disturbing the comfortable

I want to write a few words about a writer I really admire. His name is John Rustywire and he is a Navajo. He writes what might be called Fictionalized Reality about his country and his people.
Rustywire isn’t a polished writer, but he produces story after story after story. Vignettes about life in Dinehtah. He’s about as far from the fancy stories of Tony Hillerman as he can be, even though they probably live within a few hundred miles of each other. For one thing, most of Rustywire’s stories are quite short: a few hundred words. But they convey the essence of life in that hard beautiful country and among those who inhabit it.
For my money (which isn’t much) John Rustywire is one of the three or five or six best writers in the language today. Go to www.Rustywire.com and find out that one I’m saying is true.

Here we go.

This is the aristocracy (such as it is) having their cute parties while people not far away go hungry. Where people farther away die and get maimed.

• Like France, before the Revolution, yeah.

Mitzvahpalooza!!
http://bulldogpolitics.blogspot.com/2005/11/mitzvahpalooza.html
It was General Smedley Butler who once said "War is a Racket."

In light of the Bat Mitvah recently thrown by defense contractor David H. Brooks of DHB Industries for his daughter, it's glaringly obvious that Smedley Butler was RIGHT.

Entitled "Mitzvahpalooza," Mr. Brook's daughter's bat mitvah cost an estimated $10 million dollars. Appearing at "Mitzvahpalooza" were the following performers:

50 Cent
Don Henley and Joe Walsh of The Eagles
Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac
Tom Petty
Kenny G
Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith
DJ AM
Ciara

"I'm told that at one point Brooks leapt on the stage with Tyler and Perry, who responded with good grace when their paymaster demanded that his teenage nephew be permitted to sit in on drums. At another point, I'm told, Tyler theatrically wiped sweat off Brooks' forehead - and then dried his hand with a flourish."



While war profiteer David Brooks is throwing a decadent bat mitzvah for his daughter, a war rages on in Iraq. As "150 kids in attendance" were "impressed by their $1,000 gift bags, complete with digital cameras and the latest video iPod," four (4) westerners were kidnapped in Iraq today.

There is an orgy of war profiteering going on in America, from congressmen to defense contractors. Does anybody give a shit?

NOTE: DHB is the "leader in the development, manufacturing and distribution of innovative, technically advanced bullet and projectile resistant garments, bullet resistant and fragmentation vests, bomb projectile blankets, and related ballistic accessories and technologies for the United States Military and Law Enforcement Agencies"

Here we go.

This is the aristocracy (such as it is) having their cute parties while people not far away go hungry. Where people farther away die and get maimed.

Like France, before the Revolution, yeah.

Mitzvahpalooza!!
http://bulldogpolitics.blogspot.com/2005/11/mitzvahpalooza.html
It was General Smedley Butler who once said "War is a Racket."

In light of the Bat Mitvah recently thrown by defense contractor David H. Brooks of DHB Industries for his daughter, it's glaringly obvious that Smedley Butler was RIGHT.

Entitled "Mitzvahpalooza," Mr. Brook's daughter's bat mitvah cost an estimated $10 million dollars. Appearing at "Mitzvahpalooza" were the following performers:

50 Cent
Don Henley and Joe Walsh of The Eagles
Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac
Tom Petty
Kenny G
Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith
DJ AM
Ciara

"I'm told that at one point Brooks leapt on the stage with Tyler and Perry, who responded with good grace when their paymaster demanded that his teenage nephew be permitted to sit in on drums. At another point, I'm told, Tyler theatrically wiped sweat off Brooks' forehead - and then dried his hand with a flourish."



While war profiteer David Brooks is throwing a decadent bat mitzvah for his daughter, a war rages on in Iraq. As "150 kids in attendance" were "impressed by their $1,000 gift bags, complete with digital cameras and the latest video iPod," four (4) westerners were kidnapped in Iraq today.

There is an orgy of war profiteering going on in America, from congressmen to defense contractors. Does anybody give a shit?

NOTE: DHB is the "leader in the development, manufacturing and distribution of innovative, technically advanced bullet and projectile resistant garments, bullet resistant and fragmentation vests, bomb projectile blankets, and related ballistic accessories and technologies for the United States Military and Law Enforcement Agencies"

I've written about this before; no doubt I'll write about it again. What caught my eye in this post off the Smirking Chimp is the quote from my "liberal" senator, Ron Wyden.

I've dealt with Ron before. He goes along to get along. The thing is, he goes along with whatever wind is blowing through Washington and ruffles the hair of various lobbyists—not necessarily the wind that comes from his constituents when they talk to him. I've written to Ron about the increasing powers of the Executive maybe a dozen times since 9/11. He always writes back to assure me he's on top of things. Uh-huh.

I think he finally did decide it might be a good idea for him to pay attention because increasing numbers of voters are thinking about the Bill of Rights and stuff like that...


Mike Whitney: 'Bush's fascist Valhalla'
Date: Tuesday, November 29 @ 09:58:03 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

Mike Whitney

The strategy to militarize the country is moving forward as planned despite apparent setbacks in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported on Nov. 27 the Dept of Defense is expanding its domestic surveillance activity to allow Pentagon spies to track down and "investigate crimes within the United States".

An alarmed Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) said, "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without a congressional hearing".

Is this the first time that the naive Wyden realized that the war on terror is actually directed at the American people?

The expanded powers of the Pentagon were presented in a proposal by a presidential commission headed by Lawrence Silberman and former Senator Charles Robb, two members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the 9-11 "whitewash" commission. The CFR, a 4,000 member amalgam of elites from the military, industry and media, was the driving force behind the Iraq war, as well as, enthusiastic advocates of the national security state. Their recommendations will allow the military to assume the traditional role of law enforcement and by giving it the authority to "carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States."



Oh, yeah; and the Pentagon will be involved in the "apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected" of criminal offenses.

This is a giant step for removing dissidents and political enemies while further militarizing the country.

The Patriot Act is also up for renewal and will remove the last nettlesome parts of the 4th amendment and any conceivable notion of personal privacy. "Lone wolf" provisions in the new bill allow law enforcement to investigate any American citizen, whether he is connected to an "alleged" terrorist organization or not, seizing whatever records they want, without having to show "probable cause". The same is true of the Act's NSS (National Security Letters) which permits government agents to sort through all of one's private records without judicial oversight.

The "due process" provisions of the Bill of Rights has been summarily removed by the 4th Circuit Court in its recent Jose Padilla ruling which allows the president to arbitrarily imprison an American citizen "indefinitely" without charging him with a crime. The long-standing "presumption of innocence", habeas corpus, and inalienable rights were quietly rescinded without as much as a whimper from the American people.

At the same time Bush has put "a broad swath of the FBI" under his direct control by creating the National Security Service (aka; the "New SS")? This is the first time we've had a "secret police" in our 200 year history. It will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of congressional oversight.

On October 27, 2005 Bush created the National Clandestine Service, which will be headed by CIA Director Porter Goss and will "expand reporting of information and intelligence value from state, local and tribal law enforcement entities and private sector stakeholders"? This executive order gives the CIA the power to carry out covert operations, spying, propaganda, and "dirty tricks" within the United States and on the American public. ("The New National Intelligence Strategy of the US" by Larry Chin, Global Research)

Also, within 2 years every American license and passport will be made according to federal uniform standards including microchips (with biometric information) that will allow the government to trace every movement of its citizens?

All of these changes in the law have taken place below the radar of public attention and all of them correspond to a "nutcase" conspiracy by the CFR to transform Canada, Mexico and the US into one, integrated "free trade" nation in 5 years time. (I'm not making this up) See: Trilateral Task Force Recommendations.

The only thing that makes this bizarre specter of a "capitalist police state" seem believable is that Bush has already carried out most of the basic recommendations of that other wacky conspiracy theory; The Project for the New American Century. The US has extended its military presence throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, curtailed civil liberties at home, greatly enhanced the power of the president, militarized space, passed legislation for Missile Defense "Star Wars", and reinvigorated the bio-chemical weapons industry. All of these were outlined in the PNAC.

Sometimes "conspiracy theories" come to fruition despite our unwillingness to give them credence.

So, let me make a prediction, however groundless and far-fetched as it may seem.

The 5 years of work that went into creating the Bush National Security State will not be passed on to some anemic Democrat, like Hillary Clinton, according to the normal protocols. The "capitalist police state" represents the concerted efforts of myriad elites from all walks of life; particularly banking, big energy, military and media. The last obstacle to realizing their macabre vision is Congress; the final hurdle to absolute power.

If some unforeseen tragedy befalls congress, like another anthrax attack, what should we expect from the Bush administration?

Well, we have a pretty good idea, since the American Enterprise Institute, to which the Bush team is closely aligned, has already "issued proposals for the operation of Congress following a catastrophic terrorist attack". They advocate the "APPOINTING" of individuals to the House of Representatives "to fill the seats of dead or incapacitated members, a first in American history"... "The Continuity of Government Commission is 'self-commissioned', its members being neither elected nor appointed by any government body...and mostly made up of professional lobbyists". (Read the whole article http://www.conservativeusa.org/cog-ronpaul.htm)

So, lobbyists and industry representatives will replace duly-elected congressman?

This gives us some idea of the seething contempt that right-wing elites have for democracy and how they plan to dismantle Congress when given half a chance.

Presently, Bush's fortunes are inextricably tied to an "unwinnable" war in Iraq. As his popularity has dwindled, Congress has become more reluctant to promote his far-right agenda and make further cuts to popular social programs. This situation will only get worse as we approach the 2006 mid-term elections.

Could it be time to "look the other way" while terrorists enter the country?

According to Sean Hannity, right-wing shiatsu for the FOX News channel, terrorists have already snuck in through our "porous borders".

A preemptive strike on congress would lift the battered Bush from the political ash-heap and put the finishing touches on the imperial presidency.

It may be time for another galvanizing "Pearl Harbor-type event"; one that will strike at the legislative nerve-center of American democracy. With Congress out of the picture, the path is clear for one man rule and Bush's fascist Valhalla.



This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23822

I've been away from this for too long. Holidays are not easy times for me: my inner curmudgeon comes out; there's also a by product of age—several people I've been close to have passed on and there are some holes in my world. Paths that used to be familiar have been rerouted around the holes left by these people. I fall in those holes, still, and it takes a while to get out of them.

I haven't been asked, but I want to set straight my part of the record: I realized some months ago that Val worked for the CIA. But I didn't tell Bob Woodward about her. In fact, I didn't even tell him about the nasty rumors that he liked to show up in the Oval Office with his fly open.

Unquestionably, someone leaked something from somewhere about somebody. But I know nothing about that.

On the local front, the Oregon Christians are still behaving badly. The theological storm troopers are fighting to inject religion into state-sponsored schools. In this case, a “Christian fellowship” is attempting to influence public policy. Just like Kansas, yeah. Just like that judge in the feudal south who wanted the Ten Commandments plastered on every courthouse wall.

While religious groups claim they are not trying to bring religion into secular institutions, the evidence is otherwise. They want to control what people learn and ultimately what people think. Once they do that, it’s only a quick step to controlling how people behave—whether or not they belong to that religious sect.

“Creationism” is one thing; education about reality—in this case, sex—is something else. Totalitarianism is always a goal of the religious mind-set.

And just as a gossipy aside, it was only a few years ago that a pastor from this particular church decided he was better off with the wife of a member of the congregation rather than his own spouse. The harder they protest, the farther they fall.

http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/news-13/113224405397470.xml&storylist=orlocal
Pastor may urge public school withdrawal over sex ed
11/17/2005, 8:07 a.m. PT
The Associated Press

MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — The leader of a Southern Oregon mega-church is threatening to remove his two young daughters from the public school system, and urge his congregation to follow suit, if Medford school board members agree to a new middle and high school curriculum that includes information on contraception.

Peter-John Courson, senior pastor at the approximately 5,000-member Applegate Christian Fellowship, has two daughters in preschool.

"I cringe at the thought of my little girls being told about contraception and condoms outside of my presence," he told The Mail-Tribune of Medford. "If (the proposed curriculum) goes forward this way, I will pull my kids and use the pulpit to ask my congregation to pull their kids out of public school."

The Medford School Board is considering an update of the health courses it teaches students in grades seven through 12.

Health teachers have spent 18 months evaluating teaching materials that meet state standards and laws requiring comprehensive sex education that includes information about contraceptives and AIDS/HIV. Classes also must cover making healthy decisions regarding alcohol, drug and tobacco use, and information on disease control and prevention, nutrition and physical activity, and injury, violence and suicide prevention.

The law also requires districts to let parents review sex education materials and remove their children from that portion of a health class if they object to the materials.

The proposed curriculum introduces contraception in eighth grade, two years earlier than it is introduced now. Teachers still will discourage middle school students from having sex, but research has shown kids need classroom information two years before they face real-life decisions for prevention to work, said McLoughlin Middle School Principal Amy Tiger.

The Rev. Bill McDonald of Medford's First United Methodist Church said he had contacted board member Mike Moran to express support for a comprehensive health program.

"I have the philosophy that we need to help our kids see the whole of health issues, including sexuality and contraception," said McDonald, whose daughter attends Hedrick Middle School. "Our schools need to be educating people for life."

___

Information from: Mail Tribune, http://www.mailtribune.com/

Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Back in the Nineteenth Century, we had the “Age of the Robber Barons.” That was when the railroad, timber, and mining industries bought and sold members of congress like cattle at an auction. It was almost a national joke: you want a piece of legislation? Go buy some politicians. For a while, it seemed like we got away from that. Not quite, but pretty much. The western states have always been a little questionable when it comes to buying votes in congress, but it hasn’t been a truly national trend. Except for defense....yeah, I take it back: our congress has been a hotbed of whores for years.

The last few years, though, it’s got worse, more blatant. “Our” elected representatives have decided to give away everything they can: land, resources, contracts, name it, it’s for sale to the highest briber.

Since the majority of citizens can’t afford to buy politicians, this means that legislation benefits the richest donors. The poor get spending cuts: the rich get what they want. We’re living in what we used to call a Banana Republic. Utterly corrupt.

US House Passes $49.9 Billion in Spending Cuts
By Richard Cowan
Reuters

Friday 18 November 2005

Washington - The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday narrowly voted to trim social programs for the poor along with farm subsidies, student loans and other federal benefits as part of a $49.9-billion package of spending cuts.

The "deficit-reduction" plan passed the House by a cliff-hanger vote of 217-215, with all Democrats and 14 Republicans voting against the Republican-authored bill.

The vote came after House leaders worked for weeks to convince rank-and-file Republican members to support the measure. Many had balked at cutting social programs while their leaders also pursued tax cuts that would benefit the rich. As a result, Republicans shaved about $4 billion from their spending-cut goal.

When the U.S. sent Negroponte to Iraq, we wondered if he was being posted there to set up militias and death squads in the manner of those in El Salvador and Honduras back when “communism” was a dirty word in Washington. During Negroponte’s stay in Central America, thousands of people were tortured and murdered by U.S. backed and trained regimes. Many believe that he was a prime mover in settling up these paramilitaries. The same thing happened in Columbia of course, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries under the protective arms of U.S. military advisors.

Looks like it. Shia militia—gangs—Kurdish paramkilitaries, as well as Sunni groups are all operating in Iraq. There are private security outfits, now called “contractors,” who do security and anti-insurgent work. The following article remarks that last year the U.S. spent $3 billion dollars in training these gangsters. Why? To fight the insurgents, of course. The enemy of my enemy is thus my friend. Just like the Taliban used to be...

Now that Negroponte is helping out with our own homeland security state, I wonder what we'll see next....


Independent.co.uk Online Edition: Home
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article327331.ece

16 November 2005 09:04


Raid on torture dungeon exposes Iraq's secret war
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
Published: 16 November 2005

The raid was at a building in central Baghdad. Men armed with automatic rifles burst in and made their way to a set of underground cells where they found 175 people huddled together. They had been captured by paramilitaries and tortured. The terrified, mainly Sunni, captives had been held in an office of the Iraqi interior ministry, and the rescue party were Iraqi police and American soldiers.

Yesterday, 24 hours later, the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, promised an investigation after the shocking demonstration of how paramilitary units working for the government, and death squads allegedly linked to it, are waging a savage war in the shadows.

People are arrested and disappear for months. Bodies appear every week of men, and sometimes women, executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have been grotesquely mutilated with knives and electric drills before their deaths.

The paramilitaries are not held responsible for all the deaths - some are the work of insurgents murdering supposed informers or government officials, or killing for purely sectarian motives.

You very seldom see American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad now. The Iraqi police are in evidence outside, but so are increasing numbers of militias running their own checkpoints - men in balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, with leather mittens and an array of weapons. An American official acknowledged: "It is getting more and more like Mogadishu every day."

Travelling through the Iraqi capital you meet Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army; fellow Shias from the Badr Brigade; the Kurdish peshmerga; as well as Western and Iraqi security guards. Then there are Iraqi soldiers and policemen, government paramilitaries, special police commandos and a group which prides itself on being the most feared, the Wolf Brigade of the interior ministry.

Many of the allegations from Sunni leaders of abuse are against the 2,000-strong Wolf Brigade, which was formed in October 2004 after training with US forces and first saw action during the widespread disturbances in Mosul last year.

The raid on the interior ministry bunker took place after Iraqi police called in US help when their search for a missing 15-year-old boy took them to the ministry dungeons at Jadriyah, one of many unofficial prisons throughout the country.

Brigadier General Karl Horst of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who was involved in the operation, said the prisoners were "in need of medical care".

The Iraqi police were more forthcoming. "These men were in a very bad way. They have obviously been tortured, some had been there a long time and they were very frightened," said an officer calling himself Yasin. He would not give any other name: "I don't want to end up in one of these rooms myself."

Although the US forces had ridden to the rescue on this occasion, many of these units have been created, trained and armed by the Americans. According to reports, $3bn (£1.7bn) out of an $87bn Iraq appropriation that Congress approved last year was earmarked for the creation of paramilitary units to fight the insurgency. Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, said: "They set up little teams of [Navy] Seals and special forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were in senior intelligence under the Saddam regime."

