Gaza — the split

When you don’t vote the way we want you to, there will be trouble … hear that Palestine? Iraq? Hear that Middle East? So now we have brother against brother — by definition, civil war … in Palestine AND Iraq.

NOT America’s finest moment, any of this … in fact, we’re still awaiting such a moment in the 21st Century [Hell, I'd settle for a non-belligerent one].

Jude

Warportuity in Gaza
John Stewart and correspondent Asif Mandvi of the Daily Show discuss the Warportuity in Gaza.
Tuesday, June 19. 2007

Carter says US, EU must bring Hamas and Fatah together in Palestinian territories
Associated Press
June 19, 2007

DUBLIN, Ireland: The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas, or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict between the rival movements, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was addressing a conference of Irish human rights officials, said the Bush administration’s refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was “criminal.”

Carter said Hamas, besides winning a fair and democratic mandate that should have entitled it to lead the Palestinian government, had proven itself to be far more organized in its political and military showdowns with the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas fighters routed Fatah in their violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week. The split prompted Abbas to dissolve the power-sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank.

Carter said the American-Israeli-European consensus to reopen direct aid to the new government in the West Bank, but to deny the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, represented an “effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples.”

While seeking to boycott the Hamas leadership because of its refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel, Europe and the U.S. have continued to send humanitarian aid to Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

During his speech to Ireland’s eighth annual Forum on Human Rights, the 83-year-old former president said monitors from his Carter Center observed the 2006 election in which Hamas won 42 percent of the popular vote and a majority of parliamentary seats.

Carter said that election was “orderly and fair” and Hamas triumphed, in part, because it was “shrewd in selecting candidates,” whereas a divided, corrupt Fatah ran multiple candidates for single seats.

Far from encouraging Hamas’ move into parliamentary politics, Carter said the U.S. and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.

“That action was criminal,” he said in a news conference after his speech.

“The United States and Israel decided to punish all the people in Palestine and did everything they could to deter a compromise between Hamas and Fatah,” he said.

Carter said the United States and others supplied the Fatah-controlled security forces in Gaza with vastly superior weaponry in hopes they would “conquer Hamas in Gaza” — but Hamas this month routed Fatah because of its “superior skills and discipline.”

He said plans to reopen international aid to the West Bank, but clamp down on aid to Gaza, would imprison 1.4 million Gazans. He called for both territories to be treated equally.

“This effort to divide Palestinians into two peoples now is a step in the wrong direction,” he said. “All efforts of the international community should be to reconcile the two, but there’s no effort from the outside to bring the two together.”

Carter was pessimistic this would happen soon.

“I don’t see at this point any possibility that public officials in the United States, or in Israel, or the European Union are going to take action to bring about a reconciliation,” he said.

Carter was U.S. president from 1977 to 1981, during which he brokered the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt but suffered foreign policy embarrassments in Iran, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. He won the 2002 Nobel in recognition of his globe-trotting work leading the Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center, which promotes conflict mediation, disease prevention and election monitoring worldwide.

Hamas Holds the High Cards
Robert Scheer, TruthDig via Smirking Chimp
Jun 20 2007

Forty years ago, I entered the Gaza Strip–soon after Israel had conquered that teeming cauldron of humanity after defeating Egypt in the Six-Day War–to report on the Israelis’ bubbling optimism about their young nation’s future. “Come back in 10 years,” I was told by an Israeli general, “and you won’t recognize the place,” he said, spelling out visions of economic development and a grateful Arab population. Similar predictions were made for the West Bank, which had been administered by Jordan in a somewhat more humane yet quite oppressive manner.

The optimism of the Israeli occupiers did not seem so far-fetched then, given the hardships the Palestinians had endured under their fellow Arab protectors and throughout the diaspora. The experience of the Palestinians was not unlike that of the Jews: they were needed but scorned for their talents. Both refugee groups were scarred by grinding oppression and each nurtured a thirst for nationhood fortified by a tribally based religiosity that secular leaders often found useful.

That is the story of Hamas, a creation of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and political organization which flourished after Israel humbled Gamal Abdel Nasser, the last great Arab nationalist leader, with its devastating victory over Egypt. The Palestinian movement was then led by puppets of Nasser and was secular in focus. It remained so, after being invigorated by the late Yasser Arafat, who gave the Palestinians their first serious and independent political identification. But as Arafat wasted his credibility in futile jockeying with Israel (mostly while in exile), corruption came to dominate his movement.

By contrast, the religious zealots who later formed the Hamas organization were more focused on spiritual probity and tended far more closely to the needs of their impoverished brethren in Gaza and the West Bank. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon–and that other Iranian-backed Islamist movement, the Shiites who now control Iraq–the religious movements, both Shiite- and Sunni-based, cornered the market on purity of purpose as opposed to rank opportunism. That is precisely why these fiercely anti-Western movements have been able to turn the favorite fig leaf of U.S. neo-colonialism, the slogans of democracy and elections, against the United States by winning popular elections.

While the American mass media tends to join the Bush administration in ignoring this unpleasant contradiction, the fact is that the people we brand as the enemy can make a strong claim to having won the election that our President Bush champions. What irony that the United States and the European Union, both of which cut off aid to the Palestinian government in 2006 when Hamas won the election, have now resumed aid to the PLO-dominated government that lost power through the vote.

This contradiction applies even more uncomfortably to Israel, which consistently demeaned the Palestinian movement when it was run by secularists. Israel only very reluctantly, and in the most limited of ways, was willing to risk the false security of occupied land for the possibility of peace. Israeli leaders of all parties drew the line at granting the Palestinians a real state with contiguous land and a significant presence in Jerusalem as it existed before the Six-Day War. Rarely mentioned is that some elements in the Israeli government initially supported the rise of Hamas as a desired alternative to the PLO and came too late to the recognition that Arafat, for all of his very serious failings, was their best alternative.

Now it is also too late for the remnants of the PLO to once again unilaterally assert a claim to lead the Palestinians. Sure, the United States, Israel and the EU can throw aid and tax dollars their way, but if the price is that the PLO assist in crushing Hamas, or even sit idly by while Israeli troops reoccupy Gaza, there will be chaos. The only hope is for the funders, including Israel (which has withheld the tax monies paid by the Palestinians from them), to recognize that the Palestinian people need to make their own history. At this point, that must include Hamas, which it is hoped will be moved, as was the PLO, to accept Israel’s right to exist within borders that permit a viable Palestinian state.

That lesson of empowerment must also be applied throughout the region, from Lebanon to Iraq and Iran, where election results subvert the ambitions of the foreigners. Elections are great if they give the conqueror the results they want, but it is in the nature of things that people will not use the ballot to legitimize their oppression for long. The democracy project, ballyhooed by President Bush, founders on its failure to allow the will of the voters to be heard when they dare vote against U.S. policy.

Palestine: How Will the Hypocritical West Deal with a Coup D’état by an Elected Government?
Robert Fisk, The Independent
June 18, 2007

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party — Hamas — and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” — and let’s keep those quotation marks in place — has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked — on our side — which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building — vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the “moderate” (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word “occupation”, who always referred to Israeli “redeployment” rather than “withdrawal”, a “leader” we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic — which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the “Palestinian Authority”.

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps — or variations of them — were what cost Fatah its election.

Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world — and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer “Palestine” EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our “war on terror” in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs. — yes Mrs. George W. Bush — and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair’s recent visit to Tripoli — Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a “statesman” by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions — and whose “democracy” is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the “war on terror”.

Yes, and we love King Abdullah’s unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn’t like The Independent’s coverage of what he quaintly calls “the Middle East”. If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the “Middle East” would be to control.

For that is what it is about — control — and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It’s easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that’s what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn’t President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn’t in control of Iran (even if he doesn’t actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries — Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don’t behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say — as we are already saying of the Iraqis — that they don’t deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d’état by an elected government?

