disturbing the comfortable

In the same theme as the last post, we have this essay on America’s war on Iraq. I say “war on Iraq” but maybe it would be truer to say “war with Iraq.” We’ve sort of set up a puppet government that we expect to respect our invasion as if we were invited to attack and bomb the country: “Oh, please, bomb us some more!”

We’re there to civilize them, right? Civilize them with white phosphorus, depleted uranium bullets, and murderous mercenaries. What a farce! But it is in our historical genes. America conquered the native people of North America in the name of civilization, christianity, and charity; when the people resisted, America declared them to be enemies, went to war with them, and interned them into relocation centers—those places were renamed “Reservatios,” of course and told them they were free and clear to do what they wanted. Within limits. But, oh, that land might be more valuable than anyone thought, and America took a lot of it back. Most of it. It’s an ugly story.

Read this:


Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

http://www.progressivetrail.org/?q=node/131

Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict

by: John Brown
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:
1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."
As for Max Boot, he writes, "‘small wars' -- fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more typical of American history than are the handful of ‘total' wars that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting that "[i]f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead."
2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:
"If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."
President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military might" has been compared to George W. Bush's modus operandi, noted in his "Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act" (December 8, 1830):
"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"
Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy -- seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.
3. GWOT is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put off "potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As Professor Jack D. Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:
"Bush has declared that the US will attack first before an ‘enemy' has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called ‘The Pearl Harbor strategy' since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that [Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader] Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west."
4. While U.S. mainstream thinking about GWOT enemies is that they are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics, and social organization -- there are Americans who believe that individuals in these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and thus be rendered harmless through training, education, or democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts against remaining evil-doers.
5. GWOT is fought abroad, but it's also a war at home, as the creation after 9/11 of a Department of Homeland Security illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2, 1924 that Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.) While engaged in the Indian wars, the U.S. fought on its own, without the help of foreign governments; such has essentially been the case with GWOT, despite the support of a few countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.
6. America's close partner Israel, which over the years has taken over Arab-populated lands and welcomes U.S. immigrants, can be considered as a kind of surrogate United States in this struggle. Expanding into the Middle East, the Israelis could be seen as following the example of the American pioneers who didn't let Indians stand in their way as they settled, with the support of the U.S. military, an entire continent, driven by the conviction that they were supported by God, the Bible, and Western civilization. "I shall need," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." Less eloquently, Ariel Sharon put it this way: "Everything that's grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands."
7. As for the current states that are major battlefields of GWOT, Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future, far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the U.S. proves willing to engage in the long-term garrisoning in each area -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (e.g., oil), and American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable -- will doubtless be lured there in search of economic opportunities. Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red Zone -- terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.
8. The methods employed by the U.S. in GWOT and the Indian wars are similar in many respects: using superior technology to overwhelm the "primitive" enemy; adapting insurgency tactics, even the most brutal ones, used by the opposing side when necessary; and collaborating with "the enemy of my enemy" in certain situations (that is, setting one tribe against another). What are considered normal rules of war have frequently been irrelevant for Americans in both conflicts, given their certainty that their enemies are evil and uncivilized. The use of torture is also a feature of these two conflicts.
9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq. And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."
10. Perhaps because they are drawn-out wars with many fronts and changing commanders, the goals of GWOT and the Indian Wars can be subject to many interpretations (indeed, even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at one point was eager to rename the War on Terror a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"). For many abroad, GWOT is a brutal expression of a mad, cowboy-led country's plans to take over the world and its resources. In the United States, a large number of Americans still interpret these two wars as God-favored initiatives to protect His chosen people and allow them to flourish. But just as attitudes in the U.S. toward Native Americans have changed in recent years (consider, for example, the saccharine 1990 film Dances with Wolves, which is sympathetic to an Indian tribe, in contrast to John Wayne shoot-the-Injuns movies), so suspicious views among the American public toward the still-seen-as-dangerous "them" of GWOT might evolve in a different direction. Such a change in perception, however, is unlikely to occur in the near future, especially under the current bellicose Bush regime, which manipulates voters' fear of terrorists to maintain its declining domestic support.


John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free upon request. The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.
Copyright 2006 John H. Brown
Published by: Tom Dispatch

Fair Use Notice:
Articles on the Progressivetrail are published, re-published, or syndicated with an express or blanket consent from the author or original publisher and are distributed without profit for the public interest.

Indian gambling—er, “gaming”—is a hot topic. The conservatives don’t like it and the liberals are spinning around trying to be politically correct and seeing gambling as an addictive process at the same time.

Of course, Indians are entitled to do what they want to do, if you believe they are sovereign nations within the commonwealth. A lot of people don’t like that. They see Indian lands as having values the Indians are “wasting.” They don’t like being subject to Indian rules and regulations within the reservations. And they think the Indians should Just Get Over It And Let Bygones Be Bygones.

And, to be truthful, I think Indians deserve every dime and dollar they can get out of white America.

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412374&print=yes
Native Currents
© Indian Country Today January 27, 2006. All Rights Reserved
Posted: January 27, 2006
by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today
Editors' note: We are always glad to see leaders in Indian country respond to media misinformation. The recent rash of anti-Indian opinion pieces requires the serious attention of all tribal columnists, journalists, researchers and letter-writers. The following was submitted by John McCarthy, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association, as a response to a column by Jan Golab, ''Indian Gaming Woes,'' published in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Campaign finance system, not tribes, to blame for scandal

John McCarthy

__________________

Guest columnist



Those of us who live in the real world frequently marvel that many of your guest columnists seem to live in another galaxy. Today's column by Jan Golab [''Indian gaming woes,'' Jan. 22] is a stellar example. Golab, a former Playboy editor, has published numerous other attacks on tribes and sovereignty, which he says is ''a festering problem.'' This column, like his other work, is crammed with outright factual errors, incorrect conclusions and undisguised racial hatred. It is surprising and disappointing that the Los Angeles Daily News chose to publish it.

First, the factual errors. Golab is wrong about tribal sovereignty and [the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act]. Tribal sovereignty was not ''codified'' by [IGRA]. It was established as a fundamental principle under the U.S. Constitution, which recognizes tribes in the same way it recognizes the states. More than a century of legal precedents from the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts has confirmed that tribes are, indeed, self-governing nations within the United States. They exist in this fashion because their existence as governments pre-dates the establishment of the U.S. government itself. When tribes ceded lands to the United States, they did so in exchange for a promise that they would have the right to govern themselves in perpetuity. Even Mr. Golab presumably understands that ''in perpetuity'' means forever, not just until it becomes inconvenient for others.

Golab was also 100 percent wrong in his review of IGRA's origin and impact. The passage of IGRA in 1988 followed the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1987 California v. Cabazon [Band of Mission Indians] case. That decision did not give tribes the right to gamble in ''states that do not otherwise allow gambling.'' In fact, it held the opposite - that sovereign Indian tribes could conduct gaming operations on tribal lands without state interference as long as gaming was otherwise legal in the state. Many states had authorized lotteries, pari-mutuel wagering, and/or some forms of casino gambling for charity purposes. The court held that tribes could not be denied the right to gamble on tribal lands if others in the state were allowed to gamble under existing state law.

Then came IGRA. Congress was not, as Golab claims, ''eager to show 'simpatico''' (that's so Hollywood) with Indian tribes. In fact, IGRA was the result of pressure on Congress from state governors and attorneys general who, concerned about the Supreme Court decision, demanded that Congress give them some measure of control over tribal gaming activities. So Congress passed IGRA, which actually limited tribal sovereignty by requiring that tribes negotiate agreements with states in order to conduct Class III casino-style gaming. Many tribes opposed IGRA because they believed it gave states too much power over them.

Golab's fourth egregious error was in characterizing Indian gaming as ''our nation's largest special-interest group.'' Tribal contributions to congressional campaigns are small compared with those from other groups. In 2004, tribal contributions to congressional campaigns comprised one-third of one percent of the total contributions made, about $7.2 million out of a total $2.05 billion. During the same 2004 election cycle, the defense industry spent $15.6 million, the commercial banking industry $31 million, the health care industry $73.9 million, and the retirement industry $184 million. Where is the outcry about these big spenders?

Back to the factual errors. Golab declares that ''reservation shopping'' has resulted in ''many new gambling resorts'' and is ''truly scandalous.'' Again, he is wrong. For the record, only three off-reservation land-into-trust transactions have been approved since IGRA was passed in 1988. Only 15 tribes have received federal recognition since 1978, and only one of those tribes has gaming. Most of those recognition claims had been pending for years, having been initiated long before Indian gaming was a glimmer in anyone's eye. Sixteen petitions for recognition have been denied since 1978. These facts can be verified by the National Indian Gaming Association, which keeps such records.

If one examines today's headlines, it becomes clear that there is not so much ''reservation shopping'' as ''Indian shopping.'' Many of the high-profile proposals for off-reservation gaming expansion have been initiated not by tribes but by non-Indian communities, state governments or private companies that would partner with tribes to solve their own economic problems.

The ''litany of woes'' attributed to tribal gaming is stunningly off the mark, and again presented without a shred of evidence. The actual facts show that where tribal gaming operates, property values have substantially increased, business start-ups have increased, average wages have improved, the tax base has expanded, and welfare costs have dropped. Since most casino workers make substantially more than the minimum wage, they are a positive economic force in their local communities.

Especially disturbing is Golab's comment about ''flooding local schools with the children of low-income casino workers.'' The racist overtones of such a statement cannot be ignored. Does he object to the schools serving the children of other low-income workers? Or is it just that some of these children might be Indian? Since the federal government pays school districts to serve Indian children, not a nickel of their education comes out of the pocket of local taxpayers. In most cases, school districts receive more in federal Indian education aids than they actually spend on the children.

Only about six of the 224 gaming tribes in the United States dealt with [Jack] Abramoff. The tribes that hired him committed no crime, other than trusting someone who shouldn't have been trusted. No court has suggested that the tribes are in any way culpable for Abramoff's appallingly unethical conduct. By ordering Abramoff to pay restitution to his tribal clients, the courts have recognized these governments as the victims, not the villains.

Even so, because of the Abramoff scandal, Indian tribes have become the scapegoats in a cynical game of political spin. Congress did create a mess, but not by passing IGRA. It made a mess by creating a campaign finance system that promotes the kind of large-scale abuse we're seeing now. Indians didn't create the rules, they just play by them.

It isn't Indian gaming that's at fault here, nor is it individual Indian tribes. It's the failed campaign finance system. To fault Indian tribes for that failure is nothing but racist demagoguery. But that is apparently Mr. Golab's specialty. Shame on the Los Angeles Daily News for giving him a forum to air his ignorance and bigotry.

John McCarthy is executive director of the Minnesota Indian Gaming Association, which represents nine of the 11 gaming tribes in Minnesota.

Even Fox News is starting to pay attention to the implications of the Bush-Cheney coup. I don’t know why that is, other than the libertarian Right is starting to squawk. And, of course, it could technically be used against, say, anti-abortion demonstrators.
But, gee, won’t those new facilities I mentioned in my last post, come in handy?

New Patriot Act Provision Creates Tighter Barrier to Officials at Public Events
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,183147,00.html
Tuesday, January 31, 2006

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

WASHINGTON — A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any "special event of national significance" away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter.

Sen. Arlen Specter , R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn't in attendance at the time.

The measure has civil libertarians protesting what they say is yet another power grab for the executive branch and one more loss for free speech.

"It's definitely problematic and chilling," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel for legislative strategy at the American Civil Liberties Union , which has written letters to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, pointing out that the provision wasn't subject to hearings or open debate.

Some conservatives say they too are troubled by the measure.

"It concerns me greatly," said Bob Barr, former U.S. prosecutor and Republican representative from Georgia. "It clearly raises serious concerns about First Amendment rights."

***

Under current law, the Secret Service can arrest anyone for breaching restricted areas where the president or a protected official is or will be visiting, but the new provision would allow such arrests even after those VIPs have left the premises of any designated "special event of national significance." The provision would increase the maximum penalty for such an infraction from six months to one year in jail.

In a post-Sept. 11 world many non-political events have been designated National Special Security Events and would rise to the higher status. Examples of possible NSSEs are the Olympics or the Super Bowl. In 2004, the presidential inaugural balls and President Ronald Reagan's June funeral procession in Washington, D.C., were designated NSSEs.

According to government sources with knowledge of the legislation, Secret Service protection and law enforcement authority would extend beyond protecting a specific person, rather the event itself would become the "protectee."

Currently, non-violent demonstrators who enter restricted areas at such events previously would be arrested and charged by local law enforcement with simple trespassing, said Graves. Under the provision included in the new law, they will be charged with felonies by the Secret Service.

***
Last year, three ticket-holding audience members at one of the president's Social Security events in Denver, Colo., were apprehended by a man who they said identified himself as Secret Service. The three were forced away from the event because of an anti-war sticker on the driver's car.

"[The administration] has certainly demonstrated a desire to have carefully-controlled events," said Graves.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based clearinghouse for domestic and international security information, said he "could certainly understand why the Secret Service would want that legal authority," given the enormous burden of making venues safe for VIPs today.

"However, I think many people have concluded that the way it is being used has nothing to do with protecting the president from Usama bin Laden and everything to do with suppressing dissent and making sure the protesters don't get on TV," Pike said.

Bush is not the first president to flex his authority in this area, said Kopel, who pointed out that beginning with Reagan, presidents have created a larger security bubble and greater distance between themselves and dissenters at public events. The 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States just intensified the situation, he said.

"I think the concerns about free speech in areas where the president is speaking long pre-date Bush. They were an issue in the Clinton administration, the first Bush administration and began as an issue during Reagan," Kopel said. "I do think the ACLU has legitimate concerns about the breadth of the new language and how it could be applied."

Graves points out that conservative "pro-life" groups will be the target of the new provisions, too, a scenario that could raise the concerns for those who are typically critical of the ACLU, which she said is necessarily concerned about other provisions in the bill that impinge on civil liberties.

House and Senate leaders, who return to Capitol Hill this week, are trying to renew the Patriot Act by Friday. Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate who filibustered a final vote in December after raising concerns about preserving civil liberties instituted a short-term extension of the previous bill, which was set to expire on Dec. 31.

Part of a press release promoting Halliburton and it’s off-spring, KBR. I will not mention how much this is worth to our Vice-President. There are two interesting aspects:

1. This is about detaining immigrants, should, for some reason, our government decide to round up a bunch, as it did after 9/11. This way they won’t have to go through the jail system, I believe.

2. It’s always handy to have detention centers, in the event of a national security emergency—especially now that the President has decided that’s entirely within his powers. Should there be the need, any sort of security risks could be jailed. It’s part of Homeland Security and one never knows when there’ll be trouble-makers that need to be taken away. Interned.

Part of me thinks, Hmm, this might be a good time to keep my head down.



KBR Awarded US Department of Homeland Security Contingency
Support Project for Emergency Support Services
Business Wire
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_013106D.shtml
Friday 24 January 2006

Arlingon, Va.- KBR announced today that the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component has awarded KBR an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contingency contract to support ICE facilities in the event of an emergency. KBR is the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton (NYSE:HAL).

With a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term, consisting of a one-year based period and four one-year options, the competitively awarded contract will be executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District. KBR held the previous ICE contract from 2000 through 2005.

"We are especially gratified to be awarded this contract because it builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency operations support," said Bruce Stanski, executive vice president, KBR Government and Infrastructure. "We look forward to continuing the good work we have been doing to support our customer whenever and wherever we are needed."

The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

ICE is one of three agencies that make up the Border and Transportation Security (BTS) Directorate of the DHS. The mission of the BTS Directorate is to secure the nation's air, land and sea borders. ICE, the largest investigative arm of the DHS, is responsible for identifying and shutting down vulnerabilities in the nation's border, economic, transportation and infrastructure security.

***

If you're in a fist-fight, and are trying to fight by the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, but the other person is willing to use whatever means are necessary to win...you're going to lose.

OK, anyone out there remember Willy Horton? He’s baaack—the Republicans are up to their old tricks. Scare the people and get them to vote for the fascists. What can you say?


Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - 12:00 AM
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002758187&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=sexoffend24m&date=20060124
Legislature 2006
GOP postcards fuel a fracas

By Andrew Garber
Seattle Times Olympia bureau

OLYMPIA — House Democrats on Monday accused Republicans of dirty politics for mailing out 25,000 postcards that accuse certain lawmakers of being soft on crime and protecting violent sex offenders.

The postcards show a mug shot of a middle-age man with slicked-back hair. His eyes and his name are blacked out to shield his identity. The cards, shown in photocopies provided by Democrats, carry a bold headline that reads, "This violent predator lives in your community."

They also describe sex crimes supposedly committed by the person, then mention the name of a Democratic lawmaker and claim the legislator "refused to impose life sentences for violent sex predators."

The cards are part of a $75,000 Republican ad campaign that Democrats say is targeting lawmakers in swing districts for the November election. In addition to the cards, the campaign is using radio spots, television ads and automated phone calls.

"It's politics at its worst," fumed House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam.

House Republican Leader Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, said he had nothing to do with the ad campaign and referred questions to Kevin Carns, executive director of the Speakers Roundtable, a GOP political-action committee (PAC).

Carns said DeBolt, who has raised money for the PAC, was not involved in the ad campaign. Carns defended the advertisements, saying Democrats have used similar tactics in the past.

"I'm not going to apologize for playing tough," he said.

The attack ads are based on a vote taken the first day of the legislative session after House Republicans made a motion asking for an immediate floor debate on a newly drafted, 116-page sex-offender bill. The measure would crack down on sex offenders, including imposition of lengthy mandatory minimum sentences.

Since the session had just started, no hearing had been held on the bill and lawmakers hadn't had a chance to read it. The GOP motion was rejected on a party-line vote.

Within days, voters in six districts started getting automated phone calls attacking Democrats for not voting for the measure. Carns said there was discussion of an ad campaign even before the vote was taken, but the ads weren't created until afterward.

The mailing infuriated Democrats. "The entire postcard is a lie," Kessler said.

For example, she said, although the postcards claim the sex offender pictured lives in a particular district, the same photo appears on all the cards.

Carns said the cards aren't supposed to be taken literally. "I would have loved to put an offender from each specific district and not obscured their name. But we'd have put ourselves at liability to do so," he said.

He used one picture, with identifying information blacked out, "as a metaphor," he said.

The ad campaign is justified, Carns said, because "the House Democrats have refused to get tough on violent predators."

If they will move the Republicans' bill, HB 2476, out of committee, "the ad campaign will stop," he said.

A hearing was held on that measure and a second sex-offender bill, HB 2411, sponsored by Democrats, on Jan. 12.

Tom McBride, executive secretary of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said his group supports the Democrats' bill and has concerns about the GOP measure.

"There's lots of stuff we support" in the Republican bill, he said, "but there's one big bone of contention."

His group is concerned about the mandatory minimum sentences called for in the legislation. Such sentences could affect the willingness of children to testify when the case deals with family members, he said. The Democrats' bill allows prosecutors and the courts more discretion, McBride said.

Rep. Al O'Brien, D-Mountlake Terrace, chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee, also was troubled by the mandatory sentences.

"The vast majority of sex offenses happen within families. If you start saying family members are going to get hammered hard, you'll end up with fewer reports by family members who don't want to lose their breadwinner or don't want brother Bob to go to prison for 25 years," he said.

O'Brien said he's putting together another sex-predator bill with the help of Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican.

Andrew Garber: 360-943-9882 or agarber@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Remember back in the days of the early Indian reservations, when the Indian agents would steal everything they could? A few hundred westerns have used crooked agents and disgruntled Indians as story plots. Of course, during the Civil War there were many reports of soldiers’ boots being made of carboard and tainted food sent to the troops.

Things really haven’t changed. The current administration appears to take it’s ethical approaches from the presidency of U.S. Grant—as well as financial practices.

What amazes me is how quietly everyone takes this news. It would be nice to see America’s Versailles Palace stormed by angry citizens, wouldn’t it? No, it won’t be. People will be home watching American Idol or the latest fanciful crimes on Law and Order, or maybe just infomercials. Superbowl is coming up, too—couldn’t miss that just to throw out the most corrupt American administration ever...


The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/international/middleeast/25reconstruct.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
January 25, 2006
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
By JAMES GLANZ

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.

Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.

"What's sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction," said Wayne White, a former State Department official whose responsibilities included Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research organization.

Instead, Mr. White said, large amounts of that money may have been wasted or stolen, with strong indications that the chaos in Hilla might have been repeated at other provisional authority outposts.

Others had a similar reaction. "It does not surprise me at all," said a Defense Department official who worked in Hilla and other parts of the country, who spoke anonymously because he said he feared retribution from the Bush administration. He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the major southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar province. "It's a disaster," the official said of problems with contracting in Anbar.

No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.

That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official's stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official "had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash," the report says.

Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. "One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office," the report says.

The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein's government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

In another connection to Iraq's Olympic effort, a $108,140 contract to completely refurbish the Hilla Olympic swimming pool, including the replacement of pumps and pipes, came to nothing when the contractor simply polished some of the hardware to make it appear as if new equipment had been installed. Local officials for the provisional authority signed paperwork stating that all the work had been completed properly and paid the contractor in full, the report says.

The pool never reopened, and when agents from the inspector general's office arrived to try out the equipment, "the water came out a murky brown due to the accumulated dirt and grime in the old pumps," the report says.

Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.

The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general's agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: "The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people."

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

I want to thank Andy Ostroy (http://ostroyreport.blogspot.com/2005/10/list-of-bushs-lies-and-policy-failures.html) for this list of Bush blunders and lies:
Let's review Bush's impact since 2000 at home and abroad, in no particular order:

1. Lied about WMD.
2. Unilaterally invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and justification.
3. Lied during State of the Union speech re: Niger Uranium.
4. Responsible for pre-9/11 intelligence failures in White House, CIA, FBI.
5. Allowed 9-11 murderers to remain free while diverting precious military and financial resources to his vanity war in Iraq.
6. Lied about Saddam/bin Laden connection.
7. Turned Iraq into a terrorist breeding ground.
8. Lied about nation-building.
9. Opposed creation of 9-11 Commission and Homeland Security Department.
10. Disrespected and alienated the U.S. from French, German and other key allies.
11. Lied to Americans about the real cost of war.
12. Fostered an environment of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
13. Lined Halliburton's pockets in Afghanistan and Iraq with fat no-bid contracts.
14. Under-manned and under-equipped our armed forces in Iraq, resulting in unnecessary death and injuries.
15. Ignored the nuclear build-up in both Iran and N.Korea; marginalized Kim Jong Il.
16. Shunned Kyoto Treaty.
17. Lied about effects of man-made pollutants on the environment to support corporate pals.
18. Lied about the insolvency of Social Security.
19. Gave huge cuts to the wealthiest taxpayers.
20. Lied about true cost of health care bill.
21. Lied about Free Trade stand.
22. Bitterly divided the nation along religious, party and sexual preference lines.
23. Guilty of numerous cronyism appointments (Homeland Security, Supreme Court, etc)
24. Rewarded failures of Condi Rice and other cronies with key promotions.
25. Dreadful energy policies lead to record gas and oil prices.
26. Responsible for the largest debt in U.S. history.
27. Colossal failure of preparedness, rescue and relief during Hurricane Katrina.
28. Fostered a culture of corruption among GOP and top leadership (Tom Delay, etc).
29. Allowed Donald Rumsfeld to keep job despite utter failure in Iraq.
30. Presided over the U.S.'s lowest popularity throughout the world.
31. Saw No Child Left Behind fail.
32. Lied last week about Iraqi troop strength during Saturday radio address. Directly contradicted by testimony given earlier in the week by Gen. Abizaid.

