The Killing of Paul Klebnikov

MOSNEWS
http://www.mosnews.com/mn-files/klebnikov.shtml#news

Born in New York in 1963 to a family of Russian immigrants, Paul Klebnikov graduated from California University, Berkley and the London School of Economics, completing his doctorate in 1991. Klebnikov started working for Forbes Magazine in 1989. Promoted to senior editor, Klebnikov was an expert on Russian and East European politics and economics. His special field of interest was conducting investigations into the origins of wealth of the so-called oligarchs and their possible ties to the Russian mafia.

In 1996 he wrote an article in Forbes calling exiled Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and suggesting that the tycoon — who made his fortune during Russia’s controversial privatisation programme in the 1990s — might have been implicated in the murder of a well-known TV anchorman and had links with Chechen organized crime groups.

Berezovsky sued the magazine for defamation, after which Forbes admitted in open court that the allegations were unfounded and Berezovsky withdrew his suit. During the proceedings, however, Klebnikov published an equally controversial book, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia in which he asserted that Berezovsky had also channelled hundreds of millions of dollars out of Russia.

Klebnikov’s second book, Conversation With a Barbarian, written in Russian and published in 2003, was based on a series of interviews with Chechen separatist leader Khozh Akhmed Nukhayev and dealt, among other subjects, with organized crime in Russia’s ongoing war in Chechnya.

Paul Klebnikov became the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Forbes in April 2004. In May, the magazine published a list of the 100 wealthiest people in Russia, many of whom said they were unhappy about the publication.

While in charge of the new Russian Forbes, Klebnikov was also undertaking certain independent investigations that he did not speak of, Russian online news service Gazeta.ru reported, citing the source from Forbes.

On Friday night, July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov was shot several times as he was leaving his office building in Moscow. He died while in an ambulance en route to the hospital.

Pronouncing Blame on the Israel Lobby

by Dana Milbank
WASHINGTON POST

It was quite a boner.

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer was in town yesterday to elaborate on his view that American Jewish groups are responsible for the war in Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and many other bad things. As evidence, he cited the influence pro-Israel groups have on "John Boner, the House majority leader."

Actually, Professor, it's "BAY-ner." But Mearsheimer quickly dispensed with Boehner (R-Ohio) and moved on to Jewish groups' nefarious sway over Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who Mearsheimer called " Von Hollen."

Such gaffes would be trivial -- if Mearsheimer weren't claiming to be an authority on Washington and how power is wielded here. But Mearsheimer, with co-author Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School, set off a furious debate this spring when they argued that "the Israel lobby" is exerting undue influence in Washington; opponents called them anti-Semitic.

Yesterday, at the invitation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), they held a forum at the National Press Club to expand on their allegations about the Israel lobby. Blurring the line between academics and activism, they accepted a button proclaiming "Fight the Israel Lobby" and won cheers from the Muslim group for their denunciation of Israel and its friends in the United States.

Whatever motivated the performance, the result wasn't exactly scholarly.

Walt singled out two Jews who worked at the Pentagon for their pro-Israel views. "People like Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith . . . advocate policies they think are good for Israel and the United States alike," he said. "We don't think there's anything wrong with that, but we also don't think there's anything wrong for others to point out that these individuals do have attachments that shape how they think about the Middle East."

"Attachments" sounds much better than "dual loyalties." But why single out Wolfowitz and Feith and not their non-Jewish boss, Donald Rumsfeld?

"I could have mentioned non-Jewish people like John Bolton," Walt allowed when the question was put to him.

Picking up on the "attachments" lingo, Mearsheimer did mention Bolton but cited two Jews, Elliott Abrams and David Wurmser, as "the two most influential advisers on Middle East affairs in the White House. Both, he said, are " fervent supporters of Israel." Never mind that others in the White House, such as national security adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Cheney and President Bush, have been just as fervent despite the lack of "attachments."

This line of argument could be considered a precarious one for two blue-eyed men with Germanic surnames. And, indeed, Walt seemed defensive about the charges of anti-Semitism. He cautioned that the Israel lobby "is not a cabal," that it is "not synonymous with American Jews" and that "there is nothing improper or illegitimate about its activities."

But Mearsheimer made no such distinctions as he used "Jewish activists," "major Jewish organizations" and the "Israel lobby" interchangeably. Clenching the lectern so tightly his knuckles whitened, Mearsheimer accused Israel of using the kidnapping of its soldiers by Hezbollah as a convenient excuse to attack Lebanon.

"Israel had been planning to strike at Hezbollah for months," he asserted. "Key Israelis had briefed the administration about their intentions."

A questioner asked if he had any "hard evidence" for this accusation. Mearsheimer cited the "public record" and "Israeli civilian strategists," then repeated the allegation that Israel was seeking "a cover for launching this offensive."

As evidence that the American public does not agree with the Israel lobby, the political scientist cited a USA Today-Gallup poll showing that 38 percent of Americans disapproved of Israel's military campaign. He neglected to mention that 50 percent approved, and that Americans blamed Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and Lebanon far more than Israel for the conflict.

Walt kicked off the session with a warning that we face a "threat from terrorism because we have been so closely tied to Israel." This produced chuckles in the audience. Walt allowed that this was "not the only reason" for our problems, but he did blame Israel supporters for the hands-off position the Bush administration took during the Lebanon fighting.

"The answer is the political influence of the Israel lobby," Walt said. He also hypothesized that if not for the Israel lobby, the Iraq war "would have been much less likely."

Up next, Mearsheimer ridiculed U.S. leaders for "falling all over themselves to express support for Israel." And he drew groans from the crowd when he spoke about a lawmaker who, after questioning Israel's policy, "met with various representatives from major Jewish organizations, who explained to him the basic facts of life in American politics."

When the two professors finished, they were besieged by autograph- and photo-seekers and Arab television correspondents. Walt could be heard telling one that if an American criticizes Israel, "it might have some economic consequences for your business."

Before leaving for an interview with al-Jazeera, Mearsheimer accepted a button proclaiming "Walt & Mearsheimer Rock. Fight the Israel Lobby."

"I like it," he said, beaming.

The Ordering of a Superstate

GermanForeignPolicy.com

BERLIN/MAGDEBURG
(Own report) - The medieval, Europe-wide German Reich is a valid model for the union of European countries today. So says the Berlin State Minister for Culture, Bernd Neumann. According to him, the memory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation reveals "an inner historical consistency" with the founding and steady expansion of the European Union. These remarks are a preparation for the festivities in Berlin for the fiftieth anniversary of the European Economic Community (EEC), to which the Federal Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has invited the German Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger is a committed supporter of the "Imperial Ideal" (Reichsidee) and is to speak on the "spiritual foundations" of Europe in the German capital. This government offensive to revitalise the Imperial Ideal will underline the German leadership of the EU and confirm fears in France, Great Britain and almost all the states of eastern Europe. Sections of the German elites are warning against an all-too-public assertion of German hegemony.

Great Significance
As the Berlin State Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said, the German Reich of the Middle Ages can "from today's viewpoint" serve "as a valid model of the functioning order of a superstate".[1] Neumann took this opportunity when he opened an exhibition last Sunday (27 August) which is dedicated to this supposed historical exemplar ("The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, 962 - 1806"). Because of the prominence of the exhibition (partly in the state-controlled Historical Museum in Berlin), the individual stands and total content of the exhibition are attracting remarkable public interest. The Culture Minister's intervention has strengthened the political charisma of the exhibition. He is a committed supporter of the Federal Chancellor. It touches on "every great trend (...) which makes very clear to us the inner historical legitimacy and consistency of European unification", said Neumann on Sunday. The explicit aim of the organisers is "to examine the past of Old Europe in a time of fundamental inner and external reorientation".[2] According to the organisers, they have traced "structures and developmental processes" which are "of great significance for the federal construction of Europe".

