YANKEES GO HOME

Written July 15, 2007

I spent most of my first 18 years living on or near NATO Bases during the Cold War era. My family never lived anywhere longer than 3 years. We moved to Spain when I was 10 yrs old in 1983. I start here because this is the time period when I began to learn the hardest lessons about the world and its people.
I’d like to add, I love Spain. I have many fond memories along with these not so fond ones. The experiences I’m going to share now, I feel contributed to my attitude today.

My dad was stationed at Torrejon A.F.B, just outside of Madrid. Only American officers were allowed to live on base housing so we lived in a little town named Daganzo. There were only a handful of A.F. kids in the town. Most were too young to play with and my brother was four years my junior. My only companions were Yvette and Natasha, their mother was Australian-American. There were many Spanish children in Daganzo but they weren’t friendly toward us. They made it quite clear they disdained our presence with rocks and taunts.

I did befriend one Spanish girl in Daganzo. She had just moved there to live with her grandparents. I met her in the little market my mom used to send me for groceries. We ended up spending the day together. We decided, we were to be best friends. The next day, I knocked on her grandparents door and my new friend answered. She said. “My grandfather says I can’t be your friend because you are American.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know.” I still sometimes think about that little girl. She would be in her 30's, as I am. I wonder how she feels about Americans now? For that one day we spent together as children, she didn’t know the difference.

A school bus picked us up from Daganzo to deliver us to the elementary school on base. The scenery through Torrejon was plastered with posters and advertisements on the sides of buildings. My favorite was the one with Ronald Reagan. His face was half peeling away to expose a lizard alien underneath. Taken from the TV mini-series “V”. I have the DVD now. On the back it says, “They Come In Peace- To Enslave Mankind!” 24 years later, I find it ironic.

When we arrived at the base, there was a sign announcing, Torrejon A.F.B. Someone spray painted in red, “YANKEES GO HOME”. The first time I saw it, I thought the person who did it was a baseball fan. Every morning a Spanish M.P. with a gun strapped to his back would check each and everyone of our I.D.’s. They never spoke nor smiled.. One particular morning a kid had forgotten his I.D., they made him get off the bus. I remember looking at him through the window with his backpack and lunchbox as he started to cry. Those M.P.’s scared the hell out of me too. I never once forgot my I.D. the entire 3 years I lived there.

I wasn’t a great student. I guess it was hard to keep up with all the moving. Still, I loved going to school and being with other American kids. During my many schools across the states and in Europe, I’d learned every kind of drill...earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, etc... In Spain, we learned the bomb threat drill. We even had actual bomb threats, but it didn’t scare us. There were so many, we stopped taking them seriously. Our parents were not even notified. I remember watching Reagan on the news in class. He was likened to a superhero. We were the good guys and anyone against America were the bad guys. I was told many people across the world didn’t like us because they were jealous of what we had in the states and they wanted to take it from us. At this point, I started to believe it. I wasn’t afraid though. Everyone knows the good guys always prevail. For many of us A.F. brats...color, ethnicity, religion, etc...didn’t matter because most were bi-something anyway. We were American.

Americans stationed at Torrejon had a favorite restaurant, Casa De Castillos. It was influenced by American cooking. We ate there almost every week. It was bombed.


Restaurant Bombing in Madrid, Spain
Date: April 12, 1985
Location: Madrid, Spain

Description: A bomb explodes in a restaurant popular with American servicemen in Madrid, Spain, killing 18, all Spaniards, and injuring 82, including 15 Americans. It is the worst act of terrorism in Spain since the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939. Various groups claim responsibility for the bombing in calls to news organizations, including the Basque separatist group, ETA, and the Islamic Jihad organization.

Aftermath: Within days, Spanish authorities determined that the claim made in Beirut by the so-called Islamic Jihad organization was the most credible, although they conceded that anyone could have used that name as a cover. No arrests were ever made. According to Spanish officials, it remains the only major terrorist attack in the country's modern history that has not been solved.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company


The joke circulating among the adults after the bombing. “The Rib House had already started plans to be rebuild but they will be changing their menu. They no longer will be specializing in ribs. The new menu will be serving Sloppy Joe’s.” At age 11, I didn’t think it was funny. I guess it was too adult for me.

