AKUFO ADDO: NUGS Confers Its Highest Honour On Him

Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo

The statement below was issued by the national Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) and is being published without comment.

The National Union of Ghana Students has played an enviable role in the democratic dispensation of this country and recognizes its responsibility to conscientize the nation on the virtues of productive citizenry.

In this respect, we the Ghanaian students actively witnessed the height of the test of the Ghanaian Judicial Service with the recent election petition case brought forward by Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo. The petition exposed enormously the inequities in our electoral process which likely affected the individual and collective will of the Ghanaian people at the polls. The petition also provided a sustainable framework to settle disputes sparked out of Presidential Elections in Ghana.

The then candidate, Akufo-Addo resisted the character assassination by his political detractors and with stoicism demonstrated his intense affinity to the democracy he fought for during the dictatorial era of coup d’états and finally the selfless contribution of same in the promulgation of the 1992 constitutional democratic process. He accepted the verdict of the Supreme Court in good faith  and encouraged the Ghanaian people to endeavor to a path that builds.

On the 11th of October at Erata Hotel, we welcome the good conscience of the Ghanaian people to join the students of Ghana to confer on Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo, the highest award of the students of Ghana in the 47-year history of NUGS.

We are hopeful that there is more for him to contribute to the Ghanaian people and the coming years offer enough avenue for him to contribute his quota in the development and governance of Ghana. NUGS wishes him well.

NUGS through this medium also calls on Government to relinquish the burden imposed on students by the recent rise in utility prices and also water especially at the time that the economy seems to be in a bad shape. We therefore endorse the demonstration of the Progressive Peoples Party (PPP) to drum home the demand in cutting these unfavorable prices hikes.

Signed

Andrews Kofi Gyan (NUGS President)

Louisa Atta-Agyemang (NUGS General Secretary)

NPP In Biggest Panic Mode

NPP Chairman Jake Okanta Obetsebi Lamptey

By Margaret Jackson

Ever since the NPP lost the bogus Supreme Court petition case on August 29, nothing has been the same for the party which hitherto was able to whip every member to the line to signify a shaky unity within the party.

For the past one month Ghanaians have witnessed the changing scenes that daily continue to emerge from the NPP quarters which many of their members and some political pundits fear will implode into serious consequences if not managed well.

Now it seems to be an open free for all fight as everybody who thinks has a stake in the NPP is saying one thing or the other. As a result, we daily hear new things emerging which continue to tear the NPP apart. 

Suddenly, the centre of the NPP can no longer hold as the shaky unity within the party continues to turn in a widening gyre or circle.

In order for the current leadership of the party to consolidate their stranglehold on the NPP and not to be swept by the rushing storm blowing within the NPP, they have come out with a bogus rushed arrangement that is meant to return Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as the 2016 Flagbearer of the NPP.

Like it or not whoever controls delegates of any party in Ghana stands a 90% chance of being elected the flagbearer of the party. That is why even though many NPP folks did not like Akufo-Addo that much, he easily won the flagbearership race to contest the 2012 Presidential Election which he eventually lost out to President John Mahama.

Nana Akufo-Addo’s delegates are still in place. They have not gone anywhere. That is why the NPP leadership have floated and accepted in principle an arrangement to conduct the flagbearership race first before the delegates. The reason is simple; to get the current delegates “controlled” by Nana Akufo-Addo to return him as their Presidential Candidate for 2016.

If you hear people like Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie, NPP’s General Secretary saying that Nana Akufo-Addo will be their candidate if even he is in a wheelchair, then you better read between the lines.

If the NPP delegates’ elections are not held first, no NPP candidate can beat Nana Akufo-Addo if he decides to run for the 2016 flagbearership. The calculated move to get the flagbearership elections done first is to save the current crop of executives of the NPP from being axed from their positions.

If the arrangement holds and the flagbearership election is held first and Akufo-Addo wins, there will definitely be tail-coating with those on his side winning positions they will contest for.

The NPP is now in its biggest panic mode with all sorts of scenarios being floated around. The party which has thrived on lies for so long is indeed in panic and do not know how to handle it.

The NPP is in no mood to conduct any post-mortem analysis to determine why they have lost two elections in a row, but is bent on just doing anything to sweep their dirt under the carpet. The fight for positions and fame seems to be the driving force.

Remembering Kofi Awoonor: Humanity and Against

Professor Kofi Awoonor

By Wole Soyinka

I am certain there are others who, like me, received invitations to the recent edition of the Storymoja/Hay Literature Festival in Nairobi, but could not attend. My absence was particularly regrettable, because I had planned to make up for my failure to turn up for the immediate prior edition. Participant or absentee however, this is one edition we shall not soon forget.