The Europe of Tomorrow
The public references to the structures of the medieval Reich which are evident in Neumann's position used to be the province of the extreme right, or confined to clerical-conservative circles - at any rate since the Second World War. This was the opinion of the CSU (Christian Social Union) politician and grandson of the Austrian Kaiser, Otto von Habsburg who made it known at the end of the Seventies that "the European integration of our times (...) follows the grand outline and principles of the Reich, which survived 1806, because they are of lasting validity".[3] Similarly, the Pan-Europa Union, an association of EU supporters close to the CSU insisted that "the eternal function of the Reich must be renewed in the Europe of tomorrow in the interest of the West".[4] Similarly, Joseph Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that the origins of today's EU should acknowledge "a common imperial ideal (Reichsidee)".[5] In recent years, conservative newspapers have opened their columns to new advocacy for the "Reich".[6]

The Papal Speech
As the Speaker of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert (CDU) has now informed us, he has invited a supporter of the imperial ideal, Joseph Ratzinger, to Berlin next year. The invitation was extended to Ratzinger last Monday by the Federal Chancellor at a reception in Castel Gandolfo. The German Pope will be in Berlin to attend the festivities for the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome and will grace the proceedings with a speech. The German press already reports that the religious consecration will validate the European Economic Community (EEC) and will be dedicated to "the spiritual foundations of Europe's political unification".[7] The invitation legitimates the "Reich" concept of a stable co-operation of Church and State. It will be a particular affront to France, a founder member of the EEC. Paris is committed to secularism and the separation of Church and State has been a principle of French public life since the revolution of 1789.

Central Europe
The Berlin Culture Minister's speech of last Sunday will also affront those European states lying to the east and south of Germany's borders. The Minister made an obvious allusion to Poland and the Czech Republic when he said that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was "a part of the past of many European states". According to Neumann "Germany and Central Europe are historically and culturally indissolubly linked together".[8] By this the State Minister recalled the earlier German hegemony to the east of Germany's present frontiers, which the Federal Republic has tried to reassert since 1990.

Fears
The reawakening of the Reich myth has run into sharp criticism. In a press interview, the historian Heinrich August Winkler pointed to the significance of the Reich myth for Nazi propaganda. According to Winkler it was decisive "that the Reich was always something else and more than a normal national state". When, in 1939, Hitler proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia over the rump of Czechoslovakia, legal historians of pan-German views confirmed that this act was quite in line with the old Imperial ideal which had always been supranational. Winkler warns of new tensions between European states. "Incantation of the Reich" would "unavoidably create fears of German demands if it became again the model for the ordering of Europe".[9] As criticism of the well-know historian Winkler has been prominently publicised for three weeks, [10] the Minister's speech can be clearly understood as an undoubtedly intentional rebuttal on behalf of German Reich propaganda.

[1] Kulturstaatsminister Bernd Neumann eröffnet Ausstellung "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation 962-1806"; Pressemitteilung des Presse- und Informationsamts der Bundesregierung 27.08.2006
[2] www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/heiliges-roemisches-reich/index_2.html
[3] Otto von Habsburg: Karl IV. Ein europäischer Friedensfürst, München/Wien 1978
[4] Monatsinformationen der Paneuropa-Union, Januar 1977
[5] see also Habemus Europam and A Son of Germany
[6] see also Reichwerdung and Heiliges Reich
[7] Lammert lädt Papst in den Bundestag ein; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 28.08.2006
[8] Kulturstaatsminister Bernd Neumann eröffnet Ausstellung "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation 962-1806"; Pressemitteilung des Presse- und Informationsamts der Bundesregierung 27.08.2006
[9], [10] "Erste Macht Europas"; Der Spiegel 32/2006

Japan to remove exhibit from war museum

by David Pilling
THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Yasukuni shrine officials have agreed to delete a controversial exhibit and discuss further changes to the shrine's military museum, criticised by many for glossing over Japan's wartime history.

Officials from the shrine will meet a leading conservative historian today to discuss the alternations. These are likely to focus on exhibits that accuse the US of deliberately forcing Japan into the second world war, but are unlikely to address more contentious displays relating to the Japanese invasion of China and south-east Asia.

However, agreement to make changes would show that Yasukuni, which has become a flashpoint in Japan's relations with Asia, is sensitive to outside pressure even though it is a private religious organisation.

The museum, which was renovated in 2002 to reflect what many consider a revisionist view of Japanesehistory, is adjacent to the shrine, which honours Japan's war dead, including a handful of convicted war criminals.

Hisahiko Okazaki, a rightwing political commentator, said museum staff and an advisory historian from Japan's self-defence force had agreed to meet him today to discuss potential changes.

The meeting follows acolumn in yesterday's Sankei newspaper, in which Mr Okazaki called for the removal of an exhibit accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt, the former US president, of engineering a war with Japan to strengthen the US economy.

The exhibit says the plan to force Japan into war followed the failure of Roosevelt's New Deal. Mr Okazaki said the shrine had agreed yesterday to delete that reference.

An official from Yasukuni shrine said there had been contact between the shrine and Mr Okazaki's office but he declined to confirm whether there would be a meeting today. It confirmed that a review of the museum's contents was under way.

Mr Okazaki, a strong supporter of prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni, said: "This is very significant. At least we can take out the thorn with the US. This kind of interpretation is unnecessary and inaccurate."

Thomas Schieffer, US ambassador to Japan, has expressed dislike of the Yasukuni museum, which he says presents a skewed and disturbing view of Japan as wartime victim.

However, the ambassador has refrained from commenting on the controversial visits to the adjacent shrine of Junichiro Koizumi, prime minister, which have inflamed opinion in China and South Korea.

Mr Okazaki said there was no need to alter other parts of the exhibit relating to Asia, even though many historians have said these dodged issues such as the Nanking massacre and the use by the imperial army of South Korean sex slaves.

He defended some of the museum's apparent glorification of war, saying curators had chosen merely to use contemporary material that naturally reflected the wartime government's views.

"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda? Part Three:

Stealth Trotskyism and the Mystery of the WWP

by Kevin Coogan

One of the many ironies of the IAC/WWP story is that a group now aligned with some of the most dogmatic elements in what’s left of the Left is itself most likely run by secret Trotskyists. Given the hermit-like quality of the WWP, it’s hard to know for sure. Even accurate estimates of the group's members are hard to come by.

In the 1980s most conventional estimates were that it had somewhere between three and four hundred followers. Thanks to the IAC in particular, the WWP's recruiting efforts over the past decade have met with some success, especially in New York and San Francisco. If both actual WWP members and fellow travelers are counted, the group may now deploy up to a thousand cadres, if not more.

Insofar as the WWP has had difficulty in recruiting, it may be due in part to the extremely closed and clannish nature of its leadership. Nowhere is this fact more evident then when it comes to discussing the group's origin. For some reason the WWP exercises great circumspection when it comes to acknowledging its origins as a faction inside the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

The WWP’s leaders even obscure their background to their own members. In the May 6th, 1986 WW, for example, the paper began a lengthy four-part series ostensibly dedicated to explaining the WWP's history. Not once in the entire series was it ever mentioned that the WWP first emerged out of the Socialist Workers Party or that the group's founders had spent over a decade as a faction inside the SWP.

Yet the WWP's analysis of the Soviet Union strongly suggests that the sect never abandoned the worldview that its founding leaders first acquired while still inside the SWP. This issue, however, remains so sensitive that following the death of WWP founder Sam Marcy on February 1st, 1998, not one WWP memorial speech mentioned that Marcy had ever been in the SWP, much less a former member of the party's National Committee.

The bizarre nature of the WWP's attempt to conceal its origins is only heightened by the fact that virtually everything written about the group by outside commentators notes its beginnings inside the SWP. One of the rare academic discussions of the WWP's history comes in a survey book by Robert Alexander which is aptly titled International Trotskyism.

The mystery of the WWP begins with Sam Marcy, who dominated the organization from its official inception in 1959 until his death at age 86 in 1998. Born in 1911 in Russia into an extremely poor Jewish family, "Comrade Sam" grew up in Brooklyn. After spending time in the CPUSA's Young Communist League (YCL), Marcy joined the SWP in either the late 1930s or 1940s.