Iraqi politicians in the new regime have repeatedly accused the CIA of refusing to hand over control of the recreated Iraqi intelligence service to the Iraqi government, and the paramilitaries are run by Adnan Thabit, allegedly a former CIA "asset".

The raid was at a building in central Baghdad. Men armed with automatic rifles burst in and made their way to a set of underground cells where they found 175 people huddled together. They had been captured by paramilitaries and tortured. The terrified, mainly Sunni, captives had been held in an office of the Iraqi interior ministry, and the rescue party were Iraqi police and American soldiers.

Yesterday, 24 hours later, the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, promised an investigation after the shocking demonstration of how paramilitary units working for the government, and death squads allegedly linked to it, are waging a savage war in the shadows.

People are arrested and disappear for months. Bodies appear every week of men, and sometimes women, executed with their hands tied behind their backs. Some have been grotesquely mutilated with knives and electric drills before their deaths.

The paramilitaries are not held responsible for all the deaths - some are the work of insurgents murdering supposed informers or government officials, or killing for purely sectarian motives.

You very seldom see American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad now. The Iraqi police are in evidence outside, but so are increasing numbers of militias running their own checkpoints - men in balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, with leather mittens and an array of weapons. An American official acknowledged: "It is getting more and more like Mogadishu every day."

Travelling through the Iraqi capital you meet Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army; fellow Shias from the Badr Brigade; the Kurdish peshmerga; as well as Western and Iraqi security guards. Then there are Iraqi soldiers and policemen, government paramilitaries, special police commandos and a group which prides itself on being the most feared, the Wolf Brigade of the interior ministry.

Many of the allegations from Sunni leaders of abuse are against the 2,000-strong Wolf Brigade, which was formed in October 2004 after training with US forces and first saw action during the widespread disturbances in Mosul last year.

The raid on the interior ministry bunker took place after Iraqi police called in US help when their search for a missing 15-year-old boy took them to the ministry dungeons at Jadriyah, one of many unofficial prisons throughout the country.

Brigadier General Karl Horst of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who was involved in the operation, said the prisoners were "in need of medical care".

The Iraqi police were more forthcoming. "These men were in a very bad way. They have obviously been tortured, some had been there a long time and they were very frightened," said an officer calling himself Yasin. He would not give any other name: "I don't want to end up in one of these rooms myself."

Although the US forces had ridden to the rescue on this occasion, many of these units have been created, trained and armed by the Americans. According to reports, $3bn (£1.7bn) out of an $87bn Iraq appropriation that Congress approved last year was earmarked for the creation of paramilitary units to fight the insurgency. Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, said: "They set up little teams of [Navy] Seals and special forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were in senior intelligence under the Saddam regime."

Iraqi politicians in the new regime have repeatedly accused the CIA of refusing to hand over control of the recreated Iraqi intelligence service to the Iraqi government, and the paramilitaries are run by Adnan Thabit, allegedly a former CIA "asset".


© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

As the insurance companies, the medical professions and the drug manufacturers continue to fight against national health care—although “bribe” is more descriptive than “fight”—the Medicare and Medicaid mess gets worse and worse. Forty to fifty million Americans without health insurance; citizens on fixed incomes forced to choose between food and prescription drugs; government plans to shrink what medical care is available... It’s disgraceful, sure. Our politicians are disgraceful for listening to their big donors rather than attempting to really find out what people really need and want.

I’m one of the lucky folks: the HMO I’m enrolled in offers their own prescription plan and if I want another one, I have to disenroll from the HMO. Hot doggies! The choice isn’t mine to make! For another twenty dollars a month on top of my HMO, I can get drugs at somewhat of a discount—after the initial $250 out of my own pocket. Then, when I reach about $2500 dollars, I can pay full price again. I don’t know how to celebrate.

There are a lot of people getting screwed by this plan. Millions find the competing plans confusing; millions of other people just can’t figure things out because the intricacies are beyond their capabilities. It’s hard to know if the the new Medicare regulations were deliberately written in order to do that. My senators voted for this new system, but I can’t get them to explain it to me.

People are standing up and fighting back. We’ll see how effective that is.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005 - 12:00 AM

Groups sue over Medicare drug benefit
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002624285&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=medicare15&date=20051115

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Eight advocacy groups asked a federal judge Monday to ensure that no elderly or disabled Americans lose access to their prescription drugs as they enroll in the new Medicare drug plan.

The groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of about 6.4 million people who qualify for Medicare as well as Medicaid because of their incomes. Their earnings are usually well below the poverty level. Nearly 40 percent have dementia or other impairments.

Medicaid, a state-federal partnership, now covers most of their prescription-drug costs. But beginning Jan. 1, Medicare will undertake that role.

The advocacy groups are concerned that some of the "dual eligibles" no longer will be able to obtain drugs, either because they weren't enrolled in a drug plan or could not understand communications about their new coverage. Even temporary glitches could be fatal for the beneficiaries, the groups contended in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"If the government transitions 99 percent of these men and women flawlessly, there will still be 64,000 people without their medicine come January," said Robert Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Centers, which is based in New York.

The suit, which names Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt as the defendant, seeks a system under which existing coverage would be continued until these beneficiaries are enrolled in a plan that meets all their prescription needs.

Under the current program, these people can choose any drug plan they believe meets their needs. If they don't choose a plan, they will be automatically enrolled Jan. 1. Last month, Medicare sent letters to dual eligibles letting them know what plan they would be in if they didn't join one before Dec. 31.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Just as celebrity-hood saturates TV, journalists have increasingly become media performers. As performers they draw staggering salaries and get to hob-nob with the rich and fatuous. They get to fly with the president, play golf at exclusive clubs where they can see other famous people, and maybe even schmooze with them on camera. The very lucky, the Judith Millers, Babara Walters, Diane Sawyers—may even get “exclusive” interviews with political heavies. In order to get these perks, though, they have to be friendly. No critics need apply. You either kiss the prez’s ass or you might as well go kiss a toad for all the good it’s going to do.

The networks love this, because the bigger the star or politician being interviewed, the better the ratings. The better the ratings, the more advertising they can attrack. The interviews and stories aren’t there to inform the people of much of anything—maybe what the latest White House propaganda line happens to be: they’re there to hustle more advertising. It’s the presence of the media star, not not the content, that matters.

Used to be this star-worship just happened in gossip columns and movie magazines. Now it’s fucking everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Barbara Bush starts hosting a TV show. There’s a chilling thought.

As long as this ass-kissing goes on, we’ll never see serious news in the big media. And unfortunately, the more cut-throat the quest for ratings becomes, the more asses will be publically and loudly kissed.




Ted Rall: 'It's the skepticism, stupid'
Date: Wednesday, November 16 @ 09:43:10 EST
Topic: Media

How the Media Can Restore Credibility


NEW YORK--Judith Miller, the mousy Bush Administration propaganda mouthpiece forced to retire from The New York Times last week, is hardly an anomaly. American journalism is contaminated by widespread institutional corruption. Yet coming on the heels of the same paper's humiliation by phony reporter Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass' reign of error at The New Republic, the Miller mess' further contribution to the media's ever-diminishing credibility--the Gallup poll finds that 49 percent of Americans consider the news mostly or completely unreliable--has prompted industry insiders to propose cures so toothless that they only expose the cluelessness of those proposing them.

Miller, who cut-and-pasted the White House's Saddam-has-WMDs press releases into the Times to help build support for the invasion of Iraq, is being characterized as a rogue reporter by the same editors who encouraged and published her tripe. And the punditocracy is going along. She "should be promptly dismissed for crimes against journalism, and her own newspaper," Greg Mitchell wrote in the industry trade journal Editor & Publisher. "And Bill Keller, executive editor, who let her get away with it, owes readers, at the minimum, an apology." Slate.com media critic Jack Shafer, on the other hand, would settle for a mere "explanation."

The sad fact is that Miller and Blair, rather than rare exceptions, reflect the endemic vices of elitism, unaccountability and star worship that afflict our journalistic institutions beginning with top management. It will take more than another pro forma mea culpa to rebuild their eroded credibility. Systemic changes are essential:



Journalists shouldn't get cozy with government officials. Shafer wrote in 2003: "[Judith] Miller grew incredibly close to numerous Iraqi sources, both named and anonymous, who gave her detailed interviews about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction." A reporter's job is to discover and tell the truth. A politician's job is to lie. Like giant squid and sperm whales, politicians and reporters are natural enemies. With the exception of talking to whistleblowers, editors and producers ought to ban reporters from associating with high-ranking government and corporate officials outside the confines of a press conference or a formal interview situation. Press conferences produce lies, not news. What comes out of them should be treated as news only after it has been independently verified.

They should be accessible. "Isolation impairs accountability," says Philip Seib, author of a book on reporting in the cyber era. An Ivory Tower mentality keeps news away. It's easier to track down Dick Cheney in his undisclosed location than to get your local news anchorperson on the phone. Too few newspapers and almost no broadcast outlets make it easy for their readers, listeners and viewers to contact their employees, whether to correct an error or suggest a story idea. Some newspaper websites don't even list their main phone number! Every newspaper by-line should carry its writer's direct phone number and email address, and they should be required to return their messages.

Reveal biases, even in feature pieces. The New York Times Book Review frequently assigns reviews to writers with a personal, philosophical and political axe to grind against a the review's subject. Movie and music reviewers are similarly afflicted. Readers feel betrayed when they discover these biases elsewhere. If media outlets host a grudge match, they ought to own up to it at the top of the piece so readers can take the relevant history into account. Better still, don't assign pieces where there's a conflict of interest.

Stop hiring out of J-School. Only 10 percent of working print journalists hold a graduate degree in journalism but this expensive diploma makes it easier for them to land a job at influential outfits like the Times. Journalism school graduates are likelier to come from wealthy families, have less work experience in other fields and identify with powerful elites. J-Schools contribute to the lack of racial and class diversity in newsrooms, which remain 86 percent white--further separating them from their communities.

Ban patriotism. While I was covering the war in Afghanistan in 2001, a colleague from a major U.S. paper informed me: "We've captured Kunduz!" We? Never mind editorial independence--she identified with the Northern Alliance because they were backed by the United States. CNN mimicked Fox News' perpetually waving stars-and-stripes logo and TV anchors from Maine to Hawaii sported flag lapel pins--a prop on state television in dictatorships. Even when the U.S. is at war, reporters should remain neutral. Skeptics make better journalists than patriots.

Embedded reporters are whores. If Judy Miller got too close to Ahmed Chalabi, she had nothing on the hundreds of ersatz journalists who rode into Iraq in American tanks and armored personnel carriers. "When the only safety for a reporter is being embedded with the U.S. military, the reported stories tend to have a positive spin," Steve Weissman dryly observed. Reporters under military control invariably become subject to the Stockholm Syndrome. Reporters playing soldier sacrifice the popular goodwill that comes from being perceived as unbiased and thus increase the risk of attacks--such as beheadings in Iraq--against their peers. When I couldn't find a media outlet willing to send me to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an independent, I refused to go. Correspondents who participate in a story--a war, say--deserve to be fired.

Be suspicious of showboats. Lucky and well-connected reporters should always raise red flags. Stephen Glass' editors loved him because he always turned in amazing stories--about a Wall Street shrine to Alan Greenspan, for example, or orgies of Young Republicans. Jayson Blair always seemed to be at the right place at the right time when he was actually hanging out at his apartment; Judith Miller ingratiated herself to her bosses with her high-level contacts (liars) in the White House. In the real world, lucky breaks and reliable sources are few and far between. As one of my first editors told my disconsolate self when I returned empty-handed from an assignment, "Write the truth. They refused to talk to you. So what? That's a story too."

Source: Yahoo
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20051116/cm_ucru/itstheskepticismstupid


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23640

Mr Carter, I’m afraid this is the real America: the America of 2005, rolling toward the end of the fifth year of the Bush-Cheney Junta. About twenty-five months to go, assuming the country is still around by then. Or we are.

There are ideals and there are realities. “Do as I say, not as I do.” What America says and what it does are two entirely different things. I’m afraid it’s been this way for a long time. Our Constitution proclaimed and structure a country based on freedom and law. Freedom for some folks, it turned out. Law: for some folks, as we’ve seen. What we do very often shows that what we say is a pack of lies.


latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carter14nov14,0,7164514.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
This isn't the real America
By Jimmy Carter
JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis," published this month by Simon & Schuster.

November 14, 2005

IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.

Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 year


Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times |

I’m embarrassed to say that it’s only recently I began reading Thom Hartman. He’s clear and to the point: his sentences make sense (!), and he has a good perspective on history.

Right now, in case you’ve been busy watching football or “Desperate Housewives,” there’s a constitutional crisis in Washington. It’s a crisis because it has to do with an 800 year-old tradition in English and American law. The government wants to suspend the right of habeas corpus for certain select individuals. Right now they are identified as terrorists or terrorist suspects. The Supreme Court said they are entitled to the same rights as anybody else; the Junta and it’s cohorts say they aren’t, that this is special and besides, who cares what the Supreme Court says—and besides, the president should have the right to determine who goes to jail.

What bullshit. What utter totalitarian and UnAmerican bullshit.

The current status

Thom Hartmann:
'Losing Habeas Corpus — 'A more dangerous engine of arbitrary government''
Date: Tuesday, November 15 @ 09:45:32 EST
Topic: Laws, the Courts and the Legal System

Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams

About a year ago, an op-ed article on Al Jazeerah's website by Fawaz Turki titled "For Bush, A Hot Line To Churchill" opened by noting that Tony Blair had given George W. Bush a bust of Winston Churchill, which sits in Bush's Oval Office. Turki then quotes Churchill:

"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge that "power of the executive" through the use of habeas corpus laws. Habeas corpus is roughly Latin for "hold the body," and is used in law to mean that a government must either charge a person with a crime or let them go free.

And last week, U.S. Senate Republicans (with the help of five Senate Democrats) passed a bill that would begin to take down that right.



Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, in proposing the legislation, said, "It is clear to me from Abu Ghraib backward, forward, and other things we know about, that at times we have lost our way in fighting this war." Few would disagree. "What we are trying to do in a series of amendments," Graham added, "is recapture the moral high ground and provide guidance to our troops."

But destroying habeas corpus will not "recapture the moral high ground" or "provide guidance for our troops." It may, however, throw our troops (and citizens) into a living hell if they're captured by other governments that have chosen to follow our example.

This attack on eight centuries of English law is no small thing. While their intent was to deny Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp detainees the right to see a judge or jury, it could just as easily extend to you and me. (Already two American citizens have been arbitrarily stripped of their habeas corpus rights by the Bush administration - Jose Padilla is still languishing in prison incommunicado and Yasser Hamdi was deported to the police state of Saudi Arabia where every Friday they conduct public floggings and executions.)

Section 9, Clause 2, of Article I of the United States Constitution says: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Abraham Lincoln was the first president (on March 3, 1863) to suspend habeas corpus so he could imprison those he considered a threat until the war was over. Congress invoked this power again during Reconstruction when President Grant requested The Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871 to put down a rebellion in South Carolina. Those are the only two fully legal suspensions of habeas corpus in the history of the United States (and Lincoln's is still being debated).

The United States hasn't suffered a "Rebellion" or an "Invasion" Lincoln's and Grant's administrations. There are no foreign armies on our soil, seizing our cities. No states or municipalities are seriously talking about secession. Yet the U.S. Senate wants to tinker with habeas corpus.

The modern institution of civil and human rights, and particularly the writ of habeas corpus, began in June of 1215 when King John was forced by the feudal lords to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Although that document mostly protected "freemen" - what were then known as feudal lords or barons, and today known as CEOs and millionaires - rather than the average person, it initiated a series of events that echo to this day.

Two of the most critical parts of the Magna Carta were articles 38 and 39, which established the foundation for what is now known as "habeas corpus" laws, as well as the Fourth through Eighth Amendments of our Constitution and hundreds of other federal and state due process provisions.

Articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta said:

"38 In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

"39 No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."

This was radical stuff, and over the next four hundred years average people increasingly wanted for themselves these same protections from the abuse of the power of government or great wealth. But from 1215 to 1628, outside of the privileges enjoyed by the feudal lords, the average person could be arrested and imprisoned at the whim of the king with no recourse to the courts.

Then, in 1627, King Charles I overstepped, and the people snapped. Charles I threw into jail five knights in a tax disagreement, and the knights sued the King, asserting their habeas corpus right to be free or on bail unless convicted of a crime.

King Charles I, in response, invoked his right to simply imprison anybody he wanted (other than the rich), anytime he wanted, as he said, "per speciale Mandatum Domini Regis."

This is essentially the same argument that George W. Bush makes today for why he has the right to detain both citizens and non-citizens solely on his own say-so: because he's in charge. And it's an argument now supported by Senate Republicans and five Democrats.

But just as George's decree is meeting resistance, Charles' decree wasn't well received. The result of his overt assault on the rights of citizens led to a sort of revolt in the British Parliament, producing the 1628 "Petition of Right" law, an early version of our Fourth through Eighth Amendments, which restated Articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta and added that "writs of habeas corpus, [are] there to undergo and receive [only] as the court should order." It was later strengthened with the "Habeas Corpus Act of 1640" and a second "Habeas Corpus Act of 1679."

Thus, the right to suspend habeas corpus no longer was held by the King. It was exercised solely by the people's (elected and hereditary) representatives in the Parliament.

The third George to govern the United Kingdom confronted this in 1815 when he came into possession of Napoleon Bonaparte. British laws were so explicit that everybody was entitled to habeas corpus - even people who were not British citizens - that when Napoleon surrendered on the deck of the British flagship Bellerophon after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, the British Parliament had to pass a law ("An Act For The More Effectually Detaining In Custody Napoleon Bonaparte") to suspend habeas corpus so King George III could legally continue to hold him prisoner (and then legally exile him to a British fortification on a distant island).

