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In a town of roughly 1,100 people, one death can touch a lot of lives. "In a place like Akron, Indiana, this leaves a hole in everyone's hearts," said Pat Brasi.
That is especially true when that death is one of the two police officers for the whole town. Last week, Marshall Tim Fleck passed away due to a heart attack while on duty. He was only 49 years old. A friend said he had high blood pressure, while another friend reported that his father had more than one heart attack before his death.
Brasi is the Senior Chaplin for the Indiana Patriot Guard Riders. He and his guard led the funeral procession. "Tim like all members of law enforcement are the people that we actually look up to," explained Brasi, "and that's why we're here today, to honor him and honor his service."
Needless to say, in the town of Akron, everybody knows everybody. Community members say it will take time to adjust after losing a trusted member of law enforcement who served 25 years on the force. Akron residents we spoke to said they will always cherish Tim's memory.
Chad Hartzler has lived in Akron his whole life. Hartzler says there are many things he'll miss about Tim. "Just that friendly smile, caring attitude, and so the community is going to miss that, that smile," said Hartzler. Carmen Wilson used to babysit Tim's kids and said he was well-liked by children and adults. "I think it's just the security of having him around. Knowing that he's always there for any of us, not only as our officer but as our friend," said Wilson. Town Board President, Crystal Weida said that Tim was the only Marshall she had ever known, so the loss was an emotional one. "He could sometimes be very stern, but he was a very compassionate person," Weida said.The funeral was well attended at Akron Church of God, and bystanders waved American flags beside the curb for the procession.
WSJV-TV FOX 2858096 County Road 7, SouthElkhart, IN 46517
Switchboard: 574.679.9758News Phone: 574.679.4545Station Fax: 574.294.1267Email: email@example.com


text:
Magnificently situated in its own grounds, with panoramic views across Edinburgh to the Pentland Hills, the Firth of Forth and the Fife Hills beyond, the Best Western Braid Hills Hotel achieves what is the ideal in a hotel . This includes high standards of accommodation and food, combined with a welcoming atmosphere . Individually furnished bedrooms are an important part of the character of this charming hotel-built in 1886 to accommodate golfers visiting the famous Braid Hills Courses nearby . It remains an excellent base for golfing breaks with many top courses within comfortable driving distance .
The hotel is the perfect location from which to enjoy all the attractions of Scotland's capital such as the Castle, museums, galleries as well as theaters and to visit major events such as the Edinburgh Festival, the Royal Highland Show and Hogmanay Festivities . The cocktail lounge with award winning cocktails, the Allermuir Restaurant offering fine cuisine and stunning views and the Buckstone Bistro with its reputation for quality food and real ales are all popular with both visitors and locals alike .
Whether traveling on business or leisure, a stay at the Best Western Braid Hills Hotel will be a pleasure .
|Check-in Policy
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subset: commoncrawl


text: I really like Guinness beer when I've been extra good and want to treat myself. Now I read that I'm also treating myself to fish bladders. I love fish but the bladder is one part of a fish I don't want to ingest. In addition to Guinness, there are a handful of other brews my palate frequents that might have ingredients that I could do without. Take a look at this article and see if your beer makes the list of beers you should avoid .


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> Spinal Cord Injury
> Traumatic Brain Injury
> Specialty Clinics & Programs
> Internships & Employment
> Publications/Presentations
> Community Outreach
After a spinal cord injury (SCI), Inpatient Occupational Therapy focuses treatment on the goal of returning to independence. Treatment sessions are customized to the individual patient. Throughout the spinal cord injury rehabilitation program, treatment is provided to improve skills that are the foundation of function, as well as activities of daily living (ADL). Treatment sessions include training in self feeding, strength, coordination, balance, dressing, etc. All these treatments help patients achieve functional independence, return to daily life routines, and a high quality of life.
In the Outpatient Spinal Cord Injury Clinic, occupational therapists provide a number of services, the primary being part of an interdisciplinary team in providing re-evaluations to both local and non-local patients with SCI, including those who are new to the Craig system. Depending on the patient, re-evaluations include functional abilities, posture and positioning, arm and hand issues, and motor and sensory changes. At the end of the re-evaluation, recommendations are made which can then be followed up in conjunction with patients' local therapists and support systems. Upgrades programs for more extensive therapy needs are available for those who qualify.
> SCI Inpatient/Outpatient Referrals


text:
Looking for another great use of our beautiful May collab kit called Mother's Love??? What about a quick page exchange!!
This exchange will be using April's Collab Kit from all of our designers called Mother's Love. Remember you can get the collab kit for free just by spending $10 in our store (excluding coupons and gift certificates) anytime this month. Once we see your order come through we will email the coupon code to get the collab FREE!
Just create a quick page with this and you'll receive an album back full of quick pages submitted by each of the participants. Check out our Collab Quickpage Exchange Gallery to see what the participants have created.
Each participant will submit at least 1 quick page but not more than 2 using this kit (you may include any commercial use supplies as well). At the end of this exchange, all participants will receive all submitted quick pages!!
- Layouts should be created and saved at 12" x 12" and 300ppi starting with a transparent background.
- If you are familiar with creating a quick page in a transparent .png file, please submit it in that format.
- If you are not, we have a couple of tutorials to help you in this area: Paint Shop Pro & Photoshop
- If you are unable to create a .png file, please design your quick page by creating your layout and using a white or black area (whichever is of most contrast to your layout) for the photo placements. Save your layout as a flattened .jpg file at full resolution (unless you are submitting a png file already) . I will take what you submit and punch out the areas for photos and convert them to transparent .png files before sending them all back to the participants.
- Please name your files as follows to help me track these easier. YourForumName_KitName_QP.png so as an example, mine would be HollyS_motherslove_qp.png.
- Save a preview of your quick page at 600x600 and upload it to the Quick Page Exchange Gallery for all the oooohs and ahhhs!
- I will need the preview .jpg at 600x600, and either the .png or .jpg file at the full 12x12 size sent to me. You may use any file sharing site of your choice, or you can zip it up and email me the zip at firstname.lastname@example.com.
- Sign-ups are required for this so that we know who is working on pages.
- You may submit up to 2 quickpages for this challenge.
- The submission deadline for this round is end of the day on Wednesday, June 4th. Please be sure to send me the files by that time as well so that I can publish the album download links more quickly.


text:
A report looks at 323 movements to see which were most successful.
Assessing the effectiveness of civil resistance is a complex undertaking. The causes of change are often linked to a number of factors, and many what-if scenarios can be conjured up to imagine alternate endings; how adequate would nonviolent or violent resistance have been during WWII is a common hypothetical. But a new report that analyzed 323 campaigns which unfolded between 1900 and 2006 attempts to sort the ins and outs of success and failure in countries where people were striving for self-determination, unseating a leader, or driving out a military occupation. Tactics for the groups studied included anything from sit-ins to noncooperation to armed rebellion, and the results are telling:
The developments from the Arab Spring (which are still being felt) can be held up for comparison. Tunisia encompassed many of the successful indicators, such as a diverse group of people who used different tactics, and the road to democracy there looks plausible. While both Egypt (nonviolent) and Libya (violent) succeeded in ousting their leaders, their futures are less secure. These examples illustrate the fact that implementing change, even after the fall of reviled regimes, is no easy task. But chances are, had Egypt turned violent, its road would be even more precarious and vice versa with Libya. And although such hypotheticals are impossible to verify, the study's conclusions point in such directions. As for Syria, which attempted nonviolence but gave way to armed groups, the future does not look bright. Turning to violence pushed many people away and rebel forces began to rely on outside forces for aid and arms which is risky (support is "usually conditional and fickle.")
In terms of external involvement, the report calls on outside governments to support nonviolent resistance early on in order to prevent escalation of violence (from within or from forces such as NATO strikes). Had the nonviolent groups in Syria been given support from the onset, who knows what may or may not have transpired. Assisting independent media outlets, monitoring the criminal justice system, and pressuring leaders not to react with violence are also advantageous actions.
Photo by sari dennise, licensed under Creative Commons.
File this under Funniest Zines Ever: "How to Talk to Your Cat About Evolution." A whip-smart take-down of creationism, the writing is angry, alright, but its rage is mitigated by frequent mentions—and photos—of cute, fluffy cats.
The zine was written by Zachary of Slaton, Texas, who publishes it under the cheeky pseudonym the American Association of Patriots (and who wishes to keep his last name private). As the AAP, Zachary uses the question-and-answer format of "histrionic religious pamphlets"—it's kind of "Jack Chick meets Alex Jones" in its approach, he suggests, only with a few cat puns thrown in.