It was at least two days after the listing of Kofi Awoonor among the victims that I even recollected the fact that the Festival was ongoing at that very time. With that realization came another:  that Kofi and I could have been splitting a bottle at that same watering hole in between events and at the end of each day. My feelings, I wish to state clearly, did not undergo any changes.

The emotions of rage, hate and contempt remained on the same qualitative and quantitative levels. Those are the feelings I have retained since the Boko Haram onslaught overtook the northern part of our nation. I expect them to remain at the same level until I draw my last breath, hopefully in peaceful circumstances like Chinua Achebe, or else violently like Kofi. As becomes daily clarified in contemporary existence, none of us has much control over these matters.

Two earlier commitments were responsible for my inability to attend the Festival. One was a public conversation with a very brave individual, Karima Bennoune, an Algerian national, whose trenchant publication – YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE – is of harrowing pertinence to the events of Nairobi, a pertinence that continues to ravage our, and other nations. The other preventive factor was the annual conference of International Investigators in Tunis, doing battle with the monster of Corruption. The link of the former event is obvious enough, but if you think the latter has no relevance to what has happened in Nairobi, or is taking place in the northern part of this nation, permit me to correct you.

Yes, we all know of material corruption, we confront it all the time. Tragically neglected however is what we should learn to designate as spiritual corruption. Those who organized and carried out the outrage on innocent lives in Nairobi are carriers of the most lethal virus of corruption imaginable – corruption of the soul, corruption of the spirit, corruption of that animating humanistic essence that separates us from predatory beasts.

I am no theologian of any religion, but I aver that these assailants delude themselves with vistas of paradise after life, that their delusion is born of the perverted reading of salvation and redemption. Those who attempt to divide the world into two irreconciliable parts – believers against the rest – are human aberrations. As for their claims to faith, they invoke divine authority solely as a hypocritical cover for innate psychopathic tendencies. Their deeds and utterances profane the very name of God or Allah.

Let us however abandon theology and simply designate them enemies of humanity, leaving a very real question that the rest of us must resolve – whether this breed even belongs to the human race, or should be seen as a mutant sub-species that require both moral and scientific definitions. We cannot continue to pretend that those who have set their sight against that enabling spark that we call creativity, those who arrogate to themselves the right to dispose of innocent lives at will, belong within the same moral universe to which you and I belong. Without a moral universe, humanity exists in limbo.

Not since Apartheid has our humanity been so intensely and persistently challenged and stressed on this continent. History repeats, or more accurately re-asserts itself, as a murdering minority pronounce themselves a superior class of beings to all others, assume powers to decide the mode of existence of others, of association, decide who shall live and who shall die, who shall shake hands with whom even as daily colleagues, who shall dictate and who shall submit.

The cloak of Religion is a tattered alibi, the real issue – as always – being Power and Submission, with the instrumentality of Terror. Let us objectively assess the true nature of the dominion that they seek to establish in place of the present ‘dens of sin and damnation, of impurity and decadence’ in which the rest of us supposedly live. We do not need to seek far, the models are close by – they will be found in contested Somalia. In now liberated Mali.

Fitfully in Mauritania. In those turbid years of enchained Algeria, and her yet unconsolidated business of secularism. Theirs is the dominion of exclusion. Of irrationality and restraints on daily existence. A loathing of creativity and plurality. It is the dominion of Apartheid by gender.

Of the demonization of difference. It is the dominion of Fear. Let us determine that, on this continent, we shall not accept that, after victory over race as card of citizen validation, Religion is entered and established as substitute on the passport, not only for citizen recognition, but even to entitlement to residence on earth.

After the deadly calling card of these primitives, the rest of the Nairobi Festival was cancelled. Understandably, but sadly. 

I have however written to the organizers not to even bother to renew my invitation for next year’s edition – life permitting, I shall be there. We must all be there. And we must learn to smother loss in advance, not just for that Festival but for all Festivals of Life and Creativity wherever in the world.  Resolve that, no matter the tragic intervention, such events must run their course. Let us accept, quite simply, that a force of violent degeneracy has declared war on humanity. Thus, we are fated to be ever present on the battlefield until that war is over.

I submit that we were all present at that concourse of humanity in Nairobi. We were present by the side of every maimed and fallen victim, among who was a distinguished one of us, one of the very best that have defined us to the world. We were present in Mali even before this nation, to her credit, joined in stemming the tide of religious atavism and human retrogression. We were beside the students of Kaduna, Plateau, Borno, the school children of Yobe, the mangled okada riders and petty traders of Kano, beside all those who have been routinely slaughtered for so many years past in this very nation.