Now, Congress is moving to similarly detain people or exile them to camps on a distant island. Except these people are not Napoleon Bonapartes. As The New York Times noted in a November 12, 2005 editorial, "according to government and military officials, an overwhelming majority [of the Guantanamo concentration camp detainees] should not have been taken prisoner in the first place."

It may well be that the only reason these Republicans are so determined to keep our Guantanamo prisoners incarcerated is to avoid the embarrassment and negative political fallout that would ensue if they were released and told the world's media their stories of false arrest, torture, illegal imprisonment, and hunger strikes.

The Founders must be turning in their graves. As Alexander Hamilton - arguably the most conservative of the Founders - wrote in Federalist 84:

"The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus ... are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. ...[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious [British 18th century legal scholar] Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital:

"'To bereave a man of life,' says he, 'or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore A MORE DANGEROUS ENGINE of arbitrary government.''' [Capitals all Hamilton's from the original.]

The question, ultimately, is whether our nation will continue to stand for the values upon which it was founded.

Early American conservatives suggested that democracy was so ultimately weak it couldn't withstand the assault of newspaper editors and citizens who spoke out against it, or terrorists from the Islamic Barbary Coast, leading John Adams to pass America's first PATRIOT Act-like laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. President Thomas Jefferson rebuked those who wanted America ruled by an iron-handed presidency that could - as Adams had - throw people in jail for "crimes" such as speaking political opinion, or without constitutional due process.

"I know, indeed," Jefferson said in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1801, "that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough.

But, Jefferson said, our nation was "the world's best hope," and because of our strong commitment to democracy, "the strongest government on earth."

The sum of this, Jefferson said, was found in "freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

"The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civil instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."

When I was working in Russia some years ago, a friend in Kaliningrad told me a perhaps apocryphal story about Nikita Khrushchev, who, following Stalin's death, gave a speech to the Politburo denouncing Stalin's policies. A few minutes into Khrushchev's diatribe, somebody shouted out, "Why didn't you challenge him then, the way you are now?"

The room fell silent, as Khrushchev angrily swept the audience with his glare. "Who said that?" he asked in a reasoned voice. Silence.

"Who said that?" Khrushchev demanded, leaning forward. Silence.

Pounding his fist on the podium to accent each word, he screamed, "Who - said - that?" Still no answer.

Finally, after a long and strained silence, the elected politicians in the room fearful to even cough, a corner of Khrushchev's mouth lifted into a smile.

"Now you know," he said with a chuckle, "why I did not speak up against Stalin when I sat where you now sit."

The question for our day is who will speak up against Stalinist policies in America? Who will speak against the man who punishes reporters and news organizations by cutting off their access; who punishes politicians by targeting them in their home districts; who punishes truth-tellers in the Executive branch by character assassination that even extends to destroying their spouse's careers? And why is our press doing such a pathetic job that in all probability 95 percent of Americans don't even know that the U.S. Senate voted last week to begin the process of suspending habeas corpus?

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Number 8:

"The violent destruction of life and property incident to war; the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty, to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free."

We must not make the mistake that Jefferson and Hamilton warned us against. Contact your U.S. Senators (the Capitol's phone number is 202 225-3121) and tell them to stop this assault on eight hundred years of legal precedent by leaving our habeas corpus laws intact and quickly moving to ensure that the captives in our Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camps (and other, overseas, secret prisons) have the fundamental human rights of habeas corpus our Supreme Court has already ruled they should be accorded.

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books include

"What Would Jefferson Do?" and "Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK" co-authored by Lamar Waldron.

Source: Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1114-22.htm



This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23624

Yes, universal health care is one of my priorities. I spent too many years without health insurance; my family spent too many years without it; my son died owing thousands of dollars for health care he’d needed. Too many of my friends have gone without it.

There’s no solid reason not to guarantee health care to every single citizen in this country. It would be far cheaper than the current system. However, the insurance companies and the medical professions would not make as much money as they do now. Profits are more important than people.

Health Economics 101
by Paul Krugman
The New York Times
November 14, 2005

Several readers have asked me a good question: we rely on free markets to deliver most goods and services, so why shouldn't we do the same thing for health care? Some correspondents were belligerent, others honestly curious. Either way, they deserve an answer.

It comes down to three things: risk, selection and social justice.

First, about risk: in any given year, a small fraction of the population accounts for the bulk of medical expenses. In 2002 a mere 5 percent of Americans incurred almost half of U.S. medical costs. If you find yourself one of the unlucky 5 percent, your medical expenses will be crushing, unless you're very wealthy - or you have good insurance.

But good insurance is hard to come by, because private markets for health insurance suffer from a severe case of the economic problem known as "adverse selection," in which bad risks drive out good.

To understand adverse selection, imagine what would happen if there were only one health insurance company, and everyone was required to buy the same insurance policy. In that case, the insurance company could charge a price reflecting the medical costs of the average American, plus a small extra charge for administrative expenses.

But in the real insurance market, a company that offered such a policy to anyone who wanted it would lose money hand over fist. Healthy people, who don't expect to face high medical bills, would go elsewhere, or go without insurance. Meanwhile, those who bought the policy would be a self-selected group of people likely to have high medical costs. And if the company responded to this selection bias by charging a higher price for insurance, it would drive away even more healthy people.

That's why insurance companies don't offer a standard health insurance policy, available to anyone willing to buy it. Instead, they devote a lot of effort and money to screening applicants, selling insurance only to those considered unlikely to have high costs, while rejecting those with pre-existing conditions or other indicators of high future expenses.

This screening process is the main reason private health insurers spend a much higher share of their revenue on administrative costs than do government insurance programs like Medicare, which doesn't try to screen anyone out. That is, private insurance companies spend large sums not on providing medical care, but on denying insurance to those who need it most.

What happens to those denied coverage? Citizens of advanced countries - the United States included - don't believe that their fellow citizens should be denied essential health care because they can't afford it. And this belief in social justice gets translated into action, however imperfectly. Some of those unable to get private health insurance are covered by Medicaid. Others receive "uncompensated" treatment, which ends up being paid for either by the government or by higher medical bills for the insured. So we have a huge private health care bureaucracy whose main purpose is, in effect, to pass the buck to taxpayers.

At this point some readers may object that I'm painting too dark a picture. After all, most Americans too young to receive Medicare do have private health insurance. So does the free market work better than I've suggested? No: to the extent that we do have a working system of private health insurance, it's the result of huge though hidden subsidies.

Private health insurance in America comes almost entirely in the form of employment-based coverage: insurance provided by corporations as part of their pay packages. The key to this coverage is the fact that compensation in the form of health benefits, as opposed to wages, isn't taxed. One recent study suggests that this tax subsidy may be as large as $190 billion per year. And even with this subsidy, employment-based coverage is in rapid decline.

I'm not an opponent of markets. On the contrary, I've spent a lot of my career defending their virtues. But the fact is that the free market doesn't work for health insurance, and never did. All we ever had was a patchwork, semiprivate system supported by large government subsidies.

That system is now failing. And a rigid belief that markets are always superior to government programs - a belief that ignores basic economics as well as experience - stands in the way of rational thinking about what should replace it.

Back before the American Counter-Reformation began, fifteen years ago, a lot of people began looking at their personal histories. Many of these were people who had run into trouble with alcohol and drugs and got themselves straightened out. Even so, they still had major problems with their lives and relationships. Just not doing drugs, not drinking, wasn’t enough. That was when they began looking at their early years.

Cops and counselors for years have known that the three favorite hang-outs of child molesters are school athletic programs, YMCA-like programs, and church youth activites.

Now that the conservative Evangelicals have arisen to power, the whole business is being white-washed, again. And the sexual abuse of children continues.

What’s the deal? Well, it has to do with shame. People in conservative churches are expected to live very circumscribed lives: no pre-marital sex, not too much marital sex, clean thinking, clean everything. It can’t be done. The standards are too high. The more sex is proscribed, the greater it’s fascination. It isn’t just children: many many pastors become sexually involved with members of their adult congregation. I’ve known more than one Evangelical church that went through shake-ups when their pastors ran off with spouses who weren’t their’s...


OpEdNews.com

Original Article at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_051111_bush_supporting_evan.htm

November 11, 2005

Bush-Supporting Evangelicals; Abuse Victims?

Sexual abusers usually start with a con job. They offer to sit and talk, to rub a shoulder, to comfort... and then they get brutally abusive, often overpowering and subduing the victim.

We know a few things about people who have been abused as children-- they tend to become abusers themselves and, if sexually abused, they tend to become sexualized. This means they tend to become the seducers, with the parent or relative who started the sexual abuse and with others. It's a defense mechanism-- a way to take control of an otherwise horrible situation.

Research has shown that religious fundamentalists are more likely to come from families where sexual abuse has occurred. We know about the widespread abuse by Catholic priests.

I want to be clear that I have no problem with Jesus, his teachings or the Christian faith. I have problems with the monsters in the church who abuse the teachings of Jesus and people's faith in Jesus to abuse and take advantage of their congregants. What did Jesus say about them?

David McDonald reports, on his website,"

"In 2001, I heard the Evangelical radio show "Focus on the Family", hosted by psychologist and author Dr. James Dobson, discuss a crisis among Pastors of non-Catholic churches. They reported that 21% of Evangelical/Protestant pastors had had inappropriate sexual contact with members of their congregations. Sixty percent (60%) of Evangelical pastors, most of whom are married, have a problem with pornography. In a 1984 study, 76% of pastors knew of another Evangelical pastor who had sexual intercourse with a parishioner.


Now, the latest polls show that evangelicals and southerners are among the 40 some percent of the population who still believe Bush is highly trustworthy. In other words, 57% of the population have finally figured out that Bush and his extremist right wing Republican cronies have been screwing America and Americans, abusing the trust they were given, taking advantage of their belief that he was a good man they could live with.

We know that people who are abused go into denial. Their families go into denial and they allow the abuse to continue for years, even decades and generations.


Contact, published as the health and community development magazine of the World Council of Churches, comments, "Rape is much more than forced vaginal penetration; it includes insult, humiliation and aggression. It is violence expressed in its maximum form."

Is it rape, to force a woman to do something she does not want to do? Is it abuse to force a women to live a life in which she is controlled by others? Is the very core of the right wing fundamentalist belief in opposing the right of a woman to control her own body an abusive, anti-woman, rape of the woman's sense of self control?

Recovery from sexual abuse takes a lot of time. Often, adults "wake up" to realize they were sexually abused, only to discover that statutes of limitations have run out and they cannot pursue justice. Not surprisingly, Evangelical and Catholic churches have led the way in blocking the elimination of statutes of limitations in the case of sexual abuse.

Another problem within the Evangelical churches is they have tried to block laws requiring the reporting of sexual abuse cases, according to an article by Marci Hamilton, in Findlaw. She writes

"The evangelicals' argument, however, is that if a pastor must report known child abuse, then members won't confide in him. In other words, let the children suffer so the pedophile can speak to his pastor worry-free.

If we knew a lot less about childhood sexual abuse than we do now, this concern might carry some weight. But the truth is that religious groups have been horrendous at addressing child abuse when they learn about it. The balance between making sure ministers hear everything their members want to say and rescuing the children enduring child abuse is a no-brainer. The Catholic Church's infamous see-no-evil transfer-the-pedophile-elsewhere police is perhaps the most blatant example, but it is far from the only example, as new victims emerge on a regular basis.

There was a time when each religious institution stood for its individual beliefs in the public square, and fought what it believed was morally wrong - even if the moral wrong came from another religious institution. It seems that time is gone. One waits in vain for the religious institution that will stand up to either the Catholics or the evangelicals in these battles over much-needed changes to childhood sexual abuse laws. Their silence is deafening.


Blind Denial, Resistance to Fixing the Problem= Generations of Shame
With such high percentages of the leaders of the Evangelical movement guilty of sexually abusing those they minister to or guilty of problems with pornography, hence problems in relationships with women, it is no surprise that they have led their flocks along this primrose path-- into an abusive, destructive relationship with a political party that has raped them in so many ways. The blue collar, non-college educated people who make up the majority of the Evangelicals continually vote against their better interests in supporting right wing extremists who have sold their souls to corporations.

These evangelicals who worsen their lives to support their church leaders' politics are embracing the abuse and taking control of it, becoming political activists, just as sexually abused children become the seductresses so they can take control of their depraved situations. They have been abused into a perverted form of activism that they embrace to feel in control of their lives.

But gradually, the sexually abused DO wake up and remember and realize what they have been subjected to. And when they do, the rage and anger is strong. When they do, they seek justice and vindication.

Psychologists know that When abuse victims "wake up" it often occurs when a person plays a con game with them similar to the one used to initially abuse them. Sometimes it happens at work, or in a new situation.

Victims of abuse wake up when they have become strong enough to face the reality of their abuse, strong enough to face their abusers and strong enough to let go of their old seductive ways of dealing with their loss of power and innocence.

Keep in mind that abuse victims come in different varieties. They are not all victims of sexual advances, assaults or rape. Some are victims of violence and physical abuse. Some are victims of mental and emotional abuse. George Lakoff has described the typical family of a right winger as being run with a "strict parent" approach. A loving, strict parent upbringing can be a wonderful thing. But when strict parenting becomes abusive, in all the ways described above, who knows what the risk is that abused children will become abused adults, in a codependent relationship with the ultimate abusers-- right wing extremist Republicans.

The right wing extremists who have used honest Christian faith to con their victims are in for their come-uppance. We can help the victims of their abuse by finding ways to help them feel strong enough to find new lives that do not depend upon the abuse-maintaining ministers who are profitting by keeping the Evangelicals supporting a corrupt, dishonest evil, right wing Republican group in power. Therapists help adults who were abused as children by helping them to become strong enough to face their pain, face their past and strong enough to face, confront and often bring charges against their abusers.

A reader dropped me this comment:

I was a counselor in the military some years ago, and found back then that the need for security, boundaries, safety, among right wingers drove their attempts to control everyone else around them. Virtually all were victims of some form of abuse in their lives, and fell to religion in order to give themselves the external support they felt their lives required to be safe and to not pass on the abuse. They do not trust or do not generate internal safeguards, but rather must have someone else police their lives as long as they deem it to be 'safe' in nature for them.



And another reader comments:

The evangelicals are not poor abused preachers, they head up "churches" supported by FAITH BASED CONTRIBUTIONS from the administration's scheme to fund their churches through tax monies in exchange for sheparding the congregants (who are too poor to even support their own churches) to the polls. THAT'S WHY the fundamentalists support Bush and his cabal. You characterize them as "abused," I think NOT. Follow the money.

When it comes to abuse, one fundamentalist Baptist church here in Austin landed in the headlines when two "teachers" in their bible study program beat up one youngster so badly for not learning his "bible lessons" that he ended up in Brackenridge Hospital. Faith based, indeed, it's about quid pro quo. There's nothing sexy about it--it's for votes. The abused are the congregants.

Frances Morey

America has official historians: Doris Kerns Goodwin and David McCullogh come to mind. Boorstein, Schlesinger—interpeters of the status quo; this is the way it is and the way it’s supposed to be and it just keeps on keeping on. Getting better, even! There are assumptions, givens, about the way it’s all worked out. All is for the best and we really are the best country in the world. Ho-hum.

Except...America really doesn’t work all that well. For the last fifty years the country has been teeter-tottering on the brink of catastrophe. At the end of World War Two, America slipped into a state of perpetual undeclared war. That lasted until the turn of the century under the name of the Cold War. Now it’s the War on Terror. It’s a permanent war footing. The Fifty Year War against...them. Whoever it is that is out-to-destroy-us. That stance is what maintains our economy and thus our government. The military industrial complex keeps us going.

This is not the way the framers of the Constitution wanted it to go. Tom Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, or even Hamilton would be appalled to see their dream country turned into an empire. That’s a safe assumption.

Since these were all well-off, mostly, white guys, they certainly didn’t foresee a pluralistic society; in their minds the only immigrants would be people pretty much like themselves with the same language, values, and ambitions. It sure hasn’t worked out that way.

What’s so frustrating to me is the assumption that the way it is now is the only way it can or could be. Basically, the big-time historians assume the country is on track.

Howard Zinn doesn’t make that assumption. That’s one reason why I like him so much. Try this essay:

From: moderator@portside.org
Subject: Zinn: Our rights aren't up to the Supreme Court
Date: November 11, 2005 9:46:50 PM PST
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org

It's not up to the Court

By Howard Zinn
November 2005 Issue
http://progressive.org/mag_zinn1105

John Roberts sailed through his confirmation hearings as
the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with
enthusiastic Republican support, and a few weak
mutterings of opposition by the Democrats. Then, after
the far right deemed Harriet Miers insufficiently
doctrinaire, Bush nominated arch conservative Samuel
Alito to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. This has caused a
certain consternation among people we affectionately
term "the left."

I can understand that sinking feeling. Even listening to
pieces of Roberts's confirmation hearings was enough to
induce despair: the joking with the candidate, the
obvious signs that, whether Democrats or Republicans,
these are all members of the same exclusive club.
Roberts's proper "credentials," his "nice guy" demeanor,
his insistence to the Judiciary Committee that he is not
an "ideologue" (can you imagine anyone, even Robert Bork
or Dick Cheney, admitting that he is an "ideologue"?)
were clearly more important than his views on equality,
justice, the rights of defendants, the war powers of the
President.

At one point in the hearings, The New York Times
reported, Roberts "summed up his philosophy." He had
been asked, "Are you going to be on the side of the
little guy?" (Would any candidate admit that he was on
the side of "the big guy"? Presumably serious "hearings"
bring out idiot questions.)

Roberts replied: "If the Constitution says that the
little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in
court before me. But if the Constitution says that the
big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to
win, because my obligation is to the Constitution."

If the Constitution is the holy test, then a justice
should abide by its provision in Article VI that not
only the Constitution itself but "all Treaties made, or
which shall be made, under the Authority of the United
States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land." This
includes the Geneva Convention of 1949, which the United
States signed, and which insists that prisoners of war
must be granted the rights of due process.