Trained as a lawyer, he served as a legal counsel and organizational secretary for a local United Paper Workers Union. During this time he met his wife Dorothy Ballan, who also came from an immigrant Russian-Jewish family. Although Ballan (who died in 1992) graduated from Hunter College with a degree in education, she joined the United Paper Workers to spread the Marxist gospel. Following traditional Left "industrial colonization" tactics, Marcy and Ballan next moved to Buffalo and began recruiting workers in industrial plants there into the SWP. By the late 1940s, however, the anti-communist backlash that would culminate in McCarthyism made their work inside the trade union movement virtually impossible.

Despite these political setbacks, Marcy and his fellow Buffalo SWP comrades (most notably Vince Copeland) became increasingly convinced that the world had entered a new period of revolutionary class struggle, particularly following the Chinese Revolution. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 hastened the emergence of what was known in the SWP as the Marcy/Copeland "Global Class War" tendency. The Buffalo-based "global class warriors" called on the SWP to downplay its differences with Stalinist regimes and forge a joint front against "U.S. Imperialism."

Global Class War's fundamental point was that the geopolitical defense of "really existing socialism" took priority over the Trotskyist argument that put a premium on promoting class struggles inside the Soviet bloc against the dominant Stalinist bureaucracy. Marcy and Copeland's position might be best described as "semi-entrist" because although they very much wanted to court the Stalinist states, they rejected any argument that called on Trotskyists to enter the CPUSA en masse.

What the Global Class War argument meant in practice became clear during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The SWP majority supported the uprising as a student and worker-led revolt against Stalinist oppression. The Global Class War faction, however, completely disagreed. A Trotskyist named Fred Mazelis recalled Marcy telling him in 1959 that "the Hungarian workers were hopeless counterrevolutionaries and that we should support the Stalinists in their crushing of the Hungarian workers councils."

According to another former SWP'er named Tim Wohlforth, "Marcy had decided that the Hungarian Revolution was basically a Fascist uprising and that as defenders of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists had a duty to support Soviet intervention." The WWP's 1959 founding statement (reprinted in a 1959 issue of WW under the heading "Proletarian Left Wing of SWP Splits, Calls for Return to Road of Lenin and Trotsky") explained that while it was OK to support demands for "proletarian democracy," once the Hungarians began demanding "bourgeois political democracy," the correct Trotskyist policy was to support "the final intervention of the Red Army which saved Hungary from the capitalist counterrevolution."

In other words, if 99.9% of the Hungarian people wanted to overthrow Russian domination and prevent Hungary from being a satrapy of Moscow, introduce a democratic parliamentary system, and adopt an economic system that worked, they were morally wrong; in contrast, the Soviet troops who shot down unarmed Hungarian student and worker protesters were morally right.

In its founding statement, the WWP also denounced the SWP’s attempts to engage in coalition electoral campaigns with a group of former CP“ers (known as the „Gates faction“ after its leader, John Gates) who had broken from the CPUSA after the 20th Soviet Party Congress partial revelations about Stalin’s massive crimes.

According to WW, however, the real “rightwing” trend inside the Soviet Union actually began after Stalin’s death with the rise of Khrushchev! The WWP’s founding statement further noted that while Stalinism “may be theoretically as wrong as social democracy,” social democrats were “considered friendly to American imperialism and the Stalinists are considered hostile.” Ergo, Stalinism was better than social democracy.

After breaking with the SWP, the tiny WWP sought to ally itself with pro-Stalinist and anti-Khrushchev elements still inside the CPUSA who were angry about American CP leader William Foster’s refusal to openly criticize the Khrushchev “revisionists.” Around the time that the WWP was created, a splinter group called the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Party in the United States (POC) “better known as the “Vanguard” group” split from the CPUSA and embraced China’s anti-Khrushchev, “anti-revisionist” line. Although the WWP supported the Chinese position, the Vanguard group refused all of its political overtures because they viewed the WWP as treasonous “Trotskyites”! Not long thereafter, the WWP began removing Trotsky’s picture along with any references to him in party publications.

Now thoroughly isolated from the rest of the Left, Marcy led his little group with a strong hand. Tim Wohlforth met Marcy in 1959 at an SWP convention held at a New Jersey summer camp shortly before the Global Class War clique broke with the SWP. As Wohlforth later recalled in his memoir, The Prophet’s Children, while at the camp he had come upon a small mass of people “moving like a swarm of bees” and deeply engaged in conversation. In the middle of the mass “was a little animated man talking nonstop” who had a “high-pitched voice” and “spoke in a completely hysterical manner.” Yet Marcy’s devoted followers seemed “enthralled by his performance. . .It was my first experience with true political cult followers.”

From its inception, the WWP attacked any and all liberalization tendencies in Communist Bloc nations and scrambled to be first in line to applaud crackdowns on dissident movements. The April 1959 issue of WW even ran an editorial praising the brutal Chinese suppression of Tibet’s independence movement. As for the Soviet Union, the WWP regularly attacked the entire spectrum of dissident thinkers from Solzhenitsyn to Sakharov. The WWP line was that the dissidents really reflected broader „rightwing forces“ percolating inside the Soviet CP itself. In a February 22nd, 1974 essay, Marcy noted that Khrushchev’s ‘so called democratization“ had „opened up a Pandora’s box of bourgeois reaction, not only in the Soviet Union but even more virulently in Eastern Europe.“

The WWP fully supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Russian tanks crushed the Dubcek Regime and with it „Prague Spring.“ Needless to say, it also fiercely opposed the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s. The WWP’s true love throughout the 1960s was Maoist China, with North Korea a close second. The WWP even opposed the signing of the 1963 U.S.-Soviet Test Ban Treaty because it would bar China from acquiring nuclear weapons!

When the Chinese exploded their first H-bomb in 1967, WW declared it to be „a major victory for socialism.“ The party was particularly enthusiastic about China’s disastrous „Cultural Revolution,“ so much so that as late as the WWP’s 1986 party conference, Mao’s wife Chang Ching (a Cultural Revolution enthusiast and „Gang of Four“ leader) was singled out for special praise.

As much as the WWP admired China, it despised Israel. WWP cadre proudly carried signs in support of al-Fath that read “Israel = Tool of Wall Street Rule” and “Hitler-Dayan, Both the Same.” A June 24th, 1967 WW editorial following the Six Day War stated that Israel “is not the state of the Jewish nation,” but a state “that oppresses Jewish workers as well as Arabs.”

The fact that Israel was largely created by Socialist Zionists and in 1967 was led by Labor Party Premier Golda Meir (a woman something unthinkable in the Arab world), whose political base was the Social Democratic Israeli trade union movement, did not matter. Nor did it matter that every Arab state that opposed Israel had systematically crushed all independent labor unions or that “progressive” Arab governments like Jamal `Abd al-Nasr’s Egypt had a long record of employing Nazis both to train its military and security forces and to spread anti-Semitic hate propaganda throughout the Middle East.

As the WW editorial explained, “The fact that many of the Arab states are still ruled by conservative or even reactionary regimes does not materially affect this position” of support, because the Arabs “are struggling against imperialism, which is the main enemy of human progress,” whereas Israel “is on the side of the oppressors.”

This same editorial went on to assert that “When the bosses on a world scale” i.e., the imperialists “ go to war with the oppressed colonial and semi-colonial nations, it makes little difference who fires the first shot, as far as the rights and wrongs of the matter are concerned. . .Naturally, the imperialists were the original aggressors in every case.” Some two decades later, the WWP would use virtually identical arguments to justify supporting Saddam Husayn.

The WWP’s remarkable capacity for Orwellian “double think” was by no means limited to the issue of the Soviet Union or Israel. Take gay liberation, for example. Starting in the early 1970s the WWP actively recruited many gay and lesbian followers, since paradoxically enough the group had a fairly advanced position on this issue.

