Many of these people are “paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests,” writes the magazine’s Sebastian Jones, a freelance reporter after a four-month-long probe.

“Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens—and in some cases hundreds—of appearances,” Jones reports.

For example, Tom Ridge, identified as the former governor of Pennsylvania, appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews urging the White House to “create nuclear power plants.” What viewers were not told, though, is that Ridge since 2005 has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s biggest nuclear power company, Jones writes.

On the same day, last Dec. 4th, retired general Barry McCaffrey, told MSNBC viewers the war in Afghanistan would require a three-to-10-year effort and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned, Jones says, was the fact DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone and that DynCorp has a five-year, $5.9 billion deal to aid U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Jones describes MSNBC as “the cable network with the most egregious instances of airing guests with conflicts of interest.” He notes, “Only on MSNBC was a prime-time program, Countdown, hosted by public relations operative Richard Wolffe and later by a pharmaceutical company consultant, former Governor Howard Dean, with no mention of the outside work either man was engaged in. And MSNBC has yet to introduce DynCorp’s Barry McCaffrey as anything but a ‘military analyst.’”

Moreover, last January 22nd, MSNBC’s Morning Joe audience saw Mark Penn, identified only as a Clinton administration pollster, suggest the Obama administration put healthcare reform on ice. Unmentioned, says Jones, was “Penn’s role as worldwide CEO of Burson-Marsteller, which has an entire healthcare division devoted to helping clients like Eli Lilly and Pfizer ‘create and manage perceptions that deliver positive business results.’”

Jones reports that what transpires on MSNBC also occurs on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN and CNBC. These outlets “eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way (and)at times…have even disregrded their own written ethics guidelines.” MSNBC may be the most flagrant example of deception but the other networks do not appear far behind.

During a Sept. 18, 2008, Fox News appearance to discuss Sarah Palin, Bernard Whitman, president of Whitman Insight Strategies—whose clients include marketing/PR firms like Ogilvy & Mather—lambasted Sen. John McCain for proposing to “Let AIG fail,” saying his position demonstrated “just how little he understands the global economy today.” Whitman’s “ongoing work” for AIG was not mentioned!

“When there’s a whole host of pundits on the airwaves touting the same agenda at the same time, you get a cumulative effect that shapes public opinion toward their agenda,” Janine Wedel, an anthropologist at George Mason University told Jones. Another academic, Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, said, “More disclosure is good—I’m certainly in favor of that—but why are these people on at all?”

That’s a very good question. MSNBC, Fox, and the others guilty of deceptive journalism owe their viewers an apology. Such broadcasts are neither fair nor balanced. They are deceptive, slanted, and contrary to the public interest. The cable broadcasters need to pledge to their viewers to reveal the hidden corporate agendas of their guests. Until that time, viewers can always turn them off.

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist who writes on world events. Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair

Raising troubling comparisons to tactics employed by Josef Stalin and right-wing Latin American dictatorships, the U.S. government has created a “hit list” of Americans abroad marked for murder.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Feb. 3, the U.S. may, with executive approval, target and kill American terrorist suspects, Inter Press News Service reported.

”We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said.

Blair added that U.S. counterterrorism officials may try to kill U.S. citizens involved in terrorism overseas with ”specific permission” from higher up.

In response to questions from the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if ”we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Blair’s statement recalls the policies of Soviet Russia’s secret police, who often murdered those who fled Stalin’s tyranny. Red Army founder Leon Trotsky, for example, was tracked to Mexico by a Soviet agent who killed him with an ice pick.

Blair’s remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that President Barack Obama had embraced President George W. Bush’s policy of authorizing the killing of U.S. citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.

The Post reported: “After the Sep. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said.

“The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”

Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told Inter Press, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn’t relevant. But just being a ’suspected terrorist’ doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a combatant.”

She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities.’ If not, and they’re targeted, it’s a war crime.”

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, ”It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’”

Attorney George Brent Mickum, an American lawyer who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told Inter Press, “I guess my sense is that it’s just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don’t need to offer any justification.”

”We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives,” Mickum said. “And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”

“My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect,” Mickum told Inter Press. “I don’t have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better.”

Other experts on international law were outraged, too.

“This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949,” said Francis Boyle, University of Illinois professor of international law at Champaign.

“In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Boyle said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars.’”