A Secular-Democratic State Solution
The Light at the End of the Gaza-Ramallah Tunnel
OMAR BARGHOUTI
June 20, 2007

When I saw some of the images coming out of the infighting in Gaza last week, I suppressed my anguish and steaming anger, recalling the wise, almost prophetic, words of the great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who wrote:

“The central problem is this: How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? Only as they discover themselves to be ‘hosts’ of the oppressor can they contribute to the midwifery of their liberating pedagogy. As long as they live in the duality in which to be is to be like, and to be like is to be like the oppressor, this contribution is impossible. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.”

Apparently, neither of the two warring factions succeeded in transcending the being “like the oppressor” part.

The lightening success of Hamas in forcefully taking over the supposed symbols of Palestinian power in Gaza cannot and ought not obscure the fact that, given the overbearing presence of Israel’s military occupation, the bloody clash between the Islamist group and its secular counterpart, Fatah, and irrespective of motives, has descended into a feud between two slaves fighting over the crumbs thrown to them, whenever they behave, by their common colonial master.

There is no doubt that a faction within Fatah — overtly funded, trained and steered by the US and Israel — is the primary suspect behind the flare-up of this bloody internecine strife, which many observers view as a thinly veiled attempt to destabilize Hamas’s democratically-elected government, coercing it into accepting Israeli dictates that it had so far balked from. Furthermore, any decent legal expert will readily admit that the so-called “emergency government,” declared by the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, in response to Hamas’s take-over in Gaza, violates several articles in the Basic Law, the equivalent of the PA’s constitution.

While the corruption, lawlessness, profiteering and even betrayal of sections of Fatah have been known and well documented for some time now, the brutal, reckless and in some cases criminal tactics used by armed groups within Hamas were fresh reminders to neutral bystanders who were willing to give the group the benefit of the doubt that it, too, contains a strong, power-hungry faction that is eager to sacrifice principles and human rights to reach its political objectives. Hamas cannot be exonerated from the accusation that, by participating in the legislative and municipal elections according to laws and parameters set by the Oslo agreements, it has already contributed to legitimizing the products of those agreements and forsaken its claim to being a resistance movement that is primarily dedicated to realizing the main tenets of the Palestinian national program of liberation and self-determination. On top of that, and unlike the far more sophisticated and responsible Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas, in the last year and a half of ruling at various levels, has revealed its inherent tendency, like all Islamist movements, to impose its exclusionary ideological and social order, and to dismiss and whenever possible suppress diverse views and cultural outlooks that conflict with that order.

In the short term, the political vacuum that will inevitably result from the growing rift between Ramallah and Gaza and the steady collapse of the PA structures and remaining authority on the ground is most likely to be filled by an all-out Israeli reoccupation of the entire West Bank and Gaza. This would announce the official death of the so-called Oslo peace process, which actually collapsed long ago under the weight of Israel’s incessantly expanding colonies, apartheid wall — declared illegal by the International Court of Justice — and intricate apparatus of oppression and humiliation of the Palestinians under its control.

Such a scenario may either lead to threatening the very survival of the Palestinian national movement and the completion of the well-underway disintegration Palestinian society or trigger a renaissance of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. For the latter to occur, however, two difficult but realistic conditions must be met: first, Palestinian structural democratization and political reform and resetting Palestinian national priorities; and second, a critical review and revamping of the Palestinian resistance strategy, both from moral and pragmatic perspectives. Both are urgently called for, to realign the Palestinian struggle with the international social movement and to put the question of Palestine back on the world’s agenda as essentially a morally and politically justifiable and viable liberation struggle that can — again — capture the imagination and support of progressives and freedom lovers the world over.

In order to counter Israel’s dual strategy of, on the one hand, fragmenting, ghettoizing, and dispossessing Palestinians, and, on the other hand, reducing the conflict to a dispute over a partial set of Palestinian rights, the PLO must be resuscitated and remodeled to embody the claims, creative energies, and national frameworks of the three main segments of the Palestinian people: Palestinians in the OPT, Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. The PLO’s grassroots organizations need to be rebuilt from the bottom up with mass participation, and they must be ruled by unfettered democracy and proportional representation. This process must entail a well-planned transfer of power from the withering PA back to a rejuvenated PLO, including the entire spectrum of the Palestinian political movement.

As to resistance strategies, one cannot and should not strictly separate means from ends. If the struggle for freedom in Algeria, Northern Ireland and South Africa taught us anything, it is this fact. Irrespective of the right of Palestinians to resist foreign occupation by all means, as granted in international law, we have a moral duty to avoid tactics that indiscriminately target innocent civilians and inevitably corrupt our own humanity.

Concurrently, and with full deference to the first principle, we have a political obligation to select methods that maximize our gains. Given the ongoing nihilistic abuse and utter futility of Palestinian armed resistance, the uniquely harsh geo-political context of the Palestinian resistance movement, and the de facto fragmentation of the Palestinian people and isolation of its resistance core from potential sources of supply and logistical support, civil resistance that has the potential of engaging and mobilizing the Palestinian grassroots seems not only morally but also pragmatically preferable.

The young Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, modeled after the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, has already shown ample evidence that it has the potential of unifying Palestinians and international solidarity movements in a resistance strategy that is moral, effective and sustainable. In the last few years alone, many mainstream and influential groups and institutions have heeded Palestinian boycott calls and started to consider or apply diverse forms of effective pressure on Israel. These include the British University and College Union (UCU); Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists; the Church of England; the Presbyterian Church (USA); top British architects led by Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP); the National Union of Journalists in the UK; the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU); the South African Council of Churches; the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario; and dozens of celebrated authors, artists and intellectuals led by John Berger, among many others.

The intensification of Israel’s colonial and racist oppression of the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, with unprecedented impunity was the main trigger for the spreading boycott. With its wanton destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, willful killing of civilians, particularly children, apartheid wall, Jews-only colonies and roads, incessant confiscation of land and water resources, and horrific denial of freedom of movement to millions under occupation, Israel has shown the international community its total disregard to international law and fundamental human rights.

This latest dose of American — Israeli-inspired — “constructive chaos” in the occupied Palestinian territory may well wreak havoc on US-Israeli policy in the region. With the imminent dissipation of the illusion that a national Palestinian sovereignty can be established under the overall colonial hegemony of Israel, many Palestinians are now seriously questioning the wisdom of the two-state mantra and considering to repose their plight as one for equal humanity and full emancipation, within the framework of a unitary, democratic state solution in historic Palestine. After almost three decades of “searing into the consciousness” of Palestinians that only a two-state solution can deliver any of their demands, the US and Israel are harvesting what they sowed: the collapse of any semblance of independence and integrity of the PA — which was all along charged with relieving Israel’s colonial burdens vs. the inhabitants of the occupied West Bank and Gaza — and the mounting Palestinian discontent with, if not yet revolt against, the game of unilateral Palestinian compromise leading only to insatiable Israeli demands for further compromise, with the simultaneous loss of land, resources, freedoms and the bleak — and real — prospects of social breakdown.

The demise of the two-state solution should not be mourned. Besides having passed its expiry date, it was never a moral solution to start with. In the best-case scenario, if UN resolution 242 were meticulously implemented, it would have addressed most of the legitimate rights of less than a third of the Palestinian people over less than a fifth of their ancestral land. More than two thirds of the Palestinians, refugees plus the Palestinian citizens of Israel, have been maliciously and shortsightedly expunged out of the definition of the Palestinians.

It is now clearer than ever that the two-state solution — other than being only a disguise for continued Israeli occupation and a mechanism to permanently divide the people of Palestine into three disconnected segments — was primarily intended to induce Palestinians to give up the inalienable right of their refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were ethnically cleansed by Zionists during the 1948 Nakba.

A secular, democratic state solution is increasingly being perceived by Palestinians and people of conscience around the world as the moral alternative to Israeli apartheid and colonial rule. Such a solution, which promises unequivocal equality in citizenship, as well as individual and communal rights, both to Palestinians (refugees included) and to Israeli Jews, is the most appropriate for ethically reconciling the ostensibly irreconcilable: the inalienable, UN-sanctioned rights of the indigenous people of Palestine to self-determination, repatriation, and equality in accordance with international law and the acquired and internationally recognized rights of Israeli Jews to coexist in the land of Palestine — as equals, not colonial masters.