This is just a partial list, mind you. One can only imagine what our country will look like by the time he's done. Somebody please wake me up in 3 years. Andy

I just found this in my in-box. I’m hesitant to even look at the source. Anybody want to check this out?

It scares the be-Jesus out of me.


Pedro Romero wrote:
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 15:22:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Pedro Romero
Subject: Patriot Act authorizes new federal domestic police force
To: aztlan_freepress@yahoogroups.com

January 24, 2006
Unfathomed Dangers in PATRIOT Act Reauthorization
by Paul Craig Roberts

A provision in the "PATRIOT Act" creates a new federal
police force with the power to violate the Bill of
Rights. You might think that this cannot be true, as
you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it
discussed by talking heads on TV.

Go to House Report 109-333 USA PATRIOT Improvement and
Reauthorization Act of 2005 and check it out for
yourself. Sec. 605 reads:

"There is hereby created and established a permanent
police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret
Service Uniformed Division.'"

This new federal police force is "subject to the
supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security."

The new police are empowered to "make arrests without
warrant for any offense against the United States
committed in their presence, or for any felony
cognizable under the laws of the United States if they
have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to
be arrested has committed or is committing such
felony."

The new police are assigned a variety of
jurisdictions, including "an event designated under
section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of
national significance" (SENS).

"A special event of national significance" is neither
defined nor does it require the presence of a
"protected person" such as the president in order to
trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the
police themselves, can place the SENS designation on
any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an
event, the new federal police are empowered to keep
out and arrest people at their discretion.

The language conveys enormous discretionary and
arbitrary powers. What is "an offense against the
United States"? What are "reasonable grounds"?

You can bet the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it
is whatever the executive branch says.

The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent
demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing
in the language limits the police powers from being
used only in this way. Like every law in the U.S.,
this law also will be expansively interpreted and
abused. It has dire implications for freedom of
association and First Amendment rights. We can take
for granted that the new federal police will be used
to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The
Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.

Many naïve Americans will write to me to explain that
this new provision in the reauthorization of the
"PATRIOT Act" is necessary to protect the president
and other high officials from terrorists or from harm
at the hands of angry demonstrators: "No one else will
have anything to fear." Some will accuse me of being
an alarmist, and others will say that it is
unpatriotic to doubt the law's good intentions.

Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact
that the president and foreign dignitaries are already
provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The
naïve will not comprehend that the president cannot be
endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the
president is not present. For many Americans, the
light refuses to turn on.

In Nazi Germany, did no one but Jews have anything to
fear from the Gestapo?

By Stalin's time, Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all
members of the "oppressor class," but that did not
stop Stalin from sending millions of "enemies of the
people" to the Gulag.

It is extremely difficult to hold even local police
forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a
federal police protected by Homeland Security and the
president?



__________________________________________________

# posted by Talapus Pete @ 12:20 PM 0 comments

Both satire and honesty in this piece by Joel Stein. If you are against the war, and the war is being fought because those schmucks in D.C. want the oil and glory and empire and all that, and the troops are the direct agents making the war possible, hmm, no, I can't go along. I support them as far as wanting them out of there and home and whole. I don’t support their killing Iraqis anymore than I would have supported, say, the men of the 7th Cavalry riding down the Cheyenne at the Massacre of the Washita, or the U.S. troops at Wounded Knee, blasting away hundreds of women and children. No. That’s not OK behavior. That’s evil. I don’t support anyone doing evil, whether in Fallujah or My Lai, Lidice, or the Crusaders sacking Jerusalem.

I’m in debt to Joel Stein for reminding me of this.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-oe-stein24jan24,0,4430346.column?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&vote21595562=1
From the Los Angeles Times
JOEL STEIN
Warriors and wusses
Joel Stein

January 24, 2006

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there — and who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who thought 50.7% was a mandate isn't going to pick up on the subtleties of a parade for just service in an unjust war. He's going to be looking for funnel cake.

Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. They need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of "Laguna Beach."

The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon for that.

I understand the guilt. We know we're sending recruits to do our dirty work, and we want to seem grateful.

After we've decided that we made a mistake, we don't want to blame the soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to object to a war we barely understood.

But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

And sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, you get to just hang out in Germany.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |

This sounds flip—at first glance. But think about it: does the unitary executive theory as believed in by Gonzales and Alito and all the other weasels give the president the power to cancel elections without consulting others? I know they’ve talked this over, as in “how far can my power really go? Huh? Huh? C’mon, tell me!”


Does Bush believe he has the power to cancel elections?
Date: Tuesday, January 24 @ 10:15:07 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

No, really.

I've seen this joked about but consider it seriously: if Bush (and his Conservative enablers) truly believe under the doctrine of the 'unitary executive' that a Commander-in-Chief in 'wartime' has the power to supercede the Constitution, does that include cancelling elections?

I'd like to see one reporter stand up at the next press conference and ask, "Mr. President, do you believe you have the power to cancel the 2008 presidential election if national security warrants it?"

I'd like to see Scotty McClellan pestered about this on a daily basis.

Bonus question: If Bush cancelled the 2008 elections (or even the 2006 elections), would any of his supporters object?


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

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=24551

Meanwhile, back at the Capitalist Ranch: taxpayers are used to subsidize the big box stores. Not just by giving them property tax breaks on the land, but by paying for the health care of people employed by those outfits. Here in central Oregon, new hires at Fred Meyer end up going to the free clinic until their health plan kicks in. That’s assuming they work enough hours to qualify for the health plan, right. I haven’t seen the statistics for this state, but I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut they’re similar to Washington’s about which corporations get taxpayer subsidies for their employees.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - 12:00 AM

Over 3,100 Wal-Mart workers got state health aid

By Ralph Thomas
Seattle Times Olympia bureau
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2002758209&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=report24m&date=20060124
OLYMPIA — More than 3,100 Wal-Mart employees in Washington were benefiting from state-subsidized health coverage throughout 2004 — nearly double the total for any other company, according to two confidential state reports.

That total is much higher than previously thought. And it indicates that as many as 20 percent of Wal-Mart's employees were getting taxpayer-funded health care for themselves or their dependents.

The reports are sure to fuel the debate over a labor-backed push in the Legislature to require companies such as Wal-Mart to pay more for health care. Democrats in the House and Senate say the reports show that Wal-Mart and some other big companies are shifting millions of dollars in health-care costs to the state.

"I think taxpayers should be outraged," Rep. Steve Conway, D-Tacoma, said Monday. "They are subsidizing one of the wealthiest corporations in the world."

Amy Hill, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the company has no information that would confirm or refute the state's findings. But she said the data are more than a year old and might no longer be accurate.

"We implemented a lot of new plans last fall that we believe may appeal to people who had chosen to not take our coverage," Hill said.

Citing state and federal confidentiality rules, the state last month provided the new reports to only a handful of legislators and legislative staff members. But copies were leaked to The Seattle Times.

Medicaid is a state-federal program that provides health coverage to families on welfare and children in low-income families. The Basic Health Plan (BHP), funded entirely by the state, mostly covers low-income adults.

Both programs are aimed primarily at people in families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. That would mean a family of four with an income of about $38,000 would be eligible.

The new reports lists companies that in 2004 had the most employees receiving benefits under the programs.

Wal-Mart came out on top of both lists, by wide margins.

One report shows that, throughout 2004, an average 3,180 Wal-Mart employees were receiving state-funded medical assistance, including Medicaid, for themselves or for a dependent. The other report shows that 456 Wal-Mart employees were on the state's Basic Health Plan that year. Some employees may be counted on both of the lists.

McDonald's restaurants had the second-highest total, with an average 1,824 employees receiving Medicaid benefits in 2004.

Safeway was next, with 1,539 employees on Medicaid and 173 employees on the BHP.

With about 16,000 employees each, Wal-Mart and Safeway are among the state's largest employers. McDonald's has about 12,000 employees in Washington, but they work for 45 separately owned franchises or at one of 62 outlets the corporation owns.

The companies with the highest totals of employees on Medicaid and the BHP were concentrated mostly in a few industries, including general-merchandise stores, groceries and fast-food chains. Several companies that recruit and hire out temporary workers or day laborers — such as Express Personnel Services and Labor Ready Northwest — also ranked high on both lists.

Lawmakers said one of the most startling findings in the new reports is that more than half of the Wal-Mart employees who received Medicaid benefits — nearly 1,800 — were full-time workers.

For nearly all of the other companies listed, the vast majority of employees on Medicaid were part-time workers.

"It shows Wal-Mart isn't even taking care of its full-time employees," said Rep. Eileen Cody, D-Seattle.

But Cody and Conway said the reports shine a light on other companies as well.

"It's not just Wal-Mart," Conway said. "A lot of low-cost employers are shifting their health-care costs to the state."

Neither of the reports makes any attempt to calculate how much it cost the state to cover the employees and their families. But it's clearly in the tens of millions of dollars.

Wal-Mart defends its employee health benefits as competitive and affordable.

Hill, the Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company recently put in place a new "value" health plan for its employees. Under that plan, employees get 100 percent coverage for their first three doctor visits each year and after that must pay a $1,000 deductible. She said the plan's employee premiums average $23 per month.

Still, Wal-Mart's latest estimates show that only about half of its employees are on one of the company health plans. And, in an internal company memo leaked last fall, Wal-Mart acknowledged that, nationwide, nearly half of its employees' children were either on Medicaid or were uninsured.

More than a dozen other states have conducted studies to identify companies with the most employees on government-subsidized health care. In nearly every case, Wal-Mart came out on top.

Democratic lawmakers in Olympia hope to pass legislation that would require companies with 5,000 or more employees to put at least 9 percent of their payroll costs toward health-care benefits. Similar legislation was approved earlier this month in Maryland.

It's all part of an effort by a coalition of labor unions and health-care groups to push for so-called Wal-Mart bills in more than 30 states.

Wal-Mart says the legislation is "purely political" and would do nothing about the soaring cost of health care.

Hill told lawmakers in Olympia last week that the company didn't know what percentage of payroll it spends on health benefits.

To help lawmakers here prepare for the debate, Gov. Christine Gregoire last year requested the two new reports even though she knew her agencies would not be allowed to release the results to the public.

Copies stamped "confidential" were sent last month to about a half-dozen legislators, several legislative staff members and the governor's health-policy adviser. To produce the reports, the state matched its Medicaid and BHP recipient lists with employee data compiled by the state Employment Security Department. But Employment Security officials say they are barred from publicly releasing any data that reveal company names. The rankings in the new reports are similar to what lawmakers saw three years ago in a report that the state now says was improperly released to the public.

But the totals in the new reports — especially for numbers of employees on Medicaid — are much higher than before. The old report, for instance, indicated only 450 Wal-Mart employees were receiving Medicaid benefits, compared to more than 3,100 now.

It's unclear why the new numbers are so much higher, but lawmakers speculated the state did a more thorough job of gathering data this time. Officials at the Employment Security Department declined to comment.

Ralph Thomas: 360-943-9882

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Yes, they are an asset: the Party can wiretap, essentially, whoever they want. They can wiretap and bug the Democratic candidates and, since the Party has already designated dissenters as helping the enemy, justify it. They’ve done it before and justified it, at least to their own satisfaction. They’ve done a lot more than that—remember the 60s and 70s operation known as COINTELPRO? They even set people up to be killed because they were seen as threats.

White House seen to use wiretaps as campaign asset
01/22/2006 @ 8:45 pm
Filed by RAW STORY

"With Karl Rove's speech to national Republicans on Friday -- followed by a hard-hitting campaign of speeches and events this week -- the White House has effectively declared that it views its controversial secret surveillance program not as a political liability but as a tool: a way to attack Democrats and re-establish President Bush's standing after a difficult year," the NEW YORK TIMES' Adam Nagourney declares in a news analysis slotted for Monday page ones...
Advertisement

The piece is set to lay out a strategy that has been employed by the Bush campaign before -- to use what some might view as a liability and turn it into a political asset. The Bush campaign did this in 2004 with the President's troubled National Guard Service, questioning Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on his own military credentials.

Nagourney writes: "Whether the White House can succeed depends very much, members of both parties say, on its success in framing the debate at a time when the country is torn between two very strong pulls: its historic aversion to governmental intrusion and its recently born fear of a terrorist attacks at home."

Developing...

Well, yeah, she was only following orders. And, yeah, they were orders from way up the chain of command—probably right from the very tip-top. I believe that.

But. While it means she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, she did the wrong, immoral, illegal thing.

She doesn’t have such good taste in men, either, I’d say.

Former Abu Ghraib Guard Calls Top Brass Culpable for Abuse
Wife of Jailed Soldier Says Tactics Were in Place From Start
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012200928_pf.html
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 23, 2006; A03

Stepping into the Abu Ghraib prison for the first time, Megan Ambuhl was stunned. There were naked men in dusty cells, male prisoners wearing women's underwear, others hooded and shackled in contorted positions to metal railings.

An enlisted officer giving her a tour of the U.S. facility in October 2003 pointed to a group of detainees chained to a cell. He said the bars had often "been decorated like a Christmas tree," with prisoners as ornaments.

"He explained it was a military intelligence tactic," Ambuhl said in a recent interview, speaking publicly for the first time since the Abu Ghraib prison abuse was disclosed nearly two years ago. "He said it was to break the detainees that were being interrogated. It was clear it was a military intelligence facility. As I saw it, I thought that if they were doing it, it must be all right for them to be doing it."

One of the original seven military police soldiers singled out by the Pentagon for their roles in abusive techniques, Ambuhl is speaking out because she believes the truth has been obscured by high-ranking officials intent on covering up a policy of abuse. Though her defense differs little from the arguments made previously by the defendants' attorneys, Ambuhl's first-person description of the macabre world of Abu Ghraib provides a vivid perspective on how things went out of control at the prison outside of Baghdad, a place where there were few rules and little guidance. Her account also shows that some of the abusive tactics were in place when the MPs arrived at the prison.

Ambuhl has since married one of her fellow MPs -- Charles A. Graner Jr., the man the military has labeled the ringleader of the abusers -- and is on a mission to secure his release from prison.

Now out of the Army, punished with a reduction in rank and a fine for dereliction of duty but no prison time, Ambuhl says the military's top brass have dodged responsibility for what was going on at the prison by scapegoating her and other low-ranking soldiers.

By the time of her tour in 2003, Ambuhl had been in the Army reserves for about a year. She realized she was walking into something she clearly did not understand. Her unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, had been trained to do combat support jobs, not detention. She was ordered to work the night shift and said she asked few questions because she did not know what questions to ask.

Ambuhl says she and other MPs used aggressive techniques against detainees because that is what military intelligence soldiers and civilian interrogators told her to do.

She described a "roster board" that included which military intelligence "treatment" to give to certain detainees and said trainers from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, taught the MPs how to put detainees in "stress positions." She said military intelligence officials told them to keep detainees naked, embarrass them or make them exercise until they reached exhaustion.

"We were told to handcuff people in uncomfortable positions, to put people on [Meals Ready to Eat] boxes, to pour cold water on them, to make them do physical training," said Ambuhl, who worked the night shift on Tier 1B. "We did what we were told to do."

That defense has not worked well for several of the MPs charged with abuse, most notably Graner, who worked the night shift on Tier 1A, alongside Ambuhl. Graner is serving a 10-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Ambuhl married Graner last April after his conviction, sending marriage documents to him to sign in prison. The Army has prevented them from meeting or even speaking, alleging that they are co-conspirators.

Ambuhl knows that many people consider him a monster but says that is because the military has done an effective job of painting him as a ringleader and because people do not know him.

"I love being around him," said Ambuhl, 31, of Centreville, who has taken Graner's last name. Their relationship developed while the two were marooned for months at a base in Baghdad after the abuse was discovered and after Graner's relationship with Lynndie R. England, another MP serving a prison sentence for abuse, had ended. "We understand each other. I put my life in his hands day in and day out, and there isn't anyone I'd rather trust with my life, knowing everything I know."

Now back in her job as a histology lab technician, Ambuhl is determined to tell the public her version of events to free Graner. She has built a Web site, which includes documents and discussion, at http://www.supportmpscapegoats.com , where she also has a petition on Graner's behalf.

Military officials "have been trying to conceal that it was a policy that spiraled out of control," Ambuhl said, a rare moment of anger rising in her voice. "They made us out to be the cause of every ill in Iraq."

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said there have been more than 500 investigations into allegations of detainee mistreatment and that the Army is taking each allegation seriously.

"Thus far, allegations against more than 251 military members have been addressed in courts-martial, non-judicial punishment and other adverse administrative actions," Boyce said.

It was in early October 2003 that Ambuhl's unit made its way to Abu Ghraib from an assignment in Hilla, Iraq, where it conducted neighborhood searches for insurgents in what the military calls "law-and-order missions." Ambuhl, a Humvee driver in Hilla, said she received no training in dealing with enemy prisoners of war, was never specifically instructed about the Geneva Conventions and was presented with no standard operating procedures for the prison. In the middle of a war, a world away from Northern Virginia, Ambuhl did not question her superiors.

Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, who worked in the prison's higher security facility -- called the "hard site" -- and was also convicted of abusing prisoners, told investigators after his conviction that he, too, was shown the aggressive tactics on his first tour of the prison.

"He didn't say anything about the detainees, how to treat them, etc., but when we went in 1A, I did see detainees handcuffed to the bars and naked," according to Frederick's sworn statement. "I asked him about it and he told me MI ran the section, they didn't want the detainees talking to one another and that was their punishment."

Ambuhl's unit arrived just weeks after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then Guantanamo Bay's commander, made a visit to Iraq to help set up the Abu Ghraib operation. She said some of the tactics her unit employed -- such as stress positions, the use of dogs, and nudity -- came from teams Miller later sent over. Pentagon investigations have shown that such tactics were in use on high-value detainees held in Cuba almost a year earlier, but also determined that there was no policy of abuse.

Pentagon and Army officials have argued that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was isolated to a few individuals who decided to break the rules.

Ambuhl said some of the images seen in the photos depicted events that occurred every day.

"At the very least, there were a whole slew of people who knew about it," Ambuhl said. "These pictures were in no way hidden. We didn't sneak around pretending this wasn't going on."

Members of Other Government Agencies (OGA) -- a euphemism for the CIA -- were all over the hard site, keeping as many as 100 detainees there for interrogations. Once, two men with OGA had finished interrogating a detainee in a shower room and asked her to go get him.

"They said it would be funny if I burned him with my cigarette," Ambuhl said, adding that she tossed her cigarette before releasing the detainee, who was shackled to a window.

She said in hindsight she should have intervened.

"None of us were in the right frame of mind to get help for this situation," she said. "This was the norm. We didn't know any different. Maybe that's why they sent a combat support unit to do it. We wouldn't know how it was supposed to work, and we wouldn't question it.

"I wish I had done more to stop it," she said.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

You know things are bad in Washington when both Newsweek and Time print stories regarding government misbehavior. These magazines are usually staunch backs of the official status quo: everything’s fine, a little dust-up here and there, but everything’s fine, just fine, thank you; go buy something from one of our advertisers.

But the melding of the Republican Party and the lobbying industry is so deep and tangled and unsavory, even Time has to say something. I guess that’s a good thing.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1151747,00.html
Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006
When George Met Jack
White House aides deny the President knew lobbyist Abramoff, but unpublished photos shown to TIME suggest there's more to the story
By ADAM ZAGORIN AND MIKE ALLEN

As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff's visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few "staff-level meetings" that were not worth describing further. "The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him," McClellan said.

The President's memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush's aides have downplayed. While TIME's source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them. And that has been a fear of the Bush team's for the past several months: that a picture of the President with the admitted felon could become the iconic image of direct presidential involvement in a burgeoning corruption scandal—like the shots of President Bill Clinton at White House coffees for campaign contributors in the mid-1990s.

In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.

Most of the pictures have the formal look of photos taken at presidential receptions. The images of Bush, Abramoff and one of his sons appear to be the rapid-fire shots—known in White House parlance as clicks—that the President snaps with top supporters before taking the podium at fund-raising receptions. Over five years, Bush has posed for tens of thousands of such shots—many with people he does not know. Last month 9,500 people attended holiday receptions at the White House, and most went two by two through a line for a photo with the President and the First Lady. The White House is generous about providing copies—in some cases, signed by the President—that become centerpieces for "walls of fame" throughout status-conscious Washington.

Abramoff knew the game. In a 2001 e-mail to a lawyer for tribal leader Lovelin Poncho, he crows about an upcoming meeting at the White House that he had arranged for Poncho and says it should be a priceless asset in his client's upcoming re-election campaign as chief of Louisiana's Coushatta Indians. "By all means mention (in the tribal newsletter) that the Chief is being asked to confer with the President and is coming to Washington for this purpose in May," Abramoff writes. "We'll definitely have a photo from the opportunity, which he can use." The lawyer had asked about attire, and Abramoff advises, "As to dress, probably suit and tie would work best."

The e-mail, now part of a wide-ranging federal investigation into lobbying practices and lobbyists' relationships with members of Congress, offers a window into Abramoff's willingness to trade on ties to the White House and to invoke Bush's name to impress clients who were spending tens of millions of dollars on Abramoff's advice.

Abramoff was once in better graces at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, having raised at least $100,000 for the President's re-election campaign. During 2001 and 2002, his support for Republicans and connections to the White House won him invitations to Hanukkah receptions, each attended by 400 to 500 people. McClellan has said Abramoff may have been present at "other widely attended" events. He was also admitted to the White House complex for meetings with several staff members, including one with presidential senior adviser Karl Rove, one of the most coveted invitations in Washington.

Michael Scanlon, who is Abramoff's former partner and has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a Congressman, in 2001 told the New Times of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that Abramoff had "a relationship" with the President. "He doesn't have a bat phone or anything, but if he wanted an appointment, he would have one," Scanlon said. Nonsense, say others. A former White House official familiar with some Abramoff requests to the White House said Abramoff had some meetings with Administration officials in 2001 and 2002, but he was later frozen out because aides became suspicious of his funding sources and annoyed that the issues he raised did not mesh with their agenda. A top Republican official said it was clear to him that Abramoff couldn't pick up the phone and reach Bush aides because Abramoff had asked the official to serve as an intermediary.

The White House describes the number of Abramoff's meetings with staff members only as "a few," even though senior Bush aides have precise data about them. McClellan will not give details, saying he doesn't "get into discussing staff-level meetings." During a televised briefing, he added, "We're not going to engage in a fishing expedition." Pressed for particulars about Abramoff's White House contacts, McClellan said with brio, "People are insinuating things based on no evidence whatsoever." But he said he cannot "say with absolute certainty that (Abramoff) did not have any other visits" apart from those disclosed. Another White House official said, "The decision was made—don't put out any additional information." That reticence has been eagerly seized upon by some Democrats. Senate minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada wrote to Bush last week to demand details, saying Abramoff "may have had undue and improper influence within your Administration."