"How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety" was the AAP's first publication in 2013. Carried mainly by independent bookstores and comic book shops, it sold 9,000 copies in just under a year—a remarkable sales record for a zine. "It made the front page of Reddit at one point," Zachary said. "Some guy wrote an electronica song about it. Apparently, people on the internet love things about cats. Who knew!"
We spoke briefly with the AAP, who offered a few tough lessons to Utne readers (and their cats):
Which is the greater threat to cats in America today, evolution or gun control legislation?
A foolish question, but no more than we would expect from your publication of weak-kneed liberalism. To ask which is the greater threat is like asking which of an octopus's arms are a greater threat. Both are merely limbs of a greater beast, which has but one thought in its black heart: a yearning desire to overthrow America and turn our cats against us.
We thought only human citizens could be true patriots. How do cats fit in?
The idea that cats cannot be patriots is a lie, propagated by our enemies, who seek to divide the forces of freedom and deprive us of our greatest military asset. There are almost 100 million cats living in American households, and untold millions more loosely organized into feral militias. Do you not think that the enemies of America quake in fear at the thought of an extra 100 million soldiers defending our country, soldiers who are possessing of superhuman reflexes, balance, and the ability to see in the dark? The importance of cats to American sovereignty is something that, as vigilant citizens, we must never furget.
What about dogs? Are they safe from the liberal propaganda machine?
The American Association of Patriots recommends that every member of your household be armed and trained in the safe handling of that weapon. Unfortunately, following a class action lawsuit in 1996 we are now legally required to state that firearms are not suitable for dogs, and we were forced to discontinue our line of "How to Talk to Your Dog…" educational brochures.
What would you say to those who would try to keep this vital information out of our cats' paws?
Your days are numbered! Soon the true patriots of America will rise up, cats at our side, and cast off the imperialist yoke imposed on us by the puppet Obama and his masters: the effete, atheist, socialist oligarchs of Europe who wish to rob America of its manhood, its cats, and its God.
Photo by Fotolia/andrewgenn
Requiem for the American Century: Turning 70, paragraph by paragraph
First paragraphs on turning 70 in the American Century that was:
- Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to "create the first great American Century." Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time's century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else's. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I'm undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.
- The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They're so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn't even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We're talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran's Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I'm them.
- In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren't going to be part of it.
- From the time I was 20 until I was 65, I was always 40 years old. Now, I feel my age. Still, my life at 70 is a luxury. Across the planet, from Afghanistan to Central America, and in the poverty zones of this country, young people regularly stare death in the face at an age when, so many decades ago, I was wondering whether my life would ever begin. That's a crime against humanity. So consider me lucky (and privileged) to be seven decades in and only now thinking about my death.
- Recently, I had the urge to tell my son something about my mother, who died before he was born. From my closet, I retrieved an attaché case of my father's in which I keep various family mementos. Rummaging around in one of its pockets, I stumbled upon two letters my mother wrote him while he was at war. (We're talking about World War II, that ancient conflict of the history books.) Almost four decades after her death, all I had to do was see my mother's handwriting on the envelope—"Major C. L. Engelhardt, 1st Air Commando Force, A.P.O. 433, Postmaster, New York 17, N.Y." —to experience such an upwelling of emotion I could barely contain my tears. So many years later, her handwriting and my father's remain etched into my consciousness. I don't doubt I could recognize them amid any other set of scribblings on Earth. What fingerprints were to law enforcement then, handwriting was to family memories. And that started me wondering: years from now, in an electronic world in which no one is likely to think about picking up a pen to write anyone else, what will those "fingerprints" be?
- There are so many futures and so few of them happen. On the night of October 22, 1962, a college freshman, I listened to John F. Kennedy address the American people and tell us that the Russians were building "a series of offensive missile sites" on the island of Cuba and that "the purposes of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." In other words, the president of the United States was telling us that we might be at the edge of the sort of world-ending, monster-mutating nuclear war that, from Godzilla to Them, had run riot in the popular culture (and the nightmares) of my childhood. At that moment, I looked directly into the future—and there was none. We were, I believed, toast. My family, my friends, all of us, from Hudson Bay, Canada, to Lima, Peru, as the president put it. Yet here I am 52 years later. As with so many futures we imagine, somehow it didn't happen and so many years after I'm still wondering when I'll be toast.
- If, on that same night, you had returned from the future to tell me (or other Americans) that, nearly half a century hence, the Soviet Union would barely be a memory, that there would be no other great power challenging the United States for supremacy, and that its only serious enemies would be scattered bands of Islamic extremists, largely in countries no American of that era had even heard of, my sense of wonder would have been indescribable. And I don't doubt that the godlier among us would have fallen to their knees and given thanks for our deliverance. It would have gone without saying that, in such a future, the U.S. stood triumphant, the American Century guaranteed to stretch into endless centuries to come.
- If, on September 10, 2001, I had peered into the future (as I undoubtedly did not), whatever world I might have imagined would surely not have included: the 9/11 attacks; or those towers collapsing apocalyptically; or that "generational" struggle launched almost instantly by the Bush administration that some neocons wanted to call "World War IV" (the Cold War being World War III), aka the Global War on Terror; or a "kill list" and drone assassination campaign run proudly out of the White House that would kill thousands in the tribal backlands of the planet; or the pouring of funds into the national security state at levels that would put the Cold War to shame; or the promotion of torture as a necessary part of the American way of life; or the creation of an offshore prison system where anything went; or the launching of a global kidnapping campaign; or our second Afghan War, this time lasting at least 13 years; or a full-scale invasion, garrisoning, and occupation of Iraq lasting eight years; or the utterly improbable possibility that, from all of this, Washington would win nothing whatsoever. Nor, on that September day, still an editor in book publishing, barely online, and reading almost everything on the page, could I have imagined that, at age 70, I would be running a website called TomDispatch, 24/7, driven by the terrible news that would, before that day, have amazed me.
- Once upon a time, if you saw someone talking to himself or herself while walking down the street, you knew you were in the presence of mental illness. Now, you know that you're catching a snippet of a mobile or smartphone conversation by someone connected eternally to everyone he or she knows and everything happening online every minute of the day. Not so long ago, this was material for some far-fetched sci-fi novel, not for life.
- If, on September 10, 2001, you had told me that the very way we are connected to each other electronically would encourage the evolution of an American surveillance state of breathtaking proportions and a corporate surveillance sphere of similar proportions, that both would have dreams of collecting, storing, and using the electronic communications of everybody on the planet, and that, in such a brief space of time, both would come remarkably close to succeeding, I wouldn't have believed you. Nor would I have been able to absorb the fact that, in doing so, the U.S. national security state would outpace the "bad guys" of the totalitarian regimes of the previous century in the ambitiousness of its surveillance dreams. I would have thought such a development conceptually inconceivable for this country. And in that, touchingly, I would still be reflecting something of the America I grew up believing in.
- In my youth, I lived in the future. Riveted by the space operas of Isaac Asimov, among others, I grew up as a space nerd, dreaming of American glory and the colonization of distant planetary systems. At the same time, without any sense of contradiction, I inhabited future American worlds of wholesale destruction dotted with survivalist colonies in post-apocalyptic landscapes littered with mutants of every sort.
- I'm no neuroscientist, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that we, as a species, are hardwired for prediction. Preparing eternally for whatever danger might be just around the corner seems like such a useful trait, the sort of thing that keeps a species on its toes (once it has them). As far as I can tell, the brain just can't help itself. The only problem is that we're terrible at it. The famed fog of war is nothing compared to the fog of the future or, as I've often said, I'd be regularly riding my jetpack in traffic through the spired city of New York, as I was promised in my childhood. Our urge to predict the future is unsurpassed. Our ability to see it as it will be: next to nil.
Middle paragraphs for a missing American Century:
- It's been almost 13 years since the 9/11 attacks and there's still no learning curve in Washington. Just about every step of the way in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's only gotten worse. Yet from that history, from repeated military interventions, surges, and Hail Marys in each of those countries, Washington has learned ...? Yep, you guessed it: that, in a crisis, it's up to us to plunge in again, as in Iraq today where the Obama administration is sending back troops, drones, and helicopters, plotting to support certain government figures, deep-six others, and somehow fragment various Sunni insurgent and extremist groups. And don't forget the endless advice administration officials have on offer, the bureaucratic assessments of the situation they continue to generate, and the weaponry they are eager to dispatch to a thoroughly destabilized land—even as they rush to "broker" a destabilizing Afghan election, a situation in which the long-term results once again aren't likely to be positive for Washington. Consider this curious conundrum: the future is largely a mystery, except when it comes to Washington's actions and their predictably dismal outcomes.