The sect’s recruitment successes in this area came about in part because most of the other ultra-left groups competing with the WWP were orthodox Maoists who endorsed the Stalinist/Maoist line that homosexuality was a sexual perversion caused by decadent capitalism that would be swiftly cured come the revolution. Yet even though WWP cadres frequently promoted themselves as gay or lesbian, the WWP refused to criticize the notoriously repressive practices directed against homosexuals in China, North Korea, and Cuba, much less in Serbia or Iraq.

Perhaps the ultimate absurdity of the WWP, however, is that the stealth Trotskyism of its leadership actually saved the sect from collapse in the late 1970s. In the 1960s the WWP, primarily through two key front groups, Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF) and the American Servicemen’s Union (ASU), managed to recruit a fair amount of new members who were drawn to the group less by its theories than by the extreme militancy of its street actions. Indeed, YAWF’s one notable contribution to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was that it was the only group which supported the Weatherman at the disastrous SDS convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969.

YAWF also participated in the Weatherman-organized “Days of Rage” protest that same autumn. With the end of the Vietnam War, however, the entire American Left began to suffer an enormous downturn, and the WWP was no exception to the rule. The cadre-based Left was further weakened by the rise of new social movements like women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the anti-nuclear and ecology movements, all of which operated organizationally and ideologically outside the traditional framework of orthodox Marxism, much less that of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist sects.

Faced with the challenge of widespread de-radicalization, as well as the growth of new social movements, the WWP (like many other Marxist sects) took an „industrial turn“ and ordered its followers back into the labor movement. The WWP even created the Centers for United Labor Action (CULA) to help coordinate these efforts.

Yet ironically, what ultimately gave the WWP a second lease on life was the death of Mao and the subsequent ideological crisis inside post-Mao China that finally resulted in the defeat of the „Gang of Four.“ The WWP’s competitors in orthodox Maoist grouplets like the October League rapidly ran out of ideological steam as the new post-Mao Chinese leadership moved even closer to the United States. After China began aiding American and South African-backed movements like UNITA, and Chinese troops tried to invade Vietnam, orthodox Maoism became even harder to rationalize.

Thanks to the WWP’s stealth Trotskyism, however, the group managed to escape political oblivion by reorienting itself away from China and toward the Soviet Bloc with relative ease.
The WWP’s great advantage in the post-1977 period was that throughout its entire history it only concealed „ but never abandoned „ its basic Trotskyist ideology. Orthodox Maoism, it should be recalled, maintained that with the death of Stalin the Soviet Union had ceased to be socialist state. Maoists even went so far as to claim that, thanks to „Khrushchevite revisionism,“ the USSR had been transformed into „a social-imperialist state“ not unlike Tsarist Russia.

The WWP, however, completely rejected this view even while it was busily glorifying ultra-Maoist groups like China’s „Gang of Four“ for their revolutionary zeal. In a May 1976 WW article, for example, Marcy reasserted the Trotskyist position (naturally without identifying it as such) against the standard Maoist argument. More specifically, he rejected the idea „that there is a new exploiting class in the Soviet Union,“ and that there had been a „return to the bourgeoisie to power there.“

The reality was that the USSR still remained „a workers“ state“ whose „underlying social system. . .is infinitely superior to that of the most developed, the most „glorious“ and the most „democratic“ of the imperialist states.“ At the same time (again following Trotsky) he admitted that Russia had undergone „a severe strain, deterioration, and erosion of revolutionary principles, and [was] moreover headed by a privileged and absolutist bureaucracy.

Marcy' later rejection of Gorbachev as a “capitalist restorationist” in the late 1980s was not all that dissimilar to Trotsky’s attack on Bukharin not Stalin in books like The Revolution Betrayed as the main threat to socialism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The WWP’s brand of covert Trotskyism would prove crucial to its future growth. In the late 1970s, its ideology allowed the sect to attach itself like a pilot fish to Soviet and Cuban-allied organizations and avoid political annihilation either from the atrophy of its membership or from a devastating political schism.

The WWP’s switch from Mao’s China to Brezhnev’s Russia was so remarkable that in 1984 the sect, which not long before was singing the praises of the Gang of Four, now publicly endorsed Jesse Jackson for President! Finally, when the CPUSA itself split into pieces in the late 1980s, the WWP was in a position to exploit the new situation for maximum political profit.
Conclusion

Given the WWP’s worldview, the notion that a group as closely linked to the WWP as the International Action Center could ever be taken seriously, either as a „human rights“ or „peace“ organization, seems comical as well as grotesque. The all too „resistible rise“ of the IAC/ WWP, however, only makes sense when it is viewed in the context of the broader collapse of Soviet-style Marxism and all of its ideological variants. Left to its own devices, the WWP would have remained on the political margin as a quirky Left sect whose weirdly messianic ideology combined the worst aspects of Trotskyism, Maoism, and Stalinism into a unique and utterly foul brew.

That a bizarre outfit like the WWP could become a serious player in American left-wing radicalism in the year 2001 is above all a testament to the existing ideological, intellectual, and moral bankruptcy of the broader Left, which still insists on living in a decrepit fantasy world where criminals are good, the police are evil, blacks are noble, whites are all racist, heterosexual men are sexist, all women are victims, Israel is always 100% wrong, the Palestinians are always 100% right, America is „objectively“ reactionary, and America’s enemies are “objectively” progressive and therefore worth defending. If this were not the case, the IAC never could or would have emerged as a serious force.

There is no reason, at least in theory, why a new movement from the Left could not both support a U.S.-led war against Islamist fanatics and fight to preserve civil liberties and social justice, both at home and abroad. The entrenched knee-jerk anti-American mindset of so many on the Left, however, makes such a development highly unlikely. At the very least, however, the rational elements within the Left should be willing to critically examine the propagandistic claims emanating from a variety of self-styled „human rights“ and „anti-war“ groups that are as politically compromised and morally dubious as the IAC, ANSWER, and the WWP. While the future role of the Left after 9/11 may not be clear, surely that much ought to be obvious.

"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda? Part Two:

The Crisis of the Marxist Left and the Rise of the WWP

by Kevin Coogan

Although Ramsey Clark greatly contributed to the IAC's credibility with respect to the outside world, the emergence of the WWP inside the American radical movement essentially stems from resistance inside the U.S. Left to the radical changes in the Soviet Union begun by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet system sent a shock wave throughout the American Left not unlike that which had followed the partial revelations of Stalin's crimes in the famous 1956 20th Party Congress of the CPSU. Gorbachev's new policies bitterly split the American Communist Party (CPUSA), whose aging leadership clearly opposed the new turn. The CPUSA crack-up also had a profoundly disorienting effect on many of the "peace" fronts long associated with the party, as well as on its fellow travelers inside the "Rainbow Coalition"/Jessie Jackson wing of the Democratic Party.

Starting in the 1960s (when it played a major role in organizing anti-Vietnam peace demonstrations), the CPUSA managed to establish cooperative relationships with left/liberal groups like the National Commission for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), the War Resisters League, the American Friends Service Committee, Women's Strike for Peace, sections of the labor movement and the peace, civil rights, "social justice" and social gospel groups associated with the National Council of Churches; all of whom helped form the base of the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party.

When dealing with Democrats and left-liberals along "Popular Front" lines, the CPUSA carefully avoided spouting radical dogma even as its sister parties in Moscow and Havana encouraged Marxist-led revolutions in the Third World. While the CP extended its influence into left-liberal circles, particularly during the Reagan years, party "hardliners" rested content in the knowledge that the more clout the CPUSA had inside the Democratic Party and its allied constituent groupings, the less likely the Reagan Administration would be able to generate the political will needed to use military force against revolutionary regimes and movements throughout the Third World. Needless to say, this "two tier" approach met with Moscow's full approval.

All that changed with the shift of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. Hardliners were infuriated with Gorbachev's decision to end Russian support to its client states in Eastern Europe. Many of these regimes were run by ideological hardliners willing to devote considerable resources to encouraging insurgent Marxist movements in the Third World. Not surprisingly, party bosses in regimes like East Germany (whose hold on power was ultimately based on Soviet military might) now became Gorbachev?s harshest critics.

