disturbing the comfortable

I don’t know about the rest of the country, but, over in Portland, Whole Foods is the place to go: cheeses, meats, everything la-de-dah and ever-so-hip. (Around here, central Oregon, Wild Oats is the equivilent. Has anyone else noticed that the rudest shoppers in the world push carts around in the very hip upscale markets? You move slowly down an aisle and you get shoved.)

It’s like the “organic” milk or “free-range vegetarian fed” chickens routine. If the label says it’s organic, it’s good. Right? ‘Tain’t necessarily so, as the old song goes.

Published on Thursday, June 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Whole Foods CEO Mackey Endorses Cato Book – No More Corporate Crime Prosecutions
by Russell Mokhiber

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views06/0629-21.htm
Most people who shop at Whole Foods are liberal yuppies.

They have enough money to spend $9 on a pound of cherries.

They believe that shopping for groceries at Whole Foods instead of Safeway or Food Lion or Giant or Wal-Mart is the politically correct thing to do.

They probably believe that the President and CEO of Whole Foods is a liberal like themselves.

They of course would be wrong.

John Mackey is instead a libertarian with right-wing tendencies.

Mackey says that Milton Friedman is his hero.

He’s a devotee of Ayn Rand.

He’s opposed to national health insurance.

He’s a union buster.

And he has recently endorsed a book published by the libertarian Cato Institute whose author concludes that no corporation should ever be prosecuted for crimes – no matter the corporation, no matter the crime.

The book – Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law – is written by Georgetown University Professor John Hasnas.

“John Hasnas shows that new laws and regulations too often force CEOs to choose between acting legally and acting ethically,” Mackey says in a blurb on the back cover.

Unlike most books on white collar crime, which tend to rehash bland academic theories or cut corporate crimes of years past and paste them with dogmatic rants, Trapped is actually a compelling read with an original idea sprinkled here and there.

Hasnas’ big idea is that the whole system of prosecuting corporate crime is undermining the liberal principles built into traditional criminal law and designed to protect individuals against the power of the state.

The result is that corporations are forced to turn on their own employees to save their own corporate hide.

Hasnas is a hard line libertarian. He worked for a time as lawyer for the politically aggressive, right-wing, and privately-held Koch Industries – one of the nation’s largest oil companies.

And instead of concluding that we should fix the criminal justice system so that corporations and federal prosecutors can no longer gang up on individual employees – he concludes in his book that corporations should never be criminally prosecuted – ever.

No matter the crime.

No matter the corporation.

Hasnas wants to do away with corporate criminal liability.

If there is a crime committed by someone within the corporation, criminally prosecute the individual, he says.

But a corporation can’t commit a crime and should not be criminally prosecuted.

Ever.

We wanted to know: does Whole Foods’ CEO Mackey agree – corporations should never be criminally prosecuted?

No matter the crime?

No matter the corporation?

Does the libertarian John Mackey support the big business funded Cato Institute and its right wing ideology with cash – or just with quotes?

Whole Foods spokesperson Kate Lowery did not return numerous calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.

For a complete transcript of the Interview with John Hasnas, see 20 Corporate Crime Reporter 27(12), July 5, 2006, print edition only.

###

The ‘60s and ‘70s were violent times in Latin America (among other places!). The Colossus of The North, in it’s spasms of hate toward anything remotely Left, financed and trained and armed militaries and paramilitaries from Mexico to Argentina. Mexico was as oppressive as Guatemala or Salvador; it’s just they had a smoother hand with P.R. since the country is so dependent on tourism.



Mexican ex-president ordered arrested in massacre
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060630/ts_nm/rights_mexico_dc&printer=1;_ylt=Anza9ue9sPn5YdlmToWUBR9g.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
By Lorraine Orlandi1 hour, 4 minutes ago

A judge on Friday ordered the arrest of Mexico's former President Luis Echeverria for a 1968 student massacre in a surprise move just two days before a presidential election.

The judge ruled that there was enough evidence to support the charge of genocide brought against Echeverria, 84, by special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo.

The arrest order, after two failed attempts in recent years to charge Echeverria with genocide, is a breakthrough in outgoing President Vicente Fox's halting drive to punish those responsible for past government brutality. Fox leaves office in December.

"For the first time in Mexico's history a president will be tried in this way," Carrillo said. "This will work against a repetition of abuse of power, to impede it forever."

Echeverria is expected to be held under house arrest due to his age and health concerns, defense attorney Juan Velasquez said after the judge's ruling. Echeverria was president from 1970 to 1976, at the height of a so-called dirty war against leftists.

Echeverria was interior minister in charge of national security when government troops stormed a student rally in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, days before the opening of the Olympics here.

"This is an historic accomplishment after a long struggle by many for justice and truth in the face of a criminal state in the Echeverria era," said Joel Ortega, who witnessed the massacre as a student protester.

Voters go to the polls on Sunday in the first presidential election since 2000, when Fox ousted the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades, at times using repression to crush dissent.

It was not immediately clear what impact the arrest order could have on Sunday's vote, but it was unlikely to help PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo. He is in third place in opinion polls and his party has repeatedly criticized the investigation into past rights abuses.

Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a wafer-thin lead in opinion polls over ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon.

Officials said about 30 people died in what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre. But witnesses and rights activists put the death toll as high as 300. Echeverria has denied responsibility for the blood bath.

Carrillo, named by Fox to investigate and prosecute dirty-war crimes, says Echeverria oversaw a bloody campaign to stamp out dissidents when he was interior minister and president.

Fox took office pledging to shed light on Mexico's dark past and punish former high-ranking officials who planned and carried out state crimes, raising hopes for justice among survivors.

But the prosecutor has had little success, with few arrests and no convictions. Fox has been widely criticized by survivors and rights groups for falling short on his promises. He is barred by law from seeking re-election.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited.

Here’s a cogent editorial about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision and the rule of law—which supposedly is the way things work. The Constitution says treaties are the supreme law of the land, by the way; so the Geneva Conventions...?

And the answer to Ms Brooks question, "Did bush commit war crimes?? is "Does a bear shit in the woods?"


Did Bush Commit War Crimes?
By Rosa Brooks
The Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks30jun30,0,339573.column?coll=la-home-commentary
Friday 30 June 2006

Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld could expose officials to prosecution.

The Supreme Court on Thursday dealt the Bush administration a stinging rebuke, declaring in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld that military commissions for trying terrorist suspects violate both U.S. military law and the Geneva Convention.

But the real blockbuster in the Hamdan decision is the court's holding that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention applies to the conflict with Al Qaeda - a holding that makes high-ranking Bush administration officials potentially subject to prosecution under the federal War Crimes Act.

The provisions of the Geneva Convention were intended to protect noncombatants - including prisoners - in times of armed conflict. But as the administration has repeatedly noted, most of these protections apply only to conflicts between states. Because Al Qaeda is not a state, the administration argued that the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war on terror. These assertions gave the administration's arguments about the legal framework for fighting terrorism a through-the-looking-glass quality. On the one hand, the administration argued that the struggle against terrorism was a war, subject only to the law of war, not U.S. criminal or constitutional law. On the other hand, the administration said the Geneva Convention didn't apply to the war with Al Qaeda, which put the war on terror in an anything-goes legal limbo.

This novel theory served as the administration's legal cover for a wide range of questionable tactics, ranging from the Guantanamo military tribunals to administration efforts to hold even U.S. citizens indefinitely without counsel, charge or trial.

Perhaps most troubling, it allowed the administration to claim that detained terrorism suspects could be subjected to interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law, such as "waterboarding," placing prisoners in painful physical positions, sexual humiliation and extreme sleep deprivation.

Under Bush administration logic, these tactics were not illegal under U.S. law because U.S. law was trumped by the law of war, and they weren't illegal under the law of war either, because Geneva Convention prohibitions on torture and cruel treatment were not applicable to the conflict with Al Qaeda.

In 2005, Congress angered the administration by passing Sen. John McCain's amendment explicitly prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees. But Congress did not attach criminal penalties to violations of the amendment, and the administration has repeatedly indicated its intent to ignore it.

The Hamdan decision may change a few minds within the administration. Although the decision's practical effect on the military tribunals is unclear - the administration may be able to gain explicit congressional authorization for the tribunals, or it may be able to modify them to comply with the laws of war - the court's declaration that Common Article 3 applies to the war on terror is of enormous significance. Ultimately, it could pave the way for war crimes prosecutions of those responsible for abusing detainees.

Common Article 3 forbids "cruel treatment and torture [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." The provision's language is sweeping enough to prohibit many of the interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration. That's why the administration had argued that Common Article 3 did not apply to the war on terror, even though legal experts have long concluded that it was intended to provide minimum rights guarantees for all conflicts not otherwise covered by the Geneva Convention.

But here's where the rubber really hits the road. Under federal criminal law, anyone who "commits a war crime ... shall be fined ... or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death." And a war crime is defined as "any conduct ... which constitutes a violation of Common Article 3 of the international conventions signed at Geneva." In other words, with the Hamdan decision, U.S. officials found to be responsible for subjecting war on terror detainees to torture, cruel treatment or other "outrages upon personal dignity" could face prison or even the death penalty.

Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, of course. For prosecutions to occur, some federal prosecutor would have to issue an indictment. And in the Justice Department of Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales - who famously called the Geneva Convention "quaint" - a genuine investigation into administration violations of the War Crimes Act just ain't gonna happen.

But as Yale law professor Jack Balkin concludes, it's starting to look as if the Geneva Convention "is not so quaint after all."

--------

Rosa Brooks is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Her experience includes service as a senior advisor at the US State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, as a consultant for the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, as a board member of Amnesty International USA, and as a lecturer at Yale Law School.

It’s almost the Fourth. This seems like a fine time to remember a group who call themselves “Minutemen.” Their role, they told us a few months back, was to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the US-Mexico border. The group got lots of coverage—TV loved them, because they were picturesque, a symbol of the Old West meeting the electronic age, and they were led by a couple of guys who had a good sense of publicity.

The group ended up hiring a contractor to finish off their work, with a grand total of three miles of barbed-wire fence out of the ten miles they promised. I’ve yet to see a barbed-wire fence that keeps anybody out. One good thing: the Minutemen have been pretty quiet lately.

The Arizona Daily Star
Published: 06.21.2006
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/134531
Ernesto Portillo Jr. : Minutemen's fantasy fence a bust

For many young people in rural places, military service appears to be about the only way out of a depressed area.

Of two soldiers recently kidnapped and killed in Iraq, one is from this area—Madras, up the road about forty-five minutes. Madras is a farm town, but the farming is becoming less and less productive, due to competition from overseas. There used to be sawmills there, as well, but they’ve become scarce. There isn’t a lot of hope about the future for a lot of kids. The military brags about teaching skills, money for college, adventure...all the things that sound good when you’re young and unsure. Unfortunately, what is promised and what is delivered are two different things.

It looks like maybe the young man from Madras was murdered because his unit did something pretty bad.


U.S. soldiers investigated for alleged rape, killings in Iraq
6/30/2006, 9:18 a.m. PT
By RYAN LENZ
The Associated Press

BEIJI, Iraq (AP) — Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq, a U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday.

The soldiers also allegedly burned the body of the woman they are accused of assaulting in the March incident, the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of coalition troops in Baghdad, had ordered a criminal investigation into the alleged killing of a family of four in Mahmoudiyah, south of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. It did not elaborate.

The case represents the latest allegations against U.S. soldiers stemming from the deaths of Iraqis. At least 14 U.S. troops have been convicted.

***

However, a U.S. official close to the investigation said at least one of the soldiers, all assigned to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, has admitted his role and has been arrested. Two soldiers from the same regiment, including Pfc. Thomas Tucker of Madras, were slain this month when they were kidnapped at a checkpoint near Youssifiyah.

The official said the accused soldiers were from the same platoon as the two slain soldiers, whose bodies were mutilated. He said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one of them to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22.

At least four other soldiers have had their weapons taken away and are confined to Forward Operating Base Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad.

The official said the killings appear to be unrelated to the kidnappings. He said those involved were all below the rank of sergeant. Senior officers were aware of the family's death but believed it was due to sectarian violence, common in the religiously mixed town, he said.

The killings appeared to have been a "crime of opportunity," the official said. The soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.

___

AP correspondent Ryan Lenz is embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Beiji, Iraq. He was previously embedded with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Mahmoudiyah.

__

The Associated Press News and Information Research Center contributed to this report.

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

Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is alive and well, thanks to the current crop of neo-cons running around. They have, though, a large—huge—elephant sitting in the middle of their headquarters. It’s called racism.


Hans Johnson: 'Two faces of GOP hate'
Date: Thursday, June 29 @ 09:17:19 EDT
Topic: Republicans

Hans Johnson, In These Times

On the surface, Shawn Stuart and Ralph Reed have little in common, other than their quest for public office this year as Republicans. But, Stuart, a bona fide Nazi running for state representative in Montana, and Reed, who has repeatedly appealed to antigay and racist bias as Georgia GOP chair and hopes to become lieutenant governor, share an intimate bond. They both have bigotry at the core of their campaigns.

Playing on prejudice is a dance they perform with differing degrees of grace. Reed, a slick and polished consultant, looks to win his August primary, while Stuart, a clumsy first-time candidate, is a longshot for the legislature. Reed, more than Stuart, disguises gay-bashing and scapegoating of immigrants in rhetoric of faith, family, and America's security. But even fellow Republicans are having a hard time identifying what, in substance, distinguishes the wacko from the White House confidante.

Recently home from service in Iraq, Stuart is the lone GOP candidate in state House district 76, based in heavily Democratic Butte. He told the Missoula Independent that he conveyed to local Republicans his strong anti-immigrant and anti-gay views. Montana state party spokesperson Chuck Butler agreed that the 24-year-old Stuart seemed a normal, even an admirable, GOP standard-bearer. "He made a nice appearance and got himself on the ballot and then he happened to say, 'Oh, I represent some other interest.'"

"Like anybody else, you can be part of one organization and part of another," Stuart told the Missoula Independent, when his affiliation with the National Socialist Movement came to light. He added, to the Billings Gazette, that he holds "nothing against any other race. We have our right to exist in the world. They have their right to exist in the world."



Reed, also a first-time candidate, puts his appeals to prejudice down in black and white. You might not guess it from their wooden headings. His two main policy statements are called "Strengthen Georgia Families, Communities, and Values" and "A Safer and More Secure Georgia."

The first obsesses over same-sex marriage and calls for a special session of the legislature to attack it. (Yes, you read that right.) It also backs another round of gay-bashing via statewide ballot measure, like the one already approved in 2004.

The second endorses an anti-immigrant crackdown and heaps praise on Georgia Senate Bill 529, one of the harshest laws in the nation. It grants local police officers the authority to arrest and indiscriminately round up those they suspect lack proper documentation. A broad spectrum of religious leaders, including the U.S. Catholic Conference, denounced the law. Reed, however, sees it as just a "first step."

The longtime head of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, Reed has been tarred by his involvement in the Jack Abramoff GOP corruption investigation. But like his former boss, Reed has played on prejudice to sway voters and raise his reputation.

In 2002, he used mail and radio appeals denouncing abortion and praising the Confederate flag to help Saxby Chambliss defeat then-Sen. Max Cleland. In 2004, as southeast regional rep for Bush's reelection, he unleashed a mailing suggesting that Democrats would ban the Bible and aggressively promote gay couples.

The current debate about immigration reform, while dividing Republicans nationally, sets a welcome stage for some GOP candidates eager to tap into fear and hatred. It allows them to sidestep any concrete solution or measurable results by instead lashing out at what Reed calls "law-breaking" and what Stuart calls the mingling of "pelicans" and "crows."

Reed and Stuart aren't alone in playing on prejudice to woo Republican voters, or in blurring the lines between marginal and mainstream GOP candidacies.

* Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King has trivialized the torture of detained Iraqis as "hazing" and sought to cancel sections of the federal Voting Rights Act that help non-English-speaking citizens cast ballots. Like fellow GOP antagonist Tom Tancredo of Colorado, he takes a vicious line against immigrants and has called for a razor-wire wall on the Mexican border. He's also revived the tactics of Joe McCarthy by branding a California city official a "communist" and then blocking the dedication of a post office after the 94-year-old human-rights activist.

* Illinois state senator Chris Lauzen has emerged as another ringleader of attacks on gays and immigrants. In opposing a landmark state civil rights bill in 2005, he invoked the quack claims of discredited researcher Paul Cameron to argue that gays live shorter lives. And he fought a bid to allow qualified immigrants who seek a license to drive legally in the state, saying it was the same as having "privileges handed to you."

* Oklahoma state representative Kevin Calvey also rails against gays and immigrants. He has sponsored a bill like that Reed pushed through in Georgia, which would force local and state government workers to tell on suspected illegals. He also demanded, and won, the repeal of a state school board provision barring bias against gay people. Calvey trumpeted the change as insulating the state against "homosexual rights organizations."

* In Tennessee, in March, the executive committee of the state GOP bounced James Hart from the party's slot on the August 3 primary ballot. Hart was the party's candidate in 2004, taking 82 percent in the primary and 26 percent in the general election. He attacks immigrants and gays while also advocating eugenics and limits on immigration or reproduction by what he told the Associated Press are "less favored races."

Republicans can pay a price for being tagged as extremist. A March poll of Georgia Republicans by the polling company InsiderAdvantage shows that Reed, if he won his primary and appeared on the fall ballot with incumbent Gov. Sonny Perdue, would drag down all Republicans. For every 2 people who said his presence was an incentive, 3 others said he would be a hex.

Still, no other GOP leader goes as far as Butler, in Montana, who says Stuart is a disgrace to the Party of Lincoln: He and other local leaders have endorsed the Democrat in the fall showdown.

In the early '90s, longtime conservative direct-mail consultant Marvin Liebman criticized the Republican Party for increasingly relying on intolerance in its appeals to voters. He saw the GOP becoming just "an agglomeration of bigotries." For Liebman, who gave Reed one of his first jobs in politics and came out as a gay man after decades as an anti-communist mouthpiece, the pronouncement was all the more painful since it served as a mea culpa.

In politics, defeat is often a wakeup call to conscience. Democrats have regrouped from losses in '04 to move for immigrant rights at the federal level and make anti-gay discrimination illegal in three states. For Republicans, one potential by-product of rejection on Nov. 7 is that the practitioners of scapegoating might finally take a look in the mirror.

Hans Johnson, a contributing editor of In These Times, is president of Progressive Victory, based in Washington, D.C., and writes on labor, religion and the mechanics of political campaigns.

(c) 2006 In These Times

Source: In These Times
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2719/


The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=26695

Here, in Bend Oregon, you ain’t anybody unless you have an SUV—Mercedes and Lexuses are preferred, but Land Rovers will do. Even Subarus are acceptable. Every winter they go slipping and sliding on the road up to the ski-lifts as Mt Bachelor. An amazing number of them end up in the ditch—which is about the only time they ever actually get “off-road.”

It seems like it’s required that if you have a big SUV—a Land Rover at least—and you’re driving, you also have to be talking on a cell phone. It’s some sort of fantasy about Living The Good Life. Oy.

4x4 debate: Enemy of the people
Gas-guzzling, road-hogging, air-polluting... and now even doctors have joined the outcry over 4x4 cars
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 23 June 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1095828.ece
Doctors have joined the chorus of attacks on 4x4 vehicles with a warning that owners are recklessly putting other road users at risk by flouting laws over the use of mobile phones and seat belts.

Researchers who studied the behaviour of drivers of the all-terrain vehicles say that they took more risks because they felt safer than drivers of smaller cars. Scornfully known as Chelsea tractors due to their increasing appearance on urban streets, few 4x4s have seen more mud than can be picked up on a private school sports field. Teachers have tried to ban them and politicians want to impose penal tax rates on them - up to £2,000 a year, 10 times the normal road tax, in the latest proposal from the Liberal Democrats. They have been widely condemned as gas-guzzling, road-hogging and environmentally damaging. And the new front opened by the medical profession is bound further to inflame the debate on Britain's most controversial vehicle.

Although passengers in a 4x4 are less likely to suffer harm in an accident than those in a smaller vehicle, their owners are increasing the risk of injury to themselves and others by their failure to observe common safety measures, according to research from Imperial College, London, which is published in the British Medical Journal.

The pattern is an example of "risk compensation", where the safer a person feels the riskier the behaviour they indulge in.

A record 187,000 4x4s were sold in Britain last year, double the number a decade ago. One in seven cars on the road is now a 4x4, according to the Department of Transport.

However, the Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, hit out at the vehicles recently, saying: "There will come a time when it will be irresponsible for those [4x4s] to be on sale."

They have also incurred the wrath of the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who lambasted urban owners as "complete idiots". The presenter of BBC's Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, described them as "clinically insane".

For the study by researchers from Imperial College, drivers of passenger cars were observed passing three different points in Hammersmith, west London, in February 2004.

The vehicles were monitored for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening during weekdays. More than 38,000 vehicles were studied, including almost 3,000 4x4s.

The researchers found drivers of 4x4s were almost four times more likely to be seen using hand-held mobiles. They were also less likely to use seat belts.

Those who broke one law, on using a mobile or not using a seat belt, were more likely also to break the other. Overall, one in six drivers (15.3 per cent) was not wearing a seat belt and one in 40 (2.5 per cent) was using a mobile.

Lesley Walker and colleagues say in the BMJ: "Our data show a worryingly high level of non-compliance with laws on seat belts and hand-held mobile phones by drivers in London. Our observation that almost one in six drivers was not wearing a seat belt is a public health concern."

Last October the BMJ published an American study showing that 4x4s were more dangerous to pedestrians than normal cars. Tests showed that people who were hit by the vehicles in accidents were four times more likely to die than those hit by other cars.

Previous studies have shown that drivers using mobile phones have four times the risk of an accident. On that basis, 4x4 drivers are at 16 times the risk of having an accident, given that they are four times more likely to use a mobile compared with other drivers.

Dr Walker said: "In general 4x4s reduce the risk for their occupants but increase the risk for everyone else. In using a 4x4, instead of a normal car, one's chance of death or serious injury falls by four in 1,000 but the chance of killing or injuring others rises by 11 in 1,000, with a resulting cost to the community."

Bruce Thompson, charity executive, 54: 'It uses no more space than a saloon'

"We own two vehicles, a Land Rover Discovery TD5, and a high performance four-wheel-drive saloon car. The Land Rover ferries my wife to work every day, takes the family on holiday and tows a two-ton horse trailer.

"The alternative, if we want to pursue our hobby, is to buy another vehicle, which would be more harmful as the more damaging effects on the environment come from manufacture, not usage.

"It uses up no more road space than a typical, largish saloon car, and it has an engine no bigger than a typical saloon car. My wife does a round trip of 50 miles a day to the school where she teaches and does not go off-road and I drive to central London with it when I occasionally visit.

"I get cross about uninformed critics of 4x4 users and people who jump on the bandwagon and think that by banning the 4x4 there will be salvation for the planet. I find that the Land Rover encourages a more relaxed, non-aggressive approach to driving.

"I accept that you can't see past it easily, and for other road users that's annoying. I don't have a lot of sympathy with people who only buy them for the school run and never put them to the use for which they were designed."

Counting the cost

Driving a 13mpg 4x4 rather than a 25mpg car for a year will waste more energy than leaving the fridge open for seven years, leaving the TV on for 32 years or leaving the light on for 34 years.

Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

Range Rovers with a 4.4-litre engine have an urban mpg of 12.2 and emit 389g carbon dioxide per kilometre. In contrast, a Ford Mondeo 2-litre fuel-injected saloon has an urban mpg of 25 and emits 190g carbon dioxide. A Smart car emits 138g carbon dioxide.

Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

Urban 4x4s are involved in 25 per cent more accidents than saloon cars and do far more damage.

Churchill Insurance

4x4 drivers are 27 per cent more likely to be at fault in the event of an accident than saloon car drivers.

Admiral Insurance

If a pedestrian is hit by a 4x4 they are twice as likely to be killed than if they were hit by a saloon car.

New Scientist

Only 5 per cent of 4x4s are ever taken off-road.

Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

Sales of 4x4s grew by 12.8 per cent in 2004, to 179,000, more than double the number sold a decade ago.

Department of Transport, 2005

Drivers of 4x4s are most likely to have been in an argument with traffic wardens (22 per cent), compared with 6 per cent of saloon car drivers.

RAC Foundation, 2004

The risk of a fatal roll-over crash is twice as high for 4x4s as it is for a saloon car.

Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

One of America’s major drives is to control the world’s reserves of oil. It’s like Hitler’s drive toward Baku in World War Two: got to have that oil! With Texas oil-men running the country, this is understandable. We’re struggling to control Iraq. Venezuela is under seige, though no as full-blown as Iraq. Persia is being eyed as a country ripe for “regime change.” If Mexico swings left, then there’ll be lots and lots of US troops on the US-Mexico border!

Most people don’t know that Canada is actually our biggest foreign oil source—as well as of natural gas. We tried to dragoon them into fighting in Iraq but they wouldn’t go for it; enough pressure was put on, though, to get their troops in Afghanistan. What if Canada told the US to go whistle? We have to have oil, more oil, ever more more more oil.

The current hype about “alternative fuels” is just that: hype. It costs more energy to make these alternatives than they produce. Just another way to keep up the quest.

Look out, Canada, we have lots of major highways ending right at your border. We can get our military in there, fast!


C B C . C A N e w s - F u l l S t o r y :
Most Americans don't know Canada is their biggest oil supplier
Last Updated Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:01:07 EDT

http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/national/2006/06/27/energy.html?print

A new poll suggests the vast majority of Americans are unaware that Canada is the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the U.S.

Canada is the biggest foreign supplier of oil and natural gas to the U.S. Canada is the biggest foreign supplier of oil and natural gas to the U.S.

The Canadian American Business Council (CABC) — which represents some of the biggest private sector companies in both countries — said its survey of 1,000 Americans found that only four per cent of respondents thought Canada was the country that provided them with more oil than anyone else.

The survey also found that 41 per cent of Americans asked would support replacing oil from unstable areas of the world with oil from Canada "even if doing so resulted in higher prices for U.S. consumers."

"The findings suggest a foundation of American public support for meaningful initiatives to expand Canadian energy supplies to the U.S.," said CABC chairman Randoph Dove in a statement.

"As more and more Americans recognize Canada as a secure source of energy resources, this support should only increase," he said.

The release of this poll came just as energy-rich Alberta launched a massive lobbying effort in Washington to get across its message that Canada — and especially Alberta — has a stable and secure supply of oil that it's eager to sell the U.S.

Exhibits about Alberta and its vast oil sands deposits occupy a prominent place in this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington.

That's drawn criticism from an environmental lobby group, the National Resources Defence Council, which says the industry and government-sponsored exhibits at the festival make no mention of the "devastating environmental consequences" the council says oil sands mining creates.

The survey was conducted by Vitale & Associates, who interviewed 1,000 people from June 13 to 15. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.


Copyright ©2006 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - All Rights Reserved

Fires send sparks way ahead of the main blaze; that’s been one of the problems with the current administration: they don’t just start trying to burn the Constitution, they set fires where-ever possible. The sparks spread even further. Off-shore oil, domestic spying, claims on patriotism, corrupt awarding of contracts—the idea has been to run the opposition ragged trying to put out the spot fires.

The wild horses. This is another spot-fire that needs to be extinguished. The Administration plans on liquidating thousands of wild horses in order to buy the votes of the cattlemen and cowboy-heads—and to pay off the debts to these bozos that have already been incurred.


The wild mustang - free no more

http://banderabulletin.com/articles/2006/06/27/news/lifestyles/life70.txt

Once federally protected animal may again be harvested

By Jessica Hawley - Staff Writer

"Congress finds and declares that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West," states a congressional declaration dated Dec. 15, 1971.

Yet, in a surprising and highly protested move, Congress recently passed a bill that allows for the slaughter of the American wild mustang reportedly effective Wednesday, Jan. 5.

Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana introduced the one-page Rider #142 into the 3,000-page Federal Appropriations Bill HR 4848.

The rider changes the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, splitting the once federally protected wild horses and burros into two categories, those over 10 years old and those that have been to a minimum of three unsuccessful adoptions. In accordance with the rider's language, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is authorized to sell these animals to the highest bidder without regard for the buyer's intentions.

The rider was reportedly passed without opportunity for public hearing or debate. President George W. Bush signed it Dec. 8.

***

In 1987, a Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the BLM could not give title to a person whom they knew intended to sell the horse for slaughter. Instead, in an effort to prevent the overpopulation of the wild horses and preserve the public lands on which they grazed, the horses were gathered and held at facilities for training and adoption placement.

***

An ongoing debate over grazing land has encircled horse, environmental, animal activists and cattle ranchers for years. In 2003, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association reportedly proposed legislation to authorize the immediate sale of unadopted mustangs and to make federal agencies pay for land damaged by feral horses.

In a letter to Sen. Burns pleading for the removal of Rider #142, Executive Director of the Wild Mustang Foundation Mary L. Dobbs said, "Senator Conrad Burns proposed Rider #142 allowing the BLM to sell wild horses to slaughter, providing more grazing for cattle though federal law mandates protection for wild horses. Currently, there are 150 steers to every one wild horse on federal land. Only two percent of the beef eaten in the U.S. comes from public lands ranching. According to the [U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)] report in 1990, wild horses were not the cause of declining rangelands, it was attributed to overgrazing by cattle."

Took a few days off. The days actually took me off. Things to do. The world, no surprise, just kept right on keeping on. So did events.

The Supremes startled everybody, I think, with their decision that international law actually trumped the law as promulgated by El Presidente Maximo. The irony is that the US was one of the major powers to actually make international law as important as it is. After World War Two, most semi-civilized people realized we had to set some standards for human and national behaviors. Otherwise the international scene would be a chaotic scene of countries acting without any regard for anybody else. Well, yeah, that is what the US has been doing for the last six or seven years. Before then we weren't the greatest country when it came to following rules, but at least we made a pretense. The Bush-Cheney regime stripped away even that pretense. We really have become a rogue nation.

Maybe things will get better, now. Maybe.

Since I’m on a theme, this afternoon, of government secrecy and manufactured crises, I want to talk more about the busts of the “terrorists” down in Miami.

It continues to unroll as a publicity stunt for the government. You know, the way the flap about the Da Vinci Code made the movie seem like more than it really was? Good for ticket sales, mainly. Look: here’s a bunch of young black dudes down in one of Miami’s many hell-holes, Liberty City. It’s easy to picture that bleakness of life there: no jobs, high crime, little hope. Perfectly good place for frustration to brew into something really intoxicating.

Christ, if I lived there, I’d either be a drug-addict or one of these guys, probably...most likely, I’d be dead, yeah.

So these guys decided they were going to try to bring down America. But the guy they thought was al-Quaeda turned out to be a Fed. This secret police agent gave them money and a video camera, maybe some combat boots. Not much. In the agent’s presence, the group cooked up a whacked-out scheme to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. If the cop was an agent provocateur. I would not be at all surprised. We’ve seen this happening...well, at least since the Molly McGuires and the Haymarket Bombing.

These guys talked big. But they didn’t do anything, except act stupid in front of a secret police agent. But, to hear the government talk about it, you’d think this crowd was as dangerous as the Black Panthers, Red Brigades, Taliban, the Irish Republican Army, SDS, and the Yippies, all rolled into one.

The main fuction of all this hoop-la is to con the American people into being even more afraid than they usually are, these days—and to take a little heat off the administration for it’s general incompetence and greedy games.

Here's a take on this from the World Socialist Web Site. It's a nice example of why the Trotsky-ites are not a world force: they're incredibly boring.

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Miami “terror” arrests—a government provocation
By Bill Van Auken
24 June 2006
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24_prn.shtml


There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to “wage war on the United States” that suggest it, like so many previous “terrorist plots” announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.

None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.

There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as “even bigger than September 11”—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.

While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.

The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as “the al Qaeda representative.”

The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.

On Thursday, the government’s paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.

It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the “Seas of David,” which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI’s deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David “did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them.”

According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.

Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants “swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda.” Who administered this oath? The “al Qaeda representative,” AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.

Aside from this “loyalty oath” solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.

The only action with which this one individual is charged—all else is words—is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The “al Qaeda representative”—i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.

The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving “with the ‘al Qaeda representative’” to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.

In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a “list of shoe sizes.” Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.

Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been “more aspirational than operational.” In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.

“We preempted their plot,” declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.

At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened “in its earliest stages.”

So “early” was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government’s indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they’ve never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that’s ever gone beyond just talk.”

Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, “There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all.”

In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology.”

What these words mean is anyone’s guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a “home-grown” terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government’s own indictment.

R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had “lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America.” This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.

It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.

What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up “terror plot.”

What is the government’s motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed “global war on terror” waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.

To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another “conspiracy” is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.

Until now, these “sting” operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a “plot” that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant. The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.

Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.

These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.


Copyright 1998-2006
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Here's a nice succinct version of the government's position in prosecuting terrorists: "We can do what we want and we don't gotta show you no stinking evidence."

Whenever somebody wants to actually see objective evidence, the government stonewalls them. I've mentioned this before. It isn't anything I grew up believing this country would do. Neither is a president and vice-president demanding even more secrecy, national ID cards, border fences, perpetual war for perpetual peace (maybe, sometime, we'll see), or any of the bullshit coming out of this government. Hell, I didn't even believe the Democrats would lick up every turd of that bullshit and smile about it... I was misinformed, yeah. We all were.


Government asserts "state secrets privilege" in surveillance case
6/23/2006, 7:33 p.m. PT
By JOSEPH B. FRAZIER
The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Justice Department says a lawsuit filed here against warrantless civilian surveillance must be dropped because revealing information about the program — even whether an organization was monitored — would damage national security.

In a memorandum released this week, the Justice Department said it was asserting "state secrets privilege" in a lawsuit filed by the now-defunct Oregon branch of Al-Haramain, an Islamic charity, and was asking that the case be dismissed.

According to the memo, "the very subject matter of this lawsuit — including whether any of the Plaintiffs was subject to such surveillance, and whether any such surveillance was lawful — implicates classified activities and information, the disclosure of which would be required or risked if Plaintiffs' claims were to be adjudicated."

The lawsuit alleges that the National Security Agency illegally wiretapped electronic communications between Al-Haramain directors in Saudi Arabia and the group's Washington, D.C., lawyers without a court order.

Earlier this year, Al-Haramain lawyers filed a classified document under seal that they say supports their claim that the government illegally intercepted phone calls.

The government acknowledged accidentally turning over the document to Al-Haramain lawyers in 2004. The court considered it so sensitive that U.S. District Judge Garr King ordered it stored at a federal facility in Seattle because the only repository secure enough in Portland was the office of the FBI, a defendant.

In April, King said the Islamic charity has a right to know the arguments the government is making, "to the extent it can be done without compromising national security interests."

The Justice Department said in its memo this week that the secrets privilege must get the "utmost deference" from courts.

Even revealing who is being watched, the memorandum said, could reveal what the government knows and permit terrorists to adjust their operations.

Steven Goldberg, a lawyer for the charity, said the government argument misses the point.

"The essence of our case is not to say that they should not be out there doing surveillance, to do what they need to do to prevent a terrorist attack," he said. "We have no problem with that. But if they do it, do it based on the law."

"No president has the right to ignore what Congress has set forth as the procedure to be followed," Goldberg said.

He said the "state secrets privilege" still requires courts to decide if it should be used in a particular case.

"We're developing our arguments," Goldberg said, adding that they hope to reply by July 11.

In their memo, federal attorneys call Al-Haramain a "designated terrorist entity." The U.S. Treasury seized Al-Haramain assets in 2004 pending an investigation into whether the charity was involved in terrorism after it was accused of sending money to Islamic fighters in Chechnya in violation of federal tax laws.

Al-Haramain officials and foundation attorneys have denied any wrongdoing, saying the defunct charity had simply operated a prayer house and distributed Islamic literature to prisoners.

Prosecutors dropped the tax charges against Al-Haramain last year, saying it was a waste of time because nothing remained of the foundation but its corporate shell.

Since The New York Times revealed the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program in December, several civil lawsuits have challenged the legality of the program.

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

So, if the Republican administration is little more than a bootcamp for future big-time lobbyists and hucksters, who is actually opposing them?

Well, silly, the only entity that could possibly object is...you guessed it: Satan.

Politics make for strange bedfellows, yeppers. Move over, big boy, I’m tired.

http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=3970622
Article Last Updated: 6/23/2006 12:57 AM
Jacob's bad luck: Is it . . . Satan?
Bedeviled: His business deals have been delayed, keeping him from fully funding his campaign
By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune

As if beating a five-term congressman wasn't hard enough, John Jacob said he has another foe working against him: the devil.
"There's another force that wants to keep us from going to Washington, D.C.," Jacob said. "It's the devil is what it is. I don't want you to print that, but it feels like that's what it is."
Jacob said Thursday that since he decided to run for Congress against Rep. Chris Cannon, Satan has bollixed his business deals, preventing him from putting as much money into the race as he had hoped.
Numerous business deals he had lined up have been delayed, freezing money he was counting on to finance his race.
"You know, you plan, you organize, you put your budget together and when you have 10 things fall through, not just one, there's some other, something else that is happening," Jacob said.
Asked if he actually believed that "something else" was indeed Satan, Jacob said: "I don't know who else it would be if it wasn't him. Now when that gets out in the paper, I'm going to be one of the screw-loose people."
Jacob initially said the devil was working against him during a Wednesday immigration event, then reiterated his belief Thursday in a meeting with The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board.
"There's a lot of adversity. There's no question I've had experiences that I think there's an outside force," he said.
University of Utah political scientist Matthew Burbank said Jacob's sentiment is unusual for a political candidate and might show his inexperience, but is unlikely to be a major issue for the conservative voters he is targeting.
"Given that, I don't think it's very likely to make a big splash among Republican primary voters, but certainly if he gets through to the general election it might come up again and he'd have to explain it more," Burbank said.
Jacob, who like Cannon is LDS, said he is not the only one who is being opposed by Beelzebub. He said both Cannon and Sen. Bob Bennett have lost millions of dollars since going to Congress, and he believes their adversity is rooted in the same dark origins.
Cannon's campaign would not address whether Lucifer is opposing either candidate.
"Chris would not attribute any adversities to any outside influence," Cannon's chief of staff, Joe Hunter, said regarding Cannon's diminished personal wealth since going to Congress. "I'm not sure that Chris would even call them adversities. It's a conscious decision on Chris' part to do what's important to him. There's been far more important events in Chris' life than his business."
Jacob explained that, when people try to do something good, there are frequently forces that align to stop them.
"We have a country that was created by our Heavenly Father and it was a country that had a Constitution and everyone who came to America had strong faith. If that can be destroyed that would be the adversity. . . . Whether you want to call that Satan or whoever you want to call it, I believe in the last eight months I've experienced that."

Corruption is US, should be the motto of our government. Here's a quick one from Raw Story, about the Dept of Homeland Security being little more than an easy slide into getting big bucks as a future contractor:

http://www.rawstory.com/admin/dbscripts/printstory.php?story=2322

Excuse me? Aren’t “forced labor camps” part of what we were fighting in World War Two and in the Cold War? It’s amazing how the “freedom-loving” conservatives can so quickly qualify their definitions of freedom...So of Orwell-ish, you might say (and be correct).


ABC News
GOP Candidate's Call for Labor Camp Rebuked
Republican Candidate's Call for Forced Labor Camp for Immigrants Angers Two GOP Lawmakers
By JENNIFER TALHELM
The Associated Press
http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fabcnews.go.com%2FPolitics%2Fprint%3Fid%3D2112878
WASHINGTON - A Republican gubernatorial candidate's call for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants drew rebukes Friday from two GOP lawmakers, who labeled it a low point in the immigration debate.

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."

The article described Goldwater's plan as a "concentration camp" for migrants.

Goldwater, a candidate for governor in Arizona, said in a statement Friday that his comments were taken out of context. He said he was calling for a work program for convicted nonviolent felons, similar to "tried and tested, effective and accepted practices" used by state and local jails.

But two Republicans, Arizona Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jim Kolbe, called Goldwater's comments "deeply offensive" and asked state Republicans to reject his candidacy in the Sept. 12 primary.

"That Mr. Goldwater is either unaware of or indifferent to the loaded symbolism, injustice and un-Americanism of his 'plan' to address the many serious issues caused by illegal immigration reveals his flaws as a candidate and a stunning lack of respect for the basic values of a generous and decent society," McCain said in a statement.

Kolbe said that if the comments are true, Goldwater "has demonstrated his complete unworthiness for public office, and I am confident he will be soundly rejected by Republicans from the party of Barry Goldwater, who consistently demonstrated his compassion and respect for all people. This is a sad day in the national debate on immigration policy."

McCain and Kolbe favor a guest-worker program for illegal immigrants.

Goldwater made a similar comment at an April anti-immigration rally.

"Build us that wall now!" Goldwater said, referring to a proposal to add 700 miles of fences along the U.S.-Mexico border. He promised then that if elected, he would put illegal immigrants in a tent city on the border and use their labor to build the wall.

Barry Goldwater, the former Arizona senator, was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964.

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

Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

Here’s a two-fer, on the same topic: data theft.

From government, mostly, sites.

Let’s see: FEMA is good at employing political cronies, wasting money, and not getting anything done; Homeland Security is good at hyping publicity, employing pedophiles, and not getting anything done. And, of course, the Department of Justice (sic) is good at claiming states’ secrets—and hyping publicity.

And above and beyond all that, the government is virtually giving away sensitive personal data. Personal information from the VA got leaked; information on workers for the government up at Hanford got leaked; and now this, 28,000 sailors and their family members were exposed to data theft.

Even setting aside the stupid criminal war on Islam, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the current US government is utterly incompetent.

Yahoo! News
Government hit by rash of data breaches

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 53 minutes ago

The government agency charged with fighting identity theft said Thursday it had lost two government laptops containing sensitive personal data, the latest in a series of breaches encompassing millions of people.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would provide free credit monitoring for 110 people targeted for investigation whose names, addresses, Social Security numbers — and in some instances, financial account numbers — were taken from an FTC attorney's locked car.

The car theft occurred about 10 days ago and managers were immediately notified. Many of the people whose data were compromised were being investigated for possible fraud and identity theft, said Joel Winston, associate director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Theft Protection.

"Basically these were attorneys who were going to file a lawsuit, and they had relevant evidence on their laptops," Winston said, noting that the FTC employees did not violate security procedures by storing the password-protected laptops in their cars.

"We will be reassessing what procedures we have to make sure reasonable measures are taken to protect data," he said.

The disclosure comes amid a widening data breach that is expected to cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars. In all, five government agencies have reported data theft, including the Veterans Affairs Department, which on May 22 acknowledged losing data on up to 26.5 million veterans.


Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 12:00 AM

Sensitive Navy info on 28,000 turns up on insecure Web site
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003082509&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=navy24&date=20060624
By Josh White
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Navy officials discovered personal data for nearly 28,000 sailors and family members was compromised when it appeared on a public Web site this week, fueling more concerns about the security of sensitive information on federal employees.

Five spreadsheet files of data — including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of sailors and their relatives — were found exposed on a Web site Thursday night during routine internal sweeps of the Internet for sensitive material, said Lt. Justin Cole, a spokesman for the Chief of Naval Personnel. He said the material was removed from the site within two hours.

"It was information you don't want on a public Web site," Cole said. "But there was no indication it was being used for illegal purposes."

The potential security breach is one of several such losses of important personal data reported in Washington in recent weeks, part of an unusual string of thefts and Internet breaches that has compromised information belonging to millions of federal workers. Four other federal agencies have reported similar problems since early May.

The largest breach came May 9, when a Veterans Affairs laptop and external hard drive were stolen from a Maryland home, a theft that officials said included the personal information of up to 26.5 million veterans and active-duty military personnel. There was no indication the theft was targeting that information.

This week, the Agriculture Department reported that up to 26,000 employees had their data compromised by a hacker. A laptop containing data for 13,000 DC workers and retirees was stolen last week. The Energy Department reported this month that similar data for 1,500 employees might have been accessed by a hacker in September, and IRS officials said a laptop containing names, Social Security numbers and fingerprints of 291 employees and applications was misplaced in May.

In the Navy case, officials are unsure how the information ended up on an insecure Web site, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is looking into whether the person who posted it was supposed to have access to the data. Cole said it was possible the information was posted inadvertently.
Information


Sailors can contact the Navy Personnel Command call center to determine if their names were on the compromised list: 866-827-5672

Navy Personnel Command's Web site: www.npc.navy.mil

The Navy plans to contact the individuals affected and urge them to closely monitor their bank and credit-card accounts for fraudulent activity. Congress is considering a measure that would pay for credit monitoring for those affected by the VA data loss last month.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., on Friday called for the Defense Department to provide immediate free credit monitoring for sailors who may have been affected by the Internet posting.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Markey said the incident "raises serious questions about the nature and adequacy of privacy protections afforded to active-duty military personnel, their families and military veterans."

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

Not to rain on the government’s show-and-tell, but here’s a statement from the management at the Sears Tower in Chicago about the latest b.s.

But, by the way, what exactly is a "criminal discussion"?

Sears Tower terror plot foiled
http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi?getReferrer=http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/sears23.html
June 23, 2006

BY MARK SHERMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

***

Managers of the Sears Tower, the nation's tallest building, said in a statement they speak regularly with the FBI and local law enforcement about terror threats and that Thursday "was no exception."

Security at the 110-floor Sears Tower, a Chicago landmark, was ramped up after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 103rd-floor skydeck was closed for about a month and a half.

"Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions," the statement said.
***
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ward Churchill is somewhat out of the news these days. There’s a lot going on, as you might have noticed... Churchill’s perceived lack of patriotism after 9/11 infuriated most of the right-wing of our right-est party. It also dove-tailed into the neo-McCarthyite attacks on schools, led by people like David Horowitz who has made a career out of being a born-again reactionary fighting against any and all international conspiracies out to overthrow this great country, etc., etc..

Immediately, pressure was put on the University of Colorado to fire Churchill. Colorado has never been known as a progressive or even semi-liberal state. And the state-supported schools have to get money out of the legislature, which is dominated by conservatives—who get most of their ideas from the far right.

The University went into a spasm of reaction and a committee detailed all kinds of charges against Churchill. They wanted to fire him.

Most of the charges boiled down to this: he told another version of American history, one where the white people actually went out of their way to destroy the Indians, as in genocide. He wrote and taught that the United States committed genocide on American Indians. Deliberately.

Churchill is very readable. He uses many sources for his points. Not all of his sources fit into the framework of euro-American intellectualism. He sometimes even uses oral traditions—the way information and philosophy has always been transmitted in indigenous cultures. That immediately raises the hackles of many scholars. Academic scholarship is a closed club with very stringent membership requirements. It’s male and it’s predominantly white male. Women’s studies, African-American studies, and American Indian studies are not particularly well-received. Colleges and universities offer them, but in terms of how they can be distorted to fit into the traditional academic structure. I know many American Indian graduate students who have bloody heads from trying to fit “Indian Studies” into their own culture, rather than that of white academics.

Here are a couple of postings about Ward Churchill and about academic freedom—and about academic biases. The first section is from my friend, Claudia, at Idaho.

____________________________________

University of Colorado sociology prof Tom Mayer makes some extremely interesting comments about both Ward Churchill ("hyperbolic but brilliant", thus hard to handle personally but well worth it intellectually) and the entire process of academic witch-hunting by conservative media-driven administrators: what indeed constitutes academic freedom? The paragraphs near the end address both these points very lucidly, I think.

I'm going to try to summarize the separate issues and confirm the link and then post on my LJ. You, however, not only correspond with far far more people but have a real blog -- ie readers -- so I'm hoping you will raise the issues for discussion. I think Mayer makes good points about the need to separate our personal responses to a person's style from acknowledgement that they do make an intellectual contribution by stimulating discussion ...

... To judge scholarship on its merits, within its genre, rather than misapplying standards from a different genre -- a Procrustean exercise predisposed by its nature to fault-finding. Even if we pretend that the meticulous, thorough, "even-handed" documentation and evaluation of every available source is possible, this type of scholarship -- a lit review, or overview -- is a completely different exercise academically than what Churchill does, which is to advance reasonable supportive sources for one's preferred theory of interpretation. Churchill is not doing an overview, he's advocating a theory of interpretation -- which is what 99% of scholars do in the humanities. "Adequate" and "good" use of supporting sources for one's theory of meaning has to be evaluated quite differently than the "literature review" standard this report's writers chose to apply...

Their dismissal of Churchill's reliance on oral literature and poetic interpretations is ethnically biased -- also, in fact, gender-biased. It harks back to the rationalist, scientistic, mechanistic epistemological choices of white male academic dominated western culture -- epistemological, in that it is a deliberate choice about what "kinds" of evidence are voted to be "truth." Since the vote is taken by those who are already invested in only the kind of "truth" it supports, the dismissal of oral, emotive, social, personal, felt, and other sorts of evidence is theory-laden and politically-biased. Feminist philosophers, philosophers of science, environmental philosophers, post-structuralists and postcolonial theorists have widely pointed out this flaw in western Cartesian thinking.