- Doesn't it amaze you how little Washington gets it? Fierce as the internal disagreements in that capital city may be, seldom has a ruling group collectively been quite so incapable of putting itself in the shoes of anyone else or so tone deaf when it comes to the effects of its own acts. Take Germany where, starting with Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, the public response to reports of massive American surveillance of the communications of ordinary Germans and their leaders wasn't exactly greeted with enthusiasm. Now it turns out that the NSA wasn't the only U.S. "intelligence" agency at work in that country. The CIA and possibly other agencies were recruiting spies inside German intelligence and its defense ministry. Polls show that public opinion there has been turning against the U.S. in striking ways, but Washington just can't take it in. A little noted truth of this level of spying and surveillance is: it's addictive. Washington can't imagine not doing it, no matter the damage. If you keep an eye on this situation, you'll see how the U.S. national security system has become a self-inflicted-wound machine.
- Here's a question for our American moment: Why, in its foreign policy, can't the Obama administration get a break? You'd think that, just by pure, dumb luck, there would be a few small victories somewhere for the greatest power on the planet, but no such thing. So for the post-American Century news jockeys among you, here's a tip: to follow the waning fortunes of that century in real time, just keep an eye on Secretary of State John Kerry's endless travels. He's the Jonah of the Obama administration. Wherever he goes, disaster, large or small, trails behind him, even when, as in Afghanistan recently, his intervention is initially billed as some sort of modest triumph. Consider him the waning American Century personified.
- Think of the drone as a barometer of the American Century in decline. It's the latest "perfect weapon" to arrive on the global scene with five-star reviews and promises of victory. Like the A-bomb before it, by the time its claims proved false advertising, it was already lodged deeply in our world and replicating. The drone is the John Kerry of advanced weaponry. Everywhere it goes, it brings a kind of robotic precision to killing, the problem being that its distant human trigger fingers rely on the usual improbable information about what's actually on the ground to be killed. This means that the innocent are dying along with all those proclaimed "militants," "high-value targets," and al-Qaeda(-ish) leaders and "lieutenants." Wherever the drone goes, it has been the equivalent of a recruiting poster for Islamic militants and terror groups. It brings instability and disaster in its wake. It constantly kills bad guys—and constantly creates more of them. And even as the negative reports about it come in, an addicted Washington can't stop using it.
Last paragraphs on turning 70 (a requiem for the American Century):
- The true legacy of the foreshortened American Century, those years when Washington as top dog actually organized much of the world, may prove apocalyptic. Nuclear weapons ushered that century in with the news that humanity could now annihilate itself. Global warming is ushering it out with the news that nature may instead be the weapon of choice. In 1990, when the Soviet system collapsed and disappeared, along with its sclerotic state-run economy, capitalism and liberal democracy were hailed in a triumphalist fashion and the moment proclaimed "the end of history." In the 1990s, that seemed like a flattering description. Now, with 1% elections, an unmitigated drive for profits amid growing inequality, and constant global temperature records, the end of history might turn out to have a grimmer meaning.
- Global warming (like nuclear war and nuclear winter) is history's deal-breaker. Otherwise, the worst humanity can do, it's done in some fashion before. Empires rise and fall. They always have. People are desperately oppressed. It's an old story. Humans bravely protest the conditions of their lives. Rebellions and revolutions follow and the unexpected or disappointing is often the result. You know the tale. Hope and despair, the worst and the best—it's us. But global warming, the potential destruction of the habitat that's made everything possible for us, that's something new under the sun. Yes, it's happened before, thanks to natural causes ranging from vast volcanic eruptions to plummeting asteroids, but there's something unique about us torpedoing our own environment. This, above all, looks to be the event the American Century has overseen and that the drive for fossil-fuel profits has made a reality. Don't fool yourself, though; we're not destroying the planet. Give it 10 million years and it'll regenerate just fine. But us? Honestly, who knows what we can pull out of a hat on this score.
- Let me put my cards on the table. I'm the guy who started two of his book titles with the phrases "the end of" and "the last days of," so think of me as apocalyptic by nature. I don't believe in God or gods, or for that matter an afterlife. In all these years, I've never discovered a spiritual bone in my body. Still, I do care in some way that I can't begin to understand what happens to us after I'm dead, what in particular happens to my children and my grandson, and his children and theirs, too. Go figure.
- My father's closest friend, the last person of his generation who knew him intimately, died recently at 99. To my regret, I was no longer in touch. It nonetheless felt like an archive closing. The fog of the past now envelops much of his life. There is nobody left to tell me what I don't know about all those years before my birth. Not a soul. And yet I can at least recognize some of the people in his old photos and tell stories about them. My mother's childhood album is another matter. Her brother aside, there's no one I recognize, not a single soul, or a single story I can tell. It's all fog. We don't like to think of ourselves that way; we don't like to imagine that we, in the present, will disappear into that fog with all our stories, all our experiences, all our memories.
- Here's a question that, in a globally warming world, comes to mind: Are we a failed experiment? I know I'm not the first to ask, and to answer I'd have to be capable of peering into a future that I can't see. So all I can say on turning 70 is: Who wouldn't want to stick around and find out?
- Here's the upbeat takeaway from this requiem for a foreshortened American Century: history is undoubtedly filled with seers, Cassandras, and gurus of every sort exactly because the future is such a mystery to us. Mystery, however, means surprise, which is an eternal part of every tomorrow. And surprise means, even under the worst conditions, a kind of hope. Who knows just what July 20, 2015, or 2025, or 2035 will usher on stage? And who knows when I won't be there to find out. Not I.
- By the way, I have the urge to offer you five predictions about the world of 2050, but what's the point? I'd just have to advise you to ignore them all.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, to be published in September, is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World(Haymarket Books).
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Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt
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Global conflicts are increasingly fueled by the desire for oil and natural gas—and the funds they generate.
Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share several key characteristics—notably, a witch's brew of ethnic, religious, and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy.
In each of these conflicts, the fighting is driven in large part by the eruption of long-standing historic antagonisms among neighboring (often intermingled) tribes, sects, and peoples. In Iraq and Syria, it is a clash among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, and others; in Nigeria, among Muslims, Christians, and assorted tribal groupings; in South Sudan, between the Dinka and Nuer; in Ukraine, between Ukrainian loyalists and Russian-speakers aligned with Moscow; in the East and South China Sea, among the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and others. It would be easy to attribute all this to age-old hatreds, as suggested by many analysts; but while such hostilities do help drive these conflicts, they are fueled by a most modern impulse as well: the desire to control valuable oil and natural gas assets. Make no mistake about it, these are twenty-first-century energy wars.
It should surprise no one that energy plays such a significant role in these conflicts. Oil and gas are, after all, the world's most important and valuable commodities and constitute a major source of income for the governments and corporations that control their production and distribution. Indeed, the governments of Iraq, Nigeria,Russia, South Sudan, and Syria derive the great bulk of their revenues from oil sales, while the major energy firms (many state-owned) exercise immense power in these and the other countries involved. Whoever controls these states, or the oil- and gas-producing areas within them, also controls the collection and allocation of crucial revenues. Despite the patina of historical enmities, many of these conflicts, then, are really struggles for control over the principal source of national income.
Moreover, we live in an energy-centric world where control over oil and gas resources (and their means of delivery) translates into geopolitical clout for some and economic vulnerability for others. Because so many countries are dependent on energy imports, nations with surpluses to export—including Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, and South Sudan—often exercise disproportionate influence on the world stage. What happens in these countries sometimes matters as much to the rest of us as to the people living in them, and so the risk of external involvement in their conflicts—whether in the form of direct intervention, arms transfers, the sending in of military advisers, or economic assistance—is greater than almost anywhere else.
The struggle over energy resources has been a conspicuous factor in many recent conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, and the Sudanese Civil War of 1983-2005. On first glance, the fossil-fuel factor in the most recent outbreaks of tension and fighting may seem less evident. But look more closely and you'll see that each of these conflicts is, at heart, an energy war.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni extremist group that controls large chunks of western Syria and northern Iraq, is a well-armed militia intent on creating an Islamic caliphate in the areas it controls. In some respects, it is a fanatical, sectarian religious organization, seeking to reproduce the pure, uncorrupted piety of the early Islamic era. At the same time, it is engaged in a conventional nation-building project, seeking to create a fully functioning state with all its attributes.