Gorbachev's decision to distance the Soviet Union from Cuba also dealt a serious blow to Cuban-allied insurgency movements throughout both Central and Latin America. Since the romanticization of the Cuban Revolution, combined with Cuban military aid to the Sandinistas and the deployment of Cuban troops to help the government of Angola in its war against Jonas Savimbi's Union Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA, a brutal South African-, U.S.-, and Chinese-backed opposition movement) had led many American leftists into the Soviet camp in the first place, Gorbachev's actions against Cuba came as a particularly bitter blow.

The crisis inside the Soviet-allied Left became even more pronounced after Saddam Husayn's invasion of Kuwait, when Soviet foreign policy began to tilt more towards Washington than Moscow's longtime ally Baghdad.

In the midst of this larger crisis over Gorbachev and Iraq, the WWP became the first avowedly left sect more or less ideologically allied with Moscow to offer its unconditional support to Saddam Husayn as a victim of "U.S. imperialism," while it attacked Gorbachev as "a counterrevolutionary" (if not a CIA agent).

Until 1988 Sam Marcy, the WWP's three-decades long undisputed leader and theoretical guru, had taken a relatively benign view of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika.

By the fall of 1988, however, Marcy had decided that Gorbachev's decision to embrace both market reforms and political accommodation with the West was an unmitigated disaster. In a February 10th, 1989 forum on Soviet policy that included a spokesman from the Communist Party, the Soviet UN Mission, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the African National Congress, and the now-defunct Line of March grouping, WWP spokesman Larry Holmes confessed to being "worried by perestroika" and other ideas advanced "to justify policies that seem to be alien to socialism."

On September 29th, 1989, the WWP convened an "emergency conference" (entitled "In Defense of Socialism") to unify the party around the new anti-Gorbachev line. A few weeks later, in late October 1989, the WWP National Committee met to discuss Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's October 23rd speech to the Supreme Soviet, in which Shevardnadze announced that the Soviet Union had decided to disengage from Eastern Europe.

The meeting ended with the WWP sending out "messages of solidarity" to the Communist Parties of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, according to a report in the November 9th, 1989 WW. Nor did the WWP shy away from publicly defending Romania's Dracula-like dictator Nicholae Ceausescu, whom the WWP worked vigorously (but with little success) to turn from monster to mensch inside the pages of Workers World.

The WWP was equally consistent when it came to Asia. The sect even applauded the brutal Chinese repression of pro-democracy students and workers at Tiananmen Square. In the April 12th, 1990 WW, Sara Flounders (currently a leader of the "human rights" organization IAC), wrote: "Now the significance of the suppression of the right-wing movement in Tiananmen Square" could be seen from a "clearer perspective"; namely, that China had "smashed the plot of international anti-China forces to subvert the legal government and the socialist system of China."

How did Flounders know this to be true? Because Chinese Premier Li Peng said so in a March 20th speech to the National Peoples Congress in Beijing.

The WWP's public opposition to Gorbachev made it a potential vehicle for hard Left elements then trying to construct their own line independent of Moscow. Left stars like famed radical lawyer William Kunstler openly endorsed the WWP line on Gorbachev in blurbs for Sam Marcy's April 1990 book Perestroika: A Marxist Critique (essentially a compilation of his articles written for WW). Spurred on by the favorable response, the WWP intensified its attack. A September 8th, 1991 WW editorial even claimed that the introduction of capitalism into Eastern Europe "has been a tyranny as bad as any terror." On September 28-29th, 1991, the WWP held an "emergency conference" in New York "in response to the Gorbachev-Yeltsin takeover" in Russia.

According to an article in the October 10th, 1991 WW, "over 45 comrades" spoke on an open microphone at the conference about the "counterrevolutionary" events in Russia and -- surprise, surprise -- "not one of them found cause to oppose the party's analysis."

One WWP'er even expressed pleasure about the way that China had "stopped in Tiananmen Square" the "so-called democracy movement," while another praised the former East Germany as "a haven for gay liberation"!

Worry About the West — Not Israel

by Victor Davis Hanson

The reactions and media coverage coming out of the West regarding this latest war in the Middle East are as bewildering as they are instructive.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., for example, recently said, "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah or for or against Israel ."

Meanwhile, the Western news agency Reuters, responding to scrutiny by bloggers, withdrew wire photos taken by a freelance photographer of a smoky and burning Beirut . Reuters had failed to catch the freelancer's doctoring of the photos to emphasize unduly the damage from Israeli bombs.

And the Associated Press notes that initially reported Lebanese claims of 40 "civilians" killed by Israeli air strikes at Houla, Lebanon, in fact, were mistaken — and that the latest reports have lowered the death toll to one.

In Qana, where the Israeli military had hit an apartment building (and were quickly censured by European statesmen), the number of civilian fatalities reported also kept decreasing as reports were scrutinized. Plus, we have learned that several hours lapsed between the dropping of the bombs and the fatal collapse of the building, raising further questions about the relationship between the bombing and the fatalities that followed. Finally, based on photographs from the scene, the onsite rescue appeared staged for reporters.

These discrepancies suggest we have little idea what actually happened on the ground there — other than that Qana has been a favored missile-launching site against Israel , as a recent deadly aerial assault from there on Haifa attests.

There is a depressing pattern here. The sources for Western erroneous reports and faked pictures always seem to exaggerate the damage to Lebanon — but never to Israel .

Likewise, Western news agencies rarely list a precise number of Hezbollah losses, instead lumping them in with civilian fatalities. Does that mean that someone who launches a missile in Levis and sneakers is not a combatant?

In addition, the history and nature of Hezbollah do not matter to many in the West.

Knowingly or not, news outlets continue to spread Hezbollah's propaganda. One wonders if Westerners remember or know that, until Sept. 11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than had any other terrorist organization.

Most ignore as well that Hezbollah precipitated the present crisis by kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers, and launching missiles against Israel 's cities.

In retaliation, the Israeli Defense Forces use precision bombs to target combatants and try to avoid civilian casualties (though the latter is nearly impossible against an enemy who doesn't wear uniforms and uses non-combatants as "human shields"). In contrast, every random missile launched by Hezbollah is intended to hit a civilian target.

On one side of this conflict is a true democracy that was attacked. On the other are terrorists who hijacked the sovereign government of Lebanon , instituted theocratic rule over a third of the country — and started a war.

Hezbollah, of course, has been enabled in large part thanks to Iranian petro-dollars and intimidation. But the nature of Hezbollah's patrons doesn't seem to matter to many Westerners, either.

Those now calling for "dialogue" with the "major players" ignore that Iran promises to wipe out Israel . The French foreign minister was quick to praise the regional role of theocratic Iran as "stabilizing."

Then there's Hezbollah's other patron, Syria, a country that brutally occupied Lebanon, harbors terrorists and is suspected of being behind the assassination of Lebanese reformist Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

So, what then does matter to so many Westerners about this war?

Our fear, of course. We want to avoid messy complications like stirring up another 9/11 or Madrid bombing, spiking oil prices to over $80 a barrel, or treading on politically incorrect ground by criticizing the "other" of the former Third World .

The Western press — usually so careful to condemn hate speech — is utterly silent about Arab racism. But a European paper recently published a cartoon portraying Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a Nazi, secure that no rabbi would issue threats that could cost the editors their heads.

Still, when this is all over, we should not worry about the survival of Israel . For weeks, pundits have been lecturing how canny and adept Hezbollah has proved — and how a clumsy Israel could only respond by destroying Lebanon 's infrastructure. Yet, when the dust settles, the world will learn that Lebanon outside Hezbollah's domain is not destroyed. And, one hopes, those who have suffered in the Hezbollah-controlled south will reexamine their support for a terrorist organization that has brought them — and itself — to near ruin.

Instead far more worrisome is the moral crisis in the West itself. If so many of its politicians, intellectuals and media will not or cannot fathom moral differences in this war, they will hardly be able to see them anywhere else.