In Nairobi’s hub of commerce we were present, confronted yet again with that same diabolical test that was applied to school pupils in Kano many years ago, where those who failed to recite the indicated verse of the koran were classified as infidels, and led away to have their throats serially slit. We have been present at the travails of Algeria, recorded for posterity by that lady Karima Bennoune  in YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE. We were beside Tahar Djaout, author of THE LAST SEASON OF UNREASON, cut down also by religious fanatics. We are the mere survivors who continually ask, when will this stop? Where will this end?

The ones who echo Karima and that miraculous survivor Malala in declaiming – No indeed, your fatwa can never apply here. We have been beside the children of Cherchyna in the Soviet Union, innocents who, taken hostage, were reduced to drinking their own urine, then deliberately gunned down as they made their way out of a school gymnasium that had turned into an inferno. We continue to remain beside all who have fallen to the blight of bigotry, religious solipsism and spiritual toxicity. We shall continue to stand beside them, denouncing, condemning, but most critically, urging on all who can to anticipate, stem, and ultimately eliminate the tide of religious tyranny. We have taken the side of Humanity against those who are against.

At this very time of the latest outrage, the world body, known as the United Nations Organization was actually convened in General Assembly. We must instigate  that body to evolve, through just, principled, but severe and uncompromising action, into a United Humanity Organisation, that is, thinking not simply ‘nation’, but acting ‘humanity’.

It means going beyond pietisms such as – this or that is a religion of peace, but obliging its members to act aggressively in neutralizing those whose acts pronounce the contrary, so that Humanity is placed as the first and last principle of nation existence and global cohabitation. The true divide is not between believers and unbelievers, but between those who violate the right of others to believe, or not believe.

Memories that span fifty or more years are difficult to distill into a few words. Suffice it to stress for now that Kofi Awoonor was a passionate African, that is, he gave primacy of place to values derived from his Ewe heritage.  That, in turn, means that he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of ecumenism towards other systems of belief and cultural usages – this being the scriptural ethos that permeates belief practices of most of this continent. We mourn our colleague and brother, but first we denounce his killers, the virulent sub-species of humanity who bathe their hands in innocent blood. Only cowards turn deadly weapons against the unarmed, only the depraved glorify in, or justify the act.

True warriors do not wage wars against the innocent. Profanity is the name given to the defilement of the sanctity of human life. We call on those who claim to exercise the authority of a fatwa to pronounce that very doom, with all its moral weight, upon those who engage in this serial violation of the right to life, life as a god-given possession that only the blasphemous dare contradict, and the godless wantonly curtail. This scalp that they have added to their collection was roof to a unique brain that a million of their kind can never replace.

A few months ago, in New York, on a joint platform of the United Nations and UNESCO, I entered an urgent plea into the proceedings of that International Conference on the Culture of Peace: Take Back Mali!, I urged.  At home, I impressed that urgent necessity on our own government. I know that Kofi Awoonor, poet, diplomat and democrat, would approve my commendation – in this specific respect at least – of the action of our and other ECOWAS governments – albeit after France had taken the critical lead – in taking back Mali. I especially applaud the outgoing Foreign Affairs Ambassador Gbenga Ashiru, who hearkened to that imperative of speedy intervention and urged it with vigour and urgency on the African Union.

We salute the courage and sacrifices of the soldiers who reversed the agenda of the interlopers – al Queda and  company – with their arrogant designs on those freedoms that define who we are in this region, and on the continent itself. Safeguarding freedoms, alas, goes beyond even the most intense passion and will of the poetic Muse, and we must never shy away from acknowledging this cruel reality.

Those who believe that a tepid, accomodative approach to fundamentalist rampage can generate peace and human dignity should study – as I have often urged – the experience of Algeria, captured with such chilling diligence in Karima Bennoune’s work. The cost of ‘taking back Algeria’ is one that will be reckoned in human deficit – and unbelievable courage – for generations to come. Today, I urge all forces of progress to – Take Back Africa! Rescue her from the forces of darkness that seek to inaugurate a new regimen of religious despotism, ruthless beyond what our people have known even under the imperial will of Europe.

These butchers continue to evoke the mandate of Islam, thus, we exhort our moslem brother and sister colleagues:  Take back Islam. Take back that Islam which, even where it poses contradictions, declares itself one with the Culture of Learning, one that honours its followers as People of the Book, historic proponents of the virtues of intellect and its products. There is no religion without contradictions – it is the primacy of human dignity and solidarity that serves as arbiter.  We call upon the fastidious warrior class of the intellect, steeped in a creative contempt and defiance of enemies of the humanistic pursuit.

We speak here of that Islam that inspires solidarity with the Naguib Mafouzes of our trade, with the Tahar Djaouts, with the Karimas and the Mariama Bas, not the diabolism of al Shabbab, Boko Haram and their degenerate ilk. Let us join hands with the former, and enshrine their mission as the history prescribed destination of our creative urge. What Nairobi teaches – and not just this recently – is that there is no place called Elsewhere. 