As the United States learned to its dismay in Iraq and Afghanistan, nation-building is expensive: institutions must be created and financed, armies recruited and paid, weapons and fuel procured, and infrastructure maintained. Without oil (or some other lucrative source of income), ISIS could never hope to accomplish its ambitious goals. However, as it now occupies key oil-producing areas of Syria and oil-refining facilities in Iraq, it is in a unique position to do so. Oil, then, is absolutely essential to the organization's grand strategy.
Syria was never a major oil producer, but its prewar production of some 400,000 barrels per day did provide the regime of Bashar al-Assad with a major source of income. Now, most of the country's oil fields are under the control of rebel groups, including ISIS, the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, and local Kurdish militias. Although production from the fields has dropped significantly, enough is being extracted and sold through various clandestine channels to provide the rebelswith income and operating funds. "Syria is an oil country and has resources, but in the past they were all stolen by the regime," said Abu Nizar, an anti-government activist. "Now they are being stolen by those who are profiting from the revolution."
At first, many rebel groups were involved in these extractive activities, but since January, when it assumed control of Raqqa, the capital of the province of that name, ISIS has been the dominant player in the oil fields. In addition, it has seized fields in neighboring Deir al-Zour Province along the Iraq border. Indeed, many of the U.S.-supplied weapons it acquired from the fleeing Iraqi army after its recent drive into Mosul and other northern Iraqi cities have been moved into Deir al-Zour to help in the organization's campaign to take full control of the region. In Iraq, ISIS is fighting to gain control over Iraq's largest refinery at Baiji in the central part of the country.
It appears that ISIS sells oil from the fields it controls to shadowy middlemen who in turn arrange for its transport—mostly by tanker trucks—to buyers in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. These sales are said to provide the organization with the funds needed to pay its troops and acquire its vast stockpiles of arms and ammunition. Many observers also claim that ISIS is selling oil to the Assad regime in return for immunity from government air strikes of the sort being launched against other rebel groups. "Many locals in Raqqa accuse ISIS of collaborating with the Syrian regime," a Kurdish journalist, Sirwan Kajjo, reported in early June. "Locals say that while other rebel groups in Raqqa have been under attack by regime air strikes on a regular basis, ISIS headquarters have not once been attacked."
However the present fighting in northern Iraq plays out, it is obvious that there, too, oil is a central factor. ISIS seeks both to deny petroleum supplies and oil revenue to the Baghdad government and to bolster its own coffers, enhancing its capacity for nation-building and further military advances. At the same time, the Kurds and various Sunni tribes—some allied with ISIS—want control over oil fields located in the areas under their control and a greater share of the nation's oil wealth.
The present crisis in Ukraine began in November 2013 when President Viktor Yanukovych repudiated an agreement for closer economic and political ties with the European Union (EU), opting instead for closer ties with Russia. That act touched off fierce anti-government protests in Kiev and eventually led to Yanukovych's flight from the capital. With Moscow's principal ally pushed from the scene and pro-EU forces in control of the capital, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved to seize control of the Crimea and foment a separatist drive in eastern Ukraine. For both sides, the resulting struggle has been about political legitimacy and national identity—but as in other recent conflicts, it has also been about energy.
Ukraine is not itself a significant energy producer. It is, however, a major transit route for the delivery of Russian natural gas to Europe. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Europe obtained 30 percent of its gas from Russia in 2013—most of it from the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom—and approximately half of this was transported by pipelines crossing Ukraine. As a result, that country plays a critical role in the complex energy relationship between Europe and Russia, one that has proved incredibly lucrative for the shadowy elites and oligarchs who control the flow of gas, whille at the same time provoking intense controversy. Disputes over the price Ukraine pays for its own imports of Russian gas twice provoked a cutoff in deliveries by Gazprom, leading to diminished supplies in Europe as well.
Given this background, it is not surprising that a key objective of the "association agreement" between the EU and Ukraine that was repudiated by Yanukovych (and has now been signed by the new Ukrainian government) calls for the extension of EU energy rules to Ukraine's energy system—essentially eliminating the cozy deals between Ukrainian elites and Gazprom. By entering into the agreement, EU officials claim, Ukraine will begin "a process of approximating its energy legislation to the EU norms and standards, thus facilitating internal market reforms."
Russian leaders have many reasons to despise the association agreement. For one thing, it will move Ukraine, a country on its border, into a closer political and economic embrace with the West. Of special concern, however, are the provisions about energy, given Russia's economic reliance on gas sales to Europe—not to mention the threat they pose to the personal fortunes of well-connected Russian elites. In late 2013 Yanukovych came under immense pressure from Vladimir Putin to turn his back on the EU and agree instead to an economic union with Russia and Belarus, an arrangement that would have protected the privileged status of elites in both countries. However, by moving in this direction, Yanukovych put a bright spotlight on the crony politics that had long plagued Ukraine's energy system, thereby triggering protests in Kiev's Independence Square (the Maidan)—that led to his downfall.
Once the protests began, a cascade of events led to the current standoff, with the Crimea in Russian hands, large parts of the east under the control of pro-Russian separatists, and the rump western areas moving ever closer to the EU. In this ongoing struggle, identity politics has come to play a prominent role, with leaders on all sides appealing to national and ethnic loyalties. Energy, nevertheless, remains a major factor in the equation. Gazprom has repeatedly raised the price it charges Ukraine for its imports of natural gas, and on June 16th cut off its supply entirely, claiming non-payment for past deliveries. A day later, an explosion damaged one of the main pipelines carrying Russian gas to Ukraine—an event still being investigated. Negotiations over the gas price remain a major issue in the ongoing negotiations between Ukraine's newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, and Vladimir Putin.
Energy also played a key role in Russia's determination to take the Crimea by military means. By annexing that region, Russia virtually doubled the offshore territory it controls in the Black Sea, which is thought to house billions of barrels of oil and vast reserves of natural gas. Prior to the crisis, several Western oil firms, including ExxonMobil, were negotiating with Ukraine for access to those reserves. Now, they will be negotiating with Moscow. "It's a big deal," said Carol Saivetz, a Eurasian expert at MIT. "It deprives Ukraine of the possibility of developing these resources and gives them to Russia."
The conflicts in South Sudan and Nigeria are distinctive in many respects, yet both share a key common factor: widespread anger and distrust towards government officials who have become wealthy, corrupt, and autocratic thanks to access to abundant oil revenues.
In Nigeria, the insurgent group Boko Haram is fighting to overthrow the existing political system and establish a puritanical, Muslim-ruled state. Although most Nigerians decry the group's violent methods (including the kidnapping of hundreds of teenage girls from a state-run school), it has drawn strength from disgust in the poverty-stricken northern part of the country with the corruption-riddled central government in distant Abuja, the capital.
Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa, pumping out some 2.5 million barrels per day. With oil selling at around $100 per barrel, this represents a potentially staggering source of wealth for the nation, even after the private companies involved in the day-to-day extractive operations take their share. Were these revenues—estimated in the tens of billions of dollars per year—used to spur development and improve the lot of the population, Nigeria could be a great beacon of hope for Africa. Instead, much of the money disappears into the pockets (and foreign bank accounts) of Nigeria's well-connected elites.
In February, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, told a parliamentary investigating committee that the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to transfer some $20 billion in proceeds from oil sales to the national treasury, as required by law. It had all evidently been diverted to private accounts. "A substantial amount of money has gone," he told the New York Times. "I wasn't just talking about numbers. I showed it was a scam."
For many Nigerians—a majority of whom subsist on less than $2 per day—the corruption in Abuja, when combined with the wanton brutality of the government's security forces, is a source of abiding anger and resentment, generating recruits for insurgent groups like Boko Haram and winning them begrudging admiration. "They know well the frustration that would drive someone to take up arms against the state," said National Geographic reporter James Verini of people he interviewed in battle-scarred areas of northern Nigeria. At this stage, the government has displayed zero capacity to overcome the insurgency, while its ineptitude and heavy-handed military tactics have only further alienated ordinary Nigerians.
The conflict in South Sudan has different roots, but shares a common link to energy. Indeed, the very formation of South Sudan is a product of oil politics. A civil war in Sudan that lasted from 1955 to 1972 only ended when the Muslim-dominated government in the north agreed to grant more autonomy to the peoples of the southern part of the country, largely practitioners of traditional African religions or Christianity. However, when oil was discovered in the south, the rulers of northern Sudan repudiated many of their earlier promises and sought to gain control over the oil fields, sparking a second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005. An estimated two million people lost their lives in this round of fighting. In the end, the south was granted full autonomy and the right to vote on secession. Following a January 2011 referendum in which 98.8 percent of southerners voted to secede, the country became independent on that July 9th.