A district court judge in 2004 ruled that the detainees
held in Guantanamo for years without trial were
protected by the Geneva Convention and deserved due
process. Roberts and two colleagues on the Court of
Appeals overruled this.

There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious
veneration of the Constitution and "the rule of law."
The Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible
and is used to serve the political needs of the moment.
When the country was in economic crisis and turmoil in
the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the
anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme
Court was willing to stretch to infinity the
constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate
commerce. It decided that the national government,
desperate to regulate farm production, could tell a
family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land.

When the Constitution gets in the way of a war, it is
ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during
Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go,
claiming that there had been no declaration of war by
Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers
could not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to
even hear the case. When, during World War I, Congress
ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech by
passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war,
the imprisonment of dissenters under this law was upheld
unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two
presumably liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to
defend the rights of poor people, women, people of
color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come
alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate,
strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to
uphold justice.

The distinction between law and justice is ignored by
all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who
solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of
law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not
deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine
right of the king.

The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no
right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to
a living wage, no right to safe working conditions.
Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the
courts, the police, create a great movement which won
the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that
Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and
Social Security, and unemployment insurance.

The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come
from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this
is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all,
it was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited
in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was
the initiative of brave families in the South--along
with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold
War, that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored
people all over the world--that brought a sudden
enlightenment to the Court.

The Supreme Court in 1883 had interpreted the Fourteenth
Amendment so that nongovernmental institutions-hotels,
restaurants, etc.-could bar black people. But after the
sit-ins and arrests of thousands of black people in the
South in the early Sixties, the right to public
accommodations was quietly given constitutional sanction
in 1964 by the Court. It now interpreted the interstate
commerce clause, whose wording had not changed since
1787, to mean that places of public accommodation could
be regulated by Congressional action and be prohibited
from discriminating.

Soon this would include barbershops, and I suggest it
takes an ingenious interpretation to include barbershops
in interstate commerce.

The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend on
the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won
before that decision, all over the country, by
grassroots agitation that forced states to recognize the
right. If the American people, who by a great majority
favor that right, insist on it, act on it, no Supreme
Court decision can take it away.

The rights of working people, of women, of black people
have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the
other branches of the political system, the courts have
recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged
in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for
themselves.

This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or
the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to get one
person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in
the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or lose,
can be used to dramatize issues.

On St. Patrick's Day, 2003, on the eve of the invasion
of Iraq, four anti-war activists poured their own blood
around the vestibule of a military recruiting center
near Ithaca, New York, and were arrested. Charged in
state court with criminal mischief and trespassing
(charges well suited to the American invaders of a
certain Mideastern country), the St. Patrick's Four
spoke their hearts to the jury. Peter DeMott, a Vietnam
veteran, described the brutality of war. Danny Burns
explained why invading Iraq would violate the U.N.
Charter, a treaty signed by the United States. Clare
Grady spoke of her moral obligations as a Christian.
Teresa Grady spoke to the jury as a mother, telling them
that women and children were the chief victims of war,
and that she cared about the children of Iraq. Nine of
the twelve jurors voted to acquit them, and the judge
declared a hung jury. (When the federal government
retried them on felony conspiracy charges, a jury in
September acquitted them of those and convicted them on
lesser charges.)

Still, knowing the nature of the political and judicial
system of this country, its inherent bias against the
poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we
cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our
political leadership. Our culture--the media, the
educational system--tries to crowd out of our political
consciousness everything except who will be elected
President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if
these are the most important decisions we make. They are
not. They deflect us from the most important job
citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by
organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil
disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy
Sheehan's dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to
1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving
100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of
American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice
Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito.

That is why the St. Patrick's Four need to be supported
and emulated. That is why the GIs refusing to return to
Iraq, the families of soldiers calling for withdrawal
from the war, are so important.

That is why the huge peace march in Washington on
September 24 bodes well.

Let us not be disconsolate over the increasing control
of the court system by the right wing.

The courts have never been on the side of justice, only
moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed
by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the
Supreme Court, "Equal Justice Before the Law," have
always been a sham.

No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the
war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country,
or establish free medical care for every human being.
Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of
the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused
citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration
of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness--be fulfilled.

_______________________________________________________

portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
provide varied material of interest to people on the
left.

For answers to frequently asked questions:
http://www.portside.org/faq

To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside

To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
moderator@portside.org (postings are moderated)


To search the portside archive:
https://lists.mayfirst.org/search/swish.cgi?list_name=portside

America has official historians: Doris Kerns Goodwin and David McCullogh come to mind. Boorstein, Schlesinger—interpeters of the status quo; this is the way it is and the way it’s supposed to be and it just keeps on keeping on. Getting better, even! There are assumptions, givens, about the way it’s all worked out. All is for the best and we really are the best country in the world. Ho-hum.

Except...America really doesn’t work all that well. For the last fifty years the country has been teeter-tottering on the brink of catastrophe. At the end of World War Two, America slipped into a state of perpetual undeclared war. That lasted until the turn of the century under the name of the Cold War. Now it’s the War on Terror. It’s a permanent war footing. The Fifty Year War against...them. Whoever it is that is out-to-destroy-us. That stance is what maintains our economy and thus our government. The military industrial complex keeps us going.

This is not the way the framers of the Constitution wanted it to go. Tom Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, or even Hamilton would be appalled to see their dream country turned into an empire. That’s a safe assumption.

Since these were all well-off, mostly, white guys, they certainly didn’t foresee a pluralistic society; in their minds the only immigrants would be people pretty much like themselves with the same language, values, and ambitions. It sure hasn’t worked out that way.

What’s so frustrating to me is the assumption that the way it is now is the only way it can or could be. Basically, the big-time historians assume the country is on track.

Howard Zinn doesn’t make that assumption. That’s one reason why I like him so much. Try this essay:

From: moderator@portside.org
Subject: Zinn: Our rights aren't up to the Supreme Court
Date: November 11, 2005 9:46:50 PM PST
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org

It's not up to the Court

By Howard Zinn
November 2005 Issue
http://progressive.org/mag_zinn1105

John Roberts sailed through his confirmation hearings as
the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with
enthusiastic Republican support, and a few weak
mutterings of opposition by the Democrats. Then, after
the far right deemed Harriet Miers insufficiently
doctrinaire, Bush nominated arch conservative Samuel
Alito to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. This has caused a
certain consternation among people we affectionately
term "the left."

I can understand that sinking feeling. Even listening to
pieces of Roberts's confirmation hearings was enough to
induce despair: the joking with the candidate, the
obvious signs that, whether Democrats or Republicans,
these are all members of the same exclusive club.
Roberts's proper "credentials," his "nice guy" demeanor,
his insistence to the Judiciary Committee that he is not
an "ideologue" (can you imagine anyone, even Robert Bork
or Dick Cheney, admitting that he is an "ideologue"?)
were clearly more important than his views on equality,
justice, the rights of defendants, the war powers of the
President.

At one point in the hearings, The New York Times
reported, Roberts "summed up his philosophy." He had
been asked, "Are you going to be on the side of the
little guy?" (Would any candidate admit that he was on
the side of "the big guy"? Presumably serious "hearings"
bring out idiot questions.)

Roberts replied: "If the Constitution says that the
little guy should win, the little guy's going to win in
court before me. But if the Constitution says that the
big guy should win, well, then the big guy's going to
win, because my obligation is to the Constitution."

If the Constitution is the holy test, then a justice
should abide by its provision in Article VI that not
only the Constitution itself but "all Treaties made, or
which shall be made, under the Authority of the United
States, shall be the Supreme Law of the Land." This
includes the Geneva Convention of 1949, which the United
States signed, and which insists that prisoners of war
must be granted the rights of due process.

A district court judge in 2004 ruled that the detainees
held in Guantanamo for years without trial were
protected by the Geneva Convention and deserved due
process. Roberts and two colleagues on the Court of
Appeals overruled this.

There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious
veneration of the Constitution and "the rule of law."
The Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible
and is used to serve the political needs of the moment.
When the country was in economic crisis and turmoil in
the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the
anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme
Court was willing to stretch to infinity the
constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate
commerce. It decided that the national government,
desperate to regulate farm production, could tell a
family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land.

When the Constitution gets in the way of a war, it is
ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during
Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go,
claiming that there had been no declaration of war by
Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers
could not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to
even hear the case. When, during World War I, Congress
ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech by
passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war,
the imprisonment of dissenters under this law was upheld
unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two
presumably liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Louis Brandeis.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to
defend the rights of poor people, women, people of
color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come
alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate,
strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to
uphold justice.

The distinction between law and justice is ignored by
all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who
solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of
law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not
deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine
right of the king.

The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no
right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to
a living wage, no right to safe working conditions.
Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the
courts, the police, create a great movement which won
the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that
Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and
Social Security, and unemployment insurance.

The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come
from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this
is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all,
it was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited
in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was
the initiative of brave families in the South--along
with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold
War, that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored
people all over the world--that brought a sudden
enlightenment to the Court.

The Supreme Court in 1883 had interpreted the Fourteenth
Amendment so that nongovernmental institutions-hotels,
restaurants, etc.-could bar black people. But after the
sit-ins and arrests of thousands of black people in the
South in the early Sixties, the right to public
accommodations was quietly given constitutional sanction
in 1964 by the Court. It now interpreted the interstate
commerce clause, whose wording had not changed since
1787, to mean that places of public accommodation could
be regulated by Congressional action and be prohibited
from discriminating.

Soon this would include barbershops, and I suggest it
takes an ingenious interpretation to include barbershops
in interstate commerce.

The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend on
the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won
before that decision, all over the country, by
grassroots agitation that forced states to recognize the
right. If the American people, who by a great majority
favor that right, insist on it, act on it, no Supreme
Court decision can take it away.

The rights of working people, of women, of black people
have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the
other branches of the political system, the courts have
recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged
in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for
themselves.

This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or
the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to get one
person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in
the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or lose,
can be used to dramatize issues.

On St. Patrick's Day, 2003, on the eve of the invasion
of Iraq, four anti-war activists poured their own blood
around the vestibule of a military recruiting center
near Ithaca, New York, and were arrested. Charged in
state court with criminal mischief and trespassing
(charges well suited to the American invaders of a
certain Mideastern country), the St. Patrick's Four
spoke their hearts to the jury. Peter DeMott, a Vietnam
veteran, described the brutality of war. Danny Burns
explained why invading Iraq would violate the U.N.
Charter, a treaty signed by the United States. Clare
Grady spoke of her moral obligations as a Christian.
Teresa Grady spoke to the jury as a mother, telling them
that women and children were the chief victims of war,
and that she cared about the children of Iraq. Nine of
the twelve jurors voted to acquit them, and the judge
declared a hung jury. (When the federal government
retried them on felony conspiracy charges, a jury in
September acquitted them of those and convicted them on
lesser charges.)

Still, knowing the nature of the political and judicial
system of this country, its inherent bias against the
poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we
cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our
political leadership. Our culture--the media, the
educational system--tries to crowd out of our political
consciousness everything except who will be elected
President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if
these are the most important decisions we make. They are
not. They deflect us from the most important job
citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by
organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil
disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy
Sheehan's dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to
1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving
100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of
American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice
Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito.

That is why the St. Patrick's Four need to be supported
and emulated. That is why the GIs refusing to return to
Iraq, the families of soldiers calling for withdrawal
from the war, are so important.

That is why the huge peace march in Washington on
September 24 bodes well.

Let us not be disconsolate over the increasing control
of the court system by the right wing.

The courts have never been on the side of justice, only
moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed
by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the
Supreme Court, "Equal Justice Before the Law," have
always been a sham.

No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the
war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country,
or establish free medical care for every human being.
Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of
the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused
citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration
of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness--be fulfilled.

_______________________________________________________

portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
provide varied material of interest to people on the
left.

For answers to frequently asked questions:
http://www.portside.org/faq

To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings:
http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside

To submit material, paste into an email and send to:
moderator@portside.org (postings are moderated)


To search the portside archive:
https://lists.mayfirst.org/search/swish.cgi?list_name=portside

America Blog has an essay by Rob in Baltimore that excavates the moral highground right out from under the Republican Party. They’ve hyped “vales” for so long they think they have an automatic exemption from any immorality. It doesn’t matter if grandmothers in New Orleans drown or it’s OK for congressional reps to take money for promoting legislation.

The Republicans have God’s blessing, they claim, and thus everything they do is Good. Sort of like...oh, say, Torquemada putting the screws on some Protestant—it’s OK, I’m a man of God, I can’t do bad things.

Abramoff, Norquist, Delay, Frist, Rumsfeld, Cheney—all these guys are making millions of dollars off the projects they’re promoting. That’s why they’re in politics: money and power. If they can manage to get rich and become feudal lords, so much the better. It all works out for them. They can send thousands of young women and men off to die for a series of lies and make a pile on the stock market, well, great!


http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/11/trickle-down-corruption-as-far-as-eye.html


Friday, November 11, 2005

Trickle Down Corruption As Far As the Eye Can See
by Rob in Baltimore - 11/11/2005 03:45:00 PM


You know, oftentimes one can be tempted to use hyperbole to challenge one's opponents. Take this sentence for example:

The corrupt cronyism of the Republican Party is utter and complete, encompassing the Executive Branch and both branches of Congress.

Now, you might read that and think, oh, that's just a bit excessive, I'm sure that there are good people in the Republican party. Even if I disagree with their methodology, they are trying their best.

This time it's different. This time it's far worse than anything we've seen in quite a while. You judge people in life on the company they keep -- who people choose to associate with tells you a lot about them. In politics, judge people on the leaders that they choose to follow -- the example set by political leadership sets a tone and an agenda.

So let's summarize where we are today. In the Executive branch, Karl Rove is STILL in charge. In any other White House (other than Nixon), Karl Rove would have been long fired for his ties to the Plame investigation where he sacrificed national security at a time of war because his petulant side needed to be fed. This is the man that the President wants his administration follow? What Bush tells the rest of the administration and the public as a whole by keeping Rove in charge is really simple: the rules don't apply to me.

As that attitude trickles down throughout the administration, we find that something like lying to investigators becomes de rigueur. From an old, but good article from Bloomberg:

The widening investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff is moving beyond the confines of tawdry influence-peddling to threaten leading figures in the Republican hierarchy that dominates Washington.

This week's arrest of David Safavian, the former head of procurement at the Office of Management and Budget, in connection with a land deal involving Abramoff brings the probe to the White House for the first time.

Safavian once worked with Abramoff at one lobbying firm and was a partner of Grover Norquist, a national Republican strategist with close ties to the White House, at another. Safavian traveled to Scotland in 2002 with Abramoff, Representative Robert Ney of Ohio and another top Republican organizer, Ralph Reed, southeast regional head of President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

You lie to an investigator when telling the truth would be so much worse and you're terrified of what will happen if you do speak the truth. Well, the lead gives you a good sense of what might happen next - "threaten leading figures in the Republican hierarchy that dominates Washington". That's right, it's the entire Party. Mind you, this article is from Bloomberg, a BUSINESS wire service. When the business community is walking away from you, you know the stench is getting bad.

Down the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we have the Republican Congress. In the House, the exterminator, Majority Leader Tom Delay, has led quite an infestation of corruption. A reminder from the Washington Post:

A grand jury in Texas indicted yesterday a state political action committee organized by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for accepting $120,000 in allegedly illegal corporate campaign contributions shortly before and after the 2002 elections that helped Republicans cement their control of the House of Representatives.

As the culture of corruption trickles down in the House, we find Bob Ney (self-proclaimed 11th most powerful Congressman), doing things like this:

Ney, 51, in 2002 agreed to insert language in federal legislation to allow an Abramoff client, the Tigua Indians of El Paso, Texas, to reopen a casino closed by state authorities. The provision didn't make it into the final measure.

In 2000, Ney placed two statements in the Congressional Record in support of Abramoff's purchase of SunCruz Casino Ltd., a casino ship company. Abramoff was indicted by a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in August on wire fraud charges in connection with the purchase.

What is a Congressman from Ohio doing using the Congressional Record to support some casino deal in Florida?

Abramoff also has a relationship with Ney, the Ohio congressman. Ney's former chief of staff, Neil Volz, worked with Abramoff at the Miami-based law firm of Greenberg Traurig LLP.

Ah yes, there's the money shot - pun intended. (Both quotes from the Bloomberg article.) Actions like this lead us to the inevitable subpoena, of course. From Gannett:

Rep. Bob Ney said Friday that he has been subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department to hand over documents related to the government's investigation of indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

I'm smelling some serious rot over on the House side of Capitol Hill. Let's check out the Senate, maybe the air will be cleaner? From The Hill:

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Justice Department are both investigating Frist's June 13 instruction to Scobey to sell off all HCA holdings in his qualified blind trusts, including the GST-exempt trust. Two weeks after the sale was completed, HCA released a negative earnings report that sank its share price.

Ah yes, the very top of the heap in the Senate under investigation for a not-so-blind trust.

What does this trickle down corruption mean to you and me? Well, first off it shows you that Republicans go to Washington not to make America a better place, but to enrich themselves and their cronies. That attitude leads to things like the war in Iraq, the gross incompetence of FEMA, and a budget deficit that you and I will be paying for the rest of our lives. Unlike these Republicans and their extra-curricular income earning potential, we'll be paying the bill.

More importantly, what it means is that our country is being run right now by a group of people who, literally, don't care about you and me. They don't believe in any particular philosophy - tax cuts and the like are really only about making themselves and their friends richer. It's got nothing to do with you and me. The biggest proponent of tax cuts is Grover Norquist, who we can see from above is really only about getting richer himself.

So they don't believe in anything other than self-enrichment. As a result, sending people off to war to die doesn't mean anything to them. Drowning poor grandmothers and children in New Orleans doesn't mean anything to them. If it doesn't put money in their pocket, it doesn't mean anything to them.

You and I, the American public, don't mean anything to them at all.

They don't care about us. They didn't care about those poor dying people in New Orleans. They don't care about the bodies coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. THEY JUST DON'T CARE.