And finally, the fact that the CU commission -- taking their lead from conservative media hosts -- combed through more than a decade of Churchill's work to find discrepancies in citation and then made old and minor errors the stalking horse for new political hostility is, as the writer says, not only a scary violation of academic freedom's tenets, but a gigantic hypocrisy as well.

Claudia

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
Indians, Ward churchill, and us all
Date:
Thu, 22 Jun 2006 10:30:35 -0300
From:
Maurice Bazin
Reply-To:
Science for the People Discussion List
To:
SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE@LIST.UVM.EDU


Dear friends,
the politically motivated condemnation of Professor Churchill makes
us all potential "liars" if we cite any text we disagree with.
If Ward gets fired, as recommended by his University's Committee, we
all can be attacked in our bread earning jobs when denouncing the
makers of genocide, past and present. In the situation thus created
our (Science for the People activists) calling the Pentagon
Professors/Advisors "War Criminals" makes us commit 'academic
misconduct'. The official University word is at the University
of Colorado website.




The Report On Ward Churchill ( http://www.swans.com/library/art12/
zig094.html )
by Tom Mayer

[Sociology Professor Mayer of the University of Colorado at Boulder
sent this text "to several local newspapers, but they all rejected
it because it was too
long." Our thanks to Louis Proyect and David Anderson who
brought this valuable contribution to Swans' attention.]

I have finally finished a careful reading of the 124 page report
about the alleged academic
misconduct of Ward Churchill. Often, but not always, I have
been able to compare the statements in the report with the
relevant writings of Professor Churchill. Although the report by
the committee on research misconduct clearly entailed
prodigious labor, it is a flawed document requiring careful
analysis. The central flaw in the report is grotesque
exaggeration about the magnitude and gravity of the
improprieties committed by Ward Churchill. The sanctions
recommended by the investigating committee are entirely out
of whack with those imposed upon such luminaries as Stephen
Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Lawrence Tribe, all of
whom committed plagiarisms far more egregious than anything
attributed to Professor Churchill.

The text of the report suggests that the committee's judgments
about the seriousness of Churchill's misconduct were
contaminated by political considerations. This becomes evident
on page 97 where the committee acknowledges that "damage
done to the reputation of ... the University of Colorado as an
academic institution is a consideration in our assessment of the
seriousness of Professor Churchill's conduct." Whatever
damage the University may have sustained by employing Ward
Churchill derives from his controversial political statements and
certainly not from the obscure footnoting practices nor disputed
authorship issues investigated by the committee. Indeed, the
two plagiarism charges refer to publications that are now
fourteen years old. Although these charges had been made
years earlier, they were not considered worthy of investigation
until Ward Churchill became a political cause célèbre. Using
institutional reputation to measure misconduct severity
amounts to importing politics through the back door.

The report claims that Professor Churchill engaged in
fabrication and falsification. To make these claims it stretches
the meaning of these words almost beyond recognition.
Fabrication implies an intent to deceive. There is not a shred of
evidence that the writings of Ward Churchill contain any
assertion that he himself did not believe. The language used in
the report repeatedly drifts in an inflammatory direction:
disagreement becomes misinterpretation, misinterpretation
becomes misrepresentation, misinterpretation becomes
falsification. Ward may be wrong about who was considered an
Indian under the General Allotment Act of 1887 or about the
origins of the 1837-1840 smallpox epidemic among the Indians
of the northern plains, but the report does not establish that
only a lunatic or a liar could reach his conclusions on the basis
of available evidence.

The charges of fabrication and falsification all derive from short
fragments within much longer articles. The report devotes 44
pages to discussing the 1837-1840 smallpox epidemic. One
might think that Ward had written an entire book on this
subject. In fact this issue occupies no more than three
paragraphs in any of his writings. In each of the six essays
cited in the report, all reference to this epidemic could have
been dropped without substantially weakening the argument.
To be sure, the account given by Ward is not identical to that
found in any of his sources, but it is a recognizable composite
of information contained within them. The committee
peremptorily dismisses Churchill's contention that his
interpretation of the epidemic was influenced by the Native
American oral tradition. This is treated as no more than an ex
post facto defense against the allegation of misconduct. The
committee also discounts Native American witnesses who
support Churchill's interpretations as well as his fidelity to oral
accounts. The centrality of the oral tradition is evident in many
of Churchill's writings. His acknowledgments frequently include
elders, Indian bands, and the American Indian Movement. He
often integrates Native American poetry with his historical
analysis. Three of his books with which I am familiar, Since
Predator Came (1995), A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), and
Struggle for the Land (2002) all begin with poems. As a thirty-
year veteran of the intense political struggles within the
American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill could not avoid a
deep familiarity with the oral tradition of Native American
history.

By addressing only a tiny fragment of his writings, the report
implies that Ward tries to overawe and hoodwink his readers
with spurious documentation. Anyone who reads an essay
like "Nits Make Lice: The Extermination of North American
Indians 1607-1996" with its 612 footnotes will get a very
different impression. Churchill, they will see, goes far beyond
most writers of broad historical overviews in trying to support
his claims. He often cites several references in the same
footnote. Ward is deeply engaged with the materials he
references and frequently comments extensively upon them.
He typically mounts a running critique of authors like James
Axtell, Steven Katz, and Deborah Lipstadt. Readers will see that
Churchill is familiar with a formidable variety of materials and
can engage in a broad range of intellectual discourses.

Ward Churchill is not just another writer about the hardships
suffered by American Indians. He offers a very distinctive
vision of what David Stannard calls the "American Holocaust."
According to Churchill, the extermination of Native Americans
was neither accidental, nor inadvertent, nor unwelcome among
the invading Europeans. On the contrary, it was largely
deliberate, often planned (sometimes by the highest political
authorities), and frequently applauded within the mainstream
media. "[A] hemispheric population estimated to have been as
great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90
percent....and in an unknown number of instances deliberately
infected with epidemic diseases" (A Little Matter of Genocide, p.
1). Moreover, Ward maintains that the American Holocaust
continues to this day. He thinks it is fully comparable to, and
even more extensive than, the Nazi genocide of the Jewish
people during World War Two. The endemic chauvinism and
Manichaean sensibility this process has induced within our
political culture helps explain Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq, and
other American exercises in technological murder.

"If there is one crucial pattern that most affects our
assessment," writes the committee, "it is a pattern of failure to
understand the difference between scholarship and polemic, or
at least of behaving as though that difference does not matter"
(p. 95). Taking away the negative imputation, I can agree with
the latter observation. Ward believes we are all in a race
against time. Thus the main point of historical scholarship is not
to recount the past, but rather to provide intellectual
ammunition for preventing future genocides now in the making.

Like most scholars, Churchill practices an implicitly Bayesian (a
statistical term) form of analysis. That is, he evaluates the
plausibility of assertions and the credibility of evidence partly
on the basis of his prior beliefs. That government officials
connived in generating the 1837-40 smallpox epidemic seems
far more plausible to Ward than to the investigating committee
precisely because he thinks this is what American governments
are inclined to do. He discounts many of the so-called primary
sources cited in the report because their authors despise
Indians or wish to conceal their own culpability in spreading the
epidemic. And contrary to what the report says (p. 96), many
first rate scholars focus on proving their own hypotheses rather
than considering all available evidence even-handedly. Einstein,
for example, spent the last three decades of his life trying to
disprove quantum mechanics while largely disregarding
evidence in its favor. This is not research misconduct.

Virtually all the mass exterminations of recent times have
evoked amazingly divergent historical assessments and
numerical estimates. This is true of the Armenian genocide,
Stalin's collectivization campaign and purges, the Nazi
holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Great Leap Forward,
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Rwanda. In some cases there is
dispute about whether the extermination even happened, and
even when mass killing is acknowledged, numerical estimates
sometimes differ by a factor of ten or even more. These
differing interpretations are almost never politically innocent
but, when honestly advanced, they do not constitute research
misconduct. Neither do Ward Churchill's assessments of
genocidal activities by John Smith or by the U.S. Army at Fort
Clark.

The operational definition of academic misconduct used by the
investigating committee is so broad that virtually anyone who
writes anything might be found guilty. Not footnoting an
empirical claim is misconduct. Citing a book without giving a
page number is misconduct. Referencing a source that only
partially supports an assertion is misconduct. Referencing
contradictory sources without detailing their contradictions is
misconduct. Citing a work considered by some to be unserious
or inadequate is misconduct. Footnoting an erroneous claim
without acknowledging the error is misconduct. Interpreting a
text differently than does its author is misconduct. Ghost writing
an article is misconduct. Referencing a paper one has ghost
written without acknowledging authorship is misconduct. No
doubt this list of transgressions could be greatly expanded. I
strongly suspect that many people who vociferously support the
report have read neither it nor any book or essay Ward
Churchill has ever written. Perhaps this should be deemed a
form of academic misconduct.

If any of the sanctions recommended by the investigating
committee are put into effect, it will constitute a stunning blow
to academic freedom. Such punishment will show that a prolific,
provocative, and highly influential thinker can be singled out for
entirely political reasons; subjected to an arduous interrogation
virtually guaranteed to find problems; and then severed from
academic employment. It will indicate that public controversy is
dangerous and that genuine intellectual heresy could easily be
lethal to an academic career. It will demonstrate that tenured
professors serve at the pleasure of governors, political
columnists, media moguls, and talk show hosts. Most faculty
members never say anything that requires protection. The true
locus of academic freedom has always been defined by the
intellectual outliers. The chilling effect of Ward Churchill's
academic crucifixion upon the energy and boldness of these
freedom-defining heretics will be immediate and profound.

The authors of the report on Ward Churchill present themselves
as stalwart defenders of academic integrity. I have a quite
different perspective. I see them as collaborators in the erosion
of academic freedom, an erosion all too consonant with the
wider assault upon civil liberties currently underway. The
authors of the report claim to uphold the intellectual credibility
of ethnic studies. I wonder how many ethnic studies scholars
will see it that way. I certainly do not. Notwithstanding their
protestations to the contrary, I see committee members as
gendarmes of methodological and interpretive orthodoxy, quite
literally "warding" off a vigorous challenge to mainstream
understandings of American history. Confronted by the
evidence presented in this report, the appropriate response
might be to write a paper critiquing the work of Ward Churchill.
Excluding him, either permanently or temporarily, from the
University of Colorado is singularly inappropriate.

Ward Churchill is one of the most brilliant persons I have
encountered during my 37 years at this university. His brilliance
is not immediately evident due to his combative manner and
propensity for long monologues. Whenever reading one of his
essays I feel in the presence of a powerful though hyperbolic
intellect. The permanent or temporary expulsion of Ward
Churchill would be an immense loss for CU. In one fell swoop
we would become a more tepid, more timid, and more servile
institution. His expulsion would deprive students of contact with
a potent challenger of accepted cognitive frameworks. The
social sciences desperately need the kind of challenge
presented by Ward Churchill. His most strident claims may be
rather dubious, but they stimulate our scholarly juices and
make us rethink our evidence and assumptions. One of his
main objectives, Ward has often said, is "to bring consideration
of American Indians into the main currents of global intellectual
discourse." In this endeavor he has been a splendid success.

Maurice Bazin
Florianópolis
Telefone: 48 3237 3140

# posted by Talapus Pete @ 1:58 PM 0 comments

I was going to edit this rap from The Smirking Chimp, but Ed Naha makes so many points that it’s better—and funny in a gallows-humorous way—to just stick the whole thing up.

If I didn't go for the humor, now and then, like watching "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," I'd probably die of terminal pessemism.

I did particularly like his origin of the phrase “cut and run” as being what a sailing ship does when it’s in trouble and can’t get it’s anchor up: you cut the line and run with the wind. And “stay the course” is what lemmings say to each other as they head off the cliff.


Ed Naha: 'They're right. We're wrong.'
Date: Friday, June 23 @ 10:03:46 EDT
Topic: Republicans
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=26629
Ed Naha

Guided by Republican talking points, the MSM has, of late, been trying to define Democrats, using words like "divided," "unsure" and "unfocused." Well, how's this as a defining moment of Republican leadership? CNN's John King talking about the Democratic plan for leaving Iraq with Dick Cheney.

King: "Well, you disagree with the Democrats' plan, but they are stepping into a political environment in which the American people -- clearly, some have anger, some have dissatisfaction, some have doubts about this war and the administration's plan for this war. Fifty-four percent of the American people say it's a mistake; 55 percent say things are going badly in Iraq; 53 percent in our polling say the American people actually support a timetable. Why is it that the administration has failed to articulate to the American people then? The American people don't think you have a plan, sir."

Cheney: "Well, they're wrong..."

There ya' go, kids. They're right. We're wrong. Deal with it.

(Personally, I'd like to guide the MSM into defining Republicans using words like "arrogant bastards," "thieves" and "liars." But that's just me.)



This bunch would do and/or say just about anything to stay in office. Now, take Pennsylvania's Rick ("name that fetus") Santorum...please. (Rimshot!) Together with fellow Republican handjob Pete Hoekstra (Mi.), Rick announced that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

Relying on unclassified sections of a document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community, Santorum declared: "The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction is in fact false. We have found over 500 weapons of mass destruction and in fact have found that there are additional chemical weapons still in the country."

In a subsequent press release, Rick said that this was "critically important information that the world community needs to know."

The only problem is: what was found were old shells from the 1980s, from before the first Gulf War. A Defense Department official said: "This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991." In fact, the old shells, scattered around the country, "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

David Kay, the head of America's Iraq weapons hunting team from 2003-2004, said that any nerve agents found in the shells would be "less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point."

Senator Rick, you know you're in trouble when "Hardball's" Norah O'Donnell laughs her ass off while covering your scoop.

The Republican-led Congress was in Orthodox Stooge mode this entire week, voting down two separate Democratic bills designed to bring our troops home from Iraq. "Cut and run!" Republicans howled. Bill ("The Cat's Meow") Frist even issued a press release entitled: FRIST DENOUNCES DEMOCRATS' PLAN TO CUT AND RUN.

If anyone cares, "cut and run" is a nautical term defining how to save your ship should your anchor get wedged below the sea. You cut the anchor's cable and allow your ship to sail off, unencumbered. Sounds like a plan to me.

The Republican's favorite slogan "stay the course," on the other hand, is actually based on the sound lemmings make as they charge off a cliff.

Led by Chickenhawk Karl Rove, the Republican lemmings have rallied behind our ace Fighter Pilot-in-Chief to use the Iraqi occupation as a political tool to galvanize their faltering base. That might explain the noticeable lack of reaction to the kidnap, torture and slaughter of two U.S. troops this week, as well as Iraq's slide into something resembling a "best of" episode of "The Untouchables."

Before the mutilated bodies of the Americans were discovered, Tony Snow seemed irritated that the MSM was devoting so much time to the story. Why weren't they talking about the good news out of Iraq? Uhhh. Because there isn't any?

Showing their respect for hard working Americans, the Senate voted down an increase in the minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997. (Possible press release? FRIST DENOUNCES MONEY-OBSESSED WORKERS.)

The Senate's compassion compelled Lou Dobbs to write: "Corporate America, the Bush administration and the national economic orthodoxy with which they're in league have consistently argued against helping working men and women at the lowest end of the wage scale by raising the minimum wage. Big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable say it will harm the economy and eliminate jobs. As is so frequent with the faith-based economics that grips both political parties in Washington, such concerns have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

"For example, it's impossible to deny the national minimum wage of $5.15 is not enough for a family to live above the poverty line. The annual salary for workers earning the national minimum wage still leaves a family of three about $6,000 short of the poverty threshold.

"Raising the minimum wage to $7.50 would positively affect the lives of more than 8 million workers, including an estimated 760,000 single mothers and 1.8 million parents with children under 18. But even this 46 percent increase would get them only to the poverty line. Don't you think these families just might need that cost-of-living increase a bit more than our elected officials who are paid nearly $170,000 a year?

"With no Congressional action on raising the minimum wage since 1997, inflation has eroded wages. The minimum wage in the 21st century is $2 lower in real dollars than it was four decades ago and now stands at its lowest level since 1955, according to the Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities."

Rest assured, though, our Republican representatives know what it's like to live check by check. That's why the House quietly voted last week to give Congress a $3K pay raise.

(Ironically, while all this was going down, the Economic Policy Institute think tank published a study stating the CEO's now earn 262 times the pay of an average worker. In fact, a CEO earned more in one day than the average worker earned in 52 weeks.)

Still, our elected officials showed that they felt Americans' pain. That's why they voted to cut taxes on inherited estates and relieve thousands of heirs from paying taxes during the next ten years.

In the year 2004, more than 30,000 estates were taxed. If the House changes become law, by 2011 only 5,100 a year would be taxed. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that uber-millionaires would save about $283 billion in taxes from 2006 to 2016. Sniff. It makes you proud, don't it?

"This is the ultimate values debate," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "It is morally wrong to do this, especially when we are turning down, rejecting, an increase in the minimum wage."

Wotta whiner. Get with the program, lady.

The House is also pushing a Presidential line-item veto law, slightly weaker than the line-item veto law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998. (Back then, the Supreme Court said the law was notso hotso because it let the president single-handedly change laws passed by Congress. How times have changed.)

Republicans, with a straight face, are pushing this in order to allow the President to strip bills of "pork barrel" spending projects. Pork that the Republicans put in the bills in the first place. ("Stop me, Daddy, before I earmark again!")

The House Republicans' rather unique reasoning for wanting this new law led California Democrat George Miller to exclaim: "You control all mechanisms of spending. You control the House, you control the Senate, you control the presidency and you need help before you spend again! What is this, Comedy Central???"

The always hilarious House also effectively put the kibosh on Bush's immigration reforms, stating that representatives have to hold a series of hearings on the subject next month. House Speaker Dennis ("Close your mouth when you chew") Hastert opined that the hearings, to be held both in D.C. and across the country, are needed "so we understand what the American people are saying."

Fortunately, "The Bronx Cheer" sounds the same in English as it does in Spanish, so Hastert and company will definitely get the message.

The House also postponed a vote on renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law, which allowed millions of black voters to go to the polls, ended poll taxes and literary tests during the height of the civil rights struggle.

The reason the House began dragging its feet? In part, because the law requires ballots to be printed in more than one language in neighborhoods where there are large numbers of immigrants.

Possible headline: HOUSE: YOU DON' NEED NO STEENKING RIGHTS.

On the plus side, with all these bills passed and/or shot down, Congress can get down to some really important stuff. You know, topics that impact our lives every day, like gay marriage and a Constitutional amendment outlawing "flag desecration."

I personally would like a Constitutional amendment outlawing "IQ desecration." Every time any of these bozos uttered an asinine slogan, from "stay the course" to "we're fighting them over th'ar so we don't fight 'em over here," I'd fine their sorry butts. Within a month, one of two things would happen. They'd either shut up or file for bankruptcy...and we all know how easy it is to file for personal bankruptcy these days.

In terms of marriage? Let's all write to Republicans and say that, to preserve this spiritual union, we want a Constitutional amendment outlawing divorce! The silence will spread like wildfire.

So, with the week drawing to a close and Congressional Republicans heading back to their clown cars, I'd like to address California Democrat George Miller who asked "What is this, Comedy Central???"

No, George, it's more like the mutant spawn of "The Cartoon Network" and "Animal Planet."

Source:
http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=212


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

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=26629

OK, once in a while you got to laugh. A nice aspect of this story is that the West Vancouver Police didn't bring out the stun guns, the tranquilizer darts, or any of that heavy equipment. They just let the bear eat the oatmeal and when it was done, the bear split. No fuss, no muss. Good thing it didn't happen around here, because it would have been a dead bear, one way or the other. Shot while trying to escape or something.


Bear Eats Oatmeal in Woman's Kitchen

Jun 19, 5:22 PM (ET)

WEST VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - It was a real-life version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears - only in reverse - when a woman came home to find a young bear eating oatmeal in her kitchen.

The bear apparently entered through an open sliding glass door, broke a ceramic food container and started eating, West Vancouver police Sgt. Paul Skelton said.

"It sounds like a nursery rhyme, doesn't it?" Skelton said. "At least we have a health-conscious bear on our hands."

Three police officers who went to the home Thursday couldn't get the bear to budge, so authorities let the animal finish its meal.

"The bear didn't appear to be aggressive and wasn't destroying the house, so they just let it do what it was doing and eventually the bear decided to make its way out of the residence and down toward a forested gully," Skelton said. "It ended the best it could."

Skelton said bears in the suburbs north of Vancouver have been coming out of hibernation as hungry as ever but later than usual but this spring because of a heavier than normal snowpack from the winter. The report Thursday was one of six complaints police said they received about bears in the area that day.

When the US government announced it had just broken up a ring of “terrorists” down in Miami, the bells went off. In the last few years we’ve seen rings of terrorists busted in Portland, Detroit, and elsewhere in the country. There have been flags flying and politicians posing, reputed mountains of evidence, and then...collapse. The hoop-la has been to remind—to frighten— the population into believing that things are really dangerous and without all sorts of skull-duggery, the terrorists would take over the country. Or something.

When the lawyers get busy, the government falls back on saying, well, that information is classified. It’s about national security. We can’t tell you—it’s actually we won’t tell you. The government justifies many many actions on the grounds of security. The justice department (acting as a surrogate for the executive branch) has stonewalled congress. The Justice Department and the executive branch have essentially become the law unto themselves. They decide. Period.

It’s the movie “Catch 22” all over again. The government claims all sorts of things but when people start investigating, the government refuses to disclose anything.

Propaganda to try to con the public into believing the government has to keep enormous warehouses of secrets, and only acts in the best interests of the country. They they can lock up who they want without filing charges. That they can snoop into everyone’s homes and private matters. It’s in our best interests, we’re told...As if any government, anywhere and anytime, ever did anything without justifying it in terms of the best interests of the nation.



BBC: Sears Tower 'plotters' just 'wannabes'
06/23/2006 @ 10:21 am
Filed by David Edwards

In a BBC news broadcast today, Miami Herald reporter Mani Garcia remarks that the government's arrest of seven men in connection with a 'plot' to blow up the Sears Tower is probably overblown.
Advertisement

"They've been described to us by sources as 'wannabes' -- still to be determined if making a connection about talking about doing an attack and and being able to finance an attack," Garcia said. "We've seen previous cases where the Federal government has announced with great hoopla breaking terrorist cells. And when you start deconstructing a case, you see that there's a lot of talk."

In Miami today, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales outlined the alleged plot and claimed that the "homegrown terrorists" sought to join up with Al Qaeda, but instead met with an agent secretly "working with the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force."

The father of one of the defendants denied that his son could have been involved in something like this.

"This boy, he's not a violent boy. He never got into trouble. ... He didn't want to kill people," Stanley Grant Phanor's father, Joseph told the Associated Press.

Yesterday I had to get what an old Navy guy called a "bore sighting." TV camera and everything, and a couple of polyps were removed. No, they didn't find my head up there. I was doped up in an appropriate manner. The procedure was in the morning, but the rest of the day was pretty well shot...Thanks to vicodin and rest, though, I feel pretty good today.

That means that while I didn't post yesterday (did I?—Hmm I don't remember), I did post today.

What’s going on is this: the party in power, in order to show it’s dominance (and lust for revenge on liberalism) is willing to go as far as possible to move America backward. The immigration issue has been piled on top of those old imagined wrongs. So the conservatives, perhaps being afraid of losing all control over the nation, are doing everything they possibly can to reverse modernity, and to preserve a status quo that never existed in the first place.

The immigration and voting rights isn’t all of it. The rejection of a raise in the minimum wage is pure greed. The big donors don’t want to have to pay more to the peons, and that fits just fine with the conservatives’ anger toward the liberals.

Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 12:00 AM

Renewal of Voting Rights Act stalls
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003077318&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=voting22&date=20060622
By Charles Babington
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — House leaders abruptly canceled a vote to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act Wednesday after rank-and-file Republicans revolted over provisions that require bilingual ballots in many places and continued federal oversight of voting practices in Southern states.
*****

Thursday, June 22, 2006 - 12:00 AM

Senate GOP derails minimum-wage bill
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003077408&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=minwage22&date=20060622
By Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday killed an effort to raise the minimum wage, but Democrats who back the measure say they will try again both in Congress and through ballot measures in several states.

The federal minimum wage has been $5.15 per hour since 1997.