The new state had barely been established, however, when conflict with the north over its oil resumed. While South Sudan has a plethora of oil, the only pipeline allowing the country to export its energy stretches across North Sudan to the Red Sea. This ensured that the south would be dependent on the north for the major source of government revenues. Furious at the loss of the fields, the northerners charged excessively high rates for transporting the oil, precipitating a cutoff in oil deliveries by the south and sporadic violence along the two countries' still-disputed border. Finally, in August 2012, the two sides agreed to a formula for sharing the wealth and the flow of oil resumed. Fighting has, however, continued in certain border areas controlled by the north but populated by groups linked to the south.
With the flow of oil income assured, the leader of South Sudan, President Salva Kiir, sought to consolidate his control over the country and all those oil revenues. Claiming an imminent coup attempt by his rivals, led by Vice President Riek Machar, he disbanded his multiethnic government on July 24, 2013, and began arresting allies of Machar. The resulting power struggle quickly turned into an ethnic civil war, with the kin of President Kiir, a Dinka, battling members of the Nuer group, of which Machar is a member. Despite several attempts to negotiate a cease-fire, fighting has been under way since December, with thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes.
As in Syria and Iraq, much of the fighting in South Sudan has centered around the vital oil fields, with both sides determined to control them and collect the revenues they generate. As of March, while still under government control, the Paloch field in Upper Nile State was producing some 150,000 barrels a day, worth about $15 million to the government and participating oil companies. The rebel forces, led by former Vice President Machar, are trying to seize those fields to deny this revenue to the government. "The presence of forces loyal to Salva Kiir in Paloch, to buy more arms to kill our people ... is not acceptable to us," Machar said in April. "We want to take control of the oil field. It's our oil." As of now, the field remains in government hands, with rebel forces reportedly making gains in the vicinity.
In both the East China and South China seas, China and its neighbors claim assorted atolls and islands that sit astride vast undersea oil and gas reserves. The waters of both have been the site of recurring naval clashes over the past few years, with the South China Sea recently grabbing the spotlight.
An energy-rich offshoot of the western Pacific, that sea, long a focus of contention, is rimmed by China, Vietnam, the island of Borneo, and the Philippine Islands. Tensions peaked in May when the Chinese deployed their largest deepwater drilling rig, the HD-981, in waters claimed by Vietnam. Once in the drilling area, about 120 nautical miles off the coast of Vietnam, the Chinese surrounded the HD-981 with a large flotilla of navy and coast guard ships. When Vietnamese coast guard vessels attempted to penetrate this defensive ring in an effort to drive off the rig, they were rammed by Chinese ships and pummeled by water cannon. No lives have yet been lost in these encounters, but anti-Chinese rioting in Vietnam in response to the sea-borne encroachment left several dead and the clashes at sea are expected to continue for several months until the Chinese move the rig to another (possibly equally contested) location.
The riots and clashes sparked by the deployment of HD-981 have been driven in large part by nationalism and resentment over past humiliations. The Chinese, insisting that various tiny islands in the South China Sea were once ruled by their country, still seek to overcome the territorial losses and humiliations they suffered at the hands the Western powers and Imperial Japan. The Vietnamese, long accustomed to Chinese invasions, seek to protect what they view as their sovereign territory. For common citizens in both countries, demonstrating resolve in the dispute is a matter of national pride.
But to view the Chinese drive in the South China Sea as a simple matter of nationalistic impulses would be a mistake. The owner of HD-981, the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), has conducted extensive seismic testing in the disputed area and evidently believes there is a large reservoir of energy there. "The South China Sea is estimated to have 23 billion tons to 30 billion tons of oil and 16 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, accounting for one-third of China's total oil and gas resources," the Chinese news agency Xinhua noted. Moreover, China announced in June that it was deploying a second drilling rig to the contested waters of the South China Sea, this time at the mouth of the Gulf of Tonkin.
As the world's biggest consumer of energy, China is desperate to acquire fresh fossil fuel supplies wherever it can. Although its leaders are prepared to make increasingly large purchases of African, Russian, and Middle Eastern oil and gas to satisfy the nation's growing energy requirements, they not surprisingly prefer to develop and exploit domestic supplies. For them, the South China Sea is not a "foreign" source of energy but a Chinese one, and they appear determined to use whatever means necessary to secure it. Because other countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, also seek to exploit these oil and gas reserves, further clashes, at increasing levels of violence, seem almost inevitable.
As these conflicts and others like them suggest, fighting for control over key energy assets or the distribution of oil revenues is a critical factor in most contemporary warfare. While ethnic and religious divisions may provide the political and ideological fuel for these battles, it is the potential for mammoth oil profits that keeps the struggles alive. Without the promise of such resources, many of these conflicts would eventually die out for lack of funds to buy arms and pay troops. So long as the oil keeps flowing, however, the belligerents have both the means and incentive to keep fighting.
In a fossil-fuel world, control over oil and gas reserves is an essential component of national power. "Oil fuels more than automobiles and airplanes," Robert Ebel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told a State Department audience in 2002. "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics." Far more than an ordinary trade commodity, "it is a determinant of well being, of national security, and international power for those who possess this vital resource, and the converse for those who do not."
If anything, that's even truer today, and as energy wars expand, the truth of this will only become more evident. Someday, perhaps, the development of renewable sources of energy may invalidate this dictum. But in our present world, if you see a conflict developing, look for the energy. It'll be there somewhere on this fossil-fueled planet of ours.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What's Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oilis available from the Media Education Foundation.
Photo by Fotilia/peresanz
A paradoxical approach to getting money out of politics.
The Mayday Political Action Committee recognizes the irony in its strategy: by raising enough money to become an influential Super PAC they hope to get money out of politics. However they're not going about it in the traditional way. Using a Kickstarter-like platform (including giving money back to donors if their goal isn't met), their aim is to crowdsource funds in a bottom-up approach. And as of last weekend, they've met a second goal: raising $5 million.
Lawrence Lessig established the campaign in May, having organized previous initiatives to call out money's influence in politics. In January, he walked across the state of New Hampshire to initiate discussions with people about this pervasive problem. Lessig commented, "In a time of polarized politics, there's one thing that more than 90 percent of Americans agree on—that our government is broken. And broken because of the money in politics. Right now Congress doesn't answer to us. It answers to the elite few. Members of Congress waste 30-70 percent of their time raising money from the tiniest fraction of the 1 percent. That gives this tiny fraction of the 1 percent enormous power in our government."
The Super PAC's plan to address this power imbalance has four phases. The initial $5 million will be given to support five candidates in the 2014 midterm election cycle who support the campaign's premise. Based on lessons learned, the Mayday PAC will raise more money for the 2016 elections and engage in as many races as possible. While the campaign relies heavily on a grassroots approach, they will also look to wealthier contributors to donate or match funds. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has already voiced his support as have celebrities such as Jason Alexander and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The overall aim is to get 218 representatives and 60 senators elected. These Congress members would then enact phase three which is to pass major campaign finance reform legislation. Such reform would support "small dollar public funding" such as a voucher system. The last phase would entail sustaining and building upon the reforms made.
Photo by Ed Schipul, licensed under Creative Commons.
Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.
What a way to celebrate Torture Awareness Month!
According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45 percent of Americans believe that torture is "sometimes necessary and acceptable" in order to "gain information that may protect the public." Twenty-nine percent of Britons "strongly or somewhat agreed" that torture was justified when asked the same question.
For someone like me, who has been haunted by the daily existence of torture since the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, such percentages couldn't be more depressing, but perhaps not that surprising. I now live, after all, in the America where Dick Cheney, instead of being indicted as a war criminal, sneeringly (and falsely) claims to anyone who asks him—and he is trotted out over and over again as the resident expert on the subject—that "enhanced interrogations" have been and still are absolutely necessary to keep Americans safe.
As for those Americans and Britons—and so many others around the world—who find such horrors justifiable, I wonder if they have ever met a victim of torture? Or do they think this endless pain is only inflicted on remote and dangerous people caught up in unfathomable wars and savage conflicts? If so, they should think again.
When I read these sorts of statistics a scene comes back to me. I remember a man I met 20 years ago, not in my native Latin America or in faraway lands where torture is endemic, but in the extremely English town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Everybody in the room that day was crying, except for the man who had moved us all to tears, the former prisoner of war whom my son Rodrigo and I had traveled thousands of miles to meet. We had hoped to do justice to his story in a biopic, Prisoners in Time, that the BBC wanted to make for television—based on the same autobiographical material used recently in The Railway Man, the film starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman now showing in theaters across America.