He claimed President Bush “reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a ‘dirty war’ around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.  It is only a matter of time before the United States government will establish a similar ‘death list’ targeting U.S. citizens living here at home.”

Boyle added that, “As someone who used to teach Constitutional law, President Obama knows better.”

Boyle, a leading U.S. authority in international law, drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S. He is the author of a number of books in his field, including Destroying World Order.

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told Inter Press, “As with its embrace of the [George W.] Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extrajudicial killing – including of U.S. citizens – is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”

”Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty,” Pitts continued, “this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.”

Basic reporting for this article came from Inter Press News Service of Rome. Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist who writes on world events. Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct “full spectrum operations throughout South America” and to “expand expeditionary warfare capability.”

“With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region’s military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems,” writes historian Greg Grandin, a New York University professor.

Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’s February 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”

The fountainhead of this effort is Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. aid package that over the past decade “has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States,” Grandin says, noting that more Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998.

Underlying the anti-drug fight, however, is a counterinsurgency struggle for control of “ungoverned spaces” via a “clear, hold and build” sequence urged by the U.S. military to weaken Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces(FARC). The Bush White House condoned the right-wing paramilitaries who, along with their narcotraficante allies “now control about 10 million acres, roughly half of the country’s most fertile land,” Grandin reports. They also spread terror in the countryside and are responsible for many killings and for driving peasants from their land.

Grandin reports that the paras “have taken control of hundreds of municipal governments, establishing what Colombian social scientist Leon Valencia calls ‘true local dictatorships,’ consolidating their property seizures and deepening their ties to narcos, landed elites and politicians.”

What’s more, “The country’s sprawling intelligence apparatus is infiltrated by this death squad/narco combine, as is its judiciary and Congress, where more than forty deputies from the governing party are under investigation for ties to (the right-wing) AUC (United Self Defense Forces).

“Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America,” Grandin asserts. “More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since (Alvaro) Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and not one arrest has been made for the killings. And the military stands accused of murdering more than 2,000 civilians and then dressing their bodies in guerrilla uniforms in order to prove progress against the FARC.”

Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities fighting paras who have seized land to cultivate African palm for ethanol production have been evicted by mercenaries and the military, Grandin says. “From Panama to Mexico, rural protesters are likewise targeted. In the Salvadoran department of Cabanas,” he observes, “death squads have executed four leaders—three in December—who opposed the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Company’s efforts to dig a gold mine in their community.”

Obama could reconsider the Pentagon’s base deal and Plan Colombia, Grandin writes, “But that would mean rethinking a longer, multi-decade, bipartisan, trillion-dollars-and-counting ‘war on drugs,’ and Obama has other wars to extricate himself from—or not, as the case may be.”

“Unable or unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin America—normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration reform—the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture,” Grandin explains. He notes that after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Brazil, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Latin Americans to “think twice” about “the consequences” of engagement with Iran. An Argentine diplomat responded, “The Obama administration would never talk to European countries that way.”

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

“The transformation of media has not only undermined the imperial institutions of the mainstream media; it has undermined the imperial Presidency,” writes Ken Auletta, a media authority, in the January 25th The New Yorker.

Auletta reminds that six years ago there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no You-Tube and that many regional newspapers and TV stations were “highly profitable.”

Today, he writes, Politico.com Web site has 79 editorial employees to satisfy the news hunger of its 3-million unique monthly visitors and Mike Allen, the online paper’s chief White House correspondent “has become one of Washington’s most influential journalists.” [Allen has been widely criticized by bloggers and other media figures for acting as a "stenographer" for former Vice President Dick Cheney.]

Auletta quotes Anita Dunn, Obama’s former chief communications officer, as saying, “The ability for online to drive stories into the mainstream media is significant.” Once a story gains traction, Dunn says, the Administration must respond quickly or “rumors become facts.”

Obama has 69 press aides to respond to media questions, increasingly from cable news which is growing in influence. Auletta cites a Pew poll last July that found 40 percent of Americans get their national and international news from cable. He writes with the collapse of mass audiences for broadcast television “networks like Fox News and MSNBC have sought niche markets, in the process shedding all but the pretense of impartiality.”

Cable “news” is giving political partisans what they want to hear. For each Democrat who watches Fox News, there are 18 Republicans; for every Republican who watches MSNBC, there are six Democrats.