Elsewhere has always been right here with us, and in the present. I urge upon you this mandate: seize back your Islam and thus, take back our continent and, in that restorative undertaking – take back our humanity.

Professor Soyinka delivered this tribute today at a gathering of Nigerian writers at the Freedom Park, Broad Street, Lagos.

Ban Ki-moon acts like USA's puppet?

Ban Ki Moon

By Lyuba Lulko

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of commitment to a strategy of war against Syria. The reason behind this statement was the presentation of the report of the UN Commission on the use of chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21. A clear tendency to lean towards pushing the Western position is typical of Ban Ki-moon, but other people are not chosen for such positions.

Maduro said at a rally in the state of Miranda that Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, acted as a prosecutor and the world judge, and was in the service of a military strategy rather than peace,Franse Presse quoted his words.

The UN Secretary General's  statement accompanying the report has caused controversy. On Monday, September 16, Ban Ki-moon announced the conclusion of UN experts that on August 21 near Damascus a sarin gas attack took place. The experts did not identify the perpetrators, as this was not part of the investigation, the Secretary General said and showed the world the cover of the document depicting fragments of a Soviet missile that allegedly delivered the sarin.

The Secretary General has determined who was guilty in the attack before the presentation, saying a week earlier that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad committed a crime against humanity. At the end of the report (to be published on September 24), he urged the UN to support the Russian- American plan for Syria by adopting a clear resolution and said that the failure to implement the plan will cause consequences under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, allowing the use of force. Without naming the perpetrators directly, Pan has done everything to ensure that no one had any doubts that he shared the insinuations of the West, and his commission was not impartial.

The adviser of the U.S. President for National Security Susan Rice said that the report of the UN inspectors confirmed that chemical weapons near Damascus on August 21 were used by the Syrian government forces. The ambassador to the UN from the United Kingdom Layel Mark Grant said that this confirmed the opinion that the regime used chemical weapons.  

According to the President of Venezuela, the United States and its allies have changed their tactics and now want to justify the attack on Syria with the Report of the United Nations, while simultaneously preparing an attack on Syria from Turkey. Maduro likely meant that on the same day, September 16, the Turkish army shot down a Syrian helicopter that allegedly violated its airspace. Maduro said that the West wanted to align the two events, the publication of the report of the UN and the war against Syria by Turkey, which would oblige NATO to intervene.

On September 17 there was an explosion at the Turkish-Syrian border that killed seven people and injured 25. "The use of force against Syria is legitimate only in the case of self-defense in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations or in the case of its approval by the Security Council, said the Secretary General. His "or" suggests that if Syria "attacks" Turkey, the Secretary General will not object to "self-defense" by the NATO forces. Maduro is not too far from the truth.

The statements by Secretary General raise other questions. For example, why Ban Ki-moon has not granted his commission the authority of find the perpetrators? Could it be that in this case the Assad government will not be called guilty? This has already been said many times by Russian experts who submitted to the UN a report on the chemical attack carried out in the spring near Aleppo. The conclusion was clear that it was the opposition who used chemical weapons.

Ban Ki-moon is extremely two-faced. After the successful completion of negotiations for the destruction of the Syrian chemical arsenals, the West has temporarily eliminated the need for an immediate military strike, and got the opportunity to send "scouts" to Syria. The Secretary General immediately issued a statement that the commission will return to Syria and visit Aleppo for an inspection.

While condemning the Syrian government, the Secretary General does not condemn the government of Israel that bombed the Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian territories at its whim, killing innocent people. Where is the condemnation of the massacre of Kurds in the north of Syria by militants? There was none. Issuing the mandate to the UN, the Secretary General did not care how this mandate will be carried out.

Did the UN issue a sanction for the NATO bombing in Libya? No, there was only a sanction for providing an "air corridor." Again, there was no response to a gross violation of the mandate. This obvious tendency to support the West is common to all the latest UN secretaries, and it is likely that other types are not chosen.

Yesterday Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov expressed his concern with the preconceived conclusions of the commission. "We are disappointed, to say the least, by the approach shown by the UN Secretariat and the UN inspectors who were in Syria. They prepared the report without collecting materials from the other three episodes, selectively and not in full, without regard to the circumstances we have repeatedly pointed out. The Syrian side urged them to do so, and so did we,"Ryabkov told RIA Novosti.

"Without a complete picture of what's going on here, the findings arrived at by the UN experts led by Ake Selstrom cannot be called anything but politicized, biased and one-sided," Ryabkov added. With regard to this report the immediate tactical goal of the U.S. and its allies is obvious - to promote a draft resolution on Syria of the UN Security Council with strong language and a threat of using force against Damascus.