And what an extraordinary story it was!
Eric Lomax, a British officer in World War II, had been tortured by the Japanese in Thailand while working on the infamous Bangkok-Burma railroad, the one most people know about through another film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Eric, like so many victims of atrocities, was plagued by the experience, his life destroyed by memories of his agony and the desire for revenge. What differentiated him from so many others persecuted worldwide was not only that, more than 40 years later, he tracked down the man he held responsible for his suffering, the anonymous interpreter at his beatings and waterboardings, but the astounding fact that this tormentor, Takashi Nagase, once found and identified, turned out to be a Buddhist monk. Nagase had spent the postwar decades denouncing his own countrymen for their crimes and trying to atone for his role in the atrocities he had helped commit by caring for innumerable orphans of the Asians who had died building that railroad. The one scorching image from the war he could not escape was that of a brave young British lieutenant over whose torture he had presided and whom he had presumed to be dead.
Once Eric Lomax resurfaced, once the two former enemies, now old men accompanied by their second wives, met in Kanchanaburi next to the River Kwai where they had last parted, once they were face to face, Nagase begged for forgiveness. It was not instantly forthcoming. But some weeks later, in Hiroshima of all places, Lomax offered Nagase the absolution that he needed in order to live and die in peace.
The BBC had chosen me to tell this tale because, in my play Death and the Maiden, I had already probed the issues of torture, memory, mercy, and vengeance from the perspective of my beleaguered country, Chile. But in that play there had been no pardon offered and no pardon sought, so writing about Lomax's dilemma seemed a way of furthering that original exploration with a series of new questions. Is reconciliation ever really possible when the wounds are searing and permanent? Does anything change if the victimizer claims to have repented? How can we ever know if those claims are legitimate, if that remorse is not merely an ego-trip, an accommodation for the sake of outward appearances?
There was also an aesthetic challenge: given the extreme reserve of both antagonists, their inability to articulate to one another—no less anybody else—what they had been feeling all those years, how to imagine, for the screen, dialogueour two silent former enemies would never have said but that would remain true to their affliction? How to bring their story to people who can't possibly imagine what torture does to the ones who suffer it and those who create that suffering?
Our visit with Eric and his wife Patti at their home in the far north of England was a way of trying to coax from that emotionally repressed man some information—entirely absent from the memoir he had written—about how he had dealt with the barren wilderness of his sorrow, what it meant to survive torture and war more dead than alive. We were accompanied by director Stephen Walker and celebrated psychiatrist Helen Bamberg, who had helped Eric name his demons, and so saved him and his troubled marriage.
That day in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Eric confided to us, after several hours of halting monosyllables, a painful, unbelievable story. When he returned to England by ship after those traumatic years as a prisoner of war, he discovered just before disembarking that the British Army had deducted from his back pay the cost of the boots he had lost during his captivity. Bamberg, who had managed to get Eric to speak out after many distressing sessions, asked him if he had told anyone about this at the time.
"Nobody," Eric said. And then, after a pause that felt infinite, "There was nobody there, at the dock." He stopped and again long minutes of silence went by before he added, "Only a letter from my father. Saying he had remarried, as my mother had died three years before." Another long pause followed. "She died thinking I was also dead. I had been writing to her all that time and she was dead."
That's when we all started to cry.
Not just out of sympathy for his grief, but because Eric had delivered this story about his loss in a monotone devoid of any apparent sentiment, as if all that despair belonged to someone else. Such dissociation is typical of torture victims. Their mental survival during their ordeal and its unending aftermath depends on distancing themselves from the body and its fate. And it is in that distance that they dwell.
We were crying, I believe, for humanity. We were crying in the Lomax living room because we were being confronted with a reality and a realization that most people would rather avoid: when grievous harm has been done to someone, the damage may be beyond repair. Eric Lomax had been able to tame the hatred raging in his heart and, reaching into the deepest wells of compassion, he had forgiven one of the men who had destroyed him. And yet there was still something irreparable, a terror that ultimately could not be assuaged.
The film we wrote two decades ago tried to be faithful to that desolate moment of revelation and at the same time not betray the inner peace that Eric had attained, the fact that he no longer heard Nagase's voice in his nightmares demanding, "Confess, Lomax, confess and pain will stop." He had triumphed over fear and fury, but that spiritual victory had not been achieved in solitude. In addition to the support of his wife Patti, it was due to the healing process he had gone through with Helen Bamberg. Not until he had fully come to terms with what had been done to him, until he faced his trauma in all its horror, was he able to "find" Nagase, whose identity and location had, in fact, been within reach for decades.
Eric's tragedy and his attempt at reconciliation had a special meaning for me: it connected his life to that of so many friends in Chile and other countries who had been subjected to inhuman interrogations. It was a way of understanding the common humanity of all torture victims. More so, as the method that Bamberg employed to resurrect Eric's memories and restore his mental health had first been elaborated as a therapeutic response to the flood of damaged Latin Americans exiled in England during the 1970s and 1980s, those years when grim dictatorships dominated that continent. Eric Lomax, she said, had the sad privilege of being the first World War II veteran with PTSD who was able to take advantage of this new psychological treatment.
We could not know, of course, that 9/11 awaited us seven years in the future, that the waterboarding inflicted on Eric in the 1940s by the Japanese, and on the bodies of so many Latin Americans decades later by their own countrymen, would go global as the United States and its allies fought the "war on terror." Nor could we have guessed or would we have dreamed that so many millions would in that future prove so indifferent to a form of punishment that has been classified as a crime against humanity and is against international treaty and law signed onto by most of the world's nations.
It would seem, then, that Eric Lomax's story is more relevant today than ever—a story that, one would hope, brings home again, during Torture Awareness Month, the ultimate reality and anguish of being tortured. Or can we accept that the questions Eric Lomax asked himself about forgiveness and revenge, about redemption and memory, no longer trouble contemporary humanity?
How would our friend Eric, who died in 2012, react to the news that so many Americans and so many of the very countrymen he served in the war now declare torture to be tolerable? Perhaps he would whisper to them the words he wrote to Nagase when he forgave his enemy: "Sometime the hatred has to stop."
Ariel Dorfman, Chilean-American writer and TomDispatch regular, is the co-author, with his son Rodrigo, of Prisoners in Time, which won the 1995 Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Feature Film on TV. The film was seen in many countries, with one notable exception: the United States. Dorfman teaches at Duke University and lives with his wife, Angélica, in Durham, North Carolina, and, from time to time, in their native Chile. His latest book is the memoir Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile.
Photo by Fotolia/3dmentat
The United States has been at war—major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions—nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That's more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions.
Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can't be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again.
So here are five straightforward lessons—none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country—that can be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:
1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn't work. Ever.
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn't solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to "stabilize" or "protect" or "liberate" countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its "warriors," the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in history," the evidence is in: it isn't.
And here's a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis. It's not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire. The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
One caveat. Think whatever you want about war and American war-making, but keep in mind that we are inside an enormous propaganda machine of militarism, even if we barely acknowledge the space in our lives that it fills. Inside it, only certain opinions, certain thoughts, are acceptable, or even in some sense possible.
Take for an example the recent freeing of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from five years as a captive of the Haqqani network. Much controversy has surrounded it, in part because he was traded for five former Taliban officials long kept uncharged and untried on the American Devil's Island at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It has been suggested that Sgt. Bergdahl deserted his post and his unit in rural Afghanistan—simply walked away—which for opponents of the deal and of President Obama makes the "trade for terrorists" all the more shameful. Our options when it comes to what we know of Bergdahl's actions are essentially to decry him as a "turncoat" or near-voluntary "terrorist prisoner" or ignore them, go into a "support the troops" mode, and hail him as a "hero" of the war. And yet there is a third option.
According to his father, in the period before he was captured, his emails home reflected growing disillusionment with the military. ("The U.S. army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good SGTs [sergeants] are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.") He had also evidently grown increasingly uncomfortable as well with the American war in that country. ("I am sorry for everything here. These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live.") When he departed his base, he may have even left a note behind expressing such sentiments. He had reportedly told someone in his unit earlier, "If this deployment is lame ... I'm just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan."
