. If war, “the ultimate canvas” (or the global aggression of US imperialism, to be more precise), is to be a permanent feature of life, then there must be a genetic encoding to meet the new requirements. The movie’s makers, unfortunately, want to do their part for the cause. In the film’s production notes, Bigelow asserts that “Fear has a bad reputation, but I think that’s ill-deserved. Fear is clarifying. It forces you to put important things first and discount the trivial.”

The film’s greatest fallacy is that its makers apparently believe it possible to accurately portray the psychological and moral state of US troops without addressing the character of the Iraq enterprise as a whole, as though the latter does not affect how soldiers act and think. The Hurt Locker has major artistic problems. How could it not? The film’s premise is deeply false, and to be blunt, stupid—i.e., that one can treat the Iraq conflict “neutrally,” without rendering judgment on its rights or wrongs, as an example of war “in the abstract.” It is tedious to watch the heroics of the Americans. It is tedious and worse to listen to the musings of soldiers who are essentially oblivious to the Iraqis and have no reaction to the people they are slaughtering or whose land they are occupying.

The director no doubt would aver that as a bomb disposalist, James saves lives, even Iraqi lives. To emphasize the point, she has him befriending a young Iraqi boy for whom he is prepared to walk through fire, and risking his life for a repentant suicide bomber. Most of this attempt to show the “positive” side of an American fighter in an occupied country is unconvincing.

The film’s greatest fallacy is that its makers apparently believe it possible to accurately portray the psychological and moral state of US troops without addressing the character of the Iraq enterprise as a whole, as though the latter does not affect how soldiers act and think.

The Hurt Locker has major artistic problems. How could it not? The film’s premise is deeply false, and to be blunt, stupid—i.e., that one can treat the Iraq conflict “neutrally,” without rendering judgment on its rights or wrongs, as an example of war “in the abstract.”

It is tedious to watch the heroics of the Americans. It is tedious and worse to listen to the musings of soldiers who are essentially oblivious to the Iraqis and have no reaction to the people they are slaughtering or whose land they are occupying. (The film was shot in Jordan, and it is a sad irony that the Iraqis in the movie were actually Iraqis displaced by the war. Bigelow states that “the [Jordanian] royal family was very supportive of this production.”)

The Iraq invasion and occupation is one of the great crimes of modern times. The US-led operation, launched on the basis of lies against a virtually defenseless country, was and is a war of aggression, illegal under international law. During the postwar prosecution of the Nazi leaders, in fact, aggressive war was defined as “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

An estimated 1 million or more Iraqis are dead, millions more have been displaced, entire cities have been razed to the ground, the country has been divided along communal lines, which may at any point lead to a new, fratricidal civil war. For the vast majority of the world’s population, and certainly its Middle Eastern and Muslim component, the US occupation of Iraq is associated with Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah—torture and abuse, atrocities, mass destruction. None of this seems to concern Bigelow or Boal, or the complacent American middle class “intelligentsia,” in general. It is outrageous that they are not outraged.

The lives of many of the US military personnel returning from Iraq have been shattered. In the first place, the majority are not coming back to tranquil, economically stable home lives, as James does. Moreover, the atrocities that American combat troops are committing in Iraq and Afghanistan—the inevitable outcome of a neo-colonial war—are transforming a section of veterans into a severely damaged and even psychopathic layer.

A recent article on the WSWS referenced news reports about an Army unit based at Fort Carson, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. (See: “What imperialist war produces: Iraq veterans charged with murder and other crimes”) The unit’s members, who saw intense and sustained fighting in Iraq, have committed dozens of crimes back home, including murder, attempted murder, rape and robbery. A number of them are in prison serving long sentences for brutal acts.

In interviews with a local newspaper, several of the soldiers detailed the sorts of horrendous crimes they had participated in or witnessed while in Iraq: massacres of civilians, torture of detainees, the dismemberment of bodies. The Colorado newspaper commented, “More than half of the charged or convicted soldiers said they had seen war crimes during their deployments that included the killings of civilians.”

