1.  Foreign Policy speech from Senator Biden
2.  Poll of the Iraqi people
3.  Report commissioned by Bremer and Rumsfeld
4.  Futures market regarding White House actions.  There is also a link on their site to the Pentagon's short-lived Terrorist Futures Market idea
5.  Op Ed from Roy Morrison, a former leader of the Clamshell Alliance - long but worth reading.

***********************

1.  Senator Biden is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. You may not agree with his assessment but it is important to know what he is saying, as a spokesperson for the Democratic party.
http://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/20030731.htm

2.  While this poll has its limitations, it does reveal some interesting things about the views of those who were polled.
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=247

3.  This is the report that folks in Washington will be using as the basis for further decisions about Iraq - a little lengthy but worth a read.
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Iraq_Trip_Report.pdf

4.  August 1, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONSORTIUM FOLLOWS PENTAGON LEAD WITH NEW TERROR MARKET
AmericanActionMarket.org will attempt to predict White House actions
Contact: mailto:info@americanactionmarket.org

Inspired by the futures market in terror and war that the Pentagon released earlier this week (and then immediately yanked; see http://news.google.com/news?q=%22Policy+Analysis+Market%22), a consortium of computer scientists, political scientists and others announced today an online futures market in White House behavior.

"The Pentagon felt that a market in terrorism futures could predict terrorism," said AAM spokesman Tad Hirsch, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab. "If the market is indeed such a powerful tool, then it should be directed at the most urgent question facing the world: what will the White House do next? And the second most urgent: what is it doing right now?"

The site, http://www.AmericanActionMarket.org, will offer various categories of "futures" that users can bet on and trade. Some of these have easily verifiable outcomes:

* Who will be the next foreign leader to move from the CIA payroll to the White House "most wanted" list?

* What will be the next major White House lie to break, and how will the White House attempt to control it? Will the attempt be successful?

* Which corporation will be next to see its close relationship to the White House erupt in scandal?

(See http://www.AmericanActionMarket.org/concept.htm for more examples.)

In addition, AAM will also allow users to place and trade longer-term wagers on current or past scenarios that are in the short term unverifiable because of White House secrecy, and which will only be proved or disproved via impeachment hearings, journalistic sleuth-work, etc. For example:

* Was Rumsfeld the first to suggest using the attacks as pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein, as reported in the press, or did the idea first come from others?

* Was the invasion of Afghanistan planned from the start as a stepping-stone to an attack on Iraq?

* Was the President fully conscious of the lies in his pre-war speeches, or were the decisions to lie taken by others? By whom?

* How important a long-term factor in the 2003 Iraq was Iraq's expulsion of U.S. and British oil companies from Iraq between 1972 and 1975?

(See http://www.AmericanActionMarket.org/concept.htm for more examples and
sources.)

As evidence is accumulated to prove or disprove a particular future, its market value will change; this change may serve analysts as an indicator of a scenario's likelihood, even if a final resolution of the bet is never achieved.

Just as a gambler buys chips at a casino, users of the AAM system will use a secure webpage to buy "Smart Dollars," which they will then use for trading. Users will be able to "cash out" at any time by trading in their "Smart Dollars" for real ones, with 10% going to charity.

Hirsch acknowledges that the value of markets as predictors is not certain, but he insists it's worth trying. "If there's even a small chance this will help predict what the White House will do, it's well worth the effort, given the stakes."

5. OP-ed that should be of interest:
Roy Morrison               603-456-3641
P.O. Box 114 603-456-2871 (fax)
Warner, NH 03278 rmjsc@mcttelecom.com
www.essentialbooks.com 1955 words
________________________________________________________________

Weathermen: Reflections  on Bombs and Clams

Always mediagenic, the Weathermen are making a comeback. The new Sam Hamill and Bill Siegel  documentary The Weather Underground  has swiftly leaped from obscurity to national notice. After a showing this summer at the 6th  Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) at the Waterville opera house and the Film Forum  in New York, once again the Weathermen are subject of a media slanging match.

The Weather Underground, the paradigmatic off the deep end with rage, rhetoric and bombs  SDS splinter group, is being denounced on NPR  by the likes of former rad and now bottom feeding neocon David Horowitz, a sure sign of popularity. And for balance, they are also trashed by former SDS heavy and now distinguished media studies  professor Todd Gitlin.  Meanwhile, The Weather Underground, the film, is being distributed nationally by Shadow Distribution, a spin off of Maine's Railroad Cinemas and inspiration and primary venue for the MIFF.

For those products of American education who came of age too late to remember SDS, and who have been carefully protected from our own history, a brief explanation is in order. The Students for a Democratic Society evolved in the 1960s under the impact of the Vietnam War from a smallish student group on the left with unremarkable politics  to the banner carrier of the New Left.