CIA Boss John Brennan

Soldiers and Spies
By Shane Harris

It's instructive to linger over the scene-setting, thematic quotations that book authors choose to open their stories. It tells you something about where the tale is going. And where the author is coming from.

Mark Mazzetti, a national security correspondent for the New York Times, opens his new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, with a passage from John Le Carr’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

"Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren't gradual and they weren't gentle either..."

Jeremy Scahill, a national security correspondent for The Nation magazine and the author of a previous book about the military contractor Blackwater, begins his new book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield with an observation from Voltaire:

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

These are ominous openings. They signal that the story you're about to read wrestles with the darkest aspects of our human nature. What turns men into killers? What drives them from "gentleness" to savagery? How should we judge them for that?

They also tell you that each writer, who has been widely praised for the strength of his journalism, is after something more substantial here. Maybe even novelistic. You don't invoke Le Carr’s and Voltaire without a hefty dose of ambition. Fortunately for Mazzetti and Scahill, their gambles largely pay off.

Taken together -- and if you have the time, you really should read these books as companions -- The Way of the Knife and Dirty Wars are among the most comprehensive and soul-searching histories of the now 12-year-old 'Global War on Terrorism.' The authors are covering the same ground, the same organizations, and frequently the same people. Each book examines how the Central Intelligence Agency and the Special Operations forces of the military took leading roles in the terror war and were fundamentally changed by it.

In broad strokes, the CIA turned from an espionage agency steeped in the intrigue of Cold War spying into a global hit squad, killing terrorists in the most unforgiving reaches of the globe with its 21st Century weapon of choice, a remotely-piloted aircraft armed with air-to-ground missiles. The military has always been in the killing business, but the war on terror turned soldiers into spies, made them collectors of intelligence, jailors and interrogators, and deposited them in a world of covert affairs and skullduggery for which they'd never been trained.

Neither the CIA nor the special operators chose this war, which, from the beginning, knew no borders. Soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Scahill writes, "[Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld wanted plans drawn up to hit Somalia, Yemen, Latin America, Mauritania, Indonesia and beyond. ...The world is a battlefield -- that was the mantra."

It didn't matter if the host governments of these nations invited American forces to clean up the dens of terrorist and fundamentalists, or their loose network of "supporters." The United States would find its authority through congressionally-enacted authorizations of force, secretive military and intelligence directives, and a broadly articulated doctrine of self-defense. The CIA and the special operators would be on point, and there was no peace in sight.

Practically from the beginning, it was clear that while the two forces might be after the same enemy, they weren't fighting as partners. "By early 2002, Afghanistan was neither a daily shooting war nor a hopeful peace but a twilight conflict beset by competition and mistrust between soldiers and spies," Mazzetti writes. Navy SEALs and Marines spent eight days digging up graves in a fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, whom intelligence wrongly indicated might have been killed in a recent air strike. In a far costlier communication breakdown, Green Berets shot up a compound they thought was filled with Taliban gunmen. After they'd killed more than 40 fighters and returned to base, they discovered that days earlier the CIA had convinced the men to switch sides and fight with the Americans. The Green Berets never got the message.

The two sides were institutionally at odds. Mazzetti and Scahill chronicle the military's effort to set up its own human spying networks in various countries, behind the backs of CIA station chiefs. There were predictable clashes, and much head-butting and chest-thumping, as the lines between the two sides started to blur, and at times neither was sure which business they should really be in.

The spies and the soldiers were like pubescent teenagers, clumsily responding to the rapid and explosive changes to life as they knew it. On these accounts, the authors agree. But it's when they look for the reasons behind these cultural shifts, and the motivations of the spies and the soldiers and the higher-ups pulling their respective strings, that their stories diverge.

In Mazzetti's account, which is the more empathetic, the responses of the CIA and the military seem biological, a set of almost organic responses to a changing environment. About the CIA's decision to start killing suspected terrorists outside internationally recognized war zones, he writes that "each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation program pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation: that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects." The CIA was run mostly by men who, like Le Carr’s aging spymaster Control, seemed utterly unprepared for the new war, and fought at every turn to preserve the agency to which they'd devoted their careers and pledged their lives. The CIA saw targeted killing with drones as "cleaner, less personal" than detention and interrogation. Killing was new business, to be sure, but doing it at a distance, and with deniability, echoed the old ways. Institutional preservation was their guiding instinct.

In Scahill's story, which is generally more concerned with the military's side of the tale, the transformation of special operations into a global "assassination machine" seems largely engineered by the government's most powerful men, particularly Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, who used the crisis of terrorism to create private, "unaccountable" armies. Scahill sees leaders who had a moral choice and took a dark path, because it freed them from the moorings of the Constitution and reset the balance in the separation of powers decidedly in favor of the President. For him, the special operators become a private death squad, answering only to their commander-in-chief, not the Congress, not the public. The response to crisis wasn't about self-preservation, but seizing an opportunity to reengineer power in government.