Is this what Hedges means by the “enduring attraction of war”? He should tell us.

A number of critics assert that The Hurt Locker follows in the tradition of anti-war films such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full-Metal Jacket. This is absurd. Whatever the weaknesses and eccentricities of those films, they were unambiguously hostile to the Vietnam War and to the military’s dehumanizing impact on young people. Comparisons of The Hurt Locker to Francis Ford Coppola’s devastating Apocalypse Now are even more farfetched.

The almost universally favorable treatment of Bigelow’s film at the hands of the critics is a phenomenon in itself. Many of the commentators, after declaring that The Hurt Locker and its performances are “Oscar material,” observe that the film’s major advantage over previous Iraq war films is its “apolitical” stance. Who is fooling whom?

A social process is under way. An entire layer of the liberal middle class is accommodating itself comfortably to American neo-colonialism, justifying its attitude by references to the new, “progressive” administration in Washington that is conducting a different kind of intervention, for different aims. Different in what way no one can quite explain. The corpses continue to pile up.

Long live the US surge in Iraq! Long live Obama! All’s right with the world.

Joanne Laurier is a cinema commentator for the World Socialist Web Site.

FEATURE

Real-life Hurt Locker: how bomb-proof suits work

SAY YOU’RE A PROFESSIONAL bomb defuser, like the soldiers in the Oscar-nominated film The Hurt Locker— and the bomb you’re working on suddenly goes off. Do you just kiss your adrenaline-addicted ass goodbye? No — odds are you’re wearing an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) suit, which means you actually have a fighting chance of walking away alive. I had to know how these blast-resistant suits worked in real life — so I called up Pravit Borkar, a ballistics engineer at HighCom Security, a firm that manufactures EOD suits for military applications, and asked him to explain.

How a Bomb Kills You
The “EOD ensemble,” as Borkar calls it, is not simply a body-condom version of a Kevlar vest: “It’s a complex composite product consisting of both rigid and soft armor systems.” These two fundamental layers are designed to defeat the two main threats in an explosion: the overpressure pulse, or shockwave; and the fragmentation, commonly known as shrapnel.

The overpressure wave is actually the more dangerous of the two. A microsecond after a bomb goes off, the explosion compresses the surrounding air and blows it outward in a lightning-fast shockwave that ripples through clothing and literally flattens internal organs. Guy Pearce’s character experiences it firsthand at the end of The Hurt Locker’s tense opening sequence:

“You see that the technician gets knocked down well before the debris hits him,” says Borkar. “But how is he killed? That’s power of the overpressure wave: because he was relatively close to the device when it exploded, the pulse has probably punctured or collapsed his lungs.”

How the Suit Keeps You Alive
The EOD suit’s rigid outer armor layer, the first and most important defense against this threat, is composed mainly of aramids: high-tech synthetic materials that are “strain-rate sensitive.” In other words, “the faster something hits them, the harder they become,” says Borkar. (Kevlar is simply the brand name of an aramid manufactured by DuPont.) The entire front-facing portion of the suit is reinforced from head to toe with hardened composites of two or more aramids, optimized for strength and lightness. This rigid layer can literally reflect or bounce some of the overpressure energy away from the technician, while also repelling flying fragmentation.

But the overpressure wave inevitably passes through the rigid armor layer. It then encounters the “anti-coupling material”: a foamy layer of polyurethane or synthetic rubber that absorbs as much of the pulse as possible, like the crumple zone on a car. “It breaks the blast wave,” says Borkar. “These materials will not allow the pressure to pass through without dramatically attenuating it — ideally down to a level that is actually survivable when it reaches your body.”