My parents decided to divorce in Spain. My mom was homesick and claimed the military life wasn’t for her. She was tired of starting over and my dad always being TDY. He was away the day I was born on a year long tour of duty to Thailand. I was 6 months old before he saw me. My dad requested to come home to see me and was told, “It’s not their problem. The A.F. didn’t issue him a wife and kid.” My mom, brother, and I left my dad in Spain to move to Missouri. I would miss my dad but was excited to come home where I belonged.

Home wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t everything I remembered it to be or told it was. People in the states didn’t get along well at all. America is where I learned about racism and all the other petty categories we break ourselves into. At 13, I experienced “culture shock.” being so far from a military base. I wasn’t able to make friends and started failing my classes, if I went at all. A year later my dad was stationed to Luke A.F.B. in Arizona. I went to live with him, brought my grades up, and graduated high school while working at the hospital on base.

American’s reaction to 9/11 surprised me in different ways. We stopped tearing one another apart for a little while. We were compassionate and willing to help or console a stranger. But then came the fear. I saw the news reports drilling into everyone’s head the “new” dangers Americans were now to be facing. All the while I thought, this isn’t anything “new”. It’s just the realization that Americans aren’t exempt from the horrors of the rest of the world. I think Americans really hang on to the idea of fairy tale endings. Terrorism isn’t an evil supervillain to be slain. It is a mentality mixed in a civilian population. We can not wage a war on terrorism without becoming terrorists ourselves. Showing the compassion and willingness to help strangers throughout the world, as we did for one another during 9/11 is the key to curtailing terrorism. To this day, I don’t feel any safer living in America than I did as a kid living overseas. But it’s not terrorists that scare me as much as our own government and the wars it has initiated by feeding and toying with the fears of the people in this country.

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it." -Noam Chomsky

The End of American Exceptionalism

The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative historian who spent twenty-three years serving in the US Army. He also lost his son in Iraq last year. In a new book titled The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich argues that although many in this country are paying a heavy price for US domestic and foreign policy decisions, millions of Americans simply continue to shop, spend and satisfy their appetite for cheap oil, credit and the promise of freedom at home. Bacevich writes, "As the American appetite for freedom has grown, so too has our penchant for empire."





Imperial Presidency and supporting the troops

Funding The White House Campaign

The road to the seat of power in the White House is not easy, and certainly not cheap. This year's US presidential race is on track to be the most expensive in history.



Money in the 2008 Elections: Bad News or Good?

Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies

The Chautauquan Daily


The decision by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to decline the public grant of $84 million for his general election campaign has been widely viewed as, and harshly criticized for, administering the final death blow to the presidential public financing system. That system, rightly considered the crown jewel of public financing in American elections, was set up in 1974 as part of extensive amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act and has been a central feature of presidential elections ever since.

In 2000, George W. Bush became the first successful major party candidate to opt out of the nominating season matching funds section of the law and thereby free himself of the spending limits that are linked to acceptance of the public funds. President Bush repeated that practice in his 2004 re-election bid and was followed by Democratic candidates Howard Dean and John Kerry. Bush and Kerry each raised around $250 million before their party’s convention, compared with the $37 million they would have been limited to had they accepted the public matching funds. By 2008, opting into the public finance system was widely viewed as a sign of weakness. Early in 2007, Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their decision to forego public funding in the nominating season and all of the major Republican candidates followed the same path (although, in the case of John McCain, only after the revival of his candidacy in early 2008). While the nomination component of public financing fell into disrepair over a number of years, the general election grant was accepted by all of the major party candidates between 1976 and 2004. Obama’s decision to reject the public grant for the 2008 general election campaign appears to have set an ominous precedent for the entire program.

To many supporters of campaign finance reform, this was only the latest in a series of discouraging developments in the financing of the 2008 elections. The amounts of money raised by the presidential candidates ($296 million for Obama, $238 million for Clinton, and $122 million for McCain through May) shattered all previous records. The money primary in 2007 once again sharply narrowed the field of candidates before the first delegate selection event was held. The Supreme Court, under new Chief Justice John Roberts, moved in a decidedly deregulatory direction, with one decision potentially undercutting a major provision prohibiting corporate and union treasury funding of electioneering communications of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known widely as McCain-Feingold. An extended political deadlock between Senate Democrats and Republicans left the Federal Election Commission with only two members (two short of the majority required for formal action) in the heat of a hotly contested presidential election. And, as in 2004, outside groups threatened to play a prominent independent role in attacking the presidential candidates.