The only time we mean anything to them is when we vote in elections. Shame on the American public if they don't see this foolishness and wake up after the 2006 elections with a new direction for our country.

While the Democrats are cheering their electoral wins, the Cabal goes right on tearing down the Constitution.

One of the interesting switches is that Ron Wyden, the Demo senator from Oregon,voted to eliminate the right of habeas corpus for the detainees. Gordon Smith, the Republican senator from Oregon, voted against limiting the legal rights of detainees. I have no idea why Wyden would do this... On the other hand, he voted from the prescription drug program now being pushed by Medicare...

With Democrats like Wyden, who needs neo-cons?

The New York Times
November 11, 2005
Senate Approves Limiting Rights of U.S. Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/politics/11detain.html?ei=5090&en=60d760860220cb71&ex=1289365200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print


WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

The vote, 49 to 42, on an amendment to a military budget bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes at a time of intense debate over the government's treatment of prisoners in American custody worldwide, and just days after the Senate passed a measure by Senator John McCain banning abusive treatment of them.

If approved in its current form by both the Senate and the House, which has not yet considered the measure but where passage is considered likely, the law would nullify a June 2004 Supreme Court opinion that detainees at Guantánamo Bay had a right to challenge their detentions in court.

Nearly 200 of roughly 500 detainees there have already filed habeas corpus motions, which are making their way up through the federal court system. As written, the amendment would void any suits pending at the time the law was passed.

The vote also came in the same week that the Supreme Court announced that it would consider the constitutionality of war crimes trials before President Bush's military commissions for certain detainees at Guantánamo Bay, a case that legal experts said might never be decided by the court if the Graham amendment became law.

Five Democrats joined 44 Republicans in backing the amendment, but the vote on Thursday may only be a temporary triumph for Mr. Graham. Senate Democrats led by Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico said they would seek another vote, as early as Monday, to gut the part of Mr. Graham's measure that bans Guantánamo prisoners from challenging their incarceration by petitioning in civilian court for a writ of habeas corpus.

So it is possible that some lawmakers could have it both ways, backing other provisions in Mr. Graham's measure that try to make the Guantánamo tribunal process more accountable to the Senate, but opposing the more exceptional element of the legislation that limits prerogatives of the judiciary. Nine senators were absent for Thursday's vote.

Mr. Graham said the measure was necessary to eliminate a blizzard of legal claims from prisoners that was tying up Department of Justice resources, and slowing the ability of federal interrogators to glean information from detainees that have been plucked off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"It is not fair to our troops fighting in the war on terror to be sued in every court in the land by our enemies based on every possible complaint," Mr. Graham said. "We have done nothing today but return to the basics of the law of armed conflict where we are dealing with enemy combatants, not common criminals."

Opponents of the measure denounced the Senate vote as a grave step backward in the nation's treatment of detainees in the global war on terror. "This is not a time to back away from the principles that this country was founded on," Mr. Bingaman said during floor debate.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of four Republicans to vote against the measure, said the Senate was unduly rushing into a major legal shift without enough debate. "I believe the habeas corpus provision needs to be maintained," Mr. Specter said.

A three-judge panel trying to resolve the extent of Guantánamo prisoners' rights to challenge detentions sharply questioned an administration lawyer in September when he argued that detainees had no right to be heard in federal appeals courts.

The panel of the District of Columbia Circuit is trying to apply a 2004 Supreme Court ruling to two subsequent, conflicting decisions by lower courts, one appealed by the prisoners and the other by the administration.

In its June 28, 2004, decision in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the Guantánamo base was not outside the jurisdiction of American law as administration lawyers had argued and that the habeas corpus statute allowing prisoners to challenge their detentions was applicable.

Under Mr. Graham's measure, Guantánamo prisoners would be able to challenge only the narrow question of whether the government followed procedures established by the defense secretary at the time the military determined their status as enemy combatants, which is subject to an annual review. The District of Columbia Circuit would retain the right to rule on that, but not on other aspects of a prisoner's case.

Detainees would not be able to challenge the underlying rationale for their detention. "If it stands, it means detainees at Guantánamo Bay would have no access to any federal court for anything other than very simple procedural complaints dealing with annual status review," said Christopher E. Anders, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Otherwise, the federal courts' door is shut."

If the measure is enacted, civil liberties groups said it would appear to render moot the Supreme Court's decision on Monday to decide the validity of the military commissions that Mr. Bush wants to try detainees charged with terrorist offenses to trial. But some legal experts said the court might be able to move ahead if determined to do so.

Under the Graham amendment, the measure would apply to any application or action pending "on or after the date of enactment of this act."

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said: "The Senate acted unwisely, and unnecessarily, in stripping courts of jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainees. Particularly now, as the string of reports of abuse over the past several years have underscored how important it is to have effective checks on the exercise of executive authority, depriving an entire branch of government of its ability to exercise meaningful oversight is a decidedly wrong course to take."

The Senate vote on Thursday came just days after senators voted, for the second time in recent weeks, to back a measure by Mr. McCain to prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment against detainees in American custody.

Vice President Dick Cheney has appealed to Mr. McCain and to Senate Republicans to grant the C.I.A. an exemption to allow it extra latitude, subject to presidential authorization, in interrogating high-level terrorists abroad who might know about future attacks. Mr. McCain said Thursday that negotiations with the White House on compromise language were stalemated.

In addition to Mr. Specter, Republicans voting against the bill were Senators John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. The five Democrats voting for the bill were Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

America seems to be breaking up like the Spanish Armada—one constitutional right missing over there, a corrupt politician sinking up in front of us, battles lost due to inefficiency, stupidity, moral posturing, and just plain wrongness. By the time the Armada was in place in the English Channel, it was already defeated. The other side didn’t win by strategy or numerical superiority or stealth weapons: the English won because the Spanish were so goddam stupid.

Sort of like the Cheney-Bush Junta, yeah. What a difference between our leaders and King Phillip of Spain: the king was an indecisive and neurotic man who preferred seclusion to action or court life. He seems to have been genuinely pious. He didn’t know anything about the outside world, though. I guess that last point does make him kind of like Dubya, but the pious part, no. ...

When we think of machismo, Spain often comes to mind—sort of like Spain invented the whole concept. They didn’t, of course...they don’t even practice it all that much anymore. Machismo moved to Washington. The Counter-Reformation has resurfaced in America, while Spain moves progressively through the current world.

America is on the rocks and reefs of reality. We start wars because of lies repeated over and over. The Nazis would be proud. We support dictators as long as they play ball with us. We invade sovereign countries. Churches—certain churches, that is—have become government advisory groups. Lobbyists sell government access to the highest bidders. Health care has become a national disgrace. Our schools are being pressured to teach religion, not science. We hold people incommunicado in foreign prisons. We torture. Our president and his boss get on TV and flex their muscles for us, grab at their crotches, and sneer.

What a fucked-up country.

Molly Ivens says it a lot more coherently than I can:

Molly Ivins: 'Some kind of manly'
Date: Thursday, November 10 @ 09:40:07 EST
Topic: War & Terrorism

Bush administration, dead to morality, says torture is the American way

Molly Ivins, Working For Change

AUSTIN, Texas -- I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.

Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. "Only" nine senators voted against the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States." Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

"We do not torture," said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.



A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these "arguments": But we're talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2's after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the KVD weren't all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt.

"Sometimes you gotta play rough," said Dick Cheney. No shit, Dick? Now why don't you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school -- we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn't play football -- he was a cheerleader. "He is really competitive," said one friend. "You wouldn't believe how tough he is on a tennis court!" Just cut the macho crap -- I don't want to hear it.

If you are dead to all sense of morality (please let me not go off on the stinking sanctimony of this crowd), let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.

There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around -- if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison ... I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary -- it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality.

I grew up with all this pathetic Texas tough: Everybody here knows you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; and this ain't beanbag; and I'll knock your jaw so far back, you'll scratch your throat with your front teeth; and I'm gonna cloud up and rain all over you; and I'm gonna open me a can of whup-ass ...

And that'll show 'em, won't it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain't it?

"The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships." -- The Washington Post.

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame.

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let the Dogs In?

© 2005 Working Assets.

Source: Working For Change
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=19865


This article comes from The Smirking Chimp


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23556

I am now trying the browser called "Camino," to see if it supports blogger; I've been using Firefox, which works fine, but I'd rather have a mac oriented browser as default. The problem with Safari is that the html coding offered by Blogger won't work.

So this posting is a minor truce in my campaign against the Cheney-Bush cabal. A very minor truce.

"The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption," said Lawrence Wilkerson.

In case anyone missed it the first dozen times around, Cheney and Bush are oilmen. Cheney, first last and in between, is about oil. Cheney won’t talk about his energy (used to be known as oil) policy. Bush knows where the butter is on his bread. Oil. The war is about the Middle East and it is about making sure the U.S. has adequate supplies of oil for as long as possible. We are in the first of the Resource Wars; no country with large supplies of oil is safe as long as the big oil companies and Dick Cheney are going steady. George Bush is no chaperone.

Robert Parry: 'So Iraq was about the oil'
Date: Tuesday, November 08 @ 10:03:58 EST

Consortium News

When Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly decried the Bush administration's bungling of U.S. foreign policy, the focus of the press coverage was on Wilkerson's depiction of a "cabal" headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked the decision-making process.

Largely overlooked were Wilkerson's frank admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term U.S. military intervention in Iraq. "The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption," the retired Army colonel said in a speech on Oct. 19.

While bemoaning the administration's incompetence in implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the region's oil supplies.

"We had a discussion in (the State Department's Office of) Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly," Wilkerson said. "That's how serious we thought about it."



The centrality of Iraq's oil in Wilkerson's blunt comments contrasted with three years of assurances from the Bush administration that the war had almost nothing to do with oil.

When critics have called the Iraq War a case of "blood for oil," George W. Bush's defenders have dismissed them as "conspiracy theorists." The Bush defenders insisted the president went to war out of concern about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda, neither of which turned out to be true. Later, Bush cited humanitarian concerns and the desire to spread democracy.

Always left out of the administration's war equation - or referenced only obliquely - was the fact that Iraq sits atop one of the world's largest known oil reserves at a time when international competition is intensifying to secure reliable oil supplies.

O'Neill's Revelations

But Wilkerson is not the first senior Bush administration official to cite the importance of oil in the U.S. calculus toward Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made similar assertions in 2004.

O'Neill, who was fired in late 2002 after disagreeing with Bush on tax cuts and Iraq, told author Ron Suskind that Bush's first National Security Council meeting just days into his presidency included a discussion of invading Iraq. O'Neill said even at that early date, the message from Bush was "find a way to do this."

Oil and Iraq were soon mixing in the administration's thinking about energy and politics.

On Feb. 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's Energy Task Force because it was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

Before this disclosure, which appeared in The New Yorker three years later, it was believed that Cheney's secretive task force was focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto protocol on global warming.

But the NSC document suggested that the Bush administration from its first days recognized the linkage between ousting unreliable leaders like Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to "capture" oil fields in "rogue states." [For more on the NSC document, see The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

After al-Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush had the political opening he needed to turn his designs on Iraq into reality. Though there was no credible evidence connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda and Sept. 11, Bush and Cheney made the linkage anyway.

Active preparations for war with Iraq were soon underway. Behind the scenes, O'Neill said he watched as the administration refined its plans for how to divvy up Iraq's oil reserves after the invasion.

"Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset," Suskind wrote in The Price of Loyalty.

Beyond giving U.S. firms access to Iraq's oil, the Bush administration recognized how the oil could help induce both allies and rivals to back broader U.S. policies.

"One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from 30 countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest," Suskind wrote in recounting O'Neill's observations.

"An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oilfield,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration.

"The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States ... matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said."

In pronouncements to the American people, however, Bush and other administration officials denied that oil was a reason for the Iraq invasion. Instead they stressed the danger posed by Iraq's supposed WMD, then the humanitarian interest in removing Hussein, then encouraging democracy to flourish in the region, and finally preventing the spread of Islamic extremism.

Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was among the career military officers pulled into the war planning, said she and her fellow officers were troubled by how the American people were manipulated.

"Many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this (Iraq) agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people," she wrote. "Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses." [See Salon.com's "The New Pentagon Papers."]

Wilkerson's Critique

By contrast, Wilkerson openly acknowledged the oil factor both in explaining the U.S. invasion and in justifying the need to remain in Iraq to ensure that any new government is not hostile to American interests.

Despite his earlier doubts about the wisdom of invading, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell said the Middle East's oil reserves makes withdrawal from Iraq more dangerous than leaving Vietnam three decades ago.

"We can't leave Iraq; we simply can't," Wilkerson said in his Oct. 19 speech to the New America Foundation in Washington.

"I'm not evaluating the decision to go to war. That's a different matter. But we're there, we've done it, and we cannot leave. I would submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesn't leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation, put five million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East within a decade. That's what we'll have to do."

Wilkerson made clear that what made Iraq such a strategic concern was the oil.

"We consume 60 percent of the world's resources," he said. "We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation - and I don't see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind - or we better be ready to take those assets (in the Middle East).

"If you want those resources and you want (Middle Eastern) governments that aren't inimical to your interests with regard to those resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it in a mess."

So, it appears those Iraq "blood-for-oil" accusations were right all along, at least in identifying one of the real reasons for invading Iraq. The present danger, however, is that U.S. policy-makers have no better solution to the quagmire in Iraq than continuing indefinitely to barter more blood for a continued supply of oil.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Source: Consortium News
http://consortiumnews.com/2005/110705.html



This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23533

Cheney wants to see, ah, extreme methods of interrogation be OK’ed, just for the bad guys. This current crop of bad guys, that is. Cheney and his front man, George Bush, of course will reserve the right to designate “bad guys.”

All they ask is that we trust them, since they represent the Party of Moral Values and The American Way...

What is it, exactly, that are moral values? They sure as hell ain’t what the Repugnicans say they are. Here’s a piece I’ve been saving—not even sure where it came from—about a definition of moral values...pretty much my definition, too...


What Are Moral Values?

by Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers, Mayflower Church, Oklahoma City

As some of you know, I am minister of Mayflower Congregational
Church in Oklahoma City, a church in northwest Oklahoma City, and
professor of Rhetoric
at Oklahoma City University. But you would most likely have
encountered me on the pages of the Oklahoma Gazette, where I have
been a columnist for six years, and hold the record for the most
number of angry letters to the editor. Tonight, I join ranks of those
who are angry, because I have watched as the faith I love has been
taken over by those who claim to speak for Jesus, but whose actions
are anything but Christian. We've heard a lot lately about so-
called "moral values" as having swung the election to President Bush.



Well, I'm a great believer in moral values, but we need to have a
discussion, all over this country, about exactly what constitutes a
moral value -- I mean what are we talking about? Because we don't get
to make them up as we go along, especially not if we are people of
faith. We have an inherited tradition of what is right and wrong and
moral is as moral does. Let me give you just a few of the reasons why
I take issue with those in power who claim moral values are on their
side:

When you start a war on false pretenses, and then act as if your
deceptions are justified because you are doing God's will, and that
your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are
some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the
faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral.

When you live in a country that has established international rules
for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to
enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down
for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral.



When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to
acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn
them on their head (you know, Sermon on the Mount stuff like that we
must never return violence for violence and that those who live by
the sword will die by the sword), you are doing something immoral.

When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important
as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you
are doing something immoral.

When you find a way to avoid combat in Vietnam, and then question the
patriotism of someone who volunteered to fight, and came home a hero,
you are doing something immoral.

When you ignore the fundamental teachings of the gospel, which says
that the way the strong treat the weak is the ultimate ethical test,
by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest among us so the strong will
get stronger and the weak will get weaker, you are doing something
immoral.

When you wink at the torture of prisoners, and deprive so-
called "enemy combatants" of the rules of the Geneva Conventions,
which your own country helped to establish and insists that other
countries follow, you are doing something immoral.

When you claim that the world can be divided up into the good guys
and the evil doers, slice up your own nation into those who are with
you, or with the terrorists -- and then launch a war which enriches
your own friends and seizes control of the oil to which we are
addicted, instead of helping us to kick the habit, you are doing
something immoral.

When you fail to veto a single spending bill, but ask us to pay for a
war with no exit strategy and no end in sight, creating an enormous
deficit that hangs like a great millstone around the necks of our
children, you are doing something immoral.

When you cause most of the rest of the world to hate a country that
was once the most loved country in the world, and act like it doesn't
matter what others think of us, only what God thinks of you, you have
done something immoral.

When you use hatred of homosexuals as a wedge issue to turn out
record numbers of evangelical voters, and use the Constitution as a
tool of discrimination, you are doing something immoral.

When you favor the death penalty, and yet claim to be a follower of
Jesus, who said an eye for an eye was the old way, not the way of the
kingdom, you are doing something immoral.

When you dismantle countless environmental laws designed to protect
the earth which is God's gift to us all, so that the corporations
that bought you and paid for your favors will make higher profits
while our children breathe dirty air and live in a toxic world, you
have done something immoral. The earth belongs to the Lord, not
Halliburton.

When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our
killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble
the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral. We have met
the enemy, and the enemy is us.

When you tell people that you intend to run and govern as
a "compassionate conservative," using the word which is the essence
of all religious faith -- compassion, and then show no compassion for
anyone who disagrees with you, and no patience with those who cry to
you for help, you are doing something immoral.

When you talk about Jesus constantly, who was a healer of the sick,
but do nothing to make sure that anyone who is sick can go to see a
doctor, even if she doesn't have a penny in her pocket, you are doing
something immoral.

When you put judges on the bench who are racist, and will set women
back a hundred years, and when you surround yourself with preachers
who say gays ought to be killed, you are doing something immoral.

I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be
a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights
and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people
saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war.

I heard that when I was your age, when the Vietnam War was raging. We
knew that that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong --
the only question is how many people are going to die before these
make-believe Christians are removed from power?