Behind the anti-coupling layer, closest to the wearer, lies the soft armor: flexible fabric woven or knit from aramid fibers and other materials, which Borkar refers to as the “catcher’s mitt.” By now the overpressure wave has been reduced as much as it’s ever going to be, so this layer mainly acts like a traditional bulletproof vest — it stops any remaining fragmentation that may have penetrated the rigid outer armor. NASA’s space suits also contain soft aramid layers to resist impacts from flying micrometeoroids — the astronaut version of shrapnel.

This three-layer system is amazingly effective, but no EOD suit is perfect. With every step you take closer to the bomb, the destructive force of its blast increases by an exponent of three. “So the difference between being just a small distance away from the explosive device — even a few feet — versus being right next to it, can save your life,” Borkar says.

So, approaching the bomb in an EOD suit is a method of last resort. But here’s how each part of it is designed to give you a fighting chance.

The Helmet and Collar

The fin-like appendage on the helmet houses a forced ventilation fan, which blows fresh air over the technician’s face to relieve perspiration. But Borkar says that this might be one detail that The Hurt Locker got a bit wrong. “In our helmets we try not to add extraneous devices that will change the its geometrical configuration, because the blast wave will just knock that off,” says Borkar. “I don’t know what manufacturer they got that helmet from, but it was a little surprising to see that extending out and up. Normally it would be placed behind the helmet so it wouldn’t face the brunt of the blast.”

The super-high, aramid-reinforced neck collar that surrounds the helmet is the EOD suit’s version of insurance: all its moving parts are designed to heavily overlap with each other, ensuring 100% coverage no matter what position the technician contorts himself into. If the helmet were fused with the collar, the tech would have to turn his whole body, Darth Vader-style, just to look left or right.

Body Armor
The hard-armor plates that cover the tech’s torso, groin and thighs act as the primary absorbers of fragmentation, but their main function is to deflect the deadly overpressure wave. “The suit in the movie didn’t show it, but in the real world, these plates are shaped like flattened boomerangs to literally reflect the pulse energy out and away from the technician,” says Borkar. Since techs usually squat or sit on their knees while working, this rigid armor is thickest around the groin and inner thighs (to protect the femoral artery).

These plates can also be switched in and out depending on the requirements of the mission at hand and the expected blast force of the bomb. The military keeps copious records on the “survivability” of various organs under different magnitudes of overpressure, so EOD techs in the field can configure their armor to provide the optimal amount of protection to each specific area of the body while reducing the overall weight of the suit. “There’s a strategy to configuring the armor before deploying it,” says Borkar. “It’s highly modular, not ‘one size fits all.'”

Boots and Gloves (or lack thereof)
EOD boots have soles reinforced with soft armor and boomerang-shaped titanium plates to reflect blast pressure away. The suits also come with flame-resistant gloves — but in practice, few technicians wear them, preferring the subtle sensitivity of bare fingers instead. “That’s realistically portrayed in the film,” says Borkar. “The truth is, if you’re close enough to a bomb to be touching it with your hands and it goes off, no gloves are going to help you.”

Cooling Suit
You can’t see it in the film, but underneath all this gear is the EOD tech’s best friend: a flame-resistant inner layer that circulates ice water all over the body. (Defusing bombs in 120-degree Iraqi heat is stressful enough without adding risk of heatstroke to the mix. This layer is also similar to the water-cooled garments that NASA astronauts have worn inside their space suits since the Apollo missions.) The cooling suit runs off of the same onboard battery that powers the suit’s lamp, fan, and comm link; a pump circulates a liter of ice water (stored in a specially shaped bottle) from head to toe. According to Borkar, techs keep an extra bottle on ice in the field so they can swap in new water when the first bottle gets warm. There’s no built-in refrigeration mechanism, but HighCom is developing a next-generation EOD suit that will integrate the cooling system into the entire ensemble — one less thing to worry about when the clock is ticking.