Garza, the bolo-wearing former chairman of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas, has fond memories of his session with Bush, which he said was held in 2001 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. According to e-mails in the hands of investigators, the meeting was arranged with the help of Abramoff and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. In an April 18, 2001, e-mail to Abramoff, Norquist wrote that he would be "honored" if Abramoff "could come to the White House meeting." Garza—known in his native Kickapoo language as Makateonenodua, or black buffalo—is under federal indictment for allegedly embezzling more than $300,000 from his tribe. Through his spokesman, Garza said that during the session, Bush talked about policy matters and thanked those present for supporting his agenda, then took questions from the audience of about two dozen people. Garza told TIME, "We were very happy that Jack Abramoff helped us to be with the President. Bush was in a very good mood—very upbeat and positive." No evidence has emerged that the Bush Administration has done anything for the Kickapoo at Abramoff's behest.

Three attendees who spoke to TIME recall that Abramoff was present, and three of them say that's where the picture of Bush, Abramoff and the former Kickapoo chairman was taken. The White House has a different description of the event Garza attended. "The President stopped by a meeting with 21 state legislators and two tribal leaders," spokeswoman Erin Healy said. "Available records show that Mr. Abramoff was not in attendance."

—With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/ Washington

Copyright © 2006 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy

We’ve been through this before. It’s against the statutes: that means it’s against the law. That means that the political police are prohibited from doing this. Big deal, eh?

We saw this back in the ‘70s, with the program known as COINTELPRO, a government-run program to spy on and disrupt protest groups, anti-war dissenters, and anyone else Washington didn’t like. There are still people in prison because of COINTELPRO, most notable beiing the Indian activist, Leonard Peltier; others, like Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, are still dead.

So this isn’t anything new. It’s newly disgusting, though, because it means that our government operates, when it wants to, outside the law.

The Other Big Brother
The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror links, without obtaining warrants.

Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S. government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public realizes.

It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon spokesman declined to say why a private company like Halliburton would be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the past, Defense Department officials have said that the "force protection" mission includes military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work closely with them and therefore could be in danger.

CIFA researchers apparently cast a wide net and had a number of surveillance methods—both secretive and mundane—at their disposal. An internal CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation recently obtained by William Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes widely about military affairs, gives some idea how the group operated. The presentation, which Arkin provided to NEWSWEEK, shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. (The group's motto appears at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide: "Counterintelligence 'to the Edge'.") But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring." In other words, they surfed the Web.

That may have been how the Pentagon came to be so interested in a small gathering outside Halliburton. On June 23, 2004, a few days before the Halliburton protest, an ad for the event appeared on houston.indymedia.org, a Web site for lefty Texas activists. "Stop the war profiteers," read the posting. "Bring out the kids, relatives, Dick Cheney, and your favorite corporate pigs at the trough as we will provide food for free."

Four months later, on Oct. 25, the TALON team reported another possible threat to national security. The source: a Miami antiwar Web page. "Website advertises protest planned at local military recruitment facility," the internal report warns. The database entry refers to plans by a south Florida group called the Broward Anti-War Coalition to protest outside a strip-mall recruiting office in Lauderhill, Fla. The TALON entry lists the upcoming protest as a "credible" threat. As it turned out, the entire event consisted of 15 to 20 activists waving a giant BUSH LIED sign. No one was arrested. "It's very interesting that the U.S. military sees a domestic peace group as a threat," says Paul Lefrak, a librarian who organized the protest.

Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity masking" software that would allow the agency to create phony Web identities and let them appear to be located in foreign countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer Sciences Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)

Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 days—unless they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was "improperly stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name). "It was an oversight." In a memo last week, obtained by NEWSWEEK, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such information from its files—and directed that all Defense Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department policies.

That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's activities and who it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box [Pentagon officials] don't want opened," says Arkin. "What we're looking at is hints of what they're doing." As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we've already seen too much.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2006 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/

A couple of related pieces here, about the purported Bin Laden tape, and about some serious doubts as to its authenticity.

Would the Bush Administration go so far as to manufacture threats to America? I think it’s pretty clear they would. And it’s entirely possible they would go even farther. The cabal in Washington means to be—and probably stay—all powerful.

We may see more of this as the elections come closer, and again in 2008 when the presidency is up for bids once again.


Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:55:18 -0800
From: Scott Munson
Subject: The Phony bin Laden Tape

Latest Bin Laden Tape: Another of the NeoCons' "Greatest Hits"
Experts already begin to come forward with revelations that Latest tape
just another CIA fake

Steve Watson | January 20 2006
http://infowars.com http://prisonplanet.net

Spying? Torture? Illegal airstrikes? SHUT UP and hate Bin Laden.

The NeoCon use of Osama Bin Laden as a tool of fear and control is a
tried and tested method whenever the going gets tough. It's predictable
and it's tiresome, but the masses buy it every time and that's why he
has reappeared once again.

Just as the NSA spying tidal wave gathers increasing momentum, as the
media demand more answers on rendition and torture and days after the
bizarre airstrike on innocent women and children in Pakistan, we all
magically get a timely reminder of just why the government is spying on
its own citizens and torturing and killing anyone it likes anywhere in
the world.

Just like Orwell's ubiquitous Emmanuel Goldstein, Bin Laden always
seems to pop up right on cue so we can disengage our minds from reality
and join in the two minutes hate.

We are reliably informed by the mainstream media that this is because
he is a very clever man and has an impeccable sense of timing. Yet if
this is the case, why can he not work out that EVERYTIME he has
released a video or a tape it has HELPED Bush and the NeoCon agenda
tenfold?

Even the BBC lays this out in the open with the headline Bin Laden
threats may boost Bush:

The commander-in-chief has been under intense pressure in recent weeks,
accused of trampling on civil liberties in pursuit of terror suspects.
His defence has been that America is a nation at war. So Bin Laden's
latest threats to launch new attacks on the US will only serve to
underline this argument.

The White House will also cite the tape when trying to convince allies
abroad that the use of tough tactics is justified - even when civilians
are killed, as in last week's air raid in Pakistan.

That just says it all really.

Bin Laden was created by US intelligence , worked with US intelligence
in the late 70s and 80s, was used as a patsy by US intelligence before
and after 911 and is now being used as a manipulative tool of fear by
the criminal elite faction currently in power in the US.

The last time Bin Laden appeared was October 2004, exactly three days
before the election.

The same headline "Boost for Bush" appeared and some, including
Walter Conkite went as far as to suggest that the whole thing was
manufactured by Karl rove in order to secure the election for Bush.

The Tehran Times suggested that Bin Laden was "dancing to Bush’s tune"
and a "premeditated plan devised by Bush administration
neoconservatives is unfolding". The report also noted that the CIA
immediately confirmed the tape to be the voice of Bin Laden, something
they had never previously done. They have also done this this time
around too.

Bin Laden personally criticized Bush's reaction on the day of 911, a
move that undoubtedly instilled a rejuvenated support for the President
amongst the American sheeple.

If Bin Laden is so clever and so calculated and determined to justify
himself to the American people, why can he not fathom that a personal
attack could only ever help Bush? I thought it was common knowledge
that you always steer clear of personal attacks in debates and
arguments.

Bush immediately took a six point lead and subsequently won the
election.

Of course, we shouldn't find it surprising that Bin Laden consistently
helps Bush, after all it was the Bush Administration that allowed all
members of the Bin Laden family to fly out of America immediately after
911 whilst all other air traffic was grounded.

It was Bush himself who signed document W199I, ordering the FBI to back
off investigating the Bin Ladens before 911.

It was George W Bush who went into business with Bin laden's brother in
the 1970s.

It is George W Bush's father who is STILL DOING business with the Bin
Ladens via the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm.

FBI Special agent Robert Wright broke down when testifying that he had
been gagged and could not reveal the true extent of what he knew about
the Bush-Bin Laden connection and 911. his lawyer stepped up and said
live on C-Span that "The Bush Family vacations with the Bin Ladens".

The ties run deep and all lead to money, huge amounts of money. This is
how the Bushes do business, this is how they have always done business,
they own the best enemies money can buy.

Previous to the 2004 election, Bin Laden surfaced on a video on the eve
of the two year anniversary of 911. Once again impeccable timing to
deliver a video, given that he was reported to be hiding in the
mountains of Pakistan.

However, the video was quickly recognized by experts as simply a
re-hash of old material cobbled together quickly and so amateurish that
it could not have fooled anyone.

Previous to the beginning of the Iraq war, Bin Laden appeared in
February 2003 on an audio tape that was touted as proof positive of Al
Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein.

In another amazing timing coincidence, the tape came barely a week
after Colin powell's attempts to link Al Qaeda and Saddam in his
botched presentation of lies and exaggerations before the UN Security
Council.

In an even more bizarre twist, just hours before the tape was found and
aired by AlJazeera, Colin Powell announced in the US Senate that a “Bin
Laden tape is coming proving Iraq’s links with Al-Qaeda.”

How does Colin Powell know what AlJazeera are going to broadcast before
they do?

The tape voiced support for Iraq, but did not prove any link between
al-Qaeda and the Iraqi leadership. It was described as dubious at best
and at worst as an outright fake.

Previous to this tape a poor quality release in November 2002, deemed
to be completely authentic by US Experts, was determined to be a total
fake by the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial
Intelligence in Switzerland.

This time Bin Laden was said to be admitting to recent small scale
terror attacks. Yet the voice on the tape was different to around
twenty previous recordings of Bin Laden.

And of course, then there is the all time classic Bin Laden video, the
number one hit from december 2001. The one we like to call the "Fat
nosed" Bin Laden video.

This one was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban
forces moved in. It featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how
he'd carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to
manipulate viewer opinion and featured "Bin Laden" praising two of the
hijackers, only he got their names wrong.

This Osama also uses the wrong hand to write with and wears gold rings,
a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.

Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin
Laden, the CIA stood by the video whilst many have declared it an
outright fake.

And so we come back to this week's tape, Osama's "latest release".
Already experts are coming forward to suggest that yet again this is a
fake that has been put out at a very convenient time to divert
attention away from important events.

Professor Bruce Lawrence has described the tape as "like a voice from
the grave".

He thinks bin Laden is dead and has doubts about the tape. Lawrence
recently analyzed more than 20 complete speeches and interviews of the
al Qaida leader for his book. He says the new message is missing
several key elements.

We have previously highlighted the evidence to suggest that Bin Laden
is dead. More and more experts are now coming forward with the same
opinion. Every time a new tape is released it seems to become shorter
and more vague as if whoever is making them is running out of material
to work with .

If it is conceivable that there is one group of fundamentalist
individuals who wish to change the way we live because "they hate our
freedom", then it is equally as conceivable that there is another group
of richer, more sophisticated fundamentalists that wish to do the same
thing themselves and will use the first group as a cover for what they
do.

They have groomed Bin Laden for their own ends and will continue to use
his image (whether he is dead or not) until they no longer have a cause
to, this is simply another example of his usefulness in the fake war on
terror.


________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message: 18
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:09:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Al Soto
Subject: 01/20/2006 - BUSH needs Bin Laden a dialogue

Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:36:32 -0500
From: Woody Smith
Subject: Bush Needs Bin Laden

I am sure most of you who have been watching the news the past few
days have noticed that two items are dominating national coverage,
the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll
and the release of an audio tape purported to be from Osama bin Laden.

One can predict when these types of things will occur with a very
high degree of accuracy. Whenever Bush gets in trouble over one
issue or another, whether it be domestic spying, economic downturns,
revelations of corruption, plummeting approval ratings, a Supreme
Court nominee needs a bump, or whatnot, you can rely on Osama bin
Laden or one of his chief deputies to supply some kind of strangely
garbled tape, or some attractive noncombatant to be kidnapped by
"insurgents," to jar the news cycles off whatever track it's on that
Bush finds unpleasant.

Perhaps I'm just paranoid, but when we have been led into a
disastrous war for what certainly appears to be no better reason than
to multiply oil prices and profits and to permit George W. Bush to
arrogate to himself the mantle of "war president," then one is
allowed to think paranoid thoughts, particularly when the timing of
these events, which specifically designed to engender fear and
loathing, seems so consistently convenient.

Woody Smith

http://www.bareknuckles.org/bkp - Bare-Knuckles Politics, the
Freeper-Free Forum
Republicans whine and Republicans bitch: "Our rich are too poor, and
our poor are too rich."

________________________________________

Professor Says Bin Laden Tape a Fake Leaked by Pakistanis
http://infowars.com/articles/terror/bin_laden_tape_fake_leaked_by_pakistan.htm
ABC News 11 | January 20 2006
RELATED:
U.S. Rejects Any 'Truce' With Bin Laden

Bin Laden Warns of Attacks, Offers Truce

A Duke professor says he is doubtful about Thursday's audiotape from Osama bin Laden.

Bruce Lawrence has just published Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, a book translating bin Laden's writing. He is skeptical of Thursday's message.

It was like a voice from the grave, Lawrence said.

He thinks bin Laden is dead and has doubts about the tape. Lawrence recently analyzed more than 20 complete speeches and interviews of the al Qaida leader for his book. He says the new message is missing several key elements.

There's nothing in this from the Koran. He's, by his own standards, a faithful Muslim, Lawrence said. He quotes scripture in defense of his actions. There's no quotation from the Koran in the excerpts we got, no reference to specific events, no reference to past atrocities.

Join Prisonplanet.tv & watch all of Alex Jones' Documentaries Online Now

While the CIA confirms the voice on the tape is bin Laden's, Lawrence questions when it was recorded. He says the timing of its release could be to divert attention from last week's U.S. air strike in Pakistan. The strike targeted bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and killed four leading al Qaeda figures along with civilians.

Lawrence believes faulty Pakistani intelligence led to the strike and the civilian deaths, and the tape was leaked by Pakistani authorities to divert attention from their mistake.

It led to a failed military operation where America got blamed, but they people who are really to blame are the ones who provided the intelligence, Lawrence said. I think this is an effort to say were not going look at this terrible incident that happened.

Another element that Lawrence takes issue with in bin Laden's latest message is its length - - only 10 minutes. Previously, the shortest was 18 minutes




INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND


Infowars.com is Copyright 2006 Alex Jones | Fair Use Notice

# posted by Talapus Pete @ 1:56 PM 0 comments

This really is “divine right” isn’t it? Bush appears to be convinced that he can do as he wants in regards to the law, because he is a) George W. Bush, b)President of the United States, c) God’s Chosen Instrument of Vengeance, d) All of the above.

The man is dangerous.


Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:12:19 -0800 (PST)

Subject: Bush's misuse of Presidential power

From Capitol Hill Blue

Bush Leagues
Bush's misuse of Presidential power
By DALE McFEATTERS
Jan 13, 2006, 06:48




Over White House objections and by convincing,
veto-proof margins, Congress voted late last year to
ban the torture of anyone in U.S. government custody.

When President Bush signed that ban last month, he
added a disclaimer, saying that nothing in the ban
affected his prerogatives in a time of national
emergency to fight the war on terrorism how he chose.
In other words, he reserved the right to torture even
though Congress explicitly outlawed it.

And he used the same justification for bypassing the
courts and ordering the National Security Agency to
conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American
citizens.

Bush also invoked this same authority to assert that
he could hold U.S. citizens indefinitely, without
trial or counsel, simply on his say-so.

Taking an expansionist view of a new law on the
treatment of the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees, the
administration insists that it bars federal courts
from any jurisdiction over the detainees, "including
application for writs of habeas corpus." The right to
be brought before a judge is fundamental to civil
liberties, but the administration has decided it can
selectively suspend that right. It has asked the
federal courts to dismiss all detainee lawsuits,
effectively leaving the detainees' fate in the hands
of a legal process effectively controlled by the
president.

The assertion of these powers has its roots in the War
Powers Act of 1973, a controversial law, parts of
which are widely believed to be unconstitutional, and
resolutions on the war on terror and the invasion of
Iraq that Congress passed post-9/11. And the White
House says the emergency powers will last as long as
the war on terror _ in other words, until the
president declares the war on terror over.

Surely Congress did not intend such broad and
open-ended powers. When Congress returns from its
recess, an early and essential item of business is for
lawmakers to clarify what powers they did and did not
intend the president to have in the war on terror. It
is not a good precedent that the president has begun
to attach disclaimers to laws with which he disagrees.


Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_7988.shtml

The War Against Iraq—excuse me, War On Terror—is out of a pre-adolescent fantasy for our fearless wannabe-cowboy leaders.


Tomdispatch: John Brown on the War on Terror as an Indian War
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=50043

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play -- barely noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere -- that was already perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind of play, there was no need to enact the complicated present by recreating a junior version of an anxiety-ridden Cold War garrison state (though you could purchase your own H2O Missile, a water-powered toy "ICBM" in imitation of the sort just then being prepared by adults to pulverize the planet). For children in those years, there was still a sacramental, triumphalist version of American history, a spectacle of slaughter in which they invariably fell before our guns. This spectacle could be experienced in any movie theater, and then played out in backyards and on floors with toy six guns (or sticks) or little toy bluecoats, Indians, and cowboys, or green, inch-high plastic sets of World War II soldiers. As play, for those who grew up in that time, it was sunshine itself, pure pleasure. The Western (as well as its modern successor, the war film) was on screen everywhere then.

When those children grew up (barely), some of them went off to Vietnam, dreaming of John Wayne-like feats as they entered what they came to call "Indian country"; while others sallied off to demonstrate against the war dressed either in the cast-off World War II garb of their fathers or in the movie-inspired get-ups of the former enemy of another age -- headbands and moccasins, painted faces, love beads (those previously worthless baubles with which, everyone knew, Manhattan had so fraudulently been purchased), as well as peace (now drug) pipes. Sometimes, they even formed themselves into "tribes."

As it turns out, though, there was a third category of young men in those years -- those who essentially steered clear of the Vietnam experience, who, as our Vice President put it inelegantly but accurately, had "other priorities in the '60s." Critics have sometimes spoken of such Bush administration figures as "chickenhawks" for their lack of war experience. But this is actually inaccurate. They were warriors of a sort -- screen warriors. They had an abundance of combat experience because, unlike their peers, they never left the confines of those movie theaters, where American war was always glorious, our military men always out on some frontier, and the Indians, or their modern equivalents, always falling by their scores before our might as the cavalry bugle sounded or the Marine Hymn welled up. By avoiding becoming either the warriors or the anti-warriors of the Vietnam era, they managed to remain quite deeply embedded in centuries of triumphalist frontier mythology. They were, in a sense, the Peter Pans of American war play.

So no one should have been surprised that, when George Bush declared his global war on terror, he also swore to get Osama bin Laden in this fashion: "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West... I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'" Of course, that "poster" came not from any real experience he had in the West, but directly from the thrilling cowboy films of his childhood. So did his John-Wayne-like urge to "hunt" the terrorists down, or "smoke ‘em out," or (for Iraqi insurgents) "bring ‘em on." From that same childhood undoubtedly came the President's repeated urge to dress up in an assortment of "commander-in-chief" military outfits, much in the style of a G.I. Joe "action figure." (Think: doll). It's visibly clear that our President has long found delight -- actual pleasure -- in his war-making role, as he did in his Top Gun, "mission accomplished" landing on that aircraft carrier back in 2003.

It's not surprising either that a critic who spent real time up close and personal with top Bush administration figures, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson, would accuse the President of "cowboyism." Nor should it be strange that various neocon writers close to this administration and in thrall to the same spirit should lovingly quote American military men who also believe themselves out on some Western frontier. Robert Kaplan, for instance, cites one officer as saying, "The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century."

Many things have changed in our world in recent decades. For one thing, hundreds of years of history have more or less disappeared into the entertainment/media maw. In films like Dances with Wolves, which came out at the time of the first American war in Iraq, the Indians have turned all warm and fuzzy and are now the veritable Ewoks of our planet. In the meantime children on their floors and in their video games still shoot down innumerable evil ones ready to ambush them, but so many of them are now off this planet: demons, supervillains, mutants, and aliens. They are surely the first generation in memory to pass a full childhood without fighting old-style Indian Wars on their floors or playing "cowboys and Indians." And yet the paradigm of the frontier and of the Indian Wars settled deep into the American soul. So again, it should not be surprising that the now officially grown up boys, who have the power to make war on the world, should still imagine themselves in their beloved movies of long ago and that the framework of the Indian Wars, however suppressed and transformed, remains in some fashion deeply with us.

Surprising, however, is how little attention this has gotten. Fortunately, John Brown, a former State Department official who resigned to protest the coming invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and who has previously written on Bush's Global War on Terror for Tomdispatch) now takes up this theme and ushers us provocatively into the secret frontier dreamland of our rulers. Tom

"Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet"
Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict
By John Brown

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is, like all historical events, unique. But both its supporters and opponents compare it to past U.S. military conflicts. The Bush administration and the neocons have drawn parallels between GWOT and World War II as well as GWOT and the Cold War. Joshua E. London, writing in the National Review, sees the War on Terror as a modern form of the struggle against the Barbary pirates. Vietnam and the Spanish-American War have been preferred analogies for other commentators. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, Anne Applebaum, says that the war in Iraq might be like that in Korea, because of "the ambivalence of their conclusions." For others, the War on Terror, with its loose rhetoric, brings to mind the "war on poverty" or the "war on drugs."

I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the War on Terror: as a twenty-first century continuation of, or replication of, the American Indian wars, on a global scale. This is by no means something that has occurred to me alone, but it has received relatively little attention. Here are ten reasons why I'm making this suggestion:
1. Key supporters of the War on Terror themselves see GWOT as an Indian war. Take, for example, the right-wing intellectuals Robert Kaplan and Max Boot who, although not members of the administration, also advocate a tough military stance against terrorists. In a Wall Street Journal article, "Indian Country," Kaplan notes that "an overlooked truth about the war on terrorism" is that "the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians." Iraq, he notes, "is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard." Kaplan has now put his thoughts into a book, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, which President Bush read over the holidays. Kaplan points out that "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."
As for Max Boot, he writes, "‘small wars' -- fought by a small number of professional U.S. soldiers -- are much more typical of American history than are the handful of ‘total' wars that receive most of the public attention. Between 1800 and 1934, U.S. Marines staged 180 landings abroad. And that's not even counting the Indian wars the army was fighting every year until 1890." A key GWOT battlefield, Boot suggests, is Afghanistan, noting that "[i]f the past is any indication of the future, we have a lot more savage wars ahead."

2. The essential paradigm of the War of Terror -- us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) -- was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned "the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:

"If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

President Andrew Jackson, whose "unapologetic flexing of military might" has been compared to George W. Bush's modus operandi, noted in his "Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act" (December 8, 1830):

"What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?"

Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy -- seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad -- is as strikingly apparent in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.
3. GWOT is based on the principle of preventive strike, meant to put off "potential, future and, therefore, speculative attacks" -- just as U.S. Army conflicts against the Indians often were. We have to get them before they get us -- such is the assumption behind both sets of wars. As Professor Jack D. Forbes wrote in a 2003 piece, "Old Indian Wars Dominate Bush Doctrines," in the Bay Mills News:

"Bush has declared that the US will attack first before an ‘enemy' has the ability to act. This could, of course, be called ‘The Pearl Harbor strategy' since that is precisely what the Japanese Empire did. But it also has precedents against First American nations. For example, William Henry Harrison, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson to get the American Nations out of the Illinois-Indiana region, marched an invading army to the vicinity of a Native village at Tippecanoe precisely when he knew that [Shawnee war chief and pan-tribal political leader] Tecumseh was on a tour of the south and west."

4. While U.S. mainstream thinking about GWOT enemies is that they are total aliens -- in religion, politics, economics, and social organization -- there are Americans who believe that individuals in these "primitive" societies can eventually become assimilated and thus be rendered harmless through training, education, or democratization. This is similar to the view among American settlers that in savage Indian tribes hostile to civilization, there were some that could be evangelized and Christianized and brought over to the morally right, Godly side. Once "Americanized," former hostile groups, with the worst among them exterminated, can no longer pose any threat and indeed can assist in the prolongation of conflicts against remaining evil-doers.

5. GWOT is fought abroad, but it's also a war at home, as the creation after 9/11 of a Department of Homeland Security illustrates. The Indian wars were domestic as well, carried out by the U.S. military to protect American settlers against hostile non-U.S. citizens living on American soil. (It was not until June 2, 1924 that Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.) While engaged in the Indian wars, the U.S. fought on its own, without the help of foreign governments; such has essentially been the case with GWOT, despite the support of a few countries like Israel, the creation of a weak international "coalition" in Iraq, and NATO participation in Afghanistan operations.

6. America's close partner Israel, which over the years has taken over Arab-populated lands and welcomes U.S. immigrants, can be considered as a kind of surrogate United States in this struggle. Expanding into the Middle East, the Israelis could be seen as following the example of the American pioneers who didn't let Indians stand in their way as they settled, with the support of the U.S. military, an entire continent, driven by the conviction that they were supported by God, the Bible, and Western civilization. "I shall need," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." Less eloquently, Ariel Sharon put it this way: "Everything that's grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don't grab will be in their hands."

7. As for the current states that are major battlefields of GWOT, Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the model for their future, far from being functional democracies, is that of Indian reservations. It is not unlikely that the fragile political structures of these states will sooner or later collapse, and the resulting tribal/ethnic entities will be controlled -- assuming the U.S. proves willing to engage in the long-term garrisoning in each area -- by American forces in fortified bases, as was the case with the Indian territories in the Far West. Areas under American control will provide U.S. occupiers with natural resources (e.g., oil), and American business -- if the security situation becomes manageable -- will doubtless be lured there in search of economic opportunities. Interestingly, the area outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad (where Americans have fortified themselves) is now referred to as the Red Zone -- terrorist-infested territory as dangerous to non-natives as the lands inhabited by the Redskins were to whites during the Indian wars.

8. The methods employed by the U.S. in GWOT and the Indian wars are similar in many respects: using superior technology to overwhelm the "primitive" enemy; adapting insurgency tactics, even the most brutal ones, used by the opposing side when necessary; and collaborating with "the enemy of my enemy" in certain situations (that is, setting one tribe against another). What are considered normal rules of war have frequently been irrelevant for Americans in both conflicts, given their certainty that their enemies are evil and uncivilized. The use of torture is also a feature of these two conflicts.

9. As GWOT increasingly appears to be, the Indian wars were a very long conflict, stretching from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth -- the longest war in American history, starting even before the U.S. existed as a nation. There were numerous battles of varying intensity in this conflagration with no central point of confrontation -- as is the case with the War on Terror, despite its current emphasis on Iraq. And GWOT is a war being fought, like the Indian wars in the Far West, over large geographical areas -- as the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen puts it, almost lyrically, "in the Greater Middle East, including the Mediterranean basin, through the Fertile Crescent, and into the remote valleys and gorges of the Caucasus and Pakistan, the deserts of Central Asia, the plateaus of Afghanistan."

10. Perhaps because they are drawn-out wars with many fronts and changing commanders, the goals of GWOT and the Indian Wars can be subject to many interpretations (indeed, even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld at one point was eager to rename the War on Terror a "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"). For many abroad, GWOT is a brutal expression of a mad, cowboy-led country's plans to take over the world and its resources. In the United States, a large number of Americans still interpret these two wars as God-favored initiatives to protect His chosen people and allow them to flourish. But just as attitudes in the U.S. toward Native Americans have changed in recent years (consider, for example, the saccharine 1990 film Dances with Wolves, which is sympathetic to an Indian tribe, in contrast to John Wayne shoot-the-Injuns movies), so suspicious views among the American public toward the still-seen-as-dangerous "them" of GWOT might evolve in a different direction. Such a change in perception, however, is unlikely to occur in the near future, especially under the current bellicose Bush regime, which manipulates voters' fear of terrorists to maintain its declining domestic support.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department over the war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily "Public Diplomacy Press Review," available free upon request. The title for this paper comes from a 1692 quotation by Puritan preacher and witch-hunter Cotton Mather.

Copyright 2006 John H. Brown

about
Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt (bio), a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world and ourselves. The service is intended to introduce you to voices from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here) who might offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.
An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley.

Is there really much difference between this and simply trying to choke the info out of somebody? Or beat it out of them? No.

Trial Illuminates Dark Tactics of Interrogation
By Nicholas Riccardi
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_012006Z.shtml
Friday 20 January 2006

Ft. Carson, Colo. - It was dubbed the "sleeping bag technique."

Interrogators at a makeshift prison in western Iraq, desperate to break suspected insurgents, would stuff them face-first into a sleeping bag with a small hole cut in the bottom for air.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. used it on an Iraqi general as a last-ditch grab for information as Welshofer's unit was in the midst of an offensive against insurgents and desperate for intelligence.

The technique was not in the Army Field Manual, but Welshofer testified Thursday that he believed it was permitted after top commanders told interrogators "the gloves were coming off."

But Welshofer got no information.

Military prosecutors allege that Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, 57, suffocated in the sleeping bag as Welshofer sat on him. Welshofer's murder trial, which began this week at the home base of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to which he was assigned in Iraq, opens a window into the murky world of military interrogations.

Issues raised by the prosecutors and the defense about how to calibrate interrogations during the war against terrorism echo those made during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the recent debate in Washington over banning torture.

Welshofer described spending months in Iraq without any clear directives about how to manage interrogations. When rules came down, he said, they were vague and he soon found that his training did not apply.

"There was no preparation from the schoolhouse at all for what we encountered in Iraq," he said. "The doctrine was based on an enemy from 60 years ago."

But the prosecutor, Lt. Tiernan Dolan, said that Welshofer took advantage of, or blatantly neglected, decades of military standards in how to practice interrogation. "You use psychological ploys to let [detainees] know you are in control," he told Welshofer. "But you crossed the line from psychological control to physical control."

When Welshofer and Mowhoush met in the fall of 2003, the insurgency was gaining strength and interrogators were under intense pressure to obtain leads from Saddam Hussein loyalists, such as the captured general.

U.S. commanders at the time had asked for what Welshofer called a "wish list" of new interrogation techniques. Beginning in September, U.S. generals in Iraq issued a stream of rules on the acceptable bounds of interrogation, sometimes shifting them from week to week.

A witness who testified behind a screen on Wednesday - whom an attorney inadvertently referred to as someone who worked for the CIA - said Welshofer told him the day before Mowhoush's death that he was aware of the most recent regulations, but that "he was breaking those rules every day."

Welshofer said he did not recall the conversation, but his attorney, Frank Spinner, argued that his client was navigating a gray zone. Spinner cited disagreements within the Bush administration about what techniques constituted torture. "There are not clear-cut rules here," Spinner told the panel of six officers, who will determine whether Welshofer is guilty. He faces life imprisonment if convicted.

The interrogations took place at a converted train station outside of the western Iraqi city of Qaim. Mowhoush was believed to be directing attacks in the region and had surrendered himself to authorities in hopes of helping his sons, who were also in U.S. custody.

At the prison, Welshofer supervised a handful of other interrogators and 40 military intelligence officers. Another interrogator had invented the sleeping bag technique, which Welshofer said was designed to create a claustrophobic effect. Welshofer said a supervisor had approved the technique, but was concerned whether prisoners would be able to breathe, and only allowed Welshofer and its inventor to use it.

Welshofer acknowledged Thursday that when briefing his superior, he omitted that the technique he used involved straddling the detainee's chest.

Welshofer said he started gently with Mowhoush. He said he began by simply questioning the general. When Mowhoush denied his role in the insurgency, the interrogations became more heated. Over two weeks, Welshofer progressed from conversing, to slapping the general in front of other detainees, to having him held down and pouring water in his face.

During that time, Welshofer was in an interrogation room when Mowhoush was severely beaten by a group of Iraqis who, according to published reports, were in the pay of the CIA. One witness said Welshofer appeared to be directing that interrogation, but the defendant said he had "no command and control" over that situation.

Two days later, Welshofer made his final choice. "I had gone through all my techniques and all my experience that might have been applicable - except that one technique," he said.

Army Spc. Jerry L. Loper, a guard at the prison who is cooperating with the prosecution, testified that Mowhoush was unable to walk after his beatings by fellow Iraqis (those allegedly paid by the CIA), and that even on Nov. 26, he had difficulty moving and was breathing heavily. At 8 a.m., Loper led the general into the interrogation room and questioning began.

The general was issuing blanket denials, and after the final one, Loper said, Welshofer told the detainee: "If you don't answer, you're not going to like what's coming."

Welshofer said that the general at times appeared tired, but he believed he was faking his fatigue. He ordered that the olive-green sleeping bag be dropped over his head, and that he be wrapped in an electrical cord "like winding a yo-yo" to fasten the bag to his 300-pound frame. The general was lowered to the ground on his back, and Welshofer straddled his chest and continued to ask questions, occasionally putting his hand over the general's mouth, the interrogator said. He said he was stopping the detainee from calling out to Allah.

Loper and another witness testified that after several minutes, the general became unresponsive and Welshofer stood up. Then, they said, the general emitted a loud gasp and Welshofer expressed relief that he wasn't dead. Welshofer said he did not recall this occurring.

It was after the general was flipped on his stomach and Welshofer straddled his back that he became silent again. Welshofer said he pulled the bag from the general and saw an odd smile on his face, so he threw water on him to get a response. It was then, he said, that he realized the general was dead or dying, called for medics, and began CPR.

The military contends the general was smothered during the interrogation, but the defense called a pathologist who testified that the cause of Mowhoush's death was probably heart failure. Mowhoush had an enlarged heart and other signs of heart disease.

Welshofer, who has spent 17 years in the Army, is also charged with slapping another detainee, wrapping him in a sleeping bag, and body-slamming him. He said he wasn't sure to which of the many detainees he interrogated the charge referred, but said that in one case, he had to use his body weight to control a prisoner who was becoming violent.

This is a good piece of hyperbole. Of course Dubya doesn’t want to torture me—or you, or you, or any American. Unless it’s absolutely necessary. Dick Cheney may not have the same high standards, of course. Wasserman is absolutely right about the administration believing in the Divine Right of the executive. The emphasis by the Christian far-right on America being the chosen land has settled that one into Bush’s brain.

And when you get to believing in the Divine Right to rule, the country becomes a dictatorship. God wants it that way.

This is what’s so scary about these people: they believe God is telling them what to do. Maybe not all of them, but the ones who have their doubts are seduced by the money and the power.

Are You Ready to Be Bugged and Tortured by George W. Bush?
By Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press

Thursday 19 January 2006

It's not really terrorists George W. Bush wants to bug and torture. It's YOU.

It's not really terrorism he wants to fight. It's opposition from people he can't control.

It's not really US security he wants to protect. It's the power of his regime.

The Constitutional debate about whether these executive privileges are allowable in war is a smoke screen.

This isn't about war: It's about dictatorship. It's about making power permanent by using private information against you, and by terrifying you with torture.

Team Bush believes it rules by Divine right. It has already re-defined "terrorist" to mean anyone who questions its power. It will use "anti-terrorist" wiretapping as a tool against anyone who dares oppose it.

All serious indicators show that "information" extracted by torture is virtually worthless in fighting terrorism. So is the information taken from wiretapping huge numbers of people, which Bush has been doing since before 9/11.

So ask yourself: if granted the power to torture, do you trust the Bush Administration--or any regime- to refrain from torturing its political opponents? If granted the power to record private phone conversations, do you trust Karl Rove to not use this material against his political opponents?

Who will Bush go after first? Al Queda or the Quakers? Bin Laden or Cindy Sheehan?

If Bush gets away with this, then it's simple: if you are too outspoken in opposing this regime's destruction of social security, or the natural environment, or the economy, you will sooner or later be subject to torture.

If Bush's phone buggers pick up information or statements taken out of context that can incriminate or make you look bad, Rove will not hesitate to leak them to FOX and use them for partisan purposes.

The Constitution of the United States is absolutely clear about banning these abuses. The patriotic Americans who demanded the Bill of Rights knew these powers must be outlawed to retain any hope of preserving our freedom and democracy. That's why they did so, clearly and explicitly.

Those who support giving Bush these powers are undoubtedly ready and willing to be tortured and bugged themselves.

As for the rest of us, there can be no compromise with tyranny.

Here’s one for the who’s-the-liar file. Bush swears up and down...an old friend used to say “He lies and everybody swears to it.” White House Spokesweasel McClelland's nose has grown almost as long as Bush's....


From Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_8013.shtml
The Rant
Bush often met with, and praised, corrupt lobbyist
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jan 18, 2006, 07:24

Although White House spokesliar Scott McClellan claims lobbyist/crook du jour Jack Abramoff only met with administration staff two or three times, the scandal ridden buyer of influence enjoyed frequent private meetings with President George W. Bush, who referred to Abramoff as “one of this administration’s greatest friends.”

In a town where money buys influence and access, it would have been highly unusual for one of the top fundraisers for the Bush White House to not have had meetings with the President.

McClellan, in a carefully-worded response to reporters Tuesday, said his personal investigation into the matter revealed that Abramoff may have had two “private staff level meetings” at the White House. This is the same Scott McClellan who claimed he investigated the Valerie Plame leak and told reporters that neither Vice President Dick Cheney nor anyone on his staff had any involvement in that scandal. Then Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, got slapped with an indictment for giving the info to the press.

McClellan, as skilled a liar as anyone who has stood before the press and misled reporters on behalf of a President, fails to mention Abramoff’s frequent visits to the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, the private meetings that the lobbyist arranged with the President on the 2004 campaign trail and at the Republican National Convention that year.

White House visitor logs are not public record and the Bush administration keeps separate logs of visitors to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and other locations like Camp David or the President’s home. In addition, logs can – and often are – revised when scandal erupts.

But Abramoff, who raised more than $100,000 for Bush in the last campaign, promised big time donors face time with the President and delivered on those promises during the convention. In addition, he traveled to Bush’s ranch in Texas with his co-conspirator in crime, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

A former DeLay staffer who is cooperating with the investigation into both Abramoff and the disgraced GOP leader’s activities, has told investigators that Abramoff and DeLay visited Bush at his ranch on at least four occasions in 2003 and 2004.

It is common for big money contributors to get personal meetings with the President. At the GOP’s annual Presidential Dinner in Washington, those who pony up at least $25,000 are hustled into a room before the dinner for time and photo ops with the President.

Abramoff kept a photo of himself with Bush, shot at the Crawford ranch, in his office in Washington. The autograph from Bush said “to my great friend Jack.”

Dale Knally, a campaign worker in the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, recalls a meeting between Bush and Abramoff during a campaign stop in Florida.

“He put his arm around Abramoff and told us that ‘this man is one of this administration’s greatest friends,’” Knally recalls. Knally declined a job in the Bush administration and returned to school after the election and remembers some in the campaign privately calling Abramoff a “sleazeball.”

“That campaign taught me that I never wanted anything to do with the Bush administration or politics again,” Knally said. “No matter how many showers I took, I couldn’t wash away the stench.”

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

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When the world seems to be falling apart, on a personal level, or on a cosmic level, we get desperate for answers. It’s a great time for the Guru Business, or the Strongman Trade. It’s clear that George W. is the leading candidate in the field of Strongmen. And it seems to me that he’s not only leading the field, he’s running the country as well.

I want to mention that the blog/elist/website "Truthout" is the cyberspace equivilent of Harper's Magazine. Literate, intelligent, and informative. It's a great place.

The New Fascism
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_011706I.shtml
Tuesday 17 January 2006

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

- Abraham Lincoln

Say "fascism" to anyone you meet, and you will conjure images of coal-scuttle helmets, of Nazi boot-heels clicking in terrible unison down Berlin streets during dark days that only a few remaining among the living remember. Each day, members of the generation that heard those heels for themselves go into the ground, taking with them whispered words of warning. I saw it for myself, they whisper before they pass. See this tattooed number? See this scar? It happened. It was real.

Say "fascism" to anyone you meet, and you will be greeted with the boilerplate response of the blithely overconfident: such a thing cannot happen here. This is the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave. Ours is a nation of laws, of checks and balances, of righteousness and decency. Our laws and traditions stand as a bulwark against the rise of totalitarian madness. It cannot happen here. Thus we are indoctrinated into the school of our own assumed greatness.

"We must disenthrall ourselves," said Abraham Lincoln, and so we must, because it can happen here. It is already happening. All the parroted recitations of grade school civics cannot erase the fact that a new order is rising. Call it "secret fascism" or "smiley-faced fascism." Call it a quiet dictatorship. Call it what you like, but it is here with us in America today, and it is growing.

To be sure, there are no coal-scuttle helmets lined in ranks down our broad avenues, no Tonton Macoute savaging dissidents, no Khmer Rouge slaughtering intellectuals and herding citizens from cities to die by the millions on roads littered with skulls. The core strength of our new fascism is that it speaks softly. It does not present itself in such an obvious way that those who subsist on the dogmas of our greatness can point and say there, there it is, I see it.

This new fascism is not fed only by lies, though to be sure the lies are there in preposterous abundance. This new fascism is fed by myths, our myths, the myths by which we rock ourselves to sleep. This new fascism is in truth an elemental fascism, reborn today by a confluence of events; the diligent work of the few, in combination with the passivity of the many, have brought forth this new order.

The writer Umberto Eco, in a 1995 essay titled "Ur-Fascism," delineated several core elements that have existed in one form or another in every fascist state in history: "Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader. Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect. The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies. Argument is tantamount to treason. Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."

Take these one at a time.

"Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader."

George W. Bush has all but gelded Congress in recent months, attaching so-called "signing statements" to a variety of laws, which state that the president may act beyond the laws whenever he so chooses. The United States, fashioned as a republic, has as its voice the congressional body. This is all but finished. To cement his victory over the parliamentary system, Bush has put forth one Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, a man who believes in the ultimate power of the one leader over the many. The gelded congress does not appear able to keep this man from the high court, thus rendering the balancing branches of government into a satellite system of the Executive.

"Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect."

The supremacy of religious fundamentalism within and without government carries this banner before all others. What is reason in the face of the zealot's faith? Science has become a watered-down vessel for Intelligent Design, and the incontrovertible truths of empirical data are slapped aside. Spencer Tracy, in the film "Inherit the Wind," bellows the warning here: "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of that sixteenth century, when bigots burned the man who dared to bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind."

"The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies."

This has been with us for generations now. Our nation defined ourselves through a comparison to the Nazis, to the Imperial Japanese, and then through decades of comparison to Communism. Terrorism has supplanted all of these, hammered into place on a Tuesday in September by the actions of madmen. We are not them, all is justified in the struggle against them, and so we are defined.

"Argument is tantamount to treason."

All one need do to see this in action is spend some hours with the Fox News channel. Freedom fries. Why do you hate America? You are with us or you are with the terrorists. Watch what you say.

"Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear."

The manipulation of this population by fear has been ham-fisted, to be sure, but has also been cruelly effective. We do not want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud. Weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda in Iraq. Nuclear designs in Iran. Plastic sheeting and duct tape. Orange alert. Argument becomes tantamount to treason simply because everyone has been made to feel fear at all times. A frightened populace is easily governed, and governs itself; this lesson was well-learned in the duck-and-cover days of the Cold War. Those lessons have been masterfully applied once again. Today, the citizenry polices itself, and the herd moves as one body. Even the surveillance of innocent citizens by the state is brushed off as a necessary evil. Remember: you are being watched.

"Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."

Once, we lived by the glorious simplicity of the vote. Casting a ballot was the single most patriotic duty a citizen could perform, an affirmation of all we held dear and true. Today, we live in the nation of the vanishing voter. Power has been so far removed from the people by those with money and influence that most see voting as a waste of time. Add to this the growing control of the implements of voting and vote-counting by partisan corporations, and the rule of We the People is left in ashes.

We must disenthrall ourselves from the idea that our institutions, our traditions, the barriers that protect us from absolute and authoritarian powers, cannot be broken down. They are being dismantled a brick at a time. The separation of powers has already been annihilated. It is a whispered fascism, not yet marching down your street or pounding upon your door in the dead of night. But it is here, and it is laying deep roots. We must listen beyond the whispered fascism of today to the shouted fascism of tomorrow. We must look beyond the lies and the myths, beyond the dogmas by which we sleep.

Criticism of the war is criticism of the president is criticism of the troops is helping the enemy—or at least that’s what Bush wants us to believe. It’s obviously bullshit: it’s a standard pile of bull droppings that gets dragged out in every unpopular foreign adventure. I remember it from Viet Nam. Panama. Grenada. What worries me isn’t the basic untruth, so much, as the fact that Bush believes it with all his heart. He is the army, he is the country, and if you aren’t with me, you’re against America. Almost sounds...oh...you know, Nazi...fascist. It sounds fascist because it is fascist.

Bush ran out on his military commitment. Now he’s identifying himself with the military. That may well be because he’d counting on the military to maintain him in office, should the Democrats and the courts actually line up against him. Would he do that? He might not have thought of the idea, but he’s got Cheney right beside him, and I wouldn’t put anything past Cheney.


Hiding Behind The Troops
David Corn
January 18, 2006
http://www.tompaine.com/print/hiding_behind_the_troops.php
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.

When the CIA tried to hit Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's No. 2, with a missile fired from a Predator drone and ended up killing more than a dozen civilians as well as four or so people later identified as "foreign terrorists" in a Pakistani village near the border of Afghanistan, that was dumb. When George W. Bush did not quickly apologize, offer compensation to the victims and announce there would be an immediate investigation, that was also dumb. For with this strike, the Bush administration essentially aided the enemy, who now can point to this episode as proof that Bush does not give a damn about innocent Muslim lives (which is what many people in the Arab world already suspect).