This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of
this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people
who can turn things around are people like you--young people who are
just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them. It's your
country to take back. It's your faith to take back. It's your future
to take back.

Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin
to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be
wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut.
Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real
Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists--so do all the faith
traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is
precious. Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of
faith. Greed is the opposite of charity. And believing that one has
never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of
faith. And war -- war is the greatest failure of the human race --
and thus the greatest failure of faith.

There's an old rock and roll song, whose lyrics say it all: War, what
is it good for? Absolutely nothing. And what is the dream of the
prophets? That we should study war no more, that we should beat our
swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Who would
Jesus bomb, indeed?

How many wars does it take to know that too many people have died?
What if they gave a war and nobody came? Maybe one day we will find
out. Time to march again my friends. Time to commit acts of civil
disobedience. Time to sing, and to pray, and refuse to participate in
the madness.

I remember the good old days, back in the 20th Century...

Back during Nixon’s reign, the IRS was used to go after people he thought were out to get him. The IRS was used as an arm of the executive branch.

Now, here’s a thought: Bush is apparently doing the same thing—or rather the Cheney-Bush Combine.

Is this a great country, or what? —Bill Clinton

Monday, November 07, 2005
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/11/bushs-irs-to-threaten-pope.html
Bush's IRS to threaten the Pope?
by John in DC - 11/07/2005 03:01:00 PM

Assuming the IRS isn't violating US law, and the US Constitution, by launching a partisan witch hunt against a liberal church, we assume that the IRS will soon be threatening the tax status of the entire Catholic Church in America since Pope Ratzinger himself overtly tried to throw the US presidential election in favor of George Bush.

And I take you back to July 11, 2004:

American Catholic bishops are trying to defy secret advice from Rome that Communion should not be given to John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.

The advice is contained in an explosive memo - clearly directed at Sen Kerry - by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Pope's doctrinal advisor, who is head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the institutional heir to the Inquisition.

The memo was sent to the US Catholic Bishops' conference last month. With formidable clarity and force, it states that pro-abortion Catholic politicians should be warned by priests that they are not eligible for Communion. If the politician then "shows an obstinate persistence in grave sin", writes Cardinal Ratzinger, he or she should be turned away at the altar rail. Mr Kerry has consistently voted in favour of maintaining abortion rights during his 30-year senatorial career.

The tone and content of Cardinal Ratzinger's memo, which was leaked to an Italian magazine last week, leave little room for misunderstanding. Some passages appear to have been drafted specifically with Sen Kerry in mind.

"Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia," writes the Cardinal, "when a person's formal co-operation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his pastor should meet with him, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist."....

Last month the Pope delighted White House election strategists by agreeing to meet President Bush in Rome after repeated overtures from Washington. A senior religious advisor to the White House told The Telegraph that there was "no doubt" that the Pope preferred President Bush to Sen Kerry, even though the Vatican was strongly against the war in Iraq and the senator is a practising Catholic.

You'll recall that in the case of the liberal church, the IRS recently threatened to revoke the church's tax status simply based on a newspaper article's report of a sermon given in the church, a sermon critical of the war on terror. Clearly, a newspaper article stating that Pope Ratzinger intentionally crafted a memo on church doctrine in a way so that it would specifically take a swipe at the Democratic president candidate, is obviously against US tax law.

I can't wait for Bush's IRS to send a letter to every Catholic Church in America threatening their tax status. Perhaps we need to write the IRS and demand they do.

Here's the phone number for the IRS' national media office, since we are media and all:

202-622-4000.

Tell them you're looking forward to their investigating the Catholic Church's tax status, or do they only go after liberal churches

And here's the chief counsel's office:

202-622-3300

Someone said that America is like the adult child of the alocoholic parent, England. For this analogy to be true, it would mean that our entire nation needs treatment. Our nation needs something. I don't think it needs for drugs, legal or illegal. It does need to confront the irrational forces that brings a man like Dubya to office.


Naomi Wolf:
'We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender'
Date: Monday, November 07 @ 10:02:42 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

Naomi Wolf, The Guardian

In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him. George Bush can't shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the doghouse.

It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.

How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country and make it compliant.

They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.



Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11. Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse about "liberating the Middle East" and "spreading democracy", could put a yellow "Support the Troops" sticker on their SUVs and forget the spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.

Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realised inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.

So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right.

It's true that, in spite of Bush's current implosion, some rightwing structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network of thinktanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.

But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott, sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.

But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by "old Europe" - when we were intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can't bear international contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.

I don't see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made it out of the land of blogs six months ago.

Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme, we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina Jolie's work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger photo than that of Paris Hilton's latest outfit. We used not to think black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.

I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.

I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.

Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina's real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The Treehouse, Fire With Fire, and The Beauty Myth

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1635925,00.html

Seems like this compendium of lies should be enough to impeach Bush and Cheney. Lying on this scale to the American public constitutes a high crime.

Revision Thing

http://harpers.org/RevisionThing.html

A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.

Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.

* * *

Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We knew he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production. When the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied-finally denied access, a report came out of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we needed.

Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The burden was on those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they were.

We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and we captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and order. The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere.

The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent life, and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And plans were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well as medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.

The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take other people's real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.

The United States was not interested in the oil in that region. We were intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national Iraqi control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all parts of the country. The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq, all of Iraq. We estimated that the potential income to the Iraqi people as a result of their oil could be somewhere in the $20 [billion] to $30 billion a year [range], and obviously, that would be money that would be used for their well-being. In other words, all of Iraq's oil belonged to all the people of Iraq.

* * *

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn't want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush.

It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be attributed to poor planning. The number of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region dropped as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. There is a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain--he is no longer a threat to the free world, and the people of Iraq are free. There's no doubt in my mind when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind.

About the Author

Sam Smith is the author of four books, the latest of which is Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land. He is the editor of The Progressive Review.

Carl Hiassen is a journalist and a novelist. Sometimes it's hard to tell which he's better at doing. I try to read everything he writes. He has a great sense of moral outrage, and he can dismember arcane dirty politics better than any other writer I know.


Posted on Sun, Nov. 06, 2005


Adventures of Jack Abramoff -- an ugly story

By CARL HIAASEN

The glistening slime trail left by lobbyist Jack Abramoff leads to an infamous homicide scene in South Florida.

And while the indicted bosom buddy of indicted Rep. Tom DeLay says he had nothing to do with the mob-style execution of casino fleet founder Gus Boulis, Abramoff probably wasn't turning cartwheels when three men were recently charged with murdering Boulis back in February 2001.

One of the defendants is Anthony ''Big Tony'' Moscatiello, identified by police as an associate of the Gambino crime family. Moscatiello is a longtime pal with lawyer Adam Kidan, who was Abramoff's partner in what prosecutors say was a fraudulent purchase of Fort Lauderdale-based SunCruz casinos from Boulis.

Kidan and Abramoff go way back. At the Georgetown Law Center they were both members of the College Republicans.

Abramoff grew up to be a big-time GOP operative whose friendship with House Speaker DeLay opened doors to all sorts of wondrous opportunities. For example, his lobby firm received $66 million in fees from Indian tribes that either wanted to set up casino operations, or block rival tribes from doing the same.

Sen. John McCain, the tenacious Arizona Republican, is currently holding hearings about Abramoff's unorthodox lobby tactics and the favors he seems have bought at the Interior Department, which oversees Indian matters.

It's an ugly story, but not the worst of Abramoff's legal problems. That would be his partnership with Kidan, whose keen business acumen and sterling ethics had already led to multiple bankruptcies and the loss of his New York law license.

In 2000, Abramoff shiningly recommended Kidan to Gus Boulis as a buyer for the SunCruz casino boat fleet, which Boulis was being forced to sell because he wasn't a U.S. citizen.

The buyout sounded like such a sweet deal that Abramoff decided to go 50-50 with Kidan, and the papers were finally signed in September 2000.

Boulis, who'd kept a stake in SunCruz, soon became enraged with Kidan's free-spending management. Among those hired for catering and security services were Kidan's old mob friend Moscatiello and another upstanding citizen named Anthony ''Little Tony'' Ferrari. When Boulis started to raise hell about the money, things grew so tense that Kidan got a restraining order and even hired three bodyguards.

Boulis filed suit, and the next month he was dead, shot to death in his BMW after leaving his office in Fort Lauderdale. Like Abramoff, Kidan says he knows nothing about Boulis' murder.

In September, Moscatiello, Ferrari and a third man, James ''Pudgy'' Fiorillo, were charged with the crime. But back to the deal:

Four months after Boulis died, SunCruz was in the toilet. Court records showed that Kidan and Abramoff had diverted $310,000 of company funds for a luxury skybox at FedEx Field in Washington, D.C., where Abramoff entertained politicians and GOP fat cats.

He and Kidan also had helped themselves to $500,000 salaries and lots of expensive perks. But here's the best part: According to prosecutors, the two men took control of the casino line without ever putting down a dime of their own dough.

Abramoff and Kidan were indicted in South Florida last summer for allegedly faking documents showing they'd invested $23 million in the deal. Those papers enabled them to obtain $60 million in real financing.

Both men say they're innocent. Predictably, Abramoff blames Kidan for the alleged fraud and insists he didn't know about his pal's past business flops, or the disbarment.

It's quite a tale, and quite a statement about the prevailing culture in Washington, D.C., where until his troubles began Abramoff owned a restaurant popular with the conservative crowd.

His role in the SunCruz takeover wasn't widely known four years ago when Gus Boulis was shot, but Abramoff obviously wasn't concerned. He and Kidan blithely siphoned the cash out the company and moved on.

Abramoff was coasting along nicely, ripping off the Indian tribes, until the SunCruz indictments last summer. Today his big-shot friends can't help him, and wouldn't if they could.

Once a star and darling of congressional Republicans, Abramoff is now political poison. No more skybox parties or free Scottish golf vacations for the Speaker of the House. No more schmoozing with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist.

Indicted in Florida, under fire from McCain in Washington, Abramoff can now look forward to an upcoming mob-hit trial in which his once-golden name might be unflatteringly invoked.

He could even be asked to testify, an event that would reduce his once-bulging Rolodex to the thickness of a library card.

The players and politicians who are so desperately distancing themselves from Abramoff would prefer that we think of him as some small-time hustler, a fringe sleazeball who crawled out of the shadows.

He wasn't. He was a big-league hustler and a mainstream sleazeball.

And he was all theirs.



© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

Sweet land of liberty... Two and a quarter million people were in jails and prisons last year: 1.4 million under the control of state and federal prisons, and nearly 3/4ths of a million in local jails.

We’re higher than Russia or South Africa in percentages.

The important questions about prisons are these: Do they work? Do they reduce crime? No, obviously. The definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes.”

Our penal system is insane.


www.wsws.org

Record numbers in US prisons
Women, children and immigrants top incarceration increases
By Debra Watson
5 November 2005

Back to screen version | Send this link by email | Email the author

The number of people in US prisons and jails rose again last year to 2,267,787 people, continuing a trend of increasing incarceration rates that has gone on unabated for more than two decades. According to a report released in October by the US Department of Justice, by the end of 2004 there were 1.4 million prisoners in federal and state facilities and 700,000 in local jails.

One out every 109 US males was incarcerated in a state or federal prison in 2004, reflecting a 32 percent increase in the number of male prisoners since 1995. In 1980 the number in prison or jail in the US totaled 503,000. By 1990 this had doubled to over a million and by mid-year 2002 it doubled again, to surpass the 2 million mark.

The historical increase in the US prison population has been out of proportion to the general rise in population. In 2004 the US incarceration rate hit 486 sentenced inmates (those with sentences exceeding one year) per 100,000 residents, up 18 percent from 411 per 100,000 a decade ago, according to the government report.

Though US crime rates have actually fallen in recent years, a law-and-order atmosphere and more jail time and longer sentences under mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws are keeping the prisons filled. The prison system is a key component of political repression, designed to keep a lid on growing social tensions resulting from unprecedented levels of social inequality in the US.

The US has the highest prison population in the world, both in percentage of its population and in sheer numbers of people kept behind bars. Only China, with a population more than four times that of the US, even comes close, with 1.5 million prisoners. The overall US incarceration rate—724 per 100,000—is 25 percent higher than that of any other nation in the world, according to the Sentencing Project, a prisoner advocacy group.

Women and immigrants have highest increases

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report noted that the number of female prisoners rose 4 percent from 2003 to 2004, more than twice the rate of increase among men over the same time period. The annual rate of increase in women has averaged 4.8 percent for the past decade compared to an average of 3.1 percent for men. Harsher drug sentencing laws are a big part of the increase. Women now account for one in four arrests in the US, though they currently comprise only 7 percent of prison inmates. This is up from 5.7 percent in 1990.

The highest historical increase in incarceration rates has been in the area of immigration offenses, which has risen by 394 percent since 1995. In 2003 there were 16,903 people in prison for immigration offenses, up from 3,420 in 1995.

The number of persons jailed in federal prison for immigration offenses (such as attempting to enter the country within five years of being deported) doubled from 1,593 in 1985 to 3,420 in 1995. After the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was implemented in 1996 the number skyrocketed to 16,903 in 2003. Immigration lawyers have documented that 57 percent of immigration violations cases referred for prosecution by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the year 2000 involved citizens of Mexico, with nearly all of these cases being investigations of unlawful entry.

Sentenced inmates in federal prisons increased from 88,658 in 1995 to 158,426 in 2003, according to the BJS report. The largest increase was for drug offenses, just under half of the total growth. Those sentenced for drug offenses made up 55 percent of federal inmates in 2003. Public-order offenses, including weapons charges and the above mentioned immigration violations, made up nearly 40 percent.

The federal prison system has been the sole source of the growth of privately operated prisons in the past four years, according to the BJS report. Close to 25,000 federal prisoners were housed in private facilities in 2004 compared to 15,500 in 2000. The use of private prisons in the states and US territories declined over the same period. Nevertheless, states and territories held over 74,000 people in private jails.

Juveniles in adult prison

There are just over 100,000 prisoners in juvenile facilities. When juvenile justice statistics are examined in detail, the repressive conditions in US society are dramatically on display.

Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court ruled that juvenile offenders are too young and immature to be put to death. These rulings rested on the concept that children do not have the same mental capacity and thus are not as culpable as adults. But this has done little to stop the systematic dismantling of the 100-year-old juvenile justice system.

Though the number of youth convicted of murder was cut in half between 1990 and 2000, the rate of children sentenced as adults went up substantially. In 1990 there were 2,234 youth convicted of murder in the United States, 2.9 percent sentenced to life without parole. Ten years later, in 2000, the number of youth murderers had dropped to 1,006, but 9.1 percent were sentenced to life without parole.

More than one in four of the youth convicted of murder—the majority of cases remanded to adult court—were convicted of felony murder in which the teen participated in a robbery or burglary during which a co-participant committed murder, without the knowledge or intent of the teen.

In any event, experts have pointed out that the increase in the number of children sentenced as adults comes from cases that would not have been subject to the death penalty. They are young people who were accessories to crimes or who were sentenced to life (without parole) for property crimes and other nonviolent infractions.

In a recent world survey of juvenile offenders, Human Rights Watch/Amnesty International found only four countries that imprisoned children with sentences of life without parole. Out of 154 countries outside the US, the authors of The Rest of Their Lives: Life without Parole for Child Offenders in the United States found only 12 prisoners in just three countries who were serving sentences of life without parole for crimes committed while they were children. In the US, the fourth country, there were 2,200 people serving life without parole for crimes they committed before turning 18.

The US, along with only Somalia, has never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It stands in violation of the international human rights standards contained in that charter that prohibit the incarceration of children with adults. According to the report, one third of the youth offenders now serving life without parole in the US entered adult prison while they were still children.

“In eleven out of the seventeen years between 1985 and 2001, youth convicted of murder in the United States were more likely to enter prison with a life without parole sentence than adult murder offenders,” the report says.

A few US states led the increase in harsh adult sentences for children. Virginia, Louisiana and Michigan had life without parole sentences for children rates that were three to seven-and-a-half times higher than the national average of 1.77 per 100,000 children.

According to the BJS, the states with the highest incarceration rates are found in the South. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is 816 prisoners per 100,000 state residents, approaching twice the national average and substantially higher than even its closest rival, Texas, which reported 694 per 100,000.

When Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco announced her shoot-to-kill orders for New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina she was only crafting the logical extension of decades of increased police repression in the US that has accompanied the corporate and government assault on social conditions.

The response of the media was to largely ignore the semi-annual report from the BJS and the social implications of decades of increases in the imprisonment rates. Bringing up social ills in the US is rare, and discussing them in relation to crime and punishment is virtually taboo. There was only a brief outburst of protest a month ago when William Bennett, the former US Education Secretary and right-wing commentator, made his now infamous assertion that crime in the US would fall if all black babies were aborted.

Stagnant and falling wages and incomes for the poor, growing household indebtedness, cuts in social services and countless blows to the social safety net are a feature of everyday life in the US. Following the virtual elimination of any form of public assistance for the long-term unemployed and the dismantling of mental health facilities in the states, states have treated prisons as a dumping ground for the individuals ground down by society, a practice acceptable in official circles.

The Human Rights Watch/Amnesty International report found marked racial disparities among juveniles sentenced to life without parole. Nationwide, the estimated rate at which black youth receive life without parole sentences (6.6 per 10,000) is 10 times greater than the rate for white youth (0.6 per 10,000).

The BJS report finds the same racial disparities in adult prisons. In 2004 more than 40 percent of sentenced inmates were black. Of black males aged 25 to 29, 8.4 percent are sentenced inmates, compared to 2.5 percent of Hispanic males and 1.2 percent of white males in that age group. Even among middle-aged blacks, aged 45 to 54, the rate of incarceration is higher than the national average, at 3.3 percent.

Bennett, as “drug czar” under the first President Bush, was responsible for the direction of US policy in the area of drug offenses. The so-called war on drugs eschewed rehabilitation and caught up hundreds of thousands of black men in its net, even though drug use itself is no higher among racial minorities than among the population as a whole.