So What is it Like to Actually Wear This Thing?
Current suits on the market weigh anywhere from 60 to 70 pounds, and all that armor plating makes moving around pretty difficult. If there’s any gripe that Borkar has about in The Hurt Locker’s mostly-accurate portrayal of the EOD suit, it’s this: “The techs just walk far too easily.” That opening scene where Guy Pearce hoofs it away from the exploding bomb? Fat chance: according to Borkar, just walking in these suits feels like carrying an anvil between your legs.

Of course, that doesn’t stop real-world EOD technicians from trying. The current world record for running one mile in a full bomb suit was recently set by Staff Sgt. Jeremy Herbert, the explosive ordnance technician team leader for Marine Wing Support Squadron 271: nine minutes and 58 seconds flat! That cooling layer must have been working overtime.

The Road to Armageddon

February 25, 2010

The Road to Armageddon..is Paved with Lies

Americans who think “their” government is some kind of morally pure operation would do well to familiarize themselves with Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a plot drawn up by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and fabricate evidence blaming Castro so that the U.S. could gain domestic and international support for regime change in Cuba. The secret plan was nixed by President John F. Kennedy and was declassified by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. It is available online in the National Security Archive. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods )

By Paul Craig Roberts [print_link]

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

flickr image by wallyg

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.

Also at the press conference, physicist Steven Jones presented the evidence of nano-thermite in the residue of the WTC buildings found by an international panel of scientists led by University of Copenhagen nano-chemist Professor Niels Harrit. Nano-thermite is a high-tech explosive/pyrotechnic capable of instantly melting steel girders.

There will always be Americans who will believe whatever the government tells them no matter how many times they know the government has lied to them. Despite expensive wars that threaten Social Security and Medicare, wars based on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, non-existent Saddam Hussein connections to al Qaida, non-existent Afghan participation in the 9/11 attacks, and the non-existent Iranian nukes that are being hyped as the reason for the next American war of aggression in the Middle East, more than half of the U.S. population still believes the fantastic story that the government has told them about 9/11, a Muslim conspiracy that outwitted the entire Western world.

The Northwoods Memorandum

In the Middle Ages confessions extracted by torture constituted evidence, but self-incrimination has been a no-no in the U.S. legal system since our founding. But with the Bush regime and the Republican federal judges, whom we were assured would defend the U.S. Constitution, the self-incrimination of Sheik Mohammed stands today as the only evidence the U.S. government has that Muslim terrorists pulled off 9/11.

Sheik Mohammed outwitted the U.S. National Security Council, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, NORAD, the U.S. Air Force, and Air Traffic Control. He caused Airport Security to fail four times in one morning. He caused the state-of-the-art air defenses of the Pentagon to fail, allowing a hijacked airliner, which was off course all morning while the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in history, was unable to get aloft intercepter aircraft, to crash into the Pentagon.

Sheik Mohammed was able to perform these feats with unqualified pilots.

Sheik Mohammed, even as a waterboarded detainee, has managed to prevent the FBI from releasing the many confiscated videos that would show, according to the official story, the hijacked airliner hitting the Penagon.

How naive do you have to be to believe that any human, or for that matter Hollywood fantasy character, is this powerful and capable?

What is going on here is that the U.S. government has to bring the 9/11 mystery to an end. The government must put on trial and convict a culprit so that it can close the case before it explodes. Anyone waterboarded 183 times would confess to anything.

Cass Sunstein, an Obama regime official, has a solution for the 9/11 skeptics: Infiltrate them and provoke them into statements and actions that can be used to discredit or to arrest them. But get rid of them at all cost.

Why employ such extreme measures against alleged kooks if they only provide entertainment and laughs? Is the government worried that they are on to something?

If the architects, engineers, firefighters, and scientists are merely kooks, it would be a simple matter to acknowledge their evidence and refute it. Why is it necessary to infiltrate them with police agents and to set them up?