"Peace Activists" with a Secret Agenda? Introduction & Part One:

Ramsey Clark from Attorney General to the IAC

by Kevin Coogan

On September 29th, 2001, just a few weeks following the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a large peace rally was held in Washington, D.C., to oppose an American military response to the attack.

The main organizer of the D.C. rally, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), was officially established shortly after the 9/11 attack. The leading force behind ANSWER's creation is the International Action Center (IAC), which represents itself as a progressive organization devoted to peace, justice, and human rights issues.

The IAC's organizational clout is considerable: for the past decade it has played a leading role in organizing protest demonstrations against U.S. military actions against both Iraq and Serbia. After the September 11th attack, the IAC decided to turn its long-organized planned protest against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank gathering, scheduled for the 29th, into an action opposing any use of U.S. military power in response to terrorism.

The IAC owes its current success to Ramsey Clark, a former Attorney General during the Johnson Administration, who is listed on the IAC's website as its founder. Clark's establishment credentials have caused many in the mass media to accept the IAC's self-portrayal as a group of disinterested humanitarians appalled by war and poverty who are working to turn American foreign policy towards a more humane course. On its website the IAC says it was "Founded by Ramsey Clark" and then describes its purpose: "Information, Activism, and Resistance to U.S. Militarism, War, and Corporate Greed, Linking with Struggles Against Racism and Oppression within the United States."

Yet since its inception in 1992, the IAC's actions have given rise to serious doubts about its bona fides as an organization truly committed to peace and human rights issues.

Behind the blue door entrance to the IAC's headquarters on 14th Street in Manhattan can be found deeper shades of red. When one looks closely at the IAC, it becomes impossible to ignore the overwhelming presence of members of an avowedly Marxist-Leninist sect called the Workers World Party (WWP), whose cadre staff virtually all of the IAC's top positions. Whether or not the IAC is simply a WWP front group remains difficult to say.

Nor is there any evidence that Ramsey Clark himself is a WWP member. What does seem undeniable is that without the presence of scores of WWP cadre working inside the IAC, the organization would for all practical purposes cease to exist. Therefore, even if Clark is not a WWP member, he is following a political course that meets with the complete approval of one of the most pro-Stalinist sects ever to emerge from the American far left.

Part One: Ramsey Clark from Attorney General to the IAC
Before analyzing the role of the WWP in both the creation and control of the IAC, it is first necessary to explain just how the IAC managed to link up with Clark, a 74-year old Texas-born lawyer and the IAC's one big name media star.

The son of Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark (himself a Attorney General in the Johnson administration), Ramsey Clark radiates "middle America" with his puppy dog eyes, short hair, jug ears, Texas twang, plain talk, and "aw, shucks" demeanor. Clark backs up his folksy public persona with some dazzling credentials that include serving as the National Chairman of the National Advisory Committee of the ACLU, as well as serving as past president of the Federal Bar Association.

Despite his prominence within the establishment, Clark also maintains close ties to the Left. After he ceased being LBJ's Attorney General in 1969 when Nixon became President, Clark visited North Vietnam and condemned U.S. bombing policy over the "Voice of Vietnam" radio station. He also served as a lawyer for peace activist Father Phillip Berrigan, and led a committee that investigated the killing of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by local police in collusion with the FBI.

At the same time, Clark remained politically active inside the more moderate ranks of the Democratic Party. In 1976, however, his defeat in the New York Democratic primary campaign for Senate ended his political ambitions. From the mid-1970s until today, the Greenwich Village-based Clark has pursued a career as a high-powered defense attorney who specializes in political cases.

Some of Clark's current clients, including Shaykh Umar `Abd al-Rahman, the "blind Sheik" who was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for his involvement in helping to organize follow-up terrorist attacks in New York City after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, are a far cry from Father Berrigan. Shaykh `Abd al-Rahman, of course, deserves legal representation. What makes Clark's approach noteworthy is that in the case of `Abd al-Rahman (as well as those of Clark's other political clients), his approach is based more on putting the government on trial for its alleged misdeeds than actually proving the innocence of his clients.

While completely ignoring Shaykh `Abd al-Rahman's pivotal role in the Egyptian-based Islamist terror group al-Jama`a al-Islamiyyah, as well as the central role that the Shaykh's Jersey City-based mosque played in the first World Trade Center attack, Clark tried to portray the blind Shaykh as a brilliant Islamic scholar and religious thinker who was being persecuted simply as a result of anti-Muslim prejudice on the part of the American government.

Clark appears to be driven by intense rage at what he perceives to be the failures of American foreign policy; a rage so strong that it may well be irrelevant to him whether his clients are actually innocent or guilty as long as he can use them to strike back at the American establishment which once welcomed him with open arms. After losing his 1976 Senate bid, Clark deepened his opposition to American foreign policy. In June 1980, at a time when American hostages were in their eighth month of captivity in Iran, Clark sojourned to Tehran to take part in a conference on the "Crimes of America" sponsored by Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic Islamic regime.

According to a story on Clark by John Judis that appeared in the April 22nd, 1991 New Republic, while in Iran Clark publicly characterized the Carter Administration?s failed military attempt to rescue the hostages as a violation of international law. By the time Clark was sipping tea in Tehran, American foreign policy was in shambles. In both Nicaragua and Iran, U.S.-backed dictators had fallen from power. In Europe, the incoming Reagan Administration would soon be faced with a growing neutralist movement that was particularly strong in Germany. Inside the U.S., the anti-nuclear "freeze" movement was then in full swing. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had deployed massive amounts of troops into a formerly neutral nation for the first time since the end of World War II.

By the mid-1980s, however, the combination of Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in England had brought the Left to a screeching halt. Huge sums of covert CIA aid allowed the mujahidin to turn Afghanistan into a cemetery for Russian soldiers, while in Central America the U.S. managed first to destabilize and then to bring down Cuban-allied states like Nicaragua and Grenada. In the Middle East, the U.S. (with help from Israel) successfully encouraged both Iraq and Iran to fight a long bloody war against each other, a war triggered by Saddam Husayn's attempted invasion of Iran. In 1986 American planes even bombed Libya to punish Colonel Qadhdhafi for backing terrorist groups in the West.

As U.S. power began to reassert itself globally, Clark became even more extreme in his opposition to American foreign policy. He first astonished many on the Left when he agreed to defend former Grenada Defense Minister Bernard Coard, leader of the ultra-leftist clique responsible for the assassination of Maurice Bishop. (It was Bishop's 1983 murder that had supplied the pretext for the U.S. invasion of Grenada.)

After the U.S. attack on Libya, Clark journeyed to Tripoli to offer his condolences to Colonel Qadhdhafi. That same year he defended Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders from a legal suit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly retired man in a wheel chair who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on the Italian cruise ship "Achille Lauro" simply because he was Jewish. Clark even became the lawyer for Nazi collaborator Karl Linnas, who was unsuccessfully fighting deportation to his native Estonia to face war crimes charges.

Clark's next legal client was equally surprising. In 1989 he became Lyndon Larouche?s lead attorney in Larouche?s attempt to appeal his conviction on federal mail fraud charges. Larouche, who began his political career in the late 1940s as a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), had by the late 1970s embraced the far right, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial.

Clark claimed that the government was persecuting Larouche solely to suppress his political organizing, and even went so far as to express "amazement" at the personal "vilification" directed at his client! A report from the left-wing watchdog group Political Research Associates suggests that Clark's fondness for Larouche may have been rooted in Larouche's aggressive support for Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega, who had been forcibly removed from power by the Bush Administration. Both Larouche and Clark participated in the movement opposed to American military intervention in Panama. Clark even visited Panama in January 1990 as part of an "Independent Commission of Inquiry" to examine American "war crimes." (Not surprisingly, the Commission found America "guilty.")