This litany of problems associated with money in the 2008 elections conjures up an image of a broken system that is much more pessimistic than the evidence warrants. The large amounts of campaign funds raised are indicative of the extraordinarily high level of public interest in the stakes of the election and the choices being offered. Fundraising by the candidates appears more an indicator of their electoral appeal than a cause of it. In a political environment hostile to Republicans, it is no surprise that Democratic candidates have enjoyed a distinct advantage. Large soft-money contributions to parties from corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals (often arranged through intense pressure from elected and party officials) are no longer a part of the picture. Presidential candidates have focused on hard-money contributors, which are limited to $2,300 per donor. Several of the candidates, Obama in particular, have attracted a huge number of small donors via the Internet. Money has not been the decisive factor in either party’s nomination contest. Although falling short of Obama’s fundraising, Clinton raised enough money to give her a fair shot at winning the nomination. She won a number of primaries in which she was greatly outspent by Obama. Her problems stemmed more from campaign strategy and choices regarding the allocation of her resources. John McCain won the Republican nomination in spite of his fundraising shortfall. And the efforts of outside groups to shape the election outcome have thus far constituted more talk than action. Give the potential legal liabilities and questions about the efficacy of independent advertising campaigns, many wealthy donors have decided to stay on the sidelines this election season.

Even the seeming collapse of the public financing system has a silver lining. The extended and highly competitive contest between Clinton and Obama, which mobilized millions of new voters and riveted the attention of publics across the globe, would not have been possible if either had opted into the public matching program. Moreover, Obama’s decision to reject the public general election grant is unlikely to substantially alter the balance of resources that would have resulted if both candidates had opted in. That is because the public grant constitutes only a part (and clearly less than a majority) of the funds spent on behalf of the presidential candidates. The Supreme Court has ruled that political parties may spend unlimited sums on behalf of their candidates as long as they do so independently, while the presidential candidates can assist their parties by transferring unspent funds from their nomination season coffers, sharing donor lists, and engaging in joint fundraising activities. The McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee together might raise and spend as much as $300 million in the general election campaign. Obama and the DNC could have well have matched or exceeded that sum even if he had chosen to remain within the public funding system.

What Obama gains by opting out is not a huge new fundraising advantage, but instead strategic control over his resources, allowing his campaign to control his message, define the electoral playing field, and allocate resources in a way consistent with his campaign strategy.

There are virtues to public financing that merit a reconsideration of the design of existing law in light of new developments and recent practice. In the meantime, there is no particular virtue for candidates remaining within that system.

What's Next For Campaign Finance?

TAP talks with campaign-finance guru Thomas Mann, a key advocate for McCain-Feingold who now says reform should focus more on public funding of candidates and less on contribution limits.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have dealt blows to the presidential public campaign financing system -- John McCain by opting in, then opting out of nomination funds and Obama by rejecting public funds for the general election outright.

Thomas Mann, the W. Averell Harriman chair of Governance Studies at the Brooking Institution, has been an outspoken advocate of campaign finance reform for well over ten years. During the debate over McCain-Feingold in 2002, a bill that eliminated soft money, Mann frequently appeared in the media to offer comprehensive analysis of and justification for the proposed contribution limits and other fixes to the existing campaign finance structures. Over the last six years, Mann has continued to stand by contribution limits and other regulations. But now, as the Obama campaign continues to shatter assumptions about fundraising, Mann discusses how new efforts at reform might have to get creative, and whether public financing has a future.

Abby Rapoport: Now that soft money has been eliminated is the sheer amount of money spent something to be concerned about or is the steady growth in spending a sign of involvement?

Thomas Mann: I've never worried about the overall amount of money in campaigns. We're a huge country, a public not much engaged in politics or public affairs. It's hard to get through the din of advertising for commercial products. ... The problematics come with how it's raised and how it's spent, how it's allocated among candidates. But in this cycle, it seems to me that [the high amount of money came from] the high level of interest, the competitiveness between Clinton and Obama and basically the fact that the public financing system fell into disrepair.

AR: You were very involved in the passage of McCain-Feingold back in 2002. That bill tried to close off loopholes in an existing campaign finance system. Do you think there are more loopholes that have exposed themselves this cycle?

TM: My inclination is not to go back in and say what can we regulate now? Mine is to say, let's acknowledge two big things happening. One, the courts have made it absolutely clear that parties, political parties, can spend as much as they want as long as they do it independently, on behalf of their candidates. Which means there's no way now that you can control spending. That's an important point to keep in mind. The second one is that we've seen just the first evidence of the possibility of a very different source of funding for campaigns -- namely small donors.