On a procedural measure Wednesday, senators voted 52-46 in favor of raising the wage to $7.25 in three steps, but that was short of the 60 votes needed to move the legislation forward.

The vote came one day after House Republican leaders made clear they won't allow a vote on the issue, fearing it might pass.

***

He said a worker paid $5.15 an hour would earn about $10,700 a year, "almost $6,000 below the poverty line for a family of three."

Kennedy noted Congress has raised its own pay for the past nine years by $31,600, while the minimum wage remained unchanged.

He said backers may try to insert a minimum-wage amendment into another spending bill before November, including a proposed congressional pay raise or a bill to reduce the estate tax, which is popular among Republicans.

Senate Republicans argued that raising the minimum wage would lead to job cuts and hurt unskilled workers. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., referred to Kennedy's proposal as "a feel-good amendment whose intention ends up having the exact opposite result."

Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., offered an alternative Wednesday that would have raised the federal wage floor by $1.10. But Kennedy said that plan would cut overtime pay and cover 4.8 million fewer workers than his proposal.

The measure failed, with 45 senators in favor and 53 opposed.

The federal minimum wage is the lowest it has been in more than 50 years relative to the cost of living, according to a study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. The average full-time, minimum-wage worker earns $10,712 a year, about $900 more than the federal poverty level for one person and $2,500 less than the poverty level for a couple.

When fully phased in, the Democrats' proposal would have added almost $4,400 a year to the gross earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker.

In the House last week, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee — with the help of a few Republicans — succeeded in attaching a minimum- wage increase to legislation providing funding for federal social programs.

Fearing the measure would be passed with the increase intact, the GOP leadership swiftly decided to sidetrack the entire bill.

"I am opposed to it, and I think a vast majority of our [rank and file] is opposed to it," House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday.

Pressed by reporters, he said, "There are limits to my willingness to just throw anything out on the floor."

Voters and legislators have already raised the minimum wage above the federal level in 21 states, including Washington, and the District of Columbia. The minimum wage in Washington state is $7.63 an hour.

"Minimum-wage measures have really proven to be winners at the ballot box," said Christina Wilfore, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which is helping Democrats plan for the midterm elections.

This explains a lot:

Earth Surrounded by Giant Fizzy Bubbles
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 20 June 2006
12:00 pm ET
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060620_space_bubbles.html
The space above you is fizzing with activity as bubbles of superhot gas constantly grow and pop around Earth, scientists announced today.

One of the best pieces of news I’ve heard lately is that Senator Rick Santorum is trailing his Democratic contender. Santorum and Frist certainly are at the top of my list of uptight anal retentive prigs.

Santorum has lined up with some previously-obscure south Philly cafe owner who has a sign that demands people speak English because “this is America.” The right-wingers would have conniptions if they went into a restaurant in France where a sign, in French, said “This is France: Speak French.” I can’t imagine what someone like Limbaugh would say if he walked into a cafe on an Indian reservation and they were commanded to speak that particular language. Or, say, in parts of New Mexico where people have been speaking Spanish since before the Declaration of Independence was even thought of, and was told to speak Castilian. There really are some times when it would be nice to be a fly on the wall...

The English-only flap is just the same old nativist flap, the one that was used against the Irish and Italians, Jews and Germans, against all immigrants who hadn’t been in America as long as the attackers have. Another synonym of “nativist” in this case would be “racist.”

Posted on Tue, Jun. 20, 2006


In plain English, Rick backs Vento
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/14858258.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
By CHRISTINE OLLEY
olleyc@phillynews.com 215-854-5184

INJECTING HIMSELF in the middle of a South Philly controversy as burning- hot as a stainless-steel grill, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (left) made an unscheduled stop at Geno's Steaks last night to wolf down a cheesesteak and stand behind its owner.

He voiced support - albeit in an odd, indirect way - for owner Joe Vento's much debated "Speak English" sign.

"It makes all the sense in the world to have a sign like this," he told a Daily News reporter after the paper was tipped off to his late-night visit. "There's not really an extensive menu here. I mean, come on, it's cheesesteaks, onions, et cetera. It's not that hard."

Santorum took a quick turn flipping shaved beef on Geno's grill and was cheered on by about 20 T-shirt-wearing supporters, mostly 26th Ward Republicans from South Philly, who'd been told the embattled GOP senator was coming.

"We are all out here for Santorum, mostly from the 26th Ward, big supporters of Vento and the First Amendment," said Andrew Dankanich, a GOP committeeman. "He's [Santorum] here because he's an American. America started in South Philly."

The senator's strange move, not formally announced to the media, seemed to signal his determination to continue using the raging immigration controversy as a means to close the gap with his Democratic election rival, state treasurer Bob Casey Jr. Most polls have shown Casey with a double-digit lead over the two-term incumbent.

Santorum recently aired TV ads charging that Casey had "joined with Ted Kennedy and other liberals in supporting a bill that grants amnesty to millions who've entered our country illegally... . That's just not fair." Casey has said the commercial distorts his position.

In the meantime, the owner of Geno's, cheesesteak impresario Joey Vento, has won national attention for his sign that reads: "This is America. When ordering, 'Speak English.'”


© 2006 Philadelphia Daily News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.philly.com

Thom Hartmann writes with common sense (and for Common Dreams). While this is a semantic argument, he’s right. We are occupying Iraq. The only “war” we really are involved in is a War on Islam.


Published on Monday, June 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Reclaim the Issues - "Occupation, Not War"
by Thom Hartmann

Every time the media - or a Democrat - uses the phrase "War in Iraq" they are promoting one of Karl Rove's most potent Republican Party frames.

There is no longer a war against Iraq.

It ended in May of 2003, when George W. Bush stood below a "Mission Accomplished" sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and correctly declared that we had "victoriously" defeated the Iraqi army and overthrown their government.

Our military machine is tremendously good at fighting wars - blowing up infrastructure, killing opposing armies, and toppling governments. We did that successfully in Iraq, in a matter of a few weeks. We destroyed their army, wiped out their air defenses, devastated their Republican Guard, seized their capitol, arrested their leaders, and took control of their government. We won the war. It's over.

What we have now is an occupation of Iraq.

The occupation began when the war ended, and continues to this day. According to our own Pentagon estimates, at least ninety five percent of those attacking our soldiers are Iraqi civilians who view themselves as anti-occupation fighters. And last week both the Defense Minister and the Vice President of Iraq asked us for a specific date on which the occupation would end.

The distinction between "war" and "occupation" is politically critical for 2006 because wars can be won or lost, but occupations most honorably end by redeployments.

We won World War II and it carried Roosevelt to great political heights. We lost the Vietnam War and it politically destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jerry Ford. And as we fought to a draw in Korea, it so wounded Harry S. Truman politically that he didn't have a strong enough base of support to run for re-election against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

American's don't like to lose or draw at a war. Even people who oppose wars find it uncomfortable, at some level, to lose, and Republican strategists are using this psychological reality for political gain. When wars are won - even when they're totally illegal and undeclared wars, like Reagan's adventure in Grenada - it tends to create a national good feeling.

On the other hand, when arguably just wars, or at least legally defensible "police action" wars, like Korea, are not won, they wound the national psyche. And losing a war - like the German loss of WWI - can be so devastating psychologically to a citizenry that it sets up a nation for strongman dictatorship to "restore the national honor."

On the other hand, an "occupation" is something that logically should one day end, and, if it's an expensive occupation in lives or money, will find popular support to end as soon as possible.

The various colonial powers of Europe ended their occupations of most of Africa, for example, and there was no national emotional pain associated with it. Churchill's withdrawal from Uganda increased his popularity with Brits.

While Americans hate to lose wars, we're generally pleased to wrap up occupations. We had no problem with ending our occupation of The Philippines, numerous South Pacific islands, and the redeployment of our troops stationed in nations conquered in World War II (Japan and Germany) from broad-based "occupation" to locally based "assistance." (Although we still have troops in Japan and Germany, neither country has been functionally "occupied" by us since the late 1940s and the "legal" occupation of both ended shortly thereafter. It should also be remembered that not a single American life was lost because of hostile fire in either brief post-war occupation.)

If Democrats can succeed over the next three months in making it clear to average Americans that the "War In Iraq" ended in 2003, and that we're now engaged in an "Occupation Of Iraq," then Democratic suggestions to end or greatly diminish the occupation will take on a resonance and cogency that will both help them in an election year, and help to bring our soldiers to safety and Iraq to stability.

On the other hand, if Democrats are perceived as pushing for America to "lose the war in Iraq," they will be vilified and damned by Republicans and many swing voters, and could thus lose big in 2006.

The "War" is over. The Occupation has now lasted 3 years and one month - far longer than necessary.

Here's a "for example" scenario - fictitious at this moment - of how Democrats should play it out:

[Tim Russert]: So, Senator Reid, what do you think of this most recent news from the War In Iraq?

[Senator Reid]: The war ended in May of 2003, Tim. Our military did their usual brilliant job, and we defeated Saddam's army. The Occupation Of Iraq, however, isn't going so well, in large part because the Bush Administration has totally botched the job, leading to the death of thousands of our soldiers, and dragging our nation into disrepute around the world. I'd like to see us greatly scale down the current Occupation of Iraq, redeploy our Occupation Forces to nearby nations in case we're needed by the new Iraqi government, and get our brave young men and women out of harm's way. Occupations have a nasty way of fomenting civil wars, you know, and we don't want this one to go any further than it has.

[Tim Russert]: But isn't the War In Iraq part of the Global War On Terror?

[Senator Reid]: Our Occupation Of Iraq is encouraging more Muslims around the world to eye us suspiciously. Some may even be inspired by our Occupation of this Islamic nation to take up arms or unconventional weapons against us, perhaps even here at home, just as Osama Bin Laden said he hit us on 9/11 because we were occupying part of his homeland, Saudi Arabia, at the Prince Sultan Air Force Base, where Bush Senior first put troops in 1991 to project force into Kuwait and enforce the Iraqi no-fly zone. The Bush policy of an unending Occupation Of Iraq is increasing the danger that people will use the tactic of terror against us and our allies, and, just like George W. Bush wisely redeployed our troops from Saudi Arabia, we should begin right now to redeploy our troops who are occupying Iraq.

[Tim Russert]: But the War...

[Senator Reid]: Tim, Tim, Tim! The war is over! George W. Bush declared victory himself, in May of 2003, when our brave soldiers seized control of Iraq. That's the definition of the end of a war, as anybody who's ever served in the military can tell you. Unfortunately, our Occupation Of Iraq since the end of the war, using a small military force and a lot of Halliburton, hasn't worked. We should take Halliburton's billions and give them to the Iraqis so they can rebuild their own nation, the way we helped Europeans rebuild after World War Two. And go from being an occupying power to being an ally of Iraq and the Iraqi people, like we did with Japan and Germany.

[Tim Russert (bewildered)]: I can't call it a war anymore? We have to change our NBC "War In Iraq" banners and graphics?

[Senator Reid (patting Russert's hand)]: Yes, Tim. The war is over. It's now an occupation, and has been for three years. And like all occupations, it's best to wrap it up so Iraq can get on with their business. I'm sure your graphics people can come up with some new logos that say "Occupation Of Iraq." It'll be a nice project for them, maybe even earn them some much-needed overtime pay. The "War In Iraq" graphics are getting a bit stale, don't you think? After all, soon we'll be able to say that we fought World War II in less time than we've been in Iraq. Wars are usually short, but occupations - particularly when they're done stupidly - can be hellish.

[Tim Russert (brightening)]: Ah, so! Now I get it! I even wrote about wars and occupations in my book about my dad. Thanks for coming on the program today and clarifying this for us.

If the Democrats don't shift the discussion from "war" to "occupation," the Republicans will succeed in painting them as being "in favor of losing a war," which will destroy their electoral possibilities.

Instead, every time a Republican or a member of the press uses the Rove slogan "War in Iraq," Democrats need to correct them by saying, "You mean the Occupation of Iraq..."

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show carried on the Air America Radio network and Sirius. www.thomhartmann.com He's also a former marketing and communications senior executive, NLP Trainer, and consultant to government agencies and companies including many in the Fortune 500. His most recent books include "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?" and "Ultimate Sacrifice." His next book, due out this autumn, is "Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It."

###

How much does the government want to watch everybody? Well, given the latest revelations about drone aircraft being purchased by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, the stringent new regulations about drivers’ licenses, quite a bit. Security is the big growth business, these days. Below are three related postings about Homeland Security, big business, and government grasping.

Here’s an article about the “revolving door” for Homeland Security muckymucks going to work for security-focused companies:

Sunday, June 18, 2006 - 12:00 AM

Ex-security officials rake it in

By Eric Lipton
The New York Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003068930&zsection_id=2002107549&slug=homeland18&date=20060618

WASHINGTON — Dozens of members of the Bush administration's domestic-security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.

At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security — including the department's former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James Loy; and the former undersecretary, Asa Hutchinson — are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic-security business.

More than two-thirds of the department's most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door.

That’s not a good sign, since DHS just rode out a storm over pedophiles working at the agency. Neither is an AP story about how police and federal cops are simply buying telephone records from commercial brokers. I’m grateful to Elaine F. for sending this on to me.

Jun 20, 2005
AP: Police got phone data from brokers
By TED BRIDIS and JOHN SOLOMON
Associated Press Writers
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/POLICE_PHONE_DATA?SITE=MTBIL&SECTION=BUSINESS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Numerous federal and local law enforcement agencies have bypassed subpoenas and warrants designed to protect civil liberties and gathered Americans' personal telephone records from private-sector data brokers.
***
The law enforcement agencies include offices in the Homeland Security Department and Justice Department - including the FBI and U.S. Marshal's Service - and municipal police departments in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Utah.
***
The FBI's top lawyers told agents as early as 2001 they can gather private information about Americans from data brokers, even information gleaned from mortgage applications and credit reports, which normally would be off-limits to the government under the U.S. Fair Credit Reporting Act.
FBI lawyers rationalized that even though data brokers may have obtained financial information, agents could still use the information because brokers were not acting as a consumer-reporting agency but rather as a data warehouse.
***
© 2006 The Associated Press.

And, finally, this piece which comes from a peace group up in Pierce County, WA (and thank you, George H., these emails are great). This piece, about RFID tags, reminds me of the way the Nazis identified Jews and homosexuals—a simple RFID chip is so much more pleasing, isn't it? No more sewing, no more color clashes, just zip! and you're identifiable by anyone with a scanner. Philip Dick died too soon.


Subject: VeriChip CEO wants to use RFID to 'chip' immigrants
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 07:17:44 +0000

NEWS & INTERVIEW: VeriChip CEO wants to use RFID to 'chip' immigrants

[The web site Spychips.com has reported that the chairman of the VeriChip
Corporation is promoting the idea of "chipping" immigrants with RFID tags
under their skin as a way of tracking them.[1] -- "He appeared on the Fox
News Channel earlier this week, the morning after President Bush called for
high-tech measures to clamp down on Mexican immigrants," Spychips noted in
mid-May. -- Posted below is the transcript of the interview with Scott
Silverman, who was "chipped" himself about three years ago so as to better
advertise his product.[2] -- Thanks to Tom McCarthy for sending these
pieces.

http://www.ufppc.org/content/view/4687/

1.

For immediate r elease

VERICHIP INJECTS ITSELF INTO IMMIGRATION DEBATE

** Company Pushes RFID Implants for Immigrants, Guest Workers **

Spychips
May 18, 2006

http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/verichip-immigration.html

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has alarmed
civil libertarians by promoting the company's subcutaneous human tracking
device as a way to identify immigrants and guest workers. He appeared on
the Fox News Channel earlier this week, the morning after President Bush
called for high-tech measures to clamp down on Mexican immigrants.

Privacy advocates Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre are warning that a
government-sanctioned chipping program such as that suggested by Silverman
could quickly be expanded to include U.S. citizens, as well.

The VeriChip is a glass encapsulated Radio Frequency Identification tag that
is injected into the flesh to uniquely number and id entify people. The tag
can be read silently and invisibly by radio waves from up to a foot or more
away, right through clothing. The highly controversial device is also being
marketed as a way to access secure areas, link to medical records, and serve
as a payment device when associated with a credit card.

"Makers of VeriChip have been planning for this day. They've lost millions
of dollars trying to sell their invasive product to North America, and now
they see an opportunity in the desperation of the people of Latin America,"
Albrecht observes.

VeriChip's Silverman bandied about the idea of chipping foreigners on
national television Tuesday, emboldened by the Bush Administration call to
know "who is in our country and why they are here." He told "Fox & Friends"
that the VeriChip could be used to register guest workers, verify their
identities as they cross the border, and "be used for enforcement purposes
at the employer level." He added, "We have talked to many people in
Washington about using it. . . ."

Silverman is reportedly also planning to share his vision on CNBC's "Squawk
Box" if a slot opens up tomorrow (Friday) morning sometime between 6 and 9
a.m. Eastern Time. He was originally scheduled to appear on the show this
morning, but technical problems at the Florida studio prevented his
appearance.

The numbering and chipping of people seems like a plot from a dystopian
novel, but the company has gotten the buy-in from highly placed current and
former government officials, including Columbian President Alvaro Uribe. He
reportedly told Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) that he would consider having
microchips implanted into Colombian workers before they are permitted to
enter the United States to work on a seasonal basis.

"The mantra 'chip the foreigners' has little appeal once people realize the
company wants to stamp its 'electronic tattoo' into every one of us,"
cautions McIntyre. "Electronically branding and tracking visitors like
cattle is VeriChip's excuse to get the government on board. But if that
happens, we'll all be in their sights."

Tommy Thompson, former Secretary of Health and Human Services joined the
board of VeriChip Corporation after leaving his Bush administration cabinet
post. Shortly thereafter, he went on national television recommending that
all Americans get chipped as a way to link to their medical records. He
also suggested the VeriChip could replace military dog tags, and a spokesman
boasted that the company had been in talks with the Pentagon.

Privacy advocates warn that once people are numbered with a remotely
readable RFID tag like the VeriChip, they can be tracked. Once they can be
tracked, they can be monitored and controlled.

Albrecht and McIntyre, the authors of *Spychips: How Major Corporations and
Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID* believe the world's
people will stand firm against chipping. "Our country was founded on
principles of freedom and liberty. We're betting that the American people
will see the end game and buck VeriChip's attempts," said Albrecht. "We
also believe the people of Latin America will rise up in opposition once
they read our book."

The Spanish language version of *Spychips* will be hitting shelves across
Latin America next month.

ABOUT THE BOOK

*Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every
Move with RFID* (Nelson Current) was released in October 2005. Already in
its fifth printing, *Spychips* is the winner of the 2006 Lysander Spooner
Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty and has received wide critical
acclaim. Authored by Harvard doctoral researcher Katherine Albrecht and
former bank examiner Liz McIntyre, the book is meticulously r esearched,
drawing on patent documents, corporate source materials, conference
proceedings, and firsthand interviews to paint a convincing -- and
frightening -- picture of the threat posed by RFID.

Despite its hundreds of footnotes and academic-level accuracy, the book
remains lively and readable according to critics, who have called it a
"techno-thriller" and "a masterpiece of technocriticism."

The Spanish-language version of *Spychips*, titled *Chips Espias*, will be
available in bookstores in the Americas and Spain starting June 6, 2006

2.

[Transcript of "Fox & Friends" interview with Scott Silverman, Chairman of
the Board of VeriChip Corporation.The interview took place Tuesday May 16,
2006, between 6 and 7 AM on the Fox News Channel.]

Spychips
[May 2006]

http://www.spychips.com/press-releases/silverman-foxnews.html

TIKI BARBER, co-anchor: All right now, could implanting a microchip into
guest workers coming into the U.S. solve our illegal immigration problem?

BRIAN KILMEADE, co-anchor: Here to tell us right now why this is a viable
solution that might be used very shortly, Scott Silverman, CEO and Chairman
of Applied Digital. Scott, where is this being used right now?

Mr. SCOTT SILVERMAN (Chairman & CEO, Applied Digital): Well, this chip
today is being used for medical applications, to identify high-risk medical
patients and their medical records in an emergency and clinical situation.
The chip itself was approved by the FDA several years ago as a class-two
medical device, specifically for that application. But obviously, it can be
applicable for the immigration issues we face today as well.

KIRAN CHETRY, co-anchor: And we're going to take a look at it right now.
You have the little chip, and it's next to a penny, so we can see just how
small that chip would be. And you have one in you, so le t's go ahead and
just sort of explain how it would happen.

Mr. SILVERMAN: That's correct. My chip is in the upper right arm; it's
been there for about three years. It's a simple injection process just like
getting a shot of penicillin.

BARBER: OK. Now how exactly does it work? What does the chip actually
contain on it?

CHETRY: OK, so it -- I guess you can just run this over his arm, and it
comes up.

Mr. SILVERMAN: Well, the chip itself has a unique, 16-digit identification
number, and then through a serial port -- if I can. Kiran, on the bottom of
the scanner. Through a serial port, it attaches to a computer, where a
database would pull up and the medical application -- your medical records.
But in the immigration application, the registration of a guest worker
legitimately here in the United States, that could be used at the border.
But it could also be used for enforcement purposes at the employer level.

KILMEADE: What if you don't want it in your body? Do you have a choice?

Mr. SILVERMAN: Absolutely. It's an election on the part of the immigrant
or an election on the part of the government, when we ultimately define what
that technology is that no one has defined yet.

KILMEADE: Has the government bought this from you and said this is going to
be the new immigration policy?

Mr. SILVERMAN: No, they have not. We have talked to many people in
Washington about using it as an application for a guest worker program. But
we cannot say today that they have actually bought it for immigration
purposes.

BARBER: Now, a lot of people would say that's it's dangerous, that it's
invasive, it could be used to infringe on our civil liberties by tracking
us. But this is not what this is all about.

KILMEADE: Sort of like "Wild Kingdom," right?

Mr. SILVERMAN: No, that's correct, Tiki. This is not a locating device;
this has no GPS capabilities in it whatsoever. It is purely an
identification device that reads a unique 16-digit identifier with a
proprietary scanner within a very short range. It's a passive device with
no power source under the skin that ties to a database where the relevant
information is stored.

KILMEADE: Tiki knows the Secretary of State. Maybe Tiki can get this
contract for Scott. Tiki, maybe you can get a cut back. You know, you're
not going to be playing forever.

CHETRY: That's how people get arrested in Florida, Brian.

BARBER: Exactly.

CHETRY: But it is an interesting phenomenon. I don't know how comfortable
even if you asked me or Tiki or Brian if we would be willing to do it. It
just seems, like -- it seems scary.

KILMEADE: If I wanted to come to the United States, chip me to death!

BARBER: But it really is no different than having a passport and having a
way to identify yourself. T his just is a way that you won't lose it.

Mr. SILVERMAN: Yeah. It's a benefit to the person that's in the guest
worker program, because if you leave your card at home or you leave it at
your work, you're not going to be able to go back and forth across the
border.

KILMEADE: It's like permanently putting a string on your finger to remind
you of something.

Mr. SILVERMAN: Correct. That's correct.

CHETRY: It's quite interesting, so, keep us posted if there's more interest
in it. Thanks, Scott.

Mr. SILVERMAN: Thank you very much. Pleasure meeting you this morning.

KILMEADE: Especially if you get really rich.

Mr. SILVERMAN: OK. Thanks.

BARBER: Thanks for joining us.

Cities are not static. They have their own lives and dynamics—and reflect the dynamics of the societies around them.

When I was young, I saw “white flight” first hand, in the period after World War Two. As housing discrimination began to weaken, more and more white families fled the cities. The GI Bill made it possible for millions to buy their own, often new, homes. Restrictive covenants kept the population mono-cultured. For some years now, though, maybe twenty?, we’ve seen the suburbs become more and more multi-cultural—integrated, as we used to say. That was a goal: break up the lily-white monotony of the vast subdivisions surrounding the cities. It hasn’t gone away yet, but it’s cracking. I believe that’s a good thing.

So, when urban property values inflate to where they’re at now, an ethical puzzle comes along. Do we want to preserve ethnic neighborhoods? Should we? Is assimilation really what it’s all about, after all? Is it right for wealthy yuppies to gentrify every goddam neighborhood in our cities? I believe it isn’t, but I don’t make the rules (see today’s earlier post). The only reason these neighborhoods exist in the first place is discrimination. But, we’re funny: after we’ve lived in one place for a while, it feels like home. It’s comfortable. It’s scary to move out into new turf. If we’ve lived in the same area for generations, it’s very painful to leave. Market forces control our cities; economic cleansing is the problem. Think of New Orleans.


washingtonpost.com

In Parts of U.S. Northwest, a Changing Face
Economics Drive White Gentrification of Core Black Neighborhoods of Seattle and Portland

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 19, 2006; A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800605.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Already the whitest major city in America, Portland is rapidly becoming even whiter at its core.