And this botched operation has severely undermined the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revealing how Bush treats his friends and allies in the war of terrorism. Moreover, actions like this can lead one to wonder if Bush really means it when he says—as he has frequently—"We believe in the dignity of every human life." If that were indeed the case, then wouldn't he be all broken up over the Pakistani civilians blown to pieces by the CIA missile? Hunting mass-murdering terrorists who live among civilians is indeed hard and nasty work, which most people find morally justifiable. ("We have to do what we think is necessary," John McCain declared on Sunday.) Then let's be frank. Those who are willing to target a neighborhood in a far-away village—hoping to kill a terrorist but knowing that innocent human beings may well also be smashed to bits—do not really believe in the dignity of every human life. They are willing to trade certain lives (of nameless people who happen to be villagers in a remote spot) for the results they seek. The cost-benefit analysis may be defensible; in all wars, non-combatants are killed. But please, let's not kid ourselves. Bush and his commanders in the war on terrorism are willing to waste non-terrorists to kill terrorists. Right or wrong, that is not caring about the dignity of every life.

Now by writing this, I hope I am not violating Bush's standards for acceptable debate. After years of ignoring or deflecting criticism of his actions in Iraq and of his conduct of the so-called war on terrorism, Bush in recent months has taken a different tack. He has admitted mistakes were made—by others, not him—regarding the WMD intelligence. (This can be categorized as a Doh!-like concession.) And he has said that criticism of him is not out of bounds, as long as it's the right sort of criticism and doesn't, for instance, raise questions about his motives.

Last week, speaking at a Veterans of Foreign War convention, Bush made this point once again—and the next day added an electoral twist. Before the supportive crowd, he said:

We must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate—and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas. The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

I recall there were plenty of Bush supporters who never missed the chance to question Bill Clinton's motives whenever he fired a shot overseas. Remember the real-life claims of Wag the Dog ? GOP opportunism notwithstanding, what's wrong with questioning Bush's motives or arguing the case that he misled the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq? It's understandable that Bush himself may not enjoy such criticism. But he's not king—at least not yet, despite all the legal memos written by his Justice Department and counsel's office claiming that he can do anything he wants to and avoid (that is, break) any law while he is pursuing his commander-in-chief duties in the war on terrorism. (See the memo, "The Unitary Executive and Finding Big Brother (Implied) in the U.S. Constitution.") And recent polls have indicated that more than half of Americans believe that Bush deliberately overstated the threat from Iraq prior to the war. His motives are already under suspicion. Perhaps the American people, as Bush suggests, do know the difference between responsible and irresponsible rhetoric.

But apparently he doesn't want them to talk about it. Before the VFWers, he went on:

When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. In a time of war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail. And we have a responsibility to our men and women in uniform—who deserve to know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm's way, our support will be with them in good days and in bad days—and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory.

Note the sleight of hand. Accusing Bush of misleading the nation on the reasons for war is, he says, equal to questioning the mission. In a sense, he might be right about that. It certainly is saying that the cause for which Bush has sent American men and women to the death is not what Bush claimed it to be. But here he is trying to hide behind the troops. Attack me, and you're undermining them. It's cowardly. But it sure is in sync with his l'etat-est-moi view. In this case, it's l'armee-est-moi . This is not the only spin option available to Commander Bush. He could have as easily said:

"I know there are folks out there saying mean things about me and my decision to invade Iraq. Well, fire away. I'm fair game. I can take it. But whatever anyone thinks of me and the war, I know we all agree that we should do whatever can for the troops—and that even my critics are with me on that."

That might be how a uniter-not-a-divider would put it. But not Bush. Speaking the next day in Louisville, Ky., he was asked by a seven-year-old, "How can people help on the war on terror?" Bush replied,

One way people can help as we're coming down the pike in the 2006 elections, is remember the effect that rhetoric can have on our troops in harm's way, and the effect that rhetoric can have in emboldening or weakening an enemy.

So if the war in Iraq becomes an issue in this year's congressional elections, the White House is all set to point an accusatory finger and scold, "Partisan lips sink ships." It's their counterattack, and Bush has started test-driving it-in a pre-emptive fashion. Four years ago, as I wrote about recently , Bush campaigned for GOP candidates and claimed that Democrats were "not interested in the security of the American people." Nowadays, the president is suggesting that he would view similarly harsh rhetoric directed toward him (as opposed to the Democrats) as an attack on "the mission" and a threat to the troops. I might consider suggesting that rank hypocrisy is at work and that only not-to-be-trusted scoundrels shield their political backsides with the troops. But I don't want to embolden the enemy.

Well, obviously, what used to be America needs more and more secret police to handle all this data, right? That’ll be in the next budget proposal.

Robert Mueller, then head of the Feebs, worried, apparently, that eavesdropping without warrants might—just might—intrude upon constitutionally protected rights of citizens. However, as the article says, he “deferred” to Justice [sic] Department legal opinions. He was just following orders...

Spy Agency Data after Sept. 11 Led FBI to Dead Ends
By Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta Jr.
The New York Times

Tuesday 17 January 2006

Washington - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

As the bureau was running down those leads, its director, Robert S. Mueller III, raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants, one government official said. Mr. Mueller asked senior administration officials about "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but deferred to Justice Department legal opinions, the official said.

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

***
The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.

Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through prisoner interrogations or other means.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration pressed the nation's intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. to move urgently to thwart any more plots. The N.S.A., whose mission is to spy overseas, began monitoring the international e-mail messages and phone calls of people inside the United States who were linked, even indirectly, to suspected Qaeda figures.

Under a presidential order, the agency conducted the domestic eavesdropping without seeking the warrants ordinarily required from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which handles national security matters. The administration has defended the legality of the program, pointing to what it says is the president's inherent constitutional power to defend the country and to legislation passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Administration officials told Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, of the eavesdropping program, and his agency was enlisted to run down leads from it, several current and former officials said.

While he and some bureau officials discussed the fact that the program bypassed the intelligence surveillance court, Mr. Mueller expressed no concerns about that to them, those officials said. But another government official said Mr. Mueller had questioned the administration about the legal authority for the program.

Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.

F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."

In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

The views of some bureau officials about the value of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance offers a revealing glimpse of the difficulties law enforcement and intelligence agencies have had cooperating since Sept. 11.

The N.S.A., criticized by the national Sept. 11 commission for its "avoidance of anything domestic" before the attacks, moved aggressively into the domestic realm after them. But the legal debate over its warrantless eavesdropping has embroiled the agency in just the kind of controversy its secretive managers abhor. The F.B.I., meanwhile, has struggled over the last four years to expand its traditional mission of criminal investigation to meet the larger menace of terrorism.

***
By the administration's account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

But as in the London fertilizer bomb case, some officials with direct knowledge of the Faris case dispute that the N.S.A. information played a significant role.

By contrast, different officials agree that the N.S.A.'s domestic operations played a role in the arrest in Albany of an imam and another man who were taken into custody in August 2004 as part of an F.B.I. counterterrorism sting investigation. The men, Yassin Aref, 35, and Mohammed Hossain, 49, are awaiting trial on charges that they attempted to engineer the sale of missile launchers to an F.B.I. undercover informant.

In addition, government officials said the N.S.A. eavesdropping program might have assisted in the investigations of people with suspected Qaeda ties in Portland and Minneapolis. In the Minneapolis case, charges of supporting terrorism were filed in 2004 against Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen. Six people in the Portland case were convicted of crimes that included money laundering and conspiracy to wage war against the United States.

Even senior administration officials with access to classified operations suggest that drawing a clear link between a particular source and the unmasking of a potential terrorist is not always possible.

When Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was asked last week on "The Charlie Rose Show" whether the N.S.A. wiretapping program was important in deterring terrorism, he said, "I don't know that it's ever possible to attribute one strand of intelligence from a particular program."

But Mr. Chertoff added, "I can tell you in general, the process of doing whatever you can do technologically to find out what is being said by a known terrorist to other people, and who that person is communicating with, that is without a doubt one of the critical tools we've used time and again."

--------

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York for this article.

This is The Big Fear, of course. Yes, it sounds like something the government would do to the country—at least certain members of the government. It’s hard to imagine Dubya being creative enough to take such an action, but I believe Cheney and Rumsfeld and Gonzales would go along with it, assuming they didn’t instigate it. Hell, I don’t think Bush is really in charge, anyhow.

The hints are out there: “You’re for us or for the terrorists,” it’s unpatriotic to disagree with national policy, and other warnings have been made, repeatedly. The way Blackwater and the military behaved in New Orleans was shocking. It may have been a practice run for things to come... There’s no doubt the administration believes it has the power to take over. Hail, Glorious Leader!


From Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_7986.shtml
The Rant
Bush could seize absolute control of U.S. government
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jan 13, 2006, 07:42

President George W. Bush has signed executive orders giving him sole authority to impose martial law, suspend habeas corpus and ignore the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits deployment of U.S. troops on American streets. This would give him absolute dictatorial power over the government with no checks and balances.

Bush discussed imposing martial law on American streets in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by activating “national security initiatives” put in place by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.

These “national security initiatives," hatched in 1982 by controversial Marine Colonel Oliver North, later one of the key players in the Iran-Contra Scandal, charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency with administering executive orders that allowed suspension of the Constitution, implementation of martial law, establishment of internment camps, and the turning the government over to the President.

John Brinkerhoff, deputy director of FEMA, developed the martial law implementation plan, following a template originally developed by former FEMA director Louis Guiffrida to battle a “national uprising of black militants.” Gifuffrida’s implementation of martial law called for jailing at least 21 million African Americans in “relocation camps.” Brinkerhoff later admitted in an interview with the Miami Herald that President Reagan signed off on the initiatives and they remained in place, dormant, until George W. Bush took office.

Brinkerhoff moved on the Anser Institute for Homeland Security and, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, provided the Bush White House and the Pentagon with talking points supporting revised “national security initiatives” that would could allow imposition of martial law and suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the law that is supposed to forbid use of troops for domestic law enforcement.

Brinkerhoff wrote that intentions of Posse Comitatus are “misunderstood and misapplied” and that the U.S. has in times of national emergency the “full and absolute authority” to send troops into American streets to “enforce order and maintain the peace.”

Bush used parts of the plan to send troops into the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. In addition, FEMA hired former special forces personnel from the mercenary firm Blackwater USA to “enforce security.”

Blackwater USA, in its promotional materials, describes itself as “the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world,” adding that “we have established a global presence and provide training and operational solutions for the 21st century in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Blackwater is also a major U.S. contractor in Iraq and has a contract with the Bush White House to provide additional security work “on an as-needed basis.”

The Department of Homeland Security established the “Northern Command for National Defense,” a wide-ranging program that includes FEMA, the Pentagon, the FBI and the National Security Agency. Executive orders already signed by Bush allow the Northern Command to send troops into American streets, seize control of radio and television stations and networks and impose martial law “in times of national emergency.”

The authority to declare what is or is not a national emergency rests entirely with Bush who does not have to either consult or seek the approval of Congress for permission to assume absolute control over the government of the United States.

The White House press office would neither confirm nor deny existence of Bush’s executive orders or the existence of the Northern Command for National Defense. Neither would the Department of Homeland Security.

But my sources within the White House and DHS tell me the plans are in place, ready for implementation when the command comes from the man who keeps telling the American public that he is a “war time president” who will “do anything in my power” to impose his will on the people of the United States.

And he has made sure that power will be absolute when he chooses to use it.

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

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So the United States has the right to go bomb one of its allies? Excuse me? This is a clear violation of territory that has the right not to be bombed. Isn’t that clear? Pakistan is a reasonably sovereign nation.

If an extremely wanted Mexican guerilla, say, was thought to be hiding in some little town in southern New Mexico, and the Mexican air force bombed the village, what would the US do? Right, the nation would throw a fit. What the hell right would Mexico have to bomb US land? We did the same thing to Pakistan. It’s a violation of international law.

Senators Defend Air strikes in Pakistan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5547813,00.html
Sunday January 15, 2006 7:02 PM

By NEDRA PICKLER

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senators defended on Sunday a purported CIA airstrike that Pakistani officials said killed at least 17 people in a village near the border with Afghanistan but not the intended target, al-Qaida's No. 2 leader.

``We apologize, but I can't tell you that we wouldn't do the same thing again'' in going after Ayman al-Zawahri, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

McCain said it is a ``cautionary tale'' about the fate of the terrorist network's leaders that the U.S. ``didn't take them out year ago.'' He said the United States must hunt them down wherever they are hiding.

``We have to do what we think is necessary to take out al-Qaida, particularly the top operatives. This guy has been more visible than Osama bin Laden lately,'' McCain said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''

A U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information's sensitivity, said it's still unclear if al-Zawahri was killed in the attack.

Pakistani officials have strongly condemned the strike. The White House declined to comment on the attacks on Sunday, except to praise President Gen. Pervez Musharraf as well as Pakistan as ``a valued ally on the war on terror.'' Officials at several U.S. agencies have not immediately provided details about the attack.

The FBI anticipates performing DNA tests on the victims, a law enforcement official said Saturday.

Islamic groups staged demonstrations across Pakistan on Sunday to denounce the attack. A protest in Karachi drew 10,000 people, and chants of ``Death to America'' were heard.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., said the real problem is that the U.S.-allied Pakistani government does not control the region along the mountainous border with Afghanistan, where the attack occurred. Many al-Qaida and Taliban combatants are believed to have taken refuge there.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost a good friend. I’ve lost a lot of good friends in the last few years: Jim Squires, an old pal, my son Jasper, another good friend, Michael Two Horses, one of my oldest and closest friends, Tony Berrocoso, and now JV. Well, we’ll eventually all see each other again. I hope. No proof, just hope.
Thanks to Deb for this obit.

James Vance Henry 1941-2005

By Deborah Moran

James Vance Henry, Esq. passed away on December 23, 2005 in
Grass Valley, California. He led an eventful life.

JV was born in Asheville, North Carolina on October 12, 1941. He
once
said that his mother told him she believed his involvement in the Civil
Rights Movement stemmed from an incident that happened when he was three.
They were standing in line to use a drinking fountain, and JV wanted to know

why he couldn't use the drinking fountain that no one was using. His mother

tried to explain that the unused drinking fountain was for "Colored" people,

and he could not understand that. His sister, Elizabeth Henry Laisy, said
that to JV, equal meant equal.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where JV
earned a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry, he became involved in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a Field Organizer. He
became active in the Chapel Hill Freedom Movement. He went to jail more than

once for his beliefs, on one occasion landing on the chain gang in
Greensboro, NC.

His friend Hunter Gray, than known as John Salter, enlisted two of
his
friends, attorneys William Kuntsler and Arthur Kinoy, to get JV out.
JV continued in his civil rights field work, repeatedly facing
life-threatening situations, fairly common for those times. But he kept on
because he knew he was doing the right things for the right
reasons. JV later said that Hunter Gray was a major reason he received a
scholarship to Howard University Law School, in Washington,DC.

Because Howard is a known as a Black college, his father opposed JV
going there. His father went so far as to say that if JV accepted the
scholarship, he would be disowned. JV went to Howard. He became the editor
of the Howard Law Journal.

After graduation, JV went to Fresno, California, where he set up a
law
practice in 1968. He worked with migrant workers, unions and peace
activists, once winning a landmark ruling involving the right of anti-war
activists to put up a placard on a public bus. He defended two Chukchansi
men who had gotten into trouble for fighting with some members of the KKK.
"We were guilty of the charge of fighting," recalled Harold Hammond, one of
the two defendants, "but because of the entire situation and the way JV
presented it as it should be presented, we went free. I've never forgotten
JV Henry."

He was active in the National Lawyers Guild, forming a chapter in
Fresno, with Howard Watkins. He set up seminars for low income people on
landlord-tenant issues. He taught courses at San Joaquin College, where he
was once voted Best Teacher of the Year for his class on Conflict of Laws.
One of his friends said that he was by far the most intellectually
invigorating teacher there.

In 1976, he told me, he was on top of the world. He had a home, a
wife, a law practice. He was a judge pro-tem and there was talk of him
running for judge. In 1977 it was all gone. He walked away from his law
practice, as he could no longer work in a system he viewed as corrupt and
full of liars. He was unwilling to play the political games any longer.

After leaving his law practice, he became involved with Earth First.
He did "monkeywrenching". There are many people who believe that he was a
major force in stopping a hydroelectric project near Fresno. He did
community organizing, working with migrant workers in the Yakima Valley. He
worked on Indian rights issues in California, and fought with the
Sandinistas in Mexico. He also became a heavy user of drugs and alcohol.

April 23, 1995, JV walked into his first meeting of Alcoholics
Anonymous. He was so shaky that they would not let him have a full cup of
coffee, nor let him pour coffee. He stayed. At his death, he was still
drug and alcohol free. Becoming sober, he discovered a new kind of activism.

He became an internet activist.

When the Makah Nation decided to exercise their treaty rights to
hunt whales, many people went after the Makah people, using racism and other
ugly tactics. JV went all out, exposing their lies, their racism and their
hypocrisy. He gained enemies as well as friends. But again, he was doing
what he perceived as right.

In 2004, one of the enemies of the Makah campaigned to become
Executive Director of the national Sierra Club. Running with
neoconservative republicans, rightwing Christians, anti-immigration plebes,
and other elements of the right, "Captain" Paul Watson set out to take over
the Sierra Club in order to kill the most powerful voice for environmental
protection in America. JV went to war. He became a Sierra Club member, and
conveyed his entire dossier of Watson's lies, racism, demagoguery, civil and

criminal acts, and naked self-aggrandizement to national Sierra Club
leaders. Armed with JV's information, Club leaders let the voting
membership know what Watson really was. Watson was defeated; so was the
anti-immigration ballot measure with which he ran. In April 2004, after
the Board meeting, a Sierra Club Board member wrote "Thank you, JV, for all
your solid assistance. Early signs are that the Captain is apopleptic."

In 2005, JV researched peak oil and the intriguing question of
where half a million barrels of oil in the global oil market were coming
from. He concluded they must be coming from inner Asia - the `stans, as
they are called - by way of Iran. He figured that Halliburton was somehow
circumventing law and regulation, and getting oil out of Iran. He was
frustrated by his inability to prove it or investigate the case past a
fascinating captivity with statistical anomalies.

JV is survived by his sister, Beth, her two daughters, and his
cousin,
Becky, of North Carolina, his adopted Chukchansi family, the Hammonds, and
many, many friends.

Besides his activism, JV enjoyed hunting, camping, hiking, and
making his own moccasins He played chess. He enjoyed the company of friends.

He loved South Park. But most of all, he loved to read. So it seems
particularly fitting that he walked away from this life at the public
library in Grass Valley, California.

The headline on the following essay from the LA Times is a little annoying, because it defines certain aspects of our personalities as “weaknesses,” and I believe that loads the dice in an unfair way. We just are, strong-weak, up-down-negative-positive, and putting value-heavy nouns on some parts of us and value-up nouns on others doesn’t really help us with the major problem, self-acceptance.

However, the essay points out just how many values are routinely dumped on us by both the psychiatric and the drug manufacturers. People sometimes feel up and they sometimes feel down: life moves like a sine wave, not a flat line, not a series of lightning bolts. But what’s happened is that so many of the down times are now seen as being pathological that more and more people are defining themselves as being pathological. That means, of course, more business for the shrinks and greater sales for the pharm companies.

All this also means that people end up taking less and less responsibility for their lives and actions and come to depend on "experts" to tell them how to live—and, ultimately, how to think. We don't need any more Dr Phil-types.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/editorials/la-op-psych1jan01,0,1868753.story
From the Los Angeles Times
HOW WE LIVE
Psychiatry's sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into diseases
By Irwin Savodnik
Irwin Savodnik is a psychiatrist and philosopher who teaches at UCLA.

January 1, 2006

IT'S JAN. 1. Past time to get your inoculation against seasonal affective disorder, or SAD — at least according to the American Psychiatric Assn. As Americans rush to return Christmas junk, bumping into each other in Macy's and Best Buy, the psychiatric association ponders its latest iteration of feeling bad for the holidays. And what is the association selling? Mental illness. With its panoply of major depression, dysthymic disorder, bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, the association is waving its Calvinist flag to remind everyone that amid all the celebration, all the festivities, all the exuberance, many people will "come down with" or "contract" or "develop" some variation of depressive illness.

The association specializes in turning ordinary human frailty into disease. In the last year, ads have been appearing in psychiatric journals about possible treatments for shyness, a "syndrome" not yet officially recognized as a disease. You can bet it will be in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV, published by the association. As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so. The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages, by my count. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340% increase in the number of diseases over 42 years.

Nowhere in the rest of medicine has such a proliferation of categories occurred. The reason for this difference between psychiatry and other medical specialties has more to do with ideology than with science. A brief peek at both areas makes this point clear. All medicine rests on the premise that disease is a manifestation of diseased tissue. Hepatitis comes down to an inflamed liver, while lung tissue infiltrated with pneumococcus causes pneumonia. Every medical student learns this principle. Where, though, is the diseased tissue in psychopathological conditions?

Unlike the rest of medicine, psychiatry diagnoses behavior that society doesn't like. Yesterday it was homosexuality. Tomorrow it will be homophobia. Someone who declares himself the messiah, who insists that fluorescent lights talk to him or declares that she's the Virgin Mary, is an example of such behavior. Such people are deemed — labeled, really — sick by psychiatrists, and often they are taken off to hospitals against their will. The "diagnosis" of such "pathological behavior" is based on social, political or aesthetic values.

This is confusing. Behavior cannot be pathological (or healthy, for that matter). It can simply comport with, or not comport with, our nonmedical expectations of how people should behave. Analogously, brains that produce weird or obnoxious behaviors are not diseased. They are brains that produce atypical behaviors (which could include such eccentricities as dyed hair or multiple piercings or tattoos that nobody in their right mind could find attractive).

Lest one think that such a view is the rant of a Scientologist, it is no such thing. Scientology offers polemic to lull the faithful into belief. Doctors and philosophers offer argument to provoke debate.

It's a natural step from using social and political standards to create a psychiatric diagnosis to using them to influence public policy. Historically, that influence has appeared most dramatically in the insanity defense. Remember Dan White, the man who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978? Or John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan in 1981? Or Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon? White, whose psychiatrist came up with the "Twinkie defense" — the high sugar content of White's favorite junk food may have fueled his murderous impulses — was convicted and paroled after serving five years, only to commit suicide a year later.

The erosion of personal responsibility is, arguably, the most pernicious effect of the expansive role psychiatry has come to play in American life. It has successfully replaced huge chunks of individual accountability with diagnoses, clinical histories and what turn out to be pseudoscientific explanations for deviant behavior.

Pathology has replaced morality. Treatment has supplanted punishment. Imprisonment is now hospitalization. From the moral self-castigation we find in the writings of John Adams, we have been drawn to Woody Allen-style neuroses. Were the psychiatric association to scrutinize itself more deeply and reconsider its expansionist diagnostic programs, it would, hopefully, make a positive contribution to our culture by not turning the good and bad into the healthy and the sick.

The last thing the United States needs is more self-indulgent, pseudo-insightful, overly self-conscious babble about people who can't help themselves. Better, as Voltaire would put it, to cultivate our gardens and be accountable for who and what we are.



Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times |

I guess this is the topper in the life-imitating-satire-department. I haven’t spent a lot of time watching the confirmation “hearings” (like the trials Stalin put on that we called “show trials,” the outcome is a foregone conclusion). I’m continually surprised that people still expect the Democrats to stand up to the Republicans. If they did, they might not be friends anymore. They might not speak to each other after cocktails at the country club.