Omar Barghouti is an Independent Palestinian political analyst.

The Battle of Gaza
Mike Whitney, Smirking Chimp
Jun 20 2007

In less than 24 hours of fierce street-fighting, Bush’s proxy-army in Gaza was routed by armed units of Hamas. It was a stunning defeat for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and for US-Israeli policymakers who have done everything in their power to overturn the “free and fair” election of the Hamas government. For now, Hamas has reestablished its authority in Gaza although Abbas is still working frantically with Bush and Olmert to consolidate his power in the West Bank. So far, Abbas has carried out the demands of his paymasters by replacing Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh with ex-World Bank official, Salam Fayyad—a Palestinian Karzai who will take his orders from Tel Aviv or Washington. Abbas does not have the constitutional authority to replace Prime Minister Haniyeh or to disband the Hamas-dominated government, but this point is typically overlooked in the western media.

The Bush administration has abandoned any pretense of neutrality and is openly supporting the ongoing violation of UN resolution 242. Bush helped to engineer the savage boycott which has withheld food, water, medical aid and financial resources from Palestinian civilians. He has also funneled millions of dollars and weapons to the Palestinian “Preventive Security Force” headed by US-ally Mohammad Dahlan. According to the UK Guardian, “Washington has launched a controversial $60 million program to bolster Mr Abbas’s presidential guard and Israel has quietly allowed Arab states to send in arms and ammunition”. Dahlan’s militia was organized to challenge Hamas, but the plan failed spectacularly. As soon as the fighting broke out in Gaza, Dahlan’s men panicked and fled across the border to Egypt. Those who remained were disarmed, stripped and taken into custody by Hamas. One prominent Fatah gunman, Samih Madhoun, who had boasted of “executing several Hamas fighters and torching the homes of others”, was shot execution style.

The defeat in Gaza is just the latest of Washington’s debacles in the Middle East. US-Israeli failures in the territories are the result of a misguided policy which is backfiring everywhere. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh summed up the present policy like this: “We’re in the business of creating … sectarian violence.”

Hersh is right. Bush and Olmert are using the familiar “divide and conquer” strategy to provoke “Arab on Arab” violence. The policy is an extension of Henry Kissinger’s dictum during the Iran-Iraq war: “I hope they all kill each other”. The goal is the same today as it was then.

Hersh says that the Bush administration supported the group of Sunni extremists, Fatah al-Islam, who are still battling the Lebanese Army in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. He said that it is “a covert program we joined in with the Saudis as part of a bigger, broader program of doing everything we could to stop the spread of the Shiite world”.

In Lebanon, as in Gaza Strip, the “divide and conquer” strategy has produced appalling results—forcing 30,000 poor Palestinians to flee their homes and search for shelter.

This week’s bombing of the minarets at the Golden Dome Mosque is another example of the Bush Doctrine at work. Bush and his generals assure us that Al Qaeda was responsible, but reports from the New York Times tell a different story.

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Graham Bowley “Minarets on Shiites Shrine in Iraq Destroyed in Attack” (NY Times) which gives us a good idea of what really happened in Samarra. Bowley says:

“Since the attack in 2006, the shrine had been under the protection of local — predominantly Sunni — guards. But American military and Iraqi security officials had recently become concerned that the local unit had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda forces in Iraq. A move by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad over the last few days to bring in a new guard unit — predominantly Shiite — may have been linked to the attack today.”

No reference is made to the sudden and unexplained changing of the guards at the mosque in future accounts in the mainstream press. And, yet, that is the most important point. The minarets were blown up just days after the new guards took charge. They cordoned off the area, placed snipers on the surrounding rooftops, and then blew up the minarets in broad daylight.

The first explosion took place at 9:30 AM. Ten minutes later the second bomb was detonated.

Al Qaeda?

Not likely.

The Golden Dome mosque has been heavily guarded ever since it was blown up in 2006. The four main doors have been bolted shut and not a tile has been moved in over a year. The reason for this is that the Shiites consider it a “crime scene” which they intend to investigate more thoroughly when the violence subsides.

The Shiites never accepted the official US-version of events that “al Qaeda did it”. Many believe that US Special Forces were directly involved and that it was a planned demolition carried out by experts. There is considerable proof to support this theory including eye witness accounts from the scene of the crime as well as holes that were drilled in the floor of the mosque to maximize destruction. This was not a simple al Qaeda-type car-bombing but a technically-demanding demolition operation.

The damning information in the New York Times article has been corroborated in many other publications including an official statement from the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI). According to the AMSI, Prime Minister Nouri al Mailiki replaced the Sunnis who had been guarding the site for over a year with Shiite government forces from the Interior Ministry. Their statement reads:

“Security forces arrived yesterday afternoon from Baghdad Tuesday for the receipt of the task of protecting two tombs instead of the existing force there. Somehow they obtained a scuffle followed by gunfire lasted two hours over control of security forces coming from Baghdad.”

So, the Sunni guards were replaced (after a scuffle) with goons from the Interior Ministry. The next day the minarets blow up.

Coincidence?

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki immediately issued statement where he claimed that the al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. At the same time, however, he arrested all 12 of the guards he sent from the Interior Ministry.

Why? Was he afraid they would talk to the media?

The Association of Muslim Scholars said that “last year’s explosion happened after a severe political crisis between blocs involved in the political process to the occupation. After the elections, the establishment of the government was blocked at that time. It is quite similar to the political crisis faced by the government and parliament today”.

The AMSI is right. The destruction of the Golden Dome Mosque took place soon after the Iraqi parliament rejected the US-plan for dividing Iraq. (”Federalism”) This time, the parliament has voted-down the US-plan to transfer control of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves to the American oil giants via the “oil laws”.

The AMSI sees the bombing as a desperate attempt by the US occupation to break the logjam in Parliament over the oil laws and to conceal the failures of the “surge” by inciting sectarian violence. The only difference this time is that the Shiite militias have been less responsive to US manipulation. In fact, Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr has tried to stop his Mahdi Army from attacking Sunni areas and he has decried the bombing as another plot by US-Israeli intelligence agents operating in Iraq. He said that the incident reveals “the hidden hand of the occupier.”

He added, “This is what the occupiers brought to Iraq: a disintegration plot and fanning the flames of sectarian violence. Destroying the Askariya shrine goes exactly with the insurgents’ beliefs.”

Among Shiites, there’s nearly unanimous agreement that the US was behind the bombing. Middle East expert Juan Cole reports on his blog-site “Informed Comment, that protests have broken out in India, Pakistan, the Caucasus, Bahrain, Iran and other locations where there are high concentrations of Shiites. The consensus view is that the minarets were blown up as part of a larger US-Israeli strategy for controlling the Middle East.

But why would the Bush administration want to unleash a fresh wave of sectarian violence when they can’t even establish security in Baghdad?

Here’s what the AMSI says:

“Sectarian violence is an effective means to enable the militias to fully impose their control on (Sunni) neighborhoods and cities as it did after the bombings of Samarra….The government is also trying to control the capital of Baghdad; seeking to extend its power over other cities that reject the occupation, especially the cities of Baquba and Samarra”.

This is what is gained by the bombings—further ethnic cleansing of the Sunni neighborhoods and greater control over the public through a campaign of terror. It’s all part of a broader neocon strategy that centers on “creative destruction” rather than the traditional US policy of “regional stability”.

Al Sadr’s comments (as well as those of the AMSI) show that fewer and fewer Iraqis are taken in by US counterinsurgency activities. In fact, US-Israeli aggression is now seen as the main source of violence in the region. This has turned Muslims around the world against the West. For these people, the victories by Hamas and Hezbollah must come as a welcome relief. They are small indication that the imperial grip is beginning to loosen and that, perhaps change will be achievable sometime in the “not so distant” future.