Again, the authors' choice of opening quotations is instructive. Mazzetti approaches the story with the fascinated, occasionally even cold remove of a newspaper reporter who is drawn to the cultural shifts in the spy game. It's their mindset, how they slowly learned "the way of the knife," that most intrigues him. He's drawn to the humanity of killing, and how it twists people, as evidenced by his choice to close the story, in cinematic fashion, on a face-to-face meeting with an Dewey Clarridge, a complicated and deeply flawed old Cold Warrior-turned-terrorist-hunter who represents as well as any single man the uneven evolution of the CIA.

Scahill, by comparison, is a moralist. He is a journalist in the tradition of the ink-stained wretch, throwing rocks at the castle walls from the outside. Bill Moyers has called him "a one-man truth squad." Scahill inserts himself at times into the narrative (the book has photographs of him reporting in the field, and he is the subject of a new documentary film about his work), but he's not writing in the first-person for the sake of glory. When he asks, on the final pages, "How does a war like this ever end?" he does so with a personal stake. Like his subjects, Scahill has traveled to the frontlines of the dirty wars, and one gets the distinct impression he'd like to come home. 

It's these subjective, stylistic differences that make the books such a palpable pair. The subject is the same, but the history is written through different lenses. The final results, however, are equally illuminating.

The books are also especially timely. Right now, the spies and the soldiers find themselves at a turning point. The armed forces are unwinding from a decade of war and relentless counterterrorism operations. The new Director of the CIA, John Brennan, himself a career intelligence officer who was schooled in the Cold War, has said he wants to emphasize the agency's traditional work in espionage and bring the days of killing to an end.

The soldiers and the spies want to return to their old ways. They may succeed, but only if they haven't lost them.

Reccep Erdogan, Turkey President

Turkey: Prosperity for a Few, Hardship for Many
By Dorian Jones

Having tripled the size of its economy over the past decade, Turkey is invariably held up as an economic success story. But behind this outward tale of success lies a much darker backstory, one featuring a deepening income gap and crimped workers rights.

In 2012, the Ministry of Family and Social Rights revealed that nearly 40 percent of Turkey’s population of over 75.6 million lives at or below the monthly minimum wage of 773 liras, or about $415.19. A further 6.4 percent live below the designated hunger line of 430 liras ($237.95).

At the same time, 63 percent of the country’s bank deposits belong to a mere one-half of a percent of all account holders, according to Turkey’s financial watchdog, the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency.

Such disparity is causing concern even among government supporters. There is [a] big social gap between rich and poor. Poverty is getting deeper every day, warned Akif Emre, an influential columnist for the pro-government newspaper Yeni Safak.

Many members of the country’s labor unions say they are reaping the consequences. Prices are going up every day, the cost of living is becoming very expensive and workers are in no position to demand extra pay, claimed the United Metal Workers Union’s international relations head, Özer.

So, what they have to do is work longer and longer hours, Özer said. It is not even considered overtime anymore.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s Better Life Index, an annual evaluation of 34 countries well-being, reported that 46 percent of Turkish employees work very long hours (an undefined timeframe), compared to the OECD average of 9 percent.

Turkey scored a zero for the balance between time devoted to work and other activities. It also ranked at the bottom in categories such as income and employment.

Set against annual inflation of 7 percent, monthly incomes in Turkey average the lira-equivalent of $1,100, according to official data. With economic growth now on the slide the OECD predicts 3.1 percent for 2013 the average could decline.

Those wishing to improve working conditions have few options. While the economy has boomed, organized labor has suffered. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, labor union membership has fallen from 9.5 percent of the country’s workforce of 28.9 million to 5.9 percent.

The unions never recovered from Turkey’s 1980 military coup, which, along with jailing of thousands of labor activists, saw draconian laws introduced to curtail their influence.

Under pressure from the European Union, which Turkey is ostensibly still seeking to join, the government reformed its union laws in 2004. A ban on state workers joining a union was lifted, and a requirement was dropped that prospective union members have a state notary certify their intention.

But many restrictions on union activity remain firmly in place. Most worryingly for organizers, anti-terror laws continue to be used against their union members. Last year, the number of labor unionists in prison was about 67, said Emma Sinclair Webb, the Turkey researcher for the New-York-based Human Rights Watch.

 In all of these kind of operations, when you go after labor unionists as terrorists, although you have no evidence of them committing violent activities or inciting violence, it essentially has a chilling effect for the workforce more widely, Sinclair Webb said.

Clearly, the situation is getting worse, agreed Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Labor Union Confederation (ITUC). Workers can’t operate openly, they can't hold a public assembly, and major companies can use laws against workers to choose which unions operate.