Alito says presidents can violate law
'It would be a rare instance,' he says
http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktrack/print.php?referer=http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0113alito-domestic-spying13.html
Stewart M. Powell
Hearst Newspapers
Jan. 13, 2006 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, pressed on President Bush's controversial domestic spying policy, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that a president has the constitutional authority on "very rare" occasions to violate federal law.

Alito responded to questions from Senate Democrats about Bush's decision to order secret domestic surveillance without getting the approval of a special court that Congress and President Jimmy Carter set up in 1978 to curb abuses by intelligence agencies.

Alito appeared receptive to Bush administration claims that a president has the authority as commander in chief under the Constitution to embark on a domestic surveillance program without getting approval of the court, as required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Citing Bush's claim that the Constitution hands a president wide leeway to protect the country in time of war, Alito said: "I think it follows from the structure of our Constitution that the Constitution trumps a statute."

Alito added: "It would be a rare instance in which it would be justifiable for the president or any member of the executive branch not to abide by a statute passed by Congress. It would be a very rare example."

Bush has defended the super-secret program run by the National Security Agency by claiming the government was trying to eavesdrop on Americans and foreigners in the United States who were receiving telephone calls and e-mails from suspected al-Qaida operatives overseas.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said FISA gives presidents wide flexibility to spy on terror suspects inside the United States with approval by the special 11-member court. The FISA statute grants presidents emergency authority to spy on suspects for up to 72 hours before obtaining a court order.

The law makes violations a felony, subject to imprisonment and fines.

If Congress has "explicit authority under the Constitution to pass a law, and we pass that law, is the president bound by that law or does his plenary authority supersede that law?" Feinstein asked Alito.

"The president, like everybody else, is bound by statutes that are enacted by Congress," Alito said.

But he said a president could violate a statute "if statutes are unconstitutional because the Constitution takes precedence over a statute."

Sometimes, it’s as if we live in a very awful comedy on TV, some Saturday Night Live sketch about the inanity of modern life. The Pentagon appears to be writing the script and is working on the laugh track. We should all laugh more: particularly the families of those in the military. IEDs for a giggle, white phosphorous for a good belly laugh. I suspected for some time that Don Rumsfeld has slipped a couple of cogs; this scam—excuse me, plan, indicates that he’s way around the bend.

Anyone remember the old "Fixin' To Die Rag" by Country Joe and The Fish? —"be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box..." Ha-ha-hah?


USA TODAY

Pentagon to families: Go ahead, laugh
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY

When the stress of the war in Iraq becomes too severe, the Pentagon has a suggestion for military families: Learn how to laugh.

With help from the Pentagon's chief laughter instructor, families of National Guard members are learning to walk like a penguin, laugh like a lion and blurt "ha, ha, hee, hee and ho, ho."

No joke.

"I laugh every chance I get," says the instructor, retired Army colonel James "Scotty" Scott. "That's why I'm blessed to be at the Pentagon, where we definitely need a lot of laughter in our lives."

Scott, 57, is certified as a laughter training specialist by the Ohio-based World Laughter Tour, a group that promotes mirth as medicine. It touts scientific research that suggests chuckling can boost the body's immune system and decrease stress hormones.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, says the Pentagon is committed to the program and values Scott's skills. "We sent him to the training," she says.

The laughter program was Scott's idea. It costs the military virtually nothing, because Scott already travels to states as a director of military family support policy.
KEEPING THEM IN STITCHES
Ways military families are being taught to laugh:

Penguin exercise: Waddle and flap hands as though they're fins.

Lion laugh: Open eyes and mouth wide while repeating "ha ha's."

Repeat "ho, ho, ha, ha, ha," while clapping on each sound.

He has taught National Guard family group leaders in Alaska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Idaho, and will do so in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida, he says. Another laughter trainer is working with folks in North Carolina.

"We believe our program prevents hardening of the attitudes," says Scott, in one of his wordplay aphorisms that beg for a rimshot. The founder and chief executive of the World Laughter Tour is psychologist Steve Wilson, who calls himself "Cheerman of the Bored."

"The guiding principle is to laugh for no reason. And that's one of the reasons it works so well for military families," Scott says. "There's a lot they have to be stressed over, a lot of worries, a lot of concerns."

As foolish as students might feel, Scott says he's lost only one participant: a Marine sergeant major who, Scott says, fled the room with a bad case of the giggles.

Mary Frances Booth, the wife of a retired soldier, took the class last year and is an ardent devotee.

She and her two daughters — Meaghan, 10 and Sarah, 8 — were sobbing after Booth dropped her husband at the Boise airport Sunday; he was headed for Afghanistan for work as a civilian contractor, she says. Then Booth called for one of the laughing drills.

"They rolled their eyes at me and thought, 'Mom's on her laughing thing again,' " Booth says. "(But) it made it a little bit better."

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-01-12-pentagon-laughter_x.htm

Forty years ago, I read Clancy Sigal’s “Going Away,” a memoir that I thought caught the essence of the disease that had swept this country. I haven’t read it since then, but parts of it are as alive in my mind as, say, seeing a lovely hippie girl naked in Golden Gate Park.

For my money, Clancy Sigal is one of the best living American writers. He deserves more recognition.

January 12, 2006
He Broke Ranks; He Did the Right Thing
Hugh Thompson and My Lai
http://counterpunch.org/
By CLANCY SIGAL

There is an Ugly American, a Quiet American and then there's Hugh Thompson, the Army helicopter pilot who, with his two younger crew mates, was on a mission to draw enemy fire over the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March, 1968. Hovering over a paddy field, they watched a platoon of American soldiers led by Lt. William Calley, deliberately shoot unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mainly women and children, cowering in muddy ditches. Thompson landed his craft and appealed to the soldiers, and to Calley, to stop the killings. Calley told Thompson to mind his own business.

Thompson took off but then one of his crew shouted that the shooting had begun again. According to his later testimony, Thompson was uncertain what to do. Americans murdering innocent bystanders was hard for him to process. But when he saw Vietnamese survivors chased by soldiers, he landed his chopper between the villagers and troopers, and ordered his crew to fire at any American soldiers shooting at civilians. Then he got on the radio and begged U.S. gunships above him to rescue those villagers he could not cram into his own craft.

On returning to base, Thompson, almost incoherent with rage, immediately reported the massacre to superiors, who did nothing, until months later when the My Lai story leaked to the public. The eyewitness testimony of Thompson and his surviving crew member helped convict Calley at a court-martial. But when he returned to his Stateside home in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Thompson received death threats and insults, while Calley was pardoned by President Nixon. Indeed, for a time, Thompson himself feared court-martial. Reluctantly, the massacre was investigated by then-major Colin Powell, of the Americal Division, who reported relations between U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese civilians as "excellent"; Powell's whitewash was the foundation of his meteoric rise through the ranks.

Hugh Thompson died last week, age sixty two. Thirty years after My Lai, he, and his gunner Lawrence Colburn, had received the Soldiers Medal, as did the third crew member, Glenn Andreotta, who was killed in combat. "Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come," Thompson wryly observed at the ceremony.

Something stuck in my head when I learned of Thompson's death. "There was no thinking about it," he said before his death. "There was something that had to be done, and it had to be done fast."

Words similar to these are often used by combat heroes to describe incredible feats of courage under fire. With one possible difference. According to the record, Thompson did have time to think about it as he took off from My Lai, hovered and tried to wrap his mind around the horror below. Then he made a conscious decision to save lives. Some of the Vietnamese he rescued, children then, are alive today.

Ex-chief warrant officer Thompson is a member of a small, elite corps of Americans who have broken ranks and refused to run with the herd. They include Army specialist Joseph Darby, of the 372d Military Police Company, who reported on his fellow soldiers who were torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. His family has received threats to their personal safety in their Maryland hometown. And Captain Ian Fishback, the 82d Airborne West Pointer, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tried vainly for seventeen months to persuade superiors that detainee torture was a systematic, and not a 'few bad apples', problem inside the U.S. military. In frustration, he wrote to Senator McCain, which led directly to McCain's anti-torture amendment. I wouldn't want to bet on the longevity of Captain Fishback's military career.

Thompson's death also reminded me of Captain Lawrence Rockwood, of the 10th Mountain Division. Ten years ago, Rockwood was deployed to Haiti where, against orders, he personally investigated detainee abuse at the National Penitentiary in the heart of Port au Prince. He was court-martialed for criticizing the U.S. military's refusal to intervene, and kicked out of the Army. While still on duty, he kept a photograph on his desk of a man he greatly admired. It was of Captain Hugh Thompson.

Some of my friends get so angry at the Bush White House, and so despairing, that they slip into a mindset where Americans - the great 'Them' out there - are lumped into a solid bloc of malign ignoramuses. They forget that this country is also made up of people like Hugh Thompson, Joe Darby, Ian Fishback and Lawrence Rockwood - outside and inside the military.

Clancy Sigal's Zone of The Interior, is finally being published in the UK, by Pomona at £9.99. Sigal can be reached at clancy@jsasoc.com.

Anyone who’s seen a doctor lately, or who’s had to pay for some prescriptions knows about this. Yet our health care isn’t all that good. I talked to a woman who works as a checker in a (huge) chain grocery store: she depends on the local “Volunteers In Medicine” clinic. That clinic doesn’t charge; their waiting list for appointments is about six months.

Tell me, again, how much America is spending each day in Iraq?


Record Share Of Economy Spent on Health Care
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/09/AR2006010901932_pf.html
By Marc Kaufman and Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 10, 2006; A01

Rising health care costs, already threatening many basic industries, now consume 16 percent of the nation's economic output -- the highest proportion ever, the government said yesterday in its latest calculation.

The nation's health care bill continued to grow substantially faster than inflation and wages, increasing by almost 8 percent in 2004, the most recent year with near-final numbers.

Spending for physicians and hospitals shot up considerably faster than in recent years, while drug costs grew at a slower rate than over the past decade.

Even as health care costs continue to escalate, however, many Americans -- especially minorities and the poor -- still do not receive high-quality care, according to two other federal reports yesterday. The quality of health care is improving slowly and some racial disparities are narrowing, the reports found, but gaps persist and Hispanics appear to be falling even further behind.

"We can do better," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said at a Washington conference on racial and ethnic disparities in health care. "Disparities and inequities still exist. Outcomes vary. Treatments are not received equally."

Political, medical and economic leaders and experts have long warned that health care cost trends will gradually overwhelm the economy, and many companies now complain that employee and retiree health costs are making them less competitive. Yesterday's report added new reasons to worry.

The overall cost of health care -- everything from hospital and doctor bills to the cost of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, insurance and nursing home and home-health care -- doubled from 1993 to 2004, said the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2004, the nation spent almost $140 billion more for health care than the year before.

In 1997, health care accounted for 13.6 percent of the gross domestic product.

"Americans rejected the tougher restrictions of managed care in the late 1990s, and yet they want all the latest advances in medical technology," said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which researches health issues. "Since government regulation of prices and services is not in the cards, the inevitable result is higher costs."

The health care increase of 7.9 percent in 2004 was almost three times the overall national inflation rate, which was 2.7 percent. The average hourly wage for workers in private companies was essentially unchanged that year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

After a sharp jump in health care costs earlier in the decade, the health inflation rate appears to be plateauing, officials added.

The best news involved spending on pharmaceutical drugs, which increased by less than 10 percent for the first time in more than a decade.

Cynthia Smith of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, lead author of the health spending report, attributed the slower increase in drug spending to greater use of generic drugs and mail-order pharmacies, a slowdown in the introduction of costly new medications, and the impact of higher drug co-pays. Mark Merritt, president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents drug benefit managers, said the trend was also a result of their "work over the past decade to change the way consumers, clinicians and purchasers think about prescription drugs."

Although the fast rise in drug spending in the past decade attracted great attention from officials and health policy experts, it remains a relatively small part of the health care bill -- about 10 percent.

Defenders of increased drug spending have often argued that those added costs would keep people healthier and reduce the amount spent on hospitals and doctors. The 2004 statistics told a different story, however, with an increase in doctor costs of 9 percent from 2003 and an increase in hospital costs of 8.6 percent. The report's authors said the jumps appeared to be associated with higher Medicare reimbursement rates for some doctors and, anecdotally, to an upswing in construction of new hospitals.

"This is an alarming situation, but it's more like a creeping infection than a broken bone, and so people get used to it," said Edward Howard, executive vice president of the Alliance for Health Reform, a nonprofit education group chaired by Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) and Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). "Frankly, I don't see major change until people who have some sort of organized political influence start hurting a little more."

In addition to the report on costs, a different agency yesterday released two new annual reports mandated by Congress on the quality of health care and disparities in care. Officials called them the most comprehensive assessments of their kind.

For the report by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers compiled data from dozens of sources collected by the federal government and others to create 179 quality measures, including 46 "core" measures.

The researchers concluded that the overall quality of care in 2005 had improved at a rate of 2.8 percent from 2003. That was the same increase as the year before, and many measures showed no improvement or even decreases.

For example, there was improvement in the percentage of patients with high blood pressure whose condition was under control, but no improvement in providing speedy treatment to people having heart attacks.

In the second report, the National Healthcare Disparities Report, researchers found more measures on which the quality gap between whites and racial minorities was shrinking than widening. But the report found that major disparities remained for all groups and that the gap had widened for Hispanics.

Of disparities experienced by blacks, 58 percent were narrowing and 42 percent were widening, the researchers found. For Hispanics, 41 percent of disparities were narrowing, whereas 59 percent were becoming larger.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

This is a long one. It's about the relationship between the lower classes and the rulers of this country. I know that sounds Marxist, but, honest, I read The Communist Manifesto when I was in college—the only time I ever read Marx (except Groucho). I think he's unreadable; he makes Freud sound like Dave Barry.




Joe Bageant: 'Revenge of the mutt people'
Date: Tuesday, January 10 @ 09:55:53 EST
Topic: The Military

Joe Bageant

"There are some things so disgusting that only a white man would be willing to do them."
--- Walter Wildshoe, Coeur d'Alene Indian

Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d'Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates--bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d'Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn't even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: "Only a white man would work there."

The hog farm, however, offered one company benefit. The white manager gave employees any young pigs that developed large tumors--those with tumors smaller than golf calls went to market with the rest of the hogs--or were born with deformities such as heads scrunched sideways with both eyes on the same side, or a leg that stuck out of the top of their body instead of the bottom. We employees would butcher and eat them. Among hog farm employees, all of whom were tough descendants of the Scots Irish mutt people, free pork of any kind was prized, deformed with tumors or otherwise. You never saw a Swede eat the stuff.



So I took these pigs home and, using a huge old butcher's knife, slashed their throats in the woods, right in front of my two kids--ages two and four at the time--without flinching even as the pigs screamed almost like humans and thrashed around, splashing thick dark glops of blood everywhere. It bothered me not one bit, just like it never bothered my daddy or granddaddy. Nor did it seem to bother my children as they watched, just like it didn't bother me as a child when my uncle handed me sacks of barn kittens to drown in the crick. And Walter would shake his head and say, "Only a white man would wrestle a hog with a butcher knife. An Indian would shoot the motherfucker with a gun."

My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans. For instance, as a child did you ever put a firecracker up a toad's ass and light it? George Bush and I have that in common. Anyway, as all non-whites the world round understand, white people can be mean. Especially if they feel threatened--and they feel threatened about everything these days. But when you provide certain species of white mutt people with the right incentives, such as free pork or approval from god and government, you get things like lynchings, Fallujah, the Birmingham bombers and Abu Grahib. Even as this is being written we may safely assume some of my tribe of mutt people are stifling the screams of captives in America's secret "black site" prisons across the planet. Or on a more mundane scale of cruelty (according to CBS footage) kicking hundreds of chickens to death every day at the Pilgrim's Pride plant in Wardensville WV, just up the road from where I am writing this. Or consider the image of Matthew Shepard's body twisted on that Wyoming fence... All these are our handiwork. We the mutt faced sons and daughters of the republic. Born to kick your chicken breast meat to death for you in the darkest, most dismal corners of our great land, born to kill and be killed in stockcar races, drunken domestic rows, and of course in the desert dusty back streets at the edges of the empire.

Middle class urban liberals may never claim us as brothers, muchless willing servants, but as they say in prison, we are your meat. We do your bidding. Your refusal to admit that we do your dirty work for you, not to mention the international smackdowns and muggings for the republic--from which you benefit more materially than we ever will--makes it no less true.

Literally from birth, we get plenty of conditioning to kill those gooks and sand monkeys and whoever else needs killing at any particular moment in history according to our leadership. Like most cracker kids in my generation, from the time I could walk I played games in which I pretended to (practiced for) killing--Japs, Indians, Germans, Koreans, Africans Zulus (as seen in the movies Zulu and Uhuru!) variously playing the role of U.S. cavalry, Vikings ala Kirk Douglas, World War II GIs, colonial soldiers, and of course Confederate soldiers... As little white crackletts we played with plastic army men that we tortured by flame, firecracker, burning rivulets of gasoline, kerosene or lighter fluid. And if atomic bombing was called for, M-80s and ashcans. We went to sleep dreaming of the screams of the evil brutes we had smitten that day, all those slant eyed and swasticated enemies of democracy and our way of life. Later as post-cracklets in high school we rode around in cars looking to fight anyone who was different, the "other," be they black, brown, or simply from another school or county. As young men we brawled at dances, parties or simply while staring at one another bored and drunk. We bashed each over women, less-than weight bags of dope, money owed and alleged insult to honor, wife, mother or model of car--Ford versus Chevy. In other words, all of white trash culture's noblest causes. With the "fighting tradition" of Scots Irish behind us, we smashed upon each other ceaselessly in trailer court and tavern, night and day in rain and summer heat until finally, we reach our mid-fifties and lose our enthusiasm (not to mention stamina) for that most venerated of borderer sports.

Said meanness is polished to a high gloss murderous piety most useful to the military establishment. Thus, by the time were are of military age (which is about 12) we are capable of doing a Lynndie England on any type of human being unfamiliar to us from our culturally ignorant viewpoint--doing it to the "other." Sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, most of us, given the nod, can torture the other as mindlessly as a cat plays with a mouse. That we can do it so readily and without remorse is one of the darkest secrets of underlying the "heroes" mythology the culture machine is so fervently ginning up about the ongoing series of wars now just unfolding. And when one of us is killed by a rooftop sniper in Baghdad we weep and sweat in our fear, band closer together as Border brothers in the ancient oath of ultimate fealty and courage. And we meant it and we do it.

About half of the Americans killed in Iraq come from communities like Winchester, Virginia or Romney, West Virginia or Fisher, Illinois or Kilgore, Texas or... . About forty-five percent of the American dead in Iraq come from communities of less than 40,000, even though these towns make up only twenty-five percent of our population. These so-called volunteers are part of this nation's de facto draft--economic conscription--the carrot being politically preferable to the whip. The carrot does not have to be very big out here where delivering frozen food wholesale to restaurants out of your own car entirely on commission is considered a good self-employment opportunity. I'm serious. One of my sons did it for a couple of months. Once you grasp the implications of such an environment regarding the so-called American Dream, the U.S. Army at thirteen hundred bucks a month, a signing bonus and free room and board begin to look pretty good. Even a nice long ass kicking tour of the tropics killing brown guys becomes attractive. Especially compared to competing with other little brown guys at home, humping "big-roll sod" across ever-expanding MacMansionland. In the process, we mutt people learn worldly lessons that the post graduate set raving about the jobless economy cannot know. For instance we know firsthand that there is no way to beat little brown sod balling guys willing to sleep in their cars and live on canned beans and store brand soda. Better to go "volunteer" for the army.

Along with the military come those big bucks for college later, up to $65,000, which according to current wisdom is more than enough to buy your way out of the beans and soda pop car camp at the edge of the new Toll Brothers development. Maybe some poor kids do go to college on their military benefits. But personally speaking, I can count the number on one hand I know who ever did. Most of them were black. The rest seem to go to the local truck driving school (rip-offs designed to collect government money) or the ITI "vocational career training," again designed to hoover up federal dough. Let's be honest here: graduating from the average American cracker high school here in the suburban heartland is not exactly the path to Harvard Yard. Your best educational option is probably the one you are looking at one the matchbook cover.

Now that education has been reduced to just another industry, a series of stratified job training mills, ranging from the truck driving schools to the state universities, our nation is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry. Education is not supposed to be an industry. Its proper use is not to serve industries, either by cranking out feckless little mid-management robots or through industry purchased research chasing after a better hard-on drug. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live responsible lives that create and enhance their democratic culture. This cannot be merely by generating and accumulating mountains of information, facts without cultural, artistic, philosophical and human context or priority.

"No one should be forced to dive into an ocean of debt to learn how the world works, much less escape minimum wage hell. It should be enough just to want to know. Then too, look at our educational institutions. Academia, at least from this outsider's perspective, is an almost impenetrable veneer of elitist flatulence and toxic competition. Jesus, no wonder this country is in such sorry shape.
-- Arvin Hill, Texas philosopher

How in the hell did knowledge become so commoditized in America? Dumb question. After all, what do we expect from a nation of pickle vendors who will charge you for the air you breathe, and then make you beg for your change? At first blush, higher education and the working class Scots Irish mutt people seem to be oil and water. Maybe so. But the majority of them also have a snowball's chance in Florida of getting a higher education. Especially when it comes to the institutions of learning that constitute our elite springboard into careers in law and politics, business and science. The Yalesand the Harvards and Princetons... For example, according to the Wall Street Journal Asians constitute about 2% of the population but make up over 20% of Harvard graduates. About one third of Harvard graduates identify themselves as Jewish. Together Jews and Asians make up about half of Harvard graduates. Subtract these, plus the 15% minority quota and that leaves maybe 40% of openings for the 75 or 80 % of white Americans who are not Jewish, Asian, Latino or black or whatever... Now throw in the skew of northeastern WASPS at elite universities and we are left with maybe 20% of openings for 60% of white Americans. It presents a sorry damned picture of liberal East Coast WASPS and Jews and minorities getting all the prime educational gravy. The neocon leadership is right when they tell working white Americans the system has been stacked against them by an unseen hand, though they never mention that their own kids are among the silver spooners rowing around in the Ivy League gravy boat. I know I'll get clobbered by Jewish and black critics for pointing this out. But liberal refusal to see white people as also being diverse, and seeing that some of them indeed need their own sort of affirmative action is exactly the kind of thing that helped the neocons lead these working white people buy the nose. Education is everything. You know it and I know it. And what the white working classes don't know because lack of education has hurt you and me and them. So why in the hell don't we help this group of people into college and into the institutions that are elite springboards to careers in law and politics? Why not have affirmative action for Appalachian kids from the Ohio Basin or from the Deep South or anyplace else where tens of millions of kids grow up in houses containing not a single book, except possibly the Bible. Why don't we do these things? Part of the reason is that this stubborn proud people does not whine beg or threaten its way to access to education, employment or anything else. And part of it is because we unquestioningly accept a system that calls greed and self-interest drive, thus letting the prosperous professional and business classes pretend there is no disparity around them for which they might just be partially responsible, even as they pay the maid and the gardener who lack health insurance a pittance...or see that their mechanic's bill treads, "repare of fuul injection, $105." And because liberals have driven secularism into the ground and broken it off, and need to actually adhere to some religious values -- real ones -- even if we don't feel particularly inclined toward religion. (Psst! Everybody else in America DOES fell inclined toward it.)