The perception of US invincibility has been shattered. America’s moral authority is in ruins. We are neither feared nor respected; that is the unfortunate legacy of Abu Ghraib and Falluja. But what is bad news for us may be good news for the people in the Middle East. It’s now possible to imagine a New Middle East where fundamental change is possible. As resistance continues to swell from a trickle to a stream—we can envision “regime change” sweeping through the region from Riyadh, to Amman to Cairo—an entirely new world shaking off its colonial past.

The forces that Bush has put in motion will inexorably lead to the decline of “superpower rule” and the dismantling of the US imperium. The transition is already visible. The battle of Gaza is just a macrocosm of a much larger phenomenon which now extends from Mogadishu to Kabul.

Change is coming, but it might not be to Bush’s liking. That’s the real lesson of what happened in Gaza.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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Add comment June 20th, 2007

Socko! Boffo! Sicko!

Sicko will be premiering soon, the black market copies are already on the web, and the medical hierarchy is not happy with the explosive possibilities — here’s a video featuring Mike Moore and an interview, that last provided by our friend Airean, who edited out some 80 or so instances of “you know” … a Mike-ism of the moment.

Jude

Michael Moore: “I’m Being Investigated Now by the Bush Administation” [VIDEO]
Adam Howard, Alternet
June 20, 2007

It turns out “Sicko” was gestating in Moore’s mind years ago when he was making TV Nation on NBC. Years later, with a lot more clout and 9/11 workers in tow, Moore made a big splash with a trip to Guantanamo Bay. In the video to your right, Moore gives more insight into why and how he made that trip, ridicules Bill Frist (always fun), and talks about the government scrutiny he must now endure because of his rabble rousing films. ++

An Hour with Michael Moore on “Sicko,” his Trip to Cuba with 9/11 Rescue Workers, the Removal of Private Healthcare Companies & Clinton’s Ties to Insurance Companies: “They’re into Her Pocket and She’s Into Their Pocket And I Don’t Expect Much From Her”
Democracy NOW
Monday, June 18th, 2007

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore sits down with Democracy Now! ahead of the release of his new film SiCKO. The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system. It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don’t have healthcare but on the 250 million who do - many of whom are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they paid into for decades. “They are getting away with murder,” Moore said of the health insurance companies. “They charge whatever they want. There is no government control, and frankly we will not fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies.”

Michael Moore is on the move. On Wednesday, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker will testify on Capitol Hill. He then heads to New Hampshire to challenge presidential candidates, Democrat and Republican, over the nation’s healthcare system.

His latest documentary SiCKO is being released in thousands of theaters next week. The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system. It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don’t have healthcare but on the 250 million who do - many of whom are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they paid into for decades.

Yesterday I sat down with Michael Moore at the Tribeca Cinema just after he had done a sneak preview for 9/11 workers who fell ill after working in the toxic environment at Ground Zero. He was then doing a showing for the Center for Justice and Democracy - a tort reform group. I began by asking him what inspired him to make the film.

Michael Moore, Academy Award-winning filmmaker.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore is on the move. On Wednesday, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker will testify on Capitol Hill. He then heads to New Hampshire to challenge presidential candidates — Democrat and Republican — over the nation’s healthcare system.

Oh, and his latest documentary, SiCKO, is being released in thousands of theaters next week. The film is a seething indictment of the US healthcare system. It focuses not on the more than 40 million people who don’t have health insurance, but on the more than 250 million who do, many of whom are abandoned by the very health insurance industry they’ve paid into for decades.

Yesterday I sat down with Michael Moore at the Tribeca Cinema here in New York, just after he’d done a sneak preview for 9/11 workers who fell ill after working in the toxic environment at Ground Zero. He was then doing a fundraiser for the Center for Justice and Democracy, a tort reform group. I began by asking Michael Moore what inspired him to make the film.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I actually — I had a TV show on back in the ’90s called TV Nation, and one day I just — I thought it would be interesting to have like a race. So we sent a camera crew to an emergency room in Fort Lauderdale, a camera crew to an emergency room in Toronto, and then one to Havana. And they would each wait until someone came in with a broken arm or a broken leg. And then they were going to follow that person through and see how good the quality of the care was, how fast it was and how cheap it was. And I convinced Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad, sportscasters, to do the play-by-play of what we called the Healthcare Olympics. And so, it was a race between the US, Canada and Cuba. And to make a long story short, Cuba won. They had the fastest care, the best care, and it cost nothing.

We turn the show in to NBC that week, and we get a call from the censor. They’re not called “the censor,” they’re called Standards & Practices. And so, this woman calls. She’s the head of Standards & Practices — Dr. Somebody. I don’t know they — she actually had a “Dr.” before her name, but I forget her last name now. But she calls, and she says, “Mike, Cuba can’t win.” I said, “What?” “Cuba can’t win.” “Well, they won. What do you mean they can’t win? They won.” “No, we can’t say that on NBC. We can’t say that Cuba won.” “Well, yeah, but they won! They provided the fastest care. They were the cheapest. And the patient was happy, and the bone got fixed.” “No, it’s against regulations here.” I said, “Oh, well, I’m not changing it.”

Well, they changed it. They changed it. Two days later, when it aired, they changed it so that Canada won. And Canada didn’t win. Canada almost won, but they charged the guy $15 for some crutches on the way out. So it’s bugged me to this day that anybody who saw that episode, where it said, “and Canada won the Healthcare Olympics,” and in fact it was Cuba, but that couldn’t be said on NBC, because God knows what would happen.

So, anyways, I first started thinking about this issue then, and then when I had my next show, The Awful Truth, we followed a guy who had health insurance, but his health insurance company would not approve this operation he needed, which would save his life. So we took the guy to the headquarters of Humana, the HMO down in Louisville, Kentucky, took him in to see the executives there. They gave us the boot. So we went out on the lawn and conducted the man’s funeral, with him present. So we had a priest and a casket and pallbearers, bagpipes and, “Amazing Grace” and the whole deal. And the executives are looking down from the top floor at this and horrified this is going to air on national television. Three days later, they call and tell the guy, “We’ll approve the operation.” And the man is alive today.

And I thought at the time, geez, a ten-minute piece, we saved a guy’s life; what could we do if we did a two-hour movie? And so, that was the sort of the genesis of this, though the movie didn’t end up being a bunch of stories about, saving individual people’s lives, because as I got into this, I figured there’s a much, sort of bigger story to tell about the actual system itself.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, tell us about the 9/11 workers and how you got involved with all of these people who have gotten sick. We just came from one of your first showings before the premiere of the film, with 9/11 emergency responders who are sick.

MICHAEL MOORE: Right. Well, as those of us who in New York here, where, since 9/11, a lot of these workers who ran down there to help on 9/11 who were not city employees or state employees, but were just volunteers — I mean, some people got across from New Jersey and came and helped. They were maybe volunteer firefighters from New Jersey, some were EMT volunteers, and they went down there to help. Some of them stayed there for months in the recovery effort. And they got all these illnesses, respiratory illnesses and things like that, from breathing, the whole, you know — while the EPA was saying, Giuliani was saying everything’s fine down there. go ahead and breathe away. In fact, as we now know, it was very toxic down there. And hundreds, perhaps even thousands, have suffered as a result of the toxicity in the air at the time.

And then to find out that our own government and all these 9/11 funds won’t provide any help to these volunteers, because they weren’t employees of the city. So they’ve been going through all these illnesses — and some of them not even seeing a doctor or can’t afford the operations or the things that they need, the medicines they need, because they don’t have health insurance. And they can’t work now, so they’re disabled, and then they have to go through a whole rigmarole to try and get Medicaid. It’s just — I mean, making them go through hoop after hoop, very sad thing to see. And so, we got to know some of them.