And therefore my inclination is to acknowledge the first and therefore don't get confused about what public financing can or cannot do. Rethink public financing in light of what parties can do independently and secondly begin to think creatively about building the small donor base for campaigns, not just at the presidential level, but the congressional level, state legislative level. See what it takes, maybe new public policies for tax credits, for matching funds. But I'm more inclined to think less in a regulatory restrictive way, than saying, "Hey, a new dimension is opening, campaigns are changing, more people are entering as small donors. Are there ways we can build on that?"

AR: Do you feel like you've switched, over time from a more regulatory position? Or did the dynamic in campaigns change?

TM: I try to keep myself open to new information. I began in this field as a traditional political scientist that was skeptical of the reformers, that argued that money will find its outlet, that generally believed there were limits to what you could accomplish in terms of restricting money. Then as a I did research and I viewed the real world and saw what was happening out there, I came to embrace some ways of getting existing law to work where it had been undermined, and that's what the whole McCain-Feingold thing was about. But I was never a champion of spending limits for their own sake, I always believed contribution limits ought to constantly be increased to reflect the cost of campaigning. So now I see new opportunities presenting themselves by changes in technology and I see new limits in place from the courts that you've got to reckon with. So that leads me to look into some other ways to grapple with campaign finance.

AR: Many have called Obama's decision to forgo public funds the deathblow to the public financing system. You wrote back in April that the system had been "largely irrelevant" in the nominating cycle. Should legislators work to fix the existing public financing system or should they get rid of it?

TM: It's sad. It has for the most part died in the nominations phase. It began with Bush opting out and winning the election in 2000. Followed by Bush, Dean and Kerry in 2004. So as we approached 2008, it was clear any really serious candidate was going to opt out and raise as much money as he or she could. Now I think that's unfortunate. There is something to be said for having some seed money, some opportunity for lesser known candidates to raise some amount of money, to have it matched in some way, so the field of candidates is not limited to those who can either self finance or who have access to huge amounts. I continue to believe it's important to update that system. It needs much more generous matches but I guess I'm open to the possibility that we disconnect it from spending limits. Because I think almost any kind of spending limits will lead the major candidates to opt out.

I'm beginning to think we may want to refashion that program as a matching system for small contributions, up to a certain limit of public matches that would effectively make it easier for lesser known candidates to get enough money at the outset to keep a campaign alive at least through Iowa and New Hampshire. The way it is now, many drop out a year before.

AR: What about in the general election?

TM: As far as the general election is concerned, there it's a real dilemma. The fact that Obama is opting out does not mean that he will naturally have more spent on his campaign than McCain. With party independent spending, the public financing only becomes only a part of the expenditures, and a small part. I mean you could have argued it made sense for him to take the public grant, the 84 million dollars, but raise money like crazy between now and the end of the democratic convention, raise two, three four hundred million dollars, transfer it to the party, and then let the party spend it independently on behalf of his campaign. Now he didn't do that because he wants to run his own campaign. He wants to control the message control where the playing field is, and make those decisions so there's a consistent message.

We set it up to be full public financing and for a number of years that's just how it worked. It stopped working that way in 1996 with soft money. Now soft money was eliminated but the court sort of reinforced its view that even for candidates that accept public funding, their party can then spend independently all they want and the candidate can help them raise that money at the beginning. So that leads me to question the structure of public financing in the general election. Maybe it should be a floor that's made available to candidates but doesn't limit other money they can raise and spend on behalf. But why are we doing that? I mean the public may not be real thrilled about that if they're ponying up these public dollars but it doesn't limit the overall amount or what's involved in raising the other amount. So I'm puzzled. I'm not sure what to do about the public financing system in the general election.

AR: Is there a future for public financing at other levels, like congressional and state races?

TM: I've long supported public financing at all levels of government but I think the courts interpreting the constitution have put up real obstacles to systems as we once defined them as full public financing. I'm now inclined to look for other ways of using public subsidies to enrich to resources available to candidates, to foster greater competition, to try to reduce the money chase. To see if we can't build on new forms of campaigning that might reduce the cost of campaigns.

I just feel that campaigns are not the same as they were forty years ago when the current structures were put in place. And we need to acknowledge that, to see the changes that are coming and to try think creatively about how to manage this.