So we will either see that Americans, religious or not, get educated equally so they won't be suckered by political and religious hucksters. If not, then we must accept that uneducated people interpret politics in an uninformed and emotional manner, and accept the consequences. America can no longer withstand the political naivete of this ignored white class. Middle class American liberals cannot have it both ways. It has come down to the simplest and most profound element of democracy: Fairness. Someday middle class American liberals will have to cop to fraternity and justice and the fact that we are our brother's keeper, whether we like it or not. They're going to have to sit down and actually speak to these people they consider ugly, overweight, ill educated and in poor taste. At some point down the road all the Montessori schools and ivy league degrees in the world are not going to save your children and grandchildren from what our intellectual peasantry, whether born of neglect or purposefully maintained, is capable of supporting politically. We've all seen the gritty black and white newsreels from the 1930s.

A member of this peasantry, I quit school at age sixteen in the eleventh grade to join the U.S. Navy. I hated school, hated the social class differences in a small town that make life so miserable during adolescence, when one's community and social status is being nailed down permanently for anyone planning on staying here. As a former young white cracklet I can say with all confidence that when you live with a rusty coal stove in the middle of the living room for heat, your old man smells of gasoline and motor oil no matter how much he bathes and your mom suffers from strange, unpredictable behavior due to untreated depression, you do not much feel like inviting the doctor's daughter home. Or anyone's daughter for that matter. Doctor's son = College, career, golf, nice car and a bimbo. Redneck laborer's son = Well, if you stay out of trouble, there's always room for one more broad shouldered chinless pinhead stamping out bright yellow plastic mop buckets on the injection molds at Rubbermaid. Thus, at sixteen and choosing options, I decided that launching fighter jets from the deck of an aircraft carrier to kill gooks and the notion of pussy and booze on some exotic foreign shore looked damned good. When I think about what happened to my boyhood friends who stayed home and put in 30 years at Rubbermaid, my choice doesn't sound that bad even today. They all became redneck ultra-conservatives, mostly out of some sort of fear and bitterness that I can never seem to put my finger on. But I knew these people in a younger and more hopeful time. I know they were capable of--not to mention deserved--more than they got out of life. Maybe their bitterness stems from that.

Meanwhile, their kids do the same as they did. Go uneducated. Sometimes I walk the street on which I grew up. And when I look around I see the same kinds of kids as ever. They are all fatter, but they are the same cigarette-smoking, know-nothing white punks that I was, the tough sons and daughters of the unwashed. In my old neighborhood where over one quarter of adults do not have a high school diploma, there are lots of yellow ribbons in the windows, Marine Corps and Army parent's icons on the porches and scrubby lawns, evidence enough that you do not need an education to contribute something of value the far-flung perimeter of our expanding empire of blood and commerce. Pure meanness is highly valued in Caesar's legions. Lots of Americans don't seem to mind having a pack of young American pit bulls savage some flyblown desert nation, or running loose in the White House for that matter, as long as they are our pit bulls protecting Wall Street and the 401-Ks of the upper middle class.

The problem is this: pit bulls always escalate the fight and keep at it until the last dog is dead, leaving the gentler breeds to clean up the blood spilled. We mutt people, the pit bulls, have always been your own, whether you claim us or not. And until you accept that you are your brother's keeper, and help deliver us from ignorance, you will continue to have on your hands some of every drop of blood spilled... from the sands of Iraq to the streets of East L.A. All the socially responsible stock portfolios, little hybrid cars and post modernist deconstruction in the world will not wash it off.

Joe Bageant is a writer and magazine editor living in Winchester, Virginia. His forthcoming book, Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck: Dispatches from America's Class Wars, is due out next year, to be published by Random House. Visit his blog at: http://www.joebageant.com. He may be contacted at joebageant@joebageant.com.

Copyright (c) 2006 by Joe Bageant.

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=24344

Sometimes, sometimes, I feel like packing it up and heading for Costa Rica or British Columbia and never again read anything remotely dealing with history or politics. Everytime things seem to get a bit better, there’s some incredibly stupid and vicious reaction. I haven’t seen a synthesis in a long time.

On the other hand, there’s this:

June 03, 2005
Paul Revere A Despicable Tattletale, Says GOP

http://tomburka.com/archives2/2005_06.php#000813

Republicans today criticized Paul Revere for his famous ride, saying that he had violated professional colonial ethics by divulging military secrets in violation of his duty to his lord, the King of England.

"These were sensitive informations about military troop movements with which he had been entrusted," said G. Gordon Liddy, an expert on ethics in government and a professor at several unaccredited law schools.

"Paul Revere was a traitor and a law breaker," said Anakin Skywalker in a confidential interview shortly before his limbs were lopped off and he burst into flame.

Conservatives all over America pointed out that Revere also endangered people's lives by riding willy nilly all over Massachusetts at a full gallop in the dark of night. "He could have trampled someone," said Bill O'Reilly. "Paul Revere was a reckless and irresponsible nazi," he added.

Pat Buchanan derided Revere as a "coward" and a "snake" who was unwilling to be direct with the British government regarding his complaints about the monarchy. "There were channels," he said.

Peggy Noonan shook her head. "There's nothing sadder than Americans who have no respect for the rule of law," she said.

This rainy day is the day to post about health care, I guess. Nothing like cold wet weather to make me remember things like arthritis, post-nasal drip, snot...


Profile of Bus Project Conference: ‘Ealth Care Takes Center Stage
http://www.oregoniansforhealthsecurity.org/about/monitor/index.cfm

"How long would Microsoft last if Bill Gates held on to a 10-year-old operating system, or one that is 18 months old? But we're holding onto a 40-year-old health-care system and wonder why we cannot meet the health-care challenges of the 21st century.” Governor Kitzhaber (Statesman Journal, 1/6/06)

OHS allies the Bus Project held their biennial conference this past weekend. The group focuses on the 6 E’s– education, environment, election reform, equal rights, economic strength, and our favorite– ’ealth care.

At the conference, OHS Executive Director Maribeth Healey presented common-sense solutions for reforming health care on a panel that included former Governor John Kitzhaber and Tina Kotek from Children First, Mike Bonetto of Clear Choice Health Plans, and Dr. David Pollack, an OHSU mental health professor.

Kitzhaber, who is expected to announce whether he will make another run for Governor, is working to garner support for his health care reform plan.

Kitzhaber and Healey agreed on the need for change in the current system. “With hospital profits at a six year high, pharmaceutical companies drowning in dollars from the new Medicare drug plans and more and more Oregonians losing health insurance coverage– something has got to change,” said Maribeth.

Kitzhaber shared the general structure of his plan, but said he wants to have a conversation with Oregonians to firm up the details.

Kitzhaber’s plan would combine all public health care dollars in the state, including tax breaks employers receive to provide a basic level of health care for all Oregonians. Services would be provided using evidence-based medicine to ensure the most effective use of community health care funds.

Ultimately, Kitzhaber’s plan would require federal approval, but he feels states must apply pressure to convince Congress to enact necessary reforms.

While short on specifics, Kitzhaber’s re-engagement in the public debate over health care has added a new spark. We are encouraged by the media attention and public dialogue around all of the potential initiatives to reform health care. We look forward to continuing the conversation about common-sense solutions to reducing health care costs and increasing access. All of the proposed reforms require legislative involvement, making it even more crucial health care voters get involved in the 2006 elections to ensure a pro-affordable health care majority in 2007.

Call us at 503-655-2793 to learn how you can get involved.

You could call it “economic cleansing” — trying to liquidate poor people by simply not funding services for them. Then, just sit back and let them either go away or die off.

The Republicans hated—and still hate—FDR for the New Deal. The idea of providing anything for the poor causes nausea in the collective stomach of the GOP. We’ve watched the funding drop and drop, never big enough short-falls to cause outrage, but rather a sort of desensitization process has gone on. A little less this year, a little less the next year.... Yeah, I like to hammer the Republicans on this, but Clinton, an ostensible Democrat, chopped a way at the remains of the New Deal as well.


State agency faces $172 million budget gap
12/28/2005, 12:10 a.m. PT
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-13/1135757942213000.xml&storylist=orlocal

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The director of the Oregon Department of Human Services says the agency faces a $172 million shortfall in its current 2005-2007 budget.

In a letter to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, agency director Bruce Goldberg wrote that the department "faces serious financial challenges."

Goldberg warned earlier this month that the budget set by the Legislature was not keeping pace with increasing Medicaid caseloads and a reduction in federal matching dollars. In his letter to Kulongoski, Goldberg said Medicaid caseload changes account for almost $120 million of the shortfall.

The Department of Human Services offers help to 1 million Oregon residents through its welfare and health programs. Its budget for the next two years is $9.8 billion, with state taxes accounting for roughly $2.5 billion.

The $172 million gap could force cuts in health care and other services for the poor. It might also force lawmakers into a special session.

"You could fix this by making cuts somewhere but I think it's a fool's errand," said Alan Bates, D-Ashland, one of several lawmakers who said Tuesday that they favored a special session.

"The patients just show up in another program or in an emergency room to be taken care of."

But House Speaker Karen Minnis, R-Wood Village, said it's too early to for talk of special session.

"I'm not convinced that we know the whole scope of the problems with this particular agency," she said.

The shortfall is more than three times as large as the $55 million gap in the 2003-2005 budget, which resulted from accounting errors.

Goldberg, who has only headed the agency since November, said earlier this month that factors outside the agency's control are behind the latest deficit, such as increased demand for services through the Oregon Health Plan, which provides health care for lower-income people.

Though more jobs are being created in Oregon, Goldberg noted that many of them don't come with medical benefits. Moreover, many existing employers are scaling back on benefits because of rising costs.

___

Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com

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

Our health care situation is a mess, as everyone knows. In the U.S. more money is spent on health care than in any other industrialized nation. However, our infant mortality rate, life-spans, and other health indicators aren’t at the tops of the lists. We’re steadily falling behind.

Oregon’s ex-gov, John Kitzhaber is advocating a single-payer system. At least for Oregon. It’s inevitable that we go to one on a national level, assuming the country will gradually more forward into the 20th Century when it comes to social services.

The Republicans, true to their intellectual morbidity, are still against universal health care. Their lives, they think, would be easier without poor people...except for those doing low-paid work....

Kitzhaber health ideas called a tough sell
1/10/2006, 9:16 a.m. PT
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/healthfit/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1136865315117000.xml&coll=7

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Former Gov. John Kitzhaber's proposal for providing government-paid health care to all Oregonians is being praised by some for its boldness but criticized by others as being unrealistic.

Kitzhaber's plan would scrap Medicare and Medicaid in Oregon as well as the tax break that employers get for insuring workers. He would replace them with a basic, government-paid policy for every resident, and then allow people to buy additional coverage in the private market.

Critics and some Kitzhaber allies say the idea is a tough sell, The Oregonian reported Tuesday.

"I believe it would be easier to legislate that the sun should rise in Oregon and set in New York," said Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Kitzhaber's health care brainstorming comes as he is considering a run for a third term as governor on a platform that would consist of his health care plan.

If he runs, he would take on fellow Democrat Gov. Ted Kulongoski in a primary battle.

On Monday, Kulongoski said he is "very supportive of the former governor's position that this country needs a national health care plan."

"I think he can best achieve that outside the governor's office, so no one ever accuses it of being a political solution," the governor said.

To accomplish his plan, Kitzhaber says, the federal government would have to give Oregon unusual flexibility in the form of waivers from requirements under federal Medicare and Medicaid laws. The state would use that flexibility to pool all public dollars spent on health care — estimated at $6.4 billion a year — to pay for basic universal coverage.

"When you take on Medicare — politically, I just don't see that happening," said Jim Kronenberg, chief operating officer of the Oregon Medical Association.

Kitzhaber's plan would go even further, challenging the tax break for employers providing health insurance to workers. That risks opposition from small businesses, large employers and unions.

"Medical reform is one of the heaviest lifts in Washington, D.C.," said Republican U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who recently battled his own party caucus over potential cuts to Medicaid.

The Kitzhaber plan is "a clever proposal to provoke a conversation we need to have," said Len Nichols, director of health policy at the New America Foundation, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. "Whether it's politically feasible is another matter."

"What's brilliant about it is that it puts into one place the idea that we're all in this together," said Nichols.

"However you want to paint it, he's talking about a single-payer system," said Sen. Jeff Kruse, R-Roseburg, vice chairman of two health committees during the last legislative session. "The only way that works is if we turn all health care over to the government."

"I personally think that's a disastrous road to go down," he said.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ollie North—an unholy trinity if there ever was one. North constructed, as National Security Action Office, a remarkable plan for taking over the country. Not for himself (though I don’t doubt he believed himself worthy of the task), but to save it from itself. He did this in cahoots with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, all of them unreconstructed Cold War Warriors. That the Cold War had collapsed didn’t matter to them, really: it was merely a justification for their lusting after power.

That is as scary as a nest of twenty foot rattlesnakes.


AlterNet
Eighties Surveillance Revival
By Peter Dale Scott, Pacific News Service
Posted on January 5, 2006, Printed on January 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/30434/

Revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in warrantless eavesdropping in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prompted President Bush to admit last month that in 2002 he directly authorized the activity in the wake of 9/11.

But there are reasons to suspect that the illegal eavesdropping, and the related program of illegal detentions of U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, began earlier. Both may be part of what Vice President Dick Cheney has called the Bush administration's restoration of "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- practices exercised by Nixon that were outlawed after Watergate.

In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed just such emergency surveillance and detention powers in a super-secret program that planned for what was euphemistically called "Continuity of Government" (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster.

At the time, Cheney was a Wyoming congressman, while Rumsfeld, who had been defense secretary under President Ford, was a businessman and CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle. Overall responsibility for the program had been assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, "with Lt. Col. Oliver North...as the National Security Council action officer," according to James Bamford in his book, "A Pretext for War."

These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any "national security emergency," which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: "Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States." Clearly 9/11 would meet this definition.

As developed in the mid-1980s by Oliver North in the White House, the plans called for not just the surveillance but the potential detention of large numbers of American citizens. During the Iran-Contra hearings, North was asked about his work on "a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution." The chairman, Democratic Senator Inouye, ruled that this was a "highly sensitive and classified" matter, not to be dealt with in an open hearing.

The supporting agency for the planning and implementation was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA was headed for much of the 1980s by Louis Giuffrida, whose COG plans for massive detention became so extreme that even President Reagan's then Attorney General, William French Smith, raised objections.

Smith eventually left Washington, while COG continued to evolve. And in May 2001 Cheney and FEMA were reunited: President George W. Bush appointed Cheney to head a terrorism task force and created a new office within FEMA to assist him. In effect, Bush was authorizing a resumption of the kind of planning that Cheney and FEMA had conducted under the heading of COG.

Press accounts at the time claimed that the Cheney terrorism task force accomplished little and that Cheney himself spent the entire month of August in a remote location in Wyoming. But this may have just been the appearance of withdrawal; as author James Mann points out in "The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," Cheney had regularly gone off to undisclosed locations in the 1980s as part of his secret COG planning.

As to the actual role of Bush, Cheney and FEMA on 9/11 itself, much remains unclear. But all sources agree that a central order at 10 a.m. from Bush to Cheney contained three provisions, of which the most important was, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, "the implementation of continuity of government measures."

The measures called for the immediate evacuation of key personnel from Washington. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld refused to leave, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was helicoptered to a bunker headquarters inside a mountain. Cheney also ordered key congressional personnel, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, to be flown out of Washington, along with several cabinet members.

During Cheney's later disappearance from public view for a long period after the attack, he too was working from a COG base -- "Site R," the so-called "Underground Pentagon" on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, according to Bamford.

Many actions of the Bush presidency resemble not only what Nixon did in the 1970s, but what Cheney and Rumsfeld had planned to restore under COG in the 1980s in the case of an attack. Prominent among these have been the detention of so-called "enemy combatants," including U.S. citizens, and placing them in special camps. Now as before, a policy of detentions outside the Constitution has been accompanied by a program of extra-constitutional surveillance to determine who will be detained.

As Cheney told reporters on his return last month from Pakistan, "Watergate and a lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the '70s served, I think, to erode the authority" of the president. But he defended as necessary for national security the aggressive program he helped shape under President George W. Bush, which includes warrantless surveillance and extrajudicial imprisonment -- in effect, a new Imperial Presidency.

At least two Democrats in Congress have suggested that Bush could be impeached for his illegal surveillance activities. The chances of impeachment may depend on whether Congress can prove that planning for this, like planning for the Iraq War, began well before 9/11.

Peter Dale Scott is author of "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and is completing a book on "Deep Politics and the Road to 9/11."
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/30434/

If I had a Hell-hath-no-fury drawer, I'd simply file this story in it. I'd probably forget it, too. But it's just too good to send off into the void. There's not much to say about it, no. It's just nice to see the fall of the rich and pretentitious.

http://rawstory.com/admin/dbscripts/printstory.php?story=1656
How they got caught: After lobbyist broke off engagement, ex-fiancee told of illicit dealings to FBI
01/03/2006 @ 7:03 am
Filed by Jason Leopold

Michael Scanlon found himself at the center of one of the biggest political scandals in Washington history as a result of cheating and lying—but not the type involving the numerous clients he was paid to lobby Congress for, former coworkers and friends of his ex-fiancee say.

Scanlon was implicated in the Abramoff scandal by his former thirtysomething fiancee, Emily J. Miller, whom he met in the late 1990s while working as communications director for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), three former associates who worked with Scanlon at DeLay’s office said. Colleagues say Miller went to the FBI after Scanlon broke off their engagement and announced his intention to marry another woman.

Miller did not return a call seeking comment. Scanlon’s attorney, Stephen Braga, did not respond to phone calls or emails seeking comment. Former coworkers of Scanlon and Miller at DeLay’s office and of Miller at the State Department would speak only under condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to be called as witnesses in a trial.

Miller was DeLay’s young press secretary and as communications director, Scanlon was her boss. The two began a secretive office romance and Scanlon eventually proposed marriage, associates say.

In 2003, Miller left DeLay’s office to work at the State Department. Scanlon departed too, partnering with now-indicted conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff in lobbying for an array of Indian tribes. As Scanlon’s star rose, troubles between the couple mushroomed.

In May 2004, Miller found herself at the center of attention when—while live on air—she ordered a cameraman for NBC’s Meet the Press to stop filming Colin Powell. A copy of the transcript shows Miller, who also used to work as an NBC staffer, as a brusque press aide. Powell eventually ordered that the interview continue and asked Miller to step aside.

What many people didn’t realize at the time, however, is that during the Powell interview Miller was upset because her fiancee, Michael Scanlon, had broken off their engagement, two of Miller’s former State Department co-workers said. While still engaged to Miller, Scanlon had started an affair with a manicurist and broke up with Miller because he planned to marry the other woman, three of Scanlon’s former associates at DeLay’s office said. They added that the two had numerous public arguments.

But Miller had something on Scanlon. He confided in her all of his dealings with Abramoff, former colleagues said. She saw his emails and knew the intimate details of his lobbying work—work which is now the center of a criminal fraud investigation. After the breakup, Miller went to the FBI and told them everything about Scanlon’s dealings with Abramoff, her coworkers added.

In turning him in, she became the agency’s star witness against her former lover. Scanlon pled guilty in November and is cooperating with prosecutors; Abramoff reached a plea agreement today.

Scanlon's former colleagues did not speak warmly of him, saying he was not a very likable person because of the way he treated others, and that he later became flamboyant with his newfound wealth.

Aside from the Powell interview, Miller also attracted attention after berating a Washington Post Magazine reporter. In 2001, while Miller was working as press secretary to DeLay she told a reporter who was writing a profile about DeLay. "You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don't know you. You don't exist. . . . You are dead to us."

A DeLay spokesman told the Post at the time, "Tom thinks Emily did a fine job for him."

In my lifetime, the corporate (that is, big money) take-over of government has been completed. It’s been a rather slow process, beginning with the American Revolution, and continuing ever since. While Jefferson and Lincoln blathered on about the common folks, the way things went didn’t benefit the poor except by accident, or intention to keep them from getting to pissed at things.

The American Civil War opened the gate to the assaults of the plutocrats: steel, oil, mining, manufacturing. It’s been downhill ever since.

Perhaps the greatest addiction of all is easy credit. Everyone can buy and buy and then worry about paying it all back instead of looking around them and noticing the condition of the nation. Being in debt is probably the most anxiety-producing drug ever invented. It’s crippling, utterly crippling. Like a true drug, the next jolt of credit buying will relieve that anxiety for the moment. Only it comes back faster and stronger, each time. It’s the worst narcotic.

This is a gilded age for the rich, but for the rest of us, it's a time of being clad in lead.

http://rawstory.com/admin/dbscripts/printstory.php?story=1670
The new Gilded Age
01/04/2006 @ 4:00 pm
Filed by Nancy Goldstein - Raw Story Columnist

In the summer of 1863, Lincoln's enactment of the draft--the first federal conscription in America--set off widespread rioting in the streets of New York City. The mandate's most reviled feature was a "commutation" rule that allowed sons of privilege to buy their way out of enlistment for the 21st century equivalent of $6,000. For the northern European immigrants who comprised over half of the city's population, starving cheek-to-jowl in the corroding tenements of the Lower East Side, the rule proved that Lincoln's "rich man's war" against the South had become a fight for poor, and thereby expendable, men to resolve.

Nearly a century and a half later, the wealthy don't even have to pay for the privilege of sending less well connected sons and daughters off to war to die in their stead. The draft has been rendered unnecessary by the tens of thousands of young men and women--disproportionately low income or working-class, over a third of them people of color--who "choose" to enlist while the children of better-off folk, who have other viable options for educational and professional advancement, are able to choose lines of work where they're less likely to be killed.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age. Once more, a small number of individuals have exploited the latest technology and their powerful personal connections to amass incredible wealth at the expense of an exploited majority.

Like its earlier incarnation at the end of the 19th century, the new Gilded Age is marked by huge discrepancies in income between a minority of very rich people and the majority of the rest of us (even Alan Greenspan says so), a tendency to make underprivileged people do all the dirty work, widespread abuse of corporate and political power, and profligate spending in the face of increasing national poverty. The same mass media that used to naively assert that every man could become an Andrew Carnegie now makes the same implicit claim through "The Apprentice."

Yet the excesses of this latest iteration, made possible by the take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich policies of the Bush administration, have not led to any of the upheavals that marked the end of the first Gilded Age--strikes, riots, the creation of labor unions, legislation to rein in the excesses of big business--or any of the attempts to protect the rights of consumers, workers, immigrants, or the poor that followed, during the Progressive era.

For this new Gilded Age is made palatable by the illusion that people "choose" to be either rich or poor. That they "choose" to be either captains of Wall Street or foot soldiers in Iraq. That they "choose" to be safe and sound in Crawford or shivering awaiting rescue on their rooftops in New Orleans.

In the new Gilded Age, no powerful government ever fails its citizenry and there are no catastrophes in the lives of low-income people--only lucky loafers enjoying the benefits of noblesse oblige. Or, as Barbara Bush said of the thousands of evacuees huddled in the Astrodome: "This is working very well for them."