And at the same time, I saw this thing on C-SPAN, where Senator Frist had gone down to Gitmo, because they wanted to show how, we’re taking good care of the detainees, where they’re getting all top-of-the-line prisoner treatment. And one of the things that he wanted to remark on — Mr. Frist — was how good the healthcare was —

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Frist.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, excuse me. Yes, of course, Dr. Frist. There’s another doctor. He then presented this list of, you know — here’s all the colonoscopies that we’ve been doing, you know. And, of course, the first thing I thought when I heard that, I thought, “Colonoscopies? Hey, most of these detainees are, in their twenties and thirties. you’re not really — you don’t necessarily have a colonoscopy ’til you’re fifty.” So that should have been your first clue right there something was amiss at Gitmo. But he has this whole list, Amy, of how many teeth cleanings they’ve done of the detainees, how many root canals. They do nutrition counseling.

AMY GOODMAN: Do they talk about the force-feedings of fasting prisoners?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, well, of course. That’s what’s called “nutrition counseling.” And so, he made this as part of this big, thing about how wonderful they’re treated there, and we shouldn’t worry at all about them. Well, of course, irony built upon irony here, you know. And I thought, well, here we have the 9/11 rescue workers who can’t get any healthcare. Here they are trumpeting how they have free universal healthcare, dental care, eye care, nutrition counseling, for the detainees. And I thought, well, why don’t we just take our 9/11 workers down to Gitmo and see if we can get some of that free healthcare they’re bragging about? And so, essentially, when you see the film — I don’t want to give the whole thing away — but that’s essentially what we go to do.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you get there?

MICHAEL MOORE: Geez, I wish I could tell you. I’m being investigated now by the Bush administration for this trip I took, which they said that we went to Cuba, but my point is, no, we were going to Guantanamo Bay, which you claim as American soil, so we never really left America. I mean, we pulled out of Miami in the boat, and we ended up in Guantanamo Bay, which you claim as American waters. And so — but, of course, we ended up then in, the actual nation of Cuba. And you’ll see in the film the wonderful treatment that the 9/11 rescue workers and the others I took got from the Cuban doctors and the Cuban healthcare system. But, so now they’re investigating me.

And I mean, you’ve been there. Have you ever received this letter threatening civil and criminal action against you? Or —

AMY GOODMAN: I did not.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, see? Well, it’s not fair! You’re Amy Goodman. You should get the first letter. What are you picking on me for? Anyway, so yeah, so I’m in the midst of this, so I’m not really — I don’t want to say publicly yet how we actually got there, but I actually do have a boat in the movie, you see, and we are actually in Guantanamo Bay. And you probably have never seen anybody actually sail into Guantanamo Bay. You will, when you see the movie, see this, for the first time. And, and I’m the skipper.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you afraid of the mines or what you thought might be mines?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Actually, I was more afraid of what they were pointing at us in the guard tower there on the US side of this demarcation line that’s in the bay. And I have to say — I want to tell you — I think I can say this much: the Cuban government was not exactly happy with my idea here of sailing into Guantanamo Bay, because they did not want an incident that would provoke the Americans or give them an excuse to do something against Cuba. And especially because it was me, the Cubans perceive that Mr. Bush doesn’t like me very much, and so here I am suddenly, tweaking their nose in Guantanamo Bay, and anything could happen. So we had to really actually talk quite a bit to the Cubans to letting us use their waters to get up close to the American waters there in the bay.

AMY GOODMAN: Is that area mined?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, that’s what they say, yes. Yes, yes. Well, they believe the Americans have mined it, so that no Cubans can get in there. I don’t know what the Cubans —

AMY GOODMAN: Cubans trying to break into Guantanamo to the prison?

MICHAEL MOORE: Sneak into — yeah. Hey, don’t ask me to explain the actions of the US military. I, you know — I don’t know what the Cubans — I hate to say this, but, when we were there, it doesn’t look like there’s a huge Cuban defense force, should the Americans ever decide to actually invade again, at least that route. But I’m sure they’ve got something planned if the Americans ever did that.

AMY GOODMAN: The emergency workers who you took to Cuba, talk about the healthcare system there.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, when they say that there’s a doctor in every block, that’s not a cliché. I mean, they’re really — Cuba, per capita, has so many more doctors than we have. there’s been a doctor shortage in America for a long time, and it’s been pretty much because the AMA doesn’t want anymore students in medical schools here, because they believe that if they keep the number of doctors low, those doctors get more money, as opposed to if we had a whole bunch of doctors, you have to share the pie a little bit more, so…

But the Cuban doctors, the Cuban healthcare system, I was very impressed with it. All the people we took down there were extremely happy with the treatment that they received. But they focus a lot on prevention, and because they do that, they end up not having to spend a lot of money on their healthcare. They don’t have the money. It’s a very poor country, as you know. And I was very impressed. And, with what little they have to use with their healthcare system, they end up living longer than we do. They have a better infant mortality rate than we do. On a number of issues, they’re the same or better than us.

AMY GOODMAN: Oscar Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. When we come back, he talks about the candidates, the Democratic candidates for president, and their position on healthcare.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His new film SiCKO is being released in thousands of theaters next week. I asked Michael about the United States being ranked thirty-seventh in the world for its quality of healthcare.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. We’re behind Costa Rica, but ahead of Slovenia. And that’s according to the World Health Organization. It’s pretty pathetic when the richest country on earth is ranked number thirty-seven.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, you look at three — really four — places: France, Britain, Cuba, you spend time in, and then you go visit your relatives in Canada.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about these places and what each one has. You talk to, for example, Tony Benn, the parliamentarian, the MP in Britain. Talk about what they have and how they originated. Then we’ll talk about how we got what we have here.

MICHAEL MOORE: OK. Well, the Canadians, they have a very good system that covers everyone, and the people there are very happy with it. Basically, you pay for nothing. You choose your own doctor. You need to go to the hospital, you choose your own hospital. There’s freedom of choice. And, you’ll hear the critics of the Canadian system here talk about, “Oh, the Canadians, you have to wait in line, before you can get a knee replacement, or you have to wait x-number of number of weeks, where you don’t have to wait in America.” when I hear that, I think, well, that’s what you do when you have to share the pie. Sometimes you have to wait. it’s like, I guess that’s not in our American mentality, where, you know — to wait. I want it now! Well, sometimes when you — like I said, when you’re sharing the pie, you get the first slice, you don’t have to wait; sometimes you get the third slice; sometimes you get the last slice. But the important thing to remember is, everyone gets a slice. That’s not the way it is here in this country.

Now, the British system is really government-owned, in the sense that the government owns and runs the hospitals, the government employs the doctors. And so, they work for the government, so it’s very much a government-owned and -run and -controlled program in Britain. And again, everything is free. And you see the hospitals in the film. People are very happy with it. And, if you know anybody that’s ever traveled to these countries, that’s had an experience of having to go into a Canadian hospital or British hospital — I mean, like the one woman says in the film, she thought it was going to be some dingy, horrible — like out of a Dickens novel or the old Soviet Union or something. And she went in there, and it was like, “Wow! This is incredible!”

France, though, is probably, if not the best, near the best of what we saw.

AMY GOODMAN: Still on Britain, I want to just play a clip.

MICHAEL MOORE: This guy broke his ankle. How much will this cost him? He’ll have some huge bill when he’s done, right?

NHS HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATIVE WORKER: Here, no. Just everything is free.

MICHAEL MOORE: I’m asking about hospital charges, and you’re laughing.

Even with insurance, there’s bound to be a bill somewhere.

What did they charge you for that baby?

NEW FATHER: No, no, no. Everything was on NHS.

NEW MOTHER: This is NHS.

NEW FATHER: It’s not America.

MICHAEL MOORE: So this is where people come to pay their bill when they’re done staying in the hospital.

NHS CASHIER: No, this is the NHS hospital, so you don’t pay that bill.

MICHAEL MOORE: Why does it say “cashier” here if people don’t have to pay a bill?

NHS HOSPITAL ADMINISTRATIVE WORKER: …place, you have — it just means get the traffic expenses reimbursed.