Obviously, if the U.S. government can murder its citizens abroad it can murder them at home, and has done so. For example, 100 Branch Davidians were murdered in Waco, Texas, by the Clinton administration for no legitimate reason. The government just decided to use its power knowing that it could get away with it, which it did.

ring Russia with U.S. missile bases from Poland through central Europe and Kosovo to Georgia, Azerbaijan and central Asia. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke declared on February 20 that al Qaida is moving into former central Asian constituent parts of the Soviet Union, such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Holbrooke is soliciting U.S. bases in these former Soviet republics under the guise of the ever-expanding “war on terror.”

The U.S. has already encircled Iran with military bases. The U.S. government intends to neutralize China by seizing control over the Middle East and cutting China off from oil.

This plan assumes that Russia and China, nuclear armed states, will be intimidated by U.S. anti-missile defenses and acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and that China will lack oil for its industries and military.

Considering his lucidity and honesty in denouncing the cabals that dominate America, it’s difficult to believe Paul Craig Roberts, was a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.

SHEEHAN: You Get What you Vote For!

Dateline: November 27, 2009

With the outspokenness of those who have seen the truth about our cynical, murderous foreign policy, and the disgusting corruption of a political system that spawns it…Cindy Sheehan, mother of an unnecessary Iraq War casualty, is an irrepressible force that officialdom would sooner treat gingerly, even if the mainstream media do their best to relegate her activities to journalistic limbo.

By Cindy Sheehan [print_link]

Maybe tens of thousands more US soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan soon, to join their fellows in a hopeless battle whose real goals are kept from the American people.

Secondly, On January 23^rd of a rapidly dissipating 2009, Barack Obama perpetrated his first war crime (as president) by authorizing a drone attack in Pakistan. In February of this same year, he ordered an increase of roughly 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan: more war crimes, no corresponding outcry. However, when I cried out, I was roundly attacked by the “left” for not giving Obama a “chance.” 2009 is going to be the most deadly year for our troops and Afghan and Pakistani civilians on record. I think George Bush is calling: he wants his Nobel Peace Prize back.

In the end, you always get what you vote for.

On Monday, November 30, the Peace of the Action Coalition will be sending out a press release condemning the escalation and announcing our Mother of all Protests (MOAP) that will begin in the spring.

US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America

From the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for ‘full-spectrum operations’ is escalating rapidly

WITH SELECT COMMENTARY

Sunday, 22 November 2009 / [print_link]

US air force officers and Congressmen tour the Palanquero base in Puerto Salgar, Colombia, in August. The base is expected to host US air force counter-narcotics missions under the new bilateral deal.

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The development The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington’s political and economic tutelage. President Rafael Correa, for instance, has refused to prolong the US armed presence in Ecuador, and US forces have to quit their base at the port of Manta by the end of next month.

So Washington turned to Colombia, which has not gone down well in the region. The country has received military aid worth $4.6bn (￡2.8bn) from the US since 2000, despite its poor human rights record. Colombian forces regularly kill the country’s indigenous people and other civilians, and last year raided the territory of its southern neighbour, Ecuador, causing at least 17 deaths.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has not forgotten that US officers were present in government offices in Caracas in 2002 when he was briefly overthrown in a military putsch, warned this month that the bases agreement could mean the possibility of war with Colombia.

In August, President Evo Morales of Bolivia called for the outlawing of foreign military bases in the region. President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, overthrown in a military coup d’état in June and initially exiled, has complained that US forces stationed at the Honduran base of Palmerola collaborated with Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the plotters and the man who claims to be president.

And, this being US foreign policy, a tell-tale trail of oil is evident. Brazil had already expressed its unhappiness at the presence of US naval vessels in its massive new offshore oilfields off Rio de Janeiro, destined soon to make Brazil a giant oil producer eligible for membership in Opec.

The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region’s waters in 2008. The fleet’s vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent.