“Fox News is thriving,” Auletta reports. “Glenn Becks year-old show draws 2.3 million daily viewers, twice its predecessor’s audience.” Fox’s broadcasts attract more nightly viewers than CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC combined, The New Yorker says.

Auletta tells of how the White House unsuccessfully tried diplomacy to soften Fox’s harsh coverage of the Obama presidency. By last September, though, “The White House had given up on changing Fox” and Obama’s aides began attacking it.

Apart from Fox, Auletta reports that no president in modern times has received anything comparable to the adulatory news coverage that characterized Obama’s campaign and early months in office. Time magazine, he says, put Obama on its cover six times in the space of eleven months, in part because “the Obama campaign handled the press adroitly.” And a Center for Media and Public Affairs report found that in Obama’s first 50 days in office he got more than three times the network news coverage of his predecessor.

Auletta makes the point that the emergence of new media is forcing a continuous news cycle, as Internet stories by the volume of their pick-up, push their way into the mass media. Reporters complain they hardly have breathing space to reflect on the meaning of a story but must react swiftly even to just get the headlines to their viewers and readers. “We’re all wire-service reporters now,” Chuck Todd of NBC is quoted as saying.

Todd does anywhere from eight to 16 standup interviews daily for NBC and MSNBC on a patch of White House grass, including feeds to “Today” on NBC and “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. And by nightfall, Todd may have written as many as ten tweets or Facebook postings and five blog entries. With all this sort of deadline busywork, reporters complain they don’t have a minute to do research, call experts, and to put breaking news into context.

While Auletta’s article, “Non-Stop News” concerns itself with new challenges facing the press and the presidency that are driven by new technology, it does not touch on the lack of coverage of critical issues such as the spreading wars of the Middle East. Nor was that the intent of the article. Yet that is the real media crisis today. Thus, Obama’s photogenic daughters are the subjects of saturation media coverage but the smoldering ruins of bombed-out buildings in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not. This lack challenges Auletta’s comment that the transformation of media “has undermined the imperial Presidency.” It has done no such thing.

If an imperial Presidency is defined as one in which an autocratic president can pretty much do as he pleases waging wars around the world, all that a more intensive media environment does is to provide him with heightened supporting coverage. Fox News may attack Obama for his management style but it does not dispute his basic imperialist direction, which is a continuation of the Bush-Cheney wars of aggression. Media dissent these days flickers only on the Internet. Thus the White House succeeds largely in managing the news—especially as it derives so much help from the mainstream media.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Photo/Wikimedia

The “largest lie,” wrote historian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that “everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’”

“This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”

In an article published previously in “The Long Term View” magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba’athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., “only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.”

Zinn, popularly known as the people’s historian, pointed out that the U.S. may have liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but afterwards it became Iraq’s occupier. He noted this is the same fate that befell Cuba after the U.S. liberated it from Spain in 1898. In both nations, the U.S. established military bases and U.S. corporations moved in to profit from the upheaval.

Zinn recalled the words of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the NATO ministers in Brussels in June, 2002, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of weapons of mass destruction. “That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are,” Zinn wrote.

“This explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorizing the population,” he continued.

The historian pointed out that even if the U.S. experienced few battle casualties in its invasion of Iraq, casualties would mount afterwards in the occupying army from sickness and trauma, which took a high toll both in Viet Nam and after the Gulf War. In the 10 years after the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died and 200,000 veterans filed complaints about illnesses incurred “from the weapons our government used in the war.”

Zinn predicted accurately that once the American public realized President Bush had lied to them about Iraq they would turn against the government. “When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered,” he said of the Bush administration.

Writing of his personal feelings, Zinn said, “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over… I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President (George W. Bush) who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.”

Zinn called on his readers “to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress. We find ourselves today at one of those critical points.”

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is a non-profit law school purposefully dedicated to the education of students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who would otherwise not have the opportunity to obtain a legal education. Zinn’s article in The Long Term View first appeared in The Progressive magazine.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

President Barack Obama delivers a speech announcing a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in West Point, N.Y., Dec. 1. Photo/White House photographer Pete Souza

“There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,” writes Thomas Johnson in a report published Dec. 10 in Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word “None.”

“The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,” Johnson wrote, noting, “The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing.”