Under the social, political, and government intelligence (COINTELPRO) pressures exerted by the war and the times, SDS nurtured a galaxy of radical splinters that hastened its disintegration as a unified and effective national organization. These included not just the Weathermen  (from the Dylan line, "You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows"in Subterranean Homesick Blues). There was also such radical self expression  as the maoist  Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYM II) and the Progressive Labor Party (with the soon to be fascist nut leader Lyndon LaRouche).The Weathermen were later to be renamed with an accurate and  non-sexist moniker as the Weather Underground.

Beyond the predictable big time media woofing, where the sixties are to be trashed once again, there are quite a series of lessons, personal and political, expressed, implied and derived that one can draw from watching The Weather Underground .

The film made me uncomfortable in many ways. If you are now or have ever been a member of a radical political group, or was one of the under thirty generation in the 1960s,  an"objective" viewing of The Weather Underground  is next to impossible.

 From 1976 to 1989 I was active in the Clamshell Alliance, the paradigmatic regional anti-nuclear group, in opposition to the New Hampshire Seabrook nuclear project and to the nuclear arms race. I was one of the Clams who occupied, sat in, spoke truth to power, participated in and help plan hundreds of antinuclear actions.  I became a committed pacifist and veteran civil disobedient.

Following Clamshell's May1977 Seabrook site occupation and the incarceration of 1414 occupiers for up to 13 days in N.H. National Guard Armories, Clam leapt to national prominence. Dozens of similar alliances were formed around the country. Offhand remarks about next planned Clamshell Action were front page, above the fold, New Hampshire headline news.

Richard Nixon's plan for 1,000 nukes by 2000 collapsed along with the financial health of the nuclear industry facing vigorous citizen opposition by the anti-nuclear movement in many incarnations, from the hearing rooms to the streets. More than 150 nukes were canceled
including Seabrook Unit II. Those were, for a few of my Clam years, heady activist times. As a Clamshell media spokesperson, I had the strange experience of  waking up to my own voice on the clock radio denouncing nukes on a Boston rock station. The Clamshell Armory Ball, to commemorate the '77 occupation, permitted by court order, was given a long New York Times profile. Rock stars came to our demos and carried their own guitars.

We did more than sit down or chain ourselves to construction cranes. Clam took the lead in organizing the Manhattan Project that nonviolently blockaded the  New York Stock on Oct. 29 1979, the 50th anniversary of the Great Crash. In one of many creative small actions, a Clam affinity group dressed in business suits arrived at the Board room of the Bank of Boston, who provided a line of credit for then Seabrook lead owner Public Service Co. of NH, announced they were here for a meeting and occupied the room until arrested with much media hoopla.

Clamshell's principles of disciplined non-violence and non-violence training,  consensus decision making, affinity groups, local focus and regional scope, openness, feminist leadership were in many ways inspired in reaction to the anti-war movement of the 1970s. Clamshell at its best, and in spirit, in many ways represented the opposite of the Weather Underground . They were violent and secret and humorless. We were open and peaceful and could show by street theater that the emperor had no clothes. They had Days of Rage. We had the Seabrook Bail Out Boogie Blues, and western style wanted posters and a couple of cowboys looking for outlaws like Buffalo Bill Tallman (Public Service Chair) stealing ratepayer money.

And as SDS was torn apart by more radical than thou factions, Clamshell was also gravely damaged by internal disputation. At the time when literally many thousands of eager activists were streaming into Clamshell meetings in 1979 following the Three Mile Island meltdown, Clamshell was locked in a self-destructive factional struggle.

You cannot reduce what happened to Clam to a case of nonviolent  good guys versus assholes. There is more than enough blame to go around in the history of Clamshell in from 1978 to 1980.  And I suspect much of the same could be said of SDS. Certainly in Clam's case, key mistakes were made, and moments of possible compromise and effective action lost that led the most radical faction in Clamshell to eventually inherit the organizational shell of the organization, much as Weatherpeople gained suzerainty over the SDS National Office.

They may make a movie in another decade or so showing pictures of Clams climbing over or cutting down fences. They won't have footage of the Clam coordinating committee making a huge error and rejecting a laboriously crafted compromise reached by consensus of the most committed activists planning the 1978 occupation that brought the factions together for a brief time.

We learned the hard way that movements in the swirl of action are subject to three ingrained centripetal tendencies -- a self-consciously prudent and sometimes conservative faction that councils restraint and sometimes inaction, a radical group that must act, and act now in the strongest fashion it can imagine, and a larger group that is wedded to repeating what has come before.

Nonviolent direct action movements need remember two basic things- their commitment to principled nonviolence and their commitment to principled action. Groups can't be a little bit violent no more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Neither can an action group that wants to remain effective lose it edge by arguing internally instead of acting, or by and attempting to repeat last years success. We should of known that at Seabrook after 1977. The same lesson applied to Seattle in 2000.