"The heart of the black community is gone," said Charles Ford, 76, a black activist whose neighborhood in Portland has flipped in recent years from majority black to majority white. "There ain't no center anymore."

About 150 miles north in Seattle, the nation's second-whitest major city, the same process of downtown demographic bleaching is accelerating for the same reasons.

An invasion of young, well-educated and mostly white newcomers is buying up and remaking Seattle's Central District, the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix and the once-bluesy home of the young Ray Charles. What had been the largest black-majority community in the Pacific Northwest has become majority white.

"I am concerned and I am frustrated because I don't know what the alternatives are," said Norman Rice, who in the 1990s was Seattle's first and only black mayor. "It clearly isn't racist; it's economics. The real question you have to ask yourself is: Is this good or bad?"

White gentrification is hardly unique to Portland and Seattle. It is changing Harlem, the District of Columbia and many other cities. Demographers say it is especially noticeable in major California cities -- a function of population density, the desire to escape long commutes and the relative housing bargains in black neighborhoods.

But as white gentrification accelerates in Portland and Seattle, where the percentage of black residents was already the lowest among the nation's largest cities, it is erasing the only historically black neighborhoods these cities have ever had.

In many cities with large black populations, gentrification has caused only marginal racial change. In the District, for example, the percentage of white non-Hispanic residents increased 2.7 percent between 1990 and 2004, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Still, Washington remains less than one-third white and about 60 percent black.

In Seattle's Central District, though, racial change is anything but marginal. The non-Hispanic white population in the area jumped from 31 percent in 1990 to 50 percent in 2000, according to the census.

Local demographers say white growth since 2000 has gained momentum, while the percentage of black residents appears to have fallen to less than 40 percent. With real estate prices rollicking upward at about 25 percent a year, the Central District appears to be getting whiter and richer by the month.

As black residents leave the central areas of Portland and Seattle for the suburbs -- either because they have sold their homes or been forced out by higher rents -- their community is being splintered by geographic dispersal and racial integration.

"It's destroying us, socially and politically," said Ford, the neighborhood activist from Portland. "It is just a total inconvenience and disrespect to black folks."

Rice does not view the changes as nearly so dire, especially for people who have been able to sell their homes at a substantial profit and set aside money for retirement.

Census figures suggest that blacks in Seattle and Portland have not been displaced into homelessness and that they are not economically worse off in the suburbs than they were downtown. In many cases, housing in the suburbs is newer, schools are better and crime is lower.

But Rice said that newly suburbanized African Americans in Seattle and Portland are being isolated from one another and "will have to find new places to embrace our black heritage."

With attendance falling, some black churches in Seattle and Portland have moved or are opening second sanctuaries in the suburbs.

"I have begged our people not to sell their properties but to no avail," said the Rev. Reggie Witherspoon, pastor of Mount Calvary Christian Center, a church in the Central District that is trying to open a second location in Seattle's southern suburbs, where many parishioners have moved. "A good majority of them have decided they cannot afford to drive into the city, so they have joined suburban white churches."

Neither blacks nor whites, Rice said, appear to have found a way to stop or slow the disappearance of core black neighborhoods. "They are concerned, but they don't have an option or a plan," he said.

The pressures of growth, worsening traffic congestion and the rising price of gasoline seem certain to make the hunt for close-in, upscale housing even more obsessive in the next two decades.

"The location of the Central District is so superior to the suburbs -- it has great views, it's close to downtown and to the University of Washington -- that there's a tremendous incentive to buy, especially for people with no kids or the money to send them to private schools," said Richard Morrill, a demographer and professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

Over the next two decades, Seattle is predicting the creation of 50,000 jobs in the central city, which amounts to nearly a 25 percent increase in a job base that tends to be high-wage and highly skilled. Portland, too, is growing, largely by attracting young, well-educated newcomers from California and the East Coast.

In both Seattle and Portland, which take considerable pride in being green, liberal and tolerant, the fading away of black inner-city communities has occasioned considerable hand-wringing among the overwhelmingly white population. Portland is 75 percent white, and Seattle 68 percent white.

"Many of the white liberals who condemned white flight are just as angry at the white folks who are moving back into the cities," Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle, wrote last month in his blog about movement from Seattle in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

The dispersal of African Americans is also an embarrassing reminder of why they were concentrated in the first place -- and of a time when neither Portland nor Seattle was especially tolerant.

In the '50s and '60s, when the black population was growing in the region, restrictive real estate covenants and racial prejudice kept most African Americans in selected central areas of the two cities.

"Finally, the African American community is able to make the same choice about where it's going to live as the white community," Rice said. "They are choosing to move. Is that bad or not? Stay tuned."

In northeast Portland, where Ford has been complaining for years about gentrification, he acknowledges that the tipping point has come and gone. White folks are taking over, he said, and blacks folks are all but gone.

Recently, Ford took a reporter on a tour of his gentrified neighborhood. En route, he discovered that a not-so-handsome house was for sale for $400,000. The price astonished him, especially because the house was considerably smaller than his own.

"When I see prices like that, I wonder who . . . of my race can continue to live here," he said.

Ford began ruminating about the price -- and the profit -- he might be able to get for his house, which he has owned since 1968 and which sits on a fine corner lot near a fixed-up city park.

"I have said I would never sell," Ford said. "But who can resist these prices?"
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

"If I had known the president was going to be this incompetent in his administration, I would not have given him the authority" to go to war, said Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

There are certain facts of life that all of us prefer to overlook. Some of these facts fall into the river of denial, others overwhelm us with their power, and some of them are little more than assumptions when you look closely.
I can remember the first time I heard “the golden rule is that who has the gold makes the rules.” There’s a fact of life that isn’t widely talked about. It jeopardizes everything we learned in Sunday School and civics. But to anyone who follows politics it’s as clear as a mountain stream. The rules for the EPA are made by...yup, the energy and chemical companies; the rules for lobbying Congress are made by the lobbyists; the rules most of us try to live by, to work by, are made by people who want to control us. It’s for our own good, though.

This review of Derrick Jensen’s book, Endgame, caught my eye because of the citation about decolonizing ourselves. That’s what the native communities in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia are attempting. The post-colonial world isn’t working out, except for a very select and self-selecting few. Time to face the facts of modern life and make some changes, in our world and in ourselves.


OpEdNews.com
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mickey_z_060619__22we_should_always_re.htm

June 19, 2006

"We should always remember who makes the rules"

By Mickey Z.

In his eye-opening new two-volume book, "Endgame" (Seven Stories Press), Derrick Jensen writes: "One person's strategic goal may be to make a lot of money. Another's may be to get married. Still another's may be to bring down civilization."

I don't know Derrick beyond a few e-mail exchanges so I can only speculate where he stands on marriage or accumulating capital. However, he's not at all vague on the last goal: "We need to bring down civilization now," he writes. "We need not hesitate any longer. The planet is collapsing before our eyes, and we do nothing. We hold our little protests, we make our little signs, we write our little letters and our big books, and the world burns."

As I've said before, the primary difference between a book reviewer like me and a book reader like you is that I got the book for free. So, I will not burden you with my half-baked interpretations of "Endgame" except to say it can-and likely will-change the way you see the world, the way your prioritize your activism, and the way you participate in our suicidal/homicidal culture. In place of any more my opinions, I'll provide a few excerpts from Derrick Jensen himself:

PERSPECTIVE:
"Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it's like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It's hard to love something you've never known. It's hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed."

UN-LEARNING:
"Pretend you are not civilized. Pretend you love the land where you live. Pretend you were never taught to value economic production over life, or pretend you unlearned this. Pretend you were never taught that everyone else is here for you to use, or pretend you unlearned this. Pretend you do not feel entitled to take from those around you. Pretend you know that someday you will die. Pretend you are not separate from your landbase, but a part of it, as it is a part of you. Pretend you were taught to take care of your landbase as though your life depends on it. Pretend that's what you do."

NEW TACTICS:
"Bringing down civilization first and foremost consists of liberating ourselves by driving the colonizers out of our own hearts and minds: seeing civilization for what it is, seeing those in power for who ad what they are, and seeing power for what it is. Bringing down civilization then consists of actions arising from that liberation, not allowing those in power to predetermine the ways we oppose them, instead living with and by-and using-the tools and rules of those in power only when we choose, and not using them when we choose not to. It means fighting them on our terms when we choose, and on their terms when we choose, when it is convenient and effective to do so. Think of that the next time you vote, get a permit for a demonstration, enter a courtroom, file a timber sale appeal, and so on. That's not to say we shouldn't use these tactics, but we should always remember who makes the rules, and we should strive to determine what 'rules of engagement' will shift the advantage to our side."

GET BUSY:
"One of the good things about everything being so fucked up-about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive-is that no matter where you look-no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies-there's good and desperately important work to be done."

GET RESULTS:
"I just got home from talking to a ... longtime activist. She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon. Whenever activists learned a hillside was going to be sprayed, they assembled there, hoping their presence would stop the poisoning. But each time, like clockwork, helicopters appeared, and each time, like clockwork, helicopters dumped loads of Agent Orange onto the hillside and onto the protesting activists. The campaign did not succeed.
"'But,' she said to me, 'I'll tell you what did. A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills, and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, 'We knows the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.'
"I waited for her to finish.
"'You know what happened next?' she asked.
"'I think I do,' I responded.
"'Exactly,' she said. 'The spraying stopped.'"

WHAT'S AT STAKE:
"Let's be clear: Those in power are poisoning children, stealing their physical and cognitive health: making them weak, sick, and stupid. How close must the culture cut before you will fight back?"

ACT:
"Pretend you are not civilized. Pretend you are not a slave. Pretend you are a free human being. Pretend you were taught to value freedom, your own and others, enough that you will fight for it. Pretend that is what you do."

"Endgame" has the power to rock the foundations of even the most grizzled activist veteran. Don't take my word for it, buy the book or steal the book or borrow it from your library and see for yourself. Do it now...it's later than you think.

To order "Endgame" (two volumes), please visit: http://www.sevenstories.com

Mickey Z. is the author of several books, most recently 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know (Disinformation Books). He can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.


Authors Website: http://www.mickeyz.net

Guerillas must have support from the overall population in order to survive. One of the larger pieces of turd-pie we’ve been handed is that America is widely supported in Iraq. It’s not true. Americans are hated. Maybe not individual Americans, on a person to person level, but collectively. When all the Americans seen by Iraqis look alike, there’s no such thing as person-to-person. Americans are not liberators; they’re occupiers. There’s no getting around that fact. Those Iraqis who work for the occupiers are traitors. That’s how it works. If America was taken over by, say, Bulgarians, then any American who worked for the Bulgarian occupiers would be a traitor.

Editor and Publisher
'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Details Increasing Danger and Hardship

By Greg Mitchell

Published: June 18, 2006 6:20 PM ET

NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

It's actually far worse than that, as the details publish below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

Among the other troubling reports:

--"Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant...People no longer trust most neighbors."

--One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.

--Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."

--Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May...."some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.

--It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.

--Embassy employees are held in such low esteem their work must remain a secret and they live with constant fear that their cover will be blown. Of nine staffers, only four have told their families where they work. They all plan for their possible abductions. No one takes home their cell phones as this gives them away. One employee said criticism of the U.S. had grown so severe that most of her family believes the U.S. "is punishing populations as Saddam did."

--Since April, the "demeanor" of guards in the Green Zone has changed, becoming more "militia-like," and some are now "taunting" embassy personnel or holding up their credentials and saying loudly that they work in the embassy: "Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people." For this reason, some have asked for press instead of embassy credentials.

-- "For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events....We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their 'cover.'"

--"More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate."

--The overall enviroment is one of "frayed social networks," with frequent actual or perceived insults. None of this is helped by lack of electricity. "One colleague told us he feels 'defeated' by circumstances, citing his example of being unable to help his two-year-old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in stiflng heat," which is now reaching 115 degrees.

--"Another employee tell us that life outside the Green Zone has become 'emotionally draining.' He lives in a mostly Shiite area and claims to attend a funeral 'every evening.'"

--Fuel lines have grown so long that one staffer spent 12 hours in line on his day off. "Employees all confirm that by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without.....One staff member reported that a friend lives in a building that houses a new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city ppwer 24 hours a day."

--The cable concludes that employees' "personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials."

The final line is: KHALILZAD



Greg Mitchell (is editor of E&P)


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Robert Fisk is a political commentator—rather than a straight reporter—who is able to grab our assumptions by the collar and shake them until common sense finally comes through. He’s been around the Middle East for years and is able to look at the situation with background information. That’s something the folks in Washington (and London) can’t seem to do.

It’s obvious, and has been obvious for years, that the Israelis treat the Arabs the same way Americans treated Indians, the same way the old white regime in South Africa treated people of color...as less-than-human animals that walked upright but who couldn’t be trusted. That arrogance, and the blindness with which America has looked upon Israel’s policies, has led us into the current mess. Well, that and all that oil...

Fisk Raises 9/11’s Rude Question
Maverick journalist dared to research Muslim anger.
View full article and comments here http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/06/05/Fisk/
By Crawford Kilian
Published: June 5, 2006
TheTyee.ca

British journalist Robert Fisk has inspired a verb in the blogosphere: to "fisk" is to systematically rebut unwelcome arguments. Bloggers supporting Bush and the Iraq war have long applied the term to their own critiques of Fisk's stories from the Middle East.

In Vancouver to promote his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Fisk showed he can fisk his own opponents and critics quite effectively.

Casually dressed, shirtsleeves rolled up, Fisk spoke to a crowd of over 500 on Sunday night at the Maritime Labour Centre at Triumph and Victoria. He struck his theme at once: "Refuse to accept the narrative of history laid down by presidents, prime ministers, generals and journalists."

His own narrative seemed to move almost randomly from the writing of his 1300-page book to the origins of the Palestinian issue to the failings of journalists. But in fact he spoke within a tightly structured blend of history, anecdote and gossip about Osama Bin Laden.

The history ranged from Napoleon promising the Egyptians he had come to liberate them, to prophetic quotes by Palestinian historians. Writing his own history had been depressing, he said: In reviewing centuries of torture, betrayal and genocide, "I am amazed at the restraint of the Muslim world toward us in the West."

Talking with Bin Laden

Fisk told of being on a New York-bound airliner on 9/11, and getting the news via cell phone from his editor in London. After alerting the crew, he described himself and the pilot then walking the length of the plane, looking for suspicious (because Muslim) passengers.

"In ten seconds, Osama Bin Laden had turned me into a racist," Fisk said. "He succeeded in his intent to divide innocent from innocent."

He reminisced about an interview he'd once had with Bin Laden on a mountain in Afghanistan: "From this mountain," Bin Laden had told him, "we helped destroy the U.S.S.R.; we pray to God that he lets us turn the U.S.A. into a shadow of itself." Later he defined Bin Laden as an "ideologist" who actually talks like George W. Bush in terms of good and evil.

"Tens of thousands in Saudi Arabia admire Bin Laden," Fisk said, "because he gains credibility by saying what their rulers won't say."

The forbidden subject of 9/11, Fisk argued, was the why of the attack. To ask why was to be labelled a terrorist and an anti-Semite. "We took the narrative from our leaders," he said. "Raise issues like Palestine and we were told to shut up."

He saw the same narrative emerging in last week's case of the 17 arrested in Ontario on charges of terrorism. That narrative would not involve speculating on whether the 17 might be angry about something happening in the Middle East.

Estimating the real casualties

Journalists took more fisking from Fisk than the politicians did. He read an Iraq story from the Los Angeles Times in which every source was a "U.S. official." He flayed the readiness of reporters to accept the semantic shift that changed the West Bank from "occupied territory" to "disputed territory," from "wall" to "fence." And he blasted the readiness of U.S., British, and Canadian media to give every casualty a name and family -- but not to do so for the Iraqis dying in their anonymous thousands.

Fisk described seeing the real mortality statistics on a computer in the Baghdad morgue last year on a day when 26 new bodies had come in by mid-day. For June 2005, Baghdad alone had recorded 1,100 violent deaths. Project those figures across the country, he estimated, and 36,000 Iraqis a year were dying violently.

Questioners included 9/11 conspiracy theorists; Fisk had clearly heard them before, and responded to them civilly but briefly. Asked about the Iran crisis, he called it "totally false." The real crisis, he said, was Pakistan: a nuclear power that still supported the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, but which couldn't be threatened because it was a supposed ally and already had the bomb.

He also described a meeting in Amman, Jordan, with three leaders of the insurgency, including one of Saddam's generals -- who remembered being interviewed by Fisk on a tank while invading Iran in 1980. The general had recently led the insurgents in the second battle of Fallujah.

Advice for activists

Fisk predicted that eventually the U.S. would have to talk with the insurgents, just as it eventually had to talk with the Vietnamese communists and as Britain had to talk with the IRA.

A listener asked what options for change he could suggest. Fisk laughed, saying he would cease to be a journalist if he became an activist. But he suggested that activists deal with train crews and truck drivers, the people whose sons and daughters will have to fight. "Talk to them. Don't talk to each other."

Crawford Kilian is a frequent contributor to The Tyee.

Hummer Q&A Posted by: "Scott Munson" scott@planttrees.org Thu Jun 15, 2006 3:06 pm (PST) Thursday, March 23, 2006
Hummer SUV Q and A Session

from the Best of Craigslist

Q1: I made the original down payment on an H2 "Hummer" and I've been
driving it for over half a year now and I still can't find my penis
and women still hate me and call me an asshole. When does the H2
"Hummer" start to kick in? When will I finally be a real man?

A1: Some new H2 owners will experience continued feelings of
inadequacy for some time after they purchase their surrogate penis
however rest assured that your perceptions are false: Women really do
want to have sex with you, it's only the lesbians who continue to
call you names and take out restraining orders against you. Also
don't worry: Your penis is humongous now. Trust your new "Hummer."

Q2: When I bought my Ford Expedition about a year ago, I was told
that I would be going to the mountains, driving through deserts and
heavy mud, camping out under the stars with at least two hot High
School girls. Instead I'm stuck in traffic 90% of the time, slogging
back and forth between home, K-Mart, and work. When will I start
being a rugged mountain logging man?

A2: If you're experiencing city traffic and have not yet become an
adventurous mountain man, the problem isn't with your SUV, it's with
liberal environmentalists and Communist Democrats who are conspiring
to destroy America's freedoms hand-in-hand with Iraqi terrorists
(which really, really do exist.) With the election of President
George W. Bush, this temporary problem will shortly be corrected and
any day now you'll become a rugged, action-filled adventurer.

Q3: My neighbor bought a really manly SUV so I had to go buy one even
bigger to prove I'm a better man. I was amused about a month later
when he came around a bend on the freeway at around 100 miles an hour
and rolled it, killing himself and all his family members and
everyone in a couple of other cars. But I started wondering if I'm
going to also die in a screaming, burning wreck taking other people's
kids out with me like he did. Should I worry?

A3: No, there's no need to worry! All SUV accidents are investigated
by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and media reports
about massive carnage and an 11% greater fatality rate involving SUVs
compared to girly cars are highly exaggerated. The NTSB has
consistently found in every single accident involving SUVs that other
drivers have always been at fault; it's never been the driver of an
SUV that's ever caused an accident. An education campaign is planned
to inform drivers of girly cars that they must stop getting in the
way of real men like you and stop causing these accidents which took
out your neighbor's family. You have nothing to worry about.

Q4: There is no Q4

Q5: I can't stand it any more. I'm really getting tired of all the
men, women, and children who flip me off when I'm driving my H2
"Hummer" around town. What's their problem? What can I do about these
people who shout stuff like "PIG!" and "ASSHOLE!" and stuff as they
flip me off?

A5: They're jealous of you. It's not anyone who can purchase an H2
"Hummer," after all, it takes a real man and these people -- even the
High School girls who flip you off -- are jealous of the fact that
they can't be as manly a man as you are. What you should do is sit
there and glare at them really, really bad: Let them know you're not
going to take that guilt trip abuse without giving them the glaring
of their lives. Also many of them secretly want to have sex with you
but are too embarrassed to ask so you should ask them.

Q6: Someone keeps putting citations on my SUV's windshield claiming
I'm supporting terrorism, killing the environment, that I'm a selfish
pig, and that my SUV is maiming other drivers on the highway. These
traffic citations are piling up because I don't see an address of
where I need to go to fight these tickets in court. Will they come
and arrest me for not paying these tickets? I don't think I should
have to since there's no address I can see on where to mail in fines.

A6: No, you don't have to pay those or do anything with them. You may
tear them up and throw them away along with any parking ticket or
other traffic citation you may be issued. As an SUV owner you're
entitled to special driving privileges that inferior men don't share,
and if any police officer tells you differently, you should explain
to the liberal about your rights as a SUV driver to do whatever the
Hell you want when you want to do it.

Q7: Why do so many people in other cars and people walking on the
sidewalk hold up two fingers a couple of inches apart and point at my
SUV and laugh?

A7: They're probably trying to tell you that you have a door ajar or
that they believe one of your tires is under inflated. Check to make
sure that all of your doors are closed properly and if they are, be
sure to check your tire pressure.

Q8: About once a week or so I walk out to my SUV and I find a bumper
sticker on my H2 "Hummer" either saying I'm changing the environment
or that I'm "compensating," whatever that means. What's happening to me?

A8: There's a Communist Liberal by the name of Arianna Huffington who
hates America and she travels around the world putting these bumper
stickers on people's Constitutionally protected SUVs and "Hummers"
because she hates America. It's just loony liberal nut blather which
doesn't mean anything so you can ignore it. If you want it to stop,
you need to send her email and demand that she stop harassing you
else you'll call the FBI. That'll make her stop.

Q9: I think there's something wrong with my "Hummer." Every two days
I have to refill my gas tank even though I only drive around the city
from home to work and back. I've checked for leaks and I don't smell
leaking gasoline when I'm driving so I'm thinking there must be some
reason why I'm only getting 10 miles to the gallon. What's up with that?

A9: There's nothing wrong with your car. What's wrong is the notion
that as an American your personal vehicle needs to be engineered for
fuel economy -- a Communist notion if ever there was one. When you
drive a "Hummer," you're driving freedom, liberty, apple pie, and God
-- the Christian God -- and nobody -- absolutely nobody! -- has the
right to tell you to drive some Fresh wimpy girly car. When you fill
your gas tank every other day, you're filling your tank with freedom.

Q10: I got me one of those Hummies with the jungle camouflage paint
job, really big tires, and I wear Army clothes when I drive my
Hummie, just like my fellow Hummie drivers in Iraq. Question: am I
allowed to shoot brown people like they do and get away with it like
they do? And if so, what about homos? Can I shoot homos too if I see
homos on the sidewalk?

A10: Yes, as an H2 "Hummer" driver you're entitled to shoot as many
brown-skinned people and homosexuals as you want to. There are a few
police officers who might pull you over after engaging in your
Constitutionally protected Second Amendment rights, but most police
officers will notice your "Hummer," its really cool camouflage, and
support the troops by not stopping you or giving you problems. If a
police officer does pull you over, all you need do is show him or her
your Republican Party membership card or your National Rifel
Association membership card and they'll cut you loose to continue
exercising your American rights. Any police officer who still gives
you a hassle is a closet queer...

“Stay the course!” the British cried, marching against the Americans at the Battle of New Orleans. “Stay the course!” Hitler told the army at Stalingrad. “Stay the course!” at the Little Big Horn, in Viet Nam, the Crimea, Gallipolli... The phrase of blind and demented generals, leaders, and other fools. We’re hearing it again.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but men sure do. I’ve been re-reading dispatches from the US Military Command in Viet Nam about just how good things were going. The country was collapsing around them, but all the US could do was spew out hallucinogenic fantasies of victory—and denounce those who dissented as being soft on the enemy, on communism, actual allies of the National Liberation Front... Somehow the greatest minds of the US government equated getting out of a disastrous and upopular war as being weak.

The truth is, the men—and women—in Washington who pursue the war infIraq are weak. They're locked in previous decisions and cannot admit to error. It's sort of the General Custer Syndrome, I guess. America right or wrong, my decisions right or wrong. Actually, it's crazy.

Attacks in Baghdad Kill at Least 31
Reuters
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_061706Y.shtml

Baghdad - Bomb and mortar attacks killed at least 31 people in and near Baghdad on Saturday in violence that showed no sign of easing despite a security crackdown against al Qaeda in the capital.