Clark's willingness to defend political clients so long as he felt he could use their cases to put the American government on trial meant that he was less interested in proving that his clients were saints than in proving that members of his own government were sinners. Clark's logic now began to extend beyond his choice of legal clients to encompass groups that he was willing to collaborate with who he felt might help advance his political agenda. By 1990, Clark decided he was even willing to ally himself closely with an ultra-left Marxist-Leninist sect called the Workers World Party (WWP).

Clark's ties to the WWP first became apparent during the 1990-1991 foreign policy crisis in the Middle East that began unfolding after Iraqi dictator Saddam Husayn invaded Kuwait in an attempt to dominate the Middle East?s oil supplies. During the Winter 1990-91 Mideast crisis, two separate "anti-war" coalitions arose to protest the first Bush Administration's policies.

Before the military attack on Iraq took place in January 1991, the Bush Administration (with support both from Congress and many other nations) imposed an economic embargo on Husayn in an attempt to pressure him to voluntarily withdraw his forces from Iraq and avoid a full-scale war. The embargo policy was strongly endorsed by Democrats in Washington. Although the Russians had long maintained strong ties to Iraq, even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to persuade Husayn to withdraw his forces or face military defeat.

The Bush Administration made it clear to Husayn that he was on a tight deadline, and that any failure to meet that deadline and withdraw his forces would result in war. The first anti-war coalition, the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, strongly opposed the idea of a deadline and advocated the extension of the sanctions policy against Iraq as an alternative to military action.

The National Campaign also made it clear that no matter how much it was opposed to a war against Iraq, it also considered Husayn?s invasion of Kuwait to be an undeniable act of aggression. The National Campaign's stance on the Gulf War was challenged by a rival organization, the National Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East. The National Coalition bitterly opposed the National Campaign's support for the extension of sanctions.

The Coalition argued that Iraq itself was the victim of "U.S. Oil Imperialism," which was working in cahoots with reactionary states like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the ruling class of Kuwait itself. The Coalition demanded, instead, that the Left uncritically defend "the Iraqi people" against both continued economic sanctions and direct American military intervention. The divisions inside the Left over this issue became so deep that both groups were forced to hold rival rallies in Washington in January 1991.

The hard Left National Coalition came out of a long-standing Workers World Party front organization known as the People's Anti-War Mobilization (PAM), which quickly reorganized itself into the National Coalition. The WWP's prominent role in the National Coalition was made evident by the group's choice of a leader, a WWP member named Monica Moorhead (the WWP's candidate for President in the 2000 elections).

The Coalition's office was adjacent to Clark's Manhattan law office, where another WWP cadre member named Gavriella Gemma (Coalition Coordinator) worked as a legal secretary. The National Coalition (most likely through Gemma) extended an invitation to Clark to serve as its official spokesman. To the astonishment of many, he accepted.

Yet Clark and the WWP, at least publicly, had so little in common that as late as 1989 the WWP?s official mouthpiece, Workers World (WW), never even mentioned Clark in a favorable light.
Clark's decision paved the way for his subsequent involvement in the WWP-allied International Action Center.

After the Gulf War ended, Clark established an "International War Crimes Tribunal" to denounce U.S. actions against Iraq. When the Tribunal held its first hearings in New York on May 11th, 1991, the speakers included WWP members Teresa Gutierrez ("co-coordinator" of yet another WWP front, the International Peace for Cuba Appeal), Moorhead, and WWP stalwart Sarah Flounders. One year later, on July 6th, 1992, Workers World announced the creation of a "center for international solidarity" (the IAC) with Clark as its spokesman.

Clark told WW that "the international center can become a people's United Nations based on grass-roots activism and the principles of peace, equality and justice." With Clark as spokesman and Sarah Flounders as a coordinator, the IAC sheltered a myriad of WWP front groups and allied organizations, including the National Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, the Haiti Commission, the Campaign to Stop Settlements in Occupied Palestine, the Commission of Inquiry on the US Invasion of Panama, the Movement for a Peoples Assembly, and the International War Crimes Tribunal.

From 1991 until today, the IAC/WWP has led repeated delegations to Iraq with Clark at their head to meet with Saddam Husayn and other top Iraqi officials. The close ties between the IAC and Husayn have led other critics of U.S. foreign policy toward Iraq, such as former UN inspector Scott Ritter (who, like the IAC, opposes the continuation of sanctions as being far more harmful to the Iraqi people than to Husayn), to distance himself from any association with the IAC. Ironically enough, a few years before the Gulf War broke out, the WWP had no qualms about labeling Saddam Husayn as a genocidal war criminal.

In a September 22nd, 1988 WW article entitled "Iraq launches genocidal attack on Kurdish people," WWP cadre (and current IAC honcho) Brian Becker denounced Iraq's "horrific chemical weapons attacks on Kurdish villages," citing "ample evidence" from Kurdish sources and "independent observers" that "mustard gas, cyanide and other outlawed chemical weapons have been used in a massive fashion" not just against the Kurds but also against "thousands of rebelling Iraqi forces who deserted from the army in 1984 during the Iran-Iraq war, and took refuge in the marshland areas in southern Iraq."

Becker then noted that the Iraqi attempt to crush the Kurds "by a combination of terror and systematic depopulation" has been "the hallmark of the government's policy for the last several years."

More recently both Clark and the IAC have played a leading role in uncritically defending former Serbian leader Slobodon Milosevic's brutal attempts to dominate both Bosnia and Kosovo. (Clark even defended Radovan Karadzic, the notorious Bosnian Serb warlord allied with Milosevic, against a civil suit brought against him for the atrocities carried out by his forces.)

While accusing NATO of committing war crimes against Serbia, neither the IAC nor the WWP criticized Serbia's notorious record of terror against civilians, one which includes both the infamous massacre at Srebrenica and the displacement of a million Muslim refuges from Kosovo. The Clark/IAC War Crimes Tribunal's hatred of American policy, which comes coated in legal jargon, borders on the comic as well as the megalomaniacal.

One IAC "legal brief," for example, accuses President Clinton, the U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and "U.S. personnel directly involved in designating targets, flight crews and deck crews of the U.S. military bombers and assault aircraft, U.S. military personnel directly involved in targeting, preparing and launching missiles at Yugoslavia" with war crimes. Nor does the IAC indictment ignore the political and military leadership of England, Germany, and "every NATO country," not to mention the governments of Turkey and Hungary.

It then charges NATO with "inflicting, inciting and enhancing violence between Muslims and Slavs," using the media "to demonize Yugoslavia, Slavs, Serbs and Muslims as genocidal murderers," and "attempting to destroy the Sovereignty, right to self determination, democracy and culture of the Slavic, Muslim, Christian and other people of Yugoslavia." The Alice in Wonderland quality of the "war crimes indictment" is further highlighted by its demand for "the abolition of NATO"!

No matter how surreal the IAC's actions sound, there can be little doubt that they are well-funded, since IAC/WWP cadres regularly fly to Europe and the Middle East to attend conferences and political meetings. Through a 501(c) 3 organization called the People's Rights Fund, a wealthy Serbian-American who may even have business connections to Belgrade can freely donate to both the IAC and its related media propaganda arm, the Peoples Video Network. Nor are foreign diplomats terribly shy about being publicly associated with IAC events.

Iraq's UN Ambassador, Dr. Sa`id Hasan, for example, even spoke at the IAC's "First Hearing of the Independent Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia," held in New York City on July 31st, 1999. One foreign official who will not be attending any IAC conferences in the near future, however, is former Yugoslav leader Slobodon Milosevic, who is currently on trial for war crimes in the Hague.

What's the real federal deficit?

by Dennis Cauchon
USA TODAY

The federal government keeps two sets of books.

The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005.

The set the government doesn't talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government's accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If Social Security and Medicare were included — as the board that sets accounting rules is considering — the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion.

Congress has written its own accounting rules — which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs such as the growing expense of retirement benefits for civil servants and military personnel.

Last year, the audited statement produced by the accountants said the government ran a deficit equal to $6,700 for every American household. The number given to the public put the deficit at $2,800 per household.