MICHAEL MOORE: So in British hospitals, instead of money going into the cashier’s window, money comes out.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, they look at me like I’m from Mars when I’m asking the Brits, how much they paid for this, that or whatever.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Moore. Let’s talk about how we arrived at the system we did in this country.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, my grandfather was a country doctor, actually. He was from Canada. He went to medical school in the late 1800s, which was a year then. it’s pretty much what they knew back then. They could teach it in a year. And so, the little village where, I was raised, because my mom was from there, too, because he was there, he was paid with eggs and milk and chickens, and things like that. He didn’t do it to make any big money. They didn’t make big money then. They were comfortable — the local doctor — but they weren’t the rich man in the community.

We got away from the concept of treating people because it was the right thing to do. The nuns ran the hospital that I was born in. The nuns weren’t doing this to turn profit and invest in Wall Street. I mean, they did it because they thought that was their duty to serve God and to serve mankind by opening hospitals and delivering babies. We’re a long ways from that now. Somewhere we let profit and greed enter into this.

And in the film, I peg a certain date when the HMOs really got their start. And I got very lucky. I had a twenty-three-year-old researcher in my office who worked on the film, who was actually someone I believe that was recommended by Jeremy Scahill, so there’s a Democracy Now! connection to this moment in the movie. But he found this Watergate tape — has nothing to do with Watergate, it’s one of the Nixon tapes — at the Archives, National Archives, where Nixon and Ehrlichman are discussing whether or not to support this HMO concept. And Ehrlichman says to Nixon, “You’re going to love this, because this is private enterprise. This isn’t like some freebie thing.” Nixon goes, “Oh, I like that. Tell me about it.” And then Ehrlichman says, “Well, this is how it’s going to work, these HMOs. They’re going to make more money by providing less care. The less care they give them, the patients, the more money the company makes.” Nixon goes, “Ooh, not bad!” And it’s all there on tape.

AMY GOODMAN: And they’re talking about Kaiser Permanente

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And Nixon says he met Kaiser.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, yes. Edgar Kaiser.

AMY GOODMAN: He brought him in to explain it.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, brought him in to explain the whole thing and the whole — how the scheme would work. And Ehrlichman and Nixon are just kind of rubbing their hands, going, “Oh, this is great.” And the very next day, Nixon announces his new healthcare program, which is, of course, going to include these HMOs that Kaiser Permanente wanted to have included. And there it begins. And it’s all in the movie. And so, when he — when George first brought this in, I thought, “Boy, do all roads lead back to Nixon?” I mean, I know we lay a lot of stuff at Nixon’s feet, but the HMOs, too? I mean, is he ultimately responsible for this modern-day profit-greedy mess that we’re in? And the answer is yes.

And these health insurance companies are — they’re just — they’re the Halliburtons of the health industry. I mean, they really — they get away with murder. They charge whatever they want. There’s no government control. And frankly, we will not really fix our system until we remove these private insurance companies. I mean, they literally have to be eliminated. They cannot be allowed to exist in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the American who gave the finger to his health insurance company — I mean, gave his finger.

MICHAEL MOORE: Oh, literally the finger.

MICHAEL MOORE: This is Rick.

RICK: I was ripping a piece of wood, and I grabbed it right here, and I hit a knot.

MICHAEL MOORE: He sawed off the tops of two of his fingers.

RICK: And it just zipped, and it was that quick.

MICHAEL MOORE: His first thought?

RICK: I don’t have insurance. How much is this going to cost?

MICHAEL MOORE: The hospital gave him a choice: reattach the middle finger for $60,000 or do the ring finger for $12,000. Being the hopeless romantic, Rick chose the ring finger for the bargain price of $12,000. The top of his middle finger now enjoys its new home in an Oregon landfill.

RICK: I can do that thing, where, the old man used to like pull the finger off.

MICHAEL MOORE: I mean, if he lived a few hours north in Canada, that question would never be asked of him. He would never have to make that decision. And, in fact, later in the film, we show a Canadian who has five fingers sawed off, and he gets them all reattached immediately, and it doesn’t cost him a thing. But it’s one of many examples of this kind of ironic situation that we live in the wealthiest country on earth, and yet people have to go through this.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t people understand in this country what is offered in other places and that this situation isn’t a natural — just the way things should be, that there is a way to change? What is it about the way the government and the media and the insurance companies work that keeps people so isolated from alternatives?

MICHAEL MOORE: It’s an enforced ignorance. It’s called keeping the American people stupid. Whether it’s our educational system or whether it’s the mainstream media, it’s all about making sure people don’t know what’s going on in other countries. We know nothing about the rest of the world. I mean, until recently, when they said if you travel to Canada or Mexico you had to have a passport, until then it was 80%-plus didn’t even have a passport in this country. So people don’t travel. They don’t know much. I point out in the film that our high school graduates, when asked where Great Britain is on the globe, 65% couldn’t find it. 65% couldn’t find Great Britain on the globe. 11% couldn’t find the United States on the globe — 11% of eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds, according to National Geographic. It’s like, OK — we have a problem in this country. We don’t want to know about the rest of the world. And, I mean, ask most Americans who the prime minister of Canada is. I mean, seriously. And I don’t mean — and I’m not saying this — let’s go ask a bunch of dumb hicks out in, Whereverville. I’m saying, if I just looked around this room right now and asked this crew, which I would say this is a more aware crew of people who, follow the news and, they work with you. But, is there anybody that can tell me — do you know the prime minister of Canada?

JOHN HAMILTON: Harper.

MICHAEL MOORE: Whoa! That’s good!

AMY GOODMAN: And you didn’t even ask the Canadian here.

MICHAEL MOORE: No, I was avoiding the Canadian’s eyes. Don’t ever look directly in the eyes of the Canadians, by the way, OK? No, but I’m sure that anybody listening to this on the radio or watching this on TV right now just sitting there were probably going, oh, we don’t really — most Americans don’t know who lives next door to us, and so if they don’t know simple things like that, they don’t know about their healthcare system. And what we do know about it are all the lies we’ve been told about the Canadians and the Brits and the French.

AMY GOODMAN: You do talk about Hillary Clinton and what she tried to do under Bill Clinton as president. Explain what she attempted.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I think she attempted a very brave thing fourteen years ago. She came in and said there should be healthcare for all; there should be no pre-existing conditions; everyone’s covered, no matter what you make, what job you have, or whatever. It was a very bold move on her part. And she was destroyed as a result of it. I mean, they put out I think well over $100 million to fight her.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the big insurance companies liked it, because she wanted to preserve the big five. And others said if she had gotten rid of the insurance companies altogether, single payer, it would have been more clearly explainable to the American people.

MICHAEL MOORE: And that was her fault, that she didn’t go the whole hog, the whole nine yards of what needed to happen with this. I mean, it was the same problem really — I mean, just to give you another example, this is where the Democrats — it’s like you want to go in there sometimes with a drill and get their — ’cause kind of their heart is kind of on the right track, you know. It’s kind of like I think Hillary’s heart is in the right place. she wants all Americans covered, but, hey, we can’t really get rid of the insurance companies, so let’s try and work out a little deal, kind of like what Edwards is proposing now. It’s like Al Gore with the 2000 election: instead of asking for all of Florida to be recounted, which he would have won then, they only want to recount the Democratic counties, where they thought they’d get their votes. And it was like, you know — it’s like, come on! why do you only — they take these half-step measures, and we’re all the worse for it.

So — but to jump ahead here with Hillary, she’s now — or at least last year, in last year’s congress — was the second-largest recipient of health industry money, next to Rick Santorum. He’s gone now. So she may be number one at this point, for all I know. It’s very sad to see that she’s very much — they’re into her pocket, and she’s into their pocket. And I don’t expect much from her.

AMY GOODMAN: Are there presidential candidates that you do feel are putting forward an alternative?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, yes. I mean, there’s — well, first of all, nobody is being very specific, other than Edwards, in terms of an actual plan, and his is not a good plan. Obama’s plan is not as specific, and certainly it’s full of the same flaws that the Edwards and the Hillary old plan had. Kucinich is closest to the right idea, and, of course, he keeps, saying “nonprofit,” or whatever. But I kind of don’t want to use that word anymore, and I wish that Dennis wouldn’t use that, because Kaiser Permanente is a nonprofit. Blue Cross is a nonprofit.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, the Sacramento Bee that criticized you said, “Don’t you understand that Kaiser Permanente is a nonprofit? So why say this is a for-profit industry?”