U.S. forces were searching for two U.S. soldiers who went missing after an attack on Friday in which one American soldier was killed in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Yusufiya in the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad.

"After hearing small arms fire and explosions in the vicinity of the checkpoint, a quick reaction force responded to the scene. Coalition forces have initiated a search operation to locate and determine the status of the soldiers," it said.

More than 2,500 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Saturday's violence followed a vow by al Qaeda's new leader in Iraq to avenge the death of his predecessor Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. air strike last week.

In the deadliest attack, a car bomb targeting Iraqi army and police killed 11 people.

Reuters Television footage showed the blackened remains of at least six burnt-out cars. A charred body was taken on a stretcher to an ambulance. A man with blood on his face stood nearby looking stunned and smoking a cigarette.

New Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is under pressure to rein in violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, on Wednesday launched a much-trumpeted security sweep with 50,000 Iraqi forces backed by 7,000 U.S. troops to pile pressure on al Qaeda.

But the operation, mounted one day after President Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad to bolster Maliki's month-old government, has failed to stop attacks.

In more violence of the type carried out by al Qaeda, a bomb killed six people and wounded 11 in a crowded market in central Baghdad and mortar rounds killed two people and wounded 14 in another market in the Shi'ite district of Kadhimiya.

Attacks on Markets

Attacks on crowded markets are a common tactic used by al Qaeda as part of what U.S. officials say is a campaign to ignite a sectarian civil war between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.

In the town of Mahmudiya just south of the capital, a car bomb targeting an Iraqi army checkpoint killed seven people.

Four days into the crackdown, the Interior Ministry has not announced any arrests or other results.

As the wounded from Saturday's blasts were being treated, state television broadcast footage of Iraqi soldiers marching to the sound of martial music, part of a government campaign to bolster the image of its security forces.

The U.S. military has said it expects al Qaeda's new leader, who it identified as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, to use the same tactics as Zarqawi, a Sunni Arab militant who had concentrated mass attacks against Shi'ites.

On Friday, a suicide bomber killed at least 10 people in a Shi'ite mosque in Baghdad. An Iraqi militant body linked with al Qaeda pledged on Friday to continue a holy war against U.S. forces until "doomsday."

There has been so much done to the graves of American Indians that the returns of their remains is a reason to rejoice. Dams, freeways, pipelines, and other projects have turned the gravesites of thousands upon thousands into...nothing. Anthropologists and archeologists, in the name of science and looted addtional thousands of graves. We have no idea how many boxes of bones remain in storage around the country—around the world, really.


From earth to earth, once freed from study
Culture - Native Americans retrieve and rebury the remains of 143 ancestors dug up long ago
Saturday, June 17, 2006
RICHARD COCKLE
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1150514714236140.xml&coll=7

The Oregonian
rcockle@oregonwireless.net
DAYTON, Wash. -- Wilson Wewa raised his arms above a mass grave Friday where the remains of 143 Native Americans were ceremonially laid to rest on a windswept bluff above the Snake River.

"Each and every one of us are related somehow to these people," said Wewa, an elder of the Palouse and Northern Paiute tribes who lives on the Warm Springs Reservation.

The bodies, now concealed under reed mats, had been unearthed in the early 1960s to make way for a reservoir rising behind the newly constructed Ice Harbor Dam. Since then, they've been stored in the anthropology departments of the University of Idaho at Moscow and Washington State University at Pullman.

They were returned to the tribes for reburial under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which sets guidelines for the return of cultural artifacts by museums, federal agencies and others.

"Now they are home," Wewa told about 100 people gathered by the shallow pit. "They are not sitting in a room in a box on a shelf. Their bones can go back to the ground like it was in the creation times. Our people have to go back to the ground."

The ceremony near Lyons Ferry State Park began in the morning and included speeches in English and the Sahaptin language of the Northwest tribes, interspersed with singing.

None of the bodies could be individually identified. Tribal members believe some predate the Lewis and Clark expedition and possibly the voyages of Christopher Columbus, said Harvey Moses Jr., chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation's governing Business Council.

Dealing "as best we can"

Just how many Northwest tribes are represented is impossible to know because the original burial site was a gathering spot for native people from a wide region who passed by over the centuries, he said.

"There was no embalming way back then," Moses said. "If you died during travel, you would be buried where you died."

The belief system of the Northwest tribes holds that bodies shouldn't be exhumed after burial, he said.

"They never should have been moved, period," Moses said. "It is upsetting, but a part of the American way of life is to do this, so we are dealing with it as best we can."

Alvin Shuster, a Yakama tribal elder, said he sometimes wonders "what the other side would do if we went to their cemeteries and dug their people up. How would they like it?"

A spirit of conciliation seemed to override any acrimony at the ceremony.

"Our religion forbids making judgments," Shuster said. "We have to accept things as they come. They took a lot of things away from us."

"No hard feelings to the people who have taken them out of the country. No hard feelings," said Charles Axtell, a Nez Perce elder living in Lapwai, Idaho.

A sad, telling frequency

The reburial was organized by the Confederated Colville tribes and was the largest of its kind outside the boundaries of the 1.4 million-acre Colville reservation, where 5,000 tribal members live. The Colville confederation encompasses 12 tribes, and many are related to tribal people elsewhere around the Northwest.

Reburials have become increasingly common since passage of the repatriation act in 1990. The law was restructured last year to ensure that museums comply.

In April, Arizona's Hopi Tribe reburied 1,560 sets of human remains, among them 455 nearly complete skeletons, all believed to be 700 to 1,550 years old. Most had been unearthed during archaeological excavations between the 1880s and 1960s at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Stone tablets near Friday's reburial site marked the undated burial place of 135 people recovered from a desecrated native cemetery at the mouth of the nearby Tucannon River.

Beside it was another marker signifying the last resting place of an uncounted number of Palouse moved there in 1962 from where they were exhumed at the confluence of the Snake and Palouse rivers.

"It is just the way the settlers and the government work," Moses said. "It is difficult to put a figure on how many times this has happened, how many times it will happen."

The problem now will be to keep artifact hunters away from the site, Moses said, though the remains appeared to consist mostly of deteriorated bones.

To help ensure security, the remains were partially buried, then the grave was filled with chain-link fencing and rocks before being fully covered.

Richard Cockle: 541-963-8890; rcockle@oregonwireless.net

©2006 The Oregonian
________________________________________________________

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096413057&na=1601
Repatriation options explored
© Indian Country Today May 29, 2006. All Rights Reserved
Posted: May 29, 2006
by: Jim Largo / Indian Country Today
COLUMBIA, S.C. - There are at least three options to repatriating American Indian remains now stored in boxes in museums and federal agencies, said the manager of a National Park Service program.

Retired federal judge and law professor Sherry Hutt told an audience in training at the University of South Carolina that federal agencies have ''a potential of 200,000 Native American humans remains'' to be claimed for repatriation.

Some have been identified, she said, but the rest are ''culturally unidentifiable.'' She asked the audience, ''Who are these people?'' They are the remains of indigenous peoples taken from burials even before 1990 when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act became law.

She explained that

NAGPRA regulations provide ways for these remains to be repatriated.

Hutt said NAGPRA is sometimes misinterpreted as a law only for federally recognized tribes to claim and handle the remains for reburial.

Currently, she said, a state-recognized tribe could ask a federal tribe for help. The federally recognized tribe can claim the remains and return them to the tribe.

Another way is for a state tribe to go to NAGPRA's review committee and ask it to make recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior Department concerning the repatriation of their ancestors' remains.

''You say the state of South Carolina has these individuals. We are a state-recognized tribe. We agree [with the state] that this is our aboriginal territory, and we are the descendants of these people. We have a shared identity. But because we are not federally recognized, we don't have otherwise a chance under the law. Therefore these individuals are falsely identified under the law merely by status, not by fact. This is how you work it through NAGPRA,'' she said.

Hutt said once Interior agrees with NAGPRA's recommendations, it will notify the tribe. Then NAGPRA will publish the tribe's intentions. If no one else comes forth to claim the remains within 30 days, then the tribe can go ahead with their plans, she said.

The third way is to take a claim to court. ''You say we are a people that the court recognizes. These are our people here in your boxes, and we are making a claim as their descendants,'' Hutt said. Going through the courts can be difficult but can be done, Hutt agreed.

The Waccamaw Tribe, which lives near Myrtle Beach, S.C., had some 60 sets of ancestral bones taken from the area and wants them back, but since they are not a federal tribe, they have difficulties in getting them from the state.

Hutt told Chief Harold Hatcher, the Waccamaw leader, ''Door No. 2 is your best option.'' She said new NAGPRA regulations are being written, which may provide a way for the Waccamaws to get their ancestors returned without having to go to a federal tribe or to a NAGPRA review committee.

South Carolina has 600 sets of bones in storage. Hutt urged the trainees to document counties with tribal groups, so that the bones known to have been dug up there can be returned to those groups for reburial.

Hutt explained that grave sites are protected. No one is allowed to dig up graves, even if one purchases land with an American Indian burial ground. When you buy land, you don't buy the right to dig, she explained. ''You don't own the human remains.'' Only the descendants can ask for a grave to be disturbed, she said.

“When you call me a ‘liberal,’ you son-of-a-bitch, smile.” That’s about how I feel. The liberals want most things to continue on their well-trod paths. Let’s not explore new ground, please, oh please, don’t make any waves... They’re as involved in the current mess as the conservatives; and, I think most of them hope to maintain their profit margins—certainly the ones in Congress, anyhow.

The Republicans have, for as long as I can remember, tried to corner the market on macho. When you look at most of them—bozos like Hastert, bewigged crooks like Tom Delay, dough-balls like Rove—”macho” is just about the last word anyone would ever use to describe them. “Stupid,” “arrogant,” “greedy,” “liars,” all those words fit fine. But “macho”?

I guess that’s why they try harder. Or they try to act like it’s harder. The majority of them, like, yeah, the majority of Democrats when you come right down to it, are simply old overweight farts with all the integrity of used-car salesmen or three-card-monte dealers.

So the Republicans are good at projecting liberals as being weenies. Always have been. Always will be. Both the Republicans at name-calling and the Democrats at behaving like weenies.

this is from Pizzo’s News For Real blog, for today. It’s good! —However, I think that asking for a careful retreat from Iraq, in order not to make things worse, is about like it would have been in 1939 to ask Hitler to pull out of Poland. Nobody would have said, oh, you have to fix the problem you created before you leave. No: the idea is to get the hell out of there, NOW, make many apologies and offer as much non-military aid as they want. And prosecute the lying SOBs that got us in there in the first place! Lesson Number One: when you find you've dug yourself into a hole, stop digging. Now.


Cut & Run Liberals

I want to be perfectly clear about this. We liberals really do want to cut and run.

I admit it. We are cut and run liberials, just as Karl Rove alleges. More than that, I am proud of it and encourage more Americans to join us.

We are liberal/progressives and, damn it, we want to cut and run:

We want to cut and run from the borrow and spend, borrow and spend economics of the GOP that have piled an additional $4 trillion in debt onto our children, grand children and great grand children.

We want to cut and run from the unholy alliance between the GOP and energy companies that have left us at the mercy of a bunch of medieval Islamic tribal leaders who run their own countries like feudal states and treat their people worse than Americans treat farm animals.

We want to cut and run from a national health care system designed by and for giant health care and pharmaceutical interests, that enriches a few while leaving 45 million tax paying Americans without affordable health insurance.

We want to cut and run from a government which, over the past six years, has become not only increasingly closed to public scrutiny and accountability, but overtly hostile and suspicious of citizens who insist on either.

We want to cut an run from a style of governance that not only plays on fear and petty prejudices, but cultivates and exploits them for cheap political gain. The cynical, dishonest purposeful pitting of majority populations against minority groups on the grounds that they don't share “American values,” and then later deny responsibility for the entirely predictable destructive consequences of those tactics.

We want to cut and run from policies that view science and scientists as adversaries whose findings must sometimes be suppressed, while embracing, even endorsing, religious dogmas that have no basis in fact whatsoever.

We want to cut and run from GOP economic polices that have handed the already wealthy a couple of trillion dollars in tax cuts while leaving working Americans payroll tax virtually untouched.

We want to cut and run from GOP economics that argue – with a straight face – that the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour should not be raised to a still unlivable $7.00 an hour because doing so would “hurt low wage workers.”

We want to cut and run from policies that scoff at mandating substantially higher fuel millage standards, even as the fossil fuels run out and the effects of global warming become more apparent with each passing day.

We want to cut and run from policies that justify turning “the land of the free and home of the brave,” into place where none of us can any longer feel sure that the government isn't listening to our private phone calls, reading our emails or isn't keeping an eye on us from a pole-mounted camera on the corner.

We want to cut and run from an administration that wraps inconvenient truths in the opaque blanket of national security while justifying selective disclosure of classified information for purely political reasons -- such as the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, and the now discredited disclosures that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

We want to cut and run from policies that allow religious extremists to determine what medical procedures or family planning medications women will be allowed access to.

We want to cut and run from policies that allow our government to decide which American citizens will be allowed to enter into legally recognized committed relationships, and which will be banned by law from doing so.

We want to cut and run from policies that encourage counseling and treatment for Americans suffering from alcohol addiction, but incarceration for those suffering drug addiction.

We want to cut and run from cynically selective policies that treat some dictators as friends of America and others as enemies requiring a deadly dose of regime change.

We want to cut and run from policies that are increasingly militarizing entirely domestic matters, such as internal terrorist threats, border control and domestic law enforcement, particularly the gathering of intelligence on political groups and movements.

We want to cut and run from policies that allow industries government is supposed to regulate for the public good, to write the very rules under which they will be regulated.

Do we want to cut and run from Iraq? Wish we could. But that fat is already in the fire. Liberals understand we can't cut and run. And whose fault is it that? Not ours, that's for sure. We would like to see US troops leave Iraq ASAP -- but not in a way that would make matters worse than our invasion already has.

In the meantime we are not about to let the very neocons that got us into that mess shift the blame onto liberials who oppose the war. You guys started it and that dead chicken is hung around your necks, not ours. So, Karl, stop the blame-shifting and wear it like man.

But Karl is right when he calls us "cut and run liberals." As you can see the list of things we do want to cut and run from is a long one.

We are cut and run liberals. And proud of it.


Have a nice weekend

The following post, which came off of Portside, neatly summarizes the bullshit that’s coming out of Washington.

From: moderator@portside.org
Subject: Orwell Was An Optimist
Date: June 14, 2006 4:37:47 PM PDT
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org

http://www.ranknfile-ue.org/uenews.html
UE News

(United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America)

Orwell was an optimist

By Dave Saldana

You are not paranoid.

No matter how worried you are that the government is
listening to your phone calls or tracking your internet
use, you are not paranoid. Hell, you ain't half as
worried as you ought to be.

In George Orwell's 1984, the all-knowing eyes and ears
of Big Brother are part of a soul-crushing police state
that cows and manipulates citizens with relentless
propaganda and fear. The underground struggle against
totalitarianism faces constant danger, thought police
lurk around every corner, and 're-education' camp
awaits the political heretic.

But Orwell got one crucial point wrong. Controlling
the masses in George Bush's America doesn't require
jackbooted thugs. It only requires plucking the right
chords of fear and hatred, and complacent (if not
complicit) corporate media to spread the
administration's message without challenge.

Consider what we already know. The government monitors
our communications, plants fake news stories to sell
its policies, and proclaims authority to lock us up
indefinitely on its decree that we might be terrorists.
Not a jackboot in sight.

In December, the New York Times reported that the
National Security Agency (its actions so secret, some
call it 'No Such Agency') was eavesdropping on American
citizens' telephone calls. Not to worry, said the
President and Attorney General, we're only tapping
calls involving suspected terrorists. Really. Trust
us.

'If Al Qaeda is calling you, I want to know why,'
Cowboy George sneered when asked if this wasn't, well,
kind of illegal under the federal law banning domestic
spying. He didn't answer the question, but assuaged
some people's fears about being spied upon, even as he
fanned their fears of terrorism.

Then, The Nation and USA Today reported on the NSA's
collecting millions of Americans' phone records. Not
to worry, said the President and Attorney General,
we're only gathering the information; we're not doing
anything with it. Nevermind that any half-bright
teenager with a Hotmail account needs little more than
your phone number to steal your MasterCard.

Now USA Today reports that the Justice Department wants
Internet companies to track and store user information,
like what they're looking at on-line. It's just to
catch child pornographers and terrorists, they assure
us. That's why they need to know where you and I and
my dotty old aunt Ruth are cruising on the information
superhighway. Forgive me if I'm a little cynical, but
if the President says it's hot in Houston, I'm checking
the weather map.

After all, even insiders say inconvenient facts are
doctored when politics are in play, and politics are
always in play. Upon leaving the administration,
former head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge confessed
that, under political pressure, he issued 'Terror
Alerts' on the flimsiest of evidence. For instance, he
raised the orange flag right after the 2004 Democratic
Convention nominated John Kerry. Notice how you haven't
seen any since?

Sure, there was President Bush's claim this February
that the feds foiled a 2002 plot to blow up the U.S.
Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles. Strangely, nobody
said anything about it at the time. L.A. Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa said he learned about the alleged plot
watching Bush's speech on TV, which, funny enough, Bush
gave while under fire for his warrantless wiretapping
scheme. Probably just a coincidence.

Funnier still, the guy in charge of domestic spying now
runs the CIA. Break the law, get a promotion.

We found out about this - illegal spying, secret
prisons, the whole shebang - because public servants
with a conscience and respect for the Constitution
leaked it to reporters. The response from Bush's
minions is not to stop committing crimes, but to spy on
leakers and the reporters they're talking to.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales threatened reporters
who publish leaks with prosecution for espionage. An
FBI source told ABC News investigative reporter Brian
Ross that his and other reporters' phone calls are
being monitored, and Ross says sources are afraid to
speak to him now. These days, you don't have to kill
the messenger - just tap his phone and threaten him with prison.

The Reagan era (circa 1984, aptly) gave us the doctrine
of 'plausible deniability,' which says you can do
anything - say, sell weapons to enemy states to buy back
hostages and fund right-wing death squads - so long as
you're insulated by enough bureaucratic layers that you
can say you didn't know about it.

For Bush, there's no deniability, and nothing he says
is plausible. In fact, he brags about his no-holds-
barred fight against terrorism and its successes (which
you'll just have to trust him on, because it's all
super-secret stuff). In the same breath, he says
'tough luck' to anyone whose freedom is stolen in the
struggle. If you complain too loudly, well, it's
because you hate America.

'The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. All you have to do is to tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism.' Hitler's sidekick Hermann Goering said
that. He knew a thing or two about fascism, jackbooted
thugs, bloodthirsty propaganda and all. That's Orwell's
vision of totalitarianism, about 60 years out of date.

Today's thought police wear wingtips and propagandize
with bland reassurances and contradictory denials: 'We
didn't do anything, and we only did it to protect you.'

If 1984 were written today, Big Brother would be
laughed off as the work of an unimaginative hack.

_______________________________________________________

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It did not rain yesterday, but I was definitely stuck. My wheels spun and I didn't go anywhere. It was one of those days when there were a half-dozen or more competing themes running through my mind, and I could catch up with a single one. Like trying to herd cats or baby pigs.

The mainline news services seem to have retreated into dullsville, maybe actually scared they're going to get busted if they say anything relevant. The big news story seemed to be the thuggish vote in the House of (un)Representatives about maintaining the war. Of course, it was presented to us like a serious piece of legislation, rather than waving around a big stick. Rove'st strategy, like that of A. Hitler, still works: accuse those who disagree of disloyalty and make vague but quite reasonable threats. Actually, I don't think Rove has to make many threats: most of the reps, from both sides of the aisle, are too busy counting their donations to give a shit about the moral problems provided by a criminal war against a foreign nation.

On the other hand, the Washington Post, always there to keep us informed, let us know that a new NBC series about a bunch of narcissists looking for a buried treasure is, indeed, a dud. Great.

Here's a reminder of just how much the American Empire has accomplished in, oh, say, the last 100 years. Thanks to Zoltan for this.

A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS:
From Wounded Knee to Afghanistan
Compiled by Zoltan Grossman
(revised 09/20/01)

U.S. military spending ($343 billion in the year 2000) is 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined. Russia, which has the second largest military budget, spends less than one-sixth what the United States does. Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spend $14.4 billion combined; Iran accounts for 52 percent of this total.


The following is a partial list of U.S. military interventions from 1890 to 1999. This guide does NOT include demonstration duty by military police, mobilizations of the National Guard, offshore shows of naval strength, reinforcements of embassy personnel, the use of non-Defense Department personnel (such as the Drug Enforcement Agency), military exercises, non-combat mobilizations (such as replacing postal strikers), the permanent stationing of armed forces, covert actions where the U.S. did not play a command and control role, the use of small hostage rescue units, most uses of proxy troops, U.S. piloting of foreign warplanes, foreign disaster assistance, military training and advisory programs not involving direct combat, civic action programs, and many other military activities. <

Among sources used, besides news reports, are the Congressional Record (23 June 1969), 180 Landings by the U.S. Marine Corps History Division, Ege & Makhijani in Counterspy (July-Aug. 1982), and Daniel Ellsberg in Protest & Survive. "Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798-1993" by Ellen C. Collier of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service.

SOUTH DAKOTA
1890 (-?)
Troops
300 Lakota Indians massacred at Wounded
Knee.

ARGENTINA
1890
Troops
Buenos Aires interests protected.

CHILE
1891
Troops
Marines clash with nationalist rebels.

HAITI
1891
Troops
Black workers revolt on U.S.-claimed Navassa Island defeated.

IDAHO
1892
Troops
Army suppresses silver miners' strike.

HAWAII
1893 (-?)
Naval, troops
Independent kingdom overthrown, annexed.

CHICAGO
1894
Troops
Breaking of rail strike, 34 killed.

NICARAGUA
1894
Troops
Month-long occupation of Bluefields.

CHINA
1894-95
Naval, troops
Marines land in Sino-Japanese War.

KOREA
1894-96
Troops
Marines kept in Seoul during war.

PANAMA
1895
Troops, naval
Marines land in Colombian province.

NICARAGUA
1896
Troops
Marines land in port of Corinto.

CHINA
1898-1900
Troops
Boxer Rebellion fought by foreign armies.

PHILIPPINES
1898-1910(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, killed
600,000 Filipinos.

CUBA
1898-1902(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, still hold Navy
base.

PUERTO RICO
1898(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, occupation
continues.

GUAM
1898(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, still use as base.

MINNESOTA
1898(-?)
Troops
Army battles Chippewa at Leech Lake.

NICARAGUA
1898
Troops
Marines land at port of San Juan del Sur.

SAMOA
1899(-?)
Troops
Battle over succession to throne.

NICARAGUA
1899
Troops
Marines land at port of Bluefields.

IDAHO
1899-1901
Troops
Army occupies Coeur d'Alene mining region.

OKLAHOMA
1901
Troops
Army battles Creek Indian revolt.

PANAMA
1901-14
Naval, troops
Broke off from Colombia 1903, annexed Canal Zone 1914-99.

HONDURAS
1903
Troops
Marines intervene in revolution.

DOMINICAN REP.
1903-04
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Revolution.

KOREA
1904-05
Troops
Marines land in Russo-Japanese War.

CUBA
1906-09
Troops
Marines land in democratic election.

NICARAGUA
1907
Troops
"Dollar Diplomacy" protectorate set up.

HONDURAS
1907
Troops
Marines land during war with Nicaragua.

PANAMA
1908
Troops
Marines intervene in election contest.

NICARAGUA
1910
Troops
Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto.

HONDURAS
1911
Troops
U.S. interests protected in civil war.

CHINA
1911-41
Naval, troops
Continuous occupation with flare-ups.

CUBA
1912
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Havana.

PANAMA
19l2
Troops
Marines land during heated election.

HONDURAS
19l2
Troops
Marines protect U.S. economic interests.

NICARAGUA
1912-33
Troops, bombing
20-year occupation, fought guerrillas.

MEXICO
19l3
Naval
Americans evacuated during revolution.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1914
Naval
Fight with rebels over Santo Domingo.

COLORADO
1914
Troops
Breaking of miners' strike by Army.

MEXICO
1914-18
Naval, troops
Series of interventions against
nationalists.

HAITI
1914-34
Troops, bombing
19-year occupation after revolts.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1916-24
Troops
8-year Marine occupation.

CUBA
1917-33
Troops
Military occupation, economic protectorate.