Obama Tops in Donations from Troops

By Matthew Mosk
An analysis of political contributions from soldiers on the battlefield has produced some unexpected results.

The Center for Responsive Politics has found that the presidential candidate with a record as a bona fide war hero is garnering far less financial support from the troops than the Harvard-trained lawyer.

"Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain's haul," the report said.

The report also included this surprise: "Members of the armed services overall -- whether stationed overseas or at home -- are also favoring Obama with their campaign contributions in 2008.... Although 59 percent of federal contributions by military personnel have gone to Republicans this cycle, of money from the military to the presumed presidential nominees, 57 percent has gone to Obama."

The analysis of campaign records found Obama has raised more than $60,000 from 134 military service men and women who are deployed overseas. McCain has raised $10,665 from 26 donors.

Books

The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook
Anthony Corrado, Daniel R. Ortiz, Thomas E. Mann and Trevor Potter, Brookings Institution Press 2005 c. 292pp.

Inside the Campaign Finance Battle
Anthony Corrado, Thomas E. Mann and Trevor Potter, eds., Brookings Institution Press 2003 c. 333pp.

Policy Watch Interview with Jim Lobe, IPS Washington Bureau Chief

Jim Lobe has served as the Washington D.C. correspondent and Bureau Chief of Inter Press Service (IPS) from 1980 to 1985, and again from 1989 to the present. IPS is an international news and feature agency that specializes in the coverage of events and issues of interest to or affecting developing countries. Since 2001, Lobe has served on the Foreign Policy in Focus Board of Advisors.

I recommend Jim Lobe's latest blog, Ignatius Concludes Bombing “Not Likely” August 3rd, 2008, which includes a free download of the study by the Washington Institute for Near Policy, The Last Resort: Consequences of Preventive Military Action against Iran.

Caught Between Two Extremes

Despite the apparent failure of the armed approach taken by Washington in Afghanistan, both presidential candidates and the majority of Congress support not merely continuing this approach but intensifying it. McCain and Obama are not only in agreement that the Pentagon needs to send more troops into Afghanistan, they are also in agreement that it is the war that the US must win. Operating under the pretext that killing more Afghanis is somehow going to end the desire of Washington's Islamist enemies to attack it has not only created the current stalemate in Afghanistan, it has also spread the anti-American resistance into the tribal areas of Pakistan and threatens to engulf the Pakistani city of Peshawar. The recent killings of civilians by US and NATO forces only adds to the resistance, especially when the US denies the killings ever happened. -Why Afghanistan is Not the Good War



Individuals interested in thinking more deeply about the vexing question of whether or not Mr. Obama ought to escalate what has become an ugly guerrilla war in Afghanistan can entertain themselves here with a thought experiment I dreamed up using Colonel John R. Boyd's legendary briefing of the philosophy and conduct of war, Patterns of Conflict. It is designed to let you frame the issues at the heart of a successful counter-guerrilla operation and determine for yourself if adding a small number of boots on the ground in Afghanistan will bring light to the end of a tunnel created by an inept President and incompetent neocon henchmen. The danger of allowing sound-bite politics to define military strategy looms large for Obama and our nation. This bullet train for redeployment would do well to assess whether it's on the right track. -Afghanistan: Good War or Quagmire?

It was less than a month after September 11th, 2001 that the United States launched its attack, Operation Enduring Freedom on Afghanistan, defeating the Taliban. After the bombing expedition, the US refused to allow the expansion of peacekeeping troops from Kabul to the rest of the country, claiming it would interfere with the hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda. Consequently, it re-empowered misogynist and fundamentalist warlords in the northern part of the country and allowed them to take part in government.



On paper, women are more equal to men than they were before, but in practical terms very little has actually changed in Afghanistan for women. There's increased sexual and domestic violence against women. Women parliamentarians are harassed and threatened.






Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."



Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.



Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.



Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.



Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?" -Howard Zinn



I think even the diehard Obama supporters have come to realize that the US will be leaving troops in Iraq but will shift its attention to Afghanistan (similar in the way the our attentions were shifted away from Afghanistan to Iraq), thus causing the situation in Afghanistan to deteriorate.



In my opinion, the deterioration is not due to the lack of "boots on the ground", but the occupation itself. Is it unreasonable of me to wonder if Iraq will suffer a similar fate of deterioration after the redeployment of troops. Considering US troops will remain in Iraq, but our renewed focus on the "War On Terror" will be in Afghanistan once AGAIN?