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, no. Well, right, yeah. It’s not just the for-profit. That’s why I say that essentially you don’t want any private insurance companies involved and that whether they’re for private or nonprofit, because — but when I say “profit,” you have these huge nonprofits that are under the guise of nonprofit, but they’re all about profit. They’re all about making money for themselves and for their executives, and what they make is obscene. And so, I favor the removal of all private insurance companies. I don’t know if Kucinich goes that far. I don’t know really if any of the legislation that I’ve read goes that far, because they all have a component where they will allow the private insurance companies to still be involved.

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re talking about single payer.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a distinction between single payer and universal coverage?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, yes. Of course there’s a distinction, because first of all, let me tell you, they’re all going to say universal coverage. By the time of the election — by the primaries, I’m sure all the Democrats are going to be using that word: universal coverage for everyone, coverage for everyone. Listen, a lot of their plans, all they’re going to do is they’re going to take our tax dollars and put them into the pockets of these insurance companies.

We need to cut out the middleman here. The government can run this program. They do it quite well in these other countries. if you take the top twenty-five countries, and if we were the only one not doing something of the twenty-five, are we trying to say that the other twenty-four are just screwing up and we’re the smart ones here? I don’t think so.

I think it’s — you take a country like Canada. Their overhead, their administrative cost to run their national program takes up about 1.7% of their whole budget. The average insurance company in this country will spend anywhere from 15% to 30% on overhead, administrative costs, paperwork, bureaucracy. That can be brought way down when the government does it. But, of course, the Republicans and even some of the Democrats have done a good job convincing the American people that government is bad, government will just mess it up. And as Al Franken said a few weeks ago — I heard him say — they run on that platform of the government is bad, will mess things up, then get elected and spend the next four years proving themselves right.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, his new film is SiCKO. When we come back, he goes to a British hospital and visits a doctor’s home, and he talks about what he’s doing as this film is released, working with Oprah and YouTube and MoveOn and testifying before Congress, and more. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we conclude our interview with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, in this segment, well, we play a clip of SICKO. Michael visits a British doctor in his office at the NHS — that’s National Health Service — hospital and at his home.

MICHAEL MOORE: You have like a family practice?

NHS DOCTOR: Yeah, it’s an NHS practice. We have nine doctors within that practice.

MICHAEL MOORE: You’re paid for by the government?

NHS DOCTOR: Paid for by the government, yeah.

MICHAEL MOORE: So you work for the government.

NHS DOCTOR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

MICHAEL MOORE: You’re a government-paid doctor. So working for the government, you probably have to use public transportation?

NHS DOCTOR: No, so I have a car that I use and, I drive to work.

MICHAEL MOORE: And old beater.

You live in a kind of a rough part of town, or…?

NHS DOCTOR: I mean, I live in a terrific part of town. It’s called Greenwich. It’s a lovely house. It’s a three-story house.

MICHAEL MOORE: How much do you pay for that?

NHS DOCTOR: 550,000, yeah, so –

MICHAEL MOORE: Pounds?

NHS DOCTOR: Yeah.

MICHAEL MOORE: So, a million dollars.

NHS DOCTOR: Yes, absolutely.

MICHAEL MOORE: So doctors in America do not necessarily have to fear having a universal healthcare?

NHS DOCTOR: No, I think if you want to have two or three million-dollar homes and four or five nice cars and six or seven nice televisions, then maybe, yeah, you need to practice somewhere where you can earn that.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, the AMA, the AMA in this country, has got all the doctors convinced, if we go to socialized medicine, they’re going to be in the poorhouse. And that just isn’t true. The doctors we met in Canada, the doctors we met in Britain, in France, are living quite well. And I even go to the home of one of them in Britain, as you mentioned. He’s living in a million-dollar home. He’s driving an Audi. He’s living the yuppie life. I hope the doctors that go to see my movie will walk out of there going, “Oh, at least our good life can be protected under socialized medicine.” Nobody wants to take away their big house.

AMY GOODMAN: “Skid row,” Michael Moore?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, the opposite of the big house doctors live in. Well, as you know — I mean, I think you’ve covered this — patients in Los Angeles who can’t pay their bill at the hospital, hospitals have been dumping them on skid row for some time now. They just get them out of the hospital, sometimes right in their hospital gown, put them in a taxi and tell the taxi, “Take them to skid row and drop them off.” And sometimes the taxi drivers are having to push them out of the car. And —

AMY GOODMAN: You got videotape.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. We have actual security-cam footage of a Kaiser patient being dumped on the side of the curb by the taxi that Kaiser hired to bring this woman and just dump her with no shoes out in the middle of the street in her hospital gown, very sad. And you sit there and you watch this, and you can’t believe this is the United States of America. This is what we — this is how we treat people. I mean, I just — I think when people see this movie, they’re going to go, OK, this has gone too far, and these people are going to have to be stopped.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, in the film, you talk about the AMA, you talk about the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry. On your website, you feature there preparations for this film coming out. How are they dealing with SiCKO?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, they, at first — I mean, they’ve been — I’ll go — I’ll jump back to just before we started making the movie, where no insurance company would insure me or the film, because they knew it was going to be about insurance. So I had a difficult time just, getting insurance for this thing. Then they started a number things internally that they did to warn their employees: do not talk to Michael Moore; if you talk to Michael Moore, you’re going to be in serious trouble. And, in fact, they did training sessions on how to deal with me, should I show up at their company. They had a — Pfizer had a Michael Moore hotline. You dial this number if you see him. I mean, this is all this crazy stuff —

AMY GOODMAN: Have you dialed it?

MICHAEL MOORE: Oh, yeah. In fact, last year I put it on — a couple years ago I put it on the internet, just so — I told people just dial this number, it’s the Michael Moore hotline at Pfizer. Just call them up and just say: “He’s in the building. He’s in the building!” just to — they eventually had to shut the line down, because so many people were messing around with them, but…

AMY GOODMAN: So what do they say? How do they say to deal with you in these memos?

MICHAEL MOORE: Don’t run, don’t flea, don’t put your hand over the camera. They hired a psychological profiler at one of the companies to tell the CEO how my mind ticks — so, in other words, like how to get me off on the subject. So if I happen to show up with a microphone, the psychological profiler said, we’ve determined if you can just get him to talk about Detroit sports teams, he’ll stop talking to you about the HMOs. And I read that, and I thought, that’s good. That’s pretty good.

So, anyways — but, see, they missed the whole point, because this film was never going to be about me going after a General Motors or a Pfizer, that I wanted to do something much larger here and not just — not just go after one company as if, oh, geez, if we just fixed one company, everything would be fine. There’s something much bigger that we need to fix in this country. And, actually, it’s bigger than the healthcare situation. It’s about how we structure ourselves as a society, how we treat each other, and this American mentality of every man for himself, how that has to stop — this kind of “me” society that we live in has to go to the “we” that the rest of the world lives in.

AMY GOODMAN: You have a man in the film who’s hired by the health industry to challenge people who are filing claims. Explain exactly what he does, how he investigates people.

MICHAEL MOORE: The health insurance industry does not like to pay out claims, because they don’t make money. The only way they can make a profit is if they don’t pay for your operation. If they pay for your operation and your doctor’s appointment and your pharmaceuticals, they don’t make any money. So their goal is to try and pay out as little as possible, which right away, that just tells you right there, there can’t be any room in this healthcare thing for insurance companies, because all it — health should be about helping people. And the decision should never be based on whether or not, hey, we should — how can we save our money here, how can we deny that operation?