Copyright 1998-2005
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Remember Scott Ritter? He’s the ex-Marine, ex-UN Arms Inspector in Iraq that kept trying to tell people, via the media, that the WMD threat was phony. What was sad was that the media, from the NY Times to the Washington Post, CNN to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh to any local talk show host, attacked Ritter as being a liar, a psycho, a terrorist sympathizer, and definitely un-American.

Talk about a “prophet without honor.” Ritter was right. The mountain of evidence that the lies were pre-fabricated and cynical keeps piling up. The right wing talking heads are lapsing back into remembering how things were twenty years ago, or using every red herring they can find in the garbage, trying to prop up the facade of American righteousness in invading Iraq. One of these days the pile of evidence will morph itself into one of those famous smoking guns that even CNN won’t be able to overlook.



Editor and Publisher

Smoking Gun on Manipulation of Iraq Intelligence? 'NY Times' Cites New Document

By E&P Staff

Published: November 05, 2005 1:30 PM ET

NEW YORK Ever since the Democrats briefly closed the U.S. Senate from view earlier this week, to protest alleged Republican foot-dragging in probing Bush administration pre-war manipulation of intelligence, the press has been asking: So what new evidence do the Democrats have in this matter?

Tomorrow, in its print edition, The New York Times starts to answer the question, with reporter Douglas Jehl disclosing the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It shows that an al-Qaeda official held by the Americans was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the basis for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002.

It declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda's work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports.

“The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility,” Jehl writes. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as ‘credible’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

“Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that ‘we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’”

A White House spokeswoman said she had no immediate comment on the D.I.A. report, according to the Times.

“Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts,” Jehl continues. “Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.”

Libi is in custody, apparently at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was sent in 2003.

According to Jehl, Secretary of State Colin Powell relied heavily on Libi for his speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing "the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda."


E&P Staff

Links referenced within this article

letters@editorandpublisher.com
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/mailto:letters@editorandpublisher.com


Find this article at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001434737


© 2005 VNU eMedia Inc. All rights reserved.

The march of the gulags draws closer...

Another rap on the increasing authoritarian structure of government. Despite all that talk of freedom and American values and liberty, the Bush administration really wants to control everybody and punish people who don't go along with the plan. That the mainstream Republican Party goes along with this neo-nazification simply exposes them for the hypocrits they really are. If the Libertarian wing of the GOP was not seduced by power, they'd be leading the revolt against this crap. But they are seduced and they're only sucking up closer to power.

Mike Whitney: 'Drifting towards a Police State'
Date: Saturday, November 05 @ 08:56:20 EST
Topic: Laws, the Courts and the Legal System

Mike Whitney

"Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid the terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends"
-- Former Attorney General John Ashcroft

Did you know that under the terms of the new Patriot Act prosecutors will be able to seek the death penalty in cases where "defendants gave financial support to umbrella organizations without realizing that some of its adherents might eventually commit violence"? (NY Times; editorial 10-30-05) So, if someone unknowingly gave money to a charity that was connected to a terrorist group, he could be executed.

Or, that the Senate Intelligence Committee is fine-tuning the details of a bill that will allow the FBI to secretly procure any of your personal records without "probable cause" or a court order giving them "unchecked authority to pry into personal and business matters"? (New York Times, "Republicans seek to widen FBI Powers, 10-19-05)

Or, that on June 29, President Bush put "a broad swath of the FBI" under his direct control by creating the National Security Service (aka; the "New SS")? This is the first time we've had a "secret police" in our 200 year history. It will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of congressional oversight.

Or, that on October 27, 2005 president Bush created the National Clandestine Service, which will be headed by CIA Director Porter Goss and will "expand reporting of information and intelligence value from state, local and tribal law enforcement entities and private sector stakeholders"? This executive order gives the CIA the power to carry out covert operations, spying, propaganda, and "dirty tricks" within the United States and on the American public. ("The New National Intelligence Strategy of the US" by Larry Chin, Global Research)

Or, that Pentagon intelligence operatives are now permitted to collect information from US citizens without revealing their status as government spies? ("Bill would give Cover to Pentagon Spies", Greg Miller, Times Staff writer, "The Nation")

Or, that within 2 years every American license and passport will be made according to federal uniform standards including microchips (with biometric information) that will allow the government to trace every movement of its citizens?

Or, that recent rulings, the DC District Court unanimously decided in two different cases that foreign prisoners have no rights under international law to challenge their indefinite imprisonment by the United States and, (in Rumsfeld vs. Padilla) that the president can lock up an American citizen "without charges" if he believes he may be an "enemy combatant"? Both verdicts overturn the fundamental principles of "inalienable rights", habeas corpus, and the presumption of innocence; replacing them with the arbitrary authority of the executive.

The American people have no idea of the amount of energy that has been devoted to stripping them of their constitutional protections and how stealthily that plan has been carried out. It has required the concerted efforts of the political establishment, the corporate elite, and the collaborative media. For all practical purposes, the government is no longer constrained in its conduct towards its citizens; it can do as it pleases.

The campaign to dismantle the Bill of Rights has focused primarily on the key amendments; the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th and 14th. These are the cornerstones of American liberty and they encompass everything from due process to equal protection to free speech to a ban on the "cruel and unusual" treatment of prisoners. Freedom has little tangible meaning apart from the safety provided by these amendments.

At present, there's no reason for the administration to assert its new powers. That would only dispel the widely-held illusion of personal freedom. But, the existing climate of "well being" will not last forever. The poisonous effects of war, tax cuts, burgeoning budget deficits, and inflation indicate that darker days lie ahead. The middle class is stretched paper-thin and disaster could be as close as a hike in interest rates. The new repressive legislation anticipates the massive political unrest that naturally follows a tenuous and volatile economic situation.

Is this why Congress has rubber stamped so many of the administration's autocratic laws, or does Bush simply "hate our freedoms"?

The members of America's ruling elite carefully follow the shifting of policy in Washington. They have the power to access the mainstream media and dispute the changes in the law that they oppose. Regrettably, there's been no sign of protest from the bastions of the corporate, financial and political oligarchy; just an ominous silence.

Does this mean that American Brahmins have abandoned their support for personal liberty and the rights of man?


Americans still seem blissfully unaware of the fundamental changes to the political system. The cloak of disinformation and diversion has successfully obscured the perils of our present course. Freedom is no longer guaranteed in Bush's America nor is liberty everyman's birthright. The rickety scaffolding that supports the rule of law has been replaced by the unbridled authority of the supreme presidency. The country is slipping inexorably towards the Orwellian nightmare; the National Security State.

This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=23494

So, in Cheney's—and by extention Bush's and Rumsfeld's and all the rest of the Vice-President's men's—America, torture is OK. Their America is the Official America; it sure ain't my America.

A war based on bamboozling the public by means of lies. A war that isn't even a war, unless you're in it (Congress did not declare a war). Deception, bullshit, and more bullshit. What does this say about our leaders? To me it says they're illegitimate. They've lied outrageously to get their way, they approve torture, are doing their damnedest to suspend the Bill of Rights, and then wave the flag at us. It's disgusting. They need to be impeached and tried, at the very least. Running them out of the country on a rail would be nice, too.

I found this nice (figuratively speaking—it really isn't about anything nice) juxtaposition of articles on TruthOut, one of my favorite daily news/commentary sources.

Wilkerson Points Finger at Cheney on Torture
The Associated Press

Friday 04 November 2005

Washington - Vice President Dick Cheney's office triggered abuse of Iraqi prisoners with word that filtered down to soldiers in the field that interrogations were not providing needed intelligence, a former senior State Department official has alleged.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday, "It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field."

While the view of Cheney's office was put in carefully couched terms, to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using ways that "were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war," Wilkerson, a former colonel, said on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition."

"If you are a military man you know that you just don't do these sorts of things because once you give just the slightest bit of leeway there are those in the armed forces who will take advantage of that," Wilkerson said.

Asked if Powell was aware of Wilkerson's remarks, his spokeswoman, Peggy Cifrino, said, "Colonel Wilkerson does not speak for or work for him."

A Cheney spokeswoman, Jennifer Mayfield, said: "The vice president's office has no response."

---

Go to Original

Cheney Pushes Senate for CIA Exemption
By David Espo and Liz Sidoti
The Associated Press

Saturday 05 November 2005

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in US custody, according to participants in a closed-door session.

Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.

The vice president made his comments at a regular weekly private meeting of Senate Republican senators, according to several lawmakers who attended. Cheney often attends the meetings, a chance for the rank-and-file to discuss legislative strategy, but he rarely speaks.

In this case, the room was cleared of aides before the vice president began his remarks, said by one senator to include a reference to classified material. The officials who disclosed the events spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the discussion.

"The vice president's office doesn't have any comment on a private meeting with members of the Senate," Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Cheney, said on Friday.

The vice president drew support from at least one lawmaker, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, while Arizona Sen. John McCain dissented, officials said.

McCain, who was tortured while held as a prisoner during the Vietnam War, is the chief Senate sponsor of an anti-torture provision that has twice cleared the Senate and triggered veto threats from the White House.

Cheney's decision to speak at the meeting underscored both his role as White House point man on the contentious issue and the importance the administration attaches to it.

The vice president made his appeal at a time Congress is struggling with the torture issue in light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States houses about 500 detainees at the naval base there, many of them captured in Afghanistan.

Additionally, human rights organizations contend the United States turns detainees over to other countries that it knows will use torture to try and extract intelligence information.

Cheney's appeal came two days before a former senior State Department official claimed in an interview with National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" that he had traced paperwork back to Cheney's office that he believes led to US troops abusing prisoners in Iraq.

"It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field," Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday.

Wilkerson said the view of Cheney's office was put in "carefully couched" terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that "were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war." He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.

Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Mayfield declined to comment on Wilkerson's remarks.

The Senate recently approved a provision banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees in US custody. The vote was 90-9, and an identical provision was added to a second measure on a voice vote on Friday.

Comparable House legislation does not include a similar provision, and it is not clear whether anti-torture language will be included in either of two large defense measures Congress hopes to send to Bush's desk later this year.

The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States." The president would have to approve the exemption, and Defense Department personnel could not be involved. In addition, any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and US treaty obligations, according to draft changes in the exemption the White House is seeking.

Cheney also has met several times with McCain, including one session that CIA Director Porter Goss attended in a secure room in the Capitol.

A story from the Las Vegas Sun for November 3 quotes the mayor of Las Vegas as saying that people convicted of being taggers—graffiti artists—might have their thumbs cut off as an appropriate punishment. He’s also quoted advocating a return to corporal punishment.

If the Republicans manage to keep running our national sideshow, this man may rise through the ranks to maybe become head of the Department of Justice.

I remember, when I was growing up, how this was actually quite a nice country, all things considered.

I wouldn’t say that anymore. It’s quite a spectacle, but as far as being a nice country, no.

A story from the Las Vegas Sun for November 3 quotes the mayor of Las Vegas as saying that people convicted of being taggers—graffiti artists—might have their thumbs cut off as an appropriate punishment. He’s also quoted advocating a return to corporal punishment.

If the Republicans manage to keep running our national sideshow, this man may rise through the ranks to maybe become head of the Department of Justice.

I remember, when I was growing up, how this was actually quite a nice country, all things considered.

I wouldn’t say that anymore. It’s quite a spectacle, but as far as being a nice country, no.

One side of my family comes from pioneer Utah, Mormon, stock. The Mormons, the most successful American communal group, are facinating. Facinating for what they were and facinating for what they still are.

The other day I was browsing BuzzFlash and found an article about a Utah judge who was fighting for his job because he’s a polygamist—and his position became a matter of public record. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have heard about it.

The judge’s court is in a little town in southern Utah called Hildale. Hildale used to be known as Short Creek, until a highly publicized raid busted many polygamists who lived there. Short Creek/Hildale (and adjoining Colorado City, just across the line in Arizona) is still one of the most isolated parts of the west. There are highways through there, but it’s a long way from any major law enforcement agency. Colorado City is in Mojave County; the county seat is in Kingman, a long way away—on the other side of the Grand Canyon. The nearest big city to Hildale is St George, Utah—hours away by highway.

When the federal government admitted Utah to statehood part of the deal was that the Church of Later Day Saints had to give up polygamy. The church did and didn’t; polygamy continued but on a less-visible scale and with “official” church sanctions against the practice. Many polygamists (“cohabitationists”—”cohabs” for short) headed for southern Utah because of the area’s isolation.

When I read the CNN article, I remembered Short Creek. I’ve always wondered if I have relatives there. It’s very possible: coming from one of the early families who settled in Salt Lake, I know I have relatives from one end of the state to the other.

There are periodic bursts of publicity about unofficial Mormon publicity. Usually it’s mentioned that the cohabs belong to splinter groups. But there are so many of them, it’s likely they have a certain amount of LDS support—the communities they live in are essentially Mormon communities.

Jon Krakauer’s book, Under the Banner of Heaven, details some of the more recent cohab scandals. But, here’s another:


Utah judge with 3 wives fights for job

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- A judge will ask the state Supreme Court on Wednesday to let him stay on the bench after a commission that oversees judges ordered him dismissed because he has three wives.
Those pursuing the case against Judge Walter Steed say his plural marriage creates a conflict: After taking an oath to uphold the law, he shouldn't be breaking it.
"You can't have it both ways," said Colin Winchester, the executive director of the state's Judicial Conduct Commission.
The commission issued an order seeking Steed's removal from the bench in February, after a 14-month investigation determined Steed was a polygamist and as such had violated Utah's bigamy law.
Bigamy is a third-degree felony in Utah punishable by up to five years in prison, but Steed's attorney, Rod Parker, said Utah's attorney general and the Washington County prosecutor have declined to prosecute his client.
Steed has served for 25 years in the southern border town of Hildale, handing down rulings in drunken driving and domestic violence cases. Parker contends the bigamy statute is only enforced in rare cases, such as when someone has been duped into marrying someone who already has a wife.
"There is no allegation that it's affecting his performance on the bench," Parker said. "It really is truly only about his private conduct."
The complaint against Steed was filed with the commission in November 2003 by Tapestry Against Polygamy, an advocacy group founded by ex-polygamous women who organized to help others leave the handful of secretive religious colonies that adhere to the practice.
Plural marriage was an original tenet of the mainline Mormon church, but the faith abandoned the practice as a condition of statehood in 1890. About 30,000 polygamists, who split from the main church into various fundamentalist sects more than 100 years ago, are believed to be living in Utah.
Steed legally married his first wife in 1965, according to court documents. The second and third wives were married -- or "sealed" as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints refers to it -- to him in religious ceremonies in 1975 and 1985.
The three women are biological sisters and no one in the family was expecting that the second and third marriages would be civilly recognized.
"I think it's an equal protection problem," Parker said.
The state Supreme Court's chief justice, Christine Durham, opted not to place Steed on administrative leave during the investigation.
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/11/02/polygamous.judge.ap/index.html

_________________________________________________________________

And here's a little background on the Short Creek/Hildale social scene:



A brief history of the polygamists in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah
April 5, 2002
By Rick Ross

Colorado City, Arizona has been the home for a notorious polygamist sect for more than 60 years. The mainstream Mormon Church (LDS) excommunicated its members and government officials have arrested its leaders three times. But the self-proclaimed "fundamentalist Mormons" still tenaciously cling to their exclusive doctrines, which they believe will afford them space within the highest level of heaven.

These Mormon polygamists actually have a history though that goes back to 1847, during the early days of Mormon pioneer and leader Brigham Young. Back in Young's time he came to Pipe Springs and saw its vermilion cliffs, He supposedly then did something that would later be claimed as somehow prophetic. Brigham Young said, "this is the right place [and it] will someday be the head and not the tail of the church [and]...the granaries of the Saints.''
Mormon leaders later sent the notorious John D. Lee into the same area to evade federal law enforcement. Lee was wanted for the mass-murder of 120 settlers traveling from Arkansas on a wagon train through Utah. They were apparently killed because due to their status as unbelievers. John Lee took two wives into hiding with him and started a ferryboat business and settlement. That settlement is still known as "Lee's Ferry." Lee himself was finally caught and executed in 1877.

Lee's Ferry and the so-called "Arizona Strip" became a preferred hiding place for polygamists. The practice of polygamy was eventually stopped by the Mormon Church largely in response to government pressure in 1890, when then President Wilford Woodruff received a "revelation" to end it. Later in 1904 the LDS church pragmatically enlarged that ban and officially disavowed multiple marriages.

The Arizona Strip polygamists would then claim that church President John Taylor, while staying in Centerville during the summer of 1886, had a discussion with God and Joseph Smith about polygamy. They claim God told Taylor to keep polygamy alive, but in secret. This hidden, but true church, would be somehow vital to God's plan.

The town of Short Creek, which is now called Colorado City in Arizona was founded in 1913 by Jacob Lauritzen, a cattle rancher. But it eventually it became a stronghold for the Lee's Ferry polygamists, who were excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1935 after refusing to sign an oath against polygamy.

During the Great Depression men from Short Creek came to Salt Lake City for work. They found sympathizers there such as Nathaniel Baldwin, an assembly plant owner who gave them work. John Y. Barlow and his friend Joseph White Musser also became involved. These men later formed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (FLDS), which would be led by Barlow.

The FLDS Church set up shop in Short Creek, largely due to its isolation. Buffered by the Grand Canyon and with a hundred miles of barren desert between them and the nearest law enforcement in Kingman, Arizona, they felt comfortable there. These polygamists also knew they were near a Stateline, which could easily be strategically crossed if there was trouble.
The Short Creek polygamists brought in more men with their wives by pickup truck to their growing kingdom, which they called "The First City of the Millennium." A "charitable philanthropic trust'' was set up called the "United Effort Plan," which controlled much of their assets. But Short Creek was a burden to the welfare system of Arizona's Mohave County. Many polygamist women and children collected welfare and whatever was available through government relief.