"The Chronological List of Islamic Terrorists Attacks"-1969

In my last blog, I covered the first event listed on the "Chronological List of Islamic Terrorists Attack" (the Robert Kennedy assassination) and revealed my motives to research the history behind these attacks. A myspacer used this list to justify our pre-emptive U.S. military action in the Middle East and I have recently noticed this list is posted on countless websites for the same purpose.

The second event on this list of chronological fear-mongering propaganda…

"Feb. 18, 1969 - Boeing 707 attacked at Zurich, Switzerland, killing the pilot and 3 passengers."

Hmm…and from Wikipedia…

Palestinians attacked an El Al plane at Zurich Airport killing the copilot and injuring the pilot. One Palestinian attacker was killed and others were convicted but later released.

…which is it then?? I wasn't able to find any details on this crime, other than one of the hijackers name was Amina Dhahbour, the first woman to participate in a foreign operation. Until I can find out more, I reject this as an "Islamic Terrorist Attack".

Next up on the timeline of terror…

"Aug. 29, 1969 - TWA 707 hijacked from Rome to Damascus, released with only wounded."

THE EVENT

Leila Khaled along with Salim Issawi hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens, diverting the Boeing 707 to Damascus. She claims she ordered the pilot to fly over Haifa, so she could see her birthplace, which she could not visit. No one was injured, although the aircraft was blown up.

THE BACKGROUND

Leila Khaled was born in 1944 in Haifa. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, fighting broke out between the Arabs and Jews. Khaled's family fled to Lebanon in 1948, leaving her father behind until his home and business were seized, and he was deported to Egypt. Khaled recalls, "…a YWCA American girl, Jane Marlowe, came to live at our house in Sour for a week. She was placed in our home because my younger sister Khaledia had some relations with the YWCA and because most of us spoke English at home. Jane was a typical Yankee do-gooder who came to Sour to teach the "refugees" swimming, drawing, fun and games. Jane, like most American missionaries who come to the Arab world-whatever the garb they wear was a "pacifist" who advocated peace among the semitic brothers, thinking there was plenty of room for all of us in the region. We tried to tell her that the issue was not only territory, but imperialism and Zionism and whether the Arab and Jewish masses were going to determine their future for themselves or allow the vampires of American and Zionist high finance to determine it for them. Jane told us that the word "vampire" was a hyperbole and lectured us on the necessity of using analytical language rather than emotion laden-slogans She was not as perceptive and well-informed as she claimed and in a few minutes we discovered where her real, liberal sympathies lay. She referred to Fateh as a terrorist organisation that deliberately mined roads and killed Israeli school children. She showed how colour-blind and profound she was by telling us that Palestinians should live among their brothers in the Arab states and avoid being discriminated against in Israel. We smiled sardonically as Jane revealed her ignorance of the plight of the Palestinians. She was blissfully unaware that she was spouting the Zionist line about the Palestinian problem and advocating the "final solution" that the Zionists proposed for our eternal peace. Jane had read her New York Times well and pontificated "objectively" on the need for "peace and stability" in the area. She was a Catholic girl from the Bronx who knew what was good for Arabs and Jews."

At the age of 15, Khaled became one of the first to join the radical pan-Arab Arab Nationalist Movement, originally started in the late 1940s. The Palestinian branch of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Khaled attended the American University of Beruit. She debated her American roommate Judy Sinninger, in 1962, when Kennedy threatened to invade Cuba unless the Soviet missiles were dismantled and removed from Cuba. "…She lectured me on American government, values, and social order, and I lectured her on the Arabs...I explained to Judy that we were not fighting just to expel the colonial and neo-colonial powers from our region only to offer our homeland on a silver platter to a new superpower. Judy was an imperial citizen, however liberal and idealistic she may have been. I was a Palestinian Arab woman without a homeland, living in exile in an American colony in Ras Beirut. She had everything to lose, I had everything to gain. One's social consciousness is indeed determined by one's social conditions."