WORLD WAR I
19l7-18
Naval, troops
Ships sunk, fought Germany

RUSSIA
1918-22
Naval, troops
Five landings to fight Bolsheviks.




PANAMA
1918-20
Troops
"Police duty" during unrest after elections.

YUGOSLAVIA
1919
Troops
Marines intervene for Italy against Serbs in Dalmatia.

HONDURAS
1919
Troops
Marines land during election campaign.

GUATEMALA
1920
Troops
2-week intervention against unionists.

WEST VIRGINIA
1920-21
Troops, bombing
Army intervenes against
mineworkers.

TURKEY
1922
Troops
Fought nationalists in Smyrna (Izmir).

CHINA
1922-27
Naval, troops
Deployment during nationalist revolt.

HONDURAS
1924-25
Troops
Landed twice during election strife.

PANAMA
1925
Troops
Marines suppress general strike.

CHINA
1927-34
Troops
Marines stationed throughout the country.

EL SALVADOR
1932
Naval
Warships sent during Faribundo Marti revolt.

WASHINGTON DC
1932
Troops
Army stops WWI vet bonus protest.

WORLD WAR II
1941-45
Naval,troops, bombing, nuclear
Fought Axis for 3
years; 1st nuclear war.

DETROIT
1943
Troops
Army puts down Black rebellion.

IRAN
1946
Nuclear threat
Soviet troops told to leave north (Iranian
Azerbaijan).

YUGOSLAVIA
1946
Naval
Response to shooting-down of U.S. plane.

URUGUAY
1947
Nuclear threat
Bombers deployed as show of strength.

GREECE
1947-49
Command operation
U.S. directs extreme-right in civil
war.

CHINA
1948-49
Troops
Marines evacuate Americans before Communist victory.

GERMANY
1948
Nuclear threat
Atomic-capable bombers guard Berlin Airlift.

PHILIPPINES
1948-54
Command operation
CIA directs war against Huk
Rebellion.

PUERTO RICO
1950
Command operation
Independence rebellion crushed in
Ponce.

KOREA
1950-53
Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats
U.S.&
South Korea fight China & North Korea to stalemate; A-bomb threat in 1950, & vs. China in 1953. Still have bases.

IRAN
1953
Command operation
CIA overthrows democracy, installs Shah.

VIETNAM
1954
Nuclear threat
Bombs offered to French to use against
siege.

GUATEMALA
1954
Command operation, bombing, nuclear threat CIA directs exile invasion after new gov't nationalizes U.S. company lands; bombers based in Nicaragua.

EGYPT
1956
Nuclear threat, troops
Soviets told to keep out of Suez crisis; MArines evacuate foreigners

LEBANON
1958
Troops, naval
Marine occupation against rebels.

IRAQ
1958
Nuclear threat
Iraq warned against invading Kuwait.

CHINA
1958
Nuclear threat
China told not to move on Taiwan isles.

PANAMA
1958
Troops
Flag protests erupt into confrontation.

VIETNAM
1960-75
Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; 1-2 million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in 1968 and 1969.

CUBA
1961
Command operation CIA-directed exile invasion fails.

GERMANY
1961
Nuclear threat Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.

CUBA
1962
Nuclear threat
Naval
Blockade during missile crisis; near-war with USSR.

LAOS
1962
Command operation
Military buildup during guerrilla war.

PANAMA
1964
Troops
Panamanians shot for urging canal's return.

INDONESIA
1965
Command operation Million killed in CIA-assisted army coup.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1965-66
Troops, bombing Marines land during election campaign.

GUATEMALA
1966-67
Command operation Green Berets intervene against rebels.

DETROIT
1967
Troops
Army battles Blacks, 43 killed.

UNITED STATES
1968
Troops
After King is shot; over 21,000 soldiers in cities.

CAMBODIA
1969-75
Bombing, troops, naval Up to 2 million killed in decade of bombing, starvation, and political chaos.

OMAN
1970
Command operation U.S. directs Iranian marine invasion.






LAOS
1971-73
Command operation, bombing U.S. directs South Vietnamese invasion; "carpet-bombs" countryside.

SOUTH DAKOTA
1973
Command operation Army directs Wounded Knee siege of Lakotas.

MIDEAST
1973
Nuclear threat World-wide alert during Mideast War.

CHILE
1973
Command operation CIA-backed coup ousts elected marxist president.

CAMBODIA
1975
Troops, bombing Gas captured ship, 28 die in copter crash.

ANGOLA
1976-92
Command operation CIA assists South African-backed rebels.

IRAN
1980
Troops, nuclear threat, aborted bombing Raid to rescue Embassy hostages; 8 troops die in copter-plane crash. Soviets warned not to get involved in revolution.

LIBYA
1981
Naval jets Two Libyan jets shot down in maneuvers.

EL SALVADOR
1981-92
Command operation, troops Advisors, overflights aid anti-rebel war, soldiers briefly involved in hostage clash.

NICARAGUA
1981-90
Command operation, naval CIA directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbor mines against revolution.

LEBANON
1982-84
Naval, bombing, troops Marines expel PLO and back Phalangists, Navy bombs and shells Muslim and Syrian positions.

HONDURAS
1983-89
Troops
Maneuvers help build bases near borders.

GRENADA
1983-84
Troops, bombing Invasion four years after revolution.

IRAN
1984
Jets
Two Iranian jets shot down over Persian Gulf.

LIBYA
1986
Bombing, naval Air strikes to topple nationalist gov't.

BOLIVIA
1986
Troops Army assists raids on cocaine region.

IRAN
1987-88
Naval, bombing US intervenes on side of Iraq in war.

LIBYA
1989
Naval jets Two Libyan jets shot down.

VIRGIN ISLANDS
1989
Troops
St. Croix Black unrest after storm.

PHILIPPINES
1989
Jets
Air cover provided for government against coup.

PANAMA
1989-90
Troops, bombing
Nationalist government ousted by 27,000 soldiers, leaders arrested, 2000+ killed.

LIBERIA
1990
Troops
Foreigners evacuated during civil war.

SAUDI ARABIA
1990-91
Troops, jets Iraq countered after invading Kuwait; 540,000 troops also stationed in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Israel.

IRAQ
1990-?
Bombing, troops, naval Blockade of Iraqi and Jordanian ports, air strikes; 200,000+ killed in invasion of Iraq and Kuwait; no-fly zone over Kurdish north, Shiite south, large-scale destruction of Iraqi military.

KUWAIT
1991
Naval, bombing, troops Kuwait royal family returned to throne.

LOS ANGELES
1992
Troops
Army, Marines deployed against anti-police uprising.

SOMALIA
1992-94
Troops, naval, bombing U.S.-led United Nations occupation during civil war; raids against one Mogadishu faction.

YUGOSLAVIA
1992-94
Naval
Nato blockade of Serbia and Montenegro.

BOSNIA
1993-95
Jets, bombing No-fly zone patrolled in civil war; downed jets, bombed Serbs.

HAITI
1994-96
Troops, naval
Blockade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup.

CROATIA
1995
Bombing
Krajina Serb airfields attacked before Croatian offensive.

ZAIRE (CONGO)
1996-97
Troops
Marines at Rwandan Hutu refuge camps, in area where Congo revolution begins.

LIBERIA
1997
Troops
Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

ALBANIA
1997
Troops
Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

SUDAN
1998
Missiles
Attack on pharmaceutical plant alleged to be "terrorist" nerve gas plant.

AFGHANISTAN
1998
Missiles
Attack on former CIA training camps used by Islamic fundamentalist groups alleged to have attacked embassies.

IRAQ
1998-?
Bombing, Missiles
Four days of intensive air strikes after weapons inspectors allege Iraqi obstructions.

YUGOSLAVIA
1999-?
Bombing, Missiles
Heavy NATO air strikes after Serbia declines to withdraw from Kosovo.

YEMEN
2000
Naval
Suicide bomb attack on USS Cole.

MACEDONIA
2001
Troops
NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels.

UNITED STATES
2001
Jets, naval
Response to hijacking attacks.

AFGHANISTAN
2001
Massive U.S. mobilization to attack Taliban, Bin Laden. War could expand to Iraq, Sudan, and beyond.



__________________________________________
For more information or with comments and additions please contact:
Zoltan Grossman, 1705 Rutledge, Madison, WI 53704 Phone Fax
(608)246-2256. mtn@igc.apc.org
Permission to reproduce this list in its entirety
is granted by the author, please send any published copy to the above
address.<

A few months back, I pointed out that there was a tsunami of anti-drug hysteria over the use of methedrine—meth, crank, speed, whatever the current street name is. The drug has been around the street drug market for years—at least forty that I remember. It's essentially an amphetamine; the use of amphetamines began back during World War Two when the Germans issued it to their troops. Now we issue it to our troops.The hysteria rises periodically and ends up being a justification for more punishment and jails and more intrusion into people’s private lives.

Years ago, Consumers’ Reports published a book on drug use in America. Research showed that the more publicity there was about the horrors of a specific drug, the wider spread its use became. An economic analysis also shows that no one really cares about issues like drug abuse or teen-age violence until it moves into the middle-classes.

Once again, careful studies have shown meth to be a much smaller threat than the hype portrated it as being. But the money budgeted to "fighting meth" will be used to punish people who are unfortunate enough to get strung out on it, not to help them.


Meth use rare in U.S., declining among teens, a study says
6/14/2006, 2:57 p.m. PT
By MARK SHERMAN
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/politics-0/1150322653140460.xml&storylist=orlocal
WASHINGTON (AP) — Methamphetamine use is rare in most of the United States, not the raging epidemic described by politicians and the news media, says a study by an advocacy group.

Meth is a dangerous drug but among the least commonly used, The Sentencing Project policy analyst Ryan King wrote in a report issued Wednesday. Rates of use have been stable since 1999, and among teenagers meth use has dropped, King said.

"The portrayal of methamphetamine in the United States as an epidemic spreading across the country has been grossly overstated," King said. The Sentencing Project is a not-for-profit group that supports alternatives to prison terms for convicted drug users and other criminals.

Overheated rhetoric, unsupported assertions and factual errors about the use of the drug — including frequent, misguided comparisons between meth and crack cocaine — lead to poor decisions about how to spend precious public dollars combating drug addiction, King said.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy did not immediately comment on the report.

The report cites statistics compiled by the government to make its case, including a 2004 survey that estimated 583,000 people used meth in the past month, or two-10ths of 1 percent of the U.S. population. Four times as many people use cocaine regularly and 30 times as many use marijuana, King said.

A separate survey of high-school students showed a 36 percent drop in meth use between 2001 and 2005.

The report acknowledged that methamphetamine is more widely used today than it was 10 years ago. Data from the jail populations of a handful of cities on the West Coast also show what King called a "highly localized" problem.

Among men arrested in Phoenix, 38.3 percent tested positive for methamphetamine. Figures for other cities are: Los Angeles, 28.7 percent; Portland, 25.4; San Diego, 36.2 percent; and San Jose, Calif., 36.9 percent.

But nationally, just 5 percent of men who had been arrested had meth in their systems. By contrast, 30 percent tested positive for cocaine and 44 percent for marijuana, the report said, citing government statistics.

Treatment programs for meth also have been portrayed inaccurately, with news reports suggesting that meth users do not respond as well to treatment as users of other drugs, King said. The Bush administration's recent methamphetamine control strategy also referred to a "common misperception that methamphetamine is so addictive that it is impossible to treat."

Programs in 15 states have had promising results, King said.

"Mischaracterizing the impact of methamphetamine by exaggerating its prevalence and consequences while downplaying its receptivity to treatment succeeds neither as a tool of prevention nor a vehicle of education," he wrote.

King called for a tempered approach to the problem, keeping the focus on local trouble spots and using federal money to beef up treatment programs.

___

On the Net:

The Sentencing Project: http://www.sentencingproject.org

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
.

If anyone doubts the power of the evangelical movement in America, the following story should convince them. The way stories are covered in the media indicate power; the rash of stories about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church indicates that the power of the church has declined (at least until the consolidation of power we’re experiencing from the Opus Dei/Conservative wing that’s arrived at legislative and judicial levels). Contrasting, the relative lack of stories about shenanigans in protestant churches indicates their ascendance to power.

We’ve seen the effect of religious zealots on the “morning after” pill, the general attack on any kinds of contraception, on the draconian treatment of pregnant women who don’t want to have babies, the fight for “intelligent design,” and the crusading zeal of the War On Islam.

Now we come up with religious justifications for child abuse.

This story came from a Brit newspaper. Not an American one. That should tell us something.


Giles Fraser: 'Suffer little children: US evangelists say beating the young is a Christian doctrine'
Date: Saturday, June 10 @ 09:48:14 EDT
Topic: The Religious Right

US evangelists are twisting the Bible to say that beating the young is a Christian doctrine

Giles Fraser, The Guardian

Pretty much all I remember from my prep school are the beatings: that lonely wait outside the headmaster's study; the cane, the slipper, the table tennis bat. I remember my underpants filled with blood. I remember seething with frustration when they beat my brother. My mother had asked me to look after him. But there was nothing I could do as he was led towards the study in his little tartan dressing gown.

That was 30 years ago, but in time measured out by the psyche it was yesterday. Thank God such things are now illegal. But there remain those determined to turn back the clock. "We are told that in England it is a crime to spank children," writes Debbi Pearl from No Greater Joy Ministries, following a row that has erupted over the distribution of their literature in the UK. "Therefore Christians are not able to openly obey God in regard to biblical chastisement. They are in danger of having the state steal their children."

The Pearls are evangelical Christians who believe corporal punishment is "doing it God's way". With a mailing list of tens of thousands of parents, the Pearls say that the justification for their approach is in scripture: "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes" (Proverbs 13:24).

Chastening begins early. "For the under-one-year-old, a little, 10- to 12-inch long, willowy branch (stripped of any knots that might break the skin) about one-eighth inch diameter is sufficient," writes Michael Pearl. With older children he advises: "After a short explanation about bad attitudes and the need to love, patiently and calmly apply the rod to his backside. Somehow, after eight or 10 licks, the poison is transformed into gushing love and contentment. The world becomes a beautiful place. A brand-new child emerges. It makes an adult stare at the rod in wonder, trying to see what magic is contained therein."

It's incredible to me that books such as this are readily available on Amazon; it is little short of incitement to child abuse. What makes the whole thing doubly sick is that it's done in the name of God. Apparently, the "proper application of the rod is essential to the Christian world-view". Note "essential". Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise. For, as evangelicals, the Pearls believe that salvation only comes through punishment and pain. God punishes his Son with crucifixion so that humanity might not have to face the Father's anger. This image of God the father, for whom violence is an expression of tough love, is lodged deep in the evangelical imagination. And it twists a religion of forgiveness and compassion into something dark and cruel.

It's terrifying how deep this teaching penetrates into a philosophy of child rearing. Just as divine anger is deemed to be provoked by the original sin of human disobedience, the beating of children is seen as punishment for rebellion. According to Ted Tripp, in his monstrous bestseller Shepherding a Child's Heart, even babies who struggle while having their nappy changed are deemed to be rebellious and need punishment.

Last month Lynn Paddock of North Carolina was charged with the murder of her four-year-old son, Sean. She had apparently beaten him with a length of quarter-inch plumbing line - plastic tubing. Like many in her church, Paddock had turned to the Pearls' resources on Biblical parenting. The Pearls say chastisement with plumbing line is "a real attention getter". Sean Paddock's autopsy describes layers of bruises stretching from his bottom to his shoulder.

What Jesus said about those who would harm children comes inevitably to mind: "It would be better for them if a millstone was hanged about their neck, and that they were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney. giles.fraser@btinternet.com

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1792738,00.html

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=26445

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation has had a troubled history. Discharges of radioactivity and contamination of ground water aren’t the only problems. But since the facility is closed down, we may be seeing some sort of karmic problem.


Tuesday, June 13, 2006 - 12:00 AM
Hanford workers warned of security breach
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003057673&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=hanford13m&date=20060613
By SHANNON DININNY
The Associated Press

The U.S. Department of Energy has warned about 4,000 present and former workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation that their personal information may have been compromised, after police found a 1996 list with workers' names and other information in a home during an unrelated investigation.

The discovery marks the second time in less than a week that the Energy Department has warned employees and its contractors' employees that their personal information may have been compromised.

Police in Yakima discovered the list while investigating an unrelated criminal matter, the Energy Department said, adding the list included the names of people who worked for a former Hanford contractor, Westinghouse Hanford, who were transferring to Fluor Hanford or companies under contract to Fluor Hanford in 1996.

The Energy Department awarded Fluor Hanford the contract to clean up the highly contaminated nuclear site in December 1996.

The list also included workers' Social Security numbers and birth dates, as well as work titles, assignments and telephone numbers.

The department began notifying workers about the discovery Sunday. Employees at seven companies were warned to monitor their financial accounts and billing statements for any suspicious activity.

There was no indication that Hanford's computer network was compromised. The Energy Department and Fluor Hanford were working with law-enforcement officials to determine how the list was obtained and why it was in the home, the Energy Department said in a statement Monday.

Also on Monday, Energy Department officials began contacting 1,502 individuals by phone to inform them that their Social Security numbers and other information may have been compromised when a hacker gained entry to a department computer system in September.

The workers, mostly contract employees, worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within the department that deals with the government's nuclear-weapons programs.

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

This brings up a moral dilemma that was more pressing some years back than it is today. What does one do about this? I guess I’d return it to the store, let them act as intermediaries with the cops.

Twenty years ago, I’d have gone into a panic. All that free dope! And someone was going to be trying to find it...Like a movie plot. Of course, for all those drugs, the somebody trying to find it would be out with friends and guns. Glad I never had to be in that situation...

I wonder if this has helped business at Home Depot stores.

Drugs found in Home Depot store cabinets
6/14/2006, 2:39 p.m. PT
The Associated Press
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/national-66/115032148594190.xml&storylist=ornational
SOUTHWICK, Mass. (AP) — For the fifth time in a week, a stash of drugs was found in a cabinet at a Home Depot store in Massachusetts or discovered after the fixture was brought home.

A plumber in Southwick discovered 40 pounds of marijuana and three kilograms of cocaine stashed in a bathroom vanity he'd purchased at a Home Depot in Chicopee.

A second stash was found at that store and at least two more were discovered at a Tewksbury Home Depot, Southwick Police Lt. David Ricardi said. One of the Tewksbury stashes was discovered June 8 after a homeowner brought home a cabinet and found 50 pounds of marijuana.

Police also found drugs in a fifth cabinet. Ricardi would not say where or when it was discovered but said it was within the last week.

"It's a smuggling operation gone bad," Ricardi said. "Somebody owes some money."

Ricardi said the plumber discovered the drugs on Monday after he bought the vanity for a home renovation. The man noticed the vanity top hadn't been included in the package and instead found two plastic bags containing the drugs. Ricardi said the drugs are worth $200,000.

Tony Pettigrew, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Wednesday that his agency was investigating, but declined further comment.

Atlanta-based Home Depot said it was cooperating with investigators.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The next time anybody in our national government talks about “human rights,” they should be run out of town on a rail, you know what I mean?

Guantanamo has been an embarrassment every since the War Against Islam began. Prisoners have been held for up to four years without being charged with anything other than being “enemy combatants.” That term is as vacuous as Paris Hilton. The government has resisted courts and lawyers, Amnesty International, the Red Cross, and world opinion. Interrogation techniques that were rehearsed at Guantanamo went on to be notorious at Abu Gahraib and other places hidden in distant countries (AKA “Allies”).

It won't happen with American energy, but someday the people involved in this medieval mess will be held accountable.

Paper: Rumsfeld expels US media from Guantanamo Bay

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Rumsfeld_expels_US_media_from_Guantanamo_0614.html

John Byrne
Published: Wednesday June 14, 2006

The United States military has ordered all independent media off the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base following the suicides of three detainees, RAW STORY has learned.

Writing for the Miami Herald, journalist Carol Rosenberg stated Wednesday morning that the military had "ordered all independent news media off the base by 10 a.m. Wednesday, and had arranged a flight to Miami to expedite their departure."

"A directive from the Office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," prompted a two-sentence email that was sent to reporters from the Herald and the Los Angeles Times, which stated: "Media currently on the island will depart on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 at 10:00 a.m. Please be prepared to depart the CBQ [quarters] at 8:00 a.m."

That was the entirety of the email, according to the Herald. An auto-reply email from Rosenberg after an inquiry from RAW STORY indicated that she was still en route from Guantanamo and could not be reached for comment, and the Herald news desk claimed that Rosenberg was the only one to receive the memo.

A Pentagon spokesman has since confirmed the order to Editor and Publisher, but has said it was not related to the journalist's news reports.

"While admitting that Gordon's piece had caused "controversy," he asserted that the move was related to other media outlets threatening to sue if they were not allowed in," Editor and Publisher wrote.

Essentially, the Pentagon says that it began receiving complaints from other news agencies who felt the Herald and the Times were getting more access than they were. Given two options -- to allow more reporters, or to remove the existing reporters -- they chose the latter.

Pentagon press officer J.D Gordon told the online trade publication that the Herald and Times reporters were invited to cover tribunals at the base but subsequently filed stories on the suicides after the tribunals were cancelled. A third journalist, a photographer for the Charlotte Observer, was on the island to produce a piece on the homegrown camp commander. After stories began appearing regarding the suicides, the Pentagon arranged the 10 a.m. flight to Miami.

"The correspondents came down to the base on Saturday to cover the aftermath of the suicides, at the invitation of the admiral in charge of the prison," Rosenberg wrote. "The Pentagon canceled the invitation Tuesday night, despite protests from the newspapers."



State Department Tries to Distance Itself From Guantanamo Remark
By Carol Rosenberg and Lesley Clark
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Monday 12 June 2006

Guantanamo Bay Navy Base, Cuba - The State Department attempted to distance itself Monday from one of its own officials, who called the suicides by three detainees at the U.S. terror prison "a good PR move to draw attention."

Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, whose job involves improving U.S. public relations, especially in the Muslim world, made the comment Sunday in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview.

She called the suicides "a tactic to further the jihadi cause," the BBC reported.

"I would not characterize it as a PR stunt," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Monday in reply to a reporter's question at the daily news briefing. "We have serious concern any time anybody takes their own life."

Even before the suicides, the European Union and individual countries, including Britain, had called on the United States to close the prison. About 460 prisoners are in custody at Guantanamo as "enemy combatants," a category that the Bush administration created and isn't covered by international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war.

Civilian defense lawyers have described Guantanamo captives held for more than four years as increasingly desperate. They say the detainees have few ways, other than to harm themselves, to protest their indefinite confinement.

Ali Abdullah Ahmed of Yemen and Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi and Yassar Talal al-Zahrani of Saudi Arabia hanged themselves at the remote island prison early Saturday.

The Pentagon said in a news release Monday that Ahmed was "a mid- to high-level al-Qaida operative," Utaybi was a member of the al-Qaida-linked militant group Jama'at Tabligh and other Islamist terrorist groups, and Zahrani was a Taliban fighter.

The prison camp's spokesman said a team of military pathologists had completed autopsies of the three men on Sunday.

"The bodies are now in the morgue at the naval hospital in Guantanamo, and they are being handled with great reverence and respect and observance of the Islamic rules with regard to the handling of the deceased," said the spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand.

A Muslim chaplain, Navy Lt. Abuhena Saiful Islam, said the bodies would be washed, wrapped in white shrouds and placed in coffins facing the direction of Mecca. Prayers would be said.

U.S. diplomats were negotiating with Saudi Arabia and Yemen on whether the bodies would be sent to their homelands for burial. Military sources said repatriation was likely.

It wasn't known whether the three men were among the 25 percent of detainees being regularly interrogated at this remote, offshore Navy base.

The military said none of the three men who killed themselves had lawyers, and none had been charged with war crimes.

Also, none had "ongoing psychological illness" or was taking prescription drugs, said the Pentagon's top medical professional, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.

The deaths added fuel to international calls that the Bush administration close the offshore detention and interrogation center.

Attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the detainees, argued that the interrogation methods and the indeterminate detentions were causing the men to try to kill themselves.

They presented reporters with a timeline of efforts they made to see that the detainees received some sort of physical or psychiatric medical care.

The Bush administration rejected most of the efforts, attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez said.

"The deaths over the weekend came as absolutely no surprises to the attorneys," she said, adding that the center has been working since February 2002 "to get the military to concern itself with mental health and living conditions."

"The notion that (the detainees) had the ability to protest, to raise concerns, is unfounded," she said. Lawyers had met with 130 of the detainees as of January and the "vast majority have no access to any outside counsel."