The tranquility of this new Gilded Age is secured by the substitution of consumer choice for genuine political choice, and abetted by a lazy, corporate-run media. John Berger, the brilliant British Marxist art historian of the 60s, was right: give the people enough kinds of ketchup to choose from and they'll be too busy wandering the supermarket aisles to ever stop and contemplate whether they enjoy the same degree of variety or agency regarding their government.

The less privileged are lulled into fantasies of choice, power, and control by cheap, "personalized" consumer goods secured by easy credit. But lose your job and blow your "interest only" mortgage, and neither your special ring tone nor your personally programmed iPod will protect you from the brutal realities of this time.

Because despite all the talk about "personal responsibility" and an "ownership society," the golden insignia of the new Gilded Age is a double standard that allows the wealthy and powerful to network, plea bargain, or buy their way out of their obligations while holding the feet of less privileged people to the fire at every turn.

Consider the difference in accountability between individuals unable to pay their debts and corporations that default on their pension plans.

Under the new bankruptcy law enacted last year by a Congress eager to reward their campaign contributors in the credit industry, the vast majority of common folk saddled by unmanageable debt--usually because of severe misfortune, such as medical emergencies, job loss, or divorce - will be deemed to be in possession of "excess income" and will no longer be permitted to wipe the slate clean. Instead, they'll be put on an accelerated payment schedule for a 3-5 year period at a much higher rate of interest and forced to pay for "fiscal management" classes in addition to lawyers' fees.

How poor will you have to be to avoid this fate? Let's put it this way. A couple each earning measly minimum wage for a total of $21,840 per year with no dependents? According to the new "means test," that couple is $9,720 over the so-called poverty threshold, or stated similarly, earning 80.2% "excess" annual income. Those sluggards will just have to pay up.

But it's an entirely different story when corporations fail to meet their financial obligations to their workers--which is increasingly the case. As Roger Lowenstein notes in a recent article on the end of pensions, "Corporations were happy to offer rich retirement plans to their workers as long as accounting tricks and federal insurance made it easy to delay the day of reckoning."

And why not? When the day of reckoning comes, the firm won't sell off its assets to pay for the failed plan or garnish the wages of the CEO (who, on average, earned $9.84 million, or 358 times the average worker's pay last year). Debt from the failed plan becomes the responsibility of the government's pension insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)--currently in the red to the tune of $23 billion (and estimated to bloom to $100 billion within two decades). Which means that average taxpayers like you and me will pay the corporation's debts while it goes merrily on its way.

Because that's what "personal responsibility" really means to this administration. When it comes to covering bad debt from corporations that underestimate how much they need to put away to keep their commitments, it's on us. Ditto for when businesses game the system by exploiting lax rules that allow them to get away with inadequately funding their pension plans. Or promise the world to their workers, knowing that there's a safety net if they ever get in too deep. And when it comes to shouldering debt from bad individual luck, that's on us too.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age. It's back and it's better than ever - if you're one of the gilded.


Nancy Goldstein can be reached at goldstein.nancy@gmail.com.

THE AWAKENING


I am, for reasons I’ll try to explain, anti-authoritarian. You know the bumper sticker, “Question Authority.” Authority offers systems: think, act, dress, eat, live, this way: everything will be OK if you do. My family offered one authority: follow our directions and you will turn out good. If you don’t, look out!

The thing was, I could see that the family system wasn’t all that hot. What was said and what was done weren’t the same. There were feuds and hurts. I was taught to be honest but I saw lots of dishonesties. Business deals, tax arrangements, even how people were treated and then talked about afterward didn’t have much to do with honesty. It was pretty easy to decide that those authorities weren’t all that great. A voice inside me said, “Something’s wrong here.”

I got older and found other authorities: out of books, mostly, but also friends. I tried those. The little voice inside said, “Hmm, this isn’t quite right, either,” but at that age, youth, late adolescence, it was very important to belong. I paid more attention to the voices around me than to the one inside me. I tried to follow those directions.
They were like clothes that didn’t fit, but they were supposed to, so I stuffed myself into them. About then I pretty much stopped listening to myself.

After years and years of careening through life I reached the point where it became clear to me: my life wasn’t working. I started waking up. It was a surrender to reality. What I believed I should be doing and how I should be doing it just didn’t work.

I’d rejected one set of outside authorities for another set. The reverse image, only with a 1960s spin. I’d taken on, wholesale, other values than those I’d been raised with and already rejected. But I’d never checked out the new ones in terms of their functionality in my life.

My life was a bloody awful mess. Total wreckage. It was easy to not take responsibility for that—a million different riffs on “if only” were available. “If only I wasn’t so far in debt, if the job paid more, if only the this that or the other was different.” You know.

Eventually, things evolved. Reality was still reality, however. What became different was that my perceptions of things changed. It was a bloody hard process to go through. I’d hammered my head against a brick wall because everything I chose to believe, what I’d ingested but not digested, required me to get through that particular wall. There was no way I could get through it. Finally, I gave up and stumbled away from it. The world didn’t end. I wandered—or was led, depending on how you look at it—into 12-step recovery and my wounds began to heal. There’s no way to describe how difficult it was: I went through periods of being scared stupid, of utter confusion, total dislocation. But even all that was better than crashing my head against that wall. It was as if I could see things I couldn’t before see.

For a while, there was the authority of the book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the experiences of the people in the meetings. I was lucky: the book and the people kept everything in the realm of their experiences and suggestions—it was, well, since nothing else has worked, why not try this?. See how it goes. There was just enough improvement that I kept it up. It was all based on checking back on my experience: did things get better? Yes: increment by increment.

I gained a home, reunited with my family, and a small income. There were still problems, however.

The 12-step meetings didn’t satisfy my essential loneliness and an ongoing feeling of being incomplete. But I knew I wasn’t going to become whole through someone or something else.... The authority offered by the book and the meetings offered a recycled rap about religion; like if I just turned myself over to God and got spiritual, everything would be cool. I went to church; I got told a lot about what I should do. Not suggestions, this time, just commands. It was back to not looking to my own life for information about what to do next, instead, just follow a higher authority, because I was, basically, a sinner and couldn’t trust myself. That didn’t ring true. Therapy, counseling, was the next step.

That was when I started liking myself the way I was and quit assuming I was all wrong. 12-Step Recovery had brought me to an acceptance of the world and of my own responsibilities; counseling took me to self-acceptance. The beginnings of self-acceptance—that part couldn’t come from the outside; it has to be done on the inside.

A couple of things that kept me on track: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” and, “if God knows all about you and loves you, why don’t you?” I can’t love my neighbor, or anyone else, if I don’t love myself. That means eating right, sleeping enough, not poisoning myself with crap, forgiving myself for being human and doing what humans do. For not being perfect. If God, however one defines God, if God does love me, then God wouldn’t have brought me this far just to say, “Hah-hah, April Fool!”

I’ve been told there’s a contradiction in insisting on self-authority and then talking about God or Creator. The people who say that offer to be authorities for me. Thanks, I’ll trust to find my own authority.

On a daily basis, I check with myself: am I honest about what I’m going? Am I kind to myself and others? Do I try to help myself and others rather than hinder? That brings me to consider responsibility to the rest of creation. Five hundred years ago, John Donne, the English poet and divine, wrote: “No man is an island, entire of himself.”

That’s the way it works for me.

As a closing note, here’s a quote from Stanley Milgram, who performed an experiment on why people will do god-awful things because they’re told to:

“ The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."

So much for obeying authority.

Robert Fisk is a good reporter: probably the best one covering the Middle East.

Orwell died too soon.

Telling It Like It Isn't
By Robert Fisk
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_122705S.shtml
Tuesday 27 December 2005

I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" - or even, in some cases, "outposts."

Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land - just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all - so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" - words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency - referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently - and grotesquely - by American journalists.

American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict - the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs - are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed.

Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.

Back in the old days, we used to believe - did we not? - that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.

So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.

-------

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the author, most recently, of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, published last month by Knopf.

So, since Bush and Cheney were elected, we’ve seen our world improved so much. Let’s see: we’ve helped Bagdad get all of six hours of electricity a day, oil go tip-toeing up to $50-60 a barrel, oil companies achieve staggering profits, and Afghanistan farmers return to growing opium. How much all of this has actually cost the U.S. taxpayer is more than anyone wants to know.
However, at no cost at all to us, the new president of Bolivia has promised to legalize the cultivation of coca. It may cost us another guerilla war to stop him, however, and that will be expensive. How much has the war on drugs cost us in the last five years, anyhow?
What if Cheney and Bush would get addicted to crack cocaine...Yikes! — What if they already are?



Yahoo! News
Desperate Afghan farmers returning to opium
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051231/ts_afp/afghanistandrugs&printer=1;_ylt=Av578eiwziPVQQFXP2qTQ.6GOrgF;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
Sat Dec 31, 2:15 PM ET

For three years Gulam Gul has been growing wheat, rice, radishes and cauliflower -- anything but the opium that his family once depended on.

The work is hard and his income too low to support his 13 dependents, and he is planning a career change -- to merchant in a bazaar.

"When I was growing opium, for one season I was earning 200,000 rupees (3,345 dollars). Now I get 60,000 rupees for one season," Gul says in his field on the outskirts of Jalalabad, where the Pakistani rupee is commonly used.

He and other farmers ripped up their opium poppies because the government ordered a halt to Afghanistan's huge production of illicit opium, which makes up more than 85 percent of the world's total and is used to make heroin.

In eastern Nangahar, of which Jalalabad is the capital, the order was particularly successful with a more than 95 percent reduction in the poppy cultivation this year. The province was the second largest producer in 2004.

But many Nangahar farmers, especially those in remote, mountainous areas, have turned back to the lucrative crop this planting season which began a few weeks ago, says former agriculture minister Sayed Aziz Zaheer, who oversaw the drop in output.

"I know people have already planted in the far districts. Between 40 to 50 percent of them are in mountainous areas -- it's far away where people cannot see it," he says.

One reason is that farmers have not been successful in switching to other crops, in part because the government has failed to distribute promised fertilizer and seeds, Zaheer says.

"I say for the next year poppy cultivation will increase because the government hasn't fulfilled their promise," he says.

Another reason is that opium is so much more lucrative than other produce: income from opium poppies was around 5,400 dollars per hectare (2.47 acres) this year compared with about 550 dollars for wheat, according to UN figures.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime also expects opium production to creep up in several provinces, including Nangahar, after slipping in 2005.

In August the office announced there had been a 21 percent drop in land area planted with poppies, although this only translated into a 2.4 percent drop in output to 4,100 tonnes because of favourable weather conditions for the crop.

The decline was nonetheless the first since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban government, under which Afghanistan's opium production was largely unchecked until the hardliners ordered a ban in 2000 in a bid to avoid international sanctions.

But the ouster of the Taliban also meant the collapse of law and order which saw a resurgence in the crop first grown on a large scale in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

The new US-backed government now has support in its fight against the drugs trade -- which is equivalent to 52 percent of the official gross domestic product -- from its international partners, notably Britain and the United States who stress the link between drugs and terrorism.

To curb production, eradication programmes must be stepped up, says an American official involved in the counter-narcotics efforts, adding though it is likely to take at least 20 years for "overall elimination" of the crop.

There should be more "prosecution of traffickers, more law enforcement, and removals of some corrupted local officials involved in the trafficking," he says, under condition of anonymity.

The government is defensive of its efforts in its "war on drugs", regularly releasing details of the smashing of makeshift heroin labs and confiscation of batches of opium.

It has also enlisted mullahs in this devout country to preach against the scourge, but resisted suggestions that it legalise its opium and turn it towards the production of legal painkillers.

Authorities are reluctant to resort to chemical spraying, such as used in Colombia -- which is the world's leading producer of cocaine with 480 tonnes annually despite the huge US-sponsored spraying, but some of Afghanistan's partners say this is the answer.

"If the government doesn't take action and reduction cannot be sustained, the idea of aerial spray will certainly be revisited. Not in one or two years, but it's a cloud in the horizon," says a Western official.

For Gulam Gul, in his field outside the city of Jalalabad, the risk of jail or having his crop destroyed is not worth the money to be made from opium, which he grew for years under the Taliban.

"If the government destroys my crop, I am a poor person. What would I do?" he asks, taking a break from meticulously sweeping grains of rice into a pile.

Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.

There are plenty of stories in the main stream about world poverty, world AIDs, world fill-in-the-blank. And lots of NGOs working on the problem. It’s almost a fashionable past-time, to speculate on alleviating the world’s poor and sick populations. Unfortunately, there isn’t much money to be made doing that. The IMF really can’t devote itself to such details—after all, we’ll always have the poor with us, somebody said. So easing world poverty is an abstract: a good intention that will remain just that.

I get annoyed with the stories about world poverty: I see too much of it here. The United States has long claimed to be the Greatest Nation In The World—every once in a while some hot-shot politician will remind us, just in case we should even doubt God’s favor.

So how come we have so many poor people? The logical answer is this: nobody really cares. They give jobs to social workers, they provide income to slum-lords, provide cheap labor...and the illogical and unspoken answer is “because it’s their own goddam fault.” America is a country that that believes wealth is a sign of God’s grace; poverty is a sign of God’s dislike. There’s something wrong with the poor, otherwise God would bless them with wealth. Turn on Christian preachers and listen to them talk about the material blessings of God’s love. If people don’t have those material things, it’s because they haven’t found favor. Never mind the causes sociologists and historians talk about. Never mind the stories about how difficult it is to crawl out of poverty when the whole system kicks you in the face for even trying.

“God helps those who helps themselves.” And just where did that come from? It isn’t in the Bible. It came, according to Cynthia Tucker, from America’s favorite philosopher, Ben “a penny saved is a penny earned” Franklin.

Here’s an essay by Ms Tucker on charity.


We have little patience with the poor

Cynthia Tucker - Universal Press Syndicate

12.27.05 - If you can't talk politely about the poor during the Christmas season, when can you?

I'll take the chance that the bitter culture wars can be suspended for a day or two -- call it a post-Christmas truce -- so we can have an uplifting, if still spirited, debate about our responsibilities to the impoverished.

Though some self-serving ranters want us to believe in a phony "war on Christmas," I think most of us know that the season's deeper meaning has nothing to do with whether retailers hang banners saying "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays." It has much more to do with how we treat one another -- including the most vulnerable among us.

So let's talk about the poor. Let's talk about those among us who cannot afford basic medical care or decent housing. Let's consider those who, despite working 40 hours or more a week, still can't afford the prescription drugs they need. Let's talk about those who join the Army just to get dental care for their children.

Don't want to hear about them? You think they're stuck at the margins because they're lazy or dumb or inclined to crime? You think America offers prosperity to any man or woman willing to work hard enough to get it?

Americans have always believed that. That idealism distinguishes us from Europeans, who are more likely to believe that class determines one's future, that pulling oneself up by the bootstraps just ruins good bootstraps. Those who abandoned their homes in the Old World to seek fortunes in the New had to be relentless optimists, hardy souls who could make their own way. While some failed, many others thrived.

Those who don't choose their parents wisely often find their achievements limited. This country is more class-oriented than many of us would like to believe. Academic research has shown that adult men are often mired in the same economic bracket their fathers were in.

Indeed, it's getting harder to climb the economic ladder. As the pace of globalization picks up and manufacturing jobs disappear -- along with their benefits and pensions -- it's increasingly difficult for those without college degrees to get ahead. And the price of a college education keeps going up.

But we have remarkably little patience with those who don't share our good fortune. A generation of politicians and pundits has told us that the poor are lazy and irresponsible and undeserving of our help. Indeed, trying to help them would only make them worse off, we're told.

So the last thing we should do is establish a broad social safety net that provides generous health care and raises the minimum wage and ensures decent housing for all. Why, any one of those things could prove absolutely ruinous to the poor!

That political philosophy -- which claims to be a hard-headed compassion rather than the hard-hearted selfishness it really is -- has become the conventional wisdom. But it's an odd thing for a nation that claims to be overwhelmingly Christian. There is nothing in the New Testament that says that helping the poor merely makes them worse off.

Many of us may believe there is, of course. In the August 2005 issue of Harper's, Bill McKibben wrote: "Three-quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that 'God helps those who help themselves.' That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.

"The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the Gospel message, with its radical summons to love (thy) neighbor."

That's a theology not heard much these days from any pulpit. But it's worth thinking about.

(c) 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=20114

The anti-evolution stance of the Kansas State School Board reminds me of the harassment of teachers that went on in Germany during the Nazi take-over: any teacher that denied the party line that Jews were sub-human was denounced, often by that teacher’s students.

The Nazis, and totalitarian states like China, the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany—they all depended on people denouncing other people to the police. So did the Inquisition. Our own government is encouraging us to do the same thing.

We live in dangerous times.



It's no fun being a biology teacher in Kansas
`Popular Science' says the job ranks right up there with human lab rat and manure inspector. What do the teachers think?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-051229teacher-story,1,7983099.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=1&coll=chi-news-hed
By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent
Published December 29, 2005, 8:03 PM CST

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Hours after students merrily departed for the long winter break, lights still blazed in Ken Bingman's biology lab at Blue Valley West High School here.

The bright TV lights belonged to the crew from "Nick News with Linda Ellerbee," a children's news magazine show on the Nickelodeon cable channel. Nick News was just the latest in a long line of those seeking the veteran biology teacher's take on the country's most spectacular recurring science squabble: the Kansas State Board of Education's on-again-off-again relationship with Charles Darwin and his theory of biological evolution.

For the moment, that tenuous and tempestuous engagement is off again. And Kansas biology teachers like Bingman once more are caught in the middle of a raging culture war.

On Nov. 8, the board adopted state science standards containing the harshest criticism of evolution in the nation. The standards pointedly cast doubt on Darwin's theory that all life on Earth shares common ancestry and developed through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. Repugnant to many religious conservatives, modern evolutionary theory is considered by the vast majority of scientists as a cornerstone of modern biology that has withstood rigorous testing over time.

In an even bolder step that drew international derision, the board redefined science as a discipline not limited to observations in the natural world and opened the door to supernatural explanations. While unspecified, these might include the biblical account of creation in Genesis and intelligent design, or ID, which presents itself as a scientific theory positing that some complexities of the natural world are best attributed to an unnamed and unseen designer. Most ID proponents believe the designer is God; most scientists believe ID is creationism in a lab coat.

***

For example, Bingman said, over the years he probably had students who disagreed with evolution; typically 10 percent of his students are creationists. But "those students really weren't vocal...Now, it's in your face, I mean, it's in your face.

"Not only do they say that intelligent design is right, they even talk about your politics and call you a liberal and those kinds of things, which I think inappropriate in a classroom," he said.

Assigned to discuss five solid pieces of evidence for evolution, one 14-year-old student wrote: "Although there is more than one viewpoint on the issue of how we all got here, Mr. Bingman is forcing [us into] believing his views by teaching us one-sided education. This is much as how the liberal media is forcing the public into disowning the war and Pres. Bush's policies. Despite my viewpoints I am forced to write about the theory of evolution."

Said Bingman, "I've never had anything like that before in 43 years of teaching. It's one instance, but it's symptomatic of what we're seeing in some young people."
***

Over the last 20 years, polls also consistently find that almost half of all Americans believe God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years. For a biology teacher in a small-town school, Bingman said the anti-evolution pressure could be enormous. "Because you teach all the sciences perhaps, or most of the sciences. Your wife may in fact be a teacher in the school...and there can be all sorts of harassment, not only to you, but to your wife and worst of all to your students or to your own children who are students in the school."

Such harassment of teachers and their families occurred in Dover, the rural Pennsylania school district whose board-mandated inclusion of ID in biology classes was struck down on Dec. 20 in a decision by federal District Court Judge John Jones III.

***

lbanderson@tribune.com

The anti-evolution stance of the Kansas State School Board reminds me of the harassment of teachers that went on in Germany during the Nazi take-over: any teacher that denied the party line that Jews were sub-human was denounced, often by that teacher’s students.

The Nazis, and totalitarian states like China, the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany—they all depended on people denouncing other people to the police. So did the Inquisition. Our own government is encouraging us to do the same thing.

We live in dangerous times.



It's no fun being a biology teacher in Kansas
`Popular Science' says the job ranks right up there with human lab rat and manure inspector. What do the teachers think?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-051229teacher-story,1,7983099.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=1&coll=chi-news-hed
By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent
Published December 29, 2005, 8:03 PM CST

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Hours after students merrily departed for the long winter break, lights still blazed in Ken Bingman's biology lab at Blue Valley West High School here.

The bright TV lights belonged to the crew from "Nick News with Linda Ellerbee," a children's news magazine show on the Nickelodeon cable channel. Nick News was just the latest in a long line of those seeking the veteran biology teacher's take on the country's most spectacular recurring science squabble: the Kansas State Board of Education's on-again-off-again relationship with Charles Darwin and his theory of biological evolution.

For the moment, that tenuous and tempestuous engagement is off again. And Kansas biology teachers like Bingman once more are caught in the middle of a raging culture war.

On Nov. 8, the board adopted state science standards containing the harshest criticism of evolution in the nation. The standards pointedly cast doubt on Darwin's theory that all life on Earth shares common ancestry and developed through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. Repugnant to many religious conservatives, modern evolutionary theory is considered by the vast majority of scientists as a cornerstone of modern biology that has withstood rigorous testing over time.

In an even bolder step that drew international derision, the board redefined science as a discipline not limited to observations in the natural world and opened the door to supernatural explanations. While unspecified, these might include the biblical account of creation in Genesis and intelligent design, or ID, which presents itself as a scientific theory positing that some complexities of the natural world are best attributed to an unnamed and unseen designer. Most ID proponents believe the designer is God; most scientists believe ID is creationism in a lab coat.

***

For example, Bingman said, over the years he probably had students who disagreed with evolution; typically 10 percent of his students are creationists. But "those students really weren't vocal...Now, it's in your face, I mean, it's in your face.

"Not only do they say that intelligent design is right, they even talk about your politics and call you a liberal and those kinds of things, which I think inappropriate in a classroom," he said.

Assigned to discuss five solid pieces of evidence for evolution, one 14-year-old student wrote: "Although there is more than one viewpoint on the issue of how we all got here, Mr. Bingman is forcing [us into] believing his views by teaching us one-sided education. This is much as how the liberal media is forcing the public into disowning the war and Pres. Bush's policies. Despite my viewpoints I am forced to write about the theory of evolution."

Said Bingman, "I've never had anything like that before in 43 years of teaching. It's one instance, but it's symptomatic of what we're seeing in some young people."
***

Over the last 20 years, polls also consistently find that almost half of all Americans believe God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years. For a biology teacher in a small-town school, Bingman said the anti-evolution pressure could be enormous. "Because you teach all the sciences perhaps, or most of the sciences. Your wife may in fact be a teacher in the school...and there can be all sorts of harassment, not only to you, but to your wife and worst of all to your students or to your own children who are students in the school."

Such harassment of teachers and their families occurred in Dover, the rural Pennsylania school district whose board-mandated inclusion of ID in biology classes was struck down on Dec. 20 in a decision by federal District Court Judge John Jones III.

***

lbanderson@tribune.com