A growing number of Congress members and accounting experts say it's time for Congress to start using the audited financial statement when it makes budget decisions. They say accurate accounting would force Congress to show more restraint before approving popular measures to boost spending or cut taxes.

"We're a bottom-line culture, and we've been hiding the bottom line from the American people," says Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a former investment banker. "It's not fair to them, and it's delusional on our part."

The House of Representatives supported Cooper's proposal this year to ask the president to include the audited numbers in his budgets, but the Senate did not consider the measure.

Good accounting is crucial at a time when the government faces long-term challenges in paying benefits to tens of millions of Americans for Medicare, Social Security and government pensions, say advocates of stricter accounting rules in federal budgeting.

"Accounting matters," says Harvard University law professor Howell Jackson, who specializes in business law. "The deficit number affects how politicians act. We need a good number so politicians can have a target worth looking at."

The audited financial statement — prepared by the Treasury Department — reveals a federal government in far worse financial shape than official budget reports indicate, a USA TODAY analysis found. The government has run a deficit of $2.9 trillion since 1997, according to the audited number. The official deficit since then is just $729 billion. The difference is equal to an entire year's worth of federal spending.

Surplus or deficit?

Congress and the president are able to report a lower deficit mostly because they don't count the growing burden of future pensions and medical care for federal retirees and military personnel. These obligations are so large and are growing so fast that budget surpluses of the late 1990s actually were deficits when the costs are included.

The Clinton administration reported a surplus of $559 billion in its final four budget years. The audited numbers showed a deficit of $484 billion.

In addition, neither of these figures counts the financial deterioration in Social Security or Medicare. Including these retirement programs in the bottom line, as proposed by a board that oversees accounting methods used by the federal government, would show the government running annual deficits of trillions of dollars.

The Bush administration opposes including Social Security and Medicare in the audited deficit. Its reason: Congress can cancel or cut the retirement programs at any time, so they should not be considered a government liability for accounting purposes.

Policing the numbers

The government's record-keeping was in such disarray 15 years ago that both parties agreed drastic steps were needed. Congress and two presidents took a series of actions from 1990 to 1996 that:

• Created the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board to establish accounting rules, a role similar to what the powerful Financial Accounting Standards Board does for corporations.

• Added chief financial officers to all major government departments and agencies.

• Required annual audited financial reports of those departments and agencies.

• Ordered the Treasury Department to publish, for the first time, a comprehensive annual financial report for the federal government — an audited report like those published every year by corporations.

These laws have dramatically improved federal financial reporting. Today, 18 of 24 departments and agencies produce annual reports certified by auditors. (The others, including the Defense Department, still have record-keeping troubles so severe that auditors refuse to certify the reliability of their books, according to the government's annual report.)

The culmination of improved record-keeping is the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," an annual report similar to a corporate annual report. (The 158-page report for 2005 is available online at fms.treas.gov/fr/index.html.)

The House Budget Committee has tried to increase the prominence of the audited financial results. When the House passed its version of a budget this year, it included Cooper's proposal asking Bush to add the audited numbers to the annual budget he submits to Congress. The request died when the House and Senate couldn't agree on a budget. Cooper has reintroduced the proposal.

The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, established under the first President Bush in 1990 to set federal accounting rules, is considering adding Social Security and Medicare to the government's audited bottom line.

Recognizing costly programs

Adding those costs would make federal accounting similar to that used by corporations, state and local governments and large non-profit entities such as universities and charities. It would show the government recording enormous losses because the deficit would reflect the growing shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.

The government would have reported nearly $40 trillion in losses since 1997 if the deterioration of Social Security and Medicare had been included, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the proposed accounting change. That's because generally accepted accounting principles require reporting financial burdens when they are incurred, not when they come due.

For example: If Microsoft announced today that it would add a drug benefit for its retirees, the company would be required to count the future cost of the program, in today's dollars, as a business expense. If the benefit cost $1 billion in today's dollars and retirees were expected to pay $200 million of the cost, Microsoft would be required to report a reduction in net income of $800 million.

This accounting rule is a major reason corporations have reduced and limited retirement benefits over the last 15 years.

The federal government's audited financial statement now accounts for the retirement costs of civil servants and military personnel — but not the cost of Social Security and Medicare.

The new Medicare prescription-drug benefit alone would have added $8 trillion to the government's audited deficit. That's the amount the government would need today, set aside and earning interest, to pay for the tens of trillions of dollars the benefit will cost in future years.

Standard accounting concepts say that $8 trillion should be reported as an expense. Combined with other new liabilities and operating losses, the government would have reported an $11 trillion deficit in 2004 — about the size of the nation's entire economy.

The federal government also would have had a $12.7 trillion deficit in 2000 because that was the first year that Social Security and Medicare reported broader measures of the programs' unfunded liabilities. That created a one-time expense.

The proposal to add Social Security and Medicare to the bottom line has deeply divided the federal accounting board, composed of government officials and "public" members, who are accounting experts from outside government.

The six public members support the change. "Our job is to give people a clear picture of the financial condition of the government," board Chairman David Mosso says. "Whether those numbers are good or bad and what you do about them is up to Congress and the administration."

The four government members, who represent the president, Congress and the Government Accountability Office, oppose the change. The retirement programs do "not represent a legal obligation because Congress has the authority to increase or reduce social insurance benefits at any time," wrote Clay Johnson III, then acting director of the president's Office of Management Budget, in a letter to the board in May.

Ways of accounting

Why the big difference between the official government deficit and the audited one?

The official number is based on "cash accounting," similar to the way you track what comes into your checking account and what goes out. That works fine for paying today's bills, but it's a poor way to measure a financial condition that could include credit card debt, car loans, a mortgage and an overdue electric bill.

The audited number is based on accrual accounting. This method doesn't care about your checking account. It measures income and expenses when they occur, or accrue. If you buy a velvet Elvis painting online, the cost goes on the books immediately, regardless of when the check clears or your eBay purchase arrives.

Cash accounting lets income and expenses land in different reporting periods. Accrual accounting links them. Under cash accounting, a $25,000 cash advance on a credit card to pay for a vacation makes the books look great. You are $25,000 richer! Repaying the credit card debt? No worries today. That will show up in the future.

Under accrual accounting, the $25,000 cash from your credit card is offset immediately by the $25,000 you now owe. Your bottom line hasn't changed. An accountant might even make you report a loss on the transaction because of the interest you're going to pay.

"The problem with cash accounting is that there's a tremendous opportunity for manipulation," says University of Texas accounting professor Michael Granof. "It's not just that you fool others. You end up fooling yourself, too."

Federal law requires that companies and institutions that have revenue of $1 million or more use accrual accounting. Microsoft used accrual accounting when it reported $12 billion in net income last year. The American Red Cross used accrual accounting when it reported a $445 million net gain.

Congress used cash accounting when it reported the $318 billion deficit last year.

Social Security chief actuary Stephen Goss says it would be a mistake to apply accrual accounting to Social Security and Medicare. These programs are not pensions or legally binding federal obligations, although many people view them that way, he says.

Social Security and Medicare are pay-as-you go programs and should be treated like food stamps and fighter jets, not like a Treasury bond that must be repaid in the future, he adds. "A country doesn't record a liability every time a kid is born to reflect the cost of providing that baby with a K-12 education one day," Goss says.

Tom Allen, who will become the chairman of the federal accounting board in December, says sound accounting principles require that financial statements reflect the economic value of an obligation.

"It's hard to argue that there's no economic substance to the promises made for Social Security and Medicare," he says.

Social Security and Medicare should be reflected in the bottom line because that's the most important number in any financial report, Allen says.

"The point of the number is to tell the public: Did the government's financial condition improve or deteriorate over the last year?" he says.

If you count Social Security and Medicare, the federal government's financial health got $3.5 trillion worse last year.

Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, a certified public accountant, says the numbers reported under accrual accounting give an accurate picture of the government's condition. "An old photographer's adage says, 'If you want a prettier picture, bring me a prettier face,' " he says.