The Mohave County attorney and the sheriff pressed charges against two polygamist leaders, who were sent to prison for two years. The FBI later raided Short Creek in 1944, and 15 more men were sent to prison in Utah. Nine of those men were later released because they signed a pledge to give up polygamy. But most simply broke that promise and returned to the practice shortly after their release.

The welfare problem became worse and Jesse Faulkner, a superior-court judge in Kingman, complained that there was a "taxpayer emergency'' regarding polygamist demands upon school facilities, even though they did not pay property taxes. Cattlemen were upset because the did pay grazing fees, which were allegedly used for polygamist schools.

Arizona Governor Howard Pyle hired private detectives to investigate Short Creek. Subsequently, on July 26, 1953 Pyle ordered a massive police raid. He said, "Here is a community...dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become mere chattels."

Polygamist men from Short Creek were jailed in Kingman, while their plural wives children stayed behind. Arizona officials took days to sort through the families, determining who was related to whom. The LDS Church-owned Desert News supported this government action. But the raid became a public relations nightmare for Pyle, when people saw newsreels of children separated from their parents. The net result was only one year of probation for 23 polygamist men. But the negative publicity ironically helped Short Creek avoid interference from law enforcement for many years to come.

The FLDS Church then sought to eliminate any connection to the "Short Creek raid" by renaming their town Colorado City in Arizona and Hildale in Utah.

Note: Source for this article was "Polygamy: Throughout its history, Colorado City has been home for those who believe in virtues of plural marriage," Salt Lake Tribune/June 28, 1998 By Tom Zoellner






Bush’s Lies Continue To Be Exposed
Does anyone not believe that Bush lied about Iraq? The longer we watch and listen and read, the more we learn about how things “work” in this country.
The first posting, from CNN, indicates that Bush was so eager to go to war (well, not him specifically—he prefers to stay at home when there’s a war, but he likes the idea of sending others to fight and die) he overlooked a very simple opportunity: to let Saddam Hussein abdicate. If you remember, “regime change” was the next justification for the war after WMDs.
The next article is from Jim Hightower. Would Bush really be so crass and arrogant to veto any legislation that prohibits torture? Yes, I believe he would. He has already turned America into a pariah nation; the only people who are satisfied are the ones at home: cheap oil, low taxes, always the police to take care of any perceived threats, a strong military (the strongest and most expensive in the entire world) just in case anyone wants to take away our god-given rights to take what we want...Hell, yes, Bush will veto anti-torture legislation. America more and more is coming to resemble the old South Africa or the present Israel.

NEWS DISSECTOR November 3, 2005

SADDAM WAS WILLING TO GO TO AVERT WAR
CNN reports from Dubai:
” DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Days before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein agreed in principle to accept an offer of exile from the United Arab Emirates, but the deal fell through, a UAE government senior official told CNN.
“The reported offer came before an emergency Arab League meeting in Egypt in discussions between UAE officials and a Hussein aide, said the senior official, who was then a member of the UAE delegation to the Arab League."
***
BUSH TO VETO ANY ANTI-TORTURE LEGISLATION
Comments Jim Hightower:
“The White House says that Bush will issue the first veto of his presidency, claiming that the ban on torture would tie the president's hands. ... Well, gosh... yes! The very idea of the ban is to bind our government's leaders to a standard of behavior recognized by all civilized nations. Military leaders know that torture yields worthless information, false confessions, and a bitter determination by the armies of those tortured to return the favor."
www.jimhightower.com
___________________________________________________________
Republicans Lead Lives Rich in Sexual Fantasies?

And, just to try to figure out what’s satire and what’s for real, here’s this piece from Atrios about Republican writing. Fiction...well, novels, as opposed to the fiction that grinds out of the White House on an hourly basis.

Atrios observes,

Between Horny Bear Scooter and Strip Search Sammy I’m really starting to wonder what the hell is up with your modern Republican party.

But that snippet seemed a little too pithy, so I followed the links to Amanda’s house, and she led me to Shakespeare’s Sister, where I read all kinds of things about Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel, The Apprentice, via this “Talk of the Town” item by Lauren Collins in the latest New Yorker.

All of which is prelude to saying that I was just a-skimmin’ the Internets one fall evening when I came across this passage, penned by Scooter Libby himself:

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

And I thought, well, now, between Alito’s approval of a clearly unwarranted strip-search of a ten-year-old girl, and Scooter’s little fantasy of ten-year-old girls being raped by bears, yes, there really does seem to be something quite odd going on here.

Now, I know there is no indication whether, in Libby’s novel, the girls are strip-searched before they are raped by bears, and of course I know there’s no paper trail as to whether Alito would approve of such a search. And I know, from reading the comments at Shakes’s Sis’s place, that there are some readers out there who’ll say, “get a grip already, you liberals! Scooter Libby was *** merely fantasizing about ten-year-old girls being raped by bears! Yeesh! Whatta bunch of literal-minded types you liberals are! No appreciation whatsoever for the right-wing literary avant-garde!”

But still, the evidence does seem to be piling up, like unto a heap of naked, abject bodies, that there’s something very rotten, very foul living in the heart of the darkness of the right-wing imagination. James Dobson and his extraordinary lifelong fetish for beating small children with belts and spoons, even when the children are as young as eighteen months. Rick Santorum and his fears about men having sex with dogs (for John Cornyn, it was box turtles). Alberto Gonzales and David Addington (Scooter’s replacement!) and the whole prisoner-torture crew. Rush Limbaugh and his hand-rubbing glee over the Abu Ghraib photographs, likening them to Madonna kissing Britney on MTV. And, of course, the Abu Ghraib - Guatanamo phenomenon itself, with its PUC-fucking, its serial rapes of women and young boys, its lethal, days-long beatings of kids who just happened to drive by at the wrong time.

Folks, I know it’s a little hard to believe that the party in power is the party of torture, child-beating, and strip searches of innocent prepubescent girls. You know, next to this stuff, a little abuse of parliamentary procedure here, a crooked Supreme Court decision there, and couple of well-coordinated smear campaigns against critics of the Iraq War look like plain vanilla evil.

So I asked a couple of scientists and philosophers what they make of all this, and they said, “Michael, we don’t believe in ‘repression’ or the ‘unconscious’ or weirdo psychoanalytic things like that. Remember, Freud’s work was never empirically verified; strictly speaking, it’s not a science at all. You literary critics really should stop making up these extravagant ‘explanations’ of human behavior and listen to the neurobiologists. After all, Alan Sokal proved that none of you know what you’re talking about.”

Well, since they were no help, I turned back to Shakespeare’s Sister, who writes,

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has toiled under a lifetime of repression, and spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn’t enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn’t succumb to exhortations to do the same.

They like to say that the sexual liberation of women and gays has some alleged detrimental affect on society, but I don’t see it. What I do see is a collection of perverts whose own sickness pours out of them given the slightest opportunity, and whose fervent belief yet that they are the moral ones encourages them to create a whole other generation of screwed-up people, as they legislate the promotion of abstinence, repression, in sex ed classes.

To which I have to add, remember the good old days, when Newt Gingrich, accomplished womanizer and sick-wife-abandoner, was telling us that Democratic policies were to blame when Susan Smith left her two kids to drown in a car?

I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.

Well, that was in 1994. Since then, y’all have voted Republican. And my, how things have changed.

I’m beginning to think that Hunter S. Thompson checked out last year only partly out of political despair—and mostly because he had the entirely plausible feeling that not even he could plumb the depths of America’s right-wing imagination any longer.
Posted by Michael

__________________________________________________________________

Rumsfeld to get rich(er) off flu vaccine!

Rumsfeld is a stake-holder, as we say nowdays, in the company that holds the patents on Timilflu, the product most-hyped as a way to beat Avian Flu. His holdings are reported at somewhere between 5 and 25 million USD. I will say that the right wing financial world is able to rejoice at a few things...like disasters and their aftermaths. The Pentagon, in July, signed a $25 million contract for the drug.

______________________________________________________________________

Gulf of Tonkin Incident another Washington excuse for war.

And finally (at least finally until I have lunch), here’s a piece from the NY Times about how the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was manufactured into the WMDs of the Viet Nam War. Nobody has a corner on cooked intellience. And McNamara is quoted in the article as saying he never heard there might be anything hincty about the official version of the incident. She-it.


The New York Times
October 31, 2005
Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 - The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.

The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack.

The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence.

Mr. Hanyok concluded that they had done it not out of any political motive but to cover up earlier errors, and that top N.S.A. and defense officials and Johnson neither knew about nor condoned the deception.

Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, who by the next year were fearful that it might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, according to an intelligence official familiar with some internal discussions of the matter.

Matthew M. Aid, an independent historian who has discussed Mr. Hanyok's Tonkin Gulf research with current and former N.S.A. and C.I.A. officials who have read it, said he had decided to speak publicly about the findings because he believed they should have been released long ago.

"This material is relevant to debates we as Americans are having about the war in Iraq and intelligence reform," said Mr. Aid, who is writing a history of the N.S.A. "To keep it classified simply because it might embarrass the agency is wrong."

Mr. Aid's description of Mr. Hanyok's findings was confirmed by the intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research has not been made public.

Both men said Mr. Hanyok believed the initial misinterpretation of North Vietnamese intercepts was probably an honest mistake. But after months of detective work in N.S.A.'s archives, he concluded that midlevel agency officials discovered the error almost immediately but covered it up and doctored documents so that they appeared to provide evidence of an attack.

"Rather than come clean about their mistake, they helped launch the United States into a bloody war that would last for 10 years," Mr. Aid said.

Asked about Mr. Hanyok's research, an N.S.A. spokesman said the agency intended to release his 2001 article in late November. The spokesman, Don Weber, said the release had been "delayed in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective."

Mr. Weber said the agency was working to declassify not only Mr. Hanyok's article, but also the original intercepts and other raw material for his work, so the public could better assess his conclusions.

The intelligence official gave a different account. He said N.S.A. historians began pushing for public release in 2002, after Mr. Hanyok included his Tonkin Gulf findings in a 400-page, in-house history of the agency and Vietnam called "Spartans in Darkness." Though superiors initially expressed support for releasing it, the idea lost momentum as Iraq intelligence was being called into question, the official said.

Mr. Aid said he had heard from other intelligence officials the same explanation for the delay in releasing the report, though neither he nor the intelligence official knew how high up in the agency the issue was discussed. A spokesman for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was the agency's. director until last summer and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, referred questions to Mr. Weber, the N.S.A. spokesman, who said he had no further information.

Many historians believe that even without the Tonkin Gulf episode, Johnson might have found a reason to escalate military action against North Vietnam. They note that Johnson apparently had his own doubts about the Aug. 4 attack and that a few days later told George W. Ball, the under secretary of state, "Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!"

But Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary played a central role in the Tonkin Gulf affair, said in an interview last week that he believed the intelligence reports had played a decisive role in the war's expansion.

"I think it's wrong to believe that Johnson wanted war," Mr. McNamara said. "But we thought we had evidence that North Vietnam was escalating."

Mr. McNamara, 89, said he had never been told that the intelligence might have been altered to shore up the scant evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.

"That really is surprising to me," said Mr. McNamara, who Mr. Hanyok found had unknowingly used the altered intercepts in 1964 and 1968 in testimony before Congress. "I think they ought to make all the material public, period."

The supposed second North Vietnamese attack, on the American destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy, played an outsize role in history. Johnson responded by ordering retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnamese targets and used the event to persuade Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution on Aug. 7, 1964.

It authorized the president "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force," to defend South Vietnam and its neighbors and was used both by Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon to justify escalating the war, in which 58,226 Americans and more than 1 million Vietnamese died.

Not all the details of Mr. Hanyok's analysis, published in N.S.A.'s Cryptologic Quarterly in early 2001, could be learned. But they involved discrepancies between the official N.S.A. version of the events of Aug. 4, 1964, and intercepts from N.S.A. listening posts at Phu Bai in South Vietnam and San Miguel in the Philippines that are in the agency archives.

One issue, for example, was the translation of a phrase in an Aug. 4 North Vietnamese transmission. In some documents the phrase, "we sacrificed two comrades" - an apparent reference to casualties during the clash with American ships on Aug. 2 - was incorrectly translated as "we sacrificed two ships." That phrase was used to suggest that the North Vietnamese were reporting the loss of ships in a new battle Aug. 4, the intelligence official said.

The original Vietnamese version of that intercept, unlike many other intercepts from the same period, is missing from the agency's archives, the official said.

The intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is "about as certain as it can be without a smoking gun - you can come to no other conclusion."

Despite its well-deserved reputation for secrecy, the N.S.A. in recent years has made public dozens of studies by its Center for Cryptologic History. A study by Mr. Hanyok on signals intelligence and the Holocaust, titled "Eavesdropping on Hell," was published last year.

Two historians who have written extensively on the Tonkin Gulf episode, Edwin E. Moise of Clemson University and John Prados of the National Security Archive in Washington, said they were unaware of Mr. Hanyok's work but found his reported findings intriguing.

"I'm surprised at the notion of deliberate deception at N.S.A.," Dr. Moise said. "But I get surprised a lot."

Dr. Prados said, "If Mr. Hanyok's conclusion is correct, it adds to the tragic aspect of the Vietnam War." In addition, he said, "it's new evidence that intelligence, so often treated as the Holy Grail, turns out to be not that at all, just as in Iraq."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

“Truth, justice, and the American Way.” Anybody remember when that actually had meaning? Truth. I forget the last time I heard something true out of a government mouth. Justice: Yeah, we’re the land of justice for everyone except certain people. It used to be that if people were arrested for anything, they were charged and brought to trial; they had legal representation; it was all in the light of day.

It doesn’t seem to be that way anymore. The government’s rounded up a lot of people, some of them without even being arrested, and locked them up. After 9/11, many people were arrested and jailed without even their families knowing where they were or maybe even where they went. The circumstances, the government told us, justified emergency police powers. The ends, saving America, justified the means.

That’s an interesting spin, isn’t it? The ends justify the means. Too bad it isn’t true; it never has been and it never will. Good ends cannot come out of evil actions. Arresting and holding people without trial, without charges in some cases, and without lawyers...that’s not just evil: it’s totalitarian. It’s what Stalin and Mao did, Batista and Duarte, Peron and Pinochet, South Africa and Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Idi Amin, Farouk—it’s a long and ugly list. And the U.S. is now part of that list.

Now we do it. And whatever happened to The American Way? Now it seems to be this:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
By Dana Priest
The Washington Post

Wednesday 02 November 2005

Debate is growing within agency about legality and morality of overseas system set up after 9/11.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities - referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents - are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the US government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
***
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other US government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by US military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.
***
Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four US government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.
***
An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.

It’s like Watergate, isn’t it? The whole effort of finding out who "outed" Valerie Plame is about reenforcing the public’s perception of the ultimate fairness and rightness of American justice. It really doesn’t have anything to do with straigthtening out a corrupt and evil system.

Bush will walk, Cheney will walk, Rumsfeld will walk. Maybe even Rove will walk. You just can’t come out and say, “All these guys who got us into this war are crooks, liars, greedheads, and general incompetents who need to be fired and put on trial.”

Somebody might get the idea there’s something wrong with our country if that happened.

ABC News
Time Reporter Says He Learned Agent's Identity From Rove
Matthew Cooper Says I. Lewis Libby Confirmed Information
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/print?id=1265736

Oct. 31 2005 — - One of the reporters at the center of the investigation into the leak of the identity of an undercover CIA officer, says he first learned the agent's name from President Bush's top political advisor, Karl Rove.

Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper also said today in an interview with "Good Morning America," that the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, confirmed to him that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative.

***

"There is no question. I first learned about Valerie Plame working at the CIA from Karl Rove," Cooper said.

Libby has since claimed that he heard the Plame rumors from other reporters. Cooper disputed that version of events. "I don't remember it happening that way," he said. "I was taking notes at the time and I feel confident."

If a trial goes ahead, Cooper said he would name Rove as his source of the information.

"Before I spoke to Karl Rove I didn't know Mr. Wilson had a wife and that she had been involved in sending him to Africa."

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

Surprise: the President has lied again. Whenever Bush talks about the judicial branch needing to be "construtionist," he means "activist." That is, activist for the conservative side rather than activist for the liberal side of issues. Activist means their side. You know, the terrorist sympathizers, the ones who want to keep you from having fully automatic weapons or who want commerce be regulated between the states, or be able to sue over discrimination—or, if you're female, from having any choices about if or when you have babies.





From: "American Progress Action Fund"

Going Against His Word
November 1, 2005
In choosing Judge Alito to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the President has gone against his word and chosen a judicial activist. If the President wanted to choose a judge who interprets the law rather than imposing his or her will on the Court, he chose the wrong nominee. Alito has been described as an activist conservative judge and he has a record to prove it. Some have even gone so far as saying that Alito’s lack of deference to Congress is unsettling.

• Judge Alito questioned Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce. In 1996, Judge Alito was the sole dissenter on the Third Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Rybar, in which his colleagues upheld Congress's right to ban fully automatic machine guns. Alito argued that Congress had no power under the commerce clause to enact such a law. But he did not stop there. He further demanded that "Congress be required to make findings showing a link between the regulation and its effect on interstate commerce, or that Congress or the president document such a link with empirical evidence."
•
• Judge Alito struck down the Family Medical Leave Act. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) "guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one." In a 2000 case, Alito used his judicial position to "prevent the federal government from enforcing civil rights protections." Alito held that Congress overstepped its authority under the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore had no power to require employers to comply with the FMLA. In 2003, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist led the majority that overturned Alito's decision.
•
• Judge Alito weakened existing antitrust and discrimination laws. Throughout his career, Alito has been willing to push the boundaries of the law for big business. In Bray v. Marriott Hotels (1996), Marriott sought to deny the plaintiff, an African-American woman, the right to present her case of racial discrimination. Alito sided with Marriott, while the majority siding with Bray criticized Alito for overstepping his judicial role and "acting as a factfinder [and] taking it upon himself to interpret the meaning of the deposition testimony of one of the defendants."

# posted by Talapus Pete @ 12:01 PM 0 comments