"They are entering their fifth year of imprisonment, held in isolation," she said. "The amount of psychiatric stress cannot be underestimated." She called the uncertainty over their fates "unacceptable" under U.S. law and basic civil rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union called for an independent investigation of the detainees' suicides and conditions at the prison.

"The shroud of secrecy surrounding Guantanamo Bay must be lifted, with independent access to and monitoring of the facilities on an ongoing basis," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. "This monitoring should include the medical treatment of detainees, especially those who have chosen to engage in hunger-striking as a way to draw attention to their conditions of confinement."

Leonard Rubenstein, the director of Physicians for Human Rights, said his group had asked the government to allow for independent medical evaluations - "the kind we conduct in all kinds of other countries" - but the request was ignored.

Josh Colangelo-Bryan, an attorney for detainee Jumah Al Dossari, who has repeatedly attempted suicide, said Dossari was often despondent and held in isolation for extended times.

Dossari had described being interrogated while wrapped in an Israeli flag and questioned as a female interrogator wiped menstrual blood on his face, he said.

At one point, Colangelo-Bryan said his client asked him, "What do I do to keep myself from going crazy here?"

Before the 2004 election, a campaign worker came by to make sure we were planning on voting. I told him, yeah, it was too important an election to note vote. He asked me who I planned on voting for, for president. After we exchanged looks of sad amusement, he said, “Gonna hold your nose and vote for Kerry, huh?”

And before that, I held my nose and voted for Gore and Leiberman, god help me. What could we do? What can we ever do in presidential elections? I’ve held my nose so many times while voting it’s amazing it still works. What a system: vote for the best man, we’re told. It’s really about voting for the least awful man. Once we get past the primaries, we vote of two choices. It’s called “free elections.” It’s a racket, when you get right down to it: the Democrats and Republicans have a monopoly on who gets elected, no other candidates really need apply.

Here I am: in less than I week I’m going to be 68 years old. I’ve voted, if my memory banks work right, in every primary and presidential election since 1963. That seems awfully good for someone like me. The primaries were one thing, but the presidential elections were almost uniformly smelly. Seems like lately they’ve become rank.

The evidence of the purged Florida voter rolls, back in 2000 seemed smellier than usual; the god-awful mess in Ohio in 2004 was even worse. What makes the stench even worse is the way it’s been ignored, particularly in Congress. The reason for this is obvious, of course: the votes are always rigged. Either by party game-playing or technical means.

It’s like “campaign reform.” Nobody really wants it because all of those congressional bozos are owned outright by their big corporate contributors. There’s nothing new in that.
The history of western states includes roll-calls of candidates hand-picked by major contributors—railroads, mining companies, ranching interests, and timber barons. Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Anaconda, Weyerhauser... Policy isn’t made by the public; it’s made by corporate presidents and board-rooms. This hasn’t changed—now the big contributors are oil companies, Energy Conglomerates, and the defense industries. In other words...

It’s a scam.

And, oh look: here come Al Gore and Newt Gingrich again. Gee, I wonder who’ll back their campaigns...

If you'll excuse me, I think it's time to disaffiliate from this system.

What if history is just a series of circles, loops? The Euro-American way of looking at things is that history, time, is linear: Point A to Point B. A beginning and an ending. Maybe that’s wrong; Vine Deloria, Jr., in his last book, posited that both evolution and so-called “intelligent design” were modern myths. I like that. It’s always good to have unexamined assumptions challenged.

So what this is about is that 17 years and three months ago, a struggle erupted in Berkeley, California over a piece of land owned by the university. It got bloody: there were cops and National Guard, shootings, even a death. And today, about 400 miles south, a group of urban farmers tangled over a piece of land.

I remember going over to Berkeley to march. That was the first time I marched past soldiers with loaded weapons and bayonets, Oakland cops looking for heads to break, all sorts of people with cameras, and felt like I was in some narrow corridor of danger. That was when I first realized the awesome power of the State. The iron fist didn't have a velvet glove over it.

The more things change, etc., etc..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Park

Hollywood stars face eviction from urban farm

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Tuesday June 13, 2006

Guardian Unlimited
The struggle to save an urban farm that has drawn celebrities from around the world came to a halt on Tuesday as 100 police moved in to evict farmers and their supporters from the site.

With helicopters circling overhead, police forced their way on to the 14-acre [5.6 hectare] site at 5am after giving protesters a 15-minute warning. Inside they found the actor Darryl Hannah, who has been living in a walnut tree on the community farm for two weeks.

Bulldozers moved on to the property to knock down fences and demolish the small plots of land, while 17 people were resisting the eviction inside the two-city block farm.
***
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Got a phone call from Jim T. this morning. Always stimulating and pleasant to talk to him. He asked me if I’d read this piece from yesterday’s Alternet. I hadn’t, but now I have. And it’s good because it asks the essential question: What the hell are we going to do about all of this?

We hae to do something: the more we do, whether it's making the U.S. take it's foot off Iraq's neck, or discovering our own personal feet are on the necks of others...Remember that ActUp sticker that said "Silence = Death"? Well, first it's the death of others; silence, however, becomes a habit, and eventually it spreads and then we're facing our own deaths—if not physical, at least our moral deaths.

AlterNet
Stick Your Neck Out, America!
By Ray McGovern, AlterNet
Posted on June 12, 2006, Printed on June 13, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/37381/

Hope is here. The cold light of truth is piercing the cloud of lies conjured by Donald Rumsfeld and others about the war in Iraq -- even in the defense secretary's own bailiwick.

A matter of conscience …

Several months ago, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada decided that U.S. involvement in Iraq is illegal and immoral. Like so many of us, Watada concluded that intelligence was manipulated to "justify" the invasion. Unlike so many of us, he has had the courage to stick his neck out and pay the price for resistance.

We should, I suppose, give the neck its due. It is a pleasant thing -- a convenient connection between head and torso. We do not risk it out of caprice. But if there is nothing for which we will risk that neck, then it has become our idol. And necks are not worthy of this status. Finally, an active duty U.S .Army officer has refused to engage in that kind of idol worship.

No publicity seeker, Watada earlier this year quietly submitted a request to resign from the Army. The request was denied. He then refused to deploy to Iraq with his unit this summer and is prepared to face prison rather than violate his conscience. Meanwhile, he fully expects the kind of ostracism encountered by those few Army enlisted men who objected to the torture at Abu Ghraib. In what might well be the understatement of the month, Watada says he may be "the most unpopular person at Fort Lewis."

… and a gift for Dan Berrigan

Watada may not realize this, but he has presented a pearl of great price to longtime war resister, Jesuit priest and poet Dan Berrigan, who celebrates his 85th birthday this weekend in New York. Facing ridicule and ostracism for acting on their principled opposition to the war in Vietnam, Dan and his late brother Phil were no strangers to prison -- or to profound disappointment at the dearth of those willing to witness in the way of Watada.

In "No Bars to Manhood," Dan wrote:

"Of course, let us have peace," we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties …" There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war -- at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

Dan Berrigan will be encouraged by Watada's resistance. And so, I hope, will Faiza Al Araji, one of the courageous Iraqi women who came to the United States in March to give firsthand testimony to the suffering of the Iraqi people. Executive manager of Arab Water Treatment Co., Faiza is a highly educated engineer who took a month off to appeal to U.S. citizens to do something to end the tragedy of her people.

I had the privilege of sharing speaking duties with her on several panels arranged by progressives in California. It was painful. Faiza would pour out her heart, only to be met with expressions of sympathy -- and impotence. After three successive days of this, she found a way to express her outrage without wearing out her welcome. We were in Santa Cruz, Calif., speaking to a standing-room-only audience. After Faiza's account of the horrors being experienced by her people elicited the all-too-familiar, hand-wringing moans of "What can we do?" she lost it.

Candid sharing …

Returning to her seat next to me on the panel, she grabbed my notebook and filled the top page with what she really wanted to say. Her poignant words, as she wrote them:

So, Iraqis are in the middle between American people who don't know what to do always? An American administration who had plans to war and never listen! Where is the key to help poor Iraqis?

In the beginning of my meeting I feel sad for American people but after passing of time my people are dying and Americans still asking stupid questions like 'What can I do?'

I feel sick.

Faiza could see it. We are, for the most part, blissfully (perhaps studiously?) unaware of our own power -- the power we still enjoy as Americans, even as the claws of fascism creep steadily closer. We in the dominant culture often feel impotent, despite the power of our inherent privilege. Perhaps it's a subconscious thing. Maybe we prefer to remain in denial because, otherwise, we would have to look in the mirror and decide whether we have the courage to put that power into play.

… and becoming aware

At the Servant Leadership School in Washington, D.C., we are constantly grappling with the debilitating accoutrements of white privilege and unexplored racism. At one point an African-American trainer threw up his hands, looked at us, and -- as calmly as he could -- explained:

"If someone has their foot on my neck, I will say once, please get off my neck. If you continue to stand on my neck and explain how you didn't know you were there and why you were there and how difficult it is to move, I cannot be nice about it any more. It's not about conversation; in the end it's about getting your foot off my neck."

And so, we are back to necks. We must stop the handwringing and find ways to get our country's foot off Iraq's neck.

What can we do? Get together with a few friends and figure it out! If we were willing to put something on the line, if we were willing to stick out our own necks, as Lt. Watada has done, things could change.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. In a public forum last month he confronted Donald Rumsfeld directly about the lies he has told about the war in Iraq.

This story was originally posted on Truthout.org.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/37381/

The week before I left for vacation was busy; I couldn’t post all the stuff I wanted to post. That’s the way things go. The following piece, though, from the WaPo, is important. It correctly interprets what our Attorney General has been aiming at: the suppression of leaked secrets, the discussion of them, or even having them in our possession. That FBI agents have been seeking old files makes sense. The government’s re-classifying information that had been declassified is part of the same pattern.

The pattern is to criminalize dissent. To deny this is about like denying Nixon’s criminality—or, for that matter, Bush’s...We're not just watching totalitarianism creep through the country, we're gradually being strangled by it.


Official Secrets
Be careful what you read.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/22/AR2006052201684_pf.html
Tuesday, May 23, 2006; A16

ATTORNEY General Alberto R. Gonzales, asked this weekend whether he believes he can prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, made a statement that should chill the bones of every American who values a vigorous press: "It depends on the circumstances." Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Mr. Gonzales explained, "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility. That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation. We have an obligation to enforce those laws." But presenting the administration's radical new strategy as mere deference to Congress is profoundly dishonest.

The administration is seeking to convert a moribund World War I-era espionage law into an American version of Britain's Official Secrets Act. Mr. Gonzales is correct that the law, which bans the transmission of national defense information to anyone not cleared to receive it, would -- if read literally -- make criminals out of journalists who publish such material. For that matter, it would also permit the jailing of whistle-blowers, academics who write about leaked information, members of Congress who disclose secrets and, theoretically, even readers of newspapers who discuss the stories. Precisely because of the law's unthinkable scope, the First Amendment has long been understood to limit its application. Government has gone after officials who promise to protect the nation's secrets and then fail to do so -- but generally not against citizens who receive those secrets.

The attorney general pretends that the administration's current understanding of the law merely reflects Congress's policy judgment, rather than its own. Yet only a few years ago, when Congress passed (and President Bill Clinton vetoed) a bill to criminalize leaks of classified material, people on both sides of the issue understood that current law did not criminalize the vast majority of leaks -- let alone subsequent disclosures by people who never swore to protect classified material in the first place.

Criminalizing such disclosures would be antithetical to the American tradition. Yet the administration has set about doing it without even asking Congress. It has brought a case against two pro-Israel lobbyists for receiving leaks and transmitting them to colleagues, a reporter for The Post and the Israeli embassy. It has leaned on the family of the late journalist Jack Anderson to allow FBI agents to rifle through his old papers -- on the theory that, as a bureau spokesman recently explained it, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided." And as the attorney general's comments make clear, it is considering prosecuting journalists for doing their jobs. It is a dangerous road.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Here’re some excerpts from a CBC story on the suicides at Guantanamo. These days, whatever the US news puts out is essentially from the Ministry of Propaganda.

I don’t care how paranoid the logic, there is no way in hell to make these suicides out to be acts of warfare. Not even Richard Nixon would try to get away with that.

C B C . C A N e w s - F u l l S t o r y :
Three die in Guantanamo Bay suicides
Last Updated Sat, 10 Jun 2006 20:29:43 EDT
CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/06/10/guant-sat.html?print
Three detainees have died at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in what the U.S. military said was "an act of ... warfare" against the United States.

***
"They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, told Reuters. "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own."

Harris added that the suicides were "clearly a planned event, not a spontaneous event ... I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of ... warfare waged against us."

***

Amnesty International said the apparent suicides "are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention" and said the prison is a blight on the Bush administration.

"Today's reported suicides of detainees in Guantanamo should serve as a wake up call to President Bush and his administration that Guantanamo is not just a public-relations problem but instead an indictment on its deteriorating human rights record."

Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights told Associated Press that those held at Guantanamo "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice. And now they're gone. And they died without ever having seen a court."

The prison, in southeastern Cuba, has been used to detain Afghan prisoners since January 2002 when the first 20 arrived. About 460 men are in custody there on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

It has come under increasing criticism from the UN, Britain and other U.S. allies because most of the inmates are being held without charge under conditions which critics say do not meet international standards.



Copyright ©2006 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - All Rights Reserved

This story depresses me. I thought it was a good thing that the president of the Pine Ridge Sioux announced she was going to get together a tribal women’s clinic that would offer abortions. South Dakota, as you know, banned abortions not long ago.

Cecilia Fire Thunder is a feminist and someone who knows the conditions women live under on the rez. It isn’t a good place to be a woman or a child. Not too good if you’re a man, either. The rate of alcoholism is atrocious; so’s the rate of abuse. Alcoholism and abuse go together, sure. They are major elephants—more like mastodons and wooly mammoths—sitting in the living rooms on too many Indian reservations in this country. Incest and things like fetal alcohol syndrome are far too common. However, this is bad p.r. to many people—at least if people know about it. So anyone who talks about these kind of issues is putting their neck on the tribal chopping block. This quote from the article co-signs that: "...the complaint states that she is not allowed to tell her side of the story to the media.

No matter what’s said, ultimately the people running the show at Pine Ridge are not exactly progressive, nor are they for women’s rights about controlling their own bodies.

If you ever saw the movie, Thunderheart, Pine Ridge was the model for it. Some things remain the same.



Fire Thunder suspended and abortions banned on Pine Ridge
© Indian Country Today June 05, 2006. All Rights Reserved
Posted: June 05, 2006
by: David Melmer / Indian Country Today
PINE RIDGE, S.D. - The Oglala Sioux Tribal Council banned abortions within the reservation boundaries, and at the same meeting suspended President Cecelia Fire Thunder - again.

Nearly mirroring the state of South Dakota in the abortion ban ordinance, the council voted unanimously to not just ban all abortions regardless of the circumstances, but to ban the use of any drug that would prevent a pregnancy or abort a fetus the day after any sexual activity.

An amendment to the ordinance would require disciplinary action against a person who contemplates or supports an abortion. That person could be banished from the reservation. The ordinance states that any donation sent directly to the tribe to financially support the clinic would be returned.

The ordinance requires BIA approval before being enacted. As it violates the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by Roe v. Wade, it should be disapproved, legal counsel said, noting that it may show the current administration's position on the issue, legal counsel said.

In anticipation of legal action, the council also approved a legal fund for any possible litigation.

The anti-choice issue was placed at the top of the council's agenda and the debate coincided with the arrival of some 200 protesters.

''You are here and you have a voice,'' Councilman Will Peters told the crowd. ''If you were born out of rape or incest, thank you for being here.''

The ordinance does not make exceptions for rape and incest or health of the mother. Throughout the debate, the health, mental or physical of the mother was never brought to the table.

Councilman Lyle Jack said that he guaranteed there would not be an abortion clinic on the reservation. He did say, however, that he supported a women's clinic that did not perform abortions.

The original idea for the clinic was conceived thought of by Fire Thunder after the governor of South Dakota signed a bill that became the strongest anti-abortion law in the country. Cora Whiting, Fire Thunder's assistant, said the original intent of the clinic was to protect victims of crime and for the protection of women.

''There are 300 kids on Social Services, these are our kids,'' Whiting said. ''There are women who drink heavily because they don't want children and they are afraid to go to the IHS. This is a wellness clinic; it's not about abortion.''

''I agree with the ordinance, but we should have a women's health clinic; we should have an elder health clinic also. Take these ideas and find something positive,'' Whiting told the council.

As heated and emotional as the issue was, the real and hidden agenda quickly emerged: the removal of Fire Thunder from office. Speakers merged anti-choice comments with a request for Fire Thunder's suspension and impeachment.

Councilman Ruth Brown was the first to bring up the president's removal. ''I want to know what to do with the president.''

Peters said Fire Thunder did not get permission from the council or the people for this clinic.

''She violated the constitution of the tribe, she needs to be suspended indefinitely; we should be embarrassed - remove her today,'' said tribal member Eileen Janis.

Fire Thunder was accused of soliciting funds on the Internet, through the U.S. mail and the media. She was also accused of misrepresenting the tribe by allegedly saying that Pine Ridge supported the clinic and abortions.

Whiting said Fire Thunder did not solicit funds and that so far any checks received have not been cashed. She said the Sacred Choices Clinic was organizing a board of directors who would make the decisions about the funds and the clinic.

Following the unanimous anti-choice vote, Peters moved the suspension of Fire Thunder without pay. That motion, too, was not legal, according to the constitution, but Peters later signed a formal complaint that set the suspension in motion.

''Your statement is meaningless to me,'' Peters told the tribal attorney who advised the motion was not legal. ''The constitution doesn't work for the majority; we are not a paper people.

''The president has fallen out of touch with the people,'' he said.

''The president has violated the [tribal] bylaws. The governing body gives her direction; she advocated for an abortion clinic and didn't consult with the governing body and not the Lakota people,'' Peters said.

Fire Thunder told Indian Country Today in a previous interview that a nonprofit organization would administer the clinic separately from tribal government.

An initial vote to suspend Fire Thunder failed, 9 - 7. The first motion did not include a hearing, which denied Fire Thunder due process, according to legal council.

The second attempt, which included the provision for a hearing, passed 14 yes and one no. Again, the actual motion violated the tribe's constitution, but Peters said he would sign a formal complaint that would make the suspension valid.

Fire Thunder is suspended without pay and is not allowed to represent the tribe in any manner, and the complaint states that she is not allowed to tell her side of the story to the media.

Fire Thunder was not present at the meeting.

The occupation of Iraq continues to be an ugly bloody mess. Things are not getting any better in Afghanistan. Parts of Africa sink farther into chaos. At home, the gasoline price games continue to the delight of the oil companies. It’s becoming apparent that the 2004 presidential election was stolen just like the 2000 election. Corruption continues unabated in D.C..
And what are the Republicans doing to straighten out the various messes? They’re having their propaganda wing jack us up with b.s. about gay marriage (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003051934_krauthammer12.html), flag burning, and so on and so forth. Anything but reality and resolution. Why would they want to actually deal with problems? They know they can rig the voting machines and hustle the theocrats into believing anything. The election, even if the Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the feet, is in the Republicans’ pockets. Even if the Dems should win, will things change? Nah.
The Dems are as crooked as the Republicans—been that way for years. The Republicans used to buy politicians while the Democrats bought urban votes. The money, though, the ongoing big big money, is what makes the difference in policies. Where the money is the government policies are sure to follow. I have no doubt that if the Dems were running the show, and they’d messed up as badly as the Republicans have, they’d be out promising to tar and feather any same-sex couples they came across. Or declare war against Bananastan.
Both parties answer to the same masters.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it?

And back into the breach. I have to say the news hasn't improved any since I've been gone. If anything, it's just got crazier than ever.

At least I get to run with a little absurdity from, of all places, the Washington Times.

http://www.washtimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20060612-123713-4122r
Homeland Security accepts fake ID
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published June 12, 2006

The Department of Homeland Security allowed a man to enter its headquarters last week using a fake Matricula Consular card as identification, despite federal rules that say the Mexican-issued card is not valid ID at government buildings.
Bruce DeCell, a retired New York City police officer, used his phony card -- which lists his place of birth as "Tijuana, B.C." and his address as "123 Fraud Blvd." on an incorrectly spelled "Staton Island, N.Y." -- to enter the building Wednesday for a meeting with DHS officials.
Mr. DeCell said he has had the card for four years and has used it again and again to board airliners and enter government buildings, without being turned down once. But he said he was surprised that DHS, the agency in charge of determining secure IDs, accepted it.
"Obviously, it's not working," Mr. DeCell said.
The Mexican government has issued millions of Matricula Consular cards in the past few years, mostly to give illegal aliens a form of identification that banks and other institutions will accept.
The FBI, in testimony to Congress, has said that the cards are not secure. The General Services Administration ruled in 2003 that the Matricula Consular is not valid ID for entering a federal building.
In addition to being a forgery obtained for him from a street vendor in California, Mr. DeCell's card was modeled on an older version, which the Mexican government publicly acknowledges is not a secure document. The Mexican government says the old-style cards "are no longer valid."
Some members of Congress tried to crack down on use of the card, particularly as valid ID for opening a bank account, but the Bush administration opposed that effort.
Jarrod Agen, a spokesman for DHS, said the department shouldn't have allowed the ID to be used for entry to its headquarters.
"DHS is following up on these allegations and will take necessary actions to ensure there is not another occurrence of this type," he said.
Mr. DeCell had provided his name, birth date and Social Security number to be pre-cleared for entry to the building and had been vetted before, Mr. Agen said. The security guard accepted the ID to match Mr. DeCell's name to a name on her list of cleared visitors, he said.
The spokesman said Mr. DeCell's group went through metal detectors and other routine security screening and had an escort at all times while in the building.
"At no time was there a threat to any person or property," Mr. Agen said.
DHS' security performance didn't surprise one member of Congress.
"You mean the Department of Homeland Insecurity," said Rep. Elton Gallegly, California Republican and one of the first to introduce a bill in Congress several years ago cracking down on acceptance of the Matricula Consular card. "The real sad story here is that it doesn't surprise me -- in fact it just vindicates all the things I've been saying here, along with so many others."
The Mexican government argues that the cards improve security by giving illegal aliens some form of identification, which assists police and businesses.
Mexico is not the only country to issue such cards, and has in fact issued a form of the Matricula Consular card for decades. But Mr. Gallegly said the Mexicans used to issue few, and only for special circumstances, while in recent years they have issued millions.
Mr. DeCell is a member of 9/11 Families for a Secure America, an organization of families with relatives who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. He and two other members paid the visit Wednesday to DHS officials.
Mr. DeCell said he keeps the fake ID card in his wallet and often shows it just to see what places will accept it. He keeps his driver's license handy in case the forgery is challenged, he said, but it never has been.
"I'm dismayed," Mr. DeCell said.
Joan Molinaro, who accompanied him, said she was shocked that DHS, of all agencies, accepted the phony ID.
"Homeland Security is not doing their job," she said. "Homeland Security accepted a fraudulent document as a legitimate one."


Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Back. Back in the States, back in Bend Oregon. Somehow, I’m experiencing culture shock after spending two weeks away. It doesn’t take much.

We spent a week in south-east British Columbia: they call it the west Kootenays. It includes the Columbia River valley, the Kootenay River, and Kootenay Lake. The mountains are mostly granite and have been smoothed by generations of glaciers.. Steep mountains and flat narrow valleys. It’s very green—especially if you’ve been living in an arid country. There are dozens of shades of green. Thick thorny undergrowth and a feeling that if one doesn’t work hard the undergrowth will simply overtake everything. There are small farms and ranches in all the valleys: cow pastures and berry farms, truck gardens and sheep pens, and flowers at every house. Log cabins—old log cabins, hand built and not kit-built, and even log barns. Rustic as hell. British Columbia is what rural Oregon fantasizes about being like.

The people up there—quite a few ex-Americans among them—have an attitude of “what the hell is your country doing?” We got along fine, sure, because once I was there, the United States was a different location, rather than an all-surrounding environment. No cars demanding “Support Our Troops,” no hourly newscasts on Our Great Crusade. Not even very many strip malls or chain restaurants or big box stores.

It’s obvious the U.S. is going to have to invade Canada, just to make Canadians behave properly. They don’t behave like Americans.

When we came back into the States, the first big town we drove through was Couer d-Alene, Idaho. That was more like it: nothing but strip malls and chain restaurants, cars with American flags and assorted patriotic-religious bumper stickers. Even subdivisions! Progress, in other words.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller called it.