Burrow experienced firsthand another growing concern of labor unions -- crackdowns by security forces on protests. Police use of tear gas and water cannons to repel May Day celebrants from Istanbul’s central Taksim Square was an extraordinary, shocking event, she said.

The government insisted that construction made the square unsafe for such a large gathering, yet a few days later, thousands of soccer fans gathered at the site to celebrate a local team’s win of the national championship.

Burrow said that the ITUC, which claims to represent 175 million workers worldwide, has appealed to Labor and Social Security Minister Faruk Celik to implement reforms, and asked the International Labor Organization to mediate between the government and Turkish unions.

The Ministries of Justice and Labor did not respond to requests for comment. The government generally argues that a business-friendly environment is a main factor behind the country’s recent economic success.

International scrutiny of Turkey’s treatment of unions could be set to grow. The EU is voicing concern over trade union conditions. Turkey’s 1995 customs union with the European Union prompted many major international companies to set up operations in Turkey, but some of those firms French car manufacturer Renault and German electronics giant Bosch, in particular -- are increasingly embroiled in conflicts with unions.

More could still be to come.

In 2015, the country will host the G-20 summit of leaders of the world’s 20-most powerful economies. G-20 events inevitably attract controversy, and Turkey, given its imprisonment of union members and restrictive union laws, will be no exception, commentators predict.

Memorial Day: A universal one for everybody

By Jim W. Dean

America celebrates another Memorial Day with our country engaged in another undeclared war where we are allied with religious terrorists in some yet unspecified defense of American interests.

It sounds so stupid I am almost too embarrassed to write it, but the truth must be faced or there is no hope.

An outrageous fraud is being perpetrated on the American people by both the Obama administration and our media. Their attempts to distance themselves from the al-Nursa and Salafist/Wahabi terrorists who along with the West have been trying to overthrow the Assad government, are frankly pitiful. Everybody knows that America's proxies in the [Persian] Gulf are arming and paying these people and there has been no US public denunciation of their doing so, hence it has our government's stamp of approval by default.

As the short sighted Soviet-Afghan-American-Saudi Arabian war served as the birthing ground for a generational wave of insurgencies from people who had never been a threat to either America or the West, we now watch the same slow motion train wreck taking place in Syria.

Zbigniew Brzezinski still insists (“I would do it all over”) that the loss of one million Afghan lives on top of the Soviet's 15,000 was worth it to have prevented the Soviets coming into Europe. But there is just one little problem with that convenient analysis.

e know in retrospect that the Soviets were already on the verge of collapse having drained their economy into war production focusing on quantity over quality. Europe was never really under the Soviet gun. And 15,000 KIA's was a drop in the bucket for the Soviet Army at the time.

Despite the Soviet-Afghan War having planted the seeds that became the replacement for a new Cold War, Brzezinski cannot bring himself to admit that his grand strategy was a disaster not only for America but for the whole region. Without the current shadow of war across the region its energy resources could have been developed at a fraction of what has been wasted in the wars.

The inflated prices for energy, unprecedented in a worldwide recession, have diverted the only major source of consumer spending which could have stimulated more job creation and economic growth. Somehow this most obvious economic fact seems to have gone over the heads of most of humanity.

How could they miss the connection of the orchestrated war threats and robbing us at gunpoint by a gang that combines international gangsters with Western governments that seem more and more to be proxies for them when it used to be the other way around?

Why am I discussing this on America's Memorial Day? Well, while it's nice to see loyal Americans do their good deed by marching out to their favorite cemetery or ceremony to honor our fallen dead. But when they come back home and then do nothing to oppose the co-option of not only our military to serve foreign interests but also our national treasury, they have just betrayed their trip to the cemetery.

When they roll over and play dead to the gangsters mentioned above, I can assure them that those in the graveyards are not happy with what they would call a dereliction of duty. And for any of them thinking that my column today is totally bizarre I must refer them to the oath that we take to defend America, ”from all enemies, foreign and domestic,”...the word 'domestic' was put in there for a very good reason.

We just had a presidential election not too along where we had a candidate who was the selection of the international crime syndicate, and his name was not Obama. Our own Supreme Court had opened the doors to these hoodlums pouring money into US presidential campaigns through foreign corporations. With a closely split American vote, international criminals now had a shot at being the king-makers.

Our Intelligence sources told us that Romney had actually solicited contributions from these hoodlums and they were flying into his overseas fundraisers in Israel and London. We know this, as international hoodlums are constantly under surveillance in their travels by tracking the tail numbers on their corporate owned or leased jets.

No matter what they try to do to disguise their movements; the data mining technology that exists today can quickly dig down to who organized the trip and who all is aboard. And when they all conglomerated in one place...like a presidential fundraiser, well...it was a bit embarrassing. It was also unprecedented and considered a national security threat. Corporate media missed the whole story.