Whether it was the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook or the Weatherpeople, some kids frustrated at the slow pace of change and who  wanted to put on bike helmets and fight the cops got their chance. In 1980 I watched the Nuclear Liberation Front (NLF) at Seabrook marching like Roman legionnaires behind plywood shields assault the fence surrounding the nuke site defended by baton wielding cops and construction workers. Wounded NLFers were carried off on their shields. This was sexy fun of a sort for those not too seriously injured.

And they found out both at Seabrook and after 1969's Chicago Days of Rage that this was no way to build a mass movement for substantive change. The cops learned fast. The opponents took advantage of the images of gas masks, tear gas, and violence. And the movement withered.

One of the more insightful bits of The Weather Underground   was a reflective Mark Rudd (who was once  notorious for being anything but that) noting that when hundreds instead of the expected thousands showed up in Chicago for what was supposed to be an epochal battle with the cops, they should have realized that the game was up. It seems clear, at least in hindsight, that bomb making was not the best course to follow a clear lack of public enthusiasm for a call to action.

I'll offer my own exercise of criticism-self-criticism, for which the Weather Underground  were renowned (not featured in the movie), in addition to their politically sanctioned  nonmonogamous and orgiastic sex (which was). In the late sixties and early seventies I was not unsympathetic to the Weather Underground . During the Vietnam war I was a marginal activist who attended some demos, collected money and signatures on the street for the SMC (Student Mobilization Committee). While nonviolent I had a considerable degree of admiration for the folks underground blowing up symbolic targets, injuring no one, and avoiding the FBIs. And I confess, with lust in my heart, that Bernardine Dohrn in her leather outfit on her FBI post office wanted poster was one sexy thing.

My closest connection with the Weather Underground  was walking down 11th street in the Village soon after the 1970 town house bomb factory explosion. We could peer into neighbor Dustin Hoffman's library. The wall of his house having been peeled away by the explosion. Hoffman makes a brief uncredited appearance in the movie in picturers taken at the scene shortly after the explosion.

The blast that was meant to kill attendees at a Fort Dix NCO dance, instead killed three bomb assembling weatherpeople in the Village. I learned from watching The Weather Underground  that it was this explosion that led the organization to decide to blow things up very carefully and take very serious (and successful) precautions to avoid human injury in their  many subsequent bombing for political effect.

A generation older, the underground vets offer some striking differences as well as a common broadly  maintained radical sentiment. Bill Ayers, former terrorist, now unrepentant memoirist and Distinguished Professor of Education at University of illinois at Chicago and Bernardine Dohrn, former terrorist, now unrepentant Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Children and Family Justice Center seem to have the last laugh.  Co-stars of The Weather Underground  they live comfortable,  apparently tenured middle class lives together. David Gilbert is in prison, probably for the rest of his life, for his part in  a post weatherman Black Liberation Army  robbery and murder. Marc Rudd, now teaching math at a western community  college, and other former weatherpeople Naomi Jaffe,  Brian Flanagan, and Laura Whitehorn seem to live lives quite a bit  less comfortable and more reflective than Ayers and Dohrn in an America still a swirl of hope, rage, sadness and contradictions. This is our America still making war and wreaking havoc upon the poor and mostly innocent half-a-world-away.

And amidst this violence we should remember that nonviolence is the effective antidote to violence as well as the tool at our command . Rage, despair and impatience in the face of injustice are expressions whose energies need be channeled into effective nonviolent action, not used as an excuse to pick up the gun, make bombs and join the blood rimmed tide.

A fitting epitaph for the film is delivered by Weatherman alum and now NY City bar owner Brian Flanagan who said, looking back, the Vietnam War drove us all a little crazy. And so it did.

Fact check:
David Horowitz neo-con clips:
http://dir.salon.com/topics/david_horowitz/index.html

Maine International Film Festival schedule:
http://www.miff.org/

shadow distribution
http://www.indiewire.com/boxoffice/films/the_weather_underground.html

COINTELPRO
http://www.derechos.net/paulwolf/cointelpro/

Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYMII)
http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/againstcurrent.html

SDS History
http://www.sdsrebels.com/oral_history_project.htm
http://www.uvm.edu/~jmoore/sixties/sixtiesbooks.html
http://www.historyamericas.com
Democracy_Is_in_the_Streets_From_Port_Huron_to_the_Siege_of_Chicago_06741972
59.html

Clamshell Alliance:History
http://old.valleyadvocate.com/25th/archives/seabrook.html
http://www.ecologia.org/newsletter/year90/jan90c.html
http://www.social-ecology.org/harbinger/vol3no1/movements_2.html
http://www.izaak.unh.edu/specoll/mancoll/clamshell.htm

Clamshell Alliance 1977 occupation film
http://www.turningtide.com/SEABROOK.htm

Bill Ayers today <bayers@uic.edu >
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/bios/ayers.htm
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/radicals_8-22.html

Bernardine Dohrn today <b-dohrn@law.northwestern.edu>
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/clinic/dohrn/dohrn.html
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201dohrn.htm

David Gilbert today
http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/davidgilbert/