Indications of US willingness to envisage the stationing of nuclear weapons in Colombia are seen as an additional threat to the spirit of nuclear disarmament. After the establishment of the Tlatelolco Treaty in 1967, four more nuclear-weapon-free zones were set up in Africa, the South Pacific, South-east Asia and Central Asia. Between them, the five treaties cover nearly two-thirds of the countries of the world and almost all the southern hemisphere.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s leading think-tank about disarmament issues, has now expressed its worries about the US-Colombian arrangements.

With or without nuclear weapons, the bilateral agreement on the seven Colombian bases, signed on 30 October in Bogota, risks a costly new arms race in a region. SIPRI, which is funded by the Swedish government, said it was concerned about rising arms expenditure in Latin America draining resources from social programmes that the poor of the region need.

Much of the new US strategy was clearly set out in May in an enthusiastic US Air Force (USAF) proposal for its military construction programme for the fiscal year 2010. One Colombian air base, Palanquero, was, the proposal said, unique “in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from… anti-US governments”.

The proposal sets out a scheme to develop Palanquero which, the USAF says, offers an opportunity for conducting “full-spectrum operations throughout South America…. It also supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent, except the Cape Horn region, if fuel is available, and over half the continent if un-refuelled”. (“Full-spectrum operations” is the Pentagon’s jargon for its long-established goal of securing crushing military superiority with atomic and conventional weapons across the globe and in space.)

Palanquero could also be useful in ferrying arms and personnel to Africa via the British mid-Atlantic island of Ascension, French Guiana and Aruba, the Dutch island off Venezuela. The US has access to them all.

The USAF proposal contradicted the assurances constantly issued by US diplomats that the bases would not be used against third countries. These were repeated by the Colombian military to the Colombian congress on 29 July. That USAF proposal was hastily reissued this month after the signature of the agreement The Colombian forces, for many years notorious for atrocities inflicted on civilians, have cheekily suggested that with US help they could get into the lucrative business of “instructing” other armies about human rights. Civil strife in Colombia meant some 380,000 Colombians were forced from their homes last year, bringing the number of displaced since 1985 to 4.6 million, one in ten of the population. This little-known statistic indicates a much worse situation than the much-publicised one in Islamist-ruled Sudan where 2.7 million have fled from their homes.

Amnesty International said: “The Colombian government must urgently bring human rights violators to justice, to break the links between the armed forces and illegal paramilitary groups, and dismantle paramilitary organisations in line with repeated UN recommendations.”

Palanquero, which adjoins the town of Puerto Salgar on the broad Magdalena river north-west of the capital, Bogota, is one of the seven bases that the government of President Alvaro Uribe gave to Washington last month despite howls from many Colombians. Its hangars can take 100 aircraft and there is accommodation for 2,000 personnel. Its main runway was constructed in the 1980s after Colombia bought a force of Israeli Kfir warplanes. At 3,500 metres, it is 500 metres longer than the longest in Britain, the former US base outside Campbeltown, Scotland. The USAF is awaiting Barack Obama’s signature on a bill, already passed by the US Congress, to devote $46m to works at the base.

Many Colombians are upset at the agreement between the US and Colombia that governs – or, perhaps more accurately, fails to govern – US use of Palanquero and the other six bases. The Colombian Council of State, a non-partisan constitutional body with the duty to comment on legislation, has said that the agreements are unfair to Colombia since they put the US and not the host country in the driving seat, and that they should be redrafted in accordance with the Colombian constitution.

The immunities being granted to US soldiers are, the council adds, against the 1961 Vienna Convention; the agreement can be changed by future regulations which can totally transform it; and the permission given to the US to install satellite receivers for radio and television without the usual licences and fees is “without any valid reason”.

President Uribe, whose studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford, were subsidised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has chosen to disregard the Council of State.

Top Ten Reasons President Obama Should Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize

Created 10/14/2009 [print_link]

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Look to what he does, not what he says.

Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Reason Number Nine: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.

Reason Number Seven: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.

Reason Number Five: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.

Reason Number Four: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.

Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.

The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.

The formidable Bruce Dixon

Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.