That's what we know. There is much that we don't know. However, what if, having concluded that the war was no favor to Afghans or Americans and he shouldn't participate in it, he had, however naively, walked away from it without his weapon and, as it turned out, not into freedom but directly into captivity? That Sgt. Bergdahl might have been neither a military-style hero, nor a turncoat, but someone who voted with his feet on the merits of war, American-style, in Afghanistan is not an option that can be discussed calmly here. Similarly, anyone who took such a position here, not just in terms of our disastrous almost 13-year Afghan War, but of American war-making generally, would be seen as another kind of turncoat. However Americans may feel about specific wars, walking away from war, American-style, and the U.S. military as it is presently configured is not a fit subject for conversation, nor an option to be considered.
It's been commonplace in official opinion and polling data for some time that the American public is "exhausted" with our recent wars, but far too much can be read into that. Responding to such a mood, the president, his administration, and the Pentagon have been in a years-long process of "pivoting" from major wars and counterinsurgency campaigns to drone wars, special operations raids, and proxy wars across huge swaths of the planet (even while planning for future wars of a very different kind continues). But war itself and the U.S. military remain high on the American agenda. Military or militarized solutions continue to be the go-to response to global problems, the only question being: How much or how little? (In what passes for debate in this country, the president's opponents regularly label him and his administration "weak" for not doubling down on war, from the Ukraine and Syria to Afghanistan).
Meanwhile, investment in the military's future and its capacity to make war on a global scale remains staggeringly beyond that of any other power or combination of powers. No other country comes faintly close, not the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the Europeans just now being encouraged to up their military game by President Obama, who recently pledged a billion dollars to strengthen the U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe.
In such a context, to suggest the sweeping failure of the American military over these last decades without sapping support for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex would involve making the most breathtaking stab-in-the-back argument in the historical record. This was tried after the Vietnam War, which engendered a vast antiwar movement at home. It was at least conceivable at the time to blame defeat on that movement, a "liberal" media, and lily-livered, micromanaging politicians. Even then, however, the stab-in-the-back version of the war never quite stuck and in all subsequent wars, support for the military among the political class and everywhere else has been so high, the obligatory need to "support the troops" —left, right, and center—so great that such an explanation would have been ludicrous.
The only option left was to ignore what should have been obvious to all. The result has been a record of failure that should stagger the imagination and remarkable silence on the subject. So let's run through these points one at a time:
1. American-style war doesn't work. Just ask yourself: Are there fewer terrorists or more in our world almost 13 years after the 9/11 attacks? Are al-Qaeda-like groups more or less common? Are they more or less well organized? Do they have more or fewer members? The answers to those questions are obvious: more, more, more, and more. In fact, according to a new RAND report, between 2010 and 2013 alone, jihadist groups grew by 58%, their fighters doubled, and their attacks nearly tripled.
On September 12, 2001, al-Qaeda was a relatively small organization with a few camps in arguably the most feudal and backward country on the planet, and tiny numbers of adherents scattered elsewhere around the world. Today, al-Qaeda-style outfits and jihadist groups control significant parts of Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, and even Yemen, and are thriving and spreading in parts of Africa as well.
Or try questions like these: Is Iraq a peaceful, liberated state allied with and under Washington's aegis, with "enduring camps" filled with U.S. troops on its territory? Or is it a riven, embattled, dilapidated country whose government is close to Iran and some of whose Sunni-dominated areas are under the control of a group that is more extreme than al-Qaeda? Is Afghanistan a peaceful, thriving, liberated land under the American aegis, or are Americans still fighting there almost 13 years later against the Taliban, an impossible-to-defeat minority movement it once destroyed and then, because it couldn't stop fighting the "war on terror," helped revive? Is Washington now supporting a weak, corrupt central government in a country that once again is planting record opium crops?
But let's not belabor the point. Who, except a few neocons still plunking for the glories of "the surge" in Iraq, would claim military victory for this country, even of a limited sort, anywhere at any time in this century?
2. American-style wars don't solve problems. In these years, you could argue that not a single U.S. military campaign or militarized act ordered by Washington solved a single problem anywhere. In fact, it's possible that just about every military move Washington has made only increased the burden of problems on this planet. To make the case, you don't even have to focus on the obvious like, for example, the way a special operations and drone campaign in Yemen has actually al-Qaeda-ized some of that country's rural areas. Take instead a rare Washington "success": the killing of Osama bin Laden in a special ops raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (And leave aside the way even that act was over-militarized: an unarmed Bin Laden was shot down in his Pakistani lair largely, it's plausible to assume, because officials in Washington feared what once would have been the American way—putting him on trial in a U.S. civilian court for his crimes.) We now know that, in the hunt for bin Laden, the CIA launched a fake hepatitis B vaccination project. Though it proved of no use, once revealed it made local jihadists so nervous about medical health teams that they began killing groups of polio vaccination workers, an urge that has since spread to Boko Haram-controlled areas of Nigeria. In this way, according to Columbia University public health expert Leslie Roberts, "the distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases that might otherwise not have occurred." The CIA has since promised not to do it again, but too late—and who at this point would believe the Agency anyway? This was, to say the least, an unanticipated consequence of the search for bin Laden, but blowback everywhere, invariably unexpected, has been a hallmark of American campaigns of all sorts.
Similarly, the NSA's surveillance regime, another form of global intervention by Washington, has—experts are convinced—done little or nothing to protect Americans from terror attacks. It has, however, done a great deal to damage the interests of America's tech corporations and to increase suspicion and anger over Washington's policies even among allies. And by the way, congratulations are due for one of the latest military moves of the Obama administration, the sending of U.S. military teams and drones into Nigeria and neighboring countries to help rescue those girls kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram. The rescue was a remarkable success ... oops, didn't happen (and we don't even know yet what the blowback will be).
3. American-style war is a destabilizing force. Just look at the effects of American war in the 21st century. It's clear, for instance, that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed a brutal, bloody, Sunni-Shiite civil war across the region (as well as the Arab Spring, one might argue). One result of that invasion and the subsequent occupation, as well as of the wars and civil wars that followed: the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, and Lebanese, while major areas of Syria and some parts of Iraq have fallen into the hands of armed supporters of al-Qaeda or, in one major case, a group that didn't find that organization extreme enough.
Meanwhile, the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the CIA's drone assassination campaign in the tribal borderlands of neighboring Pakistan have destabilized that country, which now has its own fierce Taliban movement. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya initially seemed like a triumph, as had the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan before it. Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and the rebels swept into power. Like Afghanistan and Iraq, however, Libya is now a basket case, riven by competing militias and ambitious generals, largely ungovernable, and an open wound for the region. Arms from Gaddafi's looted arsenals have made their way into the hands of Islamist rebels and jihadist extremists from the Sinai Peninsula to Mali, from Northern Africa to northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is entrenched. It is even possible, as Nick Turse has done, to trace the growing U.S. military presence in Africa to the destabilization of parts of that continent.
4. The U.S. military can't win its wars. This is so obvious (though seldom said) that it hardly has to be explained. The U.S. military has not won a serious engagement since World War II: the results of wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq ranged from stalemate to defeat and disaster. With the exception of a couple of campaigns against essentially no one (in Grenada and Panama), nothing, including the "Global War on Terror," would qualify as a success on its own terms, no less anyone else's. This was true, strategically speaking, despite the fact that, in all these wars, the U.S. controlled the air space, the seas (where relevant), and just about any field of battle where the enemy might be met. Its firepower was overwhelming and its ability to lose in small-scale combat just about nil.
It would be folly to imagine that this record represents the historical norm. It doesn't. It might be more relevant to suggest that the sorts of imperial wars and wars of pacification the U.S. has fought in recent times, often against poorly armed, minimally trained, minority insurgencies (or terror outfits), are simply unwinnable. They seem to generate their own resistance. Their brutalities and even their "victories" simply act as recruitment posters for the enemy.
5. The U.S. military is not "the finest fighting force the world has ever known" or "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known," or any of the similar over-the-top descriptions that U.S. presidents are now regularly obligated to use. If you want the explanation for why this is so, see points one through four above. A military whose way of war doesn't work, doesn't solve problems, destabilizes whatever it touches, and never wins simply can't be the greatest in history, no matter the firepower it musters. If you really need further proof of this, think about the crisis and scandals linked to the Veterans Administration. They are visibly the fruit of a military mired in frustration, despair, and defeat, not a triumphant one holding high history's banner of victory.
Is there a record like it? More than half a century of American-style war by the most powerful and potentially destructive military on the planet adds up to worse than nothing. If any other institution in American life had a comparable scorecard, it would be shunned like the plague. In reality, the VA has a far better record of success when it comes to the treatment of those broken by our wars than the military does of winning them, and yet its head administrator was forced to resign recently amid scandal and a media firestorm.
As in Iraq, Washington has a way of sending in the Marines, setting the demons loose, leaving town, and then wondering how in the world things got so bad—as if it had no responsibility for what happened. Don't think, by the way, that no one ever warned us either. Who, for instance, remembers Arab League head Amr Moussa saying in 2004 that the U.S. had opened the "gates of hell" in its invasion and occupation of Iraq? Who remembers the vast antiwar movement in the U.S. and around the world that tried to stop the launching of that invasion, the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to warn of the dangers before it was too late? In fact, being in that antiwar movement more or less guaranteed that ever after you couldn't appear on the op-ed pages of America's major papers to discuss the disaster you had predicted. The only people asked to comment were those who had carried it out, beaten the drums for it, or offered the mildest tsk-tsk about it.
By the way, don't think for a moment that war never solved a problem, or achieved a goal for an imperial or other regime, or that countries didn't regularly find victory in arms. History is filled with such examples. So what if, in some still-to-be-understood way, something has changed on planet Earth? What if something in the nature of imperial war now precludes victory, the achieving of goals, the "solving" of problems in our present world? Given the American record, it's at least a thought worth considering.
As for peace, not even a penny for your thoughts on that one. If you suggested pouring, say, $50 billion into planning for peace, no less the $500 billion that goes to the Pentagon annually for its base budget, just about anyone would laugh in your face. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn't include most of the budget for the increasingly militarized U.S. Intelligence Community, or extra war costs for Afghanistan, or the budget of the increasingly militarized Department of Homeland Security, or other costs hidden elsewhere, including, for example, for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which is buried in the Energy Department's budget.)
That possible solutions to global problems, possible winning strategies, might come from elsewhere than the U.S. military or other parts of the national security state, based on 50 years of imperial failure, 50 years of problems unsolved and wars not won and goals not reached, of increasing instability and destruction, of lives (American and otherwise) snuffed out or broken? Not on your life.
Don't walk away from war. It's not the American way.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
Copyright 2014 Tom Engelhardt
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text:
so lastnight dd was refusing to wear a diaper so i let her go bare bum and put the potty out. after about 30 minutes i told her to sit on the potty and try to pee and she went!!! she used the potty and had zero accidents from 5pm till bedtime (8pm) then this morning she has already pooped and peed in the potty! hoping this is a training success.
but i probably just jinxed myself by sharing the good news on here. lol.
the vent: sil is making me look bad..... she has twins that are 1 month older than ds, a full time job, keeps her house cleaner than i do and she is going to graduate with her MASTERS in a month. i can barely keep a clean house..... thats all.


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The Rusk County Sheriff's Office says six people, including a baby, were injured in a two-car crash near Mt. Enterprise on Wednesday night.
It happened at about 6:30 P.M. at the intersection of FM 95, and Highway 84, about five miles east of Mt. Enterprise.
The sheriff's office says there were three people in each car, and two of the injured were taken to Tyler hospitals by helicopter. One of the injured was an 11-month-old child, but the baby was not one of the victims flown to Tyler.
The names and ages of the injured have not been released. DPS troopers also helped to work the scene of the crash.
Copyright 2013 KLTV. All Rights reserved.
1909 Wynnton Road
Columbus, Ga. 31906
FCC Public File
EEO Report
Closed Captioning


text:
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Gemvara jewelry is truly personal: you design it, choosing gems and metals to celebrate your story, and we craft it just for you. We'd love to help you find your perfect piece! (more)What quality are your gemstones?
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text:
Table of Contents
Collection Overview
Collection Inventory+/-
Biographical Note/Historical Note
Content Description
Collection Use
Administrative Information
Collection Overview +/-
Collection Inventory +/-
Box 1: INVENTORY (1899-1903)
fd 1: Official authorization for registered mail to be delivered to other than addressee, dates March 24,1899 to December 31, 1902. (Rose E. Dean, postmistress).
fd 2: Hand written authorization for registered mail to be delivered to other than addressee. Date range, February 5, 1900 to July 29, 1902, 1 undated.
fd 3: Samples of Official Post Office forms.
fd 4: Five remittance letters signed by Rose E. Dean. Dates range from 1899 - 1903.
fd 5: Temperance poem undated, no salutation, no signature.
fd 6: Correspondence - Auditor for Post Office. Contains one handwritten letter from Rose E. Dean, 10 account audit cards and 3 official auditor forms.
fd 7: Correspondence - Post Office Inspector. One official form instructing accurate accounting of postage on all matters postmarked at Marriotts post office. Four hand written letters regarding postal matters under this department. Date range, 1899 - 1903.
fd 8: Correspondence - Retiring Postmaster. One hand written letter delineating procedure of retiring postmaster, gives account transactions and balances on postal items (money orders, stamps, etc.). Date range 1899 - 1903.
fd 9: Correspondence - Rose E. Dean's resignation letter, December 23, 1902. Handwritten letter.
Correspondence - First Assistant Postmaster General
fd 10: Dead Letter Office. Contains three official forms pertaining to this department. Two undated, one dated August 31, 1902.
fd 11: Money Order Division. Contains two canceled forms, new money order sample and receipts for money order transactions.
Correspondence - Third Assistant Postmaster
fd 12: Letter of Transmittal. Contains two official forms, January and March 1903.
fd 13: Official Order Forms. Contains two official forms, June and October, 1902.
fd 14: Postal Stamp Agency. Contains seventeen official forms,. Date range January, 1899 - November 1902.
fd 15: Stamped Envelopes - New Contract and Examples. Contains three stamped envelopes and new contract schedule.
fd 16: U.S. Postal Card and Stamped Envelope Receipts. Contains seventeen items.
Correspondence - Fourth Assistant Postmaster General
fd 17: Bond Division- Contains one official form.
fd 18: Inventory/Statistics. Contains fifteen items, handwritten notes, official forms and booklets pertaining to postal items. Dates range 1899-1903.
fd 19: Miscellaneous Postal Forms. October 1898 and November 1899.
Biographical Note/Historical Note +/-
Before North Ogden had a post office, mail came through the Ogden City post office. Anyone going to the Ogden post office from North Ogden usually pick up his/her neighbors mail. On April 23, 1864, the United Postal Service located the first North Ogden post office in the Sidney Stevens' store. Henry Holmes was appointed the first postmaster and he picked up mail twice a week from the Utah Northern Railroad mail stop in Harrisville. On December 1, 1893, the United States Postal Service started a daily mail delivery system for North Ogden from the Ogden post office. John W. Rex, was the next known postmaster and he handled mail service in the Rex, Dean and Campbell Company building. Francis Dudman, followed John Rex as postmaster and moved the post office to his grocery store. John A. Dean erected the first post office in North Ogden. Rose Elvina Dean became the first postmistress. Following Rose Dean, was Alice S. Dean as postmistress. George S. Dean held the title of postmaster from 1903-1907 and he moved the post office to his printing office. When the post office moved from George Dean's office to the Marshall store, William Ellis became postmaster and later Rose Toone took over as postmistress. On December 1, 1902, rural free delivery of mail came to North Ogden. Business at the North Ogden post office declined and it was closed. Fred Ellis delivered mail on the R.F.D. route for about ten years to Harrisville, West Weber, Plain City and North Ogden. In 1911 there was a post office at Five Points from which mail was picked up and delivered R.F.D. to North Ogden by Mr. Penshaw.. On November 5, 1961, the North Ogden branch post office was dedicated and Maurine Barker was hired as postmistress. In 1985 a post office opened in North Ogden at Macey's Sack N' Save, until 1989 when the Ben Lomond branch was built at 221 North Washington Blvd. which now serves North Ogden and surrounding areas.
Content Description +/-
The collection is arranged alphabetically by genre and consists of official documents regarding postal business. Inventory; statistics; procedures; letters of transmittal; audits; change in postmaster; order forms, Rose E. Dean's resignation letter as postmistress, December 23, 1902 and an undated temperance poem. The collection was obtained by purchase from Benchmark Books, Salt Lake City, Utah in September of 1998.
Collection Use +/-
Restrictions on Access:
Open for public research.
Administrative Information +/-
This collection is arranged in chronological order.
Acquisition Information:
Processing Note:
Process date unknown
North Ogden Post Office
Material in English .
Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant, 2007-2008
1 box
Language of the Finding Aid:
Finding aid encoded in English .
Author of the Finding Aid:
Sarah Langsdon
EAD Creation Date:
Finding aid based on DACS
Subjects +/-
Subject Terms:
Politics, Government, and Law
Geographical Names:
North Ogden (Utah)