New Quaker Notebook

Shocked and awful. I struggled most of the day today to find the right word to describe the reasons why I couldn't bring myself to blog on yesterday's New York Times report concerning the apparently systemic abuses of detainees by US soldiers in Afghanistan.[1] That report cited a 2,000-page dossier covering the Army's investigation into the December 2002 deaths of two Afghan detainees at the Bagram base in Afghanistan. The two were tortured to death my US military interrogators. The word I've been looking for is exhausted—as when one is emotionally overwhelmed by the horror of American brutality abroad and the sadistic misanthropy espoused by our soldiers.

Today a "shocked" Hamid Karzai is demanding that the US turn over custody of all Afghan prisoners and also control over American military operations in Afghanistan. He had read the New York Times piece, and he declared: "No operations inside Afghanistan should take place without the consultation of the Afghan government.... They should not go to our people's homes any more without the knowledge of the Afghan government."[2] "No Afghan is a puppet, you know," Karzai said in a Fox News interview. "There is a stronger ownership of the Afghan government and the Afghan people now."[3]

Of course, what Mr Karzai really wants to say is that Geppetto should get out of his house—but he won't say that, and indeed he can't. The country still has Taliban fighters, Osama Bin Laden may be lurking somewhere in the hills over there, and the failure on the part of Western governments to inculcate in Afghanistan a sustainable alternative economy has created what may turn out to be one of the largest emerging centers for poppy cultivation in the world.[4] In the meantime, the Bush administration has been promoting mainly an aggressive ground eradication program in the absence of realistic inducements to the farmers to carve out some livelihood other than heroin.[5]

1. New York Times, May 20, 2005.
2. See New York Times, May 21, 2005; the news article is also available at this AP source.
3. International Herald Tribune, New York Times, May 22, 2005.
4. "With an estimated 40 to 60 percent of its GDP attributed to narcotics (IMF), Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming a narcotics state." So declared the 2005 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in March; read the full report. In November 2004 the annual US Government estimate for opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was approximately 206,700 hectares of poppy, a 239 percent increase in poppy crop over 2003 estimates. See White House Press Release, November 19, 2004.
5. On May 13 the US Embassy in Kabul sent a 3-page cable to Condoleeza Rice whining that Karzai was not doing enough to help the ground eradication program. "Although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar," complained the cable. See New York Times, May 21, 2005.

File this under: I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now. I've had my own terrible experience with the Amway Corporation, so I'm encouraged by the release of Eric Scheibeler's Merchants of Deception: An insider's look at the worldwide, systematic conspiracy of lies that is Amway/Quixtar and their motivational organizations (2004) as a free PDF document. The book goes a long way toward exposing the corporation as a Christian cult and a global fraud. Originally writing it under the pseudonym "John Jacob" after the author and his family received death threats while completing research for the book, Scheibeler says he wrote Merchants of Deception "specifically to be a road map for regulators and prosecutors worldwide." He assisted in NBC's Dateline exposé in May 2004 and continues to work against an organization with extensive financial tendrils within the current GOP structure.

He lost much in coming forward with his story. He had worked his way up to Emerald level in the Amway organization, and those who are familiar with Amway know how much effort goes into reaching that point within its pyramidal system. Getting to that level also allowed him access to higher-level distributors, many guarded business secrets, and the truth about the Amway organization itself:

"I was horrified to discover and later document that the Amway business is used in a bait and switch fraud of global proportions. As much as 94% of some Diamonds' income is derived not from Amway but from another, secretive, source altogether. As a result of this, nearly all of the thousands of people we brought into the Amway business lost money. Some lost tens of thousands of dollars. We were unknowingly used to extract millions of dollars of good people's hard-earned money for our upline Diamonds' covert business. Amway's owners and management have known of this deception for twenty years and have failed to stop it. Looking the other way has made them wealthy beyond belief."

When he brought this to the attention of senior management personnel at Amway/Quixtar, he ended up having his income totally shut off, his career, his home, and his livelihood completely taken away.

You can download a copy of the book at merchantsofdeception.com and it's also available at seven other mirror sites. (I suppose his readers should hurry—Scheibeler thinks his sites are going to be shut down at any time.) Anyone who wants to share an Amway experience can also set up their own "Word Sponsor" web page at the Let's Get the Word Out! site. For a good overview of Scheibeler's book and projects, see the Bill Berkowitz article in Thursday's WorkingForChange.