"In late September, 1963, I departed for Kuwait with mixed feelings and without prospect of employment. For three months I was without work, waiting for a reply to my application from the Kuwait ministry of education…During the intervening three months I thought about the world situation and pondered the meaning of life, especially after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22. I do not know why the Kennedy assassination affected me emotionally. Kennedy was the president of the state that helped perpetuate my exile, a state that maintained and advanced the Zionist cause I hated. Kennedy was a sophisticated patrician, a class enemy, and he had given key posts in his regime to at least three dedicated Zionist Jews. He also approved the invasion of Cuba in April, 1961 by a pack of American-supported mercenaries. Yet I, the hardened Palestinian revolutionary, for some inexplicable reason, cried when I heard the news." "I watched the funeral on TV and saw Americans weep. Until then I had thought of the United States as a nation of monsters and scoundrels capable of perpetrating every conceivable crime…I wept for Kennedy perhaps because I somehow identified with the youth of America that loved and admired him dearly. Perhaps I may have believed, as Arabs did, that Kennedy was indeed going to work for the restoration of Palestinian rights, as the Kennedy Nasser correspondence later illustrated. I suspect that my tears were a natural human reaction, my prejudices couldn't stop them until it was too late. I am not sorry I cried."

After the landing of the high-jacked plane in 1969, Leila delivered this speech to the passengers:

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your kind attention and co-operation during the flight. I am captain Shadiah Abu Ghazalah. That's not my name; my name is Khaleda. Shadiah is an immortal woman who wrote: "Heroes are often forgotten, but their legends and memories are the property and heritage of the people." That is something historians and analysts cannot understand. Shadiah will not be forgotten by the Popular Front and by the generation of revolutionaries she helped mould in the path of revolution. I would like you to know that Shadiah was a Palestinian Arab woman from Nablus; that she was a schoolteacher and a member of the Popular Front underground; that she died in an explosion at her own home at the age of twenty-one on November 21, 1968, while manufacturing hand grenades for the Front. She was the first woman martyr of our revolution. I assumed her name on flight 840 to tell the world about the crimes the Israelis inflict upon our people and to demonstrate to you that they make no distinctions between men, women and children. But for their own propaganda objectives they repeatedly state in your press how we attack their "innocent" women and children and how cruel we are. I want you to know that we love children, too, and we certainly do not aim our guns at them. We diverted flight 840 because TWA is one of the largest American airlines that services the Israeli air routes and, more importantly, because it is an American plane. The American government is Israel's staunchest supporter. It supplies Israel with weapons for our destruction. It gives the Zionists tax-free American dollars. It supports Israel at world conferences. It helps them in every possible way. We are against America because she is an imperialist country. And our unit is called the Che Guevara Commando Unit because we abhor America's assassination of Che and because we are a part of the Third World and the world revolution. Che was an apostle of that revolution. We took the plane to Haifa because Comrade Salim and I come from Haifa. Both of us were evicted in 1948. We took you to Tel Aviv as an act of defiance and challenge to the Israelis and to demonstrate their impotence when the Arabs embark on offensive rather then defensive strategy. We brought you to Damascus because Syria is the pulsating heart of the Arab homeland and because the Syrians are a good and generous people. We hope you will enjoy your stay in Damascus. We hope you will go home and tell your friends not to go to Israel-to the Middle East war zone. Please tell your neighbours that we are a people like you who wish to live in peace and security in our country, governing ourselves. Please tell the Americans that if they hate war and the exploitation of others, they should stop their government from making war on us and helping the Israelis to deprive us of our land. Tell your people that coming to Israel helps her to deny our rights. Revolution and peace. Greetings to all lovers of the oppressed!"

Khaled has said in interviews that she developed a fondness for the United Kingdom when her first visitor in jail, an immigration officer, wanted to know why she had arrived in the country without a valid visa. She also developed a relationship with the two policewomen assigned to guard her in Ealing and later corresponded with them. Khaled continued to return to Britain for speaking engagements until as late as 2002. Khaled has said that she no longer believes in hijacking as a legitimate form of protest, though she is wary of the Arab-Israeli peace process. According to Khaled, "It's not a peace process. It's a political process where the balance of forces is for the Israelis and not for us. They have all the cards to play with and the Palestinians have nothing to depend on, especially when the PLO is not united." She has become involved in politics, becoming a member of the Palestinian National Council and appearing regularly at the World Social Forum.

Letter to the Future President by SUBMEDIA

"I was going to do a totally different remix, but when I was combing through McCain and Obama speeches, they both reminded me of something I have heard before. So I went back to Bush's 2007 State of the Union and BAM! See for yourself. I have yet to hear McCain or Obama talk about public transport, consuming less, bicycles etc. etc. Who you gonna vote for now America?"-The Stimulator

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