There has always been corruption in politics, but this was on a scale that no one had ever seen before. The red alerts went out not only throughout the US Intelligence community but others around the world with the common interest being that if America was being run by hoodlums then what chance did anyone else have to not be.

The Cubans even pitched in about Romney's secret trips to Cuba, his Cuban/Russian mistress there, and the money laundering operation that Bain and company had safely run through there for the drug cartels. Romney and former President of Mexico Carlos Salinas were at Harvard together.

We learned that Salinas' father had organized the drug cartels so they could be 'taxed' via payoffs, and that one of the main goals of NAFTA was to be able to launder huge amounts of drug money by building all the Mexican production plants there that sold into the US market for clean dollars. It solved the problem of washing billions of dollars year after year.

This is not what our graveyards full of soldiers fought for, but it is what we have. And we dishonor their sacrifice for every year, every day we allow this scandalous situation to continue with hardly a whimper. So I stayed home today to write this commentary instead of my traditional ceremony attendance where I usually video.

I have a personal interest, also. My family has experienced war intimately going back to my Revolutionary War ancestor, Private Joseph Culppeper who fought the British, for freedom yes....but also the land grant that he received with it was over in Georgia. His sons begat sons who fought for the Confederates State Army against the Yankees...with 18 grandsons and relations just in Company C of the 40th Alabama Infantry and other units. They died at Vicksburg, Kings Mountain, Reseca, and one at Camp Point Lookout as a PoW.

Today my soon to be 86 year old mother will usually get her three veterans flags out and cry most of the day, two husband and one son. Her flag collection began as a WWII widow at age sixteen, having only been married a few months. Her husband, Staff Sergeant Leon Miller went down on the SS Paul Hamilton in the Mediterranean with all aboard, the largest loss of life on a Liberty ship in WWII.

The War Department brass had decided to make troop ships out of ammunition ships for more efficient shipping logistics. So when the SS Paul Hamilton's convoy was attacked at dusk on April 20th, 1944, off the coast of Algiers by German torpedo bombers, the first torpedo struck the Hamilton. With it's 7000 tons of explosives and 580 mean aboard it went up like an atomic bomb, rolling nearby ships over onto their sides from the shock wave. Only two bodies were ever found.

When she was eighteen she married my father, the dashing fighter pilot. He was a trainer in close formation combat tactics which I learned may years after he died had a much higher death rate than combat pilots due to mid air collisions.

I knew he had been in one of those so I made an attempt to locate the other pilot. I discovered he had been a recent West Point graduate going up on his first day check out flight. When my father and he shook hands before taking off neither knew that in fifteen minutes they would both be hurtling toward the ground in flaming P-40s after crashing into each other during a maneuver.

The West Point pilot never got out and he became one of the most unknowns of all, those who die in combat training accidents. His name was Lt. Paul Bradshaw, and from an interview with a classmate who had been at the Deridder, La, airfield with him, I learned he was an excellent pilot. He just made one mistake.

My older brother had been a retired Army Ranger Colonel. He had done a tour in Vietnam, but that came back to haunt him when he died while on Agent Orange disability. When we buried him in Arlington in April of 2005 on a Thursday, mother and I had arranged to have a ceremony for Sgt. Miller the following day.

Arlington has a small area for stones where nobodies were recovered, using hillsides which would normally have been left vacant. Mother having been a Daughter of the American Revolution gave her some priority for getting a spot as the DAR had donated some of the land for Arlington many years ago.

Only she and I attended. The Honor Guard had never done an empty grave ceremony before. It blew their minds that we were finally able to have this done 61 years after he was killed. The ceremony is a bit of a backwards one. They start with a folded flag, unfold, and have the ceremony, and then a traditional refold.

Mother was a walking shell that day. She may be the only one to have done two Arlington ceremonies back to back. Fortunately I had my new TV camera, using it the first time to get the archive footage which she was able to see afterward. But reliving it was also tough. Such archives are a blessing and a course.

So I will close with a wish and a prayer to all, that if we really wish to honor our war dead will will do more to stop the killing. But if some must go on, and the trail of bodies continues to the cemeteries of the world, we must strive to see that they are those who were responsible for bringing it on.

Some may think this is harsh, but when we no longer have such people among us...that might be the only way it will ever stop. It is a fair price to pay, and with the right blood.

 I had the sad duty this morning to add another name to Veterans Today's In Memoriam list, that of Yarra Abbas, Syrian TV journalist, KIA, Memorial Day - 2013, covering a battle near al-Daba airport, al-Qusayr, Syria. Our prayers and condolences are with his family and the 100,000 others who mourn this day. May we one day, instead of sharing grief, share victory over the evil forces among us...God willing.