So they hire these hit men, what we call insurance company hit men, who, after, let’s say — let’s say you had to go in, for a broken ankle or whatever, and they get that bill and they go, “Wow, that’s like $5,000 for a broken ankle. That shouldn’t have cost more than $1,000. We don’t want to pay all that.” So they hire — they have these investigators, they have investigative units at the insurance companies, and they say, “You know what? Go dig into Amy Goodman’s past. Go find out if maybe on her health insurance application she didn’t tell us about something that she had maybe ten years ago.” And they literally will go and get these records, and they’ll do this incredible research on your health history to where they can then come and say, “You know what? You didn’t tell the truth here. You had a pre-existing condition. we didn’t know about this. You didn’t tell us. And so, therefore, we want the money back from that operation, or we’re not going to pay for it.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the most powerful parts of this film are the people who are coming forward, like the guy who says he couldn’t do it anymore, and he hasn’t been investigating people for a long time. And then you have Linda Penno.

MICHAEL MOORE: Right, the whistleblowers in the film, especially Linda Penno. She’s a doctor from Kentucky. She worked for Humana. She was a medical reviewer there. And it was her job as a doctor to go through claims and approve or deny them. And she tells in the film and in testimony before Congress how she was expected to deny a certain percentage of claims that would come in from patients, even regardless of whether they were true or not. They expected, say, a 10% denial rate. The doctor at the insurance company, the doctor, medical reviewer, who denied the most got like a big Christmas bonus. I mean, it’s absolutely, again, crazy that —

AMY GOODMAN: Her salary increased from a couple hundred dollars a week to six figures.

MICHAEL MOORE: To six figures, because she kept denying. She couldn’t take it any longer. Her conscience got to her, and she resigned, and then went and blew the whistle to Congress, and that testimony is in the film. It’s very powerful, and she’s a very brave soul for coming forward.

AMY GOODMAN: How many more people responded in that way? You said 25,000 people responding about all the terrible problems they have had with health insurance, and then you have these people.

MICHAEL MOORE: Right. I’d say we had a couple hundred people within the industry — pharmaceutical industry, hospital corporations, health insurance industry — that wrote to us, wanting to share with us different things. Some wanted to be on camera, some didn’t. Some sent us files, some — I mean, it was really amazing how many people were — whose consciences were bothering them, essentially. They just couldn’t take it any longer.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Moore, Oscar Award-winning filmmaker. How does this connect to Fahrenheit 9/11? How does SiCKO link to your previous films and Bowling for Columbine?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, that’s a good question. It does — there is a thread, actually, that goes from Bowling for Columbine through Fahrenheit into this film. Part of it is the use of fear. The reason we don’t have a better system is because we’ve been made afraid of socialized medicine, the Canadian system, whatever, and trying to scare the American people, using ignorance as a way to increase the level of fear in the country. It’s these films — and I’ve been doing this really since Roger & Me” — are films about — ultimately about our economic system. We have an economic system, as I’ve said before, it’s unjust, it’s unfair, it’s not democratic. And until, ultimately, that changes, until we construct a different form of economy in a way that we relate to capital, I don’t think that — I think we’ll continue to have these problems, where the have-nots suffer and the haves make off like bandits.

AMY GOODMAN: So how are you organizing? As you release this film in thousands of theaters around the country in the next few weeks, you’re also working with unions, you’re working with YouTube, with Oprah, you’re testifying before Congress. Explain.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Yeah, it is kind of a weird convergence. But you know what? It’s because this issue affects all Americans. And I’m being contacted by all kinds of groups and people now that want to get involved in this. And so, we are going to have a very strong organizing effort through the California Nurses Association, through Physicians for a National Health Plan. MoveOn is going to be very active and involved in this. So, many of the groups and unions that are on the left are organizing around it. But there’s also, things, like you said, like YouTube, people like Oprah, who has decided to make this a very important issue, in terms of something that she’s very concerned about. I was on her show a couple weeks ago, and she has asked her fans to post their healthcare horror stories on her website when the film opens. She’s going to do a town hall on this issue in the fall. So I —

AMY GOODMAN: YouTube?

MICHAEL MOORE: YouTube, again, is asking for people to videotape their stories and put them on YouTube, and there’s going to be a whole section on YouTube of people telling what the insurance company did to them or a family member or a friend, or the hospital or the pharmaceutical company, where they have to pay for drugs or drugs they can’t get.

So I think this will have what they call a viral effect, in the sense — and I hope it does — that people, that these people, are given a voice. And people otherwise are sitting in their homes all across the country suffering and not wondering how can I ever be heard. I hope through my website, through the California Nurses Association, through YouTube, through Oprah’s site, through others that are going to be coming into this, and I think that we’re going to hear what Americans are really going through. And I’ve got to believe something good is going to come out of this. And we’re going to hold the candidates’ feet to the fire on this issue, especially the Democrats.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you going to be doing a second film dogging them? Are you going to have a man in a chicken suit following them?

MICHAEL MOORE: Oh, you’re referring to our corporate crime-fighting chicken on our old TV show. Oh, it’s so nice you remember that chicken. No, but we are actually going up to New Hampshire at the end of this week. And we are going to release information to the public about just how bought and paid for the candidates are that are running for president and for public office.

AMY GOODMAN: How bought and paid for are they?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, you’ll have to wait ’til the end of the week to hear the answer to that. But let me just say it won’t be pretty. I hate to say that, but you know what? And again, I mean, I like a lot of the candidates, for a lot of reasons, that are running. But, if we all throw in with them too soon on this without forcing them to take good positions on these issues, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. The Democrats have already proven that since the November election, that, they will drag their feet if at all possible. And so — and, we’ve already seen what Hillary’s position is on this, and, of course, with her position on the war, this makes it very difficult for people who otherwise would like to vote for her, would like to see our first woman president, but simply can’t support somebody who supported the war for so long and who is taking such large contributions from the health industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, were you surprised by anything you found in making this film?

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, I was constantly — here’s one thing that really struck me. When I was interviewing that British doctor and I was asking how much money he makes — he makes like a little under $200,000 a year — and he said, “But my pay is based on how good of a job I do. If I get more of my patients to stop smoking this year or if I bring their cholesterol down or their blood pressure or their sugar down, I’ll make more money. So it’s actually based on how healthy my patients are. So I have an incentive to actually do good work here to make money.”

And I thought, geez, it’s like just the opposite here. It’s like the more people that smoke or don’t eat well or whatever, who end up with illness and disease, that means more money for the pharmaceutical companies, more money for the doctors, more money for the hospitals. Everybody gains, when you get sick.

And it got me thinking a lot about just myself, personally, because when I was there and I said, maybe one way I should say to people, one way to beat the system, at least this system, is that we should all try to take a little better care of ourselves, and starting with number one here, myself. And so, I started eating fruits and vegetables. I don’t know if you’ve heard of these things, but they come in different colors and they’re crunchy, and, they’re very good for you, if you haven’t tried them. your mother is sitting over there. I don’t know if I should point this out, but your mom is sitting over there, and she looks like she did a good job teaching you the importance of fruits and vegetables.

AMY GOODMAN: She did a great job.

MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. And she said that you were an excellent child, by the way. We missed that off-camera here, but I want your viewers and listeners to know that mom pretty much approves of how you’ve turned out.

And the other thing is, I started going for a walk every day. So I go for a walk for like a half-hour to an hour a day, and I just — I feel 100% better. I’ve like lost thirty pounds. Don’t worry, I’m not going to — you’re not going to see the Jane Fonda workout video from me or anything. I’m just saying, though, that if we just — each of us — if we all just do a couple things just to take better care of ourselves, we can avoid this crazy healthcare system. And you know what? I think it’s better for the planet, too. Again, we’re over-consumptive on so many things as Americans, and we all need to kind of think about that a little bit in how we behave. So — and I say that for myself, start with me.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker. His newest film, SiCKO, is going to be in theaters next week, thousands of theaters around the country. This week, he heads to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress to challenge the healthcare system in this country, calling for single-payer insurance, and then he goes to New Hampshire to challenge the presidential candidates.

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“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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1 comment June 20th, 2007