Author Johnson is no armchair admiral. He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., a man who has conducted his own on-site investigation in Afghanistan.

Also referring to the President’s West Point address, The Nation magazine editorialized that Obama failed to explain why his goal to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan “requires 100,000 troops at a cost of nearly $100 billion. By the military’s own calculation, there are at most 100 Al Qaeda operatives, mostly low-level, in Afghanistan, the leadership having fled to Pakistan years ago.”

Even as the Afghan war bids to become the longest in U.S. history, “The Nation” adds:

“The undeniable fact is that eight years of US occupation and war have led to a growing insurgency, fueled by anger at one of the world’s most corrupt governments, run mostly by former and not-so-former warlords who were installed by the United States after 9/11. Many of these warlords are deeply involved in the opium trade, among them the brother of Hamid Karzai, the president, who was re-elected only through massive fraud.”

Writing in the Miami Herald of Dec. 20th, Carl Hiaasen says that Johnson believes “Obama knows this war is unwinnable, and that the surge is meant to provide political cover in advance of a full U.S. withdrawal before the 2012 election.”

Hiaasen adds, “Obama wouldn’t be the first U.S. president to let domestic political concerns affect his military moves abroad, but he certainly campaigned as a different kind of leader.”

Does this mean Obama is escalating an unwinnable war for political considerations? Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the December 14th New Yorker, thinks politics has a lot to do with it. An immediate withdrawal, he writes, would inflict “severe” political and diplomatic damage to Obama and trigger, among other things, “a probable Pentagon revolt.” And the Pentagon has left no doubt about the right course. As General David Petraeus, who commands U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan forces, told The New York Times, “a sustained, substantial commitment” is required.

As the war drags on, the death toll mounts. Writing in the Dec. 21st issue of Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, says by his conservative count, the war has claimed 30,000 lives. And the CIA’s drone warplane sorties authorized by Obama are boosting that toll.

Obama’s strategy is also spreading the war ever deeper into Pakistan. As Dan Pearson and Kathy Kelly report in the December “Catholic Worker,” 3,000,000 people were uprooted by violence in the Swat Valley and neighboring districts and those who returned found “that their homes, crops and other means of survival had been damaged or destroyed.”

They quote Dr. Aasim Saijad of Lahore University of Management Sciences as saying the attacks in Pakistan are only swelling the Taliban’s ranks. “The hundreds of thousands languishing in refugee camps talk of the mortar shells that have destroyed their homes and killed their relatives,” Saijad said.

“They seethe with anger and warn the government that most Taliban fighters hail from the local population. The longer the war continues—and it has only just begun in this region—the better the chances that the Taliban will be able to recruit from the refugees,” he said.

If Afghans are dying by the thousands and Pakistanis have become refugees by the millions to ensure Obama’s political survival, the U.S. has lost any vestige of moral authority. Is it thinkable to ask what if the purpose of the war is not “victory” but to keep the engines of the military-industrial complex humming? If so, it is not only primitive peoples’ who sacrificed the flower of their youth to ensure a good harvest.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C. says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.

For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for defense in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.

Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam’s Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.

If the Pentagon figure of $1 trillion is somewhat less than all other taxing authorities, keep in mind the FBI, the various intelligence agencies, the VA, the National Institutes of Health (biological warfare) are also spending on war-related activities.

A question that describes the above and answers itself is: In what area can the Federal government operate where states and cities cannot tread? The answer is: foreign affairs—raising armies, fighting wars, conducting diplomacy, etc. And so Uncle Sam keeps enlarging this area. His emphasis is not on diplomacy, either.

For every buck spent by the State Department, which gets some $50 billion a year, the Pentagon spends $20. As for the Peace Corps, its budget is a paltry $375 million—hardly enough to keep the Pentagon elephant in peanuts.

Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and finance authority Linda Bilmes write in their “The Three Trillion Dollar War”(W.W. Norton), “defense spending has been growing as a percentage of discretionary funding (money that is not required to be spent on entitlements like Social Security), from 48 percent in 2000 to 51 percent today. That means that our defense needs are gobbling up a larger share of taxpayers’ money than ever before.”

And they add, “The Pentagon’s budget has increased by more than $600 billion, cumulatively, since we invaded Iraq.” With its 1,000 bases in the U.S. and another 800 bases globally, the U.S. truly has become a “Warfare State.” Today, military-related products account for about one-fourth of total U.S. GDP. This includes 10,000 nuclear weapons. Indeed, the U.S. has lavished $5.5 trillion just on nukes over the past 70 years.

No other nation has anything remotely like this menacing global presence. The Pentagon strengthens its grip by running joint “training” exercises with the military of 110 other nations, including outright dictatorships that suppress internal unrest.

The U.S. spends more on weaponry than the next dozen nations combined and is by far the No. 1 world arms peddler. “The government employs some 6,500 people just to coordinate and administer its arms sales program in conjunction with senior officials at American embassies around the world, who spend most of their ‘diplomatic’ careers working as arms salesmen,” writes Chalmers Johnson in “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire(Henry Holt).”

Johnson goes on to say the U.S. military establishment today is “close to being beyond civilian control” and that despite its ability to “deliver death and destruction to any target on earth and expect little in the way of retaliation” it demands more and newer equipment “while the Pentagon now more or less sets its own agenda” and “monopolizes the formulation and conduct of American foreign policy.”

How long will it be before this tyrannical, anti-democratic, colossus that is sucking up as much money for war as all states, counties and cities spend on peace—and which straddles the globe, boosts dictators, and beats the war drums—turns on its own people?

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Seven million Americans have been arrested since 1995 on marijuana charges and 41,000 of them are rotting in federal and state prisons. Thousands of other pot users and sellers are confined in local jails. But the public is starting to rebel against “the preposterous war on pot,” two political scientists say.

People convicted of possessing even one ounce of marijuana can face a mandatory minimum sentence of a year in jail, and having even one plant in your yard is a federal felony,” progressive organizer Jim Hightower and co-author Phillip Frazer point out in the November issue of “The Hightower Lowdown.”

Police arrest someone in America every 36 seconds on marijuana charges, with a record 872,000 arrests made in 2007, “more than for all violent crimes combined,” Hightower and Frazer point out. They note that 89 per cent of all marijuana arrests “are for simple possession of the weed, not for producing or selling it.”

They argue the drug war “is doing far more harm than marijuana itself ever will,” because (1) it diverts hundreds of thousands of police agents from serious crimes “to the pursuit of harmless tokers”; (2) it costs taxpayers at minimum $10 billion a year to catch, prosecute and incarcerate marijuana users and sellers; (3) it enables government to snatch the cars, money, computers and other properties of people caught up in drug raids even if they have had no charges filed against them; and (4) it allows “police agents at all levels to trample our Bill of Rights in their eagerness to nab pot consumers.”

The drug war has also unleashed a torrent of racism in the form of unjust sentencing, which confines crack-cocaine users who are mostly black to prison for longer terms than powder snorters, who are mostly white.

Hightower and Frazer say authorities have perverted the infamous “Patriot Act” of 2001 for use in non-terrorism cases, allowing “sneak-and-peak” search warrants to be used in drug war probes, including pursuit of marijuana users.

The Act’s provisions were supposed to be applied only for suspected terrorist acts.  Only three of the Justice Department’s 763 requests for “sneak-and-peak” last year were used for terrorism searches, they report in Lowdown.

By outlawing drugs, Hightower and Frazer contend, Congress has created “a vast, murderous narco-state within Mexico” to satisfy U.S. consumer demand for the drugs.  And Plan Colombia, the multi-billion-dollar operation started by Bill Clinton in 2000 to eradicate coca production there, has failed, judging by the 15 percent increase in coca production.

For all the legislation against it, pot is more plentiful than ever and 10 per cent of Americans told surveyors they have enjoyed using it in the previous year while four in ten say they used it at some point in their lives.

Plus, a 2005 survey found 85 per cent of high school seniors claimed pot was “easy to get”, easier than alcohol, which is a regulated drug, The Hightower Lowdown points out.

The publication quotes a University of Michigan student who told them, “If the government trusts society to use alcohol responsibly, it is idiotic to assume citizens are somehow incapable of responsible use of cannabis.”

A Gallup opinion poll in 2005 found 51 percent of Americans stating that alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana and 52 per cent saying pot should be legalized, taxed, and regulated.

State and local governments, Hightower and Frazer report, “have begun walking step by step away from the weed war.” Since 1996, 13 states from Rhode Island to Alaska have passed laws to allow growing and distribution of doctor-prescribed marijuana for medical purposes.

What’s more, pot possession is no longer criminalized in a dozen states: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon.

The drive now is for outright legalization of pot, the authors say. This would enable officials to take the exorbitant profit and violence out of illicit black-market weed by legalizing it and turning it into a revenue-producer that would rake in tax dollars.

Instead, the Office of National Drug Control Policy says, Americans spend $9 billion a year buying pot from Mexico; $10 billion on pot from Canada, and $39 billion on home-grown pot, now America’s Numero Uno cash crop – “topping the value of corn and wheat combined.”

By one estimate, legalization would produce annual tax revenues of $6.2 billion. In Portugal, which legalized all drugs in 2001, hard drug use has showed a stunning decline while the numbers of people getting detox aid has soared, Time magazine reported on April 26. By contrast, the United States has the highest rates of drug use in the world.

As Rep. Barney Frank has said, “I now think it’s time for the politicians to catch up to the public. The notion that you lock people up for smoking marijuana is pretty silly.”

There is, however, a downside to the legalization of pot: some of the individuals in the legal system who depend on the arrests of pot smokers might have to find worthwhile jobs instead.

Look at all the paychecks that get cut: The cops make their collars. The bail bondsmen get their rake off. The prosecutors make their cases. The social workers write up their interviews. The clerks push their papers. The lawyers collect their fees. The judges render their verdicts. The prison guards make their rounds. The vendors sell their baloney sandwiches. The construction firms build their additions. And the shrinks nod their heads.

One last thought: cigarettes kill 440,000 Americans every year and sicken millions, while smoking a joint creates no such danger. If the growers and peddlers of pot belong in jail, where do the manufacturers of brand-name cigarettes and cigars belong?

In two years, they kill more Americans than all the Blues and Grays who died (620,000) in the Civil War. Indeed, in the next two years, 440 times as many Americans will be killed by smoking cigarettes than all U.S. troops killed in six years of fighting in Iraq.

While this writer opposes the use of all drugs, and does not indulge himself, it’s easy to see the prosecution of pot smokers and growers for victimless crimes is, as Lowdown reports, “preposterous.”

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com.

“The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

“Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex,” he writes. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, “who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India.”

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from their triggers to prevent anyone from launching a warhead without at least pausing to put it together. A U.S. rapid-response team of terrorism and nonproliferation experts is stationed at the ready at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, is at the ready to fly to Pakistan if the security of any of its 80-plus nukes is threatened.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari “spoke with derision” in an interview about U.S. concern over the vulnerability of his country’s nuclear arsenal, Hersh said. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us. The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan.”

Moreover, an unnamed senior Pakistani official said to have close ties to Zardari added, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’etat in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?”

The official answered his own question with, “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told Hersh the Pakistanis gave the U.S. intelligence about their warheads, some of the warheads’ locations, and their command-and-control system. However, a U.S. military spokesman for Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of the Department of Energy’s intelligence operation, warned of the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan…” He added, “Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” (in America’s security).

The question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is made more perplexing by U.S. efforts to pursue its Afghan enemies on Pakistani soil and involve that country’s military in its operations. Sultan Amir Tarar, a retired Pakistani intelligence official, told Hersh that the U.S. campaign will backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us.” If Obama persists, he added, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse.” Tarar is further quoted as saying, “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage.”

Tarar believes the U.S. has to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that means direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, Hersh reported. He noted that stepped-up fighting in the tribal areas of Pakistan could further “radicalize” that nation.

How respect for the U.S. is declining in Pakistan was reflected by a source described as “a retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer” who told Hersh, “My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted. The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

And in India, which has been at loggerheads with Pakistan since the 1947 partition, an official told Hersh, “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans. I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, currently living in exile in London, told Hersh that he is troubled by U.S.-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Speaking of Predator attacks, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told Hersh, “What the (Pakistani) Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.”

The issue of nuclear weapon instability in Pakistan reflects on the series of historic American decisions to (a)manufacture and use atomic weapons in World War Two in the first place, and (b) to spend literally trillions of taxpayer dollars over the years to increase their numbers and lethality and (c)to help nations such as Israel, India and Pakistan to build their nuclear arsenals over the objections of the international authority. The U.S. (d) has also sold warplanes capable of carrying nuclear bombs both to hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, further increasing